The professor should have done so, and thanked the officer for being so quick to protect his residence. But no. The professor had to dish out attitude, and he got what he deserved because of it.
It's thoroughly depressing to see in our society the authoritarian outlook that someone deserves to be arrested for giving "attitude", in his own home no less. The officer's job is to protect and serve. As two police chiefs interviewed on NPR stated, an officer in that situation should be attempting to get done what he has to and then de-escalate the situation. There was no valid ground for arrest here (which is likely why the charges were dropped).
People shouldn't be dicks to cops, just as they shouldn't be dicks to people in general, but only in an authoritarian society can the cops arrest anyone who they feel does not show them the proper respect. This is the real issue of the case, which has been lost amongst all the discussion about race.
but if you've installed third-party drives or memory to which a problem is attributable, tough luck, Chuck
And this one of several reasons I'd hesitate to ever buy AppleCare. I have always assumed that any failure would be attributed to third party parts (which I'm bound to install, based on the insane upcharge for getting RAM from Apple), and it's not like I'd have any very reasonable recourse. The value of extended warranties is always dubious, but in this case the policy is far too vague to be worth the money.
News sites provide nothing that can't be eventually seen on TV or read elsewhere.
There is print news and TV news in much the same way that there is Camembert and there is that stuff that comes out of the spray can. You'll never see the same thing on TV; namely, you'll never see in-depth factual reporting. I don't believe print journalism is some paragon of perfection, but TV news is a total farce. I'm continually amazed that people take things like CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC seriously.
Besides overall quality, the other thing that print news brings to the table is serious investigative journalism. I can recall many major investigative stories broken by the New York Times and even papers such as USA Today. I struggle to remember any instances of major stories (of a non-tabloid nature) unearthed by TV investigative journalism. This sort of journalism is really important to the nation, but the problem is that it entails a big positive externality. The newspaper pays the price for the journalism, but even if we don't read the paper (or website) we benefit from the oversight of our public institutions, and TV news gets to repeat the headline and use it as the basis for talking head opinion infotainment. Since the rest of us don't have to pay for the benefit derived, that poses a serious problem for the newspaper.
Unfortunately, I can't see any good solution to this issue. I don't see how you can get people to start paying for that external benefit without measures that would be too dangerous to the freedom of speech or would give government too much control over the media. But without the sunlight that investigative journalism shines on our public institutions (corporate and government), I expect things to get considerably worse in society.
I can't believe how many people here won't take Apple at their word. They're only looking out for your best interests. And anyway, with a bad attitude like that how do you expect to be allowed to buy the new improved iPhone? You don't want to miss out.
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them...
Actually the authors specifically does not prevent the recipient from copying as it was not their intention. It was to prevent man in the middle attacks of people who were not supposed to be copying in the first place.
You're right. I actually had to run out just a few minute after the reading the summary and didn't get a chance to RTFA until now. I can see how this could potentially be useful for encrypted communications between two trusted parties to ensure that neither party is later coerced into divulging the key. When they mentioned Facebook, I thought they were talking about solving the problem of the company or other users who have access to information on Facebook divulging it, but that's clearly not the problem this is meant to solve (nor does it solve that problem).
If the software allows the user to view the plain text, then it can be copied, so I don't see how this would really ensure it disappears. While I would love to be able to have social networks or cloud computing that could guarantee privacy by having technological measures to prevent the dissemination of private information, I think that problem is exactly the same one DRM tries to solve. And that is why it is doomed to fail. The only way it could really hope to succeed is in a world of ubiquitous "trusted computing" where the computer (and any other recording devices) ultimately will not carry out user commands to copy the data (or copy the output from the "analog hole". In the current world, such a scheme is doomed to fail, and the world where it would work sounds like a dystopian future to me.
All that being said, perhaps it can be used to prevent authentication of the information? Somehow the digital signature could no longer be read, so you could show a copy of a document but not demonstrate that it was really created by the author. It's not clear to me whether that's possible.
