One of the most annoying things I find about Slashdot is the immediate reflexive response to regard an article as either 'for' or 'against' issue X. As soon as I saw that an old Brittanica writer had commented on Wikipedia I could guess the shape of the Slashdot debate, without even knowing what the Brittanica fellow had said.
I have read his comments, and as a not insignificant Wikipedia contributor, I have to say they're correct: he gets it. He does not regard Wikipedia as a useless adventure, but he does not trust (have ) that the collaborative process will necessarily produce excellent-quality articles.
I have to say I agree. I admire the idea that quality is a sought-after goal, but such efforts as the Collaboration of the Week succeed only because Wikipedians focus their attentions on a given article closely for a short period of time.
I have seen too many articles that are confusing and disorganized at a meta-level. A simple factual error invites itself to be corrected, and therefore will be corrected, but restructuring a whole article when you know someone may come along and violate your scheme tomorrow is a discouraging thing.
As well, too many articles on controversial subjects end up being a confusing mismash of argument against or for the point in question. This is particularly the case for recent controversial political figures. I'm happy all the information is there, but I will not believe that the collaborative process will naturally produce an article that covers the issue fairly.
I view the Wikipedia as analogous to a probabalistic algorithm in computer science (e.g. a probabalistic primality testing algorithm). Such an algorithm is true most of the time, and can be a hell of a lot faster than the always-true deterministic algorithm.
Those who criticize the algorithm's potential for falseness miss the fact that its nondeterminism gives it great power, but its proponents should never forget that it is not deterministic.
Replace that with: "Forward only what isn't spam, and make Google replace spam with their own spam for you." It's an ad-based service, after all, so they just replace regular "online pharmeci" ads with Google "online pharmeci" ads. Just because the ads are targeted, doesn't mean they are not annoying.
I won't use the service if Google actually changes my messages incoming, or if using it requires me to sign up to get periodic spam from Google.
Even so, though, I imagine Google-generated spam would be far less of a nuisance than sifting through hundreds of penis enhancement ads. The spam filtering is the only reason I use gmail for anything.
Then, again, by now my eyes are trained not to pay attention to ads on a Web page - so much so that if you ask me what the ad was on the page I just looked at, I honestly couldn't tell you. If anyone told me ten years ago I'd be able to filter information like that, I'd laugh in his face.
Is it really that new? I do the same filtration with magazines and newspapers, none of which have changed that much in the last ten years.
I get annoyed occasionally with those newpaper ads where the advertiser has tried to make it look like a newspaper article. I'm sure you know the kind: similar font, letter size, etc. to a regular article but you can tell something's a little off even before you start reading, then you spot the little "Advertisement" in small print near the top.
My annoyance stems from the idea that the advertiser is being presumptous enough to try to fool my automatic ad-avoidance habit. This goes to show how far these skills have become reflexive in me, and I doubt I'm atypical.
The funny thing about this is that it uses the polite form of the second-person, Sie. So it's as though you said, "Please, sir, bite my shiny metal donkey".
I really don't see the big fuss, whether God created the world one way or another, it doesn't affect the core basis of my beliefs. This has little to do with morality and my day to day life.
It does turn out to be a lively debate that can go on for hours between two opinionated people. And my guess is that those two people usually care more about looking smarter than the other, than they care about their beliefs and Morality.
Sure, what belief someone chooses to hold is of little consequence to me. From my perspective, if one wants to wilfully blind oneself to all available fact and believe the creationist hythothesis, by all means go ahead.
What I object is to the advocacy of the creationist hypothesis as being on an equal or near-equal footing with evolution, for example in school textbooks.
I recall a particularly bad example in a history text, printed in the USA, that we used in Grade 10. It had something like 20 chapters, and chapter 3 was supposed to cover the prehistoric life of the planet Earth; however, there were in fact two "chapter 3"s, chapter 3a, covering evolution. and chapter 3b, covering various creationist hypotheses.
