you are picking a hundred year window, and saying anyone that uses a different window is wrong.
Um. No. That is nothing like what the article is saying. The article is saying that there is a natural, periodic cooling trend that runs about every 11 years. Furthermore, this trend is sitting on top of a general *increase* in temperature.
To put it another way, think of the 11-year cooling trend as a sawtooth function. If you just sample the downhill section, it will look like a decreasing function, but over time, it is constant.
Now, take the above function and overlay a positively slopped function that has a slope less than the absolute value of the negatively sloping section of the sawtooth. The result is that you can cherry pick periods of time and still claim a decrease, but if you look at a period of time beyond the known 11-year oscillation, you see an increase.
yeah, because "I’m sure you agree–the Mann/Jones GRL paper was truly pathetic and should never have been published. I don’t want to be associated with that 2000 year 'reconstruction'." would mean something entirely different if it was in context.
Well, I looked at the email, and unfortunately, the rest of the email doesn't really provide much more context or an explanation of why the author of that comment dislikes that paper.
As such, we have little information, other than knowing that one scientist doesn't much like the work of another scientist. There is nothing in the criticism of this one, specific paper to indicate anything other than professional rivalry.
In fact, looking over these emails, I see evidence of frustration and a desire to convince people, but I don't see anything that indicates a widespread cover-up. As before, nothing to see here that undermines the science...
Sadly, I think we are heading towards justifiable violence as the only means to take back control of our countries and our lives. Protests and legislative bodies are accomplishing next to nothing and the situation is getting so bad, that my only choice will ultimately be violence or incarceration.
I hear your frustration, but let's give this more time. The thing about non-violent protest is that it takes a lot of time to work. Note that the African-American civil rights movement ran for 13 years.
The Arab spring and popular protests across Europe and the US haven't even hit the one year mark, but already the national (and international) dialogue is changing, as evidenced by this very thread.
Yes, there is a lot of bad shit going down, but for the first time in a while, there is reason to hope that change will come. Just be sure to take *some* kind of (non-violent) action to push that change.
On the flip side, though, there are a lot people labeling taxation as theft without recognizing the benefit (ie, roads, schools, safe food, etc.) that are purchased through taxes.
we have a perfectly functional system for overthrowing the government on a periodic basis: voting.
That is probably the funniest thing I've seen posted here for a long time. Our election system is broken. In our system, two major sources of power (ie, the political parties) pick a handful of candidates and let the people fight about which one of the pre-chosen people they want to be in power.
Furthermore, the winner is decided in part by the people, but there is a LOT of money that gets spent in elections and the more money you can spend, the more likely you are to win. Right now, the only practical political choices boil down to either a Republican or Democrat, both of which are run by a small group of elite. This is why we have things like the Bush dynasty - do you really believe that father and son were both president because of their merits and not their wealth and influence? Hell, on the other side of the coin, we almost had a Clinton dynasty starting when Hillary was showing real potential to take the oval office.
If that's not enough to start you questioning our "perfectly functional" system, I would suggest you read all of the articles posted on slashdot about the trouble with the voting machines used in most elections!
To change this, we first need enough people in the streets to generate enough political capital for someone to step up and try to represent these new voices. Even if that doesn't work, they are already having an effect. Without them being on streets, we wouldn't even be having this conversation, and the longer they stay on the streets, the more people will talk about why they are there and these ideas will start to spread.
My only hope is that this kind of movement can generate enough momentum to actually cause a change.
FYI, you would be a lot more convincing if you stopped just linking to things that you've said already. I tried to follow your argument, but I kept on seeing you do some of your own analysis of situations, then link to your analyses as fact.
You may have some very good points, but you are so deep in your own layers of thinking that it is hard to believe anything you say and I don't personally feel that it is worthwhile to spend long hours digesting every little point that some dude posted on the internet.
Well, that's the strawman version of the argument.
Right now, it is possible for a single worker to produce more than every before in history. Given that statement, we may expect that right now our society is, for the average person, more wealthy and that we have more free time than ever before. It turns out, though, that all of these great gains in wealth, etc. are concentrated in the top few percentages of people.
