I don't know that I can add much to this, but your comments are among the most insightful here. Lots of people seem to want to attack Crick - I assure you, of all the famous scientists I've met (mostly at Harvard), he was far and away the truest to the profession, the most consummate pursuer of knowledge in all its forms, and the least attention or fame-craving of the lot. People like to attack the DNA contribution, the fact that Rosalind Franklin didn't get sufficient credit for the image she took (they did credit her, she clearly didn't really get the structural implications until they figured it out). They sometimes confuse Watson's fame-seeking and occasionally nasty behavior for Crick - I hear people demeaning Crick regularly for things he had nothing to do with and that he despised.
In any case, despite the controversies surrounding the double helix papers, Crick's overall contribution when you factor in the central dogma (i.e. the protein codon concept), and the other molecular biology work, you can't escape the fact that he was a truly great scientist. It was the professors (mostly of physics) I met in college that made me decide I didn't want to be one of them. Unlike them, he's the one person I met who makes me sometimes wish I had pursued a PhD and become a scientist.
I would venture to say that your claim is beyond ludicrous. Yes, I knew Dr. Crick personally and the rest of his family as well. Anybody who knew him personally will tell you that though he did have quite an intellect and was not shy about it (especially in his younger days, apparently), he was beyond uninterested in credit. Watson is, was and always has been the guy running around, giving speeches, getting in front of journalists and so on. Not saying Watson's a bad guy, but he loves basking in the glory of his scientific work. Francis Crick was a consummate scientist's scientist. He was genuine in his desire to have his privacy, hated giving interviews, and basically just loved talking to anybody who shared his intellectual interests.
We had some fabulous conversations about the nature of consciousness last summer in La Jolla, and he went on for hours and hours about the work his friend Christoff Koch was doing at Caltech - but the conversation was never about taking credit for ideas or who did what.
Wilkins went behind Rosalind Franklin's back and gave copies of her image data to James Watson. I don't believe that Crick even knew that he was looking at data without her permission. Regardless, he isn't the type of person to deny the credit she was due, nor to be shy about the fact that it was mostly he who deciphered the X-ray diffraction images. He was beyond uninterested in the politics side of science.
Like Dr. Crick, I studied physics and once thought I wanted to be a physicist. We discussed this, and I explained my reasons for not pursuing graduate studies these days, due to the excessive politics involved and the nature of funding, being beholden to a professor's interests and so on. And he agreed that if he were graduating from college today, he might feel the same way.
As for the "right bastard" part, like many scientists, and lots of people on Slashdot too, Dr. Crick was no social genius. He liked socializing with academics and people who would talk about ideas with him. But he always seemed to be a very decent person to me.
I believe it. My G4 PowerMac was in a car accident that totalled the car (luckily the driver, my at-the-time-girlfriend's sister, was just scraped and bruised). They put the pieces of the car up on a tow truck, and retrieved the belongings of the trunk, including one slightly cracked Mac G4, with the "handle" pieces on top broken off and a few internally knocked loose (which were easily reattached). These computers are real troopers with physical abuse.
This is not insightful. Wealthy != plutocrat. In fact, Kerry's reputation in Massachusetts is as the senator who is NOT responsive to big business interests, relative to Ted Kennedy at least (and this has been confirmed by CEOs of large Mass. based companies).
Military service != militaristic. And the authorizing vote in Congress does not count as militarism either - I'm not saying I agree with that particular vote of Kerry's, but he was not on the Intelligence Committee and did not have access to all of the privileged information.
Bush isn't responsible for September 11th, but he did take advantage of it to further an agenda in the Middle East with respect to Iraq, and he failed miserably to successfully stabilize and modernize Afghanistan. These failures have done immeasurable harm to our foreign policy position (something Kerry surely understands much better than Mr. Bush as a fairly senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations committee).
The fact that people running for Senate tend to be wealthy is not surprising. If you are born with money, it opens political doors. If you aren't, and you have brains/charisma/people skills, you will try to make money in the private sector first to enable you to pursue a career in politics.
In any case, not every wealthy person pursues selfish policies that only benefit them.
Yes, adult gamers are a big market - but mostly 20-somethings and single guys. The game companies _already know this_, and plan accordingly and sell tons of games to this market. They do plenty of demographic research, they know the people who buy games. My point is that this guy wants games designed for his personal needs. That's not what matters to the industry. If this guy thinks the industry is underserving a niche, fine, go get somebody to fulfill it and make some damned money off it, stop bitching on Slashdot.
People always come in with the idea that _they_ are the market for games, and thus game developers should be making games that entertain them and match their lifestyle. Look, game companies are businesses - they make games for their markets. If they aren't making games targeted toward people who work 60 hours a week, maybe that's because those people have families, jobs, responsibilities and generally do other shit in their spare time than play computer games (or rather, they aren't going to go out and buy the five latest greatest 60 dollar console games because they were the top elitest games in Console Gamer Monthly).
Is there a niche market that matches this description? Probably. But if you're so god damned sure about it, go and try to convince a small game dev. shop and help them pitch a specific game meeting these criteria to a publisher, don't come and whine about it on Slashdot. Welcome to the capitalist system, come take part, get rich and fulfill a need in the market, otherwise you are just participating in large scale mental masturbation in front of hundreds of thousands of Slashdot readers.
While I generally agree with the sentiment, right now there is a substantive difference in foreign policy approach taken by the Democratic party and Republican party as a whole, and the current negative perceptions of Americans, the rejection of multilateralism and inability to cooperate with foreign nations ("coalition of the willing"... give me a break). This difference is why voting for Kerry is important. That and the fact that Bush is truly an idiot - I know I don't feel good about anybody _that_ dumb having substantial decision-making power over my country.
