Slashdot Mirror

I think you got the names mixed up there.

No, he got them right.

https://www.usnews.com/opinion...

https://cmpa.gmu.edu/study-fac...

The fact checkers are harder to the right than the left. Notice the links are well before the 2016 election cycle.

What you mean is

Drink! AmiMojo telling other people what they're thinking!

Give us an example of bias from any of these left leaning orgs.

https://cmpa.gmu.edu/study-med...

Study shows PolitiFact rates Republicans lie more than Democrats. This could mean Republicans lie more... or PolitiFact is biased against Republicans

And here's one person doing his own study and analysis to support the latter idea:

http://thefederalist.com/2016/...
http://thefederalist.com/2016/...

Do you know who owns the patents (Tesla, Panasonic, Gigafactory)?

patents are not property and cannot be owned

False. Chief Justice Roberts wrote:

“[A patent] confers upon the patentee an exclusive property in the patented invention which cannot be appropriated or used by the government itself, without just compensation, any more than it can appropriate or use without compensation land which has been patented to a private purchaser.”

Patents are property, per the US Supreme Court. End of discussion.

Re: "Piers Corbyn does not make the kind of predictions you claim. You're putting forth something he has not done as factual."

Corbyn is an astrophysicist who makes his money by making long-range forecasts about extreme weather events -- predictions which are then literally purchased by the people who need to know this information in the regions in which he currently covers. He literally sells predictions for a living, and people continue to buy them for the very reason that they are accurate. From his website:

WeatherAction will develop and extend Piers Corbyn's revolutionary world-leading Solar based method* of Long Range forecasting to include all countries of the world months and years ahead particularly for extreme and dangerous events. The background physics principles behind the method are available in presentations** and will be published in full in due course.

*Solar-Lunar-Action-Technique
**see eg PiersCorbyn Uni Exeter Go Green Week 25 Feb 2016 http://bit.ly/1LLdfuf

The quote which contains the claims which you suggest have been made up come from a paper which appeared in Proc. Eighth Intl. Conf. on Risk and Gambling, London, July 1990, and was apparently republished later in a journal named Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy. The author, Robin Dale Hanson, is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. He received his degree from Caltech.

Which part of this are you claiming has been made up?

Gun nuts will start bleating about the Constitution. Guess what, you AREN'T part of a well regulated militia.

George Mason, Tench Coxe, Patrick Henry, and other framers would stringently disagree with you.
http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/quotes/arms.html

Also the Arms provision from my "state", which predates the Federal one makes it even more clear:
1776 - 1st revision: "That the people have a right to bear arms for the defense of themselves and the state; and as standing armies in the time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up; And that the military should be kept under strict subordination, to, and governed by, the civil power. "

1790 - 2nd & current revision: "The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State shall not be questioned."

If you need, there is also settled case law from SCOTUS:
"The right to bear arms is not granted by the Constitution; neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence. The Second Amendments means no more than that it shall not be infringed by Congress, and has no other effect than to restrict the powers of the National Government."
92 U.S. 542 (1875)

By the way f**k fascists and f**k socialists and f**k racists - but a free society values free speech.

You realize these dipwads held get togethers for years and zero violence and zero coverage. Now, thanks to anti-free speech people like you they're all over the news. The f**king Streisand Affect all over again.

SRSLY? THe violence of these people has been caused by the streisand effect?

First off, the KKK has had a long long history of violence and killing https://www.splcenter.org/figh...

By your estimation, gentle and lawful Klan members were forced into violence in 1871 as well. Just an example. http://historymatters.gmu.edu/...

Fucking liberals in the 1920's http://www1.assumption.edu/ahc...

So if I read you right, it is liberals and anti-free speech people who are driving these gentle and innocent folks to kill them, correct? What a crock of shit. "We're gonna hang some Black people - and when you don't allow us to post that, we gonna go out and hang some Black people - and it's your fault because you didn't allow us to post that we're gonna hang some black people" That logic don't fly.

I have this Simpson's reference of Nelson grabbing Milhouse's arm and hitting him with it, saying "Quit Hitting Yourself! Quit hitting yourself! Quit Hitting yourself!

That is a GREAT Madison quote! I like this one, too!

"The government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like state governments, whose powers are more general. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government."
-- James Madison, speech in the House of Representatives, January 10, 1794

But what did Madison know about the Constitution, he only wrote the thing...

Strangely, the anti-government folks who fall into the "starve the beast" camp also tend to have the same attitude about their state governments.

That is a GREAT Madison quote! I like this one, too!

"The government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like state governments, whose powers are more general. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government." -- James Madison, speech in the House of Representatives, January 10, 1794

But what did Madison know about the Constitution, he only wrote the thing...

It is biologically totally fine to be attracted to any girl that is pubescent. When they start having periods and developing secondary sexual characteristics, they're A-OK in nature's book to have sex and babies with. The problem is that we're hard-wired to want to have sex with young people but we've also collectively pushed the minimum acceptable age to have sex artificially higher than that. The double standard comes when modeling is examined: most models start their careers up while they are young adolescents. It's totally okay to have 13-year-old girls modeling sexy things but it's totally not okay to think they're actually sexy.

