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Many people that were paying attention (people that I knew) realized that the CIA data was fabricated. From: http://www.slate.com/id/2087735/ "One U.S. intelligence official said analysts may have been too eager to find evidence to support the White House's claims. As a result, he said, defectors "were just telling us what we wanted to hear." Check here: http://www.slate.com/id/2077558/, or here: http://www.slate.com/id/2078196/ for articles written before the war that dispute the intellegence. The CIA was in shambles and needed some bolstering, so when the data didn't support the WMD theory, it was pressured into manufacturing it. There are similar articles in Atlantic monthly and other places stating the same.

Many people that were paying attention (people that I knew) realized that the CIA data was fabricated. From: http://www.slate.com/id/2087735/ "One U.S. intelligence official said analysts may have been too eager to find evidence to support the White House's claims. As a result, he said, defectors "were just telling us what we wanted to hear." Check here: http://www.slate.com/id/2077558/, or here: http://www.slate.com/id/2078196/ for articles written before the war that dispute the intellegence. The CIA was in shambles and needed some bolstering, so when the data didn't support the WMD theory, it was pressured into manufacturing it. There are similar articles in Atlantic monthly and other places stating the same.

Many people that were paying attention (people that I knew) realized that the CIA data was fabricated. From: http://www.slate.com/id/2087735/ "One U.S. intelligence official said analysts may have been too eager to find evidence to support the White House's claims. As a result, he said, defectors "were just telling us what we wanted to hear." Check here: http://www.slate.com/id/2077558/, or here: http://www.slate.com/id/2078196/ for articles written before the war that dispute the intellegence. The CIA was in shambles and needed some bolstering, so when the data didn't support the WMD theory, it was pressured into manufacturing it. There are similar articles in Atlantic monthly and other places stating the same.

Actually, the most selfish are those who insist on working directly with the charity -- even though an extra hour of work would provide them with the money to do far better good for the masses. Slate had an article on this late last year. Simply not donating would be rather neutral, because no party would benefit, and thus both would benefit equally. Check out the blockquote:

This isn't some silly tautology. If these do-gooders really were motivated by the desire to do good, they would be doing something different. It would almost always be more effective to volunteer less, work overtime, and give more. A Dutch banker can pay for a lot of soup-kitchen chefs and servers with a couple of hours' worth of his salary, but that wouldn't provide the same feel-good buzz as ladling out stew himself, would it?

From this article at Slate

Personally, I'd rather see South Park, Terrance & Phillip, Clerks, etc style animation instead of CG. Something similar to Batman Beyond would be pretty cool for this.

I know what you mean, it's the uncanny valley. They DO seem to be trying to avoid that, from what I can see here. Note especially Kenobi's(?) beard. Threre's not enough to tell if they're sucessful, unfortunately.

Someone posted the answer to your long post already: the Bible, if you consider it a historical source, documents several instances of genocide in the process of occupying the Promised land.

Here is a link to David Plotz's (of Slate.com) "Blogging the Bible" series- the part on the Book of Joshua:

http://www.slate.com/id/2150402/entry/2150403/

Better yet, here is the Book of Joshua itself:
http://www.surfinthespirit.com/bible/Joshua.html

Please consider that the original poster is referring to events long in the past before you immediately post the kneejerk, only thinking of today, response. I do not think the original poster is accusing the Jewish people of having commiting genocide at some nearby time in history, but merely that it was a common enough tactic that everyone- including the Jewish people- employed back in the day.

Math credentials worked for the last guy up to a point....

How is perjury different from making false statements? To commit perjury, you have to be under oath, and you have to knowingly fib about something that's relevant to the case at hand.

My lifetime best was 1200 wpm, back when my eyesight was excellent. One trick for reading slowly is to stop after each page and precis the contents in your head. This also improves retention, though remembering the content of some books is not an advantage.

WTF? This is how I've always done speed-reading...

It's like this:- that, in a 189++ comments thread, yours was one of the few to actually point out that guns are designed to kill people is indicative of the fact that the so-called gun debate in the US is over. Most Americans actually support gun-control, but forget about any meaningful, within-Second-Amendment policy on this.

