So lack of insecurity is your driving consideration for electing someone?
I assume you mean "lack of security". "Lack of insecurity" is the antithesis to the rest of what you wrote. But I'm sure you knew that.
And you can know who you are and still worry that you are making the right decision. That's not the insecurity I was referring to. When I wrote "identity crisis", that's what I meant. Gore simply seemed to have no clue who he was, or he knew and didn't like who he was, or he wanted to be President so badly that he felt the only way to do so was to portray an image best suited for getting him elected, rather than to simply be himself. He let others around him attempt to tell him who he needed to be, or appear to be, in order to win the election. If he had just fired all his image consultants, and figured out how to talk to people and to the camera in a non-condescending way, then I wouldn't have detested him so much, and neither would many other independents. But instead he was just spineless. If you don't understand that, maybe you are too.
Personally, I seriously doubt you can homeschool a child without one parent devoting themselves to the task full-time. Either that, or if the parents are rich enough maybe they could hire someone to do the task for them. But when I think of homeschooling, I don't think of abandonning a child in front of a computer for five hours and expecting anything to happen.
Moreover, the only sure way to get good grades in liberal arts courses is to say whatever the professor wants to hear. THERE IS NO THINKING, CRITICAL OR OTHERWISE, INVOLVED.
That's actually my point. As I said, "liberal arts" today is not what it should be. Too many of the courses are taught by professors who believe it's more important to teach a student what to think rather than how, or who sacrifice what's important for what's cool, fun, sexy, whatever.
As for history, philosophy, art, and literature being useless, they're not. See if you can answer a few questions without looking them up on the internet:
What was the fundamental philosophical conflict of the Cold War? (And don't give me a G.W.Bush-ish answer of "freedom vs. evil") E.g., why did the Cold War happen? How can understanding this help you as a citizen of a democracy prevent such a thing from happening again? Why would you want to?
Why is abstract art like computer programming?
What can literature teach you about linguistics and the evolution of human language?
All of these questions are things you learn in a true liberal arts program, and what they ideally lead up to is an understanding of humanity. Such an understanding is crucial when analysing the President's decision to attack Iraq, or figuring out your opinions on abortion, or deciding what religion means to you.
I concede that some people like yourself and many other posters at/. are curious and smart enough to pursue such learning on your own. You're one of the relatively few Americans pursuing a Master's degree, so you tell me whether or not you're a representative statistic in that regard. For the rest of the country, there's a good chance they didn't get any of this in high school (not if it was like my typical public hs, anyway), and college should provide some exposure.
Otherwise, we may as well kill off all the completely useless workers, breed the efficient ones, and send them to trade school their whole life where we'll indoctrinate them as workers of the peoples' education. They'll be easily led and manipulated, but they're guaranteed work and income, so what does it matter?
We don't need to send all these people to college. Let's be realistic about that and send some of them on the path to a meaningful trade.
Considering that many colleges are glorified trade schools now anyway, I won't protest too strongly. But theoretically, college should be a place where students are taught the liberal arts that produce an educated, informed, and critcally-thinking citizenry necessary for democracy. History, Philosophy, Art, and Literature are all super-important in that respect, and one reason our society has become so dumbed-down and easily manipulated by politicians, the media, and large corporations is that people no longer see value in learning anything other trade-skills that will get them a job and some income as soon as possible. So theoretically, if colleges were still doing their job of reliably providing that liberal (as in classical, Enlightenment Liberal, not today's left-of-center political liberal) education, I would disagree with your assessment that not everyone needs college. But as things are today, I won't protest too much...
Stupid is so cool that we (meaning you all who voted for him) elected an intelligence underachiever (Bush) rather than a brainiac (Gore).
I didn't vote for Gore not b/c he was a braniac, but b/c he was an egotistical, insecure man in his 50s who still hadn't found himself. I have no problem with braniacs, but I have little regard for braniacs with something to prove, and Gore's apparent insecurity made me sceptical that he was truly a braniac in the first place. For chrissake, how could anyone vote for a guy who has to hire a renowned feminist to teach him how to be an alpha male. P-A-T-H-E-T-I-C. The election 2000 was pure Sophie's Choice. An unthinking, overly-religious, drug-addled idiot or a narcisistic man with a midlife identity crisis. Election 2004 isn't much better. The country's going to hell in handbasket, I tell you.
The true purpose of schooling, according to Gatto, is to produce an easily manageable workforce to serve employers in a mass-production economy. Actual education is a secondary and even counterproductive result since educated people tend to be more difficult to control.
To anyone interested in this topic, I'd suggest also reading Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt's book, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America. It'll make you want to homeschool your kids.
