"There are plenty of ways" Put up or shut up. He turned the papers over to an activist, who gave them to the media, the state attorney general, and the secretary of state. An internal investigation signifying nothing is what he would've gotten if you had your druthers.
FTFA: "The company's AccuVote-TSx model was banned in May 2004, but Diebold machines were conditionally recertified by Secretary of State Bruce McPherson last week for use in 17 counties for this year's elections."
There's the real story: whistleblowers get charged, fraudulent, partisan gov-buddies get recertified.
Here's the reality of the public trust today: remember, the NSA whistleblowers disclosed that the government is spying on Americans to the media. The President of the United States was repeatedly committing felonies, unless you believe the Commander-in-Chief power BS.
The New York Times sat on the story for a year. That year just happened to include a presidential re-election.
If you think you know how those guys could've done better than the "liberal media" with the "Republican government" I'd love to know how. The feds are investigating these whistleblowers under the aegis of national security right now.
Two datapoints do not make a pattern. But there are many more examples of dissent-quashing available if you like.
could destroy network neutrality. If I'm worried about anyone messing with the Internet it's the telco gang of rent-seeking thugs bringing an imperialist caste system to a great freewheeling experiment in international democracy, all for the sake of a quick buck.
If it's between the geeks and the telcos, I choose the geeks.
The idea that Fox News Channel is fair and balanced is completely ridiculous. I have never seen such an atrocious lie, even in the bowels of Slashdot.
As if you needed any proof that Fox News plays favorites with the right, maybe you should read the 923 items at the link detailing lies, misinformation, and right-wing bias brought to you by the Fox News Channel. http://mediamatters.org/issues_topics/outlets/foxn ewschannel
When even Bill O'Reilly thinks the network slants to the right, maybe you should too.
When you are more likely to be misinformed as a Fox News viewer than as a consumer of any other channel on television, maybe you should change the channel.
For each of the three misperceptions, the study found enormous differences between the viewers of Fox, who held the most misperceptions, and NPR/PBS, who held the fewest by far. Eighty percent of Fox viewers were found to hold at least one misperception, compared to 23 percent of NPR/PBS consumers. All the other media fell in between.
CBS ranked right behind Fox with a 71 percent score, while CNN and NBC tied as the best-performing commercial broadcast audience at 55 percent. Forty-seven percent of print media readers held at least one misperception.
As to the number of misconceptions held by their audiences, Fox far outscored all of its rivals. A whopping 45 percent of its viewers believed all three misperceptions, while the other commercial networks scored between 12 percent and 16 percent. Only nine percent of readers believed all three, while only four percent of the NPR/PBS audience did.
Ranking pages in search is all about trust. You hop from one trustworthy area to another hoping that good information breeds good information. The best scheme for trustworthy information right now is the collaborative pointing of a large group of trustworthy sources. There aren't schemes independent of pointing to decide, for example, if a certain page is semantically well-related to the execution of your query and provides accurate information in the domain you are interested in. Too much common-sense contextual knowledge is required.
If a ranking algorithm for search based on trust and collaboration is publicized, and people mess with it to the point that collaborative pointing becomes a non-factor, what will you add back in order to end the gaming of search results? I don't think the technology is there yet.
The security through obscurity is necessary because there isn't a generic, viable model of trustworthy information. There are, however, viable models of operating system security. MS hasn't always followed them and would die of embarrassment if they released Windows, but obscurity has still harmed Windows more than it has helped it.
No. I just wish that you would provide some evidence supporting your unfounded statement that "It's not just the right-wing that's arguing this issue, and I in fact see many of the same people (libertarians) objecting both to Google's caving in to the commies,". If I have been imprecise in arguing that you should provide evidence or withdraw your statement, I'm sorry. In fact, I would agree with your assessment that Google's behavior in China is not a "crisis".
I don't disagree with you that Google may have made the wrong decision. It's too close to call, in my opinion. It is, in fact, immaterial to my argument, which is that beginning hearings on tech companies' dealings with China in the middle of hearings on illegal NSA wiretaps and irresponsible crisis management during Hurricane Katrina is intended to divert media attention from Republican scandals. The right blogosphere tends to act as a proxy for the Republican leadership, so I mention them as evidence of that diversion. The House Republicans tend to act as a proxy for the White House's political maneuvering as well, so it would be germane to my argument if you have some evidence on the non-Republicans who are focusing on Google's (and other companies') behavior in China.
