1) Why do they exist at all, and 2) why are they published primarily in print? The first question is easy; journals are structured the way that they are in order to vet quality and remove bias. The refereeing process for prestigious journals is quite complex; the papers are often anonymized, and then read by multiple readers, each of whom are recognized as significant contributors to their field. Changes or additional data may be asked for prior to publication to clarify or improve the article. It's comparable in many ways to the work flow of any magazine or other publication, but more rigorous and involved. Also keep in mind that the people who are editing and reviewing important papers are not primarily editors; they often have full-time loads of teaching and research for a university as well. These are areas where expertise is more important than number of eyes; having 10,000 people with a sophomoric understanding of a field review a research paper in a technical field is much less useful- and possibly counter-productive- than having one or two people who have a more complete background in the topic (they've read all the papers that the new paper sites, as well as having performed their own research in the field- in other words, they have a PhD).
Why are they published on paper instead of primarily online? Well, one reason is certainly inertia. On the other hand, there are relatively few individual subscribers to these journals. They are mostly shipped to universities and research institutes, which keep them in the periodicals room for a month/quarter/whatever, and then bind them into collections and keep them in perpetuity in their library collection. After that point, the institution is not dependent on permission or payment to anyone else in order to provide access to the work in question. Print publication provides a good back-up in the event of a journal ceasing publication (taking its web site with it), or a paper or publisher running afoul of the law in some other area.
Another point to be made here is that increasingly, journals are publishing material online in addition to their print releases. There are fees associated with access (typically that only universities want to pay), but on the other hand keeping this system of rigorous refereeing going requires some monetary inputs (as does perpetually hosting and indexing these papers in a robust system). Print publication is slow, but significant papers are often also available on the web from their authors, are shared in pre-publication formats, or are presented at conferences or seminars. The rights granted to a journal on publication are often narrowly defined enough that the authors can do whatever they want with the paper before or after publication. In these scenarios, publication in a journal acts primarily as a stamp of approval, rather than as the primary channel of distribution for the information that the paper contains.
I would be happy to see every journal in the world parallel-publish their content on the web free of charge, and frankly think that a lot of academics would too. It will probably happen, eventually. However, right now you can get access to almost anything that has been published through either a university, or even public library in most cases. Technical articles in particular are increasingly made available on the web by their authors- hit the home page of any professor of computer science or a related field and you'll find lots of papers to download. Access is lagging behind primarily in non-tech savvy fields- you can very easily find free copies of significant papers in engineering fields, not so much in philosophy and ancient history. These fields will likely catch up over time, and in the meantime the number of people who have 1) the background sufficient to contribute to the field but 2) no ready access to these papers is likely to be very small. As such, I would be surprised if the journal system is really holding back progress in any meaningful way.
Are teachers at private schools getting screwed over so bad?
Private school teachers are typically paid less and have lesser benefit and retirement packages. In exchange, they deal with far fewer student disciplinary problems and less meddling from state and local bureaucracy. On the other hand, they can be fired for pissing off students with well-connected parents.
If you talk to people who used to be public school teachers and have moved on or changed to private schools, I think that very few people would tell you that the union is the problem. Private school teachers readily accept lower pay in exchange for not having to deal with 20-year old ex-cons and not being lectured every three weeks on the latest educational fads, typically, by "educational consultants" who were in the classroom as little as possible before moving on to more lucrative careers- if they were teachers at all.
Loan forgiveness programs are nice, but compared to comparably educated people teachers are treated very poorly. Compared to other professional workers, they have much less control over their schedules, fewer job perks, and significantly lower pay. If you have a science or math degree, if you go into something other than teaching you can probably afford to pay off your loans and still have more take-home pay than a new teacher who is getting subsidized loan repayment.
Teachers without unions generally have lower pay and lower job security. My guess is that this stems from the fact that large numbers of educated women traditionally had few other choices for their occupation, not from unions.
He said that the policies tend to be popular in the long run, not the person who enacts them. Lyndon Johnson is a great example; he was excoriated at the time for trying to get the Civil Rights Act passed, but few people these days would like to overturn it. The term of a US president, even one who wins re-election, is too short to really be called "long term".
Most plastics are recyclable, as are most electronic components- it's just that in some cases, recycling them either requires or releases some nasty chemicals as you try to undo the various bonding and mixing that got them in their present state.
As for making wood or steel cabinets for things, there are several problems. * Added weight means huge additional costs in cash and energy for shipping, particularly when you're talking about moving inventory from Asia. * Production costs. Making quality wooden stuff or stamping out quality steel has higher labor and materials costs than injection molding a bunch of plastic bits. Customers aren't willing to eat the higher costs because of... * Product life cycles. Building things to last costs more money and energy, typically. I don't need my Playstation crafted to the same standards as an heirloom china cabinet because the PS is going to be obsolete in 4 years, whereas a piece of furniture isn't. "Built to last" in electronics dropped off the map once it became clear that by the time something broke down, you get get something newer and better for less than the cost of a repair.
In short, TVs used to be put in wooden cabinets because newer, better TVs weren't being rolled out every 3 years. The market also won out here- most people decided that cheap plastic junk was a better investment than an heirloom-quality TV cabinet. It was cheaper, less of a hassle to move around, and easier to place in a room and match to your other furnishings.
But even on windows, it worked for version (I think) 1.4 but not version 1.5; either they did some real digging in order to find forward-incompatible features, or the Sun-provided JRE broke some subtle assumptions about how code worked at the implementation level. Things went back to working under 1.6 on Windows- all of this without changes to the applet itself. That to me sounds like a JRE issue- I know that on FreeBSD, some JREs would segfault running certain byte code, while others had no problems. No changes to the Java application.
I suspect the poster is alluding to the fact that Sun's decision not to make Java more open from the beginning cost them a lot of position in the market. Sun thought that Java was going to be the Next Big Thing, and so kept the language under their tight control to prevent it being forked by competitors or used in manners that they didn't approve of. The result was that because of 1) objections to Sun's control of the language, and 2) Sun's priorities in terms of support for certain platforms and not others, Java lost a lot of ground in the back-end space to Python, Ruby, and others, and the space occupied by the applet was essentially devoured by Ajax. Sun was envisioning Java as having a ubiquity in the application space to rival that of C in the systems space, but it hasn't really reached that potential. The decision to push for a closed, tightly controlled language early on is a good part of what caused that.