Yes, that's right folks; the gun-maniacs have won. Arm yourself America (or get Nokia to produce the world's first mobile-cum-mp3-player-cum-0.38-special), it's going to get even bloodier from now on.

(Not American, but have had some training in rifles before in a semi-professional setting.)

How the rating system works
How big is a 10 alarm fire?

I hate to break it to you, troll, but "M$" is getting nailed by the very system you claim they enjoy. Ever heard of Eolas? I'd really appreciate it if you showed us a single instance of Microsoft (oh, "M$") using a patent offensively. That does not include FAT32, which is about as common a licensing scheme as it comes in the hardware world.

Microsoft plays the game the same way IBM and everyone else does to protect themselves from the patent trolls. The system is broken. Constantly harping on why "M$ is teh bad" like Stallman is not going to help much.

Except for the fact that many people tried to help him all along the way:

See the dialogue with the author here.

When you look at the highest-crime-prone years of the post-Roe cohort, you'll see that the drop in crime doesn't match up with where it should be. Plus, Levitt tried to rule out race by explaining it through three other variables that had an extremely high correlation with race, but not as high as race, a violation of Occam's Razor if there ever was one.

Those people aren't crazy by any legal definition: They can tell right from wrong and they know exactly what they're doing; they just happen to be totally evil.

This probably has a bearing on the situation. Are iTunes' Premium Downloads Worth It?

It makes the case that the ENCODER is much more important to sound quality than the bitrate. To quote, "In any case, doubling the bitrate from 128 kbps to 256 kbps won't make music sound twice as good, because the smaller file already has the most important information."

That probably goes doubly when you go from 256 kbps with a good encoder to "lossless", as 99.999% of that data is already represented. Again, to quote, "So, as you compare higher and higher bitrates, sound quality becomes harder to distinguish--the musical equivalent of diminishing returns."

And as I said earlier, I'd gladly trade off some probably imperceptible bit of sound quality for disk space. Especially since they've yet to cram a TB or so into the notebook I use on a daily basis.

See:
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/ 16/208250

or

http://www.slate.com/id/2153352/?nav=tap3

Actually, it's pretty much only Scalia who thinks he's smart enough to evaluate climate change. He got smacked down in oral argument:

"Scalia observes that there is a difference between an "air pollutant" and a "stratospheric pollutant." Milkey interrupts: "Respectfully, Your Honor. It is not the stratosphere. It's the troposphere."

How can the US be slammed for protectionism when we don't let anyone in the US to do online gambling?

This also touches on broader "moral issues". If a country doesn't want something to come in because it objects on moral grounds, who is another country to sue about it? It's like Columbia complaining to the WTO that we ban cocaine.

(Some may argue that regular gambling is legal in parts of the US, but I think online gambling falls into a different realm. Because of the ease of access, it could lead to an major increase in gambling.)

All of these arguments were tried already, and failed. There's a very good article on Slate.com (http://www.slate.com/id/2153352/?nav=tap3) which discusses this. If the U.S. did ban all online gambling, it would be in the clear, but it doesn't. From the article, it seems that the Wire Act of 1961 is the main piece of legislation that is used to attack online gambling. Unfortunately, it doesn't ban all online gambling, in particular bets placed within a single state. The act also excludes horse racing, which is covered by the 1978 Interstate Horseracing Act; apparently it's legal to bet on horse races from out of state. The US made the argument that it does ban internet gambling in its WTO case, but because not all forms are banned, the current laws constitute unfair protectionism for its domestic industries

With regards to the "morals" idea, the WTO does allow exceptions that would permit the US to ban "immoral" activities. It made this case too, but again since some forms of gambling are permitted but not others, it didn't fly. I guess it is a tough argument that poker is immoral but betting on the horses isn't.

The bottom line is that the US must enforce its WTO treaty obligations: either ban all online gambling, or else stop discriminating against Antigua. If not, it faces retaliatory sanctions.

