Please devise such a system then. And get it passed through congress and signed into law (or adopted as a constitutional amendment, since it probably violates seperation of powers). Then get back to us.
Um... we did. And Bush deliberately circumvented the system. That's the point.
It's not a political attack on Bush; the NYT follows the standard of calling politicians "Mr." (or, I assume, "Miss" or "Mrs." or "Ms.") most of the time unless there's some specific reason to identify them by title. Many other, mostly British, papers do the same -- "Mr. Blair," etc. As for "President," there are other stylistic schools which hold that former Presidents never lose the title; thus you'll see not only "President Clinton" but also "President [George H.W.] Bush," "President Carter," "President Ford," etc. Find a particular mainstream news source which routinely talks about both "Mr. Bush" and "President Clinton," and you'll have an argument. Otherwise your post is just more standard-issue right-wing whining.
FISA, for one. Which is a law that grants him extraordinary powers -- retroactive warrants! -- but apparently, that just isn't enough.
Me, personally, I'd rather have a President who lies about a blowjob than one whose agents are carrying out massive, illegal, unaccountable surveillance of the American people. You know, in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps I'm just silly that way.
Genetic screening for risk factors is an intermediate step; the real goal is to use the information in your sequence to tailor medical treatment to your personal genome. I know I'm oversimplifying here, but... suppose that for a given disease, we know that people with allele "A" of a certain gene respond better to treatment with drug "X", but people with allele "a" respond better to drug "Y". So if you're diagnosed with that disease, the doctor can prescribe whichever medication is most likely to work for you personally, rather than just starting you on the standard course of treatment.
The usual problem with science reporting, particularly in biology. The article says "... the first team that completely decodes the DNA of 100 or more people..." No; the prize winner will sequence the DNA. That is a looong way from "decoding" the human genome, or even the genomes of any particular 100 people. Sequence information is valuable, but it's not "decoded" in any meaningful sense of the word. Imagine looking at an enormous program written in a language you've just started learning, and full of function and variable names like "do_stuff()" and "x1".
Apparently, not only did you not RTFA, you couldn't even be bothered to read the summary correctly. Congratulations! You may have a prosperous future ahead of you working in the IP industry!
The "one CD full of shit with maybe 1-2 good songs" comes up every time this subject is discussed, and I have to ask: what CD's are people buying that they say this, anyway? I'd say I like 90+% of the songs in my CD collection, whether I'd heard the song before buying the CD or not -- because I usually buy CD's by artists whose work I know is consistently good, or that have been recommended to me by friends whose musical judgement I trust. Even the best band can turn out a lousy song on occasion, sure, but I have to say that if you buy an album expecting and accepting that most of the songs on it are going to suck, then you pretty much deserve what you get.
... thus neatly illustrating exactly what's wrong with usual "the market will take care of it" argument. No, the market doesn't always take care of it; usually the market does take care of it, but often it doesn't, and sometimes it makes things worse. "Corporate citizenship" is apparently a dead idea, but it shouldn't be.
My recommendation is a 50% Tyrant Ass Kissing Tax, where 50% of Western corporations' revenues (not profits) get taken, and if they try to fib on how much money they're taking out of repressive regimes, we simply calculate an estimate, add 25% and take it out of their banks, or their assets if they attempt to hide the cash.
It's a great idea, but politically untenable, for the simple reason that every major corporation in the US and Europe would be liable for the tax. Actually, now that I think about it, it's not that great an idea, because applied strictly it would amount, at least in the short term, to a US-and-EU-wide boycott on trade with China, which wouldn't really benefit anybody.
That being said, I sure would like to see the US (don't know how this works for the EU) live up to its own standards in granting "most favored nation" trading status. MFN has long ago ceased to mean anything except "we're not currently at war with you, and oh, you're not Cuba," and that kind of sucks.
... is not the precise market share, but that the market share is big enough so that sites can't afford to be IE-only any more. I really don't care if the market share of Firefox (and other Mozilla browsers) is 10%, 25%, or even 50% -- what I care about is that the sites I need to go to are standards-compliant and don't rely on crap like ActiveX. Ideally, I'd like to see several major browsers, using several different rendering engines, and a host of minor ones, none having more than 50%, all rendering sites that conform to W3C standards reasonably well, all competing with each other. Doesn't seem like too much to ask.
