I don't know much about Stallman personally, although I admit I'm a huge fan of his work and vision. But I think there are legitimate reasons to call it GNU/Linux. From Stallman's perspective, the Linux kernel is replaceable with, say, HURD. If that ever comes to pass, then you can't possibly call the system Linux even if to most users GNU/Linux and GNU/HURD are nearly identical. Putting aside issues of ego, this suggests that the proper name for the generic type of system would emphasize the GNU aspect.
Since Linux is AFAIK the only kernel in town, it makes sense to keep calling it Linux. I personally will continue to do so. But I also support having a choice between kernels and Stallman's right to emphasize the distinction between the kernel and the rest of the system.
That's not correct. Statistical significance doesn't tell you anything about whether there's a causal mechanism at work. It doesn't even tell you whether the measured differences are real. It gives you an estimate of the probability of seeing your data given that there is no difference. It's possible for a p-value to be 0 while the probability that there is no difference is 100%. And for any given significance level (say, p=.0001), there are datasets such that differences almost certainly don't exist. This means that from an epistemological standpoint, statistical significance tells you next to nothing. Several statisticians have proven that in scenarios mimicking those in the social sciences with a.05 cutoff, the probability that there is no difference can be as high as 60%, meaning a 40% probability that an effect is real.
It's not the cost of paper I mind -- it's the waste. Plus there are only 2 quality laser printers I can use for free. This means that much of the time when I want to print something I have to pay 10 cents a copy, including at my department office and all campus libraries etc.
This looks great for people in academics. I read 100 pages or so per week of articles in PDF that I may never read again. Reading them on an LCD screen is a huge pain, so I usually end up printing them out (and of course using both sides and recycling). This would save me a lot of paper.
Umm, I care which page it's on. How do you refer to a quotation, or worse a figure, so that other people can find it without referencing a page number? Do they have to search the whole ebook? What if the ebook is a different translation of a foreign work and the language between the two does not exactly match? Then not even a word search would yield the appropriate passage.
Albums and tracks are important conceptual terms, they're not archaic or rendered useless by digital media. Songs are discrete entities, and you should be able to refer to them as such. But that doesn't mean that an album can't have emerging properties that you don't get when you simply listen to the tracks by themselves. Similarly, you can refer to any word in this sentence, but what makes the sentence meaningful is the particular arrangement of the words. Itsnotliketheonlywaytomaketheordermeaningfulistoel iminatethediscretenessofitsparts.
I think you misunderstand the goal of science. It's generally done to advance knowledge and better humanity, not make money. You also seem to misunderstand the division of labor. If the people on slashdot could cure AIDS, I'm sure many of them would do it for free. Certainly research must be sustainable, but that doesn't mean it needs to be profit-driven and heartless.
More people die of curable diseases (malaria, TB, etc) than of AIDS. I know AIDS is chic and all, but if we're talking humanitarian aid to countries that can't afford adequate health care, we don't need to wait for an AIDS cure. The impedement isn't science but politics and economics.
I personally think it's kind of cool. Before I started using Linux, I would have LOVED to know somebody who was willing to share. I would make sure to include a dorky note to the effect of "I'm not going to be offended if you don't use this blah blah blah" so they don't feel awkward. Let them know you're just spreading the joy and not preaching.
If I may speak as a (fairly successful) student of philosophy, I think many of the criticisms are misplaced.
First, the author assumes a problematic theory of truth that is not appropriate in many encyclopedic entries. While there is a truth-of-the-matter in cases of birth dates and scientific facts, there is no such thing in topics in the "human dimension", like in interpretations of historical events or art works. The "truth" in these areas comes from exactly the sort of community discussion that Wikipedia fosters, and I imagine Wikipidia outshines other encyclopedias in these areas.
To give one example, the Wikipedia entry on the philosopher Kant mentions Kant's flirtation with white supremacy, something that few "authoritative" encyclopedias mention. I imagine Wikipedia gives more space to the concerns of small but important groups in other areas, such as in feminist critiques of science. Typically, I see this happening as addendums to otherwise neutral articles rather than a "feminization" of an article, and hence reflect breadth rather than bias.
This first point, in conjunction with the already mentioned depth of information about Science and Technology, would indicate that Wikipedia has an edge in both Science and Humanities.
