> I'll always buy it. Even if it costs me $100 more
You might. Most Open Software users would not.
Just start thinking in terms of $40 per hour, then if it takes more than 2.5 hours to get a piece of hardware working, you haven't gained anything by buying cheaper.
Maher and Stewart lean left, but they don't follow party lines. They actually think for themselves. It's remarkable how often their moronic Los Angeles audiences will applaud at some liberal talking point, then immediately quiet down when the host disagrees
Actually, Jon Stewart's moronic Los Angeles audience is from New York.
I'd forward the opinion that it is easier to determine what is fake and/or unimportant news watching the Daily Show than most other 'real' news programs.
The fact that it is News-tainment doesn't bother me as the show has a social conscience, and attacks whenever and wherever it has found someone/something wrong.
Comedy on the Daily Show works by a pretty simple principle. They say things that have an element of truth, but everyone else is avoiding saying, and they say them with extreme gusto. As such, the Daily Show often ends up saying things closer to the truth than the actual news, because their method of humor is a funny version of "Bzzzt, wrong!"
Which is why we had David Duke (KKK, Nazi) running against Edwin Edwards (unconvicted, then, but well known to be as crooked as a dog's hind leg - in jail now) for Governor four elections back. "Vote for the Crook, it's important" was a popular bumper sticker during that particular election.
Gah... That's precisely why you need Approval Voting for an election like that, so you choose the candidates who are most liked, and not the candidates whose votes are least split.
Good. Maybe, once everyone who remembers Three Mile Island is finally dead, we can start using it more.
Actually, most of the people who remember TMI are doing quite fine, because the safety protocols that were in place there worked just fine, resulting in no harm to the surrounding population.
Safety protocols and reactor designs now are even better than this.
I'd be impressed to see the ratio of bullets bought in the US to total people murdered.
You got me curious. The numbers I found show around 10 billion bullets sold a year in the US, and around 10,000 gun homicides per year. That's around 1 million bullets per gun homicide. So clearly most of them are going for other use.
it really comes down to a question of morals... My hearts telling me "Kill these fuckers who would kill my own innocent mother."
The important thing is for your brain to intervene and make sure you're only attacking the specific people who have done such things, and not just everyone who looks like them. THAT'S morality.
Is this the part where I get to assume it's already fact?
If you had heard the actual speech, then you would know that the word "blatantly" belongs there in place of "allegedly". The only thing shocking to me is that this senator claims to have initially thought Allawi wrote it himself.
People wonder why Hollywood celebrities are so leftist
In addition to the reasons you stated, it can also be noted that actors, actresses, and rock stars are usually creative people. Creativity seems to be correlated with awareness of other cultures and subcultures, and this in turn seems to be correlated with liberalism.
Didn't taco say the politics section was going to have a balance of opinion and wouldn't be slanted either way?
Balanced does NOT mean showing the viewpoints of both sides equally. There is such a thing as objective truth, and there is far more value in examining what is actually true in the world, and how politics should reshape itself to fit those facts.
Showing two-sided propaganda does not lead to that truth. And as the quote from the Daily Show goes, "How does one report the facts in an unbiased way when the facts themselves are biased.... it's become all too clear that facts in Iraq have an anti-Bush agenda." Does that mean you should balance facts with lies to avoid bias?
O'Reilly went off on Glick, because that's what he does.
I believe this quote sums it up nicely:
"You scuttled away from the issue. The issue is not policy, the issue is defamation. I'm not going to discuss policy with you." -- Bill O'Reilly, The O'Reilly Factor
Elections should be carefully monitored by as many independent groups as possible. The highest levels of vigilance are the only way to maintain a free democracy.
The president knows... it's the followers of him that we must shelter.
"The majority of people who come out to wave do so in a friendly fashion, although there is of course the occasional unfriendly wave." -- George W. Bush
Combine this with electronic voting with no paper trails, and you have a great way to rig an election, since nobody has any idea roughly how it should have come out to even contest the validity of the electronic votes.
The solution to this is exit polling, not random calling of households. It makes more sense to poll the people who actually show up if you're trying to evaluate the accuracy of an election. Then you will get a closer sampling to the real population being considered.
No, because most of the posts on this page are complaining about the article being senseless Bush bashing. That's the beauty of the Slashdot format, you get replies which can counter the blatant biases of the article.
