This entire article is just a sad addition to the various sayings about how eventually liberals face the real world and become conservative. As far as I can tell, locked in my ivory tower forced to work with people from all around the world, the "real world" consists of taking a job where someone that makes a whole lot more money than you tells you and a bunch of other people exactly like you what to do each day. They pay you enough money to live in the suburbs with a bunch of other people that make the exact same amount of money and have the exact same color skin as you.
Funny thing about the "real worlders" is that they are *always* asking for help with there "real world" stuff: broken cars, electrical wiring, computers.
Both freedom and science are rooted in skepticism. It's not coincidence that the first proto-democracies were also proto-scientific societies. It's not coincidence that the political philosophers that wrote the canon of modern liberal democracy were also natural philospohers. And it is certainly not coincidence that the full-on assault of science education in the US is being waged by the same people who want to make government radically oppressive and the media a propaganda organ of the GOP.
Ah, yes, the starry-eyed free marketeers are coming to our rescue!
That free markets are a complete disaster is obvious to anyone with even a clumsy grasp of the actual facts of history, unless of course, we define "actual facts of history" to mean "my last reading of Atlas Shrugged ".
One problem with your hypothesis--completely unsupported by any actual evidence by the way--is that the governments of the developed world massively subsidize the oil economy. Oooops!
And yet another problem with your hypothesis is the fact that there is no major economic disincentive--excluding second order effects like consumer activism--to activities which are damaging to the environment. You already hear the energy industry mentioning "clean coal" for instance. It is completely clear that industry has and will pollute up to--and in many cases beyond--the limits imposed by regulations.
Oh, but I forgot! You will just have us hand out "shares" in the atmosphere, and let the market take care of the rest. Sorry, I choose to remain here in reality!
Yes, tit for tat. There are no facts. Just a Republican opinion and a Democratic opinion. The best you can do is let your idealogy decide for you. Have fun! Please just don't expect me to respect you.
The core problem is that not enough peopole leave any margin when they drive. They know what there car can *usually* handle, and then when they hit an ice patch somehow it is the ice's fault!
And I'm not just talking about the swerve-monkeys here, I even notice this with many relatively calm drivers. You need to leave a little time and space to account for uncertainty in road conditions, car performance, and what other drivers will do. What drives me mad is that it's not as though this even has to result in dramatically longer travel times. Gracefully coasting into place behind someone at a stop sign is not any slower than screeching into place. And I love watching the swerve monkeys get stuck in the far right lane while those of us patiently waiting our turn to pass pull ahead.
I've always thought the law enforcement effort has been too focused on speed. Travelling 70 miles per hour is not the problem; swerving in and out in order to maintain 70 mile per hour is.
You are ready to toss out the Dark Matter model on the basis of one pre-print article because you don't like it. I don't consider that particularly scientific.
There is absolutely nothing unscientific about the dark matter hypothesis. It helps explain present observations, and makes unique predictions that can be tested.
Scientific theories don't just spring flawlessly from the pen of one person. The fact that scientific models evolve with time doesn't make them unscientific. It's only when all the hacks and tweaks of the model still don't work that the underlying theory is rejected. This type of philosophical debate is exactly what the creation propagandists want: "see cosmology / evolution is non-scientific because the model wasn't specified exactly correctly before any experiments were performed!"
I hate the credit card industry. I try to pay cash always. But it drives me crazy that I have to pay the same price as people who pay with credit cards.
This essentially means that I am subsidizing their free trip to Hawai (1%) and credit industry profits (99%).
I love how people think they are getting free trips out of these cards. That $300 free ticket cost you about $3000 smarty pants. My only gripe is that we all have to pay for it.
Let's leave alone for a moment the fact that you are misusing occam's razor.
The point you are missing is that when scientists claim they want the simplest theory, they don't mean simple in the sense of "simple to explain to someone unwilling to learn the necessary mathematics". So I can say that all of Maxwell's equations are equivalent to local guage invavariance of the U(1) group. And if you are unwilling to go learn what that means, you will not appreciate that it is a truly elegant treatment.
