... Republican Web 2.0 Consultants and their online campaigning game. This just proves that old Republicans can learn new tricks
New tricks - or more money, better spent? As you mention, they have a staff of "Web 2.0 Consultants" - ie. this is not so much "republicans being web-savvy" as it is "republicans investing advertising money on computer consultants" - who can, for all we know, be from anywhere in the political spectrum. Money is money, and you'd have to be very idealistic in today's America to say no to an income simply for political reasons.
Discrimination is discrimination, whether it is 'positive' or not, and I think is it mostly harmful. You can't force a change in people's attitudes by passing a law; it just reinforces tensions and creates resentment. However, I think this whole idea misses the actual point by about a mile - surely, if women are not interested in hard science (assuming that it is actually a problem), the thing to do is to work on making them interested? Find out what is the problem with science's image in relation to women; science has a rather nerdy image, and women are probably less likely to be nerds than men (boys are >4 times as likely to be affected by autism spectrum disorders), so for that reason alone it is much less likely to attract women. Perhaps more women would choose "hard science" if there was more emphasis on cooperation and social aspects?
I would have thought the point of playing a game is to play the game - in person. I haven't followed this is any detail, but to me it seems that somebody has developed a tool to circumvent the "play" part of the game; if you are playing alone on a computer at home or somewhere, one could say that this is no problem, as the only one that is cheated at the end of the day is yourself. But when you are many players together, having a few players that cheat and thereby dominate the entire thing, ruining the game for everybody else - that is an entirely different matter. For one thing, everybody else will feel they have wasted their money and the company that expected to earn money on hosting the game will lose business on it.
This, as far as I can see, is the essence of the matter - whether or not laws and contracts reflect this, I don't know, but it is why we are not allowed to cheat in any game. In a way this is also a very good illustration of the collision between "freedom" and "fairness" - I mean why should we not be allowed to cheat? Why is doping illegal in all competition sports? Why can I not, if I play chess, just ram my queen right through five rows of the opponent's defence and knock the king down? Not being allowed these things, having to follow rules, is a limitation of my freedom. In this case the freedom of one company to make money out of helping people cheat in WoW is being limited - and as far as I can see this is entirely appropriate.
Now, I'm sitting here with a strange feeling, writing this - I mean why on Earth should it be necessary to even put these things into words? But on the other hand, from the comments I see people making, and from the fact that there is even a market for a way to cheat in something as inconsequential as WoW, it seems that this is far from clear to a lot of people. And we wonder why society seems to be falling apart.
Unfortunately the ineffable American political system has only given us Obama and McCain to choose between, so this is not a question about getting the optimal president, but one of getting a president that doesn't stagger too much when he's chewing gum, and doesn't drool or fart every time he's on camera.
So which one would you rather not see as president? That is the real question, sad though it is. That's all the democracy you get for your money.
Heaven forbid that we should see fair and balanced views online! I mean, if I was forced to consider other viewpoints, I might end up thinking about what I said and who knows what that could lead to. This is clearly directed solely against conservatives and Republicans, and supported by biased libertarian media, like Fox News.
On the other hand, did it say that it would keep all politicians off the net? Hmm, maybe not so bad. Let me think about that.
Why should it raise anyone's hackles? I see it as a sign of success that Linux is now seen as beginners' stuff - of course, when I hear that "Linux is for beginners" I think "Yeah, that's all you know"; but with a smile. We've arrived.
Just to be sure: Your company/department is being bought by HP, right? I don't how HP works at all, but it is my impression that they aren't all that bad; though, there was a rough patch some years back.
Some 5 years ago I was in a small, but successful company that was bought by Informatica - I'm still here, in case you wonder. I think for the first year or so we all hated it; we really felt like we were pariahs - part of that was our fault; we we resented the whole thing, for a large part because nobody asked our opinion, and I think we all felt rather betrayed. Since then we have worked out our differences, but it didn't happens automatically - management, from the very top, understood that there was a serious problem, and they have consistently tried to do all the right things and address the real problems (as opposed to just trying to look good).
It is very important to feel welcome in a new company, and to feel that you and the way you do things enjoy respect and are valuable. In the beginning I would have left, given half a chance; now I would be very reluctant to change job.
