I'm only a literature major, so I don't know a lot about this English stuff (especially that old English crap: Paradise Lost, Travels of Marco Polo, who reads such junk?) but I'd parse that sentence very roughly as "Because security of the nation is assumed to be good, and a militia is needed for such security, and militias need guns, then our citizens need access to guns (and since in a militia, unlike an army, you supply your own weapon citizens need to be able to own them too)."
However, this was all based on the assumption that the US didn't have an army, or at least not one that was strong enough to do without a militia (I'm a lit student not a historian). Considering that our army is not only the biggest in the world, but is in fact bigger than all others, minus the top six or so, combined, we really don't need a militia. And even if you consider the reserves or national guard to be our modern equivalent, well then they have plenty of guns provided for them, so I still see no need for average citizens to own guns according to the logic of our founding fathers.
But I'll tell you what, I'll support removing all gun laws if all the gun nuts out there support cutting our military down to the 1% or so of itself that it actually needs to defend this country (and we'll call the resulting well-armed populace the backup plan).
Well, I would try to explain to you that what separates amendments II from amendments I, IV, and X is that amendment II contains the phrase "a well-regulated militia," and the others don't. But I'm afraid that would be like trying to explain... well, pretty much anything, to George W. Bush: you might smile and nod, but it would just go in one ear and out the other.
My reasoning here is that you tried to dispute my contention with a citation from a Supreme Court case which ruled that the phrase "all men are created equal" didn't apply to, well, all men. Seriously, they wrote "it is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration." If you think those are expert legal scholars, whose interpretation of the constitution we should consider a model, then I really doubt your reasoning facilties.
Ultimately, while I think America would be a lot better off with every gun except hunting rifles outlawed, I respect that the 2nd amendment does play a very important role in our legislature. I doubt any real legal expert would disagree. But it does not equate to a carte blanch right for every individual idiot to own any weapon they want, and whenever people try to assert as much they simply betray their own ignorance.
Another common mistake, fostered by gun fanatics who feel the need to own Uzis so that they can... hunt? hole up in a fort in Waco? compensate for physical inadequacies? or whatever, is that the 2nd Amendment somehow applies to "individual Americans." In fact, it doesn't. Rather it specifies preserves the right for individuals to own firearms only as part of "a well-regulated militia."
This is why, for instance, those crazy legal know-nothings at the Supreme Court specifically allowed a ban on sawed-off shotguns: such weapons aren't necessary for the preservation of a well-regulated militia. Likewise, I think it would be pretty hard to argue that our national defense was being compromised because our militias didn't have access to good hacking code. Instead it seems far more likely to me that one could argue our civil liberties, which make this country something actually worth defending, would be compromised by such coding prohibitions.
"The rehabilitation model has failed miserably"
What kind of crack are you on? The rehabilitation model is the only effective long term soloution to crime, and there are hundreds of studies to prove it. But IMHO the guy in Blow said it best, roughly "I went in with a bachelor's in marijuanna and came out with a phd in coke." Jail don't stop crime, they just delay it at the cost of making it a lot worse when the criminal is released.
In The Beginning Was The Command Line was, IMHO, awesome. Probably my favorite part is when Stephenson does the operating systems as cars analogy, and get's to Linux. He says something like "and then down the street from the dealerships are the Linux guys with a giant sign that says FREE TANKs. But everyone sees it and goes 'I don't know how to drive a tank' so they just pass on by." To me that summed up incredibly vividly how the mainstream looks at open source software.
"Also, people bitten by spiders don't generally become ultra-powerful."
People don't, and that's why Peter Parker is special. Remember people, this is the Marvel Universe, where people are born with strange and unuusual powers because of some genetic mutation. Many of them only manifest when triggered by a stressfull situation. I imagine being bitten by a radioactive spider would qualify as stressful.
So I was doing a summer internship at a large computer manufacturer, and I was doing some testing of stuff that required me to use five or six test computers. However, since I was only there for the summer, they figured it was easier to just give me a really big cubicle (I had the biggest office space of any of the 50+ interns) rather than an actual lab. And since what I was testing (graphic card driver compatability with monitors) didn't require identical test statoins, I was given a hodgepodge of PCs and random parts with which to assemble my test stations.