There is a parable about finding the truth, which says (super short version), ask a friend, then ask an enemy. You get both sides of the story, and you can figure out roughly what happened. But what if you don't bother to get the other side?
Yeah, sure, you should always check both sides. But one of the fallacies of modern journalism is the idea that somehow reporting two sides of an issue makes the report objective. Do two subjective viewpoints make an objective viewpoint? Whatever happened to the idea of investigating to see which things is actually true?
One of the fundamental links between politics and journalism is that politicians are only as honest as journalists hold them to be. When all a politician has to do to get out of lying is say, "Well, the other side is just out to get me because they're mean and dirty," then you have every lie turning into a he-said-she-said situation. The job of journalists SHOULD be to act as an independent third party to look for objective truth and present it.
Does nobody else find it strange that they can't vote/don't have US citizenship/rights , and that they are still a part of the US?
They ARE full citizens (Puerto Rico since 1917, and many of the Islands since 1927), and thus possess the same rights as any other US citizens. Because we are stuck in an electoral college system, citizens living in the territories do not get a vote for president, but currently they are as free as any other citizen to move into a state which does have an electoral representative, and thus vote for president. Is this ideal or fair? No. But it's hardly fair to call them oppressed or subject to a dictator.
If someone walks in with a head cold, why not do an MRI (a costly diagnostic procedure) just to make sure it's not a tumor, as long as the price is $0?
Because doctors should know better. Many of the people on Slashdot are computer programmers. If someone comes to a computer programmer and asks the programmer to fix a bug, should the programmer rewrite the program to make sure there aren't other bugs? If you have setup a system where a doctor profits more by performing extra unnecessary procedures, then you have setup a system incorrectly.
If quality of service deteriorates, or barriers develop between me and the care I need, or medical research grinds to a halt, I will lose years (or decades) from my life and the remainder won't be nearly as pleasant.
That's why I don't want socialized health care. But I suppose most people don't care, since they don't stand to lose nearly as much as I do.
Socialized health care doesn't need to be that way. Capitalistic healthcare has two problems. The first is that many hospitals get paid per procedure they perform. This produces an incentive to run more tests and perform more procedures than are necessary. At the same time, insurance companies have an incentive to encourage no tests or procedures to be performed, as this maximizes their profit. Neither of these two parties have the interest of the patient in mind, they are simply at conflict with each other, and the patient comes out okay only when those two parties are kept in balance.
There is nothing intrinsic which prevents socialized healthcare from being constructed such that doctors and patients can be the sole deciders of what is necessary and prudent, so that the first interest of the healthcare system would be caring for the health of patients.
You don't always get the best choices and the best service by paying for it. Your local Barnes and Noble bookstore has a wide selection of books available for you to buy (mostly the ones that they think they can sell), but I bet you that the nearest public university library has far more books on far wider topics available for free (because they're interested in accumulating knowledge, not selling it), and that university library is essentially a socialist system.
Statistically speaking if you poll about 1200 people with a statistical representation of the populous (i.e. race balance that reflects the population, party affiliation ratios that match, etc.) you will get within 4% of perfectly accurate
Certainly. The problem is you just glazed over the phrase "statistical representation" without a passing thought. Getting a random sample from a population is an extremely difficult thing to achieve. Getting even CLOSE to a random sample from a population is rather challenging. And the whole point being discussed here is that the sampling being done is not random, and thus not a statistical representation.
If you walk down the street, and talk to everyone you see who is over 6'2 about gender equality in the workplace, then you're not getting a random sampling, and you're not getting correct results. This is because there is a strong correlation between height and gender, and probably a significant correlation between gender and concerns about gender equality in the workplace.
This is what it's like to poll the first person you speak to at a land line, with only one person per phone number. The results are skewed for anything which correlates to ownership of a landline, and number of voting age people per household with a landline.
And what are you going to do when all the old people move to Florida to retire? Burden the entirety of Florida's workforce with paying for the retirement of people who previously worked elsewhere? Or instead eliminate or cut Florida's social security benefits? If you're going to have a social security program, then it makes much more sense for it to be federal so that retired people can have freedom of movement without worrying about being able to eat.
If your state wants a healthcare program, then they can do it. If it fails, other states hopefully won't adopt it.
