Maybe it's the fault of the media in certain countries that the moderate Muslim reaction isn't being sought or heard?
What is the moderate reaction to ANYTHING heard? The media quotes Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson when they want to represent the "Christian" viewpoint, as if those two speak for the billion-odd Christians of the world. The media thrives on showing people at their worst.
The irony is that I have a B.A. English. Which means I know what irony actually means and thus I know full well that I'm misusing the term here. There's also the remote possibility of a typo!
If you have spent your life building up a law firm based on IP law, and your clients come to you to defend their IP rights and patent rights, and you've got an employee running around talking about why those laws blow, it doesn't really inspire faith in your firm. If I work for Ford and decide to write articles bashing domestic cars, I expect to be dismissed. This guy is an idiot.
My point is that smart people see IT for what it is - treated like an expensive and annoying hassle by the rest of the company, and IT returns the ire. What intelligent woman wants to get wrapped in that? I also think it's possible that girls whose parents "grew up" in their careers while computers and IT staffs were becoming more common may impart a general bias against IT on their children regardless of gender. This leaves untouched the underwhelming presence of women in engineering sciences. I strongly believe that parents also bias their kids in general away from "hard" stuff. "Daddy, I want a degree in biochemistry." "That's way too hard." Perhaps they're more likely to say this to their daughters than their sons. Or maybe so many girls are growing up without fathers that there's nobody there to support them.
In any case, I refuse to believe that misguided feelgood nonsense like soap opera characters, segregated classrooms, will solve anything. There's also the simple possibility that, due to physiological and biological differences between the genders, chicks don't dig science as much as guys do. They're all topics worth researching to discover the truth. Except the last one. We can't research or even talk about that one. Just ask Lawrence Summers.
You can't outsource lawyers, doctors, plumbers, and carpenters. If I could do it all again I'd be a union electrician. I don't blame anybody, female, black, white, plaid, or fuscia, for avoiding IT. I just look at the level of disdain with which IT holds the rest of the company - you know, the people who actually MAKE MONEY for the company - and I marvel that the CFO doesn't spend his entire life in a stomach-turning nausea over the amount of money they sink into IT just to keep computer up and running that were up and running just fine in 1992 when their IT department was 4 guys with some wire cutters. Now it's a multimillion dollar enterprise that they think they have to have just to keep up, and it's almost entirely peopled by self-righteous technowizards who sneer and laugh at all the non-IT people in the company who actually work all day. I view our internal clients as paying customers. Most of IT views them as an interruption of work, rather than the purpose of it. "We've got an ID 10 T error!" The rallying cry of the office nerd. "Haha. Users are so dumb. God, they want everything fixed like immediately." Yeah, because they work 60 hour weeks and 40 of them are spent waiting for IT to quit playing Asteroids and do something. That's the perception. I would wager that a lot of kids, not just girls, avoid IT just based on the negative perception of it that they get from their parents, especially following the big burst. "Oh, don't go into computers, it's so unstable, you'll be going from job to job constantly and always getting laid off or outsourced."
Yeah, and why do we need Negros in these careers? For that matter, why do we need women or Negros in any high-paying careers?
We don't need specific people of any specific gender or ethnicity in almost any career. All we need is for them to have the option to pursue any career that interests them, and they have that.
Is this really something we need to "fix"?
I can't speak for you, but in I work in the financial sector of IT, and blacks are overrepresented at my office. So are Indians, Japanese, and women (especially in management).
If they wanted to do this stuff, they would. Are "civil rights" proponents saying modern Negros are incapable of making that decision for themselves?
Yes, actually. I think modern civil rights proponents, especially in positions of leadership in the black community, are saying exactly this. That blacks cannot achieve on their own and they need help from government.
Do we need lab coats in traditional African colors? How about fried chicken with its own chemical formula on the side? Seriously. Do we want people whose direction in life is so easily influenced by the speechs of one minister [wikipedia.org]?
If you're trying to claim that Martin Luther King's relationship to the black civil rights movement is somehow analogous to a soap opera character and women in the sciences, I suggest that you are... well there's no delicate way to put this, you're an idiot.