Also, I wanted to touch on your particular links. Your major source seems to be Hernando De Soto. I'll grant that the criticism of his ideas is poorly presented on Wikipedia. But you can find plenty of people that can give you some ideas: Slate linked from Wikipedia, Fair Housing and Foreign Policy.

The Foreign Policy article is not freely available, but I think it makes some interesting points: no evidence his ideas work even though the Peruvian government established a Commision to institute his ideas in 1996 (and is not the only country where his ideas have demonstratedly failed); the ideas are not different from his ideas published in 1986 in _The Other Path_ and can be traced backed to the ideas of people such as David Collier and Jagdish Bhagwati in the 1970s; doesn't allow for cultural variation like the fact that traditional Muslims are opposed to borrowing money; and the fact that other factors such as famine, disease, war and so forth impact economic opportunities.

Best part is this quote:

His solution is vague enough to appeal to people of all political stripes.

Although judging from the coverage in the business press, IMF and places like the Cato Institute, he clearly appeals to a particular flavor of politics more than others.

What bothers me about people like de Soto is that they are experts that don't have to live with the problems their policies create. They have ideas that are not backed up by any empirical evidence, and when they are tested, these policies fail because they are simplistic. In the meantime, the do more harm to the poor and in some cases find ways to funnel cash to the wealthy (someone is flying him around the world to attend conferences and give advice for a reason).

Speaking of simplistic, did you read the sub-title for People's Capitalism? It's Peoples' Capitalism: The Economics of the Robot Revolution. Originally published in 1976, it is an example what is called Binary Economics (you can see that it is finally mentioned at the bottom of the page). I loved this quote from the article - Binary Economics: Paradigm Shift or Cluster of Errors by Timothy D. Terrell in Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, Spring 2005, v. 8, iss. 1, pp. 31-50:

Binary economists stress the uniqueness of their "new paradigm." Yet the theory is riddled with severe problems. Milton Friedman, who once debated Kelso, called Kelso's "two-factor economics" a "crackpot theory," and with considerable justification, it seems. It is not clear from reading binary economists that they understand the "conventional" economics that they are criticizing. Many binary economists are not formally trained in economics...Binary economics is, in sum, a cluster of significant theoretical errors masquerading as a market-friendly solution to our worst economic problems. Kelso's employee stock option plan is a legitimate method of simultaneously compensating employees and solving a pervasive principal-agent problem. Binary economics takes the ESOP and turns it into a fantastic Wolkenkuckucksheim, heedless of the massive inflation that would necessarily accompany its policy proposals.

I don't claim to be an expert in economics. I personally think a lot of it is based on false premises, and it is of limited use. However, there is enough in the article you linked to that did not sound right - particularly how all of our problems could be solved if we just followed this two part plan.

You should do a better job of looking into the background of people selling these crackpot theories and what kind of criticism they are recieving. I realize that conversations like these are how we discover our mistakes - but I can't help but wonder whether you put the effort into checking into and th

"Tell newbies what IS can do"

What "is" can do?!?

I'm still trying to figure out what the MEANING of "is" is!

I believe these are the rules the Kuchinich is trying to bring back? From what I can see...these rules only were from the FCC and applicable to broad casters...it appears along the lines of that ruling, that many exemptions were introduced, and finally about 1987, these requirements were dropped.

I haven't seen in my short searches where this was ever required of print media.

THIS seems to be one article alluding to this as well as THIS ARTICLE . This was just from a quick search...

The first thing that came to my mind was the Sheepboys from the Skittles commercial.

It's finally a reality! (Jibberjabbering not included)

I think that is incorrect. Apple's approach to price-fixing, a Minimum Advertised Price scheme, is described well in a Slate article, "Gadgets for Sale ... or Not: Why you can't get iPods at a discount," by Sean Cooper. Link: http://www.slate.com/id/2156030/

http://www.slate.com/id/2161616/

Ok in growing children, physical activity doesn't have as much direct effect as I would have assumed. But I made that assumtion based on the direct effect that physical activity has on the health of adults. If school is there to help prepare our youth to be highly functional adults, learning to value physical fitness and activity is still an important thing to instill in the kiddies, not just for health but for general succes in life. "No woman or guy wakes up beautiful in the morning. The beautiful is a result of smart life choices, smart shopping choices, smart diet choices, smart makeup choices, smart outfit and accessories choices and even smart chair-stylist choices." "It is not just politicians whom we prefer to be beautiful. A number of studies, many involving American economist Daniel Hamermesh, have found that "ugly" people earn less in many walks of life, from advertising to law. The beauty premium seems to apply even in professions where there is no reason to expect that beauty counts."