I had not been previously exposed to these, and could not believe someone had seen fit to include them. One theory described attempted to explain why certain animals are only found in particular layers in sedimentary rock (the evolutionary explanation being, of course, that the layers of rock represent the time span in which a given animal at certain species lived). Its argument was that during the Great Flood, some animals could swim better than others, so the worst swimmers were the first to die and be deposited at the sea bottom, where they then became fossilized. However, it was nowhere explained why fish "died" before, say, dinosaurs.
Sure, if the storry was about USA internet cafes, I would imediatly think about used as a pretext.
Perhaps I would too, but I doubt it. The USA is a hell of lot freer than China. China is a lot better than it was even twenty years ago, but do I really need to list the ways it which it is less open than the USA?
With which right do you asume that every action of an authority in China is: antidemocratic, anti human rights, anti free information?
I didn't say I assumed that. I was saying
Isn't USA the country where some guy who is rich, convicted of driving drunk and committing a "murder", also dull and boring, able to be president?
I think *you* have more problems than China trying to get minors away from playing violent games.
Oh ho, I see! The 'you' in your comment is the USA. That's super. I object to two things here:
1) Your strange idea that simply being a citizen of a country which had Bush as a president would disqualify one from being able to criticize or discuss potential abuses towards democracy in any other country.
The US government does suck right now. But that suckiness is the fault of the people at large, not any one American, and in any case the suckiness is (still, thankfully) not significant in comparison to, for example, Belarus.
2) With which 'right' to you assume I'm American? I'm not. To repeat: ich bin nicht Americaner.
In german we have a saying: clear your own front garden, before you attempt to clear your neighbours.
Here's one back: Don't leap to conclusions. You read some random English-speaking guy on some website suggest a sinister interpretation of a foreign government action, and you conclude I'm not just an American but a jingoistic, gung-ho pro-Bush American. I'm pretty damn far from being either.
It is obvious that most of the mainstream press has a left wing slant to it.
Sigh, this is such a tedious argument to make. No, actually it is not that obvious that most of the mainstream press has a left wing slant to it.
In particular, I think this is false. Every time I watch a Buffalo station, or read foxnews.com (or even CNN) online, I am shocked by the unquestioning acceptance of statements by the government, the rarity of critical opinion being found easily in newspapers or mainstream news sites, the ridiculous lack of coverage of big stories (Why was Al Qaa'qa not a bigger issue before? Why is all the crazy Diebold crap not a bigger issue now??) that I would simply not expect to find even here in Canada.
I'm a bit of a lefty, even for Canada. I do think that even we here have a ridiculously biased right-wing media (thank you, Conrad Black and Izzy Asper).
So you can just imagine what I think of Fox News!
The thing is, my opinions are not freakish crazy ones. I am prohably well within the centre of the political spectrum for my demographic. I just don't understand why my views would be regarded as so freakish in the U.S.
What is so bloody wrong with universal health care? Gay marraige? Gun control?
I don't expect anyone who disagrees to be converted, but I think at the very least that fewer Americans should regard these issues as so freakish as to be not even worth debate.
Quite the contrary. Regardless of their bias, Fox reports the same news as every other mainstream media outlet. They are not tabloid, as far as tabloids go.
Maybe the same as every other mainstream American media outlet, but there is a hell of lot of news they don't report on.
As well, Fox News tends to have a habit of covering stories on issues which could be politically damaging for the Republican Party only after the stories have gained enough momentum in other media that they can no longer be ignored.
The last thing a country under threat of invasion needs is weapons inspectors letting the enemy know that the country doesn't have anything to defend itself with.
Perhaps, but had the weapons inspectors told everyone that no, they were convinced that Iraq had no WMDs, then the whole justification for the invasion would be lost, too.
It looks like the US allowed the weapons inspectors to do enough to be sure that Iraq could not repel an invasion or retaliate against its invaders.
