Anytime a U.S. president gets shot he becomes sainted and we refuse to acknowledge the horrible things he's done. Getting shot is like automatic sainthood for a U.S. President (thank God Reagan survived his assassination attempt - imagine that moron as a martyr).
Kennedy got us involved in Vietnam. Lincoln was personally responsible for more American deaths than any person/country/army. No one (aside from history buffs) knows much about McKinley or Garfield but they have a surprising amount of buildings and whatnot named after them for do-nothing presidents.
You fucking freedom hating commie! You shouldn't be allowed to post such things! There should be some congressional committee to subpoena you or something.
Yeah, I was all with him until he got to #3. Here's my version of the third point:
America has a whole lot of rural areas where fathers teach their sons to hunt. This is something that is passed down, generation from generation, since in a lot of cases one of their ancestors settled in the area and hunted to stay alive. Not only is this so ingrained in our culture that it's not going to go anywhere anytime soon, it's also necessary because with the currently low proportion of predators to deer, deer are so overpopulated they're a nuisance/road hazard and hunting them with the limitations imposed by law is much preferable to poisoning them or some other form of pest control.
Hunters love their guns like mechanics love hot rods. Oftentimes they want big and ridiculous ones to compliment their go to work car (or hunting shotgun/bow in this case).
I haven't seen anyone mention Roald Dahl yet. That's who I was reading at that age. It's neither traditional sci-fi or fantasy, but that's part of what makes it great, it can't really be pigeonholed into a genre. The man just wrote great stories. I think it's the perfect step up from Dr. Seuss. After Dahl, I'd go for Tolkien and Bradbury and The Hunger Games trilogy.
The Hunger Games aren't the sort of books I normally read but they came highly recommended and I was very impressed. They're great books, whether you're a kid or not.
I had no problems reading Dune at the age of 8. I loved it and highly recommend it if the 8 year old has the patience.
I think it's one of those things you let your eight year old read - if they can get through it more power to them. But it would be awkward to read to them unless you were intending to bring up those inevitable conversations.
It's really too bad that Google Chrome (the OS) had to have this radical dependence on remote storage, because I image hardware manufacturers like HP and Dell would really buy into it now that they're competing with Microsoft on the hardware front and that means they're going to have to support Android. If they're going to support Linux they might as well go all in.
Really, companies like Canonical should be setting up meetings with hardware manufacturers pronto. Imagine "Ubuntu Dell Edition" -- a version that includes drivers that will support all Dell hardware configurations from 2012+ (but leaves out the unnecessary ones). Ubuntu HP Edition, etc. The biggest problem with Linux is the same problem Windows has - it has to support so much freaking hardware that support becomes a nightmare. The advantage Windows has is that most of this is setup for the user when they purchase the computer. All these hardware manufacturers will probably now realize that their dependence on Microsoft these past couple decades has put them in an extremely vulnerable position. They should have realized it when the XBox came out.
Remember, Microsoft is a goddamn corporation. They would gladly drown your grandmother for a nickel's bump in share price.
An absurd statement if I ever heard one. To claim that there is something inherently evil about corporations is just silly. It's one thing to criticize the political or economic system that allows corporations to conduct business in an unethical manner, but to make the claim that any group of individuals that forms an organization funded by public stockholders for the sake of operating a profitable business are inherently evil is inherently dumb.
Believe it or not, but there actually are corporations run by individuals who care about running the business in an ethical manner. Of course, Microsoft isn't one of them, but it's unfair to judge every corporation based on the actions of Microsoft. That's like judging all Republicans on the basis of what Rush Limbaugh says.
When I'm playing a weaker opponent in chess I tend to be extremely careless with my queen and I put her in dangerous places that are quite threatening. The strategy relies on the fact that weaker chess players get squeamish when an opponent's queen hangs out on their side of the board and they start investing too many of their moves into defense, thus ceding board control.
The downside is that a strong opponent knows to relentlessly attack the queen until she's either dead or in a position that isn't advantageous. Another downside is that, even against weaker opponents, she's still in a vulnerable position and I tend to lose her that way.
