Galileo's story is almost a parable, an illustration that HOW you say something can be just as important as WHAT you say.
In the famed example, Galileo framed his arguments to make the pope look like a simpleton and a fool, alienating his former ally, the one person who protected him from everyone who thought heliocentrism was heresy. It's important to remember that before that incident the pope was a moderate figure. He didn't believe in Galileo's position, but he did defend him from the cardinals who thought Galileo should be tried for heresy. This paper was commissioned by the pope who asked Galileo to present both sides without taking a position. When Galileo took the pope's arguments and not only insulted them but implied the pope was an idiot for thinking them, no surprise, the pope wasn't interested in offering him any protection.
It's worth noting that this probably wasn't even Galileo's attention -- he was blindsided by the reaction and never understood what he may have done wrong... something I continue to see this day in the geek community with brilliant people who don't know how to communicate. Maybe Galileo had Aspergers.:-P
The truth of an argument is almost immaterial. If you frame the debate in an especially insulting way, expect to make an enemy of the person you are denigrating.
You're suffering from confirmation bias. You dislike Gore, possibly because of his politics, and thus will tend to believe the worst of him in any situation, regardless of the evidence.
You're assuming a lot. I actually like Al Gore as vice president, thought he would have made a much better President than Bush during and after the 2000 election, and agree with many of his positions. However, I am not happy with his hypocritical environmental record (carbon trading is a scam that will not effect climate change either way, he takes incredibly polluting private jets, and his own home is extremely energy inefficient). He likes to promote, but half the time, he is promoting himself as the leader of a movement rather than solutions that would work.
So did saddam, and he also gassed the Iranians, and we turned a blind eye. We also turn a blind eye to the Kingdom of Saudia Arabia and its mal-treatment of people, and last nation scale functioning monarchy on the planet. So yeah, we've turned blind eyes torwards worse.
What I am hearing now is that yes, we've turned a blind eye towards worse, but Rwanda changed things, just as 9/11 changed things. No longer are world governments willing to sit things out and hope that when the atrocities start that they'll work things out. No one wants another Rwanda, thus the intervention in Libya. Thus, the rumblings of war on Syria.
That's exactly what the US should do. Why is this the problem of a country half a world away? Where are Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Israel when there is a war on their borders?
The first is that ANY problem that affects Israel is automatically the US's problem. I hate how our relationship with that country works, but I have to admit it happens.
And Al-Qaeda isn't as strong as it used to be, certainly, but it's hardly weak. And it doesn't have to be Al-Qaeda either, any fundamentalist jihad movement can spring up and swell pretty easily in that section of the world.
(should we talk about the rebels carving out and eating organs again?)
Ah, but which rebels are we talking about here? It's more than a 2-sided war; that's one of the many things that make this whole situation so messy.
No, but some options are worse than others, and one of those is groups like Hezbollah getting ahold of large quantities of nerve gas, which they might decide to fling into Israel at some random point in the future, or al-qaeda-ized militants also getting ahold of said weapons and shipping them off to god knows where for future use.
If that is the risk, then it seems like keeping Assad in power would be in the United States' best interests.
The real question is why Russia and China are doing absolutely nothing other than supplying Assad with more weapons and stonewalling even toothless UN resolutions.
The Russians at least want Assad in power because he works with their interests. Doesn't matter if he gasses his people, if everyone hates him, if he commits atrocities. All that matters is if he allows Syria to be in the sphere of Russian influence. If so, then they'll let him do whatever the hell he wants short of letting the conflict become inter-country.
Russia and China are being promoted as the shining lights of progressive international governance and outstanding defenders of human rights and transparency so shouldn't they help resolve this situation?
I... is this sarcasm? I can't tell. When has anyone, anyone outside of maybe those two countries said such a thing?
Right now this smacks too much of "wag the dog". A nice war against a "bad man" so that everyone can forget the NSA leaks. And a big party when we kill the "bad man".
