Wait, now your culture stops being a culture if you migrate? Shit, someone tell the Han Chinese and the Vietnamese that their culture is way younger than they thought.
Because the dominant cultures in the US are descendant from European cultures; they don't go back *in North America* for thousands of years.
And British culture doesn't go back *in Britain* for thousands of years; nearly everything cultural--language, dress, religion, ethnicity--filtered in relatively recently from Germany, France, Rome, Greece, Jerusalem, and so on.
So, are you claiming that this new theory of "cultural descent" or whatever works only over contiguous land-masses? Or perhaps there's a maximum velocity a culture can travel at?
If I recall, China had domesticated animals (pigs, chickens, horses) whereas subequatorial Africa didn't--the jungle killed them. Also, China had rice and wheat; I don't think they grew those in subequatorial Africa. Without animals and good crops, the Africans were at a disadvantage.
Alas, the book was pretty skimpy on the history of pre-European African empires, but I remember two bits: (1) the invention of steel, and (2) the Zulu were nearly a match for the (Dutch?) Europeans who landed there; the invaders advanced at an average of (roughly) one mile per year against them, despite possessing firearms, horses and a professional military. Especially impressive compared to the Europeans' successes in the Americas.
"Guns, Germs, and Steel" might have some good answers. The National Geographic miniseries was spotty at points, but contains some good visual demonstrations of precision horseback riding and rapier fighting. (It's talking about Pizarro and the Inca, but it's the same idea.)
The Inquisition was a way to separate people from their property, and get some good old-fashioned torturin' in at the same time. It wasn't even supposedly meant to appease any gods--the only soul supposedly in danger was the one of the guy about to get set on fire to save said soul.
But I suppose it would have gotten in the way of a cute rhetorical point.
In intelligible form? Sorry, but no European culture goes back "thousands of years". If you go back two thousand, you're at the dawn of Christianity, which bore only a passing resemblance to today's versions. The Romans had switched over to imperial rule. While I can understand how Western culture takes a lot from Romans and Greeks, to imply that we're all part of the same culture is plainly bullshit--we don't do human sacrifice, giant statues of our gods in the town square, gladiator fights, Legions forbidden from coming home, or the divine right of kings. Or humping little boys.
You'd have as much luck fitting into Roman society as you would into a Bantu empire of the same period. Living in Europe may mean you live near some old buildings, but it doesn't mean you live in the same culture that built them.
If you are considering when slavery ceased to be an accepted part of life in the countries which later became the UK, this would have been in the early Middle Ages, around 1100 (not long after the Romans left and the Danes settled, around 800. The Vikings would have been the last group living in England who accepted slavery as a normal condition.
No, those are the dates when enslaving white people became unacceptable. The British were quite involved with African slavery from 1562 until 1803, when they started discouraging it, and 1833, when it was actually abolished by the Brits.
Habeas Corpus, though codified in the Magna Carta (1215), was part of the common law well before this date, and indicates that freedom is the presumed state for any individual who has not been found guilty of a crime. While slavery was formally abolished in the US around 1865, the acceptance of slavery seems to have persisted in the southern states until around 1960.
It's disingenuous for you to compare the time when Brits stopped enslaving fellow whites to the time when Americans ended legal discrimination against blacks.
And also, what persisted in the South until the Civil Rights era wasn't slavery so much as it was Jim Crow--segregation, much like the Apartheid that South Africa had until relatively recently. Racist, certainly--but comparing it to the end of whites-as-slaves in Viking culture? Give me a break.
I think he's not saying that the slaves lived better over here, but rather that their descendants here live better than the descendants of those who weren't taken as slaves, over in Africa. Which is arguably true. Anyone who tries to assign nobility to the slavers for this, of course, deserves a cod-slap. It's irony.
What useful invention or discovery can be attributed to any of the huge number of sub-saharan Africans?
Didn't one of the Bantu empires make steel before the Europeans?
But yes, there's a lot of good stuff about the influence of environment on the society that arises there; check out Guns, Germs, and Steel if you haven't already.
... this wouldn't even be necessary if they'd taken security seriously in the first place, instead of tacking it on as an afterthought, or using the "eh, we can probably trust all this user-submitted content" model.
But still, good to see them taking it seriously. Now, instead of Bantown getting an eternal newspost declaring their victory, they'll just get permanent accounts.
