My apologies - I didn't mean to imply that Bush was responsible for the entire thing, merely that he (and the current administration) was the catalyst that has speeded up the entire process ten- or a hundredfold. Whether they're doing it more than previous adminsitrations, or just doing it more blatantly and shamelessly, the effect they're having is much more marked than Clinton, Bush I or Reagan.
A good president can affect the way a society works - that is, after all, their job.
If a president prizes accountability, transparency, honesty and integrity, those values filter down through the administration, and into the culture. Transparency makes corruption becomes harder, and so is reduced. Accountability weeds out people who don't do their job, so professionalism rises, morale improves and everyone benefits.
A bad president plays the system for whatever he wants (power, conquest, special-interest groups, etc), and this filters down, too. Cronyism, a lack of accountability, corruption and dissembling all become more common, and the average citizen becomes disillusioned, apathetic and lazy.
Funnily enough, the second type of administration is probably easier to control, since voters care less what you do, and checks and balances on your power wane.
However, the first type of presidency is the one that ensures your country continues to be prosperous, free and happy. The second one runs your ecomony into the ground (hey, look at the old USSR).
"No, they didn't mind it because they needed our protection from being crushed by the russians. Now that there's no global threat, other countries and societies freely piss and whine about everything they think is wrong with America. Rather tiresome, really."
Indeed. The USSR was indeed much worse than the US at the time, and even now.
However, now you're in position to be the world's benevolent dictator, the power has gone to your heads, and the benevolent part is slipping.
History shows us that once a country starts down that path, nothing much stops it short of invasion, civil war or (once it's got so bad even the populace realises it) revolution.
In addition, now that the US isn't fighting communism it doesn't need allies all over the world to help it[1], so it feels free to ignore international law, invade other countries on trumped-up charges and blame everything on other countries because it stops them having to examine their own behaviour or motivations one bit.
Footnotes:
[1] Contrary to your apparent belief, had it ended up with the USA vs. the world, the USA would have lost. Had it even ended up with the USA vs. the USSR, it would have been a very, very close call and the USSR could still have swung it. Although the USA had better technology, it also has a lot less resources, a lot less manpower and a lot less territory. It also had to deal with internal dissention in a much more inefficient way than the USSR (and good thing too).
I know it's very temping to believe the world needed the USA and the USA didn't need the world, but it's a fairy-story. Yes, we might well have needed you more than you needed us, but without allied economies, innovations and territories, the USA wouldn't have "won" either.
"A proud nation needs to be very careful; all it takes is a charismatic leader to conquer the world."
The problem is, this is not seen as a bad thing by the Right in America.
There seems to be a perception that they're "the good guys"[1], so anything they do is ok. Neocon ideology states that the best possible outcome is for America to be in control of the world, either directly by military means, or economically and ideologically.
This is completely unfounded and baseless nationalism, taken as an article of faith. It is also why the rest of the world is very, very scared.
Footnotes:
[1] Good Guy: n. A mythical beast, only ever seen in action movies. Utterly without negative feelings, everything he does is good, because it's him doing it.
Often confused with Heroes, who while generally good and admirable can also be flawed. People who believe themselves to be the Good Guys are basically fanatics, because they can excuse any action on the basis "it's them doing it" - circular logic, similar in effect to traditional "because God wants it" fanaticism. Good Guys don't exist, but Heroes do.
Importantly, anyone who believes themselves to be either one isn't, by definition.
i) The first thing that occurs when you start thinking about it, and
ii) It's the motivation offered by any US citizen who isn't actively opposed to the current direction the country's taking
However, it's also:
iii) The most comfortably smug conclusion available to a US citizen, since it makes them the best and anyone who disagrees a blind, irrational, hate-filled jealous idiot, whom they can safely demonise and ignore without having to examine their own behaviour one iota.
iv) The worldview your government and media have pushed very, very hard to promote... both because it excuses their behaviour (government) and tells you what you secretly want to hear (advertising-lead media).
v) Extremely hard to justify, since if you haven't substantially increased "bad" behaviour in modern times, then why is your international reputation at such an incredibly marked all-time low? Sure there was always anti-american feeling in the Middle East, but there was never one hundredth the strength of negative feeling there is now in Europe, and even in the UK/Canada - your freaking allies.
And can you seriously claim that, after clamping down on civil liberties, one (two?) dodgy elections and two foreign invasions (one on stated charges that were proven to have been trumped up, and your president's still in power) you should still be considered the most trustworthy and respect-worthy culture on earth?
I'm just curious to see how you answer these issues, or if you simply dismiss them because they contradict your comfortable world-view.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but then it's easy to paint any country as evil if you try hard enough - for example, much of the current turmoil and instability in the Middle East was originally caused by the British and French empires withdrawing after WWI/WWII. We basically ignored all the tribes, indiginous races and existing cultures in the area, slapped a bunch of borders wherever we thought they'd look good, tapped some random guy on the head and said "You're president now" and legged it.
Unsurprisingly, many of the countries then fell to in-fighting and dissention. About the time we backed out of interfering the US stepped in, and continued where we left off.
Regarding your post, I'm not blaming the whole thing on Bush, and there has always been a moderate amount of anti-american feeling in the world. However, since Bush and Neocons like Cheney took power the process of corruption, military expansion and ignoring of international opinion has accelerated a hundredfold.
Now, there are roaring choruses of anti-americanism, even amongst your allies (like the UK, for example). A 2003 (and it's only got worse since then!) survey in a number of major European countries revealed more people considered Bush the greatest threat to world peace than Saddam or Bin Laden combined. The reason being, Saddam and Bin Laden, ultimately, don't have any real power. A Bush-lead USA could cause WWIII if it wanted to. And if it did want to it couldn't do a lot better than it's doing - a few more invasions here and there (say, N. Korea or Syria) and we'd have a serious possibility of a West vs. Middle/Far East rumble shaping up.
"Until then, you're just going to have to wait until either an economic crisis cripples us, or civil war breaks out. I don't see either happening any time soon."
The US's ongoing culture war notwithstanding, my money's on economic collapse, or at least crippling recession.
Your economy's tanking, you're running an all-time record trade deficit, you're strengthening your oil economy and ignoring alternative forms of energy at the same time the middle east is destabilising even more (and peak oil's coming eventually), and you're granting tax-cuts to the wealthy while the number of people below the poverty line is increasing.
The loss of international prestige is making people (OPEC, China, etc) shift from the US Dollar to the Euro, and your economy is basically a services-based one, artificially inflated because your currency is (currently) the world's chosen medium of exchange - all your manufacturing and resource-mining ones have been offshored to other countries.
Your IT/knowledge-working industry (the one thing which might save you) is only becoming more and more tied in red tape, patents and lawsuits, to the benefit of a few existing multi-nationals, and at the expense of your government, industry, level of innovation and average worker.
Allow me to state, right up-front, I'm dealing with perceptions here. I'mn not arguing they're necessarily right (although I believe some of them are), but I'm talking about what the rest of the world perceives.
That said (and asbestos underwear on)...
