Slashdot Mirror

I should add that the Strauss-Kahn red meat is getting old. First off, most of the descriptions of the case are way off, partially inspired by the prosecutors switching from overplaying the case against him to overplaying the case for him. To be clear:

1) If an accusation is made, and the accused is convicted, the legal system has been determined that the person is guilty.
2) If an accusation is made, the accused is not charged, and the accuser is convicted of making a false accusation, then the legal system has determined that it was a false charge.
3) If an accusation is made, the accused is not charged, but neither is the accuser, then the legal system has made no finding in any direction due to insufficient evidence to match the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard in either direction.

This should be obvious, but for some reason, many people are always fixated on interpreting #3 (by far the most common scenario) as #2.

As for Kahn? Since then he's been caught up in one sex related charge after another - and has admitted to parts of them. He's currently out on bail awaiting trial for running a prostitution ring; the trial begins a couple days from now.

I should add that the Strauss-Kahn red meat is getting old. First off, most of the descriptions of the case are way off, partially inspired by the prosecutors switching from overplaying the case against him to overplaying the case for him. To be clear:

1) If an accusation is made, and the accused is convicted, the legal system has been determined that the person is guilty.
2) If an accusation is made, the accused is not charged, and the accuser is convicted of making a false accusation, then the legal system has determined that it was a false charge.
3) If an accusation is made, the accused is not charged, but neither is the accuser, then the legal system has made no finding in any direction due to insufficient evidence to match the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard in either direction.

This should be obvious, but for some reason, many people are always fixated on interpreting #3 (by far the most common scenario) as #2.

As for Kahn? Since then he's been caught up in one sex related charge after another - and has admitted to parts of them. He's currently out on bail awaiting trial for running a prostitution ring; the trial begins a couple days from now.

Go ahead and read the statistics proving the Patriots have been cheating since 2007. The Patriots are a team of cheaters. Everyone knows that. Even New England has to admit it by now. They cheated in the game against the Colts, they cheated in the game against the Ravens, they've cheated in every game starting in 2007. The statistics prove it. The Patriots should be removed from the Superbowl because they're cheaters. The science and statistics prove it.

Yet drivers violate the right-of-way of pedestrians more often than the other way around.

I've heard claims that one in four women will be raped at some point in their lives, and have yet to hear any sort of data-based rebuttal.

Really? You heard such an extraordinary claim, but apparently made zero effort to look into its validity?

Here you go. And here. And here.

Essentially, that inflated number is based on questionable surveys which often fail to distinguish between a regrettable drunken hookup and rape, and is not just about rape but about behavior ranging from grabbing a woman's butt on up through attempted rape and actual rape. (Yes, grabbing someone's butt is bad. It's assault. It's unacceptable. It is not, however, rape.)

Is rape much more common than most people think? Yes. The data is murky but I would be surprised if the lifetime victimization rate for women was less than 5%, 1 in 20. Is it 25%, "eeny-meeny-miney-RAPE!" common? No.

And a teacher sending a student sexy messages over the internet is certainly a breach of professional conduct...but it's not rape.

Yeah! I wish people would stop demonizing things like the measels!

And just so it is clear what level of morality exists among Federal prosecutors, consider this "game" which certainly gets applied in real life:

At the federal prosecutor's office in the Southern District of New York, the staff, over beer and pretzels, used to play a darkly humorous game. Junior and senior prosecutors would sit around, and someone would name a random celebrity -- say, Mother Theresa or John Lennon.

It would then be up to the junior prosecutors to figure out a plausible crime for which to indict him or her. The crimes were not usually rape, murder, or other crimes you'd see on Law & Order but rather the incredibly broad yet obscure crimes that populate the U.S. Code like a kind of jurisprudential minefield: Crimes like "false statements" (a felony, up to five years), "obstructing the mails" (five years), or "false pretenses on the high seas" (also five years). The trick and the skill lay in finding the more obscure offenses that fit the character of the celebrity and carried the toughest sentences. The, result, however, was inevitable: "prison time."

http://www.slate.com/articles/...

