I remember back when I was toying with going to school for a degree in psychology, and we talked about the various loci of control. This is highlighted in this whole debate very nicely. People with the internal locus are active principles, and think that they are ultimately in control of themselves and the world around them, while people with the external locus believe in fate, and that circumstances are largely out of their control. Interestingly people with the internal locus are far less likely to suffer from depression than those with the external locus.
The pro-drug, and anti-bootstrap crowd all show thoughts indicative to the external locus, while the people who think you can bootstrap yourself out of depression all show thoughts pointing towards and internal locus. While this observation doesn't really add anything to the debate, it is interesting nonetheless.
That said, I'm guessing our choice of the way out of depression depends on the person suffering. Some of us CAN bootstrap ourselves out of it, while other can't. Depending on our own personal philosophy of self. Thus to say that one or the other is categorically wrong is somewhat fallacious, since it is a subjective call.
The above statement isn't trolling... it's just stating the obvious. Sure, torture and war are perfectly acceptable, but sex? That's bad!
This isn't just true for Utah, but for the totality of the US. Look at our media, the largest movies we have are war or action flicks, and these can get a solid PG-13 rating, but the second you show some full frontal nudity you get an automatic R, not to mention sex scenes. Outside of Hollywood, even our network TV is completely filled with wanton violence, but not a shred of sex (not allowed). I'm not even talking about strange or explicit sex, but just nudity.
We wonder why we're such a violent country, with such a high incidence of sex crimes, and I think we can make some solid inferences from the above. Sex, on the whole, is less destructive than war and violence, yet we shun the former, and celebrate the latter. And then sit confused at the consequences.
Our latent puritanism is STILL showing.
I would rather let my children watch a movie with tasteful sex, than some action blockbuster. There is nothing wrong with the human body or its functions.
Except if your name is Warren Jeffs and then it's OK to have sex with underage girls.
Warren Jeffs is NOT a Mormon as we think of them. It's like calling David Koresh, or Jim Jones, a Protestant. He is part of an extreme splinter group, of cult, based off of Mormonism. Every religion spawns its wacko splinter cults, and you can not judge the main religion from these people. In mainstream Mormonism polygamy is banned, as stipulated by the conditions of statehood.
Mormons, as people, are generally quite nice. Out of all the Christians I've met, Mormons are probably the least obnoxious as a whole.
This would still lead to too much focus. I, as stated earlier, went to school for philosophy (and psych), I don't think this would make me corporately viable. A good half of my friends when to college for other "non-practical" degrees such as english, art, and music. While these degrees might not make any big companies (or even the recipient) money, I still think that they are valid studies, if only for the potential social value. I still believe in education for educations sake, and really have a hard time thinking that even people's self-enlightenment should have a capitalistic ends, like most everything else today.
Corporations, and the government, DO sponsor specific programs. I know several people who got engineering, physics, and language, degrees from the government, either by scholarship, or by direct sponsorship. This is enough.
In college I noticed a good degree of difference between the people in college for genuine advancement (regardless of profit or future), those who are there as a parental imposed secondary high school degree, and as a mere trade school. Of them the two latter cases performed the worse, and got the least of the experience.
To stray back on topic; teaching people a proper understanding of science is not about any specific skill set, but more about general critical thinking, meaning a broader academic experience, and not the goal oriented one that would, assuredly, be demanded by corporate America. That said, I do think EVERY college student should have to take at least 2 philosophy classes, and at least one history and art class.
The biggest problem is getting the public to listen to good science is to make them understand the scientific method and the philosophy of science. Otherwise it is just another type of belief to them.
I half agree. We should teach the method, but when it comes to Philosophy of Science we open a large can of worms. Nothing against the discipline (it was my field of interest within philosophy in college), but it is too complex to teach at any level that matters, this is including the more complex philosophical analysis of the method I learned in my studies. I got the scientific method at the beginning of EVERY science class I took 3-college, so I doubt that this is the problem. The problem is basic reasoning skills, which applies equally well to science as well as advertisements, politics, and math. I think the modern slang is "critical thinking".
Kids need a general "bullshit" detector, period.
To be a conspiracy nut for a second, this is not in the best interests of the powers that be, so I'm not holding my breath.
Most people can't stand sauerkraut even, though. I'm from a german family, and from Wisconsin, so I had it almost daily growing up, but now most of my friends just leave it untouched when I make them brats, even if I jazz it up with some white wine, and anise or coriander seeds (my bastardization of Austrian kraut).
I've only had Kimchi at a bad buffet, and it was like rotten kraut but HOT. I'm not taking this as the exemplar of good kimchi, but it was enough to turn me off of the stuff.
But then again I heard from a friend who was stationed in Korea that they also eat baby birds, in the egg, whole. Which makes me think my tastes are divergent to theirs to a pretty large degree.
I can't even do this anymore. Even before AdBlock ubiquitous ads (noise) caused my brain to automatically filter the header of websites, the same with the 2 minute blocks between television shows. With AdBlock the topic is invalidated of course, since I never deal with online ads. But with television sometimes my family/friends comment on an ad that was just on, and I have no awareness of what the hell they are talking about. If you were a young ape in the forest you couldn't survive being aware of every useless detail (noise), thus you filter them out unless they are actually useful.
I'm just getting sick of how ubiquitous they are now, thanks to the increase in advertising I pretty much stopped watching TV and going to sporting events, since the actual events have pretty much turned into a mere advertisement for the advertisements. The event is only a way to get you to see ads, and thus has as much content as the ads themselves, none.
