>>Far right-wingers who claim that the Democrats are "left-wing" or "socialist" or "communist" only reveal their absymal ignorance of history
I can think of at least three different usages of the terms "socialist and communist": Marx's usage of the terms The usage of the terms in America The usage of the terms in Europe
In America, the term socialist means government control of business, more or less. Communist means taking that to a further extreme. So by this definition, the government buying out GM and AGI and establishing pay czars and whatnot does indeed count as a socialist activity.
Now, you might argue that these are just a few companies out of the many we have in America, and you may be right, but you can't argue that the terms are being used incorrectly, because that's exactly what the terms mean here. If you live in the EU, you probably have a different conception of the terms, as do people that read Marx.
But your criticism that people that use the terms are ignorant of history is just completely mistaken.
To put it in more concrete terms: Obama's policies are in essence Republican policies of a generation or two ago, and ever Republican President of the latter half of the 20th c. -- yes, even St. Ronald -- would be considered far too liberal to find a place in the Republican Party of today.
To the contrary, the US has been moving further and further LEFT as time goes on. Go back and watch the televised debates between Kennedy and Nixon.
Kennedy was more right wing than Reagan, and was fighting with Nixon over who was more anti-communist. Now we have a Republican presidential candidate (McCain) blasting Obamacare for cutting into our socialized health care system (Medicare).
It's a topsy turvy world we live in, but you have it entirely backwards.
They're also attempting to fabricate facts, ignore facts, and spread religious and philosophical intent into what should be textbooks, not books on philosophy and religion. These board members are doing a disservice to their constituency. They should be removed from their positions, as they have cleary been (IMHO) irresponsible
What? We're removing people for putting bias into textbooks now?
I'm intrigued by who you think will be left to teach after your purges have been carried out.
I study the history of history, and it's very fascinating to watch this Texas process happen. It's a reaction to a trend that's been going on since the 1960s, which has been more or less looking at history through a politically correct lens. In the 1950s, the crusades were considered a just war. Kids raised today were raised instead by a series of textbooks that portrayed them as a war of European aggression against the innocent people living in the Levant.
In honesty, the first is closer to the truth, but if you mention this to anyone raised by the modern system, they will sputter and become outraged if you claim the crusades had some justification to them. They know what they know, but they don't know what they know is wrong.
Note: I disagree with many of the Texas changes, but there is a politically correct bias in the majority of modern day historical scholarship, that I think they have a legitimate reason to respond to.
But when you read the WWF's statement on extinction (http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/biodiversity/biodiversity/) they hand-wave that 10,000 species are going extinct a year. Naturally, the Endangered Species list in America is a small subset, but if this imaginary massive die-off was happening, I think we'd have seen more than two species go extinct in America, in 37 years.
Absolutely. I have a messed up biological clock. Forgot the proper medical term for it but basically my day/night rhythm isn't a typical 24 hour cycle like most people have but slightly longer. My body likes to think there are 26 hours in a day so to speak.
That's actually normal for a human. It becomes problematical when you can't fall asleep at a normal time. I'm like that if I don't get enough sunlight during the day.
The light from monitors can definitely disrupt your sleep cycle - I fall asleep like a baby whenever I'm out backpacking as soon as the lights go out, but in front of a computer I normally fall asleep at about 2-4AM or so. Been that way since college.
>>Reading the affidavit, the thing that disturbs me most is that Apple seems to have pet police detectives at their beck and call. The affidavit basically says "Apple wants to search this guy's place and take everything there, right down to any credit cards they find."
Actually, the thing that disturbs me the most reading over the PDF is the sheer number of misspellings in it.
"Exsternal Hard Drive" "Coffee Tabel" "Canon Reblel digital camera" "HP MediaSmart searver" etc.
If this is all the best-of-the-best REACT team can do, I'm really worried about law enforcement in America.
>>"I thought you might want to come out and investigate. They broke the lock, left their tool, probably left fingerprints everywhere..." "No, we don't do that", said the cop, and hung up.
Yep, same thing happened to me in SF when a guy broke into my car. They wouldn't even come out and look at it, and were confused why I was even reporting it. I finally drove it to the station to file a report (which took a couple hours of standing around because the SFPD have practiced ignoring people as a fine art) and they didn't even bother looking at it there, either.
But, OH BOY. A phone that Gizmodo already returned to Apple? Why that's time to call out the secret Bay Area Ninja Team.