A computer would never do what I do with my queen (and I would never use the strategy vs. a computer . . . again). What makes people intelligent is their ability to make estimates, predictions, and generalizations that compensate for the limitations of memory. I may not be able to beat my computer in chess, but my computer works harder than an entire nation of brains to kick my ass at it.
I don't like the article confusing this way of thinking with irrationality, concluding that, "we're not nearly as rational as we believe." One's thinking can be rational and imprecise. It can also be rational and wrong. These little tests these researchers are doling out catch people on common fallacies. The more intelligent you are the less likely you are to second guess your answer, the more likely you are to rely on a logical shortcut. Like playing a weak chess opponent. And then, when you've lost, your weak chess opponent can point and laugh and say something stupid that he somehow thinks is clever, like, "hah! Smart people are stupid!"
That's why, in the rematch after losing to a weaker opponent, I dot all my i's and cross all my t's. I don't experiment and I double (triple, quadruple, etc.) check my moves before committing to them. Then, after my pride has been returned, I go back to poking and prodding with attempts to scholar's mate my opponent in some variation because no other victory is more satisfying.
Because if you do good merely for the sake elevating your popularity then it's questionable whether you're really doing something good.
If you set up a scam to make it appear that you're doing good which allows you to avoid paying taxes and eventually pass your wealth on to your children without paying inheritance tax, all the while investing the majority of your money into capitalist schemes with a negligible amount going to real charity, then you're probably doing something extremely unethical. Especially when all those charitable donations you make are 1) less than the amount you would pay in taxes without the foundation and 2) are just a business expense for your personal investment company that you call a charity because that's the key to setting this scam up.
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, this con was exposed decades ago, far before Mr. Gates tried his hand at it. Carnegie and Rockefeller invented it, if I recall correctly.
But the article (if it's long enough to call it that) was terrible. The author spent more time on his high horse railing against military drones than discussing the topic at hand.
His conclusion that the Orvillecopter is a work of art is completely baseless. I don't believe it's art, but the statement wouldn't bother me if he had at least attempted to justify it somehow.
He could have interviewed the guys who made it, he could have explained the power source and any challenges they had constructing this thing. He could have approached the article from all sorts of angles that would actually be on topic. Instead, the pictures were the only interesting part of this link. Shoddy blog posts like this are the reason people still trust the old media moguls more than the internet. The saddest part is the article ends with an advertisement for this douche bag's Twitter handle. Why would I follow him on Twitter? Certainly not for his wit, insight, or flowery prose.
I don't understand why he would even bring up Genesis and God and all that. That stuff has nothing to do with evolution. The fundamentalists who use documents written in 700 BC to make their case aren't going to be swayed by any amount of empirical evidence. They choose to remain ignorant because their theology isn't flexible enough to deal with the truth. That isn't true of all Christian sects.
In fact, most reasonable Christian sects only keep the Old Testament around for its historical significance. The whole point of following the teachings of Jesus Christ rather than old fashioned Judaism is because Jesus told people to repudiate the old teachings in favor of pure morality: love one another and all that good stuff. People who even bother to concern themselves with the afterlife nonsense are the worst kind of, "What's in it for me?" types that misunderstand the whole point in honoring the man and learning what is known about his life (multiple sources are studied rather than a single gospel because it's understood that none of it is very accurate - the parallels and deviations are very interesting, as does how this escapes fundamentalist preachers).
So who's mind is going to be changed by any amount of scientific evidence? It won't be the Lutherans or the Catholics who already believe in evolution. It won't be the Baptists who are batshit insane. I'm pretty sure most Baptists know that evolution, in one form or another, is just a fact of life. They're just in denial and the truth never really mattered to them anyway, or they wouldn't be Baptists.
If the scientific community feels they have enough empirical evidence to claim evolution has exceeded being a theory and can now be considered a verifiable fact, then that's great. By why troll the fundamentalists? They're not going to be convinced unless God himself tells them it's true.
I could have sworn I read the other day that Microsoft was assembling some type of attack on torrents. Which was confusing to be because I don't understand how that's legal. But apparently they wage wars on botnets throughout the world as well, which is something I also don't understand the legality of (although I recognize that the end result of this is good, it baffles me how a tech company can be awarded powers normally reserved for the government).
