The thing about American Justice though... it's based on money. If an individual kills someone, and everybody realizes it, but they have a ton of money, they might have a shot at convincing a judge and jury to let them get away with it.
I don't think this concept can be applied so broadly. The lesson I take from the OJ trial is not that millions of dollars can buy acquital, but that millions of dollars can uncover enough potentially exculpatory evidence that might not be seen otherwise. Which is depressing not because OJ went free (although I do think, based on almost zero knoweldge of the case, that he's guilty), but because hundreds of poorer, dumber people are convicted and even sentenced to death based on far worse evidence, because they had no effective legal representation. (Texas being the worst example, which is why I lost all respect for Bush a long time ago, back when compassionate conservatism seemed like it might be the real thing.)
As for the parallel to SCO, bear in mind that they went up against one of the largest computer companies and a huge user and developer community that were obviously going to take it personally. This means that there is tons of money (or manpower - all of the anti-SCO research would have cost a boatload if a real law firm was doing it) being spent fighting SCO, and they're getting slowly bludgeoned to death as a result. The fact that it's a distributed and largely non-profit effort shouldn't obscure that. SCO really sees itself as the underdog in this fight, and they're correct. (A snarling, vicious little dog, that's trying to gnaw your trousers whenever it isn't copulating with your shoe.)
If Jeb Bush did that, it would be a gross abuse of power.
He didn't. The suggestion was that perhaps Disney was worried about losing their tax breaks, but there was never any evidence that Jeb had said something along these lines. At any rate, I'm not sure I blame Disney for wanting to keep as far away from Michael Moore as possible. If we want to embarass and ridicult the Bush family (a worth cause, to be sure), we can do better than that ass-clown.
what i'd like to see is Feingold/McCain (or vice verca, but McCain would have to run as an independant...) in 2008.
I suspect a lot of people would agree with you; many voters said they supported either Bradley or McCain in 2000 (my parents donated to both their campaigns). Which isn't really that weird; if you're a centrist, you basically have a choice of voting for someone to your right or to your left. So it comes down to a matter of style and personal taste. I would be a liberal Republican but there isn't really any such thing now, except for a few holdouts; I loved McCain because I agreed with most of his policy positions AND he was willing to stand up to the psychos in his party. I get a hardon every time I read an article suggestion a Kerry/McCain ticket - there's no way in hell I'm voting for Bush anyway, but I'd love to see a bipartisan, centrist administration. (It would screw the far right and the far left for years.)
On the subject of 2008, both my dad and I are terrified that we're going to end up with a choice between Jeb and Hillary.
but according to the account I read, even he didn't get a chance to read the whole thing.
I didn't hear that part - sounds a little unbelievable to me. Do you have a link for that? Sensenbrenner (that's the committee chair) seems like a sharp enough guy that he wouldn't let a bill out of committee unless he had read it, especially since he'd already bounced it once. That sounds like a serious procedural violation. (Not that I don't think the administration would try something like that. For a good rundown of what they've been up to, this article gives an extensive overview.)
current evidence shows that there were no intelligence failures.
Key word being "current." Back then, it was a safe assumption to make that we'd been blindsided - I remember seeing an anonymous quote from an NSA employee saying "I want to know how the fuck we didn't see this coming." Anyway, the act was partly designed to increase intelligence-gathering capability and allow cooperation between agencies. There's nothing wrong with that in principle; it's all in the implementation.
Anyway, I think the PATRIOT ACT is the least of our worries. It's unpleasant in parts, and the way it was passed was pretty pathetic, but the actions the administration has taken independently are much more disturbing. At least the PATRIOT ACT is subject to sunset provisions and congressional oversight, and the proposed followup bill never made it to the floor. The most important question now is whether the SCOTUS will show some balls with these enemy combatant cases. (And on an intellectual level, I'm really curious whether Scalia will a) vote on principle, b) abandon his strict constructionism entirely and side with the administration, or c) find some contorted way to justify siding with Bush based on his strict constructionism. I'm guessing (b), but I'm optimistic that at at least five and probably six justices will do the right thing.)
I don't think I agree on Feingold on any issue other than his opposition to the PATRIOT Act, but I might just vote for him anyways.
He's an old-school New-Deal big government liberal; he's not a crazy leftist. I have philosophical differences with his policies, but not moral objections. He's not going to actively fuck the country up, for sure, and sometimes his lone voice of opposition is very much needed.
What's most important, though, is that Feingold is one of the few people in Congress with real integrity, consistency, and the willingness to take risks for what he believes in (Wellstone was another good example, or McCain and Ron Paul on the other side). I read an article back when he first got elected describing how his office was returning lobbyist gifts unopened. The GOP spent a huge amount of soft money trying to take him out in '98, and his challenger was one of the 1994 upstarts from the House - smart and vicious. Feingold refused to break his own rules for funding his campaign and nearly lost as a result.
