Slashdot Mirror

So should you. It's been a term of disparagement from as far back as 1590.

Net Neutrality has been about an OPEN INTERNET. That means ISPs cannot throttle traffic.

If that's all it was, it would not have required 300+ pages to spell the rules out. Nor would it be necessary to keep the new regulations secret — despite repeated attempts to publicize them before the voting took place.

The lost "War on Poverty", which we've been fighting for the last 50 years, has cost us — inflation-adjusted — $22 trillion or, roughly three times more than all actual wars combined since founding of the Republic

Anyone who thinks that the US has spent less than 7 trillion dollars on war, total, and adjusted for inflation, is cherry-picking from a very conservative data set. No wonder the linked article doesn't give a citation for that figure.

Government spending money on anything is terrible except for the military, naturally

Exactly. Because military is one of the very few things, which is the government's actual responsibility per the Constitution.

Most of the rest is just that — unconstitutional:

I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.

- James Madison

Republicans love them some war boners.

The lost "War on Poverty", which we've been fighting for the last 50 years, has cost us — inflation-adjusted — $22 trillion or, roughly three times more than all actual wars combined since founding of the Republic .

Please, don't hate.

I recently heard a story on NPR (link appears to be down... of course) about some new therapy that removes what they refer to as the "cloaking device" that cancer cells use to hide from the immune system. This allows the immune system to track down every cancerous cell and remove it.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2015/02/09/373292216/harnessing-the-immune-system-to-fight-cancer

I was referring to Wayne LaPierre's statement.

http://www.npr.org/2012/12/21/...

WAYNE LAPIERRE: The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun.

This has been rebutted by people who know far more about guns than I do:

http://gawker.com/its-really-h...
It's Really Hard to Be a Good Guy With a Gun
Adam Weinstein
6/10/14 4:20pm

Fine. I leave it to you, the hypervigilant. Even though the statistics show mass shootings are on the rise, and not one has been stopped by armed good guys—armed civilian good guys. In fact, they've been shot more often than they've shot the baddies. Which is natural, since assault weapons are on the rise, and it's hard to conceal a weapon that can outshoot someone with a Bushmaster. I leave it to you, because I still puzzle in my mind over all the tactical difficulties posed by someone in civilian clothes carrying a gun during a shooting. (How do you telegraph your goodness to the cops and bystanders?)

One of the things LaPierre blamed for the killings was the absence of "an active, national database of the mentally ill." Since he didn't take questions at his press conference, nobody was able to ask him who would decide who goes into the database, how they would decide, and whether they would then prevent people in the database from buying guns.

One thing I do know about is the medical evidence.

In fact, psychiatrists (the people who decide who is mentally ill) say that such laws would be useless. There was a debate about that in the Annals of Internal Medicine between a gun-owning doctor and a doctor who wanted to stop people with mental disease from buying guns. The gun-restricting doctor admitted he was wrong. Only a tiny minority of people with mental illness are a danger to anyone else. About 30% of the population over 65 has clinical depression. Does LaPierre want to take the guns away from 30% of the population over 65?

In fact, the NRA has lobbied for laws that let people who were prevented from possessing guns, because they were convicted of violent crimes, appeal and have those convictions set aside again in a rubber-stamp procedure, so they could buy guns again. And several of those people have committed murders as a result. So LaPierre wants to give guns back to murderers to let them murder again.

Unfortunately, as a story in Nature said last year, there is no good evidence on gun violence one way or the other. That's because the NRA lobbied congress to stop the Centers for Disease Control from doing gun-related research. That was in response to a study that found that people who bought guns were more likely to use them to commit suicide than to defend themselves. That study would be impossible today, because of the network of NRA-supported laws that prevent researchers from even getting information about guns.

But in the absence of hard data, most doctors and scientists say that the cause of this level of gun violence is the widespread ownership of guns, and that if there were fewer guns in circulation, there would be fewer gun-related homicides and suicides. They also say it's politically impossible to do anything significant about it in the U.S. for the foreseeable future. So our NRA-protected gun access makes it impossible to stop terrorist attacks in malls. Anyone with basic gun skills can get a quick-firing gun and kill 20 people in a crowd before even a more-skilled gun owner can stop him. And if a group of terrorists plan a coordinated attack, they could kill hundreds. If a concealed-gun owner jumps into the fray, on the average he seems to do more harm than good.