I think it is obvious now that I am not asking you to prove a negative. Just provide the link that justifies your assertion.
It's not just the right-wing that's arguing this issue, and I in fact see many of the same people (libertarians) objecting both to Google's caving in to the commies,
and later...
My objections to Google's actions in China have nothing to do with which wing of the Ruling Party in the USA I happen to find less odious on any particular day.
All I wanted you to do was prove your assertion (unfounded, I think) that the Google-in-China crisis is not right-wing hype. I'm not trying to argue some fact about your personal politics. My private opinions about Google's decision aren't particularly partisan either, but the Republican noise machine and Republican Congressional investigations, as I originally posted, are. So provide the link.
How do you walk with your knees jerking like that?
Sorry, I overreact to people who agree, even coincidentally, with Fox News. So, I regret the offense.
You might link to some other evidence that the Clinton Administration broke a wiretapping law to ease the strain on my uncontrollable joints.
(Not to mention the previous administration's similar attempts.)
If you're talking about the Clinton Administration's use of physical searches without a warrant before the law was amended to prohibit it, the analogy to the Bush Administration's breaking a law already on the books (FISA) is pretty weak. You need to stop getting your information from Fox News. Or, if you don't watch FNC, let me suggest that taking positions coincidentally aligned with debunked Republican talking points spouted by Rush Limbaugh does not help your credibility.
If that's not what you were talking about, feel free to expand on your assertion.
I would be interested to see whatever evidence you have that criticizing Google's China decision is not a partisan practice. Link away.
The real point is that instead of making hay over the executive's increasingly intrusive surveillance of ordinary Americans, the right wing is trying to change the subject to Google's relatively neutral move to enter China on the Communists' terms. Google is in the news as an advocate of privacy (for not turning over a full week of searches) and the right is trying to tarnish their image.
As evidence, note the Mighty Wurlitzer's campaign for divestment led by right-wing PJ Media and friends. Like Roger Simon's "I like to think that if I had any Google stock I'd be divesting it now". Or here. Or Michelle "The case for interning American Muslims" Malkin.
Don't buy the head fake. Google waited a long time to enter the Chinese market. They didn't just do this for the money. Instead, get back to the NSA illegal wiretap scandal, the Hurricane Katrina scandal, the no-room-at-the-inn hotel evictions of Katrina victims, the Jack Abramoff scandal, the Valerie Plame scandal, the prewar Iraq intelligence scandal (still no Phase II report! senior intelligence official reports that the administration commissioned no strategic-level assessments in the run-up to war), the troop-fatality-body-armor scandal, the Iraq reconstruction money scandal... and many other scandals.
I know it's not the same, but it's the only MMOG I can stand to play. Finally, a virtual world for the terminally brilliant.
It's like those dumb puzzle games on Yahoo, but every puzzle works towards a piratey goal, like drinking someone under the table, or running a smoothly operating pirate ship, or defeating an army of other pirates. The games are fun and short, and you can get interesting things done in less than half an hour.
Best of all, if you don't have much of a stake in getting ahead in the game or having the best pirate clothes, you can play for free on micropayment (Doubloon) servers. I've whiled away many hours at no cost to myself. The monthly, if you want it, is $10 or less.
Check it out for a refreshing break from ready-to-slash stance.
Money is great, but all it represents is the investment of your time. It is a limitless commodity. Your time, unfortunately, is not.
I watched Groundhog Day recently. It's nice that Bill Murray learned to love and to play the piano, but I probably would've spent the first million years in the public library. If they'd had the internet then, maybe the first billion years.
Anyway, I digress. You don't have a billion years, you have three score and ten, plus or minus two score. For a huge chunk of that time, say forty hours a week for several decades, you're at work.
Think about what kind of life you want to have. If it's a life filled with a lot of stuff, maybe you belong at a job where you can buy it all. If it's a life where you do what you want after age 40 or 50, maybe you belong at a job where you can save up the millions of dollars necessary. But if it's a life where you do meaningful work, maybe you need to leave.
The meaning of work is intertwined with the meaning of life. I can't tell you what the meaning of your life is. Even if I knew, you wouldn't listen; at some level, you have to discover it for yourself. 40 hours a week is more than a third of your waking life, so figure out if you need your work to mean anything to you.
