Unless they have prior felony convictions, the members of the RNC Welcoming Committee all have the right to bear arms.
On Saturday afternoon, he displayed a number of the confiscated items: a gun, throwing knives, a bow and arrows, flammable liquids, paint, slingshots, rocks and buckets of urine.
"We know these things were going to be used as weapons," Fletcher said, a charge protesters and their advocates vigorously disputed.
Fletcher however, stressed that he and other agencies had informants planted inside this and other groups for "a long period of time."
Clearly, somebody is guilty of conspiracy here. I wonder whether it's the activists or the fuzz, but after reading the Star Tribune article, the arrests look legit and the anarchists look dirty. I also suspect that they're criminals. Responsible gun owners never store their buckets of urine nearby. Corrosion.
But then, Salon includes a very important detail that the Star Tribune omitted: the cops never presented a warrant! Because they failed to present a warrant, Title 18, USC, Section 242 says they were "acting under color of law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom to willfully deprive or cause to be deprived from any person those rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution and laws of the U.S."
In the house that had just been raided, those inside described how a team of roughly 25 officers had barged into their homes with masks and black swat gear, holding large semi-automatic rifles, and ordered them to lie on the floor, where they were handcuffed and ordered not to move. The officers refused to state why they were there and, until the very end, refused to show whether they had a search warrant. They were forced to remain on the floor for 45 minutes while the officers took away the laptops, computers, individual journals, and political materials kept in the house. One of the individuals renting the house, an 18-year-old woman, was extremely shaken as she and others described how the officers were deliberately making intimidating statements such as "Do you have Terminator ready?" as they lay on the floor in handcuffs.
I hope that the fraudulent arrests are prosecuted as kidnapping, committed during conspiracy against rights.
Title 18, U.S.C., Section 241
Conspiracy Against Rights
This statute makes it unlawful for two or more persons to conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person of any state, territory or district in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him/her by the Constitution or the laws of the United States, (or because of his/her having exercised the same).
It further makes it unlawful for two or more persons to go in disguise on the highway or on the premises of another with the intent to prevent or hinder his/her free exercise or enjoyment of any rights so secured.
Punishment varies from a fine or imprisonment of up to ten years, or both; and if death results, or if such acts include kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse or an attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for any term of years, or for life, or may be sentenced to death.
These jack-booted thugs need to be reminded who they're responsible to protect and serve. If standing trial for a death penalty offense doesn't put them in line, convict and execute.
John McCain is no longer maverick enough to talk straight to the religious extremists in the GOP (assuming he ever really was the "maverick" that the fascist media portrays) as evidenced by his buddying up to Hagee and other fringe elements, whose beliefs he has had to publicly renounce afterward. He's been trying, since declaring his candidacy for President at least, to play both sides of Christian fundamentalism. Listening to him (or his goons) try to say something that's agreeable to everybody about the role of embryos in science and medicine makes clear that he lacks the strength of character to play it straight, whenever religion is involved.
But embryonic stem cells pose a political challenge for McCain. Although Holtz-Eakin says McCain is anti-abortion, he has broken with the anti-abortion movement on the embryonic stem cell issue and joined Democrats in supporting a bill that would expand federal funding for stem-cell research.
Holtz-Eakin says the Arizona senator still favors such legislation, but hopes new research will make it unnecessary. McCain's "hope is that we may reach the day when we no longer need to use embryonic stem cells as the foundation of this particular line of research, where we can move to the more recent advances and take away the tough decisions about life versus science," he said.
The fact is that embryos are not alive. I liked McCain in 2000, but he's no longer a straight shooter. Couldn't hit the broad side of a barn, these days.
Holtz-Eakin says McCain's time in the Senate has made him comfortable with scientists who may have politically unwelcome views. "He [McCain] has always felt that sound science is a foundation of good public policy," he said. "He believes deeply that the science should be the science. Legislators can then learn from that science, and go forward and deliver good public policies."
Correct, but hardly substantive enough to be worth saying, nor of reading for that matter. The statement is not very specific. I think McCain is as ill-informed of science generally as he admits to being of the dismal science, economics, and this article did nothing to alter that opinion.
As for the presumptive Democratic nominee, Barnes says an Obama administration would be much more transparent, so it would be hard to suppress or distort scientific findings. "We're talking about things like videotaping various proceedings so everyone can see it," she said. "Using technology to not only watch, but also engage with the federal government so they have a better sense of what's going on."
The word "transparent" is vague and over-used (NB: and the choice of the author, not of the Obama staffer), but "videotaping" is a specific proposal, and in a couple lines, Obama's spokesperson committed not only to making more information available to us, but to a means of doing it. That's the kind of straight answer I want in return for my tax dollars.
Cnet objects to ensuring that school district funds are used for educational, not recreational purposes.
In our 2006 Technology Voters' Guide, which ranked Senate votes from July 1998 through May 2005, Biden received a mere 37.5 percent score because of his support for Internet filters in schools and libraries and occasional support for Internet taxes.
Computer viruses, spread via the Internet, have cost tens of billions of dollars. Suggesting that such a cost center be subject to taxation is no different than taxing cigarettes and alcohol to discourage their use and provide for medical treatment of related diseases. Those are frivolous complaints, but they're equated with the current administration's systematic and reckless abuse of the Fourth Amendment right to privacy.
If I get my opinion of Phil Zimmerman or the right to freedom from unlawful search & seizure -- or anything or anybody for that matter -- from Cnet, may God help me!
To equate Obama's vote for the most recent FISA bill to McCain's consistent voting record in support of warmongering and surveillance across the board is unconscionably disingenuous. Obama said the bill contained other provisions which he feels are genuinely so necessary for national security that even the objectionable telecom immunity must be accepted -- for now. McCain, on the contrary, is a simple military-industrial stooge, who believes "just kidding" excuses singing "bomb Iran" and that "former POW" equals "war hero." Unless he's subjected to daily waterboarding in Guantanamo for the remainder of his campaign, I don't believe he remembers enough of his vacation at the Hanoi Hilton to take war as seriously as the leader of a free world must take it. Anybody who votes for such a moron, who cracks jokes about war, votes to lose all their offspring to the next draft, and deserves just that.
Your reaction is so personal, I wonder, are you an astronomer? Department Head of one or more of the researchers? What enormous personal stake in this field has evoked such a vehement response? Even if you were direct supervisor of every single one of those researchers, how dare you presume any of them owes you perfection? If you knew enough to do as well, you would have to know enough about the scientific method to have not assumed that a hypothesis had been a theory. It was never portrayed as such.
The error is entirely your own. How's that for black and white, you clown?
What I hate the most...
So personal!
What I hate the most is the very concept of theories. The idea that some half-assed guess gets passed around as an acceptable explanation until proven otherwise just strikes a nerve with me. I wish science would stick to black and white, "we know this" and "we don't know this".
You either understand the difference between a hypothesis and a theory and don't whine about scientists' fallibility, or you're not qualified to comment on science at all and as a result when you do comment, you whine like a fool.
Stop this "we think this and that, have no real clue, but are going to pat ourselves on the back for pretending to know something we don't".
