Speaking of IRC, there's an administrator only channel (#wikipedia-en-admins). Admins regularly discuss their actions on Wikipedia there, including bans. Why is this any different than the so-called "secret" mailing list?
Well, mostly the difference is it hasn't been posted to slashdot as a Great Revelation.
At least not yet... maybe I'll wait a couple of days and submit it.
First they can ensure that the message itself doesn't contain any recipient info (a big bcc basically).
How exactly is a message supposed to get somewhere if it doesn't have the recipient info?
I think you're confusing what you see in your mail box to what the mail servers see.
In any case, as is typical the news article doesn't really provide enough information to determine how the system
actually works. It does sound like it's working on the premise that since spam is done in "bulk", if you see lots of identical messages
going through a server you can assume that that's spam. The obvious problem would be that spammers can include randomly generated content.
But that problem is so obvious, it seems likely to me that I don't understand the system they have in mind.
Really? I always thought that DJB never clearly attached any license to his work, but told people they were brainwashed for thinking they even needed one, which started all the confusion in the first place...
That was my impression also. My first thought on reading this summary was that
Bernstein making a verbal announcement doesn't really mean all
that much, since -- if I understand the situation correctly --
part of the trouble has been his reluctance to say things in writing
in the code distribution.
If you folks are coming into this story in the middle, djb is probably best known as the author of "qmail" (that's a "Q" not a "G"), which was once upon a time one of the few alternates to "sendmail" (these days, there's "postfix" and "exim" and probably some others).
Among other quirks, licensing of "qmail" has always been a sticky issue.
I suggest reading Rick Moen's take on this subject:
You, are one of the social and intellectual elite having thought about and done this. Before you think me sarcastic, I did the same thing.
Before you guys go too crazy congratulating yourselves, allow me
to point out that you've seized on only one aspect of the issues
that Doctorow is talking about here.
Let's say you have a carefully-crafted set of identities, so
that, for example, your LinkedIn network is solely composed of
professional contacts, and you use a network on, say, Tribe for
your friends. Now you're getting dozens of invites from people
you worked with to add you to their LinkedIn networks, and
they're all asking you for their seal of approval, they want you
to stamp them "recommended".
Now, all of a sudden this act of writing a recommendation for
someone goes from being an occasional occurrence to something
you need to do all the time. Do you want to give a thumbs-up to
someone you worked with for only a week, and really only barely
know about? But would you want to deny this guy a
recommendation, perhaps creating an enemy? After all, you might
want a recommendation from him some time. Even stalling on the
question could be a dicey thing, it could seem insulting to
provide a recommendation after waiting a few months...
This is something that comes up over and over again: new
technological options are never really optional, because they
create pressure on you to use the option, if you choose to
decline you're sending a message by that act that never existed
before.
And on a completely different front, I'm a little skeptical about
the philosophical assumptions you folks are making about how
"it's just common sense" to carefully wall off your personal life
from your work life. To me, this sounds like "hiding from the
world", and I suspect it's (a) rarely a good idea and (b)
unlikely to be successful.
"Already killed LinkedIn", yeah "LinkedIn" is what I was thinking
about. I'm not sure if it's dead yet, but I kind of hope it does
go away.
I still get occasional invites, most of which I don't know what to do
with. You know: "Hm, that name sounds familiar, I think I worked with
him for a couple of weeks back at that terrible job I was doing a few
years ago."
Then there's "meetup" or whatever it is, that has the same
annoyances that Cory Doctorow is complaining about: it's sends
you email notifying you of a change, but doesn't tell you what
the change is.
(Why was this moderated as "OffTopic"? Someone at LinkedIn
feeling nervous?)
I'm not so sure how well the Empire State Building would fare. It is certainly strong, but how would it handle the fire?
The Empire State Building, like all older buildings has structural members of steel embedded in concrete to act
as thermal insulation, so they don't weaken during a fire.
The WTC achieved it's height by sacrificing this scheme, and switching to a newer idea, steel inside of something like asbestos to provide
thermal insulation.
And as I understand it, the situation got even more complicated because asbestos became illegal while they were constructing the building, and they had to switch to a different insulating material.
The new material was supposed to be as good or better as asbestos as far as insulation goes -- I speculate (but don't know) that it may have been more brittle: if it shakes off during impact, then you're screwed once the fire starts.
