I read it too, and it's just great that Obama wants to have a Whitehouse that takes the Constitution seriously. But you know what? I don't want my rights to depend on the whim of one man. I don't want our freedom to dangle by the frayed thread of Executive dispensation. I want our freedom and rights to be protected by the Law! I want the system of checks and balances that has preserved them for 200+ years to be respected and enforced.
The President, Vice President, many in his administration, and the telcos broke the law. They committed multiple, egregious crimes. They must be brought to justice, and Congress must do the bringing.
Swear to god, what this FISA crap tells this citizen is that as of today, the Law means nothing. Our rights and freedoms are now naked to the depredations of cowards and tyrants.
The more industry tries to lock down TV broadcasts and equipment, the more moms and dads and grandparents they confuse when they can't watch their programs. That in turn drives the young'uns, who get the calls from the confused parents, to just burn them restriction-free copies from BitTorrent. Or, neither party bothers and they stop watching TV altogether and go hang out with friends instead--nothing worth watching anyway.
The MSM are getting desperate, folks, because they can see this writing on the wall. Though the Internet freight train has been coming at them for a while, most of them ignored it hoping it would go away or that some technical lock would magically save them. They refused to learn how to adapt. So now they're pulling stuff like this and like what the AP is doing (trying to lock down their content through the courts by declaring it illegal to link to their content or quote them at all).
China has a lot of people. Most of them are poor and undereducated. But the Party has been cherry picking the country's best and brightest for 40 years now, sending them to the best schools and universities in China, and then to the best foreign universities. Those people are as competent as engineers and scientists as any from the rest of the world.
Unfortunately given the system and ideology they're raised in, they largely possess an aggrieved sense of innate superiority to everyone else. In their eyes, Western countries, Japan, South Korea, and a handful of others have gotten where they are by cheating, essentially. Likewise China has "fallen behind" ("luohouzhuyi"--"fallen-behind-ism") because Western countries, Japan, and others have been engaged in a conspiracy to keep them down.
They're wrong, of course, just as are those who buy the line that Chinese are just a developing country incapable of such technological feats. But it behooves the rest of the world to keep a close eye on China's actions, given the nasty reasons that drive them and the chilling implications of their national sense of victimhood.
The real trick is to welcome China's arrival as a modern power, while curbing their deep desire to get revenge for past wrongs, real or imagined.
has not been invented. Not only does IM constantly interrupt your train of thought and derail productive activity, but it also sucks down minutes and minutes when a 15 second phone conversation would do.
Most technologies eventually find their useful niche, like text messaging being great when you're in a place where it's either too loud to hear a phone call or when breaking the silence would be rude. But IM, despite having been around since the earliest days (I remember using it with a friend in the early to mid-80's), seems to have persisted because it's what people do when they want to procrastinate.
I was a Metallica fan back in the day. Hearing Master of Puppets was blissful release from the Top-40 land I grew up in. When Napster came on the scene I downloaded all the bootlegs I could find; Napster was a fan's cornucopia, such as there has not been since. One fellow Metallica fan I downloaded from also had tracks from Plastic People of the Universe, which was one of the weirdest and most interesting bands I'd ever heard.
Then Lars testified that his fans were pirates, and joined the RIAA's jihad against music lovers everywhere. I took out all my Metallica albums and memorabilia and burned them.
There is nothing Metallica can do to get back in my good graces. I'm sure I'm not alone.
You can sort of understand cutting funding to things like behavioral sciences or research on frogs or something. Their benefits are not always obvious to the layman.
You can also, given their ideology, understand why they want to de-fund climate research. That sort of thing leads to uncomfortable implications about John and Jane Doe's lifestyle in the exurbs.
But de-fund particle physics? Really? The successors to the folks who brought you the wonders of the atom bomb and who do all kinds of cool death-ray and weapons-applicable research (roughly)? To put it in terms even Bush and Congress should understand, "You like the boom-boom? They make the boom-boom."
How is it they cannot grasp that de-funding these facilities leads directly and quickly to the loss of our technological and military edge?
It's bad enough that they killed the supercollider. But killing the last of our first-rate physics labs is just plain nuts.
For Pete's Sake!
on
I Will Derive
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Yes it was obvious and we've all seen a lot of stuff like it before, but it was still funny. Don't be a killjoy. It's Memorial Day weekend.
Mass transit in most cities in the United States is excellent for commuting, which constitutes most of the daily driving that most people do. Fewer cities have mass transit that can adequately substitute for car ownership (NYC, Boston, Chicago, DC, San Francisco). But as more people take to commuting by mass transit (as they are, thanks to $4/gal. gas), the incentive for cities to expand routes and service grows.
Other, local trips are generally under the 10mi. range. Bikes are excellent for this. Good for you, the environment, and the pocketbook too.
If you want to buy heavy things like furniture or lots of groceries, do what New Yorkers do and get it delivered. If it costs you a $50 delivery fee for the easy chair you picked out at Sears or a $4 tip to the guy who delivers the groceries, you're still saving vast amounts of money over doing all that by car.
There are exceptions, of course. The infirm and elderly will not be able to do this as ably as others (but the infirm and elderly seem to exist here in NYC also, so they must manage somehow). And there will be the odd person who lives in the middle of nowhere for whom there is no way to find mass transit or bike where they need to go.
