Well, yeah, you have to take that bias into account. You don't just read the Bible and take them at their word for what happened. But you can confirm much of the Bible's historicity via archaeology and referencing contemporary sources.

For example, the Old Testament might say King Johesephus ruled such and such kingdom at such and such time period and he was a terrible, wicked ruler who murdered children and was struck down by God. You can go back and confirm via other methods that there really was a King Johesephus that ruled that kingdom and during that time period. Was he actually as horrible and wicked as described in the Bible? Maybe not. Like you said, the accounts written down in the Bible were from people with a very biased viewpoint so you have to take that into account. But you can confirm or deny a lot of it.

That's what I mean when I say that things in the Bible seem to be fairly accurate after a certain point. Obviously the ancient Jews had their own biases and that has to be taken into account, but we can confirm that many events happened at the same times and places described in the Old Testament. But the further you go back the more inaccurate it gets. The Kingdom of Judah was certainly not the way described in the Old Testament and there is absolutely no evidence for the Jews being enslaved in Egypt, for example.

Compare it to Ancient Greek history. Just because the Illiad is obviously legend doesn't mean the Peloponnesian war didn't happen.

It is a nice bedtime story, but there is nothing to cite to show any of it really happened.

That's not true. Much of the history in the Old Testament (I'm not talking about the fables found in Genesis, but the descriptions of kingdoms and events that have been proven to exist) is severely distorted history at best, but much of it is relevant.

Generally speaking the dividing line is the conquest of Babylon by the Persians. Everything before that is more legend than fact. Everything after that is fairly accurate (but obviously highly biased).

... I see no evidence, quite honestly, that the NSA has the wrong motives.

What about the evidence that the NSA's network is being used for industrial espionage? National security is one thing, but that one's impossible to justify.

At Mach 6 I imagine it probably *is* a spacecraft. Pretty close at least.

That was an excellent post. Thanks for taking the time to write it.

Exactly. There's nothing stopping someone from configuring Linux any way they so choose, which includes installing commercial, closed-source software. But the moment you make the distro dependent upon proprietary software you loose the thing which makes FOSS special in the first place.

It's a bit disingenuous to paint RMS and the "FOSSies" as uncompromising radicals when it was their efforts and that ideology that created open source and made it what it is today. If progress were impossible with their ideology, we wouldn't even be sitting here discussing the problems with Linux because it wouldn't exist.

I know RMS can be a twat sometimes, but there is a degree of proof for his ideology present in the success of the GNU project and the freedom it has brought to the world of consumer and commercial computing that is impossible to refute. To call him "mililtant" is entirely missing the point. He's just trying to keep his original vision moving forward and quite frankly *everybody* is a Johnny-Come-Lately compared to RMS. Even when you criticize him you have to at least give him the respect he (and by extension his ideology) deserves.

I know it can be frustrating when you just want the damn thing to work correctly, but you're throwing out the baby with the bathwater by complaining about the 5% that is preventing OSS from dominating OSX and Windows as a commercial force, forgetting the 95% that makes it truly special in the first place.

Right..... those are the only two options: all or none. If you even mention the prospect of raising taxes it's assumed that the goal is a quasi-communist state where no one is allowed to keep any money.

Good post, I would make just one important distinction. The teens were when the progressive side of the Republican party died and the fiscal conservative strain we are so familiar with today became dominant (famously embodied in the Coolidge administration), but the pro-business strain of the GOP existed from the very beginning of the party. In fact that was the major source of strain between Roosevelt's progressivism and the rest of the party, since Roosevelt was so staunchly anti-trust.

To call the Republicans the progressive party is a bit confusing because of all the different connotations the phrases progressive and conservative have gone through since then. In the middle-to-late 19th century murdering natives and Mexicans and giving their land to massive corporations was the height of progressivism, which is a little bit confusing from the modern perspective :)

Oh, please. I graduated from high school ten years ago, and I saw plenty of violence. A girl in my brother's class (middle school age) got her ass kicked by a group of two or three kids, went home and grabbed a baseball bat. She came back and beat them so bad one of the kids ended up with permanent brain damage. How's that for hyper-escalation? One of my friends back then was constantly harassed and bullied, stood up for himself, and got his ass beat nearly every day because of it. This wasn't little kids shoving each other waiting for someone to start something, he got a thorough ass-kicking on a regular basis. Despite it being obvious what was happening, the administration wouldn't give any of the kids responsible more than in-school suspension. Care to guess how successful his education was?

A school is a place of learning. You want to teach a kid how to fight then put them in Krav Maga. School should be a safe haven. Any sort of violence or threatening behavior should warrant a harsh and immediate punishment. There is no place whatsoever for violence or intimidation, and anyone advocating such is completely fucking insane.

Criminal charges are an absolute joke in this situation, but that doesn't mean the kid didn't do anything wrong. He should have been taken aside and informed why what he did was a stupid idea, and possibly given detention or some other sort of mundane punishment. But anyone claiming that schools should be perfectly fine with violence, or (in your case) openly advocating such behavior to "toughen them up" needs to have their head examined. I hope you never have to deal with telling your kid to stand up for himself and then watch him get brutalized.

You are correct that Feynman's books are insufficient to learn introductory physics, but the lectures were only one part of the curriculum. From Feynman's Preface:

"The lectures form only part of the complete course. The whole group of 180 students gathered in a big lecture room twice a week to hear these lectures and then broke up into small groups of 15 to 20 students in recitation sections under the guidance of a teaching assistance. In addition, there was a laboratory section each week...

The reason there are no lectures on how to solve problems is because there were recitation sections. Although I did put three lectures in the first year how to solve problems, they are not included here."