(Actually, this was really funny because the GOP elections chair absolutely despised campaign finance reform. In my home state of WA, a far-right congresswoman named Linda Smith was running against our second-rate senator, Patty Murray, the same year. Smith was practically on the militia end of the spectrum, but she was also honest to a fault and very principled. And she surprised a lot of people by strongly backing CFR - which put her on the GOP shit list. So the elections chair refused to spend any money on her campaign, and threw it all towards beating Feingold. Feingold won, Smith lost. I felt sort of bad for her.)
Feingold also voted to confirm Ashcroft, because he felt that Bush had the right to appoint who he wanted and because he wanted to extend a peace offering and save energy for more important debates. This turned out to be a useless gesture, but this virtuous approach to partisan politics is too rare. If people acted like that, regardless of their political affiliation, we might not be in such a mess today.
it's scary that the same legislature that passed the Patriot Act has also tried numerous times to introduce a flag-burning amendment.
This is mostly done now to try to embarass the Democrats and make them look weak on defence and/or ungrateful to our soldiers. The most recent committee meeting on this was a few months ago, and they packed it with elderly veterans. I guess they thought it'd be a slam dunk against the liberals on the committee. Unfortunately, one of the Democrats immediately brought up the subject of unpaid military salaries, thereby making the administration look weak on defence. Absolutely ruined the GOP's show.
That seems to be the case for most Democrats. Voting against the "Patriot Act" would have been political suicide at the time.
Three points:
1) Russ Feingold voted against it. It'll be interesting to see if this comes back to bite him in the ass - he's up for re-election this fall. I hope he makes it; he's one of the few politicians in either party that I respect (even though I think the campaign finance reform bill is unconstitutional).
2) Most politicians didn't even read it before they voted on it, which is why there's a minor backlash against it now from both parties. Fortunately, at least some people paid attention. The Republican committee chairman responsible for vetting the bill before it hit the floor (I forget his name) actually read the original version that Ashcroft submitted, and deleted significant portions. Apparently the original allowed suspension of habeas corpus, and the chairman's response was something along the lines of "WTF?" (Of course, the administration seems to be getting away with that on its own; I hope the SCOTUS slaps them down.)
3) The bill was designed to fix some of the more obvious intelligence failures leading up to 9/11. Although there's a lot of nasty stuff in it, people recognized immediately that some changes would need to be made. So, they were in a hurry to pass the bill because it was obvious that they'd been caught with their pants down. Which, of course, meant that they voted without thinking.
There's a lot of statements in this thread about about Macs not being useful for science due to software support. What the hell? That's like saying that HP, Dell, etc can't be used - Mac systems can take UNIX versions just like any other computer.
I think people are confusing commercial and non-commercial apps. The commercial programs are either targeted towards industry/pharma, or are part of some other proprietary system - for example, controlling a purification or mass spec system. These are usually Windows, or sometimes platform-specific Unix. I haven't seen any of these running on Macintosh, and very few of them have been ported to Linux.
The open-source scientific software is almost exclusively Unix, and yes, it will almost always run on Mac. Virtually every piece of software I use for my research is open-source - and actually, the lone program that isn't has a Mac port anyways. In bioinformatics, almost every important program is open-source, and there's actually quite a bit of interest in getting stuff running well on Mac. The author of one of my favorite programs (PyMOL) actually recommended the dual G5 as the optimal system for running his software.
How many "ordinary scientists" have $40k burning a hole in their pocket?
At a decent research university, probably most of them. If they're comp bio, they probably have even more money than that. In bioinformatics, you don't need to spend $250 on a milliliter of antibodies or thousands of dollars on primers - the overhead for keeping a lab running is much lower. And experimentalists regularly have to spend considerably more than $40k on their equipment - as the other poster pointed out, microscopes are an excellent example. (EM systems are even worse - these are usually at least $300k.) Therefore, grant money stretches a long way.
When I worked at the University of Washington doing life sciences research, my personal observation saw it to be about 50/50 pc vs mac.
It depends on the branch of life sciences, and more importantly, the biases of the individual professor.
In most computational labs, ALL of the computing is done on Unix, which nowadays means mostly Linux. In crystallography, people still hang on to SGIs but there's a lot of migration towards both Linux and Mac. In fact, my impression is that Apple may be making real progress here, because people explicitly want a computer that can handle both graphics apps, Unix-based physics programs, and PowerPoint/Word.
My previous lab was entirely bioinformatics, and the majority of people used Windows on their desktop, usually a Dell workstation or a Thinkpad. The reason for this had nothing at all to do speed or application availability - it was almost entirely due to laziness or prejudice. When new people joined that lab, they were generally either very computer-savvy and already ran Linux, or they were clueless and needed one of us gurus to set up their computer - so they got Linux. We'd made some progress migrating people, but the boss was such a Windows addict that there's a limit to what we could have done.
There were actually a number of people who would have preferred Macs, but the boss refused to buy them on principle - which principle, I'm not sure. However, most professors are very Mac-friendly; I'd guess that well over half of the ones in my department (mol. bio.) use Macs. Their lab members, however, tend to be very anti-Apple.
