Maybe not in the old-fashioned sense of government censors using black tape and scissors on newspapers and magazines.
We're much more sophisticated now. The government doesn't need to use such heavy-handed tactics, not least because government does not necessarily represent the most powerful institutions anymore.
Instead, we have just a few very powerful information 3 and 4 letter sources and wire services with access to most of the audience. Other viewpoints don't need to be actively suppressed, but rather ignored, just left to wither amidst a small audience of fringe elements. If the fringe elements have a valid point or important information it won't circulate too far. It will be drowned out.
Are you even away of what was going on in Europe for the 2 millenia before 1776.
Most Americans are generally unaware of what history taught Europe in that time.
That suppressing honest scientific inquiry kept technical progress to a minimum, but helped to enforce the status quo.
Serfs can be made to work for generations for the lord of the manor, owning nothing and forever indebted.
Harsh persecution of non-state religions can fester animosity between people that lasts generations.
Distracting dumb peasants is easier and makes for easier government than convincing smart peasants that you're acting in the best intereste of their welfare.
The founders of America attempted to safeguard the new nation from those problems as best they could see at the time.
They did a reasonably good job, had some luck due to circumstances, but couldn't foresee every new development (corporations) or the consequences of existing problems (i.e., slavery, displaced indigenous peoples).
The institution normally monitors elections in third world countries in transition,
Many observers of long term socio-economic trends in the United States regarding wealth and income distribution have indicated the U.S. is in transition towards a neo-feudal third world country, whe
Russia beat us to that objective by a couple of decades, but we'll make up for loss ground.
Soon enough our budget deficits and social welfare policies such as Social Security, Food Stamps, etc. will come under the harsh guidelines of the IMF and World Bank if we want the bailout that we're certain to require if U.S. debt levels keep increasing.
Carter's presidency, while marked with practical difficulties (like his micromanagement of White House tennis court schedules), will be remembered 100 years from now as
more moral and principled, especially after the Watergate scandal ridden presidencies of Nixon and, to a lesser extent, Ford.
Carter's stand on human rights violations by tinhorn dictators in the 3rd world was particularly admirable. And, yes, foreigners I met overseas in the late 1970's were impressed with Carter.
Every president since Carter has sacrificed moral principles to greater and various degrees, usually to friendly financial interests, be they Marc Rich or Enron.
You'll be able to buy cheap plastic USB key look-a-alikes that are non-functional but look like the real thing at any drug store checkout counter for $1.99.
Third graders will start wearing them to school.
People will be able to buy decals to "upgrade" their USB key.
Think of how much respect you'll get walking into DefCon with a USB key that has something like 32 GB written on the side of it.
Or, better still, an extra long manly connector that suggests you are a dude that taps into that data stream directly.
And, just like the lowrider cars with neon license plate frames, night visibility of USB keys will be enhanced by a soft purple glow around the edges.
Or like the rotating wheel covers that make a stopped car look like it's moving, USB keys will be equipped with gyroscopic stabilizers so that even when you're dancing with one around your neck it will move "as if it were subject to some mysterious force" - "Yeah, baby!"
Many people can point to severe problems in the current and past foreign policy of the United States.
How exactly do you propose to best shift the United States from its current mess to a better foreign policy in a realistic way, recognizing that decades of resentment and anti-U.S. sentiment in the world at large won't go away overnight?
No update for Win2000 which is still used by my 50000-employees company ?
Yes, Win2K is a perfectly fine OS that could be patched and upgraded and serve customers well for years to come - if that's what Microsoft wanted to do.
It's not part of their business plan for customers to sit happy on the same OS for years at a time.
Don't give up hope though. Win 2K represents something of a watershed where MS decided to give customers what they wanted in terms of reliability and stability (as compared to previous OS products).
Maybe with the pressure from FOSS they'll listen to customers enough to give them modularity and complete, free and open specifications for file formats, network protocols, API, application behavior, file formats (even if they get to hide their superduper implementation).
