This is always *my* reaction. In my state, you don't have to hire a lawyer most of the time for this kind of thing. You call the state AG's consumer protection office and they contact the firm that's harassing you. Once they (or their lawyers, or assignees or whatever) find out you don't have to hire a lawyer yourself, they back off fast. Their game is picking on people who can't defend themselves.
If your state doesn't work this way, then you should elect a different state government.
In the U.S., politicians post speeches full of lies online, and nobody cares. I'm not sure if this is because everybody believes the lies, or because nobody believes the politicians.
You can't describe political behavior with two-state logic. For example one of the most desirable states to entrain your followers into might be described thus: "I don't believe what the politicians say, but I'll act as if I do believe them." This is ideal because it relieves the politicians of the drudgery of dreaming up *plausible* lies.
One of the surest signs of this intermediate belief state is when you hear somebody, when a politician he supports is caught, respond with "they all do it." This only *appears* to be a condemnation of the politician in question, but the person doesn't mean "They all do it, therefore I'll withdraw support from both sides and look for someone less despicable." It means "They all do it, therefore I will pretend none of this has happened."
A related state of intermediate belief is "Everyone says...". This is where the person in question believes that all politicians are liars, but steadfastly refuses to acknowledge the political origin of political lies. Also known as "echo chamber epistemology".
Except during Katrina. All told the US received pledges of over a billion dollars in aid from countries all around the world. Pakistan and Bengladesh each sent a million dollars to private US relief agencies, and Bengladesh offered it's flood disaster response expertise. Kuwait ponied up half a billion dollars and the Saudis $250 million, but I'm more impressed with Bengladesh's generosity, considering that's a country with per capita income of only $2000.
Oh, and after Hurricane Sandy the US government got offers of aid from France and Iran, which we declined. Can't blame them if we turned them down. During the BP oil spilll, the US did not request aid for four weeks, but in that time thirteen unsolicited offers of aid came in from the international community. Ultimately 30 countries offered aid, including Mexico, Norway, Japan, the Netherlands and Croatia.
The international community *does* step up when the US is in need, but (a) most of them are not as rich as us, (b) few of them have the capacity (i.e., military air and sealift) to deliver large amounts of material aid quickly and (c) we just don't like to accept aid, even when it the less fortunate of us could use it.
Now if you're asking how much help the Philippines has sent to us in past hurricanes, probably not much. It's a poor country with a per capita income about 1/20th of the US, and it is not a superpower, not even a regional one. Do you think it's reasonable to hold it against them that they can't send us disaster aid?
*We* on the other hand *are* a superpower, with national interests in virtually every corner of the globe. Foreign and disaster aid buys us goodwill and cooperation. But even discounting our self-interest, we aren't nearly as generous as we think we our. If you rank our foreign aid as a percentage of GDP, we're 19th in the world, sending 1/5th the percentage of our GDP that Luxembourg or Sweden do. Luxembourg, for pity's sake! It's not like they need countries to give their ships access or bombers fly-over permission.
No, we're not nearly so generous as we like to think we are. But when it comes to *whining* about helping other people, we're world champs.
I ride a bike, and I do not blow lights or stop signs, and certainly do stop for pedestrians in crosswalks. I do not ride on sidewalks or in food crossings. I happen to have a license. As for being "entitled" to being treated like a car, that's a matter of law in most states. And bike lanes that do not "meld" with other traffic -- I'm not sure what you mean, but it seems to me likely to be a matter of traffic engineering and traffic law enforcement.
And smugness? You may not like it, but it sure beats indifference to the problems you create. The world would be a better place if more people commuted by bike, but I don't insist everyone do it. Nor is that the reason I insist on being treated with the rights granted to me under the law. If you don't like smugness, how about the smugness of people who think that *everyone* should drive, and that the public roadways are there for their own benefit alone? Doesn't that strike you as arrogant?
Of course not. People never see the log in their own eye.
I was thinking that there must be some folks over at MIT with both cognitive science and software background. I also know for a fact people in the aero/astro department do human factors research; I even helped run some of it when I worked at the Center for Space Research (now the McNair Building).
And if your neighbor is hit by a bus, how well do you know your neighbor's heirs?