That's my understanding anyway. I see that the wikipedia article on the subject suggests a different mechanism: the open floor plan of the WTC let impact debri spread throughout the building, igniting more fires than would've happened in a more traditional, heavier structure.
Maybe a nuke plant could melt down as a result of such an attack, but it would be quite a shot in the dark. After the first hit, they almost certainly would shut down the reactor. Hits 2-4 would, at best, spread around a little bit of the uranium fuel.
You're being way too generous in your estimate of the likelyhood of cracking a containment building.
The idea that you're going to punch through a reactor containment vessel with airplanes is if not bugnuts crazy, pretty close to it. We're talking about a five-foot thick shell of windowless steel reinforced concrete. Compared to that, the aluminum shell of a passenger plane is essentially tissue paper...
Now let's talk about the real problem here. It's no trick it all to google up things such as this:
ASME briefing informs Capitol Hill staffers about U.S. nuclear plants. But the OP could not care less, because the anti-nuclear people don't trust any group such as the American Society of Mechanical Engineers any more than they trust Congress. If an anti-nuke person hears something that confirms their beliefs, they trust that source, if they hear something that contradicts it, they presume that the source is compromised somehow. It would be easy to rant and rave about this as intellectual laziness, but that's perhaps a little unfair to the anti-nuke crowd: what are they supposed to do, trust everything that the government tells them? Are they supposed to get a degree in engineering so they'll be competent to assess the risk themselves? In a Democratic society, the opinions of regular folks are supposed to count for something, but in a technological world, public policy decisions necessarily involve issues that only experts can understand, and the regular folks have no system they can trust to get the facts they need to make decisions.
So: what do we do? Here we are in a bold new world of information technology, anything you want to know is (supposedly) a google search away --
but name a website that you can use as a source or reliable information about some critical issue of the day? slashdot? wikipedia?
Can the reactors be shut down safely? Will anyone even be able to find out?
I was out at the Naval Reactor Facilty site in Idaho when there was a small earthquake that barely
shook the ground. All of the reactors did automatic shutdowns, just as they were supposed to.
Getting a reactor to scram if something weird happens is a really easy technical problem.
(Note: the problem at TMI was the clueless operators that kept overriding the safety features,
refusing to let the reactor shut itself down.)
A strike against Indian Point, rather than the WTC, would have been vastly more devastating.
I'm pretty sure that an airplane would just sort of crumple up against the side of a containment dome. It's also a harder thing to hit, as the domes are smaller and lower than the WTC towers were.
Yup. Reactor containment vessels are tough, but then the WTC was a really badly designed house-of-cards, comapred to it, everything is tough.
If they'd hit the Empire State Building, for example, it would certainly take some damage, but it wouldn't have pancaked.
Well, first off I have to say I respect your commitment to a set of ideals - it takes a lot to go risk getting killed or maimed in service of one's country. That commitment is a very honorable thing to follow.
You're jumping to a number of conclusions. All the guy said is that he was in Iraq. Maybe he's an accountant working for Blackwater.
(Or maybe he's a propagandist sitting in Washington, working for Bush Jr.)
Just be glad it's the USA you're talking about. Yes, we do stuff wrong, and things get out of hand. But we have a system that corrects itself before stuff gets completely beyond repair. We're already on top of fixing this one, and we're likely to put stuff in place to prevent it from happening again.
Um... can you name three things that prove your point? I can name any number of things that go against it -- e.g. the executive branch
blatantly violates the law, and repeatedly thumbs their nose at any kind of congressional oversight, and yet the democratic leadership in Congress is doing their best to prevent impeachment from even being discussed.
Consider that Nancy Pelosi's constituency is San Francisco, and she's repeatedly declared that "impeachment is off the table". She doesn't need to guess on the will of the people on this one, we voted on a direct initiative calling for impeachment. For that matter, the nationwide polls on the subject bounce around between a third and more than half being in favor of impeachment (depending on who does the polls: one wonders where that wide spread comes from...). There's no way you can spin this as some extreme, crazy notion, it's essentially middle-of-the-road as far as the people at large are concerned, and conventional wisdom as far as the people of San Francisco are concerned.
What do you call a representive government that doesn't represent you?
