And WHO actually is out to get us? And out of that how many of them are out to get us because we are out to get them (or at least this is how they see it)?
No one hates us because we're free. People hate us because of what we do to other people, and our support for genocidal regimes that are okay with killing people. People hate us because we won't mind our own goddamn business. yes, now it might be too late since we already garnered enough antipathy globally to be screwed for generations, but if we actually worked for the global good, and not just ours at their expense, then perhaps we could trim back military spending and spend it on things that actually matter.
Living in a country who kills people for their own self interest, how can you find a real problem with people doing the same to us? This is my intellectual quandary. For the record I find killing anyone for money wrong, whether and American pulls the trigger or not. Calling it "defense" is a misnomer, a lot of it goes to actively killing people who don't have any plans against us.
My problem isn't so much with the soldier on the ground, but the fat cat in a chair who commands them from a hundred thousand miles away. Soldiers aren't (for the most part) making whole nationalities of people dehumanized, and thus marked for death. Most of the soldiers on the ground I've known sounded pretty much like you, with the same sentiments, some of them worse, while their leaders have the ability to be emotionally detached, they never have cause to actually worry that they are killing humans being just like them. To them it can remain academic.
This might be true for you, but for many people it isn't. Many people I know treat their animals like they were their own children, especially if they are a childless couple. I accord my own cat with roughly the same level of accord as I do most people, if you were crapping on the carpet I would swap you too. Seriously, though, there is a long history of people anthropomorphizing their tools and machine. Look at naval vessels, and bombers, or any other transportation method that people depend on for their very lives, the practice of calling these vessels "she" points to the fact that we don't view them as "merely" machines.
Heck, all of my computers have had names, and from time to time I do talk to them, cajole them into functioning properly. Academically I know my box isn't a person, nor does it really understand a word a say, but I have been interacting with it closely for years, know its little quirks, etc...
So in the end my right to property is forfeited by a companies right to profit?
Screw that. My individual rights are greater than a corporations (a legal fiction). If some idiots want to use it to copy the move and hand it out for free on bittorrent, then yes, I can accept that as a crime. But to make EVERYONE, a vast majority of whom will never upload or download this product illegally, suffer and lose fair use is wrong. I bought it, I have the right to back it up, or use it in alternative enviroments, regardless of what unrelated people on Pirate Bay are doing.
I will buy it. It will be my property, and as such I will do whatever the heck I please with it. The fact that they have bought politicians to make their "morals and values" (to misuse both these terms) law, does not change the fact that it is wrong. And being wrong, it is okay to ignore it.
No one here is talking about sharing, we're talking about claiming our full rights over our property.
Then its the Pizza place's responsibility to deal with him, or your responsibility to go to a different pizza place.
There is not, and SHOULD NOT, be a right to not be offended. It is not the governments job to let us live in some mythical 50's utopia. The woman (? it is second life, one can't be sure) could have logged off, and complained to Linden Labs, like any responsible person. Next I can call the cops on murder because some idiot rogue kills me in WoW? No one was hurt, no law was broken.
Sure, if the guy told her he would REALLY rape her, then I can see this. But a little unconsensual pixel grinding is rather harmless.
More like "your price is too high, and thus I am going to steal it from you with dubious means and no negotiation".
Thats what gets me, is that discourse was never an option. It was just "I want it, and I will have it". Yes the guy who made the page asked an unacceptably high amount for the page, but still does not justify the Obama campaigns actions. I think Obama could have lived without "ownership" of the MySpace page, and thus resisted ALL headlines about his spending, or lack thereof. The page was in competent hands, and the campaign could still manipulate people using the page (they had full access). The status-quo was not broken. Obama's campaign just want COMPLETE control over everything dealing with their candidate, which I find more frightening than the MySpace ordeal itself.
As for the registering in his name bit; we must remember that this page is OLD, it wasn't spurred by Obama running for president, but by Obama originally running for senate, meaning this was a local thing and not some big hijacking thing.
I do wonder how much of this actually involves Obama himself, though, and how much is just an over-zealous campaign manager. At what level was this whole thing initiated.
You took that out of context... The full statement was . Think of it as a formula:
If [human], then act according to x.
