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adoption?
of course!
why didn't I think of that?

now if only we can figure out what to do with the 600,000 (minimum) extra babies -per year- that would be piling up assuming even the most generous estimates for adoption-seekers vs abortions....

http://www.ithaca.edu/faculty/cduncan/230/adoption.htm

Not only fair, but desperately needed. Not many people know that the NSF funded the creation of 9 math curricula (5 high school and 4 middle school), but part of the idiot requirements of the funding was that they had to be given over to a publisher to publish them. The project could not retain the works and release them for free. I see this ridiculous requirement as essentially stealing high quality math textbooks from the people that paid for them and keeping them away from the students that need them the most.

More about all the high school texts themselves can be found at http://www.ithaca.edu/compass/

http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/161/3/228 "... moderate levels of alcohol intake may be associated with improved cognitive function and reduced risk of cognitive decline and dementia."

Social drinking leads to better job performance and career success. http://www.ithaca.edu/ithacan/articles/0610/05/opinion/2drinking_.htm

Excess alcohol consumption, on the other hand, is almost always a bad thing. There are some studies that show the benefit of moderate consumption but there is no studies that show that heavy consumption is anything but bad.

And this is not just genre snobbery. Comic books became graphic novels when Art Spiegleman wrote Maus about the holocaust. This was again almost instantly recognized as a true work of art and he is exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York along side Picasso, Warhol, etc. Call me when the Museum of Modern Art exhibits some video game screen shots.

http://www.ithaca.edu/news/release.php?id=394

There are such a thing as standards, until video games grow up and get some standards and move beyond sophomoric relativism they can be guaranteed to never produce a work of greatness. Why, because guess what like all great things good art is hard work and relativism encourages laziness. Why bother to strive to produce great and moving art if everything is just the same and no different than clouds drifting by in the sky in it's level of attainment?

Obviously a little conflicted young fundamentalist is:
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This homie is doing is part to go against stereotypes
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Sometimes life is just hard
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Dirty girl...
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Anyone notice how the hero looks suspiciously like Michael Jackson with white hair?

The problem is, only a long-time fan with cognitive dissonance could claim that Crusade was anything other than the unmitigated piece of crap that it was.

Nitpicking psychological vocabulary: You use the term "cognitive dissonance" backwards. It really means the discomfort felt at holding two conflicting beliefs, which directs individuals to relieve strain by modifying one of those beliefs.

But in your sentence, you used it to indicate the lack of such discomfort. Inserting the word "unresolved" would correct the usage, but it remains a gratuitious insertion of pretentious psychobabble.

there was an arc -- something almost unheard of in television science fiction at the time or since

Without a caveat like "in popular USA programming", that overgeneralization is false. Sci-fi anime (which is usually constrained to less than 1 year for the whole run) provides especially abundant exceptions.

Crusade was a pathetically hollow attempt to set up a dungeons-and-dragons style quest, right down to adding one character of each DD clas

And it couldn't even do that properly. One of the points of a Tolkien/D&D adventure is cooperation not just between different professions, but different races of characters. B5 was nice in that it allowed several species to have interesting characters (instead of just defining an alien race with Star Trek-style stereotypes). Crusade lost something by going human-centric (besides other conceptual shortcomings).

In a way, that problem could be just a symptom of Crusade's other great problem: budget. B5 was constantly exceeding it's budget, and the special effects (both in makeup, stunts, and outer-space CGI) suffered for it. It looks like Crusade decided to aim lower in those regards, but it was too high a price- B5 fans had been willing to overlook when effects fell short and appreciate the effort.

The fact that Galen -- the most hilariously bad character from Crusade is going

I didn't like him either... but slapping a Vorlon suit onto the guy would've made him tolerable. Anything sounds more profound if said through a speech-synthesizer!

It has happened before, in the Inslaw/Promis Software Affair.

Oh yeah, that was a propietary app. Guess there's no security there either.

That's not entirely true - otherwise we wouldn't have any use for ECC or parity. Computers can make "mistakes" in as much as data can be corrupted by physical processes that having nothing to do with the intended or programmed operation.