Yeah, that sort of BS was said about Clinton also when he mounted an air strike on Osama Bin Laden (too bad the intelligence was bad -- sorry factory workers). We found out three years later that yeah, Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda really were that big a threat after all, but it didn't stop all the media outlets for mocking Clinton for their perception that Clinton just wanted a distraction, as if national and world events just stop when a scandal happens.
I don't think people are forgetting about the NSA leaks. But really not many people CARE about the NSA leaks outside of Internet geeks and EFF, and probably the ACLU. I would wager the majority of the American public is fine with the Patriot act, drone strikes on suspected terrorist targets in Pakistan, and the NSA looking at sender/receiver headers. A HELL of a lot more people are going to care more about whether we get into another war.
Of course he never said "I practically invented the internet". He said "I took the initiative in creating the Internet"
That's the same damned thing.
Sure, he wasn't writing code for the TCP/IP stack, nor does he have a single RFC to his name
And that makes a big difference. He didn't design or implement it. He cannot claim inventor status. Now, I think it would be quite fair to say "I shepherded the Internet from infancy to adulthood." Maybe without his funding it could have been a forgotten experiment. Without his help the Internet may have been delayed for years. But that is a far, far cry from inventing or creating it.
Al Gore authored the legislation that made Darpanet public, which created the internet thus making his comment which was "I practically invented the internet" correct
That's bullshit. The people writing the code, the people doing the design, the project managers, and maybe even the guys laying some cable, those are the people I would say created the Internet.
I wouldn't Godwin it. Adolph Hitler absolutely deserved Time's Man of the Year for 1938. Absolutely no one else on Earth shaped events like he did. They were horrible, cruel events, but no one cast a longer shadow. Not Stalin, not Roosevelt.
Your mistake is treating "Man of the Year" like it's some sort of award or honor. IT WAS NOT. Sure, after Time's fall from grace, they lost their balls and Person of the Year became an award to honor people we like (Re: Rudy Giuliani instead of Osama Bin Laden in 2001) but decades earlier they weren't scared to make controversial (and right) choices.
This is a willful misreading of the original post. "4x more powerful" is vague, of course, but by no reasonable reading would interpret it as "4x windspeeds". I read it to mean "4x as destructive". That could be a matter of an increase in as little as 10 mph. Damage to manmade structures is what we're interested in.
That doesn't make much sense. We used to use such a subjective system for measuring earthquakes, the Mercalli scale, but it was mostly abandoned when the Richter Scale was made (and these days, the MMS scale is usually used, even when people say Richter). Building codes and materials change drastically over the decades, and buildings in hurricane country are more likely to be able to survive hurricane-force winds. New York had a lot of damage with Tropical Storm Sandy, but there was so much more -to- damage in 2012 than 80 years ago when a similar storm came through.
A "how much damage did it cause" scale is subjective and makes it difficult or impossible to compare the strengths of storms that hit different areas. I, and I think most people, am far more interested in the relative actual strengths of storms.
That's cherry-picking a statistic. Taking a single year with abnormally high temperatures then comparing all the years after to that one year to try and claim that average temperatures have not been rising.
I have a lot of respect for Cerf's contributions to Internet protocols we take for granted, but he was way off base there in that letter. Not his finest moment, and I particularly disagree with his assertion that Gore was not trying to take more credit than was due. He has a history of self-promotion before then and especially since then.
Yeah, but you don't know if it's one person or a dozen modding you down. Sometimes you'll offend someone and they'll want to grind that axe. You can get stalkers on Slashdot, and often those stalkers will get mod points and then spend them all on one person.
I've definitely seen stalkers who follow specific posters around and post a reply to each and EVERY post they make in every topic, telling everyone what an asshole that person is. I'll bet those sort just spend their mod points in one place when they get them.
I'd be fine with a -2 system as long as that system had a way of culling -2 posts and ANY FURTHER replies to them (and replies to those replies). You can browse at 0 or 1, but then you see all the people getting hot under the collar falling for a troll post and that just adds lots of noise as well.
