There are too many high priests vying for the position of the intermediary between 'God' and the people who are nothing more than con artists only looking after their own self interest.
I don't think we should blame the religion for those who misinterpret it.
In the Tuskeegee experiments, they thought it was acceptable to put "inferior people" into scientific studies that endangered their lives.
Clearly, that's a misinterpretation of science. In the same way we do not blame science for this misinterpretation, we should not blame religion for those who choose to misinterpret it for their own benefit.
I am not religious, but it seems to me that most of the religious people are not like the people in this article.
Normally, they view science as our attempts to understand the infinitely complex mind of God. Most of them think we will never really get close to understanding it.
Since they approach it that way, to them there is no threat in science, and science should not feel threatened by religion. However, you're not going to read about them in this article, because the squeaky wheel gets all the grease. In this case, the "squeaky wheel" is whoever cooks up a crazy reason to stop paying attention in class.
It sounds like it's time to change tactics. I have a suggestion: use democracy for what it was designed to do.
Our country fought a revolution to give us the democratic right to change. If you are able to find an audience, take petitions, publicize your goals and then elect officials, you can change the policy in this country.
While some votes can be bought, I doubt even the infamous 1% can buy out 51% of Americans.
Many brave people died to bring us these rights, and since then, many other brave people have died defending them. It's not a lost cause to use "the system" instead of giving up on it.
If you know of a corrupt public servant or politician, try reporting them. Many cities, states and government agencies have whistleblower lines like this one:
If he'd pulled this trick during the cold war, he would have had a mysterious "car accident" in the country late at night with lots of empty bottles and a young male prostitute in the car with him. That.45 caliber wound to his head would have obviously been from the steering wheel, of course.
Now they just set him up on a phony charge for not requesting sexual relations via the Swedish government-approved triplicate form. What's next, claiming he killed someone with secondhand smoke, or arresting him for going over his personal carbon cap?
While XML is annoying, it shows us the importance of both data and data describing that data (including "meta-data").
My guess is that we'll take a page from object-oriented computing and in the future, see data as stored only within object types, with associated description data and possibly transformation data (something like XSLT).
In particular, this would open up all file formats to the end user, as understanding the structure of a data object is a lot more sensible that hand-coding a parser for binary files.
The influence of the semantic web, object-oriented thinking, and the inevitable inclusion of high-capacity databases as part of the operating system (we already see this with LAMP as a popular platform not only for development, but for daily use) will drive this change.
Personally, I think it's about time. A file is a low-level format, basically a giant string of data between two points. We should not be using files as end users; that's for the operating system. And at the same time, we'd like our data to be there in a form we can manipulate, not dependent on file-types and specific applications.
Back in the 80s, there was more of this thinking but no one got it to catch on. The original Macintosh file system used a "data fork" and a "resource fork" for objects included with the file. There were other experiments, most notably Talient and OpenDoc (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc).
A good discussion of what open data formats might mean can be found here:
Eligibility Criteria for 8(a) and/or SDB Program Participation
In order to qualify for access to the 8(a) or SDB program, a company must qualify as a small business with potential for success that is owned and controlled by individuals who are socially and economically disadvantaged. The owners of the company must submit an application to the SBA which details how the company meets these criteria. Here are a few tips on meeting the SBA's requirements.
1. Small Business
To qualify as a small business, a company must compare its status with other companies operating in the same (or similar) line of business. The U.S. Department of Commerce maintains a regulatory matrix for use in determining if a company qualifies as a small business. Visit our page entitled, "What is a Small Business?" to find out more.
2. Social Disadvantage
Social disadvantage refers to any circumstances under which the owners of a company have faced racial, ethnic or cultural bias within the U.S. to the detriment of their ability to establish or grow their business. Clear examples of social disadvantage include race- and gender-based discrimination, as well as discrimination on the basis of physical disability or lack of access to traditional education.
The government has determined that a presumption of social disadvantage applies to certain racial and ethnic minorities including African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Pacific Americans, Subcontinent Asian Americans, and Native Americans. Other applicants, including non-minority female, veteran, and disabled business owners, must affirmatively demonstrate social disadvantage by a preponderance of the evidence.