But 90% or more of America's population is urban or suburban, so it's more a question of mindset and habit than reality or necessity.
There's very little worth watching, and what is, is available to watch by the season on DVD. With the key demo, males 18-35, spending more and more time playing GTA IV and Halo, the TV industry would be well-advised to stop poisoning the well. Else, in 10 years' time the only ones watching will be retired Baby Boomers who live on $800 of social security every month.
Due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was swallowed by a small dog.
In seriousness, I have a great and very cheap countermeasure against electronic insects, snakes, mice, etc.: cats. DARPA may spend billions developing these tiny surveillance critters, but nature has spent billions of years evolving an efficient hunter to eat them.
is an excuse that doesn't fly for 5-yr olds. Why should the administration, especially this administration, be allowed to get away with it?
Throw the book at 'em. History would have been happier if Al Capone had gone down for murder, conspiracy, extortion, and racketeering, but at least the income tax evasion charge took him down. That is, I would like to see these people impeached and sent to prison for the rest of their lives for human rights violations, the warrantless wiretapping, or any one of the other egregious crimes they've committed, but I'll settle for them going down for violating Federal law requiring the retention of public records.
36, sick of IT, bored to death with Interactive, looking to make a career change (into science, in my case). But to those sounding the heavy fear alarm here, you don't have to make six figures to live in this country, even now. If you can change careers to something you love but pays, say, $50K, then you're still making a lot more than the median wage in this country. You can live pretty well on that, because most people do.
Look, what things do you really need that you must make a lot of money to have? $100 steaks? A Maserati? Vacations in Monte Carlo? A steak is a steak, my friend. Your Nissan will get you to work through the inevitable traffic as fast as a Maserati ever would. And a beach is a beach, for crying out loud.
Keep food on the table and a roof over your head. For everything else, it's not worth your happiness or your life to waste it on something you hate. After all, you only get to do this once.
Life's too short to wake up and hate your life every day because you hate your job. Yes, you need to provide for your family, but beyond basics the most important thing you can pass on to your kids is your happiness, positive attitude, and general sense of well-being. If you feed them, clothe them, and house them but instill in them a deep sense of resentment, depression, and defeatism, then they will never be truly successful in their own lives.
So don't listen to the posts here telling you to suck it up and be a man--they're coming from men who've already made the wrong decision and are trying to drag you down with them. You owe it to your kids and yourself to follow your heart.
Consumers are abandoning physical media in droves; filesharing is way up; Radiohead, NIN, Madonna, and now Metallica (!) are eschewing the labels; and those who have been sued by the RIAA are starting to win cases and university law schools are turning beating the RIAA into class projects.
How long before the RIAA and the labels behind them vanish?
If/. implements new features, a deathwatch meter (like a/. poll, but ongoing) would be a fun one...
That the means of genetically finger-printing are not entirely beyond the means of the concerned public? We often like to think that government officials are more virtuous or more protected than the rest of us, but they're not. Somewhere, somehow, they must leave DNA residue behind, be it at a diner or fundraiser or prostitute's bed.
If we citizens resolve to track and catalogue them the way they do us, I think that we'd all quickly discover that the meme of holier-than-thou, upon which a policy like this rests, is a double-edged sword.
Yes, the government has ostensibly more money than we average citizens do. But the gap is not so enormous that it cannot be overcome. If we, as citizens of democracies, undertake the same level of vigilence toward our leaders that they mandate over us, then I believe we shall quickly find that the balance tips in our favor.
But more than our come-uppance, it is our duty to control those who supposedly work for us. Let's, as citizens, assert our employer's right to correct and discipline our employees in the government.
We're straddling one of those moments in history when technological advances are at odds with received social and political constructs. Information flow used to be controlled by a few with agendas. Now, due to technological advances, message control has largely gone out the window.
Naturally those who have a vested interest in the status quo, like Joe Biden or the *AA's, either in terms of identity or raw economic reality, will fight the ensuing changes tooth-and-nail. The traditional media, which has for centuries grown accustomed to controlling the public discourse, have been complicit in the effort to shut down the reality of changes on the ground.
It's no small source of consternation for those of us on the ground. But please take comfort in the knowledge and evidence that the tide of history and progress can't be ignored or reversed. The traditional powers-that-be know their time is drawing rapidly to a close and are fighting it, but even they, with all their accumulated power and influence, can't counter, in the end, the teenage girl downloading music files to her laptop.
The struggles will intensify over the next five years, but the traditional power brokers will collapse as suddenly as their influence seemed eternal and ineluctable. Recall: the Warsaw Pact never seemed so indomitable as the eve before they completely collapsed and people streamed across the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.
So fix your courage and resolve. The powers-that-be are fighting as hard as they can now, which means that they're about done. In a couple years they'll be gone, and we'll all breath easier.
Of a couple of weeks, hasn't it? The FBI faking evidence so that it can get Congress to give it the power to violate the Constitution over and over again. And this comes on top of revelations that the Vice President, National Security Advisor, and 4 other top members of the Administration actually sat in a room and choreographed how the CIA would torture people who fell into their clutches.