Maybe someone less lazy or better informed than me can provide an answer. . .
Google gave me a bunch of results about this story, but I did find one nugget:
Perhaps the best way to explain it would be the concept of "The People" in a society with revolutionaries afoot (whether they're successful revolutionaries or not is irrelevant in this example). Revolutionaries always claim to be representing and fighting for "The People," but if one were to take them literally it wouldn't make sense unless they're fighting machines like in the Matrix or something.
"The People," if I had to define it, would actually be the entire citizenry in a sort of Rawlsian "if you weren't born yet and you had no idea what station in life you would be born into." Thus the revolutionaries fight for the fairness of these hypothetical people. Any other definition of "The People" is either exclusive or neglects that there is no consensus among them (like the Bolsheviks/French Revolutionaries).
So Anonymous is the same way. There are no members of Anonymous, however there are organized people here and there who fight for this idea that Anonymous represents. The way I understand it (they've never intrigued me enough to lurk around their boards in an attempt to fully grok them), the idea is right there in the name: the only common belief among them is that anonymity is essential to the internet. Thus anyone who takes up the mantle of Anonymous is someone who pursues this ideal just like revolutionaries pursue distributive justice or liberties or whatever abstract idea in vogue among them that seems essential for some reason or the other.
But what makes the joke so horribly true is that you really are throwing your vote away by casting it for a third party, especially if you live in a swing state.
If it weren't for the Nader votes here in Ohio - just here in Ohio - then Gore would have been elected in 2000. So here, votes do matter. If I lived in California or Texas I may be inclined to make a statement vote.
The part about the joke I disagree with is that both candidates are evil aliens determined to enslave the human race. While neither party is ideal, the G.W. Bush presidency underscored how much less ideal one party is than the other. That Simpsons episode came out before the G.W.'s presidency and it was reflecting this sentiment that there was no difference between the parties so who you vote for doesn't really matter. After all the havoc that Cheney and Rove unleashed on the world from 2000-2008, I don't see how anyone can defend the belief that both parties are equally bad. The Democrats are incompetent. The Republicans are evil.
Ron may be popular among his niche followers, but he and his ideas are not popular. I don't know where you got that idea. The most popular idea Ron has supported has been the legalization of marijuana, which is one of the many issues that has him on the traditional Republican establishment's shitlist.
Most people I've met who support Ron Paul either know nothing about politics or they know so much about classical liberalism they won't shut up about Adam Smith and John Locke like their ideas are new and intriguing and well suited for the twenty first century.
As a Democrat, I don't mind that. Third party candidates hurt the candidate they have the most in common with, like how Nader hurt Gore/Kerry and Perot hurt H.W./Dole.
I hate the two party system but history has shown that voting for a third party/independent only hurts one's cause. As an alien on The Simpsons once said, "What are you going to do, vote for a third party candidate? Go ahead, throw your vote away! Mwahahahaha!"
It's not like all apps in Ubuntu's repository are free. It just makes sense that more software on Linux repositories would be free given the nature of the users. Many of those who have made desktop Linux a reality have done so because they believe software should be free and open. The people who made Mac OS X a reality did so because Apple paid them to so Apple could sell computers.
If Microsoft and Apple had the same market philosophy as Canonical and Red Hat and others then Linux probably would have never come about (at least, as the phenomenon it has become).
For me, I haven't downloaded much off the Mac App store but the ones I've paid for were games. When looking for an application that actually does something, I usually switch over to Ubuntu. Free software will always be nipping at the commercial vendors' heels, all the way up until it catches up and pounces.
Yeah, it wouldn't make sense that this was posted because it's news for nerds . . . there must be a more complicated, nefarious, and conspiratorial answer.
That argument would make sense if they chose Microsoft's solution. So what you're saying is that Microsoft has instilled so much FUD regarding FOSS that the Dept of Interior chose Google?