You must live in a very localized world. I've lived in four different states in the last five years. I'm not a citizen of a state, I'm a citizen of the U.S. It doesn't make sense to me for people to have to switch into different health care programs just because they happen to be in a different state.
There are plenty of issues which make sense to be localized. There are states with higher and lower population densities, and it makes sense for these states to have different zoning laws, different property tax rules, different public transportation, different speed limits, etc. But regardless of which state we live in, we're all made of the same flesh, and we all need the same health care.
Take two gases that are explosive when combined and ignigted and put them in two big tanks at a great presure then release it all at once and a split second later when the expaning mix covers a football field, but is still at very high (80+ atmospheres iirc) detonate them.
And remind me again of why John Kerry has to prove his innocence of something for which he hasn't been shown to be guilty? Is this how you would really like your political system to run?
I can easily make a statement, "George Bush killed a man for fun on January 28th, 1974." Go ahead, prove it wrong. Seriously, if George Bush didn't kill anybody, he could certainly come forward and prove that he didn't.
Note to moderators -- the above comment is not a troll but a way of wryly pointing out that in the past, the system *has* in fact changed
The system didn't change, only the names. As long as we have our current voting system, we will have two parties. If any third party jumps up to significance, it would replace one of the existing parties, everybody would redistribute into the new paradigm, and nothing would change but the labels. You would still have the same types of people running for office, and you would still have the same people voting under the same voting system.
The issues won't experience long-term shift just because a party that initially claims to support a certain issue gets into power. Even under our current system this doesn't work. Republicans support small spending, or do they? Democrats oppose censorship, or do they? It's all just a big scramble to make deals so people can keep getting reelected.
If you want to change that, you have to change how people get elected so that different people get elected and they have to do different things to stay elected. And if you want more serious change beyond that, you have to change what the people pay attention to, which is a cultural change.
Slashdot Mirror
> I'll always buy it. Even if it costs me $100 more
You might. Most Open Software users would not.
Just start thinking in terms of $40 per hour, then if it takes more than 2.5 hours to get a piece of hardware working, you haven't gained anything by buying cheaper.
Maher and Stewart lean left, but they don't follow party lines. They actually think for themselves. It's remarkable how often their moronic Los Angeles audiences will applaud at some liberal talking point, then immediately quiet down when the host disagrees
Actually, Jon Stewart's moronic Los Angeles audience is from New York.
I'd forward the opinion that it is easier to determine what is fake and/or unimportant news watching the Daily Show than most other 'real' news programs.
The fact that it is News-tainment doesn't bother me as the show has a social conscience, and attacks whenever and wherever it has found someone/something wrong.
Comedy on the Daily Show works by a pretty simple principle. They say things that have an element of truth, but everyone else is avoiding saying, and they say them with extreme gusto. As such, the Daily Show often ends up saying things closer to the truth than the actual news, because their method of humor is a funny version of "Bzzzt, wrong!"
Which is why we had David Duke (KKK, Nazi) running against Edwin Edwards (unconvicted, then, but well known to be as crooked as a dog's hind leg - in jail now) for Governor four elections back. "Vote for the Crook, it's important" was a popular bumper sticker during that particular election.
Gah... That's precisely why you need Approval Voting for an election like that, so you choose the candidates who are most liked, and not the candidates whose votes are least split.
Good. Maybe, once everyone who remembers Three Mile Island is finally dead, we can start using it more.
Actually, most of the people who remember TMI are doing quite fine, because the safety protocols that were in place there worked just fine, resulting in no harm to the surrounding population.
Safety protocols and reactor designs now are even better than this.
I'd be impressed to see the ratio of bullets bought in the US to total people murdered.
You got me curious. The numbers I found show around 10 billion bullets sold a year in the US, and around 10,000 gun homicides per year. That's around 1 million bullets per gun homicide. So clearly most of them are going for other use.
it really comes down to a question of morals ... My hearts telling me "Kill these fuckers who would kill my own innocent mother."
The important thing is for your brain to intervene and make sure you're only attacking the specific people who have done such things, and not just everyone who looks like them. THAT'S morality.
...allegedly wrote...
Is this the part where I get to assume it's already fact?