And yet, there's no hollering and screaming in the public for heads to roll. The Democratic majority in Congress, our supposed check on this kind of abuse, still does not call for impeachment.'
Soon, my friends, very soon, there will be little recourse but to converge on Washington DC and burn it to the ground.
But in the small hope that that can be avoided, please call and write your Congresspeople and demand impeachment for these and all the many other crimes they've committed.
It's ironic that in keeping Hillary's wikipedia page "clean," Schilling perpetuates the meme that the Clintons are always complaining about everyone picking on them whenever anyone calls them on their evasions, distortions, and whoppers.
The old, mainstream media destroyed their credibility and authority by doing five things:
1. Dumbed down their content by turning to celebrity gossip, etc. and cutting investigative reporting. 2. Turned to publishing corporate press releases almost verbatim 3. Began regurgitating Reuters/AP feeds for national/international stories instead of doing original reporting 4. Slashed local reporting in favor of the economies of scale of publishing the same news across multiple markets. 5. The owners and editors began spinning everything from a partisan perspective.
All of these things were done, of course, to maximize profits by cutting costs or pumping up mindshare through sensationalism.
Online sources of news/information, however, are evolving to a quality that's much greater than what the old media ever had. Let me explain:
What's happening with information online is happening to the process that we here on Slashdot already know works with similar public goods like Science and FOSS and Security. Let's call it "Peer Review." Yes, there's a lot of dross, but what's good quickly floats to the top.
And there might not be a single online site where you can get top-quality information on all topics, but that's fine. "jack of all trades, master of none" and all that. But there are at least several I know of that are worth the time: Slashdot for general geek news (I love reading an article about, say, cryogenics and then seeing posts from professionals who actually work in that field); Tom's Hardware; Stratfor for political/international/international relations. There is a lot of aggregation/regurgitation from the MSM, but increasingly from the primary sources journalists wouldn't bother to check or feign to understand as well as original research.
And if anything puff-piece-ish shows up on those sites, it almost always gets shot down in flames almost immediately. That wouldn't happen in the MSM, where the echo chamber picks up and repeats errors 10 million times so that when the real information does come out, it gets ignored because everyone's sick of hearing about it.
If the MSM were to sit down collectively and send all their reporters, journalists, and editors to re-education at the BBC, which was and still is the best that the old media had/has to offer, then they might have a shot at relevance. But they won't, and they'll vanish, and good riddance.
Yes, I have lived and studied in both Japan and China. In Beijing and Harbin, to be specific, at Capital Normal University and Harbin Institute of Technology. I speak Mandarin and Japanese and hold a Master's in Social Science (with a concentration on East Asian studies) from the University of Chicago. While in China, I also travelled and worked extensively with an ExIm factor, which bundles smaller accounts to meet lending minimums; I have spoken to a great many Chinese from all walks of life.
That said, my particular scholarly focus at the time was on contemporary efforts in China to syncretize two opposite Western epistemologies, Communism and Capitalism, on top of a substrata of traditional Chinese/Confucian values, not on an exhaustive study of Mao's follies. Frankly, I was not interested in a detailed study of Mao's actions (beyond the theoretical re-positioning of Communism in China from an urban proletariat to a rural peasantry and that's implications for my work), because even an intermediate acquaintance with the circumstances of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution aroused quite enough depression and revulsion.
But what I did hear often from my Chinese professors and middle-aged people who lived through the Maoist era were their personal experiences. One was a history professor who, as a young student in Beijing, was forced to go work at a lumber operation in Heilongjiang Province. To make their quotas he had to stand at the front entrance to the mill while they brought in a load of logs, took it out the back entrance, and circled back to the front to count it again. Was he lying? Did he misremember the details? Perhaps. But it being a story not terribly at odds with what I had read myself I took his word for it.
In such vein I heard and related the story about the songbirds, which I heard in that formulation on more than one occasion. That's why when I related it here, I called it an "anecdote," that is, something I heard but did not have scholarly knowledge of. Was the songbird part and Mao hating them urban legend or misremembered by my interlocutors? OK, maybe--I can't say with authority because I'm not an expert on the Great Sparrow Campaign. However, if you bothered to read the 2nd link I provided you it did say that autopsies were done on the sparrows and they were found to have died from cardiac arrest, ie. fear. So the story I heard about the campaign may have suffered exaggeration and thematic drift over time and re-telling, but there seem to be kernels of truth in it.
Was my original post too glib? OK, fair enough. But consider the venue--this is Slashdot and not an academic journal. The requirements of documentation are quite different. If that is not clear to you, then, as the Slashdot saying goes, "you must be new here."
But from the tone of your replies it seems the tripwire here is an injured sense of pan-Han nationalist pride that often obtains in the Chinese diaspora, which is lamentable but understandable when coming from someone who actually is Han, but which is arcane when it comes from those who are not. Submitting apologia for Chairman Mao could originate from almost no other place. Mao was directly responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese and the wanton destruction of countless, priceless items and sites resplendent with cultural heritage and achievement accumulated over thousands of years. The Long March, the anti-Japanese struggle, and victory over the Nationalists do not negate that. He has earned the scorn of history.