Unless you are a fellow astronomer, and have a better model for the very radial-velocity variation around TW Hya here under discussion, but your superior hypothesis and research have not been published due to some personal bias, you have no complaint about those scientists that are investigating that phenomenon nor that their success is as yet incomplete. If you're not curious enough about whether it's a planet or a cold spot on the sun to contribute to the research, and if you're not appreciative enough of the scientific process to at least cheer for the researchers, just go away.
Sports fans often cheer for each goal scored, and almost never whine in the middle of a contest that it isn't won yet. Boxing and races may be exceptions, so let's keep this sports analogy to (timed) ball games. People attend ball games only to support of one of the two teams, not to bitch and moan about ball games being a waste of other people's time because those of us who hold that opinion have the option to not attend, so we simply don't waste our own time on ball games. Such is the extent of one's right to "hate" any endeavor in which we are disinterested: non-participation. And neither I nor any of the authors show up at brothels or johns' homes to heckle you about your career. Be a good sport and kindly show the same respect for professional scientists that we show to professions we don't enjoy or appreciate. You obviously don't appreciate science so just go away, and stay there. Yes, I promise to do the same when your program begins, Jerry Springer.
This is why I can't stand the FSF. Sure guys, it would be nice if everything was open and free, but that is NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN.
Yes, it will -- no thanks to you. Eventually, just as has happened in other industries in their adolescence, digitized entertainment will settle on de facto standards, for the technicians' convenience and because the superiority of the best methods will become known widely enough that willing victims of trash like the.mp3 &.wav formats will disappear from the market. For example, electricians all use (in the United States) 120V/60Hz for residential outlets (AC because it's better for transmission, 60Hz because lower frequencies were found to cause headaches and agitation in some customers, so nobody will accept that now that the cause is known) and all plumbing works lefty=loosy, righty=tighty (standardized purely for convenience -- the opposite could function just as well but it's important to standardize, one way or the other). For now, a lot in IT is as obscure to most IT customers as building methods were when the Masons were a secret society. This, too, shall pass.
Not to mention that Theora and Vorbis are only used by a very tiny sliver of the population. Face it, FSF: The only people using these formats for their personal use are FOSS advocates and on toward the zealot end of the spectrum.
You're half right: few people care about 128k mp3 or comparable.aac v..wav & lossless compression, ie.flac. You're half wrong: the reason for the above is not that we are "on toward the zealot end of the spectrum," but because we are also few who own earphones or speaker/amplifier sets accurate enough to hear the difference. But if you ever incorporate an audio sample into your own work, the damage of repeated compression (the lossier, the worse) is more likely to become noticeable, so it's not unreasonable to suppose that mash-up creative models will become popular enough in the near future for.ogg or.flac to become undisputed king. Probably not before the next major revision to the iPod, but possibly within the next decade. Certainly, not "NEVER."
BTW, I had a similar reaction to the OP to what you expressed for the FSF. I don't see the sense in picking on the BBC, but not because open standards are "NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN." I would instead pin the blame on Microsoft, Apple, and last time I checked, RealNetworks, because those are major drivers of digitized entertainment formats and do not support.ogg nor.flac, both of which are superior to.aac,.mp3 and.wav, which those "major players" push. Ogg is better lossy compression, and FLAC is better because lossless compression is better than useless bloat, which is a perfectly honest and accurate description of the silent bits in WAV files. If any of the aforementioned corporate megoliths were truly the ruthless competitors that they pose as in earnings reports, conventions and press releases, they would embrace open formats without reservation and battle for the best implementation of the best totally open formats. Unfortunately, they do not profit only by providing the best value possible to their customers. They differ from Adam Smith's model of free enterprise in their care for shareholders' interests, even if those are contrary to the interest of their customers. When profit can be reaped any way other than serving customers' demands, that signals one or both of two things: an immature market, or an overregulated one. We know IT is immature. I expect we'll disagree in the future about whether IT's also overregulated.
You're absolutely right, the FBI's excuse about Troyer's search method is a cowardly, blatantly dishonest cop-out.
Indeed, experts generally agree that most -- but not all -- of the Arizona matches were to be expected statistically because of the unusual [sic] way Troyer searched for them.
In a typical criminal case, investigators look for matches to a specific profile. But the Arizona search looked for any matches among all the thousands of profiles in the database, greatly increasing the odds of finding them.
An honest test of the rigor of any matching system is to pursue all matches, meaning they should not only welcome "greatly increasing the odds of finding them," their goal should be maximizing the odds of finding spurious matches. That requires that in a set of 65,000 DNA profiles, each datum must be compared to every other datum, for a total of 65,000^2 = 4.225 Billion DNA profile pairs to compare, none of which should yield a match. This is exactly the same algorithm assumed by the 1 in 113 Billion estimate of the statistical unlikelihood of a match, so their complaints about an "unusual" search method are 100% invalid, and they all know it.
My interest also waned when I got to the allegation that $30 million was advertised as $300 million, unsubstantiated by any named source. Sure, I can Google it, but a good article saves me the trouble. What I did find interesting was the claim that Microsoft's offers have been made on days that Yahoo's share price is lowest. I also don't recall a source for that and haven't checked up on it myself, but it certainly could draw a lot of people's attention to the lowest prices of Yahoo's stock, giving the impression that those prices are typical. I would hope that actual investors wouldn't be fooled by that, but having witnessed a dot-com bubble with a real estate bubble encore, I don't really believe the average investor does any more research than the average casino gambler. So I could give 1/2 Insightful point to the article for that.
but the 'crowd' I'm thinking of would simply cry out because *potentially* AVG *might* keep track of such information, sell it to the bad guys and become rich overnight.
You mean they would complain about something that isn't even happening just like you are doing. Good one. I apologize for not getting your joke sooner.
grin, but if they'd do that the 'privacy-crowd' will start yelling that AVG is 'illegally observering' their browsing habits...
I would not have any 'illegally observering' [sic] objection, unless the IP addresses or other personal information of AVG users were stored with the URLs we report, and that was not part of AC's suggestion. Your straw man, observing browsing habits, is a valid concern, but not relevant to AC's idea. A cache which stores only URLs hosting malware, which is all that AC actually recommended, does not technologically necessitate any invasion of privacy.
Self-respect is a fantastic thing to have, but it must be earned. I'm sure you wish you had.
How old is the Sun? How old is the Earth?
Irrelevant. You have an unrealized wish to find fault in the plethora of specific published research that has proved global warming, so in desperation you appeal to the scientifically illiterate voters with the fallacy that understanding current conditions impossible, because of what we do not know about the Billions of years of inapplicable temperature data on Earth, under drastically different conditions, in periods in which conditions suitable for the existence of mammals were not present. You're pathetic. Before humans evolved, we can safely say that overall conditions had not yet become suitable for humans, and ignore those Billions of years altogether.
To those you wish to claim omniscience
No, but I'm not surprised you think so. To paraphrase Asimov, any sufficiently advanced intelligence cannot be distinguished from omniscience by of an utter ignoramus like you.
How complex is the atmosphere?