Hassle, more than anything else, sums it up. Installing the JDK or JRE is never as easy as installing other programs. Some distros won't include Java in their standard package repositories because of licensing constraints. You end up with two maintenance/upgrade processes: one for Java, and one for everything else. It's a pain if you have a lot of machines that need to run java- you're always manually copying around install tarballs and jar libraries that you can't just yum or apt-get out of the appropriate repo. Difficulty in Java installation is also a barrier for simple desktop Linux; at this point, Java should Just Work for any reasonable desktop experience.
I suspect that the closed sourcing is also why support for Java on non-priority systems has lagged behind. It's been a while, but I used to support Java apps that were running on FreeBSD. At the time, the state of Java there lagged behind the big three (Linux, Windows, Solaris) considerably- the latest versions of of the JDK/JRE weren't always available, and when they were there were sometimes weird bugs lurking in them that would cause applications to puke. Support for other languages wasn't anywhere near as far behind because it was much easier for BSD developers to track changes in the source of languages that primarily targeted Linux.
For that matter, despite Suns attempts at making Java a universal platform, support on some platforms has been better than others. My employer bought a 3rd party Java HR application for employees to use for leave/VK time reporting, with the promise that it would work for any system since it's Java (a lot of people have Linux or Mac). No such luck. It's interface is an applet that works on only certain versions of the JRE under windows. Maybe the vendor is just incompetent, but Java is supposed to simplify the writing of cross-platform applications. I strongly suspect that these kinds of problems are a consequence of Sun keeping the source closed: priorities on development of the JRE/JDK had to be constrained by Sun's resources and economic priorities. No matter how enthusiastic the user community on lower-priority operating systems, they couldn't fix problems themselves.
That is like saying we've been able to make nuts, bolts, valves, pistons, crankshafts and other components of an internal combustion engine, but have not yet built any engine that actually runs. Most, if not all of these organic components were assembled from bits and pieces that were once part of a living organism. Nobody has yet constructed even a simple protein from the available 92 or so basic elements. Nobody has yet duplicated the process of photosynthesis. All scientists ALWAYS have to start with pieces that were once alive.
Scientists see engines at work, and make engine parts from non-engine parts, and postulate: "There must be a way to get there from here. Lets keep experimenting until we work it out." Progress is incremental, but possible. Creationists see working engines and parts made in a lab and say "We don't currently know how to get from A and B, so lets assume that a supernatural being intervenes. We can look into how he did it, but if at any point we see evidence that doesn't match up with the theory, that's OK because it's supernatural." Once you start admitting supernatural causes, it's just a question of where and how frequently you are willing to apply them.
No you don't. You can say God did it and now let's do experiments to figure out how He might have done that. A theory of how God may have built something can be tested just as readily as a theory that postulates time and chance was the originator.
ID lets you ask "how does it work" (how does god accomplish this effect in a living creature), but not "how did it get there". If you accept that organisms changed over time to reach their current capabilities, you're accepting evolution. If you reject change over time, you're saying that an organism at some point in the past emerged fully formed from nothing by the will of a creator. That isn't reconcilable with science. That also doesn't address the fact that creationists reserve the right to reject information that does not gel with their preexisting interpretation of the facts on the basis of divine will.
A theory of how God may have built something can be tested just as readily as a theory that postulates time and chance was the originator.
How can you test that god built something? If you're saying explore alternate physical processes by which something may have happened, then you're not figuring out how god built it; you're figuring out a natural process (science) and then attributing it to a supernatural entity (religion). If you're exploring processes not compatible with reality as we understand it ("maybe God reversed thermodynamics for a little bit, in a localized region"), then you're not creating a testable hypothesis. You can carry out an experiment that says "under these circumstances, random chance doesn't suffice", but that doesn't argue for a supernatural origin, it just argues against the circumstances and mechanism proposed in the experiment.
We reverse engineer human creations all the time. So now the scientists can and do reverse engineer some of the things that God first came up with. Cameras and Sonar are just two examples of man copying God's designs. Good thing He doesn't sue us for patent and copyright infringement. Science can work just as well or even better with the underlying idea of investigating God's clever designs and make them useful for the service of humanity.
We've had some success investigating how to duplicate function (though in the case of cameras and sonar, I don't know that success came primarily from copying nature; it's just as likely that understanding non-biological effects like lensing of prisms and carrying of noise underwater were primary drivers. Echolocation was demonstrated in bats in 1938; patents for echo sounding devices date to 1912-1913 according to Wikipedia. Likely we discovered marine mammal echolocation as a result of creating devices to measure sound underwater, ra
So tell me, has any lab ever bee able to show how an amoeba, or some other collection of one celled organisms becomes an organism even as lowly as a worm?
Has there ever been an experiment to show how that life can come from non-liveing chemicals? Has any lab ever determined where the immense amount of information originated that is inherent in any living cell?
There are hundreds of experiments into just these areas that have been going on for decades. We've seen the production of (fairly) complex organic chemicals from non-organic mixtures. Research is ongoing into how, and in what environment, the first cell membranes were created. Research into genetics makes it possible to attempt to isolate smaller and smaller differences between strains of a species, and when and where changes might have occurred. Have final answers been reached? No. But unlike with ID, work is ongoing in the field. There are always new experiments being performed, and theories and hypothesis are being re-evaluated and refined over time. Science creates more science.
ID does not progress. You get to a point and you say "OK. I don't know. God did it. Let's put down our tools and go have lunch." There are not testable hypothesis being produced. At any time when a difficulty is reached in reconciling observation with theory, you can just throw up your hands and say "magic happened". You can't do that in science. When observation doesn't fit theory, you have to either 1) check that you didn't screw up the experiment (repeatability), 2) modify the theory, or 3) discard the theory. If a theory has stood for a long time it takes a lot of evidence to justify 3, but it does happen.
Evolution continues to provide a useful framework for creating new experiments, and to survive the experimental tests that it has been put through. ID does not, because it rests on non-negatable premises having to do with the existence of omnipotent, undetectable actors. Any piece of evidence can be dismissed as "God wanted it to be that way"- exactly what some ID proponents say about the fossil record.
Evolutionary theory isn't perfect. There are limitations, some of which are based in our abilities, and some of which come from the incomplete information that we have to work with (see fossil record). But it keeps being tested, and it keeps being refined. ID proponents typically fail to grasp that flaws in the current evolutionary theory don't argue for intelligent design; they just argue that evolutionary theory is still a work in progress. However, unlike ID, it's a work in progress that provides a framework for future science, and which has proven to have fantastic properties in terms of guiding new areas of research and explaining observed phenomena.