This is understandable since humans (on the whole) do not operate towards each others with the same principles as they do towards animals, or any other non-human thing. So x is invariant, while [human] varies by time and culture, thus ethics (x) is going to be somewhat situational.
By which meaning of "universal" do you mean? That it applies to EVERYONE? I can't do that, since as said who is in this class varies. But in the sense that we operate under some root ethical parameters, that is easier. We can see it in the universality of altruism, and reciprocity, which both fall in some form under Kant's Categorical Imperative. I doubt this answered your question, sorry, it is 3:30a.
Agreed. Though I'm going to miss my old one, and feel rather silly once this fad passes, and I forget to remove this one. I average about 3 years per sig... Lazy.
I love how geeks do this, just when I think that we all are unethical morons, we go show that we can protest SOMETHING. If nothing else geeks are the grand protectors of information, woe to he who crosses this one ethical commandment of geekhood.
Though Digg is really imploding with it. It has reached the point of absurdity there, with 15 of 15 stories being "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" related.
99.9% of people are, regardless of what they want to say. Gender means "do you have a man parts or woman parts?", "sex" is where social options come in. Gender is biological, sex is social. I don't care if you really want to be ~x, if you have the x bits, thats your gender.
And I firmly believe that 30% of people are sociopaths, which you admit you are.
Yes, the definition of "human" has changed with time, and only recently have blacks, women, and people who don't own property have joined this elite cabal of fully human. But if you went to a slave holder and asked them to kill a random white property owner, their morality would have stepped in the way. Ethics are universal, it just depends on who we accord worthiness to that is variable with time.
I personally have a hard time killing fish (I now fish without bait, to eliminate this problem) or animals, much less people. Animals and fish assuredly are not human, and there is nothing bad that can happen to me for killing them, but still I accord them some feelings. I empathize. Empathy is the key, which is why we (humans) are historically ethical (lets ditch the term moral, its different) towards members that they can identify with, generally by proximity and similarity. We can actually talk about the evolutionary merits of reciprocity and altruism (I recommend starting with Dawkins or Shermer), where it IS advantageous to evolve with an ethical system. It is innate, empathy, and those who don't have it are pathological.
Morals are handed down from some mythical big brother, ethics up from you genes AND society.
I'm sure C|Net can afford the bandwidth for this article. No reason to rip-off their article. The whole reason companies publish stuff for free is because ads help pay for it.
Bleh. It lets me RTFA, which is a rarity here in/.land without having to have my eyes burned out with ads. I'll stay away from ads if Ican help it, companies be damned. Their bottom line is not my moral responsibility.
I think this is also because its easier to find something you agree with. The internet greatly facilitates groupthink. You have 100% choice of what POV you want to hear online, which is something we're never had before. You can see it happening on cable news too, to a smaller extent since you have 3 or 4 real choices, and not the hundred thousand or so you have online. How many lefties watch Fox, and how many cons watch CNN or MSNBC? How many registered Republicans are getting their political news from Dailykos?
You typical blog is a news story ripped from a primary news gatherer, then layered with political commentary.
Ghost died, pure and simple. It was Blizzards first attempt at re-entering the console market since the SNES days, and they got beaten by their own characteristically long development cycles. It was supposed to be XBox and Ps2, but then the next gen rolled around while they were still working on it, and eventually they gave up, since it would already be dated (its Blizzard, 5-6 years is a SHORT cycle).
You said you can't say "all niggers are fags, so we have twice as many reasons to kill them".. but... Did the liberal decency police come to your door yet.
Yes, I'm being pedantic. In most of the civilized world ungood words are judged by people, since they are a breach of a social more or norm, or such. Your going to get nasty glances, and perhaps private punishment (trouble at school, fired from work etc...), the government has no role in this. It is not legalistic. The government DOES have a role in ACTIONS. If you state "all niggers are fags, so we have twice as many reasons to kill them" then go killing black people, you legal (state sponsored) punishment will be upped. Thats the difference.
We have freedom of speech, though we still have the responsibility to respect our societies norms.
You are wrong. Clinton was impeached for PERJURY, meaning he lied under oath, which is illegal and rather unbecoming for a president. He was impeached for a valid reason.
Granted the whole idiocy leading up to his perjury was nonsense.