In the 2004 election, many places were using electronic voting machines without any papertrail.
The one and only way you could possibly detect any election fraud with those machines is by
looking at descrepancies with the exit polls, and we did indeed see some strange descrepancies.
Consequently, we've suddenly seen lots of people talking about how exit polls just suck.
It's not like the vendor of the voting machines would want to rig an election. What for? They'd get paid by either party anyway, so why bother?
And here we see the problems with working from economic theory instead of actually looking at what's been happening.
People do all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons, not all of them are economically motiviated. The folks at
Diebold famously had a strong Republican bias, and there are strong personal connections between the people running these
electronic voting machines companies (to quote Freeman and Bleifuss again: "The voting machine company Datamark, which became American Information Systems and is now known as ES&S, was founded in 1980 by two brothers, Bob and Todd Urosevich. Today, Todd is a vice president at ES&S and Bob is CEO of Diebold Election Systems.").
You want me to explain why someone would want to do what they do? What, am I a mind reader? If you talk to Mark Crispin Miller on the subject, he'll start ranting about Republican "theocrats". Maybe he's right, maybe not, how are we supposed to know?
The obvious point should be that we need a simple transparent election process to make sure that such things don't happen,
even if no one is convinced (or wants to believe?) that they already have happened.
When you have a paper-only voting process, simply dump the votes on the protester and tell him to recount.
Actually in San Francisco, there's a history of dumping the votes in the Bay to make sure that they can't be counted at all, but that's another problem.
"They"? Who are "they" and what election did they steal? Proof? Something from a reliable source, please?
Listen: have you looked into this at all? Why is it the problem of some-guy-on-slashdot to bring you up to speed on what ought to be common knowledge at this point? In summary, there have been three different styles of attack in play in US elections (1) denial of the right to vote for people likely to vote against you; (2) shorting key districts of voting machines; (3) falsify the vote itself, via electronic voting machines. Oh, and you might throw in a number (4) manipulation of the government legal system to smear the opposition.
If you're in the mood to look up supporting data on each of those three points, for (1) I might suggest reading Greg Palast on the subject, (2) try reading some Ohio Free Press articles (they're online), also that HBO documentary had some striking footage of the problem (3) I suggest reading Freeman and Bliefuss on the subject (4) Is how Alberto Gonzales got chased out of the Attorney Generals office, it's not exactly obscure.
My apologies for not doing the link farming for you, but I'm getting tired of playing co-dependant with the willfully ignorant.
If you ask me, there's certainly been enough proof of chicanery to justify an investigation into the problem, but that hasn't happened.
And there's definitely, shall we say, "cause for concern" about the integrity of American elections. Debra Bowen's election to Secretary of State of California has been one of the few bright spots in recent years.
Those were successful Democrat fixes in '04. You don't want to talk about those? What a surprise.
Why wouldn't we want to talk about them? Is this the old "but democrats do it to!" defense?
Even if that were true, it's hardly reassuring.
Better evidence of crooked voting there then Ohio or Floriduh.
Oh bullshit. I was following the Washington story and it hardly deserved to be called a "fix".
It was however, entertaining to watch the Republicans get nailed in a close election ala Florida,
and take a completely different line when it was their ass getting screwed.
They have absolutely no shame. It's amazing what the media let's them get away with.
Both major parties are big time cheaters and have been sense way before electronic voting machines. That's why nobody with any power wants a real investigation.
"Well you see, we're not going to talk the slashdot crowd into voting Republican, but they're a paranoid bunch,
and if you play up that you can make them apathetic about going out and voting Democrat..."; "Okay, that sounds good. Play it that way."
what an intriguing mix of insight and paranoid nonsense.
Voting machines do not exist for people to buy elections. They exist because it monetizes the election process, allowing people to get wealthy by controlling a process that is required in a democracy.
You're jumping to the conclusion that because you understand one aspect of the situation, you understand all of them.
There's some statistical evidence that there were some funny things going on with electronic voting machines in the 2004
election: Who won?.
The notion that the Republicans stole one (or two?) presidential elections in a row might be wrong, but doesn't deserve to be dismissed as "paranoid nonsense". At the very least, you'd think it would be a high priority to make sure that such things aren't remotely possible in the future...
