Do remember that he [Obama] was the first (and so far only) Presidential candidate to forgo Federal matching funds for his campaign, since skipping those funds meant he didn't have to abide by the campaign finance limits.
I don't believe that is accurate. This suggests that Steve Forbes skipped on matching funds in 1996 and 2000. G. W. Bush skipped on matching funds in 2000 and 2004, which caused Howard Dean and John Kerry to forgo in 2004 as well. Over the last decade, everybody who wins, forgoes matching funds, as well as a significant number of the losers.
There are valid reasons to say Obama is doing things that are bad, but I think we have a real tendency to say "He's the first to do this!" when he's doing stuff that has been the trend for quite some time.
The No-Fly list is actually a misnomer. I was on the list for a few years, though I don't think I'm on it anymore. For American Citizens, being on the No-Fly list is annoying (and I'll even buy unjustified and useless), but it doesn't permanently ground you.
Basically, when you check in at the front desk, the auto-check in machines will flag you, and one of the people behind the counter will come over and ask for your identification. Then they'll pretend like they're subtle, and call in to some central number. Over the phone, they'll say your name, and rattle off your birthdate, and usually some other identifying number, like your driver's license number. This is basically a background check. If you're actually wanted, and there's a warrant out for your arrest, I suspect you'd be arrested there. If you're just a person of interest, they finish checking you in and put a special marking on your boarding pass.
The mark varies from airport to airport, but it's primarily to tell the TSA security guys that you are on the list, and that you need extra screening before they let you on the plane. Sometimes, this is cool, because it lets you go into a separate security line that's shorter. Sometimes it's not so cool, because someone's probably going to touch your junk. Often times you get the puffer machine, the pat down, the metal detector wand, etc. It seems to depend a lot on the airport. If you clear that, you're in the clear, and you're just like any other passenger.
They may also do additional screening on checked bags, but that was always out of my field of view, so I have no idea what they did with my stuff.
You may be asking "How do you know that you're on the no fly list?" My understanding is that airport personelle aren't supposed to tell you, but after a few years of going through this routine, I asked someone at the desk one time during the background call. He said, "You're on the No-Fly list. Well, what's most likely is that there's someone else out there with your same name who has a felony warrant out for their arrest. If you were to book your tickets using your middle initial, you probably wouldn't have to go through this."
Sure enough, once I started booking with my middle initial after my first name, I stopped getting extra screening. A few years ago they implemented the identifying characteristics system (gender & birthdate when buying tickets), I haven't been harassed near as much as I used to be, which may mean the list is a lot more refined than it used to be.
At least, this is the deal for US citizens. I've heard foreigners who are No-Fly listed literally cannot fly into or out of the U.S.
The preamble of the United States constitution reads: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." (emphasis added)
Article I, section 8 reinforces this general welfare statement by remarking: "To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof." (more emphasis added).
Insofar as Planned Parenthood encourages the development of families that are planned and not just accidents, ACORN encourages get out the vote projects to enhance American democracy, General Electric, General Motors, and Chrysler provide gainful employment for Americans, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac provide opportunities for home ownership, and the like, I think you reasonably have to say the goal is to provide for the general welfare.
You and I are welcome to disagree over whether those are the best ways to promote the general welfare (and in many cases, though not all, I suspect we would be in agreement, despite this post). However, the constitution is pretty clear that the US government has a general broad right to promote the general welfare in the United States.
I should also like to add, one of the primary advocates of the United States Constitution during the period leading up to its ratification was Alexander Hamilton, who was originally in favor of setting up a fairly powerful monarch. He lost out on the the first draft of the Constitution -- the Articles of Confederation -- which provided for a much more limited government. However, we threw that in the toilet and opted for the Constitution, which was designed to strengthen and centralize the Federal government's power, not really limit it (though it does have its own limitations laid out in the Bill of Rights).
Look, I'm pretty sympathetic to the Jeffersonian minimalist government ideal. But the Constitution isn't a Jeffersonian document. It's a Hamiltonian and Madisonian one, and those guys were more for centralized power than the original founders were. Insofar as that's the government we got, that's the government we got.
I simply worry about their ability to get it done at all. Not the NIMBY's and the environmental impact, just the corruption factor and the fact that it's Tax-N-Spendifornia. If they were in the black it'd be one thing but they want the federal gov't to pay for it when they are deep in a major budget crisis? If I were the feds (or the rest of the nation) I'd say "screw you, come back when you can manage your own budget and maybe we'll talk."
I think you may be mistaking California for Massachusetts. If California were Tax-N-Spend, it wouldn't have a budget issue. The issue in California is that they can't tax. All budgets in California must (1) be balanced, and (2) be passed by a super-majority. The legislature's made up of the Senate consisting of 25 Democrats and 15 Republicans; and the Assembly having 49 Democrats, 29 Republicans, 1 Independent, and 1 vacancy. So the Dems have a significant majority (and have since 1970), but not enough to pass a budget on their own. And the California Republican party has maintained incredible party discipline for a while now, absolutely refusing any increases in taxes, period. So, obtaining taxes for services has become essentially impossible.