Both quotes from:http://www.slate.com/id/2161615/

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I could keep going, but I don't really feel like patronizing you. You do read the news, don't you?

The move to Dubai could save Halliburton (and CEO Dave Lesar) some money on foreign taxes, though. (With operations in 100 countries, Halliburton had to pay out $289 million to foreign governments last year.) The United Arab Emirates government may have sweetened the deal with favorable real-estate terms or other incentives. Dubai's Jebel Ali Free Zone, which already houses more than 5,000 foreign-owned businesses, doesn't impose corporate or personal income taxes and has a robust workforce with no minimum wage.

Listen, I'm not a fan of Halliburton screwing over the American taxpayers. I'm also against their huge no-bid contracts.

But as Slate's "Explainer," well, explains, Halliburton "is still incorporated in Delaware and remains subject to U.S. law and taxes." The article goes on to say that Halliburton would have a hell of a time incorporating in Dubai, but moving its workforce overseas is not out of the question.

After all, 55% of the company's business comes from the Eastern hemisphere. This move makes perfect sense, given their long-term business plans.

PS: The company's defense component, KBR, is set to become its own company. Halliburton's new HQ should not affect KBR.

http://www.slate.com/id/2161652/fr/rss/

The teachers are in a hard place. Teachers will have parents complaining about giving too much homework, while parents in the same class will complain about not enough homework.

Theyre called cell phone repeaters. ...and may run afoul of the FCC.

Will you hear or see that happening ? With jay walkers not being able to face their accusers in court, because their right to habeas corpus is suspended ?

Like we haven't heard about Jose Padilla?

Of course, we all know that once it gets suspended (not that it has), we'll never EVER get it back. Good thing it has NEVER happened before!

People use free OSes for the same reason they don't buy cars with the hoods welded shut.

People don't buy cars with the hoods welded shut because they don't sell them, which is totally irrelevant to what OS they use.

Anyway, a) most new cars are so complex that the hood might as well be welded shut as far as the owner is concerned, b) whether or not they can modify their car is not the primary consideration for most purchasers (hint: it's something you put drinks in), c) welding the hood shut would increase labor in the event that repairs had to be made, which would increase warranty costs, making those vehicles less competitive, and d) I suspect that, despite all of that, most people would still buy Corvettes even if the hood was welded shut. True, that's purely speculative, but no less than your absurd implication that manufacturers secretly desire to weld hoods shut.

Here's an informative Slate article on why there's no autism epidemic:

http://www.slate.com/id/2157496/

Essentially it boils down to the fact that correlation does not equal causation. Then, when you look at history, you see there isn't really any correlation at all!

Actually, that wasn't his first bit of political idiocy. In the 80's he wrote an alarmist, nativist fiction book called Rising Sun on how the Japanese (whose economy at that time was trucking) were going to overtake the US. The epilogue included an explicit commentary where he basically said, "This was fiction, but I'm not kidding. You really should hate the Japanese because they are taking away the American manufacturing base." Oh the horrors, an economic successful country that isn't the U.S. Looking back, it really seems silly doesn't it? For all its flaws, the US economy has steadily grown at a rate faster than much of Europe. Our manufacturing base continues to shrink, but these days, it's going to China, and more to the point, so what? His political commentary has a record of being foolish.

I'm not a biologist but from what I've seen on the news, mostly people killing birds, more people have died in the USA last year from the regular flu then the total worldwide who've died from this bird-flu. Last I'd seen, the count was 9 dead from bird-flu worldwide.