The fact that, as you say, "you cannot prove or disprove it" is exactly why ID is not a scientific theory. The fact that it isn't a scientific theory is exactly why it shouldn't be taught. It is not the government's job to provide me with religious interpretations; as a matter of fact, the government has no right to provide me with religious interpretations, because that conflicts with my right to come up with my own.
Scientific theories need to be falsifiable; that's what makes them scientific theories that can be tested in the lab rather than religious beliefs. ID is not falsifiable. A leading ID proponent admitted in court that a definition of "science" that includes intelligent design would also admit astrology as a scientific theory. Should we teach that in school because some people believe in it? We don't teach that maybe God is guiding evolution for the same reason that we don't teach that invisible, massless pixies are responsible for guiding objects towards Earth when they fall. It's a proposition about which science can say nothing. Should we also teach that maybe 1 + 1 = 2 because God wants it to? That computers might be operated by invisible gremlins? None of these things can be proven false.
Furthermore, I would think that religious people would be pretty unhappy with attempts to teach any single religious interpretation of the facts. For Biblical literalists, the notion that God is simply guiding evolution is an unacceptable compromise. Why should their children have to listen to someone else's religious interpretation of current scientific theories? Should we also teach how current views of large-scale cosmology are compatible with the Hindu belief that we're all living inside the body of Vishnu?
Separation of church and state doesn't just protect secular people from being evangelized to. It also protects religious people from having a particular interpretation of religious phenomena selected or championed by the government. The only approach that protects everyone's rights is to say: "These are the testable, measurable facts as science currently understands them. This is the state of research in this scientific community. If you want insight into what that means about your relationship with ultimate Truth, go ask someone else."
... and the reason that the passengers and crew attacked the hijackers instead of cooperating was that someone got a call from family on the ground informing them that the hijackers were going to crash the plane into an occupied building, instead of flying it to a neutral country to negotiate. The passengers cooperated, thinking that like most of the hijackings of the 70's and 80's there would be a negotiated settlement, until they started getting information from the ground that indicated otherwise.
None of which is really relevant to this debate; in a serious 9/11 type emergency, people are going to ignore any regulations on phone use anyway, and smart hijackers are likely to start confiscating phones.
The Chinese argument "We're doing it for the Tibetans" falls apart in the face of the simple fact that Tibetans don't seem to want them there, and never have. It further falls apart when you look at the fact that the Chinese presence there has offered much greater benefits to China than it has to Tibetans. The spoils of any economic development in Tibet have largely accrued to China. China has reaped strategic benefits by using Tibet as a way to secure its border with India.
And of course, there's the politicized periods of Maoist rule- like the Great Leap Forward- where resources (like... food) were stolen from Tibetans and other marginalized ethnic groups to provide for people in mainland China, because of the disastrous consequences of the government's moronic experiments in communal rule and planned economy. Not a lot of reciprocal benefit there.
Have there been some benefits to Tibetans? Sure. Education and literacy have improved. Infrastructure has been improved. Awesome. But couldn't those things have been achieved without suppressing Tibetan culture and their right to self-determination? Couldn't that have been achieved without murdering a lot of people, and driving many others into exile? I get this funny feeling like the Chinese could have helped Tibetan kids learn to read Chinese without bombing monasteries and using people as slave labor. Building roads in Tibet is great. But there's no reason that you need to forcibly sterilize Tibetan women or beat people for owning pictures of a guy in red robes and glasses in order to do it.
Say that the Chinese had the purest intentions in the world. That all of the benefits that had accrued to China were a big accident. That all they wanted was to make life better for Tibetans. How can that be rationalized with how they've actually conducted themselves in Tibet? How can the brutality visited on the Tibetan people be somehow necessary for the modest economic and educational gains that have been made under Chinese rule?
There's far more involvement by the royal family in Thai politics than is comperable in Japan or the UK. While it's very difficult to get accurate research on the Thai monarchy (because of Thailand's strict lese majesty laws), some scholars would point to the influence of the monarchy as one of the reasons why Thailand has gone through so many constitutions and non-democratic changes of government since its transition away from absolute monarchy. When democratic leaders become entrenched, or threaten the traditional privileges of the monarchy (as Thaksin did), they get swept out by military coups with the blessing of the crown. After a "transition period", political groups associated with the old regime are outlawed, and a new constitution and elections usher in a few more years of ostensible democracy.
It's a prime example of how a monarchy can undermine a democratic government, despite being legally granted relatively little power. That being said, Thailand has done OK overall as a democracy, particularly compared to the rest of mainland SE Asia. They got a lot of aid and trade during the cold war to prevent them from going the way of Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos because Western governments had an easier time justifying such measures to a friendly democracy, rather than a friendly despot. There was an article recently speculating that Bhutan is trying the same trick; few people in Bhutan are actually interested in pursuing a democratic government (the king had to order the creation of two political parties, because no one wanted to contest the elections), but they've realized that by being a democracy they will attract aid and support that they wouldn't get otherwise, particularly if the Marxist/Maoist guerrilla problem that has plagued Nepal starts to spread, or if India suddenly takes a notion to collect all three Himalayan Buddhist kingdoms (thereby qualifying to send away the proofs of purchase and get a special bonus prize).
One of the reasons I am wary of this whole Tibet issue is that China happens to be the West's main economic rival, and now it is convenient for Western governments to support the Dalai Lama's cause. The Dalai Lama is not a democratically elected leader, and pre-1949 Tibet was not exactly the merry free independent country you see in Hollywood depictions. Most of the Tibetans were serfs and enslaved in all but name, serving the religious aristocracy of the Lamas.
"Western governments" supporting the Dalai Lama? The most that the West has ever done for the Dalai Lama and Tibet is make a half-assed attempt at training some Kham and Amdo guerrillas during the 1950's and early 60's. During later years, they did less, not more for Tibet, limiting themselves to minor expressions of irritation while engaging in multi-billion dollar trade deals. Western governments give no little or no official recognition to the Dalai Lama in order to avoid stirring up the Chinese. The economic ties between the West and China have resulted in less, not more, support for Tibet. Meanwhile, the Tibetan exile community's demands have gotten weaker and weaker every year. Most Tibetan exile groups are no longer asking for independence, or even autonomy. Instead, they're advocating for the preservation of Tibetan culture- for the right to teach the Tibetan language and use it in Tibetan-speaking areas, and for the right to free religious practice.