The atmosphere is not too complex to know which data are most strongly correlated to global mean temperature, and to favor those with the most research. And it's not too complex for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to have a good track record at predicting how the upcoming year's global mean temperature will compare to the previous recorded years. The NOAA's record isn't perfect, but it's good. That is just evidence that science works, not anything about "omniscience," which nothing and nobody gave you any cause to bring up except your own non-sentience.
So I went back to Microsoft.com and looked at the instructions. I have to click on a folder called WindowsXP. Why should I do that? Windows Update knows I am on Windows XP.
What does it mean to have to click on that folder? So I get a bunch of confusing stuff but sure enough one of them is Moviemaker.
So I do the download. The download is fast but the Install takes many minutes. Amazing how slow this thing is.
What it means to have to click on that folder is that you have not provided adequate leadership on programming, the primary function of your software company. Because you have established no rules to make installation convenient for your paying customers, as the filesystem hierarchy standard does for Linux users for free, your programmers just toss their junk together in whatever way is most convenient for them. After all this time, to have failed to create an analogous Windows filesystem hierarchy standard, is atrocious, negligent incompetence.
College should teach programmers how to write efficient algorithms. You should teach them how to integrate those algorithms into a larger project, with your own model of advanced object-oriented programming, which you should have developed but have not. Then, every one of your programmers would know the same convention for the entire path of any downloaded install binary. It appears from your complaints in this article that you have not even defined a directory naming standard. I wasn't planning to be so hard on you for the many failures of your products to increase my convenience or to perform their advertised functions, but after your literally monumental public displays of incompetence, you have the audacity to whine that all the good programmers are foreign.
You are not a good programmer. You have failed to demonstrate the expertise to define standards that would ensure that useful information is made available by your various product teams to the other teams, for your buzzword "interoperability" to be meaningful within your own brand. You are therefore not qualified to speak at a junior college computer science faculty barbecue about good programming, or to anybody else about any other aspect of technical aptitude, because you have demonstrated a complete lack of any. The spectacle of you speaking to Congress as a technology expert is an embarrassment to the nation. I do not believe a corporation is entitled to the individual right to Free Speech which is incorrectly asserted as defense of corporate donations to politics. I do believe that the irrational exuberance of the dot-com boom that led to unprecedented price-to-earning ratios, which necessitated the eventual correction of the dot-com bust, was a direct result of that inappropriate tolerance of corporate interference in government. Politicians who should have been neutral were instead at the very best, shading the truth to say favorable things about their information technology donors whenever the subject was raised, and investors foolish enough to believe that anything they said about that industry was said as representative of the people concluded that then-current stock prices were likely to be justified by near-future earnings, and were taken to the cleaners.
You, of course, are not a big enough fish to be single-handedly responsible for all, or even for very much of that, but you are the most willing public mouthpiece of the information technology industry's thirst for cheaper foreign laborers. I want you to shut the hell up about all immigration laws, for one thing because your software demonstrates your abject lack of qualification to make any of the statements that you have previously made, to Congress no less, about the lack of talented programmers. You don't know a good programmer from Shinola, and nobody in the Congress would help you pretend that you are, excep
Who, unlike cameras, can come to the aid of the public - and run after any legitimate criminals.
Where the police want to do police work, surveillance cameras are unwanted because they're worse than useless. In fact, they're positively correlated to increases in violence. I don't know, but I suppose that when shoplifting becomes impossible because all the commercial areas are infested with video cameras, the same crooks resort to mugging, presumably when their victims are out of frame.
The implicit justification for the video surveillance system is security. But it is far from clear how the proliferation of video cameras through public spaces in D.C. would have any real impact on crime. In fact in England, where there are so many public cameras that they have stopped keeping count, incidents of violent crime have risen since the network was installed. Furthermore, in Oakland, CA, officials considered video surveillance for three years and rejected it. Police Chief Joseph Samuels, Jr., stated that his department had hoped to be "among the pioneers in the field of taped video camera surveillance" but ultimately found that "there is no conclusive way to establish that the presence of video surveillance resulted in the prevention or reduction of crime."
The Supreme Court has previously ruled it satisfactory that obscenity be legally "defined," not by a single, universal definition, but by the fallacy "community standards," which, assuming such a thing even exists, obviously varies from community to community. In fact, however, standards of decency vary from person to person, and just law operates on a principle obviously never fathomed by the author of the aforementioned decision, that people have the right to uphold our own standards, not that everybody is held down to the standards of the most prudish.
Either the court that ruled on a depiction of animated fellatio in Grand Theft Auto forgot about that precedent, or (much more likely) grossly misjudged the standards of the community of Grand Theft Auto players. I think we all know that most in the community of GTA players would be more offended by poor animation than by the fact of fellatio being portrayed in the game, but how would any court know that? It would have to survey the community in question!
Theodore Frank, director of the Legal Center for the Public Interest at the American Enterprise Institute, believes that the lack of claimants proves that the case was meritless from the beginning. He submits that this lack of response proves that the plaintiffs claims were overblown, and as a consequence the suit may be deemed meritless and the lawyers who tried the case will not be able to collect their $1.3 million in legal fees they are demanding from Take-Two. Speaking to the New York Times, Frank says:
"There are two possibilities. Possibility one is they have a meritorious lawsuit and theyre selling out the class for attorneys fees. The other possibility is that, and frankly I think this is the more likely possibility, they brought a meritless lawsuit that had no business being brought to court at all."
Because I'm not a lawyer trying this case, and my only interest in this case is as a citizen who values my right to decide for myself what to consider indecent, I have no need to be as delicate as Mr. Frank. Of course it's "a meritless lawsuit that had no business being brought to court at all." The Supreme Court's own previous opinions on obscenity have no business being brought to court at all. Consider the lack of claimants in the GTA case in lieu of a formal survey of that community's standards. The court's incorrect estimate of that community's standards illustrates vividly that offering "community standards" instead of objectively defining what may be considered legally prohibited obscenity and what cannot be excluded from the First Amendment protection of free speech, is nothing better than a cop-out, and provides little or no value as precedent for subsequent judgements. To apply that "precedent" honestly would require a community survey for every obscenity case ever brought to court. Obviously, "community standards" do not provide a sufficient definition, in purely pragmatic terms, to have any positive value for purpose of upholding the rule of law. Laws are objective. Malleable statutes mean rule by fiat.
The definition of obscenity set forth in Roth was:
Speech which " . . . to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material, taken as a whole, appeals to prurient interest" and which is "utterly without redeeming social importance..."
Customers who are not so offended that they demand a full refund and willingly return their copy of the game are entitled to no compensation whatsoever for their offense. Whatever judge ruled that customers have the right to keep their game and receive punitive damages for having been offended by a work that they intend to keep should be disbarred.
"Somehow" was a polite way to mock the insane idea that human beings can control the climate.
Yes, I noticed what you were trying to do, and I picked that one word, "somehow," "to mock the insane idea that" of yours, that science has not absolutely determined how carbon dioxide traps heat, and that therefore the basic premise of anthropogenic global warming is a matter of dispute among legitimate scientists. It is not. As a matter of fact, radiative forcing has been known and well understood since Arrhenius, and I can prove the phenomenon to you right now, in terms that every reader can easily understand.
