>>Lincoln was a well known abolitionist (as were most Republicans at the time)
Quite wrong. Abolitionism was a fringe movement, even in 1860. Something like 1% of people in the north were actually Abolitionists.
Lincoln was *tarred* with the abolitionist brush by his own party, leading him to make quite a few public statements that were against his privately held beliefs.
>>Slavery was the issue and "states rights" was the legalistic rationale.
In the South, the conception of liberty (derived from the Scots-Irish lineage) was that of "Don't tell me what to do". Even though you might not understand this concept, it makes it no less important historically. People genuinely did not want the federal government to be able to regulate things that they had to right to, and were willing to fight over that. This gets confused with the states rights issue, but it's really what the Civil War was fought over.
You also have to understand that most Southerners didn't own slaves, and were more concerned about what would happen to the work force if a huge number of slaves were suddenly freed -- but many, especially poor whites -- did not like slavery. It was hard for a poor white laborer to compete with "free" labor.
>>Many of them look down on white Americans like white Americans used to (and some still) do Africans. They see European culture as inferior, European language unrefined, and Christianity and Judaism infinitely superstitious.
Au contrare. By and large, they love America and all things American. KFC, Pizza Hut, Nestle Ice Cream, etc., have been exploding around the nation for the last decade, and if you travel to China as an American (on your own... tour groups are a different story) you'll have women coming up to you asking to take a photo with them, and petting your hairy arms. Seriously, speak a little bit of Chinese (I took a year of community college Mandarin before I went) and you'll feel like a rock star.
Even Western religions are very fashionable, with people wanting to get married in, or in front of, western style churches even if neither the bride or groom are Christian.
It's terrible. No real lessons, it just shows you four photos and a sentence next to each one. No explanation of the words, or grammar, or any of that stuff which is really, really critical for learning Mandarin.
The pronunciation in Firefly *is* horrible. The words sound as if they hired white actors who were trying to read romanized Chinese words off a script. My Chinese sucks, but I flinch whenever they try to say anything.
I have been learning Mandarin for the last three years. It's a lot of fun -- mainly because Chinese people give you these serious WTF? looks when you speak to them.
While the summary is kind of insulting, learning Chinese is actually a fairly pragmatic choice these days (as you rightly point out, China is making the US its bitch) and I actually think this idea of a language MMO is incredibly awesome. When I lived in San Diego and San Francisco I had no trouble finding community college Chinese classes -- but now that I live in Fresno, there's no options available.
ChinesePod is an... okay... web site, but their lessons are all over the place instead of organized in a systematic approach to teaching Chinese, and while its free, you have to pay huge amounts of money just to see what the characters used in the lessons are. It's very expensive for a free site.
Every Chinese software product I've tried sucks (especially Rosetta Stone -- it's terrible), though Fluenz looks pretty good... but I'm not willing to part with $300 bucks to support my hobby though.
>>his "message" is that the "right" will use any means necessary (including abusing/breaking the law) to enforce their religion on everybody else.
Damn, I didn't get that memo. I'm right-wing, and here I am thinking the guy is a lunatic, when he's actually carrying out our secret plans for world domination! Nuts!
Of course, Lieberman, Clinton and Bayh were the three senators passing the thinkofthechildren act of 2005.... but -- oh, I get it! -- that's why you put the quotes around the "right"! Clever, clever.
I've had SSL certificates change or be self-signed on my mail server at UCSD. At that point, I can decide either to click ok, or not check my email. Guess what I, and every single one of the other people in the computer science did? Clicked ok.
I was suspicious enough to delay clicking okay until I called the helpdesk, but it turns out, yes, they did mess with their cert, and it was legit.
Sad but true: People need their email more than they need security.
Radiation includes alpha, beta, and gamma particles (among other things), of which gamma particles are indeed EM "radiation", but even though all cats are mammals, and dogs are mammals, it doesn't mean that dogs are cats.
Wi-Fi routers also don't emit gamma rays, I'm pretty sure.
>>>>> Only in the sense that EM Radiation is "that which is radiated". The English language can turn any verb into a noun. >>Whatever, dude.
It's like the who's on first of the physics community. But it's true, the process is called Verbification. If I run someone over with a car, I can claim that I carred him and invent a verb on the spot. Many of our most common words in English were formed by verbifying a noun. Email someone recently?
Note that not all languages allow conversion between nouns and verbs, which means that they would probably be less susceptible to confusing EM Radiation and Radiation Radiation.
>>No, it isn't. There's no such thing as 'radiation radiation'
Radiation which is radiated from a source is radiation radiation -- but I was using in the reduplicated form in order to differentiate it between other things which are radiated. Sound waves radiate from a source, so they are sound radiation.