A Pete Seeger song, likewise covered by Peter, Paul and Mary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://www.metrolyrics.com/whe...
====
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time ago

Where have all the flowers gone?
Young girls have picked them everyone
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

Where have all the young girls gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the young girls gone?
Long time ago

Where have all the young girls gone?
Gone for husbands everyone
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

Where have all the husbands gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the husbands gone?
Long time ago

Where have all the husbands gone?
Gone for soldiers everyone
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

Where have all the soldiers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Long time ago

Where have all the soldiers gone?
Gone to graveyards, everyone
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

Where have all the graveyards gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Long time ago

Where have all the graveyards gone?
Gone to flowers, everyone
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time ago

Where have all the flowers gone?
Young girls have picked them everyone
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?
===

See also on the Bob Dylan backstory for "Blowing in the Wind": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
http://www.npr.org/2000/10/21/...

And for another part of that picture, from a US Major General Smedley Butler :
http://www.ratical.org/ratvill...
"WAR is a racket. It always has been.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.
How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?
Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few -- the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.
And what is this bill?
This bill r

http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulw...

So believe it or not, we actually have a couple of decades' worth of data showing how technology is changing the workforce, painstakingly tracked by the BLS...
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...

Yes, computers took away your secretaries, and replaced them with truck drivers.

Yes, truck drivers ought to worry about self-driving trucks, or else they too will need to learn to become software developers or primary school teachers.

Well - if they had the original 200k people to send on the mission -- maybe 40 would still be alive when the spaceship arrived.

As for financing - they plan to sell all of it as a Reality TV show. Here's an NPR writeup from 2013 "This one-way trip to Mars is brought to you by": http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetw...

No new technology? Pretty sure there are several "known unknowns" that haven't been figured out. Gamma Ray protection tops the list. I remember one of the moon astronauts describing the strange flashes of light that they would see during the trip. Leaving earth's protection completely is expected to be even worse.

I remember hearing an interview on the radio with an "expert" after Prez Obama made his Mars declaration. This expert listed some absolutely fascinating problems, even basics, that still need to be solved. Some of the issues were things I wouldn't have thought of - ever. Wish I could find that interview - it was also on NPR but I can't remember which show.

I think that there can be better systems but, it would take someone much smarter than me to design one and have it work for a global economy. (We're talking Nobel prize territory here.)

That sounds like what turned Brazil's economy around. How Fake Money Saved Brazil

And, basically, inflation did end, and the country's economy turned around. In the years that followed, Brazil became a major exporter, and 20 million people rose out of poverty.

So I'm a white male that's actually done a little reading on the issue of women and STEM. Folks should recognize that there's a vast literature out there about the impacts of both conscious and unconscious bias in testing, hiring and performance of minorities and women in STEM fields. Like many of you out there, I never personally experienced these issues (being a white male), and it was illuminating for me to read about the weird ways in which the human brain internalizes various societal cues about how women and minorities fit into STEM. Anyone who wants to comment on this topic seriously should at least read through this research:

* Book - "Whistling Vivaldi," written by Claude Steele . Professor Steele isn't the best writer in the world, but the experiments he describes are just fascinating. I challenge anyone to look at his results and not refine their views on these issue. Nice mix of pop-psychology and scientific research. http://www.amazon.com/Whistlin...

* Planet Money Podcast - "When Women Stopped Coding", very much pop-psychology, but thoroughly entertaining and I certainly found some basic truth in their theory. http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...

* Article in the journal "Nature" on what the GRE test actually measures, http://www.nature.com/naturejo... Also see a partial refutation of the initial (which I found less convincing, but I put it out there anyway): http://www.nature.com/nature/j...

* Recent pop-science article citing a meta-analysis about "Genius" in male and female professors (interesting, if somewhat anecdotal): http://www.vox.com/2015/2/12/8...

Reading this research (even at the cursory level pop-science perspective) certainly got me thinking about women (and minorities) in STEM. Personally, it turned me from a skeptic of the type of program Intel is purposing into .... well, I'm not entirely sure. Read the research and I think you'll see what I mean.

Apologies for bringing actual science to a flame war.....

Prior to the 1980s, the number of women working in computer science was about on par with the male demographic.

What happened, was the introduction of the home computer, which was marketed as a boy's toy. Boys were encouraged to become computer experts early, girls were de-facto conditioned to believe that computing was for boys, and the demographic diverged splendidly.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...