It is very important that feel confident in yourself if you stay in your new company - they have bought you guys because they believe in your product, but also because they believe in you guys. Where the problems can come in is when the lower to middle managers aren't willing to give an inch; they have more direct influence over your daily lives than upper management.
If you are a native English speaker, go for Chinese and learn to speak it well. It won't help you find a job in China since they are all very well educated and naturally prefer to employ native Chinese, but with China set to become the next superpower, their culture and language are growing in influence, and at some point they may well overtake English.
As an example of how fast things can change: it is only a few centuries ago that Latin was the language of all intellectuals in the West, and now it is only really used by the clergy of the Catholic Church. How long did it take for English to replace it as the main language of intellectual discourse? Probably less than a century, in reality. Nowadays international communication is many orders of magnitude faster, and the English language could be replaced as soon as enough people decide that Chinese is much more convenient.
BTW, I am not saying that Chinese is necessarily better than English, but with more and more research being conducted in China and published only in Chinese, at some point it may well be that learning Chinese is the obvious thing to do, if you want to be part of the leading edge. There are simply more Chinese in the world than any other kind of people.
It seems to me that the people who want the so-called utilitarian names are the people who least need to have access to the actual machines, really. Such as managers, who want to know where the machines are and possibly what they do, so they can make plans and budgets. I am, by the way, a UNIX system manager myself in a middlesized company.
There are several practical advantages to not using utilitarian names:
1. If a hostname is easy to pronounce, it is a lot easier to talk about the server - like when users say "I have a problem on bentley". Names like "as400_3_aix" or "mhz890-6" don't exactly roll off your tongue, so they don't get used. Sometimes they are abbreviated - e.g. "dash 6" - or they are referred to rather circuitously, like in "the big LPAR that runs AIX 5.3; it is 5.3, isn't it? I need a login on it." It may seem like a small thing, but you just try to live with it as a user or sysadmin.
2. A hostname that is easy to pronounce is also easy to type. This may not be relevant if you don't connect from the commandline, but take it from one who does it tens of times every day: it is a lot nicer to write "ssh fox" rather than "ssh as400_3_linux". Again a small thing, really, but it can make the difference between being slightly annoyed and not - and a person that is in a bad mood is less responsible.
3. If you work in a big-ish company, you may have a setup where you can't just slap new names into DNS as and when you need them. They need to be approved by the security officer (No, I can't think why that is either, but it happens none the less), which takes days, so you end up pre-allocating them in batches. Which means that you don't know what is going to be running on the server when it is actually installed, since it hasn't actually been planned yet. So you might as well just allocate some simple, easy and pronouncable names.
4. Fun. SW engineers are often creative people with a good deal of humour, even if other people don't quite see it that way. And being allowed to integrate your sense of humour into your work means that it will be more dear to you - it will contribute to a pleasant and relaxed atmosphere in the workplace. This actually matters - a lot, in fact.
I don't think there really are any overwhelmingly strong reasons for the utilitarian names; a manager who perhaps thinks about the servers once a month could reasonably be expected to make the small effort to look up what and where the servers are in a spreadsheet. As far as I can see, it is more a matter of whether it looks "messy" or not. But this is where DNS comes to our help - it is perfectly simple to have it both ways. What I do on my servers is to set the machines' hostnames to something pronouncable, make the primary DNS entry the same, and then assign aliases as needed along the way. Some aliases are "utilitarian", others are functional, like "qadisk", "devsrv" or "perforce". The funny thing is - everybody uses the non-utilitarian names, even though they have both options.
It seems bizarre - both the attempt to sell one's vote, but more than that, the heavy-handed way it is being treated. So, can one assume that it is actually illegal to sell one's vote? As in "there is a law against it"? I don't think we should trouble ourselves with explaing that it is unethical to sell your vote - so many other things are seen merely as economic assets in the US, so why not your vote, if money is all that matters to you?
I think that was quite likely the young man's whole point - that with all the lobbying and the money-centric mentality that seems to be more and more pervasive, the only value a person's vote has is what you can sell it for. And perhaps it is only to be expected in the run-up to an election that some sanctimonious idiot puts on a morally outraged mask and tries to stamp out this person's right to utter a political statement. This is one case where claims about freedom of speech actually have a meaning - if you can't give voice to your misgivings about things in your society, you might as well not have a vote.
