The idea is to make a ruckus, raise the profile of the idiocy of the Kansas Board of Education, who are basically quietly destroying science education as Dorothy knows it in Kansas.
The idea is moronic; don't challenge our position, or we'll take our ball and go home and your stupid hick kids will get nothing. This whole thing smacks of arrogant authoritanianism. Congratulations, scientists, you just validated the fears that every fundamentalist preacher warned about. Why don't you guys just tell them they have to have the number of the beast tatooed on their foreheads to pass class as well? Yeah, way to really win hearts and minds there, Jack.
Now, if Kansas parents collectively shrug their shoulders and say,"Well, no science is Ok.", then they deserve to have their children shut out of every known college/university/whatever-you-name-it in the world (not just the US).
That smacks of so much arrogance it's incredible. If we don't get our way, we're going to fuck your kids forever, is that it?
Both the copyright threat, and response of people like you to it, display a profound pettiness.
America is more than anti-science. American culture in the broadest terms has become very anti-intellectual, which is really a super-set of being anti-science.
This is true. But do you know why this is? Because in the last couple of decades, "intellectual" has come to mean someone so out of touch with the vast majority that the label is distrusted. Intellectual = some snotty guy at Harvard telling you middle America peons that you're, well, peons, and that everything would be better if you just listened to volvo-driving people like himself. And frankly, intellectuals haven't worked very hard to erase this image, because like all good legends, there's a kernel of truth to it.
I'm a pretty well-educated, science-minded kinda guy, atheist and all that.
And here is specifically the problem people of faith have with modern Science. There is this idea that scientist = atheist, and that you can't be one without the other. This wasn't always this case. But if you tell everyone that the cost of embracing science is the revocation of their faith, well, you're cutting out a huge number from the pool then. As anti-Christian as Slashdot is, I know that gives you guys a warm fuzzy feeling, that you get to keep the club to yourselves and all.
Because pathetic assholes from Slashdot, DailyKOS, and DemocraticUnderground will crapflood the site with "first post!" and "No Blood For Oil!". People really interested in genuine communication will be drowned out.
There seems to be this assumption that if you're a conservative, than you're in bed with MS and hostile to Linux, Open Source, yada yada.
This is, plainly spoken, bullshit.
Go to a place like FreeRepublic, and you'll find a good deal of Linux advocacy and Microsoft distrust.
The most prominent popular culture conservatives don't run Windows, nor are Microsoft cheerleaders. Rush Limbaugh and Tom Clancy are OSX users, and Clancy is a longtime critic of MS software.
Dark Matter has always been a crock. It was the dot.bomb of astrophysics, all hype.
Glad to see that it's being recognized that science has a good bit of quackery out there. As I've said before, the scientific method may be perfect, but the humans invoking it are not.
Next fad to expose: stem cell research. It has some promise, but levelheaded scientists are beginning to admit it's overhyped. Sanjay fucking Gupta was on CNN yesterday telling you that stem cells would allow you to grow replacement body parts in a petri dish, then just tack them on....fucktards....
I've known professors who should have their work overwritten by college freshmen.
Yup. While a degree should give weight to an opinion, it shouldn't be the final criteria used to judge someone's expertise in a place like Wikipedia, because frankly, there are so many whackjob professors out there right now. In an ideal world, all professors would be wise, honest experts. Unfortunately, the academy has these leading lights to contend with these days:
Ward Churchill - got a full professorship without a PhD because he's an American Indian. Oh wait...
Leonard Jeffries - The guy at CCNY that claimed melatonin made blacks a superior race. I'm surprised they found the courage to sack this jackoff.
Martin Bernal - His book Black Athena claims Greece was a black civilization.
All of these guys are or were professors at schools with good reputations (CU, CCNY, Cornell). Though they've been discredited, lots of their ilk remain in the academy, yet to be exposed. Only professors in the maths and hard sciences should get the kind of near-automatic legitimacy being discussed for Wikipedia. And keep in mind, even science has it's dogmas. The fact that it took twenty years for the truth of the real cause of ulcers (bactieria) to gain mainstraim scientific acceptance should give us pause; the scientific method may be perfect, but humans practicing the scientific method are not.
One more note of caution; many people with advanced degrees are given automatic credibility even when speaking on a non-related subject, and this also should give us pause. Noam Chomsky is a good example. His field of expertise is linguistics, but he's most noted for his political writings and opinions. Should Chomsky be given automatic credibility when speaking on matters other than language? He and others often are, being lumped into the general category of "intellectuals". For something like wikipedia, "expert" status on something should be limited to actual expertise in the given field.
Folks, she was a trial lawyer. It was her job to argue her clients position. Unless you're working for an idealogically based organization (ACLU, ACLJ, EFF, NRA), you're basically a mercenary, a hired gun for your client.
