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[ Posted May 6, 2015 By Bruce Byfield Submit Feedback » More Articles » Every since Linux first became popular, articles have been condemning its shortcomings. Hardly a month goes by without someone explaining what Linux lacks, or how it needs a particular feature, application, or service to be usable-- and, as often as not, the complaints are misguided.]

[ Posted May 6, 2015 By Bruce Byfield Submit Feedback » More Articles » Every since Linux first became popular, articles have been condemning its shortcomings. Hardly a month goes by without someone explaining what Linux lacks, or how it needs a particular feature, application, or service to be usable-- and, as often as not, the complaints are misguided.]

"In keeping with previous Congressional attacks on research, this one would target the social sciences at the NSF, cutting its budget by nearly half. Also targeted are the Earth sciences, which would take a 12 percent hit (a separate bill is contemplating even more drastic cuts to geoscience research at NASA). Environmental research at the Department of Energy would take a 10 percent cut, as would the Advanced Research Projects Agency‐Energy, a high-risk research body modeled on DARPA."

"In keeping with previous Congressional attacks on research, this one would target the social sciences at the NSF, cutting its budget by nearly half. Also targeted are the Earth sciences, which would take a 12 percent hit (a separate bill is contemplating even more drastic cuts to geoscience research at NASA). Environmental research at the Department of Energy would take a 10 percent cut, as would the Advanced Research Projects Agency‐Energy, a high-risk research body modeled on DARPA."

" How do you know if you are a potential candidate to become a Linux user? It's this simple: What's the first app you fire up after booting into your system? If you said 'browser', then you are a potential Linux user."

"There are lots of ways to kill an open source project, and there's plenty of blame to go around. Both project maintainers and users are culpable, one GitHub official believes."

"Sometimes looking for information on a Unix system is like looking for needles in haystacks. Even important messages can be difficult to notice when they're buried in huge piles of text. And so many of us are dealing with "big data" these days -- log files that are multiple gigabytes in size and huge record collections in any form that might be mined for business intelligence."

"from the because-fuck-you,-that's-why dept When pharmaceutical companies defend outrageously-priced medicines, they often claim these massive profit margins are there to help them recoup the money dumped into research and development. But that has nothing to do with the high prices. R&D costs are consistently lower than companies portray them."

"How the courts work There are different types of courts in England and Wales which cover between them all legal disputes, from defendants accused of crimes, consumers in debt, children at risk of harm, businesses involved in commercial disputes or individuals asserting their employment rights. The main three types of court are:"

"The global trend toward democratization of the last two decades has been accompanied by the resurgence of various politics of "identity/difference." From nationalist and ethnic revivals in the countries of east and central Europe to the former Soviet Union, to the politics of cultural separatism in Canada, and to social movement politics in liberal western-democracies, the negotiation of identity/difference has become a challenge to democracies everywhere. This volume brings together a group of distinguished thinkers who rearticulate and reconsider the foundations of democratic theory and practice in the light of the politics of identity/difference.\nIn Part One Jürgen Habermas, Sheldon S. Wolin, Jane Mansbridge, Seyla Benhabib, Joshua Cohen, and Iris Marion Young write on democratic theory. Part Two--on equality, difference, and public representation--contains essays by Anne Phillips, Will Kymlicka, Carol C. Gould, Jean L. Cohen, and Nancy Fraser; and Part Three--on culture, identity, and democracy--by Chantal Mouffe, Bonnie Honig, Fred Dallmayr, Joan B. Landes, and Carlos A. Forment. In the last section Richard Rorty, Robert A. Dahl, Amy Gutmann, and Benjamin R. Barber write on whether democracy needs philosophical foundations.\nThis is an excellent yext for someone interested in models of the public sphere. While all the authors are proponents of the deliberative model of democracy (as opposed to, for instance, the liberal, interest-based, technocratic, communitarian, or civic-republican) many of them place their arguments in the context of other models. So, the book reads like a symposium of like-minded people, rather than like a rally of true believers.\nAlmost all of the essays are accessible to a generalist, but several really stand out (especially those by Benhabib, Fraser, and Young)."

"When does the wisdom of crowds give way to the meanness of mobs? In the 1990s, Jaron Lanier was one of the digital pioneers hailing the wonderful possibilities that would be realized once the Internet allowed musicians, artists, scientists and engineers around the world to instantly share their work. Now, like a lot of us, he is having second thoughts. Mr. Lanier, a musician and avant-garde computer scientist - he popularized the term "virtual reality" - wonders if the Web's structure and ideology are fostering nasty group dynamics and mediocre collaborations. His new book, "You Are Not a Gadget," is a manifesto against "hive thinking" and "digital Maoism," by which he means the glorification of open-source software, free information and collective work at the expense of individual creativity."

