I had a long reply, but apparently it didn't make it. Shorter is probably better anyway.
Of course Bush had an effect on getting the bill passed, his administration was championing it the minute the Treasury Secretary Paulson finished writing it. Also the point the GP made was that he allegedly threatened members of congress with "martial law", arguably metaphorically, to get it passed. I agree the majority leaders at the time are also culpable, but if you're going to spread the blame around you might want to look at the minority leaders as well. More than a third of the republicans voted for the bill, and it wouldn't have passed otherwise.
The question I asked myself after reading your defense here was why couldn't they get a warrant if they "knew he did it". I hope you asked yourself the same question and found a good answer that I could not. I would be interested in hearing it.
What Obama administration "shenanigans" are you referring to? I certainly have gripes with the current administration, but nothing up to the level the Bush administration was infamous for. And with respect to due process Obama has been injecting it back into the system despite receiving a lot of criticism for it as of late so I'm wondering what you're referring to. Please provide actual events though; I've heard enough blogs, entertainment news, and general speculation to last the rest of his term.
To answer your question. No I am not furious that the decision was legal. And no I wouldn't be upset if the other URL was found legal.
I an and would be furious that both exists and I am a little ticked that Slashdot puts it on the front page and NOT under politics which I have set to not show up on my front page of Slashdot.
Well it is under yro and that is an appropriate tag since it is about a ruling in a court case about satire and political free speech. If this were just about the website I might have agreed with you.
Will my internal wireless card have a better chance of working with this one.? I've had a lot of trouble with the previous version getting any of the wireless drivers to work.
A free market requires that everyone's property and individual rights be respected.
A free market has nothing to do with personal rights. Its about having minimal goverment intervention allowing the ecnomony to find the path of least resistance. The most efficent way to produce goods and services.
Its based on the theory that the ecnomony can regulate itself better then the goverment can. Some regulation is needed, but preferably minimial. The more the goverement controls the system, the less of a free market and more of communist system we step towards.
You don't want to take either side to an extreme, as there is a balaning act involved. Too little oversight will result in companys becoming reckless in the serch for profits; too little freedom will smother companies, minimzing the jobs and profits they provide to the region.
This. This is the problem with many people who think they're touting the free market, especially as political policy. (a)A free market != (b)a market - (g)all gov't. regulation . (a)A free market = (b)a market + (c)no externalized costs + (d)an informed consumer - (g)all gov't regulation not required to enforce (b) + (c). Trampling rights and destroying common resources are definitely costs that are currently "external".
With respect to externalized costs a gov't can either regulate the industry through direct legislation, or subsidize businesses that don't externalize costs and rely on consumer ignorance(even if that ignorance is somewhat willful). The push to regulate has met a lot of resistance here which is why you've seen a push in the other direction recently.
Did you miss the last couple years of recession? Before you try and claim that gov't started it, remember that loans made by lenders under the CRA were statistically no more likely to be "bad" than unregulated banks. Sorry, but the gov't didn't force banks to make those loans, that was all unregulated market.
Oh wait, maybe you're taking a long term view of things, ignoring the "short term setbacks". Kind of like an "everybody dies eventually" approach. Yeah, that's not really what I want out of my economy, I prefer stability and efficiency. I wish 'Libertarians' would take the long term view when looking at external costs and not just recessions.
I do believe that the freest market possible provides the greatest benefit to the most individuals, though many people who also believe this are unclear that unfettered capitalism will lead to capital concentration and a non-free market.
Here, here. It could be argued that this is not really libertarianism, but I think it's a more practical idea of freedom that and unregulated free-market.
Cool post. I don't know a lot about realtime scheduling, but a co-worker once described how a priority system works in this way(sorry it's a plane analogy rather than a car analogy):
Priority isn't based on real life importance, but frequency and tolerance to gain "overall performance as you said". Say you have software to run a plane and the microwave needs to run 1ms every 10ms and the landing gear needs to run for 10ms every 30ms. Naively one might say the landing gear is of higher priority because it is more important than running the microwave. But this would cause missed deadlines for the microwave and for anything running at a lower priority than the microwave when both can run without missing their deadlines. The landing gear would be predictably interrupted an upper bound of 3 times to complete after 13ms which is well before the next time of 30 ms while not causing any problems.
