Domain: washingtonpost.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to washingtonpost.com.
Comments · 10,374
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Re:Friend "wrote something stupid"
First, given all the trouble the FBI has had issuing legal National Security Letters, I wouldn't assume that there's a valid warrant until I read it.
Second, if stalking immigrant kids is the FBI "doing their job", they should find a different job. Getting a warrant requires "probable cause". Probable refers to probability. How many of these fishing expeditions has the FBI gone on? If less than 50% of them lead to arrests, they are getting warrants for improbable causes. That's unconstitutional.
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Re:just a witch hunt;
The Washington Post seem to be suggesting that the Attorney General does not understand the law. That is false, of course.
In a grant application, Michael Mann cited some of is his prior research papers that, it is alleged, Mann knew were bogus. In other words, Mann committed fraud in a grant application. That is a crime, as it obviously should be.
For details, read the Attorney General's letter to UVA. -
Re:Don't bet against Cuccinelli
"Cuccinelli thoroughly analyzes the relevant law and doesn't misinterpret it to fit his preconceptions."
Cuccinelli claims on page 28 of the subpoena that since Mann used the word “community” in a blog post, he must be using “Post Normal” jargon, and that might be “misleading/fraudulent” in the context of a grant application. Now if that's not making a pretzelised interpretation of the law I don't know what is.
Given a fair judge, I cannot see any possibility of Cuccinelli nailing Mann to a cross while simultaneously grasping at such tenuous straws. -
Re:just a witch hunt;
Washington Post: "Ken Cuccinelli seems determined to embarrass Virginia":
What's particularly astonishing, though, is that Mr. Cuccinelli's legal case against Mr. Mann seems unrelated to any of the controversial research the attorney general spends so much time attacking. Mr. Cuccinelli is supposedly investigating whether Mr. Mann committed fraud when the scientist applied for and received a state-funded research grant -- to study what Mr. Mann describes as "the interaction of the land, atmosphere and vegetation in the African savannah." The topic "has nothing to do with climate change or paleoclimate," Mann says. The attorney general appears to argue that, since Mr. Mann listed his controversial papers on his curriculum vitae when he and two other scientists applied for the savannah research grant, he may have committed some kind of fraud.
The attorney general's logic is so tenuous as to leave only one plausible explanation: that he is on a fishing expedition designed to intimidate and suppress honest research and the free exchange of ideas upon which science and academia both depend -- all because he does not like what science says about climate change. "
There is some suggestion that this is test case to see what he can get away with. The last time around, the judge bitch-slapped him so hard, it nearly broke his neck, so now he is trying to see what the judge will tolerate by going after something less directly connected with Mann.
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just a witch hunt;
Washington Post: "Ken Cuccinelli seems determined to embarrass Virginia":
What's particularly astonishing, though, is that Mr. Cuccinelli's legal case against Mr. Mann seems unrelated to any of the controversial research the attorney general spends so much time attacking. Mr. Cuccinelli is supposedly investigating whether Mr. Mann committed fraud when the scientist applied for and received a state-funded research grant -- to study what Mr. Mann describes as "the interaction of the land, atmosphere and vegetation in the African savannah." The topic "has nothing to do with climate change or paleoclimate," Mann says. The attorney general appears to argue that, since Mr. Mann listed his controversial papers on his curriculum vitae when he and two other scientists applied for the savannah research grant, he may have committed some kind of fraud.
The attorney general's logic is so tenuous as to leave only one plausible explanation: that he is on a fishing expedition designed to intimidate and suppress honest research and the free exchange of ideas upon which science and academia both depend -- all because he does not like what science says about climate change. "
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Re:Yeah. Or just legalize marijuana.
Fine countries for each citizen found illegally residing in our country, *10 for repeat offenders.
Not sure that would help anything. This study shows illegal immigrants cost the federal government at most 10 billion a year. Stopping that wouldn't save that much either, since as the article points out, a significant amount of that is actually going to their US born children. And how much do we spend on fighting illegal immigration? I couldn't find a figure after googling for 10 minutes, everything just kept coming up with estimates for how much illegal immigrants cost us, with the numbers varying wildly.
Plus I suspect if we told mexico to pay 10 billion or nearly anything, they'd tell us to fuck off, and also that we can deal with the drug smuggling barons directly since we're mostly funding the drug smuggling ourselves anyway.