I guess I'm missing something if the regular olde flu season in the USA kills on average 36,000 people ANNUALLY, and so far 9 have died from this bird-flu... WTF?

FYI, a link on the 36,000 dead number:
"Why should you get your flu vaccination?" http://www.slate.com/id/2091774/

LoB

> You mean race has nothing to do with the fact Africans haven't invented the wheel yet?

We have no idea who invented the wheel,

We can be certain, though, he wasn't named Tyrone, right?

but the reason the industrial revolution took place in Europe, inasmuch as there can ever be a single reason for anything so complex, is probably due to climate as much as anything: temperate zones are more likely to produce conditions such as year-round grain surplus. Obviously there were many other factors as well; history is complicated. It is entirely possible that genetic tendencies in different people groups might be one of those factors, and cultural factors certainly are, but the causative relationship there is not as simple as you imply.

I might be over-simplifying the matter, but I'm not sure your approach of excessively complicating it is right either. The idea that the environment is the major shaping force for human (and I use "human" quite loosely) behavior, is dying like every other fallacy - slowly but surely. It's all in the genes. Compare White Rhodesia to Black Zimbabwe, compare White South Africa to the cesspool it is under black rule and see if you can tell me with a straight face that it's all environment's fault. And no, it's not the fault of white colonialism either. There are African states that were never colonized.
To really see the level of blacks' ability to self-govern, google Liberia. And those are blacks that are supposed to have been cured by the almighty environment, seen that they left the US to form Liberia.

http://www.slate.com/id/2086490/
http://www.e-z-smith.com/butt.html/

"General Butt Naked", dude. Couldn't make it up if I wanted to.

There are historical reasons for that statistic (which, incidentally, you exaggerate somewhat, although it is a very real and measurable phenomenon), having to do mostly with concentration in urban areas. Not that that's any excuse for crime: criminals are criminals and must take responsibility for their personal actions. Nonetheless, there is a VERY strong correlation in the US between population density and criminal activity, and a somewhat weaker but still quite significant correlation between population density and racial diversity, and the correlation between race and crime is (at least mostly) a result of the interaction of those. Why racial diversity is so much higher in the urban areas is an interesting study. (Why crime is so much higher in the urban areas is, in my opinion, obvious: you crowd people together, they're going to step on one another's toes, and also the apparent anonymity of the individual is MUCH stronger in more densely populated areas.)

Put another way, a white person living in the inner city is statistically *WAY* more likely to be a criminal than a black person living in a small town in a rural county. If you correlate against where the person's parents and grandparents lived (urban versus rural), it's even more obvious.

I can counter that with the fact that countries with compact white population have very low crime-rate, within cities and in rural areas. I am talking about ex-communist countries like Estonia, Poland, Belarus - countries that haven't yet tasted the pleasures of "diversity". On the other hand, thriving cities like Cleveland and Chicago have become hellholes with the rising of you know what demographic exactly:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Chica go#Ethnicity/

The data is from 2000, the % of blacks would be around 60 now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland,_Ohio#Demog raphics/

50% blacks in 2000, maybe 70% by now. An you don't find the correlation? Why are the whites moving in

Slate currently has an "Obama Messiah Watch" column that chronicles the media's excessive praise of the would-be-president.

http://www.slate.com/id/2159502/?nav=navoa

Autism and Aspergers aren't cancer, it's a way of being and a "cure" is a threat to the identity of autistics.

This is the same collectivist bullshit as saying that being black is "a way of being" instead of a level of skin pigmentation, or that being female is "a way of being" instead of one chromosome. Apart from Nazism and communism, that sort of "thinking" also leads to this sort of atrocity.

Man is a being of self-made soul. Identity is personal, and is by nature authored by the individual, not his genetics or any sort of arbitrary group membership. Even the most abject conformists who allow themselves to be defined in that manner, well, still *chose* to abdicate that power, and they remain responsible for it.

Identity collectivism is a rationalization for the desire to evade that responsibility.