China is a complex and multi-layered place. There are tensions (North/South, urban/agrarian, elite/peasant, etc.) that run like fault lines across the country. There are seams of innovation that have produced marvelous technology, science, art, literature, and philosophy. It has been the scene of human achievement and great atrocities. Knowing that context is necessary, but I assert that affecting neutrality upon a given data set once its members are complete is disingenu
"As I recalled, my fellow students and I climbed onto some tall trees on the side of the road and banged our gongs, drums, washbasins and anything else that can make loud noises. The sparrows were forced to keep flying until they dropped dead from fatigue."
Beijing is not right next to the Gobi Desert, but it is downwind from it when the winds shift that way in the Spring. The rest of the year, it's not. But Beijing at any other time of the year, on a windy day the atmospheric effect is like being in a dust storm.
China's government is not comprised of idiots, but their ideologically-driven policies and lack of free and open discussion in a robust civil society lead to actions and results that are adverse to their own interests at a rate greater than that in countries that do have the ability to contest government policy.
The point of my post was that in China under the CCP, there is a history of trampling the environment for the sake of, previously, Mao's mass campaigns, and now, for the sake of rampant economic development. There is also a concommitant pattern of wildly over-engineering the environment when common sense would do. It is within that context that the story about cloud-seeding resonated.
So the post was a bit of a hip-shot. The above links and many more could have been initially provided, but it's Slashdot and the tone of the post was meant to be wry and few, even on this site, want to wade through a dissertation in response to every article. Thus, the comments were couched under the term, "anecdote."
But as an East Asian studies scholar who's lived there for significant swathes of time over the past 18 years, the comments were not pulled entirely out of thin air. Even a casual visitor to Japan can observe that many products have humorous names or sayings in English on them, such as Calpis Water or Poccari Sweat. Most people do not demand academic citation upon hearing about such a thing--they accept them for what they are: anecdotes.
It was in that spirit that the stories were relayed.
of three anecdotes about China and the environment.
The first was from the Lonely Planet's China guide, wherein one of the contributors said he was an avid jogger who moved to Beijing. Upon discovering the poor air quality, he decided it was better for his health to stop jogging.
The second was the funny and sad story of the fate of songbirds in Beijing. Apparently, Chairman Mao hated them. So he commanded all the citizens of the city to go outside and bang on pots and pans. The birds, scared by the racket, flew around and around until they dropped dead out of the sky from exhaustion. Subsequently, the insect population soared without the birds to keep them in check.
A reasonable person might have concluded that they should bring back the birds and restore equilibrium, but not Mao. He then decreed that since insects were breeding in the grass and vegetation in the capitol, that everyone should turn out and uproot all the plants and soak the trees down with DDT (a practice which continues to this day, in fact). Then, with no ground-level vegetation around, the city began to experience vexing dust storms.
The Chinese Communist Party efficiently proclaimed it a consequence of being downwind from the massive Soviet industrial complexes in Siberia.
The third anecdote involves the Three Gorges Dam. When the it looked like the CCP would put the plans into action, scientists and experts from around the world unanimously proclaimed it a Bad Idea. It would wipe out endangered species. It would erase one of the two greatest cultural and scenic features of China: the Three Gorges are somewhat analogous to the Grand Canyon and have inspired Chinese poets and artists for thousands of years. It would prove ineffective in generating power over the long run due to the rapid silting up of the reservoir. It would dislocate millions of people pushed out by the rising waters. It would create a potential disaster for the people living downstream (including Shanghai, one of the most densely populated cities in the world), because the dam itself was built across several faults.
But the CCP went ahead, because nature and man must be subsumed beneath the needs of the proletariat. Now it turns out, once the reservoir is filling, that all those concerns were true. For instance, the increased weight of water in the reservoir above the fault lines has accelerated the number of temblors. Also, with restricted water flow, regions downstream are experiencing drought (an unexpected consequence). And with the reduced water flow, pollution has become more concentrated and caused public health problems. And the last unexpected consequence is that the increased water levels in the reservoir have triggered all kinds of landslides.
In short, China's approach to the environment is nothing short of a disaster. And unhappily for them, the effects of the disaster are immediately felt and born by the rank-and-file Chinese, given the high population density. Yet because of the totalitarian presence of the CCP and its totalizing ideology and propaganda, the country and its people are unable to efficiently evaluate proposals and effectively respond to problems.
It's sad, because the Chinese are an incredibly inventive and resourceful group. They've given so much to the world. One wonders what they could achieve in a free and open society. But alas, they have, at least for the time being, chosen to handicap themselves with a system that turns all their genius to idiocy.
The rest of us should observe, and take notes for our own societies.
Slashdot Mirror
I read it too, and it's just great that Obama wants to have a Whitehouse that takes the Constitution seriously. But you know what? I don't want my rights to depend on the whim of one man. I don't want our freedom to dangle by the frayed thread of Executive dispensation. I want our freedom and rights to be protected by the Law! I want the system of checks and balances that has preserved them for 200+ years to be respected and enforced.
The President, Vice President, many in his administration, and the telcos broke the law. They committed multiple, egregious crimes. They must be brought to justice, and Congress must do the bringing.
