Something is very wrong, indeed. Bradley Manning should have been charged with treason and hanged.
I'm sure what you meant to write is: "Bradley Manning should have been charged with and tried for treason, and if convicted, sentenced to death."
The fact is that all these pussy liberals are going to soft on him. Traitors must be punished and executed.
It's always interesting to see how quickly conservatives are ready to abandon their alleged commitment to the rule of law and the purity of the US Constitution.
Unless you're in the military. Then you get a tribunal.
If you're in the military, you get a court-martial (or a non-judicial punishment, a.k.a. Article 15, for minor offenses -- but even there, you always have the right to request a court-martial, if you really think that's a good idea...) Even official POWs get this. The "military tribunal" is a made-up kangaroo court which only applies to people falling into the equally made-up "enemy combatant" status.
During the Cold War, there was a bitter German joke to the effect of, "Tactical nuclear weapon: any nuclear weapon intended to be detonated over German territory." IOW, it's a euphemism, and "tactical" nukes are, in practice, unlikely to be any less murderous than "strategic" ones.
Researchers: "[NetRank operates] in a manner similar to Google's PageRank" Retard masquerading as a professional journalist: "Researchers modified PageRank to develop NetRank"
Die. Just die in a fire. Die, die, die.
Researchers' paper: "NetRank is based on Google's PageRank algorithm."
Why does this sort of stuff just plain piss the left leaning person off? I mean, even if you are a dedicated communist shouldn't you still wish to find corruption, overspending, and waste, and squash it? Shouldn't that be something anyone from any party would rally behind?
But no, unfortunately when someone says limited government they immediately get called a right wing racist teabagger.
Well, speaking as a left leaning person, I'd say nothing in that list pisses me off. What pisses me off is all the right wing social conservatism (often including a healthy dose of racism) and insane militarism that so often seems to go along with calls for "limited government" which, of course, isn't limited at all. Liberalism and libertarianism are both viewpoints that have a place in a sane political debate; what calls itself conservatism long ago went off into la-la land.
Mortality is an attribute of a population; mortality risk (or, yes, damn it, "risk of death" -- no qualification needed for those who know what they're talking about) is an attribute of individuals. If you say "smokers are 80% more likely to die of cancer than non-smokers," you're talking about mortality. If you say "smoking increases your probability of dying of cancer by 80%," you're talking about mortality risk, because you can't be 80% more dead. You can claim that this isn't a standard medical or biostatistical usage, but about 218,000 results from a Google Scholar search on the phrase "mortality risk" argue against you.
Okay, I'm going to make a computer and car analogy.
Suppose that on every single story that mentioned RAM in any context, there were guaranteed to be a hundred comments along the lines of "Isn't the Ram a pickup truck?" Some of these comments would be meant as in-jokes, but most would be absolutely serious. The people making the comments (a self-selected group of intelligent, technically minded people who are, supposedly, interested in the world around them) would absolutely refuse to understand, no matter how many times it was explained to them, that the word "ram" has multiple specific meanings, and that only one of those meanings is relevant to the conversation at hand.
And I'm sure the researchers who conducted the study, the agencies that paid for the study, and the editors and peer reviewers who read the paper before publication never ever once thought of controlling for risk factors. You'd better contact the NEJM and NCI immediately and tell them what idiots they are to have missed something so obvious. I'm sure they'll be blown away by your critique.
Oh, Jesus H. Christ. This comment comes up on every story dealing with mortality risk, and it's getting kind of old. Look, the hazard rate function is not that hard to understand. Educate yourself instead of making the same worn-out joke over and over again, okay?
I don't mind looking up for new words but if you ask me to look up for jargon then I am quite sure the author doesn't know how to communicate or doesn't have much to communicate to begin with.
Well, then... good luck learning anything technical, ever.