Technicalities aside, none of the election problems are about counting accuracy, neither human, nor mechanical, nor electronic. That's not the point. All measurements have an associated accuracy. It's how we deal with it that counts. If the margin of the election is of a size that given the error rate of the system there's a "reasonable" probability that the outcome is in error (1 sigma, 13% probability of error, say, given the error rate of the technology used) then a run-off election should be automatic, even if there's only two candidates in both elections. No matter what the voting technology. A 5% threashold would be statistically supportable.

All sampling systems have a margin of error. It's a 9th grade science mistake to get an F for submitting a graph of plant growth or whatever without any error bars. We seem to suffer from cognitive dissonance in refusing to admit there's an inescapable margin of error, and thereby not accommodating for it.

In 2000, FL and several other states should have held run-off elections between W and G after the first election found them at a "statistical tie". It's not clear which way it would have gone after that, but whoever thereby won would actually have been a democratically elected president, rather than one technically appointed by a divisive judicial coup.

Anyway, the critical failure regarding DREs is the lack of recognition that they are fallible. How do we deal with critical systems that might fail? We create an audit trail so if something goes wrong, we have a chance of undoing the error, or at least figuring out what failed and fixing it, and at the very least knowing that something did in fact go wrong so we can try again.

The systems shipped by Diebold and ESS etc are both intrinsically fallible and intrinsically inauditable, which is intolerable. Further, if a voter has reason to doubt the impartiality of a company that has, for example, pledged to deliver it's electoral votes to the republican in the next election to be run on it's own vote counting equipment, they might have some reason to doubt the veracity of the black-box tallying process and that undermines the authority of democracy. It is important, therefore, even if it were proven technically unnecessary, to provide voters with the familiar indicator of fairness provided by a human-readable, authoritative, tangible ballot.

We've gone through a lot of effort convincing ourselves, and by force much of the world, that having a brainwashed electorate choose one or the other corporate flack as titular head of the country is the best and fairest form of government on the planet (and it may well be, alas); at the very least we can apply basic 9th grade science to finding out whether tweedle dee or tweedle dum won the popularity contest.

The Democrats accomplished packing by using a sophisticated computer program referred to as the Computer Curtain. The Computer Curtain successfully arranged the districts so that as many Republicans as possible fit into the least number of districts. The Republican Party found it impossible to win any sort of a majority. The effects of this process are still existent even as the new plan for 2002 comes into shape.

Now realistically, Diebold's issues were exposed, so no matter what, this will affect them. After the issues surrounding Gore/Bush, if something did happen again, I wouldn't blame Diebold, I would blame those who went ahead and used the machines Diebold supplied. You remember that bringing the horse to the water story don't you? I could never explain it better. People have a short attention span, and the people would literally be the ones to blame for using Diebold's equipment from the point of the problems first being announced.

Now when you state something like a throw away the key approach, you're one of those same jurors those evil, condescending, malicious, gestapoish corporations look for to sit on a panel and make rash judgments.

Suppose Diebold first thought their intellectual property was at stake, or the livelihood of their business was at stake; is it wrong for them to fight for what they believe in. Maybe they saw he truth after being blinded and retracted the lawsuit, ever think about this for a minute? It's called being fair and analysing the situation.

I expect to see a bunch of noise made in the news about this once the deadline approaches,

Yea sure you will. Just like when the country came together for 9/11 they're going to drop it all for a television set. We'll have a "Million Man Television March", arrange it, I'll go.

followed by lots of Congressional campaigns running on the "The big bad federal government wants to take away your TV... over my dead body!" platform. Are you serious? From whom the congressmen you state? The same people who automagically make big time lobby money from some of the vendors? OK. If you say so. Pass me some oxycodone please my comments end her

But the idea of cognitive dissidence, which implies a brain at war with itself, seems fitting in SCO's case.

ok...while I don't have links to back up every paper I have read over the last 20 years...I did find a site that has a nice summary of the U.S. Iraq relations.

US-iraq relations

Hope that is what you were looking at, he has a bibliography if you want to learn more etc.

duffbeer703, please put your hands up in the air. You are being arrested for the murder of Jimmy Hoffa.