It isn't that something biological in the female's brain makes them not as intrinsically interested in computers-- it is that culturally, we have conditioned them to stay away from computers.

That, and the "Being social" thing is also heavily reinforced with targeted children's shows.

There's a feedback loop between targeted television, and the biases those shows target. EG-- the marketing notion of "Girls are social! Let's make shows about girls being social, to target girls!" works-- and causes girls to relate being social with being a girl-- reinforcing the marketing ploy.

It is this latter feedback that has had such a negative impact on (female participation in) computer culture since the 80s.

Here's a link to an article done by NPR on the subject.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...

If Google and Disney were REALLY forward thinking, they would depict a future where both males and females are equally proficient at computer science related tasks, and neither gender treats it like "their thing".

But marketing drones are marketing drones, and they gotta not be forward thinking, and instead focused on the next quarter.

This.

See Also.
Between Jason Zimba and the "wah, wah, common core math is too hard because that's not how I learned it" AC above, it's really easy to tell who the fsking moron is, and that's clearly NOT Jason Zimba, nor the rest of the experts.

is pointless. All the actual, (good) teachers I know are basically fine with it. The concept also makes a lot of sense as there is currently far too much variation in school curriculum from state to state and sometimes from district to district or school to school. If a kids moves from one state to another and finds they are basically a year or more behind or ahead of they were learning, it's not good for anyone. We also need high school graduates to actually, you know, be ready for college instead of having to take a bunch of remedial courses just to get up to speed on several subjects.
The people developing common core are, by and large, have a great deal of knowledge, experience, and expertise in teaching and developing consistent and engaging curriculum.
Just one example.
Seriously, I don't understand the big stink, mostly coming from idiots who randomly decided that if "the government" had anything to do with it, it must be heinous and evil. Those folks need to get over their own issues and actually LOOK AT the course material. It's not perfect but there's some really really good stuff in there and it's leaps and bounds better than the previous status-quo at numerous school districts across pretty much all states.

p>If you recall, Rick Perry mandated HPV vaccinations in 2007.

Lots of people totally lost their shit over this despite the fact that HPV can cause cancer and the vaccine is effective

Bah, I bet that if Rick Perry found a cure for cancer the conservatives would complain that he was immoral and that people's virtue would protect them from cancer.

For stuff like this, I hear you, but for actual medications, store brand is absolutely the way to go. Same level of regulation as the name brand, and a huge amount cheaper. Pharmacists and doctors are much more likely to buy the generic version of an over the counter medication than the population as a whole is...

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...

The Demagoguery over this issue is breath taking.

If you recall, Rick Perry mandated HPV vaccinations in 2007.

Lots of people totally lost their shit over this despite the fact that HPV can cause cancer and the vaccine is effective and not just because of donations. The term parental choice was thrown around a lot.

Many people in the news on their high horse about Christie 's comments are the same ones who were shitting bricks about Perry''s mandate. Hell, even Obama was on the fence about vaccinations in 2008.

So file all this under Complete and Utter Presidential Race Bullshit.

So, ignorant people are pissed about any sort of mandatory HPV vaccination when it's estimated that eighty percent of women will contract it in their lives?

Yeah, no reason at all to mandate that shit with those statistics, especially with the fucking Tinder generation...

The Demagoguery over this issue is breath taking.

If you recall, Rick Perry mandated HPV vaccinations in 2007.

Lots of people totally lost their shit over this despite the fact that HPV can cause cancer and the vaccine is effective and not just because of donations. The term parental choice was thrown around a lot.

Many people in the news on their high horse about Christie 's comments are the same ones who were shitting bricks about Perry''s mandate. Hell, even Obama was on the fence about vaccinations in 2008.

So file all this under Complete and Utter Presidential Race Bullshit.

The summary (though not the article) begins on the assumption that professors make big bucks. That may have been true at one point, but it's certainly not true now. Yes, full-time tenure track faculty average close to six figures annually, but only 27% of university instructors are full-time or tenure-tracked[1]. The remaining 73% or so is made up of adjunct faculty, who typically earn somewhere between $20-25k annually[2]. So, the idea that the sharing economy is going to be able to massively bring down educational costs by putting market pressure on faculty salaries doesn't really hold up. That market pressure was already there, and faculty salaries are already in the toilet. I'm not sure salaries can go down further without those teachers exiting the market entirely.

