Frankly, I wouldn't watch even if the broadcast the game under Creative Commons. I have no interest in American Football at all. Frankly, I'd be surprised if more than 40-50% of Slashdotters were planning on watching. Of course, I don't think most people actually watch it -- they just have it in the background as an excuse to drink beer and eat nachos... (as if people really need an excuse for that).
I'm not trying to idealize the past, but we need to learn from it or the future is going to kick all of our asses and, as usual, its going to be the poor and uneducated who are going to take the brunt of the suffering.
Taking your point about racism -- when racism manifests itself in say, segregated, limited, or banned education for minorities -- say, blacks in the Americas, Jews in Eastern Europe, etc -- then the effect is that one group is institutionally denied access to the information, skills, and cultural knowledge necessary to successfully operate in the culture and the economy. The widening gulf then just serves to reinforce prevailing notions that one group is superior and the other inferior -- after all, if everyone where truly equal, then we shouldn't see discrepancies, should we?
You then see the creation of perennial underclasses, major linguistic splits, dialects and jargon eventually might even turn into completely different languages and then you cease to have a nation based on any common cultural thread, but instead just an out and out separation of populations and power.
Cockney English vs RP in the UK, for instance. Or Ebonics vs "standard English" in the US. Of course, the situation is even worse with immigrant populations from countries with vastly different backgrounds and languages. A lot of anti-immigrant types in the US are afraid that Spanish-speaking immigrants are going to destroy American culture or some such. Of course, many Spanish speaking immigrants, especially those with families, would like nothing better than to learn to speak English, or for their children to learn. Why? Because English is now, and will be for the foreseeable future, the language of power and influence. To get ahead, they need to learn it and they know it.
Meanwhile, we have our own children just flagrantly disregarding education. People with advanced degrees are generally viewed with suspicion on the right, and the degrees themselves are usually denigrated by technical people as "worthless" (for some reason). The people in power are selling the farm, replacing industry with a "knowledge economy," but the people who are going to need to get "real jobs" ('cause, you know, those hippie liberal intellectuals are all a bunch of commies...) don't even see the ground shifting out from underneath them.
Under the Spanish Republic, they pushed for public schooling because education is necessary to the future of a democracy, whether liberal, socialist, anarchist, or whatever else have you. You need to be able to read and write, communicate your ideas, at least perform enough mathematics to do the job you do, etc. Of course, the aristocrats, fascists and the army were against this. In the USA, the GOP is always pushing to undermine public schools, pushing for charter schools, private schools, home schools -- which are all well and good for people who can afford them, but most cannot. So, its just an attempt to limit education to the people who already have economic and political power so that they can maintain their stranglehold on it, under the thin veil of "reform." B.S.
But, again, it appears that large portions of the population are content to let their rights be eroded and their future dimmed, so maybe I should just stop caring, too. Sometimes I wish I hadn't spent the time and money to get an education, because then I could just remain ignorant of the whole situation.
The demographic of the underclass is now and has always been manufactured for the purpose of serving the people who have access to knowledge. If that class is growing, then it only means that the elites are more successful at it.
The KJV isn't meant to be spoken English per se. They hired on some of the best literary minds available in England at the time, who could also read the original Greek, Latin and Hebrew, then translated the original text and re-wrote it in literary form. Part of literature, particularly verse (poetry, song lyrics) is playing with grammar so as that while it's still recognizable, its different enough that even the form of the sentence is noticeable in addition to the actual content. So, I'm not sure I'd use the KJV as an a point any more than I would William Blake.
Now, Chaucer might be a better example as the difference between middle and modern English is substantial enough to not just be a difference between written literature and spoken vernacular. However there is a difference between the way in which phonetic units are pronounced overtime and being completely ignorant of fundamental grammatical constructs, and the inability to use the language of power has massive implications in society, both economic and political.
Loss of grammatical knowledge in the vernacular eventual brought the vulgate latin down to where it morphed into Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian -- but the language of the church and government remained Latin, and when the people and their rulers are separated by linguistic barriers like that, then it just leads to oppression and resentment, then eventually to revolution and upheaval, and there has been MAJOR upheaval in all of those countries even after the powerful accepted the new vernacular when high profile people, such as Dante and Cervantes began to write in it, or Chaucer -- the first major author in the English language after the Norman conquest brought French in as the language of the landed.