Still 30-below! lol

it's a balmy -11 now, breaking out the beach shorts tomorrow

"Would you be better off paying for online newspapers like this one? Should you feel guilty about downloading free music? Is the Web's "information-wants-to-free" culture hurting writers, musicians and the rest of the "digital peasants," as Jaron Lanier calls us, now providing unpaid content to be exploited by the "lords of the clouds" like Google? In my Findings column, I discuss Mr. Lanier's new book, "You Are Not A Gadget," a manifesto decrying the Web's effect on individual creativity. (You can see excerpts of his criticism at Edge and at Cato Unbound.) Mr. Lanier mentions this newspaper as one of the victims as well as the promoters of the Web's ideology. "The New York Times," he writes, "promotes so-called open digital politics on a daily basis even though that ideal and the movement behind it are destroying the newspaper and all other newspapers. It seems to be a case of journalistic Stockholm syndrome." Mr. Lanier also faults himself: "

""This is a deeply thought-provoking book about the dramatic changes we must make to save the planet from financial madness" - Naomi Klein. Opening with Oscar Wilde's observation that "nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing," Patel shows how our faith in prices as a way of valuing the world is misplaced. He reveals the hidden ecological and social costs of a hamburger (as much as $200), and asks how we came to have markets in the first place. Both the corporate capture of government and our current financial crisis, Patel argues, are a result of our democratically bankrupt political system. If part one asks how we can rebalance society and limit markets, part two answers by showing how social organizations, in America and around the globe, are finding new ways to describe the world's worth. If we don't want the market to price every aspect of our lives, we need to learn how such organizations have discovered democratic ways in which people, and not simply governments, can play a crucial role in deciding how we might share our world and its resources in common. This short, timely and inspiring book reveals that our current crisis is not simply the result of too much of the wrong kind of economics. While we need to rethink our economic model, Patel argues that the larger failure beneath the food, climate and economic crises is a political one. If economics is about choices, Patel writes, it isn't often said who gets to make them. The Value of Nothing offers a fresh and accessible way to think about economics and the choices we will all need to make in order to create a sustainable economy and society."

Hmmm... I enjoyed this article. My experience of the extended mind is that it is not enclosed in a groups collective intelligence but part of the morphogenic field. Our global brain. We can access any time. There is one piece he mentions about: But there's also the more speculative possibility, not mentioned by Woolley et al, of enhancing the social sensitivity of group members. What would happen if group members took, for instance, a pharmaceutical of some sort that enabled them to be more socially sensitive towards each other? What if some sophisticated technology were available that augmented the individual's ability to better listen to the ideas of others - to let others have time to speak and to be intellectually open to opposing views? I began to test this in group settings with a good amount of success. It is difficult to measure though. I have tested with flower essences. http://www.laviedelarose.com one particular called shasta daisy which supports individuals and groups to achieve an ever deepening sense of community and experience of Oneness. My seminars are mostly about mind (topics like socialmedia, collective intelligence, new economy) yet I try to make them integral and include other body/mind, spirit. We do meditate. In the seminars where I don´t use the flowers there is a different feeling to it. Its very difficult to describe. Its a sense of a field.

[...Gleick: When people say that the Internet is going to make us all geniuses, that was said about the telegraph. On the other hand, when they say the Internet is going to make us stupid, that also was said about the telegraph. I think we are always right to worry about damaging consequences of new technologies even as we are empowered by them. History suggests we should not panic nor be too sanguine about cool new gizmos. There's a delicate balance. ...]

"Half a billion people around the world spend more than 20 hours a week "wearing" avatars, that is, using digital representations of themselves. Did you know that a virtual representation of a politician could be more convincing than the politician himself? That your heart beats just as fast when your girlfriend winks at you from your computer screen as when she walks into the room? That if you make your onscreen surrogate mimic your friend's head movements, he's more likely to do what you say? Within three years, many online interactions will not simply involve passages of text typed on a keyboard but will instead be rich exchanges involving sophisticated representations of ourselves. Those digital beings are called avatars, and today at least half a billion people around the world are routinely socializing through them over the Internet, for example in online games."

"Open is about sharing and collaboration. It's the idea that "we" is more powerful, more rewarding and fulfilling than "I". I can't promise jobs, but I do know that open is becoming very big. Governments and funders are pushing the open agenda, even though academics are generally uninterested or seriously self-interested."

"Wipe Out Humans - Bill Gates - Vaccines are "Best Way" to Depopulate Planet =========================================================================== The mad, mad, mad, mad agenda of the super-rich - wipe out most of humanity, to make the earth into a giant park for them to live in. Fantasy? Decide for yourself."

"Wipe Out Humans - Bill Gates - Vaccines are "Best Way" to Depopulate Planet =========================================================================== The mad, mad, mad, mad agenda of the super-rich - wipe out most of humanity, to make the earth into a giant park for them to live in. Fantasy? Decide for yourself."

"When you take a moment and look around at the world, things can appear pretty messed up. Take 5 or 10 minutes and watch the 6 o'clock news. Chances are, the entire time, all you are going to see is war, conflict, death, illness, etc. Sure, ..."

"The first lesson from her work is that it's important to get the value proposition correct. Many of the nonprofits aren't delivering value to people, and the thing that will get people engaged will be if it's valuable to them. For-profits are nailing the value proposition for consumers, which is why consumers are flocking to them."

[... So armed with some information and just as much misinformation, I set out to study the options open to us Linux users. I mean, in my heart of hearts, I didn't think that virus and malware threats are near as prevalent on Linux as they are on Windows, but it turns out that several antivirus companies did not agree, to the point that they created antivirus programs for Linux too. ...]