This bias is the chief thing Apple will need to overcome if they want their computers to be used for HPC. Most of the apps are custom-coded or open-source to begin with, so there's little or no barrier to using them on OS X versus any other platform. The people using them, however, may be very good biologists or programmers but they know nothing about the computer systems except thirdhand knowledge that hasn't been true since the 1990s. This is why everyone I work with insists on using our old SGIs, while my laptop is several times faster for the same tasks, and they won't touch a Mac unless there's nothing else around.
What I've found really surprising is that of all the comp bio people of various stripes that I've known, those with the most hardcore programming or sysadmin experience have on average been the most Mac-friendly by a long shot.
1. You might be able to graduate early if you have enough AP credits. Even Ivy League schools allow it. I guess if you were really strapped for cash or just wanted to get your degree, this would make sense, but any one of my college courses was superior to all of my AP courses combined. I wish I'd had more AP credits for the subject I actually majored in (biology) instead of history and lit, but I would have just taken more advanced classes or humanities rather than leave early. On the other hand, I liked college and my parents could afford it.
2. You can skip ahead to more advanced classes. This is often very useful; I got out of taking intro calc, which was required for my major. However, I'm dubious about how well some of these tests really represent college-level preparation. It's most useful for subjects like calculus or intro chemistry, which are very inflexible subjects.
3. You get a more padded college application. This is actually more useful than it sounds; high scores on AP tests give admissions committees a better yardstick to measure you with. (This is true of many grad schools and the GRE as well; the dean of one very prestigious program told me they didn't really care about the GRE if they could evaluate your qualifications independently.) If you went to an elite private school, they already know what your grades mean. If you went to Bumfuck Regional High School ("Home of the the Fighting Bollweevils"), those 5's will add heft to your transcript and put you in better standing against the legions of East Coast prep school brats.
Yes, it sucks that to play DVDs, you have to buy a license. But...so?
Valenti lobbied heavily for the law that prevents us from legally writing a free player (although in practice, there are plenty of these available). The anti-circumvention clause is in direct contradiction with long-established fair use rights and even prevents reverse engineering for interoperability. The point is that the OS community shouldn't have to pay a license to write a player, because it's really difficult enough that they need the DVDCCA's specs - yet by writing this software, they're technically violating the law.
The issue is not so much about the license per se, as the MPAA's use of the US government to force use of the license.
No thank you. Someday, I'd actually like to get laid.
A "bad" name can seem like a liability, but if you make it "in your face" enough, it can help.
"The GIMP" sounds like something that a really twisted 16-year-old kid wearing all black hacked together in his parents' basement. And most people I've mentioned it to have the same gut reaction, and they're all still addicted to Photoshop on Windows. Which is a pity, because it's an excellent program in its own right and perfectly suitable as a substitute for Photoshop for most users.
If Kerry wins, the status quo will continue, just with less bluster and more whining.
Which is more or less what most of us want, actually. What won't continue under Kerry is, for instance, the increasingly massive deficits, or the appointments of ultra-rightists to the federal court system. Nader supporters conveniently forget about these little details when pimping for their candidate. (And based on what I've read about Nader, I'd prefer to take my chances with four more years of Bush.)
i don't hear the left complaing when the same court ruled that two dudes butt-fucking was a constitutionally protected right.
Many of the liberal responses that I read focused on how poor the reasoning was and how there was certain to be a huge backlash, regardless of how they personally agreed with the sentiments in Kennedy's opinion. I'm inclined to agree; the constitutional basis for the ruling was as bad as Roe v. Wade.
Regardless, the right brought this upon themselves. Sodomy laws are a ridiculous waste of law enforcement and an unconscionable invasion of personal privacy. These embody the very worst of large, intrusive government. As soon as Lawrence challenged the law, the Texas AG should have apologized and asked the legislature to revoke it. The Religious Right should have been campaigning all across the country to have similar laws erased from the books.
Why? Well, first of all, anyone who values personal liberty - and that includes RELIGIOUS liberty - should be on guard against a government that has the power to regulate our most private acts. And, more practically, if the Texas AG had chosen not to fight the law all the way to the Supreme Court, the SC would not have been able to write this new privacy right into the constitution. This is arguably what precipitated the current gay marriage crisis. Without these laws, homosexual conduct would be unregulated but also without constitutional protections, meaning that gays could go about their lives without the theocrats busting in on them in the bedroom, and the states wouldn't find themselves forced to recognize gay marriage.
So, by refusing to abandon a set of outdated, meddling, and immoral laws, the Right pulled us into a constitutional crisis over gay marriage which might otherwise have been years away. Fuck them.
Hah hah. It indeed would be, if the GTA creators stated it as their goal to encourage car theft. Marxism is a revolutionary philosophy - revolutionary in the "violent upheaval" sense, not in the "sliced bread" sense. Anyone who claims that it was a benign philosophy that got carried too far is either ignorant or lying.
Selected quotes from The Communist Manifesto (feel free to check them against another translation):
the first step in the revolution is. . . to win the battle of democracy
the proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the proletariat
Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property. . .
Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another
The Communists. . . openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.
Sounds like a guidebook for much of the 20th century to me.
So, if it's impossible to implement what Marx proposed with homo sapiens how exactly did it kill about 100M people?
