Mental retardation is an actual medical term which is subject to the Euphemism Treadmill effect, where over time a term becomes an insult in common usage and the professionals have to find a new word that doesn't have the baggage associated with it to maintain professional integrity (Similar to the reason we call them "Bathrooms" today instead of "Water Closets" or "Toilets" as the two latter terms became too crude through common usage). Don't blame "political correctness" on this, blame crass people like Anne Coulter who use the medical term in a derogatory sense towards those who don't have the disability without any sensitivity to those who must actually live with the condition.
Replace the word "Retard' with "AIDS carrier," "Cancer Survivor," or "Quadriplegic" and try making the argument that the offense people take to your use of these terms to disparage others is just "political correctness." The reason you don't use these terms as insults is because these are human beings who can fight back. "Retard" is okay because the mentally retarded can't defend themselves. Coulter is a bully and a coward for using the term and defending its use.
People like Coulter who call the backlash against their use of these words "political correctness" do so because the word "ignorant" applies to them. They are ignorant of the suffering of others, ignorant of medical science, and ignorant of basic good taste. I used the world "retard" as an insult when I was a child, but I'm an adult now and I am educated enough to know how abusing that word abuses those who are living with this debilitating condition.
My wife and I attended the Reason Rally on the National Mall this year, which was billed as a positive expression of non-theistic secular thought. We met many wonderful people there and were truly inspired by Adam Savage's incredibly positive and inspiring speech on the wonders of science, Nate Phelps remarkably eloquent denunciation of his father's Westboro Baptist Church, and your own speech highlighting the absurdity of having to hold such a rally at all; however, I we were also incredibly put off by vitriol on display by so many other speakers who were entirely focused on the evils of religion rather than the good science and rationality brings to civilized life. We ended up leaving the rally in the middle of PZ Meyer's speech because we found it so distressing in its Rush Limbaugh-esque tone.
My attempts to get people to read your book The God Delusion were met with strong resistance, people were very turned off to its tone, but those same individuals loved your book The Magic of Reality. As someone who has pursued both the strategy of being highly critical of religion in one work, while apparently softening that criticism in your latter work in exchange for focusing on the wonders of the natural world, could you speak to pros and cons of these different strategies of persuasion, not just in your own work but in the efforts of others like Adam Savage and PZ Meyers?
Thank you so much for your taking the time to interact with us on/.! This really is an exciting development and an honor.
This is a very important finding, and something people need to be aware of, but I also want to add another variable to the equation: part of the reason women don't command higher salaries is because they don't demand higher salaries. I don't want to take the sexist position that women need to act more like men to achieve salary equality, but I do get extremely frustrated by the fact that my female peers seem to lack the will to fight for equal pay. My father had to coach my mother into demanding a higher salary when she got a job as a professor. I've had to coach my sister to ask for higher pay, and I've done the same for female coworkers, where I have even taken them aside and told them my salary to see their eyes bug-out and then get angry at the injustice of our different pay-scales.
Yes, women and men discriminate against women concerning salaries and capabilities. It's scientifically proven, and it's something we all need to be cognizant of so we can work for a just society; however, women also need to stop allowing themselves to be discriminated against. I have seen many women go from unequal pay to getting what they deserve simply by having some self-confidence in their value to the company and demanding their worth when the opportunity arises to ask for it. If the boss still refuses, sue the discriminatory #$%@.
I agree. This is @#$%ing offensive. My wife and I are software developers and she is a million times the better coder than I, she is very attractive, and she was the lead developer at her last company, where she eventually decided to quit because of self-absorbed idiots like the author of this article who were constantly getting heart-bubbles for her and later putting her down when they learned she was out of their league. Today, years later, that same company pays her an exorbitant hourly rate to maintain their code because those same idiot developers can't program worth a damn, but they still try to make themselves feel better by sending her snotty emails criticizing the code she writes (that they could not write themselves).
The intended audience for this piece are the same guys who read and believe Penthouse Forum. It's exactly this kind of delusional mindset that make the IT department in so many companies intolerable to deal with. I'm embarrassed see this make Slashdot, but maybe I shouldn't be surprised.
Re:Seems like a perfect application for BitTorrent
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Black Mesa Released
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The fact that all the direct download links appear to be overrun, but the Torrent works fine is a strong argument for why Torrenting isn't in and of itself piracy.
This article should be required reading for kids today. This is an issue I find myself wrestling with from time to time. I spent two years wasting time in Star Trek Online with the purpose of wasting that time. It was a pretty game and I decided this was where I was going to grind away in thoughtless leveling-up--and it was brainless, repetative nonsense. I basically voluntarily put myself in a Skinner Box, holding down the "fire" button while runing around for hundreds of hours in order to get that little hit of dopamine each virtual reward of experience points brought me. Finally, I decided it was time to just uninstall the damn thing and walk away from it incomplete (not that it could ever be completed).
That one was voluntary, when Skyrim came along, I got sucked in again, playing heavily for several months before my family and job responsibilities forced me to shelve it for six months. I recently started it up again long enough to complete the main quest, and that felt like a chore. The months of not playing broke the spell, so that I didn't feel connected and invested in the rewards anymore. Why the @#$% would I spend hours saving to buy a virtual house or read a hundred vitual books about a virtual world when I've got the real thing to work on here? Skyrim was epically beautiful, but so is a weekend hike in the mountains.
Gaming is an important, healthy activity. It increases mental alertness and improves reaction times. I think all kids should play video games--or rather, play the right kinds of video games. My new rule for games is no more "forever" games like MMORPGs and Skyrim. I'm currently looking for a new game, and the most important characteristic is that it that it take <=20 hours to complete. I'll pay $20 to see a two hour movie with my wife, so $50 enjoying 20 hours of Portal II is a bargain.
