Yes, let's get into a semantics argument. "or" as it is used in English means "xor" while "and/or" means "or". Now you know.
Incorrect. English "or" frequently means "xor", but not always. Consider: "Do you have a dime or two nickles?" Your answer can be "yes" if you have a dime, two nickles, or a dime and two nickles. Or: "Do you want something to eat or drink?" You can say "yes" if you want something to eat, or if you want something to drink, or if you want both.
But word by default capitalizes words I don't want capitalized, uncapitalizes things I do, and dissappears menu items.
It also wrecks the grammar in your internet posts.
Has anybody ever noticed that grammar nazis tend not to understand English grammar? There is nothing grammatically wrong with that sentence. Bad spelling and capitalization, yes. But the grammar is fine.
It looks like our designer has improved our memory management and patched some vulnerabilities.
Maybe the next release will include DRM to lock out multiple personalities from sharing a single body.
The New and Improved Human 1.8! Now faster, more secure, and more stable than ever before!
So now I can pay to spend an ungodly amount of time and energy to get some 320x240 jittery so-so contrast version of some big screen movie. And I'll have to watch it in a certain time period or lose it? Or, they'll restrict the number of times I can watch it?
Dude, get a grip. They have to limit the time period or number of watches. That's why it's a rental instead of a sale.
Frankly, I'm looking forward to this. I fly frequently. Not every flight has a movie, and the movie shown is often completely uninteresting to me. I've tried watching a movie on my laptop, but that is very inconvenient--no tray space left for the drinks and peanuts, have to close down when my neighbor needs to go to the bathroom, etc. A movie on my iPod would work perfectly.
I'd never buy such a movie, but I'd rent it if the price were right.
Well, you folks could simply have started requiring ODF for internal communications (or SXW for older OOo versions), and then let the MS Office users complain about incompatibility.
I don't understand why you said this in response to what I said. Compatibility between OpenOffice and MS Office has been good for us. Requiring ODF would have done nothing but force people to use a product that they don't like using. How is that beneficial to anybody?
As long as you try to stay compatible with MS Office, you _will_ get screwed.
If we were incompatible with MS Office, we would have been screwed. We had an important presentation to make, and we tried doing it with OpenOffice. Writing was going too slow and the results were unimpressive. The main presentation writer switched over to PowerPoint, and everything ran much better. We then ran the presentation using OpenOffice, and there was only one small formatting problem we couldn't figure out how to fix. Compatibility with MS Office has been good for us. It's using OpenOffice that is a problem.
To give you an idea of what we don't like about it: The comments functionality in OO is the pits. Working with multiple fonts is a pain--the dialogue box is so buggy it irritates me every time I use it (which is frequently). We use a lot of unicode, and we have been unable to set up keyboard commands to easily insert specfic characters (Word does that with no problem). Autofilter in the spreadsheets is deficient to the point of being unusable. The only good thing I can say about the presentation stuff is that it handles PowerPoint files pretty well. And overall, it is slow to start up, and response time for simple things can be too long.
I dont have anything against openoffice.. but comparing openoffice with Microsoft-office.. it still has looong way to go (you are free to disagree).. where as firefox beats Internet-Explorer quite easily.
Indeed. I convinced my project to use OpenOffice. I did this purely to satisfy my anti-Microsoft ideology. I convinced the others via cost and demonstrating how well it handled Office files. Two months later, 2/3 of the people were complaining about how bad it was, and the rest were admitting that it wasn't so good. 1/3 of the people had installed Office, knowing that the rest of us would still be able to handle their files. The rest of us continue to use openoffice because of ideology, apathy, or laziness.
Basically, only the spreadsheet has worked to our satisfaction. Text documents are passable, but unpleasant. Presentations are completely inadequate. The migration to Office was mainly triggered by the need for PowerPoint.
I still tell people about OpenOffice, and that we (mostly) use it for our project. But I only recommend it to people who have to do simple things, like short reports or billable hours.
On the other hand, all of us independently decided to use Firefox. And nobody except me realized that there were all those extensions and themes---they chose it because it just worked better "out of the box".
Percentage of GDP is not a better metric for military spending. The US can get more firepower for 4% of GDP than Tahiti can get for 50%. In armed conflict, it is absolute firepower that matters, not firepower as a percentage of GDP.