Swear to god, what this FISA crap tells this citizen is that as of today, the Law means nothing. Our rights and freedoms are now naked to the depredations of cowards and tyrants.
The more industry tries to lock down TV broadcasts and equipment, the more moms and dads and grandparents they confuse when they can't watch their programs. That in turn drives the young'uns, who get the calls from the confused parents, to just burn them restriction-free copies from BitTorrent. Or, neither party bothers and they stop watching TV altogether and go hang out with friends instead--nothing worth watching anyway.
The MSM are getting desperate, folks, because they can see this writing on the wall. Though the Internet freight train has been coming at them for a while, most of them ignored it hoping it would go away or that some technical lock would magically save them. They refused to learn how to adapt. So now they're pulling stuff like this and like what the AP is doing (trying to lock down their content through the courts by declaring it illegal to link to their content or quote them at all).
Bonfire of the Vanities...
China has a lot of people. Most of them are poor and undereducated. But the Party has been cherry picking the country's best and brightest for 40 years now, sending them to the best schools and universities in China, and then to the best foreign universities. Those people are as competent as engineers and scientists as any from the rest of the world.
Unfortunately given the system and ideology they're raised in, they largely possess an aggrieved sense of innate superiority to everyone else. In their eyes, Western countries, Japan, South Korea, and a handful of others have gotten where they are by cheating, essentially. Likewise China has "fallen behind" ("luohouzhuyi"--"fallen-behind-ism") because Western countries, Japan, and others have been engaged in a conspiracy to keep them down.
They're wrong, of course, just as are those who buy the line that Chinese are just a developing country incapable of such technological feats. But it behooves the rest of the world to keep a close eye on China's actions, given the nasty reasons that drive them and the chilling implications of their national sense of victimhood.
The real trick is to welcome China's arrival as a modern power, while curbing their deep desire to get revenge for past wrongs, real or imagined.
The Chinese have yet to invent anything remotely resembling a decent breakfast. (Thin rice gruel does not count)
has not been invented. Not only does IM constantly interrupt your train of thought and derail productive activity, but it also sucks down minutes and minutes when a 15 second phone conversation would do.
Most technologies eventually find their useful niche, like text messaging being great when you're in a place where it's either too loud to hear a phone call or when breaking the silence would be rude. But IM, despite having been around since the earliest days (I remember using it with a friend in the early to mid-80's), seems to have persisted because it's what people do when they want to procrastinate.
I was a Metallica fan back in the day. Hearing Master of Puppets was blissful release from the Top-40 land I grew up in. When Napster came on the scene I downloaded all the bootlegs I could find; Napster was a fan's cornucopia, such as there has not been since. One fellow Metallica fan I downloaded from also had tracks from Plastic People of the Universe, which was one of the weirdest and most interesting bands I'd ever heard.
Then Lars testified that his fans were pirates, and joined the RIAA's jihad against music lovers everywhere. I took out all my Metallica albums and memorabilia and burned them.
There is nothing Metallica can do to get back in my good graces. I'm sure I'm not alone.
You can sort of understand cutting funding to things like behavioral sciences or research on frogs or something. Their benefits are not always obvious to the layman.
You can also, given their ideology, understand why they want to de-fund climate research. That sort of thing leads to uncomfortable implications about John and Jane Doe's lifestyle in the exurbs.
But de-fund particle physics? Really? The successors to the folks who brought you the wonders of the atom bomb and who do all kinds of cool death-ray and weapons-applicable research (roughly)? To put it in terms even Bush and Congress should understand, "You like the boom-boom? They make the boom-boom."
How is it they cannot grasp that de-funding these facilities leads directly and quickly to the loss of our technological and military edge?
It's bad enough that they killed the supercollider. But killing the last of our first-rate physics labs is just plain nuts.
Yes it was obvious and we've all seen a lot of stuff like it before, but it was still funny. Don't be a killjoy. It's Memorial Day weekend.
Go outside and play or something!
Mass transit in most cities in the United States is excellent for commuting, which constitutes most of the daily driving that most people do. Fewer cities have mass transit that can adequately substitute for car ownership (NYC, Boston, Chicago, DC, San Francisco). But as more people take to commuting by mass transit (as they are, thanks to $4/gal. gas), the incentive for cities to expand routes and service grows.
Other, local trips are generally under the 10mi. range. Bikes are excellent for this. Good for you, the environment, and the pocketbook too.
If you want to buy heavy things like furniture or lots of groceries, do what New Yorkers do and get it delivered. If it costs you a $50 delivery fee for the easy chair you picked out at Sears or a $4 tip to the guy who delivers the groceries, you're still saving vast amounts of money over doing all that by car.
There are exceptions, of course. The infirm and elderly will not be able to do this as ably as others (but the infirm and elderly seem to exist here in NYC also, so they must manage somehow). And there will be the odd person who lives in the middle of nowhere for whom there is no way to find mass transit or bike where they need to go.
But 90% or more of America's population is urban or suburban, so it's more a question of mindset and habit than reality or necessity.
There's very little worth watching, and what is, is available to watch by the season on DVD. With the key demo, males 18-35, spending more and more time playing GTA IV and Halo, the TV industry would be well-advised to stop poisoning the well. Else, in 10 years' time the only ones watching will be retired Baby Boomers who live on $800 of social security every month.