I think the Sklyarov case would be the canonical Slashdot example. IIRC, in that case the guy was basically doing something that was a foreign citizen working in a foreign country (Russia) doing something that was legal in his country. Then he came to a conference in the US and was picked up by US authorities because his activities would be illegal under US law.
Your line of argument is totally irrelevant. What I'm arguing is that the logic that American colonists used to justify breaking British laws and eventually to justify outright revolution can be applied here (under the assumption of a similar lack of representation). The fact that some of those colonists also had a commitment to liberty and the courage to stand up for it is a separate issue. I am certainly not trying to argue that copyright infringement is a particularly brave or revolutionary act (even under the aforementioned assumption), only that under this view they can be seen as doing nothing wrong.
I also should say what while I believe the RIAA/MPAA have had a very corrupting influence on Washington, I don't personally accept that we are effectively unrepresented as the OP does. I think there just isn't a big enough copyright reform movement yet to be heard over their influence, but if more of our society cared, we would be heard.
While someone who thinks the government is that corrupt certainly has reason to take direct actions to change it, consider that if he believes that, "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed" as our founding fathers did, then he may reasonably conclude that the law has no moral authority, and morally it need not be followed. Indeed, I think you'd find that many of our founders adopted a similar attitude in the face of a government in which they believed they had no representation. Your apparent sanctimony here is misplaced.
First of all, I'm talking about Science as the body of knowledge obtained by the scientific method, not scientists (who vary in their beliefs about God). Science uses empiricism, it studies testable explanations for repeatable, objectively measurable phenomena. One can accept a view of metaphysics in which the only things that exist are those that can be studied scientifically (I believe this is something close to what's known as logical positivism), or one can have a view of metaphysics that allows for the existence of other things beyond those that can be revealed by science, or one can be a radical skeptic and not even accept the things you can see, touch, and measure as real. All these can be logically self-consistent world views, though they may be mutually incompatible.
Some people claim to have experienced miracles. Others may claim to have a more direct, extra-sensory experience of God(s). None of these are repeatable, objectively measurable things, so they are not admissible according to the scientific method, but I cannot logically rule out that others have had these experiences and that God does, indeed exist. I can adopt an the view of the scientific method that says I accept the simpler view of metaphysics, that these things don't exist (they are imagined, hallucinated, etc.), but this is simply an assumption no more provable than the idea that God does exist. Logic does not necessitate that the only things that exist are those that can be empirically studied. In other words, if you insist that the only things that exist are those that can be empirically tested, you're just being a fundamentalist of a different flavor.
Scientists know that there are many parameters and constants, including the earth's magnetic field, which have to be exactly right in order to have life as we know it upon the earth. The probability that all of these came into place by any means other than thinking it is absurdly low.
I think that's not really true. In fact, we have no reasonable way to assign it a probability at all (high or low). If you're willing to take the time, I suggest reading this. I do agree with you that Science can not speak on the existence of God; the scientific method is constructed only to look for naturalistic explanations (which is what makes it practically useful), so it's not equipped to answer the question.
Obviously, colloquial language is not very precise. The term "average" in common usage can refer to the mean, median, mode, and perhaps even other things, depending on the context. Most speakers won't even be aware of the difference between these concepts. However, in this case I think it's clear that average is most reasonably interpreted to refer to the median, so it is correct to say that only 50% of drivers are above average, no more. No reference has been made to any metric for quantification, nor will there necessarily be a single objective metric of being a good driver (one could choose number of accidents, number of deaths caused, amount of damage caused, or some combination of these factors). We're clearly talking about ranking drivers from better to worse, so we've got to be talking about the median. (...and anyway, I'd guess that for any reasonable quantifier, the distribution would be approximately Gaussian.)
This reminds me of a discussion on an old article about whether it's incorrect to say that a star has already exploded if its light has not yet reached us.
That is really a huge blow to the reputation of Elsevier... of course they publish hundreds (thousands?) of journals, so in absolute terms maybe it is not that big a deal
One more data point, in the not-too-distant past it came to light that one of their journals "Chaos, Solitons, and Fractals" was publishing large volumes of nonsense articles by the editor. That was a fairly big scandal.
