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"please name one example of a law that has changed to this effect."

Laws do not need to change in order for freedom of expression to be reduced or even wiped out. The political mood in the last 5 years has turned downright repressive; people in power will not hesitate to use their resources against you in case you dare express opinions against the current US political agenda.

Man arrested for wearing an antiwar shirt
Man arrested after addressing Cheyney on the Iraq war
Man arrested for handling toilet paper with Bush Face on it
Man arrested for dressing up and waving a fake gun
Killed GI's mother arrested

You'll have bad choices, put her in jail if she stole your SSN and opened credit accounts without your knowledge, or be poor and miserable for years as you pay off the damage. Hard even if there aren't children involved, nightmarish if there are, "Daddy put Mommy in Jail..." All In The Family

Hey, it happened to me, and I realized I'll never really recover from it either financially or emotionally. I've seen it happen to a lot of other people I know as well.

One of the status symbols you can't afford? A spouse...

Oh, and this kind of usury? The kind that will carelessly allow your son or mother to apply for credit in your name and leave you stuck with the bill... it's new and recent development, I wonder where it will lead?

you got it all wrong!

we are busy waiting for Christian American Idol and following everything which is happening with the late Anna Nicole Smith

=)

Peace!

First of all, 99% of polls are useless. :P

They are all subject to the bias of the analyst. What Conservapedia doesn't tell you in the blurb is that an additional 27% of Americans believe people evolved with divine guidance. What's sad (IMHO) is that greater than 50% of "All Americans" believe that we were just winked into existence by a divine power.

Your declaration that "tens of millions of Christians" believe as you say does not mean that they do

I don't expect you to take my word for it; it's all over the media. Google for "creationism controversy" or something similar. There's a never-ending stream of stories about people complaining about evolution being taught to their kids at school, people starting Creationist museums, etc.

Better yet, why not look at some actual surveys?
According to CNN in 2004, 37% of Americans believe in teaching Creationism instead of Evolution, while a whopping 65% believe both should be taught. 55% (again, a majority) believe that god created humans exactly as they are now, which basically means they believe in Creationism.

If anything, I was actually too conservative in my previous estimates.

nor that they are 'true Christians'.

Why not? If 111 million (37% of 300 million) Americans call themselves Christian and believe in strict Creationism, who am I or anyone else to say they aren't "true" Christians? A very small group of other Christians? Sorry, it doesn't work that way.

If all 300 million Americans are polled, and 75% of them say they love NASCAR, then it would be fair to make the generalized statement that "Americans like NASCAR". Like anything, there's always going to be exceptions, but in regular speech, there's nothing wrong with making generalizations for the purpose of efficiency. This is Slashdot, not an academic dissertation demanding utmost accuracy; it's basically the equivalent of people talking in a bar.

Now, if you said "Americans like NASCAR" to an American who didn't like NASCAR in this hypothetical example, it would be ridiculous for that person to claim that the NASCAR-lovers aren't "true Americans" because he doesn't like NASCAR.

It's the same with Christians (especially if you narrow your scope to American Christians, which is still a huge number of people, who happen to have a lot of political and military influence in the world). Anyone who claims to be a Christian, by definition, IS a Christian. Only radical extremists would say that people whose beliefs don't match theirs aren't really a member of their religion, when that religion is very large, and its holy texts have been interpreted countless different ways.

Therefore, if we suppose that 75% of Americans are Christian (which is probably a little generous, but it's certainly less than 100%), and from this poll we see that 55% of Americans believe in Creationism, that obviously qualifies as a majority, so any arguments about these people not being "true Christians" is obviously ridiculous as they obviously aren't some tiny, obscure sect.

No couple is forced to work two jobs. If a couple works two jobs, it is more likely that they are living beyond there means. That could be buying expensive crap they don't need to inflate their ego in relation to their peers, or they are in a mountain of debt, most likely related to the results of living beyond their means.

