OK, I'll agree that identity theft is a potential cost. You seem to think the benefits are negligible while dismissing non-techies (at least senior ones) as "morons".
Evidence
Do you have any hard evidence that active networkers in general suffer more identity theft than non networkers? Anything specific to LinkedIn? Based on your post, I'd expect to see a long line of "morons" at the Social Security office and on soup lines... maybe I missed the 60 Minutes episode on that.
The ethical way to do something that you know is illegal but think should be legal is to do it, report yourself to the proper authority, accept the punishment and use the experience to try to change the law that you think is wrong. Too many people think civil disobedience is a legal defense. It isn't.
I wasn't really thinking about whether it could happen, but whether it would happen. I don't see the same incentives for blocking or refusing traffic as for refusing to host it. Transport is essentially anonymous. No one's going to ask "what routers did that content use?". Yeah, I suppose some router owners could decide they wanted to reject certain traffic, but I thought that one of the basic features of the Internet is that when one node doesn't work, packets seek an alternate route to their destination.
I think the way you phrase it deserves more exploration. The only truly public "space" is the transport. By that, I mean that I don't think we're seeing any reports of routers selectively denying packets of content that their owners don't like. At least, I haven't heard anything like that.
Free speech has never meant freedom to use someone else's podium. It's not free beer, to make an analogy that should find a natural home here.
The free press guaranteed by the First Amendment was never without cost -- and certainly never included the obligation to print something contrary to what the publisher wanted. We're all free -- at liberty -- to publish what we want to say on the web. We're all free to charge what the market will bear for that content. Unless one can show that Flickr operates a monopoly with the only means of publishing certain information (please!), I don't see what this has to do with free as in speech. It's just bitching about less than free as in beer.
Google Docs Not Ready for Primetime
on
Google Apps Hacks
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· Score: 2, Informative
Am I the only one profoundly disappointed by Google Docs? I tried both the word processor and the spreadsheet and found that they do not come close to my desktop software in the key area of WYSIWYG. Without that, mirroring all the standard buttons and functions of MS Office doesn't do much for me.
I do think that sharing is easier with Google Docs, but why would I want to share a doc that looks like crap?
Maybe it won't take a big fix, but it will take a fix before I'd consider switching.
Also, while Google Sites has some great templates and a pretty easy admin interface, they've got to enable true domain mapping so that I can get www.mydomain.com on Google Sites, and do something with their confusing rights management.
Well, I agree that age-appropriateness is important, but how can you teach critical thinking without teaching different thought models, one of which is the scientific method? K-12 is a broad range of intellectual development, and we should hope that somewhere along the way, critical thinking can develop. K, not so much. 12 better get it, or we're fucked.
Maybe a small percentage of students "get" the scientific method because we don't teach the method, just the findings. And if we teach the findings as Truth, then it's our own damn fault if they get confused and have a view that religion can answer the same questions with the same Truth.
Well, you're just incorrect about science. To the extent you believe it, you're no better than the creationists. Science is not about Truth with a capital T. It's about explaining the world as best we can. It may suggest a theoretical explanation of everything, but I think that's where scientists get into trouble.
When you restate the distinction as "how" vs. "why", you are making the same distinction between Truth and truth that I have made.
Moral or ethical worth can be considered for facts when they purport to be Truth, and not just true. The moon orbiting the earth may not seem an ethical question -- and I agree that it is not -- but the Catholic church certainly considered it an ethical issue when it persecuted Galileo.
My point about ethics was exactly that science doesn't get us there, and that we still have to make ethical judgments. I tend to agree that the ethical and moral judgments of religion are wrong, as in morally wrong. But science alone can't make that judgment.
You may be correct that the compromise won't work. Don't you think it's intellectually dishonest not to seek it?
I don't propose capitulating if the compromise won't work. I propose insisting that science and religion not be taught in the same class. The compromise is only to validate an idiot's right to be an idiot, just not to teach idiocy to my kids.