IOW, customers feel better if you don't close and lock all the exit doors before the show begins.
Most tragic of the ranks of the lowest paying disciplines being "Elementary Education".
There's a certain ugly self-consistency of a society that devalues elementary educators and psychologists, the latter help people become aware and correct of their dysfunctional views of the world they acquired in childhood.
make: *** No rule to make target `bootstrap_society'. Stop.
If any other country were to impose such invasive measures on visiting US citizens, the howls of outrage that anyone should dare to fingerprint Americans
Of course, the professor has a vested interest in increasing the number of CS students and also in getting more research funding for CS projects - which is to be expected given where his bread is buttered.
He does make good points about the long term consequences of turning out fewer CS grads per capita than other countries, and about how younger researchers deserve a chance to do independent research without laboring as indentured post-docs under the wing of less creative mentors.
But trying to encourage more students to go into CS and IT right now is not necessarily as good a plan as trying to improve the education level of future CS students that are only 0-10 years old right now.
Supply and demand say that the price will go down.
The free market works great if
there are many buyers and many sellers in the market,
buyers or sellers don't collude with one another (effectively reducing the number of buyers or sellers), and
there is free exchange of truthful information and a dearth of powerful and effective deceptive information.
There are various examples where those conditions are not met.
There are also a few other singular cases where the elasticity in the market can become strained, such as healthcare provision. If you're hurtin', you might be willing to pay a lot to feel better, not die, etc.
On the LCD issue, I'm looking at big LCD TVs, like the Sharp Aquos 45". I like the native hi-res and the tolerably good pixel response time, but they're only just beginning to come onto the market and I'm not sure how expensive they are - the mentioned projected intial retail prices around US$10K are too steep for me, but if the price goes down 30% I'd probably get one. Samsung also has a big LCD in this size range.
Arguably the government can use the data to do a better job of investigating and preventing terrorism.
And so it should.
But, the current policies are being driven forward with that single-minded objective with no consideration whatsoever given to the preservation of the rights and liberties that have made America a desirable place to be a citizen.
Sure we can defeat terrorism - but who wants to live in a police state?
The government should institute the recommendation of the 9/11 commission to create a truly independent advisory panel to oversee these unprecedented encroachments into citizens rights to insure there are no abuses and that the data is used for legitimate law enforcement purposes only.
James Fallows recently wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly about the debate styles of Kerry and Bush.
Some interesting highlights of the article were that:
Neither candidate has really been "defeated" in a debate thus far.
Bush's speaking style has changed over the past 15 years or so. In the past he spoke in a much more coherent, less-broken fashion.
Despite the appearance of ignorance, Bush is sharper than he comes across.
Bush relies on coming into the debate as a favored underdog. As with his debate with the sharp and expressive Ann Richards for governor showed, the expectations built up for Bush were as low as a snake's chin. If he even showed up for the debate people wanted to give him a B+ just because he managed to be there.
Bush's temper can flare up and he can become angry under certain rare circumstances (some Republican primary debate with McCain in the mid atlantic states brought this out, IIRC.)
An interesting article.
I'm much more interested to see the VEEP debates. Cheney, the de facto Head of Government (Bush is the US Head of State), is intelligent and ruthless. Edwards' southern drawl might lull people to believe he's just a hick, but he's one of the sharpest trial lawyers in the country.
As far as I'm concerned, the Presidential debates will be minor league spat compared to the blood and wounds that the contenders in the VP debates will inflict.
Moderator: Targeted specific question about exact concrete details that you would do the next four years in your administration.
Candidate: Mom and apple pie generalities that everyone recognizes as good, that I'm for and, by implication, my opponent is against.
This recipe will be followed by both Bush and Kerry. People will watch for visual and audio cues that help them emotionally identify with what they already believe and cheer and boo as if they're at a sporting event.
why is God's name brought up when it comes to Foreign Policy and Foreign Aid decisions?