The Dalai Lama himself is advocating not for his return to power; ideally, he's said that he wants Tibetan self-determination, but the priority is on preserving their national language and their own religion and culture. The governance of the Tibetan Government in Exile is performed by civilian elected officials, not the Dalai Lama. I don't know anyone who actually knows anything about Tibet who believes that it was a smiling utopia prior to the communist invasion, but that fact doesn't terminate the Tibetan people's right to self-determination.
As long as China was an ally of the US against the Soviet Union, you did not hear much about Tibet or the Dalai Lama.
First of all, when exactly were the US and China allies? Second of all, Tibet and the Dalai Lama have been in the media since the invasion of Tibet- the Dalai Lama's flight from Lhasa was on the front page of Time magazine. Yes, the internet and the indy film scene (with the exception of Kundun, which had limited screenings, and 7 Years in Tibet, recent films on Tibet have been almost exclusively small, independent productions) have given more exposure to Tibet; the Dalai Lama winning the Nobel Peace Prize didn't hurt either. Depicting this growth as a conscious effort by Western countries is goofy; the West is pointedly disinterested in discussing Tibet with the Chinese because real action on the issue threatens a valuable trade relationship. If the Western economic powers were manipulating public depictions of Tibet, you would see media depictions of Tibet converging on the Chinese, not Tibetan, consensus on the issue, because that's where the money is. I think the US government generally would be just as happy if the exile groups and Free Tibet crowd would shut up and disappear, so that they could focus on financing our massive deficit spending with Chinese cash and not have to (once in a blue moon) answer pointed questions about why we fell all over ourselves to liberate Quwait, but couldn't be bothered to defend a country with much better historical claims to cultural and political independence.
The 3/5ths compromise wasn't a Supreme Court decision, it was made at the Philadelphia Constitutional convention. And while SC decisions can be revisited, the court is very, very wary of overturning earlier decisions without a very big change in the culture; the justices are on the whole a very conservative body, and are typically unwilling to directory contradict the reasoning of an earlier justice unless there is either a marked flaw in the decision (as in logical fallacy) or there's been a big change in the country (Plessy v. Vergusson vs. Brown v. BOE). Since the privacy decision that the EFF cites was made in 1995, the odds of the Supremes (much less the Four Tops, or the Shirelles) revisiting the decision seems very slim. Particularly over some goofy law that (I believe) an ex-University of Kentucky quarter back made up on his weekend off because people were calling him names on the intertubes,
Castro sucks and all, but still being miffed over the Cuban missile crisis is a pretty terrible reason for maintaining a particular foreign policy. The embargo continually pushes Cuba closer to US enemies (USSR, Hugo Chavez), while substantially reducing the quality of life for the average Cuban much more than it punishes the creeps at the top. Meanwhile, economic disengagement has removed any leverage that the United States might be able to exert on Cuba in order to encourage better behavior by the government. The question with the embargo is: who exactly is this helping? From what I can tell, the big beneficiaries have been the USSR and Venezuela. In exchange for slipping the Cubans just enough money and resources to keep their economy from grinding to a halt, they get (in Russia's case) a strategic foothold in the Western hemisphere, and a PR victory for propping up a regime that is an ongoing embarrassment for the United States.
The 1960's era horror picture of a screaming teen?? Rating things on a scale of "David Bowie" to "David Blane"? Claiming the internal combustion engine is "just wrong" because it runs on tiny explosions? The article is tongue in cheek. The author is poking fun at unreasonable fears on the one hand, and on the other poking fun at technologies that get on his nerves (Twitter et. al.) by calling them offensive to human sensibility and threats to the earth.
No, no it isn't. By associating that crap with actual science in the slightest we're giving it an unearned legitimacy and credibility. People with no understanding of the scientific method and no ability to reason like a scientist get to pretend they know something about science. This only gets in the way of actually educating them.
I think you over-estimate the credibility that science has with the general public. From their view, science being on television lends it legitimacy. "If it's so important, why wasn't there anything about it on TV?"
Some shows on Discovery, History, and others unfortunately do give unwarranted attention and authority to marginal or debunked theories while giving scant attention to less sensational but solid science (the show on History about the "Bible Code" nonsense was one of the worst I've seen in this respect). But many of them also do a good job of conveying bits and pieces of fairly current knowledge about science and history in a way that is appealing to people. Some of these commercially produced documentaries are certainly more effective teaching tools than a lot of the materials used in schools, in terms of what people actually retain from watching them and their ability to hold people's interest.
If you compare it to some idealized form of discourse between the scientific establishment and the public, these shows are going to come up short. But that idealized form has never existed, and likely never will.
Jared Diamond made some excellent points in this regard in his book Collapse. If companies are going to do something that is socially good- like improve their environmental policies- current law requires that the corporation show that either 1) it's required by law to do it, or 2) it will make its shareholders more money by being nice than not. On the other hand, were we to get rid of the various shareholder protection laws that require corporations to be constantly acting in the interest of the shareholder's money, it becomes very difficult to ensure that corporations aren't spending investor's money irresponsibly.
In other words, if you want companies to act ethically, you need to either "align their incentives" with it- make it costly for them to behave unethically- or make it illegal to act unethically.
The case here seems a bit quixotic- I can't see a court ruling that Yahoo was failing to enhance shareholder value by turning down a somewhat low ball acquisition. Even the rumor that Yahoo was nosing around for a white knight could ultimately show that there was other interest in Yahoo as a property, and that Microsoft's bid undervalued the company, if others were interested. Maybe someone is trying to cover a short-term gap; maybe they're heavy in both Yahoo and Microsoft and want to pull cash out of the Yahoo deal while holding onto Microsoft stock that would hopefully be ultimately buoyed by the acquisition. A lot of these local and regional pension systems are hurting to cover their obligations; if they have a lot of Yahoo stock that they need to liquidate to cover near-term debts, they might prefer the guarantee of a Microsoft buyout to the prospect of unloading stock gradually over the next n months or years, where the price is going to be subject to greater volatility. A large holder or two dumping stock onto the market can depress prices, reducing the value of any additional holdings that they have; a nice orderly buyout would put cash in their hands at a fixed price.