Are you familiar with C. P. Snow's "The Two Cultures"? It describes the kind of nonsense that makes people who are not self-identified dorks reluctant to understand anything the least bit technical or scientific. Willful ignorance bothers me to no end.
Carmageddon! Sure, the 3D graphics are dated and campy, but there's nothing quite like a game that sets up some relatively simple rules (in this case, slightly cartoonish laws of physics) and tries to stay out of your way the rest of the time. I recently rediscovered it, and it's even better than I had remembered. (Especially now that it's abandonware, and relatively easily available for free.)
Could you be a dear and tell me how many combat deaths US forces suffered in Kosovo, as well as the total monetary cost to our armed forces? Could you point out there Clinton (a) endorsed domestic wiretapping in contravention of FISA, and (b) claimed that he was above the law, and did not need to follow it anyway? And finally, could you explain why "Clinton did it" would be a valid defense, even if it were true?
At least the NSA is choosing people with some intelligence on them and not eavesdropping on every damn call.
I take it you work at the NSA and can actually back this up? Or are we to take the president's word for it?
And I beg to differ that the NSA wiretap is "no different". You know when you're patted down at the airport. You don't know when the NSA wiretaps you. The airport searches are conducted in compliance with the law. The warrantless wiretaps are conducted in violation of the law. It doesn't get much clearer than that.
I want some big, important pundit on the right to give an example of something the president does not, by their lights, have the authority to do. If he becomes a dictator in wartime (which it's mighty sketchy to say we're in), why not come out and say this? Can he rape and murder? No, seriously, if he can break one law, why not others?
Shit, I thought I understood our system of government--the legislature expresses the will of the people in laws; the executive branch then implements and executes said laws. For instance, if Congress makes kidnapping a federal offense, the FBI (under the Department of Justice) investigates kidnappings. But according to some of our less stable pundits and her commenters, "The legislature cannot limit the authority of the president, just like the president cannot limit the authority of the legislature." So, does he have divine, kingly powers now? Did we suddenly get that?
Oh, who am I kidding? Clearly the president's imperial authority stops at the beginning of the next Democrat administration.
... that whatever the influence of signing statements in the past, they're not the place to say things like, "I will obey and uphold the law, unless I decide that I won't."
I went to public university, and I'm quite certain that people can fail out of it. You must be thinking of public primary and secondary schools, which indeed function similarly to prisons, where the top priority is the students' or inmates' presence; the rest is incidental.
My brother dropped out of school and lost his first real job because he didn't like his bosses. He ended up working at the local Dandy Donuts to make ends meet. I remember visiting him while he was filling up a big plastic bucket with water to wash the vomit off the front stoop that some friendly wino had left there for him earlier.
He sent out resumes like the devil until he got an interview for an IT job, impressed the hell out of the interviewer (he's a clever guy; he was just unmotivated) and consistently impresses his new boss with the quantity and quality of the work he does. ("If only I had six of him.")
So, hey, it worked for him.
On another note, the thing I liked most about going to college was that in high school, there had been kids who'd sullenly refuse to learn, and the school would spend untold effort cajoling them and stroking their egos. But in college, if some kid stuck out his lip and said "I don't wanna go to class!", the instructor would just shrug and say, "Fine, scram." I was ecstatic at the time that I would only be sharing classroom space with people who actually wanted to be there,
The questions were mostly just true/false; the ones that weren't were things like, "The amount of time it takes the earth to go around the sun is (a) a month, (b) a day, (c) a year". I'm unsure how the questions are particularly misleading or deceptive. Hell, I took the test myself when I found it (I can't for the life of me remember where it is now, but I first saw it with the questions separated), and I didn't miss any. So we're left with poor methodology. Are there particular known flaws in the design? I have little experience with survey design, so perhaps you can help me. What are the flaws, and why would they produce these particular effects?
Slashdot Mirror
"Girl One", anybody?
I meant full disclosure as in releasing the details of an exploit as soon as it's found, instead of keeping it covered up until a fix is released.
So, let's hear someone argue against full disclosure now, eh?
Wait, now your culture stops being a culture if you migrate? Shit, someone tell the Han Chinese and the Vietnamese that their culture is way younger than they thought.
