There are historical reasons for this, going back to the establishment of the American Republic. Rather than rehashing that tired old issue, the main thing here was to diffuse power among a whole bunch of people so there wouldn't be any singular concentration of power among one group or one population center. In this regard, the system has worked out fantastically.
Have you looked at the US Senate recently?
One square mile, one vote. It's a fundamental principle of democracy.
Why, where would be if big agribusiness states where no one lives weren't given equal weighting?
I think you could hardly say that the big states like California, Texas, and New York get "zero attention". They get considerable attention.
They do? I've lived in Los Angeles my whole life, and as far as I can tell, presidential campaigns are something that happen on TV.
Yeah, and if we finally got national primaries, and broke Iowa and New Hampshire's lock as the leaders, do you know what would happen? Presidential campaigns would be something that happen on TV... everywhere. The major candidates wouldn't do any personal campaigning at all, it would all be a battle for the cameras.
I'm certainly tired of my vote not making any difference (I live in San Francisco), but it's not clear to me national primaries are a great solution.
Doesn't meme mean some sort of belief? Not a type of post on Facebook.
No, certainly not. Dawkins original example of meme-transmission involved errors/changes in the lyrics of a folk song -- this facebook example is a very close parallel (the number in "NN random things about me" mutates, and for some reason a particular value of NN survives and becomes dominant).
If "meme" were just another word for "idea", there wouldn't be a useful concept at all. The whole point of talking about "meme"s is that there are pieces of information that mutate and spread through human culture without us being particularly conscious of the process of invention and selection -- much in the same way that species evolve without directing their evolution.
They are all crooks. The hypocrisy of the democrats who ripped on republicans and Bush and now ignore it when they do the EXACT same type of stuff just kills me.
When was that exactly? Funny, the way I remember the Bush junior's two sort-of-elected terms was that
the Democrats essentially rolled over and played dead the entire time. The only people openly criticizing the Bush gang were outliers like Dennis Kucinich.
If you guys are going to try to astroturf obama to death, do you think you could try to come up with something, anything, real to complain about?
Oh, by the way: highest recommendations go to "Gregory Benford" -- his output has slowed down a lot in recent years, but he's one of the few who can do it all, blending hard SF with really solid literary skills.
Genuine Science Fiction has always been rather thin on the ground. Doing it well is *hard*. Hal Clement was one who did it well. Larry Niven occasionally did it well. (Known Worlds series incl. Ringworld et seq.)
These are not terrible picks, of course, but both these writers
tended to write relatively thin works, very light on things like
characterization, emotional engagement, or philosophical ideas.
I would go with someone else's example of Asimov's "Caves of Steel" (which I consider a set of two, including "The Naked Sun", myself) as a better example of intelligent classic SF -- he was dealing with "New Urbanism" issues several decades before most people were.
Currently I only know of Charles Stoss, though there may be others. (I've cut back on my reading a lot.)
Bruce Sterling, when he feels like it. Some of Ken McCleod's stuff (start with "Cassini Division"). Steven Brust's name comes up a lot.
Anyone who's been around the block on this subject knows better than to get to concerned about getting a precise distinction between "fantasy" and "science fiction":
It isn't just that you've "grown up" or something -- the world
has changed a lot, and I suspect Science Fiction (and it's variants)
has a much smaller role to play...
Yes, I don't. I see two armies fighting: one has soldiers hidden
behind children, the other has an excessive amount of power. One
lost, the other won. And both of them are far, far away from
where I live and aren't connected to my culture or family. So
yes, I don't care.
Israel is doing this on our dime, in our names. There are
solid, practical reasons why we should care about what they're
doing, even if you shrug off the "humanitarian" ones.
You're a "might makes right" idiot.
... I'm someone who believes in respect and civilization. And I
believe that "feel good" attitudes aren't worth shit. I'd rather
plan and achieve actual results to help other people than acting
like a simplistic prick who thinks that real life is a leftist
retard fantasy.
You believe in respect as long as it's nice white people who live
next door (as though they would behave any different than the
Palestinians, after being subjected to Israeli's treatment for
half a century).
And you're idea of "civilization" is "whoever has the most bombs".
All of your "pragmatic" calculation is useless if you don't
recognize that real strength grows from the sanction of other
human beings -- "the force of our example, rather than the
example of our force". Rule by force alone rarely succeeds in
anything but the short term, and sometimes not even in that.
"The hand of iron begets a soul of iron in the body it grips."-- H.G. Wells
They did that, huh? Do you have a source? Or do you actually mean "civillians being killed while the Israeli army attacked militants hidden in the middle of the population?".
