That's is a good question? Why do you suppose that they haven't?
Could it be that they truely did lose, fair and square, and realize that their protests and complaints would not only be a pathetic waste of time but, also a waste of the tax payers money?
You seem to be assuming that I'm talking about candidates in elections that have already taken place. I'm not; I'm talking about candidates in upcoming elections, particularly (of course) in November 2004.
But, I'll bet that you think it is because the opposing party is somehow controlling them and making it impossible for them to complain.
No, I think it's because their campaign advisers, who ought to be following this issue closely, aren't, and aren't advising them to talk about it as much as they should. Look, anyone with any technical knowledge whatsoever who's been following this issue know that something is seriously screwed up. But the problem is that -- and I don't think anyone on/. will dispute this claim -- politicians and their staffs are, as a matter of course, profoundly ignorant on technical issues.
You see, when you post on what should be a non-partisan subject in an extraordinarily biased and partisan fashion, you lose credibility. Most reasonable people of any party will have already discounted you as biased and full of sour grapes the moment they read your whiny rant at the top of the post.
Right now, it's a partisan issue because the companies that seem to be doing the nasty work (at best incompetent, at worst a direct assault on the foundations of American freedom; the truth, as usual, probably lies somewhere in the middle) are all run by right-wing Republicans. And so is Fox News. I defy you to tell me that either of those statements is untrue.
But it's not inherently a partisan issue, and I never said it was. Like I said, I'd expect the Republicans to kick up a fuss if the roles were reversed. What if this had been happening in 1996 instead of 2004, and the largest voting machine company in the country were being run by someone who had publicly announced that he wanted to "deliver Ohio's electoral votes for President Clinton"? Wouldn't that bother you, just a tad?
Anyone, of any political persuasion, who genuinely believes in government of the people, by the people, and for the people, should be terrified by the implications of this problem. The fact that they're not speaks to me of a profound and dangerous ignorance.
... it's in Wired. Not on, say, Fox News. (Although it would have been, no doubt, if it had been Democrats rather than Republicans doing all the screwy stuff.)
Even if every techie in the world knows how screwed up the voting machines are, it's not going to do any good until Joe Sixpack is hearing about it over dinner. I would be willing to bet that right now, the majority of voters don't give a damn what kind of voting machine they use, and of those who do, the majority assume that anything newer and sleeker and higher-tech is thereby more reliable. The number of people who have any understanding of the problem is growing, but it's still tiny.
What I want to know is, why aren't the politicians who have the most to lose from this issue making more noise about it? Since right now it's mostly the Republicans who seem to be benefitting, seems to me every Democratic candidate should be yelling for a major investigation right now. That's certainly what I'd expect if the situation were reversed.
Ehhh, depends on how you define "peace." There was almost always at least a low-level rebellion, a la the Palestinian territories today, going on in some part of the Empire for its entire existence; and being a Roman soldier stationed in or near Britain, Germany, or Persia was never a particularly safe job, even when there wasn't an official campaign going on. It looked like peace from Rome -- but not from the POV of the men guarding the frontiers.
Faith healing only works if everyone involved has no doubt that it will work. Meaning everyone believes the person will be healed. This is shown many times when Jesus is healing the sick, just because they believe in him. If you recall he didn't perform many miracles in his hometown because no one there had believed he was the Christ. If you would like some scripture references let me know and I will post them at lunch.
The power of the great and powerful Oz only works if everyone involved has no doubt that it will work. Meaning everyone believes the person will receive a heart, a brain, or courage. This is shown many times when Oz is helping Dorothy and her friends, just because they believe in him. If you recall he didn't help them before that because they had believed he was just a man behind a curtain. If you would like some L. Frank Baum references let me know and I will post them at lunch.
Jeez. Way to depress an already morose population.
"In other news, today it was scientifically proven that life sucks for you, yes you, and always will..."
I don't know about you, but I find that the advances in medical technology made by human minds, and applied by human hands, are a pretty comforting thought. But I suppose if you'd rather be comforted by the idea than an invisible, omnipotent spirit in the sky is looking out for you if you get sick (but will only help if your friends and family ask reaaaally nicely) and find yourself inconsolable otherwise... well, that's your call.
