01-28-2009, 04:07 PM | #21 | |
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Jeremy Ryan Edit: Statistically speaking, however, CNN was the most watched cable news network for the inauguration!!
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I voted before it was cool!! - A wise young lad! Last edited by jryan; 01-28-2009 at 04:08 PM.. Reason: Add stats!! |
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01-28-2009, 04:15 PM | #22 | |
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01-28-2009, 04:19 PM | #23 | |
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Jeremy Ryan
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01-28-2009, 04:39 PM | #24 |
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01-28-2009, 04:40 PM | #25 | |
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01-28-2009, 04:42 PM | #26 |
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I'm in!!!!!! But we need to make it a Simon mall as we both use the Segway for mobility (I believe you have said you do as well, I apologize if I am wrong)! That way we may be able to avoid charges by bartering to not press civil charges against them!! Jeremy Ryan
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I voted before it was cool!! - A wise young lad! Last edited by jryan; 01-28-2009 at 04:49 PM.. |
01-28-2009, 04:45 PM | #27 |
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Fair enough! Do you believe that just something unusual will happen or do you believe that something will happen that will effect our lives? You know, I never believe any of this stuff, but it always intrigues me. I respect those that do and don't find them "crazy" like some will label them, but I am very interested!
Jeremy Ryan
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01-28-2009, 05:12 PM | #28 | |||
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Picking a subset of the many fine points worth of further discussion, to keep the discussion finite...
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"Transparent" means that anyone CAN, if they choose, look beyond the surface. While this is a Good Thing, it's not my point. My point is that education is a Very Good Thing, and our best defense. In some areas, such as medicine and biochemistry, Wikipedia is getting to be quite good. The motivation for corruption is absent, and that helps greatly. In other areas, it's a sideshow. Want to know about Obama? I wouldn't even think of looking there. Better off looking at his own web site -- it'd be less biased, and the bias would be more clear. Or McCain's. What better test bed for training kids to handle varying qualities of information? I quite agree that letting kids just grab stuff from Wikipedia blindly would be very, very bad. I'm just looking at it from a different direction -- the need to actually TEACH about the matter. You (and your son's teacher) see the problem. I see the teaching opportunity. Quote:
NO! Not even close. The most likely outcome would be extreme bias in all directions but the truth. You can conceive of that as being a bias away from the center, though that's not quite right. "Truth" doesn't live halfway between right and left. It's usually not even on a straight line between them. The best tool we have for arriving at truth is the scientific method. And the heart of the scientific method is to be suspicious of your information, and its interpretation whether from another source or from your own observations. Always being open to the possibilities of a different explanation, but always demanding evidence. Often, while the right and the left argue wildly, what is lost is that they both have good points that are being strangled. Big government causes big problems. Business left unregulated can cause big problems. Both true! And in each case, the party that talks about the cause, is frequently the biggest culprit. Look at spending and growth of the government sector under Republican control, as well as various matters intruding in private life. Look at the Democrats' record on financial regulation. I think a big part of the problem is the "talking head" phenomenon. Somebody says something -- and it gets reported as news. Statements, not facts. Not news. Unless it's news that the person making the statement is an idiot. I see that a lot on Wikipedia, too. Often as a result of trying to "inject balance". Balance is NOT about giving "both" sides equal access to making silly statements. Balance is about presenting the subtleties and complexities that make an issue controversial, and the differing values that lead to a different way of looking at it. (Or sometimes, one side is simply wrong (or more than one side) -- operating off incorrect information. Transparency helps understand when that happens.) Quote:
I think Wikipedia is a HUGE success. It is a repository for vast amounts of information which would not be collected anywhere, and there's no substitute. But it is ALSO a MASSIVE failure, for the reasons you cite. I hope someday it will evolve to better deal with such issues, but I don't know what that solution would look like. Whether you see the success or the failure depends on where you look, for it is indeed, both at the same time. On the whole, I am extremely positive about the effects of the internet, Google, and access to information in general. I think it is one of the most important developments in all of human history. At the same time, it's something I care a lot about (and think a lot about), and I really get ticked off when things don't meet my standards. That's what you were seeing as my "negativity" in the other thread. |
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01-28-2009, 08:36 PM | #29 | ||
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For time will Tell
I hadn't heard of the 2012 arguement, but was a bit concerned with the y2K problem wich was nothing to worry about afterwards it seems. What worried me the most was all the fear it produced and ultimately all the program debugging with businesses mostly from foreign programmers into very secure systems to prevent anything from happening at y2K. Which to me opens up a can of worms with some of those companies that made a trade off with very secure info in the hands of foreigners or perhaps unknown hackers and to what kind of stuff they got a hold of and what they could have possibly put into those systems to backfire or corrupt them at a later date.
Just like talking to someone at AOL help desk for instance. A lot of the times when I had a problem with my internet and would call them I would get a foreigner on the other end and either could not understand what they were saying or they would bounce my call around to someone else that also was a foreigner. I got tired of it and got rid of AOL for that reason. I have the same trouble with seeing new doctors who obviously are foreigners and can barely speak English but are specialists in this particular field. Yet I cannot understand them or their instructions and they quite frequently bounce around to different or new locations all the time. So if I cannot understand them, they obviously can't understand me and my health issues, so I refuse to go to them. What the heck is going on? But on to Bud's post: Quote:
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I liken this scenerio to watching a Star Trek series, and all the things that have been introduced in the series to help mankind and all the hardware and gadgets they created (or presented as real) . They were futuristic and things thought of for the future (predictions). And over the base time period of twenty years or so that the series has been on some of those gadgets and hardware and software, and stuff have come to fruitation and exist today as a result of that series. So in that respect I can see nostradamus predictions coming true, for time will tell
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01-28-2009, 08:52 PM | #30 |
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For many of us
Noon this past January 20th was when the world began again!
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Will W Hopper DCSEG Washington, DC, U.S.A. |
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