Hmmm... Unfortunately, looking at the list of blocked URLs does provide examples of censorship of political dissent. Mostly I see facebook, twitter, most google services blocked, netflix, porn sites, piratebay, more porn sites, wikimedia, and Chinese Wikipedia. My amateur opinion would be that these blocks are due to porn being illegal there and the government eliminating access to websites that compete with their own services and social networks that the government cannot oversee.
This is just my quick random sampling of a few dozen sites out of 2163, so take it with a grain of salt. At some point a plurality of anecdotes becomes data, and this post doesn't come anywhere near that threshhold, but it does provide some nuance to the NPR article I cited above.
Actually, NPR ran a story on this recently. It turns out China doesn't really censor criticism of the government, but they do censor attempts to organize. If you want to call the Chinese government a corrupt evil organization, the censors will usually allow it, but if you want to have a barbecue and invite more than 10 people to it, they will take that content down.
This actually groks with what I've seen on the Chinese version of twitter/facebook weibo. There's plenty of criticism of government organizations some fair and some I was surprised the censors were allowing (my favorite innocuous criticisms were in a thread on school buses after a crash killed a dozen children, where many commenters were posting pictures of American school buses (which look like tanks) and saying we were doing it right), but I have never seen anything about attending concerts, parties, or other public events. I didn't think anything of it until reading the NPR article.
I think Science Debate is the greatest thing to happen to those of interested in science and politics. When they got Obama and McCain to answer science questions in the 2008 election, I immediately cancelled my membership to the Union of Concerned Scientists and started donating to this grassroots organization.
These might seem like small accomplishments, but compared to the Dark Ages of the Bush Administration they were a breath of fresh air. Unless Romney answers the science debate questions this election cycle, I won't even consider him.
You're not a member of the GOP, but you vote for them based on a very biased selection of case studies in scandal. If you look at the long long long list of just political sex scandals in America you will find there are plenty of Republicans who did not step down nor were they urged to after egregious behavior and many democrats who were urged to step down.
It's easy to laugh and feel superior that a small percentage of people fall for these scams, but what isn't funny is that the people falling for it are mostly senior citizens. Just yesterday my mother-in-law brought me the phone and told me, "It's somebody from Microsoft! They say our computer is infected with a virus!"
I answered the phone and somebody with an Indian accent told me his name was "Todd Moody" and that our computer was sending error messages to Microsoft. Curious about the scam, I let him walk me through opening the application error log and trying to delete some errors from it, to which he exlaimed, "Oh no sir! You cannot delete the errors! This is very very bad! You have a very dangerous trojan virus on your computer!"
If I hadn't been there, my mother-in-law would have handed over her credit card information no questions asked. In fact, my father-in-law had done this in the past. One day I'm going to be a senior citizen and my bullshit detector is going to stop working like it does for everyone else. The Federal Government should be putting a stop to this predatory scumbaggery with extreme prejudice.
When you see this crap, do your civic duty and report it.
Grammar only matters to a point because English grammar is an antiquated inconsistent mess of silliness whose chief purpose is keeping English teachers employed. Many great minds over the past few centuries have argued that grammar does not matter. Seymour Papert cites studies showing that children who are good at math can be turned off to English because its rules are illogical and inconsistent. Isaac Asimov blamed our inconsistent grammar and spelling system for illiteracy in America. Richard Feynman argued that if kids are having problems with grammar and spelling then there are problems with your grammar and spelling standards. Benjamin Franklin proposed a phonetic spelling system arguing that our current alphabetic spelling system would become like Chinese characters, devoid of an phonetic meaning if we did not implement reform. China implemented spelling reform to simplify its characters in order to improve literacy with quantifiable results.
I'm approaching this as someone who majored in English in college before going into programming. I couldn't get a job working for a newspaper because the editors would take one look at my BA and say, "Sorry. You know how to write." It took me years to understand what they were talking about. Grammar is important to the point of being able to properly communicate ideas, but that's all. Grammar-nazism is all about job security for elitist journalists and English teachers at the expense of increasing literacy in America. It's like the imperial/metric debate or qwerty/dvorak keyboards, just another out-of-date standard that could be fixed in one generation if that generation could get over the fact that "through," "coo," "do," "true," "knew," and "queue" all rhyme nonsensically but spelling them "throo," "koo," "doo," "troo," "nyoo," and "kyoo" simply looks silly despite being logical.
I think Richard Dawkins made it okay to use these quasi-anthropomorphic terms to describe processes of evolution when he titled his book "The Selfish Gene," so long as you constantly remind people, as he does laboriously in his text, that genes do not have wants, intentions, or consciously-implemented strategies. It's like saying photons are both a wave and a particle, I've read many physicists who point out that we use the wave-particle duality as a means of conceptualizing something so alien to our macro-reality into something we can understand so the non-expert can enjoy the wonder as well. So too do we attribute all sorts of human concepts to the algorithm of natural selection to make it easier to understand.
Still, your criticism is a valid one and something people need to be reminded that we are talking about inanimate processes.
Something that occurred to me reading the article was that when I saw the term "cell division" I immediately pictured a developing embryo, but that would be a somatic mutation rather than a germinal mutation. It's important to remember that all these evolutionary mutations didn't happen in the animals, they happened in the animals' gametes, the sperm and eggs. A mutation that occurs in the cell division of a developing embryo wouldn't have any affect on the individual's gametes, the mutation had to occur in the sperm or egg first.
What's sad is that the AGW skeptics give so much link-love to this bungled demonstration, that the other experiments get pushed down in the google results. AGW Skeptics are a lot like evolution-deniers in this regard, who also push anti-evolution nonsense to the top of all google results. It must be nice to have so much free time to promote this propaganda, while real science is so careful, nuanced, and time-consuming it gets lost in the politics.
The issue isn't that these people shouldn't be in prison. They took the FBI's bait and I don't feel sympathy for them. Let them rot.