Standard street lights and fluorescent lights are generally considered less pleasant than old-fashioned filament bulbs because of the frequency of the photons they emit. All light bulbs operate by electrically stimulating photon emission from different substances, and each substance in The Universe has a unique emission spectrum, the set of frequencies of light it can emit. The emission spectrum of carbon dioxide is such that its thermal energy, aka heat, does not correspond to any emission wavelentghs and therefore cannot be radiated. Because radiation is one of only three physically possible means of heat transfer, the effect is not negligible. Most readers, even the "NERDS" for whom/. exists, will need to use teh Google to fully appreciate it, but all can easily understand: You're wrong and I'm mocking you.
Furthermore, by comparing the surface temperature of The Sun to the recorded surface temperatures on Earth and, just for emphasis, the flash point of humans, we can easily ascertain that a minute increase in the insulative properties of our atmosphere is real cause for grave concern.
I'm not sure the relevance of the link you gave to your post as it supports my comments and shows yours to be contradictory.
Yes you are, but you want to play coy. Fine. Tell me how little you understand about radiative forcing, and I'll publicly humiliate you with as much explanation of the physics as you omit. Hint: Shut the fuck up.
reply to TFA on wired.com, by 'rigatoni':
More data allows us to do what we're already doing faster and more efficiently, but it can't open any new possibilities without trying to interpret the data. Chris Anderson correctly observes that some value can in some spheres be extracted from the mere correlation of data (Do advertisers care why method A is correlated to more sales?), then incorrectly asserts a generalization based on his sometimes-correct observation of the superiority of correlation over the more challenging question of causation, that causation is categorically irrelevant. On the contrary, CxOs, directors and investors care very much why costs increase. Whether lesser employee expertise or greater fuel costs, for example, are the primary cause of reduced profit margins is a very important distinction which calls for robust, complete knowledge of theory to invest or shape corporate strategy intelligently. Even for the ideal search engine, one needs theory to know what terms to dump on the search engine. I won't subscribe to Wired, nor support any of Chris Anderson's future ventures, categorically.
Suckers. We're all suckers. I strongly suspect the fear of public exposure as dupes has more to do with Bush & Cheney not being impeached than the fear of public exposure as accomplices. If I was planning a conspiracy to counterfeit a rationale for an oil war, I wouldn't want a lot of people to know the plan. I would want a lot of people to feel stupid as soon as they start to learn about it. If they could be made to feel increasingly stupid as they learn more, they'd never even want to get to the bottom of it!
The idea had been going around for some time. Charles was not even the first Darwin to conceive of "evolution" of species.
Although he did not come up with natural selection, he did discuss ideas that his grandson elaborated on sixty years later, such as how life evolved from a single common ancestor, forming "one living filament". Ben Stein, eat my shorts!
Where has the Bush Administration denied the greenhouse effect warms the side of the Earth which isn't facing the Sun?
Oh, you meant they refuse to formally acknowledge U.S. human activity somehow controls the greenhouse effect. That's very different. What do you mean, "somehow"? Did you fail high school chemistry or just skip science education altogether?
The conspiracy theories are interesting, but house-of-cardish. Not if any of those speculators have ever received government subsidies. In that case, theories of market manipulation are very serious allegations, which oil industry profiteers would either have to lucratively pay off, or discredit as "conspiracy theories" to keep their loot. Or, was that the wrong pronoun? Should I be calling that "your loot"?
So, should ALL the people in the link I just provided, including Nancy Pelosi, Bill Clinton, Sandy Berger, John Kerry, Robert Byrd, Ted Kennedy, and the oracle himself, Al Gore all be tried for treason?
Origins: All of the quotes listed above are substantially correct reproductions of statements made by various Democratic leaders regarding Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's acquisition or possession of weapons of mass destruction. However, some of the quotes are truncated, and context is provided for none of them — several of these quotes were offered in the course of statements that clearly indicated the speaker was decidedly against unilateral military intervention in Iraq by the U.S.
If so, on what grounds? No, they did not say "THE EXACT SAME THING." They made similar statements, when discussing the real dangers of Iraq, but they did not ignore contradictory facts and they did not run a publicity campaign for the purpose of waging a war of aggression in Iraq.
First, nothing from the Huffington Post can be used as a source... EVER. It is opinions posted by the most ignorant of Americans, celebrities. If anything, having something said in the Huffington post should be used as COUTNER-evidence to whatever was said.
In my opinion, discarding any one article merely because it appears in the Huffington Post [or any other source] would be to subscribe to the premise of guilt by association, which I do not. Heh, I held my nose and read the article you posted from snopes. You're entitled to your opinions. Everybody else is equally entitled to our opinions, and that includes everybody who disagrees. That's life. The subject at hand is not difference of opinion, but irresponsible and dishonest representation of fact in the pursuit of others' opinions, voters' opinions, in one of the gravest of all political matters, declaration of war. To dismiss a fact merely because it's expressed by a person, or in a journal, with which you have a difference of opinion is to make the very same type of error as we are discussing.
However, I did notice that there was no mention of Sandy Berger, the Clinton security advisor stealing top secret documents and cutting them up with scissors during the 9-11 investigation. I guess that was no big deal, what with Bush lying and all.
That's a disgrace, no doubt about it and no argument, but it is not currently "news." It was not omitted from that article because of Democratic bias. That was the correct professional journalistic decision.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said yesterday that his intelligence service had warned the Bush administration before the U.S. invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein's government was planning attacks against U.S. targets both inside and outside the country.
Vladimir Putin, no matter how friendly he may be nor how pure his soul, is primarily responsible for advancing the interests of Russia, not of the United States. As those tend to overlap these days, it is wise to be receptive to any tips he offers, to take them seriously. But because he is primarily responsible not to us but to a foreign power, the correct next step is to validate what he says independently, with U.S. intelligence assets and never take him, nor any other foreign power, on feith. "Russian President Vladimir Putin said" is not relevant rebuttal to the findings of the U.S. Congress, for this U.S. citizen.
Your selective excerpts, Mr. Hiatt, only support the weak, in fact trivial assertion, that some of the tales that George Walker Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Ari Fleischer and Richard B. Cheney told the U.S. voters about Iraq prior to invading it, destabilizing the region and harming already difficult relations with Iran, were true. For your claim to be true ("It found nothing"), the full text of the report must not contain a single instance of conclusions that were not "generally substantiated by intelligence information."
It's strange, making me suspicious of your thesis, that with all the hyperlinks in that Washington Post article, not one points to the full text of the report it discusses, nor even to complete paragraphs or even complete sentences that specify, for example, on [sic] nuclear or biological weapons, just which of the "president's statements 'were substantiated by intelligence information.'" And it's strange that, among so many excerpts, all the excerpts from that article are sentence fragments, necessitating the improper grammar repeated ad nauseam, "On [fallacy]?. The president's statements 'were substantiated [by...].'" Did the complete report not begin those sentences with subjects that support the desired thesis?