I had already set-up four of the stations, and I was hard at work testing stuff on them, but in the few minutes while each computer was running tests or booting up or whatever I would switch to the task of trying to assemble another test station. So I stick some RAM in to this one system, boot it up, and then roll back over to one of the test staions to check something. I then roll over to my actual desktop, which was on the other end of the cubicle, and as I'm entering some data I catch a whiff of smoke. I check behind me, but I don't see anything, and I figure it's someone else's fault.
Two minutes later some random guy walks in to my cubicle and says, "hey didja know your computer is on fire?" I turn around and discover that there is in fact a large amount of smoke coming out of the computer. So I race over, yank the power cord out, grab the nearest piece of paper to use as an oven mitt, and attempt to extract the burning RAM. After a couple failed attempts I manage to remove it... in peices.
So now this whole section of a giant building smells like burning ozone, I have charred peices of RAM lying on the table as my "smoking gun," and some guy I've never met just had to inform me that I had nearly caused a major fire. I was absolutely convinced I was going to be fired, and since a family member and helped to get me the job I was convinced he was going to be screwed by association.
My one saving grace was that, because I was just a temporary intern and they didn't care about making me walk a lot, they placed my cubicle in the same building as my workgroup, but not in the same area. So no one in the immediate vicinity (the one's who got to inhale the stench of ozone for the rest of the afternoon) actually knew me, and because the engineers in that area were forgiving people, or maybe just apathetic, no one ever told my boss about it. Amazingly, it turned out the only thing that was actually damaged (besides my pride) was the RAM itself, which I had suspected was bad anyway, and which I happened to have enough extra of that I could assemble all the systems without the charred DIMM.
So my summer internship lasted until the end of summer, and I later helped save the company's huge exhibit at SIGRAPH (you'd think the people that organized the exhibit would check before they decide to replace 50+ monitors for the exhibit, but no they just assumed all products made by their company would magically work together out of the box). So since I saved the thousands of dollars that would have been required to acquire, pack, and ship 50+ monitors overnight, the cost of the RAM I burnt was kind of made up, and ultimately it was a good thing the company never fired me.
But sitting in my office that afternoon, with the stench of ozone everywhere, expecting that my boss would walk in any minute and tell me to pack my things, I learned the valuable lesson that one should ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWYAS CHECK TO MAKE SURE RAM IS SEATED PROPERLY BEFORE TURNING A COMPUTER ON.
http://www.tolerance.org/news/article_tol.jsp?id=7 31
I've thought about Canada, but I'm afraid my fragile Californian physique could not withstand the arctic temperatures up there:-) Besides, I believe in changing things from within, not running from problems.
Oh yeah, foreigners are completely welcome here in the US. Unless they are muslim. Or look muslim. Or don't look muslim, but speak Arabic. Or even something that sounds Arabic. Or they do none of the above but wear a turban. Or they're French.
Or they are Indian visiting Silicon Valley. Or Mexican or Latin American visiting, well any of the southern states. Or...
I could go on, but I think I've beaten my point in to the ground. For a country made almost entirely of immigrants (seeing as how we did such a good job of clearing out the locals) you'd think we'd be a tolerant people. But then you'd turn on a talk radio station, and realize you were quite wrong.
Its been awhile since I looked in to this myself, but I believe they both used to be fairly similiar. Nowadays though I believe Flash is far more robust and widespread. In fact, many people use Flash for computer animations that aren't even on the web, though it dominates the web as well. Shockwave in contrast seems to be less widely used, and only for smaller animations, like bits of a web pages UI.
But I could be way of base here, and I didn't go research a bit of what I just said because I am lazy. So <insert fancy latin phrase for buyer beware that I can't remember because I just woke up>.
Heh. 2.8 isn't all that impressive, I admit. I almost didn't include it, but I wanted to give people some idea of the quality of school UCSC was by giving my application details (although of course my application also included difficult to summarize extracurricular activities and a college essay).
