Hmm. The "source" of the intuition is the precondition of our subjectivity. Intuition isn't the best word to use, at least not in English, but yes, that's the first 80 pages of the Critique after the prefaces.
Plato and Kant differ a great deal. The only reason you're equating them is because you've mistakenly attributed to Kant the idea that our ideas are to some large but undefined extent functions of the things in themselves. All we can say is that they're preconditions of our subjectivity. None of that would have made sense to Plato in the least. Remember Plato's cave: for him, there is ultimate reality and successively dimmer perceptions of it. The ideas are accessible to the most refined reason. To proceed up the chain Platonically is to get a better view of objective reality; the Kantian project brackets off objective reality and elaborates, paradoxically, a sort of transpersonal subjectivity.
Besides, if you look at the Meno again, no one is deriving principles, we just supposedly know it all already like so many packets of data, and the major underpinning of this notion isn't that such knowledge is a precondition of our existence, or that universals underly our consciousness like archetypes of something, but that we've all lived past lives. The Meno explores the learning paradox. This modern debate may call the discovery of mathematics idea Platonic, but it isn't, unless they are using "mathematics" as short hand for "all knowledge."
I much prefer the Kantian approach, which, simplified, is that space and time are the forms of human intuition, and it is these forms of intuition that lead to us understanding things the way we do (spacially and temporally, whose relationships are mathematical). "Things in themselves" are unknowable, and can only be approached through some set of references, whether it be through the space and time we perceive, other possible ways time and space could work (non-Euclidian geometries?), or ways we can't even imagine. Unlike Plato's idea, which is that mathematics involves universal truths we discover, Kant's "Copernican turn" puts the subject as the one who projects mathematics onto everything it experiences. Arguably, this is the idea that has lead to the "modern era".
This makes mathematics the study of these forms of intuition, so unlike Plato's approach, we're not "discovering" universal ideas, but rather coming to understand the way we interpret the world (and by "we", I mean me, the beings who do science that makes sense to me, and probably most beings on earth whose methods of sensation resemble that of humans).
To answer the question of discovery or invention from this perspective, we can invent ways to do mathematics, but the relationships themselves are a discovery of the way we intuit anything we can sense.
As soon as I saw "Kantian," I knew what my answer would be to the question, and I am very happy to see that someone articulated it breve et clare much better than I could have.
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Sadly, I'm without mod points today, but I'm tipping my virtual hat.
Never underestimate the power of xenophobia on any public mob.
Very true, but I'd blame it on those inciting a xenophobic reaction rather than on the weakness of the mob.
I don't know the reason, but when the news first reported the mishap, they reported that the Russian government was blaming the Americans for the mishap, which seems rather odd, unless the American passengers were, I don't know, rocking the capsule back and forth on the way down.
If we're all so indoctrinated and there is no freedom why do I have to sift through so many overblown posts about the American media to find any posts actually discussing this new iron curtain?
Exactly. Thanks for saying that. And let's not forget all the long posts about American gun policies and prisons. Apparently, it's still just not gratifying enough for people to discuss a problematic issue about another country; you always have to find a way to discuss how America is worse or just as bad.
you mean 6000 years ago, and if by a drought you mean a flood, and if by 2000 human beings, you mean one bad-ass yachtsman named Noah and his hot wife Jessica Alba, then I would be inclined to agree.
Otherwise I'm afraid this is just another godless article passed off as 'science' by Lucifer-worshipping scientists and their ilk over at CNN.
Actually the study can't support the statement that there were only 2,000 of us at that time. What it does say is that only 2,000 of us alive at that time managed to pass down their genes until today. There might have been a larger population whose genes we have lost in the intervening time (e.g. during the Bubonic plague).
The problem with these studies is that there isn't any DNA record of the humans that didn't make it. The only evidence we could hope to find of the humans that have died out is fossilized remains, which are few and far between. Very true. Such DNA studies have a bad habit of ignoring the limits of their implications. Environmental studies do the same thing in different ways. In part, I think this is because scientists with very little experience analyzing human societies get some nice bit of scientific data and think it just explains everything.