Due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was swallowed by a small dog.
In seriousness, I have a great and very cheap countermeasure against electronic insects, snakes, mice, etc.: cats. DARPA may spend billions developing these tiny surveillance critters, but nature has spent billions of years evolving an efficient hunter to eat them.
is an excuse that doesn't fly for 5-yr olds. Why should the administration, especially this administration, be allowed to get away with it?
Throw the book at 'em. History would have been happier if Al Capone had gone down for murder, conspiracy, extortion, and racketeering, but at least the income tax evasion charge took him down. That is, I would like to see these people impeached and sent to prison for the rest of their lives for human rights violations, the warrantless wiretapping, or any one of the other egregious crimes they've committed, but I'll settle for them going down for violating Federal law requiring the retention of public records.
36, sick of IT, bored to death with Interactive, looking to make a career change (into science, in my case). But to those sounding the heavy fear alarm here, you don't have to make six figures to live in this country, even now. If you can change careers to something you love but pays, say, $50K, then you're still making a lot more than the median wage in this country. You can live pretty well on that, because most people do.
Look, what things do you really need that you must make a lot of money to have? $100 steaks? A Maserati? Vacations in Monte Carlo? A steak is a steak, my friend. Your Nissan will get you to work through the inevitable traffic as fast as a Maserati ever would. And a beach is a beach, for crying out loud.
Keep food on the table and a roof over your head. For everything else, it's not worth your happiness or your life to waste it on something you hate. After all, you only get to do this once.
Life's too short to wake up and hate your life every day because you hate your job. Yes, you need to provide for your family, but beyond basics the most important thing you can pass on to your kids is your happiness, positive attitude, and general sense of well-being. If you feed them, clothe them, and house them but instill in them a deep sense of resentment, depression, and defeatism, then they will never be truly successful in their own lives.
So don't listen to the posts here telling you to suck it up and be a man--they're coming from men who've already made the wrong decision and are trying to drag you down with them. You owe it to your kids and yourself to follow your heart.
Consumers are abandoning physical media in droves; filesharing is way up; Radiohead, NIN, Madonna, and now Metallica (!) are eschewing the labels; and those who have been sued by the RIAA are starting to win cases and university law schools are turning beating the RIAA into class projects.
/. implements new features, a deathwatch meter (like a /. poll, but ongoing) would be a fun one...
How long before the RIAA and the labels behind them vanish?
If
That the means of genetically finger-printing are not entirely beyond the means of the concerned public? We often like to think that government officials are more virtuous or more protected than the rest of us, but they're not. Somewhere, somehow, they must leave DNA residue behind, be it at a diner or fundraiser or prostitute's bed.
If we citizens resolve to track and catalogue them the way they do us, I think that we'd all quickly discover that the meme of holier-than-thou, upon which a policy like this rests, is a double-edged sword.
Yes, the government has ostensibly more money than we average citizens do. But the gap is not so enormous that it cannot be overcome. If we, as citizens of democracies, undertake the same level of vigilence toward our leaders that they mandate over us, then I believe we shall quickly find that the balance tips in our favor.
But more than our come-uppance, it is our duty to control those who supposedly work for us. Let's, as citizens, assert our employer's right to correct and discipline our employees in the government.
We're straddling one of those moments in history when technological advances are at odds with received social and political constructs. Information flow used to be controlled by a few with agendas. Now, due to technological advances, message control has largely gone out the window.
Naturally those who have a vested interest in the status quo, like Joe Biden or the *AA's, either in terms of identity or raw economic reality, will fight the ensuing changes tooth-and-nail. The traditional media, which has for centuries grown accustomed to controlling the public discourse, have been complicit in the effort to shut down the reality of changes on the ground.
It's no small source of consternation for those of us on the ground. But please take comfort in the knowledge and evidence that the tide of history and progress can't be ignored or reversed. The traditional powers-that-be know their time is drawing rapidly to a close and are fighting it, but even they, with all their accumulated power and influence, can't counter, in the end, the teenage girl downloading music files to her laptop.
The struggles will intensify over the next five years, but the traditional power brokers will collapse as suddenly as their influence seemed eternal and ineluctable. Recall: the Warsaw Pact never seemed so indomitable as the eve before they completely collapsed and people streamed across the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.
So fix your courage and resolve. The powers-that-be are fighting as hard as they can now, which means that they're about done. In a couple years they'll be gone, and we'll all breath easier.
Of a couple of weeks, hasn't it? The FBI faking evidence so that it can get Congress to give it the power to violate the Constitution over and over again. And this comes on top of revelations that the Vice President, National Security Advisor, and 4 other top members of the Administration actually sat in a room and choreographed how the CIA would torture people who fell into their clutches.
And yet, there's no hollering and screaming in the public for heads to roll. The Democratic majority in Congress, our supposed check on this kind of abuse, still does not call for impeachment.'
Soon, my friends, very soon, there will be little recourse but to converge on Washington DC and burn it to the ground.
But in the small hope that that can be avoided, please call and write your Congresspeople and demand impeachment for these and all the many other crimes they've committed.
Sounds like a feminine hygiene product.