Or, if you want, compare total dolars spent on education in other countries to how much is spent in the US. I gaurantee that the US outspends all of them on that front too, and by a large margin.
In this case, the percentage matters more than absolute dollars. Education is supposed to be distributed to each individual, so the percentage is more informative than an absolute number. If the US spent $1 per student it would be far more money than if Tahiti spent $100 per student. But which would be providing a better education (assuming rational spending practices)?
The U.S. spends so much on the armed forces for the same reason that at one point the U.S.S.R had enough nukes to destroy the entire planet a few times over- we want to make the idea of (a major nation) going against us in any significant way (as in more than "we don't support what you are doing") a horrifying thought. We want to have so much power that the rest of the world is FORCED to follow our lead or pay the price for getting in front.
Of course that's why we spend so much. But some of us don't think we should bully the rest of the world into following our lead. I don't really care what another country does, as long as they don't actively seek to harm our country. Deterant is good enough, and we can achieve that without spending $500 Billion.
There is also that whole "military spending leads to domestic jobs" thing as well.
Which is a toothless argument, because almost any field we spend $500 Billion on can generate domestic jobs.
First, I think our military might be sized right, but also might be underfunded. Why? We can barely keep an occupying force together in one country of 24 million. Imagine if there was another flash-point somewhere? Shouldn't we have a standing force large enough to handle that?
I'd say "No". I'm of the belief that our standing military should be strong enough to defend ourselves from reasonable threat, and no stronger. We can make it stronger when we need to. And it won't be too hard to raise such an army if there is clear danger. There is no Soviet Union equivalent in today's world to justify the current size of our military. If it is true that the largest threat to America is from terrorists and rogue nations, then our current military structure is not going to protect us the way we need it to. What would protect us better would be to divert much of the military spending into better border security and covert ops.
Maybe not, but I think it's not an unreasonable discussion to have.
Agreed.
We spend way too much on health, and you can lay the blame largely on Medicare. They should have something like they have in parts of the third-world: free, federally-funded clinics. These would take some of the pressure off of emergency rooms. Emergency rooms are where the US treats it's poor, and this is an expensive way to pretend we don't have socialized medicine. Free clinics would end up costing less, in my opinion - especially if we keep them miserable enough (long lines, etc.) such that only the uninsured would consider using them - just like emergency rooms today.
I mostly agree with this. But until we have such a system, we have to deal with what we have. And we aren't spending enough to deal with our current needs.
Education needs serious improvement in this country, but frankly we already spend more than we should.
Yes and no. The problem isn't with how much we spend, but how it is spent. Most the money goes to administrators at the top who siphon the money into their pet projects. The children tend not to benefit from most that money. At my Junior High, for example, the principal allocated funds to paint moronic murals and slogans on the school walls, and the textbooks in the science classroom remained 10 years out of date. Seriously, the Challenger exploded when I was in the third grade, but my seventh grade science book speculated about reusable spacecraft. Also, schools get frivolous lawsuits all the time. Little Timmy is horsing around on the slide and falls off, breaking his arm; and his parents sue the school for negligance. Nobody wants to talk about that though---we want to talk about frivolous medical malpractice suits instead. We don't need to spend less money, we need to make sure it gets to the students. Up-to-date books, fewer students in the classroom so they can get more personalized attention, and for god's sake we need to stop forcing teachers to focus on passing unrealistic standardized tests.
Last time I checked, the US literacy rate was 99%. Our neighbor to the north - spending considerably less on it's military - has something like 97%. So much for that correlation.
According to the Human Development Reports, the US and Canada are basically tied on the educational front. Both have such high literacy rates that they don't bother to collect detailed national statistics, so UNESCO gives both a 99% rate. On the other hand, Canada's life expectancy from birth is 80.0 years, and the US's is 77.4 years.
I think it's safe to say that the US military budget would not go towards education in any case.
Agreed. That doesn't mean it shouldn't go there though. Or, why not put it towards healthcare and get our life expectancy rates up?
Do all hippies think that we don't need a military?
Can't speak for hippies, having not talked to many in my life; but some of us regular people think we could reduce spending to a mere $100 billion, spend the other $400 billion on health, education, infrastructure, etc., and still have more than enough power to defend our country from anyone else in the world. We outspend the next 20 countries combined---we don't need to spend that much.