"Thou shalt not look to see if I am actually here." -God
Yep. Or as the article says:
Many theologians say that, even if you believe in the power of intercessory prayer, such a trial is doomed to failure because it "puts God to the test" - and there are clear instructions in the Bible not to do this.
Which neatly encapsulates the fundamental difference between science and religion; in science, you always look to see if something's actually there. And anyone who says, "I'm going to assert that this is true, but you don't get to test it" is rightly viewed with suspcicion and contempt.
As a fellow bioinformatician (bioinformaticist, computational biologist, whatever) who occasionally likes to make pretty pictures, I can tell you that Photoshop is just an amazingly useful program for... well, anything that involves pretty pictures. It's taken me a while to figure out that visualization matters, and most methods you can come up with to portray information visually look better after you've run them through a filter or two.
Also, I've written Photoshop plugins, and I can tell you that the routines needed to crunch large amounts of image data and the routines needed to crunch large amounts of sequence or expression data are... pretty similar, actually. A graphic is a huge two-dimensional array of numbers, all of which have some relation to their immediate neighbors, and possibly to some farther away. Sound familiar? So Photoshop speed is a pretty good measure of how well a system handles that kind of calculation generally.
This country was founded "under God". It was founded by those who could not worship God because of persecution. There i s n o d e b a t e about this. This is history. If you disagree, return to your history classes
Actually, there's quite a bit of debate about this, the way you put it. The country was founded well over a century after the Pilgrims came; and although they and many other colonists came here to escape religious persecution (though they were far from shy, once they arrived, about persecuting those who disagreed with their own beliefs) the vast majority of colonists came here for thoroughly secular reasons. And the country itself was founded by humanist rationalists who explicitly rejected Europe's theocratic traditions.
I take back what I said before -- there is no debate; anyone who actually know the history, knows perfectly well that the ideas you put forth are simply not true. Unfortunately, many people simply seem not understand the difference between the Pilgrims and the Founding Fathers; apparently the fact that a whole lot of history happened in America between Plymouth Rock and the Declaration of Independence is lost on them.
A 22 word prayer, crafted by the New York State Board of Regents, was read aloud daily in public school classrooms. Student participation was voluntary. On June 25, 1962, the Court ruled the Regents' prayer unconstitutional.
In a public school, I cannot lead a group prayer, even voluntarily. Prayer must be seperate from the school.... Despite what the all-knowing michael says, evidently after 0 minutes of research, there ARE LAWS AGAINST VOLUNTARY PRAYER.
You are, I suspect deliberately, confusing the issue. A prayer "read aloud daily in public school classrooms" is not voluntary, especially not when crafted by a government body. The students have no choice about being there; those who don't believe in the particular brand of religion being pushed either have to sit there and take it, or (if the school allows them to) leave the room -- either way they're singling themselves out.
As a non-religious student in our supposedly Godless public schools, I was subjected to constant abuse for my lack of beliefs, up to and including having a knife held to my throat, with the full knowledge of the teachers. And no, I didn't push my non-beliefs on others; I simply answered honestly when people asked me questions about what I believed, and why I didn't say the "under God" part when we recited the Pledge. That is what "voluntary" prayer as an official part of the school day gets you.
"Sweetheart deal" doesn't mean the deal where a manufacturer gives a discount to a customer who buys in volume; that's standard business practice. It means the deal where a large purchase is made as a favor to a friend, rather than on the basis of rational cost-benefit analysis. Often there's some kind of direct kickback involved.
This kind of thing happens all the time in small businesses, of course, and I have a hard time arguing with it; often, it's the only way a small business can survive those first couple of years. But when you're talking about organizations the size of Dell and UT -- the latter spending taxpayers' money! -- it is, to say the least, a bit shady.
There's a "send us a comment" link at the bottom of the story. Everyone should use it, as long as they can refrain from frothing at the mouth. Here's what I sent:
Why are attorneys and software engineers doing their jobs being portrayed as Mafiosi and/or KGB agents? The GPL is a software license like any other; companies which violate its terms are just as guilty as those which pirate software from proprietary vendors such as Cisco, Oracle, and Microsoft. If you don't like the terms, don't use the code -- it's that simple.