Isn't there supposed to be some subsection in the Big Book of Scientific Method about not grossly oversimplifying things you don't know a whole hell of a lot about? Even a little knowledge of history, in the absence of the logic that should have been employed from the start, would clue them in to the fact that a huge portion of humanity never achieved genetic immortality, so to speak.
When I first read this, I thought "Cool!" I'm a big fan of the anime. However, with a series like Ghost in the Shell, one almost has to worry that Hollywood will take the signature wheels-within-wheels plot lines will and severely dumb them down for us "simpleton audiences" on this side of the big pond. Hopefully not; we'll have to wait and see. Actually, the principle reason that movies are dumbed down, and even more so that dialog is dumbed down, is that movies are aimed at a global marketplace. They don't make things stupid for North America; they make things simple and stupid so that they can easily localize a little moronic dialog and market the films across the globe.
It's about humanity's lowest common denominator. When you are unconcerned about telling stories that make sense or play well outside of a certain culture or sub-population, you have a lot more room for complexity and depth.
It is an idiotic approach. Vista is the one being annoying....how could someone predict that end users would blame the applications and not the os that's to blame? Not to mention the whole issue of purposely designing a ui to annoy paying customers, to pressure 3rd parties to change.
Bad idea all around if this was their intention at design. At the risk of being annoyingly irrelevant, these stupid tactics remind me of the misguided perversion of the concept of civil disobedience promoted by dumb-ass protesters these days. In their idiotic self-righteousness, they forget that civil disobedience is about annoying the government; whereas they make life miserable for the average citizen, who then complains to the government, which is then supposed to do something to appease the protesters. It never actually works, but if you're dumb enough, you can believe that you're saving the world that way.
In sum, Microsoft's strategy might as well have been pulled out of the ass of the most inane, vapid, ignorant, self-absorbed, unemployed counter-cultural wannabe you can imagine.
I don't know about everywhere else, but in Arizona you are technically okay if the light is still yellow once the front of your car has entered the intersection.
At least thats what they told us in traffic school. That's true in California as well, both in the traffic schools and according to law enforcement.
You know, I always considered this problem to be one of the few dozen things you learn in college, puzzle over awhile, and then set aside. (I could say the same for Marilyn VS; I thought she was an early 90's flash in the pan.)
For me, the process was: get jolted by the fact that's it's so counter-intuitive; spend 15 minutes failing to explain it to yourself theoretically; then spend 2 minutes counting out possible outcomes on your fingers and totally get it; and then periodically experience more theoretical confusion, whenever you need to explain it someone (which incidentally will clear up, as soon as you count out the possible outcomes again).
I'm guessing I'm also not the only person who heard stories of "someone" at the CS department of their school who wrote a program to prove that the numbers add up. Feedback on that?
Precisely. It's a factor too many people automatically discount in our culture. If the study had been about women misinterpreting men, I'm certain the focus would have been on how men can't communicate their intentions, because we all know that women completely understand everything. Take any division in our culture (gender, race, sexual orientation, whatever) and let ideology enlighten you as to the fact that of course whichever group is perceived as disadvantaged/oppressed/marginalized/violated/cursed (whatever) completely understands the dominant group as well as themselves, while the dominant group understands nothing. This of course leads us to such wonderful paradoxes as the completely unique yet somehow the same in every important way modality, but since, I'm told, logic is purely a function of my x-y chromosome set, or perhaps of my evil, post-colonial culture, I'm supposed to accept such nonsense as meaningful.
The General's answer to the third question ("Accept, Retain, Solicit good people?") clearly shows that his answer to "Usually the outside industry pays quite well for the good ones. Are you prepared to financially compete for the best?" is "No."
So, US Government, please let us know when you're ready to put your money where your mouth is, and we'll subsequently give you the best damn computer security on Planet Earth. Until then, you're just another employer trying to get more than he's paid for out of his staff.