How much do you trust your neighbor's physical security?
And can you count on your neighbor being home if you need your data fast?
If you can live without your data for a few weeks, and your backups are encrypted, then walking your data over might not be such a bad thing. Having *two* offsite friends you park encrypted backups with would be better, and if they lived at least a few miles apart that would be even better (e.g. in case of a tornado, flood or large neighborhood fire).
I was OK with 8.0. I've reached the point where I hate the new versions of everything (except maybe XFCE, which is pretty much pitched toward people who hate the new versions of everything). The reason is all this struggle to revolutionize the user experience seems to have left the goals of making common tasks convenient for the user behind. Impressive but pointless seems to be à la mode these days, and designers appear increasingly incapable of distinguishing creativity from novelty.
But given that virtually everybody has caught this disease, I pretty much have given up on insisting that things making sense. I only ask for a few things, that a user interface be stable and respond consistently (consistency was a huge problem with Vista), and that I can figure out how to do what I need done after a few days with the system. Windows 8.0 fit the bill. It didn't make much *sense*, but it didn't crash and responded in a stable way so I simply adjusted to its quirks.
Windows 8.1 doesn't fit the bill, because it doesn't respond consistently; it brings back some of the Vista experience of having the OS throw unpredictable little delays into your work. The file manager windows are especially bad (e.g. when you're ejecting a drive). How in Hades' name could someone screw up something like that in 2013?
And the 8.0 to 8.1 upgrade process was terrible. It was so poorly designed from an HCI standpoint that I was actually tempted to believe it was an abusive prank by a disgruntled MS employee.
MS these days is looking to ever more like Lotus Software in its declining days. Despite being located in city crowded with world class universities, Lotus seemed utterly incapable of addressing even basic user interface problems except by pasting cheery looking wallpaper over them. I used to reflect when I passed their headquarters on Land Boulevard that if they put up a billboard say "We'll pay $100,000 to anyone who can fix our stupid UI problems," probably twenty or thirty people a day would see it who could probably take them up on the offer.
Use your special system architecture x-ray vision, folks. This is not simple, stand-alone site like Slashdot that just has to do some database queries and generate some XML, then uses JQuery or something to asynchronously load some advertising into a DIV. This is a system that must orchestrate a complex *synchronous* process involving servers that belong to outside organizations.
Case in point; the system requirements say that the site must exclude illegal immigrants, so the system has to request and obtain proof of your status from Homeland Security's servers before it can proceed. Also, instead of issuing the same subsidy to everyone, the law specifies and income dependent, means-tested subsidy, which means the system ALSO has to check your claims against the IRS's computers before continuing. That's before it actually gets to obtaining the marketplace data.
So the most complex aspect of this system is essentially untestable short of a near-full scale roll-out. Hey, IRS, can I try hosing down your servers with JMeter? Even if you could orchestrate the non-functional testing you'd want to do, you won't know how the system works until it's handling real data. It's not like you can shove a test load equivalent to a thousand applications per hour, then another equivalent to ten-thousand, then draw a straight line that will tell you how the system will perform with twenty-thousand. There are some serious discontinuities in performance lurking, and the actual data submitted is likely to change things.
I think if I were in charge of this, the extreme difficulty of realistic non-functional testing might have led me to isolate some of the data interchange into a post-processing step. That is, I'd let people apply and take them at their word about their immigration status and income, then tell them to check back in a day while we confirm the data they submitted. It's more bureaucratic, but a big part of user experience is predictability. If someone knows they can complete their application in half an hour and come back 24 hours later for confirmation, it's not so bad. But if the system is designed to give them the expectation that they can finish in a half hour, but sometimes takes so long their sessions expire, that's a disaster.
"Begging the question" refers to a logical fallacy in which you pose a question that can't be answered without assuming something that really ought to be proved first. The common example is "Have you stopped beating your wife?" It seems to call for a yes or no answer, but such an answer is only possible until we all agree that you've been beating your wife.
"Begging the question" is sometimes a result of sloppy thinking, but it can sometimes be an "intentional fallacy" -- a dirty trick, as when a prosecutor asks you, "How long have you been stealing from your employer?"
