Yes, but the post I responded to specified "a murder he didn't commit." People have been cleared of their crimes while on death row, but the only groups pushing to clear these old cases are basically left-wing. There aren't any right-wing organizations I know of that even address the issue of innocents being sent to death row.
And it's easy to get bogged down on defining when a fertilized ovum becomes a person. What I find interesting is that the closer you look at the right-to-life movement, you start seeing trends. People in this movement are the same ones giving alarmist, erroneous "information" that condoms don't protect against disease, and so on. The abortion thing is the biggest item, but it is still one item on a continuum, and the continuum is their agenda. They oppose sex-ed, condom availability, and so on. They don't mix messages, and you won't see this in an anti-abortion spot, but if you look at both movements you see that they are the same movement.
They want a world where sex outside of marriage is outright dangerous because they think that "sin" is dangerous and should have consequences. This is why right-wing groups (not all of them, to be fair) object to the Day After pill and the HPV vaccine--they want "Jezebels" to pay for their sins, so other women won't be Jezebels. They don't want a world where women can have casual sex with no consequences. The abortion crusade is only the most marketable element of this larger agenda.
and he found a liberal lawyer to overturn his conviction.
What is so sad is that only "liberals" would care if you were set to be executed for a murder you didn't commit. I'm a conservative when it comes to the budget, but when it comes to issues like this, I would be ashamed to stand on the same side of the room as conservatives. This is also why their "right to life" movement rings so hollow. It isn't life they cherish. They just don't want women escaping the consequences of sex.
This system can't work for Microsoft because distributing the source code is not an option.
Another reason this can't work for Microsoft is that they are in the business of selling software. They can't survive on a business model built on selling you something that never has to be wholly replaced. They can't just trickle out improved software daily, incrementally improving software and security as time goes by. There has to be a big "all-new! shiny!" ad campaign to bring in the money, so they need big releases.
Apple is selling an overall computing experience and an image. Apple gets to win both ways, by appealing both to the "new and shiny" crowd, and the command-line unix users who don't want the wheel reinvented. I don't have a Mac (Ubuntu fits my needs/budget) but I wish they had a higher market share. It's sad that early predatory business decisions locked MS into such a high market share. If they had had to compete on the merits of their software, they wouldn't have done all that well. Their stuff isn't crap (I liked Win98, I admit) but I can do without everything since Win2K and OfficeXP.
You won't kill all the flu viruses (is that a word?), because some will be resistant, or the vaccine wasn't full-strength, or something. Survivors will reproduce like crazy because their weaker kin aren't there to compete with, and the weakest of THEIR descendents will be killed off, leaving a slightly more resistant population. Rinse, wash, repeat, and any countermeasure short of complete eradication will be worked around by nature. The only people who believe in a magic-bullet cure are the ones too ignorant or obstinate to believe in evolution. A magic-bullet cure only works in a world without genetic variation, the foundation (though not sole component) of evolution.
The free market always wins when you make simplistic arguments and ignore all the contrary arguments. Alternatively, you can point to Hayek and imply that anything other than laissez-faire capitalism (an oxymoron, since corporations feed so heavily at the government trough) leads inexorably to serfdom, fascism, halitosis, and wedgies. Don't get me wrong--I consider myself pretty much a libertarian in that I think everything else sucks more, but capitalism, i.e. greed, doesn't solve all the world's ills, and it won't solve this one.
On a darker note, I don't think government can solve it either. The world is the way it is because we are the way we are. People can't look beyond their own short-term profit, or even convenience, or even political alleigance to an ideology. All we can hope for is that the oil will run out soon. People will do the right thing, when the wrong thing is no longer convenient or profitable.
It's just a fact, if we have six months to do a job, we'll finish in exactly six months. If we're given 12 months to do the same job, we'll finish in exactly 12 months.
Then why not set up a deadline of 24 hours and be done with it? I was going to suggest 30 seconds, but the email server may be slow, and you have to plan for that. Work actually does take real-world time, and putting everyone in perpetual panic mode isn't going to help you. Here's another maxim for government service--the work will expand to fill the time you have. If you finish the project early, more work will just surface to fill up the time. You'll just carry more weight for the same money, and you'll get no more thanks for it. Doing the job well while providing a little padding to ingratiate the little people to you will help you more than running them into the ground in permanent emergency mode.