Where the FBI is doing wrong is in the way they are publicizing these busts. I keep seeing headlines that read: FBI FOILS PLOT TO BLOW LOTS OF PEOPLE UP. Which scares the hell out of people, and convinces Americans to give the FBI more taxpayer dollars (and surrender more freedoms), which the Federal Agency uses to stage more fake terrorist attacks, which gets them more funding, etc, etc, etc.
The point of terrorism isn't to kill people, it's to terrorize them for personal gain. If the FBI is staging fake acts of terrorism using people who would never be capable of pulling a terrorist attack on their own in order to foil those fake terrorist plots, then the FBI is terrorizing Americans for personal gain.
How did this make the front page of Slashdot??? James Lovelock is not a Climate Scientist, he's and an independent scientist and environmentalist who is famous for the Gaia Hypothesis a half-scientific half-philosophical metaphor for understanding Earth's biosphere. There is no reason anyone should give this man any credibility when it comes to speaking on the subject of Climate Change projections.
Do you know who is qualified to speak on this subject? James Hanson, and a 1981 paper he published in a peer-reviewed journal attempted to project the rise in temperatures over the next 30 years. Those projections still managed to underestimate the observed rise in temperatures by 30 percent and even the worst case scenario of those projections managed to underestimate the observed trend.
So no. You are not vindicated. You have demonstrated that you have no understanding of how science works, elevating the opinion of someone speaking outside their realm of expertise over the peer-reviewed published research of an expert with over three decades working inside the subject of climate change.
I'm sorry this display of ignorant prejudice got modded up as "insightful". I know there are unthinking people on slashdot like anywhere else, but I would expect the more thoughtful community members to down-mod such an offensive stereotype that has no basis in reality. If 13 percent of Americans are poor then, based on your idiotic generalization, there should be base-thumping rim-spinning Lexus cars all over the freakin' place.
I accidentally bought a house in a poor neighborhood in Northeastern North Carolina because I naively didn't know segregation still existed in the South. The people who lived on my street owned old beat-up cars and a few lived without electricity, heating their homes with wood stoves. Yes, there were a few kids whose hobby was working on old Cadillacs to bling them out or whatever, but they were the exception and not the rule.
When I got to know these families, I was constantly challenging them as to why they didn't get rid of their cable-TV service (shared between households) and not go in on a community internet connection with wifi? The answer, it took me forever to finally understand, is that the entire family can share watching a single cheap television, while a computer is something only one person can use and interact with at a time. When you have five kids, you can't get a computer for each and every one of them.
Finally, I sold some stock and used it to buy every kid on my street a used laptop at $200 a head. I gave the kids the laptops on the condition that they take a series of classes from me about computing, which I blogged about, and everything seemed great. I opened our internet connection and put signal-boosters in some of the houses so everyone could enjoy it. I thought I was doing a good thing in this world.
One year later, not a single one of those laptops was still functioning. One by one they succumbed to being stolen by neighborhood gang members or simply broke from the abuse they took at home (if you've ever been in a poor family's damp, cockroach-infested, ancient crumbling home, you'll understand this last statement completely). On the bright side, after the kids got on the internet for a little while, they craved more and I get to keep in touch with most of them on Facebook today as they will walk to the library to get online or have pooled their money together on a family computer.
So when I read comments like those of the parent, it fills me with rage at their ignorance, and when I see people the statement up as "insightful" it breaks my heart.
We do subsidize our gasoline in the United States, to the tune of $10 Billion in tax breaks a year, with which the Oil Industry did nothing to lower prices, but rather maximized profits with record earnings.
I actually hadn't noticed gas prices going up here in the States. That's probably because my hybrid-electric nerdmobile can go 500 miles on a single 10 gallon tank of gas. In fact, everytime the price of gas goes up, so does the resale value of my car. Must suck to be one of the majority of Americans who didn't pay attention in science or math class growing up. Ignorance is expensive.
It means: We don't own the message. We own the medium.
Imagine if Microsoft said "We don't own the content of your document, but if we find any of your *.docx files being offered anywhere other than approved Microsoft partner's shop, we will sue you into the ground."
Somehow we're not supposed to still be outraged over this?
I did find the article interesting when it appeared in The Atlantic, but after some thoughtfulness I realize it's very unfair to argue that a human being falls into the Uncanny Valley, and that this article is really just a stretch to find some shred of fresh insight in a Presidential Primary that has dragged on forever through too many debates with a mainstream media that can't look away while viewers are completely over it (sorry for the run-on sentence). Things that fall into the UV are supposed to be "creepy," and Romney isn't creepy, he's just out of touch and it's fair to compare him to the Al Gore of the 2000 election in that respect.
That being said, Republicans seem to be split into the "angry" and "policy" factions. Newt Gingrich is in many ways more liberal than Romney, but Red-Meat-Limbaugh-Coulter conservatives love him because of his in-your-face debate style. He appeals to that anger Fox News and 24-hour conservative AM radio has firmly rooted in so many Americans. That's why I find it hilarious that Limbaugh and Coulter are arguing against him, as it was their rhetorical style that has made his candidacy possible.
I hope Romney wins this so America can have a constructive debate over economic equality. He'll bring attention to the fact that capital gains are only taxed at 15% compared to labor-income being taxed at 30%, and that the reason it's so low is because he personally lobbied against making it more equitable in the 1980s. Evangelical Christians will have to rethink their tax-deductible church donations in the context of Romney's $3 million yearly donations to the Mormon Church. He'll bring attention to the fact that companies like his keep their money in tax shelters overseas and that his consulting firm bankrupted many of the companies they claim to have saved when they had to pay the consulting feeds. He's not creepy, but he is out of touch with what life is like for 99% of voters ("I'll bet you $10,000."), and he'll put a face on the faceless economic issues we need to address in these United States.