The term "begging the question" has never been clear in English; it's a literal translation of the Latin term "petitio principii"; it might better be called "assuming the conclusion". "Begging the question" in the logical-fallacy sense was always jargon, and thus not a first class member of the English lexicon in my opinion.
Anyhow, your reaction proves my point. The majority of even reasonably educated people now think "begging the question" mens "raising the question"; and so we have to accept that's one of it's meanings. It's more practical to reform the dictionary than it is to reform the language. If it helps, this is a case of what linguists call metonymy. The fallacy of petitio principii does indeed involve raising a question -- the question of the implicit premise's truth. Over time that meaning has been broadened to include *all* instances of raising questions.
Initially those who used "begging the question" to mean "raising the question" were just ignorant people trying to ape the writing of their more educated betters. But that's gone on so long there's no practical alternative but to grant that sense of phrase naturalized citizenship. But there are some who will never accept it, so it's best to accept the use of that sense by others but not to use it oneself.
It didn't affect me directly because I was working on System V Unix and we weren't directly connected to ARPANet.
I remember thinking, "Gee, someone actually *made* one of those?"
The idea had already popped up in some 70s sci-fi stories, and I remember in the late 70s pranking was already fairly common on timesharing systems. As soon as people began to share systems pranksters began to fool around with them, creating "fork bombs" and "chain jobs". It was annoying for sysadmins, but I think it wasn't malicious. The people who did this stuff were fascinated with the edge cases, the things a system could be made to do that it wasn't designed to do; and, let's just say they weren't necessarily the most attuned to the needs and desires of others.
Since the idea of network-vectored malware had cropped up shortly after the idea of a networked world became commonplace (this was still sci-fi stuff in the 70s), people had been talking about the real possibility of such a thing in the 80s; there were even some academic papers on the notion. But our forward thinking was more focused on the positive things that networked computers would do. In the end I think most of us fell short on both ends. Most of us underestimated just how useful and ubiquitous networking would become, at least in our lifetimes. And although we knew network-vectored malware was a theoretical possibility, we had no idea what a major feature of the networked world it would become -- at least in our lifetimes.
in retrospect, the Morris Worm wasn't so remarkable. We'd already seen pranksters on timesharing systems. I called them "doorknob twisters"; people whose curiosity and distractability meant they couldn't walk down a corridor without taking a peek behind the closed doors. Often these were the best people; Ken Thompson even described putting hidden hacks the C compiler in his Turing Award speech. And people had been talking about the possibility for network worms, albeit in sci-fi terms. Again in retrospect, something like the Morris Worm was bound to happen, probably within the next two or three years.
The Morris Worm is remarkable because it was our introduction to the unpredictability inherent in the scale of the network world. Just a tiny miscalculation was enough to turn an intellectual curiosity into a widespread disaster.
Yeah, the word "data" is plural and "impact" is not a synonym for "affect".
When you insist that the vast majority of a language's speakers are speaking wrongly, you're just spitting into the wind. I've even given up on "begging the question". I used it "correctly" myself, but it's far past the point where only morons use it to mean "brings up the question".
Let's concede for now that the data might show that today's youth has less *dispositional* empathy than say, forty years ago when I was a teenager. And today we have kids spending a lot of time with "apps", which didn't even exist back then. It's a heck of a stretch to attribute the change in stable, ongoing concern for others to the corrupting influence of apps on the young brain.
I'll tell you one of the big differences between today and the 70s: its a more complex, demanding world, and we spend more time preparing to live in it. When I was maybe ten years-old, it was not uncommon for people to get married when they were 18 - 22 years old. Two of my older siblings did. Going to college was not as nearly universal as it is today in the middle class.
Now it's more common for people to go to college, possibly spend five or six more years as single professionals, and then get married around thirty. That really got going with my cohort; I got married when I was almost 30, and when our first child came my wife's obstetrician said that mid 30s had become the usual age to have a first child. When she'd started in the professions it was mid to late 20s.
Sure, we have apps now and didn't back in the day, but that's nothing when you've considered we've effectively extended the length of childhood by some seven or eight years. Not "childhood" exactly, but more like an extended period of young adulthood where you are still learning the ropes and are expected to shoulder than full adult roles.