This has been complicated by being "tough on crime." Things like Three Strikes laws have dramatically increased California's prison population in recent years. This has resulted in an increase in funds that must go to prisons. This, combined with a refusal to increase taxes means that much more of the limited government revenue is going into the black hole that is the prison system. Because of this, pretty much every aspect of California's selection of services have been significantly cut back for at least a decade now. The impact on the University of California in particular has been huge; they lost 20% of their funding in this past year alone, on top of significant cuts before the budget crisis. (The increase in tough on crime laws is bi-partisan, the democrats have their fair share of blame in this one. The lack of increase in taxes to cover for shortfall is a R-party issue entirely though.).
I was born in December and pursuing double masters with GPA of 3.4 is it really bad?
I was born in June, and received a Ph.D by the time I was 27, with a 3.95 GPA. Luckily for me, part of that Ph.D training involved learning that the word data is not the plural of anecdote.
The term 'bullshit' actually has a number of academic articles and books published on it. For those who think seriously about it, it's a rather precise word. The most famous book on the subject is Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit. If Frankfurt is correct, 'bullshit' is should be defined as a lack of concern for the truth. Bullshit is not necessary false, though it can be. It may also turn out to be true. The point is, when one is bullshitting, one doesn't care if one is true or false. So, when you write bullshit for an exam answer as an undergrad, you don't care if you get it right or not, you care about your score on the exam. Likewise, if you're bullshitting someone about their favorite sports team, you don't really care if their team sucks or not, you're just trying to rile up the person.
That doesn't diminish Penn and Teller's point. Usually, a bullshit artist is not concerned with whether their vitamins cure AIDS. They're concerned with selling vitamins. I'm not sure if it does help you avoid libel claims though.
I don't know about professional philosophers, but ignorant citations of random quotations rather than demonstrating a real understanding of the text makes people who actually have read the Republic (and thought deeply about it) really angry.
As the slashdot story itself wasn't about the Republic or Plato, I didn't feel it was appropriate for a multi-paragraph essay to provide an interpretation of the book just to correct someone who said something spectacularly wrong. But, since there still seems to be a lot of people who are claiming to know what's going on in the Republic, and they're really missing the market, I'll fill my comment out more fully. I'm only going to do this if I make one caveat clear: the Republic is probably the most widely debated book in the history of humanity. There's only 1 other that comes close, and that would be the Bible (new testament + old testament). And I'm willing to wager the Republic has been debated even more than the Bible, primarily because the Republic is heavily read and taken seriously by thinkers of all major western religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), where the Bible may not be taken as seriously by certain sects of Judaism (new testament for example) or Islam. In short: No difference of interpretation about the Republic is going to be solved in a Slashdot comment.
Having said that, you would have to go through lots of interpretive hoops to claim that the Republic isn't about providing a definition for justice. And the surface (though not shallow) reading of the book is fairly explicit that Socrates reaches an exact definition of what justice is. And it is defined exactly as I said in my post: justice is minding one's own business and not being a busy body. The structure of the book is roughly as follows:
Book I of the Republic begins in traditional Socratic manner of Socrates running into various members of the Athenian community and beginning a discourse on some concept. In this case, it is about justice. Commonplace definitions of justice are provided by the various characters who make appearances. Cephalus defines justice as paying back your debts and telling the truth. Cephalus's son, Polemarchus, defines justice as helping your friends and hurting your enemies. Thrasymachus defines justice as whatever is to the advantage of the stronger, and then refines his position to say that justice is less profitable than injustice. Socrates finds all of these definitions to be inadequate and provides a rather shitty rejection of all of them. Thrasymachus gets pissed and says (in a rough paraphrase) "Socrates, stop screwing around and just tell us what you think justice is." Book I ends without any clear definition, and a rather unsatisfying result. This is traditional for the earlier Socratic dialogues, and it is sometimes believed that Book I was originally intended to be a stand alone piece titled the Thrasymachus.
After Book I, the style of the Republic changes dramatically. Instead of Socrates just rejecting positions, he actually begins to take a stance. This happens because Glaucon and Adiemantus (Plato's real life brothers) call Socrates out and say "You know, you haven't convinced me that Thrasymachus is wrong." Glaucon then suggests that the reason we concern ourselves with being just is that suffering injustice really sucks, and we'd all be better off if we agreed to do the just thing. However, Thrasymachus may be right, and doing what is unjust may lead to maximizing our own personal benefit in isolated cases. Glaucon then tells a rather famous story of a ring that turns one invisible, and the guy who gets it goes off and kills the king, seduces the queen and is living life pretty high. I don't know why turning invisible helps you seduce the queen, but whatever. That's what the book says.
At this point, Socrates suggests that they've been looking for justice in the individual, and since the individual is very small, i
Plato said that there is no true measure of justice, but it is important for a government to give the appearance of justice to society. This is a textbook example of that in action.
What? Plato didn't say that. That's completely wrong. Plato explicitly defined justice in the Republic. I quote:
we affirmed Justice was doing one's own business, and not being a busybody
It's neat that Google does interesting things like this, but it blows my mind how a company that plays so much can survive.
Keep in mind that the vast majority of the Internet has some form of Google advertising on it somewhere. So, it's not an exaggeration to say "Time you spend on the Internet, in almost any form generates profit for Google." Thus, it's in their interest to encourage you, in a wide variety of ways, to spend time on the Internet.
So, Google Earth allows you to play with various maps. That may cause you to become interested in a specific location, which causes you to use Google Search (+profit) to find a website (+profit) that discusses the location that you were interested in. Interested in the moon? Again, Google Earth to the Apollo Lander, Google Search Apollo Program (+profit), find various websites about the Apollo Program. Some, if not most, of these sites will have adsense (+profit).