The fun little story behind the age of consent in America in particular makes it seem even more ridiculous. Most places settled on a minimum age of 10 years old when the laws started to become specific about age around the globe. Imagine the outrage if the age of sexual consent was lowered to 10 in America today! Here's where the truth behind the big boosts in age of consent laws starts to come out of the cracks, though. Feminists in the early 1900s started the "social purity movement" to control female sexuality which was really just older women not wanting to have to compete with more attractive younger women for male attention, and of course the easiest way to do that is to dog the men until they make those laws happen to shut the nagging feminists up so they can sleep at night. Feminists in the early 1900s used the exact same arguments to outlaw sex with people under 16-18 years of age that were used to rationalize denying women the right to vote, citing things like emotional and mental immaturity.

Guess what? When the age of consent floated around 10-12 years of age, the law made perfect sense based on the reality of nature. Child (as in pre-pubescent child) sexual abuse has been illegal for a long time. Age of consent laws as they exist today are directly contrary to the way human sexuality works. They exist to reduce sexual competition for older women; everything we've been told about how "it's damaging because they're not adults" is scientifically unsupported bullshit created to bolster the position. The real source of trauma from most adolescent sexuality with older adults is the same as for rape victims who come forward and tell people. It comes from the way they are treated "specially," like they're damaged and can't possibly handle normal life anymore. Being labeled a sexual victim in Western society causes everyone who finds out to socially exile you. Treating them as such fragile broken flowers to try to make it easier for them to cope has the insanely ironic effect of absolutely destroying their psyche long-term, especially in the case of completely consensual adolescent sex acts that are prosecuted over the protests of the adolescent participant(s).

I suspect that while the most vocal and prolific posters on Slashdot seem to be pro-Democrats

I haven't notice that.

I'd like to see statistics.

, the vast majority of silent readers are more pro-Republicans.

That was an argument originally made by Richard Nixon! How can you disprove that the "silent majority" favored him, when they're silent? The really great thing about that argument is that it is supported by the absence of facts: you're pointing to the silence as support for what you say.

It makes no sense to have a legislative body (The Senate) that is not proportionally sized according to population. The way it works now, a citizen in Vermont's vote means more to the election of a Senator than a voter in California simply because Vermont has less people than California.

We already have a legislative body that is proportional, the House of Representatives.

The Senate was ALWAYS from the beginning supposed to represent STATE interests. Since the 17th explain to me HOW a state government is supposed to get a Senator to represent STATE government interests when there is NO leverage on the side of state governments to push Senators to represent them?

That's what the 17th amendment did, it tilted Federalism in the direction of the Federal Government so that States basically have no say over what the Federal Government does. Prior to the 17th state legislatures made sure that Senators voted for Supreme court justices that listened to them (states).

The only leverage states have is Article V which they've never successfully used.

If have any interest in the 17th Amendment, and want to cut through all the stupid rumors (like the lie that dozens of senators were never seated prior to the 17th)

http://mason.gmu.edu/~tzywick2...

It's a VERY good paper on the subject.

Let me quote the 2nd Amendment for you:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Note that phrase "well regulated" in the actual literal text of the Bill of Rights. Very very few people say that all guns should be taken away; instead, the argument is that we should actually follow the constitution and regulate guns.

Jesus Christ, not this line of crap again. "Regulated" in that time meant "functioning". And if there's any question as to what this was all about, take if from one of the writers of that article:

"I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials." — George Mason, in Debates in Virginia Convention on Ratification of the Constitution, Elliot, Vol. 3, June 16, 1788

The Federalist Papers make it very clear that the public has an unquestionable right to arms in order to defend themselves from government tyranny.

And you are wrong, there are many people who want to take ALL weapons away from law abiding citizens. Of course their method to do that, ironically, is to use gun-toting cops and military to do it.

well regulated is clearly meant in reference to bowel function. Nobody wants to see a constipated man with a firearm..

Let me quote the 2nd Amendment for you:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Note that phrase "well regulated" in the actual literal text of the Bill of Rights. Very very few people say that all guns should be taken away; instead, the argument is that we should actually follow the constitution and regulate guns.

Jesus Christ, not this line of crap again. "Regulated" in that time meant "functioning". And if there's any question as to what this was all about, take if from one of the writers of that article:

"I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials."
— George Mason, in Debates in Virginia Convention on Ratification of the Constitution, Elliot, Vol. 3, June 16, 1788

The Federalist Papers make it very clear that the public has an unquestionable right to arms in order to defend themselves from government tyranny.

And you are wrong, there are many people who want to take ALL weapons away from law abiding citizens. Of course their method to do that, ironically, is to use gun-toting cops and military to do it.

Edward Maibach, for example, is the Director of Climate Change Communication, and holds a BA in social psychology from University of California at San Diego, an MPH in health promotion from San Diego State University, and a PhD in communication research from Stanford University. He teaches how to talk about climate, but he doesn't study it.

That's sort of how the libertarian viewpoint evolves, I guess. Like Reagan started out as a democrat, presumably because he cared about people and favored social reforms. Then after living through the Communist purges in the McCarthy era,

Living through and not exactly vigorously opposing them. Whilst he did say he didn't think that the Communist Party should be outlawed:

Whether the party should be outlawed, I agree with the gentlemen that preceded me that that is a matter for the Government to decide. As a citizen I would hesitate, or not like, to see any political party outlawed on the basis of its political ideology. We have spent 170 years in this country on the basis that democracy is strong enough to stand up and fight against the inroads of any ideology.

he was, as the article says, a bit of a "friendly witness".

So I rather doubt that McCarthyism made him a Republican.

(Unless you meant that all those horrible Commies in Hollywood made him anti-government.)

Hi cold,
It is easy to mistake what the Libertarians are saying, but many of their authors try to claim that Unions fail to support individuals and thereby are bad for the workers that are in them. This is clearly contradictory to the history of unions the capability that they give workers to negotiate with owners.