Just another employer? Pay is certainly an issue, but I wouldn't want anyone in a sensitive position who approaches the defense of their country as just another job. If someone is that self-absorbed, they don't belong in the military or the intelligence community. No one could reasonably expect extreme self-sacrifice from every person working in those fields, but the "me first" and "what's the government going to do for me" attitude can remain in self-congratulatory security forums, where the useful and venal troll for self-esteem.
We also cannot just ditch the question of how the military could possibly pay private sector wages. The reasons they cannot and should not would take far too long to explain, and I won't waste my time trying to inform people incapable of seeing past their navels.
So.. you can't find someone with the right 'skill set'.
Maybe what you really need are smarter programmers. Anyone who has talent can pick up new languages, especially when they need to maintain an existing system and not create a new one from scratch. Ignoring C++ developers simply because one has a Java web platform (or WebSphere because one has a JBOSS environment) is just plain ignorant. All languages share common elements, and good developers use those elements to pick up the nuances of syntax. All application servers share common elements, and good application support staff can learn new ones.
I'm in sourcing and am so very happy that all the companies I've worked for understand what you just said. There are some cases where switching specializations is either impossible or undesirable for the engineer, but there are so very many cases where a person who has been working with one set of technologies can switch over, if they wish to.
Being a professional implies that one can learn new but related things with extreme rapidity. For some reason, too many people just pigeon-hole engineers.
On the other hand, many developers who actually aren't good enough to learn new things, or who are insanely for or against certain technologies will freak, if you ask them whether they might be interested in working with something else, but...this situation is exacerbated by the fact so many bottom feeders don't bother to read resumes, profiles, email etc. and contact a dedicated MySQL guy about an Oracle job, not because they think he's capable of doing either, but because they didn't bother to notice what he had actually done and wanted to do. At first glance, it's hard to tell whether someone has seriously thought about your history and thinks you can do new things or hasn't paid any attention at all and is just grasping for straws.
Only if you assume that American political terminology is standard for the rest of the world.
In most places "liberal" is equivalent to what Americans call "libertarian," and the parties Americans call "liberal' are known as "labor" or "left".
Just want to second that. Here in the U.S., conservatives have labored since the 60's at least to redefine the term "liberal" for their own benefit. They achieved success in late 70's/early 80's. At this point, few people know any meaning for the term other than what the political class uses. Still, everyone is pretty far away from Latin liberalis at this point. I wonder whether the concept behind that term will ever be strong enough again to merit a word that unambiguously denotes it.
"Liberal" in U.S. political discourse is the result of an extremely successful and masterful propaganda/marketing campaign. I despise the result, but damn, you have to admire such conceptual and linguistic control of the masses.
The X300 is like a tank, the Air like a sculpture
It was a simile, you illiterate tool.
Actually, we have two similes and one quadripartite comparison which implies at least that the relationship between the two computers is analogous to that obtaining between tanks and sculpture.
Not that I'm calling anyone in the thread a tool, just saying, if we want to go crazy with the terminology...
Tools are good for something anyway, and we all know we're just fucking off by posting here. hehe
This is just the same old "gateway crime" argument, which, if history is any example, will inevitably be scientifically proven false by statistical studies showing (perhaps a correlation, but) no causation.
And the old gateway crime argument is just a form of the ancient post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
People fill in the gaps in their information with ideology. Unfortunately, a great deal of law enforcement training perpetuates these ideas. Time and again, they'll tell you that people convicted of felony X first committed misdemeanor Y, but they fail to notice that they have no idea how many people actually commit misdemeanor Y without ever coming under the radar. Counterarguments which are under the radar, like the hordes of people who smoke pot but don't do crack, are filed away as potential crack smokers rather than demonstrations that smoking pot does not necessarily lead to smoking crack. They also ignore extensions of their own arguments, and not just the ad nauseam examples. For instance, one could just as easily say that drinking beer leads to smoking crack even in adults, but they won't. Why causal linkages between beer and pot and crack are so strong in kids, while the link between beer and anything "druggy" magically disappears during adulthood is beyond me, but then, I only had 9 years of full-time University education and 3 years of doctoral research, so I guess I ain't clever enough to suss out thar thinkun'
Just wait until they sell the technology to the private sector. Instead of poor slobs standing on street corners waving signs, we'll have troops of unskilled laborers running around with laser devices trying to shoot everyone in the head.
