At least CBS corrected themselves and apologized. Fox publicly stated that they should be able to deliberately misinform the public, and took that issue through the courts.
Well, if Crossfire on CNN is any example, I've noticed that they frequently choose a charismatic and eloquent person to argue one side of the issue, and a person who lacks good rhetorical skills to argue the other side.
Interestingly, the person who is able to appear competent is generally on the side of the status quo.
What you've missed is skepticism. A lot of people have Ph.Ds, or are considered industry experts, etc. It is very easy for them to get attention from reporters, or to masquerade hypothesis as proven theory.
Just as harmful is when a scientist makes a perfectly valid claim that is based on a certain set of preconditions or stated assumptions, but the media fails to report these preconditions or assumptions.
Don't lose faith in science and scientists. Lose faith in your ability to believe in every piece of information that comes (or only purportedly comes) out of the scientific community. Science is a system that depends heavily on peer review and skeptical inquiry. You have to consider all sorts of details that you won't get from most media outlets before you can seriously expect to be able to consider the validity of a statement, including not only the assumptions made in a study or experiment, but also the structure of that study or experiment. Otherwise, you are deciding whether or not something is true when you don't even know what the thing whose truth you are evaluating is.
Not to mention that way back when/. started its subscription service, they made it clear that they would allow advertisers to pay them to post articles. Nobody seemed to complain too loudly back then.
It can be done, but in order to do so we need to have a change in the OSS culture. Right now, the DIY impulse is so strong that many hackers are more interested in re-inventing the wheel than they are in contributing to an existing project.
It's an understandable impusle. Everyone wants to feel like they are doing big things, and it's much easier to just start writing something from scratch (since you usually see the biggest things right at the start of a project). You don't have to futz around with learning another app's architecture, the team's programming style, and all that just to get to the point of throwing in a slightly better checksum routine or whatever.
Possibly we could mitigate this by working towards better coding standards or somesuch. For example, I think we could take another example from Apple and create a standard GNU plugin framework the way Apple has in Cocoa.
Well, I think that Nullsoft/AOL could compete in the standalone player market. I personally don't think it would be very difficult at all to create a WMP-killer, for example.
But yeah, Nullsoft isn't going to even start competing directly with iTunes until they are also competing directly with iTMS and (much more importantly) the iPod.
If we're talking small government in terms of decreased spending, then Halliburton is a terrible example. I fail to see how handing a cost-plus contract to a company without any bidding process whatsoever is a good way to save money. It may sound good in theory, but in practise I imagine that it's a lot like giving some random guy a blank check to go get you some beer instead of walking to the store yourself.
Am I the only one who isn't so obsessed with CPU power that I want to see a cheap linux notebook with a weak processor (I'm thinking something like a Celeron 500 here) but amazing battery life? It's not like I need that Pentium-4 or whatever to run emacs on a text terminal the way I usually do.
Too bad Intel is too busy pushing their 40ghz, +6 v undead Pentium 13370 |)00|)! (tm) to devote production capacity to anything else.
Another one to remember is people who do travel a lot. My job has sent me on road trips that are literally months long, and for a situation like that I really don't want to make do with a dinky little super-portable notebook.
Technically, you can do that with punchcards, too.
Granted, if I were to do that I would probably do it with Pepto-Bismol and Ex-Lax rather than salsa and guac. A stack of cards would really do some damage to your digestive tract.
OK, so you've leveled the field somewhat for the poorest level who can only afford the bare necessities, anyway. But it's still a system where your tax burden increases as your economic status decreases.
Who claimed that letting people run around naked is okay?
And what sorts of psychologically scarring things are we talking about here?
Anyway, since it's the day after the election and you bring up Christianity as well as "hatred, death, and disease," let's look at the things the political party that strong Christians seem to overwhelmingly support openly stands for (either through actions or words, they both speak loudly to me):
Two wars, as well as naming things which are not wars wars, such as the War on Drugs. And if we aren't just counting the past for years, you can add several more wars. Some of those, such as the Contra war in Nicaragua, make Iraq look like a friendly game of monopoly in terms of sheer evilness of tactics.