However, since I was also an Education minor at UCSC, I know that while a person's GPA can reflect many things, including their scholastic ability, intelligence, academic priorities, culture, economic and social status, etc. it in no way is guaranteed to be an indication of any one of the above. One reason I decided to go to UCSC was their evaluation system. Grades were optional. However, every student received a narrative evaluation, even the simplest of which demonstrated far better than a simple letter grade the student's performance.
This system allowed a much more comprehensive overview of a student's performance, and focused one's attention not on gaining a single percentage point on a test, but rather on making an effort to truly understand the course material and to produce schoolwork which would generate the kind of comments from an instructor that one would be proud to have on their transcript. Unfortunately, due to reasons largely unrelated to educational philosophy, the university has since decided to require grades for all students, but thankfully it still continues the evaluation system as well. Even though this system encourages the idea that one's GPA is significant, at least it also allows a more accurate depiction of one's academic achievements. It is unfortunate more academic institutions do not feel similarly.
As for my degree, I'm incredibly proud of it. The ability to think intelligently and critically about a topic, the ability to communicate and express oneself both in speech and in prose, and an understanding of human nature (that is both superior and inferior to that of a psychology major), are just a few of the many benefits I received from my chosen course of study. I may sometimes regret not having double-majored in computer science, especially considering my difficulty finding employment in the current job market, but I have not for a moment regretted my decision to study Literature.
I'm flattered by the praise, both from you and Mr. Starx. You have my full permission to use the post in your class. Although I had some outstanding English classes at my high school, I never had a Language and Media Literacy course, and I find the idea very intriguing. I only hope your students realize how lucky they are for being able to take such a significant and relevant course in high school.
I strongly disagree with that statement.
I'm a recent college graduate from the University of California at Santa Cruz. Its no UC Berkeley or LA, but it is an excellent college. I had, I think (it's been awhile), a 2.8 GPA and a 1440 SAT in high school. So I don't exactly consider myself a moron.
I majored in Modern Literature, which at UCSC includes several classes on Postcolonialism, and how history has shaped the creative space. We learned a lot about how reality has influenced the perception of reality, and vice versa. In other words, one thing we learned was how governments serve their own interests, and systems perpetuate themselves, through the spread of false information.
You need only read The Republican Noise Machine, where a former right wing journalist explains how extremist right-wing strategists have deliberately set out to subvert journalistic integrity and present false information as truth, all while crying out "Liberal Media" as a diversionary tactic, to see modern evidence of this phenomena. Or just watch some speeches by Bush or his cabinet prior to the Iraq war, where they claimed with almost absolute certainty that Saddam possesed weapons of mass destruction. Some of them even continue to maintain this today, despite the lack of any evidence whatsoever.
In this kind of environment, it needs to be understood that what is reported on the network news, or in your local newspaper, must be questioned and challenged almost as thoroughly as information you hear on the street. For numerous reasons, these institutions are constricted, and failing to recognize that can mean the difference between recognizing fact and faction.
Both the Daily Show and SNL need to be questioned as well. But it should also be recognized that because of their status as "comedy", they are able to present information and views which cannot otherwise be presented in our society. While this doesn't excuse the Daily Show's actions (if you believe they require excuse), to deny that they have significant journalistic value due to their location outside the mainstream is to miss out on a critical opportunity to come closer to understanding objective truth.
Picking one source of information and always believing it will inevitably lead to believing in a lie. The only way to ever truly determine whether an idea is true or false is to consider as many arguments for or against it as objectively and open-mindedly as possible. The only solution to bad information is more information.
Considering alternative sources of information such as newscomedies allows you a greater chance of seperating fact from fiction. When you do that, you can see the falseness in the idea that one person "can't change anything anyway."
I had a very negative experience with ATI's TV Wonder. Unless I turned off every other program it would crash often when I was watching TV. Sometimes it even crashed the whole system. Then if I dared to try using the record feature (which was supposed to be a sort of Tivo like thing before DVRs were common) it crashed every few minutes. I tried using it for a small video editing project and I couldn't record more than a couple minutes at a time, if that, because inevitably the whole thing would just shut down.