It's probably also worth mentioning, the vast majority of traditional (and non-traditional) students don't really go to an educational institute just to learn (though, it would be nice if they were to learn too). Students usually go to those institutions for a recognized credential or degree. Even if you're obtaining excellent instruction from the Internet, you're not going to get that degree. The real scarcity isn't teachers at the university level (as demonstrated by super-low wages for adjuncts). The real thing that keeps prices up is the artificial monopoly created by accreditation systems.

And, that might not entirely be a bad thing. Four year universities usually try to create well-rounded students, who learn much more than they'd ever need in their personal career. Students often complain about having to take classes they don't care about, but being broadly educated does seem to make individuals more open minded to solutions to problems that are not necessarily within their usual field of vision. If students could pick and choose their own courses, they'd rarely get that broad-view approach.

In short: this new app might be fine, but it won't revolutionize higher education in any meaningful fashion.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01...
[2] http://www.npr.org/2013/09/22/...

Oh, there is more to it than that. Canning was a vital element of Napoleon's war machine.

Why Napoleon Offered A Prize For Inventing Canned Food

1. Napoleon's Food Preservation Prize (1795)

Napoleon offered 12,000 francs to improve upon the prevailing food preservation methods of the time. Not surprisingly, the purpose was to better feed his army "when an invaded country was not able or inclined to sell or provide food". Fifteen years later, confectioner Nicolas François Appert claimed the prize. He devised a method involving heating, boiling and sealing food in airtight glass jars — the same basic technology still used to can foods.

How many of those cogs of a war machine do you have at the moment? Shouldn't you rid yourself of them for the sake of purity so you don't feel compelled to hold yourself in contempt?

why does everyone always talk about the koch brothers

Why, indeed:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsal...

once again, science and technology triumph where religion has shown mixed results at best!

the previously legendary properties of the River Ganges are now firmly established! at least until the resistance evolves.

Argue with the graph.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...

A "computer" used to refer to a human calculator operator, and lots of them were women. Here's some history in picture form for you:
http://womenandtechnologyproje...

On fear, talking specifically about how children's worlds are shrinking.

It's a new podcast, seeing how it turns out.

Librarians have been fighting the good fight in America at least as far back as the 1940s when they stood up to red scare shenanigans. They were also at the forefront of fighting the PATRIOT act, both in lobbying and in action when they redesigned their lending software to delete all information once a book was returned. They are also at the center of the hackerspace movement.

Actually, prairie dogs have been found to have a fairly complex language system: http://www.npr.org/2011/01/20/132650631/new-language-discovered-prairiedogese.

Sure it's not as advanced as human language, but we're only reaching the point where we ourselves are capable of determining just how good the languages of other creatures actually are. There's a lot of it we can't even begin to understand because we haven't been able to fully understand the context and we can't exactly sit down with most animals and exchange language. With our ability to better study animals and perhaps create an environment where we can always monitor their behavior to better understand the context in which language is being used, perhaps we'll come to find that they're more developed that originally imagined.

Tell you want, let the Republicans all live down stream of plants which have no EPA controls. I dare you. Go ahead, drink that water and tell us it's safe. Expose your children to it.

Ha, ha - silly poster. That's never going to happen. More that 50% of Congress are millionaires (many "multi") and don't live where *we* live. The same goes for heads of large (polluting) corporations. I'm pretty sure none of them are here on /.

You're obviously correct about everything else though. The EPA saves the rest of us from those that don't care about the environment. (Which is pretty much one of the big roles of Government in general.)

Nice try. Kennedy took the top tax rate down from 91% to 70%. He also got Congress to pass his economic agenda, which included:

• "Increasing the minimum wage.
• Expanding unemployment benefits.
• Boosting Social Security benefits to encourage workers to retire earlier.
• Spending more for highway construction."

Still think he'd be welcomed by today's Republican Party?

It's not entirely clear in the summary, but the accident didn't happen at Los Alamos, it happened at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the $19b pilot plant that is at least in part a replacement for the Yucca Mountain plans.

Also, the original mistake that caused the chemical reaction? They used the wrong kind of cat litter to package the plutonium!

This is surprising to me, as I recall reading about plans for Canadian underground storage of nuclear waste back in the 90s. The plans then were to vitrify it - process it into a glass crystal - so that (a) Terrists couldn't get at it, and (b) it would be inert. I'm kind of amazed that they the DOE is happy with using steel drums and cat litter on their plutonium, though if it works (assuming you get the right kitty litter) then there's no reason to stop using it, I suppose.