He had a cool job, but I did not envy his position when he had to explain to management why our project's equivalent of landing gear had to be lower priority than our microwave in order for real-time scheduling to run correctly.
Why is the authors' presumption that it's the cosmic rays (or lack thereof) that are regulating tree growth, rather than solar and sunspot activity itself?
Because he has a statistical correlation showing that when comic rays increase, plant growth also increases? FTFA:
When the intensity of cosmic rays reaching the Earth's surface was higher, the rate of tree growth was faster.
The effect is not large, but it is statistically significant.
The intensity of cosmic rays also correlates better with the changes in tree growth than any other climatological factor, such as varying levels of temperature or precipitation over the years.
Also interesting for those mentioning sunspots FTFA:
The levels of cosmic rays reaching the Earth go up and down according to the activity of the Sun, which follows an 11-year cycle.
As for the mechanism, we are puzzled
Sigrid Dengel
University of Edinburgh
Every 11 years or so, the Sun becomes more active, producing a peak of sunspots. These sunspots carry a magnetic field that blocks and slows the path of energetic particles.
When the researchers looked at their data, they found that tree growth was highest during periods of low sunspot activity, when most cosmic rays reached Earth.
But growth slowed during the four periods of cosmic ray-blocking high sunspot activity, which have occurred between 1965 and 2005.
No. It should be up to the customer. The alternative breeds what we call a "Nanny State." That's a Bad Thing.
Nanny state is such a funny term. Libertarians use it to describe unwelcome economic regulation while liberals use it to describe unwelcome social regulation.
A regulation like this is trying to prevent a tragedy of the commons, specifically with our air. At first glance I thought it was specious also, but in a warm place like California where the AC is running probably a good portion of the time, I wouldn't be surprised if the AC is the weakest link in the chain of efficiency.
I don't really know if this is a bad idea or not; I see merits but I also see drawbacks.
I have a couple misgivings about the article too. Beyond the interesting fact that it's an Auto Insider article:
Major automakers, led by the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers and Association of International Automobile Manufacturers, argued for a different standard that would "absorb" rather than "reflect" energy and wouldn't risk wireless signals.
"It achieves about 85 percent of the benefit at about 10 percent of the cost, and it doesn't have any of the complications of reflective glazings," said the alliance's Steve Douglas.
I don't see how absorption could provide the same benefit because that would generate heat. There must be a lot more to the whole thing than this article is letting on.
If you're not a troll then I suggest you read the links I provided for comprehension rather than just skimming. You have to distinguish social policy from economic policy(hence my choice of words above). Meaning I don't see socialist, republican, democrat, fascist as different points on a single line, but different points on a grid. One can favor free market capitalism while also favoring social authoritarianism. Similarly, one can favor social freedom while also favoring market regulation.
Ideologically Bush is much closer than Obama with respect to Fascism.
None of the links you provided mention "Fascism". But by interpreting them to mean, what you wrote, you reveal, that you are one of those, who consider Fascism as somehow opposite of Socialism.
angry troll rant
So you are just a troll. If you had gone to the link for "Fascism" you would have seen that Fascism aka authoritarianism is opposite social anarchy. Similarly, communism is opposite economic libertarianism. Stalin was a communist fascist aka socialist(your word not mine). Hitler was a fascist economic libertarian, although less of a libertarian than either Bush or Obama, and more of a fascist than either. The point was, Bush is more of a fascist than Obama.
Ideologically Bush is much closer than Obama with respect to Fascism. Neither are really comparable to Hitler or Mussolini though, of course.