Nah, I don't think the U.S. cared about the practical intelligence value of the weapons inspectors' reports. The weapons inspections were simply a part of the diplomacy game which sought to justify the invasion, convince hostile nations to do nothing and friendly nations to come on board with the U.S.
so, its either believe saddam hussein, a known liar, who was actively attempting to deceive the un and the weapons inspectors or use force to find out what the truth really was.
Well, as a third option they also could have continued with the weapons inspections. Saddam was actually being fairly compliant with his entire country surrounded by hostile armies.
As far as I know, democracies are always biased toward the majority. If they weren't, it wouldn't be a democracy.
I suppose we could normalize votes between minorities and majorities. But what are you goint to do when every election gets normalized to a tie?
You missed my point, which was the winner-takes-all approach which most States use in selecting delegates to the electoral College is biased towards "the majority".
The usual counterexample, to make things crystal clear, is to suppose parties A and B are contesting for seats in a parliament. In every electoral distrinct, A wins 51% of the vote and B 49%. So A gets 100% of the seats with 51% of the vote.
This is an extreme example, but illustrative of the faults of the first-past-the-post system.
There are many faults commonly listed against a proportional-representation system for seats in a parliament. But when the vote is for a single individual (like the president) it would seem to offer many advantages over the first-past-the-post system.
But to argue, as Cobb and the grandparent poster seem to, that attempting to protect the interest of rural folks is 'racist' is really, I think, a reductio ad absurdum of the whole concept of majoritarian democracy.
I was the grandparent poster. As I said, I have interest in defending the claims I listed.
I was merely countering the claim that there "was no racial argument to be made, not even an obviously specious one."
Intriguingly, a take-off on this same technique of mixing up the incompatible, or doublespeak as Orwell would have it, was used in the thirties as we can plainly see from the acronym Z in the acronym NAZI which stood for Zocialismus or something like that.
The abbreviation Nazi comes from German Nationalsozialistische, "national socialist".
So, the rhetorical strategy, crude as it is, remains the same basically. Just mix up anything that you imagine is popular or unpopular and use it as a blunt weapon to force your position by any means. The Republican Party has a staff that specializes in just such techniques and they've been remarkable successful in their efforts up to this point.
You're not at all clear in what you mean here. Are you saying the Republican party mixes up socialism and fascism to make something more palatable for the "lower class, uneducated types"?
I think instead that they are guilty of the opposite; using the word "socialist" (or even "liberal") to paint their opponents as being of the same political stripe as Mao or Stalin.
Oooh, you lost me at "I'm a colossal dumbass." People who use the word "racist" when there is absolutely no racial argument to be made whatsoever--not even an obviously specious one--are not worth our time or attention.
Well, one could argue plausibly that, because the Electoral College gives greater representation to rural areas than urban ones, that it is unfairly biased towards whites simply because few people of color live in rural areas.
Further, one could argue plausibly that since most states have a winner-takes-all approach to electing Electoral College representatives, that their systems are unfairly biased towards "the majority", which is in many cases white European descendants.
I have no interest in defending these claim, but you could make them. One does not need to have poll taxes or segregated waiting rooms to have racism.
I'd rather have this country run by people who want the paycheck then people who want the power.
I swear, I just don't get it.
Here we see two perfect examples of the myth of the American dream, and not only are they back-toback, they're even raised in opposition to each other. It's like seeing two physicists argue with differential equations over the beauty of a sunset.
The "if you don't like it, then run yourself" meme is shortsighted. Now, I would not like its opposite ("you can't do anything no matter what you try") to become more popular than it is, but in this age, when the amount which a candidate has spent on an election has a ridiculously high correlation with his chance of winning it, it naive to believe that running in an election has a hope of change.
There are other options: you could become a professional lobbyist or activist, or a full-blown revolutionary. These may seem unpalatable, but the longer elections are won by the strong and the rich, the more attractive they will be.
The other shortsighted meme is that "money attracts competence". This is, obviously, a meme beloved of the rich, since it serves to justify their current state.