I am pretty leftist too, so don't go run and say I'm spouting republican propaganda, his perjury is a fact, and its illegality is a fact. Even if I support Clinton (and miss him being in office, all things considered), lying under oath is a no-no, no matter what its about. He should have just been honest and said "I have no taste in woman, but I've got Hillary, what else am I to do?".
If I had mod points, I would have modded this funny. But... I think he's serious, which frightens me.
How is Bush a man of honor? How? He lied to the people to start a private war. He's gobbling up power for the presidency, which is dangerous as hell. He's implementing social policies that would make Stalin proud. He's violating the Geneva Convention daily with his jingoistic game of "enemy combatants". Thousands of people die because of him, for no real reason besides some stupid document drafted by Dick Cheney (the New American Century) which amounts to fueling Americas future on the blood of foreign people. He's trying to destroy the time honored establishment cause.
How can you be serious?
Sorry for the rant. I just don't understand defending the man who will probably go down as the worst president since Nixon (though it should be Reagan, even if we lionize him now for some reason).
Phi of Sci is pretty interesting, especially since science is getting abused more and more. But thats a different story. I'd recommend starting with Thomas Kuhn, he pretty much is the most influential of the crop, his Structure of Scientific Revolutions pretty much structured the whole modern idea of science, AND it is a small quick read.
And don't forget that many people actually seem to be proud that they aren't good at math. Not only is it useless, but it's something you don't want to be good at?
In the US (at least, I'm not too sure about the rest of the world on this count) it isn't just math, its intelligence period. I went to school for philosophy and psych, and daily heard "Well I don't know anything about that!" said in a tone that bordered on pride. This goes for all fields that carry the taint of academic, I fear. It seems in America, as least, we have a rabble mentality, we don't really want anything that puts us above the crowd. At a family dinner, the other night, we were talking about books we're reading, and my stepmother proudly declared "I don't like books, and I don't read", as if sitting around folding laundry and watching Operah/Dr. Phil is a thing to be proud of. Me and my fellow bibliophillic friend were speechless, since we had to maintain the aura of politeness. But it really left me confused.
I ran into the same thing in college, I managed to be in the "math light" course until I run into philosophy of science/physics and psych research/statistics, both of which became passions, which I felt I completely was outclassed by the more mathematically inclined of my peers.
Out of curiosity, what aspect of cog sci are you in? I'm guessing the computational aspect, this being/. and all. Interesting field, I almost fell into it (as evident by the phi/psy), but philosophy of science grabbed me.
I am really really bad at math, I'll be the first to admit it. I blame this, in part, on primary school and high school math teachers though, since they are rather quick to squash any deep curiosity in it. By this, I mean that they they absolutely abhor the word "why?", they were teaching meaningless number shuffling, and refused to ever let anyone in on the actual reason that things work. I tested into advanced math my first year of Junior High, but completely crapped out. I lost sight of math until I started studying logic under my philosophy degree, and statistics in the course of my psychology studies, and then I met it with a very high degree of frustration, being years out of touch.
Math was always had the least room for curiosity in my early education, which is dumbfounding since it is the most abstract study, and thus would need more grounding. Yes, some teachers tried, but only as far as making it vaguely practical, which is somewhat a ruse since most people won't need it beyond balancing check-books, or such, but they never ventured into the actual reasons that it works. The beauty (speaking from someone who loves logic, but I'm guessing its the same for math) of the necessary and deep connections flowing together to make something new, but still inevitable, I guess its a poor man's sense of discovery, but still the "clicking" sensation makes it worthwhile, but only when you understand the reasons behind it, and thus many people will never see it.
I came close to that in my undergrad Stats courses though, seeing seemingly random strings of numbers turn into something more than their mere sum, and understanding WHY they were doing that. Sure Stats is 90% rote processing, but still it allowed a small glance at the necessary underpinnings of math.
Wow, that was a tangent...
Re:Jokers appear to have hijacked the bidding
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Or, as the other FA said, they could wait for it to scroll off the first page in a day or so.