What I don't get is why LibreOffice hasn't even been mentioned. Everyone likes to bitch about wasteful government spending . . . well, shouldn't we mandate that the government use FOSS solutions when available? Shouldn't proprietary formats that can lock the government into a single vendor be avoided like the plague? I know people like to harp on LibreOffice's Word compatibility but since it got forked from OOo it has vastly improved and has continued to get better. And, if.odt becomes the standard format and Office compatibility is only used for legacy stuff, it shouldn't be an issue at all.
These hosted (cloud!) solutions seem even worse than a proprietary format to me. Now they're not only dependent on a single vendor, but they're using a system that's inherently less secure and reliable. The only cloud system that I would understand the federal government using would be one they host themselves. Which brings up another question, why would the Dept of Interior use a different software solution from the Dept of Energy or any other agency? Why would each of our bloated agencies each negotiate contracts for word processing software when it's safe to assume that every government agency/dept/bureau uses word processing software? If they bought licences at a larger volume they could pay less.
You did a good job of pointing out why Google, Amazon, Microsoft, et al love the hosted app solutions; but what real advantage does it provide the Dept of Interior?
I always assumed that they don't pay shills. There probably isn't a need. Every company has those true believers who won't tolerate anything but the greatest praise about the business. I always just assumed that lots of Microsoft employes, being geeks and all, read/. and post comments defending their employer. Some may look at it as what's good for Microsoft is good for them, some may truly subscribe to the corporate vision (someone has to).
They have so many employees, many of whom are programmers, that I could see them writing a shill script before actually paying a person to do it. But they probably don't even do that. It's probably just some vice-president of marketing dicking off and trolling/.
Sure. And let's ignore The Iliad and The Odyssey while we're at it. Let's ignore all Greek and Roman mythology. While we're at it, we can forget the remaining information we have about Celtic paganism that didn't get scrubbed away during medieval times. Let's ignore Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Might as well toss out One Thousand and One Nights.
Personally, I think people should be studying more ancient books rather than ignoring them. They may not always be historically or scientifically accurate, but to expect such would be to hold our ancestors to an impossible standard for their time. It's not like Homer was concerning himself with how people in the year 2012 would interpret his poetry. Furthermore, the Iliad is still useful to historians and archeologists, even if they have to take every line with a grain of salt. The Bible is no different.
Then there's Shakespeare. How could anyone understand writers such as him without some cursory knowledge of Greek and Roman mythology and Christianity? It makes me sick how so many in the hard sciences are so dismissive of liberal arts and vice versa.
The Tao that can be followed is not the eternal Tao
Any claims regarding the nature of God cannot be blindly accepted. The omnipotent claim is usually rooted in Abrahamic religions where the concept of divinity is personified into this entity known as 'God.' In ancient Greek mythology, for example, the gods are well known for their fallibilities.
Assuming divinity is a real thing, that doesn't mean it's a conscious or even physical thing. Would you consider a wolf immoral because it kills? No, moral and immoral are not words that apply to wolves, even if a farmer says, "That evil wolf killed my prize sheep!" Similarly, I find the notion of labeling a divine entity as omnipotent or fallible/restrained to be inapplicable. Morality is the domain of men, as are free choice and introspection. God can only have these characteristics when personified, which is common among many religions. But aside from the mouth-breathing Baptists and similar Evangelical Christian sects, most religious people don't take such personifications as literal, especially if they're educated. This is also true with non-Christian religions. I've known some Hindus who were not very well educated who seemed to take divine personification literally, but ones I've known who were well educated didn't do this. Religion doesn't require this personification - Taoism and Buddhism are examples - but it probably helped early religions spread as it's easier to remember such stories back when information was generally shared orally.
An omnipotent god is one that can be followed but he is not the eternal God. That's not to say that divinity is even real. I believe in it, but I never believed such a thing could possibly be, in a literal sense, omnipotent. You can attack the beliefs of Evangelicals using such arguments, but they're such an easy target and the argument doesn't even extend to Christianity as a whole, let alone other religions.
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Anytime a U.S. president gets shot he becomes sainted and we refuse to acknowledge the horrible things he's done. Getting shot is like automatic sainthood for a U.S. President (thank God Reagan survived his assassination attempt - imagine that moron as a martyr).