I wondered, so I checked, and in fact this is obvious within the first paragraph, you lazy, pathetic excuse for a "journalist":
The major key judgments in the NIE, particularly that Iraq "is reconstituting its nuclear program," "has chemical and biological weapons," was developing an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) "probably intended to deliver biological warfare agents," and that "all key aspects - research & development (R&D), production, and weaponization - of Iraq's offensive biological weapons (BW) program are active and that most elements are larger and more advanced than they were before the Gulf War," either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting provided to the Committee. I can admire loyalty, even misplaced loyalty, up to a point. But willful ignorance of obvious facts is never admirable. If the subsequent excuses [Saddam was bad, he might have wanted to have nuclear yellow-cake from Nigeria despite never hearing of it, liberating the people of Iraq though we didn't do a thing about Darfur and now watch Zimbabwe like it's just a movie] offered by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and McCain had any validity, they should have been sufficient arguments in 2002/2003. Those were not valid arguments, and are still not now, as evidenced by our non-involvement in Zimbabwe and Darfur. They all lied. I'm not a lawyer, but I'd say it's obvious that in lying about matters of national security, with the result of initiating war despite lack of any clear and present danger in the world of fact, they all knowingly undermined the United States' ability to confront our real enemies, thus giving them comfort. Ergo, they all committed treason.
And, no, most of Congress did not know at that time anything but the cherry-picked version manufactured by Douglas Feith & co.
Although the measurement of casual browsing is less scientific than conducting a 'casual browsing' session, scripting it, then testing all browsers on exactly the same activity, I think it's still notable that Firefox 3's ~120MB memory usage was reached within ~148 seconds. The only other browser to ever reach what I would call an equilibrium state was Flock, and it took ~1300s. That indicates to me that regardless of whether or not the browsers all suffered the same load Firefox 3 is better at dealing with the load it was given. Observing that the author mentioned nothing about system or browser lock-up, and making the reasonable assumption that neither occurred, I conclude that for a wide range of system load, this test strongly suggests that Firefox 3 is the best of those tested at judging the load put on it, allocating the correct level of memory usage, and then sticking to it. I suppose this also implicitly assumes that the load even within one test is consistent, which also isn't quantified in the description of the 'benchmark.' Still, the author did put constraints on the number of browser windows and the number of tabs in each, so fairly stable load seems *likely*, and so I'm still inclined to think that reaching an equilibrium level of memory usage, and reaching it more quickly, are both indicative of good memory allocation and de-allocation.
Slashdot Mirror
On Saturday afternoon, he displayed a number of the confiscated items: a gun, throwing knives, a bow and arrows, flammable liquids, paint, slingshots, rocks and buckets of urine.
"We know these things were going to be used as weapons," Fletcher said, a charge protesters and their advocates vigorously disputed.
Fletcher however, stressed that he and other agencies had informants planted inside this and other groups for "a long period of time."
Clearly, somebody is guilty of conspiracy here. I wonder whether it's the activists or the fuzz, but after reading the Star Tribune article, the arrests look legit and the anarchists look dirty. I also suspect that they're criminals. Responsible gun owners never store their buckets of urine nearby. Corrosion.
But then, Salon includes a very important detail that the Star Tribune omitted: the cops never presented a warrant! Because they failed to present a warrant, Title 18, USC, Section 242 says they were "acting under color of law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom to willfully deprive or cause to be deprived from any person those rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution and laws of the U.S."
In the house that had just been raided, those inside described how a team of roughly 25 officers had barged into their homes with masks and black swat gear, holding large semi-automatic rifles, and ordered them to lie on the floor, where they were handcuffed and ordered not to move. The officers refused to state why they were there and, until the very end, refused to show whether they had a search warrant. They were forced to remain on the floor for 45 minutes while the officers took away the laptops, computers, individual journals, and political materials kept in the house. One of the individuals renting the house, an 18-year-old woman, was extremely shaken as she and others described how the officers were deliberately making intimidating statements such as "Do you have Terminator ready?" as they lay on the floor in handcuffs.
I hope that the fraudulent arrests are prosecuted as kidnapping, committed during conspiracy against rights.
Title 18, USC, Section 241
Title 18, U.S.C., Section 241 Conspiracy Against Rights
This statute makes it unlawful for two or more persons to conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person of any state, territory or district in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him/her by the Constitution or the laws of the United States, (or because of his/her having exercised the same).
It further makes it unlawful for two or more persons to go in disguise on the highway or on the premises of another with the intent to prevent or hinder his/her free exercise or enjoyment of any rights so secured.
Punishment varies from a fine or imprisonment of up to ten years, or both; and if death results, or if such acts include kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse or an attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for any term of years, or for life, or may be sentenced to death.
These jack-booted thugs need to be reminded who they're responsible to protect and serve. If standing trial for a death penalty offense doesn't put them in line, convict and execute.
But embryonic stem cells pose a political challenge for McCain. Although Holtz-Eakin says McCain is anti-abortion, he has broken with the anti-abortion movement on the embryonic stem cell issue and joined Democrats in supporting a bill that would expand federal funding for stem-cell research.
Holtz-Eakin says the Arizona senator still favors such legislation, but hopes new research will make it unnecessary. McCain's "hope is that we may reach the day when we no longer need to use embryonic stem cells as the foundation of this particular line of research, where we can move to the more recent advances and take away the tough decisions about life versus science," he said.
The fact is that embryos are not alive. I liked McCain in 2000, but he's no longer a straight shooter. Couldn't hit the broad side of a barn, these days.
Holtz-Eakin says McCain's time in the Senate has made him comfortable with scientists who may have politically unwelcome views. "He [McCain] has always felt that sound science is a foundation of good public policy," he said. "He believes deeply that the science should be the science. Legislators can then learn from that science, and go forward and deliver good public policies."
Correct, but hardly substantive enough to be worth saying, nor of reading for that matter. The statement is not very specific. I think McCain is as ill-informed of science generally as he admits to being of the dismal science, economics, and this article did nothing to alter that opinion.
As for the presumptive Democratic nominee, Barnes says an Obama administration would be much more transparent, so it would be hard to suppress or distort scientific findings. "We're talking about things like videotaping various proceedings so everyone can see it," she said. "Using technology to not only watch, but also engage with the federal government so they have a better sense of what's going on."
The word "transparent" is vague and over-used (NB: and the choice of the author, not of the Obama staffer), but "videotaping" is a specific proposal, and in a couple lines, Obama's spokesperson committed not only to making more information available to us, but to a means of doing it. That's the kind of straight answer I want in return for my tax dollars.
In our 2006 Technology Voters' Guide, which ranked Senate votes from July 1998 through May 2005, Biden received a mere 37.5 percent score because of his support for Internet filters in schools and libraries and occasional support for Internet taxes.
Computer viruses, spread via the Internet, have cost tens of billions of dollars. Suggesting that such a cost center be subject to taxation is no different than taxing cigarettes and alcohol to discourage their use and provide for medical treatment of related diseases. Those are frivolous complaints, but they're equated with the current administration's systematic and reckless abuse of the Fourth Amendment right to privacy.
If I get my opinion of Phil Zimmerman or the right to freedom from unlawful search & seizure -- or anything or anybody for that matter -- from Cnet, may God help me!