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Re:Well let's face it...
There's no such thing as "clean coal".
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Re:I guess I'm not surprised
Well, if you remember in "Bicentennial Man", he slowly perfected artificial human organs, until there wasn't much that couldn't be replaced.
I'm a bit surprised at the 20 to 25 year claim. I thought it wasn't more than a year or so ago that artificial hearts, though promising, were never practical for long-term use. At best they were a stop gap measure between the original heart failing, and getting a real flesh donor heart.
I went looking for more information. The most detailed I could find was this 2006 news story
Of the 14 original recipients, two died on the operating table. The rest survived for an average of 5.2 months, with the longest living 17 months.
...
The original patients all had a life expectancy of a month or less when the device was put in, and their net gain in longevity was 4.5 months.It sounds like they're offering the kid a very optimistic view of life. The article is very short on information, like specifics on the device (who makes it, what it's called, what testing has been done, what have the long term animal trials shown, etc). I'm sure they're very good engineers and doctors, but it would be nice to have more information before people start really believing that they can have an artificial heart with a MTBF of 20 to 25 years.
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Re:More likely concern
A more likely concern is that the device can be used to reveal government misconduct. It was hobbyist plane-spotters who, through their observations of civilian air traffic, exposed the CIA's Torture Jet flights
If I were the CIA, and I were worried about this app, I'd make sure my extraordinary rendition flights didn't have an ADS-B transmitter. But, then, I'm not the CIA....
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More likely concern
As many here have pointed out, it's absurd to think that this app would be useful for a terrorist who has the resources to obtain a surface to air missile. If you're going to shoot down a civilian plane, do you really need to know the flight number? Or do you just pick the one you see above you?
A more likely concern is that the device can be used to reveal government misconduct. It was hobbyist plane-spotters who, through their observations of civilian air traffic, exposed the CIA's Torture Jet flights or "extraordinary renditions", wherein they kidnapped people abroad and transferred them to third countries like Egypt, Jordan and Uzbekistan for interrogation using tortures that even the CIA wouldn't use (I guess there still are some).
If the choice is between ceasing their crimes against humanity, or trying to cover them up better: they prefer the latter strategy.
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Re:Change we can believe in
When talking about families and individuals, which is what this is about -- the accomplishment of individuals -- a "generation" is one person's life. A family consisting of two parents, age 76, and a child, age 50, does not consist of three generations. It has two.
Go read the first chapter, of the "The Millionaire Next Door". It has a nice profile of who are the millionaires in the United States.
What IS meaningful is that the strongest correlation for the wealth of a son is the wealth of his father. Accidents of birth are the primary driver for how wealthy a person will be.
Did you actually read that paper at all? Did you for some reason stop after seeing figure 2? Did you see figure 3? The one that says parent's wealth contributes about 15% to predicting a child's wealth. And the huge area labeled "unexplained" that represents more than 65%. It supports exactly what I said: that parental wealth is not the determining factor in the child's success and wealth.
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Maybe its because they don't want to hire geeks?
"It was supposed to be a war fighter unit, not a geek unit," said task force veteran Jason Healey, who had served as an Air Force signals intelligence officer.
A fighter would understand, for instance, if an enemy had penetrated the networks and changed coordinates or target times, said Dusty Rhoads, a retired Air Force colonel and former F-117 pilot who recruited the original task force members. "A techie wouldn't have a clue," he said. --Washington PostWith their attitude towards cyber security experts (who are probably also geeks!), I am not particularly surprised they have had trouble with staffing.
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Re:Autocratic?
== Tyrant? If true it sounds like he's as bad as the leaders he's trying to expose?
President Obama has argued that he can have American citizens assassinated and that the courts aren't allowed to intervene, as that would violate state secrecy. Call me when the corpses start piling up in Mr. Assange's bedroom.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/25/AR2010092500560.html?hpid=topnews
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Re:It's a Pyrrhic victory
He'll spend a lifetime in that county getting pulled over for crossing the yellow line and not signaling on lane changes.