Laser Advertising: straight out your marketers' asses into your customers' heads.
A few people from S. America told me that besides "gringos" (which means white U.S. citizens if you were just born yesterday), they call (Americans/Gringos/United Statians) "north americans" or informally just refer to everyone as american(o/a)s from either North or South.
Actually, gringo in actual use translates more accurately as "white guy" or even "white boy." It's a racial term, not an designation for the intersection of a particular ethnicity and a particular nationality.
Not all/.ers follow common sense lines of thinking, but it's common sense to refer to YOUR America as THE AMERICA. It brings people together, and helps create an "other" that you can berate and if push comes to shove, steal their oil!
Well, every adjective used in a self-representation helps create the other, so that's not saying much at all. The oil reference is not only gratuitous, but inaccurate with respect to this hemispshere.
What most vocal/.ers seem unable to grasp is that "American" simply has a wide and a narrow meaning and, gasp, context tells you which one is relevant. That's a feature of natural language. Moreover, how often does anyone have to designate anything as "American" in the sense of 'belonging to North or South America or some other place in the Western Hemisphere'? Outside of some specialized academic discourse, where people are smart enough to understand linguistic usage and not politicize everything. Should women start demanding that a male not be called a "man," since "Mankind" and related expressions include them too? Oh, but people went the other way with that one and decried the wide application of the term.
It's a non-issue, unless you are so weak that you cannot formulate an image of yourself and your culture without explicit, incessant references to the United States.
Of course, the disadvantage provided by academic expertise is that the politicians would use words like "dialogical."
All things considered, I'll take the non-academic, thanks.
The other glaring disadvantage, and let me point out that I was in academia full-time until my early 30's, is that academics are not in a "dialogic" relation with reality. There are many other areas in which one may become trained in proper dialectic, if you want to call it that, and of them all, academic debate is often so far removed from reality, from any practical plan of action, that the whole discourse is nearly self-referential. (How many years did I have to dump into graduate school to sound like that? haha). Nearly all great academic discourse is 95% focusing on some terribly small problem and 5% at the end showing how this enlightens us as to the totality of existence.
Politicians don't need an academic background, just a solid, basic education. What they need are advisors pulled from many areas of expertise. Sadly, what they usually get are corporate types who serve the interests of their subspecies.
We may add to this the problem that the number of representatives in the House hasn't increased since 1958, even though our population has grown by 2/3 and the number and complexity of issues they must deal with has grown significantly. Not a single member of Congress, being only or nearly human, has the time to inform themselves on even the most important topics. The system is broken.
Besides, how many academics actually master a dozen vastly different areas of knowledge? Hmmm? Even the greatest multidisciplinary giants get skewered by area experts, when they publish something with a wide focus.
Doing business with an oppressive regime helps bring up the standard of living for the people under it, eventually as the middle class grows it forces reform. Once there's food in your belly and a roof over your head, you start to pay more attention to what else is going on in your life. While Google is being a party to the state-censorship in China, remember that it's really the Chinese government at fault, and overall Google will have done more good than harm.
This is a very old argument that comes in many forms and has been used to justify doing business with and forming political alliances with many questionable entities. While there is something to be said for engagement, it really does not demonstrably do "more good than harm" except for the government or the business that choose to cooperate. What it does is mollify critics who don't look too deeply into motivations or miss most of the contradictions in corporate and state propaganda.
And in particular...
Doing business with an oppressive regime helps bring up the standard of living for the people under it...
Prove it - a priori or empirically, generally or with respect to China in particular, I don't care, just try to back that up
....eventually as the middle class grows it forces reform.
If a government creates conditions that allow for the elevation of people to what we call the middle class, those thus elevated have a heavy investment in maintaining that status quo. Moreover, the people in China with what we would consider a middle class lifestyle are still among the narrow elite, when you factor in the huge number of really poor.