"I think it has a whole lot less to do with these things [trustworthy, democratic, meritocratic, the least corrupt and the most "free" (libre) society] and a whole lot more to do with political beliefs. None of these things have changed."
Trustworthyness: The US is in the middle of its most aggressive invasive period in recent history. Even in the Vietnam era you had the excuse you were fighting another superpower. The world perception is that you're using the threat of terrorism as a carte-blanche excuse to go after anyone you like. It's been proven that Iraq was basically invaded on trumped-up charges. Not that it wasn't necessarily in need of a regime-chance, but that the reasons Bush gave for going in there were known and proven false, even before he invaded. Clinton was nearly impeached because of lying about a blow-job. Bush was voted back in for a second term. You do the math;-)
Democracy: The 2000 election shook the world's faith in the US democratic system. You were the butt of "Banana Republic of America" jokes around the globe for months, and even to some extent now. Add to that the stranglehold one party has over all three wings of government, your complient (or just apathetic) mass-media, the lack of a credible, organised opposition party and widespread (and utterly ineffectual) popular dissatisfaction with the way the country's going, and from outside your democracy looks really quite shaky in places.
Meritocratic: Your president is a borderline-remedial, fundamentally unqualified, former alcoholic cokehead who can't even read through a single sheet of briefing notes without getting frustrated and bored. Again, perceptions, but you can't deny that many (and increasingly) people are getting to the top of US society based more on "old-boy" connections than on true ability or merit. Look at FEMA and New Orleans, for merely the most recent and most graphic example.
The least corrupt: Bush's ongoing attack on the concept of judicial oversight. Cronyism and graft everywhere you look. No-bid Iraqi Reconstruction contracts awarded to companies who merely happen to have rock-solid connections to the president, vice-president or prominent republican allies. Sure, all this has always gone on a bit, but it's massively increased (or there's just, arrogantly, no attempt to bother hiding it) under Bush.
The most "free" (libre) society: Not since the (temporary) PATRIOT act, the PATRIOT act being signed into permanent law, people being chucked out of political conventions using "anti-terrorism" powers, new powers for the FBI to issue secret subpoenas and hold secret trials, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.
Honestly, this is what the rest of the world sees. Don't you? Is it all wrong?
"The only thing that's changed is we have someone in the White House that isn't as in line with European political views as the last administration."
Indeed, because most of Europe perceives itself as still favouring things like freedom, civil liberties, meritocracy, diplomacy and consensus and judicial oversight. Sure, everyone's treading more carefully since 9/11, but the US is actively opposing things like civil liberties, human rights and international opinion, in defiance of international agreements they've already signed-up to.
"How did people who are more conservative come to power? Through the democratic, meritocratic, and "free" (libre) system of government that we have in place."
Again, with the Florida 2000 election shenanigans, Diebold voting machines, electoral roles being "adjusted" by Republican-linked companies to the Republicans' advantage and the absence of anything approaching real opposition by the Demo
"Just a point. There are a few hundred million people in the US. All of them are not arrogant and conceited, any more than all the French are rude and smelly, all Muslims are terrorists, or all the Chinese are great at math."
Indeed. However, in recent times your government has been play-acting the worst of the American stereotype (arrogant, inward-looking, aggressively expansionist), which has accordingly strengthened that stereotype worldwide.
Most american's aren't arrogant or expansionist (they've got you bang to rights on the inward-looking, though), but the ones you nominate to power are, so you all cop the world-opinion fall-out.
"Yes, there are legitimate grievances against the US. But much or what is perceived as US arrogance is merely the US attempting to retain it's own constitutional structure. A large portion of the world wants the US to tear up our constitution and remake ourselves in the image of the EU."
Again, this is a very common US perception. In fact, all the rest of the world wants is for the US to stop telling them what to do.
You can easily give this a reality-check: How many EU countries have tried to use trade embargoes, tariffs or full-scale military invasion to change the US's position on economic or political issues? And how many times has the US done the same?
Obviously terrorists would love it if you turned the Us into a middle-eastern-style fundamentalist theocracy, but we're talking national governments here, and politics/economics, not private individuals and religion.
"Most of the what the world knows about the US is garbage, heavily influenced by Hollywood. Just as most of what most Americans know about the Middle East is from Hollywood bull and news reports showing scenes of war and terror."
That's a very interesting assertion. So basically you're saying that:
What the rest of the world knows about America comes from what America tells them about itself, and What America knows about the middle east is what America tells itself.
Hmmm.
Add to that the fact that what other countries know about the US is what America tells them and how the US actually acts towards their country, and you're getting close to why there's such a lot of anti-american feeling in the world, especially in the poorest countries, where the disparity between that the US says and does is greatest.
"Then why is there such anti-Americanism? Or are you claiming that for the most part people outside of the US are too stupid to see the virtues of Americans?"
Or... maybe... the types of Americans that foreigners like the OP and I tend to meet are either highly teched-up and relatively articulate ones who post on forums like Slashdot, or freakishly well-travelled and cosmopolitan ones who actually leave the country and experience other cultures occasionally.
Unfortunately, compared to these unrepresentative examples, the overwhelming majority of Americans are (international-) culturally ignorant and surprisingly closedminded. This is why so many Americans I've met were pretty intelligent, cool people (and, oddly, overwhelmingly likely to be Democrat), and yet your voters as a group are sending your country down the tubes and causing you to be the world's favorite whipping-boy these days.
"In any case, We're China's number one customer, do you really think they'll close the borders to us? It would do them more harm than what it would do to the US in the long run."
Do I think they will? No.
Do I think they could? In a second.
Yes, it would hurt their international trade, but the key thing is this - your government hasn't been preventing inflation in its currency by using all its economic reserves to buy up and sit on billions of US dollars.
China has.
I read a very interesting article a few months ago (in the Economist, IIRC), which was basically pointing out that, should China peg its currency to the Euro instead of the US Dollar, it could then theoretically simply sell all its billions of dollar reserves at once, and crash the US economy overnight.
The thing is, you're also currently running a record trade deficit to boot, which would make economic recovery to your present levels difficult to the point of impossibility, at least within a time-frame short of decades.
Again, I don't think this would be in any way a good thing, but you really ought to know how far down the slope your president's already let you slide, and with a rating-obsessed "news" media that knows people like to be told what they already believe, you aren't hearing it from anyone apart from "foreigners".
With your precariously-balanced economy and plummeting international goodwill, the US is going to have to wake up to the fact that they soon won't be able to afford to tell the rest of the world to go fuck themselves anymore.
It won't come easy to the national character, but it's an essential lesson if you don't want a very, very tough economic future.
Just remember kids - all empires fall in the end. The famous Roman Empire fell after only about 500 years, and that was when society was much more static and inert than now. The US has enjoyed most of this century as the top dog in the world - how long (statistically) do you think it would likely last?
Distressingly for everyone, many of your fellow countrymen seem to agree with you, at least in inclination, if not in extent.
And they aren't being sarcastic.
The current brouhaha is merely the first public example of the US coming into conflict with the rest of the world as a result of recent changes in its image.
You (the USA) are currently the only global superpower.