Because the dominant cultures in the US are descendant from European cultures; they don't go back *in North America* for thousands of years.
And British culture doesn't go back *in Britain* for thousands of years; nearly everything cultural--language, dress, religion, ethnicity--filtered in relatively recently from Germany, France, Rome, Greece, Jerusalem, and so on.
So, are you claiming that this new theory of "cultural descent" or whatever works only over contiguous land-masses? Or perhaps there's a maximum velocity a culture can travel at?
If I recall, China had domesticated animals (pigs, chickens, horses) whereas subequatorial Africa didn't--the jungle killed them. Also, China had rice and wheat; I don't think they grew those in subequatorial Africa. Without animals and good crops, the Africans were at a disadvantage.
Alas, the book was pretty skimpy on the history of pre-European African empires, but I remember two bits: (1) the invention of steel, and (2) the Zulu were nearly a match for the (Dutch?) Europeans who landed there; the invaders advanced at an average of (roughly) one mile per year against them, despite possessing firearms, horses and a professional military. Especially impressive compared to the Europeans' successes in the Americas.
"Guns, Germs, and Steel" might have some good answers. The National Geographic miniseries was spotty at points, but contains some good visual demonstrations of precision horseback riding and rapier fighting. (It's talking about Pizarro and the Inca, but it's the same idea.)
Making software bulletproof is probably impossible.
Tell that to Dan Bernstein or Donald Knuth.
The Inquisition was a way to separate people from their property, and get some good old-fashioned torturin' in at the same time. It wasn't even supposedly meant to appease any gods--the only soul supposedly in danger was the one of the guy about to get set on fire to save said soul.
But I suppose it would have gotten in the way of a cute rhetorical point.
Most mature cultures go back thousands of years.
In intelligible form? Sorry, but no European culture goes back "thousands of years". If you go back two thousand, you're at the dawn of Christianity, which bore only a passing resemblance to today's versions. The Romans had switched over to imperial rule. While I can understand how Western culture takes a lot from Romans and Greeks, to imply that we're all part of the same culture is plainly bullshit--we don't do human sacrifice, giant statues of our gods in the town square, gladiator fights, Legions forbidden from coming home, or the divine right of kings. Or humping little boys.
You'd have as much luck fitting into Roman society as you would into a Bantu empire of the same period. Living in Europe may mean you live near some old buildings, but it doesn't mean you live in the same culture that built them.
If you are considering when slavery ceased to be an accepted part of life in the countries which later became the UK, this would have been in the early Middle Ages, around 1100 (not long after the Romans left and the Danes settled, around 800. The Vikings would have been the last group living in England who accepted slavery as a normal condition.
No, those are the dates when enslaving white people became unacceptable. The British were quite involved with African slavery from 1562 until 1803, when they started discouraging it, and 1833, when it was actually abolished by the Brits.
Habeas Corpus, though codified in the Magna Carta (1215), was part of the common law well before this date, and indicates that freedom is the presumed state for any individual who has not been found guilty of a crime. While slavery was formally abolished in the US around 1865, the acceptance of slavery seems to have persisted in the southern states until around 1960.
It's disingenuous for you to compare the time when Brits stopped enslaving fellow whites to the time when Americans ended legal discrimination against blacks.
And also, what persisted in the South until the Civil Rights era wasn't slavery so much as it was Jim Crow--segregation, much like the Apartheid that South Africa had until relatively recently. Racist, certainly--but comparing it to the end of whites-as-slaves in Viking culture? Give me a break.
I think he's not saying that the slaves lived better over here, but rather that their descendants here live better than the descendants of those who weren't taken as slaves, over in Africa. Which is arguably true. Anyone who tries to assign nobility to the slavers for this, of course, deserves a cod-slap. It's irony.
What useful invention or discovery can be attributed to any of the huge number of sub-saharan Africans?
Didn't one of the Bantu empires make steel before the Europeans?
But yes, there's a lot of good stuff about the influence of environment on the society that arises there; check out Guns, Germs, and Steel if you haven't already.
... this wouldn't even be necessary if they'd taken security seriously in the first place, instead of tacking it on as an afterthought, or using the "eh, we can probably trust all this user-submitted content" model.
But still, good to see them taking it seriously. Now, instead of Bantown getting an eternal newspost declaring their victory, they'll just get permanent accounts.