That is the specific complaint - that the income/wealth gap is spreading and that the only solution offered by the politicians (specifically by the GOP) is to put more money in the hands of the wealthy, as if all of our economic woes are due to the rich just not having enough money, which is total, complete, utter bullshit. If that is the solution, why is there a problem?
It is painfully obvious that we need a fairly significant shift in our thinking. We also need to stop sitting around reducing the "other side" to a bunch of whiny, stupid, people. There are smart folks in the Tea Party and there are smart folks in the Green Party, and they all have valid, if incomplete, perspectives.
Your post addresses some of the basic understanding, but it is more complicated than you paint it. After all, if it wasn't why would there still be a lot of research into it? Consider this thought experiment:
You have a large solution of water with 3 oil molecules floating around inside of the water. Eventually, these 3 molecules bump into each other and stick. By having these two molecules start acting like one, there is a relatively large entropic penalty to be paid, and our understanding of a lot of these other forces doesn't explain who is paying for the entropic loss.
I had exactly the same response to the article - they've created a mathematical model the reflects what they observe, but they still don't really understand the mechanism. Looking at the comments of the article, I found a link to the original article. From what I can understand (by reading the abstract), it sounds as if the work was (surprise) a lot more complicated than the article linked above. From the abstract:
A quantitative and general model is derived for the interaction potential of charged bilayers that includes the electrostatic double-layer force of the Derjaguin–Landau–Verwey–Overbeek theory, attractive hydrophobic interactions, and repulsive steric-hydration forces. The model quantitatively accounts for the elastic strains, deformations, long-range forces, energy maxima, adhesion minima, as well as the instability (when it exists) as two bilayers breakthrough and (hemi)fuse.
In short, as far as I understand it, their model is built upon a lot of existing models and considers many, known phenomena. If you dove into the actual article, you may get a sense of the "why" but it strikes me as a complicated enough of an explanation that it would probably take a strong background in physical chemistry to fully grok.
Does gravity work because mass distorts space or because of gravitons? At the heart of it most science doesn't care why, but it does care what.
No, it is engineering that really doesn't care about why. Steel is stronger than wood, which is why we build big buildings out of steel and not wood, but to make a building, we don't need to understand why, only how it behaves.
Science is all about explaining why something happens. If someone could determine, conclusively, the mechanism of how gravity works, that would be a major scientific discovery. At that point, then, we'll how to ask why THAT happens, and thus science continues.
The average females instinct, no matter how independent and successful she is, is still to "settle" with a provider (due to the large investment she makes in the offspring). That hasn't changed. The males instinct (to spread seed far and wide due to lesser investment in offspring) is to mate with as many females as possible. This also hasn't changed.
Further to this point, you can see how female and male sexuality play out in the absence of the other gender (ie, homosexual relationships). On the one hand, you have male dominated gay clubs where there is a culture of lots of quick and meaningless sex. On the other hand, you have the following joke (which I originally heard from a lesbian friend of mine):
What does a lesbian bring to the second date? A U-haul.
(These are, of course, generalizations. There are plenty of lesbians having quick, meaningless hook-ups and plenty of gay men in long-term, committed relationships.)
I would argue that the number of programs licensed under the GPL has more to do with the fact that it is a good idea and a lot less to do with RMS as a spokesman.
Don't get me wrong - I think that he has made some great contributions to the world. I just think that his cause may be better served by another spokesman.
If you're trying to convince people, you need to avoid out-right insulting them and mocking them
I don't remember the Apple fanboys criticising Steve Jobs for mocking and insulting Microsoft.
Well, that's a problem with the fanboys, which shows that childish name calling isn't the providence of one group of people.
We should stop tolerating ANY kind of name calling and derision, especially when it comes from someone we agree with. Unfortunately, it is a widespread issue that goes way beyond the discussion at hand.
I'm sorry, did you need a hug? It sounds like maybe you needed a hug, so I thought I'd offer.
If you think I was bemoaning the fact the RMS was trashing Jobs, I must not have been clear.