Because once it is made clear that God intends a particular purpose, all arguments end. There is no debate, no worrying about complicated details of motivation or of consequence. All around, it's the easier to justify any action, political or otherwise.
That's all great if that stated position really is God's will. But anyone that reads the Bible knows that throughout history, people have been afflicted with false prophets: people too willing to preface their own agenda with "Thus saith the Lord..."
God might be infallible, but people aren't. I find too many people ready to accept other people's interpretation of what God's will happens to be in a particular situation.
Too many Christians accept what others tell them instead of doing the hard work of praying and meditating on the scriptures to determine God's will for themselves.
Just because someone calls themself Christian and generally seems to be a pretty good person doesn't necessarily mean that they're speaking or doing God's will.
That goes for our leaders and it goes for ourselves.
Converting visible light or beyond into electrical signals - I'm not sure what carbon nanotube antennae offer over established solid state devices based on Si or the III-V compounds, but perhaps they might be more useful in creating biologically compatible prosthetic eyes.
You can glue together all those highly efficient numerical kernels written in FORTRAN, C or C++ with a nice object oriented scripting language. No need to go through more off-road stress testing of a new Java implementation of SomeOldAlgorithm with all the quirky corner cases that people have already hit using the crust old code in languages no one wants to learn anymore.
An interesting chunk of history, the details of which I was unaware until I recently rented Fog of War.
Now that the DVD is out on rental, it's really worth picking up and seeing this historical narrative with McNamara.
At one point he relates how he discovered, a couple of weeks after JFK got into office, that the missile gap didn't exist. A sticky political situation at the time.
Slashdot Mirror
but in some ways there is no censorship.
Maybe not in the old-fashioned sense of government censors using black tape and scissors on newspapers and magazines.
We're much more sophisticated now. The government doesn't need to use such heavy-handed tactics, not least because government does not necessarily represent the most powerful institutions anymore.
Instead, we have just a few very powerful information 3 and 4 letter sources and wire services with access to most of the audience. Other viewpoints don't need to be actively suppressed, but rather ignored, just left to wither amidst a small audience of fringe elements. If the fringe elements have a valid point or important information it won't circulate too far. It will be drowned out.
No. That's a lot of damn work.
So, you can actually pay admission to see live theatre productions in many cities if you don't want to be a direct part of the production process.
This helps aspiring performers and stage hands that like this kind of thing to perfect their skills.
Live performance is really special, much better IMHO than something projected on a flat screen.
Go support your local live performers!
I doubt that a lot of people will abandon what has been hammered into them for years in favor of an open standard.
Quite so.
The meaning of a free, open and complete standard is lost on most people.
For them, MS is the standard because, well, "...because it's what everybody uses, right?"
Are you even away of what was going on in Europe for the 2 millenia before 1776.
Most Americans are generally unaware of what history taught Europe in that time.
The founders of America attempted to safeguard the new nation from those problems as best they could see at the time.
They did a reasonably good job, had some luck due to circumstances, but couldn't foresee every new development (corporations) or the consequences of existing problems (i.e., slavery, displaced indigenous peoples).
The institution normally monitors elections in third world countries in transition,
Many observers of long term socio-economic trends in the United States regarding wealth and income distribution have indicated the U.S. is in transition towards a neo-feudal third world country, whe
Russia beat us to that objective by a couple of decades, but we'll make up for loss ground.
Soon enough our budget deficits and social welfare policies such as Social Security, Food Stamps, etc. will come under the harsh guidelines of the IMF and World Bank if we want the bailout that we're certain to require if U.S. debt levels keep increasing.
Isn't it the duty of every good citizen to try to influence how others vote?
Maybe every politician, too?
While I was graduate student in the 1980's there were a bunch of the most powerful Cray supercomputers at Los Alamos running this OS.
I think there was even a variant, LTSS that was run at Livermore.
Those were the days of using line editors over 300 baud modems.
