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Politics Central / Conspiracy Theories / The Authoritarians
« on: February 21, 2007, 07:19:34 PM »
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It pleases me to announce that Prof. Bob Altemeyer, of the University of Manitoba, has published his new book, the Authoritarians, in PDF format, available free, here: http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/.
Why would you care?
Depends on how well you understand neocons -- which, for most, would be barely-verging-on-not-at-all. Unless, of course, you ARE a neocon, in which case the work will have you screaming 'victim' like a pig in a pizza oven.
"The Authoritarians" was written via the prompting of former White House Counsel John Dean, who worked with Dr. Altemeyer in writing "Conservatives Without Conscience". Prof. Altemeyer's work continues examination of the authoritarian personality, and follows the line of inquiry pursued in such famous studies as the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Experiment. |
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The Tech Section / Tech News / Commentary / Well, _duh_!
« on: November 01, 2006, 03:13:45 AM »
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http://tinyurl.com/ykg4lz
Smart move, Microsofties, and tres overdue.
MS has been taking it in the shorts from Linux in the server market for some time. Use of PHP (and laziness) are what keep me from using IIS instead of Apache for Win32. While creating sites and writing code are more convenient using a sandbox, page loads on a Windows box crawl like Morrowind: Oblivion on an S3 Virge and Limbaugh-esque quantities of Oxycontin, and that's AVOIDING IIS.
AMAZING that MS is optimizing performance by ELIMINATING a software layer (POSIX) for a change.
Maybe MS is about to get start getting things right again... Nah.
(This post paid for by Concerned Citizens for Literary Inflection Through RANDOM Capitalization, but is not affiliated with nor endorsed by ECA) |
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Water Cooler / Entertainment / Why can't Johnny read (offline)?
« on: August 19, 2006, 10:49:26 PM »
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While it's probably my own damned fault for trying to read crap (Terry Pratchett, Stephen King) I note that I've amassed a pile of novels lately that I've started and can't seem to finish.
I do a fair amount of reading on-line, however -- easily an hour a day, and that's only if I don't have access to a computer, in which case a slow day is two to three hours.
Lately, though, I've begun to suspect that I simply have a hard time reading anything that isn't indexed by Google. While I know a great many people CLAIM they don't like reading in a browser, is there anybody else who finds themselves in the middle of a book and wondering if the paper all came out of the same forrest, tree, recycling bin, etc.? |
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Water Cooler / Tasteless or Not Tasteless / My widdle angel-bear...
« on: June 24, 2006, 05:30:49 PM »
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To paraphrase the Shadowrun manual:
"Dead is dead. Parts is parts. Dead guys is parts."
So what about dead babies?
http://www.huggableurns.com/
http://tinyurl.com/ltjmm
Should it shock anyone that the story was published by the Detroit Free Press?
This is only slightly more tasteful than the series of still-born babies thier mother had photo-shopped into angels that appeared briefly on Something Awful.
Myself, I'd tend to think I'm not THAT easily disturbed, but this is a matter of fetishizing the remains of a dead child. My immediate reaction can't help but be that this is going to encourage people to develop issues they were inclined towards simply by virtue of considering such a thing. Is it that far removed from selling razor blades to people prone to self-mutilation? Why not decorative puke buckets for bulemics?
How would a child respond, given a dead sibling's remains in a bear, especially if they didn't learn of it until after they'd been dragging it around with them a while?
[edit]
Ooops. Credit where its due: stolen from Romenesko's Obscure Store, by way of Dvorak's Home Page.
(That's right, John -- I've been sucking up your bandwidth every time I open my browser for seven years!) |
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Fight Club / Religious Debate / Its not nice to nag the creator
« on: June 23, 2006, 01:59:13 AM »
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http://tinyurl.com/mg48v (LA Times, reg required, http://bugmenot.com or get firefox and let the extension log in for you)
I don't know that I would have posted this, except that it fulfills recent requests for balance.
Granted, its nothing new, but its interesting to note that all three religions have found excuses to go balls-crazy on the subject. The same technology thats facilitating the modernization of the apocalyptic tradition also makes it simpler for them to declare war on each other. Its not like they can simply be left alone to work it out amongst themselves. |
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Politics Central / Soapbox - general discussion / Let me be the first to say it doesn't matter...
« on: June 21, 2006, 10:58:37 AM »
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http://tinyurl.com/enlbc
This told me nothing I didn't know; I was surprised most to realize I didn't care then and hadn't thought about any of this until someone wrote this article.
On the other hand, maybe one of these cats gets the nomination.
Then I still won't care, but more importantly, so won't a lot of other people who might have otherwise.
Or at least claimed they would.
Which will probably matter a little in that you'll wanna call them on it.
Another great reason to be poly (besides being spared the humiliation of public office). |
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The Tech Section / DIY / Favorite CMS/Portal?
« on: June 21, 2006, 03:00:27 AM »
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I'm curious to know if any of my fellow geeks have a favorite CMS. I'm a Drupal user, myself, but have never used anything else besides PHPNuke (and if you use anything else, odds are you may be an ex-nuker, too).
I've also read substantial criticism of Drupal from Joomla and Mambo users, among others, and while I do not take this personally, I'm curious to find out what other people's CMS-of-choice is, and why.
I started using Drupal about five years ago, mostly because there were a suitable number of add-on modules for it and because I do not do web design professionally nor do I have specific requirements, really, my approach to design is to install anything that looks cool, learn to use it, and then whatever the result is becomes the design.
I also have long since mastered the software in such a way that even if I can't do more than minor modifications at the PHP level, outside of adding my own dream apps, I can also make it do whatever I want. If the learning curve is any steeper than anything else, then I should have no trouble if I ever decide to jump ship for a better platform, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.
As an open-source project, Drupal has attracted enough actual money in the form of consulting outfits and grants like Google's Summer of Code, that its hit its stride without becomming less hackerly. While I've read a lot of criticism with regard to it being more developer-friendly than user friendly, I haven't put in any time in on it that wouldn't have gone towards becomming more familiar with current web standards or best practices under general circumstances. I can see new users sitting around with a fresh install and wondering "Now how do I make this look like the site I had in my head before I started this?" and have sat with them when they thought it (used to support the CivicSpace branch back when it was DeanSpace). Outside of the necessity of a plan, though, and the time it takes to configure something with very few default options pre-set, I've never had the same problem. Nor any other that wasn't the product of my hosting service, using pre-release or outdated software, or (most often), me.
The one weak point, at least in terms of what I've heard, is that Mambo/Joombla are easier to theme, but again, the only comparison I have is PHPNuke. My impression has been simply that theming is a lousy way to learn CSS/XHTML under any circumstance, since it taught me to hack someone else's theme and customize it instead of how the markup and semantics work. That came after I discovered that what looked fine on my machine broke someone else's browser.
Nor do I expect to see the problem completely solved (at least for the newer user) until the next version of Drupal, but I also follow the developer's mailing lists and so on and know that there are changes in the pipe for the PHPTemplate engine, which Drupal themes are largely based on, as well as making modules more easily themable (hopefully adding a microformat to the existing theme hooks used by modules). The inclusion of Yahoo's grids.css files (which deal with most of the major browser hacks needed to avoid having IE 6 etc. blow up), support for gd lib and other improvements should make it simpler. Then again, it doesn't seem that hard to me, now, but what do I know?
I will also freely admit my own site remains unthemed as a result of other projects, time wasted here baiting trolls, and the usual excuses made by cobblers with barefoot children. |
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