The death penalty.
Pollution. (taking stuff like mercury off the list of toxic pollutants, scaling back legislation to protect the environment, etc.)
Denial of access to quality medical care and drugs to the poor and elderly. (Most of us, even the middle class, are really pretty darned rich, and as far as I'm concerned being opposed to expansion of health care just because you don't want to pay higher taxes is one of the vilest forms of greed, only a few steps below straight up killing for money.)
Backing away from the United Nations.
Assault weapons.
Putting weapons in space.
Exemption of the U.S. from the Geneva Convention.
So, you know what? You can talk about Christianity and how it preaches love and peace all you want. And that's fine, because I agree wholeheartedly. And I will be glad to try my very best to avoid making statements that suggest I think all Christians are immoral people because I do believe that that there are people who truly live up to the model Christ set forward. One of them is a close friend whom I consider my role model.
But until the Christian Right stops its wholesale and shameless support of greed and death, nothing will be able to convince me that its members are anywhere near the path of righteousness they claim to walk.
(I'm not familiar with FairTax, so bear with me here) Some would argue that income taxes are the only really fair tax, because consumption taxes tend to put a much greater burden (relative to income) on the poor than the rich. When you're living paycheck-to-paycheck, you're paying a tax on every cent you earn. When you're able to invest most your income in stocks, bonds, and capital ventures, you're only paying tax on a fraction of your income.
I would just like to say that I consider the set of values that has been deemed in America to be "Moral" is completely immoral. I've had a few discussions about "moral values" and "family values" with various people, and it seems to me that they are based more in jingoism and/or fear (depending on the particular value) than in an honest desire to make the world a better place.
Agreed. The problem I have with America right now isn't our leader. It's that so many people have completely failed to see what a harmful and despicable administration we have had for the past four years. I honestly believe that anyone who thinks that Bush's policies are making the world (or even the United States) a safer place has only been listening to what Bush has to say on the issue, and hasn't bothered to actually find out what has been going on in the world for the past three years. And I honestly believe that anyone who fell into the bandwagon of believing that attacking Iraq was going to stabilize the Middle East is guilty of not taking the time to bang two neurons together before forming an opinion.
But really, the thing that has upset me the most about the past few years of being an American is the fact that nobody seems to have been outraged in the slightest by such thinly-veiled acts of deception as calling an act that loosens environmental regulations the "Job Creation Act" (and no, it had nothing to do with jobs). It's like nobody even wants to know the truth, like Americans think that all you have to do to be a responsible citizen and informed voter is to occasionally stick a propaganda funnel such as CNN or MSNBC down their throats and open the sluices.
I disagree that people should emigrate from the U.S.A., because the last thing the biggest gun in the world needs is to have all of the responsible and thoughtful citizens leave their posts and give the trigger over to the morons without a fight, but I am incensed with America for being such an excellent example of what happens when Democracy falls so far from its ideals that it becomes nothing more than a specimen of crass mob rule.
And it doesn't help that Americans don't realize that if we're going to throw our weight around the globe, we should at least have the god damn human decency to sit and think about whether we're going to make life suck for anybody else before we act.
So, getting back to the topic, isn't it just as possible that, say, 100 years from now, someone will be saying the same thing about modern-day creationists that you say about people who believed in the heavenly spheres back in the 15th century?
While I agree that most of those are good reasons, I must say that I think that something is terribly wrong with the legal system if the vendor can be liable for my intentional misuse of their product.
I envision a similar situation in which Detroit gets sued because they are liable for a person's speeding ticket. Only the person had to override some sort of speed limiter device in order to do it.
I wasn't talking about the shape of the heavenly bodies, I was talking about the frabric of the universe and the forces that keep the heavenly bodies aloft. The thought was that Earth was surrounded by a series of concentric spheres, and the heavenly bodies were embedded in these "heavenly spheres." (They had to be attatched to something or they would all come crashing down.) The heavenly bodies' circular orbits were caused by the spheres in which they were embedded rotating in place.