I suppose what may be more surprising is that this business plan is actually wildly profitable, instead of just speculative.
Okay, so it starts at 250k and then when that isn't enough it moves down to 200k then 150k and...wait there is no one left to pay because everyone is just living on the government. The problem with many of these social programs is that they aren't temporary. We have created entire cultures and generations of people who live off the government. Do we want to put even more people on the gov. dole?
The top 1% of the population in the US controls 33.4% of the private wealth in the country as of 2001. The top 20% of the population controls 80% of the private wealth. If the lower 80% of the country paid nothing at all, you'd still have plenty of wealth from the top 20% to fund basic government functions. Last I heard, the wealth gap has increased since then as well, under the Bush Administration which shifted the tax burden from the wealthy to the middle class.
If you were to try and have equal tax rates for everyone in an attempt to fund government, you'd actually have to raise taxes quite a bit for most people, as it'd require a rather massive tax cut on those who control most of the wealth.
I'm also not sure where you're finding these people who are living high off the government dollar. I know there was a big deal made of them in the 80s, but I've never actually seen any numbers.
Unless, by curing HIV, we're putting a halt to the next stage in human evolution. It could be that HIV was intended to trigger a dormant subsection of our genome.
HIV doesn't have intentions. It's a virus, not a God.
While I'm sure there's something to this, that's not necessarily the case. LaTeX is actually quite successful in academia, despite the name. If it's the best tool for the job, people can move beyond the name.
Not exactly. When you're invisible, the light simply passes through where you would have been as normal. You're just not in the way to block those waves anymore. According to the article, the water from the Tsunami mostly goes straight through as if the island wasn't even there. So, if there is a wave that originates from the east, it hits this cloak, the wave will continue it's movement west as if it never hit an island at all. The only ones who would be affected would be anyone who's behind that island, who has been using it to break their Tsunamis in the past.
Having said that, I'm not entirely clear how you can use the device described to protect coastlines. It looks like you need a 360 degree coverage for the device to work. That's not going to work for something like say...China's coast.
I know the wording is awkward. But, keep in mind, light is understood to be a wave as well. Thus, the mechanic of causing a tsunami to go seamlessly around an island should be nearly the same as causing a light beam to go around the object. This wouldn't block the Tsunami wave, the wave would continue as normal, as if nothing had happened. The Island also would not be touched by the wave either. The metaphor seems to work.
I think you kind of missed their point. That's not to say that their point is reasonable, because it's not reasonable at all. But, here's the logic anyway...
PETA holds the position that it's unethical to force animals into slavery and cruel conditions for the purpose of human amusement. Thus, PETA's position is the following: (1) Cow's milk is unnecessary for a human diet. (2) For those who really like and enjoy dairy products, we have another source of dairy available: humans. (3) Human milk is preferable to PETA than cow's milk because a human being can say "Yeah, I'd be willing to have a pump hooked up to my breast for X dollars a day." It doesn't mean any human being necessarily IS willing, only that they COULD be willing. Cow's can't have a choice in the matter.
Therefore, PETA's position is that the cow dairy industry is cruel to cows because it is both unnecessary for human survival and because we have a source of dairy that doesn't require coercing other creatures to obtain dairy. They're not trying to make ice cream taste better, or to make it more economical, or even more desirable. Quite the contrary, they'd probably be happy if the entire dairy industry disappeared entirely. But it's purely from an ethical standpoint about the treatment of animals. Economics or preferences have nothing to do with it.
Again, this is not to say that I think PETA's right here, but you should at least understand their framework before you reject it as absurd.
My understanding was the exhibit was not about censorship. It was about looking at things that should not exist, and questioning the reasons why the establishment denies their existence. This can range from the moons of Jupiter or to satellites designed to spy on domestic affairs. His interest is not in the silencing, but in the denial.
Yes, because it's easy for terrorists to train a highly skilled computer programmer and infiltrate them into a system where they get access to the source code for security checkpoints, recompile it, and do all that without having a single background check performed on them. Hacking of this caliber is far easier than say...just getting a large enough pool of suicide bombers and just brute forcing it.
If it's a random probability, if you try enough times, you'll get through eventually. This is far more likely (and realistic) than some Hollywood terrorist hacker plot.
Regarding officers of the state having bigger and better firearms on campus.
I know you claim that it's "for our protection" (speaking as a student). However, some of us do still remember that in 1970, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on a group of students at Kent State. The students were, at the time, largely protesting national war policies. The details of what happened at Kent are most likely less important than the psychological image. There exist precedent for officials of the state utilizing lethal force on students attempting to make a political statement.
Having a law that focuses specifically on radical elements in Universities while at the same time increasing the presence of lethal force on University campuses is likely to just antagonize those radical elements even further, and further increase the probability of unnecessary bloodshed.
I made a version of this post in the previous thread, but some form of it should probably make an appearance here as well.
Undergraduate education is not about developing skills, job training, making you a better employee or things of that sort. The proper way to learn new specialized skills (like new programming languages, techniques, or the like) is to either go to a trade school, pick up a book and start teaching yourself, or (heaven forbid) require your employer to train you for the job he wants you to perform. Skills are nice to have, no question. But specific skills are not the goal of an education.
