I did vote. I vote in every election including local, judicial elections. I'm what they call a "1."
I have also been an activist, petitioning our representatives lawfully and demanding they change. I have given money to those candidates and causes with whom I agree. None of it did any good, because it only reinforced the status quo.
Our government is not designed to evolve to fit present circumstances. It is designed to protect the privilege of established interests and to resist change at all costs. As such, it has failed as a model of government. We, the American people, must hit the reset button now or we shall see a further slide into totalitarianism.
before the American people hit the reset button on the country? The government is obviously completely out of control. We have the TSA fondling children and strip-searching innocent citizens who simply want to travel from point A to point B. We have a Congress and Whitehouse who simply can't be bothered to do anything to help the Middle Class, preferring instead to concentrate even more wealth and power in the hands of the ultra-rich, ultra-connected, unaccountable, and demonstrably incompetent (eg. tax breaks for the wealthy and net neutrality). And thanks to Wikileaks the illusion that the government knows what it's doing has been shattered.
It's almost like those in power are betting each other they can screw the American people indefinitely, unapologetically, right in front of them and no one will do anything. And amazingly, the most heavily armed populace in the world is letting them get away with it.
The only ones it helps is themselves because they can charge a higher tuition based on their brand equity. For Middle and Lower Class students, it's a terrific way to fleece them six figures for a degree they'll be paying for the rest of their lives and which won't help them one damn bit. It's another ingenious way to funnel money from lower echelons of the socio-economic ladder to the very, very wealthy who run the student loan companies. In fact, if it weren't for the sub-prime mortgage collapse, the big story right now would be the scandal about how student loan offices in universities have been taking kick-backs from loan companies to encourage students to maximize their debt by offering them false promises of guaranteed financial success after they graduate. Between the student loans, the usurious rates on the credit cards they hand out like candy on campus, and the outrageously inflated housing market the powers-that-be have guaranteed that everyone under 40 in this country who thought they could get an education to have a better life graduates as a debt-slave for life.
Sure, there might be a few lucky kids out there whose parents taught them about the real world of managing your finances who didn't fall for that stuff, and they're sure to jump in and blame everyone who didn't, saying "well nobody twisted their arm to do those things!" But nowhere in the United States in any school, at least in public schools, do they teach you how to invest and manage your money and, frankly, make money. That's not a subject that they will ever allow to be taught.
You have diluted the meaning of the word "violently" to meaninglessness. But the way you use it to describe a virtual action that physically harms no one, and then shrink from even that in order to defend your rights, speaks volumes about the depths of your cowardice.
My favorite part about this story is that they are burning the house down without due process of law. Apparently CA policemen are now judge & jury as well as cops.
Secure the house, and let this guy have his day in court first.
This sounds like something they'd do. When you interview to be a Foreign Service Officer they refuse to tell you on what criteria you're going to be evaluated, and when it's over they refuse to tell you how you did. Because those criteria are top secret. This genius system was designed for them by McKinsey & Co, who are of the same ilk as Goldman Sachs and all the other tea & crumpet outfits that are the last bastion of the White Man's burden. The State Department, along with the rest of the government, needs to be defunded, dismantled, and built back up to reflect and represent American values.
Another of the obvious plots: shoot up (or toss bombs, or suicide-bomb, or carbomb, or...well, you get the point) a Black Friday opening line or three on the east coast at a big box store.
I vote for a Black Friday opening line or three in the MIDWEST at a big box store. Here on the east coast we've already taken our lumps. And you know what? It wasn't the end of the world. Were we pissed off? You bet. Did we want to hunt bin Laden down and put his head on a pike? You bet your ass. But it was the sheltered people in the Midwest who were crying to daddy in DC to take away all our freedoms in order to make them, who were safe the entire time, feel "safer."
Maybe a little adversity for the sheltered would make them remember their mettle, which they once had.
I spent a year learning Mandarin in Beijing 15 years ago. The air smelled like burnt soy sauce every day thanks to the coal-fired generators they conveniently located in the heart of the city. I stopped jogging because it was healthier to do so. Can only imagine what another 15 years of 'progress' has done for air quality there.