Well, actually for the person making 9,000/yr the EIC will change things somewhat (like I said, I was leaving aside the tax credits), but it doesn't change the picture much.
I don't have a citation, but I do find the comment believable.
Which, yours or mine? I've just said that I can state from personal experience that the statement, "the bottom 40% of Americans have no income tax liability" is simply false (based on the US income distribution reported here).
As a graduate student, you probably don't *really* know what poor is.
I never said anything about being poor, I only stated the objective fact that I fall below the 40th percentile of income.
Now if you look at a copy of the 1040 for 2008, you'll see that the standard deduction is $5,450 for those filing as single or married filing separately, $10,900 for those married filing jointly, and $8,000 for head of household. You get another deduction of $3,500 per exemption, which will be 1 (assuming no one can claim you as a dependent) plus the number of dependents. Obviously there are lots of possible permutations and there are there are various tax credits, the possibility of itemized deductions, etc., but it's clear from those numbers that plenty of people making less than the 40th percentile (about $35k/yr) will pay taxes. A single person with no dependents making over $9,000/yr can easily end up paying taxes, and a single parent (head of household plus one dependent) making more than $15,000/yr can end up paying tax.
So, it's clear that that factoid is bunk. I was legitimately curious where you got it from, because you're not the first person I've heard use it (or something similar). I even heard someone being interviewed on a news show say something similar.
According to IRS statistics, the bottom 40% of Americans have no income tax liability. They pay no federal taxes. Zip, zero, nada.
Citation please? The thing is, that as a graduate student I fall into that bottom 40% in income, and I most certainly do pay federal (and state) taxes. Other graduate students I've talked to on the issue pay taxes as well. Given the size of the standard deduction, I can't see how anyone without dependents who made much more than $10,000/yr could avoid paying some taxes (except in select cases, like running a home business in the red).
I thought you were saying research died in the 70s. I think the stories I mentioned took a fair amount of research. In any case, I agree that the government tries to manipulate the media for exactly the reason you say, and to some degree they succeed. This is the way it has always been and almost certainly the way it always will be. I think that in many ways the government exercises less control today than they did in the past; for example if you contrast press control during WWII to the two recent wars in the middle east. However, you're right that they certainly still control coverage to some degree. (See for example this bit of newspaper investigative reporting about just that.)
I generally believe in applying Hanlon's razor to such things, though, so I don't think there's any grand conspiracy behind it. The press is in a sort of battle with the government, and the government has a lot of power and legal ways to enforce secrecy, so it wins a lot of the time in being able to manipulate the press. And I think most of the time the government types think they're doing it for the greater good. In the warrantless wiretapping case, the Times held back on publishing because they were told it would significantly endanger national security. They may well have thought that was BS, but they were not in a position to be sure (because they didn't have all the information), so they held off on publishing out of a sense of moral obligation (and probably fear of litigation).
You don't see much outside the political mainstream in the media for three reasons: 1) The people in the media are mostly part of the political mainstream, so they may see the ideas as nutball stuff not worthy of coverage. 2) They don't think it will sell. 3) They don't think people are intersted. On point 1, they obviously have to make this call at some point, lest the news be full of stories about how the moon landing and the holocaust were faked, but obviously sometimes they will ignore things worth covering. On points 2 & 3, they are probably often right. Now, I do think they should err on the side of including some of the more fringe stuff and let people decide for themselves whether to lend it credence.
To take the Ron Paul thing as an example: They should have covered at least things like his poll numbers, but he never had any real chance of of winning the republican nomination let alone the presidency for the simple reason that his views are very different from the majority of Americans. His combination of views is relatively unusual today (for good or ill) and carrying them out would be a huge departure from they way our society is currently organized. The other candidates were largely interchangeable (part of your point, I think), and if all but one would have left the race, the remaining one would have garnered almost all the votes of the others. So each had a legitimate chance. Paul could never have garnered the supporters of the others, because his views were totally dissimilar; thus, he never had a shot in hell. I think that's why the mainstream media didn't really cover him.