Once there's food in your belly and a roof over your head, you start to pay more attention to what else is going on in your life
Huge, huge leap necessary to get from not worrying about basic physical needs to political activism. Might also want to try to show everyone how big business benefits the majority of the dirt-poor masses, since worrying about food and shelter is really their problem, not that of the average city dweller in China who might be elevated to the middle class. Moreover, cheap and dangerous manufacturing jobs will probably be what gets them that food and roof, and I'm just not seeing poisoned factory workers as effective lobbyists.
While Google is being a party to the state-censorship in China, remember that it's really the Chinese government at fault...
Complicity? Aiding and abetting? These have no meaning for your version of ethics? It's "really China's fault"? No, if a company chooses to cooperate, it's their fault. It's China's fault that it engages in censorship. Any party that cooperates is responsible for that cooperation
Once again, I get the strangest sense that Paul Verhoeven somehow foresaw this. Verhoeven worked his way through college in the Netherlands working as a gas-station attendant and would later go on to direct the movie "Robocop." Coincidence? Perhaps not...
First of all, there are other bizarre coincidences, such as the appearance of a DVD in the movie "Robocop" (ten years before DVD would actually debut), the "President Schwarzenegger" reference in "Total Recall" (long before his political career), the 9-11 satire in "Starship Troopers" (four years before 9-11), etc.
Did he use his Ph.D. in mathematics to construct a time machine (perhaps to come back and have sex with a young Elizabeth Berkley)? Is he the prophet of our age? And what more does this portend? Are invisible men next?
Oh, man, this is the most enlightening theory I have encountered, since I learned that the band Laibach is actually Queen (Freddy Mercury never actually died, you see, just reinvented himself and his band as post-Industrial, quasi-Socialist, broken German speaking performers.).
The commercial reminds me of nothing so much as when Homer Simpson introduced that monstrous car he designed for his half-brother Herb's company.
I'm also a little confused by the CEO's assertion that "most people have laptop computers".
Most people in the world don't have a computer at all, so he can't mean them.
Most people who do have computers own desktops, so he can't mean them.
Perhaps most people he knows have laptop computer, in which case, he can expect to sell the Noahpad to his mom and his friends, but I don't know about the rest of his market.
Are we absolutely sure the Onion didn't do that commercial?
How much do we spend yearly on the pentagon again?
Well, as to what is officially acknowledged by the DoD Budget Office... I can't say I understand the differences between Direct Budget Plan, Budget Authority, and Outlays exactly, since the chart includes this year, and they must all be estimates of something then, but I'll give you the lowest numbers, which are marked Outlays.
FY 2006 : 499.277 Billion (what a bargain, a whole empire for only 499 instead of the usual 500)
FY 2007 : 516.508 Billion
FY 2008 : 459.754 Billion
You were probably asking a rhetorical question, but in case someone wanted to know, I looked it up.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm. The "source" of the intuition is the precondition of our subjectivity. Intuition isn't the best word to use, at least not in English, but yes, that's the first 80 pages of the Critique after the prefaces.
Plato and Kant differ a great deal. The only reason you're equating them is because you've mistakenly attributed to Kant the idea that our ideas are to some large but undefined extent functions of the things in themselves. All we can say is that they're preconditions of our subjectivity. None of that would have made sense to Plato in the least. Remember Plato's cave: for him, there is ultimate reality and successively dimmer perceptions of it. The ideas are accessible to the most refined reason. To proceed up the chain Platonically is to get a better view of objective reality; the Kantian project brackets off objective reality and elaborates, paradoxically, a sort of transpersonal subjectivity.
Besides, if you look at the Meno again, no one is deriving principles, we just supposedly know it all already like so many packets of data, and the major underpinning of this notion isn't that such knowledge is a precondition of our existence, or that universals underly our consciousness like archetypes of something, but that we've all lived past lives. The Meno explores the learning paradox. This modern debate may call the discovery of mathematics idea Platonic, but it isn't, unless they are using "mathematics" as short hand for "all knowledge."