Seriously, "jargon" is what people who are scared of big words call vocabulary they don't know yet (and with that attitude, probably never will.) Now, it's true that a lot of writers use obscure words or abbreviations when a common word would do just as well, and generally that's a bad idea. But in any technical field worthy of the name, a lot of the concepts cannot be communicated without using the proper terms. Those who can't deal with this should just come to terms with the fact that they've chosen to be ignorant.
Yes, you can target by age and gender and such, but unlike with Google and AdWords you cannot target to specific interests or queries. Yet Facebook charges almost kind of prices per click than Google does.
I think Facebook tries to target its ads -- a lot of ads pop up in my sidebar that appear to be related to keywords either in my profile or in my recent posts. The problem is the targeting isn't very good. The current crop:
"RN Degrees for Paramedics with No Classroom Attendance! Make Up to $15,000 More. Get Info!" "Pursue a top-ranked MBA while you serve your country. Request Info Today!" "Get an EXTRA 30% off Atheist T-shirts w/code FB30. Only @ CafePress. Shop Now!"
It's easy enough too see where this particular crop comes from -- medic, grad student, more-or-less atheist -- but the specifics are amusingly wrong -- I haven't had so much as a basic EMT certification for years and have no interest in a nursing degree, I've been out of the service for quite some time and regard MBAs as anti-degrees which make people less qualified for any real job, and I've never felt the need to wear my lack of belief on my chest.
Google's ads, OTOH, tend to be eerily spot-on. This shouldn't really be a surprise.
Significantly delaying the onset of age-related diseases is one of the biggest contributors to quality of life I can imagine. And if we have to work an extra twenty years for an additional twenty years of youth and health... well, that's a tradeoff I'd certainly be willing to make, and I expect a whole bunch of other people would feel the same.
There wouldn't be any need to delay the age of adulthood as you suggest. We'd just have longer, healthier, more productive, and all-around better adult lives. Sign me up.
Not only that, but the protocol is often used to download fully legal software that competes directly with Microsoft's products.
But of course that has nothing to do with their sponsorship of the project. Nothing at all, not noway nohow. I mean, surely a legitimate business would never fund legally questionable activities in order to cripple their competition. Big corporations, especially, have all earned their success by competing honestly and openly in the free market. Honestly, I'm disappointed that you would even imply such a vile thing.
Hmmm, the Slashdot equivalent of the burglar complaining the homeowner shot at them while they were breaking in.
This is more like shooting at your neighbor's house because you claim to have seen a burglar there. Which would not, I'm reasonably sure, stand up as a valid defense in any court.
The difference is that most military decorations are for bravery, valour and honour. For helping others rather than putting yourself first.
Actually, most US military decorations these days are for, um, showing up. When I was stationed in England, the RAF guys (who really have to earn their decorations; it's not unusual in the British military to go an entire career without earning more than a couple of ribbons) used to laugh their asses off at the amount of crap decorating our dress uniforms. And lest anyone think this is just an Air Force problem, I have a green uniform hanging in my closet too, and it's even gaudier than the blue one.
Personally I'd have been a lot happier with a lot fewer decorations, and the sense of having had to really earn the ones I had; most of the people I served with felt the same way. There's probably a lesson here for the corporate "gamifiers," but I can practically guarantee you they won't learn it.
Yeah, I'm kind of shocked that there aren't fifty back-and-forth posts (or possibly the same AC posting in reply to himself) on the subject already. Surely we haven't been abandoned? Return to us, Return To Gamemakerdom Guy!
I am curious...as a non-USAian why you find the current president lacking in backbone military wise.
Because Obama is a Democrat, and as a matter of doctrine, all Democrats are spineless wishy-washy appeasers, and all Republicans are tough manly war heroes. If you want to understand US politics, you first need to understand that approximately half of our political establishment is operating in a world which bears only the most superficial resemblance to reality.
Weight loss rebound only happens to people who are fat already. It's not a problem that anorexics face.
This is simply not true. There are many people (mostly but not exclusively young women) of normal weight who starve themselves in an attempt to become extremely thin, and then become obese afterward. And obese people often become more obsese after such a cycle. That's just the way the biology works; starvation creates major changes in metabolism. If you're interested, here is one of many, many references on this phenomenon.