I just don't buy it. There are simply two many very rich people who are ridiculously corrupt and ineffective, and they aren't all lazy frat boys who are just sitting on their ancestors' money. Many of them "climbed the ladder", and were ultimately revealed to be hideously corrupt after their attainment of high status.
We have to realize that, though money and leadership competence are correlated, that the correlation is not perfect, and money should not be used as a measure of leadership quality.
Re:When did the Communists take over outer space?
on
Lawyers In Space...
·
· Score: 1
Or, you could simly have googled it yourself.
Well, it wasn't at all clear to me that it was the Plymouth Rock settlement you were talking about (though that was suggested by the term 'pilgrim'), and I didn't want to read through all the Google hits for North American colonization.
A lot of times I want to go to a sight but I don't like having it stay in my address bar. Going into the registry to delete one url is a bitch (using ie).
Hmm? What about
Tools -> Internet Options -> Clear History
??
Re:When did the Communists take over outer space?
on
Lawyers In Space...
·
· Score: 1
Actually, in the latter case it was. The pilgrims initially attempted a communist-style society - from each according to his means, to each accoreding to his needs. They nearly starved to death. The next season they switched to a more capitalistic system and wound up with a surplus.
On the other hand, his website is at a.dk (Danish) address, so it's fairly likely he's not a native English speaker. If so, he deserves more slack than the average Slashdotter.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the most annoying things I find about Slashdot is the immediate reflexive response to regard an article as either 'for' or 'against' issue X. As soon as I saw that an old Brittanica writer had commented on Wikipedia I could guess the shape of the Slashdot debate, without even knowing what the Brittanica fellow had said.
I have read his comments, and as a not insignificant Wikipedia contributor, I have to say they're correct: he gets it. He does not regard Wikipedia as a useless adventure, but he does not trust (have ) that the collaborative process will necessarily produce excellent-quality articles.
I have to say I agree. I admire the idea that quality is a sought-after goal, but such efforts as the Collaboration of the Week succeed only because Wikipedians focus their attentions on a given article closely for a short period of time.
I have seen too many articles that are confusing and disorganized at a meta-level. A simple factual error invites itself to be corrected, and therefore will be corrected, but restructuring a whole article when you know someone may come along and violate your scheme tomorrow is a discouraging thing.
As well, too many articles on controversial subjects end up being a confusing mismash of argument against or for the point in question. This is particularly the case for recent controversial political figures. I'm happy all the information is there, but I will not believe that the collaborative process will naturally produce an article that covers the issue fairly.
I view the Wikipedia as analogous to a probabalistic algorithm in computer science (e.g. a probabalistic primality testing algorithm). Such an algorithm is true most of the time, and can be a hell of a lot faster than the always-true deterministic algorithm.
Those who criticize the algorithm's potential for falseness miss the fact that its nondeterminism gives it great power, but its proponents should never forget that it is not deterministic.
Replace that with: "Forward only what isn't spam, and make Google replace spam with their own spam for you." It's an ad-based service, after all, so they just replace regular "online pharmeci" ads with Google "online pharmeci" ads. Just because the ads are targeted, doesn't mean they are not annoying.
I won't use the service if Google actually changes my messages incoming, or if using it requires me to sign up to get periodic spam from Google.
Even so, though, I imagine Google-generated spam would be far less of a nuisance than sifting through hundreds of penis enhancement ads. The spam filtering is the only reason I use gmail for anything.
Then, again, by now my eyes are trained not to pay attention to ads on a Web page - so much so that if you ask me what the ad was on the page I just looked at, I honestly couldn't tell you. If anyone told me ten years ago I'd be able to filter information like that, I'd laugh in his face.
Is it really that new? I do the same filtration with magazines and newspapers, none of which have changed that much in the last ten years.
I get annoyed occasionally with those newpaper ads where the advertiser has tried to make it look like a newspaper article. I'm sure you know the kind: similar font, letter size, etc. to a regular article but you can tell something's a little off even before you start reading, then you spot the little "Advertisement" in small print near the top.