Like this guy? http://www.npr.org/2014/09/25/...
Or these guys? http://rt.com/uk/184112-britis...
http://www.theguardian.com/wor... (and holy shit that's the Saudis)

Or maybe you'd like to say "If only the Muslims would fight ISIS and the fundamentalists!"
I mean, who do you think the YPK is made up of? Or Hezbollah (which, oddly enough is an ally in the fight against ISIS and their ilk)?

The fact is, there are MANY MANY MANY Muslims who are sick of this shit, just like non-Muslims. And they speak out against their backwards, inbred rednecks. The media is loathe to report this side of the story (see the Fergeson protests.. the media only concentrated on the trouble makers, not the hundreds/thousands who protested without managing to rob stores and burn shit down). All it takes is a cursory look around and you realize that money is to be made by sensationalism, and you've been had.

The insurance companies will only pay out to repair it, other engineers say that's impossible.

If the stadium owners thought insurance was the way to go, they were highly mistaken and this proves the point.

Insurance is the biggest scam out there. It doesn't matter what the insurance policy says, insurance companies will do everything in their power not to pay out anything or at best, a token amount.

Witness what happened when Katrina (a hurricane for those not in the know) hit Louisiana. The insurance companies tried to claim storm surge damage wasn't covered even though the houses were damaged by winds.

Even worse, the people relied on their insurance agent who told them they didn't need flood insurance. Further, they lost their case.

Pick any insurance you want and the same applies. You pay and pay and pay, then when you need coverage, you pay some more before the insurance companies hand over a pittance.

Hopefully the stadium owner goes after the insurance company and forces them to do what they were paid to do. If not, get your money back for breach of contract.

So it's okay to put up a sign in a bar that says "no blacks or hispanics?"

There is the gun range which has a sign saying, "Muslim Free Zone" and so far they're able to get away with it.

or for a pharmacist to refuse to fill a prescription because the person is a Muslim?

No, but we do have pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control because it might offend their religion.

Not to mention there are those bakeries and photographers who refuse to cater to gay people who want to get married.

While the courts have ruled against the above practices, the owners can simply be more selective in who their clients are, thus getting around the issue. This is the same thing businesses do when interviewing. They see someone's great resume but when they come in they realize the person is over 40 and disqualify them.

The reason they can give is simply, "We found someone more aligned with our requirements" even though they are discriminating by age.

To all the people who say "women don't want to work in tech", note that women were the MAJORITY in the early days of computing, right up until the advent of personal computers. (Source) From the article: "... families were much more likely to buy computers for boys than for girls — even when their girls were really interested in computers."

So it's quite probable women WOULD go into tech fields ... if they had encouragement, a pleasant working atmosphere, and at least some assurance that motherhood wouldn't throw them completely off their career track.

Well, the FCC has banned the sale of receivers capable of operating in cellular bands in the USA (never mind how trivially easy it is to bypass this feature).

No it hasn't. It regularly signs off on cellular equipment, it just requires a license to use it. They've also approved the use of IMSI catchers. It's unlicensed devices that the FCC has banned.

Now, that's not to say that the use of these devices is entirely appropriate, and there are examples of cases where their use has been potentially illegal, but that doesn't make the devices themselves illegal.

California now requires egg-laying chickens to have at least 116 sq in of floor space.

A little more office downsizing and a little more chicken coop expansion and California will be able to pass a single law to cover both chickens and office workers.

If you genuinely think this then you haven't been paying attention. The primary point of feminism has been historically to put men and women on equal footing and give them equal opportunities. The fields in question, computer science, are actually a case in point: the percentage of females in computer related fields actually used to be higher. It actually dropped with the rise of the personal computer which was advertised as a thing for young boys. See http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding and it still hasn't gotten to the point it was in the 1980s. And when skilled people, of any gender, aren't going to the fields where their skills can be most useful, we all suffer.

Yes, there are some radical feminists who have some very bad ideas or end goals, but that's going to occur in any political movement. Paying attention to outliers is not helpful. If someone had said in 1970 that the movement for racial equality's primary objective was to sabotage white people that would be the exact same sort of thing, and it would have the exact same things wrong with it.

'The Interview,' Greeted By Sold-Out Shows, May Net Millions This Weekend
'The Interview' Opens to Singing, Sold-Out Crowds as Sony CEO Explains His Decision to Show Film
'The Interview' Draws Sell-Out Crowds After Sony Flips On Release Cancellation
New York showings of âThe Interviewâ(TM) sell out

Oh yeah, it's "bombing" in the US alright...

