The main reason academic publishing is what it is is that in theory if something is published in a journal, they've gone through some sort of vetting project that says that the article is both useful and credible. That's where the publish-or-die rule for academics comes from: the idea is that if you're publishing stuff, you must be doing useful and credible research.
And it's worth mentioning that the journals most likely filter out a lot of cranks, quacks, and liars. They also may serve to highlight the work of less experienced academics who may not have much of a reputation (good or bad) who otherwise might easily be ignored by the experienced hands.
And as a self-confessed socialist, I'd much rather be in a discussion with an intellectually honest conservative or libertarian than I would with an idiotic socialist. Glad to know we agree on that.
When did it become fashionable to display such a stunted view of politics by saying that "liberals/conservatives say X"?
It's always been fashionable going back to at least the 1700's, but arguably has been hastened by the dominance of commercial television over other forms of communication. The trouble with TV is that if you can't say what you need to say in less than 20 seconds, you're too slow. TV shows do not generally go in depth, they don't challenge people when they pull straw man arguments (like what you just described) and other logical fallacies, and don't typically go on and say "Yesterday, Joe Schmoe stated ____, but our research staff checked on it and discovered that they were completely wrong." It's telling that when TV personalities flat-out lie on the air, it takes Jon Stewart, who isn't even a journalist, to publicly humiliate them for it (not atypical on the Daily Show - clip of talking head X saying that he never supported position Y, shortly followed by a clip of X declaring his support for Y).
Of course, this is an argument I use in favor of socialist media: As imperfect as they are, publicly funded broadcasters like PBS and the BBC tend to do much much more of the in-depth stuff. You might not agree with them, but they are at least focused on what's true and what's not rather than what opinions they want to put out.
Look at all the college graduates who can not find a decent job.
But of course! How else could you ensure that there was plenty of cheap highly-educated labor available? Without that, my hedge fund returns would be reduced a good 2-5%. And even better, these sorts of programs reduce the need to fund public education, giving me a significant reduction in those pesky property taxes on each of my 7 homes.
And it's not all bad: I used to have to hire illegal immigrants as my maid / personal masseuse. Now I can get a very nice beautiful Harvard-educated Japanese woman for the same price. She seemed pretty happy to be working at all, so everybody benefits from that arrangement.
He's nowhere near the best Republican: Abe Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower all come out way ahead of him. And all of those guys would be branded as complete and utter loonies in current US politics, especially their views on class, corporations and taxes. Heck, there's a good argument that Ronald Reagan wouldn't be accepted within the current Republican Party, because he allowed for some tax increases in the 1980's.
Or, you know, Dick Cheney's commission of what we considered war crimes when the Germans and Japanese did it in the 1940's. It's an open-and-shut case: We have video footage and transcripts of him telling the world all about the crimes he committed on national television.
There was 1 for-profit company, who just so happened to have financial ties to then-DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, who shoved the idea down the TSA's throat. These guys aren't even trying to hide the corruption anymore.
This is one of those things the free market already provides, with the help of numerous news organizations. One of the more useful is Politifact, but there are plenty of others.
Those who don't trust government sources of information won't trust this government agency any more than they trust the various government reports. And they shouldn't: The government source matters, but it should be corroborated by other sources.
I'm tired of religious despots. I'm fed up with tribes who circumcise infant girls. I'm real fucking annoyed with honor killings. I have come to the conclusion that there are some traditions and cultures that need to die out sooner rather than later, and I'm willing to apply the necessary explosives to make it happen.
I'm not willing to try to solve those problems with explosives when there are far better ways available. Compare, for instance, the conditions in Iraq (where heavy explosives were employed to oust a despot) to the conditions in Egypt (where a popular uprising ousted a despot): Things aren't perfect in Egypt, but you don't have thousands of people getting shot regularly. Similarly, if you want to go after female circumcision and honor killings, the best way to do that is to empower women to organize themselves and stand up against the men of their culture.
The basic method here is: 1. Give the people the knowledge that they're oppressed. That means getting Al Jazeera in there (because they regularly do investigative pieces on the leadership in that area), it means giving them the best Internet access you can, it means creating Radio Free Middle East, and it means Wikileaks. 2. Give the people a viable alternative to tolerating the oppression. There are lots of ways of doing that, but so far the most successful ones seem to be mass protests. It's far from a 100% success rate, but if they succeed they have the advantage of reducing the chance that the evil despot is replaced by another evil despot.
Unfortunately, as a judge I'm sure you're well aware that "disorderly conduct" is all too often a stand-in for "annoyed a police officer". Anyone with any kind of legal training knows that annoying a police officer is not a crime, but that doesn't mean you can't be arrested for it.