To equate Obama's vote for the most recent FISA bill to McCain's consistent voting record in support of warmongering and surveillance across the board is unconscionably disingenuous. Obama said the bill contained other provisions which he feels are genuinely so necessary for national security that even the objectionable telecom immunity must be accepted -- for now. McCain, on the contrary, is a simple military-industrial stooge, who believes "just kidding" excuses singing "bomb Iran" and that "former POW" equals "war hero." Unless he's subjected to daily waterboarding in Guantanamo for the remainder of his campaign, I don't believe he remembers enough of his vacation at the Hanoi Hilton to take war as seriously as the leader of a free world must take it. Anybody who votes for such a moron, who cracks jokes about war, votes to lose all their offspring to the next draft, and deserves just that.
The error is entirely your own. How's that for black and white, you clown?
What I hate the most ...
So personal!
What I hate the most is the very concept of theories. The idea that some half-assed guess gets passed around as an acceptable explanation until proven otherwise just strikes a nerve with me. I wish science would stick to black and white, "we know this" and "we don't know this".
You either understand the difference between a hypothesis and a theory and don't whine about scientists' fallibility, or you're not qualified to comment on science at all and as a result when you do comment, you whine like a fool.
Stop this "we think this and that, have no real clue, but are going to pat ourselves on the back for pretending to know something we don't".
Unless you are a fellow astronomer, and have a better model for the very radial-velocity variation around TW Hya here under discussion, but your superior hypothesis and research have not been published due to some personal bias, you have no complaint about those scientists that are investigating that phenomenon nor that their success is as yet incomplete. If you're not curious enough about whether it's a planet or a cold spot on the sun to contribute to the research, and if you're not appreciative enough of the scientific process to at least cheer for the researchers, just go away.
Sports fans often cheer for each goal scored, and almost never whine in the middle of a contest that it isn't won yet. Boxing and races may be exceptions, so let's keep this sports analogy to (timed) ball games. People attend ball games only to support of one of the two teams, not to bitch and moan about ball games being a waste of other people's time because those of us who hold that opinion have the option to not attend, so we simply don't waste our own time on ball games. Such is the extent of one's right to "hate" any endeavor in which we are disinterested: non-participation. And neither I nor any of the authors show up at brothels or johns' homes to heckle you about your career. Be a good sport and kindly show the same respect for professional scientists that we show to professions we don't enjoy or appreciate. You obviously don't appreciate science so just go away, and stay there. Yes, I promise to do the same when your program begins, Jerry Springer.
This is why I can't stand the FSF. Sure guys, it would be nice if everything was open and free, but that is NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN.
Yes, it will -- no thanks to you. Eventually, just as has happened in other industries in their adolescence, digitized entertainment will settle on de facto standards, for the technicians' convenience and because the superiority of the best methods will become known widely enough that willing victims of trash like the .mp3 & .wav formats will disappear from the market. For example, electricians all use (in the United States) 120V/60Hz for residential outlets (AC because it's better for transmission, 60Hz because lower frequencies were found to cause headaches and agitation in some customers, so nobody will accept that now that the cause is known) and all plumbing works lefty=loosy, righty=tighty (standardized purely for convenience -- the opposite could function just as well but it's important to standardize, one way or the other). For now, a lot in IT is as obscure to most IT customers as building methods were when the Masons were a secret society. This, too, shall pass.
Not to mention that Theora and Vorbis are only used by a very tiny sliver of the population. Face it, FSF: The only people using these formats for their personal use are FOSS advocates and on toward the zealot end of the spectrum.
You're half right: few people care about 128k mp3 or comparable .aac v. .wav & lossless compression, ie .flac. You're half wrong: the reason for the above is not that we are "on toward the zealot end of the spectrum," but because we are also few who own earphones or speaker/amplifier sets accurate enough to hear the difference. But if you ever incorporate an audio sample into your own work, the damage of repeated compression (the lossier, the worse) is more likely to become noticeable, so it's not unreasonable to suppose that mash-up creative models will become popular enough in the near future for .ogg or .flac to become undisputed king. Probably not before the next major revision to the iPod, but possibly within the next decade. Certainly, not "NEVER."
.ogg nor .flac, both of which are superior to .aac, .mp3 and .wav, which those "major players" push. Ogg is better lossy compression, and FLAC is better because lossless compression is better than useless bloat, which is a perfectly honest and accurate description of the silent bits in WAV files. If any of the aforementioned corporate megoliths were truly the ruthless competitors that they pose as in earnings reports, conventions and press releases, they would embrace open formats without reservation and battle for the best implementation of the best totally open formats. Unfortunately, they do not profit only by providing the best value possible to their customers. They differ from Adam Smith's model of free enterprise in their care for shareholders' interests, even if those are contrary to the interest of their customers. When profit can be reaped any way other than serving customers' demands, that signals one or both of two things: an immature market, or an overregulated one. We know IT is immature. I expect we'll disagree in the future about whether IT's also overregulated.
.flac, the free lossless audio codec.
BTW, I had a similar reaction to the OP to what you expressed for the FSF. I don't see the sense in picking on the BBC, but not because open standards are "NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN." I would instead pin the blame on Microsoft, Apple, and last time I checked, RealNetworks, because those are major drivers of digitized entertainment formats and do not support
PS Hardware is cheap, but not free, so I prefer
Indeed, experts generally agree that most -- but not all -- of the Arizona matches were to be expected statistically because of the unusual [sic] way Troyer searched for them.
In a typical criminal case, investigators look for matches to a specific profile. But the Arizona search looked for any matches among all the thousands of profiles in the database, greatly increasing the odds of finding them.
An honest test of the rigor of any matching system is to pursue all matches, meaning they should not only welcome "greatly increasing the odds of finding them," their goal should be maximizing the odds of finding spurious matches. That requires that in a set of 65,000 DNA profiles, each datum must be compared to every other datum, for a total of 65,000^2 = 4.225 Billion DNA profile pairs to compare, none of which should yield a match. This is exactly the same algorithm assumed by the 1 in 113 Billion estimate of the statistical unlikelihood of a match, so their complaints about an "unusual" search method are 100% invalid, and they all know it.
My interest also waned when I got to the allegation that $30 million was advertised as $300 million, unsubstantiated by any named source. Sure, I can Google it, but a good article saves me the trouble. What I did find interesting was the claim that Microsoft's offers have been made on days that Yahoo's share price is lowest. I also don't recall a source for that and haven't checked up on it myself, but it certainly could draw a lot of people's attention to the lowest prices of Yahoo's stock, giving the impression that those prices are typical. I would hope that actual investors wouldn't be fooled by that, but having witnessed a dot-com bubble with a real estate bubble encore, I don't really believe the average investor does any more research than the average casino gambler. So I could give 1/2 Insightful point to the article for that.
True,
but the 'crowd' I'm thinking of would simply cry out because *potentially* AVG *might* keep track of such information, sell it to the bad guys and become rich overnight.
You mean they would complain about something that isn't even happening just like you are doing. Good one. I apologize for not getting your joke sooner.
grin, but if they'd do that the 'privacy-crowd' will start yelling that AVG is 'illegally observering' their browsing habits...