What's that? You didn't murder Jimmy Hoffa? Well, I don't need proof. I think you did. Tell you what, duffbeer703, I'm going to arrest you and execute you anyway. I know you did it, I just need a little more time to find the evidence. Would you prefer death by bunker buster, or M-16?

What's that? You'd rather I had proof before I convicted you?

That's just crazy talk.


p.s. The CIA helped the Iraqis gas the Kurds. Not to mention the U.S. sold them the helicopters. See this report by a professor at Cornell, if your memory of history is a bit foggy.

Something I have a vague recollection of from my lectures in Psychology can be applied to gambling machines.

Apparently, the most effective way to get someone to keep doing something is to provide a reward at random intervals [of button pressing, lever pulling etc.], centered around some average. It doesn't matter how large the reward is, just as long as it is something. Most studies were carried out on rats, but humans are so similar to rats that you might as well generalise.

For "Fruit Machines", you can encourage people to play by rewarding them randomly, but on average, say, about every 20 button pushes. The amount returned from the machine doesn't really matter in terms of how addictive the machine will be, so a 99% payout would work as well as a 80% payout.

But then again, who ever listened to a psychologist and believed what they were saying?

My god. I can't believe the number of people that think Saddam Hussein is responsible for 9/11. It's simply mind blowing how much the propaganda has gotten to you Americans.

If this war was really about removing a bad dicatator, why hasn't the US ever done anything about the situations in Africa?

If this war was really about quashing terrorism, why the fuck are they going to Iraq? Saudi Arabia is way more of a problem! Afghanistan is way more of a problem!

Read this, and try to think for once, instead of just repeating what the fucking news tells you.

http://www.ithaca.edu/politics/gagnon/talks/us-ira q.htm

So the Iraqi military are civilians?

You need to do some more research. There were Time and Newsweek articles about fleeing civilians being killed on the "Highway of Death."

According to a Time magazine article March 18, 1991, cars, buses and trucks full of Palestinian and Iraqi refugees (families and all their possessions) were also hit.

I've done a bit of research in this area.

What I found more interesting was later in the same report, where it listed the major record companies and their market share and labels. To save effort, I've excerpted (fair use) this information below:

Concentration of Ownership

Today, many recording artists and studios earn a great deal of money, pushing industry sales to about $40 billion. Nevertheless, sales of all recordings have leveled off, except for a few superstars.

As in other media, a few corporations dominate the recording industry. It is interesting to note that only one, AOL Time Warner, has its corporate headquarters in the United States. In the 1990s, here's how the major labels stacked up.

WEA, which is owned by AOL Time Warner, controlled more than 25 percent of the market through Atlantic, Elektra, Giant, Reprise, Rhino, Sire, and Warner Brothers. Sony held about 14 percent of the market share through Columbia and Epic.

Polygram, which is owned by Philips Electronics, captured just over 13 percent of the market with A&M, Def Jam, Deutsche Gramophone, Island, Motown, and Polydor. BMG, which is owned by Bertelsman, held just over 12 percent through Arista, BMG Classics, Private Music, RCA, Windham Hill, and Zoo.

Other major companies, which control about 10 percent of the market, include CEMA through its labels Capitol, Chrysalis, EMI, IRS, Liberty, and SBK; and French-owned Vivendi through Geffen, GRP, MCA Records, and Uptown.

We all know there are lots of things that add to the cost of the disk, but that got me thinking...

The breakdown of a $15 CD is:
$5 to the store
$5 record company
$3 artist
$2 manufacturers and distributors

Who does this type of key purchase leave out? The store (since the samples do their own promotion), the manufacuturers and distributors (since these people have already gotten the physical product to you).

So, basically, record companies just have to pay artist $3 and get to keep the rest. If they pay themselves the same amount as a CD, the key should cost $8. Any bets on if they get greedy?

There are 5-6 thousand students on campus here, and we've got dual T3s, plus they added more bandwitdth over spring break. Napster takes up 50 percent of all network traffic at peak hours! It's gotten so bad that I've only been able to get online a few hours this weekend!

JOhn Lavoie
Sophomore, Ithaca College