Wait... Your talking at cross purposed. Your saying people don't like it (cheap wifi) since it censors, but they also can't switch. But if enough people wanted a wifi ISP with free speech wouldn't it be profitable for some big non-government regional monopoly to move in and make a killing? I don't see the government BLOCKING competition. Perhaps they don't want to since it is better for them, so they are willing to accept some of bad with the good.
What I don't understand is how a baby-bell is less anti-capitalist? Where I live you have two choices for ISPs (broadband), the regional Baby-Bell, or the regional cable company. Both restrict access from poor or rural areas, and fix rates unnaturally, and limit content. This is 100% better than 5 years ago when you got 1 choice.
When it comes to good internet access you're not dealing with a nice fair arena for competition in the first place, so why bother complaining that some people are getting a cheap deal? Sure, when I can pick a local "mom and pa" ISP, then I'll agree with you. But having a choice of one monolithic corporation or... well possibly, if your lucky, another monolithic corporation isn't much a choice. But then again I don't agree with the libertarian ethos.
I don't have a link to post, but in my old college psychological research methodology class, our book had a full chapter of foils that happen. All of them are well know, and most of them have good design work-arounds. But the big one was that people like to answer how their expected to answer, to make the researcher happy.
Every one of us shares the blame. Just to take a step back towards a prior part of this conversation, how many of you are aware that Bank of America was one of the very last major supporters of apartheid? How many of you out there bank with them, knowing that the only thing that make them withdraw their investments in corporations and assorted institutions supporting apartheid was the fact that their customers were starting to leave them over it? How many of you still bank with them knowing that you were supporting a modern incarnation of slavery? Slavery of a people simply because they look different from other people?
The other day I had a sobering thought. If today, right now, the U.S. government decided to round up all the Muslims in America, and put them in interment camps, no one would really take steps to stop it. Sure we might give lip service to it, and have some angry bloggers and protesters, but no one really would bother. I'm just using the U.S. as an example, but increasingly it seems that the ideological climate of the world might be leading towards another holocaust, or at least the type of circumstances that would allow it. I could as easily imagine the Israelis doing it to the Palestinians, or the radical Muslims in Saudi Arabia or Iran doing it, but the frightening thing is that it is imaginable.
Just like before WWII the world is steeped in idealism and nationalism. Instead of the opposing forces of fascism and communism, we have liberalism and religious zealotry (with a good heaping of pure economic greed clouding our ethics and foresight, thrown in for fun). It scares me. The western world (the U.S. and Britain, mostly) are devolving into corporate police states. The U.S. is in the throws of a totalitarian religious movement. The middle east has already devolved into totalitarian theocracies, and worse, warring ones. Everyone is affected by severe xenophobia, and ideological blindness.
If something terrible didn't happen in our life times, I would be very (pleasantly) surprised.
I'd disagree. I just bought a new 5.5G because I ran out of space. I never did like having to decide what I might be in the mood for listening to in the future, I'd rather have it all there in case the mood strikes me (how do I know it isn't going to be a Guns N' Roses day?). The philosophy of the Shuffle is even more off kilter to my lifestyle, I've got 3000+ songs on my computer, the odds its going to chose 50 of them that I really feel like listening too is rather remote. I had a smaller flash player before my iPod, and it sat forgotten on a shelf since it was too much hassle to rotate the play-lists, I took my old CD brick out instead, that way I was not attached to a small selection of music.
They have their places though. I wouldn't mind a nano or shuffle for the gym, or more active stuff, since they are well-nigh indestructible.
Re:The value of good user interface design...
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Absolutely correct. Design and function should be handled in equal measure in any application (both in the meat-world sense, and in the software sense), to much design can lead to an over-simplification of the desired purpose, leading to a useless product, while too much engineering can lead to a cumbersome unusable product. That's always been my beef with the windowing systems in Linux, you can tell that there are not many designers willing to work for free, it is the most competent OS, but also the most unusable. I have noticed though, that most geeks are solidly anti-design, preferring function over form, when realistically we do have to interact with whatever system, and interaction is, in large, an aspect of design.
Bringing me back OT, when I got my iPod ($80 for a 4G 20gb with the purchase of an iBook through my school), I was immediately hooked by the simplicity, and cleanness of the whole thing, which is why I use it, and recently replaced it with a larger one, completely ignoring the stack of other HD Mp3 players. Yes, they have more features, cheaper, but for this they suffer in actual utility. I'd rather sacrifice some power, for the nicety of never having to think (or tinker) with something.
