It's interesting, because on the one side you have the chance that the vast majority of scientists specialized in a discipline are all either corrupt or stupid, and on the other you have a lot of hand waving about how because this one detail can't be right everyone else must be wrong.
If we "waste" "trillions" reducing our CO2 output over a false alarm, then yes there might be a lot of upset people, of course the alternate bad side is that we don't spend those "trillions" billions of people will likely die from the ecological and economic collapse that will likely trigger the third world war.
The American military is already spending significant amounts of money to plan for the military repercussions of inaction. Of course we all know the military is full of liberal tree huggers, so that shouldn't surprise anyone, right? Or at least that's what the people funding the global warming is hoax story might spin it. I'm a little amused that the same people who funded the "there's not enough evidence that smoking causes cancer" campaign are behind the "there's not enough evidence that global warming is happening" campaign.
They appear to be counting all searches that are directed to all of Microsoft's sites. The actual comScore Press Release indicates that Google and Microsoft are splitting up Yahoo's search traffic. About half of former Yahoo users are going to Google and half are going to Microsoft.
I'm sorry, did I say anything about not seeing it on the Daily Show?
I can't be "fair" about this for a simple reason, I know Fox has gone to court to defend their right to lie on the air when they fired reporters who complained about Fox editing news coverage to make it more favourable to their sponsors.
It's not "the scruples of one member of Fox's video production team", it's part of a pattern of disregard for truth and honesty that permeates the majority of Fox News.
Fox viewers are among the least informed people in America when it comes to understand current events, and frankly I think that's more than mere coincidence.
Of course, there's always the case of causation vs. correlation to consider. It's possible that it just happens that well informed people are the people most interested in watching the Daily Show, in fact, it might even be probably since if you don't know anything you probably won't get many of the jokes. Personally, I think it's a little of both.
Staging shots to make a protest look big for the camera is "acceptable" behaviour. Lying about the number of people who showed up, and using actual footage from protests from months ago is not.
In case you weren't aware, Fox News used footage from the "Tea Party" protests they sponsored, helped organize, and promoted in September to make the Health Care protest from last week look much larger than it was.
According to Fox News, it is common knowledge that Fox News only airs news between the hours of 9-4 and 6-8 and that the rest of Fox News programming is entertainment program and not news.
So, the "24 hour news channel Fox News" airs 9 hours of news daily. Most of it, I suspect, when the least people are watching. Frankly, I'd be surprised if most Fox viewers could name any of the people on the shows categorized as news.
Of course, a related issue is that often the little bit of news that Fox airs that people actually watch tends to be diluted when those News programs report on what their own opinion programs have been saying as if reporting on what Fox News personalities are saying is actual news.
Most of your analysis just seems completely wrong. Microsoft has left vulnerabilities unpatched for years after they were to disclosed before, I see no reason they wouldn't do it again. In theory their business partners might lose confidence, but let's be frank most of Microsoft's business partners are entirely reliant on Microsoft, it'd takes years for them to make any significant changes. Effectively Microsoft can do whatever it wants, and it has.
Vulnerabilities listed in patch notes are not a good metric for determine which browser is "most vulnerable" because patch notes can be easily gamed by a closed source company. Simply roll up a bunch of nominally related bugs into one patch and suddenly your browser is more secure than the competition. It relies on the all of the groups involved acting in good faith which is naive at best.
Yesterday Microsoft released a patch for IE that prevents a drive-by rooting of your computer on all versions of Windows (Except 7 and 2008 R2) and all versions of IE. Sure. And yet it's somehow supposedly to be more secure than Firefox?
We've heard the same tired refrain from Microsoft sponsored people every time they target a new company. They pay people to make up statistics and lie about the competition. I, for one, am tired of it.
No one can do so perfectly, but we all have to step back from the absolutism that is so prevalent today.
Too often people say "this must be done" or "this must not be done" without understanding that often the method can be more important than the goal.