I don't see how I'm trolling. I wasn't defending religion. I agree with you that it doesn't confront issues *well*, or even credibly. But it does provides answers -- wrong as I think they may be. You don't win any debates by calling the other side stupid.
How is that trolling?
Science is also the product of "semi-savage cultures" -- or do you not know what "society" was like in Aristotle's time, or Newton's, for that matter? The Nazis produced some great science, too. It's not something I would defend.
Also, your identification of Western Religion as schlock is curious. Eastern religions have no better basis in rationality. And if you think all Eastern religions are peaceful, you haven't seen how lower castes are treated in Hindu culture.
Apologies if I am misquoting, but I'll go with Henri Theil: "models are to be used, not believed".
Real science isn't about belief. When scientists try to advocate for teaching any theory (yes, even gravity) as a belief system, they get sucked into a debate that is not winnable -- exactly what the creationists want.
The justification for teaching evolution or any science is that it works, not that it is True. Evolution doesn't have to explain everything; it just has to follow scientific methods and explain more than another scientific theory. We'll still have to deal with people who claim creationism or intelligent design is science, but so far we've done ok when that is the debate.
The morality or ethical worth of scientific "facts" has to be dealt with in a different framework -- one where religion is quite relevant. And we should be advocating for schools to teach religious studies -- somewhere other than in science class.
Maybe if we could at least get people to understand that science and religion deal with different phenomena, we could make some progress.
Yes, I know that eventually science confronts some of the same cosmic questions, but it does so in a completely different approach, one that cannot and should not seek Truth.
One more cost consideration for Virgin (ditto to all the previous comments about low net cost): I got a deal for $15 every three months with automatic top-up tied to my VISA debit card. True, that means I had to give them my credit card info, but it cut the already lowest cost in the universe by 25%, since I've never exceeded the minimum charge. How much lower than $5 / month can you go? FWIW, I'm carrying a balance; in other words, my "minutes" (not really, my "dollars") roll foward in perpetuity, which is a lot better than the rollover plans that I saw when I switched to Virgin two years ago. Every once in a while (2-3 years?), I'll have a month where I need more than just a few minutes, so I'm sure I'll use that balance eventually, and the effective cost will be far lower than the cost was when I had a minimal plan with (your provider name here), and I'd get reamed by the over-minute charges (way higher than Virgin's, which decline as you use more minutes per month).
Nope. By definition, your friend has the time, because that's what she chooses to do with it. You said it yourself. We all live in the same time space -- 24 hours in a day for all of us.
I'm simply not suggesting anything good or bad about spare cycles, but I think we would probably both agree that almost no job requires 100% cycle utilization. Very few things do, which is good, because I'm pretty sure human beings aren't built for that. The spare cycles characterization is still a useful description, if we can peel away the normative reactions everyone seems to have (positive or negative). For your friend, the spare cycles apparently exist in her sleep time. For others, it's during "work" time.
I have an old CPU with a faulty controller, so none of this seems to help me much. Cheers.
with or without the presence of a "I have time and don't know what to do with it" state
I think "I have time" is a necessary condition. Just as obvious to me, "don't know what to do with it" is definitionally false for anyone doing anything with their time, unless it is possible to occupy one's time completely by accident. ("I woke up and discovered I had written a C# library".)
I think the NeoSmart reaction was a little bit defensive (though a lot less defensive than half the responses here on/.). I didn't interpret Chris Anderson's characterization ("bored") as a pejorative. I think he was just adding some dimension to the definition of spare cycles, and it touched a raw nerve in some. He certainly was not laying out any logic that dictates a conclusion that anyone doing open source or blogging or wikipedia must be a loser or should do something more valuable. I think NeoSmart goes a little overboard in the opposite direction by characterizing the same activities as "selfless".
Regardless of the "true state of mind" of open source developers, bloggers, and even Solitaire players, hurra! for the spare cycles phenomenon. Without it, neither selfless soul nor degenerate slacker would have the capacity for open source or the next Great American novel (or for the next crappy blog post, take your pick).
In case my comment obscured it, I agree that your alternatives play a role, as do a lot of other factors, as diverse as human motivation in general.