And where is all the interest in getting more white males in these positions? They're obviously better at these jobs and want to do them more, because they have almost all of them currently.
Nobody suggested that they're better them, but clearly they are chosing in greater numbers to do these jobs. How can you even pretend to argue with that?
Again, this is not a good analogy. These positions are open to anybody, there's no need to try to "get" white males, black females, Japanese metrosexuals, or androgenous Eskimo cross-dressers into any specific job. The door to these opportunities is open wider than it has ever been. As a good friend of mine once said, "I can't believe this country isn't 90% black female attorneys. You can go to law school for free on that alone." FYI, she's a black female attorney, although she didn't go for free.
I believe that these attempts to lure women in traditionally male degree programs and careers is well-intentioned but misguided rahrahism, as is this whole "GIRLS REWL" and "GIRL POWER" revolution, in which we have movies shock full of spindly blondes beating the snot out of hulking masses of muscle. It may tickle us into relieving our guilt over the fact that "Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming" contains 19 white male virgins at the local university but if that's what is putting girls over the edge for comitting to a computer science program, I don't think we're doing them any great service. Then agian, I never ran into this "girls can't do math/science" bullshit that seems to prevelent everywhere else. In my school, it was boys that couldn't do math, or science, or anything for that matter. All of our advanced science and math classes were dominated by girls, who mostly went on to be either doctors or teachers.
Why do we need more women in these careers? I wish people would quit trying to find ways to "fix" the "problem" of there being too few women in computers and the sciences. People who want to do this stuff will do it. To think that modern girls are incapable of making that decision for themselves and need soap opera role models to encourage them is a slap in the face to strong, independent women everywhere. Should we fix up some scientist Barbies? How about lipstick with its own chemical formula on the side? Do titration mounts need to start coming in pink? Lab coats need "Hello Kitty" on the back? Seriously. Do we want people whose direction in life is so easily influenced by a soap opera to be the next generation of great minds in the sciences?
And where is all the interest in increasing male participation in primary education?
We want free information, we'll take the battles as they come.
Information is free. If you want to listen to music for free, turn the radio on. If you want free books, borrow them from the library. Free CDs and movies? The same. I haven't paid to rent a DVD in years, the public library has a fair collection that you can borrow for no charge, they even have an external drop-box and the late fee is like eighty cents. Our library even has a web interface to reserve hard-to-find copies from other libraries. They ship them over to the branch near my house and I get an email when they're in so I know to go pick them on the way home from work.
By couching mass copyright infringment in terms of "free information" when it already is free (in terms of both libre and gratis), what you really want is a copy of it to keep forever and ever. If all we truly wanted was to "try before we buy", there's ways to do that that are perfectly legal. You can listen to a goodly clip on iTunes, even. Or hear it on the radio. Listen to a friend's copy. It's out there.
No, what you want is free CDs, it's that simple. And free movies and TV shows.
And the least risky and seemingly most proffitable is music...
I don't understand what profit and risk have to do with the desire for information to be free. Or is this just a confession that what you really want to do is screw a bunch of corporate amalgams that have too long enjoyed an exclusive and captive market place. I can respect that goal in principle, if you had the courage to just admit it.
We know that more music will be produced once the industry falls in fact the quality will probably rise. Artists only get about 3-4% of a sale currently, and most of the rest is spent marketing music in various ways...
Because 3-4% of whatever they make off selling millions of albums nationwide using the resources of global distribution channels is greater than the $0 they get from you downloading copies for free. That's some easy math.
We're not being unrational or really acting unilaterally.
No, I didn't accuse you of being irrational. Only of hiding your true motivations. This whole thing all boils down to free shit. Sometimes it's "protect P2P," sometimes it's "privacy", sometimes it's "information wants to be free," it's always something. But it's rare to see a Slashdot poster just come out and say, "I can't help myself, I love the trash that BMG turns out and can't bring myself to pay for it. My iTunes is cluttered up with pirated copies of Cotton-Eye Joe, Mambo #5, and all the other trash on MTV that I act like I'm too smart to like." That's what this boils down to for a lot of people. There's an added bonus of knowing that every time you don't buy a CD some jackass CEO in a $4,000 suit twitches in a board meeting.