The 4 elements and stable earth originated in Greek mythos, but the Church adopted them (and many other parts of Aristotalean cosmology) and found biblical justification for them. (If you would like a list of other aspects of Christianity that come from religions other than Judaism, I can gladly point out a few more examples.)
Heck, I think we should teach all of the competing biblically-supported competitors to scientific "facts" that Christianity has held to be true over the past several hundred years. For example, we should teach that there are four elements, the earth is unmoving and at the center of the universe, all celestial objects are held aloft by heavenly spheres, and the world south of the equator is an uninhabitable region of fire.
It's only fair that our children get several sides to the story in order to make sure they get an objectively balanced education.
Apple can't have a patent on all jog wheels; I was using jog wheels on video editing equipment ten years ago. It's probably the touchpad jog wheel, which is nice but not necessary.
Half of these don't even come close to competing with the iPod. The ones that play movies are more in competition with portable DVD players and Game Boys. Others just don't look like good buys compared to an iPod or iRiver. (Why am I going to pay $500 for a 1GB player when I can pay half that for a 6GB player that's not much larger?)
Personally, I think that the thing that really makes the iPod, and which I have failed to see in any competitor, isn't iTMS or iTunes, or the sexy design, or even the fact that you can put a scratch on it by looking at it for too long. It's the interface. Starting with the jog dial (which I haven't seen on anything else. Scroll wheels don't count.) and going to the software UI, I haven't tried out another player that comes close to being as easy to use as an iPod. Heck, the iPod is so much more pleasent to use that I'd gladly take one over a player that sports 20 more GB, costs $100 less, and is HDTV-ready.
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At least CBS corrected themselves and apologized. Fox publicly stated that they should be able to deliberately misinform the public, and took that issue through the courts.
Well, if Crossfire on CNN is any example, I've noticed that they frequently choose a charismatic and eloquent person to argue one side of the issue, and a person who lacks good rhetorical skills to argue the other side.
Interestingly, the person who is able to appear competent is generally on the side of the status quo.
You would think that Fox News's credibility would have been blown to pieces after this came out.
Guess not.
Oh well.
What you've missed is skepticism. A lot of people have Ph.Ds, or are considered industry experts, etc. It is very easy for them to get attention from reporters, or to masquerade hypothesis as proven theory.
Just as harmful is when a scientist makes a perfectly valid claim that is based on a certain set of preconditions or stated assumptions, but the media fails to report these preconditions or assumptions.
Don't lose faith in science and scientists. Lose faith in your ability to believe in every piece of information that comes (or only purportedly comes) out of the scientific community. Science is a system that depends heavily on peer review and skeptical inquiry. You have to consider all sorts of details that you won't get from most media outlets before you can seriously expect to be able to consider the validity of a statement, including not only the assumptions made in a study or experiment, but also the structure of that study or experiment. Otherwise, you are deciding whether or not something is true when you don't even know what the thing whose truth you are evaluating is.
Not to mention that way back when /. started its subscription service, they made it clear that they would allow advertisers to pay them to post articles. Nobody seemed to complain too loudly back then.
It can be done, but in order to do so we need to have a change in the OSS culture. Right now, the DIY impulse is so strong that many hackers are more interested in re-inventing the wheel than they are in contributing to an existing project.
It's an understandable impusle. Everyone wants to feel like they are doing big things, and it's much easier to just start writing something from scratch (since you usually see the biggest things right at the start of a project). You don't have to futz around with learning another app's architecture, the team's programming style, and all that just to get to the point of throwing in a slightly better checksum routine or whatever.
Possibly we could mitigate this by working towards better coding standards or somesuch. For example, I think we could take another example from Apple and create a standard GNU plugin framework the way Apple has in Cocoa.
Well, I think that Nullsoft/AOL could compete in the standalone player market. I personally don't think it would be very difficult at all to create a WMP-killer, for example.