Everyone points to the RMAH, but the non-RM auction house is just as much to blame. The auction system killed any higher-level enjoyment of the game for me when it became clear that you were just farming for gold to spend on the auction houses. The Diablo series is an item hunt, and if the item hunting sucks, the game flounders.
I can understand your point...but Blizzard had to do "something" about the discrepancy between Diablo 1 and 2 accounts/games on Battlenet and the actual number of copies sold.
Did they really? I mean... why? It's not like they received any revenue from Battle.Net accounts. It all came from actual game sales. I think the "no single-player" decision is an anti-piracy move and nothing more.
I can tell you what they could have done to increase Battle.Net usage: make the BNet servers more stable. Nothing like running away from monsters and finding new areas of the screen are just black because you've gotten desynced and then disconnected from the server. Happened often to me and to anyone I talked with about the game. The entire Battle.Net experience with D2 (flaky/desynced servers, grouping with selfish and anti-social people) was a big reason why I didn't nab World of Warcraft immediately.
Enigma was awesome!!! Of course getting a legit one was pretty much a pipe dream. (by legit I mean making it with non duped runes.)
That was my problem with Diablo 2 -- all the good stuff was (mostly) only available through cheatery. Were real drop rates modified by the expectation/reality of duping bugs?
This is why so many property seizure/shakedown cases from the police have the officer saying he "smelled pot" after he stopped the car. He never found any, and never had any reasonable suspicion there was some, but he would say there was a smell of pot in the car, so he seized the property in it. A car smelling "too clean" was another reason.
You are well named. As a troll you bring neither fact nor insight and exist only to rile people up. I apologize for falling for it, I should have known better by now.
Saying "The law should protect me" is little comfort when faced with an agency known for its dirty tricks and now stands accused of violating other laws as a matter of casual policy.
Supposedly laws were supposed to protect Bradley Manning, but after his torture, I wouldn't blame anyone for thinking they'd be far safer in non-US jurisdiction.
Slashdot Mirror
Galileo's story is almost a parable, an illustration that HOW you say something can be just as important as WHAT you say.
In the famed example, Galileo framed his arguments to make the pope look like a simpleton and a fool, alienating his former ally, the one person who protected him from everyone who thought heliocentrism was heresy. It's important to remember that before that incident the pope was a moderate figure. He didn't believe in Galileo's position, but he did defend him from the cardinals who thought Galileo should be tried for heresy. This paper was commissioned by the pope who asked Galileo to present both sides without taking a position. When Galileo took the pope's arguments and not only insulted them but implied the pope was an idiot for thinking them, no surprise, the pope wasn't interested in offering him any protection.
It's worth noting that this probably wasn't even Galileo's attention -- he was blindsided by the reaction and never understood what he may have done wrong... something I continue to see this day in the geek community with brilliant people who don't know how to communicate. Maybe Galileo had Aspergers. :-P
The truth of an argument is almost immaterial. If you frame the debate in an especially insulting way, expect to make an enemy of the person you are denigrating.
You're suffering from confirmation bias. You dislike Gore, possibly because of his politics, and thus will tend to believe the worst of him in any situation, regardless of the evidence.
You're assuming a lot. I actually like Al Gore as vice president, thought he would have made a much better President than Bush during and after the 2000 election, and agree with many of his positions. However, I am not happy with his hypocritical environmental record (carbon trading is a scam that will not effect climate change either way, he takes incredibly polluting private jets, and his own home is extremely energy inefficient). He likes to promote, but half the time, he is promoting himself as the leader of a movement rather than solutions that would work.
So did saddam, and he also gassed the Iranians, and we turned a blind eye. We also turn a blind eye to the Kingdom of Saudia Arabia and its mal-treatment of people, and last nation scale functioning monarchy on the planet. So yeah, we've turned blind eyes torwards worse.
What I am hearing now is that yes, we've turned a blind eye towards worse, but Rwanda changed things, just as 9/11 changed things. No longer are world governments willing to sit things out and hope that when the atrocities start that they'll work things out. No one wants another Rwanda, thus the intervention in Libya. Thus, the rumblings of war on Syria.