NPR's Planet Money had an interesting episode about pallets and CHEP pallets this summer: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...

Episode 545: The Blue Pallet

If you don't listen to Planet Money, you should.

Citibank is famous for helping the drug cartels launder money :
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/...

And Bank of America, Western Union, and JP Morgan, Goldman-Sacks, etc. are guilty too :
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

http://www.washingtonsblog.com...
http://www.npr.org/blogs/paral...
http://www.infowars.com/big-ba...

Actually, it was ShangahiBill who attempted to move the goalposts. My original response was to his claim that " It isn't clear if yellow light duration was decreased in the intersections studied." It's clear.

Even then it was just some interesting questions he raised. Probably not known until he goes through the Paywall. Not very likely that a consensus can be reached, because what are the metrics? Some might say increased safety is laees accidents, some may say loss of life, some may say insurance company payouts. Some may just want the ticket money.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetw...

If you use less accidents as a metric, it is very difficult to defend the cameras. If less T-Bone accidents, you can. Money? Oh frabjous day, this is a friggin cash cow!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

And safety? Hey, Washington will give you a redlight ticket if you don't come to a full and complete stop and turn right.

What is more, remember that the companies have a say, they love that money too. So some contracts specifiy the shortest yellow duration to maximize the number of people fined.

http://www.npr.org/2012/02/22/...

http://www.npr.org/templates/s...

There's plenty more.

Now as ShanghaiBill noted, the real increases in Safety come from longer yellow light times. Very short times tend to cause more in the intersection accidents, and coupled with cameras, are more likely to produce rear end accidents, especially with the very short yellow light timing - and some say the photos are taken while the light is still yellow. I know myself, if we had redlight cameras in my area and short times. If I see the yellow light, I'm standing on the brakes. Yeah, I might get rear ended, but it will be the other drivers fault. I might know I am going to get hit, but I'll avoid a big fine. What a stupid, stupid system, that in essence causes people to purposely cause traffic accidents. That's just insane.

In principle, I hae no issue with redlight cams. In real life however, politicians are too anxious to get any non-tax revenue they can, and the companies that install and run these things are the kinfolk of the for profit prison people, so the demands for increased profits every quarter will have a similar effect. More tickets will need to be issued, and company pressure placed on the local Government to increase fines in order to increase profit. So there will be tinkering, I suspect in the end to just randomly take photos,of cars in intersections because most people will just cough up the thousand dollars or so it will cost by that time rather than hire a lawyer. Sweet gig if you can get it.

Since the human factor is inevitably and fatally flawed, the cameras need to be banned outright.

Actually, it was ShangahiBill who attempted to move the goalposts. My original response was to his claim that " It isn't clear if yellow light duration was decreased in the intersections studied." It's clear.

Even then it was just some interesting questions he raised. Probably not known until he goes through the Paywall. Not very likely that a consensus can be reached, because what are the metrics? Some might say increased safety is laees accidents, some may say loss of life, some may say insurance company payouts. Some may just want the ticket money.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetw...

If you use less accidents as a metric, it is very difficult to defend the cameras. If less T-Bone accidents, you can. Money? Oh frabjous day, this is a friggin cash cow!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

And safety? Hey, Washington will give you a redlight ticket if you don't come to a full and complete stop and turn right.

What is more, remember that the companies have a say, they love that money too. So some contracts specifiy the shortest yellow duration to maximize the number of people fined.

http://www.npr.org/2012/02/22/...

http://www.npr.org/templates/s...

There's plenty more.

Now as ShanghaiBill noted, the real increases in Safety come from longer yellow light times. Very short times tend to cause more in the intersection accidents, and coupled with cameras, are more likely to produce rear end accidents, especially with the very short yellow light timing - and some say the photos are taken while the light is still yellow. I know myself, if we had redlight cameras in my area and short times. If I see the yellow light, I'm standing on the brakes. Yeah, I might get rear ended, but it will be the other drivers fault. I might know I am going to get hit, but I'll avoid a big fine. What a stupid, stupid system, that in essence causes people to purposely cause traffic accidents. That's just insane.

