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Ah, but we did have a decentralized government when the government's power affected individuals from greatest to least in this order : local -> county -> state -> federal. Most power has centralized to the federal government, which is not what made this nation great. Do you honestly think that we have a democratically elected government filling the halls of Washington, D.C.? What we have is a vile, reprehensible bureaucracy that has only it's own survival at heart with only the faces of politicians giving it the barest sheen of decency. For every Thaddeus McCotter there is a Jesse Jackson, Jr. In addition, the 'rich cabal' got rich by finding ways to make money. There's plenty to be made by addressing peoples fears of AGW or any other change to the climate. What would stop them from doing that? Resting on the principle that they are only allowed to make money as caricatures of e-e-e-e-vil conservatives? In my opinion, most of this country does not educate itself properly when it comes time to vote and is grossly misinformed about AGW and how the climate works in general.

it's because he's entertaining as hell to watch

Exactly, and in his own words to Alistair Campbell, "I don't believe what I write, any more than you believe what you say". Clarkson plays a character, and it's a lot of fun to watch, but I don't for a second believe he's like that in real life. At worst he plays a caricature of himself.

Slashdot is not a community opposed to pornography. Be honest: A lot of you enjoy it. I'll freely admit myself to frequently engaging in sexual roleplay online. It's a lot of fun. Because of this though, a lot of us have no understanding of the other side of the debate. All we see is a caricature screaming 'sex is evil!' I don't know anything about the philippines, but in the interests of fairness, here is the official stance of one of the leading American anti-pornography organisations:

"Pornography has spread like a plague in our nation. It has moved from the margins of our culture to the mainstream, attacking marriages, families, and communities. Worst of all, it has stolen a time of innocence from our children. ... Pornography is a visual representation of sexuality which distorts an individual's concept of the nature of conjugal relations. This, in turn, alters both sexual attitudes and behavior. It is a major threat to marriage, to family, to children and to individual happiness. In undermining marriage it is one of the factors in undermining social stability. ... Pornography use is a pathway to infidelity and divorce, and is frequently a major factor in these family disasters. Among couples affected by one spouse's addiction, two-thirds experience a loss of interest in sexual intercourse. Men who view pornography regularly have a higher tolerance for abnormal sexuality, including rape, sexual aggression, and sexual promiscuity. Pornography engenders greater sexual permissiveness, which in turn leads to a greater risk of out-of-wedlock births and STDs. These, in turn, lead to still more weaknesses and debilities. Child-sex offenders are more likely to view pornography regularly or to be involved in its distribution. he presence of sexually oriented businesses significantly harms the surrounding community, leading to increases in crime and decreases in property values."

On second thoughts... no, the caricature is about right. I was hoping to find some more depth on their site to quote so that slashdot could pick apart their arguments, but they don't really have any. Just scaremongering. I especially like how they claim in one part that pornography ruins marriages by making men not want sex, and in another part that it claims that pornography makes men have more casual sex leading to STIs and out-of-wedlock births. Then they have to drag out talk of child pornography, the atomic bomb of debate. So go ahead, make fun of them. They deserve it.

I'm going to look at porn now.

Shows how much you don't know. I have Shia Muslim friends. You see, you lack understanding again and misattribute a caricature of some right wing guy to me. Both false. I have zero problem with Muslims (and hate no-one, so stop making shit up). I have a problem with an evil ideology called Islam (whose main victims are, in fact, Muslims). Most Muslims are cool precisely because they are not pious and do not follow the dictates of Islam. I hope you can comprehend that. The Muslims that are devout and strictly follow Islam are the ones to be concerned about. They believe they are on a mission from Allah and can do as they wish to anyone. National borders, sovereignty, Western laws, natural justice mean nothing to these guys. One is right to be concerned with the rise of such 'Islamists' and warn others about them (since most people, including you apparently, are ignorant of the difference between Muslims and Islamists, and that ideology of Islam is the root of much of the strife in the World today). Does that help you get it now? Or do you still want to project your incorrect mental model onto me and the World?

I suspect that they don't know that and are, instead, approaching the problem through some sort of horrible caricature of naive Bayesian induction:

"The whole system is a magical black box that I don't understand. However, I have connected to 'the wifi' at home, work, starbucks, and the airport, on numerous occasions and in numerous locations. Almost every time I connect to 'the wifi', I obtain internet access. Therefore, 'the wifi' must provide internet access, and an FCC proposal to 'expand the wifi' must be a proposal to provide internet access!"

The same reasoning could also be used to demonstrate that you can obtain free potable water just by connecting a pipe to a sink and then shoving it into the ground(but, conveniently, also obtain access to a sewage line by connecting a pipe to a toilet and shoving it into the ground. How do they not get mixed up? Magic!); but so it goes...