You'd really have to look at funding sources for the buildings. I suspect some of them came from funds earmarked for specific projects... funds that couldn't have been used to lower tuition.
I'll also say that many of those investments have paid of. UCSD really is an incredible school, probably even more so now than when you attended.
Eh, the Price Center expansion is a cavernous dark building, really no taste to it at all. The mini-mart is probably needed, but damn that's an ugly building.
It's also worth noting that the students kept voting it down, and yet we got it anyway. Sort of like RIMAC (which is also funded by student fees).
Some buildings ARE paid for by private entities or earmarks (when I worked for the Bioeng department they got a nice building from a foundation ~1999), but a lot are funded, somewhat unwillingly, by the students themselves.
>>Such people, finding a lost cellphone, would look through the contents of the phone to try and identify the owner or somebody who knows the owner, and then try to return within a couple of days
>>Minorities who try to believe "there is always a way to adapt and come out on top" run smack into the cold hard wall of reality, which says, no, sorry, there is not always a way for you.
Like my girlfriend that got a free college education because she was a minority?
It only came with a mandatory summer education that taught her that white people were the devil, and that the cold hard wall of reality is keeping her from success.
While you're right that the dominant culture is so pervasive we'll probably never have a black president in our lifetimes, the simple fact of reality is that we WANT minorities to succeed. It's not the 1830s any more.
>>As for FOI requests, those were pure DoS attacks where more than 50 requests were filed in a single day, just to harass the scientists. They simply don't have the man power to handle such denial of service attacks by denialists.
People like McKitrick filed one FOIA request a quarter, because they denied 100% of his requests.
The classic in my last job was when we had a security contractor in on the weekend hooking something up and he looped off a hot breaker in the computer room, slipped, and shorted the white phase to ground. This blew the 100A fuses both before and after the UPS and somehow caused the generator set to fault so that while we had power from the batteries, that was all we had.
To be perfectly frank, I'm a bit scared of what sort of security system your datacenter has when the system can cause a blowout of that magnitude.
>>Does apple withhold information what code can be generated?
The only officially approved code generation method for the iPad is to send a nicely worded letter to Apple, along with X dollars. In Y months your app will be compiled for you and put up on the app store, for which you'll receive no royalties.
>>Sure, a shrinking population can have certain problematic effects, but 'Oh my god in 1000 years there will be 50 Japanese people left!' is not one of those effects, and you're just making yourself look like a crazy person by claiming it is.
Right. Because people will probably do something about it.
I'm just saying that based on current estimations, people should really be talking about the population decrease, not the population increase, as a problem to solve. And as I said way up the thread, if you want to end the Malthusian trap, just give women an education and bring the third world up to a comfortable middle class standard of living.
>>I wouldn't bank on that being a silly question in a few years time.
You can pry XP out of my cold, dark, pudgy hands.
If it was possible to get Windows 7 with the XP UI, I'd switch, but even when you make all the adjustments you can, the inherent stupidity of the Vista and Win7 UI shines through.
I've had this discussion with Blizzard. Their DRM didn't like my CD-RW (just that it was a CD-RW) and they told me to go get a CD drive. I asked them to send me a dev build without the obvious broken check - even with my name in it - and they wouldn't. They claimed it was impossible to remove. I sent them a link to the crack and asked again. They read me the riot act about piracy, ignoring the fact that had I been using a pirated copy I wouldn't have had DRM trouble, and that I was asking them for another way...
That's wrong like three different ways... and yet it's exactly how I'd expect a large company to behave.
>>Don't be ridiculous. It's not like people are going to stop having kids altogether
You don't understand how exponential decay works. By 3000, at the current rate, there'll be 50 Japanese people left. I consider that a problem, even if you don't.
>>As others have pointed out in this discussion, PC games from as far back as Quake (1996) are still perfectly playable because it uses an 'open', dedicated server based framework for its multiplayer services.
Indeed. There's still an active CustomTF community going, even after over a decade.
I refused to buy Modern Warfare 2 because of their lack of dedicated servers, and what EA does (shutting down old Madden servers when a new version comes out) has basically led me to informally boycott their games as well.
>>Also, in case you haven't noticed, Japan doesn't have room for 500 million more people.
Exactly. You might also notice that their population will go down by 60% in the next century unless something is done. You're right, the Ponzi scheme design for social systems IS a trap, and needs to be tweaked. That number just gives you a sense of scale of what we're talking about.