This is a good example of somebody speculating about things they haven't really got the tools for - in this case neurologists speculating about what things like thought, consciousness and self-awareness are. You might think they, if anybody, would know about these things, but this is actually a subject that philosophers have struggled with for centuries, figuring out just what these things are and how it can be that we seem to feel that the our essential being is something that sits somewhere inside and looks out through the eyes. You may scorn the notion that philosophers are at all useful in this context, but before we can make valid statements about a subject, we need to make up our minds about what concepts and what words are meaningful to use - and that is what good philosophy is about. And since we haven't really quite got a good, firm hold of what thoughts etc are, it is a bit bold for a team of neurologists to suddenly have sorted it all out in one go. At the very least you would expect them to define unambiguously what those terms and concepts are and what they mean.
But back to their results - apparently a person's brain reaches a conclusion about which button to press a while before that person feels that s/he has reached the conclusion. I don't think it says anything about freedom of will; but seen in light of evolution maybe this result isn't surprising. Animals have evolved from having no brain to increasingly complex setups over time, and they have had to react to their enviroment in all that time; IOW they have had to make decisions with whatever brain they had at the time. The human brain is not a radical redesign of the basic model, but rather just a strongly upgraded and extended version; we still share part of our brain's design with fish, amphibia and reptiles - as well as other mammals, of course, so it is reasonable to expect that the functionality that already worked well in those parts of the brain still happen there, mostly. Consciousness, whatever that is, is likely have come in relatively late in the design, so of course a lot of decisions are made without consciousness being required.
Compare this with a big company - the executive managers makes decisions about the whole of the company; they make guidelines about how they want their staff to act in different situations, but they are not involved in every decision that is made in the company. Instead they expect the lower echelons to make their own decisions in accordance with the guidelines. The top level managers often don't hear anything about those details, and when they do, it is normally much later. This is how I imagine our brain works - in our consciousness we make decisions about the principles we want to operate under, but we are not consciously involved in most of what goes on, it just happens, and in most cases decisions are made long before our consciousness hears about it. So do we have free will? I would say yes - in fact, we probably have many levels of free will happening all over the place.
We all have the freedom to express our ideas, of course; but sometimes I really wish they wouldn't. This kind of demonstration is silly - it doesn't even qualify for an emotionally charged expletive, it's just silly. I mean, all that comes out of this is that they get banned for a while, like naughty school children, and rightly so. If you imagine you sympathise with Tibet, how on Earth is it going to help them that we insult the Chinese leaders?
It's like that other daft gesture of "I don't want to play with you anymore, ever" - when high ranking American officials started calling the French names, like you would imagine primary school children. All it does is make people feel embarrassed about knowing you; as well as taking the attention away from more serious issues. Such as the problems in Tibet.
No, don't worry, we're not descending into chaos just yet.
If I understand it, the argument in favour of the right to own lots of guns goes something like this: "It's so common folks can rise up against a bad government". Presumably the assumption is that "common folks" will stand united in their cause, in complete agreement about how the country should be run afterwards.
However, seeing how people on this list argue and assuming that the opinions here are not that far removed from what is common in the US, I think it is highly unlikely to work that way. Isn't it more likely that that there will be 5 - 10 small, but violent groups fighting it out against each other, all the while killing indisciminately? It is certainly the way things have happened in all other countries throughout history. And who will come out on top in the end? Are we guaranteed a better society after a revolution? History again seems to show that what you have after a revolution is quite often a government that is more restrictive, not less, which is hardly surprising. After all, they have just been through a vicious, civil war, and have seen first-hand what happens when "common folks" are well-armed.
The American revolution was pretty unique, I think, in that after the English had been thrown out, the people in charge were fairly decent and idealistic. But those are not qualities that win the war each time; the victors will normally be ruthless people, low on the softer human qualities such as tolerance and decency.