Nobody minded this too much[1] while you were seen as trustworthy, democratic, meritocratic, the least corrupt and the most "free" (libre) society on earth.
In the last two presidential terms, your reputation has become more and more tarnished (sorry, but it's true), to the point that the benefit of the doubt has simply been withdrawn. Please note that I'm not saying whether this is right, wrong, fair or unfair... merely that it is the case.
No, I don't expect you to agree, or even to realise. You're part of the US, famously one of the most insular cultures on earth, and people are always the last to hear gossip about themselves anyway.
Since you are no longer trusted to be trustworthy, democratic, meritocratic, uncorrupt or free, you are no longer adoringly looked up to by other nations. They no longer feel safe banking on your currency, they no longer trust you as an honest broker in international politics, and they sure as hell don't want you in any kind of position of power over them.
For the entire lifetime of the net nobody's cared who ran the root servers. Now, the explosive rise of the internet's importance has met the free-falling reputation of the US, and it's hardly surprising that other countries are getting antsy about your position of "authority" over them in this area.
Short version: You were the Google of international politics, now you're more the Microsoft. Expect a lot more international anti-trust arguments in the future.
Footnotes:
[1] Well, most of the relatively powerless middle east didn't like it much, but the West, the far East and their allies didn't mind, and China (as always) just studiously ignored everyone else.
A truly superb analysis of advertising, and where it often goes horribly wrong these days. Well done that man.
One final point to add, regarding advertising in games: Make sure not to break the immersion of the player.
Nothing's going to piss me off more than playing Deserted-Future-Alien-Spacestation-Blasting-Romp 2067 Part III and seeing an advert for this year's high-end graphics card, or an ad for a current promotion at Burger-King.
Playing something modern-day like GTA? Fine - have all the ads for soft drinks, tampons, cars, etc you like. Playing a sci-fi/fantasy title? Then advertise things appropriate to those scenarios, or don't do it at all.
"If the headline had read "Get Internet Explorer website hacked... Again!" you and everyone else on Slashdot would have been all over Microsoft."
First, I would not have. You presume too much.
Secondly, I would have, however, stood by anyone who wanted to bash Microsoft for their lax patching schedule. Likewise, feel free to bash The SpreadFirefox crew for their lack of admin skills.
However, if someone had tried to imply that someone cracking a Microsoft site through a third-party application was in any way a reflection of the security of their browser, I would have told them to shut up and cease their twattery, just as I invited the GP to, and just as I invite you to now.
Had someone cracked a Microsoft site using a hole in IIS (a Microsoft product) I would have had more sympathy, since this is comparing apples with apples. I would not have weighed in, but I would not have had a go at them either.
Just out of interest, what part of "I'm all for pointing out when anyone fucks up, regardless of if they're saintly Firefox developers or "t3h evil 0ne5" at Microsoft." did you not understand?
For additional clarity, the bit about "t3h evil 0ne5 at Microsoft" is in quotes because I was being sarcastic, satirising the very childish partisan midset you both accuse me of and demonstrate yourself.
Short version:
Company X suffers a crack because of a security hole in their own software? This casts doubt on their ability to produce secure software.
Company X suffers a crack because of a security hole in an unrelated product? This casts a little doubt on their ability to produce secure software of the first type.
Company X suffers a website crack through a third-party product? This implies nothing whatsoever about Company X's product's security, and you'd be a fucking tool to assume otherwise.
This holds true whether "Company X == Microsoft" or "Company X == Mozilla Foundation".
You seem to believe that pro-Firefox partisan fuckwittery excuses pro-Microsoft partisan fuckwittery.
It does not, and partisan fuckwits of all flavours merely cheapen the debate.
'"Fat client"? You need a "fat" client to run a browser? Please...'
Not forgetting, of course, that all this is based on AJAX. That is, HTML, CSS, Javascript/ECMAScript, which aren't "owned" by any one vendor. The day Google starts producing (i) the majority web-browser browser with (ii) proprietary extensions is the day we have to worry in the slightest about vendor lockin.
And the day Google habitually charges a subscription fee for any of its mainstream services (go on, name one) is also the day we can even start worrying about them becoming the next Microsoft here.
This isn't about vendor-lockin. This is about taking away Microsoft's competitive get-out-of-jail-free card, their monopoly over the majority development API (the Windows API).
Once a full-featured (hell, even half-way decent) MS Office compatible office suite doesn't need the Windows API, there's no hard requirement for most businesses to use Windows. In fact, the ease of adminning/free-ness/lack of installation requirements of a web app means there are very compelling reasons to make the switch.
The reasons Star/OpenOffice haven't taken off are:
(i) Marketing: Nobody (apart from us geeks) has really heard of them. (ii) Trust: Very few companies have the kind of big-name-brand trust CEOs (erroneously) have for Microsoft). (iii) Hassle of administration: There are no practical obvious admin advantages in switching from one desktop app to another.
However:
(i) Everyone and his grandma have heard of Google these days, and they could (should they wish to) likely amass a marketing budget on the same scale as Microsoft's, at least for one product launch. (ii) Google, although a relative newcomer, is now sufficiently ubiquitous and useful that it's rapidly gaining (if it hasn't already) big-name-brand recognition. (iii) Switching from a desktop app to a web app, however, is a no-brainer. Especially for overworked and underfunded IT departments the world over.
"It will be a daunting task to convince people to change. Expect a torrential outpouring of FUD from Microsoft and others as they try and keep their grip on selling software in the 'traditional' way."
Is this the same Microsoft that held off updating IE for years, trying to avoid making the web-browser any more attractive an application user-interface than it already was?
And very recently recanted, is releasing IE7 soon, and is currently spending millions on advertising Hailstorm and it's own "Web Services" application model?
Short version: Microsoft may not have liked this in the past, but I think they've come to realise they don't have a choice. They can either jump on the web-applications bandwagon or be left choking in the dust.
Because the guys behind Mozilla/Firefox are clearly the same people as those who write TWiki, right? And the guys who run the Firefox marketing site are clearly exactly the same guys who do the hardcore browser development too.
I'm all for pointing out when anyone fucks up, regardless of if they're saintly Firefox developers or "t3h evil 0ne5" at Microsoft. Nevertheless, if we're going to start pointing fingers at anyone and scoring cheap points, can we at least make sure it's, y'know... their fault?
Short-sightedly knee-jerking and implying a marketing-run website crack is in any way a reflection of the security of an entirely separate developer-run product is just as bad as the people you're having a go at that think FL/OSS developers' shit smells of roses.
"That's not to say you're wrong or right, but to point out that science in this area is difficult to produce and interpret for many reasons."
Not least of which because drugs' very illegality makes studying the users and effects massively harder.
And the fact that, since the 1950s at least, the US government has spent billions telling people pot (for example) provably leads to everything from rape to murder to psychosis to funding terrorism. To now publically back down and actually scientifically examine if they were baselessly bullshitting the populace for the last half-century (in fact, initally for purelyeconomicreasons) would be a credibility and PR catastrophe, not least of which because of the millions who've grown up in the mean-time believing every word they were told on the subject.