Kennedy got us involved in Vietnam. Lincoln was personally responsible for more American deaths than any person/country/army. No one (aside from history buffs) knows much about McKinley or Garfield but they have a surprising amount of buildings and whatnot named after them for do-nothing presidents.
You fucking freedom hating commie! You shouldn't be allowed to post such things! There should be some congressional committee to subpoena you or something.
Yeah, I was all with him until he got to #3. Here's my version of the third point:
America has a whole lot of rural areas where fathers teach their sons to hunt. This is something that is passed down, generation from generation, since in a lot of cases one of their ancestors settled in the area and hunted to stay alive. Not only is this so ingrained in our culture that it's not going to go anywhere anytime soon, it's also necessary because with the currently low proportion of predators to deer, deer are so overpopulated they're a nuisance/road hazard and hunting them with the limitations imposed by law is much preferable to poisoning them or some other form of pest control.
Hunters love their guns like mechanics love hot rods. Oftentimes they want big and ridiculous ones to compliment their go to work car (or hunting shotgun/bow in this case).
I haven't seen anyone mention Roald Dahl yet. That's who I was reading at that age. It's neither traditional sci-fi or fantasy, but that's part of what makes it great, it can't really be pigeonholed into a genre. The man just wrote great stories. I think it's the perfect step up from Dr. Seuss. After Dahl, I'd go for Tolkien and Bradbury and The Hunger Games trilogy.
The Hunger Games aren't the sort of books I normally read but they came highly recommended and I was very impressed. They're great books, whether you're a kid or not.
I had no problems reading Dune at the age of 8. I loved it and highly recommend it if the 8 year old has the patience.
I think it's one of those things you let your eight year old read - if they can get through it more power to them. But it would be awkward to read to them unless you were intending to bring up those inevitable conversations.
It's really too bad that Google Chrome (the OS) had to have this radical dependence on remote storage, because I image hardware manufacturers like HP and Dell would really buy into it now that they're competing with Microsoft on the hardware front and that means they're going to have to support Android. If they're going to support Linux they might as well go all in.
Really, companies like Canonical should be setting up meetings with hardware manufacturers pronto. Imagine "Ubuntu Dell Edition" -- a version that includes drivers that will support all Dell hardware configurations from 2012+ (but leaves out the unnecessary ones). Ubuntu HP Edition, etc. The biggest problem with Linux is the same problem Windows has - it has to support so much freaking hardware that support becomes a nightmare. The advantage Windows has is that most of this is setup for the user when they purchase the computer. All these hardware manufacturers will probably now realize that their dependence on Microsoft these past couple decades has put them in an extremely vulnerable position. They should have realized it when the XBox came out.
Remember, Microsoft is a goddamn corporation. They would gladly drown your grandmother for a nickel's bump in share price.
An absurd statement if I ever heard one. To claim that there is something inherently evil about corporations is just silly. It's one thing to criticize the political or economic system that allows corporations to conduct business in an unethical manner, but to make the claim that any group of individuals that forms an organization funded by public stockholders for the sake of operating a profitable business are inherently evil is inherently dumb.
Believe it or not, but there actually are corporations run by individuals who care about running the business in an ethical manner. Of course, Microsoft isn't one of them, but it's unfair to judge every corporation based on the actions of Microsoft. That's like judging all Republicans on the basis of what Rush Limbaugh says.
When I'm playing a weaker opponent in chess I tend to be extremely careless with my queen and I put her in dangerous places that are quite threatening. The strategy relies on the fact that weaker chess players get squeamish when an opponent's queen hangs out on their side of the board and they start investing too many of their moves into defense, thus ceding board control.
The downside is that a strong opponent knows to relentlessly attack the queen until she's either dead or in a position that isn't advantageous. Another downside is that, even against weaker opponents, she's still in a vulnerable position and I tend to lose her that way.
A computer would never do what I do with my queen (and I would never use the strategy vs. a computer . . . again). What makes people intelligent is their ability to make estimates, predictions, and generalizations that compensate for the limitations of memory. I may not be able to beat my computer in chess, but my computer works harder than an entire nation of brains to kick my ass at it.