If there were no Higgs, all the Bosonic modes of the Electroweak field would have to be massless (so-called "Goldstone Modes"). If this was the case, the Weak Force (which is mediated by the Ws and Zs) would have infinite range, just like the Electromagnetic Field (which is mediated by the remaining mode, the Photon), and that would really mess this Universe up.
No. It would mess up the currently accepted model, the universe would tick along just fine. Sorry for being pedantic, I just get kinda ill when people confuse models for the real thing. Blame all the time spent sitting in philosophy of science/physics classes.
IANAP but even if Higgs is false, it wouldn't invalidate what we have so far, in as much that there might be a, as yet undiscovered, rival hypothesis. That said, I'll believe it when we observe it.
It's a good theory based on solid observed evidence, but without being able to see the process in nature, it is difficult to justify calling it scientific fact.
We have observed evolution in nature, just not specialization. We can see evolution in antibiotic resistant bacteria, those industrial age color changing English moths, Darwin's finches, etc... The "survival of the fit" bit of Origin of Species was factual, commonsensical, and observable.
However there still is argument over the method of evolution, the scale of it, the regularity of it, etc...
But as it stands it does fit the best guess area of the term theory, a best guess backed by a large amount of empirical evidence, and explanatory power. It is more verifiable than any of its potential competition, which oddly doesn't seem to exist in the realm of science. It even has a limited degree of repeatability and prediction.
Comparing it to gravity is not what your going for. We still don't have a complete theory of gravity (quantum gravity, etc...), and what we do have is relatively recent, thanks to Einstein. Gravity will probably still be incomplete LONG after we're all dead, if it is even completable. This is science, not faith, there is no certainty, new facts will always come along and change or kill old theories. For some reason we're applying a more rigorous criteria to evolution than we do to any other scientific theory, and I find it laughable.
The use of the term theory in the evolution debate, is to scientific theory; as your personal philosophy is to Kant's philosophy. Colloquial vs. academic.
This is by no means a personal attack, but I consider this concept the height of wishful thinking.
I don't take it to be one, and it very well may be. I'm looking at this from a rather optimistic line of thought, trying it on, if you will. I would be suspicious of any move towards a single government, since it would be based on some ideology, and I am distrustful of ANY ideology. Historically all attempts on monolithic governments generally were genocidal regimes with some version of homicidal entitlement and ideology. Stalin, Hitler, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, etc... None of these can be taken as historical precedents. But these were cults of ego, and not a form of representative confederacy (like a U.N. with teeth, and no super-veto).
The concern comes from the concentration of power. [...] The more abstracted the governing system, the more layers of bureaucracy, the more the individuals get reduced to little cells in a spreadsheet. The decision makers are too removed from the individual voter.
I always thought that if we did end up with a monolithic world government of some sort it would be more like a confederacy than a large republic or such. Sort of like what the UN was supposed to be like, or like what the EU is. 7b people would be unwieldy for any non-tyranny. We can see see this in the U.S. where we already feel the strain from dealing with exponentially more people than our government was formed to deal with, thus leading to some tearing at the seams. China seems to upscale fine, but I wouldn't want to live there. A truly democratic single world government would probably collapse in 15 minutes. But a republican, or confederate one, would probably work rather well, with the added benefit of a retaining much of sovereignty.
I would think of it as another abstraction layer on top of what we have now, another layer of error checking. the federal level checks states (and interstate relations), the global government checks nation states (and their relations), and keeps them from acting out in an anti-social way. If limited in this way, it shouldn't impact the character of individual states too much.
Does this government directly tinker with the human spirit, perhaps?
Not sure what your going for there. EVERYTHING tinkers with the human spirit, from the federal level, to what brand names you like, to the social group you enjoy going to the pub with. I'm taking your use of "spirit" to be synonymous with "human nature", which I think is a largely erroneous idea.
Again, I'm still out on the idea, but its nice to play devil's advocate to work on my position.
Not trying to flame you, genuinely curious about this line of thought. What is so evil about a world government? Reading further you mention national sovereignty, but that doesn't seem to be the real crux, since nations are largely arbitrary constructs which are never actually culturally homogeneous.
I don't know if its a good idea, but I can certainly see some good things coming from the idea, as long as it was limited, for one with a world government the U.S.'s current international idiocies never would have happened.
Bad to you. This I think is the essence of the idea. I personally don't find it objectionable, and perhaps to some extent I wouldn't find it that bad for kids to look at SOME nudity. Zealots (not claiming you are one) find even that too much, but I don't think they have the right to tell me how to care for my kids, or what my kids are allowed or not allowed to see. I don't have the right to define your subjective view of bad stuff, nor you mine.
Bad stuff is purely subjective in this context. Yes we can probably all agree that snuff porn, and kiddie porn is wrong, but outside of that its all varying shades of gray. Nobody really has the right to draw the line in the sand.
With a tld as they stand today,.xxx won't matter, since ANYONE could register one, or not. It would have to be enforced so no porn could be a.com/.net/...., and maybe visa versa. This would require someone defining WHAT porn is, which is dubious.
This is an issue I've been pondering for a very long time, from a philosophy/aesthetics point of view. the real problem here is that we lack a sufficient definition of art in the first place, people have been asking what art is since Socrates, and we STILL don't have a bloody clue. It belongs in that class of "I know it when I see it" ideas, in that what we call art is largely defined by culture, time, and arbitrary academics.