Also consider that your work is reshaping your personality. I got back to graduate CS after several years of work that was often drudgery, managed by someone else, with my work time accountable to the nearest six minutes. Experiences like that wear away at you; the thousand tasks you do will recreate your mind. Figure out if they're changing you in a direction you like.
Paul Graham wrote a good essay about work recently.
This was the coming-out speech for Wilkerson. It's long, but it's well worth the time. He says Cheney and Rumsfeld made up a cabal that circumvented the foreign policy decisionmaking process, and argues for wholesale reform in the transparency of foreign policy
We have had some peaks and valleys in our history, but I think post-World War II and World War II itself was a peak, and we had some really good people thinking hard about these issues. And one of the things that they probably wouldn't tell you if they were here today - unless they'd had a few drinks, and Harry Truman would have had a few - (laughter) - is that they didn't want another FDR. They did not want another Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They even amended the Constitution to make sure they didn't get one for more than eight years. But they didn't want the secrecy, they didn't want the concentration of power, they didn't want the lack of transparency into principal decisions that got people killed, even though they'd been successful in arguably one of the greatest conflicts the world has seen. And so they set about trying to ensure that this wouldn't happen again.
That is not the case today. And when I say that is not the case today, I stop on 26 January 2005. I don't know what the case is today; I wish I did. But the case that I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes to the national security decision-making process. What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. And then when the bureaucracy was presented with the decision to carry them out, it was presented in a such a disjointed, incredible way that the bureaucracy often didn't know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out.
"Fighting the global war against tooth decay is in the vital national interest of Great Britain," said Tony Blair, Prime Minister of the UK, as he announced the march of infantry on Nazareth, home of Fluorinex. "We're sure Jesus can spare a few chapels. We will stop at nothing to honor his sacrifice -- with our glistening white smiles, if necessary."
Reaction from the United States was guarded. In an apparent reference to the incident, President Bush repeatedly mumbled to himself, "Lisa needs braces? Dental plan?" while speaking to reporters today on the subject.
Asked if the United States would be taking up the British invasion at the UN Security Council, Bush said he always liked the Monkees better than the Beatles anyway.
First they came for Padilla and I didn't speak out because I was never with al Qaeda. Then they came for the Muslims and I didn't speak out because I was not a Muslim. Then they wiretapped Americans with one degree of separation from al Qaeda without probable cause and I didn't speak out because I was not an American with one degree of separation from al Qaeda. Then they came for me and there was no one to speak for me.
Don't be a fool. The government has detained Americans on American soil without probable cause. Innocent people have been caught in the net and tortured. Enemy combatants have no habeas corpus rights. Even innocent people aren't being let go. Do some Googling, like for "innocent detainee". Here's a reference. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2005/11/13/AR2005111301061.html
The fact that it didn't happen to you is an accident of history. The fact that none of these people can post on Slashdot is an accident of the Internet access in Guantanamo Bay. Andrea Mitchell strongly implied on MSNBC that Christiane Amanpour had probably been wiretapped. Her husband was working for Democrat politicians. So the Republican government is wiretapping journalists and their political opposition and the best you can do is claim that the danger is hypothetical!
Hey, I'm a middle class white, I have the same false sense of security that you do. But obviously you don't understand the magnitude of the legal limbos and circumventions the Bush Administration has created. You, or anyone in America, can be wiretapped, detained indefinitely with no possibility of objective judgment by a court, tortured, and then killed. The fact that it hasn't happened to you is your damn fool luck.
We're on the edge of something here that is much scarier than the next terrorist attack. God forbid, but God also forbid that we sacrifice our essential liberty for momentary security. The first people have already been sent to the Ministry of Love.
"Clinton-haters and Bush-haters asside, I continue to be astonished at our ongoing success at maintaining a democracy in which our rights are so well cared for that the suggestion of a relatively minor perceived infraction of privacy is seen by half the country as a dangerous outrage."
Much ado about nothing, huh? You need to read FISA. Unless electronic surveillance is done according to the statute, the fine is up to $10000 and the prison time is up to five years. Now the American President has said publicly, and repeatedly, that he's not doing surveillance according to the statute.
