This story appeared in USA Today yesterday. From the article:
Astronomers have found what appears to be a gigantic suicidal planet.
The odd, fiery planet is so close to its star and so large that it is triggering tremendous plasma tides on the star. Those powerful tides are in turn warping the planet's zippy less-than-a-day orbit around its star.
The result: an ever-closer tango of death, with the planet eventually spiraling into the star.
It is a slow death. The planet WASP-18b has maybe a million years to live, said planet discoverer Coel Hellier, a professor of astrophysics at Keele University in England. Hellier's report on the suicidal planet is in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.
"It's causing its own destruction by creating these tides," Hellier said.
Putting aside the sensationalist journalism (calling it a "suicidal planet"), it appears that its proximity to its star is causing plasma tides on the star (similar to the tides we have here on Earth due to the Moon), and those tides are warping the planets orbit.
I'm running data conversion scripts for at least the beginning of this week, so I can easily get away with this. Well, I'm not compiling anything, but data takes a long time to convert!;-)
Please don't stress yourself out - my blood pressure went up when I read the parent you're responding to, but then again, I am Persian and what they wrote was 100% BS. The government and militia of Iran is composed of Lebanese and Palestinian arabs. The members of the Basij that were beating protesters couldn't even speak Persian properly, and were shouting commands in Arabic. The majority of Iranians want a democratically elected government and want normalized relations with the West. The parent that you responded to was just a troll trying to get a rise out of people.
Don't bother - some trolls aren't worth it. The sad part is that there are a lot of idiots that modded this guy up and agreed with them. Anyone who lived during the 60s and 70s knew that Iran had always been a 1st world country. It's slipped a little since the revolution, but hopefully a regime changed started by ethnic Persians will correct things.
In short, don't trust anyone - private or public sector - with data that you really care about. The private sector will mine the data and sell it to the top bidder. The public sector will make a push to permanently store that data for future use. In both cases, the data will sometimes mysteriously disappear and reappear on eBay or some black market in a 3rd world country.
Neither party, public or private, is on the side of the citizen.
And just how many millions has Mr. Ray Beckerman made? Are you privy to information that we are not? Although it's a common Slashdot meme to think of all lawyers as money-whoring ambulance chasers, NYCL has been utterly and undeniably passionate about the cases that the RIAA has been bringing against the people. But then again, after reading a few of your posts in this story, it sounds like you've already made up your mind or have a strong bias.
The poll was done by Terror Free Tomorrow: The Center for Public Opinion and New American Foundation. The Washington Post merely did an article on the findings from the poll.
TFT and KA use telephone interviewing instead of face-to-face research in Iran because of the political and social constraints inside Iran. Face-to-face interviewing in Iran can be difficult for interviewers who risk possible prosecution and imprisonment. Face-to-face interviewing also poses issues related to access to households and respondents due to social considerations. Access to female respondents across the Middle East can be challenging.
I'm not sure how much better over-the-phone polling is in Iran. Many in Iran are leery of being called by random strangers over the telephone asking them political questions. Whenever we call our relatives in Iran, we are extremely careful with what we say over the phone. More to the point, when you have a brutal regime and some random person calls and asks: "Who will you vote for in Presidential Elections?", I wouldn't be surprised if they answer in one way and vote in another.
I won't dismiss the findings of this survey outright - they did conduct a scientific polling, something that I haven't done. It's just difficult taking the survey very seriously when what you see happening in real life - thousands and thousands of bloodied protesters taking the streets and demanding change - and compare it with a polling sample of 1001 Iranians, as stated in their Methodology section on page 25 of the pdf document. I'm also thinking back to both the entrance and exit polls in the 2004 U.S. elections, where John Kerry was said to have won by a large margin, only to find that the opposite had happened.
I think it is evident that I am quite anti-Ahmadinejad and anti-Mullah and especially anti-Arab when it comes to my ancestral country. But I will concede that he won if more information is released and it points in favor of his victory.