Miers sucks as a SCOTUS nominee, but the fact that she once represented Microsoft has nothing to do with that.
In 1965, a Soviet whaler watched a battle between a squid and a 40 ton sperm whale. In this case neither were victorious. The strangled whale was found floating in the sea with the squid's tentacles wrapped around the whale's throat. The squid's severed head was found in the whale's stomach.
...is the colossal squid, Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni. Where giant squid are thought to get up to 60 ft long, no one knows just how large the CS can get. Remains of the two species have been compared, and the CS is bigger in just about everything, including the beak. They live only in Antarctic waters (that we know), and the remains of one washed up in the Ross Sea in 2003.
You guys can think what you want, but when Microsoft marks another company for death, usually they win. Google might not go away, but MS will find a way to beat it in the marketplace. MS's stuff won't be as good, and they won't win by fair play....but they'll win. Gates and Balmer have their minds set on it and that's that. Game over. If you're a Google employee, enjoy it while you're on top, because you're going to be polishing your resume in a couple of years. Balmer especially is one very vengeful fucker.
"Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I'm going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill Google." -
Steve Ballmer
This isn't Linux, where an open source project can't be killed. Google is a busniness, subject to business pressures. I don't rule out the possibility that Microsoft may actually find a way to buy Google one day. At the very least, Google will end up like Lotus, Apple, Wordperfect; profitable, with a dedicated fanbase, but small and irrelavent compared to the MS juggernaut. Worse, they could end up like Netscape. There was a lot of brainpower in that company too. It didn't save them.
Let's see...you've got a superior technology that suffers from bad company management... Itanium.
You've got less expensive yet outstanding technology that suffers from poor market share (for the time being)... Opteron
And then you have a bloated, legacy, piece of shit technology that's a crude copy of Opteron, a Pentium 4 with hastily tacked on 64 bit instructions (copied from AMD), a technology that Intel doesn't even believe in, that they themselves think is inferior.... Xeon
90 percent of the "non-X86 server market"? Ummm...I don't think they're telling the truth. The biggest market outside Intel/Compatibles is almost certainly Sparc/Ultrasparc, with Solaris as the OS. Besides Sparc, your options are kind of limited...PA-RISC, Alpha, Power....of those, only the Alpha might have any Netware presence. And I doubt there are too many Alphas in signifigant numbers anymore.
Isn't Netware supposed to be for X86 machines primarily? Did he possibly mean "non-MICROSOFT" server market, perhaps? (Still, I'd even have a hard time believing that...I'd bet Solaris rules there too).
Not so fast, my friend...you can bet your GNU/Ass that KDE and Gnome will try to ape Vista's looks as fast as they can manage, and then most distros will be as bloated as anything MS makes.
Bullshit. All areas have some kind of environmental setback, but New Orleans is unique in that after a disaster is over IT'S GOING TO STAY UNDER WATER, BECAUSE IT'S UNDER SEA LEVEL.
It's a stupid place to build a city. And don't give me the bullshit that it's too important to not rebuild. Other ports can handle its traffic, and river travel isn't that important anymore...truck and rail has largely replaced it.
Re:Those are geek quibles not mainstream
on
Windows 95 Turns 10
·
· Score: 1
Rose tinted? Yes if the grandparent meant engineering but not if he meant that Win95 DROVE the expansion of mainstream client internet use including the rise of PC enthusiasts and the whole build your own marketplace.
You nailed it. I was referring not the engineering, which obviously sucked ass, but the other issues. There's no doubt in my mind that Windows 95 helped open up a whole new computer culture for the public at large.
...Windows 95, despite all it's many flaws, was a lot of fun. It was stupidity to use it in a situation requiring stability, but as a gaming platform and all around PC OS, it was great to have at the time. Especially with the freeware that became rapidly available, it was a big laboratory for computer users. Remember, MS didn't have an app for everything back then, so if you needed one, you bought it or sought it out on the freeware sites. Though I'd used Unix in school, my first exposure to IRC was on Win 95, and I relied on the freeware IRC clients to learn. Same with the utilities and such.
I'd never owned an Apple, so I can't speak to what it was like to use one back then (were they using, what, system 6 at the time? I don't remember...), but while XP is more reliable, and I get a tremedous sense of "do it yourself" satisfaction with Linux (my primary laptop OS), I don't think I'll ever have as much pure fun as I did playing around with Win 95 when it first came out, warts and all.
Actually, I am surprised that there is not some sort of treaty that would prevent this BPL nonsense.
Well, get used to it, because that BPL nonsense is the future.