What we need is accurate and timely information in our society, not newspapers.
No news source will be 100% accurate. Having acknowledged that, the question is whether it is more or less accurate than the alternatives. Even with some big failures by major papers, I've never seen any alternative that convinced me it was better. Certainly cable news channels are much worse in terms of factual accuracy and bias.
Their real purpose nowadays is managing opinions and information so that the status quo is the only option presented, not research. That died in the 70s with Watergate, rather than any monopoly benefits being curtailed.
Okay, so what about investigative reporting on the "torture memos" (back in 2004), on warrantless wiretapping, on secret prisons (a.k.a. CIA black sites), on the NSA phone call record database? As far as I can see, newspapers are the only ones doing any investigative reporting of note. You may think they don't do enough or as much as they used to, but it still exists and is still important.
I don't understand. Why do we need newspapers in 2009? Please note: I'm not talking about "news-gathering organizations," but newspapers. Technology has moved on and newspapers have not
I think much of the time when people talk about saving the newspapers, they're talking about the news-gathering organizations of that specific sort, not the media on which they deliver news (though until e-readers progress a bit, many do still prefer that medium). The point is that many people, myself included, believe that the news organizations that produce newspapers are qualitatively distinct from those behind television, radio, or most purely web-based news. I for one would be perfectly happy if newspapers stopped printing physical papers as long as they didn't change their fundamental MO. The whole problem is that it looks to many people like they cannot survive in a web-only model with their existing MO.
By the time they come out, the news in them is always old. Always old. That was one thing in the days before the Internet and before the 24-hour news cycle introduced by CNN and FoxNews and similar channels, but it's very much another thing now and not something that's required by dint of its very existence.
I guess I view this as a feature, not a bug. If you have the misfortune of watching those 24-hour news channels, you'll find fluff pieces, regurgitation of press releases, miscellaneous professional commentators giving largely fact-free opinions, but what you will not see is much news of value from an investigation by the news channel. The 24-hour news cycle is about filling air time, it has little to do with decent news. I'd also point out that some (I assume most) newspapers now make continuous updates to their website with new stories. But I will agree that newspapers used to be the closest thing to up-to-the-moment news, and now they have to decide if they want to try to reclaim that place on the web or try to become something else.
Frankly, I think it's best if news organizations remain for-profit. Not just because I don't want my tax dollars to have to subsidize the people who write The New York Times or The Los Angeles Times or any of the other publications that have nothing but contempt for me. But because it will force them to compete and offer better product. I find it more than a little distasteful that you advocate in favor of monopolies in your message; monopolies don't make anything better, they merely ensure that the status quo will never, ever change.
That last statement is rather dogmatic, and I don't think it accurately reflects reality. Monopolies can have significant benefits. Relevant to this case is the fact that their stability gives them the freedom to invest on much more long-term prospects. (I think you could hold up the scientific achievements of Bell Labs as an example.) However, it's fair to say that the downsides of monopolies generally outbalance the benefits by quite a lot.
In this case, I think the problem with a market-based approach is one of externalities; when The Washington Post reported on the Watergate scandal, the country as a whole benefited, not just the readers of the Post. Today when the New York Times breaks an important investigative story (and they seem to do this far more often than any other news organization), other news sources can basically regurgitate a synopsis and do follow-up, so they benefit too. The competition in the market doesn't really reward the external benefit (to the country or to other media) of unearthing information, so I think market forces will generally tend to push away from serious investigative reporting.
Unfortunately, I don't see a good solution to this problem either. I can't see a reasonable way to internalize those externalities, and I don't see a non-market-based approach that doesn't have serious pitfalls. I'd actually prefer a system where I payed directly for my news, because then I'd know the news source was beholden only to me, not the government or corporations, but I don't really think it will be a successful business model except for certain niche cases (like the WSJ).