We're trying something out... And if sharing works then I'll see if we can convince people to shoot non-sharing people...:P
This is as close as I've seen anybody on Slashdot come to admitting what this is all about. We want free shit, and we'll rationalize it one of our many moralistic crusades to save the world from all the evil people out there who expect to get paid for doing work.
The more of these people who are legitimately caught via law enforcement instead of bullying extortionistic letters from the attorneys of the content cartels, the better. This can only be good for the rest of us, who never download anything illegally, and just want the government to keep its laws off of P2P technology. This is how copyright infringement should be handled - as a law enforcement matter - rather than lobbyists trying to make DRM a legally-mandated hardware feature for new playback devices. This is a great example of people who really are breaking law getting caught and punished via the court system rather than pushed around by a bunch of attorneys. I expect this to be universally lauded on Slashdot.
Unless, of course, we don't really care about P2P and just want free music and all of our righteous and indignant howling over curtails on p2p technology is a reaction to having buy all the trash music we claim so much to hate.
Challenger destroyed our sense of competence, and the end of the Communist Menace destroyed our sense of shared purpose.
I disagree. Reagan in particular strongly objected to the notion of a national purpose, or a "goal" of America. That's exactly the sort of thinking he attributed to communist governments, a need to shape the population into marching in lockstep towards some national objective, a need to tell people what they were living for. Maybe some Americans felt that way about the Soviets but it was not at the behest of government. Our leadership at the time discouraged such thinking.
For a brief time, we knew what we had to do: we were going to kick somebody's ass.
I was among the few who lacked a bloodthirst after 9/11. I felt that if we struck too soon with revenge on our minds, we'd more easily make a mistake or overreach. There was much howling on all sides for Bush to do something now and I was rather glad that he didn't immediately just jabbing his thumb at missile launch buttons to mollify a frightened and wounded America.
It may also be a way to bypass the more common venue of television, which some argue is becoming increasingly controlled by Republican interests.
Say rather that television is beholden to market forces. Most of America is essentially conservative, even much of the portion that votes Democrat (your union guy? He hunts and fishes and drives an SUV, he's not watching PBS at night). If that changes, television will seem more "liberal" but it's not really, it's just giving people what they'll pay for.
I'm a Brit myself, and I thought most people over here thought these views were outdated and lacked substance. None of my close friends give any credit to creationism or ID, but we're all well educated athiests so I guess that's to be expected. Maybe I've been blind to the views of the majority in this proudly secular country?
You're not alone. This malady plagues intelligent left-leaning people everywhere, but especially in English-speaking nations. The United States especially, and now Britain and Canada as well. There's a very weird kind of disdain and intolerance for the real mainstream thought among people. I'm not sure where it comes from, but it's evidence in political leadership, journalistic practices, etc. I would guess that the real think tanks of modern liberal/progressive thought tend to be concentrated in areas in which they are utterly surrounded by like-thinking individuals (New York, London, Washington DC, etc), and when all you hear all day is your own beliefs firmly recited back to you by highly educated and very intelligent people, it's hard not to assume that most people think like you do, and to dismiss anybody who doesn't as being a knuckle-dragging idiot.
Both are highly dangerous assumptions, for a number of reasons. First is that it breeds an elitist intolerance for differences of opinion ("you don't agree? God, you must be some kind of idiot") and it makes an honest debate and dialog difficult. Second, it has resulted in brilliant people being out of power, and their political leadership flailing away as the minority party, and in America at least, the Democrats have basically resorted to ineffectual marketing tactics to try to repackage what they think as something it's not.
The answer is not to try to make the ideas of the left look like the ideas of the right so people will vote for it. It's to convince people that the ideas of the left are better. Right now, people don't think they are, and rebranding the same old garbage isn't going to work. Look at the US election in 2004. What were Kerry and Bush's major platforms? Stay the course in Iraq, keep the tax cuts, strong national security, blah blah. Even with this new wiretapping story, the Democrats are not trying to get the program cancelled, only criticize how its being managed/executed, etc.