Carter
Carter's presidency, while marked with practical difficulties (like his micromanagement of White House tennis court schedules), will be remembered 100 years from now as more moral and principled, especially after the Watergate scandal ridden presidencies of Nixon and, to a lesser extent, Ford.
Carter's stand on human rights violations by tinhorn dictators in the 3rd world was particularly admirable. And, yes, foreigners I met overseas in the late 1970's were impressed with Carter.
Every president since Carter has sacrificed moral principles to greater and various degrees, usually to friendly financial interests, be they Marc Rich or Enron.
What's next:
John Dean argues we already have a Head of State (George W. Bush) and a Head of Government (Dick Cheney) and that they serve as co-presidents.
It's certainly enough for me!
Many people can point to severe problems in the current and past foreign policy of the United States.
How exactly do you propose to best shift the United States from its current mess to a better foreign policy in a realistic way, recognizing that decades of resentment and anti-U.S. sentiment in the world at large won't go away overnight?
No update for Win2000 which is still used by my 50000-employees company ?
Yes, Win2K is a perfectly fine OS that could be patched and upgraded and serve customers well for years to come - if that's what Microsoft wanted to do.
It's not part of their business plan for customers to sit happy on the same OS for years at a time.
Don't give up hope though. Win 2K represents something of a watershed where MS decided to give customers what they wanted in terms of reliability and stability (as compared to previous OS products).
Maybe with the pressure from FOSS they'll listen to customers enough to give them modularity and complete, free and open specifications for file formats, network protocols, API, application behavior, file formats (even if they get to hide their superduper implementation).
IOW, customers feel better if you don't close and lock all the exit doors before the show begins.
which factcheck.org has been doing, too. FAIR is worth looking at, too.
The other important function of blogs is to show the pulse of public opinion in areas that are not necessarily driven by large media outlets.
Go to any of the three letter network TV news sites and you'll see a lot of similarity. Consensus? Of what kind?
One of the most important sources of bias in news reporting is deciding what even qualifies as a news story.
Bloggers get to decide for themselves.
Most tragic of the ranks of the lowest paying disciplines being "Elementary Education".
There's a certain ugly self-consistency of a society that devalues elementary educators and psychologists, the latter help people become aware and correct of their dysfunctional views of the world they acquired in childhood.
If any other country were to impose such invasive measures on visiting US citizens, the howls of outrage that anyone should dare to fingerprint Americans
You mean, like Brasil?:)
OK, so maybe my tinfoil hat is wrapped on a little bit too tightly...
But isn't it strange to put this story side by side with CNET's interview of Professor James Foley's warning about too few people going into computer science related studies.
Of course, the professor has a vested interest in increasing the number of CS students and also in getting more research funding for CS projects - which is to be expected given where his bread is buttered.
He does make good points about the long term consequences of turning out fewer CS grads per capita than other countries, and about how younger researchers deserve a chance to do independent research without laboring as indentured post-docs under the wing of less creative mentors.
But trying to encourage more students to go into CS and IT right now is not necessarily as good a plan as trying to improve the education level of future CS students that are only 0-10 years old right now.
Supply and demand say that the price will go down.
The free market works great if
There are various examples where those conditions are not met.
There are also a few other singular cases where the elasticity in the market can become strained, such as healthcare provision. If you're hurtin', you might be willing to pay a lot to feel better, not die, etc.
On the LCD issue, I'm looking at big LCD TVs, like the Sharp Aquos 45". I like the native hi-res and the tolerably good pixel response time, but they're only just beginning to come onto the market and I'm not sure how expensive they are - the mentioned projected intial retail prices around US$10K are too steep for me, but if the price goes down 30% I'd probably get one. Samsung also has a big LCD in this size range.
Anyone out there with either of those?
Arguably the government can use the data to do a better job of investigating and preventing terrorism.
And so it should.
But, the current policies are being driven forward with that single-minded objective with no consideration whatsoever given to the preservation of the rights and liberties that have made America a desirable place to be a citizen.