If you want to understand the point of an undergraduate education, look at the overall structure of the program. Notice how the University has a general education requirement where you take a bunch of classes that you thought you had no interest in? Anthropology? Philosophy? Literature? Humanities? Math? Foreign Languages? Okay, keep that in mind. Now look at your chosen major. Notice how it has you take courses from a number of different fields in your chosen major? (I'm not in your major, so I can't tell you what these are, but I suspect 10 minutes with a course catalog would make them clear pretty quickly). When you see this structure, it should be clear that the goal of an undergraduate education is not specialization; it's a degree of educational breadth more than depth.
Why breadth? Part of the belief is that by having a small bit of understanding of a large amount of subjects, you as a person will be better suited for dealing with a large number of diverse circumstances. It's significantly easier to go from your own pet Instant Messenger program project to writing drives for hardware devices if you've at least had some exposure to them before. It's also easier to go from you drivers to writing video game physics if you've taken some physics classes. And it's easier to go from your video game physics to being a lead designer, if you have some background in literature, film, and the like, to provide you with some resources to make a really great game. The assumption in University education is that an individual with a wide breadth of knowledge will be smarter, wiser and more adaptive than a highly specialized individual.
And this gets me back to my previous post about the point of education. The point of a university education is not because it leads to wealth, power, or even happiness. The university as an institution that stems from 2,500 years of intellectual history, dating back to ancient Greek civilization. For the Greeks (and the Romans, and then the Christians, all of who were the champions of education), the goal of education was to make you a better person. For Plato and Aristotle, the goal was that by understanding the world around you, you would be striving towards a form of excellence that is only available to human beings. This was similar for the Romans. The Christians modified it claiming it was to get you closer to God. The point is such that, when your life is examined, it's possible to say "That is a good life."
So, I've rambled a bit, and I don't think I've answered your question. What skills should an undergraduate have? No skill is essential to an undergraduate education. What should an undergraduate have? They should have a wide array of experiences and exposures to different aspects of the world. If you leave your university with this, you may not find a job, but your life is going to end up being a lot better than the guy who's only concern was building a resume.
But, the whole reason to GO to a University, is to get the skills/education to make more money when finished, than you would have if you had not gone.
College is a means to an end....and while it is nice to learn other things to be a bit well rounded, that is extra fluff if you have the time and money for it while there, but, don't forget the real reason for going.
If people could make good $$ without college, I doubt you'd see so many people trying to go....
A degree gets you in the door for a job....regardless of what it is in often...you have to have one these days to get a good job. I want to preface my comments by saying that a lot of people have a similar mindset as you do. It's highly prevalent in the United States at this point. So, it certainly isn't your own personal shortcoming for thinking like this, it's a larger societal problem.
For a moment, put the reason why YOU go to a University to the side and consider what the purpose of the University is. It's an institution that's literally thousands of years old, dating back to the old Greek institutions of education. When Plato and Aristotle founded their schools, they didn't put up a big sign that said "When you're done, you get more money." That wasn't the promise. The promise was that by teaching you about the world, you would become a better person. That is to say, the founding concept of the University was that education lead to human excellence. And, for the Greeks especially, human excellence was not directly related to the possession of wealth.
This understanding of education was dominant up until very recently. Everyone was required to learn Greek and Latin, so they could read Homer and Plato. Reading the Homer isn't going to get you a job, it's not going to get you a promotion, it's not going to get you an interview, and it's not going to get you laid this Friday. No one at the University used to make the claim that it would. They'd claim that reading Homer made you a better person, even if it doesn't get you a job.
Now, as to why YOU should go to a University? If you're going for the purpose of getting a job, you're not going to understand the vast majority of your classes at the University. You're going to be wondering "Why do I have to take this anthropology class?" or "I have no interest in Operating Systems, why do I need this Operating Systems class?" and "Why do I need a foreign language, I'm going to be working with code all day." All these questions miss the larger point of what the University is trying to do to you. And if you're missing the point of the entire institution, it's exceptionally difficult to do well there.
The whole thing is really just the result of multiple generations of corruption, I think. Employers realized that well-rounded, educated (dare I say, excellent) human beings are better for the health of a company. So they pay more for people who are excellent, and a University degree used to be a short-hand of some form of excellence. The masses of uneducated began to realize this, and started saying to their kids "If you want a good job, you need a degree." So their kids started going to the University, thinking the point was to make money. Professors, having tenure, just did what they were going to do anyway, but now we've gone two or three generations like this. We're reaching the point where current professors went to school thinking it was for money. We have boards of Universities with pressure from the state to focus less on the goal of education for excellence and more on the goal of education for job skills.
In this instance, it's not really Netflix's fault. Netflix has repeatedly said that they want to make their steaming feature available to more operating systems, browsers and the like. The reason they haven't is because the MPAA studios which supply the movies that Netflix's rents won't license them movies unless they use some form of DRM that they approve of. And they only approve of Microsoft's DRM, which means the only options open for Netflix are Microsoft supplied DRM movies or nothing at all.
If you want proof of this, there are videos of Netflix having a working demo of their streaming tech on OS X from back in March, but they still haven't released it for the main site, since they still haven't gotten approval on the DRM from the sudios.
If you're going to protest, your protests should be directed at the MPAA. That may involve a boycott of Netflix as well, but it definitely shouldn't stop there, nor should Netflix be the primary focus.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't believe that is accurate. This suggests that Steve Forbes skipped on matching funds in 1996 and 2000. G. W. Bush skipped on matching funds in 2000 and 2004, which caused Howard Dean and John Kerry to forgo in 2004 as well. Over the last decade, everybody who wins, forgoes matching funds, as well as a significant number of the losers.