Isn't your description the functional equivalent of boredom? I'm not sure how I would see any difference between a situation where you were just plain bored and a situation where you were nominally interested but still felt that your work assignment was crappy. I guess I see that you, yourself, could differentiate between the two, but to a third party I think the two situations look alike.
My take on Long Tail is that Chris Anderson uses the term "bored" as a sort of short-hand for the variety of emotional reactions to work that doesn't demand anything close to our full concentration or energy. The reactions might not all fit the description for everyone, but the practical result still might be the same: it's the application of the spare cycles that makes the difference. In other words, playing Solitaire doesn't have the same impact as blogging or working on open source code.
Didn't the term "internet" come from Inter-Network or Interconnected Network or something similar?
I'm sorry; is "network" too technical for layperson comprehension? The word itself is not technical, even if the subject of computer networks is...
I don't think it was the word "tubes" that got "Interwebs Ted" into trouble. I've heard a lot of technical folks over the years describe bandwidth in terms like "pipes" to make an analogy with water flow. So, "tubes" is not so far off the mark. But, a network is not a series. That's not a technical distinction, and the context is what shows that Stevens is an idiot.
If the problem is the word "network", then maybe I don't understand the term "layperson", and I'm actually the one in trouble here...
Well, if "'regular' people weren't offended", then how did the politically motivated organization manage to succeed? Even if all the politically motivated organization succeeded in doing was to alert the politically motivated media, how would that have succeeded if "'regular' people weren't offended"? OK, maybe people really are offended only because they think they should be offended. I guess I'm not going to spend too much time worrying about that possibility, since I think it's quite reasonable to find the remarks offensive, no matter who publicized them.
In the quoted passage, I interpreted the word "only" as more significant than the word "black", and it was the only example of race-consciousness you chose to mention.
I don't think I was insinuating that you were racist, though I'll concede the point that I was not quite clear: I was insinuating that your focus on double standards, coupled with the one example you chose from your situation, lacks the historical perspective that racism by whites is the bigger problem. (Double-standards is the best short-hand I can think of at the moment; sorry if it's not quite an accurate summary of your original critique, with which I do not totally disagree.)
I also agree that racial-sensitivity training is over-done. I also think it is idiotic. Anyone who "needs" the seminar probably won't benefit from it. But, instead of losing respect for "minorities", maybe you could lose respect for "corporate bullshit", since that's what I would blame for the situation.
But I still think you sounded like Stephen Colbert in your GGP post.
But I didn't think it was funny, and I did think it was offensive. (I don't know about "seriously" offensive, since I don't take Imus or just about any public figure seriously.)
Does that mean I'm not liberal? Or does that mean I'm not white? (It couldn't be the other; just couldn't.)
Double standards do suck; I agree on that. But to think that they "just happen" is naive. There are pretty obvious reasons why Chris Rock is allowed to say the "n word" and I'm not. And I'm ok with those reasons. I think it's a good thing that some prominent black people are pushing to get people like Chris Rock and others to stop using the "n word". I don't think it would have been my place to start that letter-writing campaign. Double standards sometimes exist because the context is not neutral.
It is incredibly naive to think that Imus was "just making an observation" in a "politically incorrect manner". Equating tattoos with gang membership? Making an observation that a basketball team was mostly black?
OK, I happen to agree that most of the outrage is manufactured. I, personally, am not "outraged". But the defense of Imus (couched as a defense of free speech or as a criticism of the hypocrisy of the people jumping in from "the left") seems to be just as much manufactured outrage, even though I "happen to" (Carlin reference, though slightly inapt) agree that free speech is essential and that a lot of people jumping in are hypocrites.
I was not aware of the jigaboo remark. That is just as big a story -- ok, bigger.
I don't know if it's a huge deal, but I think you're just incorrect about whether "nappy headed" should be considered a racial slur. In context, I certainly think it was. He was singling out the black players on the team for insult. By itself, "ho" would have done that, too, but that doesn't mean "nappy headed" was clean.