That mandated noise IS entirely a safety issue

It is a perceived safety issue and I don't buy the arguments in favor of mandating noise pollution. If it really were a problem we should expect to see cars that are quieter than average involved in proportionally more collisions that cars that are more noisy. I've not seen one speck of evidence that quiet cars get in more accidents due to their sound levels. It is to my mind a completely nonsensical argument with no evidence to support it.

Studies have been done and have confirmed that quiet cars get in more accidents at lower speeds due to their sound levels.

The word "password" is not in the text anywhere.

I saw nothing in it that gives the school district any authority whatsoever to do such a thing. It makes the bullying illegal, and gives the school the ability to support the victim. But it does not even mention giving school administrators access to private social media accounts of the accused.

It's just a bit long and I did skim in places, please feel free to correct me if you see it in there. But I don't see any provision that is even suggestive of what is being claimed in the aritcle.

I saw this when it was in the firehose yesterday, and I didn't just skim over the text of the actual law. Your analysis is correct. We already have ways to deal with this - call the cops. Cases like http://www.slate.com/articles/...>Rehtaeh Parsons, where the cops initially did nothing, and the resulting backlash anonymous threatening, then revealing the identities of the perps, forced the prosecutors to charge and convict some of them.

There ws actually no need for a "cyber-bullying" law - harassment is illegal no matter the means employed. But I guess legislators are like the patent office - add the words "on the Internet" and it's somehow different.

The catch is that it will stop federal forfeiture but not state forfeiture.

http://www.slate.com/articles/...
Jan. 16 2015 7:36 PM
Helicopters Don’t Pay for Themselves
Why Eric Holder’s civil forfeiture decision won’t stop civil forfeiture abuse.
By Leon Neyfakh

Other reason to dump to a recovery tank might just be to minimize the number of external vents on the rocket; more vents = more things that could get contaminated, blocked up, filled with spiders etc.

This is related to space, so I'm posting it: You can see a video of the crash of the Faclon here. Plus a couple of funny tweets by Elon Musk, such as when he calls the crash a "RUD (rapid unscheduled disassembly)" - heh.

I'm not sure the physical security is that much of a deterrent (there was another article that I couldn't find which listed a host of similar issues, including allowing pizza delivery guys to the silo). The job of being a silo-jockey is not considered particularly prestigious in the USAF and we aren't getting the best of the best to guard our most powerful weapons.

On the other hand, finding a floppy disk these days to launch the damn things might be a bit harder to manage.

Haven't read all the linked articles through yet, but it's been mentioned in the past- and again in the articles- that one of the reasons for the explosion may have been the use of organic-based kitty litter(!) reacting badly with the materials being disposed of, and that the inorganic version should have been used.

One version I heard was that they changed the kitty litter formulation; this version suggests that they bought organic instead of inorganic kitty litter because of a typo.

Now, there's nothing wrong with using what amounts to kitty litter to do whatever it was being used for. If that does the job, fine.

But whichever of the cases described was true, a problem is that if the stuff they're buying is intended and sold as kitty litter, it's quite possible that the makers may feel at liberty to change the formulation in a way that doesn't effect its use as kitty litter, but massive alters its safety as a "nuclear waste disposal material".

If having organic matter in your kitty litter could inadvertantly turn the nuclear material into a form of radioactive explosive, then you should be damn sure that you're getting the inorganic formulation from a supplier that can guarantee that this is what you're getting. It won't be called "kitty litter" even if that's what- in effect- it is, and it'll probably cost a lot more, but the supplier will (or should be) in the s*** if they supply the wrong type, whereas are Los Alamos going to sue "Pets R Us" for causing a nuclear explosion even if they *did* inadvertantly put organic in an inorganic bag, or change the formulation with insufficient notice (or whatever)?