3. Economic Disadvantage
Economic disadvantage is measured in terms of the personal income, personal net worth, and fair market value of all assets owned by each individual claiming social disadvantage in an application for 8(a) or SDB certification. In calculating personal net worth, the SBA excludes an individual's ownership interest in the company, as well as any equity held in a primary personal residence. An individual's net worth must be less than $250,000 to be eligible for the 8(a) program, or less than $750,000 to be eligible for the SDB program.
4. Ownership and Control
The ownership and control of a company are critical eligibility factors. Owners applying to the 8(a) and/or SDB program must demonstrate not only unencumbered ownership of at least 51% of the value of the company, but also that they have full control of the company's day to day operations. The SBA looks into a range of matters in assessing a company's ownership and control.
There are a number of government statutes and programs which demand that disadvantaged, small business and minority contractors be considered before others.
I don't see this as unfair. It's a way of fixing the past two centuries of injustice. If you have a better way to do that, by all means speak up.
In the name of increasing equality, our government gives priority to women, minorities, gays and small businesses when it chooses its contractors. While these companies in turn higher independent IT contractors for relatively low rates, the difference in cost goes to furthering our goal of equality for these people. You may see it as $306 billion dollars wasted, but I see it as an investment in our future by increasing equality in America.
This is why I have been saying for ages "free as in beer" needs to die and be replaced by "free as in freedom" only.
I thought this was profound. Every single aspect of our society is for-profit. In order to succeed in that, an operating system needs to generate money and re-invest it in development.
How many times have you used some FOSS product and inquired about a feature, only to hear that the programmers don't consider it important and aren't interested in it, even though there's 2,000 people in the support forum asking about it?
With Linux, we got a great operating system but also a community of freeloaders.There's a reason people buy windows and OS X, which is that because you pay money, you have an expectation that they'll eventually fix stuff and put in the features you need. It ain't perfect but it's the best we got.
The underlying problem is that there are too many people going to college.
College education has become an industry. Because everyone wants to go, and the government guarantees a certain amount of loans, the colleges have upped their prices to match.
The huge numbers of people they're turning out have in turn reduced the value of a college degree.
The underlying solution is that we need to fix high schools so that a high school diploma signifies ability again. High school graduates of the future should have the abilities that our community college and state college graduates currently have.
For most people, "career" is going to mean working in an office. We don't need college careers for that.
In my case, I think college was fun but a hindrance. If you want to be a developer, you will have learned the skills you need by pushing yourself to explore the machine and read the books. Skipping college just gives you another four years of income and a chance to get ahead of everyone else.
It's not public opinion that's starving Wikileaks at the moment
If public opinion were in favor of Wikileaks, there would be a massive outcry against this financial starvation.
However, since Wikileaks accidentally leaked information that put innocent people in harm's way, public opinion has swung against them and as a result, we're not seeing much opposition to this financial starvation.
Had Assange and Co. behaved perfectly ethically, you would have seen much more defense of them throughout the time Wikileaks has been in the news.
Public opinion swung hard against Wikileaks after the accidental release of the un-redacted cables. That leak put many people in harm's way, including a lot of people trying to help overthrow oppressive regimes or criminal enterprises. If we are able to ask "who watchers the watchers?" we have to ask "who watches the watchers of the watchers?" and the answer is that, in Wikileaks' case, big problems of credibility exist.
When a writer writes a book, it is sold to the consumer for $25 and the writer sees $1 of it. The same is true of CDs/iTunes, where we pay about $10-15 and the musician sees $1.
It's unlikely the re-sellers in brick-and-mortar stores can take less of a cut; they have really high overhead.
The question we need to ask is whether labels and publishers can change their high overhead and still put out a quality product.
I think we'd all feel better knowing more of the money went to the creator of the music/book we're enjoying, and less to the bloated organizations behind it.
These programs are filed under the wrong parts of government. We need a department of science to aggressively advance all scientific discovery, not just those convenient for politicians.