If I understand this correctly, Thompson was petitioning elected representatives for a particular change in law. No matter how annoying his tactics or the fact that he was asked to stop, I have to believe that any prosecution of him for these actions would be thrown out on first amendment grounds. Recall that the first amendment reads as follows (emphasis mine):
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I'm not sure that explanation helps, because the same party was in power in both cases. In fact, I think some of the same people were major players in the government during both events.
NASA had the chance to honor a scientist or engineer, but decided not to
I think that would be a fairly ironic choice, since most scientists I've ever heard talk about it consider the ISS a total waste of time for PR purposes, sucking up NASA resources that would otherwise be used for legitimate science.
I personally find writing equations and symbols in LyX highly inconvenient. Moving my hand back and forth between keyboard and mouse is annoying.
But then again I am just speaking for myself, who only writes documents on mathematics and not other subjects.
It sounds like you're doing it wrong. Studying physics, I write a fair number of equations. You can type in commands like \log in math mode just as if editing a tex file directly, and there are keyboard shortcuts for doing most things you might conceivably want to do. In fact, because the shortcuts are shorter than function names and you don't have to fuss with opening and closing braces, it should take fewer keystrokes total and, thus, be faster.
Slashdot Mirror
It's thoroughly depressing to see in our society the authoritarian outlook that someone deserves to be arrested for giving "attitude", in his own home no less. The officer's job is to protect and serve. As two police chiefs interviewed on NPR stated, an officer in that situation should be attempting to get done what he has to and then de-escalate the situation. There was no valid ground for arrest here (which is likely why the charges were dropped).
People shouldn't be dicks to cops, just as they shouldn't be dicks to people in general, but only in an authoritarian society can the cops arrest anyone who they feel does not show them the proper respect. This is the real issue of the case, which has been lost amongst all the discussion about race.
And this one of several reasons I'd hesitate to ever buy AppleCare. I have always assumed that any failure would be attributed to third party parts (which I'm bound to install, based on the insane upcharge for getting RAM from Apple), and it's not like I'd have any very reasonable recourse. The value of extended warranties is always dubious, but in this case the policy is far too vague to be worth the money.
There is print news and TV news in much the same way that there is Camembert and there is that stuff that comes out of the spray can. You'll never see the same thing on TV; namely, you'll never see in-depth factual reporting. I don't believe print journalism is some paragon of perfection, but TV news is a total farce. I'm continually amazed that people take things like CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC seriously.
Besides overall quality, the other thing that print news brings to the table is serious investigative journalism. I can recall many major investigative stories broken by the New York Times and even papers such as USA Today. I struggle to remember any instances of major stories (of a non-tabloid nature) unearthed by TV investigative journalism. This sort of journalism is really important to the nation, but the problem is that it entails a big positive externality. The newspaper pays the price for the journalism, but even if we don't read the paper (or website) we benefit from the oversight of our public institutions, and TV news gets to repeat the headline and use it as the basis for talking head opinion infotainment. Since the rest of us don't have to pay for the benefit derived, that poses a serious problem for the newspaper.
Unfortunately, I can't see any good solution to this issue. I don't see how you can get people to start paying for that external benefit without measures that would be too dangerous to the freedom of speech or would give government too much control over the media. But without the sunlight that investigative journalism shines on our public institutions (corporate and government), I expect things to get considerably worse in society.
I can't believe how many people here won't take Apple at their word. They're only looking out for your best interests. And anyway, with a bad attitude like that how do you expect to be allowed to buy the new improved iPhone? You don't want to miss out.
So...doublethink.
You're right. I actually had to run out just a few minute after the reading the summary and didn't get a chance to RTFA until now. I can see how this could potentially be useful for encrypted communications between two trusted parties to ensure that neither party is later coerced into divulging the key. When they mentioned Facebook, I thought they were talking about solving the problem of the company or other users who have access to information on Facebook divulging it, but that's clearly not the problem this is meant to solve (nor does it solve that problem).