So this is why (e.g.) the military (for example) might pay a lot more for a given item than you or I might pay over the counter. That, and the fact that they're probably diverting the money to some dubious black ops...!

Have you seen the cartoons? They aren't much more than being assholes for the sake of being assholes. Like neo-nazis marching in a jewish neighborhood. So it is pretty fucked up that we have to side with one group of assholes against a group of even bigger assholes. At least "The Interview" had entertainment value that didn't cater to racism.

That said, the only option in the short term is to suck it up because the cartoons aren't just racist cartoons anymore, they are now also symbols of civilization over depravity. So when the AP decided to censor them it was messed up. It gets even worse now that the AP has decided to censor other blasphemous photos like Serrano's Piss Christ. It would be kind of like Universal Pictures pulling the Last Temptation of Christ from circulation because Sony pulled The Interview, despite the fact that nobody considered censoring it back when one theater showing it was burnt to the ground, injuring 12, audiences in others got tear gassed and Scorsese got death threats.

Yet again another believer in something that does not exist.

SDCs have already been driven millions of miles on public roads. Their safety record is better than humans. They may not handle all unknown situations, but that is more than compensated by not driving drunk, falling asleep, or texting on a cellphone.

And the reality could hardly be different

...what Google is working on may instead result in the automotive equivalent of the Apple Newton, what one Web commenter called a “timid, skittish robot car whose inferior level of intelligence becomes a daily annoyance.” To be able to handle the everyday stresses and strains of the real driving world, the Google car will require a computer with a level of intelligence that machines won’t have for many years, if ever.

Not lost. That's only effective if there's no pattern, and erasing a pattern is a lot more difficult than just splitting the transfers. Assuming the transfers are timely (and it would seem likely that they would be), you could narrow down the source of the funds to accounts that sent money to the launderer within a given timeframe. Seeing the pattern more than once would increase the probability of a match, so you could never receive funds to the same account twice. Further, you could never aggregate funds in the future without giving yourself away, including paying for anything, otherwise you've identified yourself. That severely lowers the value. Bitcoin is good for a lot of things, but anonymity and laundering are not among them. And pseudonymity is not anonymity. For anonymity, cash is king.

Remember all the fans adoring Candidate, President-elect, and even President Obama for his use of Blackberry? While mocking McCain for his inability to even use keyboard (because his hands were repeatedly broken by the People's Torturers in North Vietnam)?

In all likelihood, Megan J. Smith was one of the fans... Possibly, even with a special female twist to it...

Well, maybe, the job of running the Executive government's bureaucracy is just too difficult? TFA certainly suggests that... But that's exactly the job, Obama was hired for, darn it. There were people pointing out his shortage of executive experience — he never ran things (other than a failed charity — once), but this was countered, incredibly, by how he ran his election campaign...

Well, here we go — either he was never as advanced technologically as he and supporters portrayed him, or he has no ability to execute — to run things... Certainly not enough of it to affect the oft-promised change. Management is hard, let's go golfing.

I think this is what he's looking for: http://www.slate.com/articles/...

Larry Flynt has announced that Hustler is making a porn version of The Interview:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bus...

Becuase Freedom!

Agreed, and this is what happens. Anyone who tries to publish a paper can tell you how much fun it is, even for papers that follow the current thinking in a particular field. I work with a couple scientists that published a paper in regards to climate change, and it took two years of sometimes colorfully worded review comments and re-submissions before it as accepted.

Other times, complete gibberish is accepted into a journal. Getting published is by no means a guarantee of the quality of the work; all it indicates is that the work fits within the world-view of the publisher.

Exactly - and notice how there are respectable journals, and not so respected journals, the former publish good papers, the other publish complete gibberish - or the stuff that gets widely quoted by deniers.

Are U.S. troops set up in Afghanistan anywhere except there's a running oil pipeline?

There is no pipeline.

