It is nearly impossible to do a study where you watch for every conceivable chemical that ever has or ever could exist.
On the contrary, mass spectrometry makes it pretty easy
Mass spec is not a magic bullet. For reasons I mentioned to an earlier reply, it cannot identify all possible compounds in solution. Being as the fracking mix itself is always shrouded in "trade secret" cover it is impossible to know what to watch for and hence the likelihood of finding anything is not real great. Are there polar compounds in the fracking mix? We don't know. Are there highly charged compounds in the fracking mix? We don't know. Are there volatile organics in the fracking mix? We don't know that, either.
Those are just a few classes of compounds that can make mass spectrometry more difficult than what you describe, especially if the experiment is being run in a semi-blind fashion.
Hence the problem remains that we don't know what the compounds are that we are supposed to look for. Without knowing even a few simple chemical facts about them, our chances of detecting them isn't great.
It's pretty easy to run water through a gas chromatograph / mass spec and see if it has anything other than water in it, and how much of that stuff it has.
I do MS and MS data interpretation on a regular basis and I need to point out to you that you are oversimplifying the situation. MS detection is limited by - at the very least - two important factors; the ion source and the ion detector. If you don't know what compounds you are looking for, you may well not be able to ionize them using any of your common methods (water and most alcohols are great examples of this; they usually are shed in the ionization process). Similarly if you don't know the appropriate mass window for your molecule you may miss them in detection completely as every detector has its sweet spot where it does a better job of detecting ions.
In other words, mass spec is great but it is no cure all. A MS experiment can be doomed to failure if there is inadequate advanced knowledge of the sample that is being examined.
How can they be sure that they didn't detect the fracking chemicals when the industry continues to refuse to reveal the identity of said chemicals? It is nearly impossible to do a study where you watch for every conceivable chemical that ever has or ever could exist.
You can get a sticker for this license and put it in what remains of the rear window of your old Chevy truck, right next to your infinitely clever "terrorist hunting permit".
Why do companies feel they're entitled to this kind of information?
I'll play the devil's advocate here and suggest that RIM might not have done this out of a sense of entitlement, but rather out of a sense of laziness or generally poor programming. This information is not necessarily all that valuable to them anyways.
Pretty much everyone who owns a BlackBerry should be asking if they can really trust the device.
The device just came our, and this applies only to the two newest blackberries. The bigger question is how long will it take them to correct this. They have a choice here; they can either say "oops, we didn't mean to do that" and patch it so that this information isn't passed on in the future, or they can try to come up with some obfuscated excuse why this data being passed on doesn't hurt the user. If they do the former, then it can be attributed to human error. If they do the latter then they might wan to consider closing their doors for good.
The environment that a person grows up in can significantly impact the person they become in not so obvious ways.
I don't disagree with this point.
However, biomarkers can show change in individuals in response to their environment and any of a number of other factors. To take metabolites as an example, even if you only ate dry corn flakes for the rest of your life you would still have variations in your metabolites over time and in response to various non-food stimuli. Similarly the full biomarker profile also includes proteins (which change in expression, modification, and digestion profile over time) and hormones (which show the same variability in bodily fluids) amongst other things.
There has been research using identical twins that demonstrates this key point.
And those identical twins would have different biomarker profiles.
No, the US government will not fund this. Why? The US government doesn't expand funding on any kind of science, unless it directly benefits the military or the military-industrial complex.
OK, so spin it that you can find the most suitable soldiers and weed out the conscientious objectors and the pussies. This way you can get the super-soldiers.
But how do you prevent the psychopaths from going off into villages to rape and murder when the campaign is taking the evening off? How do you prevent the psychopaths from murdering their fellow soldiers if they are annoyed by an order?
There has been a lot of research done in recent years towards looking for biomarkers for a variety of ailments. The problem though is that the biomarker based tests rarely end up being statistically reproducible across a meaningful number of samples; often suffering from too many FPs or too many missed diagnoses. This is worth looking in to, but the odds of it ever developing into a single assay to find the nascent psychopaths in our population are not very good. It has a better chance of becoming a screening method for "hey these people should consider seeking mental health help" than anything but of course you can't force someone to see a shrink just because of a blood test if they are otherwise functioning adults.
Biomarkers are beyond DNA. Biomarkers are proteins, metabolites, epigenetic markers, and a variety of other things that are beyond just the DNA itself.
No, the US government will not fund this. Why? The US government doesn't expand funding on any kind of science, unless it directly benefits the military or the military-industrial complex. This doesn't directly benefit either so it will be lucky if it ever sees a single federal dime.
So, what we have is you cherry picking my words to misrepresent them
How am I misrepresenting your words when I am quoting them directly? Does it scare you that much to be confronted with your fabrications?