My annoyance stems from the idea that the advertiser is being presumptous enough to try to fool my automatic ad-avoidance habit. This goes to show how far these skills have become reflexive in me, and I doubt I'm atypical.
why not just use your real email?
Because then you can use gmail as a spam filter. Forward only what isn't spam, and let Google handle the sifting for you.
Beißen Sie meinen glänzenden Metallesel.
The funny thing about this is that it uses the polite form of the second-person, Sie. So it's as though you said, "Please, sir, bite my shiny metal donkey".
A better equivalent would be:
Beiß meinen glänzenden Metallarsch!
which Babelfish translates to
Bite my shining metal ass!
(Pretty good, really.)
Keanu Reeves' dad is from Hawaii, which is one of the states in the United States. "Keanu" is a Hawaiian word.
He is, however, a Canadian citizen.
I really don't see the big fuss, whether God created the world one way or another, it doesn't affect the core basis of my beliefs. This has little to do with morality and my day to day life.
It does turn out to be a lively debate that can go on for hours between two opinionated people. And my guess is that those two people usually care more about looking smarter than the other, than they care about their beliefs and Morality.
Sure, what belief someone chooses to hold is of little consequence to me. From my perspective, if one wants to wilfully blind oneself to all available fact and believe the creationist hythothesis, by all means go ahead.
What I object is to the advocacy of the creationist hypothesis as being on an equal or near-equal footing with evolution, for example in school textbooks.
I recall a particularly bad example in a history text, printed in the USA, that we used in Grade 10. It had something like 20 chapters, and chapter 3 was supposed to cover the prehistoric life of the planet Earth; however, there were in fact two "chapter 3"s, chapter 3a, covering evolution. and chapter 3b, covering various creationist hypotheses.
I had not been previously exposed to these, and could not believe someone had seen fit to include them. One theory described attempted to explain why certain animals are only found in particular layers in sedimentary rock (the evolutionary explanation being, of course, that the layers of rock represent the time span in which a given animal at certain species lived). Its argument was that during the Great Flood, some animals could swim better than others, so the worst swimmers were the first to die and be deposited at the sea bottom, where they then became fossilized. However, it was nowhere explained why fish "died" before, say, dinosaurs.
To repeat: ich bin nicht Americaner.
Entschuldigen Sie, ich sollte "Amerikaner" beschrieben haben.
Im Übrigen, ich bin Kanadier.
Sure, if the storry was about USA internet cafes, I would imediatly think about used as a pretext.
Perhaps I would too, but I doubt it. The USA is a hell of lot freer than China. China is a lot better than it was even twenty years ago, but do I really need to list the ways it which it is less open than the USA?
With which right do you asume that every action of an authority in China is: antidemocratic, anti human rights, anti free information?
I didn't say I assumed that. I was saying
Isn't USA the country where some guy who is rich, convicted of driving drunk and committing a "murder", also dull and boring, able to be president?
I think *you* have more problems than China trying to get minors away from playing violent games.
Oh ho, I see! The 'you' in your comment is the USA. That's super. I object to two things here:
1) Your strange idea that simply being a citizen of a country which had Bush as a president would disqualify one from being able to criticize or discuss potential abuses towards democracy in any other country.
The US government does suck right now. But that suckiness is the fault of the people at large, not any one American, and in any case the suckiness is (still, thankfully) not significant in comparison to, for example, Belarus.
2) With which 'right' to you assume I'm American? I'm not. To repeat: ich bin nicht Americaner.
In german we have a saying: clear your own front garden, before you attempt to clear your neighbours.
Here's one back: Don't leap to conclusions. You read some random English-speaking guy on some website suggest a sinister interpretation of a foreign government action, and you conclude I'm not just an American but a jingoistic, gung-ho pro-Bush American. I'm pretty damn far from being either.
This is much ado about nothing, unless we are concerned about the civil rights of minors in China not being able to play some video games.