It's inevitable that communications, which need electricity anyway, will one day travel over the same lines that provide power. For congested cities, it prevents the need to build ever more infrastructure. In growing areas, it saves money and time establishing infrastructure. I'm surprised we haven't done it already. They're already doing it in Asia. It's coming, like it or not. I was thinking last night...it'll probably be a fact of life for households to have some kind of firewall on the outside of the house, where power comes in, as one day a lot of appliances will be network enabled, and BPL will be the most logical way to do it.
We'll just have to find a technical solution to the radio problem. It can be done.
Slashdot Mirror
The idea is moronic; don't challenge our position, or we'll take our ball and go home and your stupid hick kids will get nothing. This whole thing smacks of arrogant authoritanianism. Congratulations, scientists, you just validated the fears that every fundamentalist preacher warned about. Why don't you guys just tell them they have to have the number of the beast tatooed on their foreheads to pass class as well? Yeah, way to really win hearts and minds there, Jack.
That smacks of so much arrogance it's incredible. If we don't get our way, we're going to fuck your kids forever, is that it?
Both the copyright threat, and response of people like you to it, display a profound pettiness.
This is true. But do you know why this is? Because in the last couple of decades, "intellectual" has come to mean someone so out of touch with the vast majority that the label is distrusted. Intellectual = some snotty guy at Harvard telling you middle America peons that you're, well, peons, and that everything would be better if you just listened to volvo-driving people like himself. And frankly, intellectuals haven't worked very hard to erase this image, because like all good legends, there's a kernel of truth to it.
And here is specifically the problem people of faith have with modern Science. There is this idea that scientist = atheist, and that you can't be one without the other. This wasn't always this case. But if you tell everyone that the cost of embracing science is the revocation of their faith, well, you're cutting out a huge number from the pool then. As anti-Christian as Slashdot is, I know that gives you guys a warm fuzzy feeling, that you get to keep the club to yourselves and all.
Because pathetic assholes from Slashdot, DailyKOS, and DemocraticUnderground will crapflood the site with "first post!" and "No Blood For Oil!". People really interested in genuine communication will be drowned out.
And we should be deeply thankful that they are.
There seems to be this assumption that if you're a conservative, than you're in bed with MS and hostile to Linux, Open Source, yada yada.
This is, plainly spoken, bullshit.
Go to a place like FreeRepublic, and you'll find a good deal of Linux advocacy and Microsoft distrust.
The most prominent popular culture conservatives don't run Windows, nor are Microsoft cheerleaders. Rush Limbaugh and Tom Clancy are OSX users, and Clancy is a longtime critic of MS software.
Dark Matter has always been a crock. It was the dot.bomb of astrophysics, all hype.
Glad to see that it's being recognized that science has a good bit of quackery out there. As I've said before, the scientific method may be perfect, but the humans invoking it are not.
Next fad to expose: stem cell research. It has some promise, but levelheaded scientists are beginning to admit it's overhyped. Sanjay fucking Gupta was on CNN yesterday telling you that stem cells would allow you to grow replacement body parts in a petri dish, then just tack them on....fucktards....
Says the guy quoting Marx in his sig...
Yup. While a degree should give weight to an opinion, it shouldn't be the final criteria used to judge someone's expertise in a place like Wikipedia, because frankly, there are so many whackjob professors out there right now. In an ideal world, all professors would be wise, honest experts. Unfortunately, the academy has these leading lights to contend with these days:
Ward Churchill - got a full professorship without a PhD because he's an American Indian. Oh wait...
Leonard Jeffries - The guy at CCNY that claimed melatonin made blacks a superior race. I'm surprised they found the courage to sack this jackoff.
Martin Bernal - His book Black Athena claims Greece was a black civilization.
All of these guys are or were professors at schools with good reputations (CU, CCNY, Cornell). Though they've been discredited, lots of their ilk remain in the academy, yet to be exposed. Only professors in the maths and hard sciences should get the kind of near-automatic legitimacy being discussed for Wikipedia. And keep in mind, even science has it's dogmas. The fact that it took twenty years for the truth of the real cause of ulcers (bactieria) to gain mainstraim scientific acceptance should give us pause; the scientific method may be perfect, but humans practicing the scientific method are not.
One more note of caution; many people with advanced degrees are given automatic credibility even when speaking on a non-related subject, and this also should give us pause. Noam Chomsky is a good example. His field of expertise is linguistics, but he's most noted for his political writings and opinions. Should Chomsky be given automatic credibility when speaking on matters other than language? He and others often are, being lumped into the general category of "intellectuals". For something like wikipedia, "expert" status on something should be limited to actual expertise in the given field.
Folks, she was a trial lawyer. It was her job to argue her clients position. Unless you're working for an idealogically based organization (ACLU, ACLJ, EFF, NRA), you're basically a mercenary, a hired gun for your client.