"Not having an opinion on "who/why" is not letting somebody else "handle" it."
Yes it is. People turn to Science and say "How did the universe start?" and Science says "It started with the Big Bang, a singularity that gave rise to the entire universe".
People say "What happened before the Big Bang? What/Who caused it?" and Science says "Fucked if I know. In fact, from what I do know already I'm pretty sure I'll never be able to answer that question".
"I have no idea, and I'll probably never know" is implicitely "letting someone else handle the problem".
"Besides, I suspect most will have an inkling of opinion on the matters."
But "having an inkling" is not the same as claiming you have the answer, or claiming that it's even your place to offer it.
At some point ~15bn years ago, the universe came into existence from a singularity. A singularity, by definition, is a point at which every known law of physics breaks down, including the conservation of information. It's a fundamental tenet of current scientific theory that nothing, not even something as base as information, could have survived from "before" the singularity.
Therefore any current scientist who says he knows for a fact how or why (or who caused) this singularity to come into existence (or what happened before it) is by definition not offering science, but belief. This would be bang out of order, but I defy you to offer one "proper", mainstream scientist who claims he knows for a fact what caused the universe to spring into existence. Certainly, "Science" as an institution admits this is currently beyond its purview.
To be fair, most mainstream Religion also recognises that it has no business claiming factual status. However, there is always the same lunatic fringe (ID/Creationists in this case) who overstep the boundaries by refusing to recognise what is and isn't their side's place.
"The barrier to entry for nazel gazing is quiet[sic] low."
People can navel-gaze all they like, and scientists have been known to admit their personal beliefs in public. However, when scientists do this they tend to make it very clear (and it's generally accepted) that these are beliefs. When many religious people do this they tend to claim they're facts, and this is what irritates the "science" side of the dabate.
Science deals with facts, religion deals with faith. Scientists can hold beliefs just like religious people can state facts. Anyone who claims their beliefs are facts is wrong, period.
I'll happily slap down any scientist who claims otherwise, just as hard as I'll slap any ID/Creationist. The thing is, you don't really get well-known or public groups of "fundamentalist scientists" campaigning to have science taught in Religious Education lessons, do you?
My apologies - I have every respect for those who recognise the boundaries of science and religion, and don't bring them needlessly into conflict.
I started up in full-on rant mode because you seemed to be arguing the Creationist/ID side - they're very big on claiming both subjects should be taught in science, so when you posted
"Why not just present both theories, and allow the students to make their own minds up?"
it sounded very much like a pro-teaching-Creationism-in-Sience-lessons troll.
While I suspect disagree with certain points of your philosophy[1], I have every respect for your position.
[1] I believe that humanity did arise from evolution, and that the universe is ~15bn/$best_scientific_estimate years old. I'm open to the possibility that God ultimately created it, just that if he did, he didn't violate any known laws of physics (or childishly plant needlessly misleading evidence of greater age) when he did it.
"Why not just present both theories, and allow the students to make their own minds up?"
Fine. We already have a mechanism to do this. We teach the currently-accepted[1] scientific theory in Science, and the religious theory in Religious Education. Damn straight Scientists don't want other viewpoints taught in Science, in the same way Sports teachers don't want Maths taught in their classes.
"It would take two teachers, preferably - an evolutionist and a creationist - but it should make everyone happy, unless they want their theory to be the only one presented..."
Fine. But don't erroneously label the resulting subject Science. Call it Philosophy, and there won't be any problem. The "religious side" picked this right by seeking to pass their (forgive me: baseless) beliefs off as science.
Most scientists (with a few notable exceptions) are happy to let Science handle the "when/how" and Religion handle the "who/why". Only really in the US do you have this problem with religion overstepping its mandate.
Footnotes:
[1] Emphasis on the "currently-accepted". The second a theory comes along which matches the observed evidence better, without requiring the violation of known laws of physics (also, without providing any evidence whatsoever that those laws were violated), evolution would be dropped by the majority of scientists. At the very least, it'd be weakened and the new theory would eventually replace it.
I'm down with that, as long as we also teach Strict Orthodox FSMism in Religious Education. I mean, there's also the same amount of evidence for either one of those, right?
And if you think Christianity is more "true" because of the age of the Bible vs. the age of the FSMism website? Well then, at the very least we should teach Zoroastrianism too, since it appears to predate Christianity, right?
In the same way, I'm all for the mixing of Church and State in the USA, as long as in addition to putting up the 10 Commandments in every courthouse you make a point of, in every church, stapling the Constitution to Jesus' chest.
Short version: We should start teaching ID/Creationism in Science classes when they start teaching Evolution in Sunday School, and not before.
You're assuming the study was done as part of a search for a specific answer to a question, and not on, y'know, just reading text on-line (as I suggested). You're assuming this is during the "is this actually the page I want?" stage of browsing, when what they're actually studying was how people react when they have found a page they want. You're also assuming the average user uses ctrl+F to search a page, whereas most non-techie people I know are hardly aware it exists unless it specifically occurrs to them.
IIRC, the studies I read all gave recipients standard texts to read (avoiding the additional complication of your first point), and monitored their attention-levels while reading them. Since the study deliberately avoided confusion by removing the choice of text to read, the researchers concluded that, all things being equal, people seemed to prefer their on-line textual information in smaller hyperlinked chunks.
This actually makes sense when you think about it - why are the overwhelming majority of films roughly 1.5-2 hours long? Why don't people mind TV adverts too much, but hate them on the web? Why do books commonly have chapters?
Hardly statistically rigorous, but I've known probably over a hundred people who smoked pot regularly, and only one of them (in fact, the only case I ever even heard of) was diagnosed with cannabis psychosis.
This particular person was apparently already emotionally disturbed before he started smoking, and used to smoke about an eighth of skunk pretty much every day.
So yeah, from my direct experience you're looking at around a 1% chance, if you're already disturbed and smoking enough every day to get about ten people high. If you factor in the fact that "newsworthy" occasions like this tend to get gossiped about a fair bit (and so you'd presume I'd have at least heard about other cases, e.g. involving friends-of-friends), probably a lot less even than that...
Funnily enough, this actually encourages the Average User (a mythical beast, only whose footprints have ever been found) to read the whole article. Usability reports I remember reading a few months ago indicated that on an interactive medium like the web, users get "bored" if they don't have to interact with a page for too long. If you don't provide regular user-interaction (eg, by making them click for the next page) they get fractious and are more likely to drop out of reading the article.
I've actually noticed this myself a bit - if I've got a long page (> 5 screens) to read I'll often find myself double-clicking on words/lines in the text or highlighting them with the mouse. I don't really even realise I'm doing it, but when an article's split into several shorter pages (although it annoys me slightly having to click "Next" all the time) I don't find myself doing this.
Of course, it also inflates "page-views" and ad revenue;-)
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My apologies - I didn't mean to imply that Bush was responsible for the entire thing, merely that he (and the current administration) was the catalyst that has speeded up the entire process ten- or a hundredfold. Whether they're doing it more than previous adminsitrations, or just doing it more blatantly and shamelessly, the effect they're having is much more marked than Clinton, Bush I or Reagan.