In principle, I hae no issue with redlight cams. In real life however, politicians are too anxious to get any non-tax revenue they can, and the companies that install and run these things are the kinfolk of the for profit prison people, so the demands for increased profits every quarter will have a similar effect. More tickets will need to be issued, and company pressure placed on the local Government to increase fines in order to increase profit. So there will be tinkering, I suspect in the end to just randomly take photos,of cars in intersections because most people will just cough up the thousand dollars or so it will cost by that time rather than hire a lawyer. Sweet gig if you can get it.

Since the human factor is inevitably and fatally flawed, the cameras need to be banned outright.

Actually, it was ShangahiBill who attempted to move the goalposts. My original response was to his claim that " It isn't clear if yellow light duration was decreased in the intersections studied." It's clear.

Even then it was just some interesting questions he raised. Probably not known until he goes through the Paywall. Not very likely that a consensus can be reached, because what are the metrics? Some might say increased safety is laees accidents, some may say loss of life, some may say insurance company payouts. Some may just want the ticket money.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetw...

If you use less accidents as a metric, it is very difficult to defend the cameras. If less T-Bone accidents, you can. Money? Oh frabjous day, this is a friggin cash cow!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

And safety? Hey, Washington will give you a redlight ticket if you don't come to a full and complete stop and turn right.

What is more, remember that the companies have a say, they love that money too. So some contracts specifiy the shortest yellow duration to maximize the number of people fined.

http://www.npr.org/2012/02/22/...

http://www.npr.org/templates/s...

There's plenty more.

Now as ShanghaiBill noted, the real increases in Safety come from longer yellow light times. Very short times tend to cause more in the intersection accidents, and coupled with cameras, are more likely to produce rear end accidents, especially with the very short yellow light timing - and some say the photos are taken while the light is still yellow. I know myself, if we had redlight cameras in my area and short times. If I see the yellow light, I'm standing on the brakes. Yeah, I might get rear ended, but it will be the other drivers fault. I might know I am going to get hit, but I'll avoid a big fine. What a stupid, stupid system, that in essence causes people to purposely cause traffic accidents. That's just insane.

In principle, I hae no issue with redlight cams. In real life however, politicians are too anxious to get any non-tax revenue they can, and the companies that install and run these things are the kinfolk of the for profit prison people, so the demands for increased profits every quarter will have a similar effect. More tickets will need to be issued, and company pressure placed on the local Government to increase fines in order to increase profit. So there will be tinkering, I suspect in the end to just randomly take photos,of cars in intersections because most people will just cough up the thousand dollars or so it will cost by that time rather than hire a lawyer. Sweet gig if you can get it.

Since the human factor is inevitably and fatally flawed, the cameras need to be banned outright.

Cracker as a term predates slavery in the US; it actually predates the whole country. See the crackers on wikipedia or The Secret History Of The Word 'Cracker' for an outline of the theories and history here. There was a large enough intersection between white slave owners and the white people called crackers that it probably helped popularize the term, but they were not the same group.

Maybe you missed the Supreme Court ruling earlier this week? http://www.npr.org/2014/12/15/...

No, what happened to you was odd. It's always been the case that if the cop had probable cause for conducting the search the results are admissible. If he heard screaming coming from inside your house and thought someone was being murdered so he busted inside but it turned out it was just the TV (but he genuinely thought it was real) he can still bust you for the brick of cocaine sitting on your coffee table.

So he could always get you despite being mistaken on the facts. Now it's the case he doesn't even have to be right on law. The Supreme Court just ruled that the cop doesn't even have to know the law he stopped you under.

What is inadmissible, though, is evidence obtained intentionally without warrant or cause. The cop cannot break into your house without a warrant or probable cause and snoop around, find something and then come back in the daylight with a warrant and bust you. And that's the question here. I don't understand how they can present the evidence of wrong doing if they don't say how they obtained the evidence. If they illegally hacked into his servers...then no, it shouldn't be admissible. There has to be a valid chain of custody, and we don't know if the chain is valid if we don't know where it started.

(legally) found the site, any further evidence should be tossed out of court.

  for example, you get pulled over for speeding, but you were not speeding and can prove it, cops find a bag of weed on you. that gets tossed out as soon as you prove you were not speeding. same thing should apply here

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court disagrees with you:
http://www.npr.org/2014/12/15/...

The term Cracker is much more descriptive, draws a distinction between the two but, just never seemed to catch the ear of the media darlings the put on the news.

The problem is that the term " cracker " is already well established in use, a derogatory term referring to white people from the rural south.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...