That's the conclusion I've been forced to in my experience of talking to my fellow Americans. Having been educated in England (military brat) I taught myself how the American system of government is supposed to work, and I got a handle on it pretty quick. My friends who were educated here in America, who are mostly old enough to have taken mandatory civics classes in high school, don't know anything about it - not what the branches are, nor how many Senators each State gets or how the number of Members of Congress is determined, nor how long their terms are, nor what the difference between a Bill and a law is (much less how one becomes the other). The Electoral College came as an deep surprise to most in 2000/2004.
Some of them are beginning to grasp that an informed electorate is necessary to make it work, and that it actually matters whether they participate.* The barrier then is helping them remember whether George W. Bush (or name your politician) is a Republican or a Democrat, or better yet actually tracking issues and results. It's a hard slog, but I've directly raised the awareness of maybe a dozen people to the point where they actually pay a little attention, and they're talking with wives and family, etc.
Maybe high school kids just aren't in a condition or stage of life to take this stuff in, but it can be picked up at any age, if the will to do it is there.
* The most effective argument seems to be to point out to people that a good third or more of their paycheck is being taken from them and spent on their behalf, and they are missing the opportunity to exercise even an minimal influence on that process, the people who do it and where the money goes. Any individual person can only have a tiny influence, but that's the difference between being a minor actor with a miniscule input and being a completely abject slave to the powers that be.
True, only dreamers get behind idealistic reasons for doing things, but we're already at the point where upper middle class individuals can own private airplanes, for example, not to mention command computing power which the entire world couldn't muster a generation ago. Rich individuals are already doing privately funded space exploration.
What kind of resources will a motivated dreamer be able to command a century from now?
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
Hawking thinks it is possible; he's definitely distinguished, and he's getting on a bit.
In my military training school I was doing very well and decided to test a rumor I had heard, so I deliberately answered every question incorrectly. Lo and behold, I was awarded a score of 100 for my efforts!:)
The control tower is already a butt-obvious target for terrorism. I would hope there are already serious security measures in place there. Then again, both terrorists and counter-terrorists seem to lack imagination to a remarkable degree; I guess that explains this program.
Herb Silverman, founder & President of Secular Humanists of the low Country, got this reversed in SC.
From his bio: "In 1990, a colleague pointed out that atheists were ineligible to hold public office in South Carolina. After an eight-year battle, Herb won a unanimous decision in the South Carolina Supreme Court, which struck down the religious test requirement for holding public office."
The team of Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and sometimes Stephen Barnes have produced several books/series which intelligently use ecological themes.
"Legacy of Heorot" and "Beowulf's Children" (Niven, Pournelle, Barnes) have as their prime villain (villain being defined as an entity whose aims clash with those of the humans) the grendels, a creature native to the planet a colonizing starship has reached. The colonists very sensibly initially occupy a single island which has relatively little native life on it due to a recent natural catastrophe; trouble arises when they become overconfident of their understanding of the local ecology, failing to realize that grendels act as their own alpha predators. By killing the local grendel they have ensured that *all* the local samlon, which would normally have been predated down to what might have been nuisance levels, will mature into grendels... A nice side issue is that one reason for the human failure to see the problem is that the best ecological experts have suffered "ice on the mind", a form of brain damage caused by expanding ice crystals in the brain during their arteficial hibernation - more grist for a biology class.
"The Mote in God's Eye" and "The Gripping Hand" (Niven, Pournelle) explore a world wherein a quirk of biology curses the intelligent aliens with perpetual population explosion, and the resultant atomic wars, runaway pollution and intense resource deficit only make the Darwinian struggle more acute; by the time humans come into contact with them, the Moties are individually and in small kin-groups amazingly more capable than Homo sapiens, but at the same time they are crippled by an inability to see beyond their local self-interest. The physics of the series allows two principal Just-Accept-It items, an instantaneous-jump Faster-Than-Light drive and a universally-absorbent energy field, but even here there are credible limitations on the technoloy; Alderson drives can only jump between points of equal stellar flux, and Langston Fields eventually must dissipate the energy they absorb. What really makes the series especially suitable for your friend's purposes is that the authors' examination of how deep and subtle the effects of breeding patterns on intelligent creatures, including their effect on ethics, has not been equalled in any other SF series I know of.