In the US, we have to have everything now, we can not wait for it to go on sale, and we deffiently can't wait to save up money to buy the product. I guess that is why the US has a negative savings rate.

Qwest communications told the government to "sod off" and they were soon investigated and embroiled in an insider trading case.

Like Canadian Environment Minister Christine Stewart (a nurse by training, if you can believe that):

"No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits. . . Climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world."

As long as the public faces of the global warming scare are building vast energy-hogging mansions, flying around the world in private jets, and shooting down alternative-power proposals that clash with their refined aesthetic sensibilities, I will assume they are all power-crazed liars and mountebanks of the ilk of Christine Stewart.

We are being asked to overturn the very edifice of free-market capitalism, on the basis of wild speculation about the significance of mere statistical noise, teased out of scant and questionable data by grant-chasing academics, and shouted hysterically by power-mad left-wing politicians who won't abide by the same draconian regulations they advocate for the rest of us. No thanks. I'm going to keep living my life as I please.

-ccm

Shhh! Don't give Stephen Colbert any ideas!!!!!! /In other news, Abe Vigoda's still kickin'!

They must be looking for a new noble cause to undertake since they solved Spam last year. Go team!

Considering how dependent the U.S. economy is on people continuing to spend money, even to the point of having a negative savings rate, any substantial increase in savings will have a detrimental effect on the economy. In fact, since that report came out, the savings rate has doubled to -1%.

Don't be silly, spam stopped thanks to the efforts of those wonderful people at Microsoft. You don't honestly think *government* can do anything do you? No, it's all down to the free market!

Freedom of Speech is still alive and well. For that matter, it seems everyone of the bill of rights is still there and protecting us all. I don't see what your problem is.

"$3 trillion = 5 years of Pentagon budget"
Current 2008 budget for the Pentagon is $2.9 trillion a year, it represents just 1 years budget.

"hole eating up the equivalent of 1/2 of the American GDP"
USA GDP is $13 trillion, and over the 5 years that he mislaid the money it represents 5% of GDP not half.

A quote from Rumsfeld himself:
According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions," Rumsfeld admitted.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/01/29/eveningn ews/main325985.shtml

I recall an opposing study while ago: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/03/30/health/m ain1458679.shtml. Can't remember where I saw the original.

"Probably because Iran has openly stated its desire to wipe Israel off the map should it ever have the means to do so. I'm not a big fan of US foreign policy, but I don't recall them ever making such statements."

"former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage threatened to bomb Pakistan "back to the Stone Age."

Ref1,
Ref2

A few more interesting tidbits:

-- At least 80% of women will have been infected by at least one strain of genital HPV by the time they reach 50 years of age.

-- Condoms are only about 70% effective at preventing HPV transmission

-- In 2007, approximately 11,150 cases of invasive cervical cancer will be diagnosed in the United States, and about 3,670 women will die from the disease. For comparison, seatbelts saved 13,274 lives in 2001 in the US.

-- Somewhere near 10% of people have had visible genital warts. These people may still be able to transmit the virus after the warts are gone.

-- HPV can be transmitted from a mother to her baby during birth, so it is even possible to get HPV from a virgin.

-- The HPV vaccine does not contain thimerosal/mercury.

A few more interesting tidbits:

-- At least 80% of women will have been infected by at least one strain of genital HPV by the time they reach 50 years of age.

-- Condoms are only about 70% effective at preventing HPV transmission

-- In 2007, approximately 11,150 cases of invasive cervical cancer will be diagnosed in the United States, and about 3,670 women will die from the disease. For comparison, seatbelts saved 13,274 lives in 2001 in the US.

-- Somewhere near 10% of people have had visible genital warts. These people may still be able to transmit the virus after the warts are gone.

-- HPV can be transmitted from a mother to baby during birth, so it is even possible to get HPV from a virgin.

-- The HPV vaccine does not contain thimerosal/mercury.

Here's a link backing it up.