String theory has no experimental verification, a point no one denies, but the very reason it is studied vigorously is because of its elegance. The simplicity of string theory is its *only* justification.
If it seems like a waste of time to you, don't study it.
Look, most of us agree that under our capitalist system artificially teering the market is not only legal and widespread, but also possibly sensible given the profit incentive. It's not just limitted to software; I remember first noticing this when looking at Kayaks. The same company produces tubby low end models and sleeker higher end models, with apparantly just the mold being different. The cost difference seemed likely to reflect the different marketing segments more than the different manufacturing costs.
But its important to keep track of these things! Most of us find these artificial limits on quality repugnant, and I think we are justified to list this as one of the negative consequences of a capitalist system. And complaining about issues like this isn't merely whining! Keep in mind that widespread pressure forced drug comapanies to allow generic versions of AIDs medication in poor countries. These issues seem like whines when we are talking about non-essentials, but these are very same mechanism that keep people hungry and sick unnecessarily. You may believe capitalism is worth this price, but you can't deny it is paid.
Uhhh. I'm not a big fan of either. I probably know what I'm talking about, though, because I'm a high energy particle physicist and I use my computer for, well, computing. So when your desktop computer is a gateway to a Mosix cluster and you notice how well X runs even with mad jobs being launched by your group underneath you, then you'll be as qualified as me to comment. Your probably not though.
But he has not taken into effect the combined microsoft plus PC industry strategy, which goes like:
(1) Build a fast expensive computer
(2) Write an operating system that uses all the resources of (1) just to run a word processor.
(3) Go back to (1)
That can keep the price of both inflated indefinitely. Hopefully someday people will think "Gee do I really a 1 GBit Quantum computer just for the latest version of Word?".
The hilarious and refreshing
adbusters site
claims that back in the day when a corporation exceeded its powers
or ceased to serve the public interest, its charter was revoked and
its very right to exist was nullified
Their main point is that corporate personhood--which grants
corporations some rights as individuals--has effectively eroded the
rights of real individuals. Since corporations have vast resources to
vigorously defend their rights, they exercise more rights than you and
I.
I think that we shouldn't fixate on Microsoft; there is a wider
problem of corporations becoming too powerful in general. Microsoft
is a symptom.
That's because laws aren't used to keep us safe, but to keep us in line. They need excessive laws to protect "intellectual property" because most people intuitively know that the concept is nonsense.
That's about the most depressing thing I have heard. Maybe people wouldn't feel so stupid about it if we didn't use violence and thievery to keep gas at 1$ / gallon.
Someday far in the future, I'll be up very late in my office, listening to the silence, and thinking "Man it sure was alot less lonely when we had those fans going."
There's no arguing the logic. The internet is by definition an efficient way to exchange digital information, whether copyrighted or not. I remember my little brother making this same argument over Christmas dinner during the Napster saga.
But what are they hoping to accomplish by making this argument in court? Trying to increase the absurdity of their opponents case? Is it mainly for PR?
I don't think it will do much good in either case. Either people will say "Right on!" if they thought the Napster ruling was garbage, or they will say "Yep, the internet needs better controls, just like Napster".
...but one thing I'm wondering: in the past decade, have Iraqis killed more Americans than Americans have killed Iraqis?
This is definitely one of the most censored questions at the moment, and one of the most important. Unfortunately, I think the standard circular logic goes "Iraqi's were killed because good America was fighting bad Iraq, so even though America killed more innocents, America is good and Iraq is bad".
I'm afraid we are in for another rinse and repeat...
Did you know that the US increased agricultural subsidies to Iraq immediately after he killed his farmers off, the Kurds?