"Footfall" (Niven, Pournelle) is another First Contact novel, and despite the slight dating afforded by its Cold War milieu still easily one of the best (I like to think of it as an Alternate History in which the USSR survived longer than it did AND we were visited by aliens). As in the first series, no liberties whatsoever have been taken with physics - no FTL drive, nor any FTK communication. As in the second, the best part of the book is seeing how the biological origins of the aliens (and the humans!) informs their thinking, language, decision making, ethics, and of course how they misunderstand each other. The Traveler Fithp are herd animals, you see, and that has all kinds of consequences; for example, when they accept surrender thay think the whole herd has surrendered. What we call individualists they call rogues, i.e. insane, and they are not at all prepared to deal with a race where rogues approach being the norm; a resistance by a few humans is seen as a betrayal by the whole populace. The misunderstandings span large and small. For example, they *really* believe in law and order, including one of the characteristics they (nominally) share with us - they mate for life! It's really a good read, full of fast-paced action as well as some solid philosohical meat.
It's a little unclear whether you are only looking for SF based on biological themes or more general science is good; in either case Niven is the powerhouse of this team, and his solo work abounds with insight into physics (especially astrophysics) and ecology. The Ringworld series ("Ringworld", "The Ringworld Engineers", "Ringworld Throne" and "Ringworld's Children") are mostly cited for the physics of the Rin
Ah... nothing? I could easily see them marketing a complete solution as an add-on. You know, much as you can presently buy a ready-made PC solution from several manufacturers, if you're willing to pay a bit to avoid the hassle of rolling your own.
In any case, if MythTV is a real bitch to configure in PCs, why do you think that it will eventually be any better in the PS3?
Duh... how about a known hardware configuration? PCs have bajillions of possible hardware configurations, different video cards, motherboards, memory architechtures, therefore the software configure is a pain to match up. PS3s have two hardware configurations, which are almost identical, so there aren't a lot of choices to make in the software configuration.
It is not like Sony willl be sharing their precious trade secrets with a bunch of "hippies".
OK, at this point all I can say is: WTF are you talking about?
That's right. It also isn't "piracy" which is armed robbery at sea. You'd think the FBI, as a law enforcement agency, would know that, but I still see "FBI Anti-Piracy Notice" at the beginning of my DVDs. Grrr...
Yes, "cause" often gets unconsciously limited to "sole and necessary cause" I think; that's a source of much confusion. It's a good example of why the phrase "that's just semantics" is foolish; if you don't have a grasp on the semantics then you don't know what you're talking about, literally!:)
Good. It's the single most important field for understanding and communication.
Specifically, I asked whether it was true that the existence of someone with lung cancer who did not smoke was evidence that smoking did not cause cancer.
The existence of someone with lung cancer who did not smoke is evidence that smoking is not a necessary precondition for contracting lung cancer. That doesn't prevent it from being a sufficient condition.
And would you mind to tell the Grand Jury for how long the accused Mr. Bush has been in office at that time?
Long enough to downgrade counterterrorism from a high-priority 'principals' function to a low-priority 'deputies' function, deny counterterrorism funding requests in favor of a (plainly unworkable) ballistic missile defense, terminate a program to monitor Al-Qaeda suspects in the US, and ignore both a July warning that al Qaeda planned to "use airliners as missiles" and an August report that bin Laden was "Determined to Strike in US" in a plot expected to "include the hijacking of an American airplane".
"A conservative is a liberal who's been mugged", yes, but "a liberal is a conservative who's just been arrested".
"On 9/11 our country was mugged" by terrorists, but now we're learning now what it is to be searched and wiretapped without probable cause, arrested without charges, and detained without legal representation.
I'm hoping that some of these fear-created conservatives will flip over to being fear-created liberals before it's too late.
IANAS, but obviously the unknown author has never once attempted to herd sheep of even natural intellligence. Ask any actual working shepherds whether they'd prefer their sheep were a bit smarter; there should be a happy medium between sheep who plot successful revolutions and ones who casually wander over the edges of cliffs!;)
If you did reply seriously, great. I now know that you are 22 years old, not 18.