I would suggest maybe you should try building an honest argument instead, it would be much less difficult for you to defend.
making unsupported assumptions, resorting to insults to avoid admitting you know I'm right,
I particularly enjoy that combination of statements there. In your second statement you yourself commit the very act that you are trying to accuse me of doing in the first. I will say it again though, I know you are not right. You are a repeat liar on this matter with no credibility.
and generally making an ass out of yourself
What did you say before about unsupported assumptions? But go ahead, call me names if it makes you feel better at night. It doesn't change the facts.
Nice to know that you think you know everything that happened that night and have basically convicted a man on that unsupported knowledge.
Nice unsupported assumption there!
You obviously know better than the jury and, in fact, have magical knowledge of the events of that night.
I never claimed any such magical knowledge. You, however, are doing something you were talking about just in your previous post... what was it again? Oh, yeah...
unsupported assumptions
You're good with those. Too bad they don't help your cause.
I like how you totally discount my actual experience
Because there is no reason to believe you. You have lied about a large number of things and been evasive about even more. You are clearly not above making up stories out of thin air to support your argument.
to the point of saying that it is in no way like what happened to Zimmerman. We were both attacked, knocked to the ground, straddled, and had our head slammed into concrete
Sure, you were. Was that before or after the time you single handedly prevented the sears tower from being destroyed by militant Taoist rebels from outer Berserkistan?
The only difference was the races in involved and the fact I didn't have a gun.
Being as we don't have solid evidence that it actually happened to Zimmerman in that way either, yes they might be very similar. We certainly don't have any reason to believe it happened to you in the way you claim, and you already have been dodgy on whether or not it actually was similar to the way that Zimmerman's team claimed it happened to him. If you can't get your facts straight the first time through your new story I'm not going to wait around for you to make them up again.
Tell us, have you ever experienced anything like it at all?
I'm not the one claiming to have.
Or, are you just spouting off saying what Zimmerman could and could not have done with no experience what so ever?
The evidence does not irrefutably support his story, and the other person involved in the encounter is dead.
We also know that if Martin hadn't attacked Zimmerman, no one would have been shot.
We don't know for sure - and will never know for sure - if Martin attacked Zimmerman first or if Zimmerman provoked the attack and Martin was acting in his own self-defense. We do know for sure though that if Zimmerman would have just stayed away - as repeatedly asked to do so by the 911 dispatcher - then there would have been no confrontation at all and Martin would still be alive. Zimmerman instead brought his gun with him and confronted someone who he was specifically asked to leave alone. Zimmerman had a choice to make, and he chose the choice that lead to the death of
Budget cuts are fiscally conservative. Slashdot conservatives endorse and celebrate them.
House Passes Massive Medical Insurance Bill, 219-212
Health Care Reform
The massive handout to the health insurance companies - which conservatives like to call "Obamacare" without any sense of how it came to be - would be the wet dream of every republican president we have ever had in this country. Ever since Nixon (when insurance companies really started to gain their profit and power in this country) the insurance industry has owned nearly every politician in this country regardless of their stripes. We have never had a republican president who would not have signed that bill.
Inspectors Rule That Canterbury Is Sufficiently Gay
There was no endorsement of that by slasdhot, and being as it was posted by the deeply conservative samzenpus I would wager it was posted to become a target of ridicule. Notice that the summary includes the statement that the study cost "thousands of pounds", which lead to a discussion of wasteful government spending (even though it was mostly American readers telling the British what they should be spending taxpayer money on).
Microsoft Pushes For Gay Marriage In Washington State
That is a company exerting pressure on government, which is a very conservative ideal on its own. Hell many of the conservatives here want to see damn near every government function handled by for-profit companies, they would see this as a step in the right direction.
Europe + Anglosphere + US liberals and progressives + (libertarians on social issues) = quite a tendency toward left thinking on Slashdot.
Care to try again to demonstrate that actually being true? You failed so far but I'm willing to give you another chance.
Ho Chi Minh was a communist
No, he really wasn't much of a communist. He lead a communist movement but did not hold true to communist ideals when he had power. There is a very, very important distinction there.
and that is pretty much always on the left even if there are left and right factions in any party.
Communist ideals are on the left, yes. However the actions that most self-proclaimed communist leaders take once in power are almost invariably from the opposite end.
If you want to continue your education about the history of socialist rule, try watching this: The Soviet Story
The Soviets were not in application socialists or communists. Their actual leadership philosophy was closer to authoritarian ring-wing fascism, which could hardly be further from the ideals of communism. If you want to claim yourself to be in some way knowledgeable on the ideas of communism you need to at least start at the source and read the Communist Manifesto. The manifesto is not long, and it is freely available on plenty of web sites. Read it, and you will realize that the Soviets, the Chinese ruling party, and most others who claimed themselves in revolution to be "communist" basically used Marx's writings as toilet paper.