>>It's an unfortunte misunderstanding by people who don't really know what 'radiation' means - in that sense, you are correct.
Well now you know, and knowing is half the battle.
My landlord had a similar problem... Vioxx was the only thing that really worked for his arthritis in the spine. After it got pulled from the market, he was put on morphine, and slept 18 hours a day. He said he'd risk the 2% greater chance of having a heart attack in order to get his life back.
I think our drug industry really needs to adopt a policy of informed consent. If people really know what they're getting into, they should be able to get access to such drugs of last resort. Of course, that's technically the policy already... but when manufacturers pull the drugs entirely off the market, it's a de facto ban.
The problem wasn't increasing loans to minorities, per se, but increasing loans to people classified as sub-prime (of which there is some correlation with minorities).
It was one of Clinton's last gifts to us that his administration began pressuring banks to issue sub-prime loans.
Of course, it isn't politically correct to criticize political correctness, so it's all blamed on the banks.
>>Too many Americans still ignorantly believe that the mortgage crisis was accidental!
No way.
The mortgage crisis was entirely caused by the fact that our loan operators didn't have fingerprints taken, and so when they skipped out of town, there was no way for the lendees to track them down to pay them back.
This bill will finally solve the problem of deatbeat lenders who don't want to get paid back.
Slashdot is even further behind the times than that. Well, the submitter, but still.
Before Qualcomm made it big with CDMA, their first major product was a satellite based truck tracking/logistics systems (called OMNITrack). It came out, oh, in 1985 or thereabouts.
Amazing that the summary said we're just now seeing high tech stuff appear in the world of trucking... pfft.
Of course, I only knew about that since I went to college at UC San Diego, and Qualcomm was the local high tech company that hired a huge number of our engineering graduates.
His response was rather simple, and silenced me. To this day, I'm still not sure if I agree or not. In some cases, infringing upon one person's right to free speech is creating freedom to enjoy life for another, which is another freedom granted by our bill of rights. (I think the exact terminology is something akin to the right to enjoy your property)... but the point was well taken. No offense, but his point is nonsense. If I publish a book claming that Islamic Extremism is a threat to Canada, I can get hauled in front of a judge for it. Your professor would have to dance a merry jig in order to explain how the publication of a book seriously impedes another person's "freedom to enjoy life", and I don't consider people disagreeing or even getting offended at each other to be good enough reasons to ignore freedom of speech.
I would agree that there are certain cases were harassment and free speech do collide (the paparazzi, and the Westboro Baptists are two great examples where I agree that the people are being obnoxious enough to impede on other people's liberties), I think hate speech laws in general are a horrendous blow to civil liberties, as we can now arrest people for saying things we don't like -- like a teen saying Scientology is a cult, or writing a book disagreeing with Islamic Extremism.
Sometimes, if your life has no meaning, it can find meaning as a cautionary tale. I think England's path toward eliminating civil liberties falls squarely in this camp.
My guess is that Adam Curtis himself suffers from the paranoia he attributes to others in the documentary.
Spooky stuff, but not very convincing, to be honest. It comes off more tinfoil hat than insightful commentary, though I do think there are a few interesting insights in it.
But real life can't be explained by game theory, *since people don't try to win* -- at least, not in the same way that game theory implies that we try to win.
Communism is the most evil major political philosophy of the last century, and on a national scale it can't be anything but oppressive and totalitarian by its very nature; how can you eliminate private property from those who want to keep it, except by force? I'm amazed to see that anyone still defends such a vicious, sadistic and murderous philosophy, unless, perhaps, you want to be the next Stalin or Mao.
Damn straight. It's amazing that anyone can believe that you can have a society that is both free and communistic, since communism by definition means making people do things they don't want to do.
I love Mysterious Galaxy (http://mysteriousgalaxy.booksense.com/). The staff there are awesome, and can find books for whatever your personal tastes are.
They're great people, and I think F&SF specialty stores like that deserve our support.
Slashdot Mirror
>>Lincoln was a well known abolitionist (as were most Republicans at the time)
Quite wrong. Abolitionism was a fringe movement, even in 1860. Something like 1% of people in the north were actually Abolitionists.
Lincoln was *tarred* with the abolitionist brush by his own party, leading him to make quite a few public statements that were against his privately held beliefs.
>>Slavery was the issue and "states rights" was the legalistic rationale.
In the South, the conception of liberty (derived from the Scots-Irish lineage) was that of "Don't tell me what to do". Even though you might not understand this concept, it makes it no less important historically. People genuinely did not want the federal government to be able to regulate things that they had to right to, and were willing to fight over that. This gets confused with the states rights issue, but it's really what the Civil War was fought over.