Frankly, I think CBS has the right idea with youtube; Short clips are a great way to advertise your TV shows, and also people will sit through 5-10 seconds ads in order to get the known quality of a specific uploader (i.e. CBS in this case). Right now, the only thing hurting them is that you can't do a youtube search limited to a specific user, and any random Joe can put "CBS" in his tags. I would expect google to fix that eventually.

Others will jump on the bandwagon when they realize CBS is benefiting from youtube. Joost is actually orthogonal, since it is about full-length shows rather than clips. Smart TV channels would likely post on both, using youtube clips to advertise shows on TV as well as Joost. Of course with the inevitable cracking of Joost's DRM, that will likely cause the channels to pull any new content, and doom joost's entire business model.

I am quite certain that we will see things saying how appropiate. Yet, it will be overlooked that Windows is the dominant in totalitarian states.

If you wish to fire back, note that they're just starting a transition -- everything they've done to date has been backed by Windows. Now that Castro is about to kick the bucket, Cuba faces potential for renewal, and that can start with FLOSS.

Chavez is, unfortunately, on the other course. But while we've got former US Congressmen doing PR work for him Linux is the least of our problems. When they return the bribe oil and start lobbying for nuclear power plants or windmills off the coast of Massachusetts to actually solve the heating cost problem then we can can worry about computer software.

I know this will be an unpopular comment, but maybe it will strike a cord with some of you. While I value and esteem the internet as one of the last bastions of total freedom, the so called "Wild West" of our day, the fact is that with freedom, comes responsibility. Estimates value the porn industry at 10 Billion in the United States alone. The number may vary somewhat depending on which source you use, but what this says to me is that this is a major problem, not only here in the United States, but world wide. Pornography is a scourge on any society. It cheapens the value of women (and men), destroys relationships, exploits children, and feeds our ever growing appetite for the more and more bizarre. In some areas of the world, and I know this may come as a shock to some of you, people are traded as commodities in the sex trade, all so satisfy the lusts of the the "needs" of our ever growing appetite.

Then we bitch and complain about the loss of our freedoms, and the government coming in to restrict our freedom of speech, when we haven't shown the ability to police ourselves. Who can blame them. Cute jokes aside, any person willing to look past the attractive face of pornography can see the devastating effect this has on a society.

Whether you agree or disagree, why would you be surprised at the actions of Norway? I look at the statistics above, and I see a problem. Expect to see more and more of this.

That can be applied to sightings of many other things.

The problem is, how does one determine which patterns indicate something and which patterns are just convincing illusions?

The difference is that movies try to make thier money back on the theatrical release prior to being sold for home viewing on DVD.

Sorry dude, but that's pure bull. Reality is that, back in 2003, 60 percent of Hollywood income came from DVD sales. *60 percent*. That's *massive*. And given the expansion in sales and rentals of TV shows, in addition to movies, this number has probably only increased.

conservative values call for open and unfettered competition

Doctors do not get "kickbacks" for prescribing medication. They might get a crappy pen and a doodle pad, or some golf balls with CureAllix written on it, but that's about it. Nor do they deliberately attempt to make their services unaffordable. Malpractice insurance takes a huge cut of doctors' salaries, along with the need to repay education loans, administrative overhead, crappy Medicare reimbursement, not to mention treating people who never pay their bills -- and since the poorest people are statistically likely to be in the worst health, they tend to cost the most money to treat. There are many failures of healthcare, but high costs are a symptom, not the cause.

Again, I'll mention the Commerce Clause, and throw in the Elastic clause as well. You'd do well to read them. "Powers delegated to the United States" do not end at the enumerated powers.

In reality, no. However, that's only due to the willful disregard of the Tenth Ammendment by the Supreme Court. In allowing the Commerce clause to be used to trump any and all state legislation (or inconvenient Constitutional ammendments), a strong argument could be made that they've completely undermined the very principles they've sworn to defend.