Actually, you don't have to signal on lane changes in MD. [source]
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Re:Not so bad of a result
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Re:I don't have a problem with this
Almost a million people can read super secret documents. Why are they secrets? If you read the Pentagon Papers (not the NY Times edited version), you'll find that "national security" has a 2nd meaning: is to protect big business profits and reputation, and the immoral actions by those in charge, from public exposure. Sure there is some legitimate confidentiality but that is a tiny portion in comparison.
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Why are governments so dependent on tax revenue?
It seems to me that Governments should wield the power to make money, and politicians should debate about where to spend the newly created money.
But as it is, in the UK, the United States, and elsewhere, banks create money, and decide who to loan it to. Governments have no other choice but to levy taxes on the economy.
Like Colbert said in his testimony about migrant farm workers (8:54), the political game is all about power, and the biggest economic power of all is "who gets to create money first." Whatever happened to that bill to 'Audit the Federal Reserve" (which is owned by private member banks)? I haven't kept up... Whatever you think about the Fed, at least its profits are returned to the U.S. Treasury now.
Richard C. Cook's Bailout for the People (pdf) has a really nice overview of an economic system that would work for the benefit of everyone...
Some other sites:
http://www.monetary.org/
http://www.webofdebt.com/ -
Re:China shouldn't have been allowed to join the W
Uh, you know those "foreign combatants" kept in dog kennels in Guantanamo Bay, and not charged because we don't even know why we captured them in the first place? Those guys? According to those filthy liberal peacenik commies in the Supreme Court, apparently they're actually "people"!
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Re:I don't care what anyone says
It's good to hear about 9/11. Now, how many Muslims denounce death penalty for apostasy?
Pretty much all of them. - I mean have you ever asked a muslim what he thought about it?
Really, the only ones who do care are the fundos and the politicians who pander to them.
The koran has just two passages that deal with the issue and in each case the death penalty is only applicable to apostates who then commit treason.
Just in case you've forgotten, we still have the death penalty for treason in the US.
Hell, the only reason we still have the death penalty for anything in the US is because the politicians who pander to american fundos.
No other western country has the death penalty. Even Russia abolished it.But if you have to have big names say it - lets start with Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi - Grand Mufti of the leading islamic university, Al-Azhar. If islam were anywhere near as monolithic as the catholic church then the grand mufti of Al-Azhar would be the closest thing islam has to a pope. And it wasn't something new that he brought with him when the took office in 1996 - the previous Grand Mufti al-Shaltut held to similar doctrine.
But I'm sure you've never even heard of them. So how about Daisy Khan and her husband Imam Feisal Rauf - the people building the Park51 mosque.
Or if you aren't satisfied with people who are famous among muslims or people who are famous among non-muslims, how about over a hundred regular muslims from all over the planet?
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Re:I don't care what anyone says
If any of the post-9/11 acts of violence by muslims have been denounced by the thought leaders of Islam, I've never once heard it. Apparantly neither have the terrorists. Perhaps they should denounce louder.
Maybe you just need to listen better because they do it all the time,
Here's just the latest - over 80 imams, scholars, community leaders, journalists, authors, and cartoonists have signed a denunciation of the extremists who scared the "draw muhammad day" artist into hiding. Funny thing about that - her cartoon was hijacked by anti-muslim extremists, not free-speech advocates, just muslim haters looking for any sort of politically correct cover for their raging.
What her cartoon expressed and what the haters made it into were polar opposites. Kinda like the way the original danish cartoon issue was ginned up with 3 totally fake and unpublished images created by al-qaeda associated imams looking to ignite conflict.
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Re:Another theory
Second, he did not show nor was described as showing any inclination to use nuclear weapons that I am aware of
Except for revising US strategic nuclear doctrine to include preemptive strikes, of course. As CinC, Bush was accountable, if not directly responsible, for this initiative
No one cares.
Yeah, I think that was pretty much the whole problem.
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Re:Why is the summary whitewashing?
Another irrational loon heard from.
Testing of Gulf shrimp by various universities has detected no oil:
http://news.discovery.com/earth/no-oil-detected-in-gulf-shrimp----yet.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/16/AR2010081605471.html
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Re:But wait
Fact: you don't know that the iOS hole hasn't been exploited by others.
This story is about a local root hole. Apple has them, Linux has them, Windows has them, OpenBSD has them. To use it, you need to make the computer run the code, you need an infection vector. Linux is more or less exclusively exploited as a server OS, as it has services running and accepting connections from the outside 24/7. OS X is no different. Not at all. Etc, etc. As a desktop or phone OS, I've never heard of Linux being targeted, but at least I'm not saying it's never happened.