I and millions of other software developers make a good living using open-source software. This is because the vast bulk of software development is done in-house for specific corporate applications. I have found, as many others have, that open-source applications (in my case, Linux, Apache, PHP, and MySQL) allow us to be more productive than proprietary applications. This approach saves my employer money and keeps our products rolling out the door.
Free and open-source software is not a one-size-fits-all answer -- but neither is proprietary software. Take away either, and the world will be a poorer place. Articles like this one seem designed to ensure that corporate and individual users will continue to pay more than they have to for the tools that enable them to get their work done.
Maybe if they get a few thousand reasonable, literate letters (no "c15C0 5uX0Rz!" or "soon you capitalist scum shall be swept into the dustbin of history" rants) it'll make a difference. Or maybe not, but it's worth a shot.
You toe the line. You await with bated breath. If you have a hard time keeping track of your possessions, you lose them. Hopefully, you don't try to find them by committee. The Constitution is modified by amendments. If you like computers that work, you use a Mac. If you like writing compact, powerful, but hard-to-read code, you write in Perl.
Okay, that covers the ones I can think of off the top of my head.;)
Ehhh. Yes and no. I agree with you that motorists need to be more aware of the rights of bicyclists -- particularly the right to be treated as another vehicle -- but bicyclists need not to abuse the situation, too.
I live in an older neighborhood with a lot of very narrow streets, only some of which have dedicated bicycle lanes. When I'm driving behind a bicyclist, I will slow down and only pass when I'm sure there's room to do so, just as I would with a slow-moving motor vehicle. I can't count the number of times I've done this, then come to a red light on the next block and slowed -- and here comes the bicyclist, zooming right through the red light, so I have to repeat the process on the next block. Sometimes I've had to do this three or four times in a row with the same bike, each time at some considerable risk to the rider and lesser, but still real, risk to myself.
By the third time, I'm ready to run the asshole off the road. If you want to be treated like a vehicle, fine, behave like a vehicle, which includes stopping at red lights and not going again until the light turns green. If you want to behave like a pedestrian -- i.e., crossing the street against a red light if there's no one coming the other way and you think you can get away with it -- fine, behave like a pedestrian, which includes staying the hell off the street and out of the way of cars. But you can't have both.
Exactly. Occupation of territory may be (and usually is) the objective of a military operation, but the method is to kill the enemy's soldiers until the survivors surrender or run away. I don't think any army in history has actually fought to the last man; the army which loses is the one which first loses its will to fight, and the way that happens is almost always through fear.
I strongly disagree with the idea that there are no illegitimate targets, though. A lot of this has to do with my background: as a medic, I took the LOAC (Law Of Armed Conflict, which includes the Geneva Conventions) on a rather personal level. Civilians, wounded, prisoners, and other noncombatants are never legitimate targets, no matter how desperate you are. Those who disregard this rule have IMO put themselves into the "terrorist" category by default, no matter if they're waring uniforms or not.
For those who think this view is naive (almost certainly all macho chickenhawk armchair warriors who have never heard a shot fired in anger or tried to tend to a wounded kid as he screams for his mother, but I digress) I will note that there is a practical, as well as moral, component. Killing soldiers is necessary and expected in wartime. Killing civilians does nothing but piss people off. And an enemy is a lot more likely to surrender if he thinks he'll be treated humanely.
So if the 9/11 strike had only included the plane that struct the Pentagon, it hadn't been a terrorist but a military attack ?
Not quite, because of course it was a civilian airliner that was being used as a weapon. But if the attackers had, say, fired a missile at the Pentagon, or even crashed a military plane into it... yes, I would call that an act of war, and not terrorism.
The attack on the USS Cole was, IMO, wrongly described as a terrorist attack. The people on that ship may have been eating dinner, but they were uniformed sailors of the United States, on duty in a military vessel.
Well, by that definition, any military action is terrorism. I agree with you that "innocent" is a loaded word, but we can usefully draw a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate targets. If you're attacking your enemy's military, or his political leadership, it's war; if you're attacking civilians on the street, it's terrorism. Obviously there's a fine line here when you're talking about airstrikes in crowded cities, and the like.
Alright, to be fair, we don't own the internet in that no one can own the internet but you have to admit that we still have control over the rest of the worlds use of the internet.
... as long as the rest of the world goes along with the status quo, yes. That Can Change(tm).