I would be all for people being armed, if it made good sense, but I don't think it does. As far as I can see, all the argument in favour are weak, based on wishful thinking and the invocation of something high and holy, such as "The right of all men...", whereas the arguments against seem basically to be common sense. I know there is a lot of hysteria on both sides of the debate, but that's what I see, if you try to peel away all of that.
But how about a sort of compromise, then. Am I right in assuming that in the US you have the right to own a gun, even if you haven't got the faintest idea about how to use it? To my mind that is somewhat similar to owning a car without knowing how to drive safely. It would probably be a lot safer if you could only own a gun, if you not only learned how to use it properly, but also had to join the territorial army and spend time every week, not just on military drills, but also on the ethical side of gun ownership.
All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them All models are imprecise, is the correct statement - there is a hell of a lot of difference between that and "they are wrong", which implies that they are in plain contradiction with the observed facts. All scientist know that their models have this limitation, which is why they keep researching, so they can improve the model.
The only compelling thing about this is that it compels me to conclude that neither the author nor the poster knows anything about science. This kind of nonsense is, in my view, a clear symptom that the agenda of the religious right is succeeding all too well in destroying scientific awareness and critical thinking. To hell with them.
Reciting oaths on their own is simply empty ritual - McEthics, the fast-food version of ethics. A ritual may be deeply meaningful to a person who already believes profoundly in the object of the ritual, but to somebody who doesn't it merely tends to feel a bit embarrassing.
Ethics is something that has to be learned over a reasonable amount of time. You have to understand what it is and why it makes sense, and you have to have the time to decide whether you agree or not, and if you do, what that means for yourself and your subsequent actions.
Logic can never be better than the assumptions it works with. Garbage in => garbage out.
Logic is a way of saying that anything which didn't happen yesterday won't happen tomorrow No, logic nothing to say about that - it only concerns the way in which we manipulate logical statements. What you are talking about is empiricism - the idea that because something has always happened before, it will happen again next time; this is a useful notion in many sciences, but there is no logical reason why it should be valid.
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government A lofty ideal, and one that sounds good when you want to appear 'deep'; but as one once noted: "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun" - which may sound crude, but is a lot closer to reality. The government holds the gun here - the police, the army - so they hold the power. "The people" is not going to forcibly change the government unless they are willing to risk all they have, their own comfortable lives and those of their family.
Sadly, the US is a deeply divided society, and if/when it comes to a situation where people rise up against the existing order, they are not going to agree on how things should be changed, so it will descend into the chaos of a civil war, not with just two sides, but with a large number of warlords. And due to the extreme ease of access to weapons, it will be bloody.
I don't think you actually read what I wrote, mate. What you say may or may not be right - but storing radioactive waste is still a basically unsolved problem. And did I say that we should rely on gas and oil? Of course we're in trouble - we're in trouble because we've left it too long, and now we have to run to solve the problems.
My comments were more about the wisdom in not trudging on along the same old beaten path anymore. As for your "vision" - I suppose even tunnel vision is a kind of vision too, but perhaps not the kind we need right now.
I'm a veteran when it comes to hating and mistrusting Microsoft, but fair is fair, and what I hear him saying is not so much that their products were superior. He says that the others didn't think commercially - they didn't think of their SW as products and they didn't run their businesses well. I think it is hard to argue against that - after all, the constant complaint against Windows etc has always been that they prioritise raking in money over anything else, even to the extent that they engage in highly questionable practices.
I didn't see anything about the one JavaScript feature I use more than anything else in Firefox: the ability to turn it off selectively (via the noScript extension, so one could argue that it isn't in Firefox at all, of course). Useful as JavaScript is, the way it is used to sneak adverts and other unwanted stuff on to your browser can sometimes make a website useless - at least to me.
I wouldn't be on the Web at all without it. I wonder how many depend on it the same way.
Why isn't there a larger movement promoting the use of privacy tools? Well, at least the question gets asked now, which is sort of a step forward. Could the answer be that people simply don't feel there is a big enough problem? Even, that they have thought about it and concluded that, "well, that is life, let's get on with it"?
Questions like freedom and privacy take up rather a lot of space on/. - I suppose it is because a large proportion of the readers are young, and young people are still struggling with the big questions in life, where older people will have moved on to the practicalities of everyday life. The fact of the matter is that there is only so much one can do about these things anyway, and that not everything is either black or white. It is not a matter of total freedom or no freedom, total privacy or no privacy; 99.9% of us simply want enough to get by plus a little extra.
