Month: August 2015

Source: ProgrammingSucks

 

Every word is truth, and it’s getting worse exponentially.

 

Don’t drink and derive, kids

Source: Sane people, I BEG you: Stop the software defined moronocalypse • The Register

and also: Rise up against Oracle class stupidity and join the infosec strike

 

By their very nature, mobile phones make telephony seem unreliable.

I question the word “seem”.  Modern telephony is unreliable.

An excellent essay on why we don’t make phone calls any more, without even mentioning Automatic Voice Response systems.  Everything that Prof. Bogost describes here explains why we don’t call our friends so much any more, and AVR on top of all that explains why we hate, hate, hate to have to call any business about anything any more.

Source: How Portability Ruined the Telephone – The Atlantic

We must not be hypocrites. The liberal ethos, after all, claims a far higher degree of intellectual flexibility and open mindedness than rigid, panicky conservatism. It’s what keeps the Left sane, dynamic, (mostly) free of nutball extremists, and (mostly) connected to reality, while the Right gets the unhinged, psychotic, racist comeuppance it so very much deserves.

Source: Have anti-GMO activists gone off the rails? – Notes & Errata by Mark Morford

Only when you hit 60 can you put yesterday’s worries behind you, the writer discovers.

Source: I’m Too Old for This – The New York Times

Mostly nothing, but the very last few lines tells the story:

We’re living in a hateful, argumentative time. To realize that, I realize it was a rare era I lived through with the peace and love movement.

Source: Country Joe McDonald – SFGate

They apparently think they’re fighting a real war — against drugs.

Source: New documents show the surprising reasons local cops want vehicles designed for war – Vox

Source: Should search algorithms be moral? A conversation with Google’s in-house philosopher – Quartz

Google’s search engine—and that of Bing, DuckDuckGo, and most of the other tools out there—is indifferent to truth.

Indifference to the truth happens to be part of the established philosophical definition of bullshit. “Bullshit is grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true,” wrote Princeton philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt in his seminal 1986 paper on communication theory, “On Bullshit.” “It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are—that I regard as of the essence of bullshit.”

Source: A Cop Killed A White Teen And The #AllLivesMatter Crowd Said Nothing

“Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that white Americans have, for the most part, collectively shrugged at police violence. Polls have repeatedly shown that white people are much more likely to have confidence in the police, suggesting that they’re either more willing to believe that officers are justified in their actions or that the system can be trusted to sort it out if they’re not. […] speaking up about Hammond now would create a conflict for many of those people”

The Counted

 

 

 

Source: Kansas Underfunded Education And Cut Tenure. Now It Can’t Find Enough Teachers To Fill Classrooms.

I’ve been embarrassed to admit I was educated in Kansas ever since they made the national news for denying evolution.  Back when I lived in Kansas, the education system there was well above average.  But that was a long time ago.  Sad song.