To a large part art is vetted by time, just like all things. We really don't know if any current game will be considered art, we must wait a couple decades for the lens of history to tell us. I guess aesthetics is largely Darwinian in that sense.
I'm still out on video games being art. I think they might have some "arty" potential, but I somewhat doubt that any single game actually has reached that pinnacle yet. Art must reflect the times in which it was created, and so far no videogame has really captured this aspect, as far as I can see.
If anyone is interested, I have a couple articles on aesthetics and videogames on my (defunct) blog, if you excuse the shameless self-promotion.
Ummmm...so the tendancy of journalists - who graduate from liberal arts schools, and typically vote Democrat, is right-wing? Please.
I don't think you know what "liberal arts" are. Liberal Arts in the academic context has nothing to do with political affiliation, and more to do with an academic philosophy based on balancing practical knowledge with more esoteric cultural studies and arts. Thus you can't just go to school for your MBA, you must also take some humanities. A Liberal Arts school is one with a focus ON humanities, I'm guessing.
"Liberal" has many meanings. If I make liberal use of butter in my recipe, does that mean I'm intoning the "Communist Manifesto" over my butter?
Looking at the 3 big cables news networks, I don't see any latent bias, left or right. Fox is mainly right leaning, CNN is slightly to the right with Beck, but Dobbs is schizophrenic enough to balance that out. MSNBC leans hard to the left with Obermann, but not too far because of that Tucker guy balances that out. But then again these networks are about ratings, and part of ratings is finding audiences. People want to hear what they agree with, thus all niches are filled.
The journalists themselves have less to do with any perceived bias then the corporate executives, who are generally more right leaning, and who select journalists based on what perceived audience they want to convince to watch ads.
Thanks to the FCC, there really isn't that much difference between newspapers and TV, since they are largely owned, and controlled, by the same people. Ditto with radio. These "bias" is again selected by corporate folk, to align the selected media towards the perceived audience.
Actually the media is leaning MORE leftward now, thanks to a groundswell of disgust in the Republican policies of the last 12 or so years (since the Gingrich coup taking the House), and especially of the last eight. Before the anti-war movement got authentic grass-roots groundswell status, the media was largelly right leaning in coverage. I heard NO critique of the war, or the rampant attacks on American freedom from the media until it became popular despite the media.
That said, this might be my selection bias, just as the leftist media theory could be due to yours.
I always said "Never trust a democrat with money, but never trust a republican with social policy", I had to stop saying this with Mr. Bush who decided cutting income AND increasing spending is a great idea.
But then again I am distrustful of anyone who strongly aligns with a prenamed set of ideologies and dogmas, especially those who are willing to insult others on their choice of proper noun to which they pigeonhole themselves. The only truly genuine noun to self-identify with is independent, since all parties and ideologies have at least some redeeming ideas.
It'd be kind of nice if instead of the usual "Republicans are evil" flamefest, we could treat this as what it is-- a guy who's genuinely annoyed with a bug he can't get resolution for from Apple.
I don't think he was implying that ALL Republican's are evil, just Mr. Limbaugh. You have to admit his is an especially virulent appendage to the republican party, who often spouts very nasty things. He and Coulter represent the lunatic fringe of the party (I hope). And in that spirit Job's is a damn hippy, though I don't know how far we can draw that since he is a successful capitalist who has been known to have some dubious practices, but his image is that of the ultra liberal.
I think the ultimate classification of this story would be "vaguely ironic, but generally unnewsworthy".
The funny thing to me, though, is that a mere pundit is asking the CEO of a large company for tech support.
I wish they wouldn't have, even if we were attacked as a result (which is dubious). But then again I am one of those old fashioned folk who think that Thomas Paine was on the ball with his Rights of Man, and believe that your only as good as your actions. If we disregard human rights, even of those who are guilty, we probably deserve the same respect that we offer others, meaning none. This can be generally construed as a carde blanche in favor of torturing American's.
And AS the current, albeit declining, superpower, we set an example for the rest of the world. We lead by actions. If our actions are wrong we invite others to follow. On this note, we lose the right to judge. How can we claim torture to be wrong when we do it? Is it okay for an Iraqi insurgent to torture and American to find out when OUR next attack is? How, if we condone torture?
High-Falutin' ethics out of the way, two points towards the practicality of torture: the first veers on philosophy still, by definition we do not know guilt of foreknowledge of a crime BEFORE torture, if we did we probably wouldn't need to. By this reasoning we are harming innocents on the mere CHANCE that they can be instrumental to our needs. This is ethically dubious. Second torture is well known to be the least efficient form of information gathering, we only need a sight towards history for proof of this. Unless New England and most of Europe was REALLY full of witches and baby eating Jewish communities, then I guess torture has been proven as historically accurate. People under sever duress say things to remove themselves out of that situation. These things are less likely to be true, than what the interrogator wants to here.
That said, we SHOULD heavily interrogate extremely PROBABLE suspects, with a VERY careful eye towards ethics and our value system. Every person we question is an international statement, as well as a human individual much like us, our families, and the rest of humanity. We should procure suspects by some other means that our "turn in your neighbor" bounty programs, which fill Guantanamo with people of dubious intelligence value. We should allow due process to ALL, since the system can be wrong, and we have the duty to protect ALL innocents from harm and prosecution.