The second (but related) major point I want to raise is that, as someone going into the field of academics, I can attest to the fact that "experts" are far from biased. Academic departments experience more than their share of politics, and the most expert are often the ones most thoroughly engaged in a field. So, for example, if you go to the most respected expert on George Washington, he or she may not be familiar with more marginal (but influential) debates. That is because what keeps these debates from being marginal is precisely the objections of the "experts" who are writing the encyclopedia articles. One result is that encyclopedias tend to reflect the most common interpretation of a person/work/event rather than explain where that interpretation might go wrong. For this reason when I want to get an overview on an issue where I already have advanced knowledge I go to Wikipedia first because I know Britanica is going to be watered down and oversimplified.
As others have pointed out, relying on an Encyclopedia when it really matters is not good policy. In fact, before Wikipedia, I had ruled out Encyclopedias altogether because it was easier to find relevant information in authoritative texts. An Encyclopedia is meant to be a cursory gathering of knowledge in one location. I think Wikipedia meets that and goes further. But like any source of information, you have to know how to use it.
For many theorists on both the left and right, low voter turnout is symptomatic of the ethic that politics is all about maximizing personal utility. Encouraging people to vote for selfish reasons seems like exactly the wrong thing to do.
Do we really want a government elected by a people who have to be bribed to vote? Is that really democratic?
Explain how there is bias.
The story is newsworthy because the paper (1) is the (mostly conservative) paper in a town centered around George Bush, and (2) backed George Bush in 2000 and much of his election. Bush practically invented Crawford when he built his ranch there, and you can their websites are crawling with pictures and odes to Bush. This is a pretty frigging big news story.
Your counterpoint is that a conservative paper in Lowell endorsed Bush. Well duh, it's a conservative paper, practically every town has them and they practically all support Bush (including, until recently, the iconoclast). Moreover, the story about Lowell WAS picked up by the media, despite its lack of being newsworthy.
How can you possibly think these stories are similar? The fact that people in Crawford are furious should give you some indication as to why the Iconclast story is important and the Lowell Sun one is not.
There is no evidence at all that CBS was pursuing an agenda, unlike, say the conservative bloggers whose agenda was to discredit the story. I am not sure why you believe that CBS was trying to "make Bush look bad," when media coverage of Bush has been on the whole appalingly fawning.
Judging from your post, this is exactly the sort of thing that should not result from the CBS fallout. It appears to me as if you've bought into the "liberal media" mythology and have pegged CBS as one of those media outlets (in conjunction with academics, blacks, women, homosexuals, and poor people) who are out to "get" the president. Moreover, it appears as if you took the admission by CBS that they were not positive about the document trail to mean at least (1) that they made up the story, but probably you alo believe (2) that the documents were forged, or (3) were furnished by the Kerry campaign. I'm not denying that these are possible, but I am stating that there is absolutely no evidence for them.
In this whole situation is the independent media. I can't see anything that CBS has done wrong from a purely journalistic point of view. They made a mistake believing Burkett, but news organizations make retraction more often than would be believed. The onus is not on the organization to report ONLY the truth, but to do vigorous fact checking, investigate itself internally, and apologize when mistakes are made. I think CBS has done that, even in the face of a bullying conservative media that I imagine would have forced the Washington Post to retract Watergate had they been as strong then. I believe that CBS checked its facts in earnest and made a mistake. But that is different entirely than broadcasting known lies (as Fox is known to do) or not having a fact-checking organization at all, like all bloggers.
The "documents are faked" cry came from conservative bloggers. Then people started wondering whether typewriters can make superscripts (they can) and a handfull of the document inspector panel said they didn't approve the documents. Of course, that's why there is a panel of experts, and not just one expert. Anytime there are documents, I imagine a few experts disagree, and they go with the weight of the panel. There is nothing particularly insidious about inspecting your documents and following expert opinion.
But the initial Bush response was not to deny the veracity of the claims. In fact, they didn't claim the documents were forged until the conservative bloggers had pushed the story into the media, which indicates at least partially that they were unsure. If they were unsure, there's a pretty good reason to believe that the allegations alleged MIGHT have some merit. Moreover, the Bush response was to say "these guys are just repeating old allegations," in other words, everybody already knows that Bush got it easy during Vietnam. To change from that to "CBS intentionally forged documents to hurt the president" is frankly absurd and intellectually dishonest.
CBS is NOT a partisan company. They make every effort to be neutral with respect to politics, so if CBS comes out tarnished as a Bush-hating medium by the conservative pundits, that will be a sad day indeed. The original post mentions the 2000 election call, which it may be recalled was originally made by Bush's cousin at Fox News. The absolute last thing we need is for more people to believe the "Rathergate" hype and to fall into the "liberal media bias" mythology.