No. They really didn't. Of course SP2 was going to cause *some* problems, but poo-pooing everything MS in a knee-jerk fashion doesn't help anyone and probably is keeping people from installing it, which is a real shame because:
1. Firewall on by default. Power users can easily shut it off. How many Slashdot posts do we have that wish MS did this, but when they do suddenly MS is doing wrong. Yes an admin can shut it off even with an activeX control. Such is the life of running as admin.
4. "Drive by installs" are not going to be as common as IE requires an extra step to install/download stuff and blocks pop-ups natively and by default. Man, how many slashdoot posts did we have about "MS should do something about pop-ups and click installs!" Well, they did. Sure, they didnt remove activeX altogether, but no one was expecting that.
Popup blocking is WAAAAAYYYY too late
to even think about giving MS any credit. Mozilla, Opera, Google, and umpty-five 3rd party companies all provided it long before MS. Pathetic. Strike two.
Finally, Microsoft warns that installing SP2 on a spyware-infested PC is a bad idea.
No shit. Installing ANYTHING on a spyware infested PC will cause all sorts of problems. Fighting spyware is what SP2 is trying to do. Give it time or at least introduce your friends and co-workers to a little thing called Ad Aware, especially if they'll never switch to FireFox. Face it, many people will never switch and will go to their deathbeds using bundled software.
Must we delineate
MS's culpability for the glut of spyware in the first place?
So did Slashdotters call this one?
Yup. Absolutely.
Granted, if you take the negative approach to life 24/7 you will be right every so often or at least subjectively, but I feel these are much needed changes and will help technophobes better use their machines. MS can do things right. Yeah, break out the smelling salts...
Or, if you take the negative approach to Microsoft 24/7 you will be right, objectively, 99.999% of the time.
" I might agree that iTunes' interface clashes with Windows overall look,"
What are you talking about?! Brushed aluminum is the new black, which everybody knows goes with anything, even Luna. iTunes doesn't clash at all, you uncouth guttersnipe. Geeks commenting on fashion, hrrrrmmmppphhh!
Allchin's "memo" is anything but. Rather, it's just a press release disguised as memo to make it easier for "journalists" to delude themselves into thinking they're publishing real news.
First, the terrorists are likely to fail and be subdued, at which point they will be brought in and extensively "questioned",
I think terrorists will be lucky if the passengers don't mob and kill them in a blind rage, especially if they try hijack another plane out of New York or Newark.
So how does Warp protect travelers from experiencing the massive time differential predicted by Einstein? That's one thing I've never understood about Star Trek. They travel all over the universe at faster-than-light speed, yet they stay the same relative age as everyone back on Earth. Shouldn't the rest of the universe age much faster relative to people traveling on a faster-than-light ship?
If nothing else, the passengers would fight back this time.
What do you mean, "this time"? They fought back the first time, as soon as they knew what was happening.
Re:Ah the French...
on
Vive La Loafing!
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"However, the culture is very different here. Whereas someone like Bill Gates is looked up to in the USA, in Europe very rich people are not socially looked up to very much. In fact, they are generally looked upon as being greedy."
My amateur theory on that difference is that Europe has a history of powerful people hoarding the wealth of society and justifying it using red herrings such as "divine right" and "noble blood". That was back in the time before people understood that sustained economic growth and wealth creation were possible; eg, throughout most of human history the only known way to get wealth was to take it from someone else. Hence the constant European wars, and Colonialism.
When Industrialization rolled around, initially it was the wealthy nobles and landed gentry - the bourgeoisie - who used their historically ill-gotten capital to invest in factories, mills, mines, etc. and to hire/exploit workers. Yet they still used their power to maintain control over society's capital, drastically curtailing the class mobility that we Americans so take for granted. Marx was instrumental in critiqing this system and providing an intellectual antithesis to it, and his concepts of socialism and class struggle have dominated Europe to this day.
On the other hand, America was formed with no aristocracy during the Industrial Revolution, and though we've had our share of colonialism, our social concept of wealth generation is based more on wealth-creation rather than on wealth-acquisition and hoarding. Whereas Europeans generally assume that the rich have gotten that way by screwing someone else, Americans generally assume the rich have gotten that way by creating something new and brilliant and selling it for lots of money - the American Dream - hence the general admiration of Bill Gates (/.'ers aside), and other successful entrepeneurs, inventors, and business people.
This reminds me of an old parable: An Irishman and an American are walking down the road, and they pass a grand mansion inhabited by a wealthy businessman. The Irishman says, "One day I'm going to get that guy." The American says, "One day I'm going to be that guy." I think a lot of Americans look down on Europe's attitude toward the wealthy, but it helps to understand just why the European "proletariat" distrusts the wealthy. Given their history, it's not without reason or justification.