I much prefer the Kantian approach, which, simplified, is that space and time are the forms of human intuition, and it is these forms of intuition that lead to us understanding things the way we do (spacially and temporally, whose relationships are mathematical). "Things in themselves" are unknowable, and can only be approached through some set of references, whether it be through the space and time we perceive, other possible ways time and space could work (non-Euclidian geometries?), or ways we can't even imagine. Unlike Plato's idea, which is that mathematics involves universal truths we discover, Kant's "Copernican turn" puts the subject as the one who projects mathematics onto everything it experiences. Arguably, this is the idea that has lead to the "modern era".
This makes mathematics the study of these forms of intuition, so unlike Plato's approach, we're not "discovering" universal ideas, but rather coming to understand the way we interpret the world (and by "we", I mean me, the beings who do science that makes sense to me, and probably most beings on earth whose methods of sensation resemble that of humans).
To answer the question of discovery or invention from this perspective, we can invent ways to do mathematics, but the relationships themselves are a discovery of the way we intuit anything we can sense.
As soon as I saw "Kantian," I knew what my answer would be to the question, and I am very happy to see that someone articulated it breve et clare much better than I could have.
.Sadly, I'm without mod points today, but I'm tipping my virtual hat.
And such postfix "nanos" can perform for hours without any downtime for recharging.
Very true, but I'd blame it on those inciting a xenophobic reaction rather than on the weakness of the mob.
I don't know the reason, but when the news first reported the mishap, they reported that the Russian government was blaming the Americans for the mishap, which seems rather odd, unless the American passengers were, I don't know, rocking the capsule back and forth on the way down.
Exactly. Thanks for saying that. And let's not forget all the long posts about American gun policies and prisons. Apparently, it's still just not gratifying enough for people to discuss a problematic issue about another country; you always have to find a way to discuss how America is worse or just as bad.
Not Lucifer, my friend, Cthulhu.
Ia fhthagn
You know, I always considered this problem to be one of the few dozen things you learn in college, puzzle over awhile, and then set aside. (I could say the same for Marilyn VS; I thought she was an early 90's flash in the pan.)
For me, the process was: get jolted by the fact that's it's so counter-intuitive; spend 15 minutes failing to explain it to yourself theoretically; then spend 2 minutes counting out possible outcomes on your fingers and totally get it; and then periodically experience more theoretical confusion, whenever you need to explain it someone (which incidentally will clear up, as soon as you count out the possible outcomes again).
I'm guessing I'm also not the only person who heard stories of "someone" at the CS department of their school who wrote a program to prove that the numbers add up. Feedback on that?
Precisely. It's a factor too many people automatically discount in our culture. If the study had been about women misinterpreting men, I'm certain the focus would have been on how men can't communicate their intentions, because we all know that women completely understand everything. Take any division in our culture (gender, race, sexual orientation, whatever) and let ideology enlighten you as to the fact that of course whichever group is perceived as disadvantaged/oppressed/marginalized/violated/cursed (whatever) completely understands the dominant group as well as themselves, while the dominant group understands nothing. This of course leads us to such wonderful paradoxes as the completely unique yet somehow the same in every important way modality, but since, I'm told, logic is purely a function of my x-y chromosome set, or perhaps of my evil, post-colonial culture, I'm supposed to accept such nonsense as meaningful.
Just another employer? Pay is certainly an issue, but I wouldn't want anyone in a sensitive position who approaches the defense of their country as just another job. If someone is that self-absorbed, they don't belong in the military or the intelligence community. No one could reasonably expect extreme self-sacrifice from every person working in those fields, but the "me first" and "what's the government going to do for me" attitude can remain in self-congratulatory security forums, where the useful and venal troll for self-esteem.
We also cannot just ditch the question of how the military could possibly pay private sector wages. The reasons they cannot and should not would take far too long to explain, and I won't waste my time trying to inform people incapable of seeing past their navels.
I'm in sourcing and am so very happy that all the companies I've worked for understand what you just said. There are some cases where switching specializations is either impossible or undesirable for the engineer, but there are so very many cases where a person who has been working with one set of technologies can switch over, if they wish to.