There was some commentary about this when Edwards dropped. Essentially, because of the way the federal election system works, there are specified stages in closing down a campaign- there is a legal definition between a campaign that is "suspended" and a campaign that is "ended". The big one is that a suspended campaign can continue to receive federal matching funds, which can be used to make sure that salaried staffers get their paychecks, and that debts that the campaign has previously incurred can be paid off. Suspension is a recognized stage in the process of shutting the campaign down- and it also means that in the event of something really bizarre happening, like a front-runner dropping out, the campaign can be re-activated with a minimum of procedural overhead.
Facebook's position was summed up by Georgetown Law Professor Dan Solove, 'They seem to be going on the assumption that if someone uses Facebook, they really have no privacy concerns.'
"They seem to assume that people who post their name, address, sexual orientation and gender on giant roadside billboards don't care if strangers know their name, address, sexual orientation and gender! It's like they think that people who go out into the crowded streets don't care who knows what shirt they're wearing!"
... a practice that unfairly victimizes many hard working, law-abiding consumptives. What business is it of my employer what I cough up on the weekends?
Inter-stellar communication would almost certainly be perceived as representing the entire planet.
What possible reason could anyone have for believing that? There's no data to make any sort of conclusion about alien attitudes towards government, or even if a comparable concept exists among the giant, mono-cellular vacuum-dwelling beings of Dog Doo 12 who eat UV radiation and poop gamma rays. Even assuming (for no particular reason except playing nice with 50 years of sci-fi) that aliens are human-like, if they are capable of receiving and decoding interstellar transmissions, they're at least as smart and sophisticated as we are- which means that they would already be aware that you don't need a world government to build a big radio transmitter.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Why do they exist at all, and 2) why are they published primarily in print? The first question is easy; journals are structured the way that they are in order to vet quality and remove bias. The refereeing process for prestigious journals is quite complex; the papers are often anonymized, and then read by multiple readers, each of whom are recognized as significant contributors to their field. Changes or additional data may be asked for prior to publication to clarify or improve the article. It's comparable in many ways to the work flow of any magazine or other publication, but more rigorous and involved. Also keep in mind that the people who are editing and reviewing important papers are not primarily editors; they often have full-time loads of teaching and research for a university as well. These are areas where expertise is more important than number of eyes; having 10,000 people with a sophomoric understanding of a field review a research paper in a technical field is much less useful- and possibly counter-productive- than having one or two people who have a more complete background in the topic (they've read all the papers that the new paper sites, as well as having performed their own research in the field- in other words, they have a PhD).
Why are they published on paper instead of primarily online? Well, one reason is certainly inertia. On the other hand, there are relatively few individual subscribers to these journals. They are mostly shipped to universities and research institutes, which keep them in the periodicals room for a month/quarter/whatever, and then bind them into collections and keep them in perpetuity in their library collection. After that point, the institution is not dependent on permission or payment to anyone else in order to provide access to the work in question. Print publication provides a good back-up in the event of a journal ceasing publication (taking its web site with it), or a paper or publisher running afoul of the law in some other area.
Another point to be made here is that increasingly, journals are publishing material online in addition to their print releases. There are fees associated with access (typically that only universities want to pay), but on the other hand keeping this system of rigorous refereeing going requires some monetary inputs (as does perpetually hosting and indexing these papers in a robust system). Print publication is slow, but significant papers are often also available on the web from their authors, are shared in pre-publication formats, or are presented at conferences or seminars. The rights granted to a journal on publication are often narrowly defined enough that the authors can do whatever they want with the paper before or after publication. In these scenarios, publication in a journal acts primarily as a stamp of approval, rather than as the primary channel of distribution for the information that the paper contains.
I would be happy to see every journal in the world parallel-publish their content on the web free of charge, and frankly think that a lot of academics would too. It will probably happen, eventually. However, right now you can get access to almost anything that has been published through either a university, or even public library in most cases. Technical articles in particular are increasingly made available on the web by their authors- hit the home page of any professor of computer science or a related field and you'll find lots of papers to download. Access is lagging behind primarily in non-tech savvy fields- you can very easily find free copies of significant papers in engineering fields, not so much in philosophy and ancient history. These fields will likely catch up over time, and in the meantime the number of people who have 1) the background sufficient to contribute to the field but 2) no ready access to these papers is likely to be very small. As such, I would be surprised if the journal system is really holding back progress in any meaningful way.
Private school teachers are typically paid less and have lesser benefit and retirement packages. In exchange, they deal with far fewer student disciplinary problems and less meddling from state and local bureaucracy. On the other hand, they can be fired for pissing off students with well-connected parents.
If you talk to people who used to be public school teachers and have moved on or changed to private schools, I think that very few people would tell you that the union is the problem. Private school teachers readily accept lower pay in exchange for not having to deal with 20-year old ex-cons and not being lectured every three weeks on the latest educational fads, typically, by "educational consultants" who were in the classroom as little as possible before moving on to more lucrative careers- if they were teachers at all.
Loan forgiveness programs are nice, but compared to comparably educated people teachers are treated very poorly. Compared to other professional workers, they have much less control over their schedules, fewer job perks, and significantly lower pay. If you have a science or math degree, if you go into something other than teaching you can probably afford to pay off your loans and still have more take-home pay than a new teacher who is getting subsidized loan repayment.
Teachers without unions generally have lower pay and lower job security. My guess is that this stems from the fact that large numbers of educated women traditionally had few other choices for their occupation, not from unions.
He said that the policies tend to be popular in the long run, not the person who enacts them. Lyndon Johnson is a great example; he was excoriated at the time for trying to get the Civil Rights Act passed, but few people these days would like to overturn it. The term of a US president, even one who wins re-election, is too short to really be called "long term".
Most plastics are recyclable, as are most electronic components- it's just that in some cases, recycling them either requires or releases some nasty chemicals as you try to undo the various bonding and mixing that got them in their present state.
As for making wood or steel cabinets for things, there are several problems.
* Added weight means huge additional costs in cash and energy for shipping, particularly when you're talking about moving inventory from Asia.
* Production costs. Making quality wooden stuff or stamping out quality steel has higher labor and materials costs than injection molding a bunch of plastic bits. Customers aren't willing to eat the higher costs because of...
* Product life cycles. Building things to last costs more money and energy, typically. I don't need my Playstation crafted to the same standards as an heirloom china cabinet because the PS is going to be obsolete in 4 years, whereas a piece of furniture isn't. "Built to last" in electronics dropped off the map once it became clear that by the time something broke down, you get get something newer and better for less than the cost of a repair.