I don't like the article confusing this way of thinking with irrationality, concluding that, "we're not nearly as rational as we believe." One's thinking can be rational and imprecise. It can also be rational and wrong. These little tests these researchers are doling out catch people on common fallacies. The more intelligent you are the less likely you are to second guess your answer, the more likely you are to rely on a logical shortcut. Like playing a weak chess opponent. And then, when you've lost, your weak chess opponent can point and laugh and say something stupid that he somehow thinks is clever, like, "hah! Smart people are stupid!"
That's why, in the rematch after losing to a weaker opponent, I dot all my i's and cross all my t's. I don't experiment and I double (triple, quadruple, etc.) check my moves before committing to them. Then, after my pride has been returned, I go back to poking and prodding with attempts to scholar's mate my opponent in some variation because no other victory is more satisfying.
Because if you do good merely for the sake elevating your popularity then it's questionable whether you're really doing something good.
If you set up a scam to make it appear that you're doing good which allows you to avoid paying taxes and eventually pass your wealth on to your children without paying inheritance tax, all the while investing the majority of your money into capitalist schemes with a negligible amount going to real charity, then you're probably doing something extremely unethical. Especially when all those charitable donations you make are 1) less than the amount you would pay in taxes without the foundation and 2) are just a business expense for your personal investment company that you call a charity because that's the key to setting this scam up.
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, this con was exposed decades ago, far before Mr. Gates tried his hand at it. Carnegie and Rockefeller invented it, if I recall correctly.
But the article (if it's long enough to call it that) was terrible. The author spent more time on his high horse railing against military drones than discussing the topic at hand.
His conclusion that the Orvillecopter is a work of art is completely baseless. I don't believe it's art, but the statement wouldn't bother me if he had at least attempted to justify it somehow.
He could have interviewed the guys who made it, he could have explained the power source and any challenges they had constructing this thing. He could have approached the article from all sorts of angles that would actually be on topic. Instead, the pictures were the only interesting part of this link. Shoddy blog posts like this are the reason people still trust the old media moguls more than the internet. The saddest part is the article ends with an advertisement for this douche bag's Twitter handle. Why would I follow him on Twitter? Certainly not for his wit, insight, or flowery prose.
I don't understand why he would even bring up Genesis and God and all that. That stuff has nothing to do with evolution. The fundamentalists who use documents written in 700 BC to make their case aren't going to be swayed by any amount of empirical evidence. They choose to remain ignorant because their theology isn't flexible enough to deal with the truth. That isn't true of all Christian sects.
In fact, most reasonable Christian sects only keep the Old Testament around for its historical significance. The whole point of following the teachings of Jesus Christ rather than old fashioned Judaism is because Jesus told people to repudiate the old teachings in favor of pure morality: love one another and all that good stuff. People who even bother to concern themselves with the afterlife nonsense are the worst kind of, "What's in it for me?" types that misunderstand the whole point in honoring the man and learning what is known about his life (multiple sources are studied rather than a single gospel because it's understood that none of it is very accurate - the parallels and deviations are very interesting, as does how this escapes fundamentalist preachers).
So who's mind is going to be changed by any amount of scientific evidence? It won't be the Lutherans or the Catholics who already believe in evolution. It won't be the Baptists who are batshit insane. I'm pretty sure most Baptists know that evolution, in one form or another, is just a fact of life. They're just in denial and the truth never really mattered to them anyway, or they wouldn't be Baptists.
If the scientific community feels they have enough empirical evidence to claim evolution has exceeded being a theory and can now be considered a verifiable fact, then that's great. By why troll the fundamentalists? They're not going to be convinced unless God himself tells them it's true.
I could have sworn I read the other day that Microsoft was assembling some type of attack on torrents. Which was confusing to be because I don't understand how that's legal. But apparently they wage wars on botnets throughout the world as well, which is something I also don't understand the legality of (although I recognize that the end result of this is good, it baffles me how a tech company can be awarded powers normally reserved for the government).
Maybe someone less lazy or better informed than me can provide an answer. . .
