Astrology seems to concern itself with two completely unrelated areas: personality and predicting the future. The latter is obviously suspect, since there's no evidence that the position of the planets foreshadows events. But it does it seem so far-fetched that human personality varies in a cyclical fashion? A recently published study linked the season of birth with the onset of menopause. Relevant quotes:
"Nevertheless, the data seem to suggest notable effects of the month/season of birth on the length of a woman's fertile life...The next phase of the research was seeing whether the season of birth of the women in the study influenced their psychological profile -- affecting their susceptibility to conditions such as anxiety and depression, for example. 'Results so far seem promising.'"
The effect is far from being conclusively proven, but if you discard the traditional astrological mechanism that the planets cause certain personalities instead of simply being correlated with them, its a plausible, logical hypothesis.
...they suddenly discover that they're passionate about some political issue , and bore us to death with it. And the public is complicit, because they somehow think that that the poorly-informed opinion of a celebrity is worth more attention than a better-informed 'nobody'.
Ok, which is it? Are celebrities boring the public or fascinating the public with their poorly-informed opinion? It can't be both. People are endlessly fascinated with celebrities, which is why they get coverage. Now, if you were saying that's a bad thing overall, I would agree with you, but celebrities talk about a lot of things that they like or dislike. To single out their political views for scorn while ignoring other expressions of preference or belief on literature, music or fashion smacks of a political agenda. Political speech is and should be the most strongly protected form of speech. If you are concerned about the ill effects of celebrity worship, it would be wise to cast a wider net instead of only making an issue of it when politics is involved.
The other issue I have is that it is only left-wing celebrities that are, yes, targetted. There are numerous right-wing celebrities such as Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter who criticize Hollywood celebrities for essentially doing what right-wing celebrities do everyday. The hypocrisy is sickening. As far as using PR to manufacture controversy to sell celebrity products, there are far worse examples than Hollywood, and the fact that they are ignored is highly suspicious. The same goes for South Park's Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who routinely suggest that left-wing celebrities have no right to their opinions, while putting out a movie like Team America, which is basically a movie-length essay on US foreign policy. Or maybe they are an exception because as long as you are using puppets and satire, its OK for them to make claims about subjects that they know nothing about.
I think the problem people have with celebrity politics is... they tend to whine when speaking their mind...
Yeah yeah, whatever. The real whiners are the people who constantly complain about it because they are basically upset that people pay attention to celebrities who happen to have the "wrong" viewpoints. That's all it is. Celebrities get more publicity than God, but you are threatened by their opinions, so you try to shut them up. Celebrities and their fans are free to talk about whatever viewpoint they please, or boycott whoever please, but who is telling who to shut up here? I agree that celebrities in the public eye should avoid thoughtlessly saying intemperate things and offending people, but that's not the issue here. Celebrities are being targetted for their political opinions, not for their lack of public decorum.
I thought that the implication of that question to WW was particularly offensive. Some people are so narrow-minded that they can't believe that someone could have a liberal viewpoint without imagining that some secretive cabal of Hollywood Jews coerces people to, I don't know, not hate gay people or something.
"To my knowledge, in the time I have served as secretary of Defense, the idea of reinstating draft has never been debated, endorsed, discussed, theorized, pondered, or even whispered by anyone in the Bush administration."
This is technically true. The discussion went on in the DoD:
"...the Secretary of Defense and Department of Defense manpower officials have stated recently that a draft will not be necessary for any foreseeable crisis. They assume that sufficient fighting capability exists in today's "all-volunteer" active and reserved Armed Forces for likely contingencies, making a conventional draft of untrained manpower somewhat obsolete. Yet, Defense manpower officials concede there are critical shortages of military personnel with certain special skills such as medical personnel, linguists, computer network engineers, etc... a draft of men and women possessing these critical skills may be warranted in a future crisis."
Then they started setting up the databases, designing the draft cards, started putting out the call for draft board volunteers, and hired Widmeyer Communications to "secure compliance and... mold public opinion" to support it.
Rumsfeld employs classic Bush Administration spin tactics by changing the subject, arguing that the Administration has never considered bringing back the Vietnam-era draft, which is true. But the substance of the claim is that a Skills draft will be instituted, which Rumsfeld cleverly avoids by talking about something completely different.