If the software allows the user to view the plain text, then it can be copied, so I don't see how this would really ensure it disappears. While I would love to be able to have social networks or cloud computing that could guarantee privacy by having technological measures to prevent the dissemination of private information, I think that problem is exactly the same one DRM tries to solve. And that is why it is doomed to fail. The only way it could really hope to succeed is in a world of ubiquitous "trusted computing" where the computer (and any other recording devices) ultimately will not carry out user commands to copy the data (or copy the output from the "analog hole". In the current world, such a scheme is doomed to fail, and the world where it would work sounds like a dystopian future to me.
All that being said, perhaps it can be used to prevent authentication of the information? Somehow the digital signature could no longer be read, so you could show a copy of a document but not demonstrate that it was really created by the author. It's not clear to me whether that's possible.
I think the Sklyarov case would be the canonical Slashdot example. IIRC, in that case the guy was basically doing something that was a foreign citizen working in a foreign country (Russia) doing something that was legal in his country. Then he came to a conference in the US and was picked up by US authorities because his activities would be illegal under US law.
Your line of argument is totally irrelevant. What I'm arguing is that the logic that American colonists used to justify breaking British laws and eventually to justify outright revolution can be applied here (under the assumption of a similar lack of representation). The fact that some of those colonists also had a commitment to liberty and the courage to stand up for it is a separate issue. I am certainly not trying to argue that copyright infringement is a particularly brave or revolutionary act (even under the aforementioned assumption), only that under this view they can be seen as doing nothing wrong.
I also should say what while I believe the RIAA/MPAA have had a very corrupting influence on Washington, I don't personally accept that we are effectively unrepresented as the OP does. I think there just isn't a big enough copyright reform movement yet to be heard over their influence, but if more of our society cared, we would be heard.
While someone who thinks the government is that corrupt certainly has reason to take direct actions to change it, consider that if he believes that, "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed" as our founding fathers did, then he may reasonably conclude that the law has no moral authority, and morally it need not be followed. Indeed, I think you'd find that many of our founders adopted a similar attitude in the face of a government in which they believed they had no representation. Your apparent sanctimony here is misplaced.
First of all, I'm talking about Science as the body of knowledge obtained by the scientific method, not scientists (who vary in their beliefs about God). Science uses empiricism, it studies testable explanations for repeatable, objectively measurable phenomena. One can accept a view of metaphysics in which the only things that exist are those that can be studied scientifically (I believe this is something close to what's known as logical positivism), or one can have a view of metaphysics that allows for the existence of other things beyond those that can be revealed by science, or one can be a radical skeptic and not even accept the things you can see, touch, and measure as real. All these can be logically self-consistent world views, though they may be mutually incompatible.
Some people claim to have experienced miracles. Others may claim to have a more direct, extra-sensory experience of God(s). None of these are repeatable, objectively measurable things, so they are not admissible according to the scientific method, but I cannot logically rule out that others have had these experiences and that God does, indeed exist. I can adopt an the view of the scientific method that says I accept the simpler view of metaphysics, that these things don't exist (they are imagined, hallucinated, etc.), but this is simply an assumption no more provable than the idea that God does exist. Logic does not necessitate that the only things that exist are those that can be empirically studied. In other words, if you insist that the only things that exist are those that can be empirically tested, you're just being a fundamentalist of a different flavor.
I think that's not really true. In fact, we have no reasonable way to assign it a probability at all (high or low). If you're willing to take the time, I suggest reading this. I do agree with you that Science can not speak on the existence of God; the scientific method is constructed only to look for naturalistic explanations (which is what makes it practically useful), so it's not equipped to answer the question.
I'm interested in seeing the Adams video, but when I follow the link YouTube tells me it's malformed. Can you post a correction?
Obviously, colloquial language is not very precise. The term "average" in common usage can refer to the mean, median, mode, and perhaps even other things, depending on the context. Most speakers won't even be aware of the difference between these concepts. However, in this case I think it's clear that average is most reasonably interpreted to refer to the median, so it is correct to say that only 50% of drivers are above average, no more. No reference has been made to any metric for quantification, nor will there necessarily be a single objective metric of being a good driver (one could choose number of accidents, number of deaths caused, amount of damage caused, or some combination of these factors). We're clearly talking about ranking drivers from better to worse, so we've got to be talking about the median. (...and anyway, I'd guess that for any reasonable quantifier, the distribution would be approximately Gaussian.)