In short, TVs used to be put in wooden cabinets because newer, better TVs weren't being rolled out every 3 years. The market also won out here- most people decided that cheap plastic junk was a better investment than an heirloom-quality TV cabinet. It was cheaper, less of a hassle to move around, and easier to place in a room and match to your other furnishings.
But even on windows, it worked for version (I think) 1.4 but not version 1.5; either they did some real digging in order to find forward-incompatible features, or the Sun-provided JRE broke some subtle assumptions about how code worked at the implementation level. Things went back to working under 1.6 on Windows- all of this without changes to the applet itself. That to me sounds like a JRE issue- I know that on FreeBSD, some JREs would segfault running certain byte code, while others had no problems. No changes to the Java application.
I suspect the poster is alluding to the fact that Sun's decision not to make Java more open from the beginning cost them a lot of position in the market. Sun thought that Java was going to be the Next Big Thing, and so kept the language under their tight control to prevent it being forked by competitors or used in manners that they didn't approve of. The result was that because of 1) objections to Sun's control of the language, and 2) Sun's priorities in terms of support for certain platforms and not others, Java lost a lot of ground in the back-end space to Python, Ruby, and others, and the space occupied by the applet was essentially devoured by Ajax. Sun was envisioning Java as having a ubiquity in the application space to rival that of C in the systems space, but it hasn't really reached that potential. The decision to push for a closed, tightly controlled language early on is a good part of what caused that.
Hassle, more than anything else, sums it up. Installing the JDK or JRE is never as easy as installing other programs. Some distros won't include Java in their standard package repositories because of licensing constraints. You end up with two maintenance/upgrade processes: one for Java, and one for everything else. It's a pain if you have a lot of machines that need to run java- you're always manually copying around install tarballs and jar libraries that you can't just yum or apt-get out of the appropriate repo. Difficulty in Java installation is also a barrier for simple desktop Linux; at this point, Java should Just Work for any reasonable desktop experience.
I suspect that the closed sourcing is also why support for Java on non-priority systems has lagged behind. It's been a while, but I used to support Java apps that were running on FreeBSD. At the time, the state of Java there lagged behind the big three (Linux, Windows, Solaris) considerably- the latest versions of of the JDK/JRE weren't always available, and when they were there were sometimes weird bugs lurking in them that would cause applications to puke. Support for other languages wasn't anywhere near as far behind because it was much easier for BSD developers to track changes in the source of languages that primarily targeted Linux.
For that matter, despite Suns attempts at making Java a universal platform, support on some platforms has been better than others. My employer bought a 3rd party Java HR application for employees to use for leave/VK time reporting, with the promise that it would work for any system since it's Java (a lot of people have Linux or Mac). No such luck. It's interface is an applet that works on only certain versions of the JRE under windows. Maybe the vendor is just incompetent, but Java is supposed to simplify the writing of cross-platform applications. I strongly suspect that these kinds of problems are a consequence of Sun keeping the source closed: priorities on development of the JRE/JDK had to be constrained by Sun's resources and economic priorities. No matter how enthusiastic the user community on lower-priority operating systems, they couldn't fix problems themselves.
Scientists see engines at work, and make engine parts from non-engine parts, and postulate: "There must be a way to get there from here. Lets keep experimenting until we work it out." Progress is incremental, but possible. Creationists see working engines and parts made in a lab and say "We don't currently know how to get from A and B, so lets assume that a supernatural being intervenes. We can look into how he did it, but if at any point we see evidence that doesn't match up with the theory, that's OK because it's supernatural." Once you start admitting supernatural causes, it's just a question of where and how frequently you are willing to apply them.
ID lets you ask "how does it work" (how does god accomplish this effect in a living creature), but not "how did it get there". If you accept that organisms changed over time to reach their current capabilities, you're accepting evolution. If you reject change over time, you're saying that an organism at some point in the past emerged fully formed from nothing by the will of a creator. That isn't reconcilable with science. That also doesn't address the fact that creationists reserve the right to reject information that does not gel with their preexisting interpretation of the facts on the basis of divine will.
There are hundreds of experiments into just these areas that have been going on for decades. We've seen the production of (fairly) complex organic chemicals from non-organic mixtures. Research is ongoing into how, and in what environment, the first cell membranes were created. Research into genetics makes it possible to attempt to isolate smaller and smaller differences between strains of a species, and when and where changes might have occurred. Have final answers been reached? No. But unlike with ID, work is ongoing in the field. There are always new experiments being performed, and theories and hypothesis are being re-evaluated and refined over time. Science creates more science.
ID does not progress. You get to a point and you say "OK. I don't know. God did it. Let's put down our tools and go have lunch." There are not testable hypothesis being produced. At any time when a difficulty is reached in reconciling observation with theory, you can just throw up your hands and say "magic happened". You can't do that in science. When observation doesn't fit theory, you have to either 1) check that you didn't screw up the experiment (repeatability), 2) modify the theory, or 3) discard the theory. If a theory has stood for a long time it takes a lot of evidence to justify 3, but it does happen.
Evolution continues to provide a useful framework for creating new experiments, and to survive the experimental tests that it has been put through. ID does not, because it rests on non-negatable premises having to do with the existence of omnipotent, undetectable actors. Any piece of evidence can be dismissed as "God wanted it to be that way"- exactly what some ID proponents say about the fossil record.
Evolutionary theory isn't perfect. There are limitations, some of which are based in our abilities, and some of which come from the incomplete information that we have to work with (see fossil record). But it keeps being tested, and it keeps being refined. ID proponents typically fail to grasp that flaws in the current evolutionary theory don't argue for intelligent design; they just argue that evolutionary theory is still a work in progress. However, unlike ID, it's a work in progress that provides a framework for future science, and which has proven to have fantastic properties in terms of guiding new areas of research and explaining observed phenomena.
The fact that, as you say, "you cannot prove or disprove it" is exactly why ID is not a scientific theory. The fact that it isn't a scientific theory is exactly why it shouldn't be taught. It is not the government's job to provide me with religious interpretations; as a matter of fact, the government has no right to provide me with religious interpretations, because that conflicts with my right to come up with my own.
Scientific theories need to be falsifiable; that's what makes them scientific theories that can be tested in the lab rather than religious beliefs. ID is not falsifiable. A leading ID proponent admitted in court that a definition of "science" that includes intelligent design would also admit astrology as a scientific theory. Should we teach that in school because some people believe in it? We don't teach that maybe God is guiding evolution for the same reason that we don't teach that invisible, massless pixies are responsible for guiding objects towards Earth when they fall. It's a proposition about which science can say nothing. Should we also teach that maybe 1 + 1 = 2 because God wants it to? That computers might be operated by invisible gremlins? None of these things can be proven false.