We have a bad habit in this country of letting sales figures and the profit incentive "make" decisions for us. In this case, college is a huge business. We can promise people more income if they get a college degree, so everyone wants a college degree.
Educators will tell you that perhaps college should be reserved for those with the ability and initiative to do the work. Not everyone is ready for a college education, or able to engage in the rigorous critical thinking required. That's not popular with the salespeople, who want to sell college to everyone.
The result is that college has become more like another four years of high school. The classes are easy and emphasize memorization instead of developing critical thought. Expectations are low. It's not a time of great discovery, but of people pushing through because if they just get that piece of paper, they get richer.
Through this process, we have cheapened education for everyone. High school is now four years of day care because those teachers figure the kids will really learn to spell in college. College is now like high school, a dreary period of drudgery. All of it is motivated by money, not a desire to learn or to help the truly exceptional students get ahead.
By trying to sell education to everybody, we have cheapened it and now to get anywhere in this world, you need a graduate degree. When they cheapen those, too, we're going to have to cut out the middleman and bribe our way into careers.
Google's problem is that search engines can be easily fooled. Since the user indexes his or her own data by what is published to the web page, people tend to list all sorts of keywords which in turn create false results. Google's solution was PageRank, or picking the most popular sites. This doesn't work because all language is contextual, and as a result, a search term can mean many things.
What both Google and Facebook have realized is that unless they figure out who the user is, and what types of things they are looking for, there is no way to impose a type or context to the search. Without typed searching, search results become more irrelevant with the number of pages published to the web.
Both of them have hit on the same solution. Users aren't going to log in to a search engine, but they will log in to Gmail or Facebook, and that allows these companies to keep track of who you are (Google Plus is more an extension of Gmail than a separate app). Why else do you think both of them are manic about trying to get you to "validate" your account with a phone number?
Every age has some bandwagon we can all hitch ourselves to and make headlines. I guess this decade it's climate science. The "science" here is dubious; I think he's really stretching.
What I think bothers me more is the imprecise use of language in the article.
The European conquest of the Americas decimated the people living there
And then later
Smallpox, diphtheria and other diseases from Europe ultimately wiped out as much as 90 percent of the indigenous population.
So what's wrong with this? Well, see here
Because the etymological sense of one-tenth remains to some extent, decimate is not ordinarily used with exact fractions or percentages: Drought has destroyed (not decimated ) nearly 80 percent of the cattle.
Had he been a patent hound, he'd have died a rich man.
There's more than one type of rich.
Going to your final sleep (?) knowing that you've invented something that billions use, rely upon and benefit from daily, and that has advanced the knowledge and state of humanity... there's a certain wealth in that which selling trendy gadgets can never match.
I'm not saying that I would not sell my organs for money, just that there's a bigger picture.
(1) Some guy cut me off at 75 mph this morning, almost causing a massive accident on a crowded freeway.
(2) At work, they promoted an incompetent because she has friends in the sales department and has worked there for 15 years.
(3) Someone put a bag of trash in the back of his pickup truck and got on the freeway, where the wind neatly lifted it out of the back and dropped it in front of a semi. Now trash litters the countryside.
(4) Someone else broke into my neighbor's car and stole a $10 pair of sunglasses (value is approximate, probably high).
(5) At the apartment building across the street, they keep having parties where people throw beer bottles into the street below.
Did Wall Street do all of this?
I think humanity as a whole exists in a moral vacuum, and that's a bigger problem than a few people making billions. At least in my city, there are still good jobs to be had.
Most people want function. That seems to require a "walled garden." Considering these people won't be developing their own apps, do we worry about freedom in that context? It's like demanding that Burger King make you a filet mignon. For convenience, we trade off a lot of flexibility.
Slashdot Mirror
Writing one of these tool sets is not that difficult, nor are the technical concepts involved.
They will exist even if every existing developer decides to cease supporting them.
The only solution are strong workarounds: peer-to-peer proxies like Tor and BitTorrent, in addition to strong encryption.
At the point where any of those fail you, the solution is regime change, not technology.
I don't think we should blame the religion for those who misinterpret it.