I would not have any 'illegally observering' [sic] objection, unless the IP addresses or other personal information of AVG users were stored with the URLs we report, and that was not part of AC's suggestion. Your straw man, observing browsing habits, is a valid concern, but not relevant to AC's idea. A cache which stores only URLs hosting malware, which is all that AC actually recommended, does not technologically necessitate any invasion of privacy.
You're really enamored with yourself, aren't you?
Self-respect is a fantastic thing to have, but it must be earned. I'm sure you wish you had.
How old is the Sun? How old is the Earth?
Irrelevant. You have an unrealized wish to find fault in the plethora of specific published research that has proved global warming, so in desperation you appeal to the scientifically illiterate voters with the fallacy that understanding current conditions impossible, because of what we do not know about the Billions of years of inapplicable temperature data on Earth, under drastically different conditions, in periods in which conditions suitable for the existence of mammals were not present. You're pathetic. Before humans evolved, we can safely say that overall conditions had not yet become suitable for humans, and ignore those Billions of years altogether.
To those you wish to claim omniscience
No, but I'm not surprised you think so. To paraphrase Asimov, any sufficiently advanced intelligence cannot be distinguished from omniscience by of an utter ignoramus like you.
How complex is the atmosphere?
The atmosphere is not too complex to know which data are most strongly correlated to global mean temperature, and to favor those with the most research. And it's not too complex for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to have a good track record at predicting how the upcoming year's global mean temperature will compare to the previous recorded years. The NOAA's record isn't perfect, but it's good. That is just evidence that science works, not anything about "omniscience," which nothing and nobody gave you any cause to bring up except your own non-sentience.
So I went back to Microsoft.com and looked at the instructions. I have to click on a folder called WindowsXP. Why should I do that? Windows Update knows I am on Windows XP.
What does it mean to have to click on that folder? So I get a bunch of confusing stuff but sure enough one of them is Moviemaker. So I do the download. The download is fast but the Install takes many minutes. Amazing how slow this thing is.
What it means to have to click on that folder is that you have not provided adequate leadership on programming, the primary function of your software company. Because you have established no rules to make installation convenient for your paying customers, as the filesystem hierarchy standard does for Linux users for free, your programmers just toss their junk together in whatever way is most convenient for them. After all this time, to have failed to create an analogous Windows filesystem hierarchy standard, is atrocious, negligent incompetence.
College should teach programmers how to write efficient algorithms. You should teach them how to integrate those algorithms into a larger project, with your own model of advanced object-oriented programming, which you should have developed but have not. Then, every one of your programmers would know the same convention for the entire path of any downloaded install binary. It appears from your complaints in this article that you have not even defined a directory naming standard. I wasn't planning to be so hard on you for the many failures of your products to increase my convenience or to perform their advertised functions, but after your literally monumental public displays of incompetence, you have the audacity to whine that all the good programmers are foreign.
You are not a good programmer. You have failed to demonstrate the expertise to define standards that would ensure that useful information is made available by your various product teams to the other teams, for your buzzword "interoperability" to be meaningful within your own brand. You are therefore not qualified to speak at a junior college computer science faculty barbecue about good programming, or to anybody else about any other aspect of technical aptitude, because you have demonstrated a complete lack of any. The spectacle of you speaking to Congress as a technology expert is an embarrassment to the nation. I do not believe a corporation is entitled to the individual right to Free Speech which is incorrectly asserted as defense of corporate donations to politics. I do believe that the irrational exuberance of the dot-com boom that led to unprecedented price-to-earning ratios, which necessitated the eventual correction of the dot-com bust, was a direct result of that inappropriate tolerance of corporate interference in government. Politicians who should have been neutral were instead at the very best, shading the truth to say favorable things about their information technology donors whenever the subject was raised, and investors foolish enough to believe that anything they said about that industry was said as representative of the people concluded that then-current stock prices were likely to be justified by near-future earnings, and were taken to the cleaners.
You, of course, are not a big enough fish to be single-handedly responsible for all, or even for very much of that, but you are the most willing public mouthpiece of the information technology industry's thirst for cheaper foreign laborers. I want you to shut the hell up about all immigration laws, for one thing because your software demonstrates your abject lack of qualification to make any of the statements that you have previously made, to Congress no less, about the lack of talented programmers. You don't know a good programmer from Shinola, and nobody in the Congress would help you pretend that you are, excep
Who, unlike cameras, can come to the aid of the public - and run after any legitimate criminals.
Where the police want to do police work, surveillance cameras are unwanted because they're worse than useless. In fact, they're positively correlated to increases in violence. I don't know, but I suppose that when shoplifting becomes impossible because all the commercial areas are infested with video cameras, the same crooks resort to mugging, presumably when their victims are out of frame.
The implicit justification for the video surveillance system is security. But it is far from clear how the proliferation of video cameras through public spaces in D.C. would have any real impact on crime. In fact in England, where there are so many public cameras that they have stopped keeping count, incidents of violent crime have risen since the network was installed. Furthermore, in Oakland, CA, officials considered video surveillance for three years and rejected it. Police Chief Joseph Samuels, Jr., stated that his department had hoped to be "among the pioneers in the field of taped video camera surveillance" but ultimately found that "there is no conclusive way to establish that the presence of video surveillance resulted in the prevention or reduction of crime."
Either the court that ruled on a depiction of animated fellatio in Grand Theft Auto forgot about that precedent, or (much more likely) grossly misjudged the standards of the community of Grand Theft Auto players. I think we all know that most in the community of GTA players would be more offended by poor animation than by the fact of fellatio being portrayed in the game, but how would any court know that? It would have to survey the community in question!
Theodore Frank, director of the Legal Center for the Public Interest at the American Enterprise Institute, believes that the lack of claimants proves that the case was meritless from the beginning. He submits that this lack of response proves that the plaintiffs claims were overblown, and as a consequence the suit may be deemed meritless and the lawyers who tried the case will not be able to collect their $1.3 million in legal fees they are demanding from Take-Two. Speaking to the New York Times, Frank says:
"There are two possibilities. Possibility one is they have a meritorious lawsuit and theyre selling out the class for attorneys fees. The other possibility is that, and frankly I think this is the more likely possibility, they brought a meritless lawsuit that had no business being brought to court at all."
Because I'm not a lawyer trying this case, and my only interest in this case is as a citizen who values my right to decide for myself what to consider indecent, I have no need to be as delicate as Mr. Frank. Of course it's "a meritless lawsuit that had no business being brought to court at all." The Supreme Court's own previous opinions on obscenity have no business being brought to court at all. Consider the lack of claimants in the GTA case in lieu of a formal survey of that community's standards. The court's incorrect estimate of that community's standards illustrates vividly that offering "community standards" instead of objectively defining what may be considered legally prohibited obscenity and what cannot be excluded from the First Amendment protection of free speech, is nothing better than a cop-out, and provides little or no value as precedent for subsequent judgements. To apply that "precedent" honestly would require a community survey for every obscenity case ever brought to court. Obviously, "community standards" do not provide a sufficient definition, in purely pragmatic terms, to have any positive value for purpose of upholding the rule of law. Laws are objective. Malleable statutes mean rule by fiat.
http://library.findlaw.com/2003/May/15/132747.html
The definition of obscenity set forth in Roth was:
Speech which " . . . to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material, taken as a whole, appeals to prurient interest" and which is "utterly without redeeming social importance..."