ATMs are incredibly reliable these days. The fact that these POS voting machines are built, in large part, by the same people who build ATMs indicates strongly that Occam's Razor beats Hanlon's (or Napoleon's) Razor here; malice, rather than stupidity or incompetence, is the simplest and most likely explanation.
I'm pro-nuke, although I'm deeply annoyed by the "nothing can go wrong" attitude that a lot of nuclear advocates display -- if we're ever going to convince people to start building nuke plants on a large scale again, we have to stop pretending that there are no problems with plant safety and waste disposal, because people with legitimate safety concerns can smell that bullshit a mile away. Mainly, I'm anti-magic-bullet. Wind power should be part of the equation, because there's a hell of a lot of essentially free energy out there waiting to be harvested. Same with solar. Energy is fungible; electrons don't care how they get into the grid. There is no one perfect solution, and as a rule, anyone who tries to tell you "X will solve all our energy problems," whether X is wind, solar, nuclear, increased fossil fuel extraction, or anything else, can safely be ignored from that point on, because they've pretty much demonstrated that they have nothing meaningful to add to the conversation.
Back on topic, I'm anti- the idea that any energy policy that anyone who has any influence on the debate has seriously proposed... is equivalent to two of the worst genocides in human history. Again, people who bring the Khmer Rouge or the Nazis into a debate about energy policy, of all things, should be either ignored or mocked, because they sure as hell aren't going to bring any actual thoughts to the table.
I know that not reading the article before commenting on it is a fine/. tradition, but you could try actually reading my comment before replying to it. Just a thought.
Slashdot Mirror
Something is very wrong, indeed. Bradley Manning should have been charged with treason and hanged.
I'm sure what you meant to write is: "Bradley Manning should have been charged with and tried for treason, and if convicted, sentenced to death."
The fact is that all these pussy liberals are going to soft on him. Traitors must be punished and executed.
It's always interesting to see how quickly conservatives are ready to abandon their alleged commitment to the rule of law and the purity of the US Constitution.
Unless you're in the military. Then you get a tribunal.
If you're in the military, you get a court-martial (or a non-judicial punishment, a.k.a. Article 15, for minor offenses -- but even there, you always have the right to request a court-martial, if you really think that's a good idea ...) Even official POWs get this. The "military tribunal" is a made-up kangaroo court which only applies to people falling into the equally made-up "enemy combatant" status.
During the Cold War, there was a bitter German joke to the effect of, "Tactical nuclear weapon: any nuclear weapon intended to be detonated over German territory." IOW, it's a euphemism, and "tactical" nukes are, in practice, unlikely to be any less murderous than "strategic" ones.
you simply won't be able to run X11 apps on Mac OS X any more
None of the articles in the results from your linked Google search actually seem to agree with that statement.
Researchers: "[NetRank operates] in a manner similar to Google's PageRank"
Retard masquerading as a professional journalist: "Researchers modified PageRank to develop NetRank"
Die. Just die in a fire. Die, die, die.
Researchers' paper: "NetRank is based on Google's PageRank algorithm."
Read. Just read the article. Read, read, read.
Why does this sort of stuff just plain piss the left leaning person off? I mean, even if you are a dedicated communist shouldn't you still wish to find corruption, overspending, and waste, and squash it? Shouldn't that be something anyone from any party would rally behind?
But no, unfortunately when someone says limited government they immediately get called a right wing racist teabagger.
Well, speaking as a left leaning person, I'd say nothing in that list pisses me off. What pisses me off is all the right wing social conservatism (often including a healthy dose of racism) and insane militarism that so often seems to go along with calls for "limited government" which, of course, isn't limited at all. Liberalism and libertarianism are both viewpoints that have a place in a sane political debate; what calls itself conservatism long ago went off into la-la land.