One of the hallmarks of middle adulthood is taking on caretaker roles. Parenthood is the ultimate caretaker role, but there's also taking care of aging parents. At work you find yourself moving into supervisory positions, or taking on the role of the voice of experience. It may not be coincidental that people much younger and older have both fewer caretaking responsibilities AND display less stable dispositional empathy.
Koch bros does it, soros does it, both the neocons and liberal progressives do it,
What is "it"?
Let me summarize why the article is news. According to the California AG's office, the Koch brothers have set up a fraudulent scheme that allows them and their allies to illegally deduct money spent on political projects from their taxes.
I sympathize with your strong feelings about the excessive influence of money in democracy, but the story is about more than billionaires spending their money on politics. It's about the Koch brothers allegedly committing fraud while they do that.
I dunno. Nerds like complicated machines. This story happens to be one constructed out of legal entities. The machine too complicated for the average attention span, so somebody who has a mentality that isn't daunted by a simple activity diagram ought to be paying attention.
Maybe "News for Nerds" doesn't must mean "Nerdy Stuff". Maybe it could also mean "News for Nerds to Pay Attention To".
Plus, if you really believe that 34% of Democrats believe in creationism, you seriously need to stop eating what the press is feeding you. The press is nothing but scare-mongering, and whether it's ginning up fears that the terrorists will kill you, or that the creationists will take over, the press is mostly fiction.
I'm just going by what the Gallup poll said. There may be methological flaws, of course, such as relying upon self-reported party affiliation.
As for the power of the religious right in the Republican party, I think the poll's estimate is probably high if you look at people *highly* involved in Republican politics, such as people who volunteer on campaigns or run for office. But if I'm right, that doesn't mean that the religious right isn't influential. Political power is dependent upon your ability to swing results. You don't need to be a majority in the party to have influence; you need to be necessary to forming a winning coalition.
Well, I used "creationism" as shorthand for the result. 52% of Republicans believe that the world was created by God some time in the last 10,000 years. 34% of *Democrats* took that position in the Gallup survey. It is possible that not all of the people who believed that call themselves "creationists"; but generally people reject "-ist" labels put on them by others.
What you have to do is compare favorability ratings for presidents *at the same point in their tenure*. It's normal for presidential approval ratings to drop in their second term as they attempt more contentious things, and then rise somewhat after they are out of office. At this point in George W.'s tenure his approval rate was 36.5%.
The president with the highest second term approval rating since tracking began was Clinton, at 60.6% favorable; edging out even Dwight Eisenhower by 1/10 point. And his approval has risen since. Clinton is president that Americans miss the most (using your argument), because at present he holds a staggering 66% favorable retrospective favorable rating.
Taxpayer funding of science has *not* produced politicized science; not during the period, say, from the end of WW2 to the end of the 20th C. Yeah, it *sounds* plausible that federal funding should produce politicized research, but if you ever worked in a science lab or with researchers on Federal grants you'd know that it just didn't happen.
So what has changed? Thus far, for the majority of researchers, not much. But there have been two big issues. One is the rise of political concern over climate change research. The second is the shift of the Republican party from a industrial state based, business-oriented party to a Southern regional party driven by social and religious issues. 52% of Republicans believe in creationism in a recent Gallup poll, as opposed to 34% of Democrats (still shocking). Having a majority membership of a major political party has given religious ideologues political influence they haven't enjoyed since the 1920s.
True, but energy *sources* are fungible in an electric system. That makes a huge environmental difference, as we're not forced to bear unreasonable *marginal* costs for energy technologies that have environmental dis-economies of scale.
Local shortfalls of wind or solar can be alleviated by a more efficient grid, but even if they are as unreliable as you claim, every 24 kwh net of wind energy put onto the grid is roughly one gallon of petroleum saved and 20 lb of CO2 emissions saved.
Slashdot Mirror
It was good enough to get Jim Lovell back from the moon, dammit.
Actually, that's the fundamental reason for *elections*.
This is always *my* reaction. In my state, you don't have to hire a lawyer most of the time for this kind of thing. You call the state AG's consumer protection office and they contact the firm that's harassing you. Once they (or their lawyers, or assignees or whatever) find out you don't have to hire a lawyer yourself, they back off fast. Their game is picking on people who can't defend themselves.