Why is desktop Linux and OS X targeted so rarely? Think about the infection vector: either getting people to install a trojan, or planting malicious code e.g. on a web server, and then hoping that a bunch of random users should stumble across the site, hopefully running the correct versions of the right browsers -- it just wouldn't be very effective. So you don't get widespread infections, and they aren't reported. If such an exploit were to be worthwhile, you'd expect it to be targeted to a specific user or organisation with a known software stack, using your ordinary social engineering skills to lure people into clicking a link, for instance. This shouldn't be too hard, and it would more often go undetected. Perfect for spying. The same goes for iOS, of course, although it's a lot simpler, for obvious reasons.
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Re:Go after billionaires then
Note that "five and more employees" also includes Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, and so on. If you look here you'll read that only 2 or 3 percent of "small" businesses fall into the top two tax brackets ($250K or more, this article discussing the Obama plan). In that 2 or 3 percent, you find business like:
Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts
PricewaterhouseCoopers
the Tribune Corp.
Bechtel
This is NOT a tax on the "heart" of small business, as you claim.
I note, also, the implicit assumption that people who earn a lot, worked hard for it, in some sort of a positive sense of the word "work" (as opposed to the sort of work that a bank robber or an embezzler does). You did notice, surely, that the rocket surgeons on Wall Street who devised all this CDO madness that so thoroughly trashed our economy, were extremely well paid? -
Re:Wow an adult recieving an average 10 etxts a da
No one can type as fast as they can talk
True, many of us type faster, and read faster, so text can improve the speed of communication. Notice that I only said speed, not effectiveness, since there is no visual/aural feedback.
I'm the father of a 19 yr old, who essentially refuses to call her parents (from an out-of-state college), but will respond to texts all day, so I've adapted to improve the lines of communication with her. There was a very interesting and enlightening article in the Washington Post just about a month ago (link below) on the generational differences regarding use of the phone vs. text. According to it, while most of us older Boomers think the youngsters are just being rude, not answering our calls or voicemails, the kids feel that calls are an imposition on their time, and maybe even rude. When I shared that article with my daughter, it was helpful to us to discuss these views, and how to better our own communications.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/07/AR2010080702848.html
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Re:Why?
You could not be more full of shit: "News Corp. also gave $45,000 each to GOP and Democratic campaign committees on Capitol Hill. ". The Murdoch Family has a controlling interest and Rupert is supposedly worth $6 billion and is now a US citizen. Even I have have given to democrats and even worked on one of their campaigns.
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Re:relation to politics
Progressivism has always, in all of its incarnations, had reasons for why the right-thinking adherents to the movement were smarter, wiser, better human beings, and why people who disagreed were mentally defective, overwhelmed by hate, or even subhuman. The most depressing development lately is that as more women are taking leadership positions in the conservative movement, we now have liberals deriding them as insane or sexually damaged. Modern American progressivism started with women's suffrage, and has now come full circle to attack them in the most vicious, misogynistic ways.
"Progressives" are awfully reactionary, aren't they?
It'd be hilarious if they weren't wrecking the living statards of the US populace.
In the second year of a brutal recession*, the ranks of the American poor soared to their highest level in half a century and millions more are barely avoiding falling below the poverty line, the Census Bureau reported Thursday.
About 44 million Americans - one in seven - lived last year in homes in which the income was below the poverty level, which is about $22,000 for a family of four. That is the largest number of people since the census began tracking poverty 51 years ago.
* -otherwise known as the "Obama Presidency"
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Re:Ooooooo
Yes, so we can all blind our neighbors with the laser beam.
Given that a majority of republicans are now on record for reducing funds for care of the blind and they are about to take over the government, this might not be the best thing for UC Berkeley to have developed at this time.
They're just trying to save money to take care of all the poor that Obama/Pelosi/Reid's policies are creating:
In the second year of a brutal recession, the ranks of the American poor soared to their highest level in half a century and millions more are barely avoiding falling below the poverty line, the Census Bureau reported Thursday.
About 44 million Americans - one in seven - lived last year in homes in which the income was below the poverty level, which is about $22,000 for a family of four. That is the largest number of people since the census began tracking poverty 51 years ago.