We should remove most of the reforms the 60's enacted, of that there is no doubt. On your list though you should also include more teachers, since our current ratio is rather absurd when we actually want educated youth. Overcrowding also hampers our ability to single out both excellent and substandard students for the extra attention that they need. Overcrowding has other side effects, like leading to stronger drug regimes as a manner of social control and not of psychological need.
I would add qualified teachers to the mix too. Here in Arizona you can teach if you went to college and got a BS in education. During this course you take basically the classes you will be teaching K-12, meaning you gain no depth of understanding. Changing the course work would also be a good idea, all through k-12 I really thought the Civil War was fought over slavery, and that WWII was fought to save the Jew's from Hitler, I also had many classes solely based on teaching me that x minority is in fact a person too, and then lapsing into teaching me their culture. Even at the time I pondered why am I not learning "useless" things like math, science, and reading.
Controversially, we would also need to do something about ESL students, especially in the Southwest and California. Also along these lines you also forgot existing social conditions leading to the failure of students. This includes poverty, and prevailing community prejudices against education. But then again I have very little pity against communities that dislike education, and the people in them.
That said, I have nothing against GEDs, having one myself. I had to escape high school, so got a GED and promptly enrolled in community college when I was 18. I also think for older individuals, who made mistakes in their youth, they should be available. If education was severely reformed as to be worth something in America, then they should suffer a hit in prestige over a diploma, but for now they are a good escape mechanism.
I don't know about that. I think what you say might (sadly) be mostly true, but still is somewhat a sweeping generalization. If you look at America's great waves of immigration, we were deluged with unwashed, and uneducated, masses. In a generation or two their children far out did them on academics. America also has a history of out doing our parents.
I've run into this with pool. There is a certain level of consumption where you play better, have more fun, etc... The problem is maintaining this level, since it also is the level of intoxication where shots of bourbon start looking good.
I'm guessing the increase of ability is from numbing your forebrain or such, or perhaps the slight impairment of ability leads to greater concentration.
The impulsiveness of purchases is highest in low income categories.
I wonder if this correlation can be causally linked to education. People of low income are also generally less well educated, and education grants an internal "bullshit" detector that makes people more ad proof. Also more educated individuals are more likely to deliberate on purchases, checking multiple sources and the like, and less likely to to buy the first product that their browser shows them.
If it was needed the Admin would have enabled it, I suppose, as is true of most things in a controlled environment. I'm not agreeing with burying telnet, but I just people are making it a bigger issue than it is.
If telnet was disabled by default ten years ago, my first couple years of college would have been more fruitful, so it isn't quite a bad thing...
The point is that Facebook broke IPv6, and Vista didn't fix their problem. Other than that I sopped reading it since it just seemed like another mindlessly anti-Vista rant. The easiest way to get frontpaged, or karma, is to play to the Slashdot group mind, and thats what the author shamelessly did.
I just got a HP laptop with Vista pre-installed out of curiosity, and so far there has been no deal breakers. I'm a geek, so the first thing I did was removed all the bloat I could find, turned off the superfluous security features, and removed the OEM kruft (except the damn HP media buttons/service, DAMN obnoxious those). It ran kind of slow (about as slow as my MacMini), but throwing in 3GB of ram solved that. Now it is about on par with my memories of XP, even with all the shiny OS X wanna be widgets. So far my only complaints are the slowness of copying files, the fact that it isn't an upgrade enough to warrant the hype and massive boost in system requirements, the fact that NTFS still sucks. No deal breakers, but then again I also wouldn't equate it to the second coming of Christ either.
Personally I like the new GUI, but then again I feel that I am one of the few here who actually likes pretty GUIs (perhaps for the same reason I used to play a female avatar on WoW, if I'm gonna be staring at somethings backside for hours a day, it might as well be a nice looking backside). Sure OS X is more polished looking, and follows a better form/function aesthetic, whereas Vista is more like another Cher (or Joan Rivers) face lift, same old thing, slightly new look.
Granted I got the laptop more as an experiment than as a work machine, but it is so far compitent at the minor tasks I throw at it. It runs Open Office flawlessly, Photoshop works well, it runs movies competently, Neverwinter Nights 1, WoW, and Diablo 2 run well. Nethack has never looked so fast on it.
The point is; with the usual tweaking Vista is just as good as XP after the usual tweaking, but slightly prettier. Without tweaking it is mediocre. But that is true of EVERY OS, we're nerds here, thats what we do, tweak our OS(s) of choice to meet our needs. Yes, some of us like Linux better, and can think of a nice list to "prove" it, some of us like OS X better and can do likewise, and I'm sure some will be able to do it with Vista when we get over our geekish new=bad ideas of it. Its a matter of choice, in the end, our own style of use influences what we like, there is no objective criteria.
Sure I still like OS X better, though I think that Leopard sucks, and that the Intel move hurt quality. Ubuntu still has promise as the first actually useful Linux distro, but I'm still waiting on the wings for that one, it isn't quite where I want it yet in terms of polish. But the Vista bashing is getting absurd, if you don't like it, don't upgrade, but bitching about it is rather idiotic at the same time.
And yes, you will find faults. Your looking for them. If you don't want to like something, you WILL find flaws in it.