Well hey, I bet the handful of homemade rockets that Hammas scraped together were fired at military targets too, right? After all, there are Israeli military personel scattered all around Israel, right? And anyway, the Israeli people have repeatedly elected military aggressive, expansionist governments that are always invading and occupying neighboring territories.
If these excuses work for one side, why not the other?
One thing that's always bothered me about modern user interfaces is black text on a white background. I find the opposite much more soothing. Unfortunately, I can't turn it on, for one simple reason, and you're looking right at it.
If I go for that setting, it results in a generally darker (but no less visible) desktop. The problem? You're staring right at it. Open a full-screen slashdot, and suddenly AAARGH GOD DAMN, MY EYES! As blinding white light suddenly gets beamed into my eyeballs.
So I have to begrudgingly use black-on-white all over the desktop, to avoid sudden drastic changes of contrast every time I visit a web page.
Okay, I feel your pain (literally), but you can fight back against the third-degree if you want -- admittedly though, it requires some determination, and you can probably only get about 95% of the way to success.
The first step on the road is Firefox Edit-Preferences-Content-Colors
Then you can choose your own colors -- I use a black background, a light green foreground,
and I make the link color a light-blue and the visited link color a light-pink/purple.
You will also probably need to uncheck the boxes "Use system colors" and "Allow web pages to choose their own colors".
That gets you pretty close -- but you'll still have to deal with white text edit boxes, but even worse are the occasional form that has you typing black text into a box with a black background. Further, if a webpage uses color as a UI element (e.g. error messages colored in red), you won't see those. The solution will probably be to keep another browser around (Konqueror?) to use when your customized Firefox fails you.
(It would be nice sometimes to be able to start a second, virgin Firefox on occasion -- there are ways to do it, but Firefox fights you.)
It also helps to find a good, dark, firefox theme (I use "In The Dark" myself).
Then of course, you'll need to deal with the "themes" for you desktop environment.
(I have a slight preference for KDE over gnome, but really I use icewm as my
window manager, with the "Infidel2" theme).
But there's always going to be that irreducible 5% of software where some idiot hardcoded a white background on you... the way is hard, but well worth traveling. If enough of us do it, our complaints might reduce some of these problems some day.
(Particularly frustrating to me are both "gdm" and "kdm" which have very limited "themability" as far as I can tell -- when I start up my laptop late at night to read in bed, I get flashed by some super-bright log-in screen. I may just dump the whole "*dm" business -- I never had any problem with typing "startx" after logging in.
Bull. You don't care for eye candy. I don't care for eye candy. End users care. No matter how hard we wish it were otherwise it remains a fact.
Some end users care, but many actually don't. No one is a "newbie" any more,
and I think even "non-technical" people are developing attitudes much like old unix-hackers --
like groaning when they realize someone did something weird in Flash when they could've
just used the old familiar HTML approach.
Israel is living a real-life situation at the current moment. And as a sovereign country they need to consider real-life events and strategic positions so they can keep existing. They can't call mommy and tell her what jimmy just did. They need to take action.
Israel is currently living in a deluded state, where they repeatedly try the same thing over and over irrespective of whether it "worked" last time. Kicking the shit out of Lebanon a few years ago gained them nothing, so now they're trying to kick the shit out of Gaza. You can not justify this insanity on grounds of realistic pragmatism: it's both stupid and evil (not unlike much of the Bush Jr regimes foreign policy).
But hey, who cares about slaughtering children, they were only Palestinians right? I bet those kids voted for Hamas. Or would have, if they could.
The ones hiding behind those children should be, in theory, the first ones to care about that.
Weirdly enough, when Israel drops bombs on them, they tend to blame Israel. Funny that.
You're forgetting that they actually win all conflicts they get involved in,
With US backing. 20% of their military expenditures are covered by us.
You step on their foot (and you can use lots of dates and events to justify it) and they'll smack you in the head.
No: if you step on their foot, they blow away a thousand people standing over there, in the ultimately vain hope that people will get so pissed off at you for provoking them that they'll put pressure on you to avoid it next time. Weirdly enough, the "arab street" blames Israel when Israel kills a thousand innocent people.
Yes, sure, there are small violations here and there. There is actually lots of fuel for any kind of nutjob
You have to be a nut job to think that Israel's warcrimes are "small violations".
There's no comparison between a western man giving cheap ideas from behind his keyboard to a sand monkey firing an AK-47 to a jewish family just because they're jewish, or a hate-filled idiot teaching kids that jews should be beheaded.