Offering the official administration response to FOX News, a senior Defense Department official pointed out that the chemical weapons were not in useable conditions.
"This does not reflect a capacity that was built up after 1991," the official said, adding the munitions "are not the WMDs this country and the rest of the world believed Iraq had, and not the WMDs for which this country went to war."
Here's a quote from David Kay on the topic: "It is less toxic than most things that Americans have under their kitchen sink at this point."
In other words, these finds do not vindicate the president---which is probably why he didn't make a big deal about them.
Now, I agree with you the CNN should have covered it. The Los Angeles Times also appears not to have covered it. But your criticism of the entire "liberal media" is not realistic: NPR, CBS, MSNBC, and the New York Times all covered it. I could look for more, but what's the point?
The Earthling Who Went To an Asteroid But Came Back From a Planet
Plot Summary: Two Earth astronomers visit the small Kuiper Belt Object of Pluto, to measure what is claimed to be the "last planet inside of the Solar System". It's 2117, and the Jupiter-Saturn war continues. The settlers are very proud of their "planet", and are understandably dissapointed and furious to find that it is in fact an "asteroid". Not to be outwitted by a rule (and the Earthlings who enforce it), the villagers set out to make their asteroid into a planet, but to do so they must keep the Earthlings from leaving, before the job is done.
No matter how much data you have, if it isn't true it;s worthless.
Who cares what their stated income is? When a company advertises its new widget mid-cost widget, that information is basically ignored.
Besides, as other have already pointed out, there is a lot that can be learned by correlating data from various sources. Despite my best efforts to keep my life private from advertisers, somehow some company has associated my sister's name with my address. I know this because I get a lot of junk mail for her. She has a very rare spelling of her name, so it's probably no coincidence. We haven't lived in the same city for almost 10 years. I've never given the name of any family member to any company. My sister claims she has never given my address to anybody (which I believe) nor given my name to any company (which I'm less sure about). But somebody connected the dots anyways.
My speculation as to how it happened: She uses tons of social networking sites/programs. She uses a yahoo account for her email, and we email each other. My email address is publicly listed and associated with my name and the institution I work at (I don't have much of a choice about that). We all know that various companies we do business with share our private information with their "affiliated programs" unless we specifically opt-out in time. Bam! Advertisers know my address and the name of my sister, and one clerical error puts her name with my address.
This is the power of data mining. This is why these social networking sites are worth so much.
(It is also an illustration of why we don't want the government using these techniques on us. Some company has my sister's information wrong. What if that kind of mistake happened on a terrorist watchlist instead of an advertising directory? My roommate is an Iranian who regularly calls Tehran, so I'm sure our phone is monitored by the NSA. Could one small clerical mistake put one of my family members on a no-fly list for suspicious telephone calls?)
Native Indians had little or no concept of ownership of land, animals, tools and many other things.
And look at how much they advanced science, technology, medicine, philosophy, and so on.
Their knowledge of biology and ecology was much more advanced than the Euro-Americans they were in contact with. They had wonderful philosophies. The best discussion of Truth I've ever heard was from a native elder discussing his tribe's traditional views. I've also heard very interesting and insightful comments about the impermanance of everything from such elders. (A Doaist or Buddhist philosopher would have been right at home.) We don't know the full extent of their potential philosophical and religious contributions to the world, because they were brutally suppressed. (Ten years in jail for performing the equivalent of a baptism, groups slaughtered for dancing, etc.)
Furthermore, since they had no concept of ownership of land, I guess they didn't feel all that bad when Europeans started settling land. After all, you can't lose something you don't own to begin with.
They did not feel so bad about Europeans settling on the land. If Europeans had just settled and lived off the land, there would have been much less of a problem (but not "no problem"). But that's not what Europeans did. They slaughtered animals for trade, not just eatting, which desimated the food source for the natives. They built roads through the grazing lands that shattered the local ecological balance, leading to dwindling sizes of buffalo and deer herds. They threw their trash out the side of the wagon, poluting the ground and water. They dug up sacred mountains and poured mercury into rivers in order to find gold.