The reason its an overstatement is because the current podcasting 'revolution' is happening several years after the real revolution. This is more like new internet users re-discovering something that people have been doing for years and giving it a new, Apple-centric name. In fact, there are people called DJs who put music together (professionals, semi-professionals or amateurs) into a single, downloadable form and release it on the web. Go to any DJ website, and you will be innundated with mixes, mostly made up of tracks so rare, that only a few thousand copies are ever made, mainly on vinyl. There's also an old and healthy community of radio show sharing online - this site collects tracklistings of Essential Mixes going back to 1993, most of which can be found semi-legally on your favorite p2p program. Wrapping it all up in an RSS feed is cool, but not a revolution - that happened years ago.
Mac users are getting notorious for calling revolutions on things that have been on the PC for years, like GarageBand. Sound cards came bundled with similar software as early as 1996, but that didn't stop people from claiming that Apple was going to revolutionize music-making by bringing the technology to the average user.
To treat someone with less than simple human dignity is uncalled for unless that person has wronged you.
I think you are suggesting far too much latitude. How easy it is to justify our inhumanity to each other by imagining that those acts are the necessary response to an aggressor. A bully can produce any number of reasons why his victims deserved what they got.
I believe that its never acceptable to deny someone human dignity, no matter what the conditions, a principle that extends to how you treat other people and how you treat yourself - i.e. to permit someone to treat you without dignity is morally equivalent to permitting that treatment for others. If someone incites you to assert your own dignity which causes a denial of their dignity, then they are responsible for both actions, such as if someone purposely stepped on your toes and you responded by pushing them off.
In such a situation, all of the actions that you take to restore your dignity are morally acceptable, but everything beyond that is immoral. Therefore, the impulse to retaliate and cause the attacker to experience the same humiliation that you received is immoral. Causing the attacker to be humiliated may be satisfying to the attackee, but goes far beyond restoring dignity and into punishment and disincentives and it is unjust for an attackee to dispense his idea of justice since the satisfaction of revenge would be something very much like a material benefit. A disinterested party is the proper dispenser of justice, who should restore the plaintiff's dignity if possible. But since denying an individual's dignity also strikes a blow against the community as a whole, it is just for the attacker to make additional reparations to the community itself in the form of incarceration, fines, community service, etc.
That's a load of crap. What do you think the end result would be if every open source app decided to do the same? Quite frankly, its disgusting that a GPL'd project would go out and piss all over the very commons that it depends on for its success, especially after all of the blog community's efforts to combat just these sorts of abuses. To have one of our own aid the enemy is unforgivable. I am furious, and I will not be placated by whimpering about "Matt's a nice guy" or "He needed the money!"
Its very seldom that these things happen, but when they do, we have an obligation to object and call the guilty parties to account for their actions. While harsh, boycotting WordPress and forking the code is an option that's available. Or less harsh, but more amusing, lock Matt in a room with Richard Stallman for a week.
On the whole, netspeak probably introduces new kinds of creativity, as do most new linguistic influences, but a lot of what people think of as netspeak is actually a strategy for people who have little typing experience, but use the net a lot, i.e. teenagers. If you type very slowly, then acronyms and shorthand is a good way to speed it up. If you type 60+ wpm like most experienced net users, those same shortcuts will end up slowing you down. From another post:
"OMG! LMAO!!! Every1 nos that! lol! ttfn! cya!"
OMG, TTFN, CYA are legitimate acronyms for a common phrases and LMAO and LOL express actions which are difficult to express otherwise in words. But 'Every1' for 'everyone' and 'nos' for 'knows' are slow-typer words. I can type around 60-80 WPM (probably typical among slashdotters), and even if I was as accurate with the 1 key as I am typing out 'one', I would still only be saving a fraction of a second at the most. Same with 'nos'. On the other hand, if I had to hunt-and-peck, using as few characters as possible would be the way to optimize my time.
This phenomenon is more exaggerated with cellphone text messages. Because I am fast and know how to use predictive text, I can be as verbose as I please. With predictive text, I can type out 'Everyone' with 8 key presses, but for someone who doesn't know how to use it, it would take you 20 key presses. Shortening it to 'evry1' brings it down to 12 keys.