Speaking as an Iranian, this is the best thing that could have happened to Iran in a long time. This actually got people into the streets. We're actually seeing T.V. footage from Iran, and there was one incident where four or five riot police officers were beating a protester with their batons. Suddenly, the police all dropped their batons and started running. To the left of your screen, you see about 100-200 ANGRY, PISSED OFF rioters rushing the police. This isn't civil disobedience - this is something that needed to happen for a long time.
In many countries, if you don't like something, you vote. Usually, you'll get a politician with similar goals and values such as yourself who will try to enact legislation to further them. In the case of a democratic country, rioting when something doesn't go your way is stupid. In Iran, the people are oppressed and have been treated like shit for decades. The people get a "choice" of candidates that are hand-picked by powerful, religious clerics who make sure to maintain the status quo. Peaceful protests led to brutal crackdowns where people would either disappear or would be killed on sight. Violent protests, such as the ones that we are witnessing in Iran right now, is the only choice left for a desperate population. You can only hit rock bottom before you go back up. They were at their peak when they had Mossadegh as Prime Minister, and things gradually became worse with the Shah and then the Islamic Revolution. After 30+ years of this regime, many in Iran would take the Shah back in a heartbeat. That's how bad things have been.
This current regime will not last. They ensured their own demise by cheating the system, and now they're going to be taken down. Had they simply allowed Musavi to win, these riots would never have occurred and the powerful clergy would have simply allowed Musavi the role of the President, but would have denied every attempt at reform as they did when Mohammad Khatami was President.
Any sofware company that cannot find a copy of something they produced for a customer is INCOMPETENT!
This article talks about a Pre-Sale demo, which is usually where all of the problems occur. Most proof of concept demos done by sales consultants promise the world just to get the client to buy, then scope is reduced significantly. While the majority of sales consultants have some technical background, proof-of-concepts rarely take business flow into account, and generally show what the product can do out of the box.
This is why a lot of technical guys refer to the sales side as "the dark side" - in reference to how often the tech folks get thrown under the bus when the customer goes "Well your sales guy promised xyz to us, and you're only giving us x!"
I don't see how this is related. The way that I see it, violent crime rates would have tripled and robberies would have quadrupled regardless. The system of fines and sanctions that you're looking at in the pre-1960's era would not have prevented crime rates from exploding like this. It would have only forced the police to double-check their work to avoid fines and sanctions, so crimes would have been committed anyway.
I suspect that the stagflation of the early 1970s period of oil shocks may have had something to do with an increase of crime.
Anyway, although the whole "correlation is not causation" phrase is used too much on slashdot, I think it applies here. Having said that, I am interested in why you think that there is a link between these events. I mean, aside from the bad economy in the 1970s, there must be something else that caused the crime waves during the post-1960s ?
Maybe you're right and I'm wrong - I just hate to see innocent people spend decades in prison. Most get compensation upon release, but they still lose whatever youth that they had.
First of all, I don't agree with how you were moderated as a troll for bringing in your point of view.
No, its not. You go right ahead and live on the block where 10 guilty guys went free.
Try telling that to the guy who lost 26 years of his life rotting in prison for a crime that he didn't commit. A study in 2004suspects thousands of more cases based on 328 criminal cases where the defendant was exonerated. A quote from the study:
The study identified 199 murder exonerations, 73 of them in capital cases. It also found 120 rape exonerations. Only nine cases involved other crimes. In more than half of the cases, the defendants had been in prison for more than 10 years.
I put the word "suspects" in bold because I'm trying to be realistic; there is no way to tell the exact number and the study only looked at 328 cases.
The way to deal with police mistakes is with sanctions and fines. This is the way it was before the 1960s.
I completely respect your view of how we should deal with this, but I do have to disagree. I'm all for the pre-1960's method of sanctions and fines if there was some way to guarantee that an innocent person didn't have to spend an extended period of time behind bars until proven innocent. Hell, we can't even guarantee that right now.