The problem isn't just that they're out of touch (this wiretapping story is a non-story; the only people who are really motivated and irate about it are people who were already irate at Bush - it's not a gap-closing, vote-winning issue), but that the leadership of the liberal movement is out of steam, out of ideas, and being driven and whipped by the base. The base of the Democratic party in America is not a typical American Joe Sixpack, it's angry people who are tired of Bush and his various transgressions and missteps. But, like Clinton, Bush is a winner with the suburbanites and soccer moms. Christian values, a safer America, lower taxes, these are things that are easy to sell. How have the Democrats tried to win on these issues? Run against them? "We're against Christian values, we're for higher taxes, and to hell with national security!" No. Run FOR them? But how? We mostly don't believe in those things, at least not in the same sense that the Republicans do. We embrace a code of ethics, but how to tell Susie Q. Soccermom living in Apple Valley, MN that she should vote for our guy over Bush because a secular humanist code of ethics is just as good as Christian values but doesn't violat the establishment clause? Susie is going to tell you, "Excuse me, I'm late for choir practice" and vote Republican.
So yeah. You're out of touch, and so is the leadership of progressive thought worldwide. Conservatism was originally a philosophical principle that social evolution is evitable and necessary, but is best handled slowly and incrementally to avoid chaos and civil disorder. They may have been on to something, people in mass groups don't easily let go of the things they were raised with. The Enlightenment was centuries ago and people still think God farted and produced the atmosphere.
Democratic country to dictator: Stop butchering your population for not agreeing with you.
Dictator: No.
Democratic senator: WE ARE NO BETTER THAN THEM!
What's wrong with the old Iowa Test of Basic Skills football grid? Are pencils and ovals too much to ask of the American people? I hate to federalize things but how about a simple national format that defines what the minimum ballot must contain for all federal officers of the government. The states can elect their state officers however they want. If your state does it a dumb way you can move to one that doesn't. If you can find one, that is.
Although I'm not an evangelical open source advocate, I do think that open source software is the best choice for all computerization of matters of public record. Although ballots are "secret" in the sense that nobody knows who cast which one, they are ultimately a matter of public record, since we kinda have to know who got the most votes. All machination and digitalization with regards to public records (meaning data available to the public, they can store classified documents however they want, I don't care) should be required to be stored in open formats (not free, necessarily, but open in the sense that anybody can develop software to save, retrieve, view, and edit those records), and the software used by the government to manage those records should be open to public audit at a minimum.
And frankly, if Microsoft wanted to sign up for this deal and handle our voting machines, I'd be 100% in favor of it so long as they met these requirements.
But really... when it comes to federal elections, the ungodly majority of people either pull the party handle or pick one of the two major candidates. Why on earth do we need billions invested in technology to run up a tally of how many people picked which of two options?
It would seem that Microsoft cares more about the profits of the record companies than it does about the ability of its users to be able to use its software. Just one more reason to switch to Linux [bellevuelinux.org].
I would, but the Linux community is an intolerable assortment of evangelical elitists looking down those noses at the rest of us and shaking their heads over our bad decisions and sinful choices. If I wanted that, I'd just go to church.
Nay, good sir, your intentions are well-meant, and I keep an OpenBSD machine up and running for my personal web server, but when it comes to daily computer use, I will doggedly cling to my imperfect Windows and all of its flaws. Since I don't pirate music, movies, television shows, or do anything else illegal with my machine, I'm unlikely to be negatively affected by any of this and can safely turn a blind eye to all that Microsoft and the government does.
I know a lot of people in the development community. UO and UO2 programmers, a designer for Galaxies, people from Digital Anvil, EA, Microsoft. Most of them make enough in 8 months to take 4 months off a year collecting unemployment. One is about to head back to work because he's blown through the $30,000 he had in his savings account after his last contract was up (was a gig with Microsoft). His new job is level design and mission scripting for a PS3 game. The pay is $50 hour plus double pay for overtime. So he'll work for 6 months then take the rest of the year off to play Warcraft. I have no sympathy.
All these games are (WoW, DaOC, STG, ect..) are big statistical simulations where the players do nothing but tweak numbers (player stats). I'd like to see a game where NOBODY get's to see ANY numeric values for ANYTHING. The only player indication should be health which should be some sort of description at the bottom of the page which says something like "you feel awful" or "the pain in my leg hurts like hell!".