When I tried to find out the source of the problem, ATI suggested that it was my system's fault, probably my graphics card. However, my system was very nice for its time (166 mhz athlon was impressive five years ago), and the graphics card was an ATI Rage 128 (again, good for the time, and more importantly, it was made by the same freaking company).
So I traded emails and phone calls back and forth with ATI, and in the end got the brilliant suggestion to (I shit you not) uninstall and reinstall the software every single time I wanted to use it!
A year or so later ATI finally released new drivers that were supposed to correct all the problems. But amazingly, ATI refused to make these drivers available on the web. At first you had to pay them to send you a CD (unless you had bought the TV Wonder within the last month), then at some point they droped the fee (except maybe a $2 shipping fee). By that time I was mainly using Linux, but I think I tried the drivers for a bit, and they only crashed once. Yay.
The moral of the story is that any company that will ship a product in that poor of condition, blame another product made by them for the difficulty, suggest that the user re-install the software every time they use it, and then when they finally fix the problems refuse to make the fix available for free on the web, is not a company you want to patronize.
I for one have made it a point never to buy another ATI product. So while the all-in-wonder may be awesome if it actually works for you, at the first sign of trouble you'd best pack it up and return it or else you are in for a world of unhappiness.
Slashdot Mirror
However, this was all based on the assumption that the US didn't have an army, or at least not one that was strong enough to do without a militia (I'm a lit student not a historian). Considering that our army is not only the biggest in the world, but is in fact bigger than all others, minus the top six or so, combined, we really don't need a militia. And even if you consider the reserves or national guard to be our modern equivalent, well then they have plenty of guns provided for them, so I still see no need for average citizens to own guns according to the logic of our founding fathers.
But I'll tell you what, I'll support removing all gun laws if all the gun nuts out there support cutting our military down to the 1% or so of itself that it actually needs to defend this country (and we'll call the resulting well-armed populace the backup plan).
My reasoning here is that you tried to dispute my contention with a citation from a Supreme Court case which ruled that the phrase "all men are created equal" didn't apply to, well, all men. Seriously, they wrote "it is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration." If you think those are expert legal scholars, whose interpretation of the constitution we should consider a model, then I really doubt your reasoning facilties.
Ultimately, while I think America would be a lot better off with every gun except hunting rifles outlawed, I respect that the 2nd amendment does play a very important role in our legislature. I doubt any real legal expert would disagree. But it does not equate to a carte blanch right for every individual idiot to own any weapon they want, and whenever people try to assert as much they simply betray their own ignorance.
This is why, for instance, those crazy legal know-nothings at the Supreme Court specifically allowed a ban on sawed-off shotguns: such weapons aren't necessary for the preservation of a well-regulated militia. Likewise, I think it would be pretty hard to argue that our national defense was being compromised because our militias didn't have access to good hacking code. Instead it seems far more likely to me that one could argue our civil liberties, which make this country something actually worth defending, would be compromised by such coding prohibitions.
"The rehabilitation model has failed miserably" What kind of crack are you on? The rehabilitation model is the only effective long term soloution to crime, and there are hundreds of studies to prove it. But IMHO the guy in Blow said it best, roughly "I went in with a bachelor's in marijuanna and came out with a phd in coke." Jail don't stop crime, they just delay it at the cost of making it a lot worse when the criminal is released.
In The Beginning Was The Command Line was, IMHO, awesome. Probably my favorite part is when Stephenson does the operating systems as cars analogy, and get's to Linux. He says something like "and then down the street from the dealerships are the Linux guys with a giant sign that says FREE TANKs. But everyone sees it and goes 'I don't know how to drive a tank' so they just pass on by." To me that summed up incredibly vividly how the mainstream looks at open source software.
"Also, people bitten by spiders don't generally become ultra-powerful." People don't, and that's why Peter Parker is special. Remember people, this is the Marvel Universe, where people are born with strange and unuusual powers because of some genetic mutation. Many of them only manifest when triggered by a stressfull situation. I imagine being bitten by a radioactive spider would qualify as stressful.
