Pangloss

It's the "you're not patriotic if you attack Bush" thing all over again. The far right calls the far left anti-patriotic, and the far left starts screaming about abridgement of free speech. It's all a bunch of malarky, and it's pathetic to watch the New York Times, CNN, and other major outlets play along. Yeah, they sure are better than Fox News Channel. Sure they are. What's really dumb is taking anything Michael Kinsley says as objective. Rinse, repeat. (BTW, a slight addition has been made to the original post.) (cof)

Dak I've explained what the relevence is, you're just determined to make a huge leap of faith that the authors buried a major contrary admission deep in their paper. I've no idea why you would make such a leap unless you were just determined to see what you want to see. I also have an predisposition here, but at least I'm up front about it. There isn't even the slightest hint that what you're suggesting is true. ........ <--- Oh and hang on, let me throw extra dots on the end of my first paragraph to dismissively hint that all normal people must feel as I do. There we go. I've made a prima facie case here. The onus is on others to disprove it, not just assume it's false and hint that anyone who shares my concern must be an idiot.

That was interesting, thanks.

I'm a teacher in such a school. It's a small university that has an accredited bachelor's program in information technology, and all of our courses use Microsoft software almost exclusively -- networking, programming and databasing (the obvious exception being our forensics program). So I have a bias here, but I also have recently been through the exact same process that you're going through -- as a student! So I'll toss out my opinion and you can judge it for what it's worth. (That's what we're here for, right?) I got my bachelor's at the same school where I'm teaching. My background was about half Macintosh administration, about half PC/Microsoft, and a smattering of UNIX/Linux, over about a 20-year span, from administration to product management and consulting. While working on my BIT I had much the same concern that you have -- is my degree going to "lock me in" to only understanding and being able to work with Microsoft products? Am I getting the "bigger picture"? While I can't speak to your specific school, the thing you have to understand is that you're getting a Bachelor's degree. You are not there to get industry certification training! You're not there to learn "the Microsoft way"! If your school is too focused in that direction (and as I say I can't address that point), then the school may be doing something wrong. But the fact that they're using Microsoft materials does not necessarily stand in the way of achieving the goal of making you a well-rounded, well-educated Information Technology worker. For me the actual proof of this came when I went to attempt my Masters degree in Computer Information Systems (a wider and more diverse subject, admittedly a step down the intellectual ladder from Computer Science, but still a far cry above a management or educational degree). I chose to do this at a traditional, non-profit, extremely large and well-known university. I did this in part because I wanted to validate my first degree in the minds of those who might doubt it due to the source. But I was very concerned that my education would be insufficient to handle the material that was expected of me in graduate school. I need not have been concerned. I did 16 courses in one year and had ten As in a row before I stumbled on a B. More to the point, I had no trouble understanding ANY of the material, in spite of the fact that not one single course used Microsoft tools or languages. Everything was Java, Linux, etc. And my experience with Java prior to the program was really small -- I had to take a prerequisite course in Java programming, but that would have been the case if I had, say, gotten my Bachelor's twenty years earlier at a traditional school (as was the case with many of my classmates). Recently I started working on a PhD at that same highly respected institution in a prestigious security program. My classmates include employees of the Pentagon, the National Security Agency, the FBI, IBM Research, and, ironically, Microsoft. Intimidating! But also thrilling and challenging. But again, I don't know your school, and I don't know your personal level of knowledge or your experiences, and I don't know that your results will be like mine. I don't know if, for example, there might have been times when I saw a larger concept than what an instructor in that BIT program was telling me -- that could well have happened without my realizing it. Certainly some number of my classmates must have fallen behind/below my level of understanding and achievement -- that's just basic statistics, even if I were only an average student. But I think it's reasonable to speculate that you may be unduly concerned. It is possible to teach concepts with Microsoft materials without indoctrinating students and turning them into Microsoft automatons. It happens every day. One thing is for certain -- the fact that you're asking these questions can't be a bad thing. You're right to be concerned and you're right to be paying attention to your education. Keep doing that. It cannot help but pay off for you. Good luck!

Don't let the global warming proponents hear you say that. You'll be labelled a Denier before you can blink. Oh oh, sorry, sorry everyone, I should have realized that the entire planet Earth must have fewer variables than a human body. Yeah. I apologize. Dunno what I was thinking. It just kinda slipped out. I'll do 30 "hail gaia's", I promise.

The biggest problem with CF is the lack of advertising, IMO. More people would buy them if they were better known. A spate of ads showing frustrated lightbulb-changers switching to CF would do the trick.

Well the emphasis is on "united", I suppose, ala "United Kingdom". We just kinda conveniently ignore the "S" on the end. (grin) It used to be used in the plural, back before the civil war. If memory serves, it changed during the post-war reconstruction period, or perhaps later during the world wars. In a political/legal sense, the relevence is that the federal government has authority over state governments in most concerns, include protection of civil liberties. E.G. if a specific state passes a law prohibiting Mormons from practicing their religion, that law would be rendered null and void by the federal constitution, and the federal government has the specific power to enforce that freedom within that state. So the sense of unity is fairly justified, even if there are differences from state to state on various issues.

But it did happen. Lynching isn't ok just because it's black people doing it.