What that probably indicates is that Zweideutig is not in fact Sheyenne York but chose to pretend that s/he is, after a little sloppy research, rather than post true details.
(The CAPTCHA word for this post is "furtive" - is Slashdot getting cute with the word selection?:)
... who told me that only one other customer had called her to complain... I'm cancelling my phone service w/AT&T and I will let them know exactly why... if enough people cancel in disgust, who knows, maybe they'll get the message.
If your provider isn't one of the four named then it would be a good idea to let them know that you're concerned about it too.
I emailed the Corporate Commuications veep of my cell phone provider, SunCom, to ask whether they had been asked to turn over my records and if so what their response had been. I recieved a phone call back and was told that they couldn't comment on whether they'd received such a request but that they would not turn over such records without a search warrant.
I think someone is trolling, or else someone needs to pay attention and think a bit. If the former, proceed to congratulating yourself for 'winning' your peurile little game; I really don't give a rat's ass.
Assuming you were serious:
Even taking only the single sentence you quoted, bereft of context, the grandparent still doesn't take the position you ascribe. Far from claiming that "there is no terrorist threat" the GP specifically acknowledges that a "chance of falling prey to a terrorist act" would still exist.
S/he simply expresses doubt that the chance of dying in a terrorist act would be as high as that of dying in a car accident, even had nothing been done. Read it again, it's right there in the sentence you quoted.
Car accidents have killed more than 3000 people and arguably may cause a chronic drag on the economy equal or worse than the acute impact of losing the Trade Towers. The rest of your comparisons relate not to the actual damage done but to the over-wrought perception of the threat, which is precisely what the GP is positing to be the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the conclusion I've been forced to in my experience of talking to my fellow Americans. Having been educated in England (military brat) I taught myself how the American system of government is supposed to work, and I got a handle on it pretty quick. My friends who were educated here in America, who are mostly old enough to have taken mandatory civics classes in high school, don't know anything about it - not what the branches are, nor how many Senators each State gets or how the number of Members of Congress is determined, nor how long their terms are, nor what the difference between a Bill and a law is (much less how one becomes the other). The Electoral College came as an deep surprise to most in 2000/2004.
Some of them are beginning to grasp that an informed electorate is necessary to make it work, and that it actually matters whether they participate.* The barrier then is helping them remember whether George W. Bush (or name your politician) is a Republican or a Democrat, or better yet actually tracking issues and results. It's a hard slog, but I've directly raised the awareness of maybe a dozen people to the point where they actually pay a little attention, and they're talking with wives and family, etc.
Maybe high school kids just aren't in a condition or stage of life to take this stuff in, but it can be picked up at any age, if the will to do it is there.
* The most effective argument seems to be to point out to people that a good third or more of their paycheck is being taken from them and spent on their behalf, and they are missing the opportunity to exercise even an minimal influence on that process, the people who do it and where the money goes. Any individual person can only have a tiny influence, but that's the difference between being a minor actor with a miniscule input and being a completely abject slave to the powers that be.
If a felon is one who commits a felony, you sir are an iron.
This:
[Y]ou know insulting the speaker always invalidates the facts he speaks.
coming right after this:
Clinton was an immoral slime ball with the frat boy charm that got him through.
would blow out the irony meter on anybody but a Neo-conservative fascist who is goose stepping over his fellow countrymen while saluting Fox News.
True, only dreamers get behind idealistic reasons for doing things, but we're already at the point where upper middle class individuals can own private airplanes, for example, not to mention command computing power which the entire world couldn't muster a generation ago. Rich individuals are already doing privately funded space exploration.
What kind of resources will a motivated dreamer be able to command a century from now?
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
Hawking thinks it is possible; he's definitely distinguished, and he's getting on a bit.
In my military training school I was doing very well and decided to test a rumor I had heard, so I deliberately answered every question incorrectly. Lo and behold, I was awarded a score of 100 for my efforts! :)
The control tower is already a butt-obvious target for terrorism. I would hope there are already serious security measures in place there. Then again, both terrorists and counter-terrorists seem to lack imagination to a remarkable degree; I guess that explains this program.