Being a professional implies that one can learn new but related things with extreme rapidity. For some reason, too many people just pigeon-hole engineers.
On the other hand, many developers who actually aren't good enough to learn new things, or who are insanely for or against certain technologies will freak, if you ask them whether they might be interested in working with something else, but...this situation is exacerbated by the fact so many bottom feeders don't bother to read resumes, profiles, email etc. and contact a dedicated MySQL guy about an Oracle job, not because they think he's capable of doing either, but because they didn't bother to notice what he had actually done and wanted to do. At first glance, it's hard to tell whether someone has seriously thought about your history and thinks you can do new things or hasn't paid any attention at all and is just grasping for straws.
Finally! I've had to scroll through the entire list of comments to get to a Hulk reference. Must be my age, I don't know.
At least once the startling metamorphosis occurs, we can just leap up to the star and smash it in revenge.
Just want to second that. Here in the U.S., conservatives have labored since the 60's at least to redefine the term "liberal" for their own benefit. They achieved success in late 70's/early 80's. At this point, few people know any meaning for the term other than what the political class uses. Still, everyone is pretty far away from Latin liberalis at this point. I wonder whether the concept behind that term will ever be strong enough again to merit a word that unambiguously denotes it.
"Liberal" in U.S. political discourse is the result of an extremely successful and masterful propaganda/marketing campaign. I despise the result, but damn, you have to admire such conceptual and linguistic control of the masses.
Actually, we have two similes and one quadripartite comparison which implies at least that the relationship between the two computers is analogous to that obtaining between tanks and sculpture.
Not that I'm calling anyone in the thread a tool, just saying, if we want to go crazy with the terminology...
Tools are good for something anyway, and we all know we're just fucking off by posting here. hehe
And the old gateway crime argument is just a form of the ancient post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
People fill in the gaps in their information with ideology. Unfortunately, a great deal of law enforcement training perpetuates these ideas. Time and again, they'll tell you that people convicted of felony X first committed misdemeanor Y, but they fail to notice that they have no idea how many people actually commit misdemeanor Y without ever coming under the radar. Counterarguments which are under the radar, like the hordes of people who smoke pot but don't do crack, are filed away as potential crack smokers rather than demonstrations that smoking pot does not necessarily lead to smoking crack. They also ignore extensions of their own arguments, and not just the ad nauseam examples. For instance, one could just as easily say that drinking beer leads to smoking crack even in adults, but they won't. Why causal linkages between beer and pot and crack are so strong in kids, while the link between beer and anything "druggy" magically disappears during adulthood is beyond me, but then, I only had 9 years of full-time University education and 3 years of doctoral research, so I guess I ain't clever enough to suss out thar thinkun'
Just wait until they sell the technology to the private sector. Instead of poor slobs standing on street corners waving signs, we'll have troops of unskilled laborers running around with laser devices trying to shoot everyone in the head.
Laser Advertising: straight out your marketers' asses into your customers' heads.
Actually, gringo in actual use translates more accurately as "white guy" or even "white boy." It's a racial term, not an designation for the intersection of a particular ethnicity and a particular nationality.
Not allWell, every adjective used in a self-representation helps create the other, so that's not saying much at all. The oil reference is not only gratuitous, but inaccurate with respect to this hemispshere.
What most vocal /.ers seem unable to grasp is that "American" simply has a wide and a narrow meaning and, gasp, context tells you which one is relevant. That's a feature of natural language. Moreover, how often does anyone have to designate anything as "American" in the sense of 'belonging to North or South America or some other place in the Western Hemisphere'? Outside of some specialized academic discourse, where people are smart enough to understand linguistic usage and not politicize everything. Should women start demanding that a male not be called a "man," since "Mankind" and related expressions include them too? Oh, but people went the other way with that one and decried the wide application of the term.
It's a non-issue, unless you are so weak that you cannot formulate an image of yourself and your culture without explicit, incessant references to the United States.