You are partially protected when it comes to libel: affected private citizens can sue you for it, but the government cannot bring criminal charges against you for it. It's solely a civil matter, not a criminal matter.
Free speech doesn't protect racist or sexist slurs.
Oh yes it does. For instance, in National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie the US Supreme Court ruled that the Nazis had the right to march through a predominently Jewish city. It's perfectly legal to call Hillary Clinton or Michelle Bachman (to pick a couple of random examples) a "cunt" or a "cracker" if you want to. And the various modern versions of the KKK can spew their rhetoric and have cross burnings all they like without government interference.
I'm not saying I approve of any of these, just that they are most definitely protected by free speech and assembly.
I’m getting tired of all this security at the airport. There’s too much of it. I’m tired of some fat chick with a double-digit IQ and a triple-digit income rootin’ around inside of my bag for no reason and never finding anything. Haven’t found anything yet. Haven’t found one bomb in one bag. And don’t tell me, “Well, the terrorists know their bags are going to be searched, so now they’re leaving their bombs at home.” There are no bombs! The whole thing is fuckin’ pointless.
And it’s completely without logic. There’s no logic at all. They’ll take away a gun, but let you keep a knife! (editor note: Not anymore) Well, what the fuck is that? In fact, there’s a whole list of lethal objects they will allow you to take on board. Theoretically, you could take a knife, an ice pick, a hatchet, a straight razor, a pair of scissors, a chain saw, six knitting needles, and a broken whiskey bottle, and the only thing they’d say to you is, “That bag has to fit all the way under the seat in front of you.”
And if you didn’t take a weapon on board, relax. After you’ve been flying for about an hour, they’re gonna bring you a knife and fork! They actually give you a fucking knife! It’s only a table knife, but you could kill a pilot with a table knife. If might take you a couple of minutes. Especially if he’s hefty. But you could get the job done. If you really wanted to kill the prick.
Shit, there are a lot of things you could use to kill a guy with. You could probably beat a guy to death with the Sunday New York Times. Or suppose you just had really big hands, couldn’t you strangle a flight attendant? Shit, you could probably strangle two of them, one with each hand. That is, if you were lucky enough to catch ‘em in that little kitchen area. Just before they break out the fuckin’ peanuts. But you could get the job done. If you really cared enough.
Actually, in this case it's safe to say this is probably bipartisan. Anytime the question at hand involves oppressing ordinary people, particularly at the behest of corporations, both parties are generally happy to go along with that. Google and Yahoo may complain about the cost to comply, so I'd expect some sort of amendment to compensate whichever third party is having to make changes to get rid of the links, but other than that I wouldn't be surprised if this went right through without too much debate.
The reason it got stalled the last time was that a few Senate Republicans were basically holding up all Senate business until they got what they wanted on a few specific and completely unrelated issues.
Having multiple login managers means for instance that your favorite KDM theme won't work in GDM or LightDM etc. It's not like they support some common theming standard.
If you really cared that much about your favorite KDM theme, though, you could do any of these things, in order of improvements to future interoperability: 1. Write a compatibility library to read any of the theme formats and provide the info KDM and GDM looks for in its themes, and then hook your DM of choice into it. 2. Write a conversion program to turn KDM themes into GDM themes (and possibly vice versa) 3. Use the artwork from your favorite KDM theme to create a GDM theme to your liking. 4. Run KDM and use it to log into Gnome or whatever your preferred desktop environment is.
In any of these scenarios, you could make your system do exactly what you wanted it to do. In some of these scenarios, if you give your code away you can give the same abilities to the rest of the world.
Compare that to Windows, where Microsoft designs its login screen for you and makes it difficult-to-impossible to change.
Well, the media may not be picking it up, but there's lots of environmentalist types complaining about the use of coal-fired plants too, due to the fact that it's one of the biggest sources of CO2 emissions contributing to global warming, and can turn the areas near where it's mined into wastelands.
The green folks are pretty clear on what they want to see: widespread use of wind and solar power.
If you like GDM, you can use it. This is free software (in both senses), and just because Ubuntu's main branch is going a particular direction doesn't mean you have to. If you want to be based off of Ubuntu, you could do a kubuntu-like fork. If you want to do something completely different, you can switch distros (e.g. I switched to ArchLinux because I didn't want all the eye candy and complexity of what Ubuntu was doing).
And if you're really not seeing the choices you like out there, you can always roll your own. I've done that too, it's time-consuming but not particularly difficult. And if you really like doing that, you can fairly easily set up your installs with a package manager, set up a repository, and all of a sudden you're well on your way to having your own distro.