Oh, and let's not forget the minor point that they rounded the natives up at gunpoint, moved them from the lands they had been living on for generations so that white people could use that land, put them on much smaller tracts of land that were less desirable for white people, and told them to be good or they would be killed. And if somebody found a reason for white people to use the new lands, they kicked the natives off again and put them on even smaller and less desirable tracts of land.
Interesting that even though they had no concept of ownership (according to you), they still had conflicts.
A child at school is playing with one of the class basketballs. Another kid comes over, beats him up, and starts using the ball for kick ball. There's going to be a lot of anger, bitterness, and very likely a physical fight, even though neither child owned the ball. That's closer to the native view of what happened.
And they did have a concept of ownership. They just didn't have personal ownership of community resources, like the land. They thought of trying to own the land like we think of trying to own the air we breathe. We can conceive of it, but it's a stupid idea.
People watch violent movie, then re-enact it in real life. That is, they learned a particular violent behavior by watching a violent movie (and expanding on it).
Sociologist says people have bottled-up violent impulses learned from watching violence.
You get mad at the sociologist, as if the topic of the article isn't a concrete case of his general point.
I think I see a potential definition of irony in here somewhere, but I can't quite put my finger on it.
This has nothing to do with the rise of the iPod. The ability to get single songs rather than the whole album is why downloading music (legally or illegally) got popular. We have been putting any two songs we want side-by-side since the earliest days of cassette tapes. The only way the iPod factors into this is the convenience of transfering our custom playlists onto a play-back machine. In the old days, I spent hours swapping tapes to record in the order I wanted; and I spent way too much money on blank tapes.
I love my iPod. Especially because of the sheer volume of sound files it holds, and the way its integration with iTunes* allows me to manage my songs simply. But I've been arranging songs for my personal use (without buying the entire album) for more than 15 years.
*The application, not the store. I don't like using the iTunes store, because the interface is horrible for browsing. I only use it for podcasts and the occasional audiobook.
You are right about this process redefining words. Linguists have adopted "hyperbole" as the technical term for the process you describe. Basically, if you use a word hyperbollicly once, it's a momentary change of little consequenc e; but if it gets done a lot, then the basic meaning of the word will adapt to this new hyperbolic meaning.
You are wrong about your final conclusions though. Language change is very pragmatic. If words get too watered down, new ones are brought in to take their place.
No, I'm not for prosecuting journalists, but the 1st amendment gives us all freedom of speech and freedom of the press - narrowing down who gets freedom of the press - in this case journalists - only serves to defeat the amendment. I'm tired of seeing the press get a free ticket because they are "real professionals" and people like bloggers get written off, as if the founding fathers intended the right to apply to only those who attended journalism school.
I think this is a result of the language changing a bit since 1776. The phrase "the press" used as reference to journalists dates back to roughly 1910-20. The earliest recording of this use in the OED is 1926, but it is safe to bet the phrase was in use 10 years previous (though it's impossible to be sure).
The OED gives the meaning of "freedom of the press" as
free use of the printing-press; the right to print and publish anything without submitting it to previous official censorship;
They provide a few sentences written around the time of the Constitution to support this interpretation. This definition should cover bloggers, pamphleteers--anyone who publishes information. You can bet the founding fathers would not have censored someone who handwrote their newspaper, despite the lack of a printing-press in the process.
But because of the way English is used nowadays, politicians are getting away with claiming the constitution references professional journalism, and few are aware that this is a shift in meaning. The cynical side of me wants to say that professional journalists won't cry foul, because it helps limit their competition; but I'm not sure I'm jaded enough to really believe that yet.
Wow! You are completely clueless about how human communication works! You don't understand basic English grammar either!
"Slashdotters are nerds" is declarative sentence, but being a declarative sentence is not sufficient to make it universally true. This sentence is technically called a "generic", because the truth of the statement is "generally true". By your reasoning, "Dogs bark" is false, because some dogs don't (no vocal cords). Or "Cars have four wheels" is false, because I can show you a car that has only three. That's clearly an absurd position.
When you compare these sentences to those with "all" in them, you are comparing apples and oranges. "All" makes the sentence universally quantified; and therefore the sentence can be shown to be false with a single example. Generics don't work like that.
That is bullshit. One of the points of communication is convey your ideas and thought to another. I should not be responsible for doing your communication for you.