They killed that many people attempting to set up communist regimes, and failing. In another 50 years, mass graves will be the only thing left to remind us of communism. I don't think this was quite what Marx had in mind (not that this absolves him from blame).
Marx advocated revolutionary overthrow of the existing social order, and abolition of private property and religion. The goal was mandatory egalitarianism, where nobody can ever improve their economic status. Do you really think this can be accomplished without violence and dictatorship? Communism is not some wishy-washy philosophy that says we should all work for the common good and not be greedy; it demands that this system be imposed from above.
No, the problem to which the parent referred is the fact that specific technologies introduced into the kernel may have been covered by the license IBM and others signed with AT&T. That is, code such as the RCU stuff from Dynix or whatever was originally an add-on to a derivative of SysV Unix. SCO claims that their contract restricts how such addons may be used elsewhere, and that their inclusion in Linux violates the contract. The code review might well have proven that all code was property of the submitters, but that wouldn't make any difference as far as the contract violation claim is concerned.
They may be correct. This doesn't justify the campaign they've been running or support any of their broader claims. Even under such a contract, they have no basis for claiming that their intellectual property has been stolen; the IP remains that of IBM et al., regardless of how the contract restricts its use. The claim of direct copying of code, as you note, has been pretty thoroughly debunked so far, and was probably bullshit invented to make them sound more like victims than they are.
Regardless, until either the contract case has been settled in SCO's favor by a court, or SCO can prove to the world that core parts of the Linux kernel really were copied from SysV, they have absolutely no grounds on which to sue companies using Linux or to extort licenses. I really wish one of the companies being asked to pay SCO for their use of Linux would go after them with their full legal department - this kind of crap is unacceptable.
The only adjective that applies to the royal family is "corrupt." They can't be trusted in the slightest. Unfortunately, they've proven such good salespeople here in America that they tend to get a pass for all the dumb shit they're getting away with back home. The family is also too big to act monolithically; there are undoubtedly some very pro-Western members (many of whom are frequently in the US), but many others who lurk at home and fund suicide bombers.
It is a little bit more of whether or not the "world culture" should dominate your local culture.
Sorry, but I don't think the Saudis or Chinese are blocking the Net just because they're afraid of "Friends" or "Entertainment Weekly." And even if they were, I do not believe this would justify censorship. People should be free to make their own decisions what culture to adopt, not forced into it by the government.
Accepting human rights pretty much takes the ability to completely define culture out of the hands of any given authority. If your belief system demands a general authority then the global culture will always be a horrible shock.
Yeah, well, tough. I'm not a cheerleader for the way in which the USA often acts abroad, but I have no qualms about saying that our overall principles of individual liberty and cultural/religious pluralism are superior to those of repressive nations where authority is all-important. Although I personally find the practices of, say, Wahabi Islam to be oppressive and absurd, I don't have any problem with Saudis continuing to follow it, but I refuse to enable their government to force it upon the populace. And, on the flipside, I think Falun Gong is a joke, but I don't think the Chinese government should be beating, imprisoning, or killing its practitioners.
I am of the opinion that there are quite a few places, and people, in the world who can say whatever they damn well please.
The US still has by far the most liberty in this regard, as far as I'm aware. It doesn't always seem this way because our society remains very censorious (with results such as hyper-regulation of broadcast media), but there are very few practical limits to what you can say here. Very few countries in the world will protect hate speech, for instance; Holocaust denial is illegal in some countries. Europeans find it hypocritical of us to ban tits on TV but allow Holocaust denialists to spread their venom; I disagree. We're ruling on what may be said over public airwaves, but not what may be said by private citizens.
The corollary to this, of course, is that the rest of us must spend time exposing the Holocaust denialists as the Nazi sympathizers they are. It's definitely a price I'm willing to pay for absolute liberty.
. . . which has a monopoly on a portion of the TV spectrum, granted by our government. They should be held to a different standard than a cable channel or newspaper.
Well, the two corporations are the Baseball Hall of Fame and CBS. In the former case, they were punishing Tim Robbins for an act of political speech totally unrelated to anything having to do with baseball or Robbins' acting career. This doesn't violate the 1st Amendment, it just goes totally against the spirit of it. (Yes, I know that people should be held accountable for their words, and most of the time I wish Robbins would shut the hell up.) The HOF president said that Robbins' criticisms of Bush "helps undermine the U.S. position, which ultimately could put our troops in even more danger." It's not his call. But, sure, he's still within his rights.
As for CBS, they're also on the list for bowing to pressure from politicians, and for suppressing a political ad. Yanking the Reagan movie was a particulary craven action on their part. Since they're entrusted with a fat slab of the public spectrum, our expectations for them are different than if, say, A&E decides to censor something.
Scalia apologized for this - he claimed that it was done without his authorization and that he would be modifying his policy. I think this was in large part the fault of an over-zealous deputy, and the story says that the other justices have similar policies. (Not that I'm one to defend Scalia; he's made some speeches I find pretty disturbing, some of which have inconvenienced him later.)
