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I forgot to add this to a different reply of mine: more transparency from police should be a hot button issue in the U.S. I'd vote for just about anyone who campaigned for third-party investigations of police shootings. Looks like there's at least one bill, but not in my state.

religious influence on science will continue to wane

O RLY?

Actually, the creationists think the universe is 6000 years old,

That is demonstrably false.

If you post a retraction, then you will regain some credibility. If you don't, I can't see how you are any better

"On the other side, Mr. Ham was an advocate for the creation story. He said that God created the Earth in six days, and the Earth is only 6,000 years old..."
http://badgerherald.com/oped/2...

"On the Wednesday edition of his TV show, “The 700 Club,” Robertson indirectly implored Ham to put a sock in it, criticizing Ham’s view that the Earth is only 6,000 years old."
http://www.salon.com/2014/02/0...

"Bill Nye debates Creationist Ken Ham: The Earth is not 6,000 years old"
http://www.examiner.com/articl...

Except for the fact that the University of Wisconsin isn't cooperating with the RIAA in its latest efforts:

University of Wisconsin-Madison Bucks RIAA
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/20/015121 6

UW to RIAA: No way
http://badgerherald.com/news/2007/03/21/uw_to_riaa _no_way.php

It may be illegal...
http://www.doit.wisc.edu/news/story.asp?filename=8 12

Buddy, I count 23 video cameras on my 25km bike ride from home to work. That's not counting the still cameras on major intersections looking for speeders and people running the stop lights.

Hope you enjoy living in a police state.

"Your papers, please!"

It doesn't matter what label you give it, that's just the way things are. Google for "milwaukee police beating jude" to find out about the "blue line". When certain cops were being investigated for beating the crap out of a guy, the other officers refused to say a word.

I'm not saying that is right or wrong. I'm saying "This is how things are." You may think you are "Mr. Smartguy" for making the sheriff come to your house multiple times at 3am and then finally getting a restraining order against him. The cold, hard truth is that you really don't want to have the Sheriff or any of his buddies pissed at you. The standard Slashdot retort to that is "Well, then I'd sue!". Yeah, sure you would. After something "bad" happens to you. Like the beating that Mr. Jude received.

Welcome to the real world, Mr. AC. Mess with the cops, expect to have a rough time until you move out of that community.

Want a fun example? Check out this article:

http://badgerherald.com/news/2003/11/17/police_arr est_uw_stu.php

Tell me that guy isn't going to be harassed until the day he leaves the state of Wisconsin.

All kidding aside, there is no such thing as a weeder class. If your school's equivalent of CS 302: Intro to programming is too hard for you, take the hint. Same thing goes for your school's equivalent of CS 367: Intro to data structures. While those are considered our "CS weed out" courses, if you cannot breeze through them, how in the ever loving fuck do you plan on surviving any 400 or 500 level CS course?

I'm dead serious here. A CS major is not for everyone. If you can't earn an A in those two courses while maintaining an aggressive schedule of extra-curricular binge drinking, what makes you think that you can pass CS 536: Compilers, where you get to write a compiler? Or CS 537: Operating Systems, where you get to implement an operating system? If it takes all the academic strength you can muster to pass the intro classes, the upper-level undregrad courses will kill you. You will fail. And you will fail hard.

By the way, if UM is anything like UW, you have to take like 1 course that is crosslisted with ECE. The only thing difficult about that course was getting out of bed for an 7:50a lecture while still drunk from partying the night before. So quit your bitching about having to take engineering courses while you're not in the engineering school.

Seriously, why do you want to major in CS in the first place? You don't seem to enjoy it, and it doesn't seem to come naturally to you.

There are some inconsistencies about the events of his alleged "beating".

The vast majority of those arrested do not attend the university.

According to the Badger Herald: "A total of 448 arrests were made, with only 57 identified as UW students, a figure representing 12.8 percent of the total arrests."

No.

That's the short reply. Long version: the UN, as evidenced by the oil-for-food scandal and their attempts to impose a tax on the U.S., is a corrupt organization of politicos bent on controlling everything - not unlike the American government, really.

The trouble is, the UN wants to make everything a bureaucratic struggle, such as in Darfur, and that bureaucracy would strangle the organization of the Internet.

More often than not, decentralization works better than centralization -- smaller businesses tend not to abuse their customers as much as big businesses do, smaller governments tend not to abuse their people as much as bigger governments do, and so on. It's a matter of accountability - like with the problem of increasing numbers of managers over one's head back at the office, increasing the number of "official" overseers only bogs down efficiency. Let the customers of an organization or individual be the real overseers (as is the case currently w/ ICANN) - this is a decentralizing move.

Hence, in the name of decentralization, in the name of not being tied up in corruption (at least as much of it as the UN clearly is), in the name of efficiency -- I would argue that leaving ICANN in its current position is better than putting it under the wing of the UN.

(Note to knee-jerk UN defenders: the UN has its place as a means of mediating conflicts between nations and smoothing things over; as a forum for foreign relations. But we should all be worried when it starts interfering with the sovereignty of any nation, whether that nation is ours or not.)

Inasmuch -- actually, I'm a lawyer, so I'm quite familiar with the word. :)

It's hard to see the Supreme Court decision as a "moot point" because Bush would have won anyway. If the National Guard had taken over Florida and declared Bush the winner, that wouldn't be irrelevant even though the outcome was the same. The process counts as much as the result, and the Supreme Court made a terrible mistake by forcing Florida to stop the recounts on the theory that although Gore was right in principle there was not enough time left, neglecting that its own stay and candidate Bush's ruthless strategy had run out the clock. Perhaps he "stole" (I use the term with tongue in cheek) an election that was already his, but it was still improper.

Oddly I don't care who got the brass ring because it was so close. I do care how President Bush won, and by any reckoning the election and legal squabbling were a horrible mess that we should not put behind us. We can't stop "moaning" about the election because what happened procedurally was a travesty and can not recur. I'm critical of anyone happy or unhappy with the outcome who does not agree. Ironically, President Bush just quietly signed off on a federal bill to fund updating the election procedure.

As for who would have won (or did win), the hypothetical outcomes I cited were from the same NYT/WP/CNN etc. study. Again the method chosen is critical, and I reject any method that not place the intent of the voter as paramount. Intent-of-the-voter standards tended to favor Gore. Whatever the standard, I'm surprised you would imply a "tiny, tiny" victory is somehow not a victory.

The irregularities in the Florida election were objectively concrete, not speculative, and thus are not a conspiracy theory. As it happens, this year Florida lost (and later found) 100,000 votes in one region, though (whew) it could not have affected the outcome. As we know, it some elections it would. This issue is not going away.

I should explain that I focused on voting rights in school and am more interested in fair elections than horse-race politics. The mechanics of electoral theory and its underlying irrationality are fascinating, for the right person. ;-) I'm still curious whether Kennedy legitimately defeated Nixon, and that's not political sour grapes. Anyway, I explain this at length in the hope you and others take another look at the election, not President Bush, and see what is there that's not right. After all, you wouldn't accept a computer that couldn't count right, would you?