Pipe Dreams - The origin of the "bombing-Afghanistan-for-oil-pipelines" theory.
Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline Still a Dream* - Published on Monday, September 20, 2010

A working pipeline, if it ever gets built, will require a country more stable than Afghanistan is now or will be any time soon. It is too easy to sabotage otherwise, and that would result in billions of dollars down the drain. Nobody is going to risk it.

I'm sure that you are aware of the U.S. involvement where Iraq is concerned. We install a dictator until he gets so out of control, then go in and knock him down, while the war profiteers rejoice.

The US didn't install Saddam. He was a local bully-boy that worked his way up in the Baath socialist/fascist party by native wit and sheer ruthlessness.

So knowing that, don't you think that it's a little peculiar how this whole Sony hack is getting so much press recently?

Not really, no. From what I understand the hack ended up trashing a large percentage of Sony's computers, led to leaks of emails that were fodder for many news and gossip sites, and stopped the release of a movie that was already being advertised. You don't think those extraordinary events would get coverage otherwise?

Is the U.S. creating another flimsy excuse to go to war against N. Korea?

I doubt it, no. Getting into an actual shooting war with North Korea wouldn't be a trivial thing. The body count would be huge if for no other reason than the inevitable crippling of the North Korean state would lead to widespread starvation among a population that is already barely making it. But before that happened the capital of South Korea would be flattened by artillery from North Korea. Nobody wants either outcome.

Do you really have such blind trust in your leaders that you believe any press release that they issue?

I'm willing to be skeptical, but this doesn't seem to be something contrary to the known behaviors of the North Koreans.

Has recent 20th century history taught you nothing?

One of the 20th Century's lessons is that the West has not always been firm in confronting evil regimes such as North Korea's.

Has recent 20th century history taught you nothing? I suggest that you cool your jets for a bit before rushing to judgement, especially when it concerns global matters.

When it comes to global matters there is no shortage of people that get it wrong when the question involves the US.

Unless you are yourself enlisting to be in the infantry's front lines.

Whether I do or don't, have or haven't, I'm pretty sure I can form reasonable opinions and make useful arguments.

* I can't tell you how painful it is to reference Ted Rall, slightly less so for Common Dreams.

Exactly. Not only is a $100 ticket a much smaller percentage of a middle class person's income, a middle class
person can afford to pay a lawyer $500 to fight it or can afford to take off work to appear in court, etc....
To the working poor, a $100 fine can be devastating but trying to fight it would be even more costly so they have
no choice. Here is a decent article about that: http://www.slate.com/articles/...

Agreed, and this is what happens. Anyone who tries to publish a paper can tell you how much fun it is, even for papers that follow the current thinking in a particular field. I work with a couple scientists that published a paper in regards to climate change, and it took two years of sometimes colorfully worded review comments and re-submissions before it as accepted.

Other times, complete gibberish is accepted into a journal. Getting published is by no means a guarantee of the quality of the work; all it indicates is that the work fits within the world-view of the publisher. The quality of the work depends upon the data and the methods/algorithms used, and the transparency of both. When data or the process is hidden (or both, as the case with much of the early AGW work), then the quality should immediately be suspect.

...and burn them at the stake as witches? That aught to take care of those pesky people who disagree.

Oh I wish we could do that. We'd be able to solve many problems at once.

wrote that 22 states permit direct sales of automobiles by Tesla to retail buyers, and of those the majority--14 of them-- voted for President Obama

There is a much fresher data-point for the political leanings of those states — we had elections a month ago. That this non-biased and bi-partisan article — the kind we've come to expect from the Newspaper of Record — chose to use the two year old data instead to illustrate its point, means, the point probably is not supported by the more recent poll...

He suggested that Democratic California, Illinois, and New York "have freer markets in auto retailing than Texas," which is presently Republican.

Is it "freer markets" for everyone, or just for the "green" technology — which got a major government loan (on very sweet terms) to survive and ought to be helped to avoid embarrassing the Democratic administration? Would those Democratic bastions of free markets be as supporting of freedom, if it were about sale of, say, high-capacity toilets?