How can it be bullshit? All I see are pixels on a screen representing letters. I don't see any bovine fecal matter anywhere. Oh, you meant his position it was completely incorrect. Why the hell did you make me do some of your communication for you? You should have just said what you meant. I'm not a mind reader.
See the stupidity of that position? Human communication relies on the fact that you are trying to understand the other person's words. Without it, there is no normal conversation. The grandparent's posts are more than sufficiently clear for any competent English speaker to understand.
This is true, but it took me about a week to get used to it in Safari. I make that mistake about as often as I accidentally hit "minimize" when I meant "close" in the titlebar. Now I like the feature so much, I have a hard time using Firefox without TabX installed. I'm happy about this change, because TabX seems to have some small bugs.
Why are online scams so much more successful than offline?
Immediate response without time to think about it.
I once got a phishing email supposedly from Amazon.com. I had had too much to drink, and I had been up for about 20 hours. I clicked the link and gave them my Amazon password, where they had access to my credit card information, address, etc. As I hit enter, the fact that it was fake finally penetrated the fog in my head. I quickly changed the password on my account, and have not had a problem. I would not have fallen for the scam if I weren't drunk and/or very tired. I would not have fallen for it if it was a snail mail message.
My roommate almost fell for a telephone scam. He was pretty high when the call came, so was only a little bit suspicious about a call from a "government office" at 9pm on a Friday night. I stopped him.
We both have advanced degrees.
(Secondary moral: Pot and alcohol do make you do stupid things you wouldn't do otherwise.)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, let's get into a semantics argument. "or" as it is used in English means "xor" while "and/or" means "or". Now you know.
Incorrect. English "or" frequently means "xor", but not always. Consider: "Do you have a dime or two nickles?" Your answer can be "yes" if you have a dime, two nickles, or a dime and two nickles. Or: "Do you want something to eat or drink?" You can say "yes" if you want something to eat, or if you want something to drink, or if you want both.
The New and Improved Human 1.8! Now faster, more secure, and more stable than ever before!
Dude, get a grip. They have to limit the time period or number of watches. That's why it's a rental instead of a sale.
Frankly, I'm looking forward to this. I fly frequently. Not every flight has a movie, and the movie shown is often completely uninteresting to me. I've tried watching a movie on my laptop, but that is very inconvenient--no tray space left for the drinks and peanuts, have to close down when my neighbor needs to go to the bathroom, etc. A movie on my iPod would work perfectly.
I'd never buy such a movie, but I'd rent it if the price were right.
Well, you folks could simply have started requiring ODF for internal communications (or SXW for older OOo versions), and then let the MS Office users complain about incompatibility.
I don't understand why you said this in response to what I said. Compatibility between OpenOffice and MS Office has been good for us. Requiring ODF would have done nothing but force people to use a product that they don't like using. How is that beneficial to anybody?
As long as you try to stay compatible with MS Office, you _will_ get screwed.
If we were incompatible with MS Office, we would have been screwed. We had an important presentation to make, and we tried doing it with OpenOffice. Writing was going too slow and the results were unimpressive. The main presentation writer switched over to PowerPoint, and everything ran much better. We then ran the presentation using OpenOffice, and there was only one small formatting problem we couldn't figure out how to fix. Compatibility with MS Office has been good for us. It's using OpenOffice that is a problem.
To give you an idea of what we don't like about it: The comments functionality in OO is the pits. Working with multiple fonts is a pain--the dialogue box is so buggy it irritates me every time I use it (which is frequently). We use a lot of unicode, and we have been unable to set up keyboard commands to easily insert specfic characters (Word does that with no problem). Autofilter in the spreadsheets is deficient to the point of being unusable. The only good thing I can say about the presentation stuff is that it handles PowerPoint files pretty well. And overall, it is slow to start up, and response time for simple things can be too long.
I dont have anything against openoffice.. but comparing openoffice with Microsoft-office.. it still has looong way to go (you are free to disagree).. where as firefox beats Internet-Explorer quite easily.
Indeed. I convinced my project to use OpenOffice. I did this purely to satisfy my anti-Microsoft ideology. I convinced the others via cost and demonstrating how well it handled Office files. Two months later, 2/3 of the people were complaining about how bad it was, and the rest were admitting that it wasn't so good. 1/3 of the people had installed Office, knowing that the rest of us would still be able to handle their files. The rest of us continue to use openoffice because of ideology, apathy, or laziness.