Generally, I think that as people's typing skills improve, their use of 'netspeak' lessens dramatically. The word 'netspeak' itself is a misnomer, since it mainly signifies the way new, inexperienced users communicate. Experienced users may use dramatic abbreviations in specific venues where conciseness is valued, such as in fast-moving multiplayer games, but I think its mainly new users. As such, I move we distinguish between 'n3tspeak' and 'n00bspeak'.
You did advocate mandatory abortions for people who become pregnant in what you consider inappropriate circumstances. Who else but the government would be able to take on that job? A more free market solution, perhaps, like a tax break to doctors for every abortion performed on unwed mothers!
Yes. I can definitely see how society would be better off with mandatory abortions. In fact, why not simply sterilize people who are a burden on good, upstanding citizens like you and me? We certainly wouldn't want the lazy and stupid to be encouraged to breed! You know who I mean, the riff-raff of society, the poor, the huddled masses, the wretched refuse of our teeming shore.
It is a double standard to offer large corporations a very liberal economic deal while offering a limited set of liberal rights to the workers, for example, the right to unionize. Unless there is economic pressure on companies to improve working conditions, there will be economic pressure to worsen working conditions as competition squeezes the company's bottom line.
You assertion that they are better off that if there were no sweatshops rings hollow, because you are only making a comparison between daily wages. If they were making $0.50 a day and now they are making $1 a day, that's better, right? No, not really. At what rate does their income grow? What effect does the sweatshop environment have on the average life expectancy, and therefore total lifetime income? What if it is necessary for workers to live close to the factory in crowded living quarters without adequate sanitation, resulting in the spread of disease? What if moving away from a traditional agricultural base worsens their diet, making them more susceptible to malnutrition? Moving away from an agricultural base also prevents parents from teaching their children to be self-sufficient and live off the land. Instead, all of their descendents are dependent on the whims of the factory owners, who may decide to shut it down when it stops becoming profitable, and since all the agricultural knowledge is lost, they have nothing to fall back on.
The other fallacy about your "step-up" theory is that it assumes that factory workers are able to make sound economic choices in the first place. These people may have little or no education and be unable to weigh the long-term risks and losses against the short-term gains. Would they know, for example, that the changes in their diet would shorten their lifespan and weigh that information when choosing to go work in a sweatshop?
It could go the other way, of course. Sweatshop work could provide vast income benefits, larger life expectancy and so on, but if you are trying to justify sweatshop labor, you need to show all of the benefits, not just a simple comparison between daily wages.
...user interface issues should not be solved with the most CREATIVE solutions, but rather with the most PEDESTRIAN solutions.
Not really. The majority of UIs out there are plain awful, so the most pedestrian solution is usually a very bad one. Because each application presents different information, different types of information, different levels of detail, differently-sized data sets and different kinds of end users, each UI should be creatively designed to accomodate all of this variability. If you are saying that people shouldn't re-invent the wheel I agree, but that is not the same as saying that they shouldn't be creative, any more than saying people shouldn't write perl scripts in assembly takes the creativity out of that.
Not re-inventing the wheel doesn't mean that creativity is out, only that things that work should not be changed. Unfortunately, people are accustomed to awful UI design, but what works for them is almost incomprehensible to a new user. In most cases, I think you gain more users than you lose by using good, creative UI that fits well with people's most natural way of interacting with data, and doesn't force them to interact in ways that are only natural to a computer.
There was no disagreement that Hitler's expansionist ambitions were a threat to Europe. The isolationists just didn't want to get involved in what they saw as a European conflict. Saddam demonstrated that he was a threat to his neighbors when he invaded Kuwait, and there was a clear international action in response. In Iraq War II, the US failed to demonstrate that Saddam was a threat, invaded anyway on the assumption that we would find a smoking gun that would vindicate us in the end and in the process of failing to do that, created a new terrorist training ground while the people we "liberated" persist in seeing us as an occupying force. As a moral justification, the comparisons to Hitler's Germany are childishly simple, and to my mind, are evidence of the new levels of justification that some people will resort to, to ignore international law to pursue self-interest.