It is the intent of Libertarian beliefs to undermine the workers by convincing them that their individual goals out weigh the advantages of collective bargaining for the group goals

Divide and Conquer

Oh, yes a citation
"The great libertarian theorist Friedrich Hayek concluded that unions "are the one institution where government has signally failed in its first task, that of preventing coercion of men by other men-and by coercion I do not mean primarily the coercion of employers but the coercion of workers by their fellow workers." Hayek may have been thinking mainly of corrupt and unaccountable union leaders. But even a completely democratic union sometimes supplants private rights. As libertarians like Morgan O. Reynolds point out, majorities within a union are able to ignore minorities' preferences. "
http://journals.gmu.edu/PPPQ/a...

When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago

This is similar to what happened in geology when plate tectonics became accepted. There were a cadre of crusty (pun intended) old professors who just flat out rejected the idea that the surface of the earth could move like that. They stuck to their guns, and some of them spent their final years in academia trying to refute tectonic theory. I heard about this when I was a rockhound as a kid and went to amateur geology events.

I don't know if at that time anyone accused those adopting the new theory as being personally corrupt, but doubt it. Those were different times. However, when this guy starts calling the APS corrupt he's clearly gone into the weeds.

In reality there is corruption in the climate change debate, and it's all on the side of the fossil fuel advocates. They have a lot of money at stake, and they spend a relatively large amount defending their wealth. The poster boys for this are the Koch brothers, although they are not alone.

There's a position in the economics department of Kansas University funded by the Kochs. It's filled by a person who's previous job was as a lobbyist for the Koch organization. Among other things he lobbied against wind power subsidies, which is really blatant give the vast tax write-offs that fossil fuel companies get.

Additionally, another Koch funded economist at George Mason University has come out in favor of less democracy. Dr. Garett Jones published a paper titled “10% Less Democracy: How Less Voting Could Mean Better Governance" This is a step beyond the Republican program to keep the "wrong" kind of people from voting. It's starting to look like the Kochs are getting tired of the peasants grumbling, and are considering reducing their right to petition grievances before the king.

Hello, when you refer to Americans please don't conflate a meddling, incompetent President with Americans in general. Most Americans did not actually vote for that guy, he's lost most credibility in the US and among allies and other countries around the world. Thanks.

Technically, no American president has been voted for by "most Americans" since large swaths of the people have been excluded from voting for various reasons (age, gender, race, or ethnicity, depending on the time period). But your attempts to reference the current president fall short since he got the overall majority of the vote in both elections (52% in 2008 and 51% in 2012).

2012 General Election Turnout Rates, Voting-Age Population, 240,926,957, The final popular vote totals were 65,899,660 for Obama-Biden;
65,899,660 / 240,926,957 = 27.3%, pretty blantant that most Americans didn't vote for Obama. In fact with Obama's margin of only 4,967,508,that's close to expected voter fraud rates, it's hard to say how many votes he actually won by.

Here is my problem with that argument. You're making a moral judgment, and certainly not the only possible one.

No, it is not a moral judgement. You currently have no right to vote for representatives in other states and districts. And based on the design of the system, no such right is justified on any grounds.

If you believe that the best system of governance is one where local constituencies vote for representatives who exclusively represent them and then you live with however those votes come out then of course you're going to object to meddling in somebody else's district.

I am talking about the current system in the US. Whether that is the best or not is a moral judgement that you want to make.

Now, you can try to argue that the Constitution doesn't establish a proportional democracy with a national election,

I can not only try to argue that, were I wishing to, it is trivially provable by the fact that the Constitution does not establish a national public election of any kind. The election of state representation is left to the states, and the Presidential election is specified by an electoral college whose members are selected by the states.

The Constitution also doesn't establish a representative democracy where you aren't allowed by law to tamper with elections in other districts.

The US Constitution does not specify how states elect their representation, but the state constitutions do, and the US Constitution does not override them. Keep trying. Maybe someone will change the system so you folks in large populous states can get rid of all the pesky rural folks and do everything the way you want it done. Not today.

I don't really buy the argument that less populous states get disenfranchised in a proportional system. Each man still gets one vote.

So the voters in California get to elect the senators from California, and the senators from Wyoming, and from South Dakota, and Utah and North Dakota, and all the House members from those states, because the 13 million voters in California vastly vastly vastly outnumber the voters in those states. That's not disenfranchisement? Right.

Californians, by themselves, were 10% of the total votes cast in 2012. Add 8.5 mil for Florida, 5 mil for Illinois, 7 mil for NY, 5.5 mil for OH, 3.5 for NJ, 4.8 for MI, and you've got a very large number of voters who could all vote for people who will do what THEY want instead of doing what the people in the states they allegedly represent want. And this is what you'd call a better system?

Nope. Probably because we don't discriminate against them.

HA HA HAHAHAHAHAA!

http://www.gmu.edu/programs/ic...
http://www.theguardian.com/com...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

Sorry, you were saying something? Europe is absolutely racist, it's just a bit less visible because the minority population is smaller, less visible, and doesn't try to hold power. Also, the historical repercussions of your past racism are less visible because you guys mostly kept your slaves in your colonies rather than in your backyard: it's a lot easier to pretend that Nigeria isn't your problem any more than to abandon Birmingham.

Skynet and The Terminator are definitely coming. But what about the economics of machine intelligence? This article makes an interesting case: http://hanson.gmu.edu/aigrow.p...