Mortality is an attribute of a population; mortality risk (or, yes, damn it, "risk of death" -- no qualification needed for those who know what they're talking about) is an attribute of individuals. If you say "smokers are 80% more likely to die of cancer than non-smokers," you're talking about mortality. If you say "smoking increases your probability of dying of cancer by 80%," you're talking about mortality risk, because you can't be 80% more dead. You can claim that this isn't a standard medical or biostatistical usage, but about 218,000 results from a Google Scholar search on the phrase "mortality risk" argue against you.
Okay, I'm going to make a computer and car analogy.
Suppose that on every single story that mentioned RAM in any context, there were guaranteed to be a hundred comments along the lines of "Isn't the Ram a pickup truck?" Some of these comments would be meant as in-jokes, but most would be absolutely serious. The people making the comments (a self-selected group of intelligent, technically minded people who are, supposedly, interested in the world around them) would absolutely refuse to understand, no matter how many times it was explained to them, that the word "ram" has multiple specific meanings, and that only one of those meanings is relevant to the conversation at hand.
Wouldn't you get just a little tired of this?
And I'm sure the researchers who conducted the study, the agencies that paid for the study, and the editors and peer reviewers who read the paper before publication never ever once thought of controlling for risk factors. You'd better contact the NEJM and NCI immediately and tell them what idiots they are to have missed something so obvious. I'm sure they'll be blown away by your critique.
Oh, Jesus H. Christ. This comment comes up on every story dealing with mortality risk, and it's getting kind of old. Look, the hazard rate function is not that hard to understand. Educate yourself instead of making the same worn-out joke over and over again, okay?
I don't mind looking up for new words but if you ask me to look up for jargon then I am quite sure the author doesn't know how to communicate or doesn't have much to communicate to begin with.
Well, then ... good luck learning anything technical, ever.
Seriously, "jargon" is what people who are scared of big words call vocabulary they don't know yet (and with that attitude, probably never will.) Now, it's true that a lot of writers use obscure words or abbreviations when a common word would do just as well, and generally that's a bad idea. But in any technical field worthy of the name, a lot of the concepts cannot be communicated without using the proper terms. Those who can't deal with this should just come to terms with the fact that they've chosen to be ignorant.
Yes, you can target by age and gender and such, but unlike with Google and AdWords you cannot target to specific interests or queries. Yet Facebook charges almost kind of prices per click than Google does.
I think Facebook tries to target its ads -- a lot of ads pop up in my sidebar that appear to be related to keywords either in my profile or in my recent posts. The problem is the targeting isn't very good. The current crop:
"RN Degrees for Paramedics with No Classroom Attendance! Make Up to $15,000 More. Get Info!"
"Pursue a top-ranked MBA while you serve your country. Request Info Today!"
"Get an EXTRA 30% off Atheist T-shirts w/code FB30. Only @ CafePress. Shop Now!"
It's easy enough too see where this particular crop comes from -- medic, grad student, more-or-less atheist -- but the specifics are amusingly wrong -- I haven't had so much as a basic EMT certification for years and have no interest in a nursing degree, I've been out of the service for quite some time and regard MBAs as anti-degrees which make people less qualified for any real job, and I've never felt the need to wear my lack of belief on my chest.
Google's ads, OTOH, tend to be eerily spot-on. This shouldn't really be a surprise.
But quality of life is important
Significantly delaying the onset of age-related diseases is one of the biggest contributors to quality of life I can imagine. And if we have to work an extra twenty years for an additional twenty years of youth and health ... well, that's a tradeoff I'd certainly be willing to make, and I expect a whole bunch of other people would feel the same.
There wouldn't be any need to delay the age of adulthood as you suggest. We'd just have longer, healthier, more productive, and all-around better adult lives. Sign me up.
Dear God. Apparently I should have said, "... in any court in any sane state."
Not only that, but the protocol is often used to download fully legal software that competes directly with Microsoft's products.