Get it? Bush's defense of his lawbreaking is that 1) an extremely vague resolution by Congress, the Authorization to Use Military Force, allows him to break the law to keep us safe from terrorist attacks, or failing that, 2) his commander-in-chief powers in the war on terror trump Congress's power of legislation. (Very similar, by the way, to his argument that he can ignore the McCain amendment against torture if he feels like it.)
But if that's true, as Democrat and Republican lawmakers alike have pointed out, what law can't he waive? Since the war on terror is not scheduled to end, won't the President always have these powers?
Bush doesn't veto, he writes signing statements arguing that he doesn't have to follow the law, then he breaks the law and fails to inform Congress.
The reason there is much ado is that a constitutional crisis is underway, however much you want to call it extremist partisan politics.
"Yesterday it was terrorists. Today it's pornographers. Tomorrow it's you."
Sort of gives added meaning to Google's stick-in-the-mud decision not to turn over search data to the government for its porno-regulation lawsuit.
Thank God that there are responsible people in charge over there, making tough decisions. At least there are responsible people in charge somewhere in America.
I didn't realize a Slashdotting was underway, so I just signed up and plunked in a few bills. Kind of a postmodern way to solve the Slashdot Effect, huh? So it's up now.
Just when you think you've seen it all on the internet... truly excellent that it helped scientists, too. Weird and fun.
Exactly. Kuhn's ideas about how scientists who are creating paradigm shifts are reacting to breakdowns in the normal order of things are decades old but much more insightful. Here is a thumbnail sketch of one such idea.
Kuhn saw scientists in a given specialization as members of a particular linguistic community. Genius revisionings of whole specializations or even whole sciences happen when the normal language of that science, like dynamics or chemistry, starts to prove inadequate to the task of describing what the scientist sees. Strange anomalies begin to appear that have no place in the old language.
A new language is proposed by a young scientist or someone new to the field, and a debate over the old vision and the new vision begins. It is beset by communication problems ranging from the ambiguity of words used differently in the two contexts, to the structure of reality itself in the two languages. The old vision and the new vision don't translate. But the genius is so convincing, or so elegant, or provides such surprising and shocking evidence, that the new language wins out eventually. Or, alternatively, the old language is sufficient and the new one fails to provide the evidence it should.
Incidentally, this provides a very interesting context in which to view the evolution vs. intelligent design cultural debate. Intelligent design isn't really giving scientists a new framework to work within, no new language from which to view the world, a language that resolves outstanding problems with evolution and yet is fertile enough to lead to new problems suitable for science.
But it also provides an interesting way to think about what post-evolution biological science might look like. From my layman's (CS scientist's) viewpoint, one big change might involve the causes of life and death. They are a little fuzzy for edge cases, like the origin of the proto-cellular organism, or the status of a dormant virus, or the possibility of extending human life beyond the hundred-year range. Some new language exploding these fuzzy terms, life and death, might arise that puts evolution in a larger context, if such a thing is possible.
Great science is made out of just such analogical visions, a great idea applied out of place. The linked article mentioned Darwin's geology book; Darwin applied concepts about rocks changing over time to biology and the rest is history.
In any case, the approbation of a group of scientists is key to extending the life of a scientific paradigm; these are the professional problem solvers who recognize the salience of the problems the new paradigm solves and the power of the language the new paradigm provides. They also work within the boundaries of the paradigms, hunting vigorously for anomalies, guided by a sense that they are making generalizations concrete, and yet at any moment ready to make an observation to turn the universe on its head.
One scientist alone is like a voice in the wilderness, speaking a private language. But geniuses are nurtured in good company, by a challenging community. Richard Hamming said as much in a great talk about doing great scientific work. If you want to read about genius, read that.
"The essence of science is cumulative. By changing a problem slightly you can often do great work rather than merely good work. Instead of attacking isolated problems, I made the resolution that I would never again solve an isolated problem except as characteristic of a class."
No, copy-pasting is a copyright violation. Rewording of sentences, while inacceptable practice for a professional journalist (in the case the sources aren't cites) is completly legal.
Furthermore, one could argue that an information published in an internet forum is public. I agree that a journalist have been unprofessional here, but I am surprised with most opinions expressed here, that tend to go against the "information wants to be free"/. dogma.