Your argument about not having enough resources is somewhere near correct, but not quite spot on. We do not have unlimited resources for health care, that is true. The major choice facing the U.S. is how to ration that care. Currently it is rationed according to how much you own. If you are wealthy you get some of the best health care in the world, if you are poor you get some of the worst health care in the world.
Socialized medicine operates on a triage basis, those who will benefit most from health care receive it first, regardless of their wealth.
That inconveniences a lot of very wealthy people, and they can afford to oppose that, if they choose.
Again, I should point out that not all nations are drowning under mountains of debts. Germany is really an example of how not to run a country.
To use a car analogy: You're using an sample car with flat tires to explain why cars can never work.
That's wonderful, but you really should learn that there's a difference between good regulation and bad regulation. German doctors are leaving for 2 reasons:
The system is poorly run. The doctors are poorly paid.
Sure, some German doctors are going to America where there's no socialized medicine, but many are also going to other countries with socialized medicine that run their systems better and pay their doctors more, for example, Britiain.
Ireland is nice example where expanding the role of government has actually had the opposite effect the free-market pundits predicted. Ireland has gone from one of the poorest nations in Europe to the second most wealthy country in Europe in a generation (Luxembourg remains #1).
How do I know? Every country that has passed a socialized medicine program heard the exact same tyrades by people with more passion than sense. When Canada passed it's system, there was a doctor's strike that lasted for several weeks. A few years later, most of the doctors involved in the strike grudgingly acknowledged that the socialized system had actually made their jobs better and not worse.
It ended up being win-win-win. Patients, doctors and the government won because patients ended up with more efficient and effective health care, doctors were able to see and treat more patients, and the government got a healthier workforce that pays more taxes because the workforce earns more money.
Members of the Republican party have claimed before that part of the reason they want to get into power is so they can sabotage the system from within. The classic example is the "Starving the Beast" ploy where you lower taxes without cutting spending to run up deficits, debt and decrease the amount of money available to spend on programs. A corollary to that system is that they also want to screw up the management of the services so that they piss off the people who are attempting to use them. The basic idea being if you render the government hostile and useless then eventually the people won't trust it anymore and eventually you can rip the entire thing down.
On the flip side, sometimes you really do have to expand the mandate of government. If the United States doesn't get some sane health care policy, it's going to continue to be a huge drag on the U.S. economy. One big reason for offshoring and outsourcing of jobs from the United States is that American companies are footing the bill for health care. In most of the rest of the developed world, it is governments who foot the bill using a combination of corporate and personal income taxes. Not only do those countries end up paying less than the U.S. for comparable health care, they cover all of their citizens and they cost the companies less money in the form of administration of health plans. Overall the system is both cheaper and more effective, and prime example of how government can be good and do good. By taking the responsibility for health care away from companies the government can help make American companies more competitive and make health care better for Americans.
Thomas L. Friedman book on this very topic was published in 2005. It is a trend that will continue and probably grow larger and America's prosperity will become increasing tarnished. Why do foreigner workers return home after getting educated at top American Universities? Because they can. With the advent of better telecommunications (America is increasingly one of the worst countries for internet access) and better collaboration platforms, and increased offshoring. Well educated people can increasingly return to their home countries where they not only "fit in" better with people who speak their own native tongue and share their cultural backgrounds, but back home they go from being another small fish to being one of the biggest fishes in their respective ponds.
I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but the United States is headed for a severe shock, the science and technology elite of the United States are aging. And not enough young people are following in their foot steps. We all know the reasons, smart people don't get any respect, scientists and engineers don't get paid the same as TV and sports stars, bank presidents or lawyers, the reasons go on. But it doesn't really matter, the United States is about to go into a long and painful collapse and by the time everyone realizes what happening it'll be 20 years too late to do anything about it (that is it'll take 20 years to educate a new crop of students to replace the people who have retired).