You also have to understand that most Southerners didn't own slaves, and were more concerned about what would happen to the work force if a huge number of slaves were suddenly freed -- but many, especially poor whites -- did not like slavery. It was hard for a poor white laborer to compete with "free" labor.
>>Many of them look down on white Americans like white Americans used to (and some still) do Africans. They see European culture as inferior, European language unrefined, and Christianity and Judaism infinitely superstitious.
Au contrare. By and large, they love America and all things American. KFC, Pizza Hut, Nestle Ice Cream, etc., have been exploding around the nation for the last decade, and if you travel to China as an American (on your own... tour groups are a different story) you'll have women coming up to you asking to take a photo with them, and petting your hairy arms. Seriously, speak a little bit of Chinese (I took a year of community college Mandarin before I went) and you'll feel like a rock star.
Even Western religions are very fashionable, with people wanting to get married in, or in front of, western style churches even if neither the bride or groom are Christian.
It's terrible. No real lessons, it just shows you four photos and a sentence next to each one. No explanation of the words, or grammar, or any of that stuff which is really, really critical for learning Mandarin.
The pronunciation in Firefly *is* horrible. The words sound as if they hired white actors who were trying to read romanized Chinese words off a script. My Chinese sucks, but I flinch whenever they try to say anything.
I have been learning Mandarin for the last three years. It's a lot of fun -- mainly because Chinese people give you these serious WTF? looks when you speak to them.
While the summary is kind of insulting, learning Chinese is actually a fairly pragmatic choice these days (as you rightly point out, China is making the US its bitch) and I actually think this idea of a language MMO is incredibly awesome. When I lived in San Diego and San Francisco I had no trouble finding community college Chinese classes -- but now that I live in Fresno, there's no options available.
ChinesePod is an... okay... web site, but their lessons are all over the place instead of organized in a systematic approach to teaching Chinese, and while its free, you have to pay huge amounts of money just to see what the characters used in the lessons are. It's very expensive for a free site.
Every Chinese software product I've tried sucks (especially Rosetta Stone -- it's terrible), though Fluenz looks pretty good... but I'm not willing to part with $300 bucks to support my hobby though.
>>his "message" is that the "right" will use any means necessary (including abusing/breaking the law) to enforce their religion on everybody else.
Damn, I didn't get that memo. I'm right-wing, and here I am thinking the guy is a lunatic, when he's actually carrying out our secret plans for world domination! Nuts!
Of course, Lieberman, Clinton and Bayh were the three senators passing the thinkofthechildren act of 2005.... but -- oh, I get it! -- that's why you put the quotes around the "right"! Clever, clever.
>>One has to understand that this man is most likely very unstable but has a loud voice. He knows a squeeky wheel gets the grease.
Indeed.
As much as everyone here is ripping on him, nobody is asking, "Who is Jack Thompson, and what is his message?"
The nut is bloody famous.
Yeah, just watching the number of scans a computer makes isn't worm detection, per se, but more of intrusion detection, as you say.
It will incidentally also allow network admins to automatically shut down bittorrent, so it should be quite popular.
I've had SSL certificates change or be self-signed on my mail server at UCSD. At that point, I can decide either to click ok, or not check my email. Guess what I, and every single one of the other people in the computer science did? Clicked ok.
I was suspicious enough to delay clicking okay until I called the helpdesk, but it turns out, yes, they did mess with their cert, and it was legit.
Sad but true: People need their email more than they need security.
Lol, that's brilliant.
>>If you think Obama or Hillary are real liberals and/or socialists, you REALLY need to meet some real liberals and socialists.
You mean like Obama and Hillary's mentors?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/24/AR2007032401152.html
They shared an interest in Saul Alinsky, and Obama considered Bill Ayers a role model:
http://www.aim.org/aim-report/its-the-communism-stupid/
Jeremiah Wright goes without saying.
Radiation includes alpha, beta, and gamma particles (among other things), of which gamma particles are indeed EM "radiation", but even though all cats are mammals, and dogs are mammals, it doesn't mean that dogs are cats.
Wi-Fi routers also don't emit gamma rays, I'm pretty sure.
>>>>> Only in the sense that EM Radiation is "that which is radiated". The English language can turn any verb into a noun.
>>Whatever, dude.
It's like the who's on first of the physics community. But it's true, the process is called Verbification. If I run someone over with a car, I can claim that I carred him and invent a verb on the spot. Many of our most common words in English were formed by verbifying a noun. Email someone recently?
You can enlighten yourself here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verbification
Note that not all languages allow conversion between nouns and verbs, which means that they would probably be less susceptible to confusing EM Radiation and Radiation Radiation.
