Saturday, September 4, 2010

The Discovery Channel Shooter: James Lee's Rage Against Civilization

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Our first reaction to terrorist violence is, of course, visceral. We feel revulsion and condemn the perpetrators. This is understandable but it can keep us from understanding. It may be too early, for some, to read my exposition about the ideas underlying Lee's rage. Some will want only to hear condemnation of the man, and do not think the ideas that might have influenced him should be expressed in public. But these ideas already have cultural currency. The battle against terrorism requires that we understand its ideational roots, not all of which are intrinsically evil or irrational.

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Larry Magid: Samsung to Challenge Apple With Innovative 'Galaxy Tab' Android Tablet

Larry Magid: Samsung to Challenge Apple With Innovative 'Galaxy Tab' Android Tablet

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/art-brodsky/there-is-some-leadership_b_702968.html

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The Verizon-Google plan that the Post endorsed creates a two-tiered Internet at the expense of the open Internet we now have, almost completely excludes wireless and transforms the FCC from what is supposed to be a consumer protection agency into an agent of big business. I thought we'd had enough of that. To expect big telecom and cable duopolies to protect consumers while a toothless agency stands quietly by is to expect what never was nor will be.
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Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz

Amplify’d from www.guardian.co.uk

There is a philosophy called "pessimistic meta-induction from the history of science", which proposes that, since the most watertight of old theories have been disproved, we must assume today's theories will be disproved, too. This holds for economics, medicine, education – any discipline you'd care to mention. It's a good theory but not quite as appealing as Schulz's rival account, which she calls "optimistic meta-induction from the history of everything". This states that our capacity to err is inseparable from our imagination. "In the optimistic model of wrongness, error is not a sign that our past selves were failures and falsehoods," Schulz writes. "Instead, it is one of those forces, like sap and sunlight, that imperceptibly helps another organic entity – us human beings – to grow up." Schulz doesn't relate whether she converted her colleague Ross Gelbspan to her optimistic meta-induction theory, but I hope she did. He's surely suffered enough.

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Jeffrey Evans: The Privacy Revolution

Jeffrey Evans: The Privacy Revolution

Martin Ford: Will Google Destroy Itself?

Martin Ford: Will Google Destroy Itself?

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America's misguided culture of overwork

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