Well, and the ability of the population at large to access information freely through 'internet bars'.
Does nobody here even think of the possibility that these adult games might be being used as a pretext for a crackdown on free access to information?
It is obvious that most of the mainstream press has a left wing slant to it.
Sigh, this is such a tedious argument to make. No, actually it is not that obvious that most of the mainstream press has a left wing slant to it.
In particular, I think this is false. Every time I watch a Buffalo station, or read foxnews.com (or even CNN) online, I am shocked by the unquestioning acceptance of statements by the government, the rarity of critical opinion being found easily in newspapers or mainstream news sites, the ridiculous lack of coverage of big stories (Why was Al Qaa'qa not a bigger issue before? Why is all the crazy Diebold crap not a bigger issue now??) that I would simply not expect to find even here in Canada.
I'm a bit of a lefty, even for Canada. I do think that even we here have a ridiculously biased right-wing media (thank you, Conrad Black and Izzy Asper).
So you can just imagine what I think of Fox News!
The thing is, my opinions are not freakish crazy ones. I am prohably well within the centre of the political spectrum for my demographic. I just don't understand why my views would be regarded as so freakish in the U.S.
What is so bloody wrong with universal health care? Gay marraige? Gun control?
I don't expect anyone who disagrees to be converted, but I think at the very least that fewer Americans should regard these issues as so freakish as to be not even worth debate.
Just venting, sorry.
BTW. get a clue.
Right back atcha.
Quite the contrary. Regardless of their bias, Fox reports the same news as every other mainstream media outlet. They are not tabloid, as far as tabloids go.
Maybe the same as every other mainstream American media outlet, but there is a hell of lot of news they don't report on.
As well, Fox News tends to have a habit of covering stories on issues which could be politically damaging for the Republican Party only after the stories have gained enough momentum in other media that they can no longer be ignored.
The last thing a country under threat of invasion needs is weapons inspectors letting the enemy know that the country doesn't have anything to defend itself with.
Perhaps, but had the weapons inspectors told everyone that no, they were convinced that Iraq had no WMDs, then the whole justification for the invasion would be lost, too.
It looks like the US allowed the weapons inspectors to do enough to be sure that Iraq could not repel an invasion or retaliate against its invaders.
Nah, I don't think the U.S. cared about the practical intelligence value of the weapons inspectors' reports. The weapons inspections were simply a part of the diplomacy game which sought to justify the invasion, convince hostile nations to do nothing and friendly nations to come on board with the U.S.
so, its either believe saddam hussein, a known liar, who was actively attempting to deceive the un and the weapons inspectors or use force to find out what the truth really was.
Well, as a third option they also could have continued with the weapons inspections. Saddam was actually being fairly compliant with his entire country surrounded by hostile armies.
As far as I know, democracies are always biased toward the majority. If they weren't, it wouldn't be a democracy.
I suppose we could normalize votes between minorities and majorities. But what are you goint to do when every election gets normalized to a tie?
You missed my point, which was the winner-takes-all approach which most States use in selecting delegates to the electoral College is biased towards "the majority".
The usual counterexample, to make things crystal clear, is to suppose parties A and B are contesting for seats in a parliament. In every electoral distrinct, A wins 51% of the vote and B 49%. So A gets 100% of the seats with 51% of the vote.
This is an extreme example, but illustrative of the faults of the first-past-the-post system.
There are many faults commonly listed against a proportional-representation system for seats in a parliament. But when the vote is for a single individual (like the president) it would seem to offer many advantages over the first-past-the-post system.
But to argue, as Cobb and the grandparent poster seem to, that attempting to protect the interest of rural folks is 'racist' is really, I think, a reductio ad absurdum of the whole concept of majoritarian democracy.
I was the grandparent poster. As I said, I have interest in defending the claims I listed.
I was merely countering the claim that there "was no racial argument to be made, not even an obviously specious one."