>>No, it isn't. There's no such thing as 'radiation radiation'
Sure there is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation
Radiation which is radiated from a source is radiation radiation -- but I was using in the reduplicated form in order to differentiate it between other things which are radiated. Sound waves radiate from a source, so they are sound radiation.
>>It's an unfortunte misunderstanding by people who don't really know what 'radiation' means - in that sense, you are correct.
Well now you know, and knowing is half the battle.
Only in the sense that EM Radiation is "that which is radiated". The English language can turn any verb into a noun.
Radiation radiation is something different entirely.
Like I said, it's an unfortunate mix of words.
My landlord had a similar problem... Vioxx was the only thing that really worked for his arthritis in the spine. After it got pulled from the market, he was put on morphine, and slept 18 hours a day. He said he'd risk the 2% greater chance of having a heart attack in order to get his life back.
I think our drug industry really needs to adopt a policy of informed consent. If people really know what they're getting into, they should be able to get access to such drugs of last resort. Of course, that's technically the policy already... but when manufacturers pull the drugs entirely off the market, it's a de facto ban.
>>If they're that afraid of the little bit of radiation emitted by a wireless router
Wireless routers don't emit radiation.
(They radiate EM energy, which is != emitting radiation.)
It's a shame that we have a noun and a verb which mean two very different things.
The problem wasn't increasing loans to minorities, per se, but increasing loans to people classified as sub-prime (of which there is some correlation with minorities).
It was one of Clinton's last gifts to us that his administration began pressuring banks to issue sub-prime loans.
Of course, it isn't politically correct to criticize political correctness, so it's all blamed on the banks.
>>Too many Americans still ignorantly believe that the mortgage crisis was accidental!
No way.
The mortgage crisis was entirely caused by the fact that our loan operators didn't have fingerprints taken, and so when they skipped out of town, there was no way for the lendees to track them down to pay them back.
This bill will finally solve the problem of deatbeat lenders who don't want to get paid back.
Amen!
Slashdot is even further behind the times than that. Well, the submitter, but still.
Before Qualcomm made it big with CDMA, their first major product was a satellite based truck tracking/logistics systems (called OMNITrack). It came out, oh, in 1985 or thereabouts.
Amazing that the summary said we're just now seeing high tech stuff appear in the world of trucking... pfft.
Of course, I only knew about that since I went to college at UC San Diego, and Qualcomm was the local high tech company that hired a huge number of our engineering graduates.
You didn't learn your lesson from Black and White, did you?
All the "revolutionary" God AI did in that game was crap on villagers, eat them, and dance with them. In that order.
His response was rather simple, and silenced me. To this day, I'm still not sure if I agree or not. In some cases, infringing upon one person's right to free speech is creating freedom to enjoy life for another, which is another freedom granted by our bill of rights. (I think the exact terminology is something akin to the right to enjoy your property)... but the point was well taken.
No offense, but his point is nonsense. If I publish a book claming that Islamic Extremism is a threat to Canada, I can get hauled in front of a judge for it. Your professor would have to dance a merry jig in order to explain how the publication of a book seriously impedes another person's "freedom to enjoy life", and I don't consider people disagreeing or even getting offended at each other to be good enough reasons to ignore freedom of speech.
I would agree that there are certain cases were harassment and free speech do collide (the paparazzi, and the Westboro Baptists are two great examples where I agree that the people are being obnoxious enough to impede on other people's liberties), I think hate speech laws in general are a horrendous blow to civil liberties, as we can now arrest people for saying things we don't like -- like a teen saying Scientology is a cult, or writing a book disagreeing with Islamic Extremism.
What on earth is this going to be good for?
Sometimes, if your life has no meaning, it can find meaning as a cautionary tale. I think England's path toward eliminating civil liberties falls squarely in this camp.
My guess is that Adam Curtis himself suffers from the paranoia he attributes to others in the documentary.
Spooky stuff, but not very convincing, to be honest. It comes off more tinfoil hat than insightful commentary, though I do think there are a few interesting insights in it.
But real life can't be explained by game theory, *since people don't try to win* -- at least, not in the same way that game theory implies that we try to win.
Communism is the most evil major political philosophy of the last century, and on a national scale it can't be anything but oppressive and totalitarian by its very nature; how can you eliminate private property from those who want to keep it, except by force? I'm amazed to see that anyone still defends such a vicious, sadistic and murderous philosophy, unless, perhaps, you want to be the next Stalin or Mao.
Damn straight. It's amazing that anyone can believe that you can have a society that is both free and communistic, since communism by definition means making people do things they don't want to do.
+friend
I love Mysterious Galaxy (http://mysteriousgalaxy.booksense.com/). The staff there are awesome, and can find books for whatever your personal tastes are.
They're great people, and I think F&SF specialty stores like that deserve our support.