Play a MUD, there's tons of games that obscure that data. What you find is that they're not popular and people eventually demand to see SOME numbers, and then eventually demand to see them all, because nobody wants to piss away their time trying to get a piece of equipment or slay a certain monster or complete a quest if the reward isn't worth having. Goal-oriented games are just like life - the reward has to be perceived to be worth the investment (or the risk of failure) to entice people to pursue it.
But if the link is good, why NOT share it with the audience? I believe my first priority is to the readers here. If they would enjoy a link, why should the fact that it came from a user with a negative repution make me not choose the link?
The problem is the audience and the moderation system, not the submitters. At the end of the day you've got a system driven by a bunch of flawed, biased, imperfect little organisms who aren't going to behave like a cohesive hive always making the best decisions for the community. There is no solution. You just live with it and follow your instincts. Your instincts say to publish the stories. Publish them. It's your web site.
High altitudes. Helicoptors, especially those heavily laden with cargo, have a practical ceiling for how high they can fly. The record is on the order of 40,000 feet. We have been sending balloons into the fringes of the atmosphere for decades. Whether or not a heavily cargo-laden balloon could do this (or why you'd want to), I don't know. I can see a use for an airship for lifting space vehicles into a very high altitude before firing the main rockets. Dunno if it'd be any cheaper or safer than ground-based.
Slashdot Mirror
What is the moderate reaction to ANYTHING heard? The media quotes Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson when they want to represent the "Christian" viewpoint, as if those two speak for the billion-odd Christians of the world. The media thrives on showing people at their worst.
No, not really. I'd rather have our military involved than somebody else's.
The irony is that I have a B.A. English. Which means I know what irony actually means and thus I know full well that I'm misusing the term here. There's also the remote possibility of a typo!
If you have spent your life building up a law firm based on IP law, and your clients come to you to defend their IP rights and patent rights, and you've got an employee running around talking about why those laws blow, it doesn't really inspire faith in your firm. If I work for Ford and decide to write articles bashing domestic cars, I expect to be dismissed. This guy is an idiot.
If it can't render basic shit like min-width and respect viewport positioning, I don't care. Are they CSS 1 compliant yet? As in... fully?
In any case, I refuse to believe that misguided feelgood nonsense like soap opera characters, segregated classrooms, will solve anything. There's also the simple possibility that, due to physiological and biological differences between the genders, chicks don't dig science as much as guys do. They're all topics worth researching to discover the truth. Except the last one. We can't research or even talk about that one. Just ask Lawrence Summers.
You can't outsource lawyers, doctors, plumbers, and carpenters. If I could do it all again I'd be a union electrician. I don't blame anybody, female, black, white, plaid, or fuscia, for avoiding IT. I just look at the level of disdain with which IT holds the rest of the company - you know, the people who actually MAKE MONEY for the company - and I marvel that the CFO doesn't spend his entire life in a stomach-turning nausea over the amount of money they sink into IT just to keep computer up and running that were up and running just fine in 1992 when their IT department was 4 guys with some wire cutters. Now it's a multimillion dollar enterprise that they think they have to have just to keep up, and it's almost entirely peopled by self-righteous technowizards who sneer and laugh at all the non-IT people in the company who actually work all day. I view our internal clients as paying customers. Most of IT views them as an interruption of work, rather than the purpose of it. "We've got an ID 10 T error!" The rallying cry of the office nerd. "Haha. Users are so dumb. God, they want everything fixed like immediately." Yeah, because they work 60 hour weeks and 40 of them are spent waiting for IT to quit playing Asteroids and do something. That's the perception. I would wager that a lot of kids, not just girls, avoid IT just based on the negative perception of it that they get from their parents, especially following the big burst. "Oh, don't go into computers, it's so unstable, you'll be going from job to job constantly and always getting laid off or outsourced."
Erm, I didn't say otherwise. Erm.
We don't need specific people of any specific gender or ethnicity in almost any career. All we need is for them to have the option to pursue any career that interests them, and they have that.