YAAAY HOPENCHANGE!!!!
SLAP!!!! - that's the sound of YOU being BITCH SLAPPED by FACTS.
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Re:WOAH WOAH WOAH
First of all I'd rather my children be contributing to the economy and social security when I retire.
Illegal immigrants are bankrolling your SS right now.
"Stephen C. Goss, the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration and someone who enjoys bipartisan support for his straightforwardness, said that by 2007, the Social Security trust fund had received a net benefit of somewhere between $120 billion and $240 billion from unauthorized immigrants.
That represented an astounding 5.4 percent to 10.7 percent of the trust fund's total assets of $2.24 trillion that year. The cumulative contribution is surely higher now. Unauthorized immigrants paid a net contribution of $12 billion in 2007 alone, Goss said. "
The illegals were willing to work for minimum wage and I couldn't. I have a few unemployed friends who would be more than willing to work on a farm or something similar for $8-$10 an hour just so they can get by.
Sounds like an more of a indictment of our countries ridiculously low minimum wage than anything else.
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Re:Ok you've got my attentionHere is a better explanation of what happened by Danny O'Brien (http://twitter.com/mala)
---- posted in verbatim for
/. proof ----Theres been a lot of alarming but rather brief statements in the past few days about Haystack, the anti-censorship software connected with the Iranian Green Movement. Austin Heap, the co-creator of Haystack and co-founder of parent non-profit, the Censorship Research Center, stated that it had halted ongoing testing of Haystack in Iran; EFF made a short announcement urging people to stop using the client software; the Washington Post wrote about unnamed engineers who said that lax security in the Haystack program could hurt users in Iran.
A few smart people asked the obvious, unanswered question here: What exactly happened? With all that light and fury, there is little public info about why the worlds view of Haystack should switch from it being a step forward for activists working in repressive environments that provides completely uncensored access to the internet from Iran while simultaneously protecting the users identity to being something that no-one should consider using.
Obviously, some security flaw in Haystack had become apparent, but why was the flaw not more widely documented? And why now?
As someone who knows a bit of the back story, Ill give as much information as I can. Firstly, let me say I am frustrated that I cannot provide all the details. After all, I believe the problem with Haystack all along has been due to explanations denied, either because its creators avoided them, or because those who publicized it failed to demand one. I hope I can convey why we still have one more incomplete explanation to attach to Haystacks name.
(Those whod like to read the broader context for what follows should look to the discussions on the Liberation Technology mailing list. Its an open and public mailing list, but it with moderated subscriptions and with the archives locked for subscribers only. Im hoping to get permission to publish the core of the Haystack discussion more publicly.)
First, the question that I get asked most often: why make such a fuss, when the word on the street is that a year on from its original announcement, the Haystack service was almost completely nonexistant, restricted to only a few test users, all of whom were in continuous contact with its creators?
One of the things that the external investigators of Haystack, led by Jacob Appelbaum and Evgeny Morozov, learned in the past few days is that there were more users of Haystack software than Haystacks creators knew about. Despite the lack of a public executable for examination, versions of the Haystack binary were being passed around, just like unofficial copies of Windows (or videos of Iranian political violence) get passed around. Copying: its how the Internet works.
We were also told that Haystack had a centralized, server-based model for providing the final leg of the censorship circumvention. We were assured that Haystack had a high granularity of control over usage. Surely those servers could control rogue copies, and ensure that bootleg Haystacks were exc
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Re:You gotta compete on the global marketplace!
I sat down and did the math a couple of years ago and concluded that I would never break even.
You did the math wrong.
First, you have the problem of power factor, which means that with fluorescent bulbs, you're often drawing a lot more power than you think, it just isn't getting metered that way
No, you don't -- and you're contradicting yourself. If there was more power being drawn, but somehow it wasn't being metered, then it wouldn't effect your break-even, you'd be getting the extra power for free. But in fact, there is no extra power. Watts are watts; don't be confused that they don't always equal volt-amps in non-DC circuits.
you have the spectrum of light, which because it is balanced towards the blue end and because it isn't a continuous spectrum
Full spectrum CFLs are inexpensively available.
And that's before you add in things like the increase in depression, suicides, and cancer linked with fluorescent lighting.