And to be perfectly honest, a vote for Nader might as well be a vote for Bush, since those who would even consider voting for him are all traditional Democratic-base voters (i.e. on the liberal side of things with respect to certain views). Also, if you think Kerry is a weiner and a dipshit, just look at Nader. Now *THAT* guy is a true asshole. Even the people who've worked with him for years all seem to hate him.
I wish we did have more viable options for presidential candidates, but I think a lot of us feel this election, much more so than the past several, has a desperate urgency to it.
At first, it looked like all the complaints were from one person. Then I saw at least three more complaints several pages down in the Google Groups listings from people who were defrauded via his sales in the Mac newsgroups.
Then I found this most interesting post:
From: Dermott (waste-disposal@munich.com) Subject: Re: Daniel Jackson's return View: Complete Thread (35 articles) Original Format Newsgroups: alt.tv.stargate-sg1 Date: 2002-02-05 05:00:23 PST
boundlessvariant@aol.com (SG1Fan) wrote in message 6.. > Sci-Fi commercial infested sg1.. the horror. > > Does anyone know what happened to www.sg1archive.net? It seems to no > longer be online. > > Thanks, > DL.
It was shut down afer a number of complaints were made to the FBI, the FCC and the US Postal service about the mail fraud that was being run by Adam McGaughey from that site.
Regards,
Dermott
Whether this is true or not, I don't know, but this opens up the rather interesting possibility that this all began as a mail fraud investigation and the copyright infringement thing was only pursued so strongly because of the ongoing criminal investigation. That doesn't legitimize the use of the Patriot Act (common mail fraud != terrorism), but I think the volume of complaints from at least 3 or 4 independent posters in the newsgroups here indicate that it is pretty likely Mr. McGaughey had been scamming people out of money for some time when the copyright infringement started.
Anyway, this would make me a bit weary about contributing to his defense fund. Of course, I've also sold shit online before and had bad experiences where people didn't get stuff fast enough or were terrible at communicating and then blamed me, accusing me of committing fraud. Who knows, there are crazy people everywhere.
Yet another Roland Piquepaille submission. The point of the submission wasn't to inform us, but to direct people to his blog. This guy has been doing this like crazy to pimp his blog site for the last few weeks, if not longer (I've only recently noticed it). This is evidence of why we should be able to mod stories posted down - this Piquepaille guy ought to be banned from further submissions until he stops pimping his lame, theme-stolen blog site and trying to get hits on the ads he runs there.
His blog posts are usually quite uninformative and rather poorly written too. An overview with selected quotes from the article? So now he's summarizing for/.ers who are too lazy to read the article. I can't believe Hemos posted this crap submission without at least clipping out the lame blog link.
Concur with other response to this inane post. Have you ever been to NYC? It's the most worldly city I've ever been in - I was out in Central Park the other day and heard a grandfather speaking to his two grandchildren in Finnish (while they spoke to each other in English), a bunch of people speaking Spanish to each other, a lady smoking a cigarette after running while on her cell phone speaking in a loud voice in Spanish, two mothers of young babies pushing strollers and speaking to each other in French, and a couple of German and Japanese tourists, all within about 5 minutes of each other around the Great Lawn (around 80th St. in the middle of the Park). I literally heard more non-English speakers than English-speakers.
And that's not so unusual around here. You clearly visited the wrong places if you think Americans are culturally inept - sure, there are plenty of very backwards places in every country. Hell, I went to France and met some of the most racist, backwards-assed people I've ever encountered (a bunch of Koreans in my high school group on the trip were attacked in Lyons purely because they were Asian).
I've lived for many years in Boston too, with many foreign friends and roommates there. Also a very worldly town, plenty of European-style clubs, Eastern European parties (nobody parties like Bulgarians), rich Arab kids living in opulent apartments, Indians and Russians everywhere holding up the technology industry, and so on.
In short your experiences are not everybody's. And how on earth you could say something as atrocious as saying thousands of innocent people deserved to die for our current President's foreign policy is beyond the pale. You are a sick, sick man and I won't justify such an accusation with any further discussion. I frankly think anyone who says such a thing likely deserves a bullet themselves.
Your knowledge of linguistic development is beyond underwhelming. And your assertion that I anthropomorphize words is absurd. A word has no meaning whatsoever without a group of people and a shared language, so a word can only change it's meaning within a language spoken by people.
Nobody is trying to surreptitiously change the meaning of the word Semite on you, so you can go get your panties out of a bunch. Anti-Semite and Semite are not antonyms - Anti-Semite is a specific word derived from German racial scientists in which it meant, essentially, Jew-hater. So ironically, in this particular case, Anti-Semite has never really changed meaning at all until people recently decided that it would be more politically correct and logically sound if it meant somebody who hates all Semites.
The dictionaries tell me that Semite is a broad racial and ethnic category that includes many groups from the Middle East. Nobody disputed that here. I object to the semantic legerdemain performed by Jew-haters (just to be perfectly clear who I'm talking about) who claim to _not_ be anti-Semitic because they say that to be anti-Semitic you must hate all members of the Semitic ethnic groups, which they claim they do not. Now who the hell is trying to subvert the language here? And how dare you come at me with your snide ad hominems?
Forward time travel is certainly possible. You can take advantage of relativistic time dilation and go really, really fast (very close to the speed of light) for a while in your space ship - you will definitely end up fairly far into the future. You just need lots of energy to accelerate up to 0.99999999999999 c - then about 20,000 years will pass on Earth for every day that passes on your space ship.