Information doesn't just want to be free, it wants to be legally distributed according to the author's permission. Public does not mean "public domain." Rather, information published in public is subject to the author's right to control its distribution, even if it's a derivative work. From Copyright Office Circular 14 (pdf): "Only the owner of copyright in a work has the right to prepare, or to authorize someone else to create, a new version of that work. The owner is generally the author or someone who has obtained rights from the author."
1. Type The Stand into word processor. 2. Change the names of all the characters and places. 3. Reword more than half of the sentences in each chapter. 4. Send work to 20 publishers. 5. Receive 20 rejection letters. 6. Publish magnum opus on Internet. 7. Profit!!! 8. Get sued by Stephen King.
"I don't see this as plagiarism in the whole - just poorly cited."
"I don't see this as torture in the whole - just cruel and unusual interrogation." "I don't see this as lying in the whole - just truthiness deficient." "I don't see this as adultery in the whole - just extramarital polyamory." "I don't see this as murder in the whole - just intentional killing without extenuating circumstances."
Slashdot Mirror
It was sent simultaneously to the media, the state AG and the secretary of state. Which cops did you want him to send it to?
"There are plenty of ways"
Put up or shut up. He turned the papers over to an activist, who gave them to the media, the state attorney general, and the secretary of state. An internal investigation signifying nothing is what he would've gotten if you had your druthers.
FTFA: "The company's AccuVote-TSx model was banned in May 2004, but Diebold machines were conditionally recertified by Secretary of State Bruce McPherson last week for use in 17 counties for this year's elections."
There's the real story: whistleblowers get charged, fraudulent, partisan gov-buddies get recertified.
Here's the reality of the public trust today: remember, the NSA whistleblowers disclosed that the government is spying on Americans to the media. The President of the United States was repeatedly committing felonies, unless you believe the Commander-in-Chief power BS.
The New York Times sat on the story for a year. That year just happened to include a presidential re-election.
If you think you know how those guys could've done better than the "liberal media" with the "Republican government" I'd love to know how. The feds are investigating these whistleblowers under the aegis of national security right now.
Two datapoints do not make a pattern. But there are many more examples of dissent-quashing available if you like.
could destroy network neutrality. If I'm worried about anyone messing with the Internet it's the telco gang of rent-seeking thugs bringing an imperialist caste system to a great freewheeling experiment in international democracy, all for the sake of a quick buck.
If it's between the geeks and the telcos, I choose the geeks.
As if you needed any proof that Fox News plays favorites with the right, maybe you should read the 923 items at the link detailing lies, misinformation, and right-wing bias brought to you by the Fox News Channel.
http://mediamatters.org/issues_topics/outlets/fox
When even Bill O'Reilly thinks the network slants to the right, maybe you should too.
When you are more likely to be misinformed as a Fox News viewer than as a consumer of any other channel on television, maybe you should change the channel.
http://www.alternet.org/story/16892/
Ranking pages in search is all about trust. You hop from one trustworthy area to another hoping that good information breeds good information. The best scheme for trustworthy information right now is the collaborative pointing of a large group of trustworthy sources. There aren't schemes independent of pointing to decide, for example, if a certain page is semantically well-related to the execution of your query and provides accurate information in the domain you are interested in. Too much common-sense contextual knowledge is required.
If a ranking algorithm for search based on trust and collaboration is publicized, and people mess with it to the point that collaborative pointing becomes a non-factor, what will you add back in order to end the gaming of search results? I don't think the technology is there yet.
The security through obscurity is necessary because there isn't a generic, viable model of trustworthy information. There are, however, viable models of operating system security. MS hasn't always followed them and would die of embarrassment if they released Windows, but obscurity has still harmed Windows more than it has helped it.
No. I just wish that you would provide some evidence supporting your unfounded statement that "It's not just the right-wing that's arguing this issue, and I in fact see many of the same people (libertarians) objecting both to Google's caving in to the commies,". If I have been imprecise in arguing that you should provide evidence or withdraw your statement, I'm sorry. In fact, I would agree with your assessment that Google's behavior in China is not a "crisis".
I don't disagree with you that Google may have made the wrong decision. It's too close to call, in my opinion. It is, in fact, immaterial to my argument, which is that beginning hearings on tech companies' dealings with China in the middle of hearings on illegal NSA wiretaps and irresponsible crisis management during Hurricane Katrina is intended to divert media attention from Republican scandals. The right blogosphere tends to act as a proxy for the Republican leadership, so I mention them as evidence of that diversion. The House Republicans tend to act as a proxy for the White House's political maneuvering as well, so it would be germane to my argument if you have some evidence on the non-Republicans who are focusing on Google's (and other companies') behavior in China.