If he's been overlooked, that's too bad, and maybe the Nobel Committee screwed up. But they're not going to change their minds, and by whining about it, he just makes himself look bitter. He's exactly right -- they are "above the law and accountable to no one." And that means they can give their prize to whomever they damn well choose.
Right now, even though there are other awards that have a higher monetary value, the Nobel is the most prestigious because of its name and history. If they have a few spectacular screwups, maybe that won't be the case any more, and Damadian will be vindicated. But that's history's judgement to make.
Naah. The Rumsfeld bill would be bluish gray, since he had honorable but completely bloodless peacetime military service, and the rest of his career has been spent as a colorless bureaucrat. (Maybe with a tinge of reddish-brown, a la dried blood, since now that he's finally got a chance to exercise his power fantasies, he's turning out not to be, ah, colorless at all.) Cheney, bright yellow, definitely. Bush's should be bright red, since he deserted his post in time of war, and that war (although he himself was not fighting in it, of course) was against a Communist enemy. Perhaps the Bush bill should also have a black border, for all the kids who died in combat while he was snorting coke and pretending to be a fighter pilot, except when he wasn't even bothering with that last part.
That's right. If you're too afraid of big words to read the article (which does a pretty good job of explaining the discovery in layman's terms) just make a whooshing noise. Apparently you take a perverse pride in your inability to understand anything more complex than plugging in your Xbox.
No, it's not the post that pissed me off. It was the "Insightful" rating. Apparently, it's insightful to take pride in not understanding things. This is a particularly ironic attitude to find on Slashdot, since techies get this kind of irritating "I don't get it, and that's just fine with me!!!" reaction all the time when they're trying to explain simple computer principles to their aggressively tech-illiterate family and friends.
Maybe cuz I grew up in the 60's I can't help but view all these cute Slashdotters falling over themselves to praise China's space 'initiatives' with the same patronizing bemusement I normally reserve for the 14-year-olds just discovering Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, and carrying on like someone has just invented a brand new musical note.
"Putting a Man in Space?" Great. Super. Wake me when he lands on Mars...
Putting a man in space is a necessary prerequisite to putting him on Mars. We could have done it decades ago, but we lost our national will. Now someone else is giving it a shot, and maybe this time they won't say, "Oh, okay, we did something cool, now let's go home." That's why people are excited.
I can go you one better: my Dad worked for NASA during the Apollo program, and for Martin Marietta (as it was then) during Viking and the early stages of the Shuttle. I grew up surrounded by space program memorabilia, and I've always been bitter that we never lived up to the promise of those years. This is damned exciting, and I don't see why you don't see it. Maybe because you grew up in the 60's you're a bitter, jaded old fart who can't get excited about anything any more?
And you know, Zep and Floyd are still good music. Why the hell shouldn't the 14-year-olds enjoy it, if they want to? God, I hate patronizing ageism...
I dont think you know enough Canadians. Our system is indeed good for some things, but the costs go up every year (to the point now where it may not be sustainable in the future) and there are large large problems.
Fair enough; but subsitute "Americans" for "Canadians" and "isn't working right now" for "may not be sustainable in the near future" in your post, and it's still true.
I've said this before, but it's worth reiterating: I've worked in Federal government health care, city government health care, and private health care -- and in my experience, the standard of care is roughly comparable across the three, but efficiency and accessibility go down in the order I listed them.
Slashdot Mirror
But it's not inherently a partisan issue, and I never said it was. Like I said, I'd expect the Republicans to kick up a fuss if the roles were reversed. What if this had been happening in 1996 instead of 2004, and the largest voting machine company in the country were being run by someone who had publicly announced that he wanted to "deliver Ohio's electoral votes for President Clinton"? Wouldn't that bother you, just a tad?
Anyone, of any political persuasion, who genuinely believes in government of the people, by the people, and for the people, should be terrified by the implications of this problem. The fact that they're not speaks to me of a profound and dangerous ignorance.
... it's in Wired. Not on, say, Fox News. (Although it would have been, no doubt, if it had been Democrats rather than Republicans doing all the screwy stuff.)
Even if every techie in the world knows how screwed up the voting machines are, it's not going to do any good until Joe Sixpack is hearing about it over dinner. I would be willing to bet that right now, the majority of voters don't give a damn what kind of voting machine they use, and of those who do, the majority assume that anything newer and sleeker and higher-tech is thereby more reliable. The number of people who have any understanding of the problem is growing, but it's still tiny.