Let's put aside any bias for or against Steve Jobs, and look at what we're talking about. RMS clearly has a strong, vocal idea about how he'd like software to exist in the world. That's fine, we all have our own opinions. Turns out, though, that he also wants to convert others to his opinion. Great, that's fine, too.
Now, when the name Steve Jobs is a hot news topic, where every piece is about praising him, there's an opportunity to join the discussion and to explain some of the very basic principals behind open source, etc. In other words, he could take the time to educate and inform, thereby advancing his cause.
Instead, he resorts to name-calling and bitterness. That's a failure as a spokesman, and I can only see this as helping his cause if he manages to convince someone else to step up and speak up in his stead.
The funny thing I think was the a Wall Street worker who pointed out that they were all using Apple products
You do recognize that this is a classic ad hominem attack, right? I hope you truly don't believe that *every* one of them is out there on the street "using Apple products."
Really, does use of these products have *anything* to do with the message? if the message is kooky and stupid, can't the media just point that out? Instead, they latch onto this one, minor detail, that describes *some* of the protesters in order to try to paint the whole movement as a bunch of spoiled, whiny kids.
I personally participated in a lot of the protests in Madison, WI, earlier this year. From my experiences in attending rallies, then going home to read about them online, one thing is clear - our media is a failure and it is impossible to get an accurate picture of such an event by reading about it in the news.
I sort of agree that Stallman isn't a very palatable spokesman - but on the other hand, the FSF has an uncompromising message, and requires an uncompromising figurehead.
Believe it or not, it is possible to be both polite and uncompromising. Stallman seems to be a master of the latter and a novice at the former.
Let's not delude ourselves. As far as software is concerned, with some notable exceptions, Apple always took the hard proprietary line in order to protect and add value to their hardware. It's natural for RMS to point it out. Especially at this moment in time, in a controversial manner, because well, that's what he does.
It is appropriate for RMS to point out the privacy/openness issues, but he really, really doesn't need to be so harsh to do it.
Read his words - he implies that anyone using any Apple product is a "fool" who has willingly stepped into a "jail." (Those are his specific word choices.) He has good points, but by being so polarizing, he is only pushing people further away from his own position. Rather than a few sentence rant, his time would have been better served by putting together a few thoughtful paragraphs that acknowledge the positive impacts from Steve Jobs (ie, his emphasis on usability) while pointing out the downsides (ie, software freedom, etc.).
A post like that might even cause others to think, rather than encouraging them to dismiss RMS as a crazy lunatic.
You need to take a stroll around the mall a couple more times. There are plenty of other such religions, some of them even popular. Not to knock Buddhism.
It is true that RMS serves an important role as a vocal advocate. The trouble is that he has little political or social grace. For example, his description of Steve Jobs - "Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom".
If you're trying to convince people, you need to avoid out-right insulting them and mocking them. The kind of sentiment expressed above can be loved by people of a similar outlook, but for anyone else, the harsh, mightier-than-thou attitude is a huge turnoff.
The trouble isn't his message, it is how he tries to deliver it. For most people, who don't have a technical background, he just comes across as a crazy, ranting lunatic, which probably hurts his cause more than it helps.
To make linux really take off, there needs to be someone with the charisma and vision of Steve Jobs, with the philosophical ideals of Stallman. Now *that* would be great.
I have to believe (for the sake of my soul) that someone at Microsoft wanted to do that but was *stopped* for some reason from adding the extra 0.5 KBs of synonymous commands for each of the included commands.
In my experience, I would say that it's more likely that the people working on this feature looked at a requirement on paper that said something like "Voice activated SMS ability," implemented the narrowest version of that, and moved on.
As a recent example - I work in a biotech company, and we have a software package that allows people to view our data graphically. Okay fine. Simple enough. Since our customers are scientists, it is helpful for them to easily share data with other people, and a couple of us started advocating for the ability to select some data in our software, hit copy, then go into your favorite other program and hit paste, which would paste the exact image from our application as an image.
In other words, it was an extremely useful feature that fits very well into the standard paradigm of how people expect software to work.