Comparing the standard industrial flickering "cool-white" fluorescent lighting with CFLs is ridiculous. Indeed, the first page you link to mentions a study by Ott comparing "full-spectrum, radiation-shielded fluorescent light fixtures" with the usual white tubes. If you read the page you linked to, you'd see it's not fluorescent lighting versus incandescent that the problem.
As for the second link, the study in question found that women in neighborhoods with lots of night-time illumination are more likely to get breast cancer. (Not surprisingly, the ironically-named Reason distorts the findings.) Linking that to fluorescent lighting rather than general interference with circadian rhythms, is speculative at best.
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Re:9th Circuit
I suspect you're a troll, but can you say that the following changes have pushed the court left, or kept it to the center?
Rehnquist -> Roberts
O'Connor -> Alito
Souter -> Sotomayor
Stevens -> KaganO'Connor to Alito was very, very clearly a move to the right. The last two, well, we don't have enough information (arguing a push would be reasonable). While Rehnquist was definitely on the right, the Roberts court has gone even further in that direction (see e.g. Under John Roberts, Court Re-Rights Itself).
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Re:A shame it was such a contentious issue.
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Re:Expensive
"Why is it that almost every single privately educated student is better educated than a public school educated student despite massive redistribution of wealth? With a private school, they have to make every dollar count."
That's, like, one of the dumbest and most disingenuous arguments I've ever seen. The actual answer is simply: Because private schools are rich and spend about twice as much money on average.
The secular private schools analyzed in the study spent $20,100 on each student in the 2007-08 school year vs. $10,100 in public schools. [Washington Post, "Per-Student Spending Gaps Wider Than Known", Aug-31, 2009]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/30/AR2009083002335.html
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Re:About Fucking Time
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Re:Price
So much for all the propaganda and bullshit, eh?
Well... Yeah.. pretty much. The war must go on. No good guys. Just bad guys and "worse" guys. So "bad" really is the new "good". That Shaft, he's a bad muth...
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Re:Psychiatric consultation!
Say what?
It's the modern equivalent of saving all your personal letters and other correspondence. What the heck is abnormal about that? In the old days you'd have a bundle of letters stored in the attic somewhere. But this doesn't result in heaps of paper or file cabinets full of it that get in your way, as it does for people with a genuine mental problem. For e-mail, you can store it all on one small (these days) hard disk placed in a drawer somewhere, with space to spare -- even with all the spam! And the process of figuring out how to better organize it and archive it going forward will be a useful learning exercise that might have applications elsewhere (e.g., at work, where people might be asking exactly the same question).
It's no worse than deciding to tidy up your office or study area and figuring out a system to better keep track of things so you can find them later.
I mean, heck, the President of the United States had the same fricking problem: how to properly archive e-mail, a problem discussed here numerous times. As a common problem -- personally and in business -- listening to other people's solutions before digging into it yourself is an efficient way to deal with it.
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Re:Control rooms at CERN
Looking at other control rooms is helpful. This is what BP's crisis center may or may not look like: http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/photo/gallery/100722/GAL-10Jul22-5223/media/PHO-10Jul22-239820.jpg
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Re:ok but how does this explain
glenn beck?
Beck is the natural reaction to Obamatuerism.
Who but a rank amateur would attribute a quote from Theodore Parker to Martin Luther King:
A mistake has been made in the Oval Office makeover that goes beyond the beige.
President Obama’s new presidential rug seemed beyond reproach, with quotations from Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. woven along its curved edge.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” According media reports, this quote keeping Obama company on his wheat-colored carpet is from King.
Except it’s not a King quote. The words belong to a long-gone Bostonian champion of social progress. His roots in the republic ran so deep that his grandfather commanded the Minutemen at the Battle of Lexington.
For the record, Theodore Parker is your man, President Obama. Unless you’re fascinated by antebellum American reformers, you may not know of the lyrically gifted Parker, an abolitionist, Unitarian minister and Transcendentalist thinker who foresaw the end of slavery, though he did not live to see emancipation. He died at age 49 in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War.
What kind of rank idiot fucks up something like that?!?!