Somehow this philosophy has been lost on recent administrations but it's validity exists nonetheless.
It hasn't been lost, it has been purposefully discarded, and rightfully so. Morality is a factor and always will be when dealing with totalitarianism. You can argue the moral relativist side all day, saying that there is no universal absolute standard of morality and that ethics are only what each society decides they are, and hence this is an "internal debate". And while I don't presume to be a philosopher capable of arguing relativism vs. absolutism, let me just point out that relativism had a shitty track record the past century, directly responsible for scores of millions of state-sponsored murders. Just becuase countries have borders does not justify us condoning their controlling, oppressive, manipulative governments.
The sub probably wouldn't survive the counterattack, but to disable a carrier that's probably a good trade.
Spoken like a true civilian. I assume you have a vast supply of reincarnated Japanese kamikazes or converted Al Quaeda "dead-enders" to man these suicide subs. Otherwise, you're gonna need an unmanned, remote control sub for that mission, cuz you ain't getting any sane volunteers.
We really need to get these legislators into some re-education camps where they can be indoctrinated with Hayak's theories of self-organizing open systems. This is a perfect example of such a system, and needs no government interference. The market will decide for itself whether Google's new service is worth the cost (email scanning for adwords) or not, as people experience first hand the tradeoffs involved in Google's novel scheme. All the legislature need concern itself with is whether Google is being completely forthcoming and transparent about the details of their service or not, which it appears they are doing of their own accord. Hands off, you commies-without-a-cause!
Slashdot Mirror
So lack of insecurity is your driving consideration for electing someone?
I assume you mean "lack of security". "Lack of insecurity" is the antithesis to the rest of what you wrote. But I'm sure you knew that.
And you can know who you are and still worry that you are making the right decision. That's not the insecurity I was referring to. When I wrote "identity crisis", that's what I meant. Gore simply seemed to have no clue who he was, or he knew and didn't like who he was, or he wanted to be President so badly that he felt the only way to do so was to portray an image best suited for getting him elected, rather than to simply be himself. He let others around him attempt to tell him who he needed to be, or appear to be, in order to win the election. If he had just fired all his image consultants, and figured out how to talk to people and to the camera in a non-condescending way, then I wouldn't have detested him so much, and neither would many other independents. But instead he was just spineless. If you don't understand that, maybe you are too.
Semi-Automatic: One pull of the trigger, one round fired
without the need to cock, or manually chamber a new round, or reload in between trigger pulls. I.e., it fires as fast as you can pull the trigger.
Uhm, that was a joke, you humorless uncouth guttersnipe. ;)
Personally, I seriously doubt you can homeschool a child without one parent devoting themselves to the task full-time. Either that, or if the parents are rich enough maybe they could hire someone to do the task for them. But when I think of homeschooling, I don't think of abandonning a child in front of a computer for five hours and expecting anything to happen.
Moreover, the only sure way to get good grades in liberal arts courses is to say whatever the professor wants to hear. THERE IS NO THINKING, CRITICAL OR OTHERWISE, INVOLVED.
/. are curious and smart enough to pursue such learning on your own. You're one of the relatively few Americans pursuing a Master's degree, so you tell me whether or not you're a representative statistic in that regard. For the rest of the country, there's a good chance they didn't get any of this in high school (not if it was like my typical public hs, anyway), and college should provide some exposure.
That's actually my point. As I said, "liberal arts" today is not what it should be. Too many of the courses are taught by professors who believe it's more important to teach a student what to think rather than how, or who sacrifice what's important for what's cool, fun, sexy, whatever.
As for history, philosophy, art, and literature being useless, they're not. See if you can answer a few questions without looking them up on the internet:
What was the fundamental philosophical conflict of the Cold War? (And don't give me a G.W.Bush-ish answer of "freedom vs. evil") E.g., why did the Cold War happen? How can understanding this help you as a citizen of a democracy prevent such a thing from happening again? Why would you want to?
Why is abstract art like computer programming?
What can literature teach you about linguistics and the evolution of human language?
All of these questions are things you learn in a true liberal arts program, and what they ideally lead up to is an understanding of humanity. Such an understanding is crucial when analysing the President's decision to attack Iraq, or figuring out your opinions on abortion, or deciding what religion means to you.
I concede that some people like yourself and many other posters at
Otherwise, we may as well kill off all the completely useless workers, breed the efficient ones, and send them to trade school their whole life where we'll indoctrinate them as workers of the peoples' education. They'll be easily led and manipulated, but they're guaranteed work and income, so what does it matter?