Basically, only the spreadsheet has worked to our satisfaction. Text documents are passable, but unpleasant. Presentations are completely inadequate. The migration to Office was mainly triggered by the need for PowerPoint.
I still tell people about OpenOffice, and that we (mostly) use it for our project. But I only recommend it to people who have to do simple things, like short reports or billable hours.
On the other hand, all of us independently decided to use Firefox. And nobody except me realized that there were all those extensions and themes---they chose it because it just worked better "out of the box".
Percentage of GDP is not a better metric for military spending. The US can get more firepower for 4% of GDP than Tahiti can get for 50%. In armed conflict, it is absolute firepower that matters, not firepower as a percentage of GDP.
Or, if you want, compare total dolars spent on education in other countries to how much is spent in the US. I gaurantee that the US outspends all of them on that front too, and by a large margin.
In this case, the percentage matters more than absolute dollars. Education is supposed to be distributed to each individual, so the percentage is more informative than an absolute number. If the US spent $1 per student it would be far more money than if Tahiti spent $100 per student. But which would be providing a better education (assuming rational spending practices)?
Of course that's why we spend so much. But some of us don't think we should bully the rest of the world into following our lead. I don't really care what another country does, as long as they don't actively seek to harm our country. Deterant is good enough, and we can achieve that without spending $500 Billion.
There is also that whole "military spending leads to domestic jobs" thing as well.
Which is a toothless argument, because almost any field we spend $500 Billion on can generate domestic jobs.
I'd say "No". I'm of the belief that our standing military should be strong enough to defend ourselves from reasonable threat, and no stronger. We can make it stronger when we need to. And it won't be too hard to raise such an army if there is clear danger. There is no Soviet Union equivalent in today's world to justify the current size of our military. If it is true that the largest threat to America is from terrorists and rogue nations, then our current military structure is not going to protect us the way we need it to. What would protect us better would be to divert much of the military spending into better border security and covert ops.
Maybe not, but I think it's not an unreasonable discussion to have.
Agreed.
We spend way too much on health, and you can lay the blame largely on Medicare. They should have something like they have in parts of the third-world: free, federally-funded clinics. These would take some of the pressure off of emergency rooms. Emergency rooms are where the US treats it's poor, and this is an expensive way to pretend we don't have socialized medicine. Free clinics would end up costing less, in my opinion - especially if we keep them miserable enough (long lines, etc.) such that only the uninsured would consider using them - just like emergency rooms today.
I mostly agree with this. But until we have such a system, we have to deal with what we have. And we aren't spending enough to deal with our current needs.
Education needs serious improvement in this country, but frankly we already spend more than we should.
Yes and no. The problem isn't with how much we spend, but how it is spent. Most the money goes to administrators at the top who siphon the money into their pet projects. The children tend not to benefit from most that money. At my Junior High, for example, the principal allocated funds to paint moronic murals and slogans on the school walls, and the textbooks in the science classroom remained 10 years out of date. Seriously, the Challenger exploded when I was in the third grade, but my seventh grade science book speculated about reusable spacecraft. Also, schools get frivolous lawsuits all the time. Little Timmy is horsing around on the slide and falls off, breaking his arm; and his parents sue the school for negligance. Nobody wants to talk about that though---we want to talk about frivolous medical malpractice suits instead. We don't need to spend less money, we need to make sure it gets to the students. Up-to-date books, fewer students in the classroom so they can get more personalized attention, and for god's sake we need to stop forcing teachers to focus on passing unrealistic standardized tests.
According to the Human Development Reports, the US and Canada are basically tied on the educational front. Both have such high literacy rates that they don't bother to collect detailed national statistics, so UNESCO gives both a 99% rate. On the other hand, Canada's life expectancy from birth is 80.0 years, and the US's is 77.4 years.
I think it's safe to say that the US military budget would not go towards education in any case.
Agreed. That doesn't mean it shouldn't go there though. Or, why not put it towards healthcare and get our life expectancy rates up?
Do all hippies think that we don't need a military?
Can't speak for hippies, having not talked to many in my life; but some of us regular people think we could reduce spending to a mere $100 billion, spend the other $400 billion on health, education, infrastructure, etc., and still have more than enough power to defend our country from anyone else in the world. We outspend the next 20 countries combined---we don't need to spend that much.