No one "writes HTML messages" in that they don't hand-code the HTML. But they routinely hit bold or italic, paste in tables, change font size and color, and so on. If HTML is so bad, how did this whole WWW thing take off? It isn't as if Amazon.com points to a plain-text list of books available, and an email address where you can send orders. HTML is useful. Allowing a subset of HTML function to allow for text formatting (tables particularly for me) would be useful. As much as I valued VT terminals (when we had them at work, "the system" went down less often) I do sort of like these newfangled conveniences.
I concede your point, mostly. But my bosses want tables. I need the ability to copy/paste tables and queries from Access into an email, and limiting my emails to plain-text means I have to copy/paste the text, then manually format the table into pretty columns. And the first time a boss forwards my email to someone else, the formatting is screwed up again. I don't need the full spectrum of HTML capability, but tables are useful. Give me the tabular environment from Latex, or something. People will just adapt by sending attachments, and the entire plain text of the email will be "see attached." Does Outlook's search/find function work on attachments?
My workplace recently did something similiar. I was never crazy about flashy colors and zillion font options. But I do miss the ability to send tables as part of the email. My job frequently involves info that is best represented in a table, and the ability to copy/paste a table into an email was very helpful. Even allowing for the limitations of plain text,
Outlook did me the favor the other day of removing the "extra" line breaks, screwing up the already limited formatting I was stuck with. People will get around this by attaching a Word or Excel document. So the bandwidth costs are only temporary, till they figure out how to get back the formatting capability they had. The search function will be severely limited, unless Outlook will search through attachments.
I think forcing plain text is a bit severe. I understand the vulnerabilities of HTML, but allowing a reduced subset of HTML function to provide for text formatting would be a better (as in more useful for the end user) option. If the IT folks are the only ones whose convenience is being considered, I guess plain text is fine, and for that matter we should still be using diskless VT terminals. I don't often use the "threw out the baby with the bathwater" cliche, but I think it fits here. Allowing tables and italics isn't going to kill us.
Could it be that most students today have no ability to critically think?
Were people ever any less susceptible to propaganda or groupthink? Look at the internment of the Japanese-Americans during WWII. Look up Father Coughlin. Read up on the Red Scare. People have always fell for hysterical propaganda. Even during the height (or depth, more like it) of McCarthyism, a few people were standing around saying "Are you people nuts! You're falling for this?" I think people are pretty much the same now as they were then. As much as I loathe television, I doubt they were much better before TV came along. Perhaps they knew more, but propaganda still worked--didn't Hearst pretty much singlehandedly invent the support for the Spanish-American War?
A boss I had at my last job didn't know who Stalin or Freud were. Neither the names nor pictures rang a bell. Yet she still did her job well (nursing) and, since she has a master's degree, will do well career-wise. As much as it grates on me, you don't actually have to be well-read or a decent writer to get ahead. Being likeable will get you further than a good vocabulary. Being likeable and pretty (or, to a lesser degree, handsome) will get you further than math. Being a likeable physically attractive person who is also a sociopath will get you furthest of all.
I disagree. It's not that they can't, but that they don't care to. Look at how well people track sports trivia (I wonder why they call it trivia?) or can find other asinine information or content they want. They can find content they want, navigate unintuitive websites, and generally figure out things that interest them. People can find online gaming sites, music video sites, porn sites, chat sites, myspace-type sites, ad infinitum, and the reason they "can't" find academic information is that they don't give a rat's ass about it and have no intention of wasting two seconds of mental energy on it. We're pretending it's a literacy problem because that allows us the optimism of thinking that a program or initiative will have an effect. It isn't, and they won't. Bread and circuses, all the way.
The law only allows classification of information related to national security, and that's not something the President is legally above reproach on.
This is factually wrong, and you would have to have been in a coma for 30 years to not know better. This administration recently redefined the term "civil war" and then classified the definition. Governments have long hid behind secrecy to conceal their failures, peccadillos, corruption, and so on. It didn't start with Bush, but neither did it magically stop when Bush became President. Don't act like politicians don't try to hide behind secrecy just because you think there is some liberal conspiracy to make this President look bad.
The Real Problem is that the New York Times insists on publishing again and again secrets that ultimately end up damaging the U.S.