Also, I hope you don't actually think anything on that site you linked is true. It's claims are the same type of scare-mongering as William Ayers, and Obama's birth certificate(implying Obama is a Black Panther and/or Muslim in disguise respectively, same as your link).
2. Tom and Jerry. This could be huge. Just think of the millions of children who have grown up on seeing the cat and mouse (and occasionally dog) hit each other over the head with frying pans, lead pipes, and just about everything except the kitchen sink. Actually, wait, I think they used the kitchen sink too. It could make the perfect PvP MMO. (And you may think that it would be limited to have just two races in an MMO and have it all happen in one house and its yard, but AION launched literally with one race per side and the zones aren't much bigger either.)
I for one can hardly wait to grind for the Epic Frying Pan Of Power, and whack a cat over the head with it. What? You're saying it's just me?
7. The Bible. Yes, you've heard that right. It sold more copies than all 6 Star Wars episodes and all SW books combined. And if you don't think it has MMO potential, you haven't read it.
E.g., the siege and genocide of Midian (not kidding, read Numbers) would make a great battleground. E.g., imagine the fun of an escort quest to get Lot out of Sodom. For that matter, of trying to get to Lot's house with your sphincter intact;) E.g., for a FedEx quest, recreate Jeremiah's treck to the Euphrates to bury his loincloth because the Lord told him to. (Again, I'm not kidding.) Etc.
I would play these. I'd never thought about the bible as source material for an MMO, but there is a lot of source material there. You'd have to have some balls to actually make it though.
One of the things that always stuck out at me was the mini nuclear batteries in the Foundation series of books. I had just assumed such things were impossible and were just and artifact of the time the books were written in. Apparently my imagination just wasn't flexible enough.
For all his talk his biggest accomplishment so far is bailing out the automakers to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars - if anything that would be economic. I'm no W supporter, but what possible cause is there for this other than anti-W sentiment?
Fixed that for you. TARP was Bush's plan. Not saying your overall point is invalid, just make sure you give "credit" where it's due.
Finding water in our own solar system is more about colonization than finding life. It's good for supporting the life we know about (ie: us) and refueling ships.
With the "news" (circa 1998) that the rate of expansion of the universe is increasing, it seems to me that worries about the heat death of the universe should be put on hold. There's something (currently labeled "dark energy") about cosmology that we simply lack sufficient understanding of.
Yes, the president should select the "Astrophysics Center" and move the "heat death" slider to 0 and the "dark energy" slider to 100. We must find the chosen one to combat this "dark energy" threat!
No, Stallman's objection to C# is based on history.
If I open my arms to give you a hug and then, when you get close, slap you, how many times will we repeat this exercise before you stop accepting my "free hugs"?
Valve is not only smart for snapping up a great developer, but this could end up being a huge coup for Valve in the business realm. Valve has invested a lot of time into making a DRM scheme that provides enough benefits that players are actually willing to join it. Now think, what major game company has thus far refused to join Steam and is in the midst of creating their own competing system. Hint: this company created the game that DotA is modded on. While I'm not a huge DotA fan myself, a lot of people are and support for DotA-like games on Battle.net and Steam could be a very important feature in the near-future.
I'm wondering how Blizzard let this one slip through their fingers, but considering some of their business moves as of late WRT customers, maybe I shouldn't be surprised that's they've lost their way a bit in development too.
Slaughterhouse Five and/or The Sirens of Titan and/or Cat's Cradle The Wonderful Wizard of Oz(for a well known fairy tale)
Then you can follow it up with the longer Wicked or The Ugly Stepsister or some other modern retelling so you can discuss the clash of a mundane world with a fantasy world.
For longer books I would recommend:
Ender's Game
Stranger in a Strange Land
and maybe The Dragon Never Sleeps
Slashdot Mirror
I had a long reply, but apparently it didn't make it. Shorter is probably better anyway.