Here's a quote from David Kay on the topic: "It is less toxic than most things that Americans have under their kitchen sink at this point."
In other words, these finds do not vindicate the president---which is probably why he didn't make a big deal about them.
Now, I agree with you the CNN should have covered it. The Los Angeles Times also appears not to have covered it. But your criticism of the entire "liberal media" is not realistic: NPR, CBS, MSNBC, and the New York Times all covered it. I could look for more, but what's the point?
Who's the more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him?
The Earthling Who Went To an Asteroid But Came Back From a Planet
Plot Summary:
Two Earth astronomers visit the small Kuiper Belt Object of Pluto, to measure what is claimed to be the "last planet inside of the Solar System". It's 2117, and the Jupiter-Saturn war continues. The settlers are very proud of their "planet", and are understandably dissapointed and furious to find that it is in fact an "asteroid". Not to be outwitted by a rule (and the Earthlings who enforce it), the villagers set out to make their asteroid into a planet, but to do so they must keep the Earthlings from leaving, before the job is done.
(With apologies to the writers of this film.)
Who cares what their stated income is? When a company advertises its new widget mid-cost widget, that information is basically ignored.
Besides, as other have already pointed out, there is a lot that can be learned by correlating data from various sources. Despite my best efforts to keep my life private from advertisers, somehow some company has associated my sister's name with my address. I know this because I get a lot of junk mail for her. She has a very rare spelling of her name, so it's probably no coincidence. We haven't lived in the same city for almost 10 years. I've never given the name of any family member to any company. My sister claims she has never given my address to anybody (which I believe) nor given my name to any company (which I'm less sure about). But somebody connected the dots anyways.
My speculation as to how it happened: She uses tons of social networking sites/programs. She uses a yahoo account for her email, and we email each other. My email address is publicly listed and associated with my name and the institution I work at (I don't have much of a choice about that). We all know that various companies we do business with share our private information with their "affiliated programs" unless we specifically opt-out in time. Bam! Advertisers know my address and the name of my sister, and one clerical error puts her name with my address.
This is the power of data mining. This is why these social networking sites are worth so much.
(It is also an illustration of why we don't want the government using these techniques on us. Some company has my sister's information wrong. What if that kind of mistake happened on a terrorist watchlist instead of an advertising directory? My roommate is an Iranian who regularly calls Tehran, so I'm sure our phone is monitored by the NSA. Could one small clerical mistake put one of my family members on a no-fly list for suspicious telephone calls?)
And look at how much they advanced science, technology, medicine, philosophy, and so on.
Their knowledge of biology and ecology was much more advanced than the Euro-Americans they were in contact with. They had wonderful philosophies. The best discussion of Truth I've ever heard was from a native elder discussing his tribe's traditional views. I've also heard very interesting and insightful comments about the impermanance of everything from such elders. (A Doaist or Buddhist philosopher would have been right at home.) We don't know the full extent of their potential philosophical and religious contributions to the world, because they were brutally suppressed. (Ten years in jail for performing the equivalent of a baptism, groups slaughtered for dancing, etc.)
Furthermore, since they had no concept of ownership of land, I guess they didn't feel all that bad when Europeans started settling land. After all, you can't lose something you don't own to begin with.
They did not feel so bad about Europeans settling on the land. If Europeans had just settled and lived off the land, there would have been much less of a problem (but not "no problem"). But that's not what Europeans did. They slaughtered animals for trade, not just eatting, which desimated the food source for the natives. They built roads through the grazing lands that shattered the local ecological balance, leading to dwindling sizes of buffalo and deer herds. They threw their trash out the side of the wagon, poluting the ground and water. They dug up sacred mountains and poured mercury into rivers in order to find gold.
Oh, and let's not forget the minor point that they rounded the natives up at gunpoint, moved them from the lands they had been living on for generations so that white people could use that land, put them on much smaller tracts of land that were less desirable for white people, and told them to be good or they would be killed. And if somebody found a reason for white people to use the new lands, they kicked the natives off again and put them on even smaller and less desirable tracts of land.
Interesting that even though they had no concept of ownership (according to you), they still had conflicts.