Now try doing some comparisons to the people behind Israel's foreign policy -- most recently they intentionally violated a cease fire (and then blamed it on the other side when they retaliated), and began bombing a defenseless civilian population that was trapped in a box they had created... apparently they were in a rush to get in some last licks on Bush Junior's watch.
And this is, needless to say, done with the backing of our good old wise, civilized and tolerant USA.
But hey, who cares about slaughtering children, they were only Palestinians right? I bet those kids voted for Hamas. Or would have, if they could.
But if you're on the other side of the conflict, a solution might consider on just not being attacked anymore. The old and famous "being left alone".
Poor little Israel, just wants to be left alone but keeps getting picked on? While you're looking things up, you need to review the history of this conflict. Try starting with 1967. Or if you like more recent events, try figuring out which side violated the truce agreement before Israel decided to stomp on the Gaza strip. I would not go as far to say that Israel is always at fault, but they're far from being angels.
Honestly, I'm not even sure why the government provided the coupon for converter boxes. Yes, the government is doing something that might potentially make your TV useless, but it's TV. It's TV. You might not be able to watch American Idol or something.
You're highlighting a different problem here. TV is supposed to be better than this. The broadcasters are legally required to serve "the public interest" or they should have their licenses yanked.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you looked at the US Senate recently?
One square mile, one vote. It's a fundamental principle of democracy.
Why, where would be if big agribusiness states where no one lives weren't given equal weighting?
I've got a less radical solution: subdivide the state into something like four smaller states. We'd get a lot more senators that way.
Yeah, and if we finally got national primaries, and broke Iowa and New Hampshire's lock as the leaders, do you know what would happen? Presidential campaigns would be something that happen on TV... everywhere. The major candidates wouldn't do any personal campaigning at all, it would all be a battle for the cameras.
I'm certainly tired of my vote not making any difference (I live in San Francisco), but it's not clear to me national primaries are a great solution.
geoffrobinson (109879) wrote:
No, certainly not. Dawkins original example of meme-transmission involved errors/changes in the lyrics of a folk song -- this facebook example is a very close parallel (the number in "NN random things about me" mutates, and for some reason a particular value of NN survives and becomes dominant).
If "meme" were just another word for "idea", there wouldn't be a useful concept at all. The whole point of talking about "meme"s is that there are pieces of information that mutate and spread through human culture without us being particularly conscious of the process of invention and selection -- much in the same way that species evolve without directing their evolution.
When was that exactly? Funny, the way I remember the Bush junior's two sort-of-elected terms was that the Democrats essentially rolled over and played dead the entire time. The only people openly criticizing the Bush gang were outliers like Dennis Kucinich.
If you guys are going to try to astroturf obama to death, do you think you could try to come up with something, anything, real to complain about?
Um... now that I think about it, I'm not sure why I mentioned Steven Brust at all. I was probably thinking of someone else...
Maybe Iain M. Banks? But then, while his skiffy is interesting, it's hardly harder than hard.
Oh, by the way: highest recommendations go to "Gregory Benford" -- his output has slowed down a lot in recent years, but he's one of the few who can do it all, blending hard SF with really solid literary skills.
These are not terrible picks, of course, but both these writers tended to write relatively thin works, very light on things like characterization, emotional engagement, or philosophical ideas. I would go with someone else's example of Asimov's "Caves of Steel" (which I consider a set of two, including "The Naked Sun", myself) as a better example of intelligent classic SF -- he was dealing with "New Urbanism" issues several decades before most people were.
Bruce Sterling, when he feels like it. Some of Ken McCleod's stuff (start with "Cassini Division"). Steven Brust's name comes up a lot.
Anyone who's been around the block on this subject knows better than to get to concerned about getting a precise distinction between "fantasy" and "science fiction":
HARD
It isn't just that you've "grown up" or something -- the world has changed a lot, and I suspect Science Fiction (and it's variants) has a much smaller role to play...
LOST_WORLDS_OF_UNKNOWN_TOMORROWS
Israeli soldiers recall Gaza attack orders
An Israeli soldier says they were told to "Fire on anything that moves".
By the way, I always think stories like this are interesting: Pro-Israel media: Bloggers join media war
Yes, that's why you're posting book-length propaganda screeds.
Israel is doing this on our dime, in our names. There are solid, practical reasons why we should care about what they're doing, even if you shrug off the "humanitarian" ones.
You believe in respect as long as it's nice white people who live next door (as though they would behave any different than the Palestinians, after being subjected to Israeli's treatment for half a century).
And you're idea of "civilization" is "whoever has the most bombs".