They have this a lot. They had it and spawned the Communist revolution. More recently, they had it and a l'il thing called the Tiananmen Square massacre happened. They have frequently tried to have it since then, but the secret police instantly swarm every country and high school in the country because they understand how dangerous it is to allow the young people to have their say.
I second this. And, if I may say so, I'm a bit disappointed with some of these 'do yer own damn job' posts. Slashdot is a special community filled with actual experts of all stripes. It would be remiss to not ask their advice. We all know what we know, but we so often don't know what we don't know. Why is it lazy to admit that? I rather think it demonstrates humility and a willingness to learn. Those are both qualities that all human beings could use a lot more of, especially those of us who work in technical fields.
Capsela is the best toy I ever saw that fits your requirements. It consisted of transparent plastic spherical modules with various gears you could connect to build vehicles and tools of various types. My younger brother played with his set for years and now he's a mechanical engineer who builds advanced composites for Ford. You can't buy it new anymore, but there's lots available on eBay.
Focusing attention on science education is a great goal, but Mythbusters has already done that myth to death. The last time a couple university teams did succeed in setting a ship on fire, but it took a much longer time to do than was plausible for a ship on the attack, bobbing up and down on waves.
I know this isn't one of your stated options, but ModX 2.0 is worth a look. It's so well optimized for SEO that we cloned our site in it as a test, switched it on, and within a week its organic search ranking was just under the original that we pay $40K/mo. in paid search to promote.
I heartily second this. Slashdot does have the best moderation system I've ever experienced online. Yes, there is still noise in the signal, but it often happens here that when there's an article on, say, rockets, that actual rocket scientists who know what they're talking about provide a lot of incredibly well-informed insight. Or, when the file-sharing debate crops up, we have actual lawyers who are or have defended accused file-sharers comment on the legal distinctions under consideration. Compare that with any other site with comments (eg. Digg), where every discussion resembles the holy wars between vi and emacs back in the day.
Love your comment. Free-marketeers always wave Adam Smith, saying, "See! The invisible hand will fix market malfunctions faster and better than governments can." Of course, then they rarely read past the early chapter that talks about the invisible hand to the parts where Smith addresses how those with wealth game the system, which is the behavior that the free-marketeers really want to indulge in. And they never read to the final chapters where Smith says that the free market produces evils that only governments can fix. Karl Marx, sadly, only read the final chapters and built his whole argument upon the evils of the free market.
is my suggestion for a new term that avoids the Hindenburg stigma. Imagine having an Air Yacht that you kick around the world in. Plenty of room for friends, complete freedom to come and go as you please. Saw a story about a guy who did that in Paris at the turn of the century, travelling from his rooftop to friends' rooftops in his private dirigible.
Like the Chinese geometric proof of 3-4-5 triangles or a Fibonacci spiral would be good choices, since they're aesthetically pleasing as well as mathematical.
or identity. Was it the first equation that really gave you a love for math or science, or woke you up to the beauty of creation? Is it something that speaks to who you are and how you live your life? If it's that or something like that you've thought about for years, then it will never get old or feel silly when you are old.
That's the answer I would give you to all the people here who are reflexively panning the idea of tattoos. I got two myself over twenty years ago that I thought long and hard about, a 17th century haiku by Onitsura and a passage from the Tao de Jing. I don't think about them much now, but when I do, they still exemplify core beliefs of mine and I'm happy to have them.
I was centrally involved in the Haiti earthquake relief effort. One interesting open source app we, the State Department, the UN, Red Cross, US Marines, and others used was called Ushahidi, which is a crowd-sourced news & mapping tool. Within hours of the quake the good people at Ushahidi had set up an instance to track reports and direct relief efforts at http://haiti.ushahidi.com./
You could watch, real-time, as reports funneled into the map of people texting from inside collapsed buildings requesting evac, and see first-responders picking up on them. Once Digicel, Haiti's cellphone company, started pushing official messages about which shortcode to text help requests to, and also to distribute the locations of medical help, food, water, etc., then it really picked up steam.