I'm not sure exactly what "gradually becoming a liberal" means, but maybe it is related to "hypocrisy coming from" so-called conservatives. It's not difficult to find hypocrisy among our "leaders" (elected or self-anointed). But, do you judge a situation based on whether hypocrites are exploiting it? That could be paralyzing in most situations, since hypocrites come out from left, right and in-between any time something "scandalous" happens. Your last sentence indicates to me that you see this already.
The bottom line for me is that "other people say worse things" is not a very compelling reason for Imus to keep his job. I would prefer to see the "marketplace of ideas" fire him, but it's naive to think that "pure market forces" are at work, by themselves, anywhere. I think the result here is that he was fired by the "marketplace of ideas", even if hypocrites helped engineer the workings of that marketplace. Yes, I know, even that sounds a little naive, but the alternative seems to be cynicism or nihilism or some other ism that I probably couldn't pull off.
Congratulations. You and Stephen Colbert are truly color blind. And it just so happens (George Carlin has a bit on "happens to be") that the only race-conscious person you can think of is black. It must be a problem with blacks, not whites. I agree that there are plenty of black racists. But anyone who thinks that racism problem is a problem with blacks is... well, pretty obviously white (except for the one counter-example that someone's going to pull outta their ass) and just as obviously delusional. I also agree that it is sad if, as you say, a co-worker defines himelf or herself by race. But I suspect that you might be the one doing just as much of the defining in this case.
You're also overlooking the fairly public campaign (led by blacks) to get rappers and other public figures to stop using the "n word". I'm pretty sure Jesse and Al have come out in support of that effort, but that doesn't make me a fan of their politics. I just don't bother trying to make them the focus of racial problems in America. They wouldn't be as effective in what they do if racism were not a problem. Yes, they exploit that fact. But you just exploited the fact that they exploit the situation, to make your own inane point that there's a reverse racist in your work place, without whom everyone would be singing Kum Bay Yah.
"If you had a device like this in your shoes when you walked, you would be able to generate your own small current to power small electronics," You just know that one of the early stories will be about some freak who connects this to a device shoved up his butt.
I'm not sure I like the emphasis on the value of the mob's danger (pretty sure Gandhi would want to substitute power for danger), but it's still a good read.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, I'll agree that identity theft is a potential cost. You seem to think the benefits are negligible while dismissing non-techies (at least senior ones) as "morons".
Evidence
Do you have any hard evidence that active networkers in general suffer more identity theft than non networkers? Anything specific to LinkedIn? Based on your post, I'd expect to see a long line of "morons" at the Social Security office and on soup lines ... maybe I missed the 60 Minutes episode on that.
The ethical way to do something that you know is illegal but think should be legal is to do it, report yourself to the proper authority, accept the punishment and use the experience to try to change the law that you think is wrong. Too many people think civil disobedience is a legal defense. It isn't.
I wasn't really thinking about whether it could happen, but whether it would happen. I don't see the same incentives for blocking or refusing traffic as for refusing to host it. Transport is essentially anonymous. No one's going to ask "what routers did that content use?". Yeah, I suppose some router owners could decide they wanted to reject certain traffic, but I thought that one of the basic features of the Internet is that when one node doesn't work, packets seek an alternate route to their destination.
Can I get a mod up for bersl2?
I think the way you phrase it deserves more exploration. The only truly public "space" is the transport. By that, I mean that I don't think we're seeing any reports of routers selectively denying packets of content that their owners don't like. At least, I haven't heard anything like that.
I can't believe this isn't obvious on /.
Free speech has never meant freedom to use someone else's podium. It's not free beer, to make an analogy that should find a natural home here.
The free press guaranteed by the First Amendment was never without cost -- and certainly never included the obligation to print something contrary to what the publisher wanted. We're all free -- at liberty -- to publish what we want to say on the web. We're all free to charge what the market will bear for that content. Unless one can show that Flickr operates a monopoly with the only means of publishing certain information (please!), I don't see what this has to do with free as in speech. It's just bitching about less than free as in beer.