My degree is in literature and history, and I studied linguistics in school. I fully understand that language changes, words shift meaning, etc -- however for a democracy to function it is essential that proper education be as wide-spread as possible and that the language of the powerful not differ to greatly from the language of the proletariate, lest the gulf continue to grow. This has nothing to do with efficiency of language. It has to do with can you read the ballot and pamphlet, can you communicate in court, can you deal in the workplace, etc?
But, as usual, most people refuse to see this, or much anything beyond the reach of their computer monitor, which far from being a window to the world at large has, in recent years, turned out to be a tool for reenforcing one's own ideology by being able to filter information down to almost exclusively that with which one is wont to agree. O, tempora... O, mores!
Rubber bullets kill, too. In fact, cops shouldn't even be allowed to have them because the perception that they are "non-leathal" just encourages their use -- just like the beanbag rounds. There have been cases where the beanbags come out flat with the edges parallel to the ground, sort of like a frisbee and that the impact at that angle caused severe lacerations. People have died from those, too.
I'm not anti-gun -- I have many myself. I grew up around them, and I am completely comfortable with them. I also know that if I point a loaded gun with real bullets at a person, I better be absolutely willing to kill them when I pull the trigger. Cops and soldiers are trained to know this, too. But they seem to be more than willing to pop off rubber bullets and beanbags for "crowd control," and death has been a consequence a higher-than-zero number of times.
The last thing we need is Joe Bob getting ahold of them and shooting at cats, neighbours, or even robbers. You know all those times that burglars have sued property owners over getting hurt while they're there to rob them? Imagine the lawsuits over "he shot me with a rubber bullet, broke my rib, punctured my lung and now just look at me!" I also envision a slew of YouTube videos of drunk-ass morons popping their friends with these to see what it feels like.
In short, this is pretty much the worst idea ever made.
Because the MacBook Air is basically a MacBook without the optical drive or as many peripheral ports, so that they could make it slimmer. Slimmer is not the same thing as "between a laptop and a phone". The Air still had a physical keyboard, etc. The way one interacts with a touch-screen device is a lot different than the way one interacts with a keyboard/mouse driven device. Do you really want to have to deal with an on-screen keyboard sucking up have the space, leaving precious little room to actually view your terminal? I seriously doubt it. May as well just go back to using 'ed' at that point.
Most people on Slashdot who would buy an iMac|MacBook(Pro)|Mac Pro|Mac Mini|whatever are doing it because it's a "real" Unix that can also run commercial software. What other Unix is going to natively run Matlab AND Office AND Photoshop? And I mean natively -- Wine doesn't count and GIMP isn't Photoshop. But for average people, we need to take out Matlab, 'cause we know they aren't using that. Then we can forget about it being a "real Unix", too, 'cause they don't care about that either.
They care about -- if I shut the lid, does it go to sleep and if I open it up again, does it come back to life and make my wifi connection again? Yes? Ok, then. They're more likely to be reading NY Times, WSJ, CNN or even Fox News (the horrors) than they are Slashdot. Most people use a computer to do a task then go on and live their lives. They don't use computers for the sake of using computers like a lot of us do.
Hell, I'm a SAGE member, fairly proficient with Perl and used to be good with C, too, until I stopped needing it. I'm a long-time dabbler in BSD and Linux, and I work with computers for a living. But even I just want to know that if I put the lid down the computer is going to go to sleep and when I open it up again, its going to come back to life. Sure, most Windows-based machines fit the bill more or less alright, but I need to be able to manipulate text files on the command line with perl or awk, or i'm not happy and cygwin isn't enough. So I finally caved in and bought a MacBook Pro. I'm not a major Apple fanboy or anything, but it fit the bill.
And for a lot of people this "iPad" thing probably fits the bill pretty nicely. I don't really want one. Most of us here probably can't see the value in it, because most of us here aren't really passive users of technology. But the "average" person, especially the "average" Apple customer, is who this is directed at, not people who are interested in hacking on Darwin.