Only hitch with that is if you don't get the notification. Yahoo sent out a notification that they were shutting down their Briefcase service, which went to my spam folder (on a yahoo mail account). Luckily, I don't trust anything to the cloud and keep external hard drives stashed all over the country, but I bet there were a few people out there who got burned.
The problem I have with your warhawk nonsense is the idea that it's the United State's who should do something about it. We've already blown over a trillion dollars on two wars, and you want us to blow another trillion on Iran? You conservatives do all this whining about the deficit, but gloss over the fact that it's your precious defense spending that accounts for a third of non-discretionary spending every year and your precious interventionist actions overseas that add hundreds of billions of dollars on top of that. It's funny that Ron Paul would probably be solidly in the #1 spot in Iowa today if it weren't for the fact that Republicans can't accept a man who won't spend trillions for us to enter into another war all by ourselves.
Sure the world would cheer us taking on Iran. China will gladly put us deeper in debt to them to fund the war. NATO will probably join in, the same way they joined in for Libya--as cheerleaders on the sidelines, letting us spend ourselves to death acting as their military while they spend the savings on universal healthcare and higher education for their citizens.
You called the above poster a "Eurotrash liberal drooler," but the European Union is playing us for suckers, just like former Defense Secretary Gates said, and it's Americans like you who make it all possible as you spend us into the ground with your wars and then try to blame the hole you put us in on America's crumbling libraries, roads, and schools.
Re:This is what's wrong with private healthcare.
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How Doctors Die
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Actually, it is my personal experience that some doctors at least don't believe in "death with dignity." My grandmother had a living will that explicitly stated she should not be resuscitated, but when she had a stroke that should have killed her, the doctor ignored the living will and took drastic action to save her life. She survived, but was mostly paralyzed and incoherent. When we confronted the doctor about his disobeying her wishes, he replied that his job was to save lives, not care for the dying. When we took him to court, we didn't have a case because most states don't recognize living wills.
My grandmother was a self-sufficient woman who spent her life amassing a legacy she wanted to leave to her family. It was anathema to her that the hospital would do everything in its power to keep her alive as long as possible in order to consume her life's work. She could have died with dignity on the night of her stroke; instead she spent months wasting away in a hospital bed suffering for over $1,000 a night. Luckily, we were able to get her into hospice care to prevent the hospital from taking other drastic actions to extend her misery.
I saw the exact same greedy behavior just today as a doctor tried to pressure my father-in-law into going on kidney dialysis. The old man told the specialist he was just trying to make money off his illness and demanded that another nephrologist be brought in for a second opinion. That specialist arrived today, said the dialysis recommendation was premature, and other opinions from medical professionals we've gotten since this morning all seem to suspect that the first doctor was just trying to get another permanent patient who he could make thousands off of each month through their dependency on his treatments.
I know many many wonderful doctors who are in the profession to genuinely help people, but there are also many who have the scruples of an MBA and are just in it for the dollar signs. That's why you always have to be on guard, always get second opinions, and always be aware of your rights as a patient.
I am bothered by one part of this article, the idea that Science Debate 2008 was only moderately successful. True, they were unable to get the candidates to debate science topics live on television, but the organization DID succeed in getting the candidates to debate science. The organization gave the candidates a list of questions and then posted their answers online side by side for comparison (I wrote up a score card on who I thought gave the best answer to each question).
This was more than the Federation of American Scientists or Union of Concerned Scientists have accomplished in their decades of activism. This was HUGE for an organization that had just come into existence. This success is why I abandoned my memberships to these other organizations and committed my donations to Science Debate.
(Side Note: Newt Gingrich is a scumbag, but if he gets the nomination I can't wait to see him and Obama throw-down on Science... I've seen Newt destroy John Kerry on how to tackle Climate Change and I believe his nomination would bring scientific issues into the spotlight since Obama is something of a science geek himself.)
The whole U.S. is established on the idea of God and religion.
This is demonstrably false. With the exception of a few individuals the Founding Fathers were men of science, scholars of the Enlightenment. Thomas Jefferson thought the words of Jesus were nice, but the miracles were nonsense, so he cut-and-pasted together the Jefferson Bible, leaving in only the parts of the gospels he appreciated philosophically. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin both highly praised Thomas Paine's book The Age of Reason, one of the most scathing condemnations of the Bible ever written, and it was written by the man who is considered the instigator of the American Revolution. Benjamin Franklin even had Voltaire, an atheist, bless his son. George Washington is more complex. He wasn't a regular church-goer, but was a strong advocate of religious freedom.
"Under God" wasn't added to the Nation's Pledge of Allegiance until the Cold War, the same time "E Pluribus Unum" was replaced with "In God We Trust" as the national motto. The idea that this country was founded on religious principles is complete bullshit. This country was founded on the rejection of the idea of Kings appointed by god.
Probably the most conclusive evidence of America being a secular nation comes from the 1796 Treaty with Tripoly, unanimously passed the US Senate and was signed by Adams. Article 11 contains the clause:
As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen,—and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Paine, and Washington were, all of them, men of science. It is nothing but revisionist poppycock to argue America was founded on religion when these individuals were such staunch Enlightenment scholars. I'm sick of hearing this nonsense. It's insulting to the memory of this Country's founders.
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Mental retardation is an actual medical term which is subject to the Euphemism Treadmill effect, where over time a term becomes an insult in common usage and the professionals have to find a new word that doesn't have the baggage associated with it to maintain professional integrity (Similar to the reason we call them "Bathrooms" today instead of "Water Closets" or "Toilets" as the two latter terms became too crude through common usage). Don't blame "political correctness" on this, blame crass people like Anne Coulter who use the medical term in a derogatory sense towards those who don't have the disability without any sensitivity to those who must actually live with the condition.
Replace the word "Retard' with "AIDS carrier," "Cancer Survivor," or "Quadriplegic" and try making the argument that the offense people take to your use of these terms to disparage others is just "political correctness." The reason you don't use these terms as insults is because these are human beings who can fight back. "Retard" is okay because the mentally retarded can't defend themselves. Coulter is a bully and a coward for using the term and defending its use.