Interpreting the Constitution in plain English, the Tenth Ammendment clearly trumps the Commerce clause of the Constitution, just as all ammendments must take precedence over the original text. If ammendments didn't take precedence, then the Constitution itself could not be considered ammendable, since the original text could never be modified.

Although the Federal government has gotten away with it to this point, the use of the Commerce clause to overrule state preferences has been an unconstitutional practice that has been allowed to persist for decades. Although the results have been absolutely fantastic in some cases (e.g. ending voter discrimination and forcing school integration in the 1960s), the practice has opened the door to all sorts of abuse, such as the recent raids of California medical marijuana clinics, which are permitted under state law, but not federal law. (Whether the raids were "morally right" is left to the prejudices of the reader.)

If the Federal government truly wants to seize complete power, they should attempt to pass a new Constitutional ammendment formally revoking the Tenth Ammendment and put an end to their lip service towards state autonomy. Of course, the state legislatures and a substantial number of citizens would promptly tell the Feds to go to hell, so we're probably going to continue with the status quo -- defacto revocation of the Tenth Ammendment, but not dejure revocation.

It's not just the "Climate Skeptics" that should have issues with conflict of interest. It was on March 19th of this year that "60 Minutes" profiled NASA scientist and alarmist James Hansen, who was once again making allegations of being censored by the Bush administration. See http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/03/17/60minute s/main1415985.shtml. At the time, Hansen was given a one-sided glowing profile.

The 60 Minutes segment made no mention of Hansen's partisan ties to former Democrat Vise President Al Gore or Hansen's receiving of a grant of a quarter of a million dollars from the left-wing Heniz Foundation run by Teresa Heinz Kerry, There was also no mention of Hansen's subsequent endorsement of her husband John Kerry for President in 2004. http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/dai_complete.pdf.

Many in the media dwell on any industry support given to any so-called climate skeptics, but the same media completely fail to note Hansen's huge grant from the left-wing Heinz Foundation. http://222.heinzawards.net/speechDetail.asp?speech ID=6. I guess ketchup money is different from oil money.

Yes, we have.

Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

"We didn't find the weapons we thought we would find or the weapons everybody thought he had. "

He tells correspondent Ed Bradley the real failure was not in the intelligence community but in the White House. He says he saw how the Bush administration, time and again, welcomed intelligence that fit the president's determination to go to war and turned a blind eye to intelligence that did not.

Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

"We didn't find the weapons we thought we would find or the weapons everybody thought he had. "

He tells correspondent Ed Bradley the real failure was not in the intelligence community but in the White House. He says he saw how the Bush administration, time and again, welcomed intelligence that fit the president's determination to go to war and turned a blind eye to intelligence that did not.

I thought you could connect the dots that Echelon was alive & well during the Clinton administration, yet Hillary was silent. I guess I gave you too much credit. 60 Minutes even ran a story on Echelon when Bill Clinton was in office, not to mention extensive coverage of the Aldrich Ames investigation. I didn't see Hillary's outrage about personal liberty then. But now that she is playing to the left by attacking GWB, you call her the privacy candidate? Wake up!

it's 'lame-predictions-by-our-glorious-MS-leader'. One of my favourites include:

A spam-free world by 2006? That's what Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates is promising.

"Two years from now, spam will be solved"

e.g. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/24/tech/mai n595595.shtml

As a matter of fact, the amount of spam is now bigger than ever before. And there's no seeming end to the trend. However, as Blue Security's Blue Frog clearly displayed, the solution is there and a super powerful company like MS could stop spam if it really was interested. Talk is cheap. The world's richest man can afford it nicely...

But still not as bad as artificially screwing with electricity prices by blacking out large parts of California.

You wouldn't be Bill Gates, would you: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/24/tech/mai n595595.shtml

In 1978 an Air Rhodesia plane carrying 52 passengers and four crew members was shot down by guerrillas with a shoulder-fired missile. A few months later, the missile-toting guerrillas fired on another Air Rhodesia flight, killing all 59 people on board. ... In the past 18 months, al Qaeda has twice tried to down planes with shoulder-fired missiles; both times they missed.