You can spare me any arguments that communism has never been implemented properly as many have tried.
So you are saying now that your argument depends on denying reality?
It isn't possible.
Whether or not it is possible is immaterial to the fact that the people you call out as communists are simply not communist in their ideals.
The video above points out some of the issues.
It probably overlooks the fact that Marx never intended for Communism to be applied to large countries (by population or area). It fails because it creates a power vacuum that eventually someone will fill.
It is a bloody mess pretty much everywhere it's tried.
Though likely not for any reason you have ever considered.
In what universe is someone unarmed when they are carrying a gun? It makes no difference when you believe the gun was drawn, George was undoubtedly armed
Zimmerman was armed
OK so we admit that you are playing with words here to further your agenda. We agree that indeed Zimmerman was armed. It doesn't matter if Martin knew Zimmerman was armed or not, the important bit is that Zimmerman knew he was himself carrying deadly force and choosing to enter a situation in which he did not need to.
We will never be able to determine for sure who attacked whom first, as one person is dead. We do know for sure that this happened only because George followed him, though. The confrontation was created by him.
That is a false statement. Perhaps you should review the witness testimony. A prosecution witness indicated that Martin approached and confronted Zimmerman.
There were other witnesses who claimed otherwise. More so, if you are being followed by someone, who are breaking no laws to ask them why they are following you. Even if we take that statement to be truthful that Martin asked Zimmerman why he was following him we don't know for sure the order of events that unfolded after that.
If Martin had continued on to his destination, there would have been no confrontation at all.
We cannot say that for sure. Zimmerman was following him, why should we be sure that Zimmerman wouldn't have escalated the situation further had Martin ignored him? Zimmerman was already asked by the 911 dispatcher to leave the kid alone and he ignored that request. Zimmerman was asked by the neighborhood not to carry a weapon and he ignored that request as well. We do know that if Zimmerman had actually stayed away from Martin, then the two would not have had a confrontation.
Aren't you going to address the claim and offer? No?
You are a stupid person who made a stupid offer. You can't possibly expect a more direct response to it than that.
I guess we can infer your answer from that. Zimmerman didn't have to aim. All he had to do was draw the weapon and put it in approximate contact with the person on top of him and pull the trigger.
Which is no small feat either. If you are getting your bell rung repeatedly against concrete as the defense claimed, you are going to have a lot of difficulty reaching for a weapon. Zimmerman claims he was dramatically overpowered by a 16 year old kid who weighed barely half what he did; if that is the case how was he able to reach for his gun?
And, having been in the position Zimmerman claims to have been in and having experienced such a thing, yes such an event is possible.
You're full of shit. I am willing to bet you have not experienced what Zimmerman claims to have been through that night.
Granted I didn't have a gun
OK, so you weren't in the same situation then. Thank you for supporting my claim.
but I was able to grab something from the ground and hit my assailant dazing him and then buck him off me.
That makes the situation even more different as grabbing some theoretical object from the ground is a different motion altogether than drawing a holstered weapon. Of course since you haven't experienced anything that vaguely resembles what Zimmerman claims to have been through, you have no idea what you are talking about.
I presume you mean global Warming? I'm not familiar with this Wraming thing you are talking about. The only stories I have seen here on global warming have been about the science of it, and the science of global warming is - regardless of what you might try to claim to the contrary - non-political.
Edward Snowden, Wikileaks and Bradley Manning were strictly from a conservative perspective? Yeah. Right.
I haven't seen any of them covered here (or anywhere else for that matter) as liberal causes. Indeed when they are covered here they are quickly created into conservative champions for a better world, fighting against the evil leftist new world order.
Also, in case you hadn't noticed, Ho Chi Mihn was a communist. Communists are generally considered leftists in most of the world
I see the problem here. You apparently are, like many slashdot conservatives, incapable of distinguishing between people who call themselves communists and the actual communist ideals that Marx set forward. What Marx championed was leftist. Was pretty well every leader who took the communist label for themselves since Stalin was not; this includes every communist leader in Asia. Go read the communist manifesto - it is not a long read and you can read the full text online for free- and then try again.
He seems to have embraced communism as more than just a way to get support to fight the French.
He embraced it only as a label. Authoritarian leaders are automatically not embracing communism, period. Authoritarians are almost universally using tactics of the far right.
In what universe is someone unarmed when they are carrying a gun? It makes no difference when you believe the gun was drawn, George was undoubtedly armed.
Even if Martin was afraid, he attacked and knocked Zimmerman to the ground.
We will never be able to determine for sure who attacked whom first, as one person is dead. We do know for sure that this happened only because George followed him, though. The confrontation was created by him.
he attacked and knocked Zimmerman to the ground.