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The thing about American Justice though... it's based on money. If an individual kills someone, and everybody realizes it, but they have a ton of money, they might have a shot at convincing a judge and jury to let them get away with it.
I don't think this concept can be applied so broadly. The lesson I take from the OJ trial is not that millions of dollars can buy acquital, but that millions of dollars can uncover enough potentially exculpatory evidence that might not be seen otherwise. Which is depressing not because OJ went free (although I do think, based on almost zero knoweldge of the case, that he's guilty), but because hundreds of poorer, dumber people are convicted and even sentenced to death based on far worse evidence, because they had no effective legal representation. (Texas being the worst example, which is why I lost all respect for Bush a long time ago, back when compassionate conservatism seemed like it might be the real thing.)
As for the parallel to SCO, bear in mind that they went up against one of the largest computer companies and a huge user and developer community that were obviously going to take it personally. This means that there is tons of money (or manpower - all of the anti-SCO research would have cost a boatload if a real law firm was doing it) being spent fighting SCO, and they're getting slowly bludgeoned to death as a result. The fact that it's a distributed and largely non-profit effort shouldn't obscure that. SCO really sees itself as the underdog in this fight, and they're correct. (A snarling, vicious little dog, that's trying to gnaw your trousers whenever it isn't copulating with your shoe.)
If Jeb Bush did that, it would be a gross abuse of power.
He didn't. The suggestion was that perhaps Disney was worried about losing their tax breaks, but there was never any evidence that Jeb had said something along these lines. At any rate, I'm not sure I blame Disney for wanting to keep as far away from Michael Moore as possible. If we want to embarass and ridicult the Bush family (a worth cause, to be sure), we can do better than that ass-clown.
what i'd like to see is Feingold/McCain (or vice verca, but McCain would have to run as an independant...) in 2008.
I suspect a lot of people would agree with you; many voters said they supported either Bradley or McCain in 2000 (my parents donated to both their campaigns). Which isn't really that weird; if you're a centrist, you basically have a choice of voting for someone to your right or to your left. So it comes down to a matter of style and personal taste. I would be a liberal Republican but there isn't really any such thing now, except for a few holdouts; I loved McCain because I agreed with most of his policy positions AND he was willing to stand up to the psychos in his party. I get a hardon every time I read an article suggestion a Kerry/McCain ticket - there's no way in hell I'm voting for Bush anyway, but I'd love to see a bipartisan, centrist administration. (It would screw the far right and the far left for years.)
On the subject of 2008, both my dad and I are terrified that we're going to end up with a choice between Jeb and Hillary.
but according to the account I read, even he didn't get a chance to read the whole thing.
I didn't hear that part - sounds a little unbelievable to me. Do you have a link for that? Sensenbrenner (that's the committee chair) seems like a sharp enough guy that he wouldn't let a bill out of committee unless he had read it, especially since he'd already bounced it once. That sounds like a serious procedural violation. (Not that I don't think the administration would try something like that. For a good rundown of what they've been up to, this article gives an extensive overview.)
current evidence shows that there were no intelligence failures.
Key word being "current." Back then, it was a safe assumption to make that we'd been blindsided - I remember seeing an anonymous quote from an NSA employee saying "I want to know how the fuck we didn't see this coming." Anyway, the act was partly designed to increase intelligence-gathering capability and allow cooperation between agencies. There's nothing wrong with that in principle; it's all in the implementation.
Anyway, I think the PATRIOT ACT is the least of our worries. It's unpleasant in parts, and the way it was passed was pretty pathetic, but the actions the administration has taken independently are much more disturbing. At least the PATRIOT ACT is subject to sunset provisions and congressional oversight, and the proposed followup bill never made it to the floor. The most important question now is whether the SCOTUS will show some balls with these enemy combatant cases. (And on an intellectual level, I'm really curious whether Scalia will a) vote on principle, b) abandon his strict constructionism entirely and side with the administration, or c) find some contorted way to justify siding with Bush based on his strict constructionism. I'm guessing (b), but I'm optimistic that at at least five and probably six justices will do the right thing.)
I don't think I agree on Feingold on any issue other than his opposition to the PATRIOT Act, but I might just vote for him anyways.
He's an old-school New-Deal big government liberal; he's not a crazy leftist. I have philosophical differences with his policies, but not moral objections. He's not going to actively fuck the country up, for sure, and sometimes his lone voice of opposition is very much needed.
What's most important, though, is that Feingold is one of the few people in Congress with real integrity, consistency, and the willingness to take risks for what he believes in (Wellstone was another good example, or McCain and Ron Paul on the other side). I read an article back when he first got elected describing how his office was returning lobbyist gifts unopened. The GOP spent a huge amount of soft money trying to take him out in '98, and his challenger was one of the 1994 upstarts from the House - smart and vicious. Feingold refused to break his own rules for funding his campaign and nearly lost as a result.