If IT workers knew how to think critically, they would go into programming, instead.

*cough* OK, that was mean. The thing is, critical thinking skills are notoriously difficult to teach effectively. Maybe we should put more effort into hiring IT workers who can solve problems, instead of looking for people with the right combination of resume bullet-points. If we created greater demand for critical thinkers, instead of creating demand for certifications, perhaps we would see more effort put into learning to solve problems.

Or not. Maybe we just wouldn't find anyone to hire.

you know, kristallnacht was bad, but the u.s. had its own pogroms during world war I against Germans in America. German businesses were smashed up, German printing presses were destroyed by mobs, etc.

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/...

Actually, many worlds violates CPT symmetry - worldlines divide only forward in time, not backwards.

Your link provides this objection but also the response: "The splitting is time asymmetric; this observed temporal asymmetry is due to the boundary conditions imposed by the Big Bang". Yudkowsky explains this in a comment in the thread in next paragraph's first link: "If you took one world and extrapolated backward, you'd get many pasts. If you take the many worlds and extrapolate backward, all but one of the resulting pasts will cancel out! Quantum mechanics is time-symmetric." (emphasis mine) So the violation is apparent. In fact, if the laws of physics lead to a Big Crunch, then the same cancellation happens forward in time, with alternate futures canceling out until only only one remains at the crunch point. As far as I know however the consensus seems to be that there won't be a Big Crunch, so the branching continues, perhaps without reality ever reaching a point were cancellations start occurring. Or not.

But the Less Wrong folk go further than Many-Worlds. They also consider Barbour's Timeless physics as most probably correct, what entirely removes time from the equation (literally as is the case). As such what we subjectively experience as time flow, time-dependent causality and entropy increasing, not to mention what we conceptually picture as universes branching, wouldn't be a proper description of what goes on at reality's base level. On the contrary, all states of reality, from the point of zero entropy / one world towards the other extreme of maximum entropy / whatever-worlds would form a static plenum, with causality reframed as a set of mathematical relations between static states.

So, no, not disingenuous at all. Maybe wrong, yes, but still a valid counterpoint.

If you look at the roots of all of this it goes back to the 1979 Supreme Court Ruling in Smith vs. Maryland where:

“A person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties’’

The case centered around the installation of a pen register, which records phone numbers dialed in the phone company office. As all of the current press indicates the NSA and other Federal Agencies and Administrations to justify scooping up all of information they can. In 1979 it was difficult to trace phone calls because most of the local COs were analog and getting this kind of data meant installing devices, requiring court orders, anybody remember rotary dial? The 1979 ruling has therefore been applied now in our current era where this information is "at hand." Using this we can now see why the large Data Center in Utah is being built to collect the billions of Call Detail Records and other Internet IP data that the NSA can gobble up. Strangely enough the safeguards that protect a US citizen fall down suddenly if you have contact with a foreign country. Let's see, going on vacation to Europe this year? You're sucked into the system. Have friends or family members overseas? You're sucked into the system. Compound that over zealous approach to collection and the fact that they can save the data for up to 10 years for historical analysis and you have a huge storage problem. Now if you add it Network Graph Analysis, you'll be sucked in if your friends or family members have contacts with people in other countries. That means effectively everybody in US is on a graph somewhere and it's being used to create fake evidence chains against your fellow citizens. I'm not advocating crime or terrorism in any way but there has to be oversight of law enforcement in this nation, with the NSA scoping up everything they can you have a police state where evidence can be created out of thin air and you can't challenge it's authenticity.

The ramifications of this are staggering and I for one have been in touch with my congressman and written to both my Senators to voice my opposition to it but the only way to fix this is to end the two party stranglehold of our government that has allowed this to happen behind closed doors. The FISA court needs to be abolished and the NSA systems need to be dismantled. That won't happen when you have elected officials who don't fear the electorate and the only way that will change is to force our government to enact:

• Term Limits. Stop allowing the same assholes who get re-elected over and over again from serving on these committees. Look at the Senate Intelligence Committee who has partial oversight of the NSA, how many members have changed over the past decade? Despite Republicans or Democrats running the Senate, the players strangely enough remain the same. Fuck that and start electing people who have your interests at heart, not the defense industry!
• Campaign finance reform. Washington politics runs on money, no money, no incentive for these fucktards to constantly get re-elected or to have the process corrupted by corporations and lobbying groups up on M street. Plus it will free up a lot of office space in DC.
• Get off your lazy butts and vote! General Elections get shitty turnout, it's time we take back our nation and get this career politicians afraid of the electorate again. Stop voting on pure party lines too. Democrats and Republicans could give a shit about you, it's about them maintaining power and getting re-elected so wake up.
• Stop Gerrymandering. Every 10 years we go through endless redistricting battles with lawsuits over

Latin/Greek seems like overkill. Why not just use Prolog, or some other logic programming language? Then you'd get the benefits of unambiguous propositional logic, the familiarity of English, and the ability to perform automated queries on the law. Propositional logic is much easier to teach than Latin/Greek, and would probably be beneficial to cover at some point during primary/secondary education anyway.
For an example of how this might work, see the classic 'Colonel West sells missiles to Nono' example. (slide 17 here).

The Norwegian you responded to makes a fair point regarding vote selling.

If you can lock in your vote, then change your mind right up to the time polls close, buying votes would be a fools errand, and would simply disappear.

The Washington way is more prone to vote buying, (bring in your ballet down at the union hall, vote the union ticket, sign, seal and drop in the union mailbox and collect 50 bucks). Although I'm not aware of this being done anywhere, Cy Sun managed to get elected somehow.