I should have separated by semi colon maybe. I'm alleging WASPs to make up Republican ranks (and Scotch-Irish also). Then you're normal Irish, Italians, Poles, etc, plus like 90% of your "minority" types, less the Cubans, usually go in your "Democrat" slot.
So, Russia, US, China (yes?), then India... but by what standards? There was an Israeli on the Columbia shuttle, but does he not count 'cause the US put him there? Do the JAXA and ESA astronauts on the ISS not count? I mean, good for India, but I don't think they're the fourth country to have someone in space, and besides its still "only" low orbit we're talking about. Did the Russians even get out of orbit, or was it only the Apollo program?
I studied literature and classical history, then on my own read Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Connolly, Neitzche and Heidegger as well as Plato, Cicero, Pliny, etc. I knew a lot of philisophy majors -- most of them were stoned all the time and would just ramble but they did quite well for themselves despite it. They mostly seemed to be bullshitting to me, but maybe I was just mistaken.
You can't really bullshit your way though an Engineering or Mathematics degree the same way you can Philosophy or something else -- either your answer is correct or its not, and no room really for arguing or thought experiments. That means studying harder and putting more effort in, which means less time for hanging out and taking part in the scene. It's hard to be friends with someone whose lifestyle is going to be so completely different by necessity. To a lot of people, even those who might naturally have had an aptitude for science/math/engineering, the tradeoff just might not be worth it and so they don't pursue it as a course of study.
Japan could do the technological leap because pretty much all of their previous infrastructure had been bombed into non-existance and so they didn't have to overcome inertia to replace it. Much the same in Europe, as well. In the US, we haven't fought a war on our own soil since the Civil War (Japanese invasion of the Allusion Islands doesn't count), and so once we build something it takes a really, really long time or a major incident before replacing or upgrading it seems economical to the people who are going to be paying for it. Maybe if the Chinese or someone would like to come knock down some crummy old bridges and tear up 100+ year old runs of copper wire then we can get on with the business of moving forward ourselves.
I read somewhere the the most removed any two humans are from each other is 53rd cousins, but I can't remember the source just now and I'm too lazy to search for it 'cause its about time to actually start working. Anyway, not "brothers and sisters," but definitely cousins to some degree.
People should pay them because they actually have real costs associated with doing business. The New York Times is hardly Joe Schmoe with his own personal blog the costs of which are more or less made up by the AdSense content over off to the side. They have hundreds of reports, photographers and editors all working the 9-5 at least, both at home and abroad, with real access to real sources because they come from a big name, real news organization. A Reporter from NYT is much more likely to score an interview with a top government or military official, or get valuable "on condition of anonymity" type information as well.
Of course, that's all before we even consider the IT infrastructure that they need, from servers to bandwidth to admins, to ensure that they can handle the amount of traffic that they get -- which is coming there because of the quality of the information that they provide.
Maybe the other media outlets which are free have comparable quality, maybe not. Most of the free news outlets, especially those which are purely an on-line thing, don't really go out of their way to hide bias or to be objective. We all know the editorial page slant of NYT, but they seem to do a reasonable job of remaining objective in the actual stories from what I've seen.
Not to rehash the old "you get what you pay for" argument that people always try to knock down around here, but a lot of the time that really is the case. Nothing in life is free -- someone is always paying, somehow. Advertisers aren't paying enough, so the people who want the content should be asked to support the infrastructure necessary to ensure that they continue to get what they want.
No, nor I. However at least now we can know the exact rules for ourselves as opposed to what's likely inaccurate assumptions and misquotes by journalists and posters.
I know that hardly anyone is going to read this (i just found it myself), but before we all go ranting on about this, it might be helpful to actually read the policy document with regards to search and seizure of electronic equipment by the Customs and Border Patrol: http://www.cbp.gov/linkhandler/cgov/travel/admissibility/elec_mbsa.ctt/elec_mbsa.pdf
Slashdot Mirror
Frankly, I wouldn't watch even if the broadcast the game under Creative Commons. I have no interest in American Football at all. Frankly, I'd be surprised if more than 40-50% of Slashdotters were planning on watching. Of course, I don't think most people actually watch it -- they just have it in the background as an excuse to drink beer and eat nachos... (as if people really need an excuse for that).