We don't need to send all these people to college. Let's be realistic about that and send some of them on the path to a meaningful trade.
Considering that many colleges are glorified trade schools now anyway, I won't protest too strongly. But theoretically, college should be a place where students are taught the liberal arts that produce an educated, informed, and critcally-thinking citizenry necessary for democracy. History, Philosophy, Art, and Literature are all super-important in that respect, and one reason our society has become so dumbed-down and easily manipulated by politicians, the media, and large corporations is that people no longer see value in learning anything other trade-skills that will get them a job and some income as soon as possible. So theoretically, if colleges were still doing their job of reliably providing that liberal (as in classical, Enlightenment Liberal, not today's left-of-center political liberal) education, I would disagree with your assessment that not everyone needs college. But as things are today, I won't protest too much...
Stupid is so cool that we (meaning you all who voted for him) elected an intelligence underachiever (Bush) rather than a brainiac (Gore).
I didn't vote for Gore not b/c he was a braniac, but b/c he was an egotistical, insecure man in his 50s who still hadn't found himself. I have no problem with braniacs, but I have little regard for braniacs with something to prove, and Gore's apparent insecurity made me sceptical that he was truly a braniac in the first place. For chrissake, how could anyone vote for a guy who has to hire a renowned feminist to teach him how to be an alpha male. P-A-T-H-E-T-I-C. The election 2000 was pure Sophie's Choice. An unthinking, overly-religious, drug-addled idiot or a narcisistic man with a midlife identity crisis. Election 2004 isn't much better. The country's going to hell in handbasket, I tell you.
The true purpose of schooling, according to Gatto, is to produce an easily manageable workforce to serve employers in a mass-production economy. Actual education is a secondary and even counterproductive result since educated people tend to be more difficult to control.
To anyone interested in this topic, I'd suggest also reading Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt's book, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America . It'll make you want to homeschool your kids.
So did Slashdotters call this one?
No. They really didn't. Of course SP2 was going to cause *some* problems, but poo-pooing everything MS in a knee-jerk fashion doesn't help anyone and probably is keeping people from installing it, which is a real shame because:
1. Firewall on by default. Power users can easily shut it off. How many Slashdot posts do we have that wish MS did this, but when they do suddenly MS is doing wrong. Yes an admin can shut it off even with an activeX control. Such is the life of running as admin.
Firewall only filters incoming traffic, totally oblivious to outgoing. (2nd paragraph, last sentence) How long has free Zone Alarm had this feature? Years. Strike one.
4. "Drive by installs" are not going to be as common as IE requires an extra step to install/download stuff and blocks pop-ups natively and by default. Man, how many slashdoot posts did we have about "MS should do something about pop-ups and click installs!" Well, they did. Sure, they didnt remove activeX altogether, but no one was expecting that.
Popup blocking is WAAAAAYYYY too late to even think about giving MS any credit. Mozilla, Opera, Google, and umpty-five 3rd party companies all provided it long before MS. Pathetic. Strike two.
5. NX support for AMD 64. Wow.
Nope, broken. Strike three.
Finally, Microsoft warns that installing SP2 on a spyware-infested PC is a bad idea.
No shit. Installing ANYTHING on a spyware infested PC will cause all sorts of problems. Fighting spyware is what SP2 is trying to do. Give it time or at least introduce your friends and co-workers to a little thing called Ad Aware, especially if they'll never switch to FireFox. Face it, many people will never switch and will go to their deathbeds using bundled software.
Must we delineate MS's culpability for the glut of spyware in the first place?
So did Slashdotters call this one?
Yup. Absolutely.
Granted, if you take the negative approach to life 24/7 you will be right every so often or at least subjectively, but I feel these are much needed changes and will help technophobes better use their machines. MS can do things right. Yeah, break out the smelling salts...
Or, if you take the negative approach to Microsoft 24/7 you will be right, objectively, 99.999% of the time.
" I might agree that iTunes' interface clashes with Windows overall look,"
What are you talking about?! Brushed aluminum is the new black, which everybody knows goes with anything, even Luna. iTunes doesn't clash at all, you uncouth guttersnipe. Geeks commenting on fashion, hrrrrmmmppphhh!
I for one welcome our new non-existant alien overlords.
Allchin's "memo" is anything but. Rather, it's just a press release disguised as memo to make it easier for "journalists" to delude themselves into thinking they're publishing real news.
You forgot one permutation:
Interesting how a post titled Funny can be rated, er... Funny...