There were also a few lectures that were left out for some reason, which form the basis of the book "Feynman: Tips on Physics."

In the preface, he also writes that he considered the course a failure. Based on examination scores, only about two dozen out of his class of 180 really grasped the subject, but those who did gained "a first-rate background in physics."

I'm currently taking intro physics and I've found Feynman's lectures to be invaluable. It's a much more thorough treatment than my current course, and I think it will hell set me up for more advanced courses. But you're right that by itself it is not sufficient.

For real. If it's based on user input you're going to get a lot of bad information. I lived near 87th and Blue Ridge in Raytown for a while and a bunch of the (upper-middle class, white) people I worked with gave me crap for living in "the ghetto." It was a solid neighborhood, though, just working class and black. Everyone I met was super nice and I never saw anything shady.

I'm curious where you lived in KC. A lot of KC is pretty bad, particularly at night. I would stop at the gas station on Emmanuel Cleaver and The Paseo during the day and it was fine, but I made the mistake of going there on a Friday night once and it was waaaaay sketchy.

Anyone who dismisses them outright, maybe. But there *are* systemic biases in even the most solid newspapers. Both the NYT and WSJ are capitalist institutions, and (despite the New York Times left-leaning editorial content) are for the most part decidedly conservative in their journalism. I don't mean conservative in the left-wing/right-wing political sense, but they are major pillar of the established power structure in our country and have a significant incentive ($$$$$) to continue in that role.

They don't want to rock the boat *too* much, and they often are hesitant to go after those in positions of authority unless public sentiment is clearly behind them. This becomes more readily apparent in times of war. For example, the New York Times did not cover the start Iraq War in a way consistent with their reputation and abilities. They have admitted such and apologized for that mistake, but the system that has allowed it to happen is largely unchanged.

Two of my favorite news sources are the Christian Science Monitor and Al-Jazeera, because at least their biases are obvious. Because of that they offer a slightly different perspective than most mainstream American outlets.

Hey, there! I don't know your dad, but I also grew up poor and am currently working my way through school.

First of all, you are correct to be proud of your father, and you are also correct to take a responsible outlook on your life. That sort of attitude will get you far. But you really just aren't grasping the arguments people are putting out to you. Hopefully my perspective is helpful for you to understand why people are disagreeing with you.

Let me break down my budget for you. I currently make $13/hr. After taxes and health insurance (which I am fortunate to get an an affordable rate from my company) I bring in $1600 net every month.

I am very fortunate in that my work provides a free place for me to live. Therefore I do not have to worry about rent or utilities, which is a huge boon. I am also very fortunate to live in an area with a very affordable community college. The tuition and books every semester runs me around $2000. Going three semesters a year, this comes out to almost exactly $500 a month. Food costs me about $150.

My community college is about 25 miles away from where I work and live, so I have to drive a lot. I spend about $200 a month on gasoline, $100 on insurance, and $150 on my auto payment. Should have saved up and bought a cheaper car cash you might say? Well, I had a cheap, reliable car. Someone t-boned me and ruined it. I got $2500 for it, but you can't buy a reliable car for $2500 so I had to take out a loan to cover the other $4000 I spent. So there was step one pushing me into a shitty situation.

Out of the $500 that is left over, most goes to service my consumer debt, of which I have about $4000. Again, you might criticize me for using credit unwisely but I can assure you that nearly all of that was imperative. I have only had free rent for less than a year, meaning my budget was inadequate in the past and I financed car repairs, medical bills, anything unexpected and unavoidable on credit. Because I literally had no other choice. Each of these situations has, in the past, caused me to stop going to school for a short time while I got my finances together, which included me working multiple jobs at the same time. Never janitorial, but some pretty shitty work nonetheless.

So here I am, 26 years old, and I'm working my ass off 40+ hours a week on top of going to school full time trying to make it happen. And it will happen. But I will not finish school before I'm 30, even in the best case scenario. I probably won't be out of debt until a few years after that (once I hit university tuition jumps to $10k+ a year for a couple years and I will almost definitely have to stop working so much in order to succeed, meaning large student loans). The idea that I could be flying around in a Learjet if I only I bucked up and worked a bit harder, or that I could pay for my tuition by giving up soda is so fucking ludicrous that it's hard to even take you seriously.

You known how I can tell you don't have any perspective? You haven't said a single thing about yourself. It's all "My dad did this" or "my dad did that." You obviously had a father who kicked ass and did very well by himself, and I don't mean to discount that, but what about you? Do you really think that if you were born poor and to lazy ass parents that you would be in the exact same place you are right now? Think of every dumb mistake you have ever made. Every time you made a poor decision and it somehow worked out ok for you. There is somebody out there that made that same decision and had it blow up in their face. There's somebody who wasn't given the opportunities you were and is having to scrap it out tooth and nail. Be grateful for how fortunate you have been, and don't patronize them with stupid ass arguments about giving up soda and paying for university tuition with the difference (I don't drink soda FWIW).

The direction is a circle. Bad decisions bring negative consequences, making your environment a little bit harsher. Now your life is worse because of that stupid thing you did, making it even more likely that you make more bad decisions. It's hard to break that negative feedback loop.

If you look at a kid age 13 that is from a bad home in a poor neighborhood, he's probably going to have some mental problems that are fairly normal for someone of his age. Put him in a positive environment where he has social resources and is pushed to improve himself and there's a good chance he'll end up a happy, healthy member of society. If that kid gets involved with the wrong people and is surrounded by violence and drug abuse and is in and out of the prison system, ten years later there is a pretty good chance he'll be severely mentally ill.