Slashdot Mirror
... Republican Web 2.0 Consultants and their online campaigning game. This just proves that old Republicans can learn new tricks
New tricks - or more money, better spent? As you mention, they have a staff of "Web 2.0 Consultants" - ie. this is not so much "republicans being web-savvy" as it is "republicans investing advertising money on computer consultants" - who can, for all we know, be from anywhere in the political spectrum. Money is money, and you'd have to be very idealistic in today's America to say no to an income simply for political reasons.
Discrimination is discrimination, whether it is 'positive' or not, and I think is it mostly harmful. You can't force a change in people's attitudes by passing a law; it just reinforces tensions and creates resentment. However, I think this whole idea misses the actual point by about a mile - surely, if women are not interested in hard science (assuming that it is actually a problem), the thing to do is to work on making them interested? Find out what is the problem with science's image in relation to women; science has a rather nerdy image, and women are probably less likely to be nerds than men (boys are >4 times as likely to be affected by autism spectrum disorders), so for that reason alone it is much less likely to attract women. Perhaps more women would choose "hard science" if there was more emphasis on cooperation and social aspects?
I would have thought the point of playing a game is to play the game - in person. I haven't followed this is any detail, but to me it seems that somebody has developed a tool to circumvent the "play" part of the game; if you are playing alone on a computer at home or somewhere, one could say that this is no problem, as the only one that is cheated at the end of the day is yourself. But when you are many players together, having a few players that cheat and thereby dominate the entire thing, ruining the game for everybody else - that is an entirely different matter. For one thing, everybody else will feel they have wasted their money and the company that expected to earn money on hosting the game will lose business on it.
This, as far as I can see, is the essence of the matter - whether or not laws and contracts reflect this, I don't know, but it is why we are not allowed to cheat in any game. In a way this is also a very good illustration of the collision between "freedom" and "fairness" - I mean why should we not be allowed to cheat? Why is doping illegal in all competition sports? Why can I not, if I play chess, just ram my queen right through five rows of the opponent's defence and knock the king down? Not being allowed these things, having to follow rules, is a limitation of my freedom. In this case the freedom of one company to make money out of helping people cheat in WoW is being limited - and as far as I can see this is entirely appropriate.
Now, I'm sitting here with a strange feeling, writing this - I mean why on Earth should it be necessary to even put these things into words? But on the other hand, from the comments I see people making, and from the fact that there is even a market for a way to cheat in something as inconsequential as WoW, it seems that this is far from clear to a lot of people. And we wonder why society seems to be falling apart.
Unfortunately the ineffable American political system has only given us Obama and McCain to choose between, so this is not a question about getting the optimal president, but one of getting a president that doesn't stagger too much when he's chewing gum, and doesn't drool or fart every time he's on camera.
So which one would you rather not see as president? That is the real question, sad though it is. That's all the democracy you get for your money.
Heaven forbid that we should see fair and balanced views online! I mean, if I was forced to consider other viewpoints, I might end up thinking about what I said and who knows what that could lead to. This is clearly directed solely against conservatives and Republicans, and supported by biased libertarian media, like Fox News.
On the other hand, did it say that it would keep all politicians off the net? Hmm, maybe not so bad. Let me think about that.
Why should it raise anyone's hackles? I see it as a sign of success that Linux is now seen as beginners' stuff - of course, when I hear that "Linux is for beginners" I think "Yeah, that's all you know"; but with a smile. We've arrived.
Just to be sure: Your company/department is being bought by HP, right? I don't how HP works at all, but it is my impression that they aren't all that bad; though, there was a rough patch some years back.
Some 5 years ago I was in a small, but successful company that was bought by Informatica - I'm still here, in case you wonder. I think for the first year or so we all hated it; we really felt like we were pariahs - part of that was our fault; we we resented the whole thing, for a large part because nobody asked our opinion, and I think we all felt rather betrayed. Since then we have worked out our differences, but it didn't happens automatically - management, from the very top, understood that there was a serious problem, and they have consistently tried to do all the right things and address the real problems (as opposed to just trying to look good).