A good president can affect the way a society works - that is, after all, their job.
If a president prizes accountability, transparency, honesty and integrity, those values filter down through the administration, and into the culture. Transparency makes corruption becomes harder, and so is reduced. Accountability weeds out people who don't do their job, so professionalism rises, morale improves and everyone benefits.
A bad president plays the system for whatever he wants (power, conquest, special-interest groups, etc), and this filters down, too. Cronyism, a lack of accountability, corruption and dissembling all become more common, and the average citizen becomes disillusioned, apathetic and lazy.
Funnily enough, the second type of administration is probably easier to control, since voters care less what you do, and checks and balances on your power wane.
However, the first type of presidency is the one that ensures your country continues to be prosperous, free and happy. The second one runs your ecomony into the ground (hey, look at the old USSR).
"No, they didn't mind it because they needed our protection from being crushed by the russians. Now that there's no global threat, other countries and societies freely piss and whine about everything they think is wrong with America. Rather tiresome, really."
Indeed. The USSR was indeed much worse than the US at the time, and even now.
However, now you're in position to be the world's benevolent dictator, the power has gone to your heads, and the benevolent part is slipping.
History shows us that once a country starts down that path, nothing much stops it short of invasion, civil war or (once it's got so bad even the populace realises it) revolution.
In addition, now that the US isn't fighting communism it doesn't need allies all over the world to help it[1], so it feels free to ignore international law, invade other countries on trumped-up charges and blame everything on other countries because it stops them having to examine their own behaviour or motivations one bit.
Footnotes:
[1] Contrary to your apparent belief, had it ended up with the USA vs. the world, the USA would have lost. Had it even ended up with the USA vs. the USSR, it would have been a very, very close call and the USSR could still have swung it. Although the USA had better technology, it also has a lot less resources, a lot less manpower and a lot less territory. It also had to deal with internal dissention in a much more inefficient way than the USSR (and good thing too).
I know it's very temping to believe the world needed the USA and the USA didn't need the world, but it's a fairy-story. Yes, we might well have needed you more than you needed us, but without allied economies, innovations and territories, the USA wouldn't have "won" either.
"A proud nation needs to be very careful; all it takes is a charismatic leader to conquer the world."
The problem is, this is not seen as a bad thing by the Right in America.
There seems to be a perception that they're "the good guys"[1], so anything they do is ok. Neocon ideology states that the best possible outcome is for America to be in control of the world, either directly by military means, or economically and ideologically.
This is completely unfounded and baseless nationalism, taken as an article of faith. It is also why the rest of the world is very, very scared.
Footnotes:
[1] Good Guy: n. A mythical beast, only ever seen in action movies. Utterly without negative feelings, everything he does is good, because it's him doing it.
Often confused with Heroes, who while generally good and admirable can also be flawed. People who believe themselves to be the Good Guys are basically fanatics, because they can excuse any action on the basis "it's them doing it" - circular logic, similar in effect to traditional "because God wants it" fanaticism. Good Guys don't exist, but Heroes do.
Importantly, anyone who believes themselves to be either one isn't, by definition.
Of course, since it's:
i) The first thing that occurs when you start thinking about it, and
ii) It's the motivation offered by any US citizen who isn't actively opposed to the current direction the country's taking
However, it's also:
iii) The most comfortably smug conclusion available to a US citizen, since it makes them the best and anyone who disagrees a blind, irrational, hate-filled jealous idiot, whom they can safely demonise and ignore without having to examine their own behaviour one iota.
iv) The worldview your government and media have pushed very, very hard to promote... both because it excuses their behaviour (government) and tells you what you secretly want to hear (advertising-lead media).
v) Extremely hard to justify, since if you haven't substantially increased "bad" behaviour in modern times, then why is your international reputation at such an incredibly marked all-time low? Sure there was always anti-american feeling in the Middle East, but there was never one hundredth the strength of negative feeling there is now in Europe, and even in the UK/Canada - your freaking allies.
And can you seriously claim that, after clamping down on civil liberties, one (two?) dodgy elections and two foreign invasions (one on stated charges that were proven to have been trumped up, and your president's still in power) you should still be considered the most trustworthy and respect-worthy culture on earth?
I'm just curious to see how you answer these issues, or if you simply dismiss them because they contradict your comfortable world-view.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but then it's easy to paint any country as evil if you try hard enough - for example, much of the current turmoil and instability in the Middle East was originally caused by the British and French empires withdrawing after WWI/WWII. We basically ignored all the tribes, indiginous races and existing cultures in the area, slapped a bunch of borders wherever we thought they'd look good, tapped some random guy on the head and said "You're president now" and legged it.
Unsurprisingly, many of the countries then fell to in-fighting and dissention. About the time we backed out of interfering the US stepped in, and continued where we left off.
Regarding your post, I'm not blaming the whole thing on Bush, and there has always been a moderate amount of anti-american feeling in the world. However, since Bush and Neocons like Cheney took power the process of corruption, military expansion and ignoring of international opinion has accelerated a hundredfold.
Now, there are roaring choruses of anti-americanism, even amongst your allies (like the UK, for example). A 2003 (and it's only got worse since then!) survey in a number of major European countries revealed more people considered Bush the greatest threat to world peace than Saddam or Bin Laden combined. The reason being, Saddam and Bin Laden, ultimately, don't have any real power. A Bush-lead USA could cause WWIII if it wanted to. And if it did want to it couldn't do a lot better than it's doing - a few more invasions here and there (say, N. Korea or Syria) and we'd have a serious possibility of a West vs. Middle/Far East rumble shaping up.
"Until then, you're just going to have to wait until either an economic crisis cripples us, or civil war breaks out. I don't see either happening any time soon."
The US's ongoing culture war notwithstanding, my money's on economic collapse, or at least crippling recession.
Your economy's tanking, you're running an all-time record trade deficit, you're strengthening your oil economy and ignoring alternative forms of energy at the same time the middle east is destabilising even more (and peak oil's coming eventually), and you're granting tax-cuts to the wealthy while the number of people below the poverty line is increasing.
The loss of international prestige is making people (OPEC, China, etc) shift from the US Dollar to the Euro, and your economy is basically a services-based one, artificially inflated because your currency is (currently) the world's chosen medium of exchange - all your manufacturing and resource-mining ones have been offshored to other countries.
Your IT/knowledge-working industry (the one thing which might save you) is only becoming more and more tied in red tape, patents and lawsuits, to the benefit of a few existing multi-nationals, and at the expense of your government, industry, level of innovation and average worker.
Allow me to state, right up-front, I'm dealing with perceptions here. I'mn not arguing they're necessarily right (although I believe some of them are), but I'm talking about what the rest of the world perceives.
;-)
That said (and asbestos underwear on)...
"I think it has a whole lot less to do with these things [trustworthy, democratic, meritocratic, the least corrupt and the most "free" (libre) society] and a whole lot more to do with political beliefs. None of these things have changed."