I may be wrong, but I think that you're under the assumption that with the pre-1960's method, the mistake is quickly caught and the defendant only spends a short period of time in the slammer before released. Unfortunately, they can be in there for decades, and even after the mistake is caught, it may take even more years for paperwork unless they get an immediate pardon.
Wanna bet the "protesters" were doing more than just standing there with placards ?
Wanna bet that you didn't RTFA? The protesters were described as peaceful as can be, with the average age being over 40. Their list of offenses? They made some speeches and marched to the entrance of the AEC. Essentially, they were considered trespassing.
You don't get, as a protestor, to deny anyone access anywhere.
Which they didn't do.
You don't get to damage cars, or any other type of private property and, of course, a protest takes responsability for all protestors.
Which they didn't do.
If the police thinks the group is damaging property or denying people access to a location, they do not only have the right to end the protest, they have the duty to do so.
Again, they didn't do any of those. The police arrested them for trespassing, and I don't blame them for that. The police were only doing their job. But I don't see the point in your post, when you're basing it off of assumptions and won't even bother to read any of the links posted in the summary.
Besides, peace protesting in the united states is a farce. Someone who hides in a territory that's defended by the biggest guns on the planet is not a peace protestor. A real "peace protestor" would demonstrate in a lawless region without police forces present. You know, like Southern Darfur. You don't see many peace protests there, of course, for good reason. It doesn't make peace protests in America any less hypocrite.
How the fuck did this get modded insightful? Why would peace protesting be hypocritical in the U.S. ? One of the definitions of hypocrisy is:
The practice of professing beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not hold or possess; falseness.
How are peace protesters, in this case, practicing beliefs that they do not hold? It would be hypocritical of them if they were protesting war, and at the same time, donating money to weapons manufacturers. One of the freedoms afforded to us is the freedom of assembly. It would be a damn shame for us to HAVE such freedom and not exercise it.
Pay some unmarried dude 20 million a year to live this shitty life in return for his services and, additionally, pay well some willing prostitues to be shipped in secret CIA planes to have fun with him secretly - call it "operation secret panties". Are there too many religious right-wingers at the CIA for ideas like this to stick?
The CIA already has a history of doing this. It's not publicly admitted, since it would amount to the Government hiring foreign nationals strippers on taxpayers dime. The article states though that this practice is really not encouraged except for critical situations.
From the link:
As CIA case officers attempt to recruit a foreign spy, they often offer personal inducements, ranging from cash to medical care. In some cases, a potential recruit may be taken to a strip club or even to a prostitute if it is deemed critical to cementing the relationship, longtime officers say. But for Warren, "it was a lifestyle thing," costing the agency thousands of dollars, said one former co-worker who describes himself as a friend. The bills were routinely paid, he said.
"As long as you were doing good work, it was okay," he said.
Yes, we are the good guys, and no it's not because of how the other side acts. Our standards of morals and ethics should be independent of how the opposition treats other people. We are good guys because we do not intend on killing civilians, and we certainly attempt to keep innocent deaths at an absolute minimum. I'll even ignore the nutcases that routinely try to justify civilian deaths in a war zone.
Having said that, the whole "but they're much worse than we are..." argument is dangerous for any civilized society. What it amounts to is that if the other side beheads 1,000 babies, we would be the good guys if we beheaded only 999 babies. We can't go that route. We need to have an absolute set of moral and ethical guidelines and stick to them, no matter how barbaric the other side acts.
Slashdot Mirror
This story appeared in USA Today yesterday. From the article:
Putting aside the sensationalist journalism (calling it a "suicidal planet"), it appears that its proximity to its star is causing plasma tides on the star (similar to the tides we have here on Earth due to the Moon), and those tides are warping the planets orbit.
The same thing that we do every time - give it all right back in exchange for security theatrics and "thinking of the children".