What books are used in the course will be very dependent on the theme you want to explore. Dealing with both Science Fiction and Fantasy in a high school course leaves very little time to examine many books (especially if you have a semester system). Additionally, you'll want to co-ordinate with the rest of the English department to avoid overlap. Some good places to start:
Classic Science Fiction: War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells (Chemical weapons, spaceflight, lasers, and planes appear in this book long before we learned how to actually make them work) Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (Classic but possibly overused) Brave New World by Aldous Huxley Foundation by Isaac Asimov Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke
Modern Science Fiction: Fallen Dragon by Peter F. Hamilton Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds Hyperion by Dan Simmons Dune by Frank Herbert Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh
Classic Fantasy: The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien (because you don't have time for the Lord of the Rings Trilogy) The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin
Modern Fantasy: Harry Potter and the Philospher's Stone by J. K. Rowling (I actually don't recommend this, most of the students will likely have read it) Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gamon Wizard's First Rule by Terry Goodkind (Be careful, Goodkind's a bit of a crazy libertarian but this tends to come a lot more in the later books) The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay The Dragonbone Chair by Tad Williams Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb
I agree with other people in this discussion that this proposed law is a waste of time, because the message will have to be slapped on everything. Even if photographers switched exclusively to 50mm lenses (or the equivalent), every professionally-produced advertisement-related photo these days is altered via image-editing software. The changes are usually fairly subtle, but they're there nonetheless.
Apparently they mispronounced "unprofitable". Because that's why they're not doing it, they don't want to spend the money and plus they want everyone to (pay for the) upgrade to Windows 7.
It's pretty much standard operating procedure for most corporations.
I think they simply don't know that there are different types of people who like different types of games.
Some people play for the shiny. Some people play to collect. Some people play to show off. Some people play to talk. Some people play to explore. Some people play for the plot.
Lumping them all together will, by necessity, leave you with only the cross demographic factors like price, and some of the larger factors that cut across several groups. The show-offs, collectors and talkers all like multiplayer games because they require an audience, hence that shows up as a net positive as long as the other groups aren't actively opposed to multiplayer.
In short: Most people like pie. Therefore all games should be made of pie.
It's a flop because it's supposed to be the best version of Windows to date and yet it is losing, and losing badly, to the "inferior" version of Windows that it was supposed to replace.
Frankly, I'm sure the vast majority of Vista users are the people who can't choose not to use it (either forced to by their workplace, or not technically competent enough to install an operating system). Sure, because of Microsoft's control over computer retailers almost all computers still have Windows installed, but you have remember according to this survey the number of people using Vista is significantly less than the number who bought it.
Of course, the survey methodology has a large self-selection bias, so the results are suspect. But if they are correct, then yes, Vista is a total failure in that significant numbers of people chose not to use it after they've paid for it.
Interestingly enough, according to Wikipedia, you are using those words in a manner which is unique to the United States where some of the founding fathers created new definitions for the words "republic" and "democracy" to suit their political goals.
In the rest of the world the term "representative democracy" would be used instead of "republic" and "pure democracy" would be used instead of "democracy". For the record, most of the rest of the world associates the word "democracy" with "representative democracy".
Which means most of the time if you rail against "democracy" people are just not going to understand what you're ranting about.
You don't really know anything about statistics, do you?
5000 is a sufficiently large sample to get an expected error rate of around 1.2% with a 95% confidence rating. So, in truth, unless they screwed up in some other way there's a 95% chance than the failure rate for 360s is between 52.8% and 55.2%.
The reason people don't question the survey is because for most people the rate sounds pretty reasonable. I know a few people who have 360s, however, none of them are on their first 360. Most are on their third or fourth 360. This is from normal use, in a normal environment. Your experience may be different, but with a failure rate of 55%, 45% of people wouldn't have theirs fail in the first three years. That's enough to have groups of people who's 360s all work. That's expected in a random distribution. It's also why we say "the plural of anecdotes is not data".
Slashdot Mirror
It's interesting, because on the one side you have the chance that the vast majority of scientists specialized in a discipline are all either corrupt or stupid, and on the other you have a lot of hand waving about how because this one detail can't be right everyone else must be wrong.
If we "waste" "trillions" reducing our CO2 output over a false alarm, then yes there might be a lot of upset people, of course the alternate bad side is that we don't spend those "trillions" billions of people will likely die from the ecological and economic collapse that will likely trigger the third world war.