Except there was a very broad international consensus that Hitler was a threat - that's where the "World" in WW2 comes from. The current "coalition" is nothing but a fig-leaf for the Administration to hide behind so that they can disingenuously claim that the war in Iraq is not a unilateral action. No-one is fooled into thinking that this is not an American war. Compare the current coalition with the support for Gulf War I.
And before you claim that America doesn't need international support, the Bush Administration has been very careful to claim that the war does not violate the UN Charter and is not illegal according to international law. Yet conservatives seem to disagree with the Administration on this point, routinely claiming that we are not subject to international law at all. So which is it? Why does a conservative Congress refuse to bring to vote legislation that would withdraw us from the UN if it is such a threat to our security?
Which makes it sound like activists, NGOs, and other entities (like local PTAs, homeowners associations, and the like) are somehow not impacted by the same issues.
Publicly traded corporations have legal obligations towards transparency and disclosure. Since non-profits don't have investors, they have the right to keep their records private just like any individual does. Private corporations may voluntarily offer some level of openness to combat potential PR problems, but non-profits are generally beholden to their ideological base and are judged by their effectiveness in advocating for their causes. You often hear right-wingers disingenuously calling for transparency from organizations that they have no intention of supporting in the first place, which is really kind of pointless, because the average environmentalist places other things above immediate bang for his buck anyway. That's practically the definition of environmentalism.
...running an ethical business is somehow a new invention of the anti-corporate camp, which they've strong-armed onto an unwilling business sector.
That's not necessarily an insane view point. Publicly owned corporations are legally obliged to maximize revenue for their stockholders. If its cheaper to screw your customers and stop them from finding out about it by controlling the media or by preventing them from seeking legal remedies, then why would a purely profit driven entity not try to do those things? The fear of exposure and threatening their bottom line is the only thing they understand.
In a highly competitive economy, corporations are under tremendous pressure to survive and there is plenty of legitimate concern that they will end up cutting a few ethical corners here and there. After all, the alternative is to go out of business! So ethical guidelines are rolled back just a bit, just enough to get us through this tight spot in the market. As time passes, it becomes the norm and when it comes time to tighten the belt again, another ethical lapse takes place, nothing big, you wouldn't even notice it, but it too becomes the norm. Bureaucratic organizations have a tendency to diffuse responsibility over many departments and individuals. There's no one person who suddenly decides that they are going to screw the consumer, they are just trying to get by, trying to not lose their job, but the result of those collective actions can be very different from any individual's good intentions and hard-working diligence. There's no need to demonize the employees or even the management, because "evil" corporations are the collection of a million seemingly insignificant actions made over time. The leadership may lose focus and be unable to see the forest for the trees, with sometimes damaging results. Its like that poem that starts, "For want of a nail, a shoe was lost..."
Are you implying that Slashdot doesn't like Microsoft? Wow, thanks for the insights.
When Microsoft do good things, this is the reaction you get. There are a couple of knee-jerk anti-MS bashers, a majority of pragmatic posts that judge the event on its merits, and then just for balance, a couple of guys like you who like to talk about the handful of mindless anti-MS posts and make equally mindless generalizations.
The only way it would be economically feasible to pay the same for less work is if that work was more productive, i.e. you do the same work in 30 hours that was previously done in 40.
This applies to manual labor like assembly line work, but is not very useful for knowledge workers. For one thing, you are assuming that a 25% decrease in time on the job produces an equivalent decrease in output. While this is true at a steel mill, this is clearly not the case at companies like Google, who encourage their workers to spend 12.5% of their time on personal projects. This is not just a perk, they aren't just saying "Work for us for 4 days, get the 5th day free!" Its more like a maintenance schedule for equipment - rotating a fleet of vehicles to make sure they get proper care and regular tune-ups is far more profitable than driving them everyday until they break, and when human brains are your primary business tools, the same guidelines apply but with the added benefit that regular maintenance of the brain consistently upgrades its usefulness.
Despite the recent focus that knowledge workers have received, I'm convinced that companies are still stuck in old ways of managing them, leading to inefficiencies in the economy.
Oh yeah? Want to compare state budgets? California comes first, then Texas. Texas isn't in the northeast, is it now? So logically the northeast must be leeching off California and Texas.