Looking through the wired list of ebook readers, even the cheap ones are around $300, and none of them even have a gigabyte of memory.
Anyone who buys one of these things now deservers to have "sucker" tattooed on their forehead -- these things look like they're made
to rip people off with continual "upgrades" as they gradually turn into something useable.
The e-paper displays sound interesting, I suppose, but if I'm going to spend $800 on a linux gadget I'd want it to
have the full functionality of a laptop... paying that much for a crippled laptop doesn't make a lot of sense to me...
For example, nothing the Bush regime has said about the motive for the invasion of Iraq stands up to any scruitiny, so we're left with nothing but speculation as to they whys and wherefores.
To take this further off topic, I will respectfully disagree with
this. Certainly some of the pre-war claims have been disproved,
but President Bush's political opponents try to force this into
absolutes when the truth is a lot more complicated.
Just off the top of my head -- since it's not like anyone is
going to read this at this point -- I think you're blowing smoke
like crazy wtih a lot of details that even if true are
incomplete, and fundamentally don't matter.
To be more specific, the Bush Administration made several claims
to justify the invasion of Iraq, including:
* Saddam was in violation of the UN disarmament mandate,
including resolutions 687 and 1441. This was confirmed by
the Duelfer report following the invasion where the ISG
reported their findings of dozens of hidden and illegal
weapons programs and infrastructure that the UN had no idea
existed.
Uh, so now all of a sudden the Bush regime cares about
compliance with UN mandates? If the Bush regime cared about what
the UN said, we wouldn't have invaded Iraq at all: that was in
defiance of the UN.
If you actually look at what the UN weapons inspectors were
saying at the time, they were saying they needed "not weeks, not
years, but months" to complete inspections. The Bush regime
rushed into the invasion without waiting for them to complete
inspections -- presumably because they were afraid they wouldn't
find anything, and hence undermine the main rationale the US
public was given for the invasion, namely that Iraq had "WMD"s,
and was going to nuke our babies if we didn't watch out.
It was also strongly implied that Iraq had some connection
with Al Qaeda and the 9/11 attack, without actually saying so --
this was a brilliant job of guilt established by repetitive
association: the poll numbers kept showing that everyone thought
this connection existed, and those numbers kept going up every
time Bush opened his mouth. To this day, I would venture to say
that many people think this connection exists in some form
(more recently the game has been to talk about fighting Al Qaeda
in Iraq -- and sweep under the rug the point that there was
no Al Qaeda in Iraq before we got there).
* Iraq sponsored and promoted international terrorist
groups. This was also confirmed. Iraq was first placed on
the State Department's list of State Sponsors of Terrorism
in 1979, and they were known to carry out terrorist attacks
through the IIS and directly support dozens of terrorist
groups.
Uh huh. Were they involved with Al Qaeda? More so than Saudi Arabia?
Were they more involved with "international terrorist groups" more so
than Pakistan?
The point is not that Saddam Hussein was a Nice Guy, the point is
that none of the rationales for invasion we were given have stood
up to scruitny.
* A stable and free democratic Iraq will counteract the
source of the hatred in that region that has led to attacks
like 9/11. Maybe we will know if this has been confirmed or
disproved in 30 years.
Right -- so the idea is we conquer every dictatorship in the
world, and let them hold free elections and experience the joys
of democracy. The trouble with that notion is that conquered
people are not often well disposed toward the great US "liberators"
and they tend to want to elect people who are as bad or worse as the
people we just booted out. So the US "solution" is to play games
with the elections to make sure that only "our" people get
elected. And this game playing does not exactly impress the
locals with the j
Moderated troll?! Oh my god, the moderators have a Republican bias!!!
In any case, the point stands: bloggers are full of pretensions about the great role
they're playing on the world stage, but my attitude is "Call me when you fix democracy".
Asshole idiots like you aren't content with debating the merits of one's political opinions anymore. Instead you have to dream up bullshit of what you think your political opponents must actually be thinking, and worse, you then start to actually believe your own bullshit.
No political analysis is complete without a dash
of mind-reading, though it's obviously a tricky business.
For example, nothing the Bush regime has said about the motive for the
invasion of Iraq stands up to any scruitiny, so we're left
with nothing but speculation as to they whys and wherefores.