No, it is a "caricature". Caricatures take one small (and often superficial) aspect of a situation and exaggerate it.

That is exactly what people like you are doing, and you just did it again.

First off, what you're talking about in terms of caricatures is politics. It's ugly, I don't like it, but it's gone on since the dawn of civilization and in my opinion has arguably grown worse recently primarily because of a mass media more interested in ratings than quality journalism, recent Republican gerrymandering successes, and a takeover of the Republican party by extremists. There are plenty of Democrats that have added to the problem, but I haven't seen them as a driving force in the breakdown in civility.

More importantly though is the question of how we get those in power to deal with the issues we really care about. What you're suggesting as a solution seems to be for people to go and vote for a third party candidate. That's all well and good in Pollyanna Land, but in the system we currently live in it would be about as effective as sticking your head in the sand. Running primary candidates is a step in the right direction, but it is very rare to see that against an incumbent in a presidential race. Even more rare are successes of such.

I choose to support, even if only with lukewarm praise, the best available candidate in any given race. I won't judge you for deciding to do otherwise, though I will say I think my decision is the best approach. Then I go and talk to people about possible long term solutions to the process that will make it possible to vote for people we actually like and make it less likely that we'll always have to just go with the lesser of two evils. If you didn't just jump to conclusions and had asked, you could have found out (without sounding like a major asshole) that I advocate for non-partisan redistricting, ranked choice voting for instant runoff elections, and campaign finance reform. These, among other related solutions, would go much farther than voting for another Ralph Nader like I did in 2000 (though I was voting in MD so I could afford that luxury). In this past election I would have loved to vote for Jill Stein, but my vote mattered far more this time as I reside in Virginia.

No, the problem is that you are making a caricature out of other people's position and then claim they aren't willing to talk to you reasonably

You're claiming that there isn't a large number of free marketers that are denying AGW exists?

If yes, you are clearly wrong, and exhibiting another form of denialism.

If no, then it wasn't a caricature.

No, the problem is that you are making a caricature out of other people's position and then claim they aren't willing to talk to you reasonably

The real problem is that none of the proposed solutions to climate change come even close to stabilizing CO2 levels; in fact, they don't even try. So there is a fundamental disconnect between what people who propose action on climate change claim to want to accomplish and what they actually propose. The current "protocols" and proposals are ineffective and amount to little more than corporate welfare and increases in foreign aid disguised as climate-related actions.

Put a proposal on the table that reduces net human carbon emissions to zero. Then we can talk about its costs and benefits and possibly decide to take action.

Obama ... is not a progressive

Whether Obama "is" a progressive is about as relevant as whether child raping priests "are" Catholic. The question is: who elected the guy and how keeps supporting him, and that clearly is progressives. And progressives also contribute to keeping this system in place by casting everything into an us-vs-them framework, in which the Democrats may be imperfect, but they are still always better than the Republicans; you just did it again

No, in fact it is not clear that "Republicans would be more than happy to have this sort of policy in place." There are Republicans who oppose this, just like there are Democrats who do. And the way to make change happen is to support candidates based on their issues and positions, not their party affiliation. But as long as US politics continues to be dominated by your kind of knee-jerk sports-team mentality, bad politicians like Bush and Obama will get elected.

I voted for Obama the first term because he promised to put an end to the abuses of presidential power by the Bush administration, to stop corporate welfare, and to stop the intrusion of the US government into the private lives of US citizens. As someone who voted for him, I'm entitled to say: Obama has failed miserably.

Perhaps more importantly, it is even more difficult to challenge the president of your party when the other party is vehemently and religiously against your president and party just for existing.

Oh, so true. And as soon as progressives Democrats start showing some civility and tolerance towards other political views, instead of caricaturing everybody who disagrees with them as a "one percenter" or "neocon puppet", and as soon as progressives and Democrats start thinking about issues instead of getting "their man" elected, perhaps we can actually make some political progress again. The drivel you have been writing doesn't give me much hope.

"One of the things that I usually point out is how many geologists of the late 1700s and early 1800s were deeply religious, but they rejected "global flood" or "6000-year-old Earth" well before Darwin's evolutionary theory was even proposed."

Um, perhaps that's because even the Bible itself never says how old the Earth is.... the 6K year age crap is anti-Biblical and always results from some moron with no understanding of Hebrew or Greek pouring over the geneological records of the "Book of Numbers" and (erroneously) assuming that the English word "begat" is a perfect translation to some ancient Hebrew word for "is the direct, immediate parent of" (rather than the "ancestor of") .... then compounding the error by assuming each generation lived some number of years (the Bible itself explicitly insists there was no such consistency of human longevity) and then stretching the whole bad methodology to the rest of the Bible (where accounts of family trees are less complete and indeed many generations of human history are probably skipped). There are so many variables that people plug-in with values they prefer before doing their "computation" that it's like the Biblical equivalent of the Drake Equation.