It was the first time we had all seen anything like it. The Marines told us they were using it almost like a trouble-ticket system to route their emergency teams because it was the only actionable information they could get.
Many of the Founding Fathers were also Freemasons, who strongly support the separation of church and state while admonishing each man to be steadfast in the faith of his acceptance. That is, atheists cannot become Freemasons but trying to impose your religion on others or even talking about religion within a masonic lodge is the quickest and surest way to be expelled.
That ethic infused the Constitution and Declaration of Independence and has been with us more than 200 years. We take it for granted now, but the practices the Founding Fathers took from Freemasonry and placed at the heart of the Republic formed the foundation of the powerful multicultural society we know today.
It's quite sad to see that foundation being assaulted in Arizona and Texas. Well, they'll learn quickly how futile and counterproductive this sort of behavior is.
I head the digital department at a nonprofit at the heart of the Haiti earthquake relief effort. The moment the earthquake hit I remembered reading about Ushahidi last year on the African tech blog White African written by Erik Hersman, one of the co-founders of the crisis-mapping tool. At the time I thought it might be an interesting way to source stories from our many staff on the ground in Africa, South America, and other places where internet coverage might be sparse but where cell coverage was robust. Spoke to them once, but didn't follow up on it further at the time.
The moment the news came out about Port-au-Prince, I called Erik up to ask if they could set up an instance to help coordinate first responders and disaster relief; he and they were, and even had a team of Creole-speaking volunteers to handle incoming reports and translate back and forth from English. Watching reports pop up on the map from people who were texting SOS'es from inside collapsed buildings, the hair stood up on the back of my neck because I was seeing something altogether new, different, and important.
Then reports started appearing from friends and relatives abroad, looking for loved ones who had been staying in the Hotel Montana and other major hotels for foreigners, or from expat Haitians desperate for news of their families back home. 5 days out from the event I participated on conference calls with the US State Department, Whitehouse, Red Cross, USAID, and UN Logistics Cluster and realized Ushahidi had the best actionable intelligence, bar none, and that all the other agencies had gravitated toward using it accordingly. They shared stories of the US Marines stationed on the USS Bataan anchored off Port-au-Prince begging the Pentagon for more satellite bandwidth so they could load the graphics properly, because they were scrambling missions to dig out people trapped in the rubble.
10 days out the folks at Ushahidi got hold of the owner of Haiti's cellular provider, Digicel, and he gave them the ability to push SMS back out to Haitian subscribers with official, verified locations where people could get medical attention, food, water, shelter, etc. It was incredible.
It's not often you witness something game-changing in action, but this was such a moment, and the tool was saving lives.
I was directly involved with the relief efforts, coordinating with USAID, US State Department, UN Logistics Cluster, Office of the Special Envoy, and others. The tool we did all use was an open source project called Ushahidi (haiti.ushahidi.org). Official agencies and average people with cell phones alike were able to submit situation reports, relief requests, and donations via SMS to their crisis-mapping/crowdsourcing tool. Each report was geo-tagged and mapped. The US Marines stationed in the USS Bataan anchored off Port-au-Prince told us they literally saw reports pop up from people who were still trapped in rubble but had working cell phones, and they were able to find and save them because of Ushahidi.
The folks at the Ushahidi project went one better than that, though, because they got a hold of the guy who runs Haiti's cell phone company, Digicel, and he worked with them to push out official alerts (like where to get medical care, food, water, etc) to all Digicel's subscribers in the affected area.
I've never seen anything like it. Watching reports from people trapped in rubble pop up on the map and replies from first responders quickly follow up sent shivers up my spine. It's the first time I've ever witnessed open source software saving lives in real time.
There is less waste when you give to non-profits who have salaried employees, because they know what they're doing. It is far more wasteful when you are relying on volunteers who may or may not show up, there are no defined divisions of labor, there are no communications systems, etc. That's what happened after the tsunami, which didn't have the non-profit infrastructure, and most of the food and supplies that were donated rotted at the ports and airports because there were none of what you called 'highly paid' salaried nonprofit workers to distribute it.