Your best bet for a single source of non-biased news is NPR and PBS. A recent study by the non-partisan PIPA found that NPR/PBS listeners/viewers had the best understanding of the situation in Iraq. By contrast, the more people watched Fox, the less they understood.
Of the mainstream news stations, Fox, and the Murdock and Scaif newspapers, are the only ones that have biases that interfere with their coverage. These stations and papers lean hard right and make a ton of money. As a result, media companies like MSNBC are starting to emulate their approach and are therefore going to lean slightly to the right. NPR and PBS, and to a lesser extent the New York Times get badmouthed by conservatives, but really don't spin their stories. There are some liberal news sources, but they tend to advertise that in their name (like, say, the Socialist Review).
Your best bet for finding out candidate information is to check out the various watch-dog sites that slashdoters have pointed out. Also, services at google and yahoo give you a pretty representative cross section of the day's news coverage.
That's a distortion of Kerry's position. He voted to give the president the authority to use force but only on the condition that (1) we went in with global support (2) it was honestly the only option left, and (3) they posed an immediate threat. Kerry opposed the war because, well, we went in unilaterally, we didn't exhaust diplomatic means, and Iraq posed no immediate threat. Disagree all you want with his position (I know I do) but don't distort it.
I think the database idea is interesting, but it can't logically prove anything. To say that either I would have or wouldn't have bought a CD after downloading music is a counterfactual.
I would like to see music listeners take more of a stand and instead of saying "downloading music doesn't hurt sales" say "for the love of Jebus, find a way to incorporate filesharing in your business plan, because it's the best thing that's happened to small musicians and music lovers."
I agree. No matter how smart you think you are, it's generally a bad idea to introduce yourself as uniquely clever.
I'm only a bit older than you and consider myself to be reasonably smart and have some academic credentials to prove it (graduating top of my class at an prestigious college next week). Here is my advice to you.
(1) don't be a snob. If you're smart, that's fine. But don't say you're uniquely smart or smarter than other people. That's just annoying.
(2) Do the very very best you can in school. You're not going to achieve anything brilliant by being smart at a temp job. Whether or not you find school interesting, your best bet is to go and suck it up.
(3) Poke around until you find something you like. This may mean trying different subjects, but it may also mean doing one very specialist area in one subject.
My last piece of advice, quite honestly, is to get checked out for adult ADD. Assuming you're as smart as you think you are (and I don't doubt it), it looks like something you might have. I would check it out online, and then if it looks like you, call up a doctor. I know ADD gets a bad reputation, but adult ADD is really a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Since Linux is AFAIK the only kernel in town, it makes sense to keep calling it Linux. I personally will continue to do so. But I also support having a choice between kernels and Stallman's right to emphasize the distinction between the kernel and the rest of the system.
That's not correct. Statistical significance doesn't tell you anything about whether there's a causal mechanism at work. It doesn't even tell you whether the measured differences are real. It gives you an estimate of the probability of seeing your data given that there is no difference. It's possible for a p-value to be 0 while the probability that there is no difference is 100%. And for any given significance level (say, p=.0001), there are datasets such that differences almost certainly don't exist. This means that from an epistemological standpoint, statistical significance tells you next to nothing. Several statisticians have proven that in scenarios mimicking those in the social sciences with a .05 cutoff, the probability that there is no difference can be as high as 60%, meaning a 40% probability that an effect is real.
It's not the cost of paper I mind -- it's the waste. Plus there are only 2 quality laser printers I can use for free. This means that much of the time when I want to print something I have to pay 10 cents a copy, including at my department office and all campus libraries etc.
This looks great for people in academics. I read 100 pages or so per week of articles in PDF that I may never read again. Reading them on an LCD screen is a huge pain, so I usually end up printing them out (and of course using both sides and recycling). This would save me a lot of paper.
Umm, I care which page it's on. How do you refer to a quotation, or worse a figure, so that other people can find it without referencing a page number? Do they have to search the whole ebook? What if the ebook is a different translation of a foreign work and the language between the two does not exactly match? Then not even a word search would yield the appropriate passage.
Albums and tracks are important conceptual terms, they're not archaic or rendered useless by digital media. Songs are discrete entities, and you should be able to refer to them as such. But that doesn't mean that an album can't have emerging properties that you don't get when you simply listen to the tracks by themselves. Similarly, you can refer to any word in this sentence, but what makes the sentence meaningful is the particular arrangement of the words. Itsnotliketheonlywaytomaketheordermeaningfulistoel iminatethediscretenessofitsparts.