What damage has been done, and what news story caused it? It isn't as if they outed a CIA agent or something. It's all fine and good to keep saying "they've done damage," but if you're suggesting that we curtail the freedom of the press, the burden of evidence is on you to show what dire damage was done to our nation, and how the NYT contributed to it. I've heard this allegation time and again, but the "damage" was always political--i.e. it just revealed that what the administration had been saying was factually untrue. This may undermine public support for administration policies (I certainly hope it does) but it doesn't put American lives in danger. The press is supposed to do this. It's a feature, not a bug.
when the New York Times, or most other media outlets, publish information, the discussion they present is anything but fair and rational, and since they often give only token space to opposing viewpoints, it is not very open either.
Actually, Tony Snow, President Bush, Secretary Rice, et al get more than ample time to present "opposing viewpoints." They get more press than everyone else combined, because every time they burp it's a press conference. This article is the opposing viewpoint to the administration party line. This is the voice of dissent that needs to be protected--the voice of the party in power is already protected, and already guaranteed airtime.
We haven't really ironed out giving humans rights yet, not consistently. Trial by jury, freedom from torture, no surveillance without a warrant, and all that. Corporations, yes, their rights are pretty well sewn up, or as well as they can be for entities that don't have any corporeal existence. People, not so much. So let's work on that before we start dwelling on robotic rights. Before we know it nanobots will be owning property in perpetuity while people languish behind barbed wire in "free speech zones."
Actually, I think the obvious examples would be bullets, bombs, chemical and nuclear weapons, land mines, and so on. It's true that as they got better at killing large numbers of people, beneficient discoveries were also made along the way. Lest we forget, the Nazis made some significant medical breakthroughs. But all told, I think we could've done with a little less of this sort of help, and a little more investment directed at helping humanity, rather than relying on the occasional non-lethal by-product of war research.
I've always wondered if there was something to this. We may not be able to quantify it scientifically, but I wonder if some endorphin mumbo-jumbo does boost the immune system when you feel good about life. That's what I always think when I hear about those "prayer cures" studies. I really doubt that God cares all that deeply about your sniffles (since kids are dying in house fires and leukemia, etc) but feeling good about something or other might make you feel better.
Or perhaps people just put a lower value on their misery when they have a positive attitude. I've worked in the medical field for some time, and it's well known that what we call "frequent flyers" usually (usually, not always) have some psychological issues. I read a study once in a medical journal (can't remember where or when) that people with chronic pain conditions also tend to have underlying psychiatric conditions. It's a murky question, because you can't tell if chronic pain causes psych conditions, or people with psych conditions are more likely to dramatize every passing physical symptom, or whether doctors tend to see psychiatric problems in patients they can't cure. All of those elements probably come into play on some level, though we'll never be able to isolate them and say definitively which role is played by what.
They got death threats. Do you have any more questions? Stop pretending that left-wingers are enraged that the fan base didn't embrace them and convert to communism or whatever the right thinks the left's fantasy is this week. My reaction to Limbaugh and Coulter is pretty gut-level, and I have a right to that reaction, but I don't have a right to make death threats.
Natalie learned the hard way that speech has consequences. You just don't go to a different country and put down your leader and then expect many of your fellow citizens to not express their disgust with you.
If the consequences were just "disgust," or people not buying their records, I take no issue with that. I don't buy Ann Coulter's books, for example. But death threats are not among the consequences that are okay for speech you don't like. Death threats, by definition, are signs of a pretty serious problem. A problem that infects everyone right of center? No, of course not. If someone starts making death threats against Limbaugh or Coulter, I'm not going to say "well, speech has consequences," because that would imply that I approved of the death threats. Death threats are not tolerated by civil society. But I have no objection to someone not buying their records or not attending their concerts because of their political beliefs.
In theory, the rapture could happen at any second and they'll all vanish. I was going to start a petition to get the ball rolling, but I didn't know where to submit it.
I agree that there was a lot of hyperbole that they were "silenced," when obviously they weren't. But they, and many others, were surprised at the level of hostility they got for opposing the war. They weren't silenced, but they recieved death threats and a lot of hate-mail. Were they criminally oppressed? No, but we are much less tolerant of dissent than our freedom-loving self-image would lead one to believe.