There are valid reasons to say Obama is doing things that are bad, but I think we have a real tendency to say "He's the first to do this!" when he's doing stuff that has been the trend for quite some time.
The No-Fly list is actually a misnomer. I was on the list for a few years, though I don't think I'm on it anymore. For American Citizens, being on the No-Fly list is annoying (and I'll even buy unjustified and useless), but it doesn't permanently ground you.
Basically, when you check in at the front desk, the auto-check in machines will flag you, and one of the people behind the counter will come over and ask for your identification. Then they'll pretend like they're subtle, and call in to some central number. Over the phone, they'll say your name, and rattle off your birthdate, and usually some other identifying number, like your driver's license number. This is basically a background check. If you're actually wanted, and there's a warrant out for your arrest, I suspect you'd be arrested there. If you're just a person of interest, they finish checking you in and put a special marking on your boarding pass.
The mark varies from airport to airport, but it's primarily to tell the TSA security guys that you are on the list, and that you need extra screening before they let you on the plane. Sometimes, this is cool, because it lets you go into a separate security line that's shorter. Sometimes it's not so cool, because someone's probably going to touch your junk. Often times you get the puffer machine, the pat down, the metal detector wand, etc. It seems to depend a lot on the airport. If you clear that, you're in the clear, and you're just like any other passenger.
They may also do additional screening on checked bags, but that was always out of my field of view, so I have no idea what they did with my stuff.
You may be asking "How do you know that you're on the no fly list?" My understanding is that airport personelle aren't supposed to tell you, but after a few years of going through this routine, I asked someone at the desk one time during the background call. He said, "You're on the No-Fly list. Well, what's most likely is that there's someone else out there with your same name who has a felony warrant out for their arrest. If you were to book your tickets using your middle initial, you probably wouldn't have to go through this."
Sure enough, once I started booking with my middle initial after my first name, I stopped getting extra screening. A few years ago they implemented the identifying characteristics system (gender & birthdate when buying tickets), I haven't been harassed near as much as I used to be, which may mean the list is a lot more refined than it used to be.
At least, this is the deal for US citizens. I've heard foreigners who are No-Fly listed literally cannot fly into or out of the U.S.
The preamble of the United States constitution reads: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." (emphasis added)
Article I, section 8 reinforces this general welfare statement by remarking: "To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof." (more emphasis added).
Insofar as Planned Parenthood encourages the development of families that are planned and not just accidents, ACORN encourages get out the vote projects to enhance American democracy, General Electric, General Motors, and Chrysler provide gainful employment for Americans, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac provide opportunities for home ownership, and the like, I think you reasonably have to say the goal is to provide for the general welfare.
You and I are welcome to disagree over whether those are the best ways to promote the general welfare (and in many cases, though not all, I suspect we would be in agreement, despite this post). However, the constitution is pretty clear that the US government has a general broad right to promote the general welfare in the United States.
I should also like to add, one of the primary advocates of the United States Constitution during the period leading up to its ratification was Alexander Hamilton, who was originally in favor of setting up a fairly powerful monarch. He lost out on the the first draft of the Constitution -- the Articles of Confederation -- which provided for a much more limited government. However, we threw that in the toilet and opted for the Constitution, which was designed to strengthen and centralize the Federal government's power, not really limit it (though it does have its own limitations laid out in the Bill of Rights).
Look, I'm pretty sympathetic to the Jeffersonian minimalist government ideal. But the Constitution isn't a Jeffersonian document. It's a Hamiltonian and Madisonian one, and those guys were more for centralized power than the original founders were. Insofar as that's the government we got, that's the government we got.
I simply worry about their ability to get it done at all.
Not the NIMBY's and the environmental impact, just the corruption factor and the fact that it's Tax-N-Spendifornia. If they were in the black it'd be one thing but they want the federal gov't to pay for it when they are deep in a major budget crisis? If I were the feds (or the rest of the nation) I'd say "screw you, come back when you can manage your own budget and maybe we'll talk."
I think you may be mistaking California for Massachusetts. If California were Tax-N-Spend, it wouldn't have a budget issue. The issue in California is that they can't tax. All budgets in California must (1) be balanced, and (2) be passed by a super-majority. The legislature's made up of the Senate consisting of 25 Democrats and 15 Republicans; and the Assembly having 49 Democrats, 29 Republicans, 1 Independent, and 1 vacancy. So the Dems have a significant majority (and have since 1970), but not enough to pass a budget on their own. And the California Republican party has maintained incredible party discipline for a while now, absolutely refusing any increases in taxes, period. So, obtaining taxes for services has become essentially impossible.
This has been complicated by being "tough on crime." Things like Three Strikes laws have dramatically increased California's prison population in recent years. This has resulted in an increase in funds that must go to prisons. This, combined with a refusal to increase taxes means that much more of the limited government revenue is going into the black hole that is the prison system. Because of this, pretty much every aspect of California's selection of services have been significantly cut back for at least a decade now. The impact on the University of California in particular has been huge; they lost 20% of their funding in this past year alone, on top of significant cuts before the budget crisis. (The increase in tough on crime laws is bi-partisan, the democrats have their fair share of blame in this one. The lack of increase in taxes to cover for shortfall is a R-party issue entirely though.).