That's exactly what the US should do. Why is this the problem of a country half a world away? Where are Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Israel when there is a war on their borders?
The first is that ANY problem that affects Israel is automatically the US's problem. I hate how our relationship with that country works, but I have to admit it happens.
And Al-Qaeda isn't as strong as it used to be, certainly, but it's hardly weak. And it doesn't have to be Al-Qaeda either, any fundamentalist jihad movement can spring up and swell pretty easily in that section of the world.
(should we talk about the rebels carving out and eating organs again?)
Ah, but which rebels are we talking about here? It's more than a 2-sided war; that's one of the many things that make this whole situation so messy.
No, but some options are worse than others, and one of those is groups like Hezbollah getting ahold of large quantities of nerve gas, which they might decide to fling into Israel at some random point in the future, or al-qaeda-ized militants also getting ahold of said weapons and shipping them off to god knows where for future use.
If that is the risk, then it seems like keeping Assad in power would be in the United States' best interests.
The real question is why Russia and China are doing absolutely nothing other than supplying Assad with more weapons and stonewalling even toothless UN resolutions.
The Russians at least want Assad in power because he works with their interests. Doesn't matter if he gasses his people, if everyone hates him, if he commits atrocities. All that matters is if he allows Syria to be in the sphere of Russian influence. If so, then they'll let him do whatever the hell he wants short of letting the conflict become inter-country.
Russia and China are being promoted as the shining lights of progressive international governance and outstanding defenders of human rights and transparency so shouldn't they help resolve this situation?
I... is this sarcasm? I can't tell. When has anyone, anyone outside of maybe those two countries said such a thing?
Right now this smacks too much of "wag the dog". A nice war against a "bad man" so that everyone can forget the NSA leaks. And a big party when we kill the "bad man".
Yeah, that sort of BS was said about Clinton also when he mounted an air strike on Osama Bin Laden (too bad the intelligence was bad -- sorry factory workers). We found out three years later that yeah, Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda really were that big a threat after all, but it didn't stop all the media outlets for mocking Clinton for their perception that Clinton just wanted a distraction, as if national and world events just stop when a scandal happens.
I don't think people are forgetting about the NSA leaks. But really not many people CARE about the NSA leaks outside of Internet geeks and EFF, and probably the ACLU. I would wager the majority of the American public is fine with the Patriot act, drone strikes on suspected terrorist targets in Pakistan, and the NSA looking at sender/receiver headers. A HELL of a lot more people are going to care more about whether we get into another war.
Of course he never said "I practically invented the internet". He said "I took the initiative in creating the Internet"
That's the same damned thing.
Sure, he wasn't writing code for the TCP/IP stack, nor does he have a single RFC to his name
And that makes a big difference. He didn't design or implement it. He cannot claim inventor status. Now, I think it would be quite fair to say "I shepherded the Internet from infancy to adulthood." Maybe without his funding it could have been a forgotten experiment. Without his help the Internet may have been delayed for years. But that is a far, far cry from inventing or creating it.
Al Gore authored the legislation that made Darpanet public, which created the internet thus making his comment which was "I practically invented the internet" correct
That's bullshit. The people writing the code, the people doing the design, the project managers, and maybe even the guys laying some cable, those are the people I would say created the Internet.
I wouldn't Godwin it. Adolph Hitler absolutely deserved Time's Man of the Year for 1938. Absolutely no one else on Earth shaped events like he did. They were horrible, cruel events, but no one cast a longer shadow. Not Stalin, not Roosevelt.
Your mistake is treating "Man of the Year" like it's some sort of award or honor. IT WAS NOT.
Sure, after Time's fall from grace, they lost their balls and Person of the Year became an award to honor people we like (Re: Rudy Giuliani instead of Osama Bin Laden in 2001) but decades earlier they weren't scared to make controversial (and right) choices.
This is a willful misreading of the original post. "4x more powerful" is vague, of course, but by no reasonable reading would interpret it as "4x windspeeds". I read it to mean "4x as destructive". That could be a matter of an increase in as little as 10 mph. Damage to manmade structures is what we're interested in.