It isn't as if people don't like celebrities using their fame to push a cause--all the country singers who supported the war were applauded, so it just comes down to "you can have an opinion and talk about it on stage, unless you disagree with me on something, then shut up, or you're evil." I felt they (the Dixie Chicks) were a bit naive and too brash, but I was embarassed at the hostility they got. There is nothing unpatriotic about saying "I don't think we should invade this country."
Intolerance for dissent does tend to cross political boundaries, so don't think I'm conservative-bashing. Though to be honest, I wonder how many entertainers got death threats for supporting the war? Not so many, probably.
In chess you have to beat your opponent on merit. In politics, your supporters can slime him with innuendo and false claims (ala Swiftboat) to undermine his message, and even if you're the inferior candidate you'll still win. Chess hasn't been updated with a Truthiness Gambit yet.
To make them more similar, the next big chess tournament would have to be followed by a PR blitz saying, "well of course everyone thinks that player x lost--that's all the press is reporting. But some sources are reporting that things were a bit more complicated. We'll keep you updated on the ongoing controversy."
Truthiness aside, the more likely option is that Kasparov falls down the stairs (or has an auto accident, or chokes on dental floss, or whatever) and dies tragically. Putin will attend the funeral and mourn with the rest of Russia over the loss of a national hero, and things will go on as before.
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And it's easy to get bogged down on defining when a fertilized ovum becomes a person. What I find interesting is that the closer you look at the right-to-life movement, you start seeing trends. People in this movement are the same ones giving alarmist, erroneous "information" that condoms don't protect against disease, and so on. The abortion thing is the biggest item, but it is still one item on a continuum, and the continuum is their agenda. They oppose sex-ed, condom availability, and so on. They don't mix messages, and you won't see this in an anti-abortion spot, but if you look at both movements you see that they are the same movement.
They want a world where sex outside of marriage is outright dangerous because they think that "sin" is dangerous and should have consequences. This is why right-wing groups (not all of them, to be fair) object to the Day After pill and the HPV vaccine--they want "Jezebels" to pay for their sins, so other women won't be Jezebels. They don't want a world where women can have casual sex with no consequences. The abortion crusade is only the most marketable element of this larger agenda.
Apple is selling an overall computing experience and an image. Apple gets to win both ways, by appealing both to the "new and shiny" crowd, and the command-line unix users who don't want the wheel reinvented. I don't have a Mac (Ubuntu fits my needs/budget) but I wish they had a higher market share. It's sad that early predatory business decisions locked MS into such a high market share. If they had had to compete on the merits of their software, they wouldn't have done all that well. Their stuff isn't crap (I liked Win98, I admit) but I can do without everything since Win2K and OfficeXP.
You won't kill all the flu viruses (is that a word?), because some will be resistant, or the vaccine wasn't full-strength, or something. Survivors will reproduce like crazy because their weaker kin aren't there to compete with, and the weakest of THEIR descendents will be killed off, leaving a slightly more resistant population. Rinse, wash, repeat, and any countermeasure short of complete eradication will be worked around by nature. The only people who believe in a magic-bullet cure are the ones too ignorant or obstinate to believe in evolution. A magic-bullet cure only works in a world without genetic variation, the foundation (though not sole component) of evolution.
Your skepticism made me realize something. Man seems to be the only living thing on the planet whose actions have no effect on its environment.
On a darker note, I don't think government can solve it either. The world is the way it is because we are the way we are. People can't look beyond their own short-term profit, or even convenience, or even political alleigance to an ideology. All we can hope for is that the oil will run out soon. People will do the right thing, when the wrong thing is no longer convenient or profitable.
No one "writes HTML messages" in that they don't hand-code the HTML. But they routinely hit bold or italic, paste in tables, change font size and color, and so on. If HTML is so bad, how did this whole WWW thing take off? It isn't as if Amazon.com points to a plain-text list of books available, and an email address where you can send orders. HTML is useful. Allowing a subset of HTML function to allow for text formatting (tables particularly for me) would be useful. As much as I valued VT terminals (when we had them at work, "the system" went down less often) I do sort of like these newfangled conveniences.
I concede your point, mostly. But my bosses want tables. I need the ability to copy/paste tables and queries from Access into an email, and limiting my emails to plain-text means I have to copy/paste the text, then manually format the table into pretty columns. And the first time a boss forwards my email to someone else, the formatting is screwed up again. I don't need the full spectrum of HTML capability, but tables are useful. Give me the tabular environment from Latex, or something. People will just adapt by sending attachments, and the entire plain text of the email will be "see attached." Does Outlook's search/find function work on attachments?