Imagine some site has a web page that displays a picture
surrounded by adds. Lets keep things simple, and say there is one
image for the picture and one image for the ad. A normal web page
directs your browser to request the image for the picture, tells you where
to display it, tells it to request the ad image, and then where to display
it. (actually, the ad probably comes first!).
In this case, you could view the html source yourself, type in the
URL for the image you want, and voila, just the image would pop up.
No copyright infringement, because they have built their site to
provide the image to any anonymous client on demand.
But now if I write a page that instructs your browser to go to
the other site and request the original image, then surround it
with flowers instead of ads, this is copy right infringement. But
they gave it to you on your request.
Its like if I tell you, go to Addison-Welsey, and ask them to give
you a free copy of the latest Britney Spears Bio, and they'll give it
to you, and they do, and then charge me with copyright
infringement.
If they don't want people to access the data anonymously, all
they have to do in not give it away anonymously
In our simple exam, the site could post a single gif image that has
the adds and the original image combined.
I never said that leaders like Sadam Hussein aren't greedy monsters, just that the West successfully propells people like him to power in direct opposition to popular sentiment.
It's mighty convenient that your fear of inventing "noble savages" makes it impossible to accept any blame for what happens in countries that are extremely vulnerable to Western influence.
The United States uses 25% to 30% of all of the oil produced in the world, yet we
only have less than 3% of known oil reserves. [ref] If what you are saying were true, the world would be a very different place.
As to the WWI history lesson, you have apparantly missed the point. Oil dictated
the West's policy in the Middle East throughout the 20th century, including WWI. Human rights, democracy, and the popular will are not allowed to interfere with the West's goal of total control of this strategic region. Unfortunately for the Middle East, oil is the whole story.
The petrochemical industry and its asociated economy is barely a century old.
And at the turn of the century, U.S. relations with the Middle Eastern countries were excellent; the U.S. was seen as a progressive, anti-imperialist nation. So you agree with me, I guess.
Slashdot Mirror
This entire article is just a sad addition to the various sayings about how eventually liberals face the real world and become conservative. As far as I can tell, locked in my ivory tower forced to work with people from all around the world, the "real world" consists of taking a job where someone that makes a whole lot more money than you tells you and a bunch of other people exactly like you what to do each day. They pay you enough money to live in the suburbs with a bunch of other people that make the exact same amount of money and have the exact same color skin as you.
Funny thing about the "real worlders" is that they are *always* asking for help with there "real world" stuff: broken cars, electrical wiring, computers.
Both freedom and science are rooted in skepticism. It's not coincidence that the first proto-democracies were also proto-scientific societies. It's not coincidence that the political philosophers that wrote the canon of modern liberal democracy were also natural philospohers. And it is certainly not coincidence that the full-on assault of science education in the US is being waged by the same people who want to make government radically oppressive and the media a propaganda organ of the GOP.
Ah, yes, the starry-eyed free marketeers are coming to our rescue!
That free markets are a complete disaster is obvious to anyone with even a clumsy grasp of the actual facts of history, unless of course, we define "actual facts of history" to mean "my last reading of Atlas Shrugged ".
One problem with your hypothesis--completely unsupported by any actual evidence by the way--is that the governments of the developed world massively subsidize the oil economy. Oooops!
And yet another problem with your hypothesis is the fact that there is no major economic disincentive--excluding second order effects like consumer activism--to activities which are damaging to the environment. You already hear the energy industry mentioning "clean coal" for instance. It is completely clear that industry has and will pollute up to--and in many cases beyond--the limits imposed by regulations.
Oh, but I forgot! You will just have us hand out "shares" in the atmosphere, and let the market take care of the rest. Sorry, I choose to remain here in reality!
Yes, tit for tat. There are no facts. Just a Republican opinion and a Democratic opinion. The best you can do is let your idealogy decide for you. Have fun! Please just don't expect me to respect you.
The core problem is that not enough peopole leave any margin when they drive. They know what there car
can *usually* handle, and then when they hit an ice patch somehow it is the ice's fault!