Of course Bush had an effect on getting the bill passed, his administration was championing it the minute the Treasury Secretary Paulson finished writing it. Also the point the GP made was that he allegedly threatened members of congress with "martial law", arguably metaphorically, to get it passed. I agree the majority leaders at the time are also culpable, but if you're going to spread the blame around you might want to look at the minority leaders as well. More than a third of the republicans voted for the bill, and it wouldn't have passed otherwise.
The question I asked myself after reading your defense here was why couldn't they get a warrant if they "knew he did it". I hope you asked yourself the same question and found a good answer that I could not. I would be interested in hearing it.
What Obama administration "shenanigans" are you referring to? I certainly have gripes with the current administration, but nothing up to the level the Bush administration was infamous for. And with respect to due process Obama has been injecting it back into the system despite receiving a lot of criticism for it as of late so I'm wondering what you're referring to. Please provide actual events though; I've heard enough blogs, entertainment news, and general speculation to last the rest of his term.
To answer your question. No I am not furious that the decision was legal. And no I wouldn't be upset if the other URL was found legal. I an and would be furious that both exists and I am a little ticked that Slashdot puts it on the front page and NOT under politics which I have set to not show up on my front page of Slashdot.
Well it is under yro and that is an appropriate tag since it is about a ruling in a court case about satire and political free speech. If this were just about the website I might have agreed with you.
This view is only possible if you look at all gov't policy as being on a single line Left----------Right .
It makes more sense, IMHO, if you separate economic policy from social policy so you have a Cartesian co-ordinate system instead.
It's atheros. That's promising news. I will give it a try when I get home.
Will my internal wireless card have a better chance of working with this one.? I've had a lot of trouble with the previous version getting any of the wireless drivers to work.
They both reduce the fish population.
A free market requires that everyone's property and individual rights be respected.
A free market has nothing to do with personal rights. Its about having minimal goverment intervention allowing the ecnomony to find the path of least resistance. The most efficent way to produce goods and services.
Its based on the theory that the ecnomony can regulate itself better then the goverment can. Some regulation is needed, but preferably minimial. The more the goverement controls the system, the less of a free market and more of communist system we step towards.
You don't want to take either side to an extreme, as there is a balaning act involved. Too little oversight will result in companys becoming reckless in the serch for profits; too little freedom will smother companies, minimzing the jobs and profits they provide to the region.
This. This is the problem with many people who think they're touting the free market, especially as political policy. (a)A free market != (b)a market - (g)all gov't. regulation . (a)A free market = (b)a market + (c)no externalized costs + (d)an informed consumer - (g)all gov't regulation not required to enforce (b) + (c). Trampling rights and destroying common resources are definitely costs that are currently "external".
With respect to externalized costs a gov't can either regulate the industry through direct legislation, or subsidize businesses that don't externalize costs and rely on consumer ignorance(even if that ignorance is somewhat willful). The push to regulate has met a lot of resistance here which is why you've seen a push in the other direction recently.
Did you miss the last couple years of recession? Before you try and claim that gov't started it, remember that loans made by lenders under the CRA were statistically no more likely to be "bad" than unregulated banks. Sorry, but the gov't didn't force banks to make those loans, that was all unregulated market.
Oh wait, maybe you're taking a long term view of things, ignoring the "short term setbacks". Kind of like an "everybody dies eventually" approach. Yeah, that's not really what I want out of my economy, I prefer stability and efficiency. I wish 'Libertarians' would take the long term view when looking at external costs and not just recessions.
I do believe that the freest market possible provides the greatest benefit to the most individuals, though many people who also believe this are unclear that unfettered capitalism will lead to capital concentration and a non-free market.
Here, here. It could be argued that this is not really libertarianism, but I think it's a more practical idea of freedom that and unregulated free-market.
I wonder how many of the Dutch wiretaps include U.S. citizens and if there any "trades" going on between the U.S. and the Netherlands.