People like Coulter who call the backlash against their use of these words "political correctness" do so because the word "ignorant" applies to them. They are ignorant of the suffering of others, ignorant of medical science, and ignorant of basic good taste. I used the world "retard" as an insult when I was a child, but I'm an adult now and I am educated enough to know how abusing that word abuses those who are living with this debilitating condition.
My wife and I attended the Reason Rally on the National Mall this year, which was billed as a positive expression of non-theistic secular thought. We met many wonderful people there and were truly inspired by Adam Savage's incredibly positive and inspiring speech on the wonders of science, Nate Phelps remarkably eloquent denunciation of his father's Westboro Baptist Church, and your own speech highlighting the absurdity of having to hold such a rally at all; however, I we were also incredibly put off by vitriol on display by so many other speakers who were entirely focused on the evils of religion rather than the good science and rationality brings to civilized life. We ended up leaving the rally in the middle of PZ Meyer's speech because we found it so distressing in its Rush Limbaugh-esque tone.
It bothers me that so many of us define ourselves by what we don't believe rather than what we do. As Carolyn Porco elucidated so concisely at a talk you were involved in, I am not an atheist, I am a scientist. Like Carl Sagan, I get a profound sense of spirituality from science that I want to desperately for everyone in the world to open their own eyes and discover.
My attempts to get people to read your book The God Delusion were met with strong resistance, people were very turned off to its tone, but those same individuals loved your book The Magic of Reality . As someone who has pursued both the strategy of being highly critical of religion in one work, while apparently softening that criticism in your latter work in exchange for focusing on the wonders of the natural world, could you speak to pros and cons of these different strategies of persuasion, not just in your own work but in the efforts of others like Adam Savage and PZ Meyers?
Thank you so much for your taking the time to interact with us on /.! This really is an exciting development and an honor.
This is a very important finding, and something people need to be aware of, but I also want to add another variable to the equation: part of the reason women don't command higher salaries is because they don't demand higher salaries. I don't want to take the sexist position that women need to act more like men to achieve salary equality, but I do get extremely frustrated by the fact that my female peers seem to lack the will to fight for equal pay. My father had to coach my mother into demanding a higher salary when she got a job as a professor. I've had to coach my sister to ask for higher pay, and I've done the same for female coworkers, where I have even taken them aside and told them my salary to see their eyes bug-out and then get angry at the injustice of our different pay-scales.
Yes, women and men discriminate against women concerning salaries and capabilities. It's scientifically proven, and it's something we all need to be cognizant of so we can work for a just society; however, women also need to stop allowing themselves to be discriminated against. I have seen many women go from unequal pay to getting what they deserve simply by having some self-confidence in their value to the company and demanding their worth when the opportunity arises to ask for it. If the boss still refuses, sue the discriminatory #$%@.
I agree. This is @#$%ing offensive. My wife and I are software developers and she is a million times the better coder than I, she is very attractive, and she was the lead developer at her last company, where she eventually decided to quit because of self-absorbed idiots like the author of this article who were constantly getting heart-bubbles for her and later putting her down when they learned she was out of their league. Today, years later, that same company pays her an exorbitant hourly rate to maintain their code because those same idiot developers can't program worth a damn, but they still try to make themselves feel better by sending her snotty emails criticizing the code she writes (that they could not write themselves).
The intended audience for this piece are the same guys who read and believe Penthouse Forum. It's exactly this kind of delusional mindset that make the IT department in so many companies intolerable to deal with. I'm embarrassed see this make Slashdot, but maybe I shouldn't be surprised.
The fact that all the direct download links appear to be overrun, but the Torrent works fine is a strong argument for why Torrenting isn't in and of itself piracy.
This article should be required reading for kids today. This is an issue I find myself wrestling with from time to time. I spent two years wasting time in Star Trek Online with the purpose of wasting that time. It was a pretty game and I decided this was where I was going to grind away in thoughtless leveling-up--and it was brainless, repetative nonsense. I basically voluntarily put myself in a Skinner Box, holding down the "fire" button while runing around for hundreds of hours in order to get that little hit of dopamine each virtual reward of experience points brought me. Finally, I decided it was time to just uninstall the damn thing and walk away from it incomplete (not that it could ever be completed).
That one was voluntary, when Skyrim came along, I got sucked in again, playing heavily for several months before my family and job responsibilities forced me to shelve it for six months. I recently started it up again long enough to complete the main quest, and that felt like a chore. The months of not playing broke the spell, so that I didn't feel connected and invested in the rewards anymore. Why the @#$% would I spend hours saving to buy a virtual house or read a hundred vitual books about a virtual world when I've got the real thing to work on here? Skyrim was epically beautiful, but so is a weekend hike in the mountains.
Gaming is an important, healthy activity. It increases mental alertness and improves reaction times. I think all kids should play video games--or rather, play the right kinds of video games. My new rule for games is no more "forever" games like MMORPGs and Skyrim. I'm currently looking for a new game, and the most important characteristic is that it that it take <=20 hours to complete. I'll pay $20 to see a two hour movie with my wife, so $50 enjoying 20 hours of Portal II is a bargain.
Hmmm... Unfortunately, looking at the list of blocked URLs does provide examples of censorship of political dissent. Mostly I see facebook, twitter, most google services blocked, netflix, porn sites, piratebay, more porn sites, wikimedia, and Chinese Wikipedia. My amateur opinion would be that these blocks are due to porn being illegal there and the government eliminating access to websites that compete with their own services and social networks that the government cannot oversee.
There's also a bunch of blogger and wordpress.com blogs. While many of these have titles making them sound related to China, I'm not understanding many of the censors, like this poetry site which is simply artsy, this blog about a teacher who loves Chinese culture and is visiting the country, and this pro-China pro-Communism site and others that have no content posted to them at all like sinologica.