In the Tuskeegee experiments, they thought it was acceptable to put "inferior people" into scientific studies that endangered their lives.
Clearly, that's a misinterpretation of science. In the same way we do not blame science for this misinterpretation, we should not blame religion for those who choose to misinterpret it for their own benefit.
I am not religious, but it seems to me that most of the religious people are not like the people in this article.
Normally, they view science as our attempts to understand the infinitely complex mind of God. Most of them think we will never really get close to understanding it.
Since they approach it that way, to them there is no threat in science, and science should not feel threatened by religion. However, you're not going to read about them in this article, because the squeaky wheel gets all the grease. In this case, the "squeaky wheel" is whoever cooks up a crazy reason to stop paying attention in class.
It sounds like it's time to change tactics. I have a suggestion: use democracy for what it was designed to do.
Our country fought a revolution to give us the democratic right to change. If you are able to find an audience, take petitions, publicize your goals and then elect officials, you can change the policy in this country.
While some votes can be bought, I doubt even the infamous 1% can buy out 51% of Americans.
Many brave people died to bring us these rights, and since then, many other brave people have died defending them. It's not a lost cause to use "the system" instead of giving up on it.
If you know of a corrupt public servant or politician, try reporting them. Many cities, states and government agencies have whistleblower lines like this one:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/doi/html/home/reconize.shtml
If he'd pulled this trick during the cold war, he would have had a mysterious "car accident" in the country late at night with lots of empty bottles and a young male prostitute in the car with him. That .45 caliber wound to his head would have obviously been from the steering wheel, of course.
Now they just set him up on a phony charge for not requesting sexual relations via the Swedish government-approved triplicate form. What's next, claiming he killed someone with secondhand smoke, or arresting him for going over his personal carbon cap?
While XML is annoying, it shows us the importance of both data and data describing that data (including "meta-data").
My guess is that we'll take a page from object-oriented computing and in the future, see data as stored only within object types, with associated description data and possibly transformation data (something like XSLT).
In particular, this would open up all file formats to the end user, as understanding the structure of a data object is a lot more sensible that hand-coding a parser for binary files.
The influence of the semantic web, object-oriented thinking, and the inevitable inclusion of high-capacity databases as part of the operating system (we already see this with LAMP as a popular platform not only for development, but for daily use) will drive this change.
Personally, I think it's about time. A file is a low-level format, basically a giant string of data between two points. We should not be using files as end users; that's for the operating system. And at the same time, we'd like our data to be there in a form we can manipulate, not dependent on file-types and specific applications.
Back in the 80s, there was more of this thinking but no one got it to catch on. The original Macintosh file system used a "data fork" and a "resource fork" for objects included with the file. There were other experiments, most notably Talient and OpenDoc (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc).
A good discussion of what open data formats might mean can be found here:
http://www.malcolmgroves.com/blog/?p=633
Here's a good starting point.
http://www.fedaccess.com/8%28a%29-sdb-minorities-women-disabled.htm
Eligibility Criteria for 8(a) and/or SDB Program Participation
In order to qualify for access to the 8(a) or SDB program, a company must qualify as a small business with potential for success that is owned and controlled by individuals who are socially and economically disadvantaged. The owners of the company must submit an application to the SBA which details how the company meets these criteria. Here are a few tips on meeting the SBA's requirements.
1. Small Business
To qualify as a small business, a company must compare its status with other companies operating in the same (or similar) line of business. The U.S. Department of Commerce maintains a regulatory matrix for use in determining if a company qualifies as a small business. Visit our page entitled, "What is a Small Business?" to find out more.
2. Social Disadvantage
Social disadvantage refers to any circumstances under which the owners of a company have faced racial, ethnic or cultural bias within the U.S. to the detriment of their ability to establish or grow their business. Clear examples of social disadvantage include race- and gender-based discrimination, as well as discrimination on the basis of physical disability or lack of access to traditional education.
The government has determined that a presumption of social disadvantage applies to certain racial and ethnic minorities including African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Pacific Americans, Subcontinent Asian Americans, and Native Americans. Other applicants, including non-minority female, veteran, and disabled business owners, must affirmatively demonstrate social disadvantage by a preponderance of the evidence.