What I want to know is, why aren't the politicians who have the most to lose from this issue making more noise about it? Since right now it's mostly the Republicans who seem to be benefitting, seems to me every Democratic candidate should be yelling for a major investigation right now. That's certainly what I'd expect if the situation were reversed.
Ehhh, depends on how you define "peace." There was almost always at least a low-level rebellion, a la the Palestinian territories today, going on in some part of the Empire for its entire existence; and being a Roman soldier stationed in or near Britain, Germany, or Persia was never a particularly safe job, even when there wasn't an official campaign going on. It looked like peace from Rome -- but not from the POV of the men guarding the frontiers.
As a fellow bioinformatician (bioinformaticist, computational biologist, whatever) who occasionally likes to make pretty pictures, I can tell you that Photoshop is just an amazingly useful program for ... well, anything that involves pretty pictures. It's taken me a while to figure out that visualization matters, and most methods you can come up with to portray information visually look better after you've run them through a filter or two.
... pretty similar, actually. A graphic is a huge two-dimensional array of numbers, all of which have some relation to their immediate neighbors, and possibly to some farther away. Sound familiar? So Photoshop speed is a pretty good measure of how well a system handles that kind of calculation generally.
Also, I've written Photoshop plugins, and I can tell you that the routines needed to crunch large amounts of image data and the routines needed to crunch large amounts of sequence or expression data are
I take back what I said before -- there is no debate; anyone who actually know the history, knows perfectly well that the ideas you put forth are simply not true. Unfortunately, many people simply seem not understand the difference between the Pilgrims and the Founding Fathers; apparently the fact that a whole lot of history happened in America between Plymouth Rock and the Declaration of Independence is lost on them.
As a non-religious student in our supposedly Godless public schools, I was subjected to constant abuse for my lack of beliefs, up to and including having a knife held to my throat, with the full knowledge of the teachers. And no, I didn't push my non-beliefs on others; I simply answered honestly when people asked me questions about what I believed, and why I didn't say the "under God" part when we recited the Pledge. That is what "voluntary" prayer as an official part of the school day gets you.
"Sweetheart deal" doesn't mean the deal where a manufacturer gives a discount to a customer who buys in volume; that's standard business practice. It means the deal where a large purchase is made as a favor to a friend, rather than on the basis of rational cost-benefit analysis. Often there's some kind of direct kickback involved.
This kind of thing happens all the time in small businesses, of course, and I have a hard time arguing with it; often, it's the only way a small business can survive those first couple of years. But when you're talking about organizations the size of Dell and UT -- the latter spending taxpayers' money! -- it is, to say the least, a bit shady.
UT is in Austin. Dell is in Austin.
Can you say "sweetheart deal," boys and girls? I knew you could.
That may be the single best refutation of the "open source is communism" FUD I've ever read. Thank you.
You toe the line. You await with bated breath. If you have a hard time keeping track of your possessions, you lose them. Hopefully, you don't try to find them by committee. The Constitution is modified by amendments. If you like computers that work, you use a Mac. If you like writing compact, powerful, but hard-to-read code, you write in Perl.
;)
Okay, that covers the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
Ehhh. Yes and no. I agree with you that motorists need to be more aware of the rights of bicyclists -- particularly the right to be treated as another vehicle -- but bicyclists need not to abuse the situation, too.
I live in an older neighborhood with a lot of very narrow streets, only some of which have dedicated bicycle lanes. When I'm driving behind a bicyclist, I will slow down and only pass when I'm sure there's room to do so, just as I would with a slow-moving motor vehicle. I can't count the number of times I've done this, then come to a red light on the next block and slowed -- and here comes the bicyclist, zooming right through the red light, so I have to repeat the process on the next block. Sometimes I've had to do this three or four times in a row with the same bike, each time at some considerable risk to the rider and lesser, but still real, risk to myself.
By the third time, I'm ready to run the asshole off the road. If you want to be treated like a vehicle, fine, behave like a vehicle, which includes stopping at red lights and not going again until the light turns green. If you want to behave like a pedestrian -- i.e., crossing the street against a red light if there's no one coming the other way and you think you can get away with it -- fine, behave like a pedestrian, which includes staying the hell off the street and out of the way of cars. But you can't have both.