Slashdot Mirror
I did vote. I vote in every election including local, judicial elections. I'm what they call a "1."
I have also been an activist, petitioning our representatives lawfully and demanding they change. I have given money to those candidates and causes with whom I agree. None of it did any good, because it only reinforced the status quo.
Our government is not designed to evolve to fit present circumstances. It is designed to protect the privilege of established interests and to resist change at all costs. As such, it has failed as a model of government. We, the American people, must hit the reset button now or we shall see a further slide into totalitarianism.
before the American people hit the reset button on the country? The government is obviously completely out of control. We have the TSA fondling children and strip-searching innocent citizens who simply want to travel from point A to point B. We have a Congress and Whitehouse who simply can't be bothered to do anything to help the Middle Class, preferring instead to concentrate even more wealth and power in the hands of the ultra-rich, ultra-connected, unaccountable, and demonstrably incompetent (eg. tax breaks for the wealthy and net neutrality). And thanks to Wikileaks the illusion that the government knows what it's doing has been shattered.
It's almost like those in power are betting each other they can screw the American people indefinitely, unapologetically, right in front of them and no one will do anything. And amazingly, the most heavily armed populace in the world is letting them get away with it.
Is there no steel left in the American soul?
The only ones it helps is themselves because they can charge a higher tuition based on their brand equity. For Middle and Lower Class students, it's a terrific way to fleece them six figures for a degree they'll be paying for the rest of their lives and which won't help them one damn bit. It's another ingenious way to funnel money from lower echelons of the socio-economic ladder to the very, very wealthy who run the student loan companies. In fact, if it weren't for the sub-prime mortgage collapse, the big story right now would be the scandal about how student loan offices in universities have been taking kick-backs from loan companies to encourage students to maximize their debt by offering them false promises of guaranteed financial success after they graduate. Between the student loans, the usurious rates on the credit cards they hand out like candy on campus, and the outrageously inflated housing market the powers-that-be have guaranteed that everyone under 40 in this country who thought they could get an education to have a better life graduates as a debt-slave for life.
Sure, there might be a few lucky kids out there whose parents taught them about the real world of managing your finances who didn't fall for that stuff, and they're sure to jump in and blame everyone who didn't, saying "well nobody twisted their arm to do those things!" But nowhere in the United States in any school, at least in public schools, do they teach you how to invest and manage your money and, frankly, make money. That's not a subject that they will ever allow to be taught.
You have diluted the meaning of the word "violently" to meaninglessness. But the way you use it to describe a virtual action that physically harms no one, and then shrink from even that in order to defend your rights, speaks volumes about the depths of your cowardice.
My favorite part about this story is that they are burning the house down without due process of law. Apparently CA policemen are now judge & jury as well as cops.
Secure the house, and let this guy have his day in court first.
This sounds like something they'd do. When you interview to be a Foreign Service Officer they refuse to tell you on what criteria you're going to be evaluated, and when it's over they refuse to tell you how you did. Because those criteria are top secret. This genius system was designed for them by McKinsey & Co, who are of the same ilk as Goldman Sachs and all the other tea & crumpet outfits that are the last bastion of the White Man's burden. The State Department, along with the rest of the government, needs to be defunded, dismantled, and built back up to reflect and represent American values.
Sounds like the Chinese postal service.
I vote for a Black Friday opening line or three in the MIDWEST at a big box store. Here on the east coast we've already taken our lumps. And you know what? It wasn't the end of the world. Were we pissed off? You bet. Did we want to hunt bin Laden down and put his head on a pike? You bet your ass. But it was the sheltered people in the Midwest who were crying to daddy in DC to take away all our freedoms in order to make them, who were safe the entire time, feel "safer." Maybe a little adversity for the sheltered would make them remember their mettle, which they once had.
I spent a year learning Mandarin in Beijing 15 years ago. The air smelled like burnt soy sauce every day thanks to the coal-fired generators they conveniently located in the heart of the city. I stopped jogging because it was healthier to do so. Can only imagine what another 15 years of 'progress' has done for air quality there.