Vote by mail is largely successful in Washington, with some of the highest turnout rates in the nation, triple the 21 percent quoted in TFA.
http://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/voter_participation.aspx
http://elections.gmu.edu/Turnout_2010G.html

It might not be broken and may not need fixing.

All great points. You may also have distant relatives or old friends who may still be interested in your life either now or later. At the very least, historians may be interested in your life, including in your local historical society. See for example:
"Why do historians value letters and diaries"
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/letters/whydo.html
"Thus, the historical value of reading diaries and letters involves understanding the significance of how individual writers employed, experimented with, or altered the conventional forms alive in their time. Perhaps more than any other kind of historical text, the personal writing we are considering reveals how people both embraced and resisted the time and place in which they lived. Their personal motives for employing either form -- the emotional and intellectual energy infusing the form with life each time it is written with a new subjectivity -- suggest much about how people in the past made their cultures, but made them from the materials at hand."

In any case, whether pictures or writings remain, you've made ripples in the world in all the lives you've interacted with. What is the universe quantum physicists describe but the sum total of all those sorts of waves?

Probably too late, but might give you a bit more time to make a few more ripples:
http://sciencenordic.com/cancer-patients-high-vitamin-d-levels-live-longer
"For example lung cancer patients, the median survival rate after the cancer diagnosis was 5.3 months for patients with low vitamin D levels, whereas it was 22.6 months for patients with high levels."

More about other cancer options in this thread:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3610805&cid=43358733

You might find parts of this book by Thomas Moore "Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ideals" of interest, or at least, just the summary:
http://books.google.com/books?id=RKZreNYKNHQC
"Our lives are filled with emotional tunnels: the loss of a loved one or end of a relationship, aging and illness, career disappointments or just an ongoing sense of dissatisfaction with life. Society tends to view these "dark nights" in clinical terms as obstacles to be overcome as quickly as possible. But Moore shows how honoring these periods of fragility as periods of incubation and positive opportunities to delve the soul's deepest needs can provide healing and a new understanding of life's meaning. Dark Nights of the Soul presents these metaphoric dark nights not as the enemy, but as times of transition, occasions to restore yourself, and transforming rites of passage, revealing an uplifting and inspiring new outlook on such topics as:
* The healing power of melancholy
* The sexual dark night and the mysteries of matrimony
* Finding solace during illness and in aging
* Anxiety, anger, and temporary Insanities
* Linking creativity, spirituality, and emotional struggles
* Finding meaning and beauty in the darkness"

Although it sounds like you have already found a way to honor and respect the dark night you are facing. So, I link to that more by way of honoring what you say.

A key point he makes is that in mainstream Western culture, we usually see "growth" as about like a caterpillar getting bigger, but ignore growth as "transformation", like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. "Groundhog Day" is a favorite funny movie that connects with that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog_Day_(film)

I wrote about my mother's last days here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
" I'm glad I had the "free" time

Yes, the law is supposed to distinguish between a non-criminal civil dispute between two private parties (Aaron and JSTOR) and a crime which is "an act so horrendous it is against society" - I am paraphrasing a law professor. Aaron's acts don't come close to that. Yet there he was looking at prison.

ArsTechnica has a good article on this case, which quotes Columbia law professor Tim Wu on the appalling behavior of federal prosecutor Carmen Ortiz:
In our age, armed with laws passed in the nineteen-eighties and meant for serious criminals, the federal prosecutor Carmen Ortiz approved a felony indictment that originally demanded up to thirty-five years in prison. Worse still, her legal authority to take down Swartz was shaky. Just last year, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals threw out a similar prosecution. Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, a prominent conservative, refused to read the law in a way that would make a criminal of “everyone who uses a computer in violation of computer use restrictions—which may well include everyone who uses a computer.” Ortiz and her lawyers relied on that reading to target one of our best and brightest... The prosecutors forgot that, as public officials, their job isn’t to try and win at all costs but to use the awesome power of criminal law to protect the public from actual harm... Today, prosecutors feel they have license to treat leakers of information like crime lords or terrorists. In an age when our frontiers are digital, the criminal system threatens something intangible but incredibly valuable. It threatens youthful vigor, difference in outlook, the freedom to break some rules and not be condemned or ruined for the rest of your life.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/opening-arguments-in-the-trial-of-public-opinion-after-aaron-swartz-death
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/01/everyone-interesting-is-a-felon.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/nov/17/silverglate-three-felonies-book

Academic publishers have been price gauging universities and students for a long time, but to their credit at least JSTOR had the brains to tell the feds to back off. Oritz should have listened to them. Their behavior is merely greedy. Hers is unforgivable: there is no place in government for public officials who abuse their power and harm the public for their own personal advantage.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/24/harvard-university-journal-publishers-prices
http://enculturation.gmu.edu/knowledge-cartels
http://boingboing.net/2010/01/03/prescription-for-con.html
http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2012/ending-knowledge-cartels/

How does a "small fringe" hold the party hostage?

Your logic is an absurdity.

Not the GP, but the logic isn't absurd. The reality is absurd, but not the logic. The key: Primaries.

Only the most dedicated voters vote in primaries. Here is the voter turnout from the US 2012 Primaries.

Look at Virginia's Republican primary: 4.6% of the Voting-Eligible Population (VEP). Assuming only two candidates, the winner needed 50%+1 of that, so 2.3% of the VEP's support. Wyoming? 0.3% (winner at 0.15%).*

--

*I hope these ultra-low turnout states have some other reason, but I haven't looked into them enough. Maybe the state party just picks the winner without any actual voting by members?