See, I checked into the thread figuring, Slashdot, Engineers, Terrorism = Hilarity.
I was not disappointed. Sometimes, you just know.
It's ironic that in keeping Hillary's wikipedia page "clean," Schilling perpetuates the meme that the Clintons are always complaining about everyone picking on them whenever anyone calls them on their evasions, distortions, and whoppers.
The old, mainstream media destroyed their credibility and authority by doing five things:
1. Dumbed down their content by turning to celebrity gossip, etc. and cutting investigative reporting.
2. Turned to publishing corporate press releases almost verbatim
3. Began regurgitating Reuters/AP feeds for national/international stories instead of doing original reporting
4. Slashed local reporting in favor of the economies of scale of publishing the same news across multiple markets.
5. The owners and editors began spinning everything from a partisan perspective.
All of these things were done, of course, to maximize profits by cutting costs or pumping up mindshare through sensationalism.
Online sources of news/information, however, are evolving to a quality that's much greater than what the old media ever had. Let me explain:
What's happening with information online is happening to the process that we here on Slashdot already know works with similar public goods like Science and FOSS and Security. Let's call it "Peer Review." Yes, there's a lot of dross, but what's good quickly floats to the top.
And there might not be a single online site where you can get top-quality information on all topics, but that's fine. "jack of all trades, master of none" and all that. But there are at least several I know of that are worth the time: Slashdot for general geek news (I love reading an article about, say, cryogenics and then seeing posts from professionals who actually work in that field); Tom's Hardware; Stratfor for political/international/international relations. There is a lot of aggregation/regurgitation from the MSM, but increasingly from the primary sources journalists wouldn't bother to check or feign to understand as well as original research.
And if anything puff-piece-ish shows up on those sites, it almost always gets shot down in flames almost immediately. That wouldn't happen in the MSM, where the echo chamber picks up and repeats errors 10 million times so that when the real information does come out, it gets ignored because everyone's sick of hearing about it.
If the MSM were to sit down collectively and send all their reporters, journalists, and editors to re-education at the BBC, which was and still is the best that the old media had/has to offer, then they might have a shot at relevance. But they won't, and they'll vanish, and good riddance.
Yes, I have lived and studied in both Japan and China. In Beijing and Harbin, to be specific, at Capital Normal University and Harbin Institute of Technology. I speak Mandarin and Japanese and hold a Master's in Social Science (with a concentration on East Asian studies) from the University of Chicago. While in China, I also travelled and worked extensively with an ExIm factor, which bundles smaller accounts to meet lending minimums; I have spoken to a great many Chinese from all walks of life.
That said, my particular scholarly focus at the time was on contemporary efforts in China to syncretize two opposite Western epistemologies, Communism and Capitalism, on top of a substrata of traditional Chinese/Confucian values, not on an exhaustive study of Mao's follies. Frankly, I was not interested in a detailed study of Mao's actions (beyond the theoretical re-positioning of Communism in China from an urban proletariat to a rural peasantry and that's implications for my work), because even an intermediate acquaintance with the circumstances of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution aroused quite enough depression and revulsion.
But what I did hear often from my Chinese professors and middle-aged people who lived through the Maoist era were their personal experiences. One was a history professor who, as a young student in Beijing, was forced to go work at a lumber operation in Heilongjiang Province. To make their quotas he had to stand at the front entrance to the mill while they brought in a load of logs, took it out the back entrance, and circled back to the front to count it again. Was he lying? Did he misremember the details? Perhaps. But it being a story not terribly at odds with what I had read myself I took his word for it.
In such vein I heard and related the story about the songbirds, which I heard in that formulation on more than one occasion. That's why when I related it here, I called it an "anecdote," that is, something I heard but did not have scholarly knowledge of. Was the songbird part and Mao hating them urban legend or misremembered by my interlocutors? OK, maybe--I can't say with authority because I'm not an expert on the Great Sparrow Campaign. However, if you bothered to read the 2nd link I provided you it did say that autopsies were done on the sparrows and they were found to have died from cardiac arrest, ie. fear. So the story I heard about the campaign may have suffered exaggeration and thematic drift over time and re-telling, but there seem to be kernels of truth in it.
Was my original post too glib? OK, fair enough. But consider the venue--this is Slashdot and not an academic journal. The requirements of documentation are quite different. If that is not clear to you, then, as the Slashdot saying goes, "you must be new here."
But from the tone of your replies it seems the tripwire here is an injured sense of pan-Han nationalist pride that often obtains in the Chinese diaspora, which is lamentable but understandable when coming from someone who actually is Han, but which is arcane when it comes from those who are not. Submitting apologia for Chairman Mao could originate from almost no other place. Mao was directly responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese and the wanton destruction of countless, priceless items and sites resplendent with cultural heritage and achievement accumulated over thousands of years. The Long March, the anti-Japanese struggle, and victory over the Nationalists do not negate that. He has earned the scorn of history.
China is a complex and multi-layered place. There are tensions (North/South, urban/agrarian, elite/peasant, etc.) that run like fault lines across the country. There are seams of innovation that have produced marvelous technology, science, art, literature, and philosophy. It has been the scene of human achievement and great atrocities. Knowing that context is necessary, but I assert that affecting neutrality upon a given data set once its members are complete is disingenu
As requested, documentation:
RE: killing the birds:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_sparrow_campaign
"It was decided that all the peasants in China should bang pots and pans and run around to make the sparrows fly away in fear."