I think it is obvious now that I am not asking you to prove a negative. Just provide the link that justifies your assertion.
and later...
All I wanted you to do was prove your assertion (unfounded, I think) that the Google-in-China crisis is not right-wing hype. I'm not trying to argue some fact about your personal politics. My private opinions about Google's decision aren't particularly partisan either, but the Republican noise machine and Republican Congressional investigations, as I originally posted, are. So provide the link.
Sorry, I overreact to people who agree, even coincidentally, with Fox News. So, I regret the offense.
You might link to some other evidence that the Clinton Administration broke a wiretapping law to ease the strain on my uncontrollable joints.
If you're talking about the Clinton Administration's use of physical searches without a warrant before the law was amended to prohibit it, the analogy to the Bush Administration's breaking a law already on the books (FISA) is pretty weak. You need to stop getting your information from Fox News. Or, if you don't watch FNC, let me suggest that taking positions coincidentally aligned with debunked Republican talking points spouted by Rush Limbaugh does not help your credibility.
If that's not what you were talking about, feel free to expand on your assertion.
I would be interested to see whatever evidence you have that criticizing Google's China decision is not a partisan practice. Link away.
The real point is that instead of making hay over the executive's increasingly intrusive surveillance of ordinary Americans, the right wing is trying to change the subject to Google's relatively neutral move to enter China on the Communists' terms. Google is in the news as an advocate of privacy (for not turning over a full week of searches) and the right is trying to tarnish their image.
As evidence, note the Mighty Wurlitzer's campaign for divestment led by right-wing PJ Media and friends. Like Roger Simon's "I like to think that if I had any Google stock I'd be divesting it now". Or here. Or Michelle "The case for interning American Muslims" Malkin.
Don't buy the head fake. Google waited a long time to enter the Chinese market. They didn't just do this for the money. Instead, get back to the NSA illegal wiretap scandal, the Hurricane Katrina scandal, the no-room-at-the-inn hotel evictions of Katrina victims, the Jack Abramoff scandal, the Valerie Plame scandal, the prewar Iraq intelligence scandal (still no Phase II report! senior intelligence official reports that the administration commissioned no strategic-level assessments in the run-up to war), the troop-fatality-body-armor scandal, the Iraq reconstruction money scandal... and many other scandals.
Half-Life is Episode IV: A New Gordon.
Half-Life 2 is Episode V: The G-Man Strikes Back.
Half-Life 3 is Episode VI: The Return of the Headcrab.
Aftermath is Episode I. Counterstrike is off canon. Day of Defeat is like those Clone Wars cartoons.
Don't blame me. Valve decided to do it out of order.
You've been warned.
I know it's not the same, but it's the only MMOG I can stand to play. Finally, a virtual world for the terminally brilliant.
It's like those dumb puzzle games on Yahoo, but every puzzle works towards a piratey goal, like drinking someone under the table, or running a smoothly operating pirate ship, or defeating an army of other pirates. The games are fun and short, and you can get interesting things done in less than half an hour.
Best of all, if you don't have much of a stake in getting ahead in the game or having the best pirate clothes, you can play for free on micropayment (Doubloon) servers. I've whiled away many hours at no cost to myself. The monthly, if you want it, is $10 or less.
Check it out for a refreshing break from ready-to-slash stance.
http://www.puzzlepirates.com/
Money is great, but all it represents is the investment of your time. It is a limitless commodity. Your time, unfortunately, is not.
I watched Groundhog Day recently. It's nice that Bill Murray learned to love and to play the piano, but I probably would've spent the first million years in the public library. If they'd had the internet then, maybe the first billion years.
Anyway, I digress. You don't have a billion years, you have three score and ten, plus or minus two score. For a huge chunk of that time, say forty hours a week for several decades, you're at work.
Think about what kind of life you want to have. If it's a life filled with a lot of stuff, maybe you belong at a job where you can buy it all. If it's a life where you do what you want after age 40 or 50, maybe you belong at a job where you can save up the millions of dollars necessary. But if it's a life where you do meaningful work, maybe you need to leave.