Uh yeah.... so the energy required to do this for a significant amount of matter is fairly prohibitive. And the other problem is that there's no way back that we know of, since that whole "time travel" in reverse thing is still a bit fuzzy.
It would be an interesting thing to try to market to the aging billionaires of the world though. If you could build a ship fast enough, it would be an effective way to preserve somebody's life long enough for medical science to develop the ability to treat whatever ailments they have. Really, you would only need to go about 0.995c or so for this to be effective (10x time dilation). Maybe that's a viable business model for advanced propulsion research?
As far as I know being a Jew is always about either religious practice or ethnic background. The equation of Jew with Israeli is one I've never heard made, except by Hamas and similar terrorist organizations when they speak of "Zionists" and equate them with Jews in general, and don't seem to distinguish between Jew, Israeli and Zionist.
Being against the policies of the state of Israel is different from being against the right of the Jewish people to have a homeland. I think most rational people would say you have a right to disagree with the policies of a government, as long as you don't spew racially bigotted vitriol in the process. The problem is many who criticize Israel do it in such a one-sided fashion that it leads to the rational conclusion that their only possible motive could be anti-Semitism. If you blame the Palestinian-Israeli conflict entirely on the Israelis, then yes, you are being an anti-Semite because you holding Israel to a standard that is substantially different from that which you hold the Palestinians, and that which you hold every other government in the world.
Very nice, I'm glad you have studied natural science and taxonomy for many years. You are still wrong, probably because you have not spent even a modicum of time studying linguistics. Language is not a logical puzzle, and words change meaning over time. That is how language evolves. Another poster posted the time-honored example of inflammable and flammable - your very logical, taxonomically organizing brain may tell you inflammable means "not flammable", but it would be wrong. See here or click on a few of the definitions here. Linguistics teaches us that language is a living, changing thing - in English speaking lands, bias against Jews has been around much longer than bias against Arabs or other Semitic peoples due to the historical presence of Jews throughout Europe, and then in America. It's thus hardly shocking that the word "anti-Semitism" has come to mean anti-Jewish bias. This isn't Newspeak at all, if you see the Wikipedia entry, you'd know that in fact the word derives from German racial science usage in the 1800s, and for over a century, referred exclusively to hatred of or bias against Jews. So in fact, the "Newspeak" is the attempt to broaden the word, or rather to muddy the semantics which were previously clear, with another definition.
Anti-Zionism is a strange one - since Zionism, historically, arose as a response to anti-Semitism. This is such a confused, muddied term, I'd stay away from it entirely, since it tries to collapse complicated political issues into a jingoistic phrase. Lots of people, Jews included and Israelis included, don't support parts of current Israeli government policy, ongoing occupation and so on. The word "anti-Zionist" could mean almost anything, and even Wikipedia seems befuddled by this issue since the page on it is currently locked as a result of editorial disputes.
Anti-Judaism is a pretty awkward sounding word, as is "Anti-Islam". I'd stick to "anti-Jewish bias", "anti-Muslim bias" or "anti-Arab bias" if you're worried about being misunderstood. But the hubbub against anti-Semitism needs to stop now - you can't expect people to change the meaning of words to accomodate your political agenda, and if you go around flapping your arms when people use perfectly clear dictionary English words, you're going to end up marginalizing yourself and your viewpoint.
Okay, I'll assume that the confusion here is the result of linguistic differences and lack of education, because you are definitely confused here.
Just because you choose it to change meaning, doesn't change the base meaning of the word:
Yes, it does. That is Linguistics 101. Usage changes do create meaning changes over time. I don't get to choose the meaning changes, they occur within communities and spread to broader usage within a language. Ultimately, people who compile dictionaries come up with consensus opinions about when a word's usage has become common enough to enter the accepted, defined usage for the language. Don't take my word for it - see here for example. The usage has shifted over the years to primarily imply bias against Jews. Yes, it can also mean prejudice against other Semites, including Arabs, but that usage is a secondary, and somewhat confusing, meaning in light of its primary, common modern usage.
Language shifts happen - changing them because you disagree with them is very difficult to do, because you have to convince millions of people to change their usage - witness the hacker/cracker language confusion on Slashdot. If you took a basic college linguistics class you would understand that this is how language works, and we just have to deal with it.
As for this snide comment:
Not all Arabs are Muslims, but given your previous slip up, we'll just let this one slide.
I'll just assume you aren't a native English speaker (since you describe yourself as an Arab, this may or may not be an accurate assumption). If you parsed my sentence properly, you'd realize I never said that all Arabs are Muslim, nor that all Muslims are Arab (obviously). I had a friend in college who was a Coptic Christian from Egypt, in fact. However, most Arab countries are overwhelmingly Muslim, and the undeniable fact that I was referring to is that fear and hatred of Muslim extremism has resulted in much anti-Arab ethnic bias that never really existed before, at least not on a large scale, in the US. Jews, on the other hand, have been victims of bias in Europe since the middle ages (again, thus the linguistic shift in the meaning of "anti-Semitism").
This is a stupid semantic game and we are all sick of it. Words change meaning - deal with it. Yes, we all know that Semitic is an ethnic designation that includes not only Semitic Jews, but also Arabs. Nonetheless, the word anti-Semitic has come to mean anti-Jewish in the common English parlance. There are plenty of other illogical expressions in the English language. The point of language is not always to be logically accurate, but to be a means to communicate what we mean. Since we all know what anti-Semitic means, and we can look it up in a dictionary if we don't, these repeated posts on the matter are a waste of everybody's time.