Say you're writing a paper about the life of a famous russian violinist and you just happen to use the phrase "command economy". It would be abosultely stupid to go on and cite five sources of a little tidbit of information that is peripheral to your main subject.
I think you could write a paper about any aspect of Russian culture or history and use the phrase "command economy" without having to cite it, actually; anyone who knows anything about the subject will know what you're talking about.
Scond, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with using an encyclopedia as a source of information. THAT'S WHY THEY EXIST. If you need more information or corroboration, then by all means go get it, but there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the concept of encyclopedias. They serve their purpose.
Yes, encyclopedias exist as a source of information -- but not as the be-all and end-all of research. I'll say it again: they should be a starting point, not an endpoint, at least for academic work. (Or journalism, for that matter.) If the goal is to really learn about a subject, an encyclopedia article, no matter how well-written or, er, encyclopedic, is not enough. Encyclopedia articles are, by their nature, summaries of existing knowledge; the purpose of research (yes, even in high school) is to create new knowledge, or at the very least to put existing knowledge together in new ways.
Look, I think encyclopedias are great. They're a wonderful way to satisfy your own curiosity about something, or to get a quick overview of a subject before you dig into some particular aspect of it in depth. But it's vitally important not to overestimate them.
Your teacher obviously wanted to teach his students valuable research skills. He wanted them to use non-encyclopedia sources becuase it's useful to know how to find information from other sources.
Unfortuantely, his policy gave you the wrong idea... and that's what's really wrong with it.
[shrug] I think I got exactly the right idea out of it, in that ever since then, I've known how to write a good research paper, whereas when I was an undergrad, it was immediately obvious that many of my classmates didn't. It wasn't that they couldn't, but they'd never had anyone teach them how. Research is a skill that's difficult to pick up by osmosis. It seems to me that an awful lot of time is spent in lower-division classes teaching freshmen and sophomores skills that IMNSGDHO they should have learned in high school or even earlier, and this is an example.
The idea that Wikipedia is a "plague" is nonsense, being pushed by a few curmudgeons who can't get their mind around the idea that students might be able to work more efficiently by looking up secondary sources online than by reading equivalent sources in the library. There have always been students who retyped encyclopedia articles and presented the result as their own work; sure, it's easier to cut'n'paste from Wikipedia than to type in a dead-tree encyclopedia article by hand, but it's not so much easier as to justify the reaction Wikipedia is getting.
The real problem is students, even at the college level, regarding any secondary source as sufficient research. I've said before that one of the best teachers I ever had, my American History teacher in high school, did the class an enormous favor with his source policy, which seemed Draconian at the time: "If you cite an encyclopedia article in your paper, no matter how good the rest of the paper is, you get an F on the assignment." An encylopedia -- any encyclopedia -- is a place to start looking for information, but unless you're just looking up something quickly to satisfy your own curiosity, it's never a place to finish.
While I might get flamed for this one, in the home market at least, it's not Unix that people are buying, it's an experience. Unix is an important part in the scientific communities and for some hard core techies, but the people who buy the mac mini, iMac and iPod's aren't worried about the underlying technology.
Generally true, but "the experience" runs on Unix. When my non-techie friends ask what kind of computer they should buy, and I tell them to get a Mac, I don't say, "It's really cool to have a great GUI as well as access to all the great command-line Unix tools, all in one carefully thought out integrated package." What I do tell them is, "You get the best, most modern interface, plus it's much more secure and stable than Windows because it's based on Unix, which is the operating system that actually runs the Internet.* So you can just do what you want to do with your computer instead of spending half your time dealing with crashes, viruses, and spyware. Also, if you ever do decide you want to get into some more advanced stuff, let me know." Which is a pretty successful sales pitch, and has the virtue of being both true and relevant to "the experience" they'll have with the computer.
* Yes, I know this is a horrible oversimplification, but it's essentially true, and I'm always happy to go into more detail if people ask.