3. Economic Disadvantage
Economic disadvantage is measured in terms of the personal income, personal net worth, and fair market value of all assets owned by each individual claiming social disadvantage in an application for 8(a) or SDB certification. In calculating personal net worth, the SBA excludes an individual's ownership interest in the company, as well as any equity held in a primary personal residence. An individual's net worth must be less than $250,000 to be eligible for the 8(a) program, or less than $750,000 to be eligible for the SDB program.
4. Ownership and Control
The ownership and control of a company are critical eligibility factors. Owners applying to the 8(a) and/or SDB program must demonstrate not only unencumbered ownership of at least 51% of the value of the company, but also that they have full control of the company's day to day operations. The SBA looks into a range of matters in assessing a company's ownership and control.
There are a number of government statutes and programs which demand that disadvantaged, small business and minority contractors be considered before others.
I don't see this as unfair. It's a way of fixing the past two centuries of injustice. If you have a better way to do that, by all means speak up.
In the name of increasing equality, our government gives priority to women, minorities, gays and small businesses when it chooses its contractors. While these companies in turn higher independent IT contractors for relatively low rates, the difference in cost goes to furthering our goal of equality for these people. You may see it as $306 billion dollars wasted, but I see it as an investment in our future by increasing equality in America.
If you don't like global warming, ignore it. Don't buy it or listen to it. Change the channel. Do something else instead.
Different strokes for different folks.
I thought this was profound. Every single aspect of our society is for-profit. In order to succeed in that, an operating system needs to generate money and re-invest it in development.
How many times have you used some FOSS product and inquired about a feature, only to hear that the programmers don't consider it important and aren't interested in it, even though there's 2,000 people in the support forum asking about it?
With Linux, we got a great operating system but also a community of freeloaders.There's a reason people buy windows and OS X, which is that because you pay money, you have an expectation that they'll eventually fix stuff and put in the features you need. It ain't perfect but it's the best we got.
The underlying problem is that there are too many people going to college.
College education has become an industry. Because everyone wants to go, and the government guarantees a certain amount of loans, the colleges have upped their prices to match.
The huge numbers of people they're turning out have in turn reduced the value of a college degree.
The underlying solution is that we need to fix high schools so that a high school diploma signifies ability again. High school graduates of the future should have the abilities that our community college and state college graduates currently have.
For most people, "career" is going to mean working in an office. We don't need college careers for that.
In my case, I think college was fun but a hindrance. If you want to be a developer, you will have learned the skills you need by pushing yourself to explore the machine and read the books. Skipping college just gives you another four years of income and a chance to get ahead of everyone else.
The USA should declare all Chinese outbound internet traffic to be a "rumor" and ban it immediately.
If public opinion were in favor of Wikileaks, there would be a massive outcry against this financial starvation.
However, since Wikileaks accidentally leaked information that put innocent people in harm's way, public opinion has swung against them and as a result, we're not seeing much opposition to this financial starvation.
Had Assange and Co. behaved perfectly ethically, you would have seen much more defense of them throughout the time Wikileaks has been in the news.
With 147 corporations, you have a chance to watch them all.
With 14,700 corporations you'd have no chance.
Public opinion swung hard against Wikileaks after the accidental release of the un-redacted cables. That leak put many people in harm's way, including a lot of people trying to help overthrow oppressive regimes or criminal enterprises. If we are able to ask "who watchers the watchers?" we have to ask "who watches the watchers of the watchers?" and the answer is that, in Wikileaks' case, big problems of credibility exist.
When a writer writes a book, it is sold to the consumer for $25 and the writer sees $1 of it. The same is true of CDs/iTunes, where we pay about $10-15 and the musician sees $1.
It's unlikely the re-sellers in brick-and-mortar stores can take less of a cut; they have really high overhead.
The question we need to ask is whether labels and publishers can change their high overhead and still put out a quality product.
I think we'd all feel better knowing more of the money went to the creator of the music/book we're enjoying, and less to the bloated organizations behind it.