One of the VP's an older electrical engineer, didn't see the point. You could get the same functionality by installing the program "Snag-it" on your computer, then invoking the shortcut key to Snag-it to copy and paste the image. As much as we tried, he never managed to understand that just selecting and hitting copy and paste was a HUGE difference in usability from having to use another application.
Its a mindset, and part of the culture of an organization - either you care about design and usability or you don't.
Huh? I certainly expressed a distaste for your rhetoric, but then I spent a while arguing the merits of understanding and compromise. I don't think that this is any different from any other kind of political debate. Perhaps you see fewer "attacks" coming from the right simply because you tend to lean more to the right?
I also hardly think that the right is innocent when it comes to slandering the left. After all, there is a book title "Liberalism is a mental disorder." How is that for friendly, reasonable discourse? If you want to hear more examples, just turn on your local right-wing radio or the editorial staff on Fox.
In the end, there is a loud, vocal minority on both the right and left. Or, rather, should I say the Republicans and Democrats, since at this point, neither party seems very much interested in right/left ideology so much as it is interested in defending its own team. (Based upon some of your statements, we probably agree on this point.) From everything you've said, though, it sounds like you are more willing to give the right a pass than you are willing to give the left a pass.
Next time you find yourself listening to/watching/reading an article that reeks of bias to you, take the time to notice how, specifically, the bias is conveyed. Then, when you read something that espouses an opinion that you agree with, look for those same tricks. it is eye-opening just how much bad dialogue is going on.
Yes I have a very broad statement I stand by. Removing the power from the federal government and restoring it to lower levels of government universally improves the nation, where states and other localities disagree the people will move to the places they find more suitable regionally isolating failed policies instead of making failure of policy a national universal constant.
This statement comes a bit out of nowhere in the context of this discussion, but I'll bite...
The one large objection I have to your statement is the absolutism in it. Although I generally identify as more left-leaning, I am very skeptical of government, so the general idea of giving the government less power is a good one.
At the same time, there can be issues that are not well solved locally. For example, take environment regulations. If these were all up to local control, we could easily find ourselves in a situation where a community upstream in a watershed decides to relax their rules, which causes extreme pollution and toxicity in the communities downstream from it. Here, if water quality is enforced only at the local level, there is no efficient way for those most effected to push those polluting. More generally, I think that although we should try to keep the rules in society to a minimum, we need to examine each issue individually and try to see what the most efficient solution can be.
In the end, though, I am coming more and more to the opinion that local/federal private/public are not the most important factors for how well a system works. No matter what the system, if there isn't built-in transparency and accountability, the system will fail, since the most greedy and corrupt will tend to accumulate towards the top of the power pyramid. The more we (as citizens) push for this transparency and accountability in large, powerful organizations, the better things are.
Compromise is bad. Compromise is a guarantee an idea gets Nerfed to the point of not working.
How do you feel about single-minded ideology? Is that better than compromise?
The truth is the left is the attack machine,
Ah, I see - compromise is bad, and the left is nothing but an attack machine.
Your attitude is terrifying. You push for ignoring and dismissing all kinds of compromise, then with a single wave of your hand, you managed to dismiss about half of the population. I would suggest that you put down your heavy handed rhetoric and start trying to actually understand what people on the left are saying. Hint, your strawman statement that "If a right winger has $100 he earned, the left wants all of it," has no basis in reality for 99.9% of people on the left. I'm sure that you can find one or two quotes from a fringe group advocating that, but I assure you that this is a small minority.
You self-identify as a libertarian, but you do realize that Libertarian == Far right? (At least as far as politics in the US are concerned).
You are fine to your own opinions, but please stop thinking of the other side into a farcical, trivial position. If you actually take the time to sit down and talk to someone with opposing views, you may learn something. And, yes, I would give the same advice to a liberal spouting the same kind of nonsense you are.
There are serious political, economic, and social issues right now, and the only way progress is going to be made is if we start listening to and trying to understand people we disagree with. What I see happening instead is that each side is taking a position and arguing it to death, ignoring any of the facts and counter-arguments on the other side.