The American military is already spending significant amounts of money to plan for the military repercussions of inaction. Of course we all know the military is full of liberal tree huggers, so that shouldn't surprise anyone, right? Or at least that's what the people funding the global warming is hoax story might spin it. I'm a little amused that the same people who funded the "there's not enough evidence that smoking causes cancer" campaign are behind the "there's not enough evidence that global warming is happening" campaign.
At time like this I remember this bit of advice: "If it needs a long explanation, you're probably doing it wrong."
They appear to be counting all searches that are directed to all of Microsoft's sites. The actual comScore Press Release indicates that Google and Microsoft are splitting up Yahoo's search traffic. About half of former Yahoo users are going to Google and half are going to Microsoft.
I'm sorry, did I say anything about not seeing it on the Daily Show?
I can't be "fair" about this for a simple reason, I know Fox has gone to court to defend their right to lie on the air when they fired reporters who complained about Fox editing news coverage to make it more favourable to their sponsors.
It's not "the scruples of one member of Fox's video production team", it's part of a pattern of disregard for truth and honesty that permeates the majority of Fox News.
Fox viewers are among the least informed people in America when it comes to understand current events, and frankly I think that's more than mere coincidence.
I suppose you missed this study from 2007.
Of course, there's always the case of causation vs. correlation to consider. It's possible that it just happens that well informed people are the people most interested in watching the Daily Show, in fact, it might even be probably since if you don't know anything you probably won't get many of the jokes. Personally, I think it's a little of both.
Staging shots to make a protest look big for the camera is "acceptable" behaviour. Lying about the number of people who showed up, and using actual footage from protests from months ago is not.
In case you weren't aware, Fox News used footage from the "Tea Party" protests they sponsored, helped organize, and promoted in September to make the Health Care protest from last week look much larger than it was.
According to Fox News, it is common knowledge that Fox News only airs news between the hours of 9-4 and 6-8 and that the rest of Fox News programming is entertainment program and not news.
So, the "24 hour news channel Fox News" airs 9 hours of news daily. Most of it, I suspect, when the least people are watching. Frankly, I'd be surprised if most Fox viewers could name any of the people on the shows categorized as news.
Of course, a related issue is that often the little bit of news that Fox airs that people actually watch tends to be diluted when those News programs report on what their own opinion programs have been saying as if reporting on what Fox News personalities are saying is actual news.
Most of your analysis just seems completely wrong. Microsoft has left vulnerabilities unpatched for years after they were to disclosed before, I see no reason they wouldn't do it again. In theory their business partners might lose confidence, but let's be frank most of Microsoft's business partners are entirely reliant on Microsoft, it'd takes years for them to make any significant changes. Effectively Microsoft can do whatever it wants, and it has.
Vulnerabilities listed in patch notes are not a good metric for determine which browser is "most vulnerable" because patch notes can be easily gamed by a closed source company. Simply roll up a bunch of nominally related bugs into one patch and suddenly your browser is more secure than the competition. It relies on the all of the groups involved acting in good faith which is naive at best.
Yesterday Microsoft released a patch for IE that prevents a drive-by rooting of your computer on all versions of Windows (Except 7 and 2008 R2) and all versions of IE. Sure. And yet it's somehow supposedly to be more secure than Firefox?
We've heard the same tired refrain from Microsoft sponsored people every time they target a new company. They pay people to make up statistics and lie about the competition. I, for one, am tired of it.
No one can do so perfectly, but we all have to step back from the absolutism that is so prevalent today.
Too often people say "this must be done" or "this must not be done" without understanding that often the method can be more important than the goal.
Your argument about not having enough resources is somewhere near correct, but not quite spot on. We do not have unlimited resources for health care, that is true. The major choice facing the U.S. is how to ration that care. Currently it is rationed according to how much you own. If you are wealthy you get some of the best health care in the world, if you are poor you get some of the worst health care in the world.
Socialized medicine operates on a triage basis, those who will benefit most from health care receive it first, regardless of their wealth.
