But, since Meehan is a Democrat, expect this to get absolutely no mention in any news outlet.
Right, like the way they raked Colin Powell over the coals for presenting false and plagiarised information to the U.N.? Oh wait, that's right. There was a total media blackout about that incident.
You really need to pay more attention. The media is not "liberally biased." It is biased towards its own ends, which means selling high-end advertising, toadying up to the corporate elites, and fomenting fake controversies whenever possible to stir ratings. The big corporate outlets very infrequently deal with anything of substance.
If the media appears to you to be giving the Dems a free pass, more likely it's because they rarely cover anything the left wing does, unless it's particularly showy or the right wing makes noise about it in their thousands of media outlets, consummate showmen that they are.
Put down your Ayn Rand novel and visit Media Matters on a daily basis to get a deeper picture of what's going on.
Are we upset because the entries were "cleaned"? Or are we upset because the entries were biased to begin with?
I'm dubious about your use of the word bias, but I'll reserve my judgment. What would be an example of this bias of which you speak?
Frankly, our only concern should be, were the entries factual? If there seem to be too many facts making the person appear in a negative light, concerned editors should simply add more facts that shed a positive light on the subject. Just keep it to facts, and don't remove any relevant facts, and don't be too quick to judge any facts irrelevant. Facts are important.
This doesn't mean criticism can't be included. If it is a fact that critics have said something about the subject of the article, you include their statements in a "What his critics say" section. Editors should not add their own criticisms of the subject. Such additions would be worthy of the term 'bias.'
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." - Aug 5, 2004
"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the 'truth' to sink in. You gotta catapult the propaganda." - May 25, 2005
"Tyrants and would-be tyrants have always claimed that murder is justified to serve their grand vision and they end up alienating decent people across the globe." - Oct 27, 2005
No. He's not radical. He wants to know why the powerful are able to get away with so much crap. It's so very common. Nearly everyone I know is suspicious of the administration's motives. It's almost banal at this point.
So you said: "You demonstrate why it is radical. Unlike you, he can't figure out it was, at worst, incompetence."
I think it would be more accurate to say "he can't accept it was, at worst, incompetence."
Because the Bush Administration has been very anxious for us to reach that conclusion, I am suspicious of it. And the anxiously proposed solution to Intelligence Agency incompetence: increase their funding! Seems like a win-win situation for everyone concerned.
The fact you're not suspicious of the right wing makes me wonder if you're really paying attention.
These Brownshirt students have brought to my attention critical academics and activists I would not have otherwise known about. The way they play these professors up is rather silly, in my view. But then, I'm twice their age, so maybe it's just an aesthetic thing on my part. Still, idealists like Douglas Kellner (http://www.uclaprofs.com/profs/kellner.html) are hardly "radical" in any sense. At least, they're no Weathermen. These academics, having a nuanced view of history and a strong affinity with common people, come across to me as concerned individuals of a Liberal mindset - like me the computer geek. Like my mother the folk artist. Like anyone concerned with the direction of our society in the midst of power abuses, rising populism, an obfuscating media, and unjustified wars.
This student group's attacks are full of cute asides, winks and nods to their compatriots: those sorts of people who think that protesting the Vietnam or Gulf Wars amounts to treason (they like to call it "treason" because it carries the death penalty). The writer makes a lot of fun of Kellner, for example, for doing what many young people did in the sixties - growing his hair, smoking weed, and rebelling against symbols of authority. (I like to remind such people that Jesus Christ himself preached open rebellion against authority, but not all these kids call themselves Christians. Still, they almost universally cite "authority" to back their views, and what better authority than the penultimate divine, right?)
As near as I can tell this student group is really just a bunch of kids who have glommed onto the extreme right-wing because it makes them feel powerful. They can go around pointing fingers at professors who are unhappy with the direction of American politics - those who refuse to applaud every time Bush tells a whopper or the corporate media cites American mythology - and count themselves among the "tough, rugged individualists" represented by such bastions of goodness as Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh. They have taken the short road to authority by becoming like-minded sycophants of the Regimented Order. Instead of having a truly nuanced view of human affairs and the politics of power they have attitudes based largely on pure style founded in nothing. Toughness for its own sake. Their kind of strength requires someone else to be weak, and they've chosen professors as an easy target.