The other glaring disadvantage, and let me point out that I was in academia full-time until my early 30's, is that academics are not in a "dialogic" relation with reality. There are many other areas in which one may become trained in proper dialectic, if you want to call it that, and of them all, academic debate is often so far removed from reality, from any practical plan of action, that the whole discourse is nearly self-referential. (How many years did I have to dump into graduate school to sound like that? haha). Nearly all great academic discourse is 95% focusing on some terribly small problem and 5% at the end showing how this enlightens us as to the totality of existence.
Politicians don't need an academic background, just a solid, basic education. What they need are advisors pulled from many areas of expertise. Sadly, what they usually get are corporate types who serve the interests of their subspecies.
We may add to this the problem that the number of representatives in the House hasn't increased since 1958, even though our population has grown by 2/3 and the number and complexity of issues they must deal with has grown significantly. Not a single member of Congress, being only or nearly human, has the time to inform themselves on even the most important topics. The system is broken.
Besides, how many academics actually master a dozen vastly different areas of knowledge? Hmmm? Even the greatest multidisciplinary giants get skewered by area experts, when they publish something with a wide focus.
This is a very old argument that comes in many forms and has been used to justify doing business with and forming political alliances with many questionable entities. While there is something to be said for engagement, it really does not demonstrably do "more good than harm" except for the government or the business that choose to cooperate. What it does is mollify critics who don't look too deeply into motivations or miss most of the contradictions in corporate and state propaganda.
And in particular...
Doing business with an oppressive regime helps bring up the standard of living for the people under it...Prove it - a priori or empirically, generally or with respect to China in particular, I don't care, just try to back that up
....eventually as the middle class grows it forces reform.If a government creates conditions that allow for the elevation of people to what we call the middle class, those thus elevated have a heavy investment in maintaining that status quo. Moreover, the people in China with what we would consider a middle class lifestyle are still among the narrow elite, when you factor in the huge number of really poor.
Once there's food in your belly and a roof over your head, you start to pay more attention to what else is going on in your lifeHuge, huge leap necessary to get from not worrying about basic physical needs to political activism. Might also want to try to show everyone how big business benefits the majority of the dirt-poor masses, since worrying about food and shelter is really their problem, not that of the average city dweller in China who might be elevated to the middle class. Moreover, cheap and dangerous manufacturing jobs will probably be what gets them that food and roof, and I'm just not seeing poisoned factory workers as effective lobbyists.
While Google is being a party to the state-censorship in China, remember that it's really the Chinese government at fault...Complicity? Aiding and abetting? These have no meaning for your version of ethics? It's "really China's fault"? No, if a company chooses to cooperate, it's their fault. It's China's fault that it engages in censorship. Any party that cooperates is responsible for that cooperation
Oh, man, this is the most enlightening theory I have encountered, since I learned that the band Laibach is actually Queen (Freddy Mercury never actually died, you see, just reinvented himself and his band as post-Industrial, quasi-Socialist, broken German speaking performers.).
You are seriously onto something.
The commercial reminds me of nothing so much as when Homer Simpson introduced that monstrous car he designed for his half-brother Herb's company.
I'm also a little confused by the CEO's assertion that "most people have laptop computers".
Most people in the world don't have a computer at all, so he can't mean them.
Most people who do have computers own desktops, so he can't mean them.
Perhaps most people he knows have laptop computer, in which case, he can expect to sell the Noahpad to his mom and his friends, but I don't know about the rest of his market.
Are we absolutely sure the Onion didn't do that commercial?
Well, as to what is officially acknowledged by the DoD Budget Office... I can't say I understand the differences between Direct Budget Plan, Budget Authority, and Outlays exactly, since the chart includes this year, and they must all be estimates of something then, but I'll give you the lowest numbers, which are marked Outlays.
FY 2006 : 499.277 Billion (what a bargain, a whole empire for only 499 instead of the usual 500)
FY 2007 : 516.508 Billion
FY 2008 : 459.754 Billion
You were probably asking a rhetorical question, but in case someone wanted to know, I looked it up.