Thanks. While it is a positive point for individual gun rights, it seems that there isn't much to go on if this is all that can be mustered for a particular interpretation by the founding fathers. I found this article critiquing this source: "The Second Amendment Under Fire: The Uses of History and the Politics of Gun Control"

You forgot one very important statistic: US voter turnout is lucky to top 60%. A lot of people seem to grumble about how bad the politicians are, and that you should vote for X instead of Y, but more than a third of you don't even bother to vote.

Voter turnout is ~60%. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_States_presidential_elections

The President is only a small part of the Federal government, and a very small part of the governing bodies of the US. But somehow some people think all you can do is go to the polls once every four years to pick the next dictator. No wonder voter turnout is so low in the rest of the elections.

I wrote PhD thesis using Open Document Format (ODF) and it worked out very well. I used OpenOffice.org, but I expect that LibreOffice would work at least as well. You can translate to many other formats (e.g., with "Save As" or external tools).

As with any big writing effort, one key is to separate formatting from content. You should FIRST set up a template with that does all the formatting, including all the paragraph types you'll need and the right format for them. Then write your document, selecting the paragraph types for each paragraph as appropriate. Do NOT embed formatting commands in the document itself - paragraphs should NOT have font settings, etc., but instead these should be controlled by the paragraph's paragraph type. In my case, I created an OpenDocument template for George Mason University (GMU), and gave it to GMU so others could share it. If you create a template, please share it with others.

So no, it wouldn't be a Vast Right Wing conspiracy; it would be a handful of guys with programming skills who built it for the lulz, but at least one of which also happens to be teabagger who just wants one side of the argument to "win."

(I'm the original AC you responded to).

This quote pretty much sums up why you're on the losing end of the argument, but you probably don't realize why.

For a long time politics has been treated as a sporting event, like football. You have fans of one team (republicans), fans of the other team (democrats), and cheerleaders for their team (such as Moryath above). Many people don't like the game, much less want to be a cheerleader for either side in the game.

Along comes a group of people who are tired of the stadium being noisy, leaving trash in the neighborhood, and having a riot every time something doesn't go their way. They've decided to do something about it regardless of either team's cheerleaders calling them stupid or racist or "teabaggers". Some of these are the people who are eligible to vote, but historically haven't.

We don't "do it for the lulz". Our beliefs are not centered around which team is winning or losing, but instead removing the game altogether. Overall, we don't treat politics as a full contact sport. Instead, we treat governance as just that: good stewardship of our country. It has been in irresponsible hands for far too long.

In short, an argument on Slashdot will have no bearing on our attempts to remove the corrupt and the corruptible from positions of power and an attempt to return sanity and responsibility to the system. Your use of derogatory terms will not sway our resolve. Saying that we're on the wrong team won't matter once we've gotten rid of the game altogether. There is no "winning" in the way you mean it. But there is definitely a "losing" outcome if we continue spending and borrowing without limit. Only, it won't just hurt your and your opposing team, it'll hurt everyone.

PS: The sports analogy also works for people in Europe who claim that our game (left vs right) isn't really football at all since it's played with an oblong ball instead of a spherical one.

The FBI has been doing this for decades. That notorious threat to public safety, Lucille Ball, had an extensive FBI file.

Maybe they had a reason for looking?

America may have loved Lucy but she made the FBI suspicious when she registered with the Communist Party in 1936 at the insistence of her grandfather. Although the House Committee on Un-American Activities began their investigation in 1953, no evidence was ever shown that she had supported the Communist Party and her registration appeared to be only for the sake of pleasing her grandfather. --- Lucille Ball

-----

Things I didn't know about American Communism: -- David Bernstein

I'm reviewing Martin Redish's book, The Logic of Persecution, for the Northwestern Law Review. The book is an interesting look at the so-called "McCarthy era" (which both pre and post-dated McCarthy) from a First Amendment perspective. I'll post a link to the review soon.......

Here are some of the facts I learned from doing research for my review, some of which are just "fun facts," and others of which affected my view of the era in question (if you want footnotes, you will have to wait until I circulate the paper):

(1) The first chairman of the House committee that was the predecessor to HUAC, Samuel Dickstein, was probably a Soviet agent.

(2) Hollywood scriptwriters who were members of the Communist Party (CPUSA) were expected to use their positions to promote Communist doctrine and the Party's agenda, or, if that was not possible, at least to work to exclude anti-Soviet sentiment. (And I already knew, but you might not have, that each of the Hollywood Ten was a member of the CPUSA.)

(3) The first federal prosecution under the Smith Act (later used to prosecute CPUSA leaders) was the prosecution of eighteen leaders of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party 1941. The CPUSA not only applauded this action; Party leaders assisted in the prosecution.

(4) The Smith Act prosecutions of CPUSA leaders were largely a result of the fact that top government officials had recently learned from decoded "Venona cables" between the Soviet Union and its agents and affiliates abroad that the Soviet Union used American Communists to engage in wide scale espionage against the United States. The CPUSA leaders were not prosecuted for espionage and related charges (conspiracy) because that would have involved revealing that the U.S. had deciphered the Soviets' code, and also much of the additional evidence the government had was obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Instead, the government resurrected the Smith Act, and proceeded with prosecutions of highly dubious constitutionality (though upheld by the Supreme Court, which implicitly recognized that these prosecutions were "special").