Exactly. Occupation of territory may be (and usually is) the objective of a military operation, but the method is to kill the enemy's soldiers until the survivors surrender or run away. I don't think any army in history has actually fought to the last man; the army which loses is the one which first loses its will to fight, and the way that happens is almost always through fear.
I strongly disagree with the idea that there are no illegitimate targets, though. A lot of this has to do with my background: as a medic, I took the LOAC (Law Of Armed Conflict, which includes the Geneva Conventions) on a rather personal level. Civilians, wounded, prisoners, and other noncombatants are never legitimate targets, no matter how desperate you are. Those who disregard this rule have IMO put themselves into the "terrorist" category by default, no matter if they're waring uniforms or not.
For those who think this view is naive (almost certainly all macho chickenhawk armchair warriors who have never heard a shot fired in anger or tried to tend to a wounded kid as he screams for his mother, but I digress) I will note that there is a practical, as well as moral, component. Killing soldiers is necessary and expected in wartime. Killing civilians does nothing but piss people off. And an enemy is a lot more likely to surrender if he thinks he'll be treated humanely.
The attack on the USS Cole was, IMO, wrongly described as a terrorist attack. The people on that ship may have been eating dinner, but they were uniformed sailors of the United States, on duty in a military vessel.
Well, by that definition, any military action is terrorism. I agree with you that "innocent" is a loaded word, but we can usefully draw a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate targets. If you're attacking your enemy's military, or his political leadership, it's war; if you're attacking civilians on the street, it's terrorism. Obviously there's a fine line here when you're talking about airstrikes in crowded cities, and the like.
If he's been overlooked, that's too bad, and maybe the Nobel Committee screwed up. But they're not going to change their minds, and by whining about it, he just makes himself look bitter. He's exactly right -- they are "above the law and accountable to no one." And that means they can give their prize to whomever they damn well choose.
Right now, even though there are other awards that have a higher monetary value, the Nobel is the most prestigious because of its name and history. If they have a few spectacular screwups, maybe that won't be the case any more, and Damadian will be vindicated. But that's history's judgement to make.
Naah. The Rumsfeld bill would be bluish gray, since he had honorable but completely bloodless peacetime military service, and the rest of his career has been spent as a colorless bureaucrat. (Maybe with a tinge of reddish-brown, a la dried blood, since now that he's finally got a chance to exercise his power fantasies, he's turning out not to be, ah, colorless at all.) Cheney, bright yellow, definitely. Bush's should be bright red, since he deserted his post in time of war, and that war (although he himself was not fighting in it, of course) was against a Communist enemy. Perhaps the Bush bill should also have a black border, for all the kids who died in combat while he was snorting coke and pretending to be a fighter pilot, except when he wasn't even bothering with that last part.
Oh. You're right. I didn't RTFP. Sorry.
That's right. If you're too afraid of big words to read the article (which does a pretty good job of explaining the discovery in layman's terms) just make a whooshing noise. Apparently you take a perverse pride in your inability to understand anything more complex than plugging in your Xbox.
No, it's not the post that pissed me off. It was the "Insightful" rating. Apparently, it's insightful to take pride in not understanding things. This is a particularly ironic attitude to find on Slashdot, since techies get this kind of irritating "I don't get it, and that's just fine with me!!!" reaction all the time when they're trying to explain simple computer principles to their aggressively tech-illiterate family and friends.
I can go you one better: my Dad worked for NASA during the Apollo program, and for Martin Marietta (as it was then) during Viking and the early stages of the Shuttle. I grew up surrounded by space program memorabilia, and I've always been bitter that we never lived up to the promise of those years. This is damned exciting, and I don't see why you don't see it. Maybe because you grew up in the 60's you're a bitter, jaded old fart who can't get excited about anything any more?
And you know, Zep and Floyd are still good music. Why the hell shouldn't the 14-year-olds enjoy it, if they want to? God, I hate patronizing ageism
I've said this before, but it's worth reiterating: I've worked in Federal government health care, city government health care, and private health care -- and in my experience, the standard of care is roughly comparable across the three, but efficiency and accessibility go down in the order I listed them.