That has not been determined with certainty. Only one person from the conflict was able to give a statement as to what happened, and they did not say anything under oath at the trial.
At that point, Zimmerman wasn't a threat (remember Zimmmerman didn't have his gun drawn) and Martin could have run away.
If the other person has a gun, running from them isn't very useful as you certainly won't be able to outrun a bullet.
We can get together and you can lie down with your head on a sidewalk. I will straddle you and pound your head into the concrete two or three times.
If you actually believe that is how it happened, then how do you explain George being able to draw, aim, and fire his weapon? The story simply doesn't add up. Any normal person after having experienced such an event would not be able to do such a thing.
Zimmerman was from the neighborhood WATCH. As far as I ever heard, there was no sanctioned neighborhood pursue, harrass, and shoot group. He was entrusted to report suspicious activity to the police and was asked to stand down to wait for the police to show up. Instead he decided to pull out his weapon and chase down the kid. Zimmerman was not law enforcement, he escalated a situation that didn't even exist until he showed up.
It is on slashdot because it is a conservative victory, and this is a conservative web site. Any news that proclaims victory for conservatives - even if they are a loss for justice itself - automatically make the front page. Expect to see a front page story here when the Texas governor signs the latest anti-abortion bill as well.
ROFLMAO. The political views expressed on slashdot are usually somewhat to the left of Karl Marx, Mao Tse Tung and Ho Che Mihn.
Front page stories, comment volume, and comment moderation here all refute your idea. Of course, calling Ho Chi Minh a leftist just because of his association with the Viet Cong and the Vietnam war is shortsighted and suggests to me that you don't have any real sense of what the terms conservative and liberal mean to the world beyond the USA.
If you can find a single front-page story from slashdot that was posted here in the past 5 years that was obviously celebrating anything less conservative than this story or anything GWB would have signed, I would be astonished. Many stories on the slashdot front page are so obviously conservative that they make the most conservative presidents the USA has ever had look like genies on valium.
Per the defense theory of the events, Zimmerman was pinned on the ground and getting his head slammed into concrete.
Why did the defense not need to explain how he was able to draw, aim, and fire his weapon while in such a position? This seems like a highly improbable situation that someone would be able to pull out a holstered weapon and get off an accurate shot while they are being beaten nearly to the point of losing consciousness.
For one, I'm surprised they were able to find enough people in that entire state who were able to count to 6 and hadn't already formed an opinion on this case (of course, the jury will be forever out on that matter).
However, equally important here is that the prosecution was a product of the state. The state had little interest in actually pursuing justice in this matter as they would have a huge problem on there hands if a criminal case were to lead to questioning of the stand your ground law. The state presented a case only because a crime was committed, however they were not obligated to do a competent job of presenting that case. They did such a half-assed job on this that Zimmerman could have been represented by Ronald McDonald and still would have been acquitted in that state.
Was Zimmerman an open-source advocate or something?
It appears he was an advocate of an open-source legal system, where you can write your own laws and then apply them as you see fit. As to whether or not he ever submitted his code for review is another question, he may have just been his own rogue alpha tester.
He who has the gun, is automatically guilty regardless of the facts.
Fixed that for you.
What the fuck facts are you referring to? The facts are that he was a neighborhood watch volunteer who ignored the 911 dispatcher and chased down a kid because he thought he "looked suspicious". He then killed a kid who was armed with only a bag of skittles. If he would have followed the dispatcher's advice and waited for actual law enforcement - rather than taking on the role himself - that kid would still be alive.
However there seems to be NO reason to have this story on Slashdot.
It is on slashdot because it is a conservative victory, and this is a conservative web site. Any news that proclaims victory for conservatives - even if they are a loss for justice itself - automatically make the front page. Expect to see a front page story here when the Texas governor signs the latest anti-abortion bill as well.
leave general news on whatever sites people use for news and try to keep at least some shred of technology within Slashdot stories.
You are thinking of the slashdot that we had back in 2000 or so. That slashdot is dead and buried. We aren't even lucky enough to have its old source code any more at this time.
Does anyone know if the result was related to the "Stand Your Ground" law? I'm having trouble finding a good answer.
His defense played both sides of "stand your ground". They claimed he was attacked and entitled to use it, even though he claimed he was not familiar with it (even though he took courses that covered it). They also tried to claim that it was somehow valid in a case where the person with the gun is pursuing the other person.
Somehow, in Florida, this all makes sense. I'm glad I don't live there and now I have at least one more reason not to visit there any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
It is nearly impossible to do a study where you watch for every conceivable chemical that ever has or ever could exist.