Google gave me a bunch of results about this story, but I did find one nugget:
http://www.decryptedtech.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=753:microsoft-backing-a-new-company-looking-to-attack-torrent-swarms&Itemid=139
Perhaps the best way to explain it would be the concept of "The People" in a society with revolutionaries afoot (whether they're successful revolutionaries or not is irrelevant in this example). Revolutionaries always claim to be representing and fighting for "The People," but if one were to take them literally it wouldn't make sense unless they're fighting machines like in the Matrix or something.
"The People," if I had to define it, would actually be the entire citizenry in a sort of Rawlsian "if you weren't born yet and you had no idea what station in life you would be born into." Thus the revolutionaries fight for the fairness of these hypothetical people. Any other definition of "The People" is either exclusive or neglects that there is no consensus among them (like the Bolsheviks/French Revolutionaries).
So Anonymous is the same way. There are no members of Anonymous, however there are organized people here and there who fight for this idea that Anonymous represents. The way I understand it (they've never intrigued me enough to lurk around their boards in an attempt to fully grok them), the idea is right there in the name: the only common belief among them is that anonymity is essential to the internet. Thus anyone who takes up the mantle of Anonymous is someone who pursues this ideal just like revolutionaries pursue distributive justice or liberties or whatever abstract idea in vogue among them that seems essential for some reason or the other.
To be fair, Darl McBride works for Ballmer, so we can hold Ballmer accountable for anything McBride does.
But what makes the joke so horribly true is that you really are throwing your vote away by casting it for a third party, especially if you live in a swing state.
If it weren't for the Nader votes here in Ohio - just here in Ohio - then Gore would have been elected in 2000. So here, votes do matter. If I lived in California or Texas I may be inclined to make a statement vote.
The part about the joke I disagree with is that both candidates are evil aliens determined to enslave the human race. While neither party is ideal, the G.W. Bush presidency underscored how much less ideal one party is than the other. That Simpsons episode came out before the G.W.'s presidency and it was reflecting this sentiment that there was no difference between the parties so who you vote for doesn't really matter. After all the havoc that Cheney and Rove unleashed on the world from 2000-2008, I don't see how anyone can defend the belief that both parties are equally bad. The Democrats are incompetent. The Republicans are evil.
Ron may be popular among his niche followers, but he and his ideas are not popular. I don't know where you got that idea. The most popular idea Ron has supported has been the legalization of marijuana, which is one of the many issues that has him on the traditional Republican establishment's shitlist.
Most people I've met who support Ron Paul either know nothing about politics or they know so much about classical liberalism they won't shut up about Adam Smith and John Locke like their ideas are new and intriguing and well suited for the twenty first century.
As a Democrat, I don't mind that. Third party candidates hurt the candidate they have the most in common with, like how Nader hurt Gore/Kerry and Perot hurt H.W./Dole.
I hate the two party system but history has shown that voting for a third party/independent only hurts one's cause. As an alien on The Simpsons once said, "What are you going to do, vote for a third party candidate? Go ahead, throw your vote away! Mwahahahaha!"
It's not like all apps in Ubuntu's repository are free. It just makes sense that more software on Linux repositories would be free given the nature of the users. Many of those who have made desktop Linux a reality have done so because they believe software should be free and open. The people who made Mac OS X a reality did so because Apple paid them to so Apple could sell computers.
If Microsoft and Apple had the same market philosophy as Canonical and Red Hat and others then Linux probably would have never come about (at least, as the phenomenon it has become).
For me, I haven't downloaded much off the Mac App store but the ones I've paid for were games. When looking for an application that actually does something, I usually switch over to Ubuntu. Free software will always be nipping at the commercial vendors' heels, all the way up until it catches up and pounces.
Yeah, it wouldn't make sense that this was posted because it's news for nerds . . . there must be a more complicated, nefarious, and conspiratorial answer.
That argument would make sense if they chose Microsoft's solution. So what you're saying is that Microsoft has instilled so much FUD regarding FOSS that the Dept of Interior chose Google?
Democrats/Republicans, Socialists/Capitalists, Open Source/Closed Source -- both sides produce some good in this world.