" Trying to talk to "young Earth" creationists about this subject is something on par with trying to talk chemistry with someone who still believes in the phlogiston model for burning."

Two points here:

• 1. The "phlogiston model for burning" was once the "consensus" view of "settled science" ;-) the religious are not the only people who get saddled with their share of kooky stuff; The scientific community seems to be a bit better at getting everybody to forget their past pronouncements of TRUTH
• 2. I Think you greatly generalize about "Young Earthers". I'm not one, but I have certain sympathies to certain narrow arguments they make (not particularly related to this subject) so I have had many discussions with a number of them over the years on a wide range of subjects and I have simply never encountered what you describe. I know one who was a physics prof at a state university, one who is a chem guy at a corporation, and several who are engineers. I cannot say there are none like you describe, but it strikes me as a bit of a caricature.... and caricatures like that, as opposed to thoughtful, detailed dialog, are part of th reason discussions like this often swerve-off into uncivil dialogue

Before you go too far in rejecting religious (and Christian in particular) people from science, you would be well advised to remember two things: First, nearly all modern science is based upon the works of Christians (men like Newton and Copernicus... people who look into it are often shocked at just how many of the most-famous were) and second, Oppenheimer (not himself a "biased" Christian) said that modern science would not have arisen without Christianity.

Instead it appears that they settling into comfortable middle age.

Settling into middle age and getting a bunch of unnecessary cosmetic surgery that will leave it a freakish caricature of its former self. How long until it gets a few Windows 8-ish Metroll implants?

Or as a caricature of a Nobel laureate once said in Dilbert...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJwwAVM1Auc

I studied economics at university, the only thing I learnt was how little predictive power the theories have, and how they use certain axioms to ensure their rightness, regardless of the outcome. The one thing I liked were the philosophical aspects of economics, such as the Austrian School, except they don't teach those much, as they have little to no predictive power.

Because noticing the increase in 'market value' of the people you employ is, I don't know, a standard part of business operating procedures? Because people aren't serfs? They aren't tied to the land, so to speak, and if they are treated ill, they can leave (and not return)?

The market, when functioning properly, is neither pro-employee nor pro-employer. It will, in general, match up, in the job market, the best employee with the best employer. That's when it's functioning properly. When it isn't, chaos rules the day; the bad kind of chaos, where people's lives are ruined during a Tuesday afternoon, from afar, simply because killing a profitable company would make someone else's stock rise a quarter point (the real kind of madness, where someone would execute a large corporation, like IBM, with a double tap to the head, on a day when it made no sense to happen, simply because it was doing well, and because it was doing well, the chaos to follow would be that much more volatile; people expect sick companies to die, decent ones to grow; they don't expect sick ones to be borderline immortal, and good ones to suddenly keel over from a heart-attack; why? Because if you short a sick company, you don't gain much; but if you short, then execute, a healthy company, then you make out like a king).

But back on topic. I am going to resort to a crude caricature here, for the sake of argument: the company who does not notice your increase in worth is possibly the same company which does notice your decrease in worth. They're the kind of people who do not want to pay a dollar more than they have to, and will press their advantage as much as possible when the job market is in their favor; then they'll play the loyalty card when it swings in your favor. Switching to a more sane argument: who wants to work at a company who DOES NOT notice your worth? A company who would rely on you to do important things for decades, but never issue a raise or promotion? Who would want to work for a company who is not attuned enough to the ongoings of the market such to care about such minor, but important details? You might as well be storing money in a bank that didn't notice that it had been robbed 3 months ago, but did notice that your payment for your mortgage was 30 minutes late.

Sure, that's one opinion. But you seem to have only a cartoon caricature understandiong of the opposing view. If you can't argue coherently and logically for both sides of an issue, you don't understand the issue.

mplayer links to 95% of these as well.

"95%" is a ridiculous guess, but that's not what's important - what's important is whether those dependencies are feature-optional.

XBMC with all `make config` options disabled:

        `make run-depends-list -C /usr/ports/multimedia/xbmc | wc -l` => 51

        `make build-depends-list -C /usr/ports/multimedia/xbmc | wc -l` => 60

Mplayer as I use it to play anything and everything (with the following `make config` options enabled: RTCPU, OCFLAGS, X11, X11XV, THEORA, VPX, WIN32):

        `make run-depends-list -C /usr/ports/multimedia/mplayer | wc -l` => 8

        `make build-depends-list -C /usr/ports/multimedia/mplayer | wc -l` => 9

Mplayer runs without perl / python / tcl / bash, without any gnome stuff, etc. On Gentoo Linux (my favorite Linux distro before I went all BSD) it can even run on the framebuffer, with no X! I can understand why a media center might want to optionally support any number of plug-in scripting languages, database backends, GNOME desktop integration, network protocols (ex. SAMBA), etc - but making all of them mandatory is just bloat!

it is also very hard to see what makes us not be free software according to your definitions.