"If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice!" -- Rush (the band, not the Limbaugh)

This article discusses what for most /.-readers will remain in the realm of fantasy, sci-fi, or both: http://www.slate.com/id/2159265/

there is already a cure, just stop getting immunized.

That just plain isn't true, and I don't know what made people start thinking that all of a sudden.

Sorry, that first link regarding casualty rates should've read like this.

On the other hand, if you do your research, long term investing in well run businesses with good financials has far less risk and higher return than almost anything else you can do with your money.

Actually, that's about as wasteful as day trading. Don't bother figuring out which company is good or bad. Other people are already doing that in an attempt to appropriate value the stocks. It's not enough to know which businesses are good; you have to know which ones are good relative to the price their stock is selling for, which is a much, much, much more difficult problem.

The alternative? Buy an index fund. They simply track the relevant broad market (large cap, small cap, foreign, bond, whatever). They don't have to pay for research and they don't rely on a manager's hunches.

No, this isn't sarcasm. Anyone not trying to sell you on a manager's stock picking ability will tell you the exact same thing. Slate has a great series going on now detailing this: see here.

If it weren't for Microsoft handing over our rights to the them on a silver platter, it would be the RIAA and MPAA bending over to the people instead!

Indeed. Compare the size of hollywood (the six major studios combined) with Microsoft:

Hollywood fiscal 2004 revenue: $44.8 billion
Microsoft fiscal 2005 revenue: $41.3 billion

All by itself MS is roughly equal to hollywood en toto. Then add in the rest of the American computer industry - HP, Dell, Intel, AMD, etc and Hollywood becomes a midget. In terms of what industry is more important to the US economy, Hollywood is clearly the ones who ought to bend over and take it, not the other way around.

In most states, a successful entrapment defense requires the defendant to prove three things:

      1. The idea of committing the crime came from law enforcement officers, rather than the defendant.

      2. The law enforcement officers induced the person to commit the crime. Courts have traditionally maintained a high burden of proof for inducement. Simply affording the defendant the opportunity to commit the crime does not constitute inducement. For inducement to be proved, officers must have used coercive or persuasive tactics.

      3. The defendant was not ready and willing to commit this type of crime before being induced to do so. If an undercover cop bought cocaine from a person carrying a kilogram of the drug, the seller could not plead entrapment, even if coercion were involved in the sale, since his intent to sell was clear. Most courts also allow a defendant's predisposition to be demonstrated through prior conduct or reputation.

http://www.slate.com/id/1003657/

Of course, any game based on something as horrific as the Columbine shooting is at best bad taste, at worst shameless exploitation of the event to get in the press, and people should rightfully be angry, and the game should be pulled out.

Amen! And, while we're throwing things on the bonfire, let's not stop with just one silly game!

I think we should abhor Goya's Tres De Mayo . It's simply exploitative of Napoleon's attacks in Spain. This painting is simply blood and gun porn obviously intended to appeal to a young boy's interest in violence!

And, let's not forget Picasso's Guernica . Another sicko exploiting the tragedy of WW2 for selfish gain, Picasso should have been ashamed of himself for painting this. And look at that thing! Those graphics suck so bad, it obviously has no redeeming social value. Even the U.S. government agrees with this stance!

And talking about things harmful to the children, I think we need to make sure to purge all copies of Lord of the Flies. That book is a childhood fantasy of violence for violence's sake. Killing pigs and making sacrifices to the Lord of the Flies (yet another name for Satan, mind you!) This book is distasteful, and the fact that I was a pudgy, glasses-wearing kid in school has nothing to do with my opinion. This book simply has no redeeming characteristics that could help us today.

And, let's not forget exploitative films like Saving Private Ryan. That opening scene is simply to violent, and it's disrespectful to show people being killed so gruesomely like that. It could do real harm, because it might make people watching the movie squeamish about fulfilling their duty to their country by signing up for the armed forces! Further, this move obviously exploits WW2 as a crass commercial exploitation of a national tragedy.

So, welcome fellow book burner^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmoral guardian! Let us purge all those undesirable, exploitative works out from our society! We will truly be free once there is nothing left to remind us of the horrible events in the past.