(5) Not only did the CPUSA recruit spies for the Soviet Union through its "secret apparatus," it was prepared to engage in violence on behalf of the Soviet Union.

(6) The Smith Act prosecutions and other government and private anti-Communist activity destroyed the usefulness of the CPUSA to the Soviet Union for espionage.

(7) Many of the questionable tactics used by the government against domestic Communists in the late 1940s and 1950s, including Smith Act prosecutions, were previously used by the government against domestic Nazis and fascists in the late 1930s and early 1940s by the Roosevelt Administration.

(8) Alger Hiss was not prosecuted for spying because the statute of limitations had expired.

(9) During the "Red Decade" of the 1930s, Hollywood Communists ran their own blacklist againist their polit

You can raise taxes on "rich" people (hell, even everyone who makes over $100k a year) to 100% and confiscate every last bit of their wealth - and it STILL won't pay off the whole we're in. That's what you don't get - the "SPEND SPEND SPEND!" people like you wrote so many checks that we're FUCKED for a very long time.

Your idiocy of taxing people to prevent competitiveness.....all it results in is higher costs for everything, which HURTS US citizens, but you'll refuse to ignore that and think that having no disposable income is a "good thing" because that means that evil people aren't "being greedy". But whatever, I've given up on trying to educate the intentionally ignorant like yourself.

Regardless, here's an article that you'll ignore about how we can't tax our way out of our deficit problem. http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/articles/11/EatTheRich

No, it's not about taxes. Why? Because the government's insatiable desire to spend and control exceeds the amount of money available to tax. Here's an article by an Economist explaining why taxing the rich to death won't fix the budget issues http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/articles/11/EatTheRich

Not just taxing away all of the income of anyone even vaguely considered "rich" but also confiscating all of their current wealth wouldn't come close to paying off the national debt. The only reason why we even come close to having the standard of living we have is that "evil" trade you despise. Go ask people who are old (and no, I don't mean in their 40's - I mean old). They'll tell you how the average person didn't come close to having the number of clothes we have today, how cars as a proportion of your income were much higher, how every damn thing available to guy was much more expensive (relative to income) and how there were far fewer choices to buy from.

So please, go ahead - jack taxes and tariffs and see how fast the quality of life for Americans drops. Even you would flee the country if you actually created the America you desire because you'd realize it's a horrible place to live.

The Feds already have tried to shut it down, but not before copying the idea for themselves.

I wrote this last time. The concept that Microsoft users have granted informed consent is overrated. What they've mostly granted is consent through rational ignorance, because Microsoft controls the process by which consent is granted. A more efficient way for users to assert their moral sentiments would not result in nearly so much "permission".

Example of an efficient mechanism: a user permission policy configuration which conveys appropriate sentiments to all installed and online applications, without the user ever facing 20 pages of fine print with an "I agree" button underneath, in order to receive a service benefit smaller in value than a free cup of coffee.

When web TV is universal, every major web TV decoder box brand will be able to aggregate any information passing to any click-through-consenting consenting viewer. The sports analyst on ESPN predicts one team, every other network can go live with the same prediction five minutes later, because a consenting viewer of ESPN has passed their cable box provider this tidbit of information, which is now public domain, and doesn't even need to be referred back to the original source, so attribution is dead, too.

What makes Google different (in a critical yet small way) is that users clicking on offered search links is essentially popularity data. It's a lot harder to argue that popularity data isn't public domain, even when the popularity accrues 100% to Google's huge investment in search innovation.

What might be fair play here is for Bing to mark search results offered exclusively on popularity data as such, meaning that their own search algorithm made an insignificant contribution to the result offered.

Of course, Microsoft won't consent that this is even a viable technical option. In some human languages, you actually have to speak differently of things you seen yourself vs things you've only heard second hand. A distinction has to be pretty deeply wired in the human psyche to become embedded in grammatical necessity in any human language.

I repeat that the real story here is translating click-through-consent obtained through rational ignorance as equal to first class permission.

The Fanjul family, who owns large sugar farms in the Florida Everglades, capture an estimated $60 million annually in artificial profits.

If the sugar industry ran like the software industry, every time I opened a bag of sugar, there would a sticker I would have to break granting my consent to the national sugar tariff, or no sugar for me. I would do like everyone else and buy the sugar anyway and the Fanjul family would sleep peacefully at night with the consent of the nation on their side.

Well, there are thousands of things that instantly lose my consent if I could only organize by lack of consent more efficiently, like adding to the "I agree" button a tooltip which says "not really".

What a click-through agreement actually amounts to:

For purposes of my minuscule relationship with giant corporation, we'll act for legal purposes as if I accept this legal text, but don't think for a moment I've given my moral consent or permission to engage in unethical business practices based on the latitude big corporation has carved itself with this wall of fine print

[ We understand each other ] ... [ Go jump in a lake ]

When Tony Soprano requests a garbage removal fee, does the person paying the fee consent to its payment?

I agree with you that something with the apparent brightness of the Sun but the apparent size of a star would be extremely dangerous, if it's the brightness of Venus or the Moon it's not a problem.

The image formed on the retina is not a single point: its size is governed by the diffraction limit of the human eye.

Since both Venus and the supernova have an angular size much smaller than the eye's diffraction limit of 0.5 arcminutes, the light from both will be smeared out to cover the same amount of retinal area. So if its brightness is the same as Venus, and the part of the eye illuminated is the same as Venus, it will do as much retinal damage as Venus, which is to say, none.