How efficient is nuclear power generation? (Another great example of an area where scientists/engineers have to fight their own ideological base.)

He does have a knack for it.

Oh that is too cool. Thanks!

Agreed, except I'd have called Friedman the unrealistic blowhard and Chomsky diabolically evil. (grin)

Apf. We can't even keep OJ Simpson in jail. If we're fascists we're pretty darn lousy at it. You guys squint too hard.

Why would the world end in 2012? Oh right, the 65th anniversary of Roswell. Forgot about that.

Oh no, you've created an interference pattern in the body politic! But was it caused by the issue passing through the LEFT-wing partisan blogger or the RIGHT-wing partisan blogger?!

Uh, yeah, whatever. Incidentally, speaking of "blockaded by China", I caught a blurb on the radio today about how China plans to have the largest navy in the world by 2012. I couldn't find anything online about it but I thought it was an interesting (and scary) thought.

Then why doesn't the study "show" that reaction times and visual accuity are more likely attributable to age than to political leaning? Answer: Because that wouldn't have been published.

I concur with Bascule's points above. I've felt for a while now that employer-sponsored healthcare was a nasty trap. And that's a trap that's getting worse -- I saw a story the other day about employer-sponsored mandatory psychiatric healthcare! Not happy filling out TPS reports in your cubicle? Get thee to mandatory psychiatric retraining, or else! And good luck getting healthcare from your next employer once they find out what happened at your last one. Of course the gushing news reporter missed the Matrix/Brazil/Clockwork Orange angle completely. (I knew I shoulda taken the red pill....)

I would assume that one category or the other MUST have at least a slightly higher number. That's obvious -- basic statistics. And as you say, Saryctos, it's quite possible that college influence has an impact here. What's that old addage about liberal when you're young and conservative when you get older and have a family to protect? I've always felt that there's a lot of truth in that notion. But that's not really what this thread is about. What I'm suggesting is that some people on the far left feel a need to prove that liberalism is the only possible ideology that a sufficiently intelligent person can possibly choose. The obvious correlary being that if you're conservative it has to be because you lack sufficient intelligence to be liberal. Not only is that notion ludicrous, and not only is it astonishing that people who ostensibly believe in the importance of scientific evidence and reasoning would follow that kind of mallarky (ok it's not astonishing, we see it every day right here at SFN -- just go check out the Pseudoscience board)..... .... but it strikes me as incredibly similar to the far-right need to prove the existence of GOD. There's something to this similarity, I believe. A desire for acceptance? A desire for objective confirmation? I don't know.

What I'm saying is that you're just throwing articles at people, and not explaining what you think those articles say or prove.

That either is, or should become (depending on the specifics), a legal matter, under the heading of contractual obligations and fraud. So I don't think her plan necessarily needs to address it, but it would be nice, I agree. ------------ Sure we do. I am. Look at it this way: The system will never be perfect, but people need medical treatment right now, and every single day. Apparently we cannot. Even if all inhibitions were removed from the system, the coverage problem would still exist for the most basic of economic reasons. (shrug) I think you're on the wrong track here. The cost to an individual for smoking or eating fatty foods is far greater than economic. But perhaps even more to the point, the result of those behaviors doesn't occur at the time, it occurs much later, after the damage has already been done. There's no way to learn from the mistake, and no way for the individual to repair the damage to MY business from having to replace/retrain HIS effort. So it's worth it for me, as a member of the larger society, to invest in that infrastructure, especially if that effort includes education about fatty foods and smoking (which WOULD produce a "learning" effect). It's not a matter of ideological preference, ParanoiA. It's an intelligent investment in our future. I'm not saying this is the ONLY intelligent way to pursue it, but it's not an unreasonable thing to do, and it's what people want, so I think it's the way to go. Just my two bits, of course.

Concur. People should come here to listen, not just to talk. This isn't Listen Radio, I mean Talk Radio. It's a discussion forum. So... DISCUSS. Don't just stamp the podium and demand that everyone listen because you're right and they're all wrong.

I agree there's an awful feedback loop between insurance coverage and rising healthcare costs -- you'd have to be an idiot not to see it. But I also think we've reached a period in human development where the interconnectedness caused by globalization and economy of scale have produced a situation whereby it benefits every individual to see that every other individual reaches a certain level of intellectual (educational) development and medical care. After all, it's not like I can run my factory all by myself, and somebody has to buy my goods. The market's saturated, my friend -- there are no more new ones to tame. The future is greater efficiency with the ones we got.

My hypothesis: Some far-left ideologues feel a compulsion to prove a connection between liberalism (though as Severian so neatly pointed out this morning, they really mean an enforced progressive agenda) and intelligence. And that this desire for a connection is fundamentally equivalent to the desire by some on the religious right to prove the existence of god through faux scientific evidence. By way of example, I offer this Slate opinion piece about a new scientific study published in this month's Nature attempting to connect liberalism and intelligence. I'd link the study itself, but it's under subscription so we can't read it without paying (how convenient). http://www.slate.com/id/2173965/?GT1=10436 The abstract from the study reads: Without the gobbledygook that reads "conservatives are rooted in inflexible, traditional thinking, and liberals are more open-minded and accepting of evidence".