First, the terrorists are likely to fail and be subdued, at which point they will be brought in and extensively "questioned",
I think terrorists will be lucky if the passengers don't mob and kill them in a blind rage, especially if they try hijack another plane out of New York or Newark.
Never mind, the Alcubierre Drive post below answered my question.
So how does Warp protect travelers from experiencing the massive time differential predicted by Einstein? That's one thing I've never understood about Star Trek. They travel all over the universe at faster-than-light speed, yet they stay the same relative age as everyone back on Earth. Shouldn't the rest of the universe age much faster relative to people traveling on a faster-than-light ship?
If nothing else, the passengers would fight back this time.
What do you mean, "this time"? They fought back the first time, as soon as they knew what was happening.
"However, the culture is very different here. Whereas someone like Bill Gates is looked up to in the USA, in Europe very rich people are not socially looked up to very much. In fact, they are generally looked upon as being greedy."
My amateur theory on that difference is that Europe has a history of powerful people hoarding the wealth of society and justifying it using red herrings such as "divine right" and "noble blood". That was back in the time before people understood that sustained economic growth and wealth creation were possible; eg, throughout most of human history the only known way to get wealth was to take it from someone else. Hence the constant European wars, and Colonialism.
When Industrialization rolled around, initially it was the wealthy nobles and landed gentry - the bourgeoisie - who used their historically ill-gotten capital to invest in factories, mills, mines, etc. and to hire/exploit workers. Yet they still used their power to maintain control over society's capital, drastically curtailing the class mobility that we Americans so take for granted. Marx was instrumental in critiqing this system and providing an intellectual antithesis to it, and his concepts of socialism and class struggle have dominated Europe to this day.
On the other hand, America was formed with no aristocracy during the Industrial Revolution, and though we've had our share of colonialism, our social concept of wealth generation is based more on wealth-creation rather than on wealth-acquisition and hoarding. Whereas Europeans generally assume that the rich have gotten that way by screwing someone else, Americans generally assume the rich have gotten that way by creating something new and brilliant and selling it for lots of money - the American Dream - hence the general admiration of Bill Gates (/.'ers aside), and other successful entrepeneurs, inventors, and business people.
This reminds me of an old parable: An Irishman and an American are walking down the road, and they pass a grand mansion inhabited by a wealthy businessman. The Irishman says, "One day I'm going to get that guy." The American says, "One day I'm going to be that guy." I think a lot of Americans look down on Europe's attitude toward the wealthy, but it helps to understand just why the European "proletariat" distrusts the wealthy. Given their history, it's not without reason or justification.
... I never liked "Gmail" anyway. Wish they'd just call it "Google Mail" and make the url "mail.google.com".
Somehow this philosophy has been lost on recent administrations but it's validity exists nonetheless.
It hasn't been lost, it has been purposefully discarded, and rightfully so. Morality is a factor and always will be when dealing with totalitarianism. You can argue the moral relativist side all day, saying that there is no universal absolute standard of morality and that ethics are only what each society decides they are, and hence this is an "internal debate". And while I don't presume to be a philosopher capable of arguing relativism vs. absolutism, let me just point out that relativism had a shitty track record the past century, directly responsible for scores of millions of state-sponsored murders. Just becuase countries have borders does not justify us condoning their controlling, oppressive, manipulative governments.
And if you're really a rebel, try scratching "Best Buy" off the list too.
You say this with irony, as though it would be difficult to do. It's not. http://www.newegg.com. Or, just to prove I don't work for Newegg: http://www.resellerratings.com/
wouldn't it be nicer if your government was using YOUR taxmoney to do YOU some good?
Sure, and even nicer than that is for the government to stop friggin taking my dollars so *I* can use them to do me some good.
The sub probably wouldn't survive the counterattack, but to disable a carrier that's probably a good trade.
Spoken like a true civilian. I assume you have a vast supply of reincarnated Japanese kamikazes or converted Al Quaeda "dead-enders" to man these suicide subs. Otherwise, you're gonna need an unmanned, remote control sub for that mission, cuz you ain't getting any sane volunteers.
Attaining orbit is not a matter of height. It's a matter of going so fast that you continuously miss the Earth.
Orbiting is easy, just drop your spacecraft at the Earth and miss.
We really need to get these legislators into some re-education camps where they can be indoctrinated with Hayak's theories of self-organizing open systems. This is a perfect example of such a system, and needs no government interference. The market will decide for itself whether Google's new service is worth the cost (email scanning for adwords) or not, as people experience first hand the tradeoffs involved in Google's novel scheme. All the legislature need concern itself with is whether Google is being completely forthcoming and transparent about the details of their service or not, which it appears they are doing of their own accord. Hands off, you commies-without-a-cause!