They have this a lot. They had it and spawned the Communist revolution. More recently, they had it and a l'il thing called the Tiananmen Square massacre happened. They have frequently tried to have it since then, but the secret police instantly swarm every country and high school in the country because they understand how dangerous it is to allow the young people to have their say.
I second this. And, if I may say so, I'm a bit disappointed with some of these 'do yer own damn job' posts. Slashdot is a special community filled with actual experts of all stripes. It would be remiss to not ask their advice. We all know what we know, but we so often don't know what we don't know. Why is it lazy to admit that? I rather think it demonstrates humility and a willingness to learn. Those are both qualities that all human beings could use a lot more of, especially those of us who work in technical fields.
Capsela is the best toy I ever saw that fits your requirements. It consisted of transparent plastic spherical modules with various gears you could connect to build vehicles and tools of various types. My younger brother played with his set for years and now he's a mechanical engineer who builds advanced composites for Ford. You can't buy it new anymore, but there's lots available on eBay.
Focusing attention on science education is a great goal, but Mythbusters has already done that myth to death. The last time a couple university teams did succeed in setting a ship on fire, but it took a much longer time to do than was plausible for a ship on the attack, bobbing up and down on waves.
flamebait in the morning...
I know this isn't one of your stated options, but ModX 2.0 is worth a look. It's so well optimized for SEO that we cloned our site in it as a test, switched it on, and within a week its organic search ranking was just under the original that we pay $40K/mo. in paid search to promote.
I heartily second this. Slashdot does have the best moderation system I've ever experienced online. Yes, there is still noise in the signal, but it often happens here that when there's an article on, say, rockets, that actual rocket scientists who know what they're talking about provide a lot of incredibly well-informed insight. Or, when the file-sharing debate crops up, we have actual lawyers who are or have defended accused file-sharers comment on the legal distinctions under consideration. Compare that with any other site with comments (eg. Digg), where every discussion resembles the holy wars between vi and emacs back in the day.
Love your comment. Free-marketeers always wave Adam Smith, saying, "See! The invisible hand will fix market malfunctions faster and better than governments can." Of course, then they rarely read past the early chapter that talks about the invisible hand to the parts where Smith addresses how those with wealth game the system, which is the behavior that the free-marketeers really want to indulge in. And they never read to the final chapters where Smith says that the free market produces evils that only governments can fix. Karl Marx, sadly, only read the final chapters and built his whole argument upon the evils of the free market.
is my suggestion for a new term that avoids the Hindenburg stigma. Imagine having an Air Yacht that you kick around the world in. Plenty of room for friends, complete freedom to come and go as you please. Saw a story about a guy who did that in Paris at the turn of the century, travelling from his rooftop to friends' rooftops in his private dirigible.
Like the Chinese geometric proof of 3-4-5 triangles or a Fibonacci spiral would be good choices, since they're aesthetically pleasing as well as mathematical.
or identity. Was it the first equation that really gave you a love for math or science, or woke you up to the beauty of creation? Is it something that speaks to who you are and how you live your life? If it's that or something like that you've thought about for years, then it will never get old or feel silly when you are old.
That's the answer I would give you to all the people here who are reflexively panning the idea of tattoos. I got two myself over twenty years ago that I thought long and hard about, a 17th century haiku by Onitsura and a passage from the Tao de Jing. I don't think about them much now, but when I do, they still exemplify core beliefs of mine and I'm happy to have them.
I was centrally involved in the Haiti earthquake relief effort. One interesting open source app we, the State Department, the UN, Red Cross, US Marines, and others used was called Ushahidi, which is a crowd-sourced news & mapping tool. Within hours of the quake the good people at Ushahidi had set up an instance to track reports and direct relief efforts at http://haiti.ushahidi.com./
You could watch, real-time, as reports funneled into the map of people texting from inside collapsed buildings requesting evac, and see first-responders picking up on them. Once Digicel, Haiti's cellphone company, started pushing official messages about which shortcode to text help requests to, and also to distribute the locations of medical help, food, water, etc., then it really picked up steam.