As it stands, I'm interested to see what Ubuntu comes up with, but I don't equate them to desktop Linux. There are just too many good options out there for that.
We cannot simultaneously be a society that wants to share everything and keep everything secret.
There are 2 major differences between posting stuff on the web, and companies spying on you and selling that information: 1. Anything somebody posts up on the web for the world to see is something they (or at least somebody present at the time) chose to post. And we don't share everything: Somebody could post "I just got married to a wonderful lady!" and include a picture of the bride in her wedding dress, but not include her bra size or her credit score or the fact that they met in an S&M club.
2. When people give their information away, they are exchanging it for a service of some kind (e.g. hosting their video in a publicly accessible and searchable way). When companies spy on people, they are taking it with no compensation at all. Since this data has value (otherwise, you couldn't exchange it for services, nor could the company who collects it sell it or use it), the companies in question are basically stealing it.
So we're not a society that wants to "share everything", we're a society in which some people choose to share some things in exchange for some services. And we don't (necessarily) want to "keep everything secret", but we do want to have control over what's secret and what's not, and get something in exchange for what we choose to not keep secret.
Same here - I'm passionate about code reviews and unit tests. Seriously. Especially on the stuff I've written, but also for other people's code.
Unit testing is fun if you approach it with the right attitude: I'm going to explore a system and see how it behaves. Each test is a representation of the question "What should happen if I do this? What actually happens when I do it?" The first question is the joy of creating functional specs and design. The second question is the joy of experimenting.
I'm also passionate about code reviews because they're a fantastic teaching and discussion tool. You end up with conversations about "Why did you do things that way?" or "Have you thought about doing..." which makes it easy to educate developers on approaches that others are doing.
Slashdot Mirror
The main reason academic publishing is what it is is that in theory if something is published in a journal, they've gone through some sort of vetting project that says that the article is both useful and credible. That's where the publish-or-die rule for academics comes from: the idea is that if you're publishing stuff, you must be doing useful and credible research.
And it's worth mentioning that the journals most likely filter out a lot of cranks, quacks, and liars. They also may serve to highlight the work of less experienced academics who may not have much of a reputation (good or bad) who otherwise might easily be ignored by the experienced hands.
So how do you want to divy up the slaves?
Waddaya mean, just divy up the salves? Roll 1d8 - if it comes up a 1, you're a slave. Good luck!
And as a self-confessed socialist, I'd much rather be in a discussion with an intellectually honest conservative or libertarian than I would with an idiotic socialist. Glad to know we agree on that.
When did it become fashionable to display such a stunted view of politics by saying that "liberals/conservatives say X"?
It's always been fashionable going back to at least the 1700's, but arguably has been hastened by the dominance of commercial television over other forms of communication. The trouble with TV is that if you can't say what you need to say in less than 20 seconds, you're too slow. TV shows do not generally go in depth, they don't challenge people when they pull straw man arguments (like what you just described) and other logical fallacies, and don't typically go on and say "Yesterday, Joe Schmoe stated ____, but our research staff checked on it and discovered that they were completely wrong." It's telling that when TV personalities flat-out lie on the air, it takes Jon Stewart, who isn't even a journalist, to publicly humiliate them for it (not atypical on the Daily Show - clip of talking head X saying that he never supported position Y, shortly followed by a clip of X declaring his support for Y).
Of course, this is an argument I use in favor of socialist media: As imperfect as they are, publicly funded broadcasters like PBS and the BBC tend to do much much more of the in-depth stuff. You might not agree with them, but they are at least focused on what's true and what's not rather than what opinions they want to put out.
Look at all the college graduates who can not find a decent job.
But of course! How else could you ensure that there was plenty of cheap highly-educated labor available? Without that, my hedge fund returns would be reduced a good 2-5%. And even better, these sorts of programs reduce the need to fund public education, giving me a significant reduction in those pesky property taxes on each of my 7 homes.
And it's not all bad: I used to have to hire illegal immigrants as my maid / personal masseuse. Now I can get a very nice beautiful Harvard-educated Japanese woman for the same price. She seemed pretty happy to be working at all, so everybody benefits from that arrangement.
- Phil T. Rich, Esquire
Specifically, this scene.
Barack Obama - best Republican president so far.
He's nowhere near the best Republican: Abe Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower all come out way ahead of him. And all of those guys would be branded as complete and utter loonies in current US politics, especially their views on class, corporations and taxes. Heck, there's a good argument that Ronald Reagan wouldn't be accepted within the current Republican Party, because he allowed for some tax increases in the 1980's.