In the future, please try to avoid any broad, condemning statements like you've just spouted. I hope you noticed how even though you paint the left as an "attack machine" the overwhelming majority of your post is inflammatory attacks on the left.
I don't think that the document provided says what you think it says. First of all, there's the exact statement listed:
“We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”
The thing is that scientists can be very careful, precise, skeptical people, almost by definition. The only action supported in this statement is that we continue to carefully examine the evidence, which is something that ANY scientist will support. Here's the thing, though:
The theory of evolution makes many testable hypotheses, and whenever any of these hypotheses are put to the test, they pass. Furthermore, much of the natural world only makes sense in the context of evolution and their respective evolutionary histories. Spend some time reading and really diving into modern biology, and you'll start to see how much sense evolution makes.
As for your claim of "They are REAL scientists doing science, scientifically using the scientific method," I noticed that an overwhelming minority of the people who signed this have PhDs in biology, so although they may be work in science, that doesn't make them an authority on evolution.
Furthermore, even given the signatures of a few biologists, that doesn't come anywhere close to the number of scientists who will say that evolution is by and large true. (I qualify the truth since I'm sure our understanding of all of the mechanisms of evolution is incomplete and that there exist inaccuracies in it.)
As it stand, though, there have been no major issues found with evolution that give us a reason to discount the theory. In contrast, the more people study biology, the more evolution makes sense.
Slashdot Mirror
Um. No. That is nothing like what the article is saying. The article is saying that there is a natural, periodic cooling trend that runs about every 11 years. Furthermore, this trend is sitting on top of a general *increase* in temperature.
To put it another way, think of the 11-year cooling trend as a sawtooth function. If you just sample the downhill section, it will look like a decreasing function, but over time, it is constant.
Now, take the above function and overlay a positively slopped function that has a slope less than the absolute value of the negatively sloping section of the sawtooth. The result is that you can cherry pick periods of time and still claim a decrease, but if you look at a period of time beyond the known 11-year oscillation, you see an increase.
Well, I looked at the email, and unfortunately, the rest of the email doesn't really provide much more context or an explanation of why the author of that comment dislikes that paper.
As such, we have little information, other than knowing that one scientist doesn't much like the work of another scientist. There is nothing in the criticism of this one, specific paper to indicate anything other than professional rivalry.
In fact, looking over these emails, I see evidence of frustration and a desire to convince people, but I don't see anything that indicates a widespread cover-up. As before, nothing to see here that undermines the science...
I hear your frustration, but let's give this more time. The thing about non-violent protest is that it takes a lot of time to work. Note that the African-American civil rights movement ran for 13 years.
The Arab spring and popular protests across Europe and the US haven't even hit the one year mark, but already the national (and international) dialogue is changing, as evidenced by this very thread.
Yes, there is a lot of bad shit going down, but for the first time in a while, there is reason to hope that change will come. Just be sure to take *some* kind of (non-violent) action to push that change.
You're right. They could provide this benefit through charity, but they don't. When that changes, we can disband the government.
First of all, I agree with what you said.
On the flip side, though, there are a lot people labeling taxation as theft without recognizing the benefit (ie, roads, schools, safe food, etc.) that are purchased through taxes.
That is probably the funniest thing I've seen posted here for a long time. Our election system is broken. In our system, two major sources of power (ie, the political parties) pick a handful of candidates and let the people fight about which one of the pre-chosen people they want to be in power.
Furthermore, the winner is decided in part by the people, but there is a LOT of money that gets spent in elections and the more money you can spend, the more likely you are to win. Right now, the only practical political choices boil down to either a Republican or Democrat, both of which are run by a small group of elite. This is why we have things like the Bush dynasty - do you really believe that father and son were both president because of their merits and not their wealth and influence? Hell, on the other side of the coin, we almost had a Clinton dynasty starting when Hillary was showing real potential to take the oval office.
If that's not enough to start you questioning our "perfectly functional" system, I would suggest you read all of the articles posted on slashdot about the trouble with the voting machines used in most elections!
To change this, we first need enough people in the streets to generate enough political capital for someone to step up and try to represent these new voices. Even if that doesn't work, they are already having an effect. Without them being on streets, we wouldn't even be having this conversation, and the longer they stay on the streets, the more people will talk about why they are there and these ideas will start to spread.