If these students had truly critical minds they would be more like these so-called "radical" professors. They would be more interested in undermining authority, taking the road of self-discovery, and after gaining some experience, perhaps taking part in the unglamorous social movement to restore social balance. They would be less interested in ridiculing professors, who have about as much political power as your friendly neighborhood bartender, and more interested in restoring honor to our representatives in Washington by freeing them from special interests that run increasingly counter to the general welfare.
Okay, so by your logic a person being tortured "decides" to give up information. The problem is, the person is in need of food, and instead of a carrot, you hold up a carrot on a stick and make him chase it. Nice.
Wow, that's excellent. Well, please by all means feel free to make a Windows version of this widget! (It also uses grep so that might have some bearing too.)
My favorite Google-related widget is ImagesForever (Mac only because it uses perl and curl). Many others were made to access Google, but only this one actually does something more interesting than just provide a search box.
Hmm, my domain http://fretpet.com/ still isn't working. I think your system must have gotten the redirected IP and cached it from some other process. After messing with CURL a few times in Terminal I got my system to start redirecting, but after a day it's back to broken.
Ultimately, it's the hardware manufacturer's responsibility to provide drivers for those systems they feel they can profit from. And they have no obligation to support hardware they label as "obsolete." Take the case of Wacom. They never provided any drivers for Linux at all, so a project called "linux-wacom" had to take the reigns there. And as much as I wish Wacom would support their old serial tablets under Mac OS X they absolutely refuse to do so. So it fell to me to step up and start my own open source project to get my perfectly-good serial Wacom tablet working.
Incidentally my project needs help with the preference pane, ADB, and Intuos components... any takers?
Yeah, I saw that movie too. So is that how you imagine Steve still behaves? And do you really think that's what makes Apple successful? I think you're projecting your imagined view of Apple onto the real thing. If you have a look at their current roster, and their programming methodologies, I think you'll get a much more realistic picture of what makes Apple successful.
For one thing, they hire really talented people, and quite a lot of PhDs. And they use a far superior development environment than Visual Studio. and really well-designed APIs based on objective-c for most of their applications. Third, they build on top of a Unix-like kernel, and make excellent use of open source when they recognize something worthwhile (KHTML being a prime example).
You see, Steve's second coming brought all those brilliant folks over from NeXT, and it brought NextStep, Interface builder, and a huge mass of portable objective-c code along. And it brought Apple many years of lessons learned. Things like making sure you have a solid foundation before you start building on top of it. Steve and his NeXT entourage understood that you can often get a lot further by rebuilding the whole foundation from the ground up. The reason Copland failed was that frankly, it wasn't ambitious or courageous enough to start from scratch. They didn't have the experience and insight of NeXT. It was very smart of them to admit failure and get a hold of what NeXT had... (Apple's acquisition of NeXT is an event quite comparable to Apple's visit to Xerox PARC, and literally connected to that visit. Because what NeXT leveraged best was OOP, something Steve only after leaving Apple chose to revisit.
Microsoft has had many opportunities to go back to the foundation and start over, and to some degree NT was such an endeavor. But like Copland they didn't go far enough. Had Microsoft decided - as Apple did 7 years ago - to create a completely new Unix-based OS that would use the same interface paradigms, but run old applications in a sandbox, they might not have the mess of exploitable code that is Windows today.
Honestly, the difference between programming Apple's APIs versus Microsoft's is striking. And it's the same with the development tools. Apple's libraries are so much more elegantly designed than Microsoft's. And XCode blows away Visual Studio. If you ask me, I think the reason Apple's development goes so much more smoothly is that the programmers are just a lot happier, and waste a lot less time fighting with crappy technology.
To blithely label Apple as a big personality cult is kind of silly and outdated. The people who work at Apple are quite simply brilliant engineers who for the most part enjoy working with and building well-designed systems. They are not little children playing in Steve's pond just for the delight of being at Steve's feet. If that's what you believe, I think you've watched "Pirates of Silicon Valley" a few too many times, and forgotten that it refers to pretty ancient history at this point.