Or, you know, Dick Cheney's commission of what we considered war crimes when the Germans and Japanese did it in the 1940's. It's an open-and-shut case: We have video footage and transcripts of him telling the world all about the crimes he committed on national television.
Don't forget, though, we need to Look forward, not backward. And they hate us for our freedoms. It has nothing to do with committing crimes with impunity, killing children and civilians, or supporting dictators in their country.
There was 1 for-profit company, who just so happened to have financial ties to then-DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, who shoved the idea down the TSA's throat. These guys aren't even trying to hide the corruption anymore.
This is one of those things the free market already provides, with the help of numerous news organizations. One of the more useful is Politifact, but there are plenty of others.
Those who don't trust government sources of information won't trust this government agency any more than they trust the various government reports. And they shouldn't: The government source matters, but it should be corroborated by other sources.
I'm tired of religious despots. I'm fed up with tribes who circumcise infant girls. I'm real fucking annoyed with honor killings. I have come to the conclusion that there are some traditions and cultures that need to die out sooner rather than later, and I'm willing to apply the necessary explosives to make it happen.
I'm not willing to try to solve those problems with explosives when there are far better ways available. Compare, for instance, the conditions in Iraq (where heavy explosives were employed to oust a despot) to the conditions in Egypt (where a popular uprising ousted a despot): Things aren't perfect in Egypt, but you don't have thousands of people getting shot regularly. Similarly, if you want to go after female circumcision and honor killings, the best way to do that is to empower women to organize themselves and stand up against the men of their culture.
The basic method here is:
1. Give the people the knowledge that they're oppressed. That means getting Al Jazeera in there (because they regularly do investigative pieces on the leadership in that area), it means giving them the best Internet access you can, it means creating Radio Free Middle East, and it means Wikileaks.
2. Give the people a viable alternative to tolerating the oppression. There are lots of ways of doing that, but so far the most successful ones seem to be mass protests. It's far from a 100% success rate, but if they succeed they have the advantage of reducing the chance that the evil despot is replaced by another evil despot.
Or even worse, they'll be tuning in and somebody will spill beer on the broadcasting equipment.
Unfortunately, as a judge I'm sure you're well aware that "disorderly conduct" is all too often a stand-in for "annoyed a police officer". Anyone with any kind of legal training knows that annoying a police officer is not a crime, but that doesn't mean you can't be arrested for it.
You are partially protected when it comes to libel: affected private citizens can sue you for it, but the government cannot bring criminal charges against you for it. It's solely a civil matter, not a criminal matter.
Free speech doesn't protect racist or sexist slurs.
Oh yes it does. For instance, in National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie the US Supreme Court ruled that the Nazis had the right to march through a predominently Jewish city. It's perfectly legal to call Hillary Clinton or Michelle Bachman (to pick a couple of random examples) a "cunt" or a "cracker" if you want to. And the various modern versions of the KKK can spew their rhetoric and have cross burnings all they like without government interference.
I'm not saying I approve of any of these, just that they are most definitely protected by free speech and assembly.
George Carlin said it best, long before 9/11:
I’m getting tired of all this security at the airport. There’s too much of it. I’m tired of some fat chick with a double-digit IQ and a triple-digit income rootin’ around inside of my bag for no reason and never finding anything. Haven’t found anything yet. Haven’t found one bomb in one bag. And don’t tell me, “Well, the terrorists know their bags are going to be searched, so now they’re leaving their bombs at home.” There are no bombs! The whole thing is fuckin’ pointless.
And it’s completely without logic. There’s no logic at all. They’ll take away a gun, but let you keep a knife! (editor note: Not anymore) Well, what the fuck is that? In fact, there’s a whole list of lethal objects they will allow you to take on board. Theoretically, you could take a knife, an ice pick, a hatchet, a straight razor, a pair of scissors, a chain saw, six knitting needles, and a broken whiskey bottle, and the only thing they’d say to you is, “That bag has to fit all the way under the seat in front of you.”
And if you didn’t take a weapon on board, relax. After you’ve been flying for about an hour, they’re gonna bring you a knife and fork! They actually give you a fucking knife! It’s only a table knife, but you could kill a pilot with a table knife. If might take you a couple of minutes. Especially if he’s hefty. But you could get the job done. If you really wanted to kill the prick.
Shit, there are a lot of things you could use to kill a guy with. You could probably beat a guy to death with the Sunday New York Times. Or suppose you just had really big hands, couldn’t you strangle a flight attendant? Shit, you could probably strangle two of them, one with each hand. That is, if you were lucky enough to catch ‘em in that little kitchen area. Just before they break out the fuckin’ peanuts. But you could get the job done. If you really cared enough.