Furthermore, I would think that religious people would be pretty unhappy with attempts to teach any single religious interpretation of the facts. For Biblical literalists, the notion that God is simply guiding evolution is an unacceptable compromise. Why should their children have to listen to someone else's religious interpretation of current scientific theories? Should we also teach how current views of large-scale cosmology are compatible with the Hindu belief that we're all living inside the body of Vishnu?
Separation of church and state doesn't just protect secular people from being evangelized to. It also protects religious people from having a particular interpretation of religious phenomena selected or championed by the government. The only approach that protects everyone's rights is to say: "These are the testable, measurable facts as science currently understands them. This is the state of research in this scientific community. If you want insight into what that means about your relationship with ultimate Truth, go ask someone else."
If we're going to ban everything that isn't safe for use by drunken children, we're not going to be left with much that's legal.
I believe you just remove the full stops between each letter.
... and the reason that the passengers and crew attacked the hijackers instead of cooperating was that someone got a call from family on the ground informing them that the hijackers were going to crash the plane into an occupied building, instead of flying it to a neutral country to negotiate. The passengers cooperated, thinking that like most of the hijackings of the 70's and 80's there would be a negotiated settlement, until they started getting information from the ground that indicated otherwise.
None of which is really relevant to this debate; in a serious 9/11 type emergency, people are going to ignore any regulations on phone use anyway, and smart hijackers are likely to start confiscating phones.
The Chinese argument "We're doing it for the Tibetans" falls apart in the face of the simple fact that Tibetans don't seem to want them there, and never have. It further falls apart when you look at the fact that the Chinese presence there has offered much greater benefits to China than it has to Tibetans. The spoils of any economic development in Tibet have largely accrued to China. China has reaped strategic benefits by using Tibet as a way to secure its border with India.
And of course, there's the politicized periods of Maoist rule- like the Great Leap Forward- where resources (like... food) were stolen from Tibetans and other marginalized ethnic groups to provide for people in mainland China, because of the disastrous consequences of the government's moronic experiments in communal rule and planned economy. Not a lot of reciprocal benefit there.
Have there been some benefits to Tibetans? Sure. Education and literacy have improved. Infrastructure has been improved. Awesome. But couldn't those things have been achieved without suppressing Tibetan culture and their right to self-determination? Couldn't that have been achieved without murdering a lot of people, and driving many others into exile? I get this funny feeling like the Chinese could have helped Tibetan kids learn to read Chinese without bombing monasteries and using people as slave labor. Building roads in Tibet is great. But there's no reason that you need to forcibly sterilize Tibetan women or beat people for owning pictures of a guy in red robes and glasses in order to do it.
Say that the Chinese had the purest intentions in the world. That all of the benefits that had accrued to China were a big accident. That all they wanted was to make life better for Tibetans. How can that be rationalized with how they've actually conducted themselves in Tibet? How can the brutality visited on the Tibetan people be somehow necessary for the modest economic and educational gains that have been made under Chinese rule?
There's far more involvement by the royal family in Thai politics than is comperable in Japan or the UK. While it's very difficult to get accurate research on the Thai monarchy (because of Thailand's strict lese majesty laws), some scholars would point to the influence of the monarchy as one of the reasons why Thailand has gone through so many constitutions and non-democratic changes of government since its transition away from absolute monarchy. When democratic leaders become entrenched, or threaten the traditional privileges of the monarchy (as Thaksin did), they get swept out by military coups with the blessing of the crown. After a "transition period", political groups associated with the old regime are outlawed, and a new constitution and elections usher in a few more years of ostensible democracy.
It's a prime example of how a monarchy can undermine a democratic government, despite being legally granted relatively little power. That being said, Thailand has done OK overall as a democracy, particularly compared to the rest of mainland SE Asia. They got a lot of aid and trade during the cold war to prevent them from going the way of Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos because Western governments had an easier time justifying such measures to a friendly democracy, rather than a friendly despot. There was an article recently speculating that Bhutan is trying the same trick; few people in Bhutan are actually interested in pursuing a democratic government (the king had to order the creation of two political parties, because no one wanted to contest the elections), but they've realized that by being a democracy they will attract aid and support that they wouldn't get otherwise, particularly if the Marxist/Maoist guerrilla problem that has plagued Nepal starts to spread, or if India suddenly takes a notion to collect all three Himalayan Buddhist kingdoms (thereby qualifying to send away the proofs of purchase and get a special bonus prize).
"Western governments" supporting the Dalai Lama? The most that the West has ever done for the Dalai Lama and Tibet is make a half-assed attempt at training some Kham and Amdo guerrillas during the 1950's and early 60's. During later years, they did less, not more for Tibet, limiting themselves to minor expressions of irritation while engaging in multi-billion dollar trade deals. Western governments give no little or no official recognition to the Dalai Lama in order to avoid stirring up the Chinese. The economic ties between the West and China have resulted in less, not more, support for Tibet. Meanwhile, the Tibetan exile community's demands have gotten weaker and weaker every year. Most Tibetan exile groups are no longer asking for independence, or even autonomy. Instead, they're advocating for the preservation of Tibetan culture- for the right to teach the Tibetan language and use it in Tibetan-speaking areas, and for the right to free religious practice.
The Dalai Lama himself is advocating not for his return to power; ideally, he's said that he wants Tibetan self-determination, but the priority is on preserving their national language and their own religion and culture. The governance of the Tibetan Government in Exile is performed by civilian elected officials, not the Dalai Lama. I don't know anyone who actually knows anything about Tibet who believes that it was a smiling utopia prior to the communist invasion, but that fact doesn't terminate the Tibetan people's right to self-determination.
First of all, when exactly were the US and China allies? Second of all, Tibet and the Dalai Lama have been in the media since the invasion of Tibet- the Dalai Lama's flight from Lhasa was on the front page of Time magazine. Yes, the internet and the indy film scene (with the exception of Kundun, which had limited screenings, and 7 Years in Tibet, recent films on Tibet have been almost exclusively small, independent productions) have given more exposure to Tibet; the Dalai Lama winning the Nobel Peace Prize didn't hurt either. Depicting this growth as a conscious effort by Western countries is goofy; the West is pointedly disinterested in discussing Tibet with the Chinese because real action on the issue threatens a valuable trade relationship. If the Western economic powers were manipulating public depictions of Tibet, you would see media depictions of Tibet converging on the Chinese, not Tibetan, consensus on the issue, because that's where the money is. I think the US government generally would be just as happy if the exile groups and Free Tibet crowd would shut up and disappear, so that they could focus on financing our massive deficit spending with Chinese cash and not have to (once in a blue moon) answer pointed questions about why we fell all over ourselves to liberate Quwait, but couldn't be bothered to defend a country with much better historical claims to cultural and political independence.