I'm not trying to idealize the past, but we need to learn from it or the future is going to kick all of our asses and, as usual, its going to be the poor and uneducated who are going to take the brunt of the suffering.
Taking your point about racism -- when racism manifests itself in say, segregated, limited, or banned education for minorities -- say, blacks in the Americas, Jews in Eastern Europe, etc -- then the effect is that one group is institutionally denied access to the information, skills, and cultural knowledge necessary to successfully operate in the culture and the economy. The widening gulf then just serves to reinforce prevailing notions that one group is superior and the other inferior -- after all, if everyone where truly equal, then we shouldn't see discrepancies, should we?
You then see the creation of perennial underclasses, major linguistic splits, dialects and jargon eventually might even turn into completely different languages and then you cease to have a nation based on any common cultural thread, but instead just an out and out separation of populations and power.
Cockney English vs RP in the UK, for instance. Or Ebonics vs "standard English" in the US. Of course, the situation is even worse with immigrant populations from countries with vastly different backgrounds and languages. A lot of anti-immigrant types in the US are afraid that Spanish-speaking immigrants are going to destroy American culture or some such. Of course, many Spanish speaking immigrants, especially those with families, would like nothing better than to learn to speak English, or for their children to learn. Why? Because English is now, and will be for the foreseeable future, the language of power and influence. To get ahead, they need to learn it and they know it.
Meanwhile, we have our own children just flagrantly disregarding education. People with advanced degrees are generally viewed with suspicion on the right, and the degrees themselves are usually denigrated by technical people as "worthless" (for some reason). The people in power are selling the farm, replacing industry with a "knowledge economy," but the people who are going to need to get "real jobs" ('cause, you know, those hippie liberal intellectuals are all a bunch of commies...) don't even see the ground shifting out from underneath them.
Under the Spanish Republic, they pushed for public schooling because education is necessary to the future of a democracy, whether liberal, socialist, anarchist, or whatever else have you. You need to be able to read and write, communicate your ideas, at least perform enough mathematics to do the job you do, etc. Of course, the aristocrats, fascists and the army were against this. In the USA, the GOP is always pushing to undermine public schools, pushing for charter schools, private schools, home schools -- which are all well and good for people who can afford them, but most cannot. So, its just an attempt to limit education to the people who already have economic and political power so that they can maintain their stranglehold on it, under the thin veil of "reform." B.S.
But, again, it appears that large portions of the population are content to let their rights be eroded and their future dimmed, so maybe I should just stop caring, too. Sometimes I wish I hadn't spent the time and money to get an education, because then I could just remain ignorant of the whole situation.
The demographic of the underclass is now and has always been manufactured for the purpose of serving the people who have access to knowledge. If that class is growing, then it only means that the elites are more successful at it.
The KJV isn't meant to be spoken English per se. They hired on some of the best literary minds available in England at the time, who could also read the original Greek, Latin and Hebrew, then translated the original text and re-wrote it in literary form. Part of literature, particularly verse (poetry, song lyrics) is playing with grammar so as that while it's still recognizable, its different enough that even the form of the sentence is noticeable in addition to the actual content. So, I'm not sure I'd use the KJV as an a point any more than I would William Blake.
Now, Chaucer might be a better example as the difference between middle and modern English is substantial enough to not just be a difference between written literature and spoken vernacular. However there is a difference between the way in which phonetic units are pronounced overtime and being completely ignorant of fundamental grammatical constructs, and the inability to use the language of power has massive implications in society, both economic and political.
Loss of grammatical knowledge in the vernacular eventual brought the vulgate latin down to where it morphed into Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian -- but the language of the church and government remained Latin, and when the people and their rulers are separated by linguistic barriers like that, then it just leads to oppression and resentment, then eventually to revolution and upheaval, and there has been MAJOR upheaval in all of those countries even after the powerful accepted the new vernacular when high profile people, such as Dante and Cervantes began to write in it, or Chaucer -- the first major author in the English language after the Norman conquest brought French in as the language of the landed.
My degree is in literature and history, and I studied linguistics in school. I fully understand that language changes, words shift meaning, etc -- however for a democracy to function it is essential that proper education be as wide-spread as possible and that the language of the powerful not differ to greatly from the language of the proletariate, lest the gulf continue to grow. This has nothing to do with efficiency of language. It has to do with can you read the ballot and pamphlet, can you communicate in court, can you deal in the workplace, etc?