Am I the only one profoundly disappointed by Google Docs? I tried both the word processor and the spreadsheet and found that they do not come close to my desktop software in the key area of WYSIWYG. Without that, mirroring all the standard buttons and functions of MS Office doesn't do much for me.
I do think that sharing is easier with Google Docs, but why would I want to share a doc that looks like crap?
Maybe it won't take a big fix, but it will take a fix before I'd consider switching.
Also, while Google Sites has some great templates and a pretty easy admin interface, they've got to enable true domain mapping so that I can get www.mydomain.com on Google Sites, and do something with their confusing rights management.
Well, I agree that age-appropriateness is important, but how can you teach critical thinking without teaching different thought models, one of which is the scientific method? K-12 is a broad range of intellectual development, and we should hope that somewhere along the way, critical thinking can develop. K, not so much. 12 better get it, or we're fucked.
Maybe a small percentage of students "get" the scientific method because we don't teach the method, just the findings. And if we teach the findings as Truth, then it's our own damn fault if they get confused and have a view that religion can answer the same questions with the same Truth.
Well, you're just incorrect about science. To the extent you believe it, you're no better than the creationists. Science is not about Truth with a capital T. It's about explaining the world as best we can. It may suggest a theoretical explanation of everything, but I think that's where scientists get into trouble.
When you restate the distinction as "how" vs. "why", you are making the same distinction between Truth and truth that I have made.
Moral or ethical worth can be considered for facts when they purport to be Truth, and not just true. The moon orbiting the earth may not seem an ethical question -- and I agree that it is not -- but the Catholic church certainly considered it an ethical issue when it persecuted Galileo.
My point about ethics was exactly that science doesn't get us there, and that we still have to make ethical judgments. I tend to agree that the ethical and moral judgments of religion are wrong, as in morally wrong. But science alone can't make that judgment.
You may be correct that the compromise won't work. Don't you think it's intellectually dishonest not to seek it?
I don't propose capitulating if the compromise won't work. I propose insisting that science and religion not be taught in the same class. The compromise is only to validate an idiot's right to be an idiot, just not to teach idiocy to my kids.
I don't see how I'm trolling. I wasn't defending religion. I agree with you that it doesn't confront issues *well*, or even credibly. But it does provides answers -- wrong as I think they may be. You don't win any debates by calling the other side stupid.
How is that trolling?
Science is also the product of "semi-savage cultures" -- or do you not know what "society" was like in Aristotle's time, or Newton's, for that matter? The Nazis produced some great science, too. It's not something I would defend.
Also, your identification of Western Religion as schlock is curious. Eastern religions have no better basis in rationality. And if you think all Eastern religions are peaceful, you haven't seen how lower castes are treated in Hindu culture.
Apologies if I am misquoting, but I'll go with Henri Theil: "models are to be used, not believed".
Real science isn't about belief. When scientists try to advocate for teaching any theory (yes, even gravity) as a belief system, they get sucked into a debate that is not winnable -- exactly what the creationists want.
The justification for teaching evolution or any science is that it works, not that it is True. Evolution doesn't have to explain everything; it just has to follow scientific methods and explain more than another scientific theory. We'll still have to deal with people who claim creationism or intelligent design is science, but so far we've done ok when that is the debate.
The morality or ethical worth of scientific "facts" has to be dealt with in a different framework -- one where religion is quite relevant. And we should be advocating for schools to teach religious studies -- somewhere other than in science class.
Maybe if we could at least get people to understand that science and religion deal with different phenomena, we could make some progress.
Yes, I know that eventually science confronts some of the same cosmic questions, but it does so in a completely different approach, one that cannot and should not seek Truth.