If your state doesn't work this way, then you should elect a different state government.
In the U.S., politicians post speeches full of lies online, and nobody cares. I'm not sure if this is because everybody believes the lies, or because nobody believes the politicians.
You can't describe political behavior with two-state logic. For example one of the most desirable states to entrain your followers into might be described thus: "I don't believe what the politicians say, but I'll act as if I do believe them." This is ideal because it relieves the politicians of the drudgery of dreaming up *plausible* lies.
One of the surest signs of this intermediate belief state is when you hear somebody, when a politician he supports is caught, respond with "they all do it." This only *appears* to be a condemnation of the politician in question, but the person doesn't mean "They all do it, therefore I'll withdraw support from both sides and look for someone less despicable." It means "They all do it, therefore I will pretend none of this has happened."
A related state of intermediate belief is "Everyone says...". This is where the person in question believes that all politicians are liars, but steadfastly refuses to acknowledge the political origin of political lies. Also known as "echo chamber epistemology".
This reminds me of a joke I once heard an actress tell:
Q:How do you tell the dumbest actress on a movie set?
A:She's the one who's sleeping with the writer.
Except during Katrina. All told the US received pledges of over a billion dollars in aid from countries all around the world. Pakistan and Bengladesh each sent a million dollars to private US relief agencies, and Bengladesh offered it's flood disaster response expertise. Kuwait ponied up half a billion dollars and the Saudis $250 million, but I'm more impressed with Bengladesh's generosity, considering that's a country with per capita income of only $2000.
Oh, and after Hurricane Sandy the US government got offers of aid from France and Iran, which we declined. Can't blame them if we turned them down. During the BP oil spilll, the US did not request aid for four weeks, but in that time thirteen unsolicited offers of aid came in from the international community. Ultimately 30 countries offered aid, including Mexico, Norway, Japan, the Netherlands and Croatia.
The international community *does* step up when the US is in need, but (a) most of them are not as rich as us, (b) few of them have the capacity (i.e., military air and sealift) to deliver large amounts of material aid quickly and (c) we just don't like to accept aid, even when it the less fortunate of us could use it.
Now if you're asking how much help the Philippines has sent to us in past hurricanes, probably not much. It's a poor country with a per capita income about 1/20th of the US, and it is not a superpower, not even a regional one. Do you think it's reasonable to hold it against them that they can't send us disaster aid?
*We* on the other hand *are* a superpower, with national interests in virtually every corner of the globe. Foreign and disaster aid buys us goodwill and cooperation. But even discounting our self-interest, we aren't nearly as generous as we think we our. If you rank our foreign aid as a percentage of GDP, we're 19th in the world, sending 1/5th the percentage of our GDP that Luxembourg or Sweden do. Luxembourg, for pity's sake! It's not like they need countries to give their ships access or bombers fly-over permission.
No, we're not nearly so generous as we like to think we are. But when it comes to *whining* about helping other people, we're world champs.
**Holds right hand inches in front of face and compares to left hand at arms length.**
Hey guys, I think the craters on the near side are bigger because they're closer.
I ride a bike, and I do not blow lights or stop signs, and certainly do stop for pedestrians in crosswalks. I do not ride on sidewalks or in food crossings. I happen to have a license. As for being "entitled" to being treated like a car, that's a matter of law in most states. And bike lanes that do not "meld" with other traffic -- I'm not sure what you mean, but it seems to me likely to be a matter of traffic engineering and traffic law enforcement.
And smugness? You may not like it, but it sure beats indifference to the problems you create. The world would be a better place if more people commuted by bike, but I don't insist everyone do it. Nor is that the reason I insist on being treated with the rights granted to me under the law. If you don't like smugness, how about the smugness of people who think that *everyone* should drive, and that the public roadways are there for their own benefit alone? Doesn't that strike you as arrogant?
Of course not. People never see the log in their own eye.
Storing only hashed, salted passwords has only been common practice since 1970s Unix.