Trustworthyness: The US is in the middle of its most aggressive invasive period in recent history. Even in the Vietnam era you had the excuse you were fighting another superpower. The world perception is that you're using the threat of terrorism as a carte-blanche excuse to go after anyone you like. It's been proven that Iraq was basically invaded on trumped-up charges. Not that it wasn't necessarily in need of a regime-chance, but that the reasons Bush gave for going in there were known and proven false, even before he invaded. Clinton was nearly impeached because of lying about a blow-job. Bush was voted back in for a second term. You do the math
Democracy: The 2000 election shook the world's faith in the US democratic system. You were the butt of "Banana Republic of America" jokes around the globe for months, and even to some extent now. Add to that the stranglehold one party has over all three wings of government, your complient (or just apathetic) mass-media, the lack of a credible, organised opposition party and widespread (and utterly ineffectual) popular dissatisfaction with the way the country's going, and from outside your democracy looks really quite shaky in places.
Meritocratic: Your president is a borderline-remedial, fundamentally unqualified, former alcoholic cokehead who can't even read through a single sheet of briefing notes without getting frustrated and bored. Again, perceptions, but you can't deny that many (and increasingly) people are getting to the top of US society based more on "old-boy" connections than on true ability or merit. Look at FEMA and New Orleans, for merely the most recent and most graphic example.
The least corrupt: Bush's ongoing attack on the concept of judicial oversight. Cronyism and graft everywhere you look. No-bid Iraqi Reconstruction contracts awarded to companies who merely happen to have rock-solid connections to the president, vice-president or prominent republican allies. Sure, all this has always gone on a bit, but it's massively increased (or there's just, arrogantly, no attempt to bother hiding it) under Bush.
The most "free" (libre) society: Not since the (temporary) PATRIOT act, the PATRIOT act being signed into permanent law, people being chucked out of political conventions using "anti-terrorism" powers, new powers for the FBI to issue secret subpoenas and hold secret trials, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.
Honestly, this is what the rest of the world sees. Don't you? Is it all wrong?
"The only thing that's changed is we have someone in the White House that isn't as in line with European political views as the last administration."
Indeed, because most of Europe perceives itself as still favouring things like freedom, civil liberties, meritocracy, diplomacy and consensus and judicial oversight. Sure, everyone's treading more carefully since 9/11, but the US is actively opposing things like civil liberties, human rights and international opinion, in defiance of international agreements they've already signed-up to.
"How did people who are more conservative come to power? Through the democratic, meritocratic, and "free" (libre) system of government that we have in place."
Again, with the Florida 2000 election shenanigans, Diebold voting machines, electoral roles being "adjusted" by Republican-linked companies to the Republicans' advantage and the absence of anything approaching real opposition by the Demo
"Just a point. There are a few hundred million people in the US. All of them are not arrogant and conceited, any more than all the French are rude and smelly, all Muslims are terrorists, or all the Chinese are great at math."
Indeed. However, in recent times your government has been play-acting the worst of the American stereotype (arrogant, inward-looking, aggressively expansionist), which has accordingly strengthened that stereotype worldwide.
Most american's aren't arrogant or expansionist (they've got you bang to rights on the inward-looking, though), but the ones you nominate to power are, so you all cop the world-opinion fall-out.
"Yes, there are legitimate grievances against the US. But much or what is perceived as US arrogance is merely the US attempting to retain it's own constitutional structure. A large portion of the world wants the US to tear up our constitution and remake ourselves in the image of the EU."
Again, this is a very common US perception. In fact, all the rest of the world wants is for the US to stop telling them what to do.
You can easily give this a reality-check: How many EU countries have tried to use trade embargoes, tariffs or full-scale military invasion to change the US's position on economic or political issues? And how many times has the US done the same?
Obviously terrorists would love it if you turned the Us into a middle-eastern-style fundamentalist theocracy, but we're talking national governments here, and politics/economics, not private individuals and religion.
"Most of the what the world knows about the US is garbage, heavily influenced by Hollywood. Just as most of what most Americans know about the Middle East is from Hollywood bull and news reports showing scenes of war and terror."
That's a very interesting assertion. So basically you're saying that:
What the rest of the world knows about America comes from what America tells them about itself, and
What America knows about the middle east is what America tells itself.
Hmmm.
Add to that the fact that what other countries know about the US is what America tells them and how the US actually acts towards their country, and you're getting close to why there's such a lot of anti-american feeling in the world, especially in the poorest countries, where the disparity between that the US says and does is greatest.
"Then why is there such anti-Americanism? Or are you claiming that for the most part people outside of the US are too stupid to see the virtues of Americans?"
Or... maybe... the types of Americans that foreigners like the OP and I tend to meet are either highly teched-up and relatively articulate ones who post on forums like Slashdot, or freakishly well-travelled and cosmopolitan ones who actually leave the country and experience other cultures occasionally.
Unfortunately, compared to these unrepresentative examples, the overwhelming majority of Americans are (international-) culturally ignorant and surprisingly closedminded. This is why so many Americans I've met were pretty intelligent, cool people (and, oddly, overwhelmingly likely to be Democrat), and yet your voters as a group are sending your country down the tubes and causing you to be the world's favorite whipping-boy these days.
"In any case, We're China's number one customer, do you really think they'll close the borders to us? It would do them more harm than what it would do to the US in the long run."
Do I think they will? No.
Do I think they could? In a second.
Yes, it would hurt their international trade, but the key thing is this - your government hasn't been preventing inflation in its currency by using all its economic reserves to buy up and sit on billions of US dollars.
China has.
I read a very interesting article a few months ago (in the Economist, IIRC), which was basically pointing out that, should China peg its currency to the Euro instead of the US Dollar, it could then theoretically simply sell all its billions of dollar reserves at once, and crash the US economy overnight.
The thing is, you're also currently running a record trade deficit to boot, which would make economic recovery to your present levels difficult to the point of impossibility, at least within a time-frame short of decades.
Again, I don't think this would be in any way a good thing, but you really ought to know how far down the slope your president's already let you slide, and with a rating-obsessed "news" media that knows people like to be told what they already believe, you aren't hearing it from anyone apart from "foreigners".
With your precariously-balanced economy and plummeting international goodwill, the US is going to have to wake up to the fact that they soon won't be able to afford to tell the rest of the world to go fuck themselves anymore.
It won't come easy to the national character, but it's an essential lesson if you don't want a very, very tough economic future.
Just remember kids - all empires fall in the end. The famous Roman Empire fell after only about 500 years, and that was when society was much more static and inert than now. The US has enjoyed most of this century as the top dog in the world - how long (statistically) do you think it would likely last?
Distressingly for everyone, many of your fellow countrymen seem to agree with you, at least in inclination, if not in extent.
And they aren't being sarcastic.
The current brouhaha is merely the first public example of the US coming into conflict with the rest of the world as a result of recent changes in its image.
You (the USA) are currently the only global superpower.
Nobody minded this too much[1] while you were seen as trustworthy, democratic, meritocratic, the least corrupt and the most "free" (libre) society on earth.