We know politicians don't always say precisely what they think
so predicting future behavior by looking at surface meanings
isn't adequate (look up "dog-whistle politics" some time).
For example:
I would contend that Hillary Clinton is essentially a pro-war
Democrat, and Barack Obama is essentially anti-war -- but you can
find statements where Hillary is at least trying to moderate her
pro-war stance and you will look in vain for Barack Obama saying
"bring 'em home now".
I'm tempted to make this my new.sig:
Its pathetic, and it only undermines legitimate debate. America is worse off because of pussies like you. You should be ashamed of yourself.
-- "Anonymous Coward" of slashdot.org
This seems like a relatively trivial case to use to start making pronouncements like "journalists can't hide from the internet".
Now, if internet bloggers managed to prevent the Bush regime from manipulating the US into attacking Iran in the same way that they got the US into Iraq, that would be something to be proud of.
Hell, it would be great if they could just get the mainstream media to stop referring to Denis Kucinich as some sort of crazy extremist because he's advocating what most of the US citizenry wants...
Presumably because they own the media at this point, and they new they could count on their bitch barking their way no matter what gets said in an impeachment hearing.
And they probably realized Pelosi would panic at the thought of having to do some real work, and they knew they could make her look bad this way.
So you're suggesting our Congress waste more time trying to achieve what they have chance of achieving? I suggest to you that this is perhaps _the_ reason why Congress has such low approval ratings: They're wasting time, going against the desires of the majority, and haven't really accomplished anything while they've been in power.
(1) There's a difference between choosing to not impeach (or for that matter,
choosing to fund the war) and swearing that that's the way things are going to be, no ifs ands or buts. Pelosi has thrown away any possible stick she could use to bargain with the Republicans, not surprisingly they're walking all over her.
(2) The idea that an impeachment is "against the will of the majority" is wrong in a number of respects. Polls on the subject range around 35% to 55% in favor of impeachment (wonder why there's such a big spread there, eh?): if the majority is not in favor (and I suspect it is), at the very least this is hardly a risky extreme proposition. Note that many people who don't say yes on the "I" word are still very unhappy with Bush and co, and are unlikely to be upset at someone trying to check them. Further, Nancy Pelosi's constituency is San Francisco. She doesn't have to guess if the electorate here is in favor of impeachment, we voted for a proposition directing congress to impeach.
(3) Even if removing Cheney/Bush from office via an impeachment hearing is politically unlikely, the investigation into the grounds for impeachment would hardly be a "waste". Under Bush, the executive branch has been raging out of control, these people deserve to be hauled on the carpet, whatever the actual outcome of the process.
The two times I've been exit polled, I lied to the pollster.
Cool. But now you need to explain why, back in 2004, unusual numbers of people started lying to pollsters in a particular way, in patterns that correlate with (a) battle ground states (b) the presence of Republican governors, and so on.
I don't say that you can't construct some such hypothetical after the fact, but no one would've predicted that behavior before the fact.
Myself, I think 2004 was a first in history: large-scale, automated voting fraud.
The history of American science fiction clearly begins with Hugo Gernsback and his radio-electronics porn, but if you think Wells and Verne merely "prepared the way" you should probably read more of their stuff. That ain't just proto-SF or some such, it's SF through-and-through.
For that matter, the idea that Poe merely "prepared the way" for the detective story, you're greatly underestimating "Murders in the Rue Morgue", which pinned down nearly every detail of the detective story, right down to the completely absurd "solution" to the mystery. Dupin was the template for nearly every fictional detective until the advent of competition from the hardboiled genre in the mid-1920s.
Slashdot Mirror
mdd4696 wrote:
Well, mostly the difference is it hasn't been posted to slashdot as a Great Revelation.At least not yet... maybe I'll wait a couple of days and submit it.
How exactly is a message supposed to get somewhere if it doesn't have the recipient info? I think you're confusing what you see in your mail box to what the mail servers see.
In any case, as is typical the news article doesn't really provide enough information to determine how the system actually works. It does sound like it's working on the premise that since spam is done in "bulk", if you see lots of identical messages going through a server you can assume that that's spam. The obvious problem would be that spammers can include randomly generated content.
But that problem is so obvious, it seems likely to me that I don't understand the system they have in mind.