Cool post. I don't know a lot about realtime scheduling, but a co-worker once described how a priority system works in this way(sorry it's a plane analogy rather than a car analogy):
Priority isn't based on real life importance, but frequency and tolerance to gain "overall performance as you said". Say you have software to run a plane and the microwave needs to run 1ms every 10ms and the landing gear needs to run for 10ms every 30ms. Naively one might say the landing gear is of higher priority because it is more important than running the microwave. But this would cause missed deadlines for the microwave and for anything running at a lower priority than the microwave when both can run without missing their deadlines. The landing gear would be predictably interrupted an upper bound of 3 times to complete after 13ms which is well before the next time of 30 ms while not causing any problems.
He had a cool job, but I did not envy his position when he had to explain to management why our project's equivalent of landing gear had to be lower priority than our microwave in order for real-time scheduling to run correctly.
Why is the authors' presumption that it's the cosmic rays (or lack thereof) that are regulating tree growth, rather than solar and sunspot activity itself?
Because he has a statistical correlation showing that when comic rays increase, plant growth also increases? FTFA:
When the intensity of cosmic rays reaching the Earth's surface was higher, the rate of tree growth was faster. The effect is not large, but it is statistically significant. The intensity of cosmic rays also correlates better with the changes in tree growth than any other climatological factor, such as varying levels of temperature or precipitation over the years.
Also interesting for those mentioning sunspots FTFA:
The levels of cosmic rays reaching the Earth go up and down according to the activity of the Sun, which follows an 11-year cycle. As for the mechanism, we are puzzled Sigrid Dengel University of Edinburgh Every 11 years or so, the Sun becomes more active, producing a peak of sunspots. These sunspots carry a magnetic field that blocks and slows the path of energetic particles. When the researchers looked at their data, they found that tree growth was highest during periods of low sunspot activity, when most cosmic rays reached Earth. But growth slowed during the four periods of cosmic ray-blocking high sunspot activity, which have occurred between 1965 and 2005.
No. It should be up to society
No. It should be up to the customer. The alternative breeds what we call a "Nanny State." That's a Bad Thing.
Nanny state is such a funny term. Libertarians use it to describe unwelcome economic regulation while liberals use it to describe unwelcome social regulation.
A regulation like this is trying to prevent a tragedy of the commons, specifically with our air. At first glance I thought it was specious also, but in a warm place like California where the AC is running probably a good portion of the time, I wouldn't be surprised if the AC is the weakest link in the chain of efficiency.
I don't really know if this is a bad idea or not; I see merits but I also see drawbacks.
I have a couple misgivings about the article too. Beyond the interesting fact that it's an Auto Insider article:
Major automakers, led by the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers and Association of International Automobile Manufacturers, argued for a different standard that would "absorb" rather than "reflect" energy and wouldn't risk wireless signals. "It achieves about 85 percent of the benefit at about 10 percent of the cost, and it doesn't have any of the complications of reflective glazings," said the alliance's Steve Douglas.
I don't see how absorption could provide the same benefit because that would generate heat. There must be a lot more to the whole thing than this article is letting on.
Because scientists are playing god!
If you're not a troll then I suggest you read the links I provided for comprehension rather than just skimming. You have to distinguish social policy from economic policy(hence my choice of words above). Meaning I don't see socialist, republican, democrat, fascist as different points on a single line, but different points on a grid. One can favor free market capitalism while also favoring social authoritarianism. Similarly, one can favor social freedom while also favoring market regulation.
None of the links you provided mention "Fascism". But by interpreting them to mean, what you wrote, you reveal, that you are one of those, who consider Fascism as somehow opposite of Socialism.
angry troll rant
So you are just a troll. If you had gone to the link for "Fascism" you would have seen that Fascism aka authoritarianism is opposite social anarchy. Similarly, communism is opposite economic libertarianism. Stalin was a communist fascist aka socialist(your word not mine). Hitler was a fascist economic libertarian, although less of a libertarian than either Bush or Obama, and more of a fascist than either. The point was, Bush is more of a fascist than Obama.