Miers sucks as a SCOTUS nominee, but the fact that she once represented Microsoft has nothing to do with that.
We built it. We paid for it.
And we were rather generous letting the world into the system, don't you think?
...is the colossal squid, Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni. Where giant squid are thought to get up to 60 ft long, no one knows just how large the CS can get. Remains of the two species have been compared, and the CS is bigger in just about everything, including the beak. They live only in Antarctic waters (that we know), and the remains of one washed up in the Ross Sea in 2003.
I want to thank both you and the parent posters...for outing yourselves.
RINOs, both of you. Republican In Name Only.
It's pathetic how you're prostituting yourselves to the Slashdot moonbat crowd for mod points.
This isn't Linux, where an open source project can't be killed. Google is a busniness, subject to business pressures. I don't rule out the possibility that Microsoft may actually find a way to buy Google one day. At the very least, Google will end up like Lotus, Apple, Wordperfect; profitable, with a dedicated fanbase, but small and irrelavent compared to the MS juggernaut. Worse, they could end up like Netscape. There was a lot of brainpower in that company too. It didn't save them.
Let's see...you've got a superior technology that suffers from bad company management ... Itanium.
You've got less expensive yet outstanding technology that suffers from poor market share (for the time being)... Opteron
And then you have a bloated, legacy, piece of shit technology that's a crude copy of Opteron, a Pentium 4 with hastily tacked on 64 bit instructions (copied from AMD), a technology that Intel doesn't even believe in, that they themselves think is inferior.... Xeon
Guess which one will dominate the market?
Sometimes IT really does suck.
90 percent of the "non-X86 server market"? Ummm...I don't think they're telling the truth. The biggest market outside Intel/Compatibles is almost certainly Sparc/Ultrasparc, with Solaris as the OS. Besides Sparc, your options are kind of limited...PA-RISC, Alpha, Power....of those, only the Alpha might have any Netware presence. And I doubt there are too many Alphas in signifigant numbers anymore.
Isn't Netware supposed to be for X86 machines primarily? Did he possibly mean "non-MICROSOFT" server market, perhaps? (Still, I'd even have a hard time believing that...I'd bet Solaris rules there too).
Not so fast, my friend...you can bet your GNU/Ass that KDE and Gnome will try to ape Vista's looks as fast as they can manage, and then most distros will be as bloated as anything MS makes.
So? Because the Dutch choose to do it, NO should too? How many hurricanes do the Dutch deal with every year?
And they've still got their problems with flooding.
Bullshit. All areas have some kind of environmental setback, but New Orleans is unique in that after a disaster is over IT'S GOING TO STAY UNDER WATER, BECAUSE IT'S UNDER SEA LEVEL.
It's a stupid place to build a city. And don't give me the bullshit that it's too important to not rebuild. Other ports can handle its traffic, and river travel isn't that important anymore...truck and rail has largely replaced it.
Let New Orleans Die.
Red Stick is a horrible place to live and work, with some of the nastiest people you'll ever meet. Think "Deliverance" with more whiskey.
Leaving CalTech for LSU? Asswipe...
...it's Xbox only.
You nailed it. I was referring not the engineering, which obviously sucked ass, but the other issues. There's no doubt in my mind that Windows 95 helped open up a whole new computer culture for the public at large.
...troll or no, that's the funniest damn thing I've read all day. Thank you :)
...Windows 95, despite all it's many flaws, was a lot of fun. It was stupidity to use it in a situation requiring stability, but as a gaming platform and all around PC OS, it was great to have at the time. Especially with the freeware that became rapidly available, it was a big laboratory for computer users. Remember, MS didn't have an app for everything back then, so if you needed one, you bought it or sought it out on the freeware sites. Though I'd used Unix in school, my first exposure to IRC was on Win 95, and I relied on the freeware IRC clients to learn. Same with the utilities and such.
I'd never owned an Apple, so I can't speak to what it was like to use one back then (were they using, what, system 6 at the time? I don't remember...), but while XP is more reliable, and I get a tremedous sense of "do it yourself" satisfaction with Linux (my primary laptop OS), I don't think I'll ever have as much pure fun as I did playing around with Win 95 when it first came out, warts and all.
Well, get used to it, because that BPL nonsense is the future.
It's inevitable that communications, which need electricity anyway, will one day travel over the same lines that provide power. For congested cities, it prevents the need to build ever more infrastructure. In growing areas, it saves money and time establishing infrastructure. I'm surprised we haven't done it already. They're already doing it in Asia. It's coming, like it or not. I was thinking last night...it'll probably be a fact of life for households to have some kind of firewall on the outside of the house, where power comes in, as one day a lot of appliances will be network enabled, and BPL will be the most logical way to do it.
We'll just have to find a technical solution to the radio problem. It can be done.