All of your "pragmatic" calculation is useless if you don't recognize that real strength grows from the sanction of other human beings -- "the force of our example, rather than the example of our force". Rule by force alone rarely succeeds in anything but the short term, and sometimes not even in that.
"The hand of iron begets a soul of iron in the body it grips."-- H.G. Wells
Well hey, I bet the handful of homemade rockets that Hammas scraped together were fired at military targets too, right? After all, there are Israeli military personel scattered all around Israel, right? And anyway, the Israeli people have repeatedly elected military aggressive, expansionist governments that are always invading and occupying neighboring territories.
If these excuses work for one side, why not the other?
Amnesty International: Israel used white phosphorus in Gaza civilian areas
White Phosphorous and Dense Inert Metal Explosives: Is Israel Using Banned and Experimental Munitions in Gaza?
Attacking civilian targets, bombing a territory that they occupy and control...
And the reports of phosphorous bombs, among other things, are pretty damn credible.
Not that you care. You're a "might makes right" idiot.
Okay, I feel your pain (literally), but you can fight back against the third-degree if you want -- admittedly though, it requires some determination, and you can probably only get about 95% of the way to success.
The first step on the road is Firefox Edit-Preferences-Content-Colors Then you can choose your own colors -- I use a black background, a light green foreground, and I make the link color a light-blue and the visited link color a light-pink/purple. You will also probably need to uncheck the boxes "Use system colors" and "Allow web pages to choose their own colors".
That gets you pretty close -- but you'll still have to deal with white text edit boxes, but even worse are the occasional form that has you typing black text into a box with a black background. Further, if a webpage uses color as a UI element (e.g. error messages colored in red), you won't see those. The solution will probably be to keep another browser around (Konqueror?) to use when your customized Firefox fails you. (It would be nice sometimes to be able to start a second, virgin Firefox on occasion -- there are ways to do it, but Firefox fights you.)
It also helps to find a good, dark, firefox theme (I use "In The Dark" myself).
Then of course, you'll need to deal with the "themes" for you desktop environment. (I have a slight preference for KDE over gnome, but really I use icewm as my window manager, with the "Infidel2" theme).
But there's always going to be that irreducible 5% of software where some idiot hardcoded a white background on you... the way is hard, but well worth traveling. If enough of us do it, our complaints might reduce some of these problems some day.
(Particularly frustrating to me are both "gdm" and "kdm" which have very limited "themability" as far as I can tell -- when I start up my laptop late at night to read in bed, I get flashed by some super-bright log-in screen. I may just dump the whole "*dm" business -- I never had any problem with typing "startx" after logging in.
Yeah. Where would botnets be without it?
Some end users care, but many actually don't. No one is a "newbie" any more, and I think even "non-technical" people are developing attitudes much like old unix-hackers -- like groaning when they realize someone did something weird in Flash when they could've just used the old familiar HTML approach.
Israel is currently living in a deluded state, where they repeatedly try the same thing over and over irrespective of whether it "worked" last time. Kicking the shit out of Lebanon a few years ago gained them nothing, so now they're trying to kick the shit out of Gaza. You can not justify this insanity on grounds of realistic pragmatism: it's both stupid and evil (not unlike much of the Bush Jr regimes foreign policy).
Weirdly enough, when Israel drops bombs on them, they tend to blame Israel. Funny that.
With US backing. 20% of their military expenditures are covered by us.
No: if you step on their foot, they blow away a thousand people standing over there, in the ultimately vain hope that people will get so pissed off at you for provoking them that they'll put pressure on you to avoid it next time. Weirdly enough, the "arab street" blames Israel when Israel kills a thousand innocent people.
You have to be a nut job to think that Israel's warcrimes are "small violations".
Now try doing some comparisons to the people behind Israel's foreign policy -- most recently they intentionally violated a cease fire (and then blamed it on the other side when they retaliated), and began bombing a defenseless civilian population that was trapped in a box they had created... apparently they were in a rush to get in some last licks on Bush Junior's watch.
And this is, needless to say, done with the backing of our good old wise, civilized and tolerant USA.
But hey, who cares about slaughtering children, they were only Palestinians right? I bet those kids voted for Hamas. Or would have, if they could.
Poor little Israel, just wants to be left alone but keeps getting picked on? While you're looking things up, you need to review the history of this conflict. Try starting with 1967. Or if you like more recent events, try figuring out which side violated the truce agreement before Israel decided to stomp on the Gaza strip. I would not go as far to say that Israel is always at fault, but they're far from being angels.
You're highlighting a different problem here. TV is supposed to be better than this. The broadcasters are legally required to serve "the public interest" or they should have their licenses yanked.
I gather you're not from New York.