Ideologically Bush is much closer than Obama with respect to Fascism. Neither are really comparable to Hitler or Mussolini though, of course.
Also, I hope you don't actually think anything on that site you linked is true. It's claims are the same type of scare-mongering as William Ayers, and Obama's birth certificate(implying Obama is a Black Panther and/or Muslim in disguise respectively, same as your link).
2. Tom and Jerry. This could be huge. Just think of the millions of children who have grown up on seeing the cat and mouse (and occasionally dog) hit each other over the head with frying pans, lead pipes, and just about everything except the kitchen sink. Actually, wait, I think they used the kitchen sink too. It could make the perfect PvP MMO. (And you may think that it would be limited to have just two races in an MMO and have it all happen in one house and its yard, but AION launched literally with one race per side and the zones aren't much bigger either.)
I for one can hardly wait to grind for the Epic Frying Pan Of Power, and whack a cat over the head with it. What? You're saying it's just me?
7. The Bible. Yes, you've heard that right. It sold more copies than all 6 Star Wars episodes and all SW books combined. And if you don't think it has MMO potential, you haven't read it.
E.g., the siege and genocide of Midian (not kidding, read Numbers) would make a great battleground. E.g., imagine the fun of an escort quest to get Lot out of Sodom. For that matter, of trying to get to Lot's house with your sphincter intact ;) E.g., for a FedEx quest, recreate Jeremiah's treck to the Euphrates to bury his loincloth because the Lord told him to. (Again, I'm not kidding.) Etc.
I would play these. I'd never thought about the bible as source material for an MMO, but there is a lot of source material there. You'd have to have some balls to actually make it though.
One of the things that always stuck out at me was the mini nuclear batteries in the Foundation series of books. I had just assumed such things were impossible and were just and artifact of the time the books were written in. Apparently my imagination just wasn't flexible enough.
For all his talk his biggest accomplishment so far is bailing out the automakers to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars - if anything that would be economic. I'm no W supporter, but what possible cause is there for this other than anti-W sentiment?
Fixed that for you. TARP was Bush's plan. Not saying your overall point is invalid, just make sure you give "credit" where it's due.
Finding water in our own solar system is more about colonization than finding life. It's good for supporting the life we know about (ie: us) and refueling ships.
With the "news" (circa 1998) that the rate of expansion of the universe is increasing, it seems to me that worries about the heat death of the universe should be put on hold. There's something (currently labeled "dark energy") about cosmology that we simply lack sufficient understanding of.
Yes, the president should select the "Astrophysics Center" and move the "heat death" slider to 0 and the "dark energy" slider to 100. We must find the chosen one to combat this "dark energy" threat!
No, Stallman's objection to C# is based on history.
If I open my arms to give you a hug and then, when you get close, slap you, how many times will we repeat this exercise before you stop accepting my "free hugs"?
Valve is not only smart for snapping up a great developer, but this could end up being a huge coup for Valve in the business realm. Valve has invested a lot of time into making a DRM scheme that provides enough benefits that players are actually willing to join it. Now think, what major game company has thus far refused to join Steam and is in the midst of creating their own competing system. Hint: this company created the game that DotA is modded on. While I'm not a huge DotA fan myself, a lot of people are and support for DotA-like games on Battle.net and Steam could be a very important feature in the near-future.
I'm wondering how Blizzard let this one slip through their fingers, but considering some of their business moves as of late WRT customers, maybe I shouldn't be surprised that's they've lost their way a bit in development too.
Short stories are good!
The Last Question
The Babyeating Aliens
They're made out of Meat
For some short(er) novels try:
Slaughterhouse Five and/or The Sirens of Titan and/or Cat's Cradle
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz(for a well known fairy tale)
Then you can follow it up with the longer Wicked or The Ugly Stepsister or some other modern retelling so you can discuss the clash of a mundane world with a fantasy world.
For longer books I would recommend:
Ender's Game
Stranger in a Strange Land
and maybe The Dragon Never Sleeps