That was my impression also. My first thought on reading this summary was that Bernstein making a verbal announcement doesn't really mean all that much, since -- if I understand the situation correctly -- part of the trouble has been his reluctance to say things in writing in the code distribution.
If you folks are coming into this story in the middle, djb is probably best known as the author of "qmail" (that's a "Q" not a "G"), which was once upon a time one of the few alternates to "sendmail" (these days, there's "postfix" and "exim" and probably some others).
Among other quirks, licensing of "qmail" has always been a sticky issue. I suggest reading Rick Moen's take on this subject:
Rogue974 wrote:
Before you guys go too crazy congratulating yourselves, allow me to point out that you've seized on only one aspect of the issues that Doctorow is talking about here.
Let's say you have a carefully-crafted set of identities, so that, for example, your LinkedIn network is solely composed of professional contacts, and you use a network on, say, Tribe for your friends. Now you're getting dozens of invites from people you worked with to add you to their LinkedIn networks, and they're all asking you for their seal of approval, they want you to stamp them "recommended".
Now, all of a sudden this act of writing a recommendation for someone goes from being an occasional occurrence to something you need to do all the time. Do you want to give a thumbs-up to someone you worked with for only a week, and really only barely know about? But would you want to deny this guy a recommendation, perhaps creating an enemy? After all, you might want a recommendation from him some time. Even stalling on the question could be a dicey thing, it could seem insulting to provide a recommendation after waiting a few months...
This is something that comes up over and over again: new technological options are never really optional, because they create pressure on you to use the option, if you choose to decline you're sending a message by that act that never existed before.
And on a completely different front, I'm a little skeptical about the philosophical assumptions you folks are making about how "it's just common sense" to carefully wall off your personal life from your work life. To me, this sounds like "hiding from the world", and I suspect it's (a) rarely a good idea and (b) unlikely to be successful.
"Already killed LinkedIn", yeah "LinkedIn" is what I was thinking about. I'm not sure if it's dead yet, but I kind of hope it does go away. I still get occasional invites, most of which I don't know what to do with. You know: "Hm, that name sounds familiar, I think I worked with him for a couple of weeks back at that terrible job I was doing a few years ago."
Then there's "meetup" or whatever it is, that has the same annoyances that Cory Doctorow is complaining about: it's sends you email notifying you of a change, but doesn't tell you what the change is.
(Why was this moderated as "OffTopic"? Someone at LinkedIn feeling nervous?)
The Empire State Building, like all older buildings has structural members of steel embedded in concrete to act as thermal insulation, so they don't weaken during a fire.
The WTC achieved it's height by sacrificing this scheme, and switching to a newer idea, steel inside of something like asbestos to provide thermal insulation.
And as I understand it, the situation got even more complicated because asbestos became illegal while they were constructing the building, and they had to switch to a different insulating material.
The new material was supposed to be as good or better as asbestos as far as insulation goes -- I speculate (but don't know) that it may have been more brittle: if it shakes off during impact, then you're screwed once the fire starts.
That's my understanding anyway. I see that the wikipedia article on the subject suggests a different mechanism: the open floor plan of the WTC let impact debri spread throughout the building, igniting more fires than would've happened in a more traditional, heavier structure.
You're being way too generous in your estimate of the likelyhood of cracking a containment building. The idea that you're going to punch through a reactor containment vessel with airplanes is if not bugnuts crazy, pretty close to it. We're talking about a five-foot thick shell of windowless steel reinforced concrete. Compared to that, the aluminum shell of a passenger plane is essentially tissue paper...
Now let's talk about the real problem here. It's no trick it all to google up things such as this: ASME briefing informs Capitol Hill staffers about U.S. nuclear plants. But the OP could not care less, because the anti-nuclear people don't trust any group such as the American Society of Mechanical Engineers any more than they trust Congress. If an anti-nuke person hears something that confirms their beliefs, they trust that source, if they hear something that contradicts it, they presume that the source is compromised somehow. It would be easy to rant and rave about this as intellectual laziness, but that's perhaps a little unfair to the anti-nuke crowd: what are they supposed to do, trust everything that the government tells them? Are they supposed to get a degree in engineering so they'll be competent to assess the risk themselves? In a Democratic society, the opinions of regular folks are supposed to count for something, but in a technological world, public policy decisions necessarily involve issues that only experts can understand, and the regular folks have no system they can trust to get the facts they need to make decisions.