On the contrary, mass spectrometry makes it pretty easy
Mass spec is not a magic bullet. For reasons I mentioned to an earlier reply, it cannot identify all possible compounds in solution. Being as the fracking mix itself is always shrouded in "trade secret" cover it is impossible to know what to watch for and hence the likelihood of finding anything is not real great. Are there polar compounds in the fracking mix? We don't know. Are there highly charged compounds in the fracking mix? We don't know. Are there volatile organics in the fracking mix? We don't know that, either.
Those are just a few classes of compounds that can make mass spectrometry more difficult than what you describe, especially if the experiment is being run in a semi-blind fashion.
Hence the problem remains that we don't know what the compounds are that we are supposed to look for. Without knowing even a few simple chemical facts about them, our chances of detecting them isn't great.
It's pretty easy to run water through a gas chromatograph / mass spec and see if it has anything other than water in it, and how much of that stuff it has.
I do MS and MS data interpretation on a regular basis and I need to point out to you that you are oversimplifying the situation. MS detection is limited by - at the very least - two important factors; the ion source and the ion detector. If you don't know what compounds you are looking for, you may well not be able to ionize them using any of your common methods (water and most alcohols are great examples of this; they usually are shed in the ionization process). Similarly if you don't know the appropriate mass window for your molecule you may miss them in detection completely as every detector has its sweet spot where it does a better job of detecting ions.
In other words, mass spec is great but it is no cure all. A MS experiment can be doomed to failure if there is inadequate advanced knowledge of the sample that is being examined.
How can they be sure that they didn't detect the fracking chemicals when the industry continues to refuse to reveal the identity of said chemicals? It is nearly impossible to do a study where you watch for every conceivable chemical that ever has or ever could exist.
You can get a sticker for this license and put it in what remains of the rear window of your old Chevy truck, right next to your infinitely clever "terrorist hunting permit".
Why do companies feel they're entitled to this kind of information?
I'll play the devil's advocate here and suggest that RIM might not have done this out of a sense of entitlement, but rather out of a sense of laziness or generally poor programming. This information is not necessarily all that valuable to them anyways.
Pretty much everyone who owns a BlackBerry should be asking if they can really trust the device.
The device just came our, and this applies only to the two newest blackberries. The bigger question is how long will it take them to correct this. They have a choice here; they can either say "oops, we didn't mean to do that" and patch it so that this information isn't passed on in the future, or they can try to come up with some obfuscated excuse why this data being passed on doesn't hurt the user. If they do the former, then it can be attributed to human error. If they do the latter then they might wan to consider closing their doors for good.
The environment that a person grows up in can significantly impact the person they become in not so obvious ways.
I don't disagree with this point.
However, biomarkers can show change in individuals in response to their environment and any of a number of other factors. To take metabolites as an example, even if you only ate dry corn flakes for the rest of your life you would still have variations in your metabolites over time and in response to various non-food stimuli. Similarly the full biomarker profile also includes proteins (which change in expression, modification, and digestion profile over time) and hormones (which show the same variability in bodily fluids) amongst other things.
There has been research using identical twins that demonstrates this key point.
And those identical twins would have different biomarker profiles.
No, the US government will not fund this. Why? The US government doesn't expand funding on any kind of science, unless it directly benefits the military or the military-industrial complex.
OK, so spin it that you can find the most suitable soldiers and weed out the conscientious objectors and the pussies. This way you can get the super-soldiers.
But how do you prevent the psychopaths from going off into villages to rape and murder when the campaign is taking the evening off? How do you prevent the psychopaths from murdering their fellow soldiers if they are annoyed by an order?
There has been a lot of research done in recent years towards looking for biomarkers for a variety of ailments. The problem though is that the biomarker based tests rarely end up being statistically reproducible across a meaningful number of samples; often suffering from too many FPs or too many missed diagnoses. This is worth looking in to, but the odds of it ever developing into a single assay to find the nascent psychopaths in our population are not very good. It has a better chance of becoming a screening method for "hey these people should consider seeking mental health help" than anything but of course you can't force someone to see a shrink just because of a blood test if they are otherwise functioning adults.
Biomarkers are beyond DNA. Biomarkers are proteins, metabolites, epigenetic markers, and a variety of other things that are beyond just the DNA itself.
No, the US government will not fund this. Why? The US government doesn't expand funding on any kind of science, unless it directly benefits the military or the military-industrial complex. This doesn't directly benefit either so it will be lucky if it ever sees a single federal dime.
So, what we have is you cherry picking my words to misrepresent them
How am I misrepresenting your words when I am quoting them directly? Does it scare you that much to be confronted with your fabrications?