I've noticed before that extremists of both Left and Right can be identified by, among other things, their tendency to look at everything in terms of classical economics -- they assume that "the economy" will always make "rational" decisions, whatever they consider "rational" to be. (It's almost tautological that, being extremists, they have an idea of what's rational that doesn't coincide with anything real, but that's a whole 'nother discussion.) It's left up to those of us in the Vast Middle to note that irrational forces -- altruism, generosity, and openness, yes; also greed, envy, fear, and group-think -- very often profoundly influence how people spend their money, as well as every other aspect of how they live their lives.
Seems like they're playing fast and loose with capacity: "will start producing 16 gigabit Nand Flash chips this year" vs. " currently in products such as USB drives and digital cameras in capacities of up to 8GB." Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't 16 gigabits = 2GB?
The only reason to install Windows on one is to wind up the mac zealots
Well, I'm a bit of a Mac zealot myself, and I don't see myself getting "wound up" by the idea of Windows running on a MacBook at all. On the (thankfully rare) occasions that I absolutely have to run a Windows-only app, I'll be very happy to be able to do so at native speed on my own machine, rather than having to find a Windows box I can use or deal with the slowness of VirtualPC on PowerPC. I agree that buying a MacBook, or any other Intel-based Mac, primarily to run Windows would be kind of silly, though.
I also heard that in the British Army, the first minute after waking up doesn't officially exist - that's because they're aware that people are still "out of sorts" and incapable for at least a minute. In theory, you can punch the Sgt-Major and get away with it.
Dunno about in the British Army, but in the American Army this same meme exists -- and it's a (rather dangerous) urban legend. I know this, unfortunately, because when I was an infantryman, a buddy of mine tried to use this as an excuse for kicking a 2LT in the face, and it didn't work. And yeah, the lieutenant deserved it; he used to think it was fun to sneak up to someone's tent and grab their feet and yell "Boo!" if they were sticking out. I'm 6'3", and my buddy was about the same height; you'd better believe that when we were in a tent together, especially those damn issue pup tents that probably haven't changed since the height of the average GI was 5'4" back in the Civil War, our feet were sticking out. To be fair, the 2LT got an ass-chewing -- but my buddy lost a stripe and his next three paychecks.
Really, when you think about it, it makes sense that this principle isn't generally followed; infantrymen have to be able to wake up and function almost instantly. Generally, only one guy in a foxhole is going to be awake. The other guy has to be able wake up and roll into a firing position the instant anything Really Bad starts happening. It took me years to break that habit.
Is there anyone, anyone at all in the world who thought it would be a good idea to perform critical medical procedures just after waking up?
I worked in emergency medicine for nine years, and I can tell you that unfortunately, the answer is "yes." In small, rural ER's, there's almost always only one doctor on duty, and on night shift he's napping until someone comes in. In bigger, urban teaching hospitals, most of the doctors are interns and residents, and they're so exhausted from working their absurdly long hours that they grab sleep whenever they possibly can. And it's been a dirty little not-so-secret in the medical community for... well, pretty much ever... that this kind of thing kills patients. That's why this subject needs investigation; it's not just a waste of your preciousss tax dollars.
Um... friction? Even interplanetary space in the orbit around a normal star isn't a perfect vacuum, after all; the Earth's orbit is decaying, just veeery slowly (and it would take much, much longer than the projected lifetime of the Sun for such decay to make us spiral appreciably inward.) Around a black hole, you can expect the gas to be relatively dense, and friction to have a relatively fast effect on its orbit. I say "relatively" because, of course, the density is still very low and the time scales are still very large by terrestrial standards -- at least until you get right up near the event horizon, at which point things just get weird.
Have your army of minions engrave all your really important data on clay tablets. Then try to make sure the tablets are stored in the basement of your palace when it burns to the ground, so the clay gets well-fired. Thousands of years from now, archaeologists will marvel at your beautifully preserved backups. They'll call it "cuneiporn."
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Please devise such a system then. And get it passed through congress and signed into law (or adopted as a constitutional amendment, since it probably violates seperation of powers). Then get back to us.
... we did. And Bush deliberately circumvented the system. That's the point.