This reminds me of a discussion on an old article about whether it's incorrect to say that a star has already exploded if its light has not yet reached us.
One more data point, in the not-too-distant past it came to light that one of their journals "Chaos, Solitons, and Fractals" was publishing large volumes of nonsense articles by the editor. That was a fairly big scandal.
Well, actually for the person making 9,000/yr the EIC will change things somewhat (like I said, I was leaving aside the tax credits), but it doesn't change the picture much.
Which, yours or mine? I've just said that I can state from personal experience that the statement, "the bottom 40% of Americans have no income tax liability" is simply false (based on the US income distribution reported here).
I never said anything about being poor, I only stated the objective fact that I fall below the 40th percentile of income.
Now if you look at a copy of the 1040 for 2008, you'll see that the standard deduction is $5,450 for those filing as single or married filing separately, $10,900 for those married filing jointly, and $8,000 for head of household. You get another deduction of $3,500 per exemption, which will be 1 (assuming no one can claim you as a dependent) plus the number of dependents. Obviously there are lots of possible permutations and there are there are various tax credits, the possibility of itemized deductions, etc., but it's clear from those numbers that plenty of people making less than the 40th percentile (about $35k/yr) will pay taxes. A single person with no dependents making over $9,000/yr can easily end up paying taxes, and a single parent (head of household plus one dependent) making more than $15,000/yr can end up paying tax.
So, it's clear that that factoid is bunk. I was legitimately curious where you got it from, because you're not the first person I've heard use it (or something similar). I even heard someone being interviewed on a news show say something similar.
Citation please? The thing is, that as a graduate student I fall into that bottom 40% in income, and I most certainly do pay federal (and state) taxes. Other graduate students I've talked to on the issue pay taxes as well. Given the size of the standard deduction, I can't see how anyone without dependents who made much more than $10,000/yr could avoid paying some taxes (except in select cases, like running a home business in the red).
I thought you were saying research died in the 70s. I think the stories I mentioned took a fair amount of research. In any case, I agree that the government tries to manipulate the media for exactly the reason you say, and to some degree they succeed. This is the way it has always been and almost certainly the way it always will be. I think that in many ways the government exercises less control today than they did in the past; for example if you contrast press control during WWII to the two recent wars in the middle east. However, you're right that they certainly still control coverage to some degree. (See for example this bit of newspaper investigative reporting about just that.)
I generally believe in applying Hanlon's razor to such things, though, so I don't think there's any grand conspiracy behind it. The press is in a sort of battle with the government, and the government has a lot of power and legal ways to enforce secrecy, so it wins a lot of the time in being able to manipulate the press. And I think most of the time the government types think they're doing it for the greater good. In the warrantless wiretapping case, the Times held back on publishing because they were told it would significantly endanger national security. They may well have thought that was BS, but they were not in a position to be sure (because they didn't have all the information), so they held off on publishing out of a sense of moral obligation (and probably fear of litigation).
You don't see much outside the political mainstream in the media for three reasons: 1) The people in the media are mostly part of the political mainstream, so they may see the ideas as nutball stuff not worthy of coverage. 2) They don't think it will sell. 3) They don't think people are intersted. On point 1, they obviously have to make this call at some point, lest the news be full of stories about how the moon landing and the holocaust were faked, but obviously sometimes they will ignore things worth covering. On points 2 & 3, they are probably often right. Now, I do think they should err on the side of including some of the more fringe stuff and let people decide for themselves whether to lend it credence.
To take the Ron Paul thing as an example: They should have covered at least things like his poll numbers, but he never had any real chance of of winning the republican nomination let alone the presidency for the simple reason that his views are very different from the majority of Americans. His combination of views is relatively unusual today (for good or ill) and carrying them out would be a huge departure from they way our society is currently organized. The other candidates were largely interchangeable (part of your point, I think), and if all but one would have left the race, the remaining one would have garnered almost all the votes of the others. So each had a legitimate chance. Paul could never have garnered the supporters of the others, because his views were totally dissimilar; thus, he never had a shot in hell. I think that's why the mainstream media didn't really cover him.