Bonobos _are_ chimps
I think you misunderstand the goal of science. It's generally done to advance knowledge and better humanity, not make money. You also seem to misunderstand the division of labor. If the people on slashdot could cure AIDS, I'm sure many of them would do it for free. Certainly research must be sustainable, but that doesn't mean it needs to be profit-driven and heartless.
More people die of curable diseases (malaria, TB, etc) than of AIDS. I know AIDS is chic and all, but if we're talking humanitarian aid to countries that can't afford adequate health care, we don't need to wait for an AIDS cure. The impedement isn't science but politics and economics.
I personally think it's kind of cool. Before I started using Linux, I would have LOVED to know somebody who was willing to share. I would make sure to include a dorky note to the effect of "I'm not going to be offended if you don't use this blah blah blah" so they don't feel awkward. Let them know you're just spreading the joy and not preaching.
If I may speak as a (fairly successful) student of philosophy, I think many of the criticisms are misplaced.
First, the author assumes a problematic theory of truth that is not appropriate in many encyclopedic entries. While there is a truth-of-the-matter in cases of birth dates and scientific facts, there is no such thing in topics in the "human dimension", like in interpretations of historical events or art works. The "truth" in these areas comes from exactly the sort of community discussion that Wikipedia fosters, and I imagine Wikipidia outshines other encyclopedias in these areas.
To give one example, the Wikipedia entry on the philosopher Kant mentions Kant's flirtation with white supremacy, something that few "authoritative" encyclopedias mention. I imagine Wikipedia gives more space to the concerns of small but important groups in other areas, such as in feminist critiques of science. Typically, I see this happening as addendums to otherwise neutral articles rather than a "feminization" of an article, and hence reflect breadth rather than bias.
This first point, in conjunction with the already mentioned depth of information about Science and Technology, would indicate that Wikipedia has an edge in both Science and Humanities.
The second (but related) major point I want to raise is that, as someone going into the field of academics, I can attest to the fact that "experts" are far from biased. Academic departments experience more than their share of politics, and the most expert are often the ones most thoroughly engaged in a field. So, for example, if you go to the most respected expert on George Washington, he or she may not be familiar with more marginal (but influential) debates. That is because what keeps these debates from being marginal is precisely the objections of the "experts" who are writing the encyclopedia articles. One result is that encyclopedias tend to reflect the most common interpretation of a person/work/event rather than explain where that interpretation might go wrong. For this reason when I want to get an overview on an issue where I already have advanced knowledge I go to Wikipedia first because I know Britanica is going to be watered down and oversimplified.
As others have pointed out, relying on an Encyclopedia when it really matters is not good policy. In fact, before Wikipedia, I had ruled out Encyclopedias altogether because it was easier to find relevant information in authoritative texts. An Encyclopedia is meant to be a cursory gathering of knowledge in one location. I think Wikipedia meets that and goes further. But like any source of information, you have to know how to use it.
For many theorists on both the left and right, low voter turnout is symptomatic of the ethic that politics is all about maximizing personal utility. Encouraging people to vote for selfish reasons seems like exactly the wrong thing to do.
Do we really want a government elected by a people who have to be bribed to vote? Is that really democratic?
Explain how there is bias. The story is newsworthy because the paper (1) is the (mostly conservative) paper in a town centered around George Bush, and (2) backed George Bush in 2000 and much of his election. Bush practically invented Crawford when he built his ranch there, and you can their websites are crawling with pictures and odes to Bush. This is a pretty frigging big news story. Your counterpoint is that a conservative paper in Lowell endorsed Bush. Well duh, it's a conservative paper, practically every town has them and they practically all support Bush (including, until recently, the iconoclast). Moreover, the story about Lowell WAS picked up by the media, despite its lack of being newsworthy. How can you possibly think these stories are similar? The fact that people in Crawford are furious should give you some indication as to why the Iconclast story is important and the Lowell Sun one is not.
...when this site becomes crucial to our democracy.
There is no evidence at all that CBS was pursuing an agenda, unlike, say the conservative bloggers whose agenda was to discredit the story. I am not sure why you believe that CBS was trying to "make Bush look bad," when media coverage of Bush has been on the whole appalingly fawning. Judging from your post, this is exactly the sort of thing that should not result from the CBS fallout. It appears to me as if you've bought into the "liberal media" mythology and have pegged CBS as one of those media outlets (in conjunction with academics, blacks, women, homosexuals, and poor people) who are out to "get" the president. Moreover, it appears as if you took the admission by CBS that they were not positive about the document trail to mean at least (1) that they made up the story, but probably you alo believe (2) that the documents were forged, or (3) were furnished by the Kerry campaign. I'm not denying that these are possible, but I am stating that there is absolutely no evidence for them.