I would suggest maybe you should try building an honest argument instead, it would be much less difficult for you to defend.
making unsupported assumptions, resorting to insults to avoid admitting you know I'm right,
I particularly enjoy that combination of statements there. In your second statement you yourself commit the very act that you are trying to accuse me of doing in the first. I will say it again though, I know you are not right. You are a repeat liar on this matter with no credibility.
and generally making an ass out of yourself
What did you say before about unsupported assumptions? But go ahead, call me names if it makes you feel better at night. It doesn't change the facts.
Nice to know that you think you know everything that happened that night and have basically convicted a man on that unsupported knowledge.
Nice unsupported assumption there!
You obviously know better than the jury and, in fact, have magical knowledge of the events of that night.
I never claimed any such magical knowledge. You, however, are doing something you were talking about just in your previous post... what was it again? Oh, yeah...
unsupported assumptions
You're good with those. Too bad they don't help your cause.
I like how you totally discount my actual experience
Because there is no reason to believe you. You have lied about a large number of things and been evasive about even more. You are clearly not above making up stories out of thin air to support your argument.
to the point of saying that it is in no way like what happened to Zimmerman. We were both attacked, knocked to the ground, straddled, and had our head slammed into concrete
Sure, you were. Was that before or after the time you single handedly prevented the sears tower from being destroyed by militant Taoist rebels from outer Berserkistan?
The only difference was the races in involved and the fact I didn't have a gun.
Being as we don't have solid evidence that it actually happened to Zimmerman in that way either, yes they might be very similar. We certainly don't have any reason to believe it happened to you in the way you claim, and you already have been dodgy on whether or not it actually was similar to the way that Zimmerman's team claimed it happened to him. If you can't get your facts straight the first time through your new story I'm not going to wait around for you to make them up again.
Tell us, have you ever experienced anything like it at all?
I'm not the one claiming to have.
Or, are you just spouting off saying what Zimmerman could and could not have done with no experience what so ever?
The evidence does not irrefutably support his story, and the other person involved in the encounter is dead.
We also know that if Martin hadn't attacked Zimmerman, no one would have been shot.
We don't know for sure - and will never know for sure - if Martin attacked Zimmerman first or if Zimmerman provoked the attack and Martin was acting in his own self-defense. We do know for sure though that if Zimmerman would have just stayed away - as repeatedly asked to do so by the 911 dispatcher - then there would have been no confrontation at all and Martin would still be alive. Zimmerman instead brought his gun with him and confronted someone who he was specifically asked to leave alone. Zimmerman had a choice to make, and he chose the choice that lead to the death of
Defense Chief Urges Big Cuts In Military Spending
Budget cuts are fiscally conservative. Slashdot conservatives endorse and celebrate them.
House Passes Massive Medical Insurance Bill, 219-212
Health Care Reform
The massive handout to the health insurance companies - which conservatives like to call "Obamacare" without any sense of how it came to be - would be the wet dream of every republican president we have ever had in this country. Ever since Nixon (when insurance companies really started to gain their profit and power in this country) the insurance industry has owned nearly every politician in this country regardless of their stripes. We have never had a republican president who would not have signed that bill.
Inspectors Rule That Canterbury Is Sufficiently Gay
There was no endorsement of that by slasdhot, and being as it was posted by the deeply conservative samzenpus I would wager it was posted to become a target of ridicule. Notice that the summary includes the statement that the study cost "thousands of pounds", which lead to a discussion of wasteful government spending (even though it was mostly American readers telling the British what they should be spending taxpayer money on).
Microsoft Pushes For Gay Marriage In Washington State
That is a company exerting pressure on government, which is a very conservative ideal on its own. Hell many of the conservatives here want to see damn near every government function handled by for-profit companies, they would see this as a step in the right direction.
Europe + Anglosphere + US liberals and progressives + (libertarians on social issues) = quite a tendency toward left thinking on Slashdot.
Care to try again to demonstrate that actually being true? You failed so far but I'm willing to give you another chance.
Ho Chi Minh was a communist
No, he really wasn't much of a communist. He lead a communist movement but did not hold true to communist ideals when he had power. There is a very, very important distinction there.
and that is pretty much always on the left even if there are left and right factions in any party.
Communist ideals are on the left, yes. However the actions that most self-proclaimed communist leaders take once in power are almost invariably from the opposite end.
If you want to continue your education about the history of socialist rule, try watching this: The Soviet Story
The Soviets were not in application socialists or communists. Their actual leadership philosophy was closer to authoritarian ring-wing fascism, which could hardly be further from the ideals of communism. If you want to claim yourself to be in some way knowledgeable on the ideas of communism you need to at least start at the source and read the Communist Manifesto. The manifesto is not long, and it is freely available on plenty of web sites. Read it, and you will realize that the Soviets, the Chinese ruling party, and most others who claimed themselves in revolution to be "communist" basically used Marx's writings as toilet paper.