Herb Silverman, founder & President of Secular Humanists of the low Country, got this reversed in SC.
From his bio:
"In 1990, a colleague pointed out that atheists were ineligible to hold public office in South Carolina. After an eight-year battle, Herb won a unanimous decision in the South Carolina Supreme Court, which struck down the religious test requirement for holding public office."
Five hours and you had three schisms already?
That's giving Brianists* a run for their money!
*Followers/chasers of Brian of Nazareth, split into Sandalists and Gourdies in the first half hour.
The team of Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and sometimes Stephen Barnes have produced several books/series which intelligently use ecological themes.
"Legacy of Heorot" and "Beowulf's Children" (Niven, Pournelle, Barnes) have as their prime villain (villain being defined as an entity whose aims clash with those of the humans) the grendels, a creature native to the planet a colonizing starship has reached. The colonists very sensibly initially occupy a single island which has relatively little native life on it due to a recent natural catastrophe; trouble arises when they become overconfident of their understanding of the local ecology, failing to realize that grendels act as their own alpha predators. By killing the local grendel they have ensured that *all* the local samlon, which would normally have been predated down to what might have been nuisance levels, will mature into grendels... A nice side issue is that one reason for the human failure to see the problem is that the best ecological experts have suffered "ice on the mind", a form of brain damage caused by expanding ice crystals in the brain during their arteficial hibernation - more grist for a biology class.
"The Mote in God's Eye" and "The Gripping Hand" (Niven, Pournelle) explore a world wherein a quirk of biology curses the intelligent aliens with perpetual population explosion, and the resultant atomic wars, runaway pollution and intense resource deficit only make the Darwinian struggle more acute; by the time humans come into contact with them, the Moties are individually and in small kin-groups amazingly more capable than Homo sapiens, but at the same time they are crippled by an inability to see beyond their local self-interest. The physics of the series allows two principal Just-Accept-It items, an instantaneous-jump Faster-Than-Light drive and a universally-absorbent energy field, but even here there are credible limitations on the technoloy; Alderson drives can only jump between points of equal stellar flux, and Langston Fields eventually must dissipate the energy they absorb. What really makes the series especially suitable for your friend's purposes is that the authors' examination of how deep and subtle the effects of breeding patterns on intelligent creatures, including their effect on ethics, has not been equalled in any other SF series I know of.
"Footfall" (Niven, Pournelle) is another First Contact novel, and despite the slight dating afforded by its Cold War milieu still easily one of the best (I like to think of it as an Alternate History in which the USSR survived longer than it did AND we were visited by aliens). As in the first series, no liberties whatsoever have been taken with physics - no FTL drive, nor any FTK communication. As in the second, the best part of the book is seeing how the biological origins of the aliens (and the humans!) informs their thinking, language, decision making, ethics, and of course how they misunderstand each other. The Traveler Fithp are herd animals, you see, and that has all kinds of consequences; for example, when they accept surrender thay think the whole herd has surrendered. What we call individualists they call rogues, i.e. insane, and they are not at all prepared to deal with a race where rogues approach being the norm; a resistance by a few humans is seen as a betrayal by the whole populace. The misunderstandings span large and small. For example, they *really* believe in law and order, including one of the characteristics they (nominally) share with us - they mate for life! It's really a good read, full of fast-paced action as well as some solid philosohical meat.
It's a little unclear whether you are only looking for SF based on biological themes or more general science is good; in either case Niven is the powerhouse of this team, and his solo work abounds with insight into physics (especially astrophysics) and ecology. The Ringworld series ("Ringworld", "The Ringworld Engineers", "Ringworld Throne" and "Ringworld's Children") are mostly cited for the physics of the Rin
Ah... nothing? I could easily see them marketing a complete solution as an add-on. You know, much as you can presently buy a ready-made PC solution from several manufacturers, if you're willing to pay a bit to avoid the hassle of rolling your own.
In any case, if MythTV is a real bitch to configure in PCs, why do you think that it will eventually be any better in the PS3?