If you really care for free markets, you'll vote Libertarian — with anybody else you still need a bloody permit to do (or sell) almost anything. Splitting hairs about who is more likely to permit this vs. that is stupid — you have your right to pursue happiness. Selling cars the way you want certainly ought to be covered by that.

Is the small bit of evidence enough to make a case?

No, it is not. To show, which party supports freer markets, one would need to study the market-freedom across different goods and services. Cherry-picking one item, that is so dear to one party's heart, in an industry, that is heavily-regulated by all states (as well as Federal government) is meaningless and reveals nothing but bare partisanship.

What did Bush leave Obama? Anarchy, controlled by armed gangs. Now the strongest force is the Islamic State.

Not true at all. Iraq was moving in the right direction, its various groups learning to talk to rather than fight rivals.

Withdrawal was grossly premature. That it was done not as an honest mistake, but for cynical political considerations ("See? I did not close Guantanamo, but I did get us out of Iraq"), makes it all the more disgusting...

That article seems to undercut your own argument.

In August of 2002, as George W. Bush and his allies were building the case for regime change in Iraq, Scowcroft warned in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that an attack on Iraq “would seriously jeopardize, if not destroy, the global counterterrorist campaign we have undertaken.” Though Scowcroft was confident that the U.S. could succeed in destroying Saddam’s regime, he was also confident that military action would be expensive and bloody, and that it “very likely would have to be followed by a large-scale, long-term military occupation.” As we all know, Scowcroft’s warning went unheeded by the Bush White House.

The war hawks in the Bush Administration, like Douglas Feith, were telling us that we could replace Saddam Hussein with our own dictator, Chalabai, like replacing a chip on a motherboard. The free-market ideologues were telling us that all we had to do was destroy Iraq's government-run industries, and replace them with the free market, and they would flourish.

Instead, the new free-market Iraqi health care system fell apart, the power system failed and couldn't supply electricity to run the air conditioners and sewer pumps, and most of all, neither the U.S. military nor the "free" Iraqi government could maintain security, against the armed sectarian gangs that started killing each other, as that Slate article described. Bush struggled in Iraq for longer than it took to win the entire WWII, and he failed. 600,000 Iraqis died, and 4,000 American troops and contractors.

Bush lost the war. At what point do you face that and cut your losses? Maybe you don't care about the 600,000 Iraqis, but do you want to lose another 4,000 Americans? Did you volunteer? Where did you earn your battle stripes?

What did Bush leave Obama? Anarchy, controlled by armed gangs. Now the strongest force is the Islamic State.

Not true at all. Iraq was moving in the right direction, its various groups learning to talk to rather than fight rivals.

Withdrawal was grossly premature. That it was done not as an honest mistake, but for cynical political considerations ("See? I did not close Guantanamo, but I did get us out of Iraq"), makes it all the more disgusting...

and China's one child policy is probably the best long term action for the environment.

And yet, in most developed first world countries, birth rates have pretty much plateaued, or are on the way there. The US, China, Japan, Singapore, Russia, most of Europe - all currently below population sustaining birth rates at the moment. Check out this chart, sorted by fertility rates from lowest to highest. You can likely notice a clear trend between the upper portions of the chart and the lower regions.

Economics and education (especially of women) is the key, not police state policies that encroach on more of our personal liberties. We need to get everyone to first-world economic status as fast as we can, because then:

1) People will stop pumping out kids en mass, since at that point they're an economic liability, not an advantage, and
2) People will start caring more about the environment when they're not trying to figure out where they'll get they're next meal, or if they will have a roof over their heads tomorrow.

Seriously, exploding population was the boogieman twenty or thirty years ago. If we forecast using today's trends, it seems pretty likely that the world's population will most likely peak and then decline. Take a look at the actual data trends (the recent ones - and don't extrapolate linearly), then draw your own conclusions.