If the supernova is as bright as the Moon, you start having to do math.

Intensity of supernova image = Supernova brightness / (area of supernova image)
Intensity of Sun's image = Sun's brightness / (area of sun image)

Ratio of supernova to sun intensity = (SN brightness / Sun brightness ) * (Sun image diam / SN image diam)^2

If the supernova is as bright as the moon (magnitude -13), and the Sun's magnitude is -27, the brightness ratio is 2.512^(-14) = 2.5 x 10^-6.

The sun's diameter is 30 arcminutes; the supernova's apparent diameter to the naked eye is 0.5 arcminutes, so the diameter ratio is 60.

Ratio of supernova to sun intensity = 2.5 x 10^-6 * (60)^2 = 0.009

The intensity of the supernova would be 1% of the brightness of the sun. This is comparable to looking at the Sun through heavy clouds. Not real good for you, but permanent damage is unlikely.

(Note that it's *not* the same as looking at a sun during a 99% partial eclipse, because in that case while you see less of the sun, the parts you can see project the same intensity on your retina as usual.)

Oh, so now you've redefined the Constitution to make Senators and other elected officials just proxy voters for their constituents?

No, you did. Can you point one place in the Constitution where either "health" or "medicine" appears? No, because neither are there. Because they are not there Franken is taking more than one step beyond the bounds of congressional power, as Thomas Jefferson said. "To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specifically drawn around the powers of Congress is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition."

Senators are definitely not sworn to uphold the will of the majority of their constituents,

But they are sworn to defend the Constitution. Specifically their oath is (the relevant part in bold) "I,___ ___ , do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God."

Falcon

I believe the constitution mentions the citizens of the US should have freedom and general welfare

Freedom yes, but requiring people to buy health insurance denies freedom. And "general welfare" does not mean what you think it does. The USA's Founding Fathers set out exactly what the federal government can do, the Constitution of the USA says exactly that. And nowhere in it will anybody find socialized medicine in it. Hell neither health nor medicine can be found in it anywhere, and as Thomas Jefferson said "a single step beyond the boundaries thus specifically drawn around the powers of Congress is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition."

Capitalism isn't freedom.

But free markets and free trade is freedom. Franken wants to limit both, he supports fining people for not buying insurance and he supports censoring the net.

think many people think Capitalism has something to do with freedom, when, in fact, in capitalism wealth (and therefore power) is concentrated into ever fewer hands.

No it's you who are mistaken. That is not capitalism, what you describe is corporatism and the corporate aristocracy Thomas Jefferson warned of. Or as El Duce, Mussolini, said Fascism is corporatism.

Falcon

Well, according to George W. Bush the Constitution is just a God Damned piece of paper.

Saying this I hope you don't think I oppose Franken simply because I am Republican. I said the same about Bush treating the Constitution like toilet paper. I am not. I am registered "No Party Preference".

Actually I have voted for Democrats, Independents and independents (there is an Independent party), Reform Party candidates, and Republicans. I vote for the candidate that believes in and will follow the Constitution of the USA. I oppose those who like Thomas Jefferson warned of, will "take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specifically drawn around the powers of Congress is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition."

Falcon

Where is your evidence? Your statement sounds like opinion. When has Franken disregarded the constitution?

From his own mouth, Al Franken supports single-payer health care insurance. Now where in the Constitution is that power given to the federal government? Hint, it doesn't, and as Founding Father Thomas Jefferson said, "To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specifically drawn around the powers of Congress is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition."

you come across as angry and uninformed in your posts.

I am angry, and informed.

Falcon

Even using a liberal interpretation of the Commerce Clause, most federal laws in place today are probably not Constitutionally sound without the Filburn decision.

Using a liberal interpretation of the Constitution most of what the government does would be unconstitutional. As Thomas Jefferson said "To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specifically drawn around the powers of Congress is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition."

Falcon

http://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html

"As it turns out, Sean and Tom are both absolutely correct. Usually, this
kind of urban legend stuff turns out to be completely inaccurate, but in
this case, they are right on. When I left Sun to go to NeXT, I thought
Objective-C was the coolest thing since sliced bread, and I hated C++.
So, naturally when I stayed to start the (eventually) Java project, Obj-C
had a big influence. James Gosling, being much older than I was, he had
lots of experience with SmallTalk and Simula68, which we also borrowed
from liberally."

For a while, Sun and NeXT were even in an alliance involving OpenStep, which carried on to Apple where for a while the Cocoa API was also available under Java.

In the last US presidential election only about 60% of the people eligible to vote, actually did. However, I bet a much greater number of people complained about the president/candidates. I remember reading somewhere that even though Hollywood (Puff Daddy etc..) started the whole "Vote of Die" campaign to get young people (age 18-24) to vote, approximately 1 in 10 actually did.

I always tell people, if you didn't vote in in the election, don't complain.

The bigger problem in your argument is that patents ensured for a time that improvements to the steam engine (condender and use of high pressure) would not be combined until the patents expired, thus actually retarding progress.

assuming you are serious about learning about this issue, and your post wasn't merely written to make yourself feel good, you should check out this paper. It is clear that improvements can be made even though an item is under patent, it happens all the time today. In any case there is a lot of discussion (among those who care about such things) about what happens when an area of invention becomes too encumbered by patents. That paper examines some related historical evidence.

According to everything I can find, the earliest age that Catholicism ever allowed a girl to marry at was 12, which while very young is almost never prepubescent. So please provide a reference to your claim.

"Never" is a very strong word, not to mention incorrect.