If you had heard the actual speech, then you would know that the word "blatantly" belongs there in place of "allegedly". The only thing shocking to me is that this senator claims to have initially thought Allawi wrote it himself.
People wonder why Hollywood celebrities are so leftist
In addition to the reasons you stated, it can also be noted that actors, actresses, and rock stars are usually creative people. Creativity seems to be correlated with awareness of other cultures and subcultures, and this in turn seems to be correlated with liberalism.
Didn't taco say the politics section was going to have a balance of opinion and wouldn't be slanted either way?
... it's become all too clear that facts in Iraq have an anti-Bush agenda." Does that mean you should balance facts with lies to avoid bias?
Balanced does NOT mean showing the viewpoints of both sides equally. There is such a thing as objective truth, and there is far more value in examining what is actually true in the world, and how politics should reshape itself to fit those facts.
Showing two-sided propaganda does not lead to that truth. And as the quote from the Daily Show goes, "How does one report the facts in an unbiased way when the facts themselves are biased.
O'Reilly went off on Glick, because that's what he does.
I believe this quote sums it up nicely:
"You scuttled away from the issue. The issue is not policy, the issue is defamation. I'm not going to discuss policy with you." -- Bill O'Reilly, The O'Reilly Factor
Europe,
Thank you.
-- An American.
Elections should be carefully monitored by as many independent groups as possible. The highest levels of vigilance are the only way to maintain a free democracy.
The president knows... it's the followers of him that we must shelter.
"The majority of people who come out to wave do so in a friendly fashion, although there is of course the occasional unfriendly wave."
-- George W. Bush
Combine this with electronic voting with no paper trails, and you have a great way to rig an election, since nobody has any idea roughly how it should have come out to even contest the validity of the electronic votes.
The solution to this is exit polling, not random calling of households. It makes more sense to poll the people who actually show up if you're trying to evaluate the accuracy of an election. Then you will get a closer sampling to the real population being considered.
politics.slashdot.org = Bush Bashing?
No, because most of the posts on this page are complaining about the article being senseless Bush bashing. That's the beauty of the Slashdot format, you get replies which can counter the blatant biases of the article.
There is a parable about finding the truth, which says (super short version), ask a friend, then ask an enemy. You get both sides of the story, and you can figure out roughly what happened. But what if you don't bother to get the other side?
Yeah, sure, you should always check both sides. But one of the fallacies of modern journalism is the idea that somehow reporting two sides of an issue makes the report objective. Do two subjective viewpoints make an objective viewpoint? Whatever happened to the idea of investigating to see which things is actually true?
One of the fundamental links between politics and journalism is that politicians are only as honest as journalists hold them to be. When all a politician has to do to get out of lying is say, "Well, the other side is just out to get me because they're mean and dirty," then you have every lie turning into a he-said-she-said situation. The job of journalists SHOULD be to act as an independent third party to look for objective truth and present it.
A thing is not "biased" if it is verifiably true.
Does nobody else find it strange that they can't vote/don't have US citizenship/rights , and that they are still a part of the US?
They ARE full citizens (Puerto Rico since 1917, and many of the Islands since 1927), and thus possess the same rights as any other US citizens. Because we are stuck in an electoral college system, citizens living in the territories do not get a vote for president, but currently they are as free as any other citizen to move into a state which does have an electoral representative, and thus vote for president. Is this ideal or fair? No. But it's hardly fair to call them oppressed or subject to a dictator.
If someone walks in with a head cold, why not do an MRI (a costly diagnostic procedure) just to make sure it's not a tumor, as long as the price is $0?
Because doctors should know better. Many of the people on Slashdot are computer programmers. If someone comes to a computer programmer and asks the programmer to fix a bug, should the programmer rewrite the program to make sure there aren't other bugs? If you have setup a system where a doctor profits more by performing extra unnecessary procedures, then you have setup a system incorrectly.
If quality of service deteriorates, or barriers develop between me and the care I need, or medical research grinds to a halt, I will lose years (or decades) from my life and the remainder won't be nearly as pleasant.
That's why I don't want socialized health care. But I suppose most people don't care, since they don't stand to lose nearly as much as I do.