Of all the indies out there who deserve to have been signed, sealed, and delivered to the masses, no one stands out more than Philip Price. From his own solo work, to the Maggies, to his current band The Winter Pills, I know of no artist more worthy and yet less famous. Probably everyone here knows of someone equally worthy and yet equally obscure....
Isn't methane an even more potent greenhouse gas than pure CO2? And don't our industrial animal breed-for-slaughter institutions and our oil production produce more methane than any other causes?
I'm just curious to see what the Slashdot crowd knows about this. Maybe tomorrow I'll look it up on the net.
Not all religions are dogmatic. In fact Buddhism expressly prescribes the dictum to question everything - right down to your very identity. Other religions - Christianity being a prime example - are meant to be based on similar principles as expounded by their founders, but as institutions they have become corrupted and authoritarian... like most institutions.
The thing is, when it comes to personal enlightenment you do have to transcend the reason and knowledge that locks you into your sense of identity and beliefs about reality. The methods to accomplish this are scientifically applied by trained masters, who understand the tiers of awareness firsthand. Nevertheless enlightenment is not wholly incompatible with science. It merely liberates you from the illusions imposed by discursive thinking. It certainly doesn't preclude using your mind to investigate the material world, and in fact it enhances such activities by providing more enjoyment and delight in the process.
It happens that when people encounter numinous mental states without having had the benefit of a benevolent guide they will attempt to form explanations of the phenomenon using the religious symbols of which they are aware. And if they are involved with an authoritarian church their valid experience of transcendence can be corrupted very quickly and turned into zealotry. That's the trouble. Such experiences are frankly quite accessible, through chanting, dancing, drugs, prayer, etc., but the habit of grasping for explanations makes us susceptible to religious ideology.
So to put it bluntly, religion is not at its core either about dogma or faith. Those devices and attitudes may be helpful one guides and trains himself towards self-realization, but the purpose and aim of true religion is to throw off all such crutches once you learn to exist on your own.
The reason Einstein and others have stated the value of religion is that - as far as institutions go - it is the only one that provides morality, and thus prevents us from indiscriminately using our knowledge without thinking of the consequences. Einstein and others were emphatically NOT saying anything about a designer, or "evidence to back up faith" (as if such made sense!).
I guess that's the question. If not the magnetic field, or some element of gravity that we haven't modeled yet... what about the general clockwork of the rings?
Presumably, for millions of years this material has been circling Saturn. Long enough for matter of certain sizes and densities to fall into a regular pattern. It could simply be that on occasion certain elements "line up" for a period of time as they get into synchronous orbits.
Of course if this were the case you'd expect spokes to appear and disappear here and there constantly, and not to appear all at once all around the planet.
So perhaps it's related to the rotation of the matter in the rings. At certain intervals all the matter "flips over" due to their angle to the sun. Or it could even be related to the fact that much of the matter in Saturn's rings is heavier and/or darker on one side, and as solar radiation strikes these surfaces after millions of years the matter gets pitted in such a way that sunlight reflects differently depending on the angle.
So do these spokes appear on both sides of the rings? A second probe would help with comparing angles.
The main thing for Apple is to get people hooked. For every hour that some kid is running a hacked OSX on his hand-me-down PC that's one less hour that Windows is being used and sucking out the kid's brain.
Apple gains mindshare regardless, and when that kid grows up and buys his first computer it'll probably be an official MacIntel. And of course by then he'll be able to use MacWINE to run his legacy Windows apps.
--- More people believe what the ancestral Bible - and their parents - tell them than what the scientific evidence describes.
--- Jesus said "Give up your mother and father..."
It seems to me wholly compatible with Christianity to trust science (our extended senses) to analyze the nature of material reality. Then one can apply faith properly - where uncertainties truly exist.
As an aside, from what I can tell, whenever Jesus says the word "faith" he seems actually to mean "creativity" or the ability to extend analogies.... Just a weird observation of mine.
Slashdot Mirror
But, since Meehan is a Democrat, expect this to get absolutely no mention in any news outlet.
Right, like the way they raked Colin Powell over the coals for presenting false and plagiarised information to the U.N.? Oh wait, that's right. There was a total media blackout about that incident.
You really need to pay more attention. The media is not "liberally biased." It is biased towards its own ends, which means selling high-end advertising, toadying up to the corporate elites, and fomenting fake controversies whenever possible to stir ratings. The big corporate outlets very infrequently deal with anything of substance.