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I remember back when I was toying with going to school for a degree in psychology, and we talked about the various loci of control. This is highlighted in this whole debate very nicely. People with the internal locus are active principles, and think that they are ultimately in control of themselves and the world around them, while people with the external locus believe in fate, and that circumstances are largely out of their control. Interestingly people with the internal locus are far less likely to suffer from depression than those with the external locus.
The pro-drug, and anti-bootstrap crowd all show thoughts indicative to the external locus, while the people who think you can bootstrap yourself out of depression all show thoughts pointing towards and internal locus. While this observation doesn't really add anything to the debate, it is interesting nonetheless.
That said, I'm guessing our choice of the way out of depression depends on the person suffering. Some of us CAN bootstrap ourselves out of it, while other can't. Depending on our own personal philosophy of self. Thus to say that one or the other is categorically wrong is somewhat fallacious, since it is a subjective call.
The above statement isn't trolling ... it's just stating the obvious. Sure, torture and war are perfectly acceptable, but sex? That's bad!
This isn't just true for Utah, but for the totality of the US. Look at our media, the largest movies we have are war or action flicks, and these can get a solid PG-13 rating, but the second you show some full frontal nudity you get an automatic R, not to mention sex scenes. Outside of Hollywood, even our network TV is completely filled with wanton violence, but not a shred of sex (not allowed). I'm not even talking about strange or explicit sex, but just nudity.
We wonder why we're such a violent country, with such a high incidence of sex crimes, and I think we can make some solid inferences from the above. Sex, on the whole, is less destructive than war and violence, yet we shun the former, and celebrate the latter. And then sit confused at the consequences.
Our latent puritanism is STILL showing.
I would rather let my children watch a movie with tasteful sex, than some action blockbuster. There is nothing wrong with the human body or its functions.
Except if your name is Warren Jeffs and then it's OK to have sex with underage girls.
Warren Jeffs is NOT a Mormon as we think of them. It's like calling David Koresh, or Jim Jones, a Protestant. He is part of an extreme splinter group, of cult, based off of Mormonism. Every religion spawns its wacko splinter cults, and you can not judge the main religion from these people. In mainstream Mormonism polygamy is banned, as stipulated by the conditions of statehood.
Mormons, as people, are generally quite nice. Out of all the Christians I've met, Mormons are probably the least obnoxious as a whole.
This would still lead to too much focus. I, as stated earlier, went to school for philosophy (and psych), I don't think this would make me corporately viable. A good half of my friends when to college for other "non-practical" degrees such as english, art, and music. While these degrees might not make any big companies (or even the recipient) money, I still think that they are valid studies, if only for the potential social value. I still believe in education for educations sake, and really have a hard time thinking that even people's self-enlightenment should have a capitalistic ends, like most everything else today.
Corporations, and the government, DO sponsor specific programs. I know several people who got engineering, physics, and language, degrees from the government, either by scholarship, or by direct sponsorship. This is enough.
In college I noticed a good degree of difference between the people in college for genuine advancement (regardless of profit or future), those who are there as a parental imposed secondary high school degree, and as a mere trade school. Of them the two latter cases performed the worse, and got the least of the experience.
To stray back on topic; teaching people a proper understanding of science is not about any specific skill set, but more about general critical thinking, meaning a broader academic experience, and not the goal oriented one that would, assuredly, be demanded by corporate America. That said, I do think EVERY college student should have to take at least 2 philosophy classes, and at least one history and art class.
The biggest problem is getting the public to listen to good science is to make them understand the scientific method and the philosophy of science. Otherwise it is just another type of belief to them.
I half agree. We should teach the method, but when it comes to Philosophy of Science we open a large can of worms. Nothing against the discipline (it was my field of interest within philosophy in college), but it is too complex to teach at any level that matters, this is including the more complex philosophical analysis of the method I learned in my studies. I got the scientific method at the beginning of EVERY science class I took 3-college, so I doubt that this is the problem. The problem is basic reasoning skills, which applies equally well to science as well as advertisements, politics, and math. I think the modern slang is "critical thinking".
Kids need a general "bullshit" detector, period.
To be a conspiracy nut for a second, this is not in the best interests of the powers that be, so I'm not holding my breath.
Most people can't stand sauerkraut even, though. I'm from a german family, and from Wisconsin, so I had it almost daily growing up, but now most of my friends just leave it untouched when I make them brats, even if I jazz it up with some white wine, and anise or coriander seeds (my bastardization of Austrian kraut).
I've only had Kimchi at a bad buffet, and it was like rotten kraut but HOT. I'm not taking this as the exemplar of good kimchi, but it was enough to turn me off of the stuff.
But then again I heard from a friend who was stationed in Korea that they also eat baby birds, in the egg, whole. Which makes me think my tastes are divergent to theirs to a pretty large degree.
I can't even do this anymore. Even before AdBlock ubiquitous ads (noise) caused my brain to automatically filter the header of websites, the same with the 2 minute blocks between television shows. With AdBlock the topic is invalidated of course, since I never deal with online ads. But with television sometimes my family/friends comment on an ad that was just on, and I have no awareness of what the hell they are talking about. If you were a young ape in the forest you couldn't survive being aware of every useless detail (noise), thus you filter them out unless they are actually useful.
I'm just getting sick of how ubiquitous they are now, thanks to the increase in advertising I pretty much stopped watching TV and going to sporting events, since the actual events have pretty much turned into a mere advertisement for the advertisements. The event is only a way to get you to see ads, and thus has as much content as the ads themselves, none.