In this whole situation is the independent media. I can't see anything that CBS has done wrong from a purely journalistic point of view. They made a mistake believing Burkett, but news organizations make retraction more often than would be believed. The onus is not on the organization to report ONLY the truth, but to do vigorous fact checking, investigate itself internally, and apologize when mistakes are made. I think CBS has done that, even in the face of a bullying conservative media that I imagine would have forced the Washington Post to retract Watergate had they been as strong then. I believe that CBS checked its facts in earnest and made a mistake. But that is different entirely than broadcasting known lies (as Fox is known to do) or not having a fact-checking organization at all, like all bloggers.
The "documents are faked" cry came from conservative bloggers. Then people started wondering whether typewriters can make superscripts (they can) and a handfull of the document inspector panel said they didn't approve the documents. Of course, that's why there is a panel of experts, and not just one expert. Anytime there are documents, I imagine a few experts disagree, and they go with the weight of the panel. There is nothing particularly insidious about inspecting your documents and following expert opinion.
But the initial Bush response was not to deny the veracity of the claims. In fact, they didn't claim the documents were forged until the conservative bloggers had pushed the story into the media, which indicates at least partially that they were unsure. If they were unsure, there's a pretty good reason to believe that the allegations alleged MIGHT have some merit. Moreover, the Bush response was to say "these guys are just repeating old allegations," in other words, everybody already knows that Bush got it easy during Vietnam. To change from that to "CBS intentionally forged documents to hurt the president" is frankly absurd and intellectually dishonest.
CBS is NOT a partisan company. They make every effort to be neutral with respect to politics, so if CBS comes out tarnished as a Bush-hating medium by the conservative pundits, that will be a sad day indeed. The original post mentions the 2000 election call, which it may be recalled was originally made by Bush's cousin at Fox News. The absolute last thing we need is for more people to believe the "Rathergate" hype and to fall into the "liberal media bias" mythology.
Your best bet for a single source of non-biased news is NPR and PBS. A recent study by the non-partisan PIPA found that NPR/PBS listeners/viewers had the best understanding of the situation in Iraq. By contrast, the more people watched Fox, the less they understood.
Of the mainstream news stations, Fox, and the Murdock and Scaif newspapers, are the only ones that have biases that interfere with their coverage. These stations and papers lean hard right and make a ton of money. As a result, media companies like MSNBC are starting to emulate their approach and are therefore going to lean slightly to the right. NPR and PBS, and to a lesser extent the New York Times get badmouthed by conservatives, but really don't spin their stories. There are some liberal news sources, but they tend to advertise that in their name (like, say, the Socialist Review).
Your best bet for finding out candidate information is to check out the various watch-dog sites that slashdoters have pointed out. Also, services at google and yahoo give you a pretty representative cross section of the day's news coverage.
That's a distortion of Kerry's position. He voted to give the president the authority to use force but only on the condition that (1) we went in with global support (2) it was honestly the only option left, and (3) they posed an immediate threat. Kerry opposed the war because, well, we went in unilaterally, we didn't exhaust diplomatic means, and Iraq posed no immediate threat. Disagree all you want with his position (I know I do) but don't distort it.
You can read his justification here
I think the database idea is interesting, but it can't logically prove anything. To say that either I would have or wouldn't have bought a CD after downloading music is a counterfactual. I would like to see music listeners take more of a stand and instead of saying "downloading music doesn't hurt sales" say "for the love of Jebus, find a way to incorporate filesharing in your business plan, because it's the best thing that's happened to small musicians and music lovers."
I agree. No matter how smart you think you are, it's generally a bad idea to introduce yourself as uniquely clever. I'm only a bit older than you and consider myself to be reasonably smart and have some academic credentials to prove it (graduating top of my class at an prestigious college next week). Here is my advice to you. (1) don't be a snob. If you're smart, that's fine. But don't say you're uniquely smart or smarter than other people. That's just annoying. (2) Do the very very best you can in school. You're not going to achieve anything brilliant by being smart at a temp job. Whether or not you find school interesting, your best bet is to go and suck it up. (3) Poke around until you find something you like. This may mean trying different subjects, but it may also mean doing one very specialist area in one subject. My last piece of advice, quite honestly, is to get checked out for adult ADD. Assuming you're as smart as you think you are (and I don't doubt it), it looks like something you might have. I would check it out online, and then if it looks like you, call up a doctor. I know ADD gets a bad reputation, but adult ADD is really a problem.