I was born in December and pursuing double masters with GPA of 3.4 is it really bad?
I was born in June, and received a Ph.D by the time I was 27, with a 3.95 GPA. Luckily for me, part of that Ph.D training involved learning that the word data is not the plural of anecdote.
The term 'bullshit' actually has a number of academic articles and books published on it. For those who think seriously about it, it's a rather precise word. The most famous book on the subject is Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit . If Frankfurt is correct, 'bullshit' is should be defined as a lack of concern for the truth. Bullshit is not necessary false, though it can be. It may also turn out to be true. The point is, when one is bullshitting, one doesn't care if one is true or false. So, when you write bullshit for an exam answer as an undergrad, you don't care if you get it right or not, you care about your score on the exam. Likewise, if you're bullshitting someone about their favorite sports team, you don't really care if their team sucks or not, you're just trying to rile up the person.
That doesn't diminish Penn and Teller's point. Usually, a bullshit artist is not concerned with whether their vitamins cure AIDS. They're concerned with selling vitamins. I'm not sure if it does help you avoid libel claims though.
I don't know about professional philosophers, but ignorant citations of random quotations rather than demonstrating a real understanding of the text makes people who actually have read the Republic (and thought deeply about it) really angry.
As the slashdot story itself wasn't about the Republic or Plato, I didn't feel it was appropriate for a multi-paragraph essay to provide an interpretation of the book just to correct someone who said something spectacularly wrong. But, since there still seems to be a lot of people who are claiming to know what's going on in the Republic, and they're really missing the market, I'll fill my comment out more fully. I'm only going to do this if I make one caveat clear: the Republic is probably the most widely debated book in the history of humanity. There's only 1 other that comes close, and that would be the Bible (new testament + old testament). And I'm willing to wager the Republic has been debated even more than the Bible, primarily because the Republic is heavily read and taken seriously by thinkers of all major western religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), where the Bible may not be taken as seriously by certain sects of Judaism (new testament for example) or Islam. In short: No difference of interpretation about the Republic is going to be solved in a Slashdot comment.
Having said that, you would have to go through lots of interpretive hoops to claim that the Republic isn't about providing a definition for justice. And the surface (though not shallow) reading of the book is fairly explicit that Socrates reaches an exact definition of what justice is. And it is defined exactly as I said in my post: justice is minding one's own business and not being a busy body. The structure of the book is roughly as follows:
Book I of the Republic begins in traditional Socratic manner of Socrates running into various members of the Athenian community and beginning a discourse on some concept. In this case, it is about justice. Commonplace definitions of justice are provided by the various characters who make appearances. Cephalus defines justice as paying back your debts and telling the truth. Cephalus's son, Polemarchus, defines justice as helping your friends and hurting your enemies. Thrasymachus defines justice as whatever is to the advantage of the stronger, and then refines his position to say that justice is less profitable than injustice. Socrates finds all of these definitions to be inadequate and provides a rather shitty rejection of all of them. Thrasymachus gets pissed and says (in a rough paraphrase) "Socrates, stop screwing around and just tell us what you think justice is." Book I ends without any clear definition, and a rather unsatisfying result. This is traditional for the earlier Socratic dialogues, and it is sometimes believed that Book I was originally intended to be a stand alone piece titled the Thrasymachus.
After Book I, the style of the Republic changes dramatically. Instead of Socrates just rejecting positions, he actually begins to take a stance. This happens because Glaucon and Adiemantus (Plato's real life brothers) call Socrates out and say "You know, you haven't convinced me that Thrasymachus is wrong." Glaucon then suggests that the reason we concern ourselves with being just is that suffering injustice really sucks, and we'd all be better off if we agreed to do the just thing. However, Thrasymachus may be right, and doing what is unjust may lead to maximizing our own personal benefit in isolated cases. Glaucon then tells a rather famous story of a ring that turns one invisible, and the guy who gets it goes off and kills the king, seduces the queen and is living life pretty high. I don't know why turning invisible helps you seduce the queen, but whatever. That's what the book says.
At this point, Socrates suggests that they've been looking for justice in the individual, and since the individual is very small, i
Plato said that there is no true measure of justice, but it is important for a government to give the appearance of justice to society. This is a textbook example of that in action.
What? Plato didn't say that. That's completely wrong. Plato explicitly defined justice in the Republic. I quote:
we affirmed Justice was doing one's own business, and not being a busybody
Citation: http://books.google.com/books?id=50SqFuH-4jQC&lpg=PA126&ots=O96UUppWV1&dq=justice%20not%20being%20a%20busybody%20republic&pg=PA126#v=onepage&q=&f=false
Don't just make up quotes and attribute them to Plato. It makes philosophers really angry.
It's neat that Google does interesting things like this, but it blows my mind how a company that plays so much can survive.
Keep in mind that the vast majority of the Internet has some form of Google advertising on it somewhere. So, it's not an exaggeration to say "Time you spend on the Internet, in almost any form generates profit for Google." Thus, it's in their interest to encourage you, in a wide variety of ways, to spend time on the Internet.
So, Google Earth allows you to play with various maps. That may cause you to become interested in a specific location, which causes you to use Google Search (+profit) to find a website (+profit) that discusses the location that you were interested in. Interested in the moon? Again, Google Earth to the Apollo Lander, Google Search Apollo Program (+profit), find various websites about the Apollo Program. Some, if not most, of these sites will have adsense (+profit).