The 3/5ths compromise wasn't a Supreme Court decision, it was made at the Philadelphia Constitutional convention. And while SC decisions can be revisited, the court is very, very wary of overturning earlier decisions without a very big change in the culture; the justices are on the whole a very conservative body, and are typically unwilling to directory contradict the reasoning of an earlier justice unless there is either a marked flaw in the decision (as in logical fallacy) or there's been a big change in the country (Plessy v. Vergusson vs. Brown v. BOE). Since the privacy decision that the EFF cites was made in 1995, the odds of the Supremes (much less the Four Tops, or the Shirelles) revisiting the decision seems very slim. Particularly over some goofy law that (I believe) an ex-University of Kentucky quarter back made up on his weekend off because people were calling him names on the intertubes,
Castro sucks and all, but still being miffed over the Cuban missile crisis is a pretty terrible reason for maintaining a particular foreign policy. The embargo continually pushes Cuba closer to US enemies (USSR, Hugo Chavez), while substantially reducing the quality of life for the average Cuban much more than it punishes the creeps at the top. Meanwhile, economic disengagement has removed any leverage that the United States might be able to exert on Cuba in order to encourage better behavior by the government. The question with the embargo is: who exactly is this helping? From what I can tell, the big beneficiaries have been the USSR and Venezuela. In exchange for slipping the Cubans just enough money and resources to keep their economy from grinding to a halt, they get (in Russia's case) a strategic foothold in the Western hemisphere, and a PR victory for propping up a regime that is an ongoing embarrassment for the United States.
To quote Foghorn Leghorn, "It's a joke, son."
The 1960's era horror picture of a screaming teen?? Rating things on a scale of "David Bowie" to "David Blane"? Claiming the internal combustion engine is "just wrong" because it runs on tiny explosions? The article is tongue in cheek. The author is poking fun at unreasonable fears on the one hand, and on the other poking fun at technologies that get on his nerves (Twitter et. al.) by calling them offensive to human sensibility and threats to the earth.
I think you over-estimate the credibility that science has with the general public. From their view, science being on television lends it legitimacy. "If it's so important, why wasn't there anything about it on TV?"
Some shows on Discovery, History, and others unfortunately do give unwarranted attention and authority to marginal or debunked theories while giving scant attention to less sensational but solid science (the show on History about the "Bible Code" nonsense was one of the worst I've seen in this respect). But many of them also do a good job of conveying bits and pieces of fairly current knowledge about science and history in a way that is appealing to people. Some of these commercially produced documentaries are certainly more effective teaching tools than a lot of the materials used in schools, in terms of what people actually retain from watching them and their ability to hold people's interest.
If you compare it to some idealized form of discourse between the scientific establishment and the public, these shows are going to come up short. But that idealized form has never existed, and likely never will.
Jared Diamond made some excellent points in this regard in his book Collapse. If companies are going to do something that is socially good- like improve their environmental policies- current law requires that the corporation show that either 1) it's required by law to do it, or 2) it will make its shareholders more money by being nice than not. On the other hand, were we to get rid of the various shareholder protection laws that require corporations to be constantly acting in the interest of the shareholder's money, it becomes very difficult to ensure that corporations aren't spending investor's money irresponsibly.
In other words, if you want companies to act ethically, you need to either "align their incentives" with it- make it costly for them to behave unethically- or make it illegal to act unethically.
The case here seems a bit quixotic- I can't see a court ruling that Yahoo was failing to enhance shareholder value by turning down a somewhat low ball acquisition. Even the rumor that Yahoo was nosing around for a white knight could ultimately show that there was other interest in Yahoo as a property, and that Microsoft's bid undervalued the company, if others were interested. Maybe someone is trying to cover a short-term gap; maybe they're heavy in both Yahoo and Microsoft and want to pull cash out of the Yahoo deal while holding onto Microsoft stock that would hopefully be ultimately buoyed by the acquisition. A lot of these local and regional pension systems are hurting to cover their obligations; if they have a lot of Yahoo stock that they need to liquidate to cover near-term debts, they might prefer the guarantee of a Microsoft buyout to the prospect of unloading stock gradually over the next n months or years, where the price is going to be subject to greater volatility. A large holder or two dumping stock onto the market can depress prices, reducing the value of any additional holdings that they have; a nice orderly buyout would put cash in their hands at a fixed price.
There was some commentary about this when Edwards dropped. Essentially, because of the way the federal election system works, there are specified stages in closing down a campaign- there is a legal definition between a campaign that is "suspended" and a campaign that is "ended". The big one is that a suspended campaign can continue to receive federal matching funds, which can be used to make sure that salaried staffers get their paychecks, and that debts that the campaign has previously incurred can be paid off. Suspension is a recognized stage in the process of shutting the campaign down- and it also means that in the event of something really bizarre happening, like a front-runner dropping out, the campaign can be re-activated with a minimum of procedural overhead.
Facebook's position was summed up by Georgetown Law Professor Dan Solove, 'They seem to be going on the assumption that if someone
uses Facebook, they really have no privacy concerns.'
"They seem to assume that people who post their name, address, sexual orientation and gender on giant roadside billboards don't care if strangers know their name, address, sexual orientation and gender! It's like they think that people who go out into the crowded streets don't care who knows what shirt they're wearing!"
... a practice that unfairly victimizes many hard working, law-abiding consumptives. What business is it of my employer what I cough up on the weekends?
They came for the lepers, and I did nothing...
What possible reason could anyone have for believing that? There's no data to make any sort of conclusion about alien attitudes towards government, or even if a comparable concept exists among the giant, mono-cellular vacuum-dwelling beings of Dog Doo 12 who eat UV radiation and poop gamma rays. Even assuming (for no particular reason except playing nice with 50 years of sci-fi) that aliens are human-like, if they are capable of receiving and decoding interstellar transmissions, they're at least as smart and sophisticated as we are- which means that they would already be aware that you don't need a world government to build a big radio transmitter.