One more cost consideration for Virgin (ditto to all the previous comments about low net cost): I got a deal for $15 every three months with automatic top-up tied to my VISA debit card. True, that means I had to give them my credit card info, but it cut the already lowest cost in the universe by 25%, since I've never exceeded the minimum charge. How much lower than $5 / month can you go? FWIW, I'm carrying a balance; in other words, my "minutes" (not really, my "dollars") roll foward in perpetuity, which is a lot better than the rollover plans that I saw when I switched to Virgin two years ago. Every once in a while (2-3 years?), I'll have a month where I need more than just a few minutes, so I'm sure I'll use that balance eventually, and the effective cost will be far lower than the cost was when I had a minimal plan with (your provider name here), and I'd get reamed by the over-minute charges (way higher than Virgin's, which decline as you use more minutes per month).
Nope. By definition, your friend has the time, because that's what she chooses to do with it. You said it yourself. We all live in the same time space -- 24 hours in a day for all of us.
I'm simply not suggesting anything good or bad about spare cycles, but I think we would probably both agree that almost no job requires 100% cycle utilization. Very few things do, which is good, because I'm pretty sure human beings aren't built for that. The spare cycles characterization is still a useful description, if we can peel away the normative reactions everyone seems to have (positive or negative). For your friend, the spare cycles apparently exist in her sleep time. For others, it's during "work" time.
I have an old CPU with a faulty controller, so none of this seems to help me much. Cheers.
I think "I have time" is a necessary condition. Just as obvious to me, "don't know what to do with it" is definitionally false for anyone doing anything with their time, unless it is possible to occupy one's time completely by accident. ("I woke up and discovered I had written a C# library".)
I think the NeoSmart reaction was a little bit defensive (though a lot less defensive than half the responses here on
Regardless of the "true state of mind" of open source developers, bloggers, and even Solitaire players, hurra! for the spare cycles phenomenon. Without it, neither selfless soul nor degenerate slacker would have the capacity for open source or the next Great American novel (or for the next crappy blog post, take your pick).
In case my comment obscured it, I agree that your alternatives play a role, as do a lot of other factors, as diverse as human motivation in general.
Isn't your description the functional equivalent of boredom? I'm not sure how I would see any difference between a situation where you were just plain bored and a situation where you were nominally interested but still felt that your work assignment was crappy. I guess I see that you, yourself, could differentiate between the two, but to a third party I think the two situations look alike.
My take on Long Tail is that Chris Anderson uses the term "bored" as a sort of short-hand for the variety of emotional reactions to work that doesn't demand anything close to our full concentration or energy. The reactions might not all fit the description for everyone, but the practical result still might be the same: it's the application of the spare cycles that makes the difference. In other words, playing Solitaire doesn't have the same impact as blogging or working on open source code.
Didn't the term "internet" come from Inter-Network or Interconnected Network or something similar?
...
...
I'm sorry; is "network" too technical for layperson comprehension? The word itself is not technical, even if the subject of computer networks is
I don't think it was the word "tubes" that got "Interwebs Ted" into trouble. I've heard a lot of technical folks over the years describe bandwidth in terms like "pipes" to make an analogy with water flow. So, "tubes" is not so far off the mark. But, a network is not a series. That's not a technical distinction, and the context is what shows that Stevens is an idiot.
If the problem is the word "network", then maybe I don't understand the term "layperson", and I'm actually the one in trouble here
mod up for inadvertent double entendre!
Well, if "'regular' people weren't offended", then how did the politically motivated organization manage to succeed? Even if all the politically motivated organization succeeded in doing was to alert the politically motivated media, how would that have succeeded if "'regular' people weren't offended"? OK, maybe people really are offended only because they think they should be offended. I guess I'm not going to spend too much time worrying about that possibility, since I think it's quite reasonable to find the remarks offensive, no matter who publicized them.
In the quoted passage, I interpreted the word "only" as more significant than the word "black", and it was the only example of race-consciousness you chose to mention.
I don't think I was insinuating that you were racist, though I'll concede the point that I was not quite clear: I was insinuating that your focus on double standards, coupled with the one example you chose from your situation, lacks the historical perspective that racism by whites is the bigger problem. (Double-standards is the best short-hand I can think of at the moment; sorry if it's not quite an accurate summary of your original critique, with which I do not totally disagree.)