Most of the grandstanding is happening in the popular press (you won't find it in scientific journals - even the climatology journals)...

There's so much wrong with that statement...

First off: watch An Inconvenient Truth. The movie is full of grandstanding.

Watched it, loved it. Not so much a scientific journal as it is popular media.

...claims that there's consensus on the most extreme predictions (flooding of huge parts of North America, for example, which international consensus disagrees with by an order of magnitude over the next 100 years)

Um, did you watch it? He never made such a claim. He did say that if all of the ice on Greenland melted or if the West Antarctic Ice Shelf melted, most of Manhatten (including the site of the twin towers - yes, that was grandstanding, but hey, this is a movie, not a journal article) would be flooded. Not quite the same thing you're saying he claimed, however.

I know of at least two labs (one is a well known observatory) that saw funding for good science dry up because Gore and his ilk saw their results used by their political opponents (out of context, of course).

Really? Which labs?

What realclimate and other such outlets tend to do is attack the people involved for taking "the other side", while using a one-sided argument against select pieces of the science to justify their attacks. I've never visited realclimate without getting the sense that that site could be wholy replaced by evangelism of any other flavor without chaning a whole lot. That they include footnotes is just window-dressing used to justify some very, very harsh attacks. So, as far as realclimate "defending scince" ... no.

Can you give me a single example of this? Just one?

That is, no one is saying, "climatology is bunk... it's all just the hand of God."

Actually, until recently you would find comments like this from Pat Robertson. Of course, now, he too is a convert, albeit for all the wrong reasons.

All we (the dissent) are suggesting is that the ratchet down the political discourse, and let the people doing real work in the field hash this out without yelling at them or yanking funding for suggesting "the wrong thing."

Perhaps that's all you're suggesting, but that's not what I call being a denier. To me, being a denier means believing that either (a) it's hubris to assume that man could change the climate (if I had a dime for every time someone said this...), or (b) there's a conspiracy to spread global warming theories and that the temperature will return to normal "real soon now". Again, if you look at what Pat Michaels and Richard Lindzen (two poster boys for the AGW denier camp) are saying, they don't deny that AGW is real. They merely say what you're saying - namely, that the popular press (and, yes, some scientists) are over-stating the problem. (Well, they do sometimes couch those statements in ways that a non-careful reader might think they were actually denying AGW.) On that issue, you will not find me in denial.

I recently watched a US Senate hearing on proposed airport-based anti missile systems. Experts testified that aircraft, during take-off and landing, are vulnerable to 50 caliber rounds from sniper rifles http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/01/06/60minute s/main665257.shtml. These rifles are currently available in the US on the open market (Except CA). The experts suggested that because Anti missile systems can not detect or deflect a bullet's path, they are a poor investment.

Neither article quite says that some responsibility must fall to the administration's footdragging on global warming.

Geez! Give it a break, will you? How about:

CBS News today carries a story indicating a scarcity of female leadership in the news sector. The article doesn't quite say that some responsibility must be assigned to the inherent superiority of men over women.

No, I meant more like these-

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4097267. stm - Missle defence shield test fails
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/01/12/national /main666433.shtml - Missle defense fails again
http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair09232006.html - Star Wars Goes Online...Crashes
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/824828.stm - Test failur fuels skepticism
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2924 - US missile defence test dodges decoys
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V125/N5/long4_5.5w.html - Missile Defense System Test Fails
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Second_U.S._anti-missi le_defence_system_test_fails -Second U.S. anti-missile defence system test fails

You mean like these: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/11/22/national /main530421.shtml

"Anti-Missile Test Called A Success
Fourth Success In Six Attempts; Most Complex Yet"

I would say 66% of the tests being successful counts as "any".