Zionist, by the way, has a very specific meaning - not all Jews are Zionists, in fact most Jews are not ardent Zionists in the sense that some people intend. Many Jews would say the the Jews have a right to a homeland based on our experience as an ethnoreligious group in the 20th century, but this is not "Zionist" in the negative sense that has become bandied about by a bunch of light-in-the-shoes European-style liberals who go about slandering Jews on message boards all over the net, because they believe that the Palestinians are the oppressed underdogs, and that sympathizing with the "underdog" always makes you right. In short, when you say Zionism, what you mean is radical, militaristic Zionism, people who support continued occupation of Palestinian lands and so on. This is a very small minority of Jews, just like a survey in the New York Times today showed a large majority of Palestinians (83%) in Gaza want both sides to declare peace and stop fighting (unfortunately, this excellent article points out that the Israeli military keeps coming back into Gaza primarily because Hamas keeps launching rockets at Israeli). I'm pretty sure the number supporting a peaceful two-state solution is at least that high on the Israeli side based on other poles I've seen.
So please stop lecturing us about falling into linguistic traps. The word "anti-Semitic" does not dehumanize Arabs. It's just that it's use in another sense has pre-existed common feelings of racism against Arabs that have come about from the modern phenomenon of Muslim extremism. We can still use other words, like "anti-Muslim" or "anti-Arab" depending on what exactly we mean, and everybody will understand us just fine.
For some reason, the aliens speaking English doesn't interfere with my ability to suspend disbelief with respect to the characters and story lines, which is what really matters to me. I'm a scientist by background, but it's sci-fi, it's not about absolutely realistic physics, linguistics, whatever. It's about suspending disbelief enough to relate to the characters and immerse yourself in the story.
Basically, language is always a problem in science fiction - no way to totally eliminate it, and I think they've dealt reasonably well with it in SG-1. Of course, it's not realistic that the many humans taken from Earth several thousand years ago would speak English - they'd speak something derived from whatever the source language of the human stock they came from. Many of the other alien races are much more advanced anyway, and presumably either learn our language easily (like the Gou'ould) or use their own translation devices.
But then, if they dealt with this issue realistically, the whole show would be about learning the aliens' languages before interacting with them. Shows like Star Trek dealt with this explicitly by having "universal translator" devices. *shrug*, it's hard to tell a good story in one hour episodes involving space/planetary exploration without giving this issue short shrift.
Alright, I'm about to expose myself as a huge nerd.
Was anybody else bothered by the fact that Dr. Elizabeth Weir was played at the end of the 7th season by a different actress? All the character development was done by Jessica Steen, who did a bang up job with a hard role to play, so much so that a lot of us were really looking forward to seeing her in SG:A. Now they bring in a replacement, Torri Higginson, who looks and acts nothing like Jessica Steen. I don't know the reasons behind it, but they should have cast somebody in the first place they were happy with and wanted the role. Having the actress swap created major cognitive dissonance for me watching the 8th season opener - from a purely aesthetic perspective, I could barely stand to watch Higginson, she didn't play the same character at all that Steen played.
Anyway, I don't mean to sound like a fanboy bitch, I'm not a nutcase zealot about this stuff. I just think this issue was not handled well by the show producers. Maybe I am noticing it in particular because they usually handle these kinds of things so well on SG1 that it's one of the few sci-fi shows that I find easy to achieve suspension of disbelief with. Please, SG1 production team, don't do this to us again. I just hope going into SG:A that Higginson does a better job developing this character, or I don't know how I'll be able to watch the show.
As it is, I'm desperately afraid that Teal'c with a fuzzy head and O'Neill in charge of SGC is going to fundamentally change the 8th season for the worse. Come on guys, remember what happened when you tried to kill off Michael Shanks? Did anybody like that season?
Alright, now I've gotten this off my chest. I hope Season 8 is as good as SG1 has generally been and I hope that SG:A doesn't sully the name with a crappy spinoff.
Realistically, Mozilla performance has been reasonable for some time. It's true that back during the M1-M10 milestones and thereabouts, things could get hog-slow at times, but pretty much all the 1.x releases and even later 0.x releases have been reasonable on even vaguely modern machines. And the release of Firefox made performance go from good to excellent on modern machines - subjectively, on modern machines, most users will state that Firefox is perceptually faster and much more responsive than IE 0.6 (on slower/older machines, startup and load times are still worse than IE and rendering settings may need to be tweaked if you really want optimal performance from slow net connections or CPUs). And when it comes to browsing the web, subjective speed is really more important than any minute differences in render speed anyway.
Most of the complaints about Mozilla performance have been answered long ago - if you want something fast and light, get Firefox, download the extensions you want, huzzah. If you want a full-featured browser suite with email client and web development tools, go for Mozilla. If you are still running on a Pentium 233 and want to run the full Mozilla suite, don't complain that it's slow, you are running on last century's hardware.
Wrong. I saw no evidence from these articles of any substantial investigation into RedHat by the SEC, just that they had posed some questions previously that were apparently legitimate since the company did restate their earnings. You may be confused - a class action lawsuit is brought in civil court by lawyers (the aforementioned "ambulance chasers" to use the deragatory for this type of lawyer) who claim to represent the aggrieved class of shareowners. Generally these lawsuits end up benefitting the lawyers more than they do the losing shareholders, and this has nothing to do with SEC investigations.
That does royally suck, but you're not the only one who's had life, and particuarly family health issues, unpleasantly get in the way of career and success. I have had to temporarily stop working full-time to help take care of my mother several times due to her illness (yes, I can afford help, but that only goes so far with repeated lengthy hospitalizations, surgery in different states and so on). In my case, I don't think it will make a long term impact on my career plans, once I get back in the swing of things, I hope (I'm still 25 and have done an awful lot since college despite these issues).