So wait... you think that state budgets get all of their money from federal tax dollars? Hate to break it you, but it doesn't work that way. Sure, state budgets get some federal money. Let's look at some numbers...
The books present evolution (a counter-religious theory) as fact
The only problem here is that evolution only violates certain Christian religious teachings, so putting anti-evolution stickers on science books gives special treatment to those denominations that other Christian and non-Christian religions don't enjoy.
If you wanted to clear up that little constitutional issue, you could mandate that school curricula include all the teachings from all religions where they differ from the scientific mainstream, but would Creationists be willing to have intelligent design, evolution and all the various other creation stories taught side by side? Somehow, I doubt it.
Why do you insist on only telling the politically correct version of history? Why not tell the whole truth? The CIA also supported a large number of fascist dictators, paramilitary organizations, torturers, assassinations and genocide in the Third World. In accordance with the law of unintented consequences, this helped bring power to Islamic fundamentalists in Iran.
Some argue that the end justifies the means, that these atrocities are necessary in the effort to promote freedom and democracy. Unfortunately, we aren't promoting freedom, we are promoting whatever fascist regime best suits our economic interests. Furthermore, if these actions are morally justified, our elected leaders should have no difficulty demonstrating this to the American people and being held accountable for them.
I can understand that you'd want to avoid too much passive stuff like TV, but it seems to me that computers are tools that are used to make things in the world. I guess I'm not sure what distinction you are making between computers and other tools, such that computer inhibit learning to think. I can see how you'd want to avoid doing too much button pushing, but then you'd want to avoid too much hand-writing and finger painting too, so again, that doesn't seem computer-specific.
Slashdot Mirror
By Bush's Department of Justice? At the request of the CIA?
"Nevertheless, the data seem to suggest notable effects of the month/season of birth on the length of a woman's fertile life...The next phase of the research was seeing whether the season of birth of the women in the study influenced their psychological profile -- affecting their susceptibility to conditions such as anxiety and depression, for example. 'Results so far seem promising.'"
The effect is far from being conclusively proven, but if you discard the traditional astrological mechanism that the planets cause certain personalities instead of simply being correlated with them, its a plausible, logical hypothesis.
Ok, which is it? Are celebrities boring the public or fascinating the public with their poorly-informed opinion? It can't be both. People are endlessly fascinated with celebrities, which is why they get coverage. Now, if you were saying that's a bad thing overall, I would agree with you, but celebrities talk about a lot of things that they like or dislike. To single out their political views for scorn while ignoring other expressions of preference or belief on literature, music or fashion smacks of a political agenda. Political speech is and should be the most strongly protected form of speech. If you are concerned about the ill effects of celebrity worship, it would be wise to cast a wider net instead of only making an issue of it when politics is involved.
The other issue I have is that it is only left-wing celebrities that are, yes, targetted. There are numerous right-wing celebrities such as Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter who criticize Hollywood celebrities for essentially doing what right-wing celebrities do everyday. The hypocrisy is sickening. As far as using PR to manufacture controversy to sell celebrity products, there are far worse examples than Hollywood, and the fact that they are ignored is highly suspicious. The same goes for South Park's Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who routinely suggest that left-wing celebrities have no right to their opinions, while putting out a movie like Team America, which is basically a movie-length essay on US foreign policy. Or maybe they are an exception because as long as you are using puppets and satire, its OK for them to make claims about subjects that they know nothing about.
Yeah yeah, whatever. The real whiners are the people who constantly complain about it because they are basically upset that people pay attention to celebrities who happen to have the "wrong" viewpoints. That's all it is. Celebrities get more publicity than God, but you are threatened by their opinions, so you try to shut them up. Celebrities and their fans are free to talk about whatever viewpoint they please, or boycott whoever please, but who is telling who to shut up here? I agree that celebrities in the public eye should avoid thoughtlessly saying intemperate things and offending people, but that's not the issue here. Celebrities are being targetted for their political opinions, not for their lack of public decorum.
I thought that the implication of that question to WW was particularly offensive. Some people are so narrow-minded that they can't believe that someone could have a liberal viewpoint without imagining that some secretive cabal of Hollywood Jews coerces people to, I don't know, not hate gay people or something.