Um
It's not a political attack on Bush; the NYT follows the standard of calling politicians "Mr." (or, I assume, "Miss" or "Mrs." or "Ms.") most of the time unless there's some specific reason to identify them by title. Many other, mostly British, papers do the same -- "Mr. Blair," etc. As for "President," there are other stylistic schools which hold that former Presidents never lose the title; thus you'll see not only "President Clinton" but also "President [George H.W.] Bush," "President Carter," "President Ford," etc. Find a particular mainstream news source which routinely talks about both "Mr. Bush" and "President Clinton," and you'll have an argument. Otherwise your post is just more standard-issue right-wing whining.
Which law did the President break, exactly?
FISA, for one. Which is a law that grants him extraordinary powers -- retroactive warrants! -- but apparently, that just isn't enough.
Me, personally, I'd rather have a President who lies about a blowjob than one whose agents are carrying out massive, illegal, unaccountable surveillance of the American people. You know, in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps I'm just silly that way.
Genetic screening for risk factors is an intermediate step; the real goal is to use the information in your sequence to tailor medical treatment to your personal genome. I know I'm oversimplifying here, but ... suppose that for a given disease, we know that people with allele "A" of a certain gene respond better to treatment with drug "X", but people with allele "a" respond better to drug "Y". So if you're diagnosed with that disease, the doctor can prescribe whichever medication is most likely to work for you personally, rather than just starting you on the standard course of treatment.
The usual problem with science reporting, particularly in biology. The article says "... the first team that completely decodes the DNA of 100 or more people ..." No; the prize winner will sequence the DNA. That is a looong way from "decoding" the human genome, or even the genomes of any particular 100 people. Sequence information is valuable, but it's not "decoded" in any meaningful sense of the word. Imagine looking at an enormous program written in a language you've just started learning, and full of function and variable names like "do_stuff()" and "x1".
Apparently, not only did you not RTFA, you couldn't even be bothered to read the summary correctly. Congratulations! You may have a prosperous future ahead of you working in the IP industry!
if people want something that someone else went to the trouble of creating, doesn't it seem kinda fair if the creator asks to get paid?
Why yes, it does. And the answer, apparently, from musicians who are familiar with the parasitic ways of the music industry is, "No, not really."
The "one CD full of shit with maybe 1-2 good songs" comes up every time this subject is discussed, and I have to ask: what CD's are people buying that they say this, anyway? I'd say I like 90+% of the songs in my CD collection, whether I'd heard the song before buying the CD or not -- because I usually buy CD's by artists whose work I know is consistently good, or that have been recommended to me by friends whose musical judgement I trust. Even the best band can turn out a lousy song on occasion, sure, but I have to say that if you buy an album expecting and accepting that most of the songs on it are going to suck, then you pretty much deserve what you get.
Well, there you go! They tried to upgrade their RAM at home and ended up with a better computer. A good outcome all around!
... thus neatly illustrating exactly what's wrong with usual "the market will take care of it" argument. No, the market doesn't always take care of it; usually the market does take care of it, but often it doesn't, and sometimes it makes things worse. "Corporate citizenship" is apparently a dead idea, but it shouldn't be.
My recommendation is a 50% Tyrant Ass Kissing Tax, where 50% of Western corporations' revenues (not profits) get taken, and if they try to fib on how much money they're taking out of repressive regimes, we simply calculate an estimate, add 25% and take it out of their banks, or their assets if they attempt to hide the cash.
It's a great idea, but politically untenable, for the simple reason that every major corporation in the US and Europe would be liable for the tax. Actually, now that I think about it, it's not that great an idea, because applied strictly it would amount, at least in the short term, to a US-and-EU-wide boycott on trade with China, which wouldn't really benefit anybody.
That being said, I sure would like to see the US (don't know how this works for the EU) live up to its own standards in granting "most favored nation" trading status. MFN has long ago ceased to mean anything except "we're not currently at war with you, and oh, you're not Cuba," and that kind of sucks.
... is not the precise market share, but that the market share is big enough so that sites can't afford to be IE-only any more. I really don't care if the market share of Firefox (and other Mozilla browsers) is 10%, 25%, or even 50% -- what I care about is that the sites I need to go to are standards-compliant and don't rely on crap like ActiveX. Ideally, I'd like to see several major browsers, using several different rendering engines, and a host of minor ones, none having more than 50%, all rendering sites that conform to W3C standards reasonably well, all competing with each other. Doesn't seem like too much to ask.