In the last two presidential terms, your reputation has become more and more tarnished (sorry, but it's true), to the point that the benefit of the doubt has simply been withdrawn. Please note that I'm not saying whether this is right, wrong, fair or unfair... merely that it is the case.
No, I don't expect you to agree, or even to realise. You're part of the US, famously one of the most insular cultures on earth, and people are always the last to hear gossip about themselves anyway.
Since you are no longer trusted to be trustworthy, democratic, meritocratic, uncorrupt or free, you are no longer adoringly looked up to by other nations. They no longer feel safe banking on your currency, they no longer trust you as an honest broker in international politics, and they sure as hell don't want you in any kind of position of power over them.
For the entire lifetime of the net nobody's cared who ran the root servers. Now, the explosive rise of the internet's importance has met the free-falling reputation of the US, and it's hardly surprising that other countries are getting antsy about your position of "authority" over them in this area.
Short version: You were the Google of international politics, now you're more the Microsoft. Expect a lot more international anti-trust arguments in the future.
Footnotes:
[1] Well, most of the relatively powerless middle east didn't like it much, but the West, the far East and their allies didn't mind, and China (as always) just studiously ignored everyone else.
A truly superb analysis of advertising, and where it often goes horribly wrong these days. Well done that man.
One final point to add, regarding advertising in games: Make sure not to break the immersion of the player.
Nothing's going to piss me off more than playing Deserted-Future-Alien-Spacestation-Blasting-Romp 2067 Part III and seeing an advert for this year's high-end graphics card, or an ad for a current promotion at Burger-King.
Playing something modern-day like GTA? Fine - have all the ads for soft drinks, tampons, cars, etc you like. Playing a sci-fi/fantasy title? Then advertise things appropriate to those scenarios, or don't do it at all.
Funny thing - my horse bolted the other day.
Then I shut the stable door.
Can you tell me, what am I doing wrong?
"If the headline had read "Get Internet Explorer website hacked... Again!" you and everyone else on Slashdot would have been all over Microsoft."
First, I would not have. You presume too much.
Secondly, I would have, however, stood by anyone who wanted to bash Microsoft for their lax patching schedule. Likewise, feel free to bash The SpreadFirefox crew for their lack of admin skills.
However, if someone had tried to imply that someone cracking a Microsoft site through a third-party application was in any way a reflection of the security of their browser, I would have told them to shut up and cease their twattery, just as I invited the GP to, and just as I invite you to now.
Had someone cracked a Microsoft site using a hole in IIS (a Microsoft product) I would have had more sympathy, since this is comparing apples with apples. I would not have weighed in, but I would not have had a go at them either.
Just out of interest, what part of "I'm all for pointing out when anyone fucks up, regardless of if they're saintly Firefox developers or "t3h evil 0ne5" at Microsoft." did you not understand?
For additional clarity, the bit about "t3h evil 0ne5 at Microsoft" is in quotes because I was being sarcastic, satirising the very childish partisan midset you both accuse me of and demonstrate yourself.
Short version:
Company X suffers a crack because of a security hole in their own software?
This casts doubt on their ability to produce secure software.
Company X suffers a crack because of a security hole in an unrelated product?
This casts a little doubt on their ability to produce secure software of the first type.
Company X suffers a website crack through a third-party product?
This implies nothing whatsoever about Company X's product's security, and you'd be a fucking tool to assume otherwise.
This holds true whether "Company X == Microsoft" or "Company X == Mozilla Foundation".
You seem to believe that pro-Firefox partisan fuckwittery excuses pro-Microsoft partisan fuckwittery.
It does not, and partisan fuckwits of all flavours merely cheapen the debate.
'"Fat client"? You need a "fat" client to run a browser? Please...'
Not forgetting, of course, that all this is based on AJAX. That is, HTML, CSS, Javascript/ECMAScript, which aren't "owned" by any one vendor. The day Google starts producing (i) the majority web-browser browser with (ii) proprietary extensions is the day we have to worry in the slightest about vendor lockin.
And the day Google habitually charges a subscription fee for any of its mainstream services (go on, name one) is also the day we can even start worrying about them becoming the next Microsoft here.
This isn't about vendor-lockin. This is about taking away Microsoft's competitive get-out-of-jail-free card, their monopoly over the majority development API (the Windows API).
Once a full-featured (hell, even half-way decent) MS Office compatible office suite doesn't need the Windows API, there's no hard requirement for most businesses to use Windows. In fact, the ease of adminning/free-ness/lack of installation requirements of a web app means there are very compelling reasons to make the switch.
The reasons Star/OpenOffice haven't taken off are:
(i) Marketing: Nobody (apart from us geeks) has really heard of them.
(ii) Trust: Very few companies have the kind of big-name-brand trust CEOs (erroneously) have for Microsoft).
(iii) Hassle of administration: There are no practical obvious admin advantages in switching from one desktop app to another.
However:
(i) Everyone and his grandma have heard of Google these days, and they could (should they wish to) likely amass a marketing budget on the same scale as Microsoft's, at least for one product launch.
(ii) Google, although a relative newcomer, is now sufficiently ubiquitous and useful that it's rapidly gaining (if it hasn't already) big-name-brand recognition.
(iii) Switching from a desktop app to a web app, however, is a no-brainer. Especially for overworked and underfunded IT departments the world over.
"It will be a daunting task to convince people to change. Expect a torrential outpouring of FUD from Microsoft and others as they try and keep their grip on selling software in the 'traditional' way."
Is this the same Microsoft that held off updating IE for years, trying to avoid making the web-browser any more attractive an application user-interface than it already was?
And very recently recanted, is releasing IE7 soon, and is currently spending millions on advertising Hailstorm and it's own "Web Services" application model?
Short version: Microsoft may not have liked this in the past, but I think they've come to realise they don't have a choice. They can either jump on the web-applications bandwagon or be left choking in the dust.
In Korea, only old people appoint supreme court judges.
Right. Of course.
Because the guys behind Mozilla/Firefox are clearly the same people as those who write TWiki, right? And the guys who run the Firefox marketing site are clearly exactly the same guys who do the hardcore browser development too.
I'm all for pointing out when anyone fucks up, regardless of if they're saintly Firefox developers or "t3h evil 0ne5" at Microsoft. Nevertheless, if we're going to start pointing fingers at anyone and scoring cheap points, can we at least make sure it's, y'know... their fault?
Short-sightedly knee-jerking and implying a marketing-run website crack is in any way a reflection of the security of an entirely separate developer-run product is just as bad as the people you're having a go at that think FL/OSS developers' shit smells of roses.
"That's not to say you're wrong or right, but to point out that science in this area is difficult to produce and interpret for many reasons."
Not least of which because drugs' very illegality makes studying the users and effects massively harder.
And the fact that, since the 1950s at least, the US government has spent billions telling people pot (for example) provably leads to everything from rape to murder to psychosis to funding terrorism. To now publically back down and actually scientifically examine if they were baselessly bullshitting the populace for the last half-century (in fact, initally for purely economic reasons) would be a credibility and PR catastrophe, not least of which because of the millions who've grown up in the mean-time believing every word they were told on the subject.