But, as usual, most people refuse to see this, or much anything beyond the reach of their computer monitor, which far from being a window to the world at large has, in recent years, turned out to be a tool for reenforcing one's own ideology by being able to filter information down to almost exclusively that with which one is wont to agree. O, tempora... O, mores!
Rubber bullets kill, too. In fact, cops shouldn't even be allowed to have them because the perception that they are "non-leathal" just encourages their use -- just like the beanbag rounds. There have been cases where the beanbags come out flat with the edges parallel to the ground, sort of like a frisbee and that the impact at that angle caused severe lacerations. People have died from those, too.
I'm not anti-gun -- I have many myself. I grew up around them, and I am completely comfortable with them. I also know that if I point a loaded gun with real bullets at a person, I better be absolutely willing to kill them when I pull the trigger. Cops and soldiers are trained to know this, too. But they seem to be more than willing to pop off rubber bullets and beanbags for "crowd control," and death has been a consequence a higher-than-zero number of times.
The last thing we need is Joe Bob getting ahold of them and shooting at cats, neighbours, or even robbers. You know all those times that burglars have sued property owners over getting hurt while they're there to rob them? Imagine the lawsuits over "he shot me with a rubber bullet, broke my rib, punctured my lung and now just look at me!" I also envision a slew of YouTube videos of drunk-ass morons popping their friends with these to see what it feels like.
In short, this is pretty much the worst idea ever made.
Jackboot! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castor_oil#Use_as_a_means_of_intimidation_in_Fascist_Italy
Because the MacBook Air is basically a MacBook without the optical drive or as many peripheral ports, so that they could make it slimmer. Slimmer is not the same thing as "between a laptop and a phone". The Air still had a physical keyboard, etc. The way one interacts with a touch-screen device is a lot different than the way one interacts with a keyboard/mouse driven device. Do you really want to have to deal with an on-screen keyboard sucking up have the space, leaving precious little room to actually view your terminal? I seriously doubt it. May as well just go back to using 'ed' at that point.
Most people on Slashdot who would buy an iMac|MacBook(Pro)|Mac Pro|Mac Mini|whatever are doing it because it's a "real" Unix that can also run commercial software. What other Unix is going to natively run Matlab AND Office AND Photoshop? And I mean natively -- Wine doesn't count and GIMP isn't Photoshop. But for average people, we need to take out Matlab, 'cause we know they aren't using that. Then we can forget about it being a "real Unix", too, 'cause they don't care about that either.
They care about -- if I shut the lid, does it go to sleep and if I open it up again, does it come back to life and make my wifi connection again? Yes? Ok, then. They're more likely to be reading NY Times, WSJ, CNN or even Fox News (the horrors) than they are Slashdot. Most people use a computer to do a task then go on and live their lives. They don't use computers for the sake of using computers like a lot of us do.
Hell, I'm a SAGE member, fairly proficient with Perl and used to be good with C, too, until I stopped needing it. I'm a long-time dabbler in BSD and Linux, and I work with computers for a living. But even I just want to know that if I put the lid down the computer is going to go to sleep and when I open it up again, its going to come back to life. Sure, most Windows-based machines fit the bill more or less alright, but I need to be able to manipulate text files on the command line with perl or awk, or i'm not happy and cygwin isn't enough. So I finally caved in and bought a MacBook Pro. I'm not a major Apple fanboy or anything, but it fit the bill.
And for a lot of people this "iPad" thing probably fits the bill pretty nicely. I don't really want one. Most of us here probably can't see the value in it, because most of us here aren't really passive users of technology. But the "average" person, especially the "average" Apple customer, is who this is directed at, not people who are interested in hacking on Darwin.
They're a wanna-be commie who had $75 to buy a rifle that won't hit crap anyway?
Shakrai, you're a WASP? I always sort of pictured you like the guitar player from Rage Against The Machine...
More like a... six-foot turkey.
I should have separated by semi colon maybe. I'm alleging WASPs to make up Republican ranks (and Scotch-Irish also). Then you're normal Irish, Italians, Poles, etc, plus like 90% of your "minority" types, less the Cubans, usually go in your "Democrat" slot.