Socialized health care doesn't need to be that way. Capitalistic healthcare has two problems. The first is that many hospitals get paid per procedure they perform. This produces an incentive to run more tests and perform more procedures than are necessary. At the same time, insurance companies have an incentive to encourage no tests or procedures to be performed, as this maximizes their profit. Neither of these two parties have the interest of the patient in mind, they are simply at conflict with each other, and the patient comes out okay only when those two parties are kept in balance.
There is nothing intrinsic which prevents socialized healthcare from being constructed such that doctors and patients can be the sole deciders of what is necessary and prudent, so that the first interest of the healthcare system would be caring for the health of patients.
You don't always get the best choices and the best service by paying for it. Your local Barnes and Noble bookstore has a wide selection of books available for you to buy (mostly the ones that they think they can sell), but I bet you that the nearest public university library has far more books on far wider topics available for free (because they're interested in accumulating knowledge, not selling it), and that university library is essentially a socialist system.
Statistically speaking if you poll about 1200 people with a statistical representation of the populous (i.e. race balance that reflects the population, party affiliation ratios that match, etc.) you will get within 4% of perfectly accurate
Certainly. The problem is you just glazed over the phrase "statistical representation" without a passing thought. Getting a random sample from a population is an extremely difficult thing to achieve. Getting even CLOSE to a random sample from a population is rather challenging. And the whole point being discussed here is that the sampling being done is not random, and thus not a statistical representation.
If you walk down the street, and talk to everyone you see who is over 6'2 about gender equality in the workplace, then you're not getting a random sampling, and you're not getting correct results. This is because there is a strong correlation between height and gender, and probably a significant correlation between gender and concerns about gender equality in the workplace.
This is what it's like to poll the first person you speak to at a land line, with only one person per phone number. The results are skewed for anything which correlates to ownership of a landline, and number of voting age people per household with a landline.
hydrogen leaks out of almost any container at a significant rate (I seem to remember ~10% per day).
By "almost any container" do you mean wooden barrels?
Why must retirement be a federal program?
And what are you going to do when all the old people move to Florida to retire? Burden the entirety of Florida's workforce with paying for the retirement of people who previously worked elsewhere? Or instead eliminate or cut Florida's social security benefits? If you're going to have a social security program, then it makes much more sense for it to be federal so that retired people can have freedom of movement without worrying about being able to eat.
If your state wants a healthcare program, then they can do it. If it fails, other states hopefully won't adopt it.
You must live in a very localized world. I've lived in four different states in the last five years. I'm not a citizen of a state, I'm a citizen of the U.S. It doesn't make sense to me for people to have to switch into different health care programs just because they happen to be in a different state.
There are plenty of issues which make sense to be localized. There are states with higher and lower population densities, and it makes sense for these states to have different zoning laws, different property tax rules, different public transportation, different speed limits, etc. But regardless of which state we live in, we're all made of the same flesh, and we all need the same health care.
Take two gases that are explosive when combined and ignigted and put them in two big tanks at a great presure then release it all at once and a split second later when the expaning mix covers a football field, but is still at very high (80+ atmospheres iirc) detonate them.
You forgot to add "stand back".
GW shouldn't be on illinois ballot if your right about thier aug 30 deadline.
GW isn't going to win Illinois anyway.
And remind me again of why John Kerry has to prove his innocence of something for which he hasn't been shown to be guilty? Is this how you would really like your political system to run?
I can easily make a statement, "George Bush killed a man for fun on January 28th, 1974." Go ahead, prove it wrong. Seriously, if George Bush didn't kill anybody, he could certainly come forward and prove that he didn't.
Note to moderators -- the above comment is not a troll but a way of wryly pointing out that in the past, the system *has* in fact changed
The system didn't change, only the names. As long as we have our current voting system, we will have two parties. If any third party jumps up to significance, it would replace one of the existing parties, everybody would redistribute into the new paradigm, and nothing would change but the labels. You would still have the same types of people running for office, and you would still have the same people voting under the same voting system.
The issues won't experience long-term shift just because a party that initially claims to support a certain issue gets into power. Even under our current system this doesn't work. Republicans support small spending, or do they? Democrats oppose censorship, or do they? It's all just a big scramble to make deals so people can keep getting reelected.
If you want to change that, you have to change how people get elected so that different people get elected and they have to do different things to stay elected. And if you want more serious change beyond that, you have to change what the people pay attention to, which is a cultural change.