And I'm not just talking about the swerve-monkeys here, I even notice this with many relatively calm drivers.
You need to leave a little time and space to account for uncertainty in road conditions, car performance, and what other drivers will do. What drives me mad is that it's not as though this even has to result in dramatically longer travel times. Gracefully coasting into place behind someone at a stop sign is not any slower than screeching into place. And I love watching the swerve monkeys get stuck in the far right lane while those of us patiently waiting our turn to pass pull ahead.
I've always thought the law enforcement effort has been too focused on speed. Travelling 70 miles per hour is not the problem; swerving in and out in order to maintain 70 mile per hour is.
You are ready to toss out the Dark Matter model on the basis of one pre-print article because you don't like it. I don't consider that particularly scientific.
There is absolutely nothing unscientific about the dark matter hypothesis. It helps explain present observations, and makes unique predictions that can be tested.
Scientific theories don't just spring flawlessly from the pen of one person. The fact that scientific models evolve with time doesn't make them unscientific. It's only when all the hacks and tweaks of the model still don't work that the underlying theory is rejected. This type of philosophical debate is exactly what the creation propagandists want: "see cosmology / evolution is non-scientific because the model wasn't specified exactly correctly before any experiments were performed!"
I hate the credit card industry. I try to pay cash always. But it drives me crazy that I have to pay the same price as people who pay with credit cards.
This essentially means that I am subsidizing their free trip to Hawai (1%) and credit industry profits (99%).
I love how people think they are getting free trips out of these cards. That $300 free ticket cost you about $3000 smarty pants. My only gripe is that we all have to pay for it.
Let's leave alone for a moment the fact that you are misusing occam's razor.
The point you are missing is that when scientists claim they want the simplest theory, they don't mean simple in the sense of "simple to explain to someone unwilling to learn the necessary mathematics". So I can say that all of Maxwell's equations are equivalent to local guage invavariance of the U(1) group. And if you are unwilling to go learn what that means, you will not appreciate that it is a truly elegant treatment.
String theory has no experimental verification, a point no one denies, but the very reason it is studied vigorously is because of its elegance. The simplicity of string theory is its *only* justification.
If it seems like a waste of time to you, don't study it.
So I'm thinking to myself "who's on the list with a name like Ted Kennedy?" Then it hits me: Ted Kacynski.
Look, most of us agree that under our capitalist system artificially teering the market is not only legal and widespread, but also possibly sensible given the profit incentive. It's not just limitted to software; I remember first noticing this when looking at Kayaks. The same company produces tubby low end models and sleeker higher end models, with apparantly just the mold being different. The cost difference seemed likely to reflect the different marketing segments more than the different manufacturing costs.
But its important to keep track of these things! Most of us find these artificial limits on quality repugnant, and I think we are justified to list this as one of the negative consequences of a capitalist system. And complaining about issues like this isn't merely whining! Keep in mind that widespread pressure forced drug comapanies to allow generic versions of AIDs medication in poor countries. These issues seem like whines when we are talking about non-essentials, but these are very same mechanism that keep people hungry and sick unnecessarily. You may believe capitalism is worth this price, but you can't deny it is paid.
Uhhh. I'm not a big fan of either. I probably know what I'm talking about, though, because I'm a high energy particle physicist and I use my computer for, well, computing. So when your desktop computer is a gateway to a Mosix cluster and you notice how well X runs even with mad jobs being launched by your group underneath you, then you'll be as qualified as me to comment. Your probably not though.
Yep they have individuals rights but no individual responsibilities. Cut me some slack man, you can't solve all the world's problems in one post ;-)
But he has not taken into effect the combined microsoft plus PC industry strategy, which goes like:
(1) Build a fast expensive computer
(2) Write an operating system that uses all the resources of (1) just to run a word processor.
(3) Go back to (1)
That can keep the price of both inflated indefinitely. Hopefully someday people will think "Gee do I really a 1 GBit Quantum computer just for the latest version of Word?".