Some recommendations for you though based on personal experience: look into living in states where reasonably priced personal health insurance is mandated - Massachusetts, relative to other places I've been at least, seems well ahead of the game on this. It's still freaking expensive, but compared to New York (where a single individual can pay about 800 a month for a decent POS, not even a true PPO plan), it's reasonable. This can give you a bit more freedom to make reasonable career decisions without having your health insurance be used as a weapon against you - in states like Massachusetts, you can't be refused coverage for pre-existing conditions, like your wife's lupus or your cancer, as long as you've had continuous coverage. Say what you will about the nasty liberals in Mass., their health insurance legislation is far more civilized and enlightened that Florida or New York (the others I have experience with).
Anyway, a hiring manager who's had some similar rough shakes in life should be willing to listen to your story and cut you some breaks if you can figure out how to get your resume past HR. Best recommendation is to try networking with people a bit, and get a personal recommendation to a hiring manager somewhere that will at least get your resume and life story in front of them. If I were in a hiring position and I heard that story, I'd be much more understanding about your job hopping or underemployed status and give your resume due consderation with that in mind.
I live in Cambridge, and I agree, it can be a bit difficult to get rid of these big, broken things when they no longer work. Generally it seems like if you leave something on the street corner, it usually gets taken by the garbage men or, if it still looks functional, it will get taken by somebody who thinks they could use it.
But the best way to get rid of some of this stuff is to go over to the colleges at the end of the year when everybody is throwing furniture and other stuff away. I've found there are always end-of-year scavengers around near the freshmen dorms at Harvard looking to get some goodies. These people will often take away anything that looks useful or saleable. And if all else fails, you can bet your ass the garbagemen take all the junk away from the Harvard dorms and don't leave it there and tell Harvard it's not their job to take it.:) Just my personal experience and recommendation.
I seem to recall that when you get a GeoTrust SSL cert they verify your identity using an automatic phone-dialer system that verifies your physical presence at a given telephone number while you are on their website. I guess this isn't really much better or worse than the address verification system, and it's reasonably easy to implement automatically, with essentially no ongoing manual labor. This kind of identity verification is never going to be as good as going through government issued IDs manually and verifying their legitimacy, but it's a hell of a lot cheaper and easier to implement.
You are wrong on all three counts. Conquering other nations and then establishing freely operating governments within those nations is not Imperialism. The US government did the same in Japan and West Germany at the end of World War II after temporarily occupying those countries. Are those countries ruled by the US in any meaningful way now (beyond close economic ties)? Absolutely not. So argument 1 is invalid on the face of it - temporary occupation of a defeated by a conquering power does not necessarily imply intent to extend rule over those foreign countries. I don't even think I can address your second argument it's so inaccurate - the US doesn't support Israel secretly, it does so openly, and the term "imperial" in that definition means literally the formation of empire, as in one nation that swears fealty to another nation - it has little to nothing to do with the situation in Israel. It's hard to imagine calling a nation smaller than many of the 50 states in the US an "empire" just because of a long-standing set of ethnic and border disputes between two resident populations. As for the aggressive extension of authority, I think the Canadians and Mexicans would disagree with you, though I suppose it all depends on what you mean by authority. The US has authority in the same way that China has authority - in the globalized economy, big producers and big consumers exercise a lot of sway. If you consider economic or political influence and its exertion to be "imperialism" than the word has so little meaning as to be beyond useless and we should just throw it away now, since every government capable of and needed to do so does just that. And that was exactly the point I have made a million times over that always seems to fly over the heads of the foaming-at-the-mouth euroliberals.
No, that is a definition for the common-use liberal term "imperialist", as in "cultural imperialist", "social imperialist", etc. It has nothing to do with true Imperialism, and if you note, I used the capital "I" to be absolutely unambiguous that I do not use newspeak claptrap like that OED entry. Certainly no political scientist would agree with that drivel. Other dictionaries have definitions that seem shockingly at odds with that one, for example check out the many dictionary.com entries, such as the American Heritage and Merriam-Webster definitions - none of them seem to agree with the secondary definition you provided from the Oxford Compact English Dictionary. Which just goes to show that even a great dictionary is still the work of humans, and can be flawed at times.
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In any case, despite the controversies surrounding the double helix papers, Crick's overall contribution when you factor in the central dogma (i.e. the protein codon concept), and the other molecular biology work, you can't escape the fact that he was a truly great scientist. It was the professors (mostly of physics) I met in college that made me decide I didn't want to be one of them. Unlike them, he's the one person I met who makes me sometimes wish I had pursued a PhD and become a scientist.
We had some fabulous conversations about the nature of consciousness last summer in La Jolla, and he went on for hours and hours about the work his friend Christoff Koch was doing at Caltech - but the conversation was never about taking credit for ideas or who did what.
Wilkins went behind Rosalind Franklin's back and gave copies of her image data to James Watson. I don't believe that Crick even knew that he was looking at data without her permission. Regardless, he isn't the type of person to deny the credit she was due, nor to be shy about the fact that it was mostly he who deciphered the X-ray diffraction images. He was beyond uninterested in the politics side of science.
Like Dr. Crick, I studied physics and once thought I wanted to be a physicist. We discussed this, and I explained my reasons for not pursuing graduate studies these days, due to the excessive politics involved and the nature of funding, being beholden to a professor's interests and so on. And he agreed that if he were graduating from college today, he might feel the same way.
As for the "right bastard" part, like many scientists, and lots of people on Slashdot too, Dr. Crick was no social genius. He liked socializing with academics and people who would talk about ideas with him. But he always seemed to be a very decent person to me.