> But, just like the Democrats aren't going to put their votes where their mouths are concerning Iraq, they're not going to take action on this matter, either.

Wait, weren't you just whining about "evidence"? Again, you're not even consistent.

Here, let me counter your ad hominem attacks with some of the evidence you apparently haven't seen:

Pelosi stating that impeachment is "off the table": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAGCgY4PDNA
Dems will do a non-binding resolution on Iraq instead of taking meaningful action: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/01/17/politics /main2368411.shtml

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/30/60II/mai n527513.shtml

Stan Lee had a contract for a percentage of the profits of the films and merchandise, but the company didn't want to pay him. He sued and was awarded a cut of the profits.

Not immediately relevant, but reminiscent.

I thought it looked kinda big too... well, still thin, but height and width seemed large. Then I watched this video on CBS and it makes it look much more like a phone-sized device that isn't gigantic.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/06/18/ap/busin ess/mainD8IASIGO1.shtml

The above link is an example of the serious work being done to make coal power environmentally friendly. The plant in the article won't even emit CO2. Modern coal plants (which are already very efficient), nuclear, hydro and wind power make an electric car much friendlier to the environment than gas. Of course the batteries are a bit ugly but , if such cars become common, they will be efficiently recycled.

Wow, this is terrible. I'm sure the festival organizers, including Sam Roberts whom we met last year when we competed there, are devastated by being forced into this. They courted SCRPG! for the festival, but in hindsight, it was a little too risky. Sam is a good guy who wants to push on the frontiers of gaming; he must be very disappointed. But he should be proud he had the guts to originally include it in the festival, I hope people realize it was against his wishes to pull it. It would have been unfair to the other finalists to have not pulled it, leading to the festival being cancelled.

It's unclear how much this will tarnish the reputation of Slamdance, or the broader game industry somehow, but hopefully this event will lead to more debate and discussion about games as a medium for serious expression. Although school shootings are a very incendiary topic, I think it's a better tool for debate than, say, the more puerile controversies over the right to have prostitutes and hidden soft-core sex in the Grand Theft Auto games.

I also recommend everyone rent Elephant , if you haven't already — a movie on the same topic as SCRPG!, which won the top prize at film's most prestigious festival, for crissakes! The irony is thick here.

(Trivia: My local Portland game developer meetings are sometimes organized by a guy named Corwin Light-Williams, who made the videogame parody footage for Elephant by programming an actual custom videogame, which allowed players to shoot at Gerry . How many people get "video game designer" in a movie credits?)

Actually, I'd prefer you get therapy.

Maybe not, since the most popular therapy these days is "drug them until they shut up". Eric Harris was taking the SSRI anti-depressant drug Luvox, and it's argued by some that this was a contributing factor in the killings.

I was a geek in high school, and picked on a lot. Some nights I would cry myself to sleep over it (yes, I'm man enough to admit that).

High school wasn't as bad for me, largely because I managed to transfer to a different school, outside my neighborhood. But I also was a target for bullies as a kid, and spend a lot of time depressed and tearful. I got into a lot of fights and had a lot of anger; I was never in the place where Harris and Klebold ended up, but I could see it from where I was.

But life gets better. Please, anyone out there going through this now, hear me and believe me. You are not alone, and things will get better.

They don't have any problems getting illegal aliens to work for them. Heck, they can even work them seven days a week and lock them in overnight. It's not like they're slaves, so it's a-okay, right?

With the recent events at Los Alamos such as classifed infromation being leaked and other security problems. There needs to be some level of proection on our nations secrets - if scientists can't handle the pressure of a polygraph then what chance do they stand if they were kidnapped by a forigen entity. If polygraphs help expose leaks in the system, then they serve their purpose. Serving our country requires not only bright minds, but the ability to protect information that is vital to our national interests. There are plenty of other positions for scientists that don't require polygraphs - so, if you can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen.

That said, having taken a polygraph, I think the true value lies in the "good-cop/bad-cop" environment that it creates.