It is very important to feel welcome in a new company, and to feel that you and the way you do things enjoy respect and are valuable. In the beginning I would have left, given half a chance; now I would be very reluctant to change job.
It is very important that feel confident in yourself if you stay in your new company - they have bought you guys because they believe in your product, but also because they believe in you guys. Where the problems can come in is when the lower to middle managers aren't willing to give an inch; they have more direct influence over your daily lives than upper management.
Why not just shoot people on sight as they arrive?
If you are a native English speaker, go for Chinese and learn to speak it well. It won't help you find a job in China since they are all very well educated and naturally prefer to employ native Chinese, but with China set to become the next superpower, their culture and language are growing in influence, and at some point they may well overtake English.
As an example of how fast things can change: it is only a few centuries ago that Latin was the language of all intellectuals in the West, and now it is only really used by the clergy of the Catholic Church. How long did it take for English to replace it as the main language of intellectual discourse? Probably less than a century, in reality. Nowadays international communication is many orders of magnitude faster, and the English language could be replaced as soon as enough people decide that Chinese is much more convenient.
BTW, I am not saying that Chinese is necessarily better than English, but with more and more research being conducted in China and published only in Chinese, at some point it may well be that learning Chinese is the obvious thing to do, if you want to be part of the leading edge. There are simply more Chinese in the world than any other kind of people.
Ever wanted to read Einstein's, Schroedinger's, Bohrs, Heisenberg's,... original papers, in the language they were thought out in?
Except that Niels Bohr was Danish, so he would not have thought things out in German, even if he wrote in that language.
It seems to me that the people who want the so-called utilitarian names are the people who least need to have access to the actual machines, really. Such as managers, who want to know where the machines are and possibly what they do, so they can make plans and budgets. I am, by the way, a UNIX system manager myself in a middlesized company.
There are several practical advantages to not using utilitarian names:
1. If a hostname is easy to pronounce, it is a lot easier to talk about the server - like when users say "I have a problem on bentley". Names like "as400_3_aix" or "mhz890-6" don't exactly roll off your tongue, so they don't get used. Sometimes they are abbreviated - e.g. "dash 6" - or they are referred to rather circuitously, like in "the big LPAR that runs AIX 5.3; it is 5.3, isn't it? I need a login on it." It may seem like a small thing, but you just try to live with it as a user or sysadmin.
2. A hostname that is easy to pronounce is also easy to type. This may not be relevant if you don't connect from the commandline, but take it from one who does it tens of times every day: it is a lot nicer to write "ssh fox" rather than "ssh as400_3_linux". Again a small thing, really, but it can make the difference between being slightly annoyed and not - and a person that is in a bad mood is less responsible.
3. If you work in a big-ish company, you may have a setup where you can't just slap new names into DNS as and when you need them. They need to be approved by the security officer (No, I can't think why that is either, but it happens none the less), which takes days, so you end up pre-allocating them in batches. Which means that you don't know what is going to be running on the server when it is actually installed, since it hasn't actually been planned yet. So you might as well just allocate some simple, easy and pronouncable names.
4. Fun. SW engineers are often creative people with a good deal of humour, even if other people don't quite see it that way. And being allowed to integrate your sense of humour into your work means that it will be more dear to you - it will contribute to a pleasant and relaxed atmosphere in the workplace. This actually matters - a lot, in fact.
I don't think there really are any overwhelmingly strong reasons for the utilitarian names; a manager who perhaps thinks about the servers once a month could reasonably be expected to make the small effort to look up what and where the servers are in a spreadsheet. As far as I can see, it is more a matter of whether it looks "messy" or not. But this is where DNS comes to our help - it is perfectly simple to have it both ways. What I do on my servers is to set the machines' hostnames to something pronouncable, make the primary DNS entry the same, and then assign aliases as needed along the way. Some aliases are "utilitarian", others are functional, like "qadisk", "devsrv" or "perforce". The funny thing is - everybody uses the non-utilitarian names, even though they have both options.