If the media appears to you to be giving the Dems a free pass, more likely it's because they rarely cover anything the left wing does, unless it's particularly showy or the right wing makes noise about it in their thousands of media outlets, consummate showmen that they are.
Put down your Ayn Rand novel and visit Media Matters on a daily basis to get a deeper picture of what's going on.
Are we upset because the entries were "cleaned"?
Or are we upset because the entries were biased to begin with?
I'm dubious about your use of the word bias, but I'll reserve my judgment. What would be an example of this bias of which you speak?
Frankly, our only concern should be, were the entries factual? If there seem to be too many facts making the person appear in a negative light, concerned editors should simply add more facts that shed a positive light on the subject. Just keep it to facts, and don't remove any relevant facts, and don't be too quick to judge any facts irrelevant. Facts are important.
This doesn't mean criticism can't be included. If it is a fact that critics have said something about the subject of the article, you include their statements in a "What his critics say" section. Editors should not add their own criticisms of the subject. Such additions would be worthy of the term 'bias.'
I got a few...
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." - Aug 5, 2004
"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the 'truth' to sink in. You gotta catapult the propaganda." - May 25, 2005
"Tyrants and would-be tyrants have always claimed that murder is justified to serve their grand vision and they end up alienating decent people across the globe." - Oct 27, 2005
The fact you're not suspicious of virtually everyone in the halls of power makes me wonder if you're really paying attention.
No. He's not radical. He wants to know why the powerful are able to get away with so much crap. It's so very common. Nearly everyone I know is suspicious of the administration's motives. It's almost banal at this point.
So you said: "You demonstrate why it is radical. Unlike you, he can't figure out it was, at worst, incompetence."
I think it would be more accurate to say "he can't accept it was, at worst, incompetence."
Because the Bush Administration has been very anxious for us to reach that conclusion, I am suspicious of it. And the anxiously proposed solution to Intelligence Agency incompetence: increase their funding! Seems like a win-win situation for everyone concerned.
The fact you're not suspicious of the right wing makes me wonder if you're really paying attention.
When a country sponsors terrorism, we boycott them.
We do? So... when did we boycott the United States?
These Brownshirt students have brought to my attention critical academics and activists I would not have otherwise known about. The way they play these professors up is rather silly, in my view. But then, I'm twice their age, so maybe it's just an aesthetic thing on my part. Still, idealists like Douglas Kellner (http://www.uclaprofs.com/profs/kellner.html) are hardly "radical" in any sense. At least, they're no Weathermen. These academics, having a nuanced view of history and a strong affinity with common people, come across to me as concerned individuals of a Liberal mindset - like me the computer geek. Like my mother the folk artist. Like anyone concerned with the direction of our society in the midst of power abuses, rising populism, an obfuscating media, and unjustified wars.
This student group's attacks are full of cute asides, winks and nods to their compatriots: those sorts of people who think that protesting the Vietnam or Gulf Wars amounts to treason (they like to call it "treason" because it carries the death penalty). The writer makes a lot of fun of Kellner, for example, for doing what many young people did in the sixties - growing his hair, smoking weed, and rebelling against symbols of authority. (I like to remind such people that Jesus Christ himself preached open rebellion against authority, but not all these kids call themselves Christians. Still, they almost universally cite "authority" to back their views, and what better authority than the penultimate divine, right?)
As near as I can tell this student group is really just a bunch of kids who have glommed onto the extreme right-wing because it makes them feel powerful. They can go around pointing fingers at professors who are unhappy with the direction of American politics - those who refuse to applaud every time Bush tells a whopper or the corporate media cites American mythology - and count themselves among the "tough, rugged individualists" represented by such bastions of goodness as Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh. They have taken the short road to authority by becoming like-minded sycophants of the Regimented Order. Instead of having a truly nuanced view of human affairs and the politics of power they have attitudes based largely on pure style founded in nothing. Toughness for its own sake. Their kind of strength requires someone else to be weak, and they've chosen professors as an easy target.