I said it's not " genuinely free", with the link explaining what I mean by "genuine" - but only in passing (see above).

the fact that you compare a media center to a mere command line player tells me you are barking up a tree you have never climbed.

First of all, mplayer is not "a mere command line player", it is a modular piece of software. It can be used with a GUI front-end or inside a Web browser. It can run as a daemon and be controlled by another application, like one that shows a touchscreen / mouse / LIRC menu, or takes voice commands, or Kinect input, or whatever else.

Secondly, comparing mplayer to XBMC is like comparing a UNIX system to a caricature of a "fully loaded" Windows PC that won't let you uninstall anything. Some trees are not worth climbing.

--

I think that in-browser video is the future, but note that "in-browser" doesn't necessarily mean "online". (Also future browser input device possibilities will be vastly greater than today. Most people will watch movies by sitting on a couch / armchair / recliner in front of a wall-sized screen, but how they control it will be up to them: voice commands, gesture recognition, flexible touch-pads on their couches or clothes, wearable type-on-air finger motion capture, etc, etc, etc. Stay tuned for HTML6, 7, etc...)

Examples of Web Apps that present video would include: whitelisted BitTorrent Web-sites that integrate with a BT download daemon running on your computer, a local RSS downloader daemon with a Web interface (like an in-browser alternative to Miro), an "/index.html6" on removable media, etc. Mplayer can still be a useful component for those apps (ex. launched full-screen by a client-side daemon that is controlled from the browser with a WebSockets API), until HTML5+ video makes it entirely obsolete. XBMC, on the other hand, is just The Wrong Way To Do It.

--libman

I often notice that amongst the so-called educated they quote science that leans in their favor, and then outright dismiss science that challenges their beliefs. I'm not talking about creationists or global warming deniers. I mean something less obvious and more insidious that can be found across political spectrums. A friend of mine who teaches history is oft to mention his belief that we are leaving an era of reason behind in favor of an era where 'gut' feelings and authenticity rules supreme. These people espouse a brand of empiricism that would set us back pre-Descartes, actually make that the medieval period. And their numbers are growing.

This isn't merely scientific ignorance. These people have been raised around science, but just like creationists, they've built up a straw-man caricature of science in their heads and that's what they go by, based on their feelings. They don't actually test out their assertions in a structured way beyond surfing websites that agree with them. You'll find examples of that brand of opportunism, even occasionally while browsing up through this thread. You'll find it on biased environmentalist activist websites that espouse long-term damaging solutions to complex problems, or on alternative medicine websites that attack 'science' for 'being fundamentalist' while engaging in fundamentalist behavior, people who think Autism is not an illness, or a technology that has the potential to feed billions (GM) is evil, etc etc. You'll find such bias anywhere there is an identity to protect, an ego to feed or a website to promote. Since it cherry picks, and goes by what 'feels' good, it is ultimately self-serving, hence it's 'epistemological opportunism'.

What do you think can be done to counteract these populist attitudes on science that seem to be taking over? When people collapse complex problems (like medicine, cancer, mental health, GM crops etc) into black and white issues without stopping to look at all the issues, what do you do? Is there ways of raising awareness re critical thinking and proper scientific methodology? It's so easy to demonize scientists with coy phrases or genetic fallacies. Do some approaches work better than others in explaining basic scientific concepts to the public?

Uh, no, I actually haven't run into any of those although I know quite a few folks who describe themselves as "liberal." In real life, as opposed to the faux news caricatures, I've met few, well... none really, that want to expand government power. Most of the ones I know view the Obama administration as Bush's third (and now fourth) term. They're do seem interested in having a safety net equivalent to that of the Europeans and Canadians, and tend to be irritated that the reason we don't have one is that we supplement NATO and Asian defense costs. It's easy to have a social safety net if you don't have to pay for your own defense. Quite a few that I know would like to see some bankers put in jail. Personally, I'm all for cutting defense spending, and going with a single payer health plan. I also support the death penalty and am NOT in favor of gun control. I don't want the government to fund religion directly or indirectly, but if a private entity wants to put a nativity on the courthouse lawn, it's OK with me, agnostic though I am.

Real life is complicated. What you see on political entertainment TV, not so much.

The Jewish thing is just silly. So now every mindlessly greedy character is supposed to be something for the anti-defamation league to get upset about?

IIRC, the objection isn't that the blue character was greedy, it was that he was so greedy, and he had a very prominent hooked nose, which is something Jews have been caricatured about a lot in the past.

Apparently you can, because I never saw any blatant caricature, and even with it being pointed out here, I still don't see it.