Duh... how about a known hardware configuration? PCs have bajillions of possible hardware configurations, different video cards, motherboards, memory architechtures, therefore the software configure is a pain to match up. PS3s have two hardware configurations, which are almost identical, so there aren't a lot of choices to make in the software configuration.
It is not like Sony willl be sharing their precious trade secrets with a bunch of "hippies".
OK, at this point all I can say is: WTF are you talking about?
That's right. It also isn't "piracy" which is armed robbery at sea. You'd think the FBI, as a law enforcement agency, would know that, but I still see "FBI Anti-Piracy Notice" at the beginning of my DVDs. Grrr...
All right, I'll buy often foolish rather than always foolish.
Yes, "cause" often gets unconsciously limited to "sole and necessary cause" I think; that's a source of much confusion. It's a good example of why the phrase "that's just semantics" is foolish; if you don't have a grasp on the semantics then you don't know what you're talking about, literally! :)
No, I'm not Rex.
Good. It's the single most important field for understanding and communication.
Specifically, I asked whether it was true that the existence of someone with lung cancer who did not smoke was evidence that smoking did not cause cancer.
The existence of someone with lung cancer who did not smoke is evidence that smoking is not a necessary precondition for contracting lung cancer. That doesn't prevent it from being a sufficient condition.
Why are you lying?
Because (s)he's trolling, and/or part of the 'backwash'.
Long enough to downgrade counterterrorism from a high-priority 'principals' function to a low-priority 'deputies' function, deny counterterrorism funding requests in favor of a (plainly unworkable) ballistic missile defense, terminate a program to monitor Al-Qaeda suspects in the US, and ignore both a July warning that al Qaeda planned to "use airliners as missiles" and an August report that bin Laden was "Determined to Strike in US" in a plot expected to "include the hijacking of an American airplane".
9/11 Commission report, it's a charming read.
Piggly Wiggly, a fairly big regional chain here in the Southeast, has offered Pay By Touch for well over a year.
"A conservative is a liberal who's been mugged", yes, but "a liberal is a conservative who's just been arrested".
"On 9/11 our country was mugged" by terrorists, but now we're learning now what it is to be searched and wiretapped without probable cause, arrested without charges, and detained without legal representation.
I'm hoping that some of these fear-created conservatives will flip over to being fear-created liberals before it's too late.
IANAS, but obviously the unknown author has never once attempted to herd sheep of even natural intellligence. Ask any actual working shepherds whether they'd prefer their sheep were a bit smarter; there should be a happy medium between sheep who plot successful revolutions and ones who casually wander over the edges of cliffs! ;)
If you did reply seriously, great. I now know that you are 22 years old, not 18.
:)
What that probably indicates is that Zweideutig is not in fact Sheyenne York but chose to pretend that s/he is, after a little sloppy research, rather than post true details.
(The CAPTCHA word for this post is "furtive" - is Slashdot getting cute with the word selection?
I'm cancelling my phone service w/AT&T and I will let them know exactly why
If your provider isn't one of the four named then it would be a good idea to let them know that you're concerned about it too.
I emailed the Corporate Commuications veep of my cell phone provider, SunCom, to ask whether they had been asked to turn over my records and if so what their response had been. I recieved a phone call back and was told that they couldn't comment on whether they'd received such a request but that they would not turn over such records without a search warrant.
Here's a pdf of the report, have at it:
http://www.missingkids.com/en_US/publications/NC6
Which would make the "others retained by the people" non-Constitutional rights.
Assuming you were serious:
Even taking only the single sentence you quoted, bereft of context, the grandparent still doesn't take the position you ascribe. Far from claiming that "there is no terrorist threat" the GP specifically acknowledges that a "chance of falling prey to a terrorist act" would still exist.
S/he simply expresses doubt that the chance of dying in a terrorist act would be as high as that of dying in a car accident, even had nothing been done. Read it again, it's right there in the sentence you quoted.
Car accidents have killed more than 3000 people and arguably may cause a chronic drag on the economy equal or worse than the acute impact of losing the Trade Towers. The rest of your comparisons relate not to the actual damage done but to the over-wrought perception of the threat, which is precisely what the GP is positing to be the problem.
Thank you sir! One good bastard deserves another, as they say (or should).