It seems bizarre - both the attempt to sell one's vote, but more than that, the heavy-handed way it is being treated. So, can one assume that it is actually illegal to sell one's vote? As in "there is a law against it"? I don't think we should trouble ourselves with explaing that it is unethical to sell your vote - so many other things are seen merely as economic assets in the US, so why not your vote, if money is all that matters to you?
I think that was quite likely the young man's whole point - that with all the lobbying and the money-centric mentality that seems to be more and more pervasive, the only value a person's vote has is what you can sell it for. And perhaps it is only to be expected in the run-up to an election that some sanctimonious idiot puts on a morally outraged mask and tries to stamp out this person's right to utter a political statement. This is one case where claims about freedom of speech actually have a meaning - if you can't give voice to your misgivings about things in your society, you might as well not have a vote.
I'll adopt Halle Berry, if she will come and stay at my place.
This is a good example of somebody speculating about things they haven't really got the tools for - in this case neurologists speculating about what things like thought, consciousness and self-awareness are. You might think they, if anybody, would know about these things, but this is actually a subject that philosophers have struggled with for centuries, figuring out just what these things are and how it can be that we seem to feel that the our essential being is something that sits somewhere inside and looks out through the eyes. You may scorn the notion that philosophers are at all useful in this context, but before we can make valid statements about a subject, we need to make up our minds about what concepts and what words are meaningful to use - and that is what good philosophy is about. And since we haven't really quite got a good, firm hold of what thoughts etc are, it is a bit bold for a team of neurologists to suddenly have sorted it all out in one go. At the very least you would expect them to define unambiguously what those terms and concepts are and what they mean.
But back to their results - apparently a person's brain reaches a conclusion about which button to press a while before that person feels that s/he has reached the conclusion. I don't think it says anything about freedom of will; but seen in light of evolution maybe this result isn't surprising. Animals have evolved from having no brain to increasingly complex setups over time, and they have had to react to their enviroment in all that time; IOW they have had to make decisions with whatever brain they had at the time. The human brain is not a radical redesign of the basic model, but rather just a strongly upgraded and extended version; we still share part of our brain's design with fish, amphibia and reptiles - as well as other mammals, of course, so it is reasonable to expect that the functionality that already worked well in those parts of the brain still happen there, mostly. Consciousness, whatever that is, is likely have come in relatively late in the design, so of course a lot of decisions are made without consciousness being required.
Compare this with a big company - the executive managers makes decisions about the whole of the company; they make guidelines about how they want their staff to act in different situations, but they are not involved in every decision that is made in the company. Instead they expect the lower echelons to make their own decisions in accordance with the guidelines. The top level managers often don't hear anything about those details, and when they do, it is normally much later. This is how I imagine our brain works - in our consciousness we make decisions about the principles we want to operate under, but we are not consciously involved in most of what goes on, it just happens, and in most cases decisions are made long before our consciousness hears about it. So do we have free will? I would say yes - in fact, we probably have many levels of free will happening all over the place.
We all have the freedom to express our ideas, of course; but sometimes I really wish they wouldn't. This kind of demonstration is silly - it doesn't even qualify for an emotionally charged expletive, it's just silly. I mean, all that comes out of this is that they get banned for a while, like naughty school children, and rightly so. If you imagine you sympathise with Tibet, how on Earth is it going to help them that we insult the Chinese leaders?
It's like that other daft gesture of "I don't want to play with you anymore, ever" - when high ranking American officials started calling the French names, like you would imagine primary school children. All it does is make people feel embarrassed about knowing you; as well as taking the attention away from more serious issues. Such as the problems in Tibet.
No, don't worry, we're not descending into chaos just yet.
If I understand it, the argument in favour of the right to own lots of guns goes something like this: "It's so common folks can rise up against a bad government". Presumably the assumption is that "common folks" will stand united in their cause, in complete agreement about how the country should be run afterwards.
However, seeing how people on this list argue and assuming that the opinions here are not that far removed from what is common in the US, I think it is highly unlikely to work that way. Isn't it more likely that that there will be 5 - 10 small, but violent groups fighting it out against each other, all the while killing indisciminately? It is certainly the way things have happened in all other countries throughout history. And who will come out on top in the end? Are we guaranteed a better society after a revolution? History again seems to show that what you have after a revolution is quite often a government that is more restrictive, not less, which is hardly surprising. After all, they have just been through a vicious, civil war, and have seen first-hand what happens when "common folks" are well-armed.