Slashdot Mirror
And WHO actually is out to get us? And out of that how many of them are out to get us because we are out to get them (or at least this is how they see it)?
No one hates us because we're free. People hate us because of what we do to other people, and our support for genocidal regimes that are okay with killing people. People hate us because we won't mind our own goddamn business. yes, now it might be too late since we already garnered enough antipathy globally to be screwed for generations, but if we actually worked for the global good, and not just ours at their expense, then perhaps we could trim back military spending and spend it on things that actually matter.
Living in a country who kills people for their own self interest, how can you find a real problem with people doing the same to us? This is my intellectual quandary. For the record I find killing anyone for money wrong, whether and American pulls the trigger or not. Calling it "defense" is a misnomer, a lot of it goes to actively killing people who don't have any plans against us.
My problem isn't so much with the soldier on the ground, but the fat cat in a chair who commands them from a hundred thousand miles away. Soldiers aren't (for the most part) making whole nationalities of people dehumanized, and thus marked for death. Most of the soldiers on the ground I've known sounded pretty much like you, with the same sentiments, some of them worse, while their leaders have the ability to be emotionally detached, they never have cause to actually worry that they are killing humans being just like them. To them it can remain academic.
This might be true for you, but for many people it isn't. Many people I know treat their animals like they were their own children, especially if they are a childless couple. I accord my own cat with roughly the same level of accord as I do most people, if you were crapping on the carpet I would swap you too. Seriously, though, there is a long history of people anthropomorphizing their tools and machine. Look at naval vessels, and bombers, or any other transportation method that people depend on for their very lives, the practice of calling these vessels "she" points to the fact that we don't view them as "merely" machines.
Heck, all of my computers have had names, and from time to time I do talk to them, cajole them into functioning properly. Academically I know my box isn't a person, nor does it really understand a word a say, but I have been interacting with it closely for years, know its little quirks, etc...
Us humans are all still animists at heart.
So in the end my right to property is forfeited by a companies right to profit?
Screw that. My individual rights are greater than a corporations (a legal fiction). If some idiots want to use it to copy the move and hand it out for free on bittorrent, then yes, I can accept that as a crime. But to make EVERYONE, a vast majority of whom will never upload or download this product illegally, suffer and lose fair use is wrong. I bought it, I have the right to back it up, or use it in alternative enviroments, regardless of what unrelated people on Pirate Bay are doing.
I will buy it. It will be my property, and as such I will do whatever the heck I please with it. The fact that they have bought politicians to make their "morals and values" (to misuse both these terms) law, does not change the fact that it is wrong. And being wrong, it is okay to ignore it.
No one here is talking about sharing, we're talking about claiming our full rights over our property.
Then its the Pizza place's responsibility to deal with him, or your responsibility to go to a different pizza place.
There is not, and SHOULD NOT, be a right to not be offended. It is not the governments job to let us live in some mythical 50's utopia. The woman (? it is second life, one can't be sure) could have logged off, and complained to Linden Labs, like any responsible person. Next I can call the cops on murder because some idiot rogue kills me in WoW? No one was hurt, no law was broken.
Sure, if the guy told her he would REALLY rape her, then I can see this. But a little unconsensual pixel grinding is rather harmless.
More like "your price is too high, and thus I am going to steal it from you with dubious means and no negotiation".
Thats what gets me, is that discourse was never an option. It was just "I want it, and I will have it". Yes the guy who made the page asked an unacceptably high amount for the page, but still does not justify the Obama campaigns actions. I think Obama could have lived without "ownership" of the MySpace page, and thus resisted ALL headlines about his spending, or lack thereof. The page was in competent hands, and the campaign could still manipulate people using the page (they had full access). The status-quo was not broken. Obama's campaign just want COMPLETE control over everything dealing with their candidate, which I find more frightening than the MySpace ordeal itself.
As for the registering in his name bit; we must remember that this page is OLD, it wasn't spurred by Obama running for president, but by Obama originally running for senate, meaning this was a local thing and not some big hijacking thing.