Sure we can defeat terrorism - but who wants to live in a police state?
The government should institute the recommendation of the 9/11 commission to create a truly independent advisory panel to oversee these unprecedented encroachments into citizens rights to insure there are no abuses and that the data is used for legitimate law enforcement purposes only.
What if the continent of Australia goes on a drinking binge...
Yeah, "if" - where's my Fosters?.
James Fallows recently wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly about the debate styles of Kerry and Bush.
Some interesting highlights of the article were that:
- Neither candidate has really been "defeated" in a debate thus far.
- Bush's speaking style has changed over the past 15 years or so. In the past he spoke in a much more coherent, less-broken fashion.
- Despite the appearance of ignorance, Bush is sharper than he comes across.
- Bush relies on coming into the debate as a favored underdog. As with his debate with the sharp and expressive Ann Richards for governor showed, the expectations built up for Bush were as low as a snake's chin. If he even showed up for the debate people wanted to give him a B+ just because he managed to be there.
- Bush's temper can flare up and he can become angry under certain rare circumstances (some Republican primary debate with McCain in the mid atlantic states brought this out, IIRC.)
An interesting article.I'm much more interested to see the VEEP debates. Cheney, the de facto Head of Government (Bush is the US Head of State), is intelligent and ruthless. Edwards' southern drawl might lull people to believe he's just a hick, but he's one of the sharpest trial lawyers in the country.
As far as I'm concerned, the Presidential debates will be minor league spat compared to the blood and wounds that the contenders in the VP debates will inflict.
Moderator: Targeted specific question about exact concrete details that you would do the next four years in your administration.
Candidate: Mom and apple pie generalities that everyone recognizes as good, that I'm for and, by implication, my opponent is against.
This recipe will be followed by both Bush and Kerry. People will watch for visual and audio cues that help them emotionally identify with what they already believe and cheer and boo as if they're at a sporting event.
why is God's name brought up when it comes to Foreign Policy and Foreign Aid decisions?
Because once it is made clear that God intends a particular purpose, all arguments end. There is no debate, no worrying about complicated details of motivation or of consequence. All around, it's the easier to justify any action, political or otherwise.
That's all great if that stated position really is God's will. But anyone that reads the Bible knows that throughout history, people have been afflicted with false prophets: people too willing to preface their own agenda with "Thus saith the Lord..."
God might be infallible, but people aren't. I find too many people ready to accept other people's interpretation of what God's will happens to be in a particular situation.
Too many Christians accept what others tell them instead of doing the hard work of praying and meditating on the scriptures to determine God's will for themselves.
Just because someone calls themself Christian and generally seems to be a pretty good person doesn't necessarily mean that they're speaking or doing God's will.
That goes for our leaders and it goes for ourselves.
Converting visible light or beyond into electrical signals - I'm not sure what carbon nanotube antennae offer over established solid state devices based on Si or the III-V compounds, but perhaps they might be more useful in creating biologically compatible prosthetic eyes.
One step further along that road: consider using Python to glue together old pieces.
If Java was a step toward elegant simple expression away from C++, the Python is yet another wonderful step in that direction. The URL is for Bruce Eckel's site: he of the Thinking in {C++,Java} book series fame.
You can glue together all those highly efficient numerical kernels written in FORTRAN, C or C++ with a nice object oriented scripting language. No need to go through more off-road stress testing of a new Java implementation of SomeOldAlgorithm with all the quirky corner cases that people have already hit using the crust old code in languages no one wants to learn anymore.
He claimed during the 1960 presidential campaign
An interesting chunk of history, the details of which I was unaware until I recently rented Fog of War.
Now that the DVD is out on rental, it's really worth picking up and seeing this historical narrative with McNamara.
At one point he relates how he discovered, a couple of weeks after JFK got into office, that the missile gap didn't exist. A sticky political situation at the time.