So this dude fucked some schoolgirls. So what? Fire him. Did his course material fuck any schoolgirls? No? Then keep that.

Given that 'fuck' generally means intercourse, he didn't even go that far from what I'm reading.

Also, are we talking about online courses, as in Mr Lewin taking the place of an in-class teacher, or online courses ala Khan Academy, where his presence is no longer required? Because the press release mentions that he was no longer teaching anyways.

While not as big of a deal as kicking out a student in a star court, there's currently a big over-correction against anything that looks like sexual assault/harassment in the universities, which is perverting justice.

At least with an online course the evidence should be there, reducing the amount of 'he said she said'. But there's also every possibility that the professor wasn't even given an opportunity to defend himself.

The objective of the copying and likely the patent infringement is so there would be no learning cure for their products. It would end up being a cheaper clone of Cisco that any Cisco certified admin would be comfortable on.

In short, they didn't really care about getting kicked out of school. They only wanted invited into the computer labs. Once in, it is easier to stay in.

Actually, they wanted to be Vice President.

Why Biden's plagiarism shouldn't be forgotten.

Joe Biden. Serial plagiarist. And that's Slate - hardly a Rush Limbaugh dittohead.

Nope. Bad science: http://www.slate.com/articles/...

i never said society is evil nor did i say that men and women are not different biologically.
and it does rather well prove that the societal attitutdes towards colors very much are results of society rather than biology.
the key is that those difference do not extend to our brains.

you get a fail for reading comprehension and logic.
and you should probably start here, which has a few good references to actual research on this subject: http://www.slate.com/articles/...

Citations, please.

I found the following related to the above quotes. The first one I couldn't find anything in context, only that Bush supposedly said it, and the second one is part of the the Constitution being just a piece of paper quote which was false. As to the rest. . .

"I'll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office." George W. Bush - Link

"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." - George W. Bush - Link

"You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on." - George W. Bush - Link

"You know, one of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror." - George W. Bush - Link

.. And this seems to be news every few months.

Crops, fisheries, radioactive contamination, the whole system would lead to massive collapse after a decade. Sure, hardly anyone would die from the immediate impact of the annual nuclear meltdown, but once we start ticking off the body count of the millions dying to radiation poisoning and starvation, we might want to reconsider that path.

1. The total death impact from Chernobyl is roughly 4k people. There's some high end estimates like 985k, but those seem to assume that humans are snorting all the radioactive material.
2. The exclusion zone is 1k km, 1 a year would add up to 1M 'off limits', most of it indistinguishable from a natural park. About 2% of our land mass, assuming we don't smarten up and keep plants on previously 'disallowed' areas.
3. 1 Chernobyl/year is an absolute worst case scenario. Even if we multiplied our nuclear power 100 fold we wouldn't have that disaster rate, especially as we transition past the legacy plants the US uses now.
4. Estimates range from 4k to 93k deaths from the accident and resulting radiation. Meanwhile the death toll from coal in the USA alone is 10k..., and 170k world wide.

The Guardian published this 2 years ago:

China's emissions expected to rise until 2030, despite ambitious green policies

Now, read Slate from a couple of weeks ago regarding the "great" climate deal Obama agreed to with China:

A Real Deal

The Chinese commitment is not a commitment to any specific value of emissions but rather a commitment that the country’s emissions will peak by 2030, and thereafter will not increase. The deal does not specify whether and by how much emissions will decrease after 2030, but the significance is that China is committed to get off its exponential emissions track by 2030.

Lovely. The Chinese basically agreed that yes, the Earth is already round. Obama got rolled.

That, and the entire mattress industry is a scam.

But the GOP has become obsessed with the idea that government is evil. They will not fund anything except military and espionage. That includes weather forecasting.

Apparently especially weather forecasting. They are concerned that we may learn something about climate while investigating the weather, and apparently they are ideologically opposed to learning about the climate. - http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad...

... for the google product graveyard.