Is this really something we need to "fix"?
I can't speak for you, but in I work in the financial sector of IT, and blacks are overrepresented at my office. So are Indians, Japanese, and women (especially in management).
If they wanted to do this stuff, they would. Are "civil rights" proponents saying modern Negros are incapable of making that decision for themselves?
Yes, actually. I think modern civil rights proponents, especially in positions of leadership in the black community, are saying exactly this. That blacks cannot achieve on their own and they need help from government.
Do we need lab coats in traditional African colors? How about fried chicken with its own chemical formula on the side? Seriously. Do we want people whose direction in life is so easily influenced by the speechs of one minister [wikipedia.org]?
If you're trying to claim that Martin Luther King's relationship to the black civil rights movement is somehow analogous to a soap opera character and women in the sciences, I suggest that you are ... well there's no delicate way to put this, you're an idiot.
And where is all the interest in getting more white males in these positions? They're obviously better at these jobs and want to do them more, because they have almost all of them currently.
Nobody suggested that they're better them, but clearly they are chosing in greater numbers to do these jobs. How can you even pretend to argue with that?
Again, this is not a good analogy. These positions are open to anybody, there's no need to try to "get" white males, black females, Japanese metrosexuals, or androgenous Eskimo cross-dressers into any specific job. The door to these opportunities is open wider than it has ever been. As a good friend of mine once said, "I can't believe this country isn't 90% black female attorneys. You can go to law school for free on that alone." FYI, she's a black female attorney, although she didn't go for free.
I believe that these attempts to lure women in traditionally male degree programs and careers is well-intentioned but misguided rahrahism, as is this whole "GIRLS REWL" and "GIRL POWER" revolution, in which we have movies shock full of spindly blondes beating the snot out of hulking masses of muscle. It may tickle us into relieving our guilt over the fact that "Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming" contains 19 white male virgins at the local university but if that's what is putting girls over the edge for comitting to a computer science program, I don't think we're doing them any great service. Then agian, I never ran into this "girls can't do math/science" bullshit that seems to prevelent everywhere else. In my school, it was boys that couldn't do math, or science, or anything for that matter. All of our advanced science and math classes were dominated by girls, who mostly went on to be either doctors or teachers.
And where is all the interest in increasing male participation in primary education?
Information is free. If you want to listen to music for free, turn the radio on. If you want free books, borrow them from the library. Free CDs and movies? The same. I haven't paid to rent a DVD in years, the public library has a fair collection that you can borrow for no charge, they even have an external drop-box and the late fee is like eighty cents. Our library even has a web interface to reserve hard-to-find copies from other libraries. They ship them over to the branch near my house and I get an email when they're in so I know to go pick them on the way home from work.
By couching mass copyright infringment in terms of "free information" when it already is free (in terms of both libre and gratis), what you really want is a copy of it to keep forever and ever. If all we truly wanted was to "try before we buy", there's ways to do that that are perfectly legal. You can listen to a goodly clip on iTunes, even. Or hear it on the radio. Listen to a friend's copy. It's out there.
No, what you want is free CDs, it's that simple. And free movies and TV shows.
And the least risky and seemingly most proffitable is music...
I don't understand what profit and risk have to do with the desire for information to be free. Or is this just a confession that what you really want to do is screw a bunch of corporate amalgams that have too long enjoyed an exclusive and captive market place. I can respect that goal in principle, if you had the courage to just admit it.
We know that more music will be produced once the industry falls in fact the quality will probably rise. Artists only get about 3-4% of a sale currently, and most of the rest is spent marketing music in various ways...
Because 3-4% of whatever they make off selling millions of albums nationwide using the resources of global distribution channels is greater than the $0 they get from you downloading copies for free. That's some easy math.
We're not being unrational or really acting unilaterally.
No, I didn't accuse you of being irrational. Only of hiding your true motivations. This whole thing all boils down to free shit. Sometimes it's "protect P2P," sometimes it's "privacy", sometimes it's "information wants to be free," it's always something. But it's rare to see a Slashdot poster just come out and say, "I can't help myself, I love the trash that BMG turns out and can't bring myself to pay for it. My iTunes is cluttered up with pirated copies of Cotton-Eye Joe, Mambo #5, and all the other trash on MTV that I act like I'm too smart to like." That's what this boils down to for a lot of people. There's an added bonus of knowing that every time you don't buy a CD some jackass CEO in a $4,000 suit twitches in a board meeting.