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Re:Thanks a lot, Jackass
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/19/AR2010071903686.html
This article sums it up well in that it's a group with no official racist views but is filled with an unknown amount of racists: http://www.economist.com/blogs/lexington/2010/07/tea-party_racism
The tea party, of course will not have an official racist POV because even they know it would be incredibly stupid to have that out in the open. But when one of their top players is stupid enough write a letter mocking black people, gets caught and has to be sacked.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsPSUxV07x8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S38VioxnBaI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUsBvkfQKUw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vrXJ5-EuoE
Anyone could sit here for days posting links to videos and sites showing examples of Tea Party racists. Sure they like to claim there have been plants but there aren't that many plants and the fact one of their highest people was clearly racist to the point where they had to get rid of him goes to show there is a lot of racism in the tea party. If we're going to attack moderate muslims for not tackling their extremists then the same should be done to the tea party.
The tea party won't do that because the people who aren't textbook racists are still the sort that want to just simply keep the brown people out of their country while forgetting their country was stolen from brown people.
Searching for tea party god or tea party christianity will bring up tons of official tea party sites talking about god. Some people like to claim it's not a religious group but it is they mention god often and their mascot, Palin, always talks about god. Like with the racism, it's easy to find links where tea party idiots have been intolerant of other religious beliefs.
http://www.examiner.com/humanism-freethought-in-tampa-bay/atheists-challenged-by-tea-party-patriots
http://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local-beat/Holy-water-Two-teachers-tossed-for-allegedly-tossing-holy-water-on-atheist-94795819.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/20/mark-williams-tea-party-l_n_582591.html
http://race.change.org/blog/view/tea_party_plans_kkk-style_attack_on_muslim_place_of_worship
so much for freedom of religion - http://www.teapartypatriots.org/BlogPostView.aspx?id=3e3c9354-e295-4195-bb8a-0e50fd522cf9
Again, there is plenty of material out there showing the tea party's hate for anything atheist or Muslim.
The mere fact the tea party came out just as we had our first black president pretty much shows their mentality. They had no problem with Bush driving up the national debt because it was money spent on killing brown people who didn't believe in Jesus. -
Re:I can see
on a side not, formerly holding clearance and being a staunch anti-weed guy, the ganja has changed my world for the better, more guys should try it...
Almost all the combat vets I've known smoke weed. If you smoke cigarettes, reefer will cut your chance of getting cancer in half. I was looking for the citation, and found this "Chilling effects" page listing sites Google has been ordered by the US courts to remove search results for. Many of them are scientific studies, making me suspect that the facts about pot are being censored by the drug warriers.
The study I was looking for was a statistical study of four groups of baby boomers: cigarette smokers, cannibis smokers, those who smoked both, and nonsmokers. It found that those who smoked both cigarettes and pot had roughly half the incidence of cancer than those who smoked only cigarettes, and those who smoked only pot actually had fewer cancers than nonsmokers, although the difference was stastically insignifigant.
I did find news of a different study that found that The compound found in cannabis, called cannabidiol (CBD), inhibits a gene, Id-1, that researchers believe is responsible for the metastatic process that spreads cells from the original tumor throughout the body. Oddly, that link was from a slashdot story Google listed.
Keeping pot illegal is incredibly stupid. People like the FFADFS are just plain evil.
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Re:Maybe
Oil rigs burn/explode because there is no much natural gas in the oil.
Do a Google News search on "propane explosion", and you will see 21,900 hits. There is one all the time, like this one yesterday.
Or 15,700 hits from 1980 until today for "natural gas explosion", like this pipeline explosion that killed 3.
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Comment moderation systems
The Washington Post article now has 533 comments. Why can't all sites just use Slashcode?
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Re:LOLWUT?
[citation needed]
Some the links over at the Romenesko blog shows that Mike Wise at the Washington Post was suspended for a month for his twitter hoax reguarding the Pittsburg QB.
Letmeguess, someone (you? us?) is beging tested to see if the difference between a month's suspension and begin terminated is noticable.
Did your secondhand source involve a “casino employee in Lake Tahoe”?
If you're into the, uh, "news media" you might want to check out Romenesko.
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Re:Assange is in trouble
Please provide a credible citation stating that no one has been killed due to the leaked information.
Here is where we discover the cut of your cloth. Are you a jerkwad on a mission? Or are you someone who is actually unaware of the situation?
Even though you asked for a negative to be proven, I was still able to locate exactly what you requested.