I believe it. My G4 PowerMac was in a car accident that totalled the car (luckily the driver, my at-the-time-girlfriend's sister, was just scraped and bruised). They put the pieces of the car up on a tow truck, and retrieved the belongings of the trunk, including one slightly cracked Mac G4, with the "handle" pieces on top broken off and a few internally knocked loose (which were easily reattached). These computers are real troopers with physical abuse.
Military service != militaristic. And the authorizing vote in Congress does not count as militarism either - I'm not saying I agree with that particular vote of Kerry's, but he was not on the Intelligence Committee and did not have access to all of the privileged information.
Bush isn't responsible for September 11th, but he did take advantage of it to further an agenda in the Middle East with respect to Iraq, and he failed miserably to successfully stabilize and modernize Afghanistan. These failures have done immeasurable harm to our foreign policy position (something Kerry surely understands much better than Mr. Bush as a fairly senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations committee).
The fact that people running for Senate tend to be wealthy is not surprising. If you are born with money, it opens political doors. If you aren't, and you have brains/charisma/people skills, you will try to make money in the private sector first to enable you to pursue a career in politics.
In any case, not every wealthy person pursues selfish policies that only benefit them.
Yes, adult gamers are a big market - but mostly 20-somethings and single guys. The game companies _already know this_, and plan accordingly and sell tons of games to this market. They do plenty of demographic research, they know the people who buy games. My point is that this guy wants games designed for his personal needs. That's not what matters to the industry. If this guy thinks the industry is underserving a niche, fine, go get somebody to fulfill it and make some damned money off it, stop bitching on Slashdot.
Is there a niche market that matches this description? Probably. But if you're so god damned sure about it, go and try to convince a small game dev. shop and help them pitch a specific game meeting these criteria to a publisher, don't come and whine about it on Slashdot. Welcome to the capitalist system, come take part, get rich and fulfill a need in the market, otherwise you are just participating in large scale mental masturbation in front of hundreds of thousands of Slashdot readers.
And to be perfectly honest, a vote for Nader might as well be a vote for Bush, since those who would even consider voting for him are all traditional Democratic-base voters (i.e. on the liberal side of things with respect to certain views). Also, if you think Kerry is a weiner and a dipshit, just look at Nader. Now *THAT* guy is a true asshole. Even the people who've worked with him for years all seem to hate him.
I wish we did have more viable options for presidential candidates, but I think a lot of us feel this election, much more so than the past several, has a desperate urgency to it.
At first, it looked like all the complaints were from one person. Then I saw at least three more complaints several pages down in the Google Groups listings from people who were defrauded via his sales in the Mac newsgroups.
Then I found this most interesting post:
Whether this is true or not, I don't know, but this opens up the rather interesting possibility that this all began as a mail fraud investigation and the copyright infringement thing was only pursued so strongly because of the ongoing criminal investigation. That doesn't legitimize the use of the Patriot Act (common mail fraud != terrorism), but I think the volume of complaints from at least 3 or 4 independent posters in the newsgroups here indicate that it is pretty likely Mr. McGaughey had been scamming people out of money for some time when the copyright infringement started.
Anyway, this would make me a bit weary about contributing to his defense fund. Of course, I've also sold shit online before and had bad experiences where people didn't get stuff fast enough or were terrible at communicating and then blamed me, accusing me of committing fraud. Who knows, there are crazy people everywhere.
His blog posts are usually quite uninformative and rather poorly written too. An overview with selected quotes from the article? So now he's summarizing for
And that's not so unusual around here. You clearly visited the wrong places if you think Americans are culturally inept - sure, there are plenty of very backwards places in every country. Hell, I went to France and met some of the most racist, backwards-assed people I've ever encountered (a bunch of Koreans in my high school group on the trip were attacked in Lyons purely because they were Asian).
I've lived for many years in Boston too, with many foreign friends and roommates there. Also a very worldly town, plenty of European-style clubs, Eastern European parties (nobody parties like Bulgarians), rich Arab kids living in opulent apartments, Indians and Russians everywhere holding up the technology industry, and so on.
In short your experiences are not everybody's. And how on earth you could say something as atrocious as saying thousands of innocent people deserved to die for our current President's foreign policy is beyond the pale. You are a sick, sick man and I won't justify such an accusation with any further discussion. I frankly think anyone who says such a thing likely deserves a bullet themselves.
Nobody is trying to surreptitiously change the meaning of the word Semite on you, so you can go get your panties out of a bunch. Anti-Semite and Semite are not antonyms - Anti-Semite is a specific word derived from German racial scientists in which it meant, essentially, Jew-hater. So ironically, in this particular case, Anti-Semite has never really changed meaning at all until people recently decided that it would be more politically correct and logically sound if it meant somebody who hates all Semites.
The dictionaries tell me that Semite is a broad racial and ethnic category that includes many groups from the Middle East. Nobody disputed that here. I object to the semantic legerdemain performed by Jew-haters (just to be perfectly clear who I'm talking about) who claim to _not_ be anti-Semitic because they say that to be anti-Semitic you must hate all members of the Semitic ethnic groups, which they claim they do not. Now who the hell is trying to subvert the language here? And how dare you come at me with your snide ad hominems?
Uh yeah.... so the energy required to do this for a significant amount of matter is fairly prohibitive. And the other problem is that there's no way back that we know of, since that whole "time travel" in reverse thing is still a bit fuzzy.
It would be an interesting thing to try to market to the aging billionaires of the world though. If you could build a ship fast enough, it would be an effective way to preserve somebody's life long enough for medical science to develop the ability to treat whatever ailments they have. Really, you would only need to go about 0.995c or so for this to be effective (10x time dilation). Maybe that's a viable business model for advanced propulsion research?