You can spare me any arguments that communism has never been implemented properly as many have tried.
So you are saying now that your argument depends on denying reality?
It isn't possible.
Whether or not it is possible is immaterial to the fact that the people you call out as communists are simply not communist in their ideals.
The video above points out some of the issues.
It probably overlooks the fact that Marx never intended for Communism to be applied to large countries (by population or area). It fails because it creates a power vacuum that eventually someone will fill.
It is a bloody mess pretty much everywhere it's tried.
Though likely not for any reason you have ever considered.
In what universe is someone unarmed when they are carrying a gun? It makes no difference when you believe the gun was drawn, George was undoubtedly armed
Zimmerman was armed
OK so we admit that you are playing with words here to further your agenda. We agree that indeed Zimmerman was armed. It doesn't matter if Martin knew Zimmerman was armed or not, the important bit is that Zimmerman knew he was himself carrying deadly force and choosing to enter a situation in which he did not need to.
We will never be able to determine for sure who attacked whom first, as one person is dead. We do know for sure that this happened only because George followed him, though. The confrontation was created by him.
That is a false statement. Perhaps you should review the witness testimony. A prosecution witness indicated that Martin approached and confronted Zimmerman.
There were other witnesses who claimed otherwise. More so, if you are being followed by someone, who are breaking no laws to ask them why they are following you. Even if we take that statement to be truthful that Martin asked Zimmerman why he was following him we don't know for sure the order of events that unfolded after that.
If Martin had continued on to his destination, there would have been no confrontation at all.
We cannot say that for sure. Zimmerman was following him, why should we be sure that Zimmerman wouldn't have escalated the situation further had Martin ignored him? Zimmerman was already asked by the 911 dispatcher to leave the kid alone and he ignored that request. Zimmerman was asked by the neighborhood not to carry a weapon and he ignored that request as well. We do know that if Zimmerman had actually stayed away from Martin, then the two would not have had a confrontation.
Aren't you going to address the claim and offer? No?
You are a stupid person who made a stupid offer. You can't possibly expect a more direct response to it than that.
I guess we can infer your answer from that. Zimmerman didn't have to aim. All he had to do was draw the weapon and put it in approximate contact with the person on top of him and pull the trigger.
Which is no small feat either. If you are getting your bell rung repeatedly against concrete as the defense claimed, you are going to have a lot of difficulty reaching for a weapon. Zimmerman claims he was dramatically overpowered by a 16 year old kid who weighed barely half what he did; if that is the case how was he able to reach for his gun?
And, having been in the position Zimmerman claims to have been in and having experienced such a thing, yes such an event is possible.
You're full of shit. I am willing to bet you have not experienced what Zimmerman claims to have been through that night.
Granted I didn't have a gun
OK, so you weren't in the same situation then. Thank you for supporting my claim.
but I was able to grab something from the ground and hit my assailant dazing him and then buck him off me.
That makes the situation even more different as grabbing some theoretical object from the ground is a different motion altogether than drawing a holstered weapon. Of course since you haven't experienced anything that vaguely resembles what Zimmerman claims to have been through, you have no idea what you are talking about.
So the /. coverage of Global Wraming
I presume you mean global Warming? I'm not familiar with this Wraming thing you are talking about. The only stories I have seen here on global warming have been about the science of it, and the science of global warming is - regardless of what you might try to claim to the contrary - non-political.
Edward Snowden, Wikileaks and Bradley Manning were strictly from a conservative perspective? Yeah. Right.
I haven't seen any of them covered here (or anywhere else for that matter) as liberal causes. Indeed when they are covered here they are quickly created into conservative champions for a better world, fighting against the evil leftist new world order.
Also, in case you hadn't noticed, Ho Chi Mihn was a communist. Communists are generally considered leftists in most of the world
I see the problem here. You apparently are, like many slashdot conservatives, incapable of distinguishing between people who call themselves communists and the actual communist ideals that Marx set forward. What Marx championed was leftist. Was pretty well every leader who took the communist label for themselves since Stalin was not; this includes every communist leader in Asia. Go read the communist manifesto - it is not a long read and you can read the full text online for free- and then try again.
He seems to have embraced communism as more than just a way to get support to fight the French.
He embraced it only as a label. Authoritarian leaders are automatically not embracing communism, period. Authoritarians are almost universally using tactics of the far right.
Back the fuck up.
To where?
As Zimmerman was apparently unarmed
In what universe is someone unarmed when they are carrying a gun? It makes no difference when you believe the gun was drawn, George was undoubtedly armed.
Even if Martin was afraid, he attacked and knocked Zimmerman to the ground.
We will never be able to determine for sure who attacked whom first, as one person is dead. We do know for sure that this happened only because George followed him, though. The confrontation was created by him.
he attacked and knocked Zimmerman to the ground.