I was thinking that there must be some folks over at MIT with both cognitive science and software background. I also know for a fact people in the aero/astro department do human factors research; I even helped run some of it when I worked at the Center for Space Research (now the McNair Building).
How well do you know your neighbor?
And if your neighbor is hit by a bus, how well do you know your neighbor's heirs?
How much do you trust your neighbor's physical security?
And can you count on your neighbor being home if you need your data fast?
If you can live without your data for a few weeks, and your backups are encrypted, then walking your data over might not be such a bad thing. Having *two* offsite friends you park encrypted backups with would be better, and if they lived at least a few miles apart that would be even better (e.g. in case of a tornado, flood or large neighborhood fire).
I was OK with 8.0. I've reached the point where I hate the new versions of everything (except maybe XFCE, which is pretty much pitched toward people who hate the new versions of everything). The reason is all this struggle to revolutionize the user experience seems to have left the goals of making common tasks convenient for the user behind. Impressive but pointless seems to be à la mode these days, and designers appear increasingly incapable of distinguishing creativity from novelty.
But given that virtually everybody has caught this disease, I pretty much have given up on insisting that things making sense. I only ask for a few things, that a user interface be stable and respond consistently (consistency was a huge problem with Vista), and that I can figure out how to do what I need done after a few days with the system. Windows 8.0 fit the bill. It didn't make much *sense*, but it didn't crash and responded in a stable way so I simply adjusted to its quirks.
Windows 8.1 doesn't fit the bill, because it doesn't respond consistently; it brings back some of the Vista experience of having the OS throw unpredictable little delays into your work. The file manager windows are especially bad (e.g. when you're ejecting a drive). How in Hades' name could someone screw up something like that in 2013?
And the 8.0 to 8.1 upgrade process was terrible. It was so poorly designed from an HCI standpoint that I was actually tempted to believe it was an abusive prank by a disgruntled MS employee.
MS these days is looking to ever more like Lotus Software in its declining days. Despite being located in city crowded with world class universities, Lotus seemed utterly incapable of addressing even basic user interface problems except by pasting cheery looking wallpaper over them. I used to reflect when I passed their headquarters on Land Boulevard that if they put up a billboard say "We'll pay $100,000 to anyone who can fix our stupid UI problems," probably twenty or thirty people a day would see it who could probably take them up on the offer.
Use your special system architecture x-ray vision, folks. This is not simple, stand-alone site like Slashdot that just has to do some database queries and generate some XML, then uses JQuery or something to asynchronously load some advertising into a DIV. This is a system that must orchestrate a complex *synchronous* process involving servers that belong to outside organizations.
Case in point; the system requirements say that the site must exclude illegal immigrants, so the system has to request and obtain proof of your status from Homeland Security's servers before it can proceed. Also, instead of issuing the same subsidy to everyone, the law specifies and income dependent, means-tested subsidy, which means the system ALSO has to check your claims against the IRS's computers before continuing. That's before it actually gets to obtaining the marketplace data.
So the most complex aspect of this system is essentially untestable short of a near-full scale roll-out. Hey, IRS, can I try hosing down your servers with JMeter? Even if you could orchestrate the non-functional testing you'd want to do, you won't know how the system works until it's handling real data. It's not like you can shove a test load equivalent to a thousand applications per hour, then another equivalent to ten-thousand, then draw a straight line that will tell you how the system will perform with twenty-thousand. There are some serious discontinuities in performance lurking, and the actual data submitted is likely to change things.
I think if I were in charge of this, the extreme difficulty of realistic non-functional testing might have led me to isolate some of the data interchange into a post-processing step. That is, I'd let people apply and take them at their word about their immigration status and income, then tell them to check back in a day while we confirm the data they submitted. It's more bureaucratic, but a big part of user experience is predictability. If someone knows they can complete their application in half an hour and come back 24 hours later for confirmation, it's not so bad. But if the system is designed to give them the expectation that they can finish in a half hour, but sometimes takes so long their sessions expire, that's a disaster.
"Begging the question" refers to a logical fallacy in which you pose a question that can't be answered without assuming something that really ought to be proved first. The common example is "Have you stopped beating your wife?" It seems to call for a yes or no answer, but such an answer is only possible until we all agree that you've been beating your wife.