I also agree that racial-sensitivity training is over-done. I also think it is idiotic. Anyone who "needs" the seminar probably won't benefit from it. But, instead of losing respect for "minorities", maybe you could lose respect for "corporate bullshit", since that's what I would blame for the situation.
But I still think you sounded like Stephen Colbert in your GGP post.
Wait.
I'm white. I'm liberal. I'm not a racist.
But I didn't think it was funny, and I did think it was offensive. (I don't know about "seriously" offensive, since I don't take Imus or just about any public figure seriously.)
Does that mean I'm not liberal? Or does that mean I'm not white? (It couldn't be the other; just couldn't.)
Double standards do suck; I agree on that. But to think that they "just happen" is naive. There are pretty obvious reasons why Chris Rock is allowed to say the "n word" and I'm not. And I'm ok with those reasons. I think it's a good thing that some prominent black people are pushing to get people like Chris Rock and others to stop using the "n word". I don't think it would have been my place to start that letter-writing campaign. Double standards sometimes exist because the context is not neutral.
It is incredibly naive to think that Imus was "just making an observation" in a "politically incorrect manner". Equating tattoos with gang membership? Making an observation that a basketball team was mostly black?
OK, I happen to agree that most of the outrage is manufactured. I, personally, am not "outraged". But the defense of Imus (couched as a defense of free speech or as a criticism of the hypocrisy of the people jumping in from "the left") seems to be just as much manufactured outrage, even though I "happen to" (Carlin reference, though slightly inapt) agree that free speech is essential and that a lot of people jumping in are hypocrites.
I was not aware of the jigaboo remark. That is just as big a story -- ok, bigger.
I don't know if it's a huge deal, but I think you're just incorrect about whether "nappy headed" should be considered a racial slur. In context, I certainly think it was. He was singling out the black players on the team for insult. By itself, "ho" would have done that, too, but that doesn't mean "nappy headed" was clean.
I'm not sure exactly what "gradually becoming a liberal" means, but maybe it is related to "hypocrisy coming from" so-called conservatives. It's not difficult to find hypocrisy among our "leaders" (elected or self-anointed). But, do you judge a situation based on whether hypocrites are exploiting it? That could be paralyzing in most situations, since hypocrites come out from left, right and in-between any time something "scandalous" happens. Your last sentence indicates to me that you see this already.
The bottom line for me is that "other people say worse things" is not a very compelling reason for Imus to keep his job. I would prefer to see the "marketplace of ideas" fire him, but it's naive to think that "pure market forces" are at work, by themselves, anywhere. I think the result here is that he was fired by the "marketplace of ideas", even if hypocrites helped engineer the workings of that marketplace. Yes, I know, even that sounds a little naive, but the alternative seems to be cynicism or nihilism or some other ism that I probably couldn't pull off.
Congratulations. You and Stephen Colbert are truly color blind. And it just so happens (George Carlin has a bit on "happens to be") that the only race-conscious person you can think of is black. It must be a problem with blacks, not whites. I agree that there are plenty of black racists. But anyone who thinks that racism problem is a problem with blacks is ... well, pretty obviously white (except for the one counter-example that someone's going to pull outta their ass) and just as obviously delusional. I also agree that it is sad if, as you say, a co-worker defines himelf or herself by race. But I suspect that you might be the one doing just as much of the defining in this case.
You're also overlooking the fairly public campaign (led by blacks) to get rappers and other public figures to stop using the "n word". I'm pretty sure Jesse and Al have come out in support of that effort, but that doesn't make me a fan of their politics. I just don't bother trying to make them the focus of racial problems in America. They wouldn't be as effective in what they do if racism were not a problem. Yes, they exploit that fact. But you just exploited the fact that they exploit the situation, to make your own inane point that there's a reverse racist in your work place, without whom everyone would be singing Kum Bay Yah.
I'm not sure I like the emphasis on the value of the mob's danger (pretty sure Gandhi would want to substitute power for danger), but it's still a good read.
Yes, I think cut and paste is more relevant than bias here -- not that bias can't be a problem, but laziness makes bias ineffectual.