Outlook did me the favor the other day of removing the "extra" line breaks, screwing up the already limited formatting I was stuck with. People will get around this by attaching a Word or Excel document. So the bandwidth costs are only temporary, till they figure out how to get back the formatting capability they had. The search function will be severely limited, unless Outlook will search through attachments.
I think forcing plain text is a bit severe. I understand the vulnerabilities of HTML, but allowing a reduced subset of HTML function to provide for text formatting would be a better (as in more useful for the end user) option. If the IT folks are the only ones whose convenience is being considered, I guess plain text is fine, and for that matter we should still be using diskless VT terminals. I don't often use the "threw out the baby with the bathwater" cliche, but I think it fits here. Allowing tables and italics isn't going to kill us.
A boss I had at my last job didn't know who Stalin or Freud were. Neither the names nor pictures rang a bell. Yet she still did her job well (nursing) and, since she has a master's degree, will do well career-wise. As much as it grates on me, you don't actually have to be well-read or a decent writer to get ahead. Being likeable will get you further than a good vocabulary. Being likeable and pretty (or, to a lesser degree, handsome) will get you further than math. Being a likeable physically attractive person who is also a sociopath will get you furthest of all.
We haven't really ironed out giving humans rights yet, not consistently. Trial by jury, freedom from torture, no surveillance without a warrant, and all that. Corporations, yes, their rights are pretty well sewn up, or as well as they can be for entities that don't have any corporeal existence. People, not so much. So let's work on that before we start dwelling on robotic rights. Before we know it nanobots will be owning property in perpetuity while people languish behind barbed wire in "free speech zones."
Actually, I think the obvious examples would be bullets, bombs, chemical and nuclear weapons, land mines, and so on. It's true that as they got better at killing large numbers of people, beneficient discoveries were also made along the way. Lest we forget, the Nazis made some significant medical breakthroughs. But all told, I think we could've done with a little less of this sort of help, and a little more investment directed at helping humanity, rather than relying on the occasional non-lethal by-product of war research.
Or perhaps people just put a lower value on their misery when they have a positive attitude. I've worked in the medical field for some time, and it's well known that what we call "frequent flyers" usually (usually, not always) have some psychological issues. I read a study once in a medical journal (can't remember where or when) that people with chronic pain conditions also tend to have underlying psychiatric conditions. It's a murky question, because you can't tell if chronic pain causes psych conditions, or people with psych conditions are more likely to dramatize every passing physical symptom, or whether doctors tend to see psychiatric problems in patients they can't cure. All of those elements probably come into play on some level, though we'll never be able to isolate them and say definitively which role is played by what.
They got death threats. Do you have any more questions? Stop pretending that left-wingers are enraged that the fan base didn't embrace them and convert to communism or whatever the right thinks the left's fantasy is this week. My reaction to Limbaugh and Coulter is pretty gut-level, and I have a right to that reaction, but I don't have a right to make death threats.
In theory, the rapture could happen at any second and they'll all vanish. I was going to start a petition to get the ball rolling, but I didn't know where to submit it.
It isn't as if people don't like celebrities using their fame to push a cause--all the country singers who supported the war were applauded, so it just comes down to "you can have an opinion and talk about it on stage, unless you disagree with me on something, then shut up, or you're evil." I felt they (the Dixie Chicks) were a bit naive and too brash, but I was embarassed at the hostility they got. There is nothing unpatriotic about saying "I don't think we should invade this country."
Intolerance for dissent does tend to cross political boundaries, so don't think I'm conservative-bashing. Though to be honest, I wonder how many entertainers got death threats for supporting the war? Not so many, probably.
To make them more similar, the next big chess tournament would have to be followed by a PR blitz saying, "well of course everyone thinks that player x lost--that's all the press is reporting. But some sources are reporting that things were a bit more complicated. We'll keep you updated on the ongoing controversy."
Truthiness aside, the more likely option is that Kasparov falls down the stairs (or has an auto accident, or chokes on dental floss, or whatever) and dies tragically. Putin will attend the funeral and mourn with the rest of Russia over the loss of a national hero, and things will go on as before.
No, you're thinking of Pamela Anderson.