But yeah, Nullsoft isn't going to even start competing directly with iTunes until they are also competing directly with iTMS and (much more importantly) the iPod.
Right. This is Planet Earth, where health, happiness, etc. take their seats far behind the imperative of making at least a few people get rich.
If we're talking small government in terms of decreased spending, then Halliburton is a terrible example. I fail to see how handing a cost-plus contract to a company without any bidding process whatsoever is a good way to save money. It may sound good in theory, but in practise I imagine that it's a lot like giving some random guy a blank check to go get you some beer instead of walking to the store yourself.
Am I the only one who isn't so obsessed with CPU power that I want to see a cheap linux notebook with a weak processor (I'm thinking something like a Celeron 500 here) but amazing battery life? It's not like I need that Pentium-4 or whatever to run emacs on a text terminal the way I usually do.
Too bad Intel is too busy pushing their 40ghz, +6 v undead Pentium 13370 |)00|)! (tm) to devote production capacity to anything else.
Another one to remember is people who do travel a lot. My job has sent me on road trips that are literally months long, and for a situation like that I really don't want to make do with a dinky little super-portable notebook.
Technically, you can do that with punchcards, too.
Granted, if I were to do that I would probably do it with Pepto-Bismol and Ex-Lax rather than salsa and guac. A stack of cards would really do some damage to your digestive tract.
It's safe. I bought an Ionic Breeze Quadra. It filters out harmful indoor air pollutants such as cosmic rays with the power of ions.
It also cleans my laundry with the power of oxygen.
OK, so you've leveled the field somewhat for the poorest level who can only afford the bare necessities, anyway. But it's still a system where your tax burden increases as your economic status decreases.
Wait a second.
Who claimed that letting people run around naked is okay?
And what sorts of psychologically scarring things are we talking about here?
Anyway, since it's the day after the election and you bring up Christianity as well as "hatred, death, and disease," let's look at the things the political party that strong Christians seem to overwhelmingly support openly stands for (either through actions or words, they both speak loudly to me):
Two wars, as well as naming things which are not wars wars, such as the War on Drugs. And if we aren't just counting the past for years, you can add several more wars. Some of those, such as the Contra war in Nicaragua, make Iraq look like a friendly game of monopoly in terms of sheer evilness of tactics.
The death penalty.
Pollution. (taking stuff like mercury off the list of toxic pollutants, scaling back legislation to protect the environment, etc.)
Denial of access to quality medical care and drugs to the poor and elderly. (Most of us, even the middle class, are really pretty darned rich, and as far as I'm concerned being opposed to expansion of health care just because you don't want to pay higher taxes is one of the vilest forms of greed, only a few steps below straight up killing for money.)
Backing away from the United Nations.
Assault weapons.
Putting weapons in space.
Exemption of the U.S. from the Geneva Convention.
So, you know what? You can talk about Christianity and how it preaches love and peace all you want. And that's fine, because I agree wholeheartedly. And I will be glad to try my very best to avoid making statements that suggest I think all Christians are immoral people because I do believe that that there are people who truly live up to the model Christ set forward. One of them is a close friend whom I consider my role model.
But until the Christian Right stops its wholesale and shameless support of greed and death, nothing will be able to convince me that its members are anywhere near the path of righteousness they claim to walk.
(I'm not familiar with FairTax, so bear with me here) Some would argue that income taxes are the only really fair tax, because consumption taxes tend to put a much greater burden (relative to income) on the poor than the rich. When you're living paycheck-to-paycheck, you're paying a tax on every cent you earn. When you're able to invest most your income in stocks, bonds, and capital ventures, you're only paying tax on a fraction of your income.
I would just like to say that I consider the set of values that has been deemed in America to be "Moral" is completely immoral. I've had a few discussions about "moral values" and "family values" with various people, and it seems to me that they are based more in jingoism and/or fear (depending on the particular value) than in an honest desire to make the world a better place.