This is technically true. The discussion went on in the DoD:
Then they started setting up the databases, designing the draft cards, started putting out the call for draft board volunteers, and hired Widmeyer Communications to "secure compliance and... mold public opinion" to support it.
Rumsfeld employs classic Bush Administration spin tactics by changing the subject, arguing that the Administration has never considered bringing back the Vietnam-era draft, which is true. But the substance of the claim is that a Skills draft will be instituted, which Rumsfeld cleverly avoids by talking about something completely different.
Where I come from, this is called lying.
The reason its an overstatement is because the current podcasting 'revolution' is happening several years after the real revolution. This is more like new internet users re-discovering something that people have been doing for years and giving it a new, Apple-centric name. In fact, there are people called DJs who put music together (professionals, semi-professionals or amateurs) into a single, downloadable form and release it on the web. Go to any DJ website, and you will be innundated with mixes, mostly made up of tracks so rare, that only a few thousand copies are ever made, mainly on vinyl. There's also an old and healthy community of radio show sharing online - this site collects tracklistings of Essential Mixes going back to 1993, most of which can be found semi-legally on your favorite p2p program. Wrapping it all up in an RSS feed is cool, but not a revolution - that happened years ago.
Mac users are getting notorious for calling revolutions on things that have been on the PC for years, like GarageBand. Sound cards came bundled with similar software as early as 1996, but that didn't stop people from claiming that Apple was going to revolutionize music-making by bringing the technology to the average user.
I would like to be, since its illegal. But this administration? No, not surprised at all.
I think you are suggesting far too much latitude. How easy it is to justify our inhumanity to each other by imagining that those acts are the necessary response to an aggressor. A bully can produce any number of reasons why his victims deserved what they got.
I believe that its never acceptable to deny someone human dignity, no matter what the conditions, a principle that extends to how you treat other people and how you treat yourself - i.e. to permit someone to treat you without dignity is morally equivalent to permitting that treatment for others. If someone incites you to assert your own dignity which causes a denial of their dignity, then they are responsible for both actions, such as if someone purposely stepped on your toes and you responded by pushing them off.
In such a situation, all of the actions that you take to restore your dignity are morally acceptable, but everything beyond that is immoral. Therefore, the impulse to retaliate and cause the attacker to experience the same humiliation that you received is immoral. Causing the attacker to be humiliated may be satisfying to the attackee, but goes far beyond restoring dignity and into punishment and disincentives and it is unjust for an attackee to dispense his idea of justice since the satisfaction of revenge would be something very much like a material benefit. A disinterested party is the proper dispenser of justice, who should restore the plaintiff's dignity if possible. But since denying an individual's dignity also strikes a blow against the community as a whole, it is just for the attacker to make additional reparations to the community itself in the form of incarceration, fines, community service, etc.
That's a load of crap. What do you think the end result would be if every open source app decided to do the same? Quite frankly, its disgusting that a GPL'd project would go out and piss all over the very commons that it depends on for its success, especially after all of the blog community's efforts to combat just these sorts of abuses. To have one of our own aid the enemy is unforgivable. I am furious, and I will not be placated by whimpering about "Matt's a nice guy" or "He needed the money!"
Its very seldom that these things happen, but when they do, we have an obligation to object and call the guilty parties to account for their actions. While harsh, boycotting WordPress and forking the code is an option that's available. Or less harsh, but more amusing, lock Matt in a room with Richard Stallman for a week.
"OMG! LMAO!!! Every1 nos that! lol! ttfn! cya!"
OMG, TTFN, CYA are legitimate acronyms for a common phrases and LMAO and LOL express actions which are difficult to express otherwise in words. But 'Every1' for 'everyone' and 'nos' for 'knows' are slow-typer words. I can type around 60-80 WPM (probably typical among slashdotters), and even if I was as accurate with the 1 key as I am typing out 'one', I would still only be saving a fraction of a second at the most. Same with 'nos'. On the other hand, if I had to hunt-and-peck, using as few characters as possible would be the way to optimize my time.
This phenomenon is more exaggerated with cellphone text messages. Because I am fast and know how to use predictive text, I can be as verbose as I please. With predictive text, I can type out 'Everyone' with 8 key presses, but for someone who doesn't know how to use it, it would take you 20 key presses. Shortening it to 'evry1' brings it down to 12 keys.