Customers who are not so offended that they demand a full refund and willingly return their copy of the game are entitled to no compensation whatsoever for their offense. Whatever judge ruled that customers have the right to keep their game and receive punitive damages for having been offended by a work that they intend to keep should be disbarred.
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2008/03/17/lorne-gunter-on-surveillance-cameras-in-public-places-expensive-intrusive-and-ineffective.aspx
"Somehow" was a polite way to mock the insane idea that human beings can control the climate.
Yes, I noticed what you were trying to do, and I picked that one word, "somehow," "to mock the insane idea that" of yours, that science has not absolutely determined how carbon dioxide traps heat, and that therefore the basic premise of anthropogenic global warming is a matter of dispute among legitimate scientists. It is not. As a matter of fact, radiative forcing has been known and well understood since Arrhenius, and I can prove the phenomenon to you right now, in terms that every reader can easily understand.
/. exists, will need to use teh Google to fully appreciate it, but all can easily understand:
Standard street lights and fluorescent lights are generally considered less pleasant than old-fashioned filament bulbs because of the frequency of the photons they emit. All light bulbs operate by electrically stimulating photon emission from different substances, and each substance in The Universe has a unique emission spectrum, the set of frequencies of light it can emit. The emission spectrum of carbon dioxide is such that its thermal energy, aka heat, does not correspond to any emission wavelentghs and therefore cannot be radiated. Because radiation is one of only three physically possible means of heat transfer, the effect is not negligible. Most readers, even the "NERDS" for whom
You're wrong and I'm mocking you.
Furthermore, by comparing the surface temperature of The Sun to the recorded surface temperatures on Earth and, just for emphasis, the flash point of humans, we can easily ascertain that a minute increase in the insulative properties of our atmosphere is real cause for grave concern.
I'm not sure the relevance of the link you gave to your post as it supports my comments and shows yours to be contradictory.
Yes you are, but you want to play coy. Fine. Tell me how little you understand about radiative forcing, and I'll publicly humiliate you with as much explanation of the physics as you omit. Hint: Shut the fuck up.
Oh, you meant they refuse to formally acknowledge U.S. human activity somehow controls the greenhouse effect. That's very different. What do you mean, "somehow"? Did you fail high school chemistry or just skip science education altogether?
Uh, I mean, "Mod up, funny."
I apologize for the extra "ia." I plead recent [inadvertent, obviously!] exposure to Fox News and I beg your pardon.
So, should ALL the people in the link I just provided, including Nancy Pelosi, Bill Clinton, Sandy Berger, John Kerry, Robert Byrd, Ted Kennedy, and the oracle himself, Al Gore all be tried for treason?
Do you think they should?
Origins: All of the quotes listed above are substantially correct reproductions of statements made by various Democratic leaders regarding Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's acquisition or possession of weapons of mass destruction. However, some of the quotes are truncated, and context is provided for none of them — several of these quotes were offered in the course of statements that clearly indicated the speaker was decidedly against unilateral military intervention in Iraq by the U.S.
If so, on what grounds? No, they did not say "THE EXACT SAME THING." They made similar statements, when discussing the real dangers of Iraq, but they did not ignore contradictory facts and they did not run a publicity campaign for the purpose of waging a war of aggression in Iraq.
First, nothing from the Huffington Post can be used as a source... EVER. It is opinions posted by the most ignorant of Americans, celebrities. If anything, having something said in the Huffington post should be used as COUTNER-evidence to whatever was said.
In my opinion, discarding any one article merely because it appears in the Huffington Post [or any other source] would be to subscribe to the premise of guilt by association, which I do not. Heh, I held my nose and read the article you posted from snopes. You're entitled to your opinions. Everybody else is equally entitled to our opinions, and that includes everybody who disagrees. That's life. The subject at hand is not difference of opinion, but irresponsible and dishonest representation of fact in the pursuit of others' opinions, voters' opinions, in one of the gravest of all political matters, declaration of war. To dismiss a fact merely because it's expressed by a person, or in a journal, with which you have a difference of opinion is to make the very same type of error as we are discussing.
However, I did notice that there was no mention of Sandy Berger, the Clinton security advisor stealing top secret documents and cutting them up with scissors during the 9-11 investigation. I guess that was no big deal, what with Bush lying and all.
That's a disgrace, no doubt about it and no argument, but it is not currently "news." It was not omitted from that article because of Democratic bias. That was the correct professional journalistic decision.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said yesterday that his intelligence service had warned the Bush administration before the U.S. invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein's government was planning attacks against U.S. targets both inside and outside the country.
Vladimir Putin, no matter how friendly he may be nor how pure his soul, is primarily responsible for advancing the interests of Russia, not of the United States. As those tend to overlap these days, it is wise to be receptive to any tips he offers, to take them seriously. But because he is primarily responsible not to us but to a foreign power, the correct next step is to validate what he says independently, with U.S. intelligence assets and never take him, nor any other foreign power, on feith. "Russian President Vladimir Putin said" is not relevant rebuttal to the findings of the U.S. Congress, for this U.S. citizen.
Granted, Saddam Hussein was not in full compliance with terms of treaties he signed. It is also worth noting, however, that his invasion of Kuwait was in response to diagonal oil drilling from Kuwait into Earth under Iraq and that oil was as much a motive for the defense of Kuwait against Iraq as it was a motive for Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, so the U.S., and especially t
It's strange, making me suspicious of your thesis, that with all the hyperlinks in that Washington Post article, not one points to the full text of the report it discusses, nor even to complete paragraphs or even complete sentences that specify, for example, on [sic] nuclear or biological weapons, just which of the "president's statements 'were substantiated by intelligence information.'" And it's strange that, among so many excerpts, all the excerpts from that article are sentence fragments, necessitating the improper grammar repeated ad nauseam, "On [fallacy]?. The president's statements 'were substantiated [by
And, no, most of Congress did not know at that time anything but the cherry-picked version manufactured by Douglas Feith & co.
Although the measurement of casual browsing is less scientific than conducting a 'casual browsing' session, scripting it, then testing all browsers on exactly the same activity, I think it's still notable that Firefox 3's ~120MB memory usage was reached within ~148 seconds. The only other browser to ever reach what I would call an equilibrium state was Flock, and it took ~1300s. That indicates to me that regardless of whether or not the browsers all suffered the same load Firefox 3 is better at dealing with the load it was given. Observing that the author mentioned nothing about system or browser lock-up, and making the reasonable assumption that neither occurred, I conclude that for a wide range of system load, this test strongly suggests that Firefox 3 is the best of those tested at judging the load put on it, allocating the correct level of memory usage, and then sticking to it. I suppose this also implicitly assumes that the load even within one test is consistent, which also isn't quantified in the description of the 'benchmark.' Still, the author did put constraints on the number of browser windows and the number of tabs in each, so fairly stable load seems *likely*, and so I'm still inclined to think that reaching an equilibrium level of memory usage, and reaching it more quickly, are both indicative of good memory allocation and de-allocation.