>>They barely have room for the ones they have now.
You've never been to Japan, then? Tokyo is ridiculous, but most of the country is, well, not Tokyo.
>>How many people do you have living with you, anyway? If you don't have at least a dozen people sharing your home, I think it's a little hypocritical for you to be supporting a greatly increased population.
Who said I was for a greatly increased population? I said that the real crisis is the population decrease, but that doesn't mean I want to see a Malthusian trap take place. Merely that the concerns about the Malthusian Trap are basically the results of an echo chamber in the environmental movement lasting from the 1960s.
The population of the earth is projected to peak in 2060, and then enter a decline after that. But if you listen to Greens on the issue, you'd think we were running out of food and such, when the per-capita food production has actually been rising, even with all the population growth we've had in the last 50 years.
>>Multiple investigations have found that the CRU did in fact not behave in "an anti-scientific sort of way".
Only if you read the headlines and don't know anything further about the issue. The reason their activities were anti-scientific is because replication of results is a key part of science.
In a field in which climate data and modeling are really the only thing you have, refusing to release data and models is anti-scientific. It's like claiming you invented cold fusion in physics, and then refusing to allow people access to your methods.
"The parliamentary science and technology select committee was scathing about the "standard practice" among the climate science community of not routinely releasing all its raw data and computer codes - something the committee's chair, Phil Willis MP, described as "reprehensible". He added: "That practice needs to change and it needs to change quickly.""
"Willis said that while the committee recognized Jones's frustration, this was "no excuse" for not responding properly to FOI requests. "It is important in terms of scientific endeavour that that material is made available," said Willis. He added that the committee accepted that Jones had released all the data that he was able to."
Yes, it's absolutely true that other data and models are available (CR.org goes on about this endlessly), but the CRU people did their absolute best to weasel out of their responsibility to release these things. That's what the emails showed - Phil Jones and his merry band of scientists devising quasi-legal strategies to hide their data and models... in an anti-scientific fashion.
Slashdot Mirror
>>Far right-wingers who claim that the Democrats are "left-wing" or "socialist" or "communist" only reveal their absymal ignorance of history
I can think of at least three different usages of the terms "socialist and communist":
Marx's usage of the terms
The usage of the terms in America
The usage of the terms in Europe
In America, the term socialist means government control of business, more or less. Communist means taking that to a further extreme. So by this definition, the government buying out GM and AGI and establishing pay czars and whatnot does indeed count as a socialist activity.
Now, you might argue that these are just a few companies out of the many we have in America, and you may be right, but you can't argue that the terms are being used incorrectly, because that's exactly what the terms mean here. If you live in the EU, you probably have a different conception of the terms, as do people that read Marx.
But your criticism that people that use the terms are ignorant of history is just completely mistaken.
To the contrary, the US has been moving further and further LEFT as time goes on. Go back and watch the televised debates between Kennedy and Nixon.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6Xn4ipHiwE
Kennedy was more right wing than Reagan, and was fighting with Nixon over who was more anti-communist. Now we have a Republican presidential candidate (McCain) blasting Obamacare for cutting into our socialized health care system (Medicare).
It's a topsy turvy world we live in, but you have it entirely backwards.
What? We're removing people for putting bias into textbooks now?
I'm intrigued by who you think will be left to teach after your purges have been carried out.
I study the history of history, and it's very fascinating to watch this Texas process happen. It's a reaction to a trend that's been going on since the 1960s, which has been more or less looking at history through a politically correct lens. In the 1950s, the crusades were considered a just war. Kids raised today were raised instead by a series of textbooks that portrayed them as a war of European aggression against the innocent people living in the Levant.
In honesty, the first is closer to the truth, but if you mention this to anyone raised by the modern system, they will sputter and become outraged if you claim the crusades had some justification to them. They know what they know, but they don't know what they know is wrong.
Note: I disagree with many of the Texas changes, but there is a politically correct bias in the majority of modern day historical scholarship, that I think they have a legitimate reason to respond to.
>>You have a much higher likelihood of developing cancer from UV light than from microwaves.
Depends. It's probably better to be out in the sun than hiding inside in your parent's garage.
Forest Rangers have an abnormally low level of skin cancers, and they absorb as much UV light as anyone. (Hint: It's called a tan.)
Sunlight has lots of other benefits as well, not the least of which is you're probably exercising instead of playing WoW all day.