"Begging the question" is sometimes a result of sloppy thinking, but it can sometimes be an "intentional fallacy" -- a dirty trick, as when a prosecutor asks you, "How long have you been stealing from your employer?"
The term "begging the question" has never been clear in English; it's a literal translation of the Latin term "petitio principii"; it might better be called "assuming the conclusion". "Begging the question" in the logical-fallacy sense was always jargon, and thus not a first class member of the English lexicon in my opinion.
Anyhow, your reaction proves my point. The majority of even reasonably educated people now think "begging the question" mens "raising the question"; and so we have to accept that's one of it's meanings. It's more practical to reform the dictionary than it is to reform the language. If it helps, this is a case of what linguists call metonymy. The fallacy of petitio principii does indeed involve raising a question -- the question of the implicit premise's truth. Over time that meaning has been broadened to include *all* instances of raising questions.
Initially those who used "begging the question" to mean "raising the question" were just ignorant people trying to ape the writing of their more educated betters. But that's gone on so long there's no practical alternative but to grant that sense of phrase naturalized citizenship. But there are some who will never accept it, so it's best to accept the use of that sense by others but not to use it oneself.
It didn't affect me directly because I was working on System V Unix and we weren't directly connected to ARPANet.
I remember thinking, "Gee, someone actually *made* one of those?"
The idea had already popped up in some 70s sci-fi stories, and I remember in the late 70s pranking was already fairly common on timesharing systems. As soon as people began to share systems pranksters began to fool around with them, creating "fork bombs" and "chain jobs". It was annoying for sysadmins, but I think it wasn't malicious. The people who did this stuff were fascinated with the edge cases, the things a system could be made to do that it wasn't designed to do; and, let's just say they weren't necessarily the most attuned to the needs and desires of others.
Since the idea of network-vectored malware had cropped up shortly after the idea of a networked world became commonplace (this was still sci-fi stuff in the 70s), people had been talking about the real possibility of such a thing in the 80s; there were even some academic papers on the notion. But our forward thinking was more focused on the positive things that networked computers would do. In the end I think most of us fell short on both ends. Most of us underestimated just how useful and ubiquitous networking would become, at least in our lifetimes. And although we knew network-vectored malware was a theoretical possibility, we had no idea what a major feature of the networked world it would become -- at least in our lifetimes.
in retrospect, the Morris Worm wasn't so remarkable. We'd already seen pranksters on timesharing systems. I called them "doorknob twisters"; people whose curiosity and distractability meant they couldn't walk down a corridor without taking a peek behind the closed doors. Often these were the best people; Ken Thompson even described putting hidden hacks the C compiler in his Turing Award speech. And people had been talking about the possibility for network worms, albeit in sci-fi terms. Again in retrospect, something like the Morris Worm was bound to happen, probably within the next two or three years.
The Morris Worm is remarkable because it was our introduction to the unpredictability inherent in the scale of the network world. Just a tiny miscalculation was enough to turn an intellectual curiosity into a widespread disaster.
Yeah, the word "data" is plural and "impact" is not a synonym for "affect".
When you insist that the vast majority of a language's speakers are speaking wrongly, you're just spitting into the wind. I've even given up on "begging the question". I used it "correctly" myself, but it's far past the point where only morons use it to mean "brings up the question".
Let's concede for now that the data might show that today's youth has less *dispositional* empathy than say, forty years ago when I was a teenager. And today we have kids spending a lot of time with "apps", which didn't even exist back then. It's a heck of a stretch to attribute the change in stable, ongoing concern for others to the corrupting influence of apps on the young brain.
I'll tell you one of the big differences between today and the 70s: its a more complex, demanding world, and we spend more time preparing to live in it. When I was maybe ten years-old, it was not uncommon for people to get married when they were 18 - 22 years old. Two of my older siblings did. Going to college was not as nearly universal as it is today in the middle class.
Now it's more common for people to go to college, possibly spend five or six more years as single professionals, and then get married around thirty. That really got going with my cohort; I got married when I was almost 30, and when our first child came my wife's obstetrician said that mid 30s had become the usual age to have a first child. When she'd started in the professions it was mid to late 20s.