So, Russia, US, China (yes?), then India... but by what standards? There was an Israeli on the Columbia shuttle, but does he not count 'cause the US put him there? Do the JAXA and ESA astronauts on the ISS not count? I mean, good for India, but I don't think they're the fourth country to have someone in space, and besides its still "only" low orbit we're talking about. Did the Russians even get out of orbit, or was it only the Apollo program?
Somehow I think you and I have a different understanding of the term "Irish Republican"
WASPs == Republican, Irish, Southern and Eastern European == Democrat. I think that gives at least a 60% chance of success.
They'll do no evil, right? Google's our friend, right? right? guys...?
I studied literature and classical history, then on my own read Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Connolly, Neitzche and Heidegger as well as Plato, Cicero, Pliny, etc. I knew a lot of philisophy majors -- most of them were stoned all the time and would just ramble but they did quite well for themselves despite it. They mostly seemed to be bullshitting to me, but maybe I was just mistaken.
Crap, yes, you're right. I should have double checked before clicking submit... grr /slaps self
You can't really bullshit your way though an Engineering or Mathematics degree the same way you can Philosophy or something else -- either your answer is correct or its not, and no room really for arguing or thought experiments. That means studying harder and putting more effort in, which means less time for hanging out and taking part in the scene. It's hard to be friends with someone whose lifestyle is going to be so completely different by necessity. To a lot of people, even those who might naturally have had an aptitude for science/math/engineering, the tradeoff just might not be worth it and so they don't pursue it as a course of study.
Japan could do the technological leap because pretty much all of their previous infrastructure had been bombed into non-existance and so they didn't have to overcome inertia to replace it. Much the same in Europe, as well. In the US, we haven't fought a war on our own soil since the Civil War (Japanese invasion of the Allusion Islands doesn't count), and so once we build something it takes a really, really long time or a major incident before replacing or upgrading it seems economical to the people who are going to be paying for it. Maybe if the Chinese or someone would like to come knock down some crummy old bridges and tear up 100+ year old runs of copper wire then we can get on with the business of moving forward ourselves.
Or a Communist agent called back to the motherland?
I read somewhere the the most removed any two humans are from each other is 53rd cousins, but I can't remember the source just now and I'm too lazy to search for it 'cause its about time to actually start working. Anyway, not "brothers and sisters," but definitely cousins to some degree.
People should pay them because they actually have real costs associated with doing business. The New York Times is hardly Joe Schmoe with his own personal blog the costs of which are more or less made up by the AdSense content over off to the side. They have hundreds of reports, photographers and editors all working the 9-5 at least, both at home and abroad, with real access to real sources because they come from a big name, real news organization. A Reporter from NYT is much more likely to score an interview with a top government or military official, or get valuable "on condition of anonymity" type information as well.
Of course, that's all before we even consider the IT infrastructure that they need, from servers to bandwidth to admins, to ensure that they can handle the amount of traffic that they get -- which is coming there because of the quality of the information that they provide.
Maybe the other media outlets which are free have comparable quality, maybe not. Most of the free news outlets, especially those which are purely an on-line thing, don't really go out of their way to hide bias or to be objective. We all know the editorial page slant of NYT, but they seem to do a reasonable job of remaining objective in the actual stories from what I've seen.
Not to rehash the old "you get what you pay for" argument that people always try to knock down around here, but a lot of the time that really is the case. Nothing in life is free -- someone is always paying, somehow. Advertisers aren't paying enough, so the people who want the content should be asked to support the infrastructure necessary to ensure that they continue to get what they want.
Yeah, but do you know who had awesome security? The CCCP...
No, nor I. However at least now we can know the exact rules for ourselves as opposed to what's likely inaccurate assumptions and misquotes by journalists and posters.
I don't know, but having different keys for backspace and delete on mine would be very nice...
I know that hardly anyone is going to read this (i just found it myself), but before we all go ranting on about this, it might be helpful to actually read the policy document with regards to search and seizure of electronic equipment by the Customs and Border Patrol: http://www.cbp.gov/linkhandler/cgov/travel/admissibility/elec_mbsa.ctt/elec_mbsa.pdf