I'm running data conversion scripts for at least the beginning of this week, so I can easily get away with this. Well, I'm not compiling anything, but data takes a long time to convert! ;-)
Women.
Uwe Boll, is that you? :-)
I may be mistaken, but I don't think Opportunist lives in America. Anyway, he spelled Demoralised with an 'S', so he's definitely not an American. ;-)
Yeah, just ask Jean Charles de Menezes.
Please don't stress yourself out - my blood pressure went up when I read the parent you're responding to, but then again, I am Persian and what they wrote was 100% BS. The government and militia of Iran is composed of Lebanese and Palestinian arabs. The members of the Basij that were beating protesters couldn't even speak Persian properly, and were shouting commands in Arabic. The majority of Iranians want a democratically elected government and want normalized relations with the West. The parent that you responded to was just a troll trying to get a rise out of people.
Don't bother - some trolls aren't worth it. The sad part is that there are a lot of idiots that modded this guy up and agreed with them. Anyone who lived during the 60s and 70s knew that Iran had always been a 1st world country. It's slipped a little since the revolution, but hopefully a regime changed started by ethnic Persians will correct things.
Thanks for trying though.
In short, don't trust anyone - private or public sector - with data that you really care about. The private sector will mine the data and sell it to the top bidder. The public sector will make a push to permanently store that data for future use. In both cases, the data will sometimes mysteriously disappear and reappear on eBay or some black market in a 3rd world country.
Neither party, public or private, is on the side of the citizen.
Just udderly ridiculous!
It's all about the money.
And just how many millions has Mr. Ray Beckerman made? Are you privy to information that we are not? Although it's a common Slashdot meme to think of all lawyers as money-whoring ambulance chasers, NYCL has been utterly and undeniably passionate about the cases that the RIAA has been bringing against the people. But then again, after reading a few of your posts in this story, it sounds like you've already made up your mind or have a strong bias.
Fair enough.
The poll was done by Terror Free Tomorrow: The Center for Public Opinion and New American Foundation. The Washington Post merely did an article on the findings from the poll.
From the survey linked to in the article:
TFT and KA use telephone interviewing instead of face-to-face research in Iran because of the political and social constraints inside Iran. Face-to-face interviewing in Iran can be difficult for interviewers who risk possible prosecution and imprisonment. Face-to-face interviewing also poses issues related to access to households and respondents due to social considerations. Access to female respondents across the Middle East can be challenging.
I'm not sure how much better over-the-phone polling is in Iran. Many in Iran are leery of being called by random strangers over the telephone asking them political questions. Whenever we call our relatives in Iran, we are extremely careful with what we say over the phone. More to the point, when you have a brutal regime and some random person calls and asks: "Who will you vote for in Presidential Elections?", I wouldn't be surprised if they answer in one way and vote in another.
I won't dismiss the findings of this survey outright - they did conduct a scientific polling, something that I haven't done. It's just difficult taking the survey very seriously when what you see happening in real life - thousands and thousands of bloodied protesters taking the streets and demanding change - and compare it with a polling sample of 1001 Iranians, as stated in their Methodology section on page 25 of the pdf document. I'm also thinking back to both the entrance and exit polls in the 2004 U.S. elections, where John Kerry was said to have won by a large margin, only to find that the opposite had happened.
I think it is evident that I am quite anti-Ahmadinejad and anti-Mullah and especially anti-Arab when it comes to my ancestral country. But I will concede that he won if more information is released and it points in favor of his victory.
Speaking as an Iranian, this is the best thing that could have happened to Iran in a long time. This actually got people into the streets. We're actually seeing T.V. footage from Iran, and there was one incident where four or five riot police officers were beating a protester with their batons. Suddenly, the police all dropped their batons and started running. To the left of your screen, you see about 100-200 ANGRY, PISSED OFF rioters rushing the police. This isn't civil disobedience - this is something that needed to happen for a long time.