That has not been determined with certainty. Only one person from the conflict was able to give a statement as to what happened, and they did not say anything under oath at the trial. At that point, Zimmerman wasn't a threat (remember Zimmmerman didn't have his gun drawn) and Martin could have run away.
If the other person has a gun, running from them isn't very useful as you certainly won't be able to outrun a bullet.
We can get together and you can lie down with your head on a sidewalk. I will straddle you and pound your head into the concrete two or three times.
If you actually believe that is how it happened, then how do you explain George being able to draw, aim, and fire his weapon? The story simply doesn't add up. Any normal person after having experienced such an event would not be able to do such a thing.
I'm not aware of a law against it.
Zimmerman was from the neighborhood WATCH. As far as I ever heard, there was no sanctioned neighborhood pursue, harrass, and shoot group. He was entrusted to report suspicious activity to the police and was asked to stand down to wait for the police to show up. Instead he decided to pull out his weapon and chase down the kid. Zimmerman was not law enforcement, he escalated a situation that didn't even exist until he showed up.
It is on slashdot because it is a conservative victory, and this is a conservative web site. Any news that proclaims victory for conservatives - even if they are a loss for justice itself - automatically make the front page. Expect to see a front page story here when the Texas governor signs the latest anti-abortion bill as well.
ROFLMAO. The political views expressed on slashdot are usually somewhat to the left of Karl Marx, Mao Tse Tung and Ho Che Mihn.
Front page stories, comment volume, and comment moderation here all refute your idea. Of course, calling Ho Chi Minh a leftist just because of his association with the Viet Cong and the Vietnam war is shortsighted and suggests to me that you don't have any real sense of what the terms conservative and liberal mean to the world beyond the USA.
If you can find a single front-page story from slashdot that was posted here in the past 5 years that was obviously celebrating anything less conservative than this story or anything GWB would have signed, I would be astonished. Many stories on the slashdot front page are so obviously conservative that they make the most conservative presidents the USA has ever had look like genies on valium.
Why did the defense not need to explain how he was able to draw, aim, and fire his weapon while in such a position? This seems like a highly improbable situation that someone would be able to pull out a holstered weapon and get off an accurate shot while they are being beaten nearly to the point of losing consciousness.
For one, I'm surprised they were able to find enough people in that entire state who were able to count to 6 and hadn't already formed an opinion on this case (of course, the jury will be forever out on that matter).
However, equally important here is that the prosecution was a product of the state. The state had little interest in actually pursuing justice in this matter as they would have a huge problem on there hands if a criminal case were to lead to questioning of the stand your ground law. The state presented a case only because a crime was committed, however they were not obligated to do a competent job of presenting that case. They did such a half-assed job on this that Zimmerman could have been represented by Ronald McDonald and still would have been acquitted in that state.
Was Zimmerman an open-source advocate or something?
It appears he was an advocate of an open-source legal system, where you can write your own laws and then apply them as you see fit. As to whether or not he ever submitted his code for review is another question, he may have just been his own rogue alpha tester.
He who has the gun, is automatically guilty regardless of the facts.
Fixed that for you.
What the fuck facts are you referring to? The facts are that he was a neighborhood watch volunteer who ignored the 911 dispatcher and chased down a kid because he thought he "looked suspicious". He then killed a kid who was armed with only a bag of skittles. If he would have followed the dispatcher's advice and waited for actual law enforcement - rather than taking on the role himself - that kid would still be alive.
However there seems to be NO reason to have this story on Slashdot.
It is on slashdot because it is a conservative victory, and this is a conservative web site. Any news that proclaims victory for conservatives - even if they are a loss for justice itself - automatically make the front page. Expect to see a front page story here when the Texas governor signs the latest anti-abortion bill as well.
leave general news on whatever sites people use for news and try to keep at least some shred of technology within Slashdot stories.
You are thinking of the slashdot that we had back in 2000 or so. That slashdot is dead and buried. We aren't even lucky enough to have its old source code any more at this time.
Does anyone know if the result was related to the "Stand Your Ground" law? I'm having trouble finding a good answer.
His defense played both sides of "stand your ground". They claimed he was attacked and entitled to use it, even though he claimed he was not familiar with it (even though he took courses that covered it). They also tried to claim that it was somehow valid in a case where the person with the gun is pursuing the other person.
Somehow, in Florida, this all makes sense. I'm glad I don't live there and now I have at least one more reason not to visit there any time soon.
He who has the gun, has the power and the right to do whatever the fuck he wants.
1. Tell everyone in Florida that 3.3 meters of water is coming
2. Allow the person who understands what 3.3 meters of water means to move to wherever they want
3. Celebrate