I suppose what may be more surprising is that this business plan is actually wildly profitable, instead of just speculative.
Okay, so it starts at 250k and then when that isn't enough it moves down to 200k then 150k and...wait there is no one left to pay because everyone is just living on the government. The problem with many of these social programs is that they aren't temporary. We have created entire cultures and generations of people who live off the government. Do we want to put even more people on the gov. dole?
The top 1% of the population in the US controls 33.4% of the private wealth in the country as of 2001. The top 20% of the population controls 80% of the private wealth. If the lower 80% of the country paid nothing at all, you'd still have plenty of wealth from the top 20% to fund basic government functions. Last I heard, the wealth gap has increased since then as well, under the Bush Administration which shifted the tax burden from the wealthy to the middle class.
If you were to try and have equal tax rates for everyone in an attempt to fund government, you'd actually have to raise taxes quite a bit for most people, as it'd require a rather massive tax cut on those who control most of the wealth.
I'm also not sure where you're finding these people who are living high off the government dollar. I know there was a big deal made of them in the 80s, but I've never actually seen any numbers.
Unless, by curing HIV, we're putting a halt to the next stage in human evolution. It could be that HIV was intended to trigger a dormant subsection of our genome.
HIV doesn't have intentions. It's a virus, not a God.
While I'm sure there's something to this, that's not necessarily the case. LaTeX is actually quite successful in academia, despite the name. If it's the best tool for the job, people can move beyond the name.
Not exactly. When you're invisible, the light simply passes through where you would have been as normal. You're just not in the way to block those waves anymore. According to the article, the water from the Tsunami mostly goes straight through as if the island wasn't even there. So, if there is a wave that originates from the east, it hits this cloak, the wave will continue it's movement west as if it never hit an island at all. The only ones who would be affected would be anyone who's behind that island, who has been using it to break their Tsunamis in the past.
Having said that, I'm not entirely clear how you can use the device described to protect coastlines. It looks like you need a 360 degree coverage for the device to work. That's not going to work for something like say...China's coast.
I know the wording is awkward. But, keep in mind, light is understood to be a wave as well. Thus, the mechanic of causing a tsunami to go seamlessly around an island should be nearly the same as causing a light beam to go around the object. This wouldn't block the Tsunami wave, the wave would continue as normal, as if nothing had happened. The Island also would not be touched by the wave either. The metaphor seems to work.
Wrong game. That's Mortal Kombat.
I think you kind of missed their point. That's not to say that their point is reasonable, because it's not reasonable at all. But, here's the logic anyway...
PETA holds the position that it's unethical to force animals into slavery and cruel conditions for the purpose of human amusement. Thus, PETA's position is the following: (1) Cow's milk is unnecessary for a human diet. (2) For those who really like and enjoy dairy products, we have another source of dairy available: humans. (3) Human milk is preferable to PETA than cow's milk because a human being can say "Yeah, I'd be willing to have a pump hooked up to my breast for X dollars a day." It doesn't mean any human being necessarily IS willing, only that they COULD be willing. Cow's can't have a choice in the matter.
Therefore, PETA's position is that the cow dairy industry is cruel to cows because it is both unnecessary for human survival and because we have a source of dairy that doesn't require coercing other creatures to obtain dairy. They're not trying to make ice cream taste better, or to make it more economical, or even more desirable. Quite the contrary, they'd probably be happy if the entire dairy industry disappeared entirely. But it's purely from an ethical standpoint about the treatment of animals. Economics or preferences have nothing to do with it.
Again, this is not to say that I think PETA's right here, but you should at least understand their framework before you reject it as absurd.
My understanding was the exhibit was not about censorship. It was about looking at things that should not exist, and questioning the reasons why the establishment denies their existence. This can range from the moons of Jupiter or to satellites designed to spy on domestic affairs. His interest is not in the silencing, but in the denial.
Yes, because it's easy for terrorists to train a highly skilled computer programmer and infiltrate them into a system where they get access to the source code for security checkpoints, recompile it, and do all that without having a single background check performed on them. Hacking of this caliber is far easier than say...just getting a large enough pool of suicide bombers and just brute forcing it.
If it's a random probability, if you try enough times, you'll get through eventually. This is far more likely (and realistic) than some Hollywood terrorist hacker plot.
Parent post needs to be modded +1, Terrifying.
Is this functionality available in Apple's OS X?
Regarding officers of the state having bigger and better firearms on campus.
I know you claim that it's "for our protection" (speaking as a student). However, some of us do still remember that in 1970, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on a group of students at Kent State. The students were, at the time, largely protesting national war policies. The details of what happened at Kent are most likely less important than the psychological image. There exist precedent for officials of the state utilizing lethal force on students attempting to make a political statement.
Having a law that focuses specifically on radical elements in Universities while at the same time increasing the presence of lethal force on University campuses is likely to just antagonize those radical elements even further, and further increase the probability of unnecessary bloodshed.
I made a version of this post in the previous thread, but some form of it should probably make an appearance here as well.
Undergraduate education is not about developing skills, job training, making you a better employee or things of that sort. The proper way to learn new specialized skills (like new programming languages, techniques, or the like) is to either go to a trade school, pick up a book and start teaching yourself, or (heaven forbid) require your employer to train you for the job he wants you to perform. Skills are nice to have, no question. But specific skills are not the goal of an education.