In many countries, if you don't like something, you vote. Usually, you'll get a politician with similar goals and values such as yourself who will try to enact legislation to further them. In the case of a democratic country, rioting when something doesn't go your way is stupid. In Iran, the people are oppressed and have been treated like shit for decades. The people get a "choice" of candidates that are hand-picked by powerful, religious clerics who make sure to maintain the status quo. Peaceful protests led to brutal crackdowns where people would either disappear or would be killed on sight. Violent protests, such as the ones that we are witnessing in Iran right now, is the only choice left for a desperate population. You can only hit rock bottom before you go back up. They were at their peak when they had Mossadegh as Prime Minister, and things gradually became worse with the Shah and then the Islamic Revolution. After 30+ years of this regime, many in Iran would take the Shah back in a heartbeat. That's how bad things have been.
This current regime will not last. They ensured their own demise by cheating the system, and now they're going to be taken down. Had they simply allowed Musavi to win, these riots would never have occurred and the powerful clergy would have simply allowed Musavi the role of the President, but would have denied every attempt at reform as they did when Mohammad Khatami was President.
Unless you add fifth dimensional monkeys, you just aren't cool anymore.
I thought they had consultants?
Any sofware company that cannot find a copy of something they produced for a customer is INCOMPETENT!
This article talks about a Pre-Sale demo, which is usually where all of the problems occur. Most proof of concept demos done by sales consultants promise the world just to get the client to buy, then scope is reduced significantly. While the majority of sales consultants have some technical background, proof-of-concepts rarely take business flow into account, and generally show what the product can do out of the box.
This is why a lot of technical guys refer to the sales side as "the dark side" - in reference to how often the tech folks get thrown under the bus when the customer goes "Well your sales guy promised xyz to us, and you're only giving us x!"
There's no excuse for that.
Oh that's funny. I didn't notice that the first time. I had quite a few of the books as a child, and #44 doesn't ring a bell either.
It was actually added in by hand. The original article where this picture came from is here. If you read the comments, one of them says:
The Mr. Guilty #44 is a cartoon of OJ Simpson and is not an original Mr. Men.
I really should have found a more authentic picture to link to. :\
It looks awfully like one of the original Mr. Men characters, though I cannot find the exact one.
I don't see how this is related. The way that I see it, violent crime rates would have tripled and robberies would have quadrupled regardless. The system of fines and sanctions that you're looking at in the pre-1960's era would not have prevented crime rates from exploding like this. It would have only forced the police to double-check their work to avoid fines and sanctions, so crimes would have been committed anyway.
I suspect that the stagflation of the early 1970s period of oil shocks may have had something to do with an increase of crime.
Anyway, although the whole "correlation is not causation" phrase is used too much on slashdot, I think it applies here. Having said that, I am interested in why you think that there is a link between these events. I mean, aside from the bad economy in the 1970s, there must be something else that caused the crime waves during the post-1960s ?
Maybe you're right and I'm wrong - I just hate to see innocent people spend decades in prison. Most get compensation upon release, but they still lose whatever youth that they had.
First of all, I don't agree with how you were moderated as a troll for bringing in your point of view.
No, its not. You go right ahead and live on the block where 10 guilty guys went free.
Try telling that to the guy who lost 26 years of his life rotting in prison for a crime that he didn't commit. A study in 2004 suspects thousands of more cases based on 328 criminal cases where the defendant was exonerated. A quote from the study:
The study identified 199 murder exonerations, 73 of them in capital cases. It also found 120 rape exonerations. Only nine cases involved other crimes. In more than half of the cases, the defendants had been in prison for more than 10 years.
I put the word "suspects" in bold because I'm trying to be realistic; there is no way to tell the exact number and the study only looked at 328 cases.
The way to deal with police mistakes is with sanctions and fines. This is the way it was before the 1960s.