Eye witness account of Great Sparrow Campaign:
http://zonaeuropa.com/20061130_1.htm
"As I recalled, my fellow students and I climbed onto some tall trees on the side of the road and banged our gongs, drums, washbasins and anything else that can make loud noises. The sparrows were forced to keep flying until they dropped dead from fatigue."
Beijing is not right next to the Gobi Desert, but it is downwind from it when the winds shift that way in the Spring. The rest of the year, it's not. But Beijing at any other time of the year, on a windy day the atmospheric effect is like being in a dust storm.
RE: Air quality in Beijing
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:HjyJWuowpeUJ:www.usembassy-china.org.cn/sandt/estnews0915.htm+beijing+air+quality+ranking&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=21&gl=us
"Beijing ranked second-worst out of 47 Chinese cities in a 1999 SEPA air pollution ranking "
RE: Concerns with the Three Gorges:
(from 2001)
http://www.arch.mcgill.ca/prof/sijpkes/arch374/winter2001/dbiggs/three.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam
For good measure, a couple links on deforestation in China:
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/pcs/state/chinaeco/forest.htm
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=19203227
China's government is not comprised of idiots, but their ideologically-driven policies and lack of free and open discussion in a robust civil society lead to actions and results that are adverse to their own interests at a rate greater than that in countries that do have the ability to contest government policy.
The point of my post was that in China under the CCP, there is a history of trampling the environment for the sake of, previously, Mao's mass campaigns, and now, for the sake of rampant economic development. There is also a concommitant pattern of wildly over-engineering the environment when common sense would do. It is within that context that the story about cloud-seeding resonated.
So the post was a bit of a hip-shot. The above links and many more could have been initially provided, but it's Slashdot and the tone of the post was meant to be wry and few, even on this site, want to wade through a dissertation in response to every article. Thus, the comments were couched under the term, "anecdote."
But as an East Asian studies scholar who's lived there for significant swathes of time over the past 18 years, the comments were not pulled entirely out of thin air. Even a casual visitor to Japan can observe that many products have humorous names or sayings in English on them, such as Calpis Water or Poccari Sweat. Most people do not demand academic citation upon hearing about such a thing--they accept them for what they are: anecdotes.
It was in that spirit that the stories were relayed.
of three anecdotes about China and the environment.
The first was from the Lonely Planet's China guide, wherein one of the contributors said he was an avid jogger who moved to Beijing. Upon discovering the poor air quality, he decided it was better for his health to stop jogging.
The second was the funny and sad story of the fate of songbirds in Beijing. Apparently, Chairman Mao hated them. So he commanded all the citizens of the city to go outside and bang on pots and pans. The birds, scared by the racket, flew around and around until they dropped dead out of the sky from exhaustion. Subsequently, the insect population soared without the birds to keep them in check.
A reasonable person might have concluded that they should bring back the birds and restore equilibrium, but not Mao. He then decreed that since insects were breeding in the grass and vegetation in the capitol, that everyone should turn out and uproot all the plants and soak the trees down with DDT (a practice which continues to this day, in fact). Then, with no ground-level vegetation around, the city began to experience vexing dust storms.
The Chinese Communist Party efficiently proclaimed it a consequence of being downwind from the massive Soviet industrial complexes in Siberia.
The third anecdote involves the Three Gorges Dam. When the it looked like the CCP would put the plans into action, scientists and experts from around the world unanimously proclaimed it a Bad Idea. It would wipe out endangered species. It would erase one of the two greatest cultural and scenic features of China: the Three Gorges are somewhat analogous to the Grand Canyon and have inspired Chinese poets and artists for thousands of years. It would prove ineffective in generating power over the long run due to the rapid silting up of the reservoir. It would dislocate millions of people pushed out by the rising waters. It would create a potential disaster for the people living downstream (including Shanghai, one of the most densely populated cities in the world), because the dam itself was built across several faults.
But the CCP went ahead, because nature and man must be subsumed beneath the needs of the proletariat. Now it turns out, once the reservoir is filling, that all those concerns were true. For instance, the increased weight of water in the reservoir above the fault lines has accelerated the number of temblors. Also, with restricted water flow, regions downstream are experiencing drought (an unexpected consequence). And with the reduced water flow, pollution has become more concentrated and caused public health problems. And the last unexpected consequence is that the increased water levels in the reservoir have triggered all kinds of landslides.
In short, China's approach to the environment is nothing short of a disaster. And unhappily for them, the effects of the disaster are immediately felt and born by the rank-and-file Chinese, given the high population density. Yet because of the totalitarian presence of the CCP and its totalizing ideology and propaganda, the country and its people are unable to efficiently evaluate proposals and effectively respond to problems.
It's sad, because the Chinese are an incredibly inventive and resourceful group. They've given so much to the world. One wonders what they could achieve in a free and open society. But alas, they have, at least for the time being, chosen to handicap themselves with a system that turns all their genius to idiocy.
The rest of us should observe, and take notes for our own societies.