>>We destroy things that have taken hundreds of millions of years to form in a generation without even reflecting on it.
To the contrary, we worry about extinction a lot more than it's probably happening.
You know how many animals on the endangered species list have gone extinct after they were listed, since 1973? Two.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endangered_Species_Act#Delisting
But when you read the WWF's statement on extinction (http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/biodiversity/biodiversity/) they hand-wave that 10,000 species are going extinct a year. Naturally, the Endangered Species list in America is a small subset, but if this imaginary massive die-off was happening, I think we'd have seen more than two species go extinct in America, in 37 years.
>>Do cows use quantum entanglement? no. Do sheep? no. Plants do. Why would I eat the *smarter* lifeform?
Depending on your theory of quantum mechanics, you might believe that all systems are entangled. So yeah, they all do.
That's actually normal for a human. It becomes problematical when you can't fall asleep at a normal time. I'm like that if I don't get enough sunlight during the day.
If you constantly feel jetlagged by being forced into a 24 hour schedule, you should probably look into this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_syndrome
And see if it feels similar.
The light from monitors can definitely disrupt your sleep cycle - I fall asleep like a baby whenever I'm out backpacking as soon as the lights go out, but in front of a computer I normally fall asleep at about 2-4AM or so. Been that way since college.
>>Reading the affidavit, the thing that disturbs me most is that Apple seems to have pet police detectives at their beck and call. The affidavit basically says "Apple wants to search this guy's place and take everything there, right down to any credit cards they find."
Actually, the thing that disturbs me the most reading over the PDF is the sheer number of misspellings in it.
"Exsternal Hard Drive"
"Coffee Tabel"
"Canon Reblel digital camera"
"HP MediaSmart searver"
etc.
If this is all the best-of-the-best REACT team can do, I'm really worried about law enforcement in America.
>>"I thought you might want to come out and investigate. They broke the lock, left their tool, probably left fingerprints everywhere..." "No, we don't do that", said the cop, and hung up.
Yep, same thing happened to me in SF when a guy broke into my car. They wouldn't even come out and look at it, and were confused why I was even reporting it. I finally drove it to the station to file a report (which took a couple hours of standing around because the SFPD have practiced ignoring people as a fine art) and they didn't even bother looking at it there, either.
But, OH BOY. A phone that Gizmodo already returned to Apple? Why that's time to call out the secret Bay Area Ninja Team.
Eh, the Price Center expansion is a cavernous dark building, really no taste to it at all. The mini-mart is probably needed, but damn that's an ugly building.
It's also worth noting that the students kept voting it down, and yet we got it anyway. Sort of like RIMAC (which is also funded by student fees).
Some buildings ARE paid for by private entities or earmarks (when I worked for the Bioeng department they got a nice building from a foundation ~1999), but a lot are funded, somewhat unwillingly, by the students themselves.
>>First of all, I haven't seen anything that says that Gizmodo or Hogan ever talked to Powell. Citation, please.
It's right in the main article gizmodo wrote on the subject!
http://gizmodo.com/5520438/how-apple-lost-the-next-iphone
>>Such people, finding a lost cellphone, would look through the contents of the phone to try and identify the owner or somebody who knows the owner, and then try to return within a couple of days
This is basically what happened.
>>Minorities who try to believe "there is always a way to adapt and come out on top" run smack into the cold hard wall of reality, which says, no, sorry, there is not always a way for you.
Like my girlfriend that got a free college education because she was a minority?
It only came with a mandatory summer education that taught her that white people were the devil, and that the cold hard wall of reality is keeping her from success.
While you're right that the dominant culture is so pervasive we'll probably never have a black president in our lifetimes, the simple fact of reality is that we WANT minorities to succeed. It's not the 1830s any more.
CSU != UC, dude.
UC San Diego, my alma mater, was $4k-ish a year in the mid 90s, and is now up to, I think $13k/year in tuition.
Oddly enough, while they were raising all these tuition fees, they were still building massive new buildings every year.
IIRC, they did figure out who the guy was, talked to him, and gave it back.
Kind of undermines the whole theft thing, doesn't it.
>>As for FOI requests, those were pure DoS attacks where more than 50 requests were filed in a single day, just to harass the scientists. They simply don't have the man power to handle such denial of service attacks by denialists.
People like McKitrick filed one FOIA request a quarter, because they denied 100% of his requests.
To be perfectly frank, I'm a bit scared of what sort of security system your datacenter has when the system can cause a blowout of that magnitude.