The meaning of work is intertwined with the meaning of life. I can't tell you what the meaning of your life is. Even if I knew, you wouldn't listen; at some level, you have to discover it for yourself. 40 hours a week is more than a third of your waking life, so figure out if you need your work to mean anything to you.
Also consider that your work is reshaping your personality. I got back to graduate CS after several years of work that was often drudgery, managed by someone else, with my work time accountable to the nearest six minutes. Experiences like that wear away at you; the thousand tasks you do will recreate your mind. Figure out if they're changing you in a direction you like.
Paul Graham wrote a good essay about work recently.
Video: http://www.newamerica.net/index.cfm?pg=event&EveI
Transcript (pdf): http://www.newamerica.net/Download_Docs/pdfs/Doc_
"Fighting the global war against tooth decay is in the vital national interest of Great Britain," said Tony Blair, Prime Minister of the UK, as he announced the march of infantry on Nazareth, home of Fluorinex. "We're sure Jesus can spare a few chapels. We will stop at nothing to honor his sacrifice -- with our glistening white smiles, if necessary."
Reaction from the United States was guarded. In an apparent reference to the incident, President Bush repeatedly mumbled to himself, "Lisa needs braces? Dental plan?" while speaking to reporters today on the subject.
Asked if the United States would be taking up the British invasion at the UN Security Council, Bush said he always liked the Monkees better than the Beatles anyway.
First they came for Padilla and I didn't speak out because I was never with al Qaeda.
c le/2005/11/13/AR2005111301061.html
Then they came for the Muslims and I didn't speak out because I was not a Muslim.
Then they wiretapped Americans with one degree of separation from al Qaeda without probable cause and I didn't speak out because I was not an American with one degree of separation from al Qaeda.
Then they came for me and there was no one to speak for me.
Don't be a fool. The government has detained Americans on American soil without probable cause. Innocent people have been caught in the net and tortured. Enemy combatants have no habeas corpus rights. Even innocent people aren't being let go. Do some Googling, like for "innocent detainee". Here's a reference. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
The fact that it didn't happen to you is an accident of history. The fact that none of these people can post on Slashdot is an accident of the Internet access in Guantanamo Bay. Andrea Mitchell strongly implied on MSNBC that Christiane Amanpour had probably been wiretapped. Her husband was working for Democrat politicians. So the Republican government is wiretapping journalists and their political opposition and the best you can do is claim that the danger is hypothetical!
Hey, I'm a middle class white, I have the same false sense of security that you do. But obviously you don't understand the magnitude of the legal limbos and circumventions the Bush Administration has created. You, or anyone in America, can be wiretapped, detained indefinitely with no possibility of objective judgment by a court, tortured, and then killed. The fact that it hasn't happened to you is your damn fool luck.
We're on the edge of something here that is much scarier than the next terrorist attack. God forbid, but God also forbid that we sacrifice our essential liberty for momentary security. The first people have already been sent to the Ministry of Love.
First, go read Glenn Greenwald.
"Clinton-haters and Bush-haters asside, I continue to be astonished at our ongoing success at maintaining a democracy in which our rights are so well cared for that the suggestion of a relatively minor perceived infraction of privacy is seen by half the country as a dangerous outrage."
Much ado about nothing, huh? You need to read FISA. Unless electronic surveillance is done according to the statute, the fine is up to $10000 and the prison time is up to five years. Now the American President has said publicly, and repeatedly, that he's not doing surveillance according to the statute.
Get it? Bush's defense of his lawbreaking is that 1) an extremely vague resolution by Congress, the Authorization to Use Military Force, allows him to break the law to keep us safe from terrorist attacks, or failing that, 2) his commander-in-chief powers in the war on terror trump Congress's power of legislation. (Very similar, by the way, to his argument that he can ignore the McCain amendment against torture if he feels like it.)
But if that's true, as Democrat and Republican lawmakers alike have pointed out, what law can't he waive? Since the war on terror is not scheduled to end, won't the President always have these powers?
Bush doesn't veto, he writes signing statements arguing that he doesn't have to follow the law, then he breaks the law and fails to inform Congress.
The reason there is much ado is that a constitutional crisis is underway, however much you want to call it extremist partisan politics.
"Yesterday it was terrorists. Today it's pornographers. Tomorrow it's you."