That inconveniences a lot of very wealthy people, and they can afford to oppose that, if they choose.
Again, I should point out that not all nations are drowning under mountains of debts. Germany is really an example of how not to run a country.
To use a car analogy: You're using an sample car with flat tires to explain why cars can never work.
That's wonderful, but you really should learn that there's a difference between good regulation and bad regulation. German doctors are leaving for 2 reasons:
The system is poorly run.
The doctors are poorly paid.
Sure, some German doctors are going to America where there's no socialized medicine, but many are also going to other countries with socialized medicine that run their systems better and pay their doctors more, for example, Britiain.
Ireland is nice example where expanding the role of government has actually had the opposite effect the free-market pundits predicted. Ireland has gone from one of the poorest nations in Europe to the second most wealthy country in Europe in a generation (Luxembourg remains #1).
Nothing. They're pissed and lying.
How do I know? Every country that has passed a socialized medicine program heard the exact same tyrades by people with more passion than sense. When Canada passed it's system, there was a doctor's strike that lasted for several weeks. A few years later, most of the doctors involved in the strike grudgingly acknowledged that the socialized system had actually made their jobs better and not worse.
It ended up being win-win-win. Patients, doctors and the government won because patients ended up with more efficient and effective health care, doctors were able to see and treat more patients, and the government got a healthier workforce that pays more taxes because the workforce earns more money.
Members of the Republican party have claimed before that part of the reason they want to get into power is so they can sabotage the system from within. The classic example is the "Starving the Beast" ploy where you lower taxes without cutting spending to run up deficits, debt and decrease the amount of money available to spend on programs. A corollary to that system is that they also want to screw up the management of the services so that they piss off the people who are attempting to use them. The basic idea being if you render the government hostile and useless then eventually the people won't trust it anymore and eventually you can rip the entire thing down.
On the flip side, sometimes you really do have to expand the mandate of government. If the United States doesn't get some sane health care policy, it's going to continue to be a huge drag on the U.S. economy. One big reason for offshoring and outsourcing of jobs from the United States is that American companies are footing the bill for health care. In most of the rest of the developed world, it is governments who foot the bill using a combination of corporate and personal income taxes. Not only do those countries end up paying less than the U.S. for comparable health care, they cover all of their citizens and they cost the companies less money in the form of administration of health plans. Overall the system is both cheaper and more effective, and prime example of how government can be good and do good. By taking the responsibility for health care away from companies the government can help make American companies more competitive and make health care better for Americans.
Why bother? The proper order is yyyy/mm/dd because then it'll sort in order of occurrence.
Hello Slashdot, Welcome to 2005: The World is Flat.
Thomas L. Friedman book on this very topic was published in 2005. It is a trend that will continue and probably grow larger and America's prosperity will become increasing tarnished. Why do foreigner workers return home after getting educated at top American Universities? Because they can. With the advent of better telecommunications (America is increasingly one of the worst countries for internet access) and better collaboration platforms, and increased offshoring. Well educated people can increasingly return to their home countries where they not only "fit in" better with people who speak their own native tongue and share their cultural backgrounds, but back home they go from being another small fish to being one of the biggest fishes in their respective ponds.
I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but the United States is headed for a severe shock, the science and technology elite of the United States are aging. And not enough young people are following in their foot steps. We all know the reasons, smart people don't get any respect, scientists and engineers don't get paid the same as TV and sports stars, bank presidents or lawyers, the reasons go on. But it doesn't really matter, the United States is about to go into a long and painful collapse and by the time everyone realizes what happening it'll be 20 years too late to do anything about it (that is it'll take 20 years to educate a new crop of students to replace the people who have retired).