The hilarious and refreshing adbusters site claims that back in the day when a corporation exceeded its powers or ceased to serve the public interest, its charter was revoked and its very right to exist was nullified
Their main point is that corporate personhood--which grants corporations some rights as individuals--has effectively eroded the rights of real individuals. Since corporations have vast resources to vigorously defend their rights, they exercise more rights than you and I.
I think that we shouldn't fixate on Microsoft; there is a wider problem of corporations becoming too powerful in general. Microsoft is a symptom.
That's because laws aren't used to keep us safe, but to keep us in line. They need excessive laws to protect "intellectual property" because most people intuitively know that the concept is nonsense.
That's about the most depressing thing I have heard. Maybe people wouldn't feel so stupid about it if we didn't use violence and thievery to keep gas at 1$ / gallon.
Someday far in the future, I'll be up very late in my office, listening to the silence, and thinking "Man it sure was alot less lonely when we had those fans going."
What exactly is the EFF's stategy here?
There's no arguing the logic. The internet is by definition an efficient way to exchange digital information, whether copyrighted or not. I remember my little brother making this same argument over Christmas dinner during the Napster saga.
But what are they hoping to accomplish by making this argument in court? Trying to increase the absurdity of their opponents case? Is it mainly for PR?
I don't think it will do much good in either case. Either people will say "Right on!" if they thought the Napster ruling was garbage, or they will say "Yep, the internet needs better controls, just like Napster".
This is definitely one of the most censored questions at the moment, and one of the most important. Unfortunately, I think the standard circular logic goes "Iraqi's were killed because good America was fighting bad Iraq, so even though America killed more innocents, America is good and Iraq is bad".
I'm afraid we are in for another rinse and repeat...
Did you know that the US increased agricultural subsidies to Iraq immediately after he killed his farmers off, the Kurds?
I should use this approach on my thesis...to think of the time I've wasted waiting for data!
Wouldn't that make Nitrogen gas illegal under the DMCA as a circumvention?
This is absurd.
Imagine some site has a web page that displays a picture surrounded by adds. Lets keep things simple, and say there is one image for the picture and one image for the ad. A normal web page directs your browser to request the image for the picture, tells you where to display it, tells it to request the ad image, and then where to display it. (actually, the ad probably comes first!).
In this case, you could view the html source yourself, type in the URL for the image you want, and voila, just the image would pop up. No copyright infringement, because they have built their site to provide the image to any anonymous client on demand.
But now if I write a page that instructs your browser to go to the other site and request the original image, then surround it with flowers instead of ads, this is copy right infringement. But they gave it to you on your request.
Its like if I tell you, go to Addison-Welsey, and ask them to give you a free copy of the latest Britney Spears Bio, and they'll give it to you, and they do, and then charge me with copyright infringement.
If they don't want people to access the data anonymously, all they have to do in not give it away anonymously
In our simple exam, the site could post a single gif image that has the adds and the original image combined.
I never said that leaders like Sadam Hussein aren't greedy monsters, just that the West successfully propells people like him to power in direct opposition to popular sentiment.
It's mighty convenient that your fear of inventing "noble savages" makes it impossible to accept any blame for what happens in countries that are extremely vulnerable to Western influence.
The United States uses 25% to 30% of all of the oil produced in the world, yet we only have less than 3% of known oil reserves. [ref] If what you are saying were true, the world would be a very different place.
As to the WWI history lesson, you have apparantly missed the point. Oil dictated the West's policy in the Middle East throughout the 20th century, including WWI. Human rights, democracy, and the popular will are not allowed to interfere with the West's goal of total control of this strategic region. Unfortunately for the Middle East, oil is the whole story.
The petrochemical industry and its asociated economy is barely a century old.
And at the turn of the century, U.S. relations with the Middle Eastern countries were excellent; the U.S. was seen as a progressive, anti-imperialist nation. So you agree with me, I guess.