Are you familiar with C. P. Snow's "The Two Cultures"? It describes the kind of nonsense that makes people who are not self-identified dorks reluctant to understand anything the least bit technical or scientific. Willful ignorance bothers me to no end.
Well.
Someone's not planning on running for public office for the rest of their life.
Oh, wait, your homepage is listed as Japan. Does that change things? I don't know how they roll over there.
Carmageddon! Sure, the 3D graphics are dated and campy, but there's nothing quite like a game that sets up some relatively simple rules (in this case, slightly cartoonish laws of physics) and tries to stay out of your way the rest of the time. I recently rediscovered it, and it's even better than I had remembered. (Especially now that it's abandonware, and relatively easily available for free.)
Could you be a dear and tell me how many combat deaths US forces suffered in Kosovo, as well as the total monetary cost to our armed forces? Could you point out there Clinton (a) endorsed domestic wiretapping in contravention of FISA, and (b) claimed that he was above the law, and did not need to follow it anyway? And finally, could you explain why "Clinton did it" would be a valid defense, even if it were true?
At least the NSA is choosing people with some intelligence on them and not eavesdropping on every damn call.
I take it you work at the NSA and can actually back this up? Or are we to take the president's word for it?
And I beg to differ that the NSA wiretap is "no different". You know when you're patted down at the airport. You don't know when the NSA wiretaps you. The airport searches are conducted in compliance with the law. The warrantless wiretaps are conducted in violation of the law. It doesn't get much clearer than that.
Man, that's the best summary of this whole story I've seen yet. Thank you, thank you.
I want some big, important pundit on the right to give an example of something the president does not, by their lights, have the authority to do. If he becomes a dictator in wartime (which it's mighty sketchy to say we're in), why not come out and say this? Can he rape and murder? No, seriously, if he can break one law, why not others?
Shit, I thought I understood our system of government--the legislature expresses the will of the people in laws; the executive branch then implements and executes said laws. For instance, if Congress makes kidnapping a federal offense, the FBI (under the Department of Justice) investigates kidnappings. But according to some of our less stable pundits and her commenters, "The legislature cannot limit the authority of the president, just like the president cannot limit the authority of the legislature." So, does he have divine, kingly powers now? Did we suddenly get that?
Oh, who am I kidding? Clearly the president's imperial authority stops at the beginning of the next Democrat administration.
... that whatever the influence of signing statements in the past, they're not the place to say things like, "I will obey and uphold the law, unless I decide that I won't."
So, if someone disagrees with you, they're easily reducible to a cultural stereotype? Man, that's harsh.
Isn't Churchill that guy who lied about being a Native American? Is that sort of thing widely respected?
I went to public university, and I'm quite certain that people can fail out of it. You must be thinking of public primary and secondary schools, which indeed function similarly to prisons, where the top priority is the students' or inmates' presence; the rest is incidental.
My brother dropped out of school and lost his first real job because he didn't like his bosses. He ended up working at the local Dandy Donuts to make ends meet. I remember visiting him while he was filling up a big plastic bucket with water to wash the vomit off the front stoop that some friendly wino had left there for him earlier.
He sent out resumes like the devil until he got an interview for an IT job, impressed the hell out of the interviewer (he's a clever guy; he was just unmotivated) and consistently impresses his new boss with the quantity and quality of the work he does. ("If only I had six of him.")
So, hey, it worked for him.
On another note, the thing I liked most about going to college was that in high school, there had been kids who'd sullenly refuse to learn, and the school would spend untold effort cajoling them and stroking their egos. But in college, if some kid stuck out his lip and said "I don't wanna go to class!", the instructor would just shrug and say, "Fine, scram." I was ecstatic at the time that I would only be sharing classroom space with people who actually wanted to be there,
The questions were mostly just true/false; the ones that weren't were things like, "The amount of time it takes the earth to go around the sun is (a) a month, (b) a day, (c) a year". I'm unsure how the questions are particularly misleading or deceptive. Hell, I took the test myself when I found it (I can't for the life of me remember where it is now, but I first saw it with the questions separated), and I didn't miss any. So we're left with poor methodology. Are there particular known flaws in the design? I have little experience with survey design, so perhaps you can help me. What are the flaws, and why would they produce these particular effects?