No news source will be 100% accurate. Having acknowledged that, the question is whether it is more or less accurate than the alternatives. Even with some big failures by major papers, I've never seen any alternative that convinced me it was better. Certainly cable news channels are much worse in terms of factual accuracy and bias.
Okay, so what about investigative reporting on the "torture memos" (back in 2004), on warrantless wiretapping, on secret prisons (a.k.a. CIA black sites), on the NSA phone call record database? As far as I can see, newspapers are the only ones doing any investigative reporting of note. You may think they don't do enough or as much as they used to, but it still exists and is still important.
I think much of the time when people talk about saving the newspapers, they're talking about the news-gathering organizations of that specific sort, not the media on which they deliver news (though until e-readers progress a bit, many do still prefer that medium). The point is that many people, myself included, believe that the news organizations that produce newspapers are qualitatively distinct from those behind television, radio, or most purely web-based news. I for one would be perfectly happy if newspapers stopped printing physical papers as long as they didn't change their fundamental MO. The whole problem is that it looks to many people like they cannot survive in a web-only model with their existing MO.
I guess I view this as a feature, not a bug. If you have the misfortune of watching those 24-hour news channels, you'll find fluff pieces, regurgitation of press releases, miscellaneous professional commentators giving largely fact-free opinions, but what you will not see is much news of value from an investigation by the news channel. The 24-hour news cycle is about filling air time, it has little to do with decent news. I'd also point out that some (I assume most) newspapers now make continuous updates to their website with new stories. But I will agree that newspapers used to be the closest thing to up-to-the-moment news, and now they have to decide if they want to try to reclaim that place on the web or try to become something else.
That last statement is rather dogmatic, and I don't think it accurately reflects reality. Monopolies can have significant benefits. Relevant to this case is the fact that their stability gives them the freedom to invest on much more long-term prospects. (I think you could hold up the scientific achievements of Bell Labs as an example.) However, it's fair to say that the downsides of monopolies generally outbalance the benefits by quite a lot.
In this case, I think the problem with a market-based approach is one of externalities; when The Washington Post reported on the Watergate scandal, the country as a whole benefited, not just the readers of the Post. Today when the New York Times breaks an important investigative story (and they seem to do this far more often than any other news organization), other news sources can basically regurgitate a synopsis and do follow-up, so they benefit too. The competition in the market doesn't really reward the external benefit (to the country or to other media) of unearthing information, so I think market forces will generally tend to push away from serious investigative reporting.
Unfortunately, I don't see a good solution to this problem either. I can't see a reasonable way to internalize those externalities, and I don't see a non-market-based approach that doesn't have serious pitfalls. I'd actually prefer a system where I payed directly for my news, because then I'd know the news source was beholden only to me, not the government or corporations, but I don't really think it will be a successful business model except for certain niche cases (like the WSJ).
If I understand this correctly, Thompson was petitioning elected representatives for a particular change in law. No matter how annoying his tactics or the fact that he was asked to stop, I have to believe that any prosecution of him for these actions would be thrown out on first amendment grounds. Recall that the first amendment reads as follows (emphasis mine):
Of course, in usual Slashdot fashion, IANAL.
I'm not sure that explanation helps, because the same party was in power in both cases. In fact, I think some of the same people were major players in the government during both events.
I think that would be a fairly ironic choice, since most scientists I've ever heard talk about it consider the ISS a total waste of time for PR purposes, sucking up NASA resources that would otherwise be used for legitimate science.
It sounds like you're doing it wrong. Studying physics, I write a fair number of equations. You can type in commands like \log in math mode just as if editing a tex file directly, and there are keyboard shortcuts for doing most things you might conceivably want to do. In fact, because the shortcuts are shorter than function names and you don't have to fuss with opening and closing braces, it should take fewer keystrokes total and, thus, be faster.