There are a few that do appear to possibly be blocked for challenging the government, like X in China (link is to a post listing blocked Weibo words), SmurfWillBeFree (a free Tibet blog), a blog focused on bad economic news about China, and wikipedia articles on Chinese political issues (ie "Dalai Lama", "Tank Man", etc).
This is just my quick random sampling of a few dozen sites out of 2163, so take it with a grain of salt. At some point a plurality of anecdotes becomes data, and this post doesn't come anywhere near that threshhold, but it does provide some nuance to the NPR article I cited above.
Actually, NPR ran a story on this recently. It turns out China doesn't really censor criticism of the government, but they do censor attempts to organize. If you want to call the Chinese government a corrupt evil organization, the censors will usually allow it, but if you want to have a barbecue and invite more than 10 people to it, they will take that content down.
This actually groks with what I've seen on the Chinese version of twitter/facebook weibo. There's plenty of criticism of government organizations some fair and some I was surprised the censors were allowing (my favorite innocuous criticisms were in a thread on school buses after a crash killed a dozen children, where many commenters were posting pictures of American school buses (which look like tanks) and saying we were doing it right), but I have never seen anything about attending concerts, parties, or other public events. I didn't think anything of it until reading the NPR article.
I think Science Debate is the greatest thing to happen to those of interested in science and politics. When they got Obama and McCain to answer science questions in the 2008 election, I immediately cancelled my membership to the Union of Concerned Scientists and started donating to this grassroots organization.
I have one issue that I vote on, and that's science. It's the only issue I understand well enough to evaluate the candidates on. If they know their science or have advisors that understand science, then I will trust them with most everything else. I summarized Obama's 2008 responses here, McCain's here, and my calls for who won on each issue. Obama's responses won on most issues, but McCain did not do poorly. Since Obama has taken office, he has impressed me with his support of science with Data.gov, Science.gov, a Memorandum on Scientific Integrity, proposed major increases in science funding, and put the Office of Science and Technology Policy back in the Whitehouse.
These might seem like small accomplishments, but compared to the Dark Ages of the Bush Administration they were a breath of fresh air. Unless Romney answers the science debate questions this election cycle, I won't even consider him.
You're not a member of the GOP, but you vote for them based on a very biased selection of case studies in scandal. If you look at the long long long list of just political sex scandals in America you will find there are plenty of Republicans who did not step down nor were they urged to after egregious behavior and many democrats who were urged to step down.
It's easy to laugh and feel superior that a small percentage of people fall for these scams, but what isn't funny is that the people falling for it are mostly senior citizens. Just yesterday my mother-in-law brought me the phone and told me, "It's somebody from Microsoft! They say our computer is infected with a virus!"
I answered the phone and somebody with an Indian accent told me his name was "Todd Moody" and that our computer was sending error messages to Microsoft. Curious about the scam, I let him walk me through opening the application error log and trying to delete some errors from it, to which he exlaimed, "Oh no sir! You cannot delete the errors! This is very very bad! You have a very dangerous trojan virus on your computer!"
If I hadn't been there, my mother-in-law would have handed over her credit card information no questions asked. In fact, my father-in-law had done this in the past. One day I'm going to be a senior citizen and my bullshit detector is going to stop working like it does for everyone else. The Federal Government should be putting a stop to this predatory scumbaggery with extreme prejudice.
When you see this crap, do your civic duty and report it.
Grammar only matters to a point because English grammar is an antiquated inconsistent mess of silliness whose chief purpose is keeping English teachers employed. Many great minds over the past few centuries have argued that grammar does not matter. Seymour Papert cites studies showing that children who are good at math can be turned off to English because its rules are illogical and inconsistent. Isaac Asimov blamed our inconsistent grammar and spelling system for illiteracy in America. Richard Feynman argued that if kids are having problems with grammar and spelling then there are problems with your grammar and spelling standards. Benjamin Franklin proposed a phonetic spelling system arguing that our current alphabetic spelling system would become like Chinese characters, devoid of an phonetic meaning if we did not implement reform. China implemented spelling reform to simplify its characters in order to improve literacy with quantifiable results.
I'm approaching this as someone who majored in English in college before going into programming. I couldn't get a job working for a newspaper because the editors would take one look at my BA and say, "Sorry. You know how to write." It took me years to understand what they were talking about. Grammar is important to the point of being able to properly communicate ideas, but that's all. Grammar-nazism is all about job security for elitist journalists and English teachers at the expense of increasing literacy in America. It's like the imperial/metric debate or qwerty/dvorak keyboards, just another out-of-date standard that could be fixed in one generation if that generation could get over the fact that "through," "coo," "do," "true," "knew," and "queue" all rhyme nonsensically but spelling them "throo," "koo," "doo," "troo," "nyoo," and "kyoo" simply looks silly despite being logical.
I think Richard Dawkins made it okay to use these quasi-anthropomorphic terms to describe processes of evolution when he titled his book "The Selfish Gene," so long as you constantly remind people, as he does laboriously in his text, that genes do not have wants, intentions, or consciously-implemented strategies. It's like saying photons are both a wave and a particle, I've read many physicists who point out that we use the wave-particle duality as a means of conceptualizing something so alien to our macro-reality into something we can understand so the non-expert can enjoy the wonder as well. So too do we attribute all sorts of human concepts to the algorithm of natural selection to make it easier to understand.
Still, your criticism is a valid one and something people need to be reminded that we are talking about inanimate processes.
Something that occurred to me reading the article was that when I saw the term "cell division" I immediately pictured a developing embryo, but that would be a somatic mutation rather than a germinal mutation. It's important to remember that all these evolutionary mutations didn't happen in the animals, they happened in the animals' gametes, the sperm and eggs. A mutation that occurs in the cell division of a developing embryo wouldn't have any affect on the individual's gametes, the mutation had to occur in the sperm or egg first.