If these students had truly critical minds they would be more like these so-called "radical" professors. They would be more interested in undermining authority, taking the road of self-discovery, and after gaining some experience, perhaps taking part in the unglamorous social movement to restore social balance. They would be less interested in ridiculing professors, who have about as much political power as your friendly neighborhood bartender, and more interested in restoring honor to our representatives in Washington by freeing them from special interests that run increasingly counter to the general welfare.
Have I said anything too "radical" here?
For the same reason that APES live in a BESTIARY and BEES live in an APIARY: Because there is no SPOON. Next question!
Okay, so by your logic a person being tortured "decides" to give up information. The problem is, the person is in need of food, and instead of a carrot, you hold up a carrot on a stick and make him chase it. Nice.
These weren't Neocon children, perchance?
...
5) Profit!
Wow, that's excellent. Well, please by all means feel free to make a Windows version of this widget! (It also uses grep so that might have some bearing too.)
My favorite Google-related widget is ImagesForever (Mac only because it uses perl and curl). Many others were made to access Google, but only this one actually does something more interesting than just provide a search box.
Disclaimer: I wrote ImagesForever, so I'm biased.
Aha. Today it is in fact fixed. Thanks for taking care of the problem, GoDaddy. Nice to have my domain back. I was just about to request a refund.
Hmm, my domain http://fretpet.com/ still isn't working. I think your system must have gotten the redirected IP and cached it from some other process. After messing with CURL a few times in Terminal I got my system to start redirecting, but after a day it's back to broken.
Ultimately, it's the hardware manufacturer's responsibility to provide drivers for those systems they feel they can profit from. And they have no obligation to support hardware they label as "obsolete." Take the case of Wacom. They never provided any drivers for Linux at all, so a project called "linux-wacom" had to take the reigns there. And as much as I wish Wacom would support their old serial tablets under Mac OS X they absolutely refuse to do so. So it fell to me to step up and start my own open source project to get my perfectly-good serial Wacom tablet working.
Incidentally my project needs help with the preference pane, ADB, and Intuos components... any takers?
http://tabletmagic.sourceforge.net/
"Oh no. It wasn't the asteroids. T'was beauty that killed the beast!"
.
Yeah, I saw that movie too. So is that how you imagine Steve still behaves? And do you really think that's what makes Apple successful? I think you're projecting your imagined view of Apple onto the real thing. If you have a look at their current roster, and their programming methodologies, I think you'll get a much more realistic picture of what makes Apple successful.
For one thing, they hire really talented people, and quite a lot of PhDs. And they use a far superior development environment than Visual Studio. and really well-designed APIs based on objective-c for most of their applications. Third, they build on top of a Unix-like kernel, and make excellent use of open source when they recognize something worthwhile (KHTML being a prime example).
You see, Steve's second coming brought all those brilliant folks over from NeXT, and it brought NextStep, Interface builder, and a huge mass of portable objective-c code along. And it brought Apple many years of lessons learned. Things like making sure you have a solid foundation before you start building on top of it. Steve and his NeXT entourage understood that you can often get a lot further by rebuilding the whole foundation from the ground up. The reason Copland failed was that frankly, it wasn't ambitious or courageous enough to start from scratch. They didn't have the experience and insight of NeXT. It was very smart of them to admit failure and get a hold of what NeXT had... (Apple's acquisition of NeXT is an event quite comparable to Apple's visit to Xerox PARC, and literally connected to that visit. Because what NeXT leveraged best was OOP, something Steve only after leaving Apple chose to revisit.
Microsoft has had many opportunities to go back to the foundation and start over, and to some degree NT was such an endeavor. But like Copland they didn't go far enough. Had Microsoft decided - as Apple did 7 years ago - to create a completely new Unix-based OS that would use the same interface paradigms, but run old applications in a sandbox, they might not have the mess of exploitable code that is Windows today.
Honestly, the difference between programming Apple's APIs versus Microsoft's is striking. And it's the same with the development tools. Apple's libraries are so much more elegantly designed than Microsoft's. And XCode blows away Visual Studio. If you ask me, I think the reason Apple's development goes so much more smoothly is that the programmers are just a lot happier, and waste a lot less time fighting with crappy technology.