We're trying something out... And if sharing works then I'll see if we can convince people to shoot non-sharing people... :P
This is as close as I've seen anybody on Slashdot come to admitting what this is all about. We want free shit, and we'll rationalize it one of our many moralistic crusades to save the world from all the evil people out there who expect to get paid for doing work.
Unless, of course, we don't really care about P2P and just want free music and all of our righteous and indignant howling over curtails on p2p technology is a reaction to having buy all the trash music we claim so much to hate.
I disagree. Reagan in particular strongly objected to the notion of a national purpose, or a "goal" of America. That's exactly the sort of thinking he attributed to communist governments, a need to shape the population into marching in lockstep towards some national objective, a need to tell people what they were living for. Maybe some Americans felt that way about the Soviets but it was not at the behest of government. Our leadership at the time discouraged such thinking. For a brief time, we knew what we had to do: we were going to kick somebody's ass. I was among the few who lacked a bloodthirst after 9/11. I felt that if we struck too soon with revenge on our minds, we'd more easily make a mistake or overreach. There was much howling on all sides for Bush to do something now and I was rather glad that he didn't immediately just jabbing his thumb at missile launch buttons to mollify a frightened and wounded America.
Say rather that television is beholden to market forces. Most of America is essentially conservative, even much of the portion that votes Democrat (your union guy? He hunts and fishes and drives an SUV, he's not watching PBS at night). If that changes, television will seem more "liberal" but it's not really, it's just giving people what they'll pay for.
You're not alone. This malady plagues intelligent left-leaning people everywhere, but especially in English-speaking nations. The United States especially, and now Britain and Canada as well. There's a very weird kind of disdain and intolerance for the real mainstream thought among people. I'm not sure where it comes from, but it's evidence in political leadership, journalistic practices, etc. I would guess that the real think tanks of modern liberal/progressive thought tend to be concentrated in areas in which they are utterly surrounded by like-thinking individuals (New York, London, Washington DC, etc), and when all you hear all day is your own beliefs firmly recited back to you by highly educated and very intelligent people, it's hard not to assume that most people think like you do, and to dismiss anybody who doesn't as being a knuckle-dragging idiot.
Both are highly dangerous assumptions, for a number of reasons. First is that it breeds an elitist intolerance for differences of opinion ("you don't agree? God, you must be some kind of idiot") and it makes an honest debate and dialog difficult. Second, it has resulted in brilliant people being out of power, and their political leadership flailing away as the minority party, and in America at least, the Democrats have basically resorted to ineffectual marketing tactics to try to repackage what they think as something it's not.
The answer is not to try to make the ideas of the left look like the ideas of the right so people will vote for it. It's to convince people that the ideas of the left are better. Right now, people don't think they are, and rebranding the same old garbage isn't going to work. Look at the US election in 2004. What were Kerry and Bush's major platforms? Stay the course in Iraq, keep the tax cuts, strong national security, blah blah. Even with this new wiretapping story, the Democrats are not trying to get the program cancelled, only criticize how its being managed/executed, etc.
The problem isn't just that they're out of touch (this wiretapping story is a non-story; the only people who are really motivated and irate about it are people who were already irate at Bush - it's not a gap-closing, vote-winning issue), but that the leadership of the liberal movement is out of steam, out of ideas, and being driven and whipped by the base. The base of the Democratic party in America is not a typical American Joe Sixpack, it's angry people who are tired of Bush and his various transgressions and missteps. But, like Clinton, Bush is a winner with the suburbanites and soccer moms. Christian values, a safer America, lower taxes, these are things that are easy to sell. How have the Democrats tried to win on these issues? Run against them? "We're against Christian values, we're for higher taxes, and to hell with national security!" No. Run FOR them? But how? We mostly don't believe in those things, at least not in the same sense that the Republicans do. We embrace a code of ethics, but how to tell Susie Q. Soccermom living in Apple Valley, MN that she should vote for our guy over Bush because a secular humanist code of ethics is just as good as Christian values but doesn't violat the establishment clause? Susie is going to tell you, "Excuse me, I'm late for choir practice" and vote Republican.