Generally, I think that as people's typing skills improve, their use of 'netspeak' lessens dramatically. The word 'netspeak' itself is a misnomer, since it mainly signifies the way new, inexperienced users communicate. Experienced users may use dramatic abbreviations in specific venues where conciseness is valued, such as in fast-moving multiplayer games, but I think its mainly new users. As such, I move we distinguish between 'n3tspeak' and 'n00bspeak'.
Peter Jennings: I read an article coming up here on Firefox...
BillG: COMPETITORS COMPETITORS COMPETITORS COMPETITORS!!!! See? We have competitors now god damn it, so get off my back!
Yes. I can definitely see how society would be better off with mandatory abortions. In fact, why not simply sterilize people who are a burden on good, upstanding citizens like you and me? We certainly wouldn't want the lazy and stupid to be encouraged to breed! You know who I mean, the riff-raff of society, the poor, the huddled masses, the wretched refuse of our teeming shore.
You assertion that they are better off that if there were no sweatshops rings hollow, because you are only making a comparison between daily wages. If they were making $0.50 a day and now they are making $1 a day, that's better, right? No, not really. At what rate does their income grow? What effect does the sweatshop environment have on the average life expectancy, and therefore total lifetime income? What if it is necessary for workers to live close to the factory in crowded living quarters without adequate sanitation, resulting in the spread of disease? What if moving away from a traditional agricultural base worsens their diet, making them more susceptible to malnutrition? Moving away from an agricultural base also prevents parents from teaching their children to be self-sufficient and live off the land. Instead, all of their descendents are dependent on the whims of the factory owners, who may decide to shut it down when it stops becoming profitable, and since all the agricultural knowledge is lost, they have nothing to fall back on.
The other fallacy about your "step-up" theory is that it assumes that factory workers are able to make sound economic choices in the first place. These people may have little or no education and be unable to weigh the long-term risks and losses against the short-term gains. Would they know, for example, that the changes in their diet would shorten their lifespan and weigh that information when choosing to go work in a sweatshop?
It could go the other way, of course. Sweatshop work could provide vast income benefits, larger life expectancy and so on, but if you are trying to justify sweatshop labor, you need to show all of the benefits, not just a simple comparison between daily wages.
Not really. The majority of UIs out there are plain awful, so the most pedestrian solution is usually a very bad one. Because each application presents different information, different types of information, different levels of detail, differently-sized data sets and different kinds of end users, each UI should be creatively designed to accomodate all of this variability. If you are saying that people shouldn't re-invent the wheel I agree, but that is not the same as saying that they shouldn't be creative, any more than saying people shouldn't write perl scripts in assembly takes the creativity out of that.
Not re-inventing the wheel doesn't mean that creativity is out, only that things that work should not be changed. Unfortunately, people are accustomed to awful UI design, but what works for them is almost incomprehensible to a new user. In most cases, I think you gain more users than you lose by using good, creative UI that fits well with people's most natural way of interacting with data, and doesn't force them to interact in ways that are only natural to a computer.
There was no disagreement that Hitler's expansionist ambitions were a threat to Europe. The isolationists just didn't want to get involved in what they saw as a European conflict. Saddam demonstrated that he was a threat to his neighbors when he invaded Kuwait, and there was a clear international action in response. In Iraq War II, the US failed to demonstrate that Saddam was a threat, invaded anyway on the assumption that we would find a smoking gun that would vindicate us in the end and in the process of failing to do that, created a new terrorist training ground while the people we "liberated" persist in seeing us as an occupying force. As a moral justification, the comparisons to Hitler's Germany are childishly simple, and to my mind, are evidence of the new levels of justification that some people will resort to, to ignore international law to pursue self-interest.
And before you claim that America doesn't need international support, the Bush Administration has been very careful to claim that the war does not violate the UN Charter and is not illegal according to international law. Yet conservatives seem to disagree with the Administration on this point, routinely claiming that we are not subject to international law at all. So which is it? Why does a conservative Congress refuse to bring to vote legislation that would withdraw us from the UN if it is such a threat to our security?