Here's Bill Nye's response to WattsUp's experiment, explaining why they failed to reproduce results that have been successfully reproduced over and over and over again by other scientists, organizations, and amateurs.
What's sad is that the AGW skeptics give so much link-love to this bungled demonstration, that the other experiments get pushed down in the google results. AGW Skeptics are a lot like evolution-deniers in this regard, who also push anti-evolution nonsense to the top of all google results. It must be nice to have so much free time to promote this propaganda, while real science is so careful, nuanced, and time-consuming it gets lost in the politics.
The issue isn't that these people shouldn't be in prison. They took the FBI's bait and I don't feel sympathy for them. Let them rot.
Where the FBI is doing wrong is in the way they are publicizing these busts. I keep seeing headlines that read: FBI FOILS PLOT TO BLOW LOTS OF PEOPLE UP. Which scares the hell out of people, and convinces Americans to give the FBI more taxpayer dollars (and surrender more freedoms), which the Federal Agency uses to stage more fake terrorist attacks, which gets them more funding, etc, etc, etc.
The point of terrorism isn't to kill people, it's to terrorize them for personal gain. If the FBI is staging fake acts of terrorism using people who would never be capable of pulling a terrorist attack on their own in order to foil those fake terrorist plots, then the FBI is terrorizing Americans for personal gain.
I consider that a serious problem.
How did this make the front page of Slashdot??? James Lovelock is not a Climate Scientist, he's and an independent scientist and environmentalist who is famous for the Gaia Hypothesis a half-scientific half-philosophical metaphor for understanding Earth's biosphere. There is no reason anyone should give this man any credibility when it comes to speaking on the subject of Climate Change projections.
Do you know who is qualified to speak on this subject? James Hanson, and a 1981 paper he published in a peer-reviewed journal attempted to project the rise in temperatures over the next 30 years. Those projections still managed to underestimate the observed rise in temperatures by 30 percent and even the worst case scenario of those projections managed to underestimate the observed trend.
So no. You are not vindicated. You have demonstrated that you have no understanding of how science works, elevating the opinion of someone speaking outside their realm of expertise over the peer-reviewed published research of an expert with over three decades working inside the subject of climate change.
I'm sorry this display of ignorant prejudice got modded up as "insightful". I know there are unthinking people on slashdot like anywhere else, but I would expect the more thoughtful community members to down-mod such an offensive stereotype that has no basis in reality. If 13 percent of Americans are poor then, based on your idiotic generalization, there should be base-thumping rim-spinning Lexus cars all over the freakin' place.
I accidentally bought a house in a poor neighborhood in Northeastern North Carolina because I naively didn't know segregation still existed in the South. The people who lived on my street owned old beat-up cars and a few lived without electricity, heating their homes with wood stoves. Yes, there were a few kids whose hobby was working on old Cadillacs to bling them out or whatever, but they were the exception and not the rule.
When I got to know these families, I was constantly challenging them as to why they didn't get rid of their cable-TV service (shared between households) and not go in on a community internet connection with wifi? The answer, it took me forever to finally understand, is that the entire family can share watching a single cheap television, while a computer is something only one person can use and interact with at a time. When you have five kids, you can't get a computer for each and every one of them.
Finally, I sold some stock and used it to buy every kid on my street a used laptop at $200 a head. I gave the kids the laptops on the condition that they take a series of classes from me about computing, which I blogged about, and everything seemed great. I opened our internet connection and put signal-boosters in some of the houses so everyone could enjoy it. I thought I was doing a good thing in this world.
One year later, not a single one of those laptops was still functioning. One by one they succumbed to being stolen by neighborhood gang members or simply broke from the abuse they took at home (if you've ever been in a poor family's damp, cockroach-infested, ancient crumbling home, you'll understand this last statement completely). On the bright side, after the kids got on the internet for a little while, they craved more and I get to keep in touch with most of them on Facebook today as they will walk to the library to get online or have pooled their money together on a family computer.
So when I read comments like those of the parent, it fills me with rage at their ignorance, and when I see people the statement up as "insightful" it breaks my heart.
We do subsidize our gasoline in the United States, to the tune of $10 Billion in tax breaks a year, with which the Oil Industry did nothing to lower prices, but rather maximized profits with record earnings.
I actually hadn't noticed gas prices going up here in the States. That's probably because my hybrid-electric nerdmobile can go 500 miles on a single 10 gallon tank of gas. In fact, everytime the price of gas goes up, so does the resale value of my car. Must suck to be one of the majority of Americans who didn't pay attention in science or math class growing up. Ignorance is expensive.
It means: We don't own the message. We own the medium.
Imagine if Microsoft said "We don't own the content of your document, but if we find any of your *.docx files being offered anywhere other than approved Microsoft partner's shop, we will sue you into the ground."
Somehow we're not supposed to still be outraged over this?
I did find the article interesting when it appeared in The Atlantic, but after some thoughtfulness I realize it's very unfair to argue that a human being falls into the Uncanny Valley, and that this article is really just a stretch to find some shred of fresh insight in a Presidential Primary that has dragged on forever through too many debates with a mainstream media that can't look away while viewers are completely over it (sorry for the run-on sentence). Things that fall into the UV are supposed to be "creepy," and Romney isn't creepy, he's just out of touch and it's fair to compare him to the Al Gore of the 2000 election in that respect.
That being said, Republicans seem to be split into the "angry" and "policy" factions. Newt Gingrich is in many ways more liberal than Romney, but Red-Meat-Limbaugh-Coulter conservatives love him because of his in-your-face debate style. He appeals to that anger Fox News and 24-hour conservative AM radio has firmly rooted in so many Americans. That's why I find it hilarious that Limbaugh and Coulter are arguing against him, as it was their rhetorical style that has made his candidacy possible.