What books are used in the course will be very dependent on the theme you want to explore. Dealing with both Science Fiction and Fantasy in a high school course leaves very little time to examine many books (especially if you have a semester system). Additionally, you'll want to co-ordinate with the rest of the English department to avoid overlap. Some good places to start:
Classic Science Fiction:
War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells (Chemical weapons, spaceflight, lasers, and planes appear in this book long before we learned how to actually make them work)
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (Classic but possibly overused)
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Foundation by Isaac Asimov
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke
Modern Science Fiction:
Fallen Dragon by Peter F. Hamilton
Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds
Hyperion by Dan Simmons
Dune by Frank Herbert
Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh
Classic Fantasy:
The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien (because you don't have time for the Lord of the Rings Trilogy)
The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin
Modern Fantasy:
Harry Potter and the Philospher's Stone by J. K. Rowling (I actually don't recommend this, most of the students will likely have read it)
Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gamon
Wizard's First Rule by Terry Goodkind (Be careful, Goodkind's a bit of a crazy libertarian but this tends to come a lot more in the later books)
The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan
A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin
Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay
The Dragonbone Chair by Tad Williams
Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb
This might be a good thing. Loser admins should get fired, then maybe they'll learn there are consequences to doing stupid things.
Around the turn of the century it was novels, because god-fearing Americans only need one book.
The heart of the issue IS making advertisers take responsibilities for their actions.
Or are you only concerned about certain people taking responsibility for their actions?
I agree with other people in this discussion that this proposed law is a waste of time, because the message will have to be slapped on everything. Even if photographers switched exclusively to 50mm lenses (or the equivalent), every professionally-produced advertisement-related photo these days is altered via image-editing software. The changes are usually fairly subtle, but they're there nonetheless.
That's probably a bad thing.
Apparently they mispronounced "unprofitable". Because that's why they're not doing it, they don't want to spend the money and plus they want everyone to (pay for the) upgrade to Windows 7.
It's pretty much standard operating procedure for most corporations.
I think they simply don't know that there are different types of people who like different types of games.
Some people play for the shiny.
Some people play to collect.
Some people play to show off.
Some people play to talk.
Some people play to explore.
Some people play for the plot.
Lumping them all together will, by necessity, leave you with only the cross demographic factors like price, and some of the larger factors that cut across several groups. The show-offs, collectors and talkers all like multiplayer games because they require an audience, hence that shows up as a net positive as long as the other groups aren't actively opposed to multiplayer.
In short: Most people like pie. Therefore all games should be made of pie.
It's a flop because it's supposed to be the best version of Windows to date and yet it is losing, and losing badly, to the "inferior" version of Windows that it was supposed to replace.
Frankly, I'm sure the vast majority of Vista users are the people who can't choose not to use it (either forced to by their workplace, or not technically competent enough to install an operating system). Sure, because of Microsoft's control over computer retailers almost all computers still have Windows installed, but you have remember according to this survey the number of people using Vista is significantly less than the number who bought it.
Of course, the survey methodology has a large self-selection bias, so the results are suspect. But if they are correct, then yes, Vista is a total failure in that significant numbers of people chose not to use it after they've paid for it.
Interestingly enough, according to Wikipedia, you are using those words in a manner which is unique to the United States where some of the founding fathers created new definitions for the words "republic" and "democracy" to suit their political goals.
In the rest of the world the term "representative democracy" would be used instead of "republic" and "pure democracy" would be used instead of "democracy". For the record, most of the rest of the world associates the word "democracy" with "representative democracy".
Which means most of the time if you rail against "democracy" people are just not going to understand what you're ranting about.
No, he means your time would be better spent trying to seduce the receptionist, after all, that's how he spend his time...
You don't really know anything about statistics, do you?
5000 is a sufficiently large sample to get an expected error rate of around 1.2% with a 95% confidence rating. So, in truth, unless they screwed up in some other way there's a 95% chance than the failure rate for 360s is between 52.8% and 55.2%.
The reason people don't question the survey is because for most people the rate sounds pretty reasonable. I know a few people who have 360s, however, none of them are on their first 360. Most are on their third or fourth 360. This is from normal use, in a normal environment. Your experience may be different, but with a failure rate of 55%, 45% of people wouldn't have theirs fail in the first three years. That's enough to have groups of people who's 360s all work. That's expected in a random distribution. It's also why we say "the plural of anecdotes is not data".