Say you're writing a paper about the life of a famous russian violinist and you just happen to use the phrase "command economy". It would be abosultely stupid to go on and cite five sources of a little tidbit of information that is peripheral to your main subject.
I think you could write a paper about any aspect of Russian culture or history and use the phrase "command economy" without having to cite it, actually; anyone who knows anything about the subject will know what you're talking about.
Scond, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with using an encyclopedia as a source of information. THAT'S WHY THEY EXIST. If you need more information or corroboration, then by all means go get it, but there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the concept of encyclopedias. They serve their purpose.
Yes, encyclopedias exist as a source of information -- but not as the be-all and end-all of research. I'll say it again: they should be a starting point, not an endpoint, at least for academic work. (Or journalism, for that matter.) If the goal is to really learn about a subject, an encyclopedia article, no matter how well-written or, er, encyclopedic, is not enough. Encyclopedia articles are, by their nature, summaries of existing knowledge; the purpose of research (yes, even in high school) is to create new knowledge, or at the very least to put existing knowledge together in new ways.
Look, I think encyclopedias are great. They're a wonderful way to satisfy your own curiosity about something, or to get a quick overview of a subject before you dig into some particular aspect of it in depth. But it's vitally important not to overestimate them.
Your teacher obviously wanted to teach his students valuable research skills. He wanted them to use non-encyclopedia sources becuase it's useful to know how to find information from other sources.
Unfortuantely, his policy gave you the wrong idea... and that's what's really wrong with it.
[shrug] I think I got exactly the right idea out of it, in that ever since then, I've known how to write a good research paper, whereas when I was an undergrad, it was immediately obvious that many of my classmates didn't. It wasn't that they couldn't, but they'd never had anyone teach them how. Research is a skill that's difficult to pick up by osmosis. It seems to me that an awful lot of time is spent in lower-division classes teaching freshmen and sophomores skills that IMNSGDHO they should have learned in high school or even earlier, and this is an example.
"Computer simulations show..." is another way of saying "computer programmers imagine..."
[sigh] No, it's not.
The idea that Wikipedia is a "plague" is nonsense, being pushed by a few curmudgeons who can't get their mind around the idea that students might be able to work more efficiently by looking up secondary sources online than by reading equivalent sources in the library. There have always been students who retyped encyclopedia articles and presented the result as their own work; sure, it's easier to cut'n'paste from Wikipedia than to type in a dead-tree encyclopedia article by hand, but it's not so much easier as to justify the reaction Wikipedia is getting.
The real problem is students, even at the college level, regarding any secondary source as sufficient research. I've said before that one of the best teachers I ever had, my American History teacher in high school, did the class an enormous favor with his source policy, which seemed Draconian at the time: "If you cite an encyclopedia article in your paper, no matter how good the rest of the paper is, you get an F on the assignment." An encylopedia -- any encyclopedia -- is a place to start looking for information, but unless you're just looking up something quickly to satisfy your own curiosity, it's never a place to finish.
While I might get flamed for this one, in the home market at least, it's not Unix that people are buying, it's an experience. Unix is an important part in the scientific communities and for some hard core techies, but the people who buy the mac mini, iMac and iPod's aren't worried about the underlying technology.
Generally true, but "the experience" runs on Unix. When my non-techie friends ask what kind of computer they should buy, and I tell them to get a Mac, I don't say, "It's really cool to have a great GUI as well as access to all the great command-line Unix tools, all in one carefully thought out integrated package." What I do tell them is, "You get the best, most modern interface, plus it's much more secure and stable than Windows because it's based on Unix, which is the operating system that actually runs the Internet.* So you can just do what you want to do with your computer instead of spending half your time dealing with crashes, viruses, and spyware. Also, if you ever do decide you want to get into some more advanced stuff, let me know." Which is a pretty successful sales pitch, and has the virtue of being both true and relevant to "the experience" they'll have with the computer.
* Yes, I know this is a horrible oversimplification, but it's essentially true, and I'm always happy to go into more detail if people ask.