Intriguingly, a take-off on this same technique of mixing up the incompatible, or doublespeak as Orwell would have it, was used in the thirties as we can plainly see from the acronym Z in the acronym NAZI which stood for Zocialismus or something like that.
The abbreviation Nazi comes from German Nationalsozialistische, "national socialist".
So, the rhetorical strategy, crude as it is, remains the same basically. Just mix up anything that you imagine is popular or unpopular and use it as a blunt weapon to force your position by any means. The Republican Party has a staff that specializes in just such techniques and they've been remarkable successful in their efforts up to this point.
You're not at all clear in what you mean here. Are you saying the Republican party mixes up socialism and fascism to make something more palatable for the "lower class, uneducated types"?
I think instead that they are guilty of the opposite; using the word "socialist" (or even "liberal") to paint their opponents as being of the same political stripe as Mao or Stalin.
Oooh, you lost me at "I'm a colossal dumbass." People who use the word "racist" when there is absolutely no racial argument to be made whatsoever--not even an obviously specious one--are not worth our time or attention.
Well, one could argue plausibly that, because the Electoral College gives greater representation to rural areas than urban ones, that it is unfairly biased towards whites simply because few people of color live in rural areas.
Further, one could argue plausibly that since most states have a winner-takes-all approach to electing Electoral College representatives, that their systems are unfairly biased towards "the majority", which is in many cases white European descendants.
I have no interest in defending these claim, but you could make them. One does not need to have poll taxes or segregated waiting rooms to have racism.
I'd rather have this country run by people who want the paycheck then people who want the power.
I swear, I just don't get it.
Here we see two perfect examples of the myth of the American dream, and not only are they back-toback, they're even raised in opposition to each other. It's like seeing two physicists argue with differential equations over the beauty of a sunset.
The "if you don't like it, then run yourself" meme is shortsighted. Now, I would not like its opposite ("you can't do anything no matter what you try") to become more popular than it is, but in this age, when the amount which a candidate has spent on an election has a ridiculously high correlation with his chance of winning it, it naive to believe that running in an election has a hope of change.
There are other options: you could become a professional lobbyist or activist, or a full-blown revolutionary. These may seem unpalatable, but the longer elections are won by the strong and the rich, the more attractive they will be.
The other shortsighted meme is that "money attracts competence". This is, obviously, a meme beloved of the rich, since it serves to justify their current state.
I just don't buy it. There are simply two many very rich people who are ridiculously corrupt and ineffective, and they aren't all lazy frat boys who are just sitting on their ancestors' money. Many of them "climbed the ladder", and were ultimately revealed to be hideously corrupt after their attainment of high status.
We have to realize that, though money and leadership competence are correlated, that the correlation is not perfect, and money should not be used as a measure of leadership quality.
Or, you could simly have googled it yourself.
Well, it wasn't at all clear to me that it was the Plymouth Rock settlement you were talking about (though that was suggested by the term 'pilgrim'), and I didn't want to read through all the Google hits for North American colonization.
A lot of times I want to go to a sight but I don't like having it stay in my address bar. Going into the registry to delete one url is a bitch (using ie).
Hmm? What about
Tools -> Internet Options -> Clear History
??
Actually, in the latter case it was. The pilgrims initially attempted a communist-style society - from each according to his means, to each accoreding to his needs. They nearly starved to death. The next season they switched to a more capitalistic system and wound up with a surplus.
Care to source your propaganda?
On the other hand, his website is at a .dk (Danish) address, so it's fairly likely he's not a native English speaker. If so, he deserves more slack than the average Slashdotter.
It seems, at least according to this Wikipedia entry, that there is not yet an scientific consensus on why Lake Vostok remains liquid.
Wikipedia: Lake Vostok.
mono makes your throat sore. you get it from kissing girls.
Hey, you can also get it from thinkgeek.com.
...following in Miguel's inexplicable primate fetish.
I don't know about you, but every animal I find attractive in that way is indeed a primate.