But of course that has nothing to do with their sponsorship of the project. Nothing at all, not noway nohow. I mean, surely a legitimate business would never fund legally questionable activities in order to cripple their competition. Big corporations, especially, have all earned their success by competing honestly and openly in the free market. Honestly, I'm disappointed that you would even imply such a vile thing.
Hmmm, the Slashdot equivalent of the burglar complaining the homeowner shot at them while they were breaking in.
This is more like shooting at your neighbor's house because you claim to have seen a burglar there. Which would not, I'm reasonably sure, stand up as a valid defense in any court.
Oh, I should have picked up on that from your spelling of "hono(u)r." Yeah, like I said, you guys earn your decorations, and I admire that.
The difference is that most military decorations are for bravery, valour and honour. For helping others rather than putting yourself first.
Actually, most US military decorations these days are for, um, showing up. When I was stationed in England, the RAF guys (who really have to earn their decorations; it's not unusual in the British military to go an entire career without earning more than a couple of ribbons) used to laugh their asses off at the amount of crap decorating our dress uniforms. And lest anyone think this is just an Air Force problem, I have a green uniform hanging in my closet too, and it's even gaudier than the blue one.
Personally I'd have been a lot happier with a lot fewer decorations, and the sense of having had to really earn the ones I had; most of the people I served with felt the same way. There's probably a lesson here for the corporate "gamifiers," but I can practically guarantee you they won't learn it.
Duh, how do you think people would be employeed or government would get taxes if corporates did not have profits?
This may come as a shock to you, but there are many possible economic-political systems, of which rapacious corporatist plutocracy is only one.
Yeah, I'm kind of shocked that there aren't fifty back-and-forth posts (or possibly the same AC posting in reply to himself) on the subject already. Surely we haven't been abandoned? Return to us, Return To Gamemakerdom Guy!
I am curious...as a non-USAian why you find the current president lacking in backbone military wise.
Because Obama is a Democrat, and as a matter of doctrine, all Democrats are spineless wishy-washy appeasers, and all Republicans are tough manly war heroes. If you want to understand US politics, you first need to understand that approximately half of our political establishment is operating in a world which bears only the most superficial resemblance to reality.
Weight loss rebound only happens to people who are fat already. It's not a problem that anorexics face.
This is simply not true. There are many people (mostly but not exclusively young women) of normal weight who starve themselves in an attempt to become extremely thin, and then become obese afterward. And obese people often become more obsese after such a cycle. That's just the way the biology works; starvation creates major changes in metabolism. If you're interested, here is one of many, many references on this phenomenon.
ATMs are incredibly reliable these days. The fact that these POS voting machines are built, in large part, by the same people who build ATMs indicates strongly that Occam's Razor beats Hanlon's (or Napoleon's) Razor here; malice, rather than stupidity or incompetence, is the simplest and most likely explanation.
I'm pro-nuke, although I'm deeply annoyed by the "nothing can go wrong" attitude that a lot of nuclear advocates display -- if we're ever going to convince people to start building nuke plants on a large scale again, we have to stop pretending that there are no problems with plant safety and waste disposal, because people with legitimate safety concerns can smell that bullshit a mile away. Mainly, I'm anti-magic-bullet. Wind power should be part of the equation, because there's a hell of a lot of essentially free energy out there waiting to be harvested. Same with solar. Energy is fungible; electrons don't care how they get into the grid. There is no one perfect solution, and as a rule, anyone who tries to tell you "X will solve all our energy problems," whether X is wind, solar, nuclear, increased fossil fuel extraction, or anything else, can safely be ignored from that point on, because they've pretty much demonstrated that they have nothing meaningful to add to the conversation.
Back on topic, I'm anti- the idea that any energy policy that anyone who has any influence on the debate has seriously proposed ... is equivalent to two of the worst genocides in human history. Again, people who bring the Khmer Rouge or the Nazis into a debate about energy policy, of all things, should be either ignored or mocked, because they sure as hell aren't going to bring any actual thoughts to the table.
I know that not reading the article before commenting on it is a fine /. tradition, but you could try actually reading my comment before replying to it. Just a thought.