I've noticed before that extremists of both Left and Right can be identified by, among other things, their tendency to look at everything in terms of classical economics -- they assume that "the economy" will always make "rational" decisions, whatever they consider "rational" to be. (It's almost tautological that, being extremists, they have an idea of what's rational that doesn't coincide with anything real, but that's a whole 'nother discussion.) It's left up to those of us in the Vast Middle to note that irrational forces -- altruism, generosity, and openness, yes; also greed, envy, fear, and group-think -- very often profoundly influence how people spend their money, as well as every other aspect of how they live their lives.
Seems like they're playing fast and loose with capacity: "will start producing 16 gigabit Nand Flash chips this year" vs. " currently in products such as USB drives and digital cameras in capacities of up to 8GB." Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't 16 gigabits = 2GB?
Oh yeah, she loved it when I'd scrabble around frantically in the dark for a few seconds and then ask, "Where's my weapon? Where's my weapon?" ;)
The only reason to install Windows on one is to wind up the mac zealots
Well, I'm a bit of a Mac zealot myself, and I don't see myself getting "wound up" by the idea of Windows running on a MacBook at all. On the (thankfully rare) occasions that I absolutely have to run a Windows-only app, I'll be very happy to be able to do so at native speed on my own machine, rather than having to find a Windows box I can use or deal with the slowness of VirtualPC on PowerPC. I agree that buying a MacBook, or any other Intel-based Mac, primarily to run Windows would be kind of silly, though.
I also heard that in the British Army, the first minute after waking up doesn't officially exist - that's because they're aware that people are still "out of sorts" and incapable for at least a minute. In theory, you can punch the Sgt-Major and get away with it.
Dunno about in the British Army, but in the American Army this same meme exists -- and it's a (rather dangerous) urban legend. I know this, unfortunately, because when I was an infantryman, a buddy of mine tried to use this as an excuse for kicking a 2LT in the face, and it didn't work. And yeah, the lieutenant deserved it; he used to think it was fun to sneak up to someone's tent and grab their feet and yell "Boo!" if they were sticking out. I'm 6'3", and my buddy was about the same height; you'd better believe that when we were in a tent together, especially those damn issue pup tents that probably haven't changed since the height of the average GI was 5'4" back in the Civil War, our feet were sticking out. To be fair, the 2LT got an ass-chewing -- but my buddy lost a stripe and his next three paychecks.
Really, when you think about it, it makes sense that this principle isn't generally followed; infantrymen have to be able to wake up and function almost instantly. Generally, only one guy in a foxhole is going to be awake. The other guy has to be able wake up and roll into a firing position the instant anything Really Bad starts happening. It took me years to break that habit.
Is there anyone, anyone at all in the world who thought it would be a good idea to perform critical medical procedures just after waking up?
... well, pretty much ever ... that this kind of thing kills patients. That's why this subject needs investigation; it's not just a waste of your preciousss tax dollars.
I worked in emergency medicine for nine years, and I can tell you that unfortunately, the answer is "yes." In small, rural ER's, there's almost always only one doctor on duty, and on night shift he's napping until someone comes in. In bigger, urban teaching hospitals, most of the doctors are interns and residents, and they're so exhausted from working their absurdly long hours that they grab sleep whenever they possibly can. And it's been a dirty little not-so-secret in the medical community for
Um ... friction? Even interplanetary space in the orbit around a normal star isn't a perfect vacuum, after all; the Earth's orbit is decaying, just veeery slowly (and it would take much, much longer than the projected lifetime of the Sun for such decay to make us spiral appreciably inward.) Around a black hole, you can expect the gas to be relatively dense, and friction to have a relatively fast effect on its orbit. I say "relatively" because, of course, the density is still very low and the time scales are still very large by terrestrial standards -- at least until you get right up near the event horizon, at which point things just get weird.
Yes. The first several generations of PowerBooks ran 68k processors.
Have your army of minions engrave all your really important data on clay tablets. Then try to make sure the tablets are stored in the basement of your palace when it burns to the ground, so the clay gets well-fired. Thousands of years from now, archaeologists will marvel at your beautifully preserved backups. They'll call it "cuneiporn."