A child at school is playing with one of the class basketballs. Another kid comes over, beats him up, and starts using the ball for kick ball. There's going to be a lot of anger, bitterness, and very likely a physical fight, even though neither child owned the ball. That's closer to the native view of what happened.
And they did have a concept of ownership. They just didn't have personal ownership of community resources, like the land. They thought of trying to own the land like we think of trying to own the air we breathe. We can conceive of it, but it's a stupid idea.
People watch violent movie, then re-enact it in real life. That is, they learned a particular violent behavior by watching a violent movie (and expanding on it).
Sociologist says people have bottled-up violent impulses learned from watching violence.
You get mad at the sociologist, as if the topic of the article isn't a concrete case of his general point.
I think I see a potential definition of irony in here somewhere, but I can't quite put my finger on it.
I love my iPod. Especially because of the sheer volume of sound files it holds, and the way its integration with iTunes* allows me to manage my songs simply. But I've been arranging songs for my personal use (without buying the entire album) for more than 15 years.
*The application, not the store. I don't like using the iTunes store, because the interface is horrible for browsing. I only use it for podcasts and the occasional audiobook.
You are wrong about your final conclusions though. Language change is very pragmatic. If words get too watered down, new ones are brought in to take their place.
I think this is a result of the language changing a bit since 1776. The phrase "the press" used as reference to journalists dates back to roughly 1910-20. The earliest recording of this use in the OED is 1926, but it is safe to bet the phrase was in use 10 years previous (though it's impossible to be sure).
The OED gives the meaning of "freedom of the press" as
They provide a few sentences written around the time of the Constitution to support this interpretation. This definition should cover bloggers, pamphleteers--anyone who publishes information. You can bet the founding fathers would not have censored someone who handwrote their newspaper, despite the lack of a printing-press in the process.But because of the way English is used nowadays, politicians are getting away with claiming the constitution references professional journalism, and few are aware that this is a shift in meaning. The cynical side of me wants to say that professional journalists won't cry foul, because it helps limit their competition; but I'm not sure I'm jaded enough to really believe that yet.
Biologists like to be life-affirming.
"Slashdotters are nerds" is declarative sentence, but being a declarative sentence is not sufficient to make it universally true. This sentence is technically called a "generic", because the truth of the statement is "generally true". By your reasoning, "Dogs bark" is false, because some dogs don't (no vocal cords). Or "Cars have four wheels" is false, because I can show you a car that has only three. That's clearly an absurd position.
When you compare these sentences to those with "all" in them, you are comparing apples and oranges. "All" makes the sentence universally quantified; and therefore the sentence can be shown to be false with a single example. Generics don't work like that.
That is bullshit. One of the points of communication is convey your ideas and thought to another. I should not be responsible for doing your communication for you.
How can it be bullshit? All I see are pixels on a screen representing letters. I don't see any bovine fecal matter anywhere. Oh, you meant his position it was completely incorrect. Why the hell did you make me do some of your communication for you? You should have just said what you meant. I'm not a mind reader.
See the stupidity of that position? Human communication relies on the fact that you are trying to understand the other person's words. Without it, there is no normal conversation. The grandparent's posts are more than sufficiently clear for any competent English speaker to understand.
Oh, they aren't ranked by decreasing likelihood? Nevermind then.
This is true, but it took me about a week to get used to it in Safari. I make that mistake about as often as I accidentally hit "minimize" when I meant "close" in the titlebar. Now I like the feature so much, I have a hard time using Firefox without TabX installed. I'm happy about this change, because TabX seems to have some small bugs.
Immediate response without time to think about it.
I once got a phishing email supposedly from Amazon.com. I had had too much to drink, and I had been up for about 20 hours. I clicked the link and gave them my Amazon password, where they had access to my credit card information, address, etc. As I hit enter, the fact that it was fake finally penetrated the fog in my head. I quickly changed the password on my account, and have not had a problem. I would not have fallen for the scam if I weren't drunk and/or very tired. I would not have fallen for it if it was a snail mail message.
My roommate almost fell for a telephone scam. He was pretty high when the call came, so was only a little bit suspicious about a call from a "government office" at 9pm on a Friday night. I stopped him.
We both have advanced degrees.
(Secondary moral: Pot and alcohol do make you do stupid things you wouldn't do otherwise.)