I hope Romney wins this so America can have a constructive debate over economic equality. He'll bring attention to the fact that capital gains are only taxed at 15% compared to labor-income being taxed at 30%, and that the reason it's so low is because he personally lobbied against making it more equitable in the 1980s. Evangelical Christians will have to rethink their tax-deductible church donations in the context of Romney's $3 million yearly donations to the Mormon Church. He'll bring attention to the fact that companies like his keep their money in tax shelters overseas and that his consulting firm bankrupted many of the companies they claim to have saved when they had to pay the consulting feeds. He's not creepy, but he is out of touch with what life is like for 99% of voters ("I'll bet you $10,000."), and he'll put a face on the faceless economic issues we need to address in these United States.
Only hitch with that is if you don't get the notification. Yahoo sent out a notification that they were shutting down their Briefcase service, which went to my spam folder (on a yahoo mail account). Luckily, I don't trust anything to the cloud and keep external hard drives stashed all over the country, but I bet there were a few people out there who got burned.
The problem I have with your warhawk nonsense is the idea that it's the United State's who should do something about it. We've already blown over a trillion dollars on two wars, and you want us to blow another trillion on Iran? You conservatives do all this whining about the deficit, but gloss over the fact that it's your precious defense spending that accounts for a third of non-discretionary spending every year and your precious interventionist actions overseas that add hundreds of billions of dollars on top of that. It's funny that Ron Paul would probably be solidly in the #1 spot in Iowa today if it weren't for the fact that Republicans can't accept a man who won't spend trillions for us to enter into another war all by ourselves.
Sure the world would cheer us taking on Iran. China will gladly put us deeper in debt to them to fund the war. NATO will probably join in, the same way they joined in for Libya--as cheerleaders on the sidelines, letting us spend ourselves to death acting as their military while they spend the savings on universal healthcare and higher education for their citizens.
You called the above poster a "Eurotrash liberal drooler," but the European Union is playing us for suckers, just like former Defense Secretary Gates said, and it's Americans like you who make it all possible as you spend us into the ground with your wars and then try to blame the hole you put us in on America's crumbling libraries, roads, and schools.
Actually, it is my personal experience that some doctors at least don't believe in "death with dignity." My grandmother had a living will that explicitly stated she should not be resuscitated, but when she had a stroke that should have killed her, the doctor ignored the living will and took drastic action to save her life. She survived, but was mostly paralyzed and incoherent. When we confronted the doctor about his disobeying her wishes, he replied that his job was to save lives, not care for the dying. When we took him to court, we didn't have a case because most states don't recognize living wills.
My grandmother was a self-sufficient woman who spent her life amassing a legacy she wanted to leave to her family. It was anathema to her that the hospital would do everything in its power to keep her alive as long as possible in order to consume her life's work. She could have died with dignity on the night of her stroke; instead she spent months wasting away in a hospital bed suffering for over $1,000 a night. Luckily, we were able to get her into hospice care to prevent the hospital from taking other drastic actions to extend her misery.
I saw the exact same greedy behavior just today as a doctor tried to pressure my father-in-law into going on kidney dialysis. The old man told the specialist he was just trying to make money off his illness and demanded that another nephrologist be brought in for a second opinion. That specialist arrived today, said the dialysis recommendation was premature, and other opinions from medical professionals we've gotten since this morning all seem to suspect that the first doctor was just trying to get another permanent patient who he could make thousands off of each month through their dependency on his treatments.
I know many many wonderful doctors who are in the profession to genuinely help people, but there are also many who have the scruples of an MBA and are just in it for the dollar signs. That's why you always have to be on guard, always get second opinions, and always be aware of your rights as a patient.
I am bothered by one part of this article, the idea that Science Debate 2008 was only moderately successful. True, they were unable to get the candidates to debate science topics live on television, but the organization DID succeed in getting the candidates to debate science. The organization gave the candidates a list of questions and then posted their answers online side by side for comparison (I wrote up a score card on who I thought gave the best answer to each question).
This was more than the Federation of American Scientists or Union of Concerned Scientists have accomplished in their decades of activism. This was HUGE for an organization that had just come into existence. This success is why I abandoned my memberships to these other organizations and committed my donations to Science Debate.
(Side Note: Newt Gingrich is a scumbag, but if he gets the nomination I can't wait to see him and Obama throw-down on Science... I've seen Newt destroy John Kerry on how to tackle Climate Change and I believe his nomination would bring scientific issues into the spotlight since Obama is something of a science geek himself.)
The whole U.S. is established on the idea of God and religion.
This is demonstrably false. With the exception of a few individuals the Founding Fathers were men of science, scholars of the Enlightenment. Thomas Jefferson thought the words of Jesus were nice, but the miracles were nonsense, so he cut-and-pasted together the Jefferson Bible, leaving in only the parts of the gospels he appreciated philosophically. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin both highly praised Thomas Paine's book The Age of Reason, one of the most scathing condemnations of the Bible ever written, and it was written by the man who is considered the instigator of the American Revolution. Benjamin Franklin even had Voltaire, an atheist, bless his son. George Washington is more complex. He wasn't a regular church-goer, but was a strong advocate of religious freedom.
"Under God" wasn't added to the Nation's Pledge of Allegiance until the Cold War, the same time "E Pluribus Unum" was replaced with "In God We Trust" as the national motto. The idea that this country was founded on religious principles is complete bullshit. This country was founded on the rejection of the idea of Kings appointed by god.
Probably the most conclusive evidence of America being a secular nation comes from the 1796 Treaty with Tripoly, unanimously passed the US Senate and was signed by Adams. Article 11 contains the clause:
Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Paine, and Washington were, all of them, men of science. It is nothing but revisionist poppycock to argue America was founded on religion when these individuals were such staunch Enlightenment scholars. I'm sick of hearing this nonsense. It's insulting to the memory of this Country's founders.