To blithely label Apple as a big personality cult is kind of silly and outdated. The people who work at Apple are quite simply brilliant engineers who for the most part enjoy working with and building well-designed systems. They are not little children playing in Steve's pond just for the delight of being at Steve's feet. If that's what you believe, I think you've watched "Pirates of Silicon Valley" a few too many times, and forgotten that it refers to pretty ancient history at this point.
Of all the indies out there who deserve to have been signed, sealed, and delivered to the masses, no one stands out more than Philip Price. From his own solo work, to the Maggies, to his current band The Winter Pills, I know of no artist more worthy and yet less famous. Probably everyone here knows of someone equally worthy and yet equally obscure....
Isn't methane an even more potent greenhouse gas than pure CO2? And don't our industrial animal breed-for-slaughter institutions and our oil production produce more methane than any other causes?
I'm just curious to see what the Slashdot crowd knows about this. Maybe tomorrow I'll look it up on the net.
Not all religions are dogmatic. In fact Buddhism expressly prescribes the dictum to question everything - right down to your very identity. Other religions - Christianity being a prime example - are meant to be based on similar principles as expounded by their founders, but as institutions they have become corrupted and authoritarian... like most institutions.
The thing is, when it comes to personal enlightenment you do have to transcend the reason and knowledge that locks you into your sense of identity and beliefs about reality. The methods to accomplish this are scientifically applied by trained masters, who understand the tiers of awareness firsthand. Nevertheless enlightenment is not wholly incompatible with science. It merely liberates you from the illusions imposed by discursive thinking. It certainly doesn't preclude using your mind to investigate the material world, and in fact it enhances such activities by providing more enjoyment and delight in the process.
It happens that when people encounter numinous mental states without having had the benefit of a benevolent guide they will attempt to form explanations of the phenomenon using the religious symbols of which they are aware. And if they are involved with an authoritarian church their valid experience of transcendence can be corrupted very quickly and turned into zealotry. That's the trouble. Such experiences are frankly quite accessible, through chanting, dancing, drugs, prayer, etc., but the habit of grasping for explanations makes us susceptible to religious ideology.
So to put it bluntly, religion is not at its core either about dogma or faith. Those devices and attitudes may be helpful one guides and trains himself towards self-realization, but the purpose and aim of true religion is to throw off all such crutches once you learn to exist on your own.
.
The reason Einstein and others have stated the value of religion is that - as far as institutions go - it is the only one that provides morality, and thus prevents us from indiscriminately using our knowledge without thinking of the consequences. Einstein and others were emphatically NOT saying anything about a designer, or "evidence to back up faith" (as if such made sense!).
I guess that's the question. If not the magnetic field, or some element of gravity that we haven't modeled yet... what about the general clockwork of the rings?
Presumably, for millions of years this material has been circling Saturn. Long enough for matter of certain sizes and densities to fall into a regular pattern. It could simply be that on occasion certain elements "line up" for a period of time as they get into synchronous orbits.
Of course if this were the case you'd expect spokes to appear and disappear here and there constantly, and not to appear all at once all around the planet.
So perhaps it's related to the rotation of the matter in the rings. At certain intervals all the matter "flips over" due to their angle to the sun. Or it could even be related to the fact that much of the matter in Saturn's rings is heavier and/or darker on one side, and as solar radiation strikes these surfaces after millions of years the matter gets pitted in such a way that sunlight reflects differently depending on the angle.
So do these spokes appear on both sides of the rings? A second probe would help with comparing angles.
The main thing for Apple is to get people hooked. For every hour that some kid is running a hacked OSX on his hand-me-down PC that's one less hour that Windows is being used and sucking out the kid's brain.
Apple gains mindshare regardless, and when that kid grows up and buys his first computer it'll probably be an official MacIntel. And of course by then he'll be able to use MacWINE to run his legacy Windows apps.
Ironic results in that:
--- More people believe what the ancestral Bible - and their parents - tell them than what the scientific evidence describes.
--- Jesus said "Give up your mother and father..."
It seems to me wholly compatible with Christianity to trust science (our extended senses) to analyze the nature of material reality. Then one can apply faith properly - where uncertainties truly exist.
As an aside, from what I can tell, whenever Jesus says the word "faith" he seems actually to mean "creativity" or the ability to extend analogies.... Just a weird observation of mine.