Please hand in your geekcard at the door.
If there were no Higgs, all the Bosonic modes of the Electroweak field would have to be massless (so-called "Goldstone Modes"). If this was the case, the Weak Force (which is mediated by the Ws and Zs) would have infinite range, just like the Electromagnetic Field (which is mediated by the remaining mode, the Photon), and that would really mess this Universe up.
No. It would mess up the currently accepted model, the universe would tick along just fine. Sorry for being pedantic, I just get kinda ill when people confuse models for the real thing. Blame all the time spent sitting in philosophy of science/physics classes.
IANAP but even if Higgs is false, it wouldn't invalidate what we have so far, in as much that there might be a, as yet undiscovered, rival hypothesis. That said, I'll believe it when we observe it.
It's a good theory based on solid observed evidence, but without being able to see the process in nature, it is difficult to justify calling it scientific fact.
We have observed evolution in nature, just not specialization. We can see evolution in antibiotic resistant bacteria, those industrial age color changing English moths, Darwin's finches, etc... The "survival of the fit" bit of Origin of Species was factual, commonsensical, and observable.
However there still is argument over the method of evolution, the scale of it, the regularity of it, etc...
But as it stands it does fit the best guess area of the term theory, a best guess backed by a large amount of empirical evidence, and explanatory power. It is more verifiable than any of its potential competition, which oddly doesn't seem to exist in the realm of science. It even has a limited degree of repeatability and prediction.
Comparing it to gravity is not what your going for. We still don't have a complete theory of gravity (quantum gravity, etc...), and what we do have is relatively recent, thanks to Einstein. Gravity will probably still be incomplete LONG after we're all dead, if it is even completable. This is science, not faith, there is no certainty, new facts will always come along and change or kill old theories. For some reason we're applying a more rigorous criteria to evolution than we do to any other scientific theory, and I find it laughable.
The use of the term theory in the evolution debate, is to scientific theory; as your personal philosophy is to Kant's philosophy. Colloquial vs. academic.
This is by no means a personal attack, but I consider this concept the height of wishful thinking.
I don't take it to be one, and it very well may be. I'm looking at this from a rather optimistic line of thought, trying it on, if you will. I would be suspicious of any move towards a single government, since it would be based on some ideology, and I am distrustful of ANY ideology. Historically all attempts on monolithic governments generally were genocidal regimes with some version of homicidal entitlement and ideology. Stalin, Hitler, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, etc... None of these can be taken as historical precedents. But these were cults of ego, and not a form of representative confederacy (like a U.N. with teeth, and no super-veto).
The concern comes from the concentration of power. [...] The more abstracted the governing system, the more layers of bureaucracy, the more the individuals get reduced to little cells in a spreadsheet. The decision makers are too removed from the individual voter.
I always thought that if we did end up with a monolithic world government of some sort it would be more like a confederacy than a large republic or such. Sort of like what the UN was supposed to be like, or like what the EU is. 7b people would be unwieldy for any non-tyranny. We can see see this in the U.S. where we already feel the strain from dealing with exponentially more people than our government was formed to deal with, thus leading to some tearing at the seams. China seems to upscale fine, but I wouldn't want to live there. A truly democratic single world government would probably collapse in 15 minutes. But a republican, or confederate one, would probably work rather well, with the added benefit of a retaining much of sovereignty.
I would think of it as another abstraction layer on top of what we have now, another layer of error checking. the federal level checks states (and interstate relations), the global government checks nation states (and their relations), and keeps them from acting out in an anti-social way. If limited in this way, it shouldn't impact the character of individual states too much.
Does this government directly tinker with the human spirit, perhaps?
Not sure what your going for there. EVERYTHING tinkers with the human spirit, from the federal level, to what brand names you like, to the social group you enjoy going to the pub with. I'm taking your use of "spirit" to be synonymous with "human nature", which I think is a largely erroneous idea.
Again, I'm still out on the idea, but its nice to play devil's advocate to work on my position.
Not trying to flame you, genuinely curious about this line of thought. What is so evil about a world government? Reading further you mention national sovereignty, but that doesn't seem to be the real crux, since nations are largely arbitrary constructs which are never actually culturally homogeneous.
I don't know if its a good idea, but I can certainly see some good things coming from the idea, as long as it was limited, for one with a world government the U.S.'s current international idiocies never would have happened.
Why not just block the bad stuff.
.xxx won't matter, since ANYONE could register one, or not. It would have to be enforced so no porn could be a .com/.net/...., and maybe visa versa. This would require someone defining WHAT porn is, which is dubious.
Bad to you. This I think is the essence of the idea. I personally don't find it objectionable, and perhaps to some extent I wouldn't find it that bad for kids to look at SOME nudity. Zealots (not claiming you are one) find even that too much, but I don't think they have the right to tell me how to care for my kids, or what my kids are allowed or not allowed to see. I don't have the right to define your subjective view of bad stuff, nor you mine.
Bad stuff is purely subjective in this context. Yes we can probably all agree that snuff porn, and kiddie porn is wrong, but outside of that its all varying shades of gray. Nobody really has the right to draw the line in the sand.
With a tld as they stand today,
This is an issue I've been pondering for a very long time, from a philosophy/aesthetics point of view. the real problem here is that we lack a sufficient definition of art in the first place, people have been asking what art is since Socrates, and we STILL don't have a bloody clue. It belongs in that class of "I know it when I see it" ideas, in that what we call art is largely defined by culture, time, and arbitrary academics.