Agreed. The problem I have with America right now isn't our leader. It's that so many people have completely failed to see what a harmful and despicable administration we have had for the past four years. I honestly believe that anyone who thinks that Bush's policies are making the world (or even the United States) a safer place has only been listening to what Bush has to say on the issue, and hasn't bothered to actually find out what has been going on in the world for the past three years. And I honestly believe that anyone who fell into the bandwagon of believing that attacking Iraq was going to stabilize the Middle East is guilty of not taking the time to bang two neurons together before forming an opinion.
But really, the thing that has upset me the most about the past few years of being an American is the fact that nobody seems to have been outraged in the slightest by such thinly-veiled acts of deception as calling an act that loosens environmental regulations the "Job Creation Act" (and no, it had nothing to do with jobs). It's like nobody even wants to know the truth, like Americans think that all you have to do to be a responsible citizen and informed voter is to occasionally stick a propaganda funnel such as CNN or MSNBC down their throats and open the sluices.
I disagree that people should emigrate from the U.S.A., because the last thing the biggest gun in the world needs is to have all of the responsible and thoughtful citizens leave their posts and give the trigger over to the morons without a fight, but I am incensed with America for being such an excellent example of what happens when Democracy falls so far from its ideals that it becomes nothing more than a specimen of crass mob rule.
And it doesn't help that Americans don't realize that if we're going to throw our weight around the globe, we should at least have the god damn human decency to sit and think about whether we're going to make life suck for anybody else before we act.
So, getting back to the topic, isn't it just as possible that, say, 100 years from now, someone will be saying the same thing about modern-day creationists that you say about people who believed in the heavenly spheres back in the 15th century?
While I agree that most of those are good reasons, I must say that I think that something is terribly wrong with the legal system if the vendor can be liable for my intentional misuse of their product.
I envision a similar situation in which Detroit gets sued because they are liable for a person's speeding ticket. Only the person had to override some sort of speed limiter device in order to do it.
I wasn't talking about the shape of the heavenly bodies, I was talking about the frabric of the universe and the forces that keep the heavenly bodies aloft. The thought was that Earth was surrounded by a series of concentric spheres, and the heavenly bodies were embedded in these "heavenly spheres." (They had to be attatched to something or they would all come crashing down.) The heavenly bodies' circular orbits were caused by the spheres in which they were embedded rotating in place.
The 4 elements and stable earth originated in Greek mythos, but the Church adopted them (and many other parts of Aristotalean cosmology) and found biblical justification for them. (If you would like a list of other aspects of Christianity that come from religions other than Judaism, I can gladly point out a few more examples.)
You may laugh, but it was insanely easy for me to get Pokemon Red for the Game Boy Color running on my TI-85.
Heck, I think we should teach all of the competing biblically-supported competitors to scientific "facts" that Christianity has held to be true over the past several hundred years. For example, we should teach that there are four elements, the earth is unmoving and at the center of the universe, all celestial objects are held aloft by heavenly spheres, and the world south of the equator is an uninhabitable region of fire.
It's only fair that our children get several sides to the story in order to make sure they get an objectively balanced education.
Apple can't have a patent on all jog wheels; I was using jog wheels on video editing equipment ten years ago. It's probably the touchpad jog wheel, which is nice but not necessary.
Half of these don't even come close to competing with the iPod. The ones that play movies are more in competition with portable DVD players and Game Boys. Others just don't look like good buys compared to an iPod or iRiver. (Why am I going to pay $500 for a 1GB player when I can pay half that for a 6GB player that's not much larger?)
Personally, I think that the thing that really makes the iPod, and which I have failed to see in any competitor, isn't iTMS or iTunes, or the sexy design, or even the fact that you can put a scratch on it by looking at it for too long. It's the interface. Starting with the jog dial (which I haven't seen on anything else. Scroll wheels don't count.) and going to the software UI, I haven't tried out another player that comes close to being as easy to use as an iPod. Heck, the iPod is so much more pleasent to use that I'd gladly take one over a player that sports 20 more GB, costs $100 less, and is HDTV-ready.