The American revolution was pretty unique, I think, in that after the English had been thrown out, the people in charge were fairly decent and idealistic. But those are not qualities that win the war each time; the victors will normally be ruthless people, low on the softer human qualities such as tolerance and decency.
I would be all for people being armed, if it made good sense, but I don't think it does. As far as I can see, all the argument in favour are weak, based on wishful thinking and the invocation of something high and holy, such as "The right of all men...", whereas the arguments against seem basically to be common sense. I know there is a lot of hysteria on both sides of the debate, but that's what I see, if you try to peel away all of that.
But how about a sort of compromise, then. Am I right in assuming that in the US you have the right to own a gun, even if you haven't got the faintest idea about how to use it? To my mind that is somewhat similar to owning a car without knowing how to drive safely. It would probably be a lot safer if you could only own a gun, if you not only learned how to use it properly, but also had to join the territorial army and spend time every week, not just on military drills, but also on the ethical side of gun ownership.
The only compelling thing about this is that it compels me to conclude that neither the author nor the poster knows anything about science. This kind of nonsense is, in my view, a clear symptom that the agenda of the religious right is succeeding all too well in destroying scientific awareness and critical thinking. To hell with them.
Reciting oaths on their own is simply empty ritual - McEthics, the fast-food version of ethics. A ritual may be deeply meaningful to a person who already believes profoundly in the object of the ritual, but to somebody who doesn't it merely tends to feel a bit embarrassing.
Ethics is something that has to be learned over a reasonable amount of time. You have to understand what it is and why it makes sense, and you have to have the time to decide whether you agree or not, and if you do, what that means for yourself and your subsequent actions.
Logic can never be better than the assumptions it works with. Garbage in => garbage out.
Logic is a way of saying that anything which didn't happen yesterday won't happen tomorrow No, logic nothing to say about that - it only concerns the way in which we manipulate logical statements. What you are talking about is empiricism - the idea that because something has always happened before, it will happen again next time; this is a useful notion in many sciences, but there is no logical reason why it should be valid.Sadly, the US is a deeply divided society, and if/when it comes to a situation where people rise up against the existing order, they are not going to agree on how things should be changed, so it will descend into the chaos of a civil war, not with just two sides, but with a large number of warlords. And due to the extreme ease of access to weapons, it will be bloody.
I don't think you actually read what I wrote, mate. What you say may or may not be right - but storing radioactive waste is still a basically unsolved problem. And did I say that we should rely on gas and oil? Of course we're in trouble - we're in trouble because we've left it too long, and now we have to run to solve the problems.
My comments were more about the wisdom in not trudging on along the same old beaten path anymore. As for your "vision" - I suppose even tunnel vision is a kind of vision too, but perhaps not the kind we need right now.
I'm a veteran when it comes to hating and mistrusting Microsoft, but fair is fair, and what I hear him saying is not so much that their products were superior. He says that the others didn't think commercially - they didn't think of their SW as products and they didn't run their businesses well. I think it is hard to argue against that - after all, the constant complaint against Windows etc has always been that they prioritise raking in money over anything else, even to the extent that they engage in highly questionable practices.
I didn't see anything about the one JavaScript feature I use more than anything else in Firefox: the ability to turn it off selectively (via the noScript extension, so one could argue that it isn't in Firefox at all, of course). Useful as JavaScript is, the way it is used to sneak adverts and other unwanted stuff on to your browser can sometimes make a website useless - at least to me.
I wouldn't be on the Web at all without it. I wonder how many depend on it the same way.
I'm pretty sure the fastest computer in the world must be the one on the space shuttle. At least when it is launched.
Questions like freedom and privacy take up rather a lot of space on /. - I suppose it is because a large proportion of the readers are young, and young people are still struggling with the big questions in life, where older people will have moved on to the practicalities of everyday life. The fact of the matter is that there is only so much one can do about these things anyway, and that not everything is either black or white. It is not a matter of total freedom or no freedom, total privacy or no privacy; 99.9% of us simply want enough to get by plus a little extra.