"We have yet to see any harm come to anyone in Afghanistan that we can directly tie to exposure in the WikiLeaks documents," Morrell said.
(Source)
They're confident that it will happen, but as far as the Pentagon is aware, it has not yet happened. This is a direct quote from Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell, who could reasonably be considered more knowledgeable on this topic than you or I...
Now, what exactly is the color of your content? Are you ready to acknowledge that the point you were trying to assert is lost? Or do you press on, unphased? I'm eager to see...
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Re:Who's your crack dealer?
Ah, I see. Characterize the people who are asking for reduced carbon dioxide emissions as hysterical alarmists. Good counter argument!
To get back to reality, Governor Schwarzenegger, President Obama and the U.S. Senate all have taken steps toward reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Even more has been done in Europe.
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Re:Lets be fair then,
Yeah, full federal funding of $21 million ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/02/AR2009120201955.html ) would certainly have a greater impact then California's $3 billion ( http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6384390/ ).
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Re:I can think of a good use
I'm not entirely sure why I'm bothering to interact with you on this issue, since you're too lazy to go read the article. I suppose I'm doing it just so the permanent record here provides useful information to people, and corrects the misinformation you posted. So let's take your errors one at a time, shall we?
1. You incorrectly assume that I would put up with blanket surveillance. However, I listed that as a hurdle to be overcome. I don't want to be spied on.
2. You keep erroneously saying that this is about dumb parents / bad parents / lack of intelligence / people deserving to be neutered. But if you read the article I linked to, then you would see that this kind of tragedy has happened to all kinds of people, even to people of the highest intelligence levels. It has even happened to pediatricians. It also has nothing to do with a lack of caring for the child -- it frequently happens to people who really love their kids.
3. You have a wrong view of how the human mind works. You say you would always know where your dog is. That's great. But I bet you don't drop your dog off at daycare every weekday morning at 7. Consider that to the parent in this situation, he really believes through the workday that he did drop the kid off at daycare. If you don't think the human mind is capable of playing tricks on you, think again. If you think parents are never tired and under-performing in the mornings, think again.
4. You see this as a difference between individuals, like one person would never make the error, and another person might be susceptible to it. But given the same "vulnerability surface area" (i.e. opportunities for error, like the daily daycare thing), I'm not sure that's true. I think it's more like a problem that affects the human race. We weren't designed / evolved / what have you for mission critical multi-tasking operation.
5. You make this about me. Actually, this doesn't affect me personally. I have a low "vulnerability surface area" because I work as a software engineer from home, and my spouse cares for our kids when I'm working. We have never used daycare. My interest in the problem is pretty much out of horror at the fact that it happens to other people all the time, and an ethical-geekish belief that it's a solvable problem. But the solution does not lie in badmouthing the bereaved and mourning parents. It lies in recognizing human limitations and coming up with creative solutions to compensate for them. (Like the other guy's reply suggesting that an in-vehicle IR-based alarm would be a lot more effective, which is undoubtedly true.)
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I can think of a good use
Spying on me without a warrant is a non-starter. But I personally would love some backup protection against accidentally leaving a young child in the vehicle on a hot day (before making snarky comments about Darwin Awards, read this Pulitzer prize winning article. It's not about intelligence. Just read it. Seriously.)
A couple of problems might be: (a) narrowing down the scope of the search such that society would both desire and trust the process, and (b) figuring out how to detect living, moving soft tissues of babies or pets in the vehicle, versus the solid metal of guns or something -- I don't know if this part is even feasible.
OK, you can start the "think of the children" cat calls now.
:P But I bet there are a few Slashdot parents out there (like me) who would love to see some backup protection against their worst nightmare. The scenario is that you forget to drop your kid off at daycare, then run in to work. Many hours later, you return to your car, at which time it's too late. Your typical working parents have the opportunity to make this mistake every morning at seven, five days a week. -
Re:Powerpoint in the military
Just google, "Powerpoint makes you stupid"
The first that I had heard about this was from a NASA scientist following the Columbia accident. He said that there were too many variables and choices that had to be left out of slides because there was a limit to how much detail could be displayed given (readable) font size and screen resolution
This leads to multiple slides to cover a single topic, and the loss of fresh visual memory as the presentation moves from slide to slide.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/29/AR2005082901444.html