So yeah. You're out of touch, and so is the leadership of progressive thought worldwide. Conservatism was originally a philosophical principle that social evolution is evitable and necessary, but is best handled slowly and incrementally to avoid chaos and civil disorder. They may have been on to something, people in mass groups don't easily let go of the things they were raised with. The Enlightenment was centuries ago and people still think God farted and produced the atmosphere.
Because math is hard. People in this country can't follow a simple line and punch a dot correctly.
Dictator: No.
Democratic senator: WE ARE NO BETTER THAN THEM!
Indeed, why do we bother?
Although I'm not an evangelical open source advocate, I do think that open source software is the best choice for all computerization of matters of public record. Although ballots are "secret" in the sense that nobody knows who cast which one, they are ultimately a matter of public record, since we kinda have to know who got the most votes. All machination and digitalization with regards to public records (meaning data available to the public, they can store classified documents however they want, I don't care) should be required to be stored in open formats (not free, necessarily, but open in the sense that anybody can develop software to save, retrieve, view, and edit those records), and the software used by the government to manage those records should be open to public audit at a minimum.
And frankly, if Microsoft wanted to sign up for this deal and handle our voting machines, I'd be 100% in favor of it so long as they met these requirements.
But really ... when it comes to federal elections, the ungodly majority of people either pull the party handle or pick one of the two major candidates. Why on earth do we need billions invested in technology to run up a tally of how many people picked which of two options?
I would, but the Linux community is an intolerable assortment of evangelical elitists looking down those noses at the rest of us and shaking their heads over our bad decisions and sinful choices. If I wanted that, I'd just go to church.
Nay, good sir, your intentions are well-meant, and I keep an OpenBSD machine up and running for my personal web server, but when it comes to daily computer use, I will doggedly cling to my imperfect Windows and all of its flaws. Since I don't pirate music, movies, television shows, or do anything else illegal with my machine, I'm unlikely to be negatively affected by any of this and can safely turn a blind eye to all that Microsoft and the government does.
Right?
I know a lot of people in the development community. UO and UO2 programmers, a designer for Galaxies, people from Digital Anvil, EA, Microsoft. Most of them make enough in 8 months to take 4 months off a year collecting unemployment. One is about to head back to work because he's blown through the $30,000 he had in his savings account after his last contract was up (was a gig with Microsoft). His new job is level design and mission scripting for a PS3 game. The pay is $50 hour plus double pay for overtime. So he'll work for 6 months then take the rest of the year off to play Warcraft. I have no sympathy.
Play a MUD, there's tons of games that obscure that data. What you find is that they're not popular and people eventually demand to see SOME numbers, and then eventually demand to see them all, because nobody wants to piss away their time trying to get a piece of equipment or slay a certain monster or complete a quest if the reward isn't worth having. Goal-oriented games are just like life - the reward has to be perceived to be worth the investment (or the risk of failure) to entice people to pursue it.
A. No. It's fine. And if we ever do run out, other worlds exist that might have some.
The problem is the audience and the moderation system, not the submitters. At the end of the day you've got a system driven by a bunch of flawed, biased, imperfect little organisms who aren't going to behave like a cohesive hive always making the best decisions for the community. There is no solution. You just live with it and follow your instincts. Your instincts say to publish the stories. Publish them. It's your web site.
High altitudes. Helicoptors, especially those heavily laden with cargo, have a practical ceiling for how high they can fly. The record is on the order of 40,000 feet. We have been sending balloons into the fringes of the atmosphere for decades. Whether or not a heavily cargo-laden balloon could do this (or why you'd want to), I don't know. I can see a use for an airship for lifting space vehicles into a very high altitude before firing the main rockets. Dunno if it'd be any cheaper or safer than ground-based.
I have the source for Ultima On-Line 2 around here somewhere. Knew a developer on the team before it was cancelled, he has a copy. Just no art files.