That doesn't make much sense. We used to use such a subjective system for measuring earthquakes, the Mercalli scale, but it was mostly abandoned when the Richter Scale was made (and these days, the MMS scale is usually used, even when people say Richter). Building codes and materials change drastically over the decades, and buildings in hurricane country are more likely to be able to survive hurricane-force winds. New York had a lot of damage with Tropical Storm Sandy, but there was so much more -to- damage in 2012 than 80 years ago when a similar storm came through.
A "how much damage did it cause" scale is subjective and makes it difficult or impossible to compare the strengths of storms that hit different areas. I, and I think most people, am far more interested in the relative actual strengths of storms.
You mean, as it did over sixteen years ago?
That's cherry-picking a statistic. Taking a single year with abnormally high temperatures then comparing all the years after to that one year to try and claim that average temperatures have not been rising.
Cause making money is evil?
It can be if the methods and results are evil.
I have a lot of respect for Cerf's contributions to Internet protocols we take for granted, but he was way off base there in that letter. Not his finest moment, and I particularly disagree with his assertion that Gore was not trying to take more credit than was due. He has a history of self-promotion before then and especially since then.
Yeah, but you don't know if it's one person or a dozen modding you down. Sometimes you'll offend someone and they'll want to grind that axe. You can get stalkers on Slashdot, and often those stalkers will get mod points and then spend them all on one person.
I've definitely seen stalkers who follow specific posters around and post a reply to each and EVERY post they make in every topic, telling everyone what an asshole that person is. I'll bet those sort just spend their mod points in one place when they get them.
I'd be fine with a -2 system as long as that system had a way of culling -2 posts and ANY FURTHER replies to them (and replies to those replies).
You can browse at 0 or 1, but then you see all the people getting hot under the collar falling for a troll post and that just adds lots of noise as well.
Everyone points to the RMAH, but the non-RM auction house is just as much to blame. The auction system killed any higher-level enjoyment of the game for me when it became clear that you were just farming for gold to spend on the auction houses. The Diablo series is an item hunt, and if the item hunting sucks, the game flounders.
I can understand your point...but Blizzard had to do "something" about the discrepancy between Diablo 1 and 2 accounts/games on Battlenet and the actual number of copies sold.
Did they really? I mean... why? It's not like they received any revenue from Battle.Net accounts. It all came from actual game sales.
I think the "no single-player" decision is an anti-piracy move and nothing more.
I can tell you what they could have done to increase Battle.Net usage: make the BNet servers more stable. Nothing like running away from monsters and finding new areas of the screen are just black because you've gotten desynced and then disconnected from the server. Happened often to me and to anyone I talked with about the game. The entire Battle.Net experience with D2 (flaky/desynced servers, grouping with selfish and anti-social people) was a big reason why I didn't nab World of Warcraft immediately.
Enigma was awesome!!! Of course getting a legit one was pretty much a pipe dream. (by legit I mean making it with non duped runes.)
That was my problem with Diablo 2 -- all the good stuff was (mostly) only available through cheatery. Were real drop rates modified by the expectation/reality of duping bugs?
This is why so many property seizure/shakedown cases from the police have the officer saying he "smelled pot" after he stopped the car. He never found any, and never had any reasonable suspicion there was some, but he would say there was a smell of pot in the car, so he seized the property in it. A car smelling "too clean" was another reason.
This New Yorker article is a depressing read.
$95 on bureaucracy? You are optimistic!
That New Yorker article is stunning. And depressing.
I think the delusion that he was referring to was the assertion that the Obama administration was trying to reduce "authoritarianism."
You are well named. As a troll you bring neither fact nor insight and exist only to rile people up. I apologize for falling for it, I should have known better by now.
Saying "The law should protect me" is little comfort when faced with an agency known for its dirty tricks and now stands accused of violating other laws as a matter of casual policy.
Supposedly laws were supposed to protect Bradley Manning, but after his torture, I wouldn't blame anyone for thinking they'd be far safer in non-US jurisdiction.