I do wonder how much of this actually involves Obama himself, though, and how much is just an over-zealous campaign manager. At what level was this whole thing initiated.
You took that out of context... The full statement was . Think of it as a formula:
If [human], then act according to x.
This is understandable since humans (on the whole) do not operate towards each others with the same principles as they do towards animals, or any other non-human thing. So x is invariant, while [human] varies by time and culture, thus ethics (x) is going to be somewhat situational.
By which meaning of "universal" do you mean? That it applies to EVERYONE? I can't do that, since as said who is in this class varies. But in the sense that we operate under some root ethical parameters, that is easier. We can see it in the universality of altruism, and reciprocity, which both fall in some form under Kant's Categorical Imperative. I doubt this answered your question, sorry, it is 3:30a.
Agreed. Though I'm going to miss my old one, and feel rather silly once this fad passes, and I forget to remove this one. I average about 3 years per sig... Lazy.
I love how geeks do this, just when I think that we all are unethical morons, we go show that we can protest SOMETHING. If nothing else geeks are the grand protectors of information, woe to he who crosses this one ethical commandment of geekhood.
Though Digg is really imploding with it. It has reached the point of absurdity there, with 15 of 15 stories being "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" related.
99.9% of people are, regardless of what they want to say. Gender means "do you have a man parts or woman parts?", "sex" is where social options come in. Gender is biological, sex is social. I don't care if you really want to be ~x, if you have the x bits, thats your gender.
Biology is destiny.
And I firmly believe that 30% of people are sociopaths, which you admit you are.
Yes, the definition of "human" has changed with time, and only recently have blacks, women, and people who don't own property have joined this elite cabal of fully human. But if you went to a slave holder and asked them to kill a random white property owner, their morality would have stepped in the way. Ethics are universal, it just depends on who we accord worthiness to that is variable with time.
I personally have a hard time killing fish (I now fish without bait, to eliminate this problem) or animals, much less people. Animals and fish assuredly are not human, and there is nothing bad that can happen to me for killing them, but still I accord them some feelings. I empathize. Empathy is the key, which is why we (humans) are historically ethical (lets ditch the term moral, its different) towards members that they can identify with, generally by proximity and similarity. We can actually talk about the evolutionary merits of reciprocity and altruism (I recommend starting with Dawkins or Shermer), where it IS advantageous to evolve with an ethical system. It is innate, empathy, and those who don't have it are pathological.
Morals are handed down from some mythical big brother, ethics up from you genes AND society.
I'm sure C|Net can afford the bandwidth for this article. No reason to rip-off their article. The whole reason companies publish stuff for free is because ads help pay for it.
/.land without having to have my eyes burned out with ads. I'll stay away from ads if Ican help it, companies be damned. Their bottom line is not my moral responsibility.
Bleh. It lets me RTFA, which is a rarity here in
I think this is also because its easier to find something you agree with. The internet greatly facilitates groupthink. You have 100% choice of what POV you want to hear online, which is something we're never had before. You can see it happening on cable news too, to a smaller extent since you have 3 or 4 real choices, and not the hundred thousand or so you have online. How many lefties watch Fox, and how many cons watch CNN or MSNBC? How many registered Republicans are getting their political news from Dailykos?
You typical blog is a news story ripped from a primary news gatherer, then layered with political commentary.
Ghost died, pure and simple. It was Blizzards first attempt at re-entering the console market since the SNES days, and they got beaten by their own characteristically long development cycles. It was supposed to be XBox and Ps2, but then the next gen rolled around while they were still working on it, and eventually they gave up, since it would already be dated (its Blizzard, 5-6 years is a SHORT cycle).
You notice the logical flaw? I did.
You said you can't say "all niggers are fags, so we have twice as many reasons to kill them".. but... Did the liberal decency police come to your door yet.
Yes, I'm being pedantic. In most of the civilized world ungood words are judged by people, since they are a breach of a social more or norm, or such. Your going to get nasty glances, and perhaps private punishment (trouble at school, fired from work etc...), the government has no role in this. It is not legalistic. The government DOES have a role in ACTIONS. If you state "all niggers are fags, so we have twice as many reasons to kill them" then go killing black people, you legal (state sponsored) punishment will be upped. Thats the difference.