Except the Republicans . . .
What I don't get is why LibreOffice hasn't even been mentioned. Everyone likes to bitch about wasteful government spending . . . well, shouldn't we mandate that the government use FOSS solutions when available? Shouldn't proprietary formats that can lock the government into a single vendor be avoided like the plague? I know people like to harp on LibreOffice's Word compatibility but since it got forked from OOo it has vastly improved and has continued to get better. And, if .odt becomes the standard format and Office compatibility is only used for legacy stuff, it shouldn't be an issue at all.
These hosted (cloud!) solutions seem even worse than a proprietary format to me. Now they're not only dependent on a single vendor, but they're using a system that's inherently less secure and reliable. The only cloud system that I would understand the federal government using would be one they host themselves. Which brings up another question, why would the Dept of Interior use a different software solution from the Dept of Energy or any other agency? Why would each of our bloated agencies each negotiate contracts for word processing software when it's safe to assume that every government agency/dept/bureau uses word processing software? If they bought licences at a larger volume they could pay less.
You did a good job of pointing out why Google, Amazon, Microsoft, et al love the hosted app solutions; but what real advantage does it provide the Dept of Interior?
I always assumed that they don't pay shills. There probably isn't a need. Every company has those true believers who won't tolerate anything but the greatest praise about the business. I always just assumed that lots of Microsoft employes, being geeks and all, read /. and post comments defending their employer. Some may look at it as what's good for Microsoft is good for them, some may truly subscribe to the corporate vision (someone has to).
They have so many employees, many of whom are programmers, that I could see them writing a shill script before actually paying a person to do it. But they probably don't even do that. It's probably just some vice-president of marketing dicking off and trolling /.
Sure. And let's ignore The Iliad and The Odyssey while we're at it. Let's ignore all Greek and Roman mythology. While we're at it, we can forget the remaining information we have about Celtic paganism that didn't get scrubbed away during medieval times. Let's ignore Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Might as well toss out One Thousand and One Nights.
Personally, I think people should be studying more ancient books rather than ignoring them. They may not always be historically or scientifically accurate, but to expect such would be to hold our ancestors to an impossible standard for their time. It's not like Homer was concerning himself with how people in the year 2012 would interpret his poetry. Furthermore, the Iliad is still useful to historians and archeologists, even if they have to take every line with a grain of salt. The Bible is no different.
Then there's Shakespeare. How could anyone understand writers such as him without some cursory knowledge of Greek and Roman mythology and Christianity? It makes me sick how so many in the hard sciences are so dismissive of liberal arts and vice versa.
The Tao that can be followed is not the eternal Tao
Any claims regarding the nature of God cannot be blindly accepted. The omnipotent claim is usually rooted in Abrahamic religions where the concept of divinity is personified into this entity known as 'God.' In ancient Greek mythology, for example, the gods are well known for their fallibilities.
Assuming divinity is a real thing, that doesn't mean it's a conscious or even physical thing. Would you consider a wolf immoral because it kills? No, moral and immoral are not words that apply to wolves, even if a farmer says, "That evil wolf killed my prize sheep!" Similarly, I find the notion of labeling a divine entity as omnipotent or fallible/restrained to be inapplicable. Morality is the domain of men, as are free choice and introspection. God can only have these characteristics when personified, which is common among many religions. But aside from the mouth-breathing Baptists and similar Evangelical Christian sects, most religious people don't take such personifications as literal, especially if they're educated. This is also true with non-Christian religions. I've known some Hindus who were not very well educated who seemed to take divine personification literally, but ones I've known who were well educated didn't do this. Religion doesn't require this personification - Taoism and Buddhism are examples - but it probably helped early religions spread as it's easier to remember such stories back when information was generally shared orally.
An omnipotent god is one that can be followed but he is not the eternal God. That's not to say that divinity is even real. I believe in it, but I never believed such a thing could possibly be, in a literal sense, omnipotent. You can attack the beliefs of Evangelicals using such arguments, but they're such an easy target and the argument doesn't even extend to Christianity as a whole, let alone other religions.