Actually, in this case it's safe to say this is probably bipartisan. Anytime the question at hand involves oppressing ordinary people, particularly at the behest of corporations, both parties are generally happy to go along with that. Google and Yahoo may complain about the cost to comply, so I'd expect some sort of amendment to compensate whichever third party is having to make changes to get rid of the links, but other than that I wouldn't be surprised if this went right through without too much debate.
The reason it got stalled the last time was that a few Senate Republicans were basically holding up all Senate business until they got what they wanted on a few specific and completely unrelated issues.
Having multiple login managers means for instance that your favorite KDM theme won't work in GDM or LightDM etc. It's not like they support some common theming standard.
If you really cared that much about your favorite KDM theme, though, you could do any of these things, in order of improvements to future interoperability:
1. Write a compatibility library to read any of the theme formats and provide the info KDM and GDM looks for in its themes, and then hook your DM of choice into it.
2. Write a conversion program to turn KDM themes into GDM themes (and possibly vice versa)
3. Use the artwork from your favorite KDM theme to create a GDM theme to your liking.
4. Run KDM and use it to log into Gnome or whatever your preferred desktop environment is.
In any of these scenarios, you could make your system do exactly what you wanted it to do. In some of these scenarios, if you give your code away you can give the same abilities to the rest of the world.
Compare that to Windows, where Microsoft designs its login screen for you and makes it difficult-to-impossible to change.
Well, the media may not be picking it up, but there's lots of environmentalist types complaining about the use of coal-fired plants too, due to the fact that it's one of the biggest sources of CO2 emissions contributing to global warming, and can turn the areas near where it's mined into wastelands.
The green folks are pretty clear on what they want to see: widespread use of wind and solar power.
If you like GDM, you can use it. This is free software (in both senses), and just because Ubuntu's main branch is going a particular direction doesn't mean you have to. If you want to be based off of Ubuntu, you could do a kubuntu-like fork. If you want to do something completely different, you can switch distros (e.g. I switched to ArchLinux because I didn't want all the eye candy and complexity of what Ubuntu was doing).
And if you're really not seeing the choices you like out there, you can always roll your own. I've done that too, it's time-consuming but not particularly difficult. And if you really like doing that, you can fairly easily set up your installs with a package manager, set up a repository, and all of a sudden you're well on your way to having your own distro.
As it stands, I'm interested to see what Ubuntu comes up with, but I don't equate them to desktop Linux. There are just too many good options out there for that.
We're getting another one of those aw-blah esspanyol sounds!
We cannot simultaneously be a society that wants to share everything and keep everything secret.
There are 2 major differences between posting stuff on the web, and companies spying on you and selling that information:
1. Anything somebody posts up on the web for the world to see is something they (or at least somebody present at the time) chose to post. And we don't share everything: Somebody could post "I just got married to a wonderful lady!" and include a picture of the bride in her wedding dress, but not include her bra size or her credit score or the fact that they met in an S&M club.
2. When people give their information away, they are exchanging it for a service of some kind (e.g. hosting their video in a publicly accessible and searchable way). When companies spy on people, they are taking it with no compensation at all. Since this data has value (otherwise, you couldn't exchange it for services, nor could the company who collects it sell it or use it), the companies in question are basically stealing it.
So we're not a society that wants to "share everything", we're a society in which some people choose to share some things in exchange for some services. And we don't (necessarily) want to "keep everything secret", but we do want to have control over what's secret and what's not, and get something in exchange for what we choose to not keep secret.
They were so non-conformist that they all dressed the same way, had the same hobbies, and liked the same music.
Brian: You're all individuals!
Crowd: Yes, we're all individuals.
Brian: You're all different!
Crowd: Yes, we're all different.
Man: I'm not!
No, it's just that its appeal is becoming more selective.
Get a dumb phone. You probably managed just fine without a smartphone before they existed.
Same here - I'm passionate about code reviews and unit tests. Seriously. Especially on the stuff I've written, but also for other people's code.
Unit testing is fun if you approach it with the right attitude: I'm going to explore a system and see how it behaves. Each test is a representation of the question "What should happen if I do this? What actually happens when I do it?" The first question is the joy of creating functional specs and design. The second question is the joy of experimenting.
I'm also passionate about code reviews because they're a fantastic teaching and discussion tool. You end up with conversations about "Why did you do things that way?" or "Have you thought about doing ..." which makes it easy to educate developers on approaches that others are doing.