Being against the policies of the state of Israel is different from being against the right of the Jewish people to have a homeland. I think most rational people would say you have a right to disagree with the policies of a government, as long as you don't spew racially bigotted vitriol in the process. The problem is many who criticize Israel do it in such a one-sided fashion that it leads to the rational conclusion that their only possible motive could be anti-Semitism. If you blame the Palestinian-Israeli conflict entirely on the Israelis, then yes, you are being an anti-Semite because you holding Israel to a standard that is substantially different from that which you hold the Palestinians, and that which you hold every other government in the world.
Anti-Zionism is a strange one - since Zionism, historically, arose as a response to anti-Semitism. This is such a confused, muddied term, I'd stay away from it entirely, since it tries to collapse complicated political issues into a jingoistic phrase. Lots of people, Jews included and Israelis included, don't support parts of current Israeli government policy, ongoing occupation and so on. The word "anti-Zionist" could mean almost anything, and even Wikipedia seems befuddled by this issue since the page on it is currently locked as a result of editorial disputes.
Anti-Judaism is a pretty awkward sounding word, as is "Anti-Islam". I'd stick to "anti-Jewish bias", "anti-Muslim bias" or "anti-Arab bias" if you're worried about being misunderstood. But the hubbub against anti-Semitism needs to stop now - you can't expect people to change the meaning of words to accomodate your political agenda, and if you go around flapping your arms when people use perfectly clear dictionary English words, you're going to end up marginalizing yourself and your viewpoint.
Just because you choose it to change meaning, doesn't change the base meaning of the word:
Yes, it does. That is Linguistics 101. Usage changes do create meaning changes over time. I don't get to choose the meaning changes, they occur within communities and spread to broader usage within a language. Ultimately, people who compile dictionaries come up with consensus opinions about when a word's usage has become common enough to enter the accepted, defined usage for the language. Don't take my word for it - see here for example. The usage has shifted over the years to primarily imply bias against Jews. Yes, it can also mean prejudice against other Semites, including Arabs, but that usage is a secondary, and somewhat confusing, meaning in light of its primary, common modern usage.
Language shifts happen - changing them because you disagree with them is very difficult to do, because you have to convince millions of people to change their usage - witness the hacker/cracker language confusion on Slashdot. If you took a basic college linguistics class you would understand that this is how language works, and we just have to deal with it.
As for this snide comment:
Not all Arabs are Muslims, but given your previous slip up, we'll just let this one slide.
I'll just assume you aren't a native English speaker (since you describe yourself as an Arab, this may or may not be an accurate assumption). If you parsed my sentence properly, you'd realize I never said that all Arabs are Muslim, nor that all Muslims are Arab (obviously). I had a friend in college who was a Coptic Christian from Egypt, in fact. However, most Arab countries are overwhelmingly Muslim, and the undeniable fact that I was referring to is that fear and hatred of Muslim extremism has resulted in much anti-Arab ethnic bias that never really existed before, at least not on a large scale, in the US. Jews, on the other hand, have been victims of bias in Europe since the middle ages (again, thus the linguistic shift in the meaning of "anti-Semitism").
Zionist, by the way, has a very specific meaning - not all Jews are Zionists, in fact most Jews are not ardent Zionists in the sense that some people intend. Many Jews would say the the Jews have a right to a homeland based on our experience as an ethnoreligious group in the 20th century, but this is not "Zionist" in the negative sense that has become bandied about by a bunch of light-in-the-shoes European-style liberals who go about slandering Jews on message boards all over the net, because they believe that the Palestinians are the oppressed underdogs, and that sympathizing with the "underdog" always makes you right. In short, when you say Zionism, what you mean is radical, militaristic Zionism, people who support continued occupation of Palestinian lands and so on. This is a very small minority of Jews, just like a survey in the New York Times today showed a large majority of Palestinians (83%) in Gaza want both sides to declare peace and stop fighting (unfortunately, this excellent article points out that the Israeli military keeps coming back into Gaza primarily because Hamas keeps launching rockets at Israeli). I'm pretty sure the number supporting a peaceful two-state solution is at least that high on the Israeli side based on other poles I've seen.
So please stop lecturing us about falling into linguistic traps. The word "anti-Semitic" does not dehumanize Arabs. It's just that it's use in another sense has pre-existed common feelings of racism against Arabs that have come about from the modern phenomenon of Muslim extremism. We can still use other words, like "anti-Muslim" or "anti-Arab" depending on what exactly we mean, and everybody will understand us just fine.
Basically, language is always a problem in science fiction - no way to totally eliminate it, and I think they've dealt reasonably well with it in SG-1. Of course, it's not realistic that the many humans taken from Earth several thousand years ago would speak English - they'd speak something derived from whatever the source language of the human stock they came from. Many of the other alien races are much more advanced anyway, and presumably either learn our language easily (like the Gou'ould) or use their own translation devices.
But then, if they dealt with this issue realistically, the whole show would be about learning the aliens' languages before interacting with them. Shows like Star Trek dealt with this explicitly by having "universal translator" devices. *shrug*, it's hard to tell a good story in one hour episodes involving space/planetary exploration without giving this issue short shrift.
Was anybody else bothered by the fact that Dr. Elizabeth Weir was played at the end of the 7th season by a different actress? All the character development was done by Jessica Steen, who did a bang up job with a hard role to play, so much so that a lot of us were really looking forward to seeing her in SG:A. Now they bring in a replacement, Torri Higginson, who looks and acts nothing like Jessica Steen. I don't know the reasons behind it, but they should have cast somebody in the first place they were happy with and wanted the role. Having the actress swap created major cognitive dissonance for me watching the 8th season opener - from a purely aesthetic perspective, I could barely stand to watch Higginson, she didn't play the same character at all that Steen played.