Ummm... why? You think it's preposterous that software exploits are bought and sold?

"It is common for individuals or companies who discover zero-day attacks to sell them to government agencies for use in cyberwarfare." - Zero-day attack

References:
- Zero-day exploit in Apple’s iOS operating system 'sold for $500,000'
- Nations Buying as Hackers Sell Flaws in Computer Code
- How Spies, Hackers, and the Government Bolster a Booming Software Exploit Market
- Cyberwar’s Gray Market

This goes way beyond offending people, though. This is abuse and harassment, which is not the not the same thing at all.

Anyone who has been paying even passing attention to Gamergate knows by now that in the vast, vast majority of cases, this doesn't go beyond offending people. This doesn't extend into the territory of abuse or "harassment" at all for any sane definition of these terms. Claims that it does are being used as a tool to censor and shut-down discussion around this issue. Case in point.

Since you obviously can't tell the difference, you are directly part of the problem. There is no right to make rape threats.

Case in point. A slashdotter makes a comment about the right not to be offended, and is all but called a rape supporter within 4 sentences. This is the standard, now tired tactic gamers have been exposed to for over three months now: Kafkatrapping. Refuse to agree, and you must support rape and need to "sit in a corner and think quietly before joining the rest of the online community again". Discussion terminating cliches like this would not be so serious if the main stream media hadn't engaged in a propaganda carpet-bombing of gamers and indeed wider geek communities on the internet over the last three months.

I defer to sci-fi author John C Wright's description of these tactics. "You are the boy who cries wolf"

And boys like you have cried about "misogyny" in video games for years, from accusing Super Mario of objectifying women all the way up to using absurdly unrepresentative footage to accuse gamers of being out to "derive a perverse pleasure from desecrating the bodies of unsuspecting virtual female characters". When most gamers object, protest, or declare these arguments absurd, we are accused of harassment, "mansplaining", "internalized misogyny", or inevitably "supporting rape culture". This has simply kicked into overdrive in the MSM since gamers resisted the pulpit declaration that "Gamers are Dead".

And the reason is simple. Money.

What Gamergate has uncovered, more so than any other factor, is how tactics such as the parent's post are being used to censor artists, blacklist developers, and stifle creativity and competition in the games industry. Even when industry professionals know that misogyny is not a problem in gaming, these tired claims are repeated with the express intetion of shutting out competitors, even those who ostensibly support the same causes.

These tactics and other forms of cultural scarring are being used across other geek communities and only now, in the wake of gamers consumer revolt and continued resistance, do other communities finally feel safe enough to stand up to intellectual bullying of the new Internet Red Guard and the cultural revolution it has declared on geeks.

Anyone who wants to know more about the re

I finally googled "comma inside quotes not logical" and wouldn't you know it, there are two standards:

American style is to put commas and periods inside quotes (but not colons, semi-colons, question marks, etc.) and British style, also called interestingly enough "logical" style, is to put the punctuation inside the quotes if it existed in the original, but not to if it did not.

Anyway, this was sort of interesting, at least insofar as I am at work and avoiding seriously boring stuff by reading stuff that could be considered interesting in that context:

http://www.slate.com/articles/...

Wait, what's wrong with Tesla?

It was deemed too precious to fail by the government.

I though they paid back their government loan ahead of schedule.

That's irrelevant to my argument. Not all companies helped by the government are necessary failures. The point is, there should not be any such companies.

Not to say, the Administration has failed to mishandle Tesla too:

Yet despite all the public celebration, both Solyndra and Tesla stand as warnings of the dangers in deputizing bureaucrats to play bankers and venture capitalists. In both loans, the government walked away laughably undercompensated for the risk it accepted in the startup companies. In fact, the Tesla deal was arguably far more costly for America than the Solyndra fiasco.

HI,

While focused on an academic audience of organizational scholars, I have a friend who was a Steward and has written an ethnographic book about Wikipedia:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/searc...