To a large part art is vetted by time, just like all things. We really don't know if any current game will be considered art, we must wait a couple decades for the lens of history to tell us. I guess aesthetics is largely Darwinian in that sense.
I'm still out on video games being art. I think they might have some "arty" potential, but I somewhat doubt that any single game actually has reached that pinnacle yet. Art must reflect the times in which it was created, and so far no videogame has really captured this aspect, as far as I can see.
If anyone is interested, I have a couple articles on aesthetics and videogames on my (defunct) blog, if you excuse the shameless self-promotion.
Ummmm...so the tendancy of journalists - who graduate from liberal arts schools, and typically vote Democrat, is right-wing? Please.
I don't think you know what "liberal arts" are. Liberal Arts in the academic context has nothing to do with political affiliation, and more to do with an academic philosophy based on balancing practical knowledge with more esoteric cultural studies and arts. Thus you can't just go to school for your MBA, you must also take some humanities. A Liberal Arts school is one with a focus ON humanities, I'm guessing.
"Liberal" has many meanings. If I make liberal use of butter in my recipe, does that mean I'm intoning the "Communist Manifesto" over my butter?
Looking at the 3 big cables news networks, I don't see any latent bias, left or right. Fox is mainly right leaning, CNN is slightly to the right with Beck, but Dobbs is schizophrenic enough to balance that out. MSNBC leans hard to the left with Obermann, but not too far because of that Tucker guy balances that out. But then again these networks are about ratings, and part of ratings is finding audiences. People want to hear what they agree with, thus all niches are filled.
The journalists themselves have less to do with any perceived bias then the corporate executives, who are generally more right leaning, and who select journalists based on what perceived audience they want to convince to watch ads.
Thanks to the FCC, there really isn't that much difference between newspapers and TV, since they are largely owned, and controlled, by the same people. Ditto with radio. These "bias" is again selected by corporate folk, to align the selected media towards the perceived audience.
Actually the media is leaning MORE leftward now, thanks to a groundswell of disgust in the Republican policies of the last 12 or so years (since the Gingrich coup taking the House), and especially of the last eight. Before the anti-war movement got authentic grass-roots groundswell status, the media was largelly right leaning in coverage. I heard NO critique of the war, or the rampant attacks on American freedom from the media until it became popular despite the media.
That said, this might be my selection bias, just as the leftist media theory could be due to yours.
I always said "Never trust a democrat with money, but never trust a republican with social policy", I had to stop saying this with Mr. Bush who decided cutting income AND increasing spending is a great idea.
But then again I am distrustful of anyone who strongly aligns with a prenamed set of ideologies and dogmas, especially those who are willing to insult others on their choice of proper noun to which they pigeonhole themselves. The only truly genuine noun to self-identify with is independent, since all parties and ideologies have at least some redeeming ideas.
It'd be kind of nice if instead of the usual "Republicans are evil" flamefest, we could treat this as what it is-- a guy who's genuinely annoyed with a bug he can't get resolution for from Apple.
I don't think he was implying that ALL Republican's are evil, just Mr. Limbaugh. You have to admit his is an especially virulent appendage to the republican party, who often spouts very nasty things. He and Coulter represent the lunatic fringe of the party (I hope). And in that spirit Job's is a damn hippy, though I don't know how far we can draw that since he is a successful capitalist who has been known to have some dubious practices, but his image is that of the ultra liberal.
I think the ultimate classification of this story would be "vaguely ironic, but generally unnewsworthy".
The funny thing to me, though, is that a mere pundit is asking the CEO of a large company for tech support.
I wish they wouldn't have, even if we were attacked as a result (which is dubious). But then again I am one of those old fashioned folk who think that Thomas Paine was on the ball with his Rights of Man, and believe that your only as good as your actions. If we disregard human rights, even of those who are guilty, we probably deserve the same respect that we offer others, meaning none. This can be generally construed as a carde blanche in favor of torturing American's.
And AS the current, albeit declining, superpower, we set an example for the rest of the world. We lead by actions. If our actions are wrong we invite others to follow. On this note, we lose the right to judge. How can we claim torture to be wrong when we do it? Is it okay for an Iraqi insurgent to torture and American to find out when OUR next attack is? How, if we condone torture?
High-Falutin' ethics out of the way, two points towards the practicality of torture: the first veers on philosophy still, by definition we do not know guilt of foreknowledge of a crime BEFORE torture, if we did we probably wouldn't need to. By this reasoning we are harming innocents on the mere CHANCE that they can be instrumental to our needs. This is ethically dubious. Second torture is well known to be the least efficient form of information gathering, we only need a sight towards history for proof of this. Unless New England and most of Europe was REALLY full of witches and baby eating Jewish communities, then I guess torture has been proven as historically accurate. People under sever duress say things to remove themselves out of that situation. These things are less likely to be true, than what the interrogator wants to here.
That said, we SHOULD heavily interrogate extremely PROBABLE suspects, with a VERY careful eye towards ethics and our value system. Every person we question is an international statement, as well as a human individual much like us, our families, and the rest of humanity. We should procure suspects by some other means that our "turn in your neighbor" bounty programs, which fill Guantanamo with people of dubious intelligence value. We should allow due process to ALL, since the system can be wrong, and we have the duty to protect ALL innocents from harm and prosecution.