Sure, we have apps now and didn't back in the day, but that's nothing when you've considered we've effectively extended the length of childhood by some seven or eight years. Not "childhood" exactly, but more like an extended period of young adulthood where you are still learning the ropes and are expected to shoulder than full adult roles.
One of the hallmarks of middle adulthood is taking on caretaker roles. Parenthood is the ultimate caretaker role, but there's also taking care of aging parents. At work you find yourself moving into supervisory positions, or taking on the role of the voice of experience. It may not be coincidental that people much younger and older have both fewer caretaking responsibilities AND display less stable dispositional empathy.
Koch bros does it, soros does it, both the neocons and liberal progressives do it,
What is "it"?
Let me summarize why the article is news. According to the California AG's office, the Koch brothers have set up a fraudulent scheme that allows them and their allies to illegally deduct money spent on political projects from their taxes.
I sympathize with your strong feelings about the excessive influence of money in democracy, but the story is about more than billionaires spending their money on politics. It's about the Koch brothers allegedly committing fraud while they do that.
I dunno. Nerds like complicated machines. This story happens to be one constructed out of legal entities. The machine too complicated for the average attention span, so somebody who has a mentality that isn't daunted by a simple activity diagram ought to be paying attention.
Maybe "News for Nerds" doesn't must mean "Nerdy Stuff". Maybe it could also mean "News for Nerds to Pay Attention To".
Damned iOS autocorrect. Sorosis = Soros.
I take it then that: is = 1.
Plus, if you really believe that 34% of Democrats believe in creationism, you seriously need to stop eating what the press is feeding you. The press is nothing but scare-mongering, and whether it's ginning up fears that the terrorists will kill you, or that the creationists will take over, the press is mostly fiction.
I'm just going by what the Gallup poll said. There may be methological flaws, of course, such as relying upon self-reported party affiliation.
As for the power of the religious right in the Republican party, I think the poll's estimate is probably high if you look at people *highly* involved in Republican politics, such as people who volunteer on campaigns or run for office. But if I'm right, that doesn't mean that the religious right isn't influential. Political power is dependent upon your ability to swing results. You don't need to be a majority in the party to have influence; you need to be necessary to forming a winning coalition.
Well, I used "creationism" as shorthand for the result. 52% of Republicans believe that the world was created by God some time in the last 10,000 years. 34% of *Democrats* took that position in the Gallup survey. It is possible that not all of the people who believed that call themselves "creationists"; but generally people reject "-ist" labels put on them by others.
What you have to do is compare favorability ratings for presidents *at the same point in their tenure*. It's normal for presidential approval ratings to drop in their second term as they attempt more contentious things, and then rise somewhat after they are out of office. At this point in George W.'s tenure his approval rate was 36.5%.
The president with the highest second term approval rating since tracking began was Clinton, at 60.6% favorable; edging out even Dwight Eisenhower by 1/10 point. And his approval has risen since. Clinton is president that Americans miss the most (using your argument), because at present he holds a staggering 66% favorable retrospective favorable rating.
Taxpayer funding of science has *not* produced politicized science; not during the period, say, from the end of WW2 to the end of the 20th C. Yeah, it *sounds* plausible that federal funding should produce politicized research, but if you ever worked in a science lab or with researchers on Federal grants you'd know that it just didn't happen.
So what has changed? Thus far, for the majority of researchers, not much. But there have been two big issues. One is the rise of political concern over climate change research. The second is the shift of the Republican party from a industrial state based, business-oriented party to a Southern regional party driven by social and religious issues. 52% of Republicans believe in creationism in a recent Gallup poll, as opposed to 34% of Democrats (still shocking). Having a majority membership of a major political party has given religious ideologues political influence they haven't enjoyed since the 1920s.
True, but energy *sources* are fungible in an electric system. That makes a huge environmental difference, as we're not forced to bear unreasonable *marginal* costs for energy technologies that have environmental dis-economies of scale.
Local shortfalls of wind or solar can be alleviated by a more efficient grid, but even if they are as unreliable as you claim, every 24 kwh net of wind energy put onto the grid is roughly one gallon of petroleum saved and 20 lb of CO2 emissions saved.