These programs are filed under the wrong parts of government. We need a department of science to aggressively advance all scientific discovery, not just those convenient for politicians.
We have a bad habit in this country of letting sales figures and the profit incentive "make" decisions for us. In this case, college is a huge business. We can promise people more income if they get a college degree, so everyone wants a college degree.
Educators will tell you that perhaps college should be reserved for those with the ability and initiative to do the work. Not everyone is ready for a college education, or able to engage in the rigorous critical thinking required. That's not popular with the salespeople, who want to sell college to everyone.
The result is that college has become more like another four years of high school. The classes are easy and emphasize memorization instead of developing critical thought. Expectations are low. It's not a time of great discovery, but of people pushing through because if they just get that piece of paper, they get richer.
Through this process, we have cheapened education for everyone. High school is now four years of day care because those teachers figure the kids will really learn to spell in college. College is now like high school, a dreary period of drudgery. All of it is motivated by money, not a desire to learn or to help the truly exceptional students get ahead.
By trying to sell education to everybody, we have cheapened it and now to get anywhere in this world, you need a graduate degree. When they cheapen those, too, we're going to have to cut out the middleman and bribe our way into careers.
Google's problem is that search engines can be easily fooled. Since the user indexes his or her own data by what is published to the web page, people tend to list all sorts of keywords which in turn create false results. Google's solution was PageRank, or picking the most popular sites. This doesn't work because all language is contextual, and as a result, a search term can mean many things.
What both Google and Facebook have realized is that unless they figure out who the user is, and what types of things they are looking for, there is no way to impose a type or context to the search. Without typed searching, search results become more irrelevant with the number of pages published to the web.
Both of them have hit on the same solution. Users aren't going to log in to a search engine, but they will log in to Gmail or Facebook, and that allows these companies to keep track of who you are (Google Plus is more an extension of Gmail than a separate app). Why else do you think both of them are manic about trying to get you to "validate" your account with a phone number?
A century of going to meetings, filing TPS reports, drinking Brawndo and snoring through conference calls will kill us deader than time itself can.
Every age has some bandwagon we can all hitch ourselves to and make headlines. I guess this decade it's climate science. The "science" here is dubious; I think he's really stretching.
What I think bothers me more is the imprecise use of language in the article.
The European conquest of the Americas decimated the people living there
And then later
Smallpox, diphtheria and other diseases from Europe ultimately wiped out as much as 90 percent of the indigenous population.
So what's wrong with this? Well, see here
Because the etymological sense of one-tenth remains to some extent, decimate is not ordinarily used with exact fractions or percentages: Drought has destroyed (not decimated ) nearly 80 percent of the cattle.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/decimate
Had he been a patent hound, he'd have died a rich man.
There's more than one type of rich.
Going to your final sleep (?) knowing that you've invented something that billions use, rely upon and benefit from daily, and that has advanced the knowledge and state of humanity... there's a certain wealth in that which selling trendy gadgets can never match.
I'm not saying that I would not sell my organs for money, just that there's a bigger picture.
While this data collection is intrusive, perhaps we can use it to someday calculate our future history through mathematics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_%28fictional%29
What did Wall Street do to me this week?
(1) Some guy cut me off at 75 mph this morning, almost causing a massive accident on a crowded freeway.
(2) At work, they promoted an incompetent because she has friends in the sales department and has worked there for 15 years.
(3) Someone put a bag of trash in the back of his pickup truck and got on the freeway, where the wind neatly lifted it out of the back and dropped it in front of a semi. Now trash litters the countryside.
(4) Someone else broke into my neighbor's car and stole a $10 pair of sunglasses (value is approximate, probably high).
(5) At the apartment building across the street, they keep having parties where people throw beer bottles into the street below.
Did Wall Street do all of this?
I think humanity as a whole exists in a moral vacuum, and that's a bigger problem than a few people making billions. At least in my city, there are still good jobs to be had.
Most people want function. That seems to require a "walled garden." Considering these people won't be developing their own apps, do we worry about freedom in that context? It's like demanding that Burger King make you a filet mignon. For convenience, we trade off a lot of flexibility.