We should remove most of the reforms the 60's enacted, of that there is no doubt. On your list though you should also include more teachers, since our current ratio is rather absurd when we actually want educated youth. Overcrowding also hampers our ability to single out both excellent and substandard students for the extra attention that they need. Overcrowding has other side effects, like leading to stronger drug regimes as a manner of social control and not of psychological need.
I would add qualified teachers to the mix too. Here in Arizona you can teach if you went to college and got a BS in education. During this course you take basically the classes you will be teaching K-12, meaning you gain no depth of understanding. Changing the course work would also be a good idea, all through k-12 I really thought the Civil War was fought over slavery, and that WWII was fought to save the Jew's from Hitler, I also had many classes solely based on teaching me that x minority is in fact a person too, and then lapsing into teaching me their culture. Even at the time I pondered why am I not learning "useless" things like math, science, and reading.
Controversially, we would also need to do something about ESL students, especially in the Southwest and California. Also along these lines you also forgot existing social conditions leading to the failure of students. This includes poverty, and prevailing community prejudices against education. But then again I have very little pity against communities that dislike education, and the people in them.
That said, I have nothing against GEDs, having one myself. I had to escape high school, so got a GED and promptly enrolled in community college when I was 18. I also think for older individuals, who made mistakes in their youth, they should be available. If education was severely reformed as to be worth something in America, then they should suffer a hit in prestige over a diploma, but for now they are a good escape mechanism.
I don't know about that. I think what you say might (sadly) be mostly true, but still is somewhat a sweeping generalization. If you look at America's great waves of immigration, we were deluged with unwashed, and uneducated, masses. In a generation or two their children far out did them on academics. America also has a history of out doing our parents.
I've run into this with pool. There is a certain level of consumption where you play better, have more fun, etc... The problem is maintaining this level, since it also is the level of intoxication where shots of bourbon start looking good.
I'm guessing the increase of ability is from numbing your forebrain or such, or perhaps the slight impairment of ability leads to greater concentration.
The impulsiveness of purchases is highest in low income categories.
I wonder if this correlation can be causally linked to education. People of low income are also generally less well educated, and education grants an internal "bullshit" detector that makes people more ad proof. Also more educated individuals are more likely to deliberate on purchases, checking multiple sources and the like, and less likely to to buy the first product that their browser shows them.
If it was needed the Admin would have enabled it, I suppose, as is true of most things in a controlled environment. I'm not agreeing with burying telnet, but I just people are making it a bigger issue than it is.
If telnet was disabled by default ten years ago, my first couple years of college would have been more fruitful, so it isn't quite a bad thing...
If your tech-savvy enough to need/want Telnet, I guarantee your tech-savvy enough to install it.
hold up... on my box it is exactly five clicks to install telnet. So hard.
The point is that Facebook broke IPv6, and Vista didn't fix their problem. Other than that I sopped reading it since it just seemed like another mindlessly anti-Vista rant. The easiest way to get frontpaged, or karma, is to play to the Slashdot group mind, and thats what the author shamelessly did.
I just got a HP laptop with Vista pre-installed out of curiosity, and so far there has been no deal breakers. I'm a geek, so the first thing I did was removed all the bloat I could find, turned off the superfluous security features, and removed the OEM kruft (except the damn HP media buttons/service, DAMN obnoxious those). It ran kind of slow (about as slow as my MacMini), but throwing in 3GB of ram solved that. Now it is about on par with my memories of XP, even with all the shiny OS X wanna be widgets. So far my only complaints are the slowness of copying files, the fact that it isn't an upgrade enough to warrant the hype and massive boost in system requirements, the fact that NTFS still sucks. No deal breakers, but then again I also wouldn't equate it to the second coming of Christ either.
Personally I like the new GUI, but then again I feel that I am one of the few here who actually likes pretty GUIs (perhaps for the same reason I used to play a female avatar on WoW, if I'm gonna be staring at somethings backside for hours a day, it might as well be a nice looking backside). Sure OS X is more polished looking, and follows a better form/function aesthetic, whereas Vista is more like another Cher (or Joan Rivers) face lift, same old thing, slightly new look.
Granted I got the laptop more as an experiment than as a work machine, but it is so far compitent at the minor tasks I throw at it. It runs Open Office flawlessly, Photoshop works well, it runs movies competently, Neverwinter Nights 1, WoW, and Diablo 2 run well. Nethack has never looked so fast on it.
The point is; with the usual tweaking Vista is just as good as XP after the usual tweaking, but slightly prettier. Without tweaking it is mediocre. But that is true of EVERY OS, we're nerds here, thats what we do, tweak our OS(s) of choice to meet our needs. Yes, some of us like Linux better, and can think of a nice list to "prove" it, some of us like OS X better and can do likewise, and I'm sure some will be able to do it with Vista when we get over our geekish new=bad ideas of it. Its a matter of choice, in the end, our own style of use influences what we like, there is no objective criteria.
Sure I still like OS X better, though I think that Leopard sucks, and that the Intel move hurt quality. Ubuntu still has promise as the first actually useful Linux distro, but I'm still waiting on the wings for that one, it isn't quite where I want it yet in terms of polish. But the Vista bashing is getting absurd, if you don't like it, don't upgrade, but bitching about it is rather idiotic at the same time.
And yes, you will find faults. Your looking for them. If you don't want to like something, you WILL find flaws in it.