I had already set-up four of the stations, and I was hard at work testing stuff on them, but in the few minutes while each computer was running tests or booting up or whatever I would switch to the task of trying to assemble another test station. So I stick some RAM in to this one system, boot it up, and then roll back over to one of the test staions to check something. I then roll over to my actual desktop, which was on the other end of the cubicle, and as I'm entering some data I catch a whiff of smoke. I check behind me, but I don't see anything, and I figure it's someone else's fault.
Two minutes later some random guy walks in to my cubicle and says, "hey didja know your computer is on fire?" I turn around and discover that there is in fact a large amount of smoke coming out of the computer. So I race over, yank the power cord out, grab the nearest piece of paper to use as an oven mitt, and attempt to extract the burning RAM. After a couple failed attempts I manage to remove it ... in peices.
So now this whole section of a giant building smells like burning ozone, I have charred peices of RAM lying on the table as my "smoking gun," and some guy I've never met just had to inform me that I had nearly caused a major fire. I was absolutely convinced I was going to be fired, and since a family member and helped to get me the job I was convinced he was going to be screwed by association.
My one saving grace was that, because I was just a temporary intern and they didn't care about making me walk a lot, they placed my cubicle in the same building as my workgroup, but not in the same area. So no one in the immediate vicinity (the one's who got to inhale the stench of ozone for the rest of the afternoon) actually knew me, and because the engineers in that area were forgiving people, or maybe just apathetic, no one ever told my boss about it. Amazingly, it turned out the only thing that was actually damaged (besides my pride) was the RAM itself, which I had suspected was bad anyway, and which I happened to have enough extra of that I could assemble all the systems without the charred DIMM.
So my summer internship lasted until the end of summer, and I later helped save the company's huge exhibit at SIGRAPH (you'd think the people that organized the exhibit would check before they decide to replace 50+ monitors for the exhibit, but no they just assumed all products made by their company would magically work together out of the box). So since I saved the thousands of dollars that would have been required to acquire, pack, and ship 50+ monitors overnight, the cost of the RAM I burnt was kind of made up, and ultimately it was a good thing the company never fired me.
But sitting in my office that afternoon, with the stench of ozone everywhere, expecting that my boss would walk in any minute and tell me to pack my things, I learned the valuable lesson that one should ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWYAS CHECK TO MAKE SURE RAM IS SEATED PROPERLY BEFORE TURNING A COMPUTER ON.
http://www.tolerance.org/news/article_tol.jsp?id=7 31
I've thought about Canada, but I'm afraid my fragile Californian physique could not withstand the arctic temperatures up there :-) Besides, I believe in changing things from within, not running from problems.
Oh yeah, foreigners are completely welcome here in the US. Unless they are muslim. Or look muslim. Or don't look muslim, but speak Arabic. Or even something that sounds Arabic. Or they do none of the above but wear a turban. Or they're French.
Or they are Indian visiting Silicon Valley. Or Mexican or Latin American visiting, well any of the southern states. Or...
I could go on, but I think I've beaten my point in to the ground. For a country made almost entirely of immigrants (seeing as how we did such a good job of clearing out the locals) you'd think we'd be a tolerant people. But then you'd turn on a talk radio station, and realize you were quite wrong.
Its been awhile since I looked in to this myself, but I believe they both used to be fairly similiar. Nowadays though I believe Flash is far more robust and widespread. In fact, many people use Flash for computer animations that aren't even on the web, though it dominates the web as well. Shockwave in contrast seems to be less widely used, and only for smaller animations, like bits of a web pages UI.
But I could be way of base here, and I didn't go research a bit of what I just said because I am lazy. So <insert fancy latin phrase for buyer beware that I can't remember because I just woke up>.
However, since I was also an Education minor at UCSC, I know that while a person's GPA can reflect many things, including their scholastic ability, intelligence, academic priorities, culture, economic and social status, etc. it in no way is guaranteed to be an indication of any one of the above. One reason I decided to go to UCSC was their evaluation system. Grades were optional. However, every student received a narrative evaluation, even the simplest of which demonstrated far better than a simple letter grade the student's performance.