>>Does apple withhold information what code can be generated?
The only officially approved code generation method for the iPad is to send a nicely worded letter to Apple, along with X dollars. In Y months your app will be compiled for you and put up on the app store, for which you'll receive no royalties.
>>In related news, ShakaUVM is upset about the kids on his lawn, music these days, and how television never has the shows he likes anymore.
Oddly enough, you're right about the second two, but the neighborhood kids are pretty nice.
Except when they get too noisy. Then I throw things at them.
>>Sure, a shrinking population can have certain problematic effects, but 'Oh my god in 1000 years there will be 50 Japanese people left!' is not one of those effects, and you're just making yourself look like a crazy person by claiming it is.
Right. Because people will probably do something about it.
I'm just saying that based on current estimations, people should really be talking about the population decrease, not the population increase, as a problem to solve. And as I said way up the thread, if you want to end the Malthusian trap, just give women an education and bring the third world up to a comfortable middle class standard of living.
>>I wouldn't bank on that being a silly question in a few years time.
You can pry XP out of my cold, dark, pudgy hands.
If it was possible to get Windows 7 with the XP UI, I'd switch, but even when you make all the adjustments you can, the inherent stupidity of the Vista and Win7 UI shines through.
That's wrong like three different ways... and yet it's exactly how I'd expect a large company to behave.
>>Don't be ridiculous. It's not like people are going to stop having kids altogether
You don't understand how exponential decay works. By 3000, at the current rate, there'll be 50 Japanese people left. I consider that a problem, even if you don't.
>>You still haven't answered my question about what's so wrong with a decreasing population.
The end of humanity, or something?
>>As others have pointed out in this discussion, PC games from as far back as Quake (1996) are still perfectly playable because it uses an 'open', dedicated server based framework for its multiplayer services.
Indeed. There's still an active CustomTF community going, even after over a decade.
I refused to buy Modern Warfare 2 because of their lack of dedicated servers, and what EA does (shutting down old Madden servers when a new version comes out) has basically led me to informally boycott their games as well.
>>Also, in case you haven't noticed, Japan doesn't have room for 500 million more people.
Exactly. You might also notice that their population will go down by 60% in the next century unless something is done. You're right, the Ponzi scheme design for social systems IS a trap, and needs to be tweaked. That number just gives you a sense of scale of what we're talking about.
>>They barely have room for the ones they have now.
You've never been to Japan, then? Tokyo is ridiculous, but most of the country is, well, not Tokyo.
>>How many people do you have living with you, anyway? If you don't have at least a dozen people sharing your home, I think it's a little hypocritical for you to be supporting a greatly increased population.
Who said I was for a greatly increased population? I said that the real crisis is the population decrease, but that doesn't mean I want to see a Malthusian trap take place. Merely that the concerns about the Malthusian Trap are basically the results of an echo chamber in the environmental movement lasting from the 1960s.
The population of the earth is projected to peak in 2060, and then enter a decline after that. But if you listen to Greens on the issue, you'd think we were running out of food and such, when the per-capita food production has actually been rising, even with all the population growth we've had in the last 50 years.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/Food_production_per_capita_1961-2005.png
>>Multiple investigations have found that the CRU did in fact not behave in "an anti-scientific sort of way".
Only if you read the headlines and don't know anything further about the issue. The reason their activities were anti-scientific is because replication of results is a key part of science.
In a field in which climate data and modeling are really the only thing you have, refusing to release data and models is anti-scientific. It's like claiming you invented cold fusion in physics, and then refusing to allow people access to your methods.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/mar/31/climate-mails-inquiry-jones-cleared
"The parliamentary science and technology select committee was scathing about the "standard practice" among the climate science community of not routinely releasing all its raw data and computer codes - something the committee's chair, Phil Willis MP, described as "reprehensible". He added: "That practice needs to change and it needs to change quickly.""
"Willis said that while the committee recognized Jones's frustration, this was "no excuse" for not responding properly to FOI requests. "It is important in terms of scientific endeavour that that material is made available," said Willis. He added that the committee accepted that Jones had released all the data that he was able to."
Yes, it's absolutely true that other data and models are available (CR.org goes on about this endlessly), but the CRU people did their absolute best to weasel out of their responsibility to release these things. That's what the emails showed - Phil Jones and his merry band of scientists devising quasi-legal strategies to hide their data and models... in an anti-scientific fashion.