Anyway, I don't mean to sound like a fanboy bitch, I'm not a nutcase zealot about this stuff. I just think this issue was not handled well by the show producers. Maybe I am noticing it in particular because they usually handle these kinds of things so well on SG1 that it's one of the few sci-fi shows that I find easy to achieve suspension of disbelief with. Please, SG1 production team, don't do this to us again. I just hope going into SG:A that Higginson does a better job developing this character, or I don't know how I'll be able to watch the show.
As it is, I'm desperately afraid that Teal'c with a fuzzy head and O'Neill in charge of SGC is going to fundamentally change the 8th season for the worse. Come on guys, remember what happened when you tried to kill off Michael Shanks? Did anybody like that season?
Alright, now I've gotten this off my chest. I hope Season 8 is as good as SG1 has generally been and I hope that SG:A doesn't sully the name with a crappy spinoff.
Most of the complaints about Mozilla performance have been answered long ago - if you want something fast and light, get Firefox, download the extensions you want, huzzah. If you want a full-featured browser suite with email client and web development tools, go for Mozilla. If you are still running on a Pentium 233 and want to run the full Mozilla suite, don't complain that it's slow, you are running on last century's hardware.
Wrong. I saw no evidence from these articles of any substantial investigation into RedHat by the SEC, just that they had posed some questions previously that were apparently legitimate since the company did restate their earnings. You may be confused - a class action lawsuit is brought in civil court by lawyers (the aforementioned "ambulance chasers" to use the deragatory for this type of lawyer) who claim to represent the aggrieved class of shareowners. Generally these lawsuits end up benefitting the lawyers more than they do the losing shareholders, and this has nothing to do with SEC investigations.
Some recommendations for you though based on personal experience: look into living in states where reasonably priced personal health insurance is mandated - Massachusetts, relative to other places I've been at least, seems well ahead of the game on this. It's still freaking expensive, but compared to New York (where a single individual can pay about 800 a month for a decent POS, not even a true PPO plan), it's reasonable. This can give you a bit more freedom to make reasonable career decisions without having your health insurance be used as a weapon against you - in states like Massachusetts, you can't be refused coverage for pre-existing conditions, like your wife's lupus or your cancer, as long as you've had continuous coverage. Say what you will about the nasty liberals in Mass., their health insurance legislation is far more civilized and enlightened that Florida or New York (the others I have experience with).
Anyway, a hiring manager who's had some similar rough shakes in life should be willing to listen to your story and cut you some breaks if you can figure out how to get your resume past HR. Best recommendation is to try networking with people a bit, and get a personal recommendation to a hiring manager somewhere that will at least get your resume and life story in front of them. If I were in a hiring position and I heard that story, I'd be much more understanding about your job hopping or underemployed status and give your resume due consderation with that in mind.
But the best way to get rid of some of this stuff is to go over to the colleges at the end of the year when everybody is throwing furniture and other stuff away. I've found there are always end-of-year scavengers around near the freshmen dorms at Harvard looking to get some goodies. These people will often take away anything that looks useful or saleable. And if all else fails, you can bet your ass the garbagemen take all the junk away from the Harvard dorms and don't leave it there and tell Harvard it's not their job to take it.
I seem to recall that when you get a GeoTrust SSL cert they verify your identity using an automatic phone-dialer system that verifies your physical presence at a given telephone number while you are on their website. I guess this isn't really much better or worse than the address verification system, and it's reasonably easy to implement automatically, with essentially no ongoing manual labor. This kind of identity verification is never going to be as good as going through government issued IDs manually and verifying their legitimacy, but it's a hell of a lot cheaper and easier to implement.
You are wrong on all three counts. Conquering other nations and then establishing freely operating governments within those nations is not Imperialism. The US government did the same in Japan and West Germany at the end of World War II after temporarily occupying those countries. Are those countries ruled by the US in any meaningful way now (beyond close economic ties)? Absolutely not. So argument 1 is invalid on the face of it - temporary occupation of a defeated by a conquering power does not necessarily imply intent to extend rule over those foreign countries. I don't even think I can address your second argument it's so inaccurate - the US doesn't support Israel secretly, it does so openly, and the term "imperial" in that definition means literally the formation of empire, as in one nation that swears fealty to another nation - it has little to nothing to do with the situation in Israel. It's hard to imagine calling a nation smaller than many of the 50 states in the US an "empire" just because of a long-standing set of ethnic and border disputes between two resident populations. As for the aggressive extension of authority, I think the Canadians and Mexicans would disagree with you, though I suppose it all depends on what you mean by authority. The US has authority in the same way that China has authority - in the globalized economy, big producers and big consumers exercise a lot of sway. If you consider economic or political influence and its exertion to be "imperialism" than the word has so little meaning as to be beyond useless and we should just throw it away now, since every government capable of and needed to do so does just that. And that was exactly the point I have made a million times over that always seems to fly over the heads of the foaming-at-the-mouth euroliberals.
No, that is a definition for the common-use liberal term "imperialist", as in "cultural imperialist", "social imperialist", etc. It has nothing to do with true Imperialism, and if you note, I used the capital "I" to be absolutely unambiguous that I do not use newspeak claptrap like that OED entry. Certainly no political scientist would agree with that drivel. Other dictionaries have definitions that seem shockingly at odds with that one, for example check out the many dictionary.com entries, such as the American Heritage and Merriam-Webster definitions - none of them seem to agree with the secondary definition you provided from the Oxford Compact English Dictionary. Which just goes to show that even a great dictionary is still the work of humans, and can be flawed at times.