My only hope is that this kind of movement can generate enough momentum to actually cause a change.
FYI, you would be a lot more convincing if you stopped just linking to things that you've said already. I tried to follow your argument, but I kept on seeing you do some of your own analysis of situations, then link to your analyses as fact.
You may have some very good points, but you are so deep in your own layers of thinking that it is hard to believe anything you say and I don't personally feel that it is worthwhile to spend long hours digesting every little point that some dude posted on the internet.
Well, that's the strawman version of the argument.
Right now, it is possible for a single worker to produce more than every before in history. Given that statement, we may expect that right now our society is, for the average person, more wealthy and that we have more free time than ever before. It turns out, though, that all of these great gains in wealth, etc. are concentrated in the top few percentages of people.
That is the specific complaint - that the income/wealth gap is spreading and that the only solution offered by the politicians (specifically by the GOP) is to put more money in the hands of the wealthy, as if all of our economic woes are due to the rich just not having enough money, which is total, complete, utter bullshit. If that is the solution, why is there a problem?
It is painfully obvious that we need a fairly significant shift in our thinking. We also need to stop sitting around reducing the "other side" to a bunch of whiny, stupid, people. There are smart folks in the Tea Party and there are smart folks in the Green Party, and they all have valid, if incomplete, perspectives.
How about the fact that we don't fully understand liquid water?
Your post addresses some of the basic understanding, but it is more complicated than you paint it. After all, if it wasn't why would there still be a lot of research into it? Consider this thought experiment:
You have a large solution of water with 3 oil molecules floating around inside of the water. Eventually, these 3 molecules bump into each other and stick. By having these two molecules start acting like one, there is a relatively large entropic penalty to be paid, and our understanding of a lot of these other forces doesn't explain who is paying for the entropic loss.
I had exactly the same response to the article - they've created a mathematical model the reflects what they observe, but they still don't really understand the mechanism. Looking at the comments of the article, I found a link to the original article. From what I can understand (by reading the abstract), it sounds as if the work was (surprise) a lot more complicated than the article linked above. From the abstract:
In short, as far as I understand it, their model is built upon a lot of existing models and considers many, known phenomena. If you dove into the actual article, you may get a sense of the "why" but it strikes me as a complicated enough of an explanation that it would probably take a strong background in physical chemistry to fully grok.
No, it is engineering that really doesn't care about why. Steel is stronger than wood, which is why we build big buildings out of steel and not wood, but to make a building, we don't need to understand why, only how it behaves.
Science is all about explaining why something happens. If someone could determine, conclusively, the mechanism of how gravity works, that would be a major scientific discovery. At that point, then, we'll how to ask why THAT happens, and thus science continues.
Further to this point, you can see how female and male sexuality play out in the absence of the other gender (ie, homosexual relationships). On the one hand, you have male dominated gay clubs where there is a culture of lots of quick and meaningless sex. On the other hand, you have the following joke (which I originally heard from a lesbian friend of mine):
What does a lesbian bring to the second date? A U-haul.
(These are, of course, generalizations. There are plenty of lesbians having quick, meaningless hook-ups and plenty of gay men in long-term, committed relationships.)
I would argue that the number of programs licensed under the GPL has more to do with the fact that it is a good idea and a lot less to do with RMS as a spokesman.
Don't get me wrong - I think that he has made some great contributions to the world. I just think that his cause may be better served by another spokesman.
Well, that's a problem with the fanboys, which shows that childish name calling isn't the providence of one group of people.
We should stop tolerating ANY kind of name calling and derision, especially when it comes from someone we agree with. Unfortunately, it is a widespread issue that goes way beyond the discussion at hand.
If you think I was bemoaning the fact the RMS was trashing Jobs, I must not have been clear.
Let's put aside any bias for or against Steve Jobs, and look at what we're talking about. RMS clearly has a strong, vocal idea about how he'd like software to exist in the world. That's fine, we all have our own opinions. Turns out, though, that he also wants to convert others to his opinion. Great, that's fine, too.