(Actually, this was really funny because the GOP elections chair absolutely despised campaign finance reform. In my home state of WA, a far-right congresswoman named Linda Smith was running against our second-rate senator, Patty Murray, the same year. Smith was practically on the militia end of the spectrum, but she was also honest to a fault and very principled. And she surprised a lot of people by strongly backing CFR - which put her on the GOP shit list. So the elections chair refused to spend any money on her campaign, and threw it all towards beating Feingold. Feingold won, Smith lost. I felt sort of bad for her.)
Feingold also voted to confirm Ashcroft, because he felt that Bush had the right to appoint who he wanted and because he wanted to extend a peace offering and save energy for more important debates. This turned out to be a useless gesture, but this virtuous approach to partisan politics is too rare. If people acted like that, regardless of their political affiliation, we might not be in such a mess today.
it's scary that the same legislature that passed the Patriot Act has also tried numerous times to introduce a flag-burning amendment.
This is mostly done now to try to embarass the Democrats and make them look weak on defence and/or ungrateful to our soldiers. The most recent committee meeting on this was a few months ago, and they packed it with elderly veterans. I guess they thought it'd be a slam dunk against the liberals on the committee. Unfortunately, one of the Democrats immediately brought up the subject of unpaid military salaries, thereby making the administration look weak on defence. Absolutely ruined the GOP's show.
That seems to be the case for most Democrats. Voting against the "Patriot Act" would have been political suicide at the time.
Three points:
1) Russ Feingold voted against it. It'll be interesting to see if this comes back to bite him in the ass - he's up for re-election this fall. I hope he makes it; he's one of the few politicians in either party that I respect (even though I think the campaign finance reform bill is unconstitutional).
2) Most politicians didn't even read it before they voted on it, which is why there's a minor backlash against it now from both parties. Fortunately, at least some people paid attention. The Republican committee chairman responsible for vetting the bill before it hit the floor (I forget his name) actually read the original version that Ashcroft submitted, and deleted significant portions. Apparently the original allowed suspension of habeas corpus, and the chairman's response was something along the lines of "WTF?" (Of course, the administration seems to be getting away with that on its own; I hope the SCOTUS slaps them down.)
3) The bill was designed to fix some of the more obvious intelligence failures leading up to 9/11. Although there's a lot of nasty stuff in it, people recognized immediately that some changes would need to be made. So, they were in a hurry to pass the bill because it was obvious that they'd been caught with their pants down. Which, of course, meant that they voted without thinking.
There's a lot of statements in this thread about about Macs not being useful for science due to software support. What the hell? That's like saying that HP, Dell, etc can't be used - Mac systems can take UNIX versions just like any other computer.
I think people are confusing commercial and non-commercial apps. The commercial programs are either targeted towards industry/pharma, or are part of some other proprietary system - for example, controlling a purification or mass spec system. These are usually Windows, or sometimes platform-specific Unix. I haven't seen any of these running on Macintosh, and very few of them have been ported to Linux.
The open-source scientific software is almost exclusively Unix, and yes, it will almost always run on Mac. Virtually every piece of software I use for my research is open-source - and actually, the lone program that isn't has a Mac port anyways. In bioinformatics, almost every important program is open-source, and there's actually quite a bit of interest in getting stuff running well on Mac. The author of one of my favorite programs (PyMOL) actually recommended the dual G5 as the optimal system for running his software.
How many "ordinary scientists" have $40k burning a hole in their pocket?
At a decent research university, probably most of them. If they're comp bio, they probably have even more money than that. In bioinformatics, you don't need to spend $250 on a milliliter of antibodies or thousands of dollars on primers - the overhead for keeping a lab running is much lower. And experimentalists regularly have to spend considerably more than $40k on their equipment - as the other poster pointed out, microscopes are an excellent example. (EM systems are even worse - these are usually at least $300k.) Therefore, grant money stretches a long way.
When I worked at the University of Washington doing life sciences research, my personal observation saw it to be about 50/50 pc vs mac.
It depends on the branch of life sciences, and more importantly, the biases of the individual professor.
In most computational labs, ALL of the computing is done on Unix, which nowadays means mostly Linux. In crystallography, people still hang on to SGIs but there's a lot of migration towards both Linux and Mac. In fact, my impression is that Apple may be making real progress here, because people explicitly want a computer that can handle both graphics apps, Unix-based physics programs, and PowerPoint/Word.
My previous lab was entirely bioinformatics, and the majority of people used Windows on their desktop, usually a Dell workstation or a Thinkpad. The reason for this had nothing at all to do speed or application availability - it was almost entirely due to laziness or prejudice. When new people joined that lab, they were generally either very computer-savvy and already ran Linux, or they were clueless and needed one of us gurus to set up their computer - so they got Linux. We'd made some progress migrating people, but the boss was such a Windows addict that there's a limit to what we could have done.
There were actually a number of people who would have preferred Macs, but the boss refused to buy them on principle - which principle, I'm not sure. However, most professors are very Mac-friendly; I'd guess that well over half of the ones in my department (mol. bio.) use Macs. Their lab members, however, tend to be very anti-Apple.