We have freedom of speech, though we still have the responsibility to respect our societies norms.
You are wrong. Clinton was impeached for PERJURY, meaning he lied under oath, which is illegal and rather unbecoming for a president. He was impeached for a valid reason.
Granted the whole idiocy leading up to his perjury was nonsense.
I am pretty leftist too, so don't go run and say I'm spouting republican propaganda, his perjury is a fact, and its illegality is a fact. Even if I support Clinton (and miss him being in office, all things considered), lying under oath is a no-no, no matter what its about. He should have just been honest and said "I have no taste in woman, but I've got Hillary, what else am I to do?".
If I had mod points, I would have modded this funny. But... I think he's serious, which frightens me.
How is Bush a man of honor? How? He lied to the people to start a private war. He's gobbling up power for the presidency, which is dangerous as hell. He's implementing social policies that would make Stalin proud. He's violating the Geneva Convention daily with his jingoistic game of "enemy combatants". Thousands of people die because of him, for no real reason besides some stupid document drafted by Dick Cheney (the New American Century) which amounts to fueling Americas future on the blood of foreign people. He's trying to destroy the time honored establishment cause.
How can you be serious?
Sorry for the rant. I just don't understand defending the man who will probably go down as the worst president since Nixon (though it should be Reagan, even if we lionize him now for some reason).
Phi of Sci is pretty interesting, especially since science is getting abused more and more. But thats a different story. I'd recommend starting with Thomas Kuhn, he pretty much is the most influential of the crop, his Structure of Scientific Revolutions pretty much structured the whole modern idea of science, AND it is a small quick read.
And don't forget that many people actually seem to be proud that they aren't good at math. Not only is it useless, but it's something you don't want to be good at?
/. and all. Interesting field, I almost fell into it (as evident by the phi/psy), but philosophy of science grabbed me.
In the US (at least, I'm not too sure about the rest of the world on this count) it isn't just math, its intelligence period. I went to school for philosophy and psych, and daily heard "Well I don't know anything about that!" said in a tone that bordered on pride. This goes for all fields that carry the taint of academic, I fear. It seems in America, as least, we have a rabble mentality, we don't really want anything that puts us above the crowd. At a family dinner, the other night, we were talking about books we're reading, and my stepmother proudly declared "I don't like books, and I don't read", as if sitting around folding laundry and watching Operah/Dr. Phil is a thing to be proud of. Me and my fellow bibliophillic friend were speechless, since we had to maintain the aura of politeness. But it really left me confused.
I ran into the same thing in college, I managed to be in the "math light" course until I run into philosophy of science/physics and psych research/statistics, both of which became passions, which I felt I completely was outclassed by the more mathematically inclined of my peers.
Out of curiosity, what aspect of cog sci are you in? I'm guessing the computational aspect, this being
I am really really bad at math, I'll be the first to admit it. I blame this, in part, on primary school and high school math teachers though, since they are rather quick to squash any deep curiosity in it. By this, I mean that they they absolutely abhor the word "why?", they were teaching meaningless number shuffling, and refused to ever let anyone in on the actual reason that things work. I tested into advanced math my first year of Junior High, but completely crapped out. I lost sight of math until I started studying logic under my philosophy degree, and statistics in the course of my psychology studies, and then I met it with a very high degree of frustration, being years out of touch.
Math was always had the least room for curiosity in my early education, which is dumbfounding since it is the most abstract study, and thus would need more grounding. Yes, some teachers tried, but only as far as making it vaguely practical, which is somewhat a ruse since most people won't need it beyond balancing check-books, or such, but they never ventured into the actual reasons that it works. The beauty (speaking from someone who loves logic, but I'm guessing its the same for math) of the necessary and deep connections flowing together to make something new, but still inevitable, I guess its a poor man's sense of discovery, but still the "clicking" sensation makes it worthwhile, but only when you understand the reasons behind it, and thus many people will never see it.
I came close to that in my undergrad Stats courses though, seeing seemingly random strings of numbers turn into something more than their mere sum, and understanding WHY they were doing that. Sure Stats is 90% rote processing, but still it allowed a small glance at the necessary underpinnings of math.
Wow, that was a tangent...
$1e+12 now...
Wow... I am glad it does exponents...