Publicly traded corporations have legal obligations towards transparency and disclosure. Since non-profits don't have investors, they have the right to keep their records private just like any individual does. Private corporations may voluntarily offer some level of openness to combat potential PR problems, but non-profits are generally beholden to their ideological base and are judged by their effectiveness in advocating for their causes. You often hear right-wingers disingenuously calling for transparency from organizations that they have no intention of supporting in the first place, which is really kind of pointless, because the average environmentalist places other things above immediate bang for his buck anyway. That's practically the definition of environmentalism.
That's not necessarily an insane view point. Publicly owned corporations are legally obliged to maximize revenue for their stockholders. If its cheaper to screw your customers and stop them from finding out about it by controlling the media or by preventing them from seeking legal remedies, then why would a purely profit driven entity not try to do those things? The fear of exposure and threatening their bottom line is the only thing they understand.
In a highly competitive economy, corporations are under tremendous pressure to survive and there is plenty of legitimate concern that they will end up cutting a few ethical corners here and there. After all, the alternative is to go out of business! So ethical guidelines are rolled back just a bit, just enough to get us through this tight spot in the market. As time passes, it becomes the norm and when it comes time to tighten the belt again, another ethical lapse takes place, nothing big, you wouldn't even notice it, but it too becomes the norm. Bureaucratic organizations have a tendency to diffuse responsibility over many departments and individuals. There's no one person who suddenly decides that they are going to screw the consumer, they are just trying to get by, trying to not lose their job, but the result of those collective actions can be very different from any individual's good intentions and hard-working diligence. There's no need to demonize the employees or even the management, because "evil" corporations are the collection of a million seemingly insignificant actions made over time. The leadership may lose focus and be unable to see the forest for the trees, with sometimes damaging results. Its like that poem that starts, "For want of a nail, a shoe was lost..."
When Microsoft do good things, this is the reaction you get. There are a couple of knee-jerk anti-MS bashers, a majority of pragmatic posts that judge the event on its merits, and then just for balance, a couple of guys like you who like to talk about the handful of mindless anti-MS posts and make equally mindless generalizations.
This applies to manual labor like assembly line work, but is not very useful for knowledge workers. For one thing, you are assuming that a 25% decrease in time on the job produces an equivalent decrease in output. While this is true at a steel mill, this is clearly not the case at companies like Google, who encourage their workers to spend 12.5% of their time on personal projects. This is not just a perk, they aren't just saying "Work for us for 4 days, get the 5th day free!" Its more like a maintenance schedule for equipment - rotating a fleet of vehicles to make sure they get proper care and regular tune-ups is far more profitable than driving them everyday until they break, and when human brains are your primary business tools, the same guidelines apply but with the added benefit that regular maintenance of the brain consistently upgrades its usefulness.
Despite the recent focus that knowledge workers have received, I'm convinced that companies are still stuck in old ways of managing them, leading to inefficiencies in the economy.
So wait... you think that state budgets get all of their money from federal tax dollars? Hate to break it you, but it doesn't work that way. Sure, state budgets get some federal money. Let's look at some numbers...
The only problem here is that evolution only violates certain Christian religious teachings, so putting anti-evolution stickers on science books gives special treatment to those denominations that other Christian and non-Christian religions don't enjoy.
If you wanted to clear up that little constitutional issue, you could mandate that school curricula include all the teachings from all religions where they differ from the scientific mainstream, but would Creationists be willing to have intelligent design, evolution and all the various other creation stories taught side by side? Somehow, I doubt it.
Some argue that the end justifies the means, that these atrocities are necessary in the effort to promote freedom and democracy. Unfortunately, we aren't promoting freedom, we are promoting whatever fascist regime best suits our economic interests. Furthermore, if these actions are morally justified, our elected leaders should have no difficulty demonstrating this to the American people and being held accountable for them.
Er... you know that Slashdot is a blog, right?
I can understand that you'd want to avoid too much passive stuff like TV, but it seems to me that computers are tools that are used to make things in the world. I guess I'm not sure what distinction you are making between computers and other tools, such that computer inhibit learning to think. I can see how you'd want to avoid doing too much button pushing, but then you'd want to avoid too much hand-writing and finger painting too, so again, that doesn't seem computer-specific.
In french.