Now, when the name Steve Jobs is a hot news topic, where every piece is about praising him, there's an opportunity to join the discussion and to explain some of the very basic principals behind open source, etc. In other words, he could take the time to educate and inform, thereby advancing his cause.
Instead, he resorts to name-calling and bitterness. That's a failure as a spokesman, and I can only see this as helping his cause if he manages to convince someone else to step up and speak up in his stead.
You do recognize that this is a classic ad hominem attack, right? I hope you truly don't believe that *every* one of them is out there on the street "using Apple products."
Really, does use of these products have *anything* to do with the message? if the message is kooky and stupid, can't the media just point that out? Instead, they latch onto this one, minor detail, that describes *some* of the protesters in order to try to paint the whole movement as a bunch of spoiled, whiny kids.
I personally participated in a lot of the protests in Madison, WI, earlier this year. From my experiences in attending rallies, then going home to read about them online, one thing is clear - our media is a failure and it is impossible to get an accurate picture of such an event by reading about it in the news.
Please keep that in mind.
Believe it or not, it is possible to be both polite and uncompromising. Stallman seems to be a master of the latter and a novice at the former.
It is appropriate for RMS to point out the privacy/openness issues, but he really, really doesn't need to be so harsh to do it.
Read his words - he implies that anyone using any Apple product is a "fool" who has willingly stepped into a "jail." (Those are his specific word choices.) He has good points, but by being so polarizing, he is only pushing people further away from his own position. Rather than a few sentence rant, his time would have been better served by putting together a few thoughtful paragraphs that acknowledge the positive impacts from Steve Jobs (ie, his emphasis on usability) while pointing out the downsides (ie, software freedom, etc.).
A post like that might even cause others to think, rather than encouraging them to dismiss RMS as a crazy lunatic.
Examples, please.
It is true that RMS serves an important role as a vocal advocate. The trouble is that he has little political or social grace. For example, his description of Steve Jobs - "Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom".
If you're trying to convince people, you need to avoid out-right insulting them and mocking them. The kind of sentiment expressed above can be loved by people of a similar outlook, but for anyone else, the harsh, mightier-than-thou attitude is a huge turnoff.
The trouble isn't his message, it is how he tries to deliver it. For most people, who don't have a technical background, he just comes across as a crazy, ranting lunatic, which probably hurts his cause more than it helps.
To make linux really take off, there needs to be someone with the charisma and vision of Steve Jobs, with the philosophical ideals of Stallman. Now *that* would be great.
In my experience, I would say that it's more likely that the people working on this feature looked at a requirement on paper that said something like "Voice activated SMS ability," implemented the narrowest version of that, and moved on.
As a recent example - I work in a biotech company, and we have a software package that allows people to view our data graphically. Okay fine. Simple enough. Since our customers are scientists, it is helpful for them to easily share data with other people, and a couple of us started advocating for the ability to select some data in our software, hit copy, then go into your favorite other program and hit paste, which would paste the exact image from our application as an image.
In other words, it was an extremely useful feature that fits very well into the standard paradigm of how people expect software to work.
One of the VP's an older electrical engineer, didn't see the point. You could get the same functionality by installing the program "Snag-it" on your computer, then invoking the shortcut key to Snag-it to copy and paste the image. As much as we tried, he never managed to understand that just selecting and hitting copy and paste was a HUGE difference in usability from having to use another application.
Its a mindset, and part of the culture of an organization - either you care about design and usability or you don't.
Huh? I certainly expressed a distaste for your rhetoric, but then I spent a while arguing the merits of understanding and compromise. I don't think that this is any different from any other kind of political debate. Perhaps you see fewer "attacks" coming from the right simply because you tend to lean more to the right?
I also hardly think that the right is innocent when it comes to slandering the left. After all, there is a book title "Liberalism is a mental disorder." How is that for friendly, reasonable discourse? If you want to hear more examples, just turn on your local right-wing radio or the editorial staff on Fox.