If you are more interested in accessible information he's also written an editorial regarding Wikipedia for Slate:
http://www.slate.com/articles/...

Great numbers. Not a single source on any of them. If your source is your ass then please state so.

Unemployment rates:
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries...

Deficit numbers:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/... (First Spreadsheet)

95% of recovery goes to top 1%:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/mon...

Death toll in Afghanistan:
http://www.justforeignpolicy.o...

Who knew my ass was sited all over the Internet!

Interesting observation that black snow is 'thanks to human activity',

There are several potential explanations for what’s going on here. The most likely is that some combination of increasingly infrequent summer snowstorms, wind-blown dust, microbial activity, and forest fire soot led to this year’s exceptionally dark ice. A more ominous possibility is that what we’re seeing is the start of a cascading feedback loop tied to global warming.

This year, Greenland’s ice sheet was the darkest Box (or anyone else) has ever measured. Box gives the stunning stats: 'In 2014 the ice sheet is precisely 5.6 percent darker, producing an additional absorption of energy equivalent with roughly twice the US annual electricity consumption.' Perhaps coincidentally, 2014 will also be the year with the highest number of forest fires ever measured in Arctic.

Box’s findings are in line with recent research that shows the Arctic is in the midst of dramatic change.

A recent study has found that, as the Arctic warms, forests there are turning to flame at rates unprecedented in the last 10,000 years. This year, those fires produced volumes of smoke and soot that Box says drifted over to Greenland.

In total, more than 3.3 million hectares burned in Canada’s Northwest Territories alone this year—nearly 9 times the long term average—resulting in a charred area bigger than the states of Connecticut and Massachusetts combined. That figure includes the massive Birch Creek Complex, which could end up being the biggest wildfire in modern Canadian history. In July, it spread a smoke plume all the way to Portugal. — http://www.slate.com/blogs/fut...

But the real core issues is a lack of jobs and a tax system that encourages poor behaviors and discourages good behavior. We have done more to harm the poor than help them with hand out programs. We have created whole generations of people who will not bother to do better. Who yearn and hope for the luck of the draw to lift them out of poverty. Either by 'i can sue someone' or 'win the lottery' or 'my kid got into college on a sweet scholarship so he can go onto the NFL'. Instead of giving people the tools to do better. The rich can deign upon the chosen few some riches and feel special they are helping.

So you think maybe slavery was a bad idea? http://www.slate.com/articles/...

Literally 5 seconds to search. sigh

What’s Wrong With “After-Birth Abortion”?

Fourth Trimester Abortion: Are You Serious? by Dr. Robert M. Myers, President, Toccoa Falls College

Video: Planned Parenthood Official Argues for Right to Post-Birth Abortion

Its [sic] not OK to attack the character of an individual when they are skeptical of your conclusions.

But it's OK to attack the character of an individual when they are skeptical of the facts.

What are you implying? That it's OK to attack Ken Ham, or that its OK for Ken Ham to attack people who don't believe as he does?

CaptainDork isn't implying anything. S/he says it's okay to attack the character of an individual who is skeptical of the facts, not beliefs.

Ken Ham can build whatever he wants on his own dime, in his own land.

Can he do that by practicing illegal discrimination? If you bothered to read the Slate article linked by CaptainDork, you'd see that Ken Ham is engaging in just that.

I just don't want him influencing public policy or spending public funds on projects that are not based on science.

That's the point. Again, read the Slate article linked by CaptainDork. And if you're too lazy to do that, then here you go:

But Ark Encounter isn’t privately funded; the citizens of Kentucky have been roped into paying for it, whether they like it or not. Earlier this year, Kentucky’s Tourism Development Finance Authority gave preliminary support for $18.25 million in tax credits for Ark Encounter, citing Ham’s promise that the project would create 600 to 700 jobs. And that’s just for the first phase of construction; ultimately, the state could grant Ark Encounter up to $73 million in tax breaks.