This system allowed a much more comprehensive overview of a student's performance, and focused one's attention not on gaining a single percentage point on a test, but rather on making an effort to truly understand the course material and to produce schoolwork which would generate the kind of comments from an instructor that one would be proud to have on their transcript. Unfortunately, due to reasons largely unrelated to educational philosophy, the university has since decided to require grades for all students, but thankfully it still continues the evaluation system as well. Even though this system encourages the idea that one's GPA is significant, at least it also allows a more accurate depiction of one's academic achievements. It is unfortunate more academic institutions do not feel similarly.
As for my degree, I'm incredibly proud of it. The ability to think intelligently and critically about a topic, the ability to communicate and express oneself both in speech and in prose, and an understanding of human nature (that is both superior and inferior to that of a psychology major), are just a few of the many benefits I received from my chosen course of study. I may sometimes regret not having double-majored in computer science, especially considering my difficulty finding employment in the current job market, but I have not for a moment regretted my decision to study Literature.
I'm flattered by the praise, both from you and Mr. Starx. You have my full permission to use the post in your class. Although I had some outstanding English classes at my high school, I never had a Language and Media Literacy course, and I find the idea very intriguing. I only hope your students realize how lucky they are for being able to take such a significant and relevant course in high school.
I majored in Modern Literature, which at UCSC includes several classes on Postcolonialism, and how history has shaped the creative space. We learned a lot about how reality has influenced the perception of reality, and vice versa. In other words, one thing we learned was how governments serve their own interests, and systems perpetuate themselves, through the spread of false information.
You need only read The Republican Noise Machine, where a former right wing journalist explains how extremist right-wing strategists have deliberately set out to subvert journalistic integrity and present false information as truth, all while crying out "Liberal Media" as a diversionary tactic, to see modern evidence of this phenomena. Or just watch some speeches by Bush or his cabinet prior to the Iraq war, where they claimed with almost absolute certainty that Saddam possesed weapons of mass destruction. Some of them even continue to maintain this today, despite the lack of any evidence whatsoever.
In this kind of environment, it needs to be understood that what is reported on the network news, or in your local newspaper, must be questioned and challenged almost as thoroughly as information you hear on the street. For numerous reasons, these institutions are constricted, and failing to recognize that can mean the difference between recognizing fact and faction.
Both the Daily Show and SNL need to be questioned as well. But it should also be recognized that because of their status as "comedy", they are able to present information and views which cannot otherwise be presented in our society. While this doesn't excuse the Daily Show's actions (if you believe they require excuse), to deny that they have significant journalistic value due to their location outside the mainstream is to miss out on a critical opportunity to come closer to understanding objective truth.
Picking one source of information and always believing it will inevitably lead to believing in a lie. The only way to ever truly determine whether an idea is true or false is to consider as many arguments for or against it as objectively and open-mindedly as possible. The only solution to bad information is more information.
Considering alternative sources of information such as newscomedies allows you a greater chance of seperating fact from fiction. When you do that, you can see the falseness in the idea that one person "can't change anything anyway."
When I tried to find out the source of the problem, ATI suggested that it was my system's fault, probably my graphics card. However, my system was very nice for its time (166 mhz athlon was impressive five years ago), and the graphics card was an ATI Rage 128 (again, good for the time, and more importantly, it was made by the same freaking company).
So I traded emails and phone calls back and forth with ATI, and in the end got the brilliant suggestion to (I shit you not) uninstall and reinstall the software every single time I wanted to use it!
A year or so later ATI finally released new drivers that were supposed to correct all the problems. But amazingly, ATI refused to make these drivers available on the web. At first you had to pay them to send you a CD (unless you had bought the TV Wonder within the last month), then at some point they droped the fee (except maybe a $2 shipping fee). By that time I was mainly using Linux, but I think I tried the drivers for a bit, and they only crashed once. Yay.
The moral of the story is that any company that will ship a product in that poor of condition, blame another product made by them for the difficulty, suggest that the user re-install the software every time they use it, and then when they finally fix the problems refuse to make the fix available for free on the web, is not a company you want to patronize.
I for one have made it a point never to buy another ATI product. So while the all-in-wonder may be awesome if it actually works for you, at the first sign of trouble you'd best pack it up and return it or else you are in for a world of unhappiness.