This bias is the chief thing Apple will need to overcome if they want their computers to be used for HPC. Most of the apps are custom-coded or open-source to begin with, so there's little or no barrier to using them on OS X versus any other platform. The people using them, however, may be very good biologists or programmers but they know nothing about the computer systems except thirdhand knowledge that hasn't been true since the 1990s. This is why everyone I work with insists on using our old SGIs, while my laptop is several times faster for the same tasks, and they won't touch a Mac unless there's nothing else around.
What I've found really surprising is that of all the comp bio people of various stripes that I've known, those with the most hardcore programming or sysadmin experience have on average been the most Mac-friendly by a long shot.
There are three possible benefits to AP tests:
1. You might be able to graduate early if you have enough AP credits. Even Ivy League schools allow it. I guess if you were really strapped for cash or just wanted to get your degree, this would make sense, but any one of my college courses was superior to all of my AP courses combined. I wish I'd had more AP credits for the subject I actually majored in (biology) instead of history and lit, but I would have just taken more advanced classes or humanities rather than leave early. On the other hand, I liked college and my parents could afford it.
2. You can skip ahead to more advanced classes. This is often very useful; I got out of taking intro calc, which was required for my major. However, I'm dubious about how well some of these tests really represent college-level preparation. It's most useful for subjects like calculus or intro chemistry, which are very inflexible subjects.
3. You get a more padded college application. This is actually more useful than it sounds; high scores on AP tests give admissions committees a better yardstick to measure you with. (This is true of many grad schools and the GRE as well; the dean of one very prestigious program told me they didn't really care about the GRE if they could evaluate your qualifications independently.) If you went to an elite private school, they already know what your grades mean. If you went to Bumfuck Regional High School ("Home of the the Fighting Bollweevils"), those 5's will add heft to your transcript and put you in better standing against the legions of East Coast prep school brats.
Yes, it sucks that to play DVDs, you have to buy a license. But...so?
Valenti lobbied heavily for the law that prevents us from legally writing a free player (although in practice, there are plenty of these available). The anti-circumvention clause is in direct contradiction with long-established fair use rights and even prevents reverse engineering for interoperability. The point is that the OS community shouldn't have to pay a license to write a player, because it's really difficult enough that they need the DVDCCA's specs - yet by writing this software, they're technically violating the law.
The issue is not so much about the license per se, as the MPAA's use of the US government to force use of the license.
Take pride in the software you use.
No thank you. Someday, I'd actually like to get laid.
A "bad" name can seem like a liability, but if you make it "in your face" enough, it can help.
"The GIMP" sounds like something that a really twisted 16-year-old kid wearing all black hacked together in his parents' basement. And most people I've mentioned it to have the same gut reaction, and they're all still addicted to Photoshop on Windows. Which is a pity, because it's an excellent program in its own right and perfectly suitable as a substitute for Photoshop for most users.
If Kerry wins, the status quo will continue, just with less bluster and more whining.
Which is more or less what most of us want, actually. What won't continue under Kerry is, for instance, the increasingly massive deficits, or the appointments of ultra-rightists to the federal court system. Nader supporters conveniently forget about these little details when pimping for their candidate. (And based on what I've read about Nader, I'd prefer to take my chances with four more years of Bush.)
i don't hear the left complaing when the same court ruled that two dudes butt-fucking was a constitutionally protected right.
Many of the liberal responses that I read focused on how poor the reasoning was and how there was certain to be a huge backlash, regardless of how they personally agreed with the sentiments in Kennedy's opinion. I'm inclined to agree; the constitutional basis for the ruling was as bad as Roe v. Wade.
Regardless, the right brought this upon themselves. Sodomy laws are a ridiculous waste of law enforcement and an unconscionable invasion of personal privacy. These embody the very worst of large, intrusive government. As soon as Lawrence challenged the law, the Texas AG should have apologized and asked the legislature to revoke it. The Religious Right should have been campaigning all across the country to have similar laws erased from the books.
Why? Well, first of all, anyone who values personal liberty - and that includes RELIGIOUS liberty - should be on guard against a government that has the power to regulate our most private acts. And, more practically, if the Texas AG had chosen not to fight the law all the way to the Supreme Court, the SC would not have been able to write this new privacy right into the constitution. This is arguably what precipitated the current gay marriage crisis. Without these laws, homosexual conduct would be unregulated but also without constitutional protections, meaning that gays could go about their lives without the theocrats busting in on them in the bedroom, and the states wouldn't find themselves forced to recognize gay marriage.
So, by refusing to abandon a set of outdated, meddling, and immoral laws, the Right pulled us into a constitutional crisis over gay marriage which might otherwise have been years away. Fuck them.
Hah hah. It indeed would be, if the GTA creators stated it as their goal to encourage car theft. Marxism is a revolutionary philosophy - revolutionary in the "violent upheaval" sense, not in the "sliced bread" sense. Anyone who claims that it was a benign philosophy that got carried too far is either ignorant or lying.
Selected quotes from The Communist Manifesto (feel free to check them against another translation):
the first step in the revolution is. . . to win the battle of democracy
the proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the proletariat
Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property. . .
Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another
The Communists. . . openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.
Sounds like a guidebook for much of the 20th century to me.
So, if it's impossible to implement what Marx proposed with homo sapiens how exactly did it kill about 100M people?