I completely respect your view of how we should deal with this, but I do have to disagree. I'm all for the pre-1960's method of sanctions and fines if there was some way to guarantee that an innocent person didn't have to spend an extended period of time behind bars until proven innocent. Hell, we can't even guarantee that right now.
I may be wrong, but I think that you're under the assumption that with the pre-1960's method, the mistake is quickly caught and the defendant only spends a short period of time in the slammer before released. Unfortunately, they can be in there for decades, and even after the mistake is caught, it may take even more years for paperwork unless they get an immediate pardon.
It must have been someone from the blogosphere *ducks*
Wanna bet the "protesters" were doing more than just standing there with placards ?
Wanna bet that you didn't RTFA? The protesters were described as peaceful as can be, with the average age being over 40. Their list of offenses? They made some speeches and marched to the entrance of the AEC. Essentially, they were considered trespassing.
You don't get, as a protestor, to deny anyone access anywhere.
Which they didn't do.
You don't get to damage cars, or any other type of private property and, of course, a protest takes responsability for all protestors.
Which they didn't do.
If the police thinks the group is damaging property or denying people access to a location, they do not only have the right to end the protest, they have the duty to do so.
Again, they didn't do any of those. The police arrested them for trespassing, and I don't blame them for that. The police were only doing their job. But I don't see the point in your post, when you're basing it off of assumptions and won't even bother to read any of the links posted in the summary.
Besides, peace protesting in the united states is a farce. Someone who hides in a territory that's defended by the biggest guns on the planet is not a peace protestor. A real "peace protestor" would demonstrate in a lawless region without police forces present. You know, like Southern Darfur. You don't see many peace protests there, of course, for good reason. It doesn't make peace protests in America any less hypocrite.
How the fuck did this get modded insightful? Why would peace protesting be hypocritical in the U.S. ? One of the definitions of hypocrisy is:
The practice of professing beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not hold or possess; falseness.
How are peace protesters, in this case, practicing beliefs that they do not hold? It would be hypocritical of them if they were protesting war, and at the same time, donating money to weapons manufacturers. One of the freedoms afforded to us is the freedom of assembly. It would be a damn shame for us to HAVE such freedom and not exercise it.
Schrodinger's Article.
Where every article is both a dupe and an original until you RTFA.
I would LOVE to see the tax code done in 140 characters. :) My guess is, the body would only contain tl;dr
Pay some unmarried dude 20 million a year to live this shitty life in return for his services and, additionally, pay well some willing prostitues to be shipped in secret CIA planes to have fun with him secretly - call it "operation secret panties". Are there too many religious right-wingers at the CIA for ideas like this to stick?
The CIA already has a history of doing this. It's not publicly admitted, since it would amount to the Government hiring foreign nationals strippers on taxpayers dime. The article states though that this practice is really not encouraged except for critical situations.
From the link:
As CIA case officers attempt to recruit a foreign spy, they often offer personal inducements, ranging from cash to medical care. In some cases, a potential recruit may be taken to a strip club or even to a prostitute if it is deemed critical to cementing the relationship, longtime officers say. But for Warren, "it was a lifestyle thing," costing the agency thousands of dollars, said one former co-worker who describes himself as a friend. The bills were routinely paid, he said.
"As long as you were doing good work, it was okay," he said.
Yes, we are the good guys, and no it's not because of how the other side acts. Our standards of morals and ethics should be independent of how the opposition treats other people. We are good guys because we do not intend on killing civilians, and we certainly attempt to keep innocent deaths at an absolute minimum. I'll even ignore the nutcases that routinely try to justify civilian deaths in a war zone.
Having said that, the whole "but they're much worse than we are..." argument is dangerous for any civilized society. What it amounts to is that if the other side beheads 1,000 babies, we would be the good guys if we beheaded only 999 babies. We can't go that route. We need to have an absolute set of moral and ethical guidelines and stick to them, no matter how barbaric the other side acts.