Or, as the other FA said, they could wait for it to scroll off the first page in a day or so.
Wait... Your talking at cross purposed. Your saying people don't like it (cheap wifi) since it censors, but they also can't switch. But if enough people wanted a wifi ISP with free speech wouldn't it be profitable for some big non-government regional monopoly to move in and make a killing? I don't see the government BLOCKING competition. Perhaps they don't want to since it is better for them, so they are willing to accept some of bad with the good.
What I don't understand is how a baby-bell is less anti-capitalist? Where I live you have two choices for ISPs (broadband), the regional Baby-Bell, or the regional cable company. Both restrict access from poor or rural areas, and fix rates unnaturally, and limit content. This is 100% better than 5 years ago when you got 1 choice.
When it comes to good internet access you're not dealing with a nice fair arena for competition in the first place, so why bother complaining that some people are getting a cheap deal? Sure, when I can pick a local "mom and pa" ISP, then I'll agree with you. But having a choice of one monolithic corporation or... well possibly, if your lucky, another monolithic corporation isn't much a choice. But then again I don't agree with the libertarian ethos.
I don't have a link to post, but in my old college psychological research methodology class, our book had a full chapter of foils that happen. All of them are well know, and most of them have good design work-arounds. But the big one was that people like to answer how their expected to answer, to make the researcher happy.
. htm
Through a quick google: http://psychology.about.com/od/dindex/g/demanchar
The other day I had a sobering thought. If today, right now, the U.S. government decided to round up all the Muslims in America, and put them in interment camps, no one would really take steps to stop it. Sure we might give lip service to it, and have some angry bloggers and protesters, but no one really would bother. I'm just using the U.S. as an example, but increasingly it seems that the ideological climate of the world might be leading towards another holocaust, or at least the type of circumstances that would allow it. I could as easily imagine the Israelis doing it to the Palestinians, or the radical Muslims in Saudi Arabia or Iran doing it, but the frightening thing is that it is imaginable.
Just like before WWII the world is steeped in idealism and nationalism. Instead of the opposing forces of fascism and communism, we have liberalism and religious zealotry (with a good heaping of pure economic greed clouding our ethics and foresight, thrown in for fun). It scares me. The western world (the U.S. and Britain, mostly) are devolving into corporate police states. The U.S. is in the throws of a totalitarian religious movement. The middle east has already devolved into totalitarian theocracies, and worse, warring ones. Everyone is affected by severe xenophobia, and ideological blindness.
If something terrible didn't happen in our life times, I would be very (pleasantly) surprised.
I'd disagree. I just bought a new 5.5G because I ran out of space. I never did like having to decide what I might be in the mood for listening to in the future, I'd rather have it all there in case the mood strikes me (how do I know it isn't going to be a Guns N' Roses day?). The philosophy of the Shuffle is even more off kilter to my lifestyle, I've got 3000+ songs on my computer, the odds its going to chose 50 of them that I really feel like listening too is rather remote. I had a smaller flash player before my iPod, and it sat forgotten on a shelf since it was too much hassle to rotate the play-lists, I took my old CD brick out instead, that way I was not attached to a small selection of music.
They have their places though. I wouldn't mind a nano or shuffle for the gym, or more active stuff, since they are well-nigh indestructible.
Absolutely correct. Design and function should be handled in equal measure in any application (both in the meat-world sense, and in the software sense), to much design can lead to an over-simplification of the desired purpose, leading to a useless product, while too much engineering can lead to a cumbersome unusable product. That's always been my beef with the windowing systems in Linux, you can tell that there are not many designers willing to work for free, it is the most competent OS, but also the most unusable. I have noticed though, that most geeks are solidly anti-design, preferring function over form, when realistically we do have to interact with whatever system, and interaction is, in large, an aspect of design.
Bringing me back OT, when I got my iPod ($80 for a 4G 20gb with the purchase of an iBook through my school), I was immediately hooked by the simplicity, and cleanness of the whole thing, which is why I use it, and recently replaced it with a larger one, completely ignoring the stack of other HD Mp3 players. Yes, they have more features, cheaper, but for this they suffer in actual utility. I'd rather sacrifice some power, for the nicety of never having to think (or tinker) with something.