They killed that many people attempting to set up communist regimes, and failing. In another 50 years, mass graves will be the only thing left to remind us of communism. I don't think this was quite what Marx had in mind (not that this absolves him from blame).
Marx advocated revolutionary overthrow of the existing social order, and abolition of private property and religion. The goal was mandatory egalitarianism, where nobody can ever improve their economic status. Do you really think this can be accomplished without violence and dictatorship? Communism is not some wishy-washy philosophy that says we should all work for the common good and not be greedy; it demands that this system be imposed from above.
No, the problem to which the parent referred is the fact that specific technologies introduced into the kernel may have been covered by the license IBM and others signed with AT&T. That is, code such as the RCU stuff from Dynix or whatever was originally an add-on to a derivative of SysV Unix. SCO claims that their contract restricts how such addons may be used elsewhere, and that their inclusion in Linux violates the contract. The code review might well have proven that all code was property of the submitters, but that wouldn't make any difference as far as the contract violation claim is concerned.
They may be correct. This doesn't justify the campaign they've been running or support any of their broader claims. Even under such a contract, they have no basis for claiming that their intellectual property has been stolen; the IP remains that of IBM et al., regardless of how the contract restricts its use. The claim of direct copying of code, as you note, has been pretty thoroughly debunked so far, and was probably bullshit invented to make them sound more like victims than they are.
Regardless, until either the contract case has been settled in SCO's favor by a court, or SCO can prove to the world that core parts of the Linux kernel really were copied from SysV, they have absolutely no grounds on which to sue companies using Linux or to extort licenses. I really wish one of the companies being asked to pay SCO for their use of Linux would go after them with their full legal department - this kind of crap is unacceptable.
The only adjective that applies to the royal family is "corrupt." They can't be trusted in the slightest. Unfortunately, they've proven such good salespeople here in America that they tend to get a pass for all the dumb shit they're getting away with back home. The family is also too big to act monolithically; there are undoubtedly some very pro-Western members (many of whom are frequently in the US), but many others who lurk at home and fund suicide bombers.
It is a little bit more of whether or not the "world culture" should dominate your local culture.
Sorry, but I don't think the Saudis or Chinese are blocking the Net just because they're afraid of "Friends" or "Entertainment Weekly." And even if they were, I do not believe this would justify censorship. People should be free to make their own decisions what culture to adopt, not forced into it by the government.
Accepting human rights pretty much takes the ability to completely define culture out of the hands of any given authority. If your belief system demands a general authority then the global culture will always be a horrible shock.
Yeah, well, tough. I'm not a cheerleader for the way in which the USA often acts abroad, but I have no qualms about saying that our overall principles of individual liberty and cultural/religious pluralism are superior to those of repressive nations where authority is all-important. Although I personally find the practices of, say, Wahabi Islam to be oppressive and absurd, I don't have any problem with Saudis continuing to follow it, but I refuse to enable their government to force it upon the populace. And, on the flipside, I think Falun Gong is a joke, but I don't think the Chinese government should be beating, imprisoning, or killing its practitioners.
I am of the opinion that there are quite a few places, and people, in the world who can say whatever they damn well please.
The US still has by far the most liberty in this regard, as far as I'm aware. It doesn't always seem this way because our society remains very censorious (with results such as hyper-regulation of broadcast media), but there are very few practical limits to what you can say here. Very few countries in the world will protect hate speech, for instance; Holocaust denial is illegal in some countries. Europeans find it hypocritical of us to ban tits on TV but allow Holocaust denialists to spread their venom; I disagree. We're ruling on what may be said over public airwaves, but not what may be said by private citizens.
The corollary to this, of course, is that the rest of us must spend time exposing the Holocaust denialists as the Nazi sympathizers they are. It's definitely a price I'm willing to pay for absolute liberty.
They are a private entity!
. . . which has a monopoly on a portion of the TV spectrum, granted by our government. They should be held to a different standard than a cable channel or newspaper.
Well, the two corporations are the Baseball Hall of Fame and CBS. In the former case, they were punishing Tim Robbins for an act of political speech totally unrelated to anything having to do with baseball or Robbins' acting career. This doesn't violate the 1st Amendment, it just goes totally against the spirit of it. (Yes, I know that people should be held accountable for their words, and most of the time I wish Robbins would shut the hell up.) The HOF president said that Robbins' criticisms of Bush "helps undermine the U.S. position, which ultimately could put our troops in even more danger." It's not his call. But, sure, he's still within his rights.
As for CBS, they're also on the list for bowing to pressure from politicians, and for suppressing a political ad. Yanking the Reagan movie was a particulary craven action on their part. Since they're entrusted with a fat slab of the public spectrum, our expectations for them are different than if, say, A&E decides to censor something.
Scalia apologized for this - he claimed that it was done without his authorization and that he would be modifying his policy. I think this was in large part the fault of an over-zealous deputy, and the story says that the other justices have similar policies. (Not that I'm one to defend Scalia; he's made some speeches I find pretty disturbing, some of which have inconvenienced him later.)