If you want to understand the point of an undergraduate education, look at the overall structure of the program. Notice how the University has a general education requirement where you take a bunch of classes that you thought you had no interest in? Anthropology? Philosophy? Literature? Humanities? Math? Foreign Languages? Okay, keep that in mind. Now look at your chosen major. Notice how it has you take courses from a number of different fields in your chosen major? (I'm not in your major, so I can't tell you what these are, but I suspect 10 minutes with a course catalog would make them clear pretty quickly). When you see this structure, it should be clear that the goal of an undergraduate education is not specialization; it's a degree of educational breadth more than depth.
Why breadth? Part of the belief is that by having a small bit of understanding of a large amount of subjects, you as a person will be better suited for dealing with a large number of diverse circumstances. It's significantly easier to go from your own pet Instant Messenger program project to writing drives for hardware devices if you've at least had some exposure to them before. It's also easier to go from you drivers to writing video game physics if you've taken some physics classes. And it's easier to go from your video game physics to being a lead designer, if you have some background in literature, film, and the like, to provide you with some resources to make a really great game. The assumption in University education is that an individual with a wide breadth of knowledge will be smarter, wiser and more adaptive than a highly specialized individual.
And this gets me back to my previous post about the point of education. The point of a university education is not because it leads to wealth, power, or even happiness. The university as an institution that stems from 2,500 years of intellectual history, dating back to ancient Greek civilization. For the Greeks (and the Romans, and then the Christians, all of who were the champions of education), the goal of education was to make you a better person. For Plato and Aristotle, the goal was that by understanding the world around you, you would be striving towards a form of excellence that is only available to human beings. This was similar for the Romans. The Christians modified it claiming it was to get you closer to God. The point is such that, when your life is examined, it's possible to say "That is a good life."
So, I've rambled a bit, and I don't think I've answered your question. What skills should an undergraduate have? No skill is essential to an undergraduate education. What should an undergraduate have? They should have a wide array of experiences and exposures to different aspects of the world. If you leave your university with this, you may not find a job, but your life is going to end up being a lot better than the guy who's only concern was building a resume.
College is a means to an end....and while it is nice to learn other things to be a bit well rounded, that is extra fluff if you have the time and money for it while there, but, don't forget the real reason for going.
If people could make good $$ without college, I doubt you'd see so many people trying to go....
A degree gets you in the door for a job....regardless of what it is in often...you have to have one these days to get a good job. I want to preface my comments by saying that a lot of people have a similar mindset as you do. It's highly prevalent in the United States at this point. So, it certainly isn't your own personal shortcoming for thinking like this, it's a larger societal problem.
For a moment, put the reason why YOU go to a University to the side and consider what the purpose of the University is. It's an institution that's literally thousands of years old, dating back to the old Greek institutions of education. When Plato and Aristotle founded their schools, they didn't put up a big sign that said "When you're done, you get more money." That wasn't the promise. The promise was that by teaching you about the world, you would become a better person. That is to say, the founding concept of the University was that education lead to human excellence. And, for the Greeks especially, human excellence was not directly related to the possession of wealth.
This understanding of education was dominant up until very recently. Everyone was required to learn Greek and Latin, so they could read Homer and Plato. Reading the Homer isn't going to get you a job, it's not going to get you a promotion, it's not going to get you an interview, and it's not going to get you laid this Friday. No one at the University used to make the claim that it would. They'd claim that reading Homer made you a better person, even if it doesn't get you a job.
Now, as to why YOU should go to a University? If you're going for the purpose of getting a job, you're not going to understand the vast majority of your classes at the University. You're going to be wondering "Why do I have to take this anthropology class?" or "I have no interest in Operating Systems, why do I need this Operating Systems class?" and "Why do I need a foreign language, I'm going to be working with code all day." All these questions miss the larger point of what the University is trying to do to you. And if you're missing the point of the entire institution, it's exceptionally difficult to do well there.
The whole thing is really just the result of multiple generations of corruption, I think. Employers realized that well-rounded, educated (dare I say, excellent) human beings are better for the health of a company. So they pay more for people who are excellent, and a University degree used to be a short-hand of some form of excellence. The masses of uneducated began to realize this, and started saying to their kids "If you want a good job, you need a degree." So their kids started going to the University, thinking the point was to make money. Professors, having tenure, just did what they were going to do anyway, but now we've gone two or three generations like this. We're reaching the point where current professors went to school thinking it was for money. We have boards of Universities with pressure from the state to focus less on the goal of education for excellence and more on the goal of education for job skills.
In this instance, it's not really Netflix's fault. Netflix has repeatedly said that they want to make their steaming feature available to more operating systems, browsers and the like. The reason they haven't is because the MPAA studios which supply the movies that Netflix's rents won't license them movies unless they use some form of DRM that they approve of. And they only approve of Microsoft's DRM, which means the only options open for Netflix are Microsoft supplied DRM movies or nothing at all.
If you want proof of this, there are videos of Netflix having a working demo of their streaming tech on OS X from back in March, but they still haven't released it for the main site, since they still haven't gotten approval on the DRM from the sudios.
If you're going to protest, your protests should be directed at the MPAA. That may involve a boycott of Netflix as well, but it definitely shouldn't stop there, nor should Netflix be the primary focus.