"Not having an opinion on "who/why" is not letting somebody else "handle" it."
Yes it is. People turn to Science and say "How did the universe start?" and Science says "It started with the Big Bang, a singularity that gave rise to the entire universe".
People say "What happened before the Big Bang? What/Who caused it?" and Science says "Fucked if I know. In fact, from what I do know already I'm pretty sure I'll never be able to answer that question".
"I have no idea, and I'll probably never know" is implicitely "letting someone else handle the problem".
"Besides, I suspect most will have an inkling of opinion on the matters."
But "having an inkling" is not the same as claiming you have the answer, or claiming that it's even your place to offer it.
At some point ~15bn years ago, the universe came into existence from a singularity. A singularity, by definition, is a point at which every known law of physics breaks down, including the conservation of information. It's a fundamental tenet of current scientific theory that nothing, not even something as base as information, could have survived from "before" the singularity.
Therefore any current scientist who says he knows for a fact how or why (or who caused) this singularity to come into existence (or what happened before it) is by definition not offering science, but belief. This would be bang out of order, but I defy you to offer one "proper", mainstream scientist who claims he knows for a fact what caused the universe to spring into existence. Certainly, "Science" as an institution admits this is currently beyond its purview.
To be fair, most mainstream Religion also recognises that it has no business claiming factual status. However, there is always the same lunatic fringe (ID/Creationists in this case) who overstep the boundaries by refusing to recognise what is and isn't their side's place.
"The barrier to entry for nazel gazing is quiet[sic] low."
People can navel-gaze all they like, and scientists have been known to admit their personal beliefs in public. However, when scientists do this they tend to make it very clear (and it's generally accepted) that these are beliefs. When many religious people do this they tend to claim they're facts, and this is what irritates the "science" side of the dabate.
Science deals with facts, religion deals with faith. Scientists can hold beliefs just like religious people can state facts. Anyone who claims their beliefs are facts is wrong, period.
I'll happily slap down any scientist who claims otherwise, just as hard as I'll slap any ID/Creationist. The thing is, you don't really get well-known or public groups of "fundamentalist scientists" campaigning to have science taught in Religious Education lessons, do you?
My apologies - I have every respect for those who recognise the boundaries of science and religion, and don't bring them needlessly into conflict.
I started up in full-on rant mode because you seemed to be arguing the Creationist/ID side - they're very big on claiming both subjects should be taught in science, so when you posted
"Why not just present both theories, and allow the students to make their own minds up?"
it sounded very much like a pro-teaching-Creationism-in-Sience-lessons troll.
While I suspect disagree with certain points of your philosophy[1], I have every respect for your position.
[1] I believe that humanity did arise from evolution, and that the universe is ~15bn/$best_scientific_estimate years old. I'm open to the possibility that God ultimately created it, just that if he did, he didn't violate any known laws of physics (or childishly plant needlessly misleading evidence of greater age) when he did it.
Oh, ok... if you really want a serious answer:
"Why not just present both theories, and allow the students to make their own minds up?"
Fine. We already have a mechanism to do this. We teach the currently-accepted[1] scientific theory in Science, and the religious theory in Religious Education. Damn straight Scientists don't want other viewpoints taught in Science, in the same way Sports teachers don't want Maths taught in their classes.
"It would take two teachers, preferably - an evolutionist and a creationist - but it should make everyone happy, unless they want their theory to be the only one presented..."
Fine. But don't erroneously label the resulting subject Science. Call it Philosophy, and there won't be any problem. The "religious side" picked this right by seeking to pass their (forgive me: baseless) beliefs off as science.
Most scientists (with a few notable exceptions) are happy to let Science handle the "when/how" and Religion handle the "who/why". Only really in the US do you have this problem with religion overstepping its mandate.
Footnotes:
[1] Emphasis on the "currently-accepted". The second a theory comes along which matches the observed evidence better, without requiring the violation of known laws of physics (also, without providing any evidence whatsoever that those laws were violated), evolution would be dropped by the majority of scientists. At the very least, it'd be weakened and the new theory would eventually replace it.
I'm down with that, as long as we also teach Strict Orthodox FSMism in Religious Education. I mean, there's also the same amount of evidence for either one of those, right?
And if you think Christianity is more "true" because of the age of the Bible vs. the age of the FSMism website? Well then, at the very least we should teach Zoroastrianism too, since it appears to predate Christianity, right?
In the same way, I'm all for the mixing of Church and State in the USA, as long as in addition to putting up the 10 Commandments in every courthouse you make a point of, in every church, stapling the Constitution to Jesus' chest.
Short version: We should start teaching ID/Creationism in Science classes when they start teaching Evolution in Sunday School, and not before.
You're assuming the study was done as part of a search for a specific answer to a question, and not on, y'know, just reading text on-line (as I suggested). You're assuming this is during the "is this actually the page I want?" stage of browsing, when what they're actually studying was how people react when they have found a page they want. You're also assuming the average user uses ctrl+F to search a page, whereas most non-techie people I know are hardly aware it exists unless it specifically occurrs to them.
IIRC, the studies I read all gave recipients standard texts to read (avoiding the additional complication of your first point), and monitored their attention-levels while reading them. Since the study deliberately avoided confusion by removing the choice of text to read, the researchers concluded that, all things being equal, people seemed to prefer their on-line textual information in smaller hyperlinked chunks.
This actually makes sense when you think about it - why are the overwhelming majority of films roughly 1.5-2 hours long? Why don't people mind TV adverts too much, but hate them on the web? Why do books commonly have chapters?
Hardly statistically rigorous, but I've known probably over a hundred people who smoked pot regularly, and only one of them (in fact, the only case I ever even heard of) was diagnosed with cannabis psychosis.
This particular person was apparently already emotionally disturbed before he started smoking, and used to smoke about an eighth of skunk pretty much every day.
So yeah, from my direct experience you're looking at around a 1% chance, if you're already disturbed and smoking enough every day to get about ten people high. If you factor in the fact that "newsworthy" occasions like this tend to get gossiped about a fair bit (and so you'd presume I'd have at least heard about other cases, e.g. involving friends-of-friends), probably a lot less even than that...
Indeed - kudos to the Slashdot editors for pulling a dupe once it was realised. Here's hoping it'll happen all the more often.
;-)
Well, here's hoping we'll never get any more dupes ever, but this is a good first step in that direction
Funnily enough, this actually encourages the Average User (a mythical beast, only whose footprints have ever been found) to read the whole article. Usability reports I remember reading a few months ago indicated that on an interactive medium like the web, users get "bored" if they don't have to interact with a page for too long. If you don't provide regular user-interaction (eg, by making them click for the next page) they get fractious and are more likely to drop out of reading the article.
;-)
I've actually noticed this myself a bit - if I've got a long page (> 5 screens) to read I'll often find myself double-clicking on words/lines in the text or highlighting them with the mouse. I don't really even realise I'm doing it, but when an article's split into several shorter pages (although it annoys me slightly having to click "Next" all the time) I don't find myself doing this.
Of course, it also inflates "page-views" and ad revenue