Sort of gives added meaning to Google's stick-in-the-mud decision not to turn over search data to the government for its porno-regulation lawsuit.
Thank God that there are responsible people in charge over there, making tough decisions. At least there are responsible people in charge somewhere in America.
And no, I don't work for Google.
I didn't realize a Slashdotting was underway, so I just signed up and plunked in a few bills. Kind of a postmodern way to solve the Slashdot Effect, huh? So it's up now.
Just when you think you've seen it all on the internet... truly excellent that it helped scientists, too. Weird and fun.
Also, the site is http://www.wheresgeorge.com/ but http://www.whereisgeorge.com/ redirects to the former anyway.
Exactly. Kuhn's ideas about how scientists who are creating paradigm shifts are reacting to breakdowns in the normal order of things are decades old but much more insightful. Here is a thumbnail sketch of one such idea.
Kuhn saw scientists in a given specialization as members of a particular linguistic community. Genius revisionings of whole specializations or even whole sciences happen when the normal language of that science, like dynamics or chemistry, starts to prove inadequate to the task of describing what the scientist sees. Strange anomalies begin to appear that have no place in the old language.
A new language is proposed by a young scientist or someone new to the field, and a debate over the old vision and the new vision begins. It is beset by communication problems ranging from the ambiguity of words used differently in the two contexts, to the structure of reality itself in the two languages. The old vision and the new vision don't translate. But the genius is so convincing, or so elegant, or provides such surprising and shocking evidence, that the new language wins out eventually. Or, alternatively, the old language is sufficient and the new one fails to provide the evidence it should.
Incidentally, this provides a very interesting context in which to view the evolution vs. intelligent design cultural debate. Intelligent design isn't really giving scientists a new framework to work within, no new language from which to view the world, a language that resolves outstanding problems with evolution and yet is fertile enough to lead to new problems suitable for science.
But it also provides an interesting way to think about what post-evolution biological science might look like. From my layman's (CS scientist's) viewpoint, one big change might involve the causes of life and death. They are a little fuzzy for edge cases, like the origin of the proto-cellular organism, or the status of a dormant virus, or the possibility of extending human life beyond the hundred-year range. Some new language exploding these fuzzy terms, life and death, might arise that puts evolution in a larger context, if such a thing is possible.
Great science is made out of just such analogical visions, a great idea applied out of place. The linked article mentioned Darwin's geology book; Darwin applied concepts about rocks changing over time to biology and the rest is history.
In any case, the approbation of a group of scientists is key to extending the life of a scientific paradigm; these are the professional problem solvers who recognize the salience of the problems the new paradigm solves and the power of the language the new paradigm provides. They also work within the boundaries of the paradigms, hunting vigorously for anomalies, guided by a sense that they are making generalizations concrete, and yet at any moment ready to make an observation to turn the universe on its head.
One scientist alone is like a voice in the wilderness, speaking a private language. But geniuses are nurtured in good company, by a challenging community. Richard Hamming said as much in a great talk about doing great scientific work. If you want to read about genius, read that.
"The essence of science is cumulative. By changing a problem slightly you can often do great work rather than merely good work. Instead of attacking isolated problems, I made the resolution that I would never again solve an isolated problem except as characteristic of a class."
n/t
Information doesn't just want to be free, it wants to be legally distributed according to the author's permission. Public does not mean "public domain." Rather, information published in public is subject to the author's right to control its distribution, even if it's a derivative work. From Copyright Office Circular 14 (pdf): "Only the owner of copyright in a work has the right to prepare, or to authorize someone else to create, a new version of that work. The owner is generally the author or someone who has obtained rights from the author."
1. Type The Stand into word processor.
2. Change the names of all the characters and places.
3. Reword more than half of the sentences in each chapter.
4. Send work to 20 publishers.
5. Receive 20 rejection letters.
6. Publish magnum opus on Internet.
7. Profit!!!
8. Get sued by Stephen King.
IANAL
"I don't see this as plagiarism in the whole - just poorly cited."
"I don't see this as torture in the whole - just cruel and unusual interrogation."
"I don't see this as lying in the whole - just truthiness deficient."
"I don't see this as adultery in the whole - just extramarital polyamory."
"I don't see this as murder in the whole - just intentional killing without extenuating circumstances."
n/t
Usenet vanished today in a puff of illogic.