In the end, there is a loud, vocal minority on both the right and left. Or, rather, should I say the Republicans and Democrats, since at this point, neither party seems very much interested in right/left ideology so much as it is interested in defending its own team. (Based upon some of your statements, we probably agree on this point.) From everything you've said, though, it sounds like you are more willing to give the right a pass than you are willing to give the left a pass.
Next time you find yourself listening to/watching/reading an article that reeks of bias to you, take the time to notice how, specifically, the bias is conveyed. Then, when you read something that espouses an opinion that you agree with, look for those same tricks. it is eye-opening just how much bad dialogue is going on.
This statement comes a bit out of nowhere in the context of this discussion, but I'll bite...
The one large objection I have to your statement is the absolutism in it. Although I generally identify as more left-leaning, I am very skeptical of government, so the general idea of giving the government less power is a good one.
At the same time, there can be issues that are not well solved locally. For example, take environment regulations. If these were all up to local control, we could easily find ourselves in a situation where a community upstream in a watershed decides to relax their rules, which causes extreme pollution and toxicity in the communities downstream from it. Here, if water quality is enforced only at the local level, there is no efficient way for those most effected to push those polluting. More generally, I think that although we should try to keep the rules in society to a minimum, we need to examine each issue individually and try to see what the most efficient solution can be.
In the end, though, I am coming more and more to the opinion that local/federal private/public are not the most important factors for how well a system works. No matter what the system, if there isn't built-in transparency and accountability, the system will fail, since the most greedy and corrupt will tend to accumulate towards the top of the power pyramid. The more we (as citizens) push for this transparency and accountability in large, powerful organizations, the better things are.
How do you feel about single-minded ideology? Is that better than compromise?
Ah, I see - compromise is bad, and the left is nothing but an attack machine.
Your attitude is terrifying. You push for ignoring and dismissing all kinds of compromise, then with a single wave of your hand, you managed to dismiss about half of the population. I would suggest that you put down your heavy handed rhetoric and start trying to actually understand what people on the left are saying. Hint, your strawman statement that "If a right winger has $100 he earned, the left wants all of it," has no basis in reality for 99.9% of people on the left. I'm sure that you can find one or two quotes from a fringe group advocating that, but I assure you that this is a small minority.
You self-identify as a libertarian, but you do realize that Libertarian == Far right? (At least as far as politics in the US are concerned).
You are fine to your own opinions, but please stop thinking of the other side into a farcical, trivial position. If you actually take the time to sit down and talk to someone with opposing views, you may learn something. And, yes, I would give the same advice to a liberal spouting the same kind of nonsense you are.
There are serious political, economic, and social issues right now, and the only way progress is going to be made is if we start listening to and trying to understand people we disagree with. What I see happening instead is that each side is taking a position and arguing it to death, ignoring any of the facts and counter-arguments on the other side.
In the future, please try to avoid any broad, condemning statements like you've just spouted. I hope you noticed how even though you paint the left as an "attack machine" the overwhelming majority of your post is inflammatory attacks on the left.
I don't think that the document provided says what you think it says. First of all, there's the exact statement listed:
The thing is that scientists can be very careful, precise, skeptical people, almost by definition. The only action supported in this statement is that we continue to carefully examine the evidence, which is something that ANY scientist will support. Here's the thing, though:
The theory of evolution makes many testable hypotheses, and whenever any of these hypotheses are put to the test, they pass. Furthermore, much of the natural world only makes sense in the context of evolution and their respective evolutionary histories. Spend some time reading and really diving into modern biology, and you'll start to see how much sense evolution makes.
As for your claim of "They are REAL scientists doing science, scientifically using the scientific method," I noticed that an overwhelming minority of the people who signed this have PhDs in biology, so although they may be work in science, that doesn't make them an authority on evolution.
Furthermore, even given the signatures of a few biologists, that doesn't come anywhere close to the number of scientists who will say that evolution is by and large true. (I qualify the truth since I'm sure our understanding of all of the mechanisms of evolution is incomplete and that there exist inaccuracies in it.)
As it stand, though, there have been no major issues found with evolution that give us a reason to discount the theory. In contrast, the more people study biology, the more evolution makes sense.