It was the first time we had all seen anything like it. The Marines told us they were using it almost like a trouble-ticket system to route their emergency teams because it was the only actionable information they could get.
Many of the Founding Fathers were also Freemasons, who strongly support the separation of church and state while admonishing each man to be steadfast in the faith of his acceptance. That is, atheists cannot become Freemasons but trying to impose your religion on others or even talking about religion within a masonic lodge is the quickest and surest way to be expelled.
That ethic infused the Constitution and Declaration of Independence and has been with us more than 200 years. We take it for granted now, but the practices the Founding Fathers took from Freemasonry and placed at the heart of the Republic formed the foundation of the powerful multicultural society we know today.
It's quite sad to see that foundation being assaulted in Arizona and Texas. Well, they'll learn quickly how futile and counterproductive this sort of behavior is.
I head the digital department at a nonprofit at the heart of the Haiti earthquake relief effort. The moment the earthquake hit I remembered reading about Ushahidi last year on the African tech blog White African written by Erik Hersman, one of the co-founders of the crisis-mapping tool. At the time I thought it might be an interesting way to source stories from our many staff on the ground in Africa, South America, and other places where internet coverage might be sparse but where cell coverage was robust. Spoke to them once, but didn't follow up on it further at the time.
The moment the news came out about Port-au-Prince, I called Erik up to ask if they could set up an instance to help coordinate first responders and disaster relief; he and they were, and even had a team of Creole-speaking volunteers to handle incoming reports and translate back and forth from English. Watching reports pop up on the map from people who were texting SOS'es from inside collapsed buildings, the hair stood up on the back of my neck because I was seeing something altogether new, different, and important.
Then reports started appearing from friends and relatives abroad, looking for loved ones who had been staying in the Hotel Montana and other major hotels for foreigners, or from expat Haitians desperate for news of their families back home. 5 days out from the event I participated on conference calls with the US State Department, Whitehouse, Red Cross, USAID, and UN Logistics Cluster and realized Ushahidi had the best actionable intelligence, bar none, and that all the other agencies had gravitated toward using it accordingly. They shared stories of the US Marines stationed on the USS Bataan anchored off Port-au-Prince begging the Pentagon for more satellite bandwidth so they could load the graphics properly, because they were scrambling missions to dig out people trapped in the rubble.
10 days out the folks at Ushahidi got hold of the owner of Haiti's cellular provider, Digicel, and he gave them the ability to push SMS back out to Haitian subscribers with official, verified locations where people could get medical attention, food, water, shelter, etc. It was incredible.
It's not often you witness something game-changing in action, but this was such a moment, and the tool was saving lives.
I was directly involved with the relief efforts, coordinating with USAID, US State Department, UN Logistics Cluster, Office of the Special Envoy, and others. The tool we did all use was an open source project called Ushahidi (haiti.ushahidi.org). Official agencies and average people with cell phones alike were able to submit situation reports, relief requests, and donations via SMS to their crisis-mapping/crowdsourcing tool. Each report was geo-tagged and mapped. The US Marines stationed in the USS Bataan anchored off Port-au-Prince told us they literally saw reports pop up from people who were still trapped in rubble but had working cell phones, and they were able to find and save them because of Ushahidi.
The folks at the Ushahidi project went one better than that, though, because they got a hold of the guy who runs Haiti's cell phone company, Digicel, and he worked with them to push out official alerts (like where to get medical care, food, water, etc) to all Digicel's subscribers in the affected area.
I've never seen anything like it. Watching reports from people trapped in rubble pop up on the map and replies from first responders quickly follow up sent shivers up my spine. It's the first time I've ever witnessed open source software saving lives in real time.
There is less waste when you give to non-profits who have salaried employees, because they know what they're doing. It is far more wasteful when you are relying on volunteers who may or may not show up, there are no defined divisions of labor, there are no communications systems, etc. That's what happened after the tsunami, which didn't have the non-profit infrastructure, and most of the food and supplies that were donated rotted at the ports and airports because there were none of what you called 'highly paid' salaried nonprofit workers to distribute it.