So: what do we do? Here we are in a bold new world of information technology, anything you want to know is (supposedly) a google search away -- but name a website that you can use as a source or reliable information about some critical issue of the day? slashdot? wikipedia?
I was out at the Naval Reactor Facilty site in Idaho when there was a small earthquake that barely shook the ground. All of the reactors did automatic shutdowns, just as they were supposed to.
Getting a reactor to scram if something weird happens is a really easy technical problem.
(Note: the problem at TMI was the clueless operators that kept overriding the safety features, refusing to let the reactor shut itself down.)
MightyYar wrote:
Yup. Reactor containment vessels are tough, but then the WTC was a really badly designed house-of-cards, comapred to it, everything is tough. If they'd hit the Empire State Building, for example, it would certainly take some damage, but it wouldn't have pancaked.
electroniceric wrote:
You're jumping to a number of conclusions. All the guy said is that he was in Iraq. Maybe he's an accountant working for Blackwater.
(Or maybe he's a propagandist sitting in Washington, working for Bush Jr.)
Um... can you name three things that prove your point? I can name any number of things that go against it -- e.g. the executive branch blatantly violates the law, and repeatedly thumbs their nose at any kind of congressional oversight, and yet the democratic leadership in Congress is doing their best to prevent impeachment from even being discussed.
Consider that Nancy Pelosi's constituency is San Francisco, and she's repeatedly declared that "impeachment is off the table". She doesn't need to guess on the will of the people on this one, we voted on a direct initiative calling for impeachment. For that matter, the nationwide polls on the subject bounce around between a third and more than half being in favor of impeachment (depending on who does the polls: one wonders where that wide spread comes from...). There's no way you can spin this as some extreme, crazy notion, it's essentially middle-of-the-road as far as the people at large are concerned, and conventional wisdom as far as the people of San Francisco are concerned.
What do you call a representive government that doesn't represent you?
In the 2004 election, many places were using electronic voting machines without any papertrail. The one and only way you could possibly detect any election fraud with those machines is by looking at descrepancies with the exit polls, and we did indeed see some strange descrepancies. Consequently, we've suddenly seen lots of people talking about how exit polls just suck.
Strange, that.
And here we see the problems with working from economic theory instead of actually looking at what's been happening. People do all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons, not all of them are economically motiviated. The folks at Diebold famously had a strong Republican bias, and there are strong personal connections between the people running these electronic voting machines companies (to quote Freeman and Bleifuss again: "The voting machine company Datamark, which became American Information Systems and is now known as ES&S, was founded in 1980 by two brothers, Bob and Todd Urosevich. Today, Todd is a vice president at ES&S and Bob is CEO of Diebold Election Systems.").
You want me to explain why someone would want to do what they do? What, am I a mind reader? If you talk to Mark Crispin Miller on the subject, he'll start ranting about Republican "theocrats". Maybe he's right, maybe not, how are we supposed to know?
The obvious point should be that we need a simple transparent election process to make sure that such things don't happen, even if no one is convinced (or wants to believe?) that they already have happened.
Actually in San Francisco, there's a history of dumping the votes in the Bay to make sure that they can't be counted at all, but that's another problem.
Listen: have you looked into this at all? Why is it the problem of some-guy-on-slashdot to bring you up to speed on what ought to be common knowledge at this point? In summary, there have been three different styles of attack in play in US elections (1) denial of the right to vote for people likely to vote against you; (2) shorting key districts of voting machines; (3) falsify the vote itself, via electronic voting machines. Oh, and you might throw in a number (4) manipulation of the government legal system to smear the opposition.
If you're in the mood to look up supporting data on each of those three points, for (1) I might suggest reading Greg Palast on the subject, (2) try reading some Ohio Free Press articles (they're online), also that HBO documentary had some striking footage of the problem (3) I suggest reading Freeman and Bliefuss on the subject (4) Is how Alberto Gonzales got chased out of the Attorney Generals office, it's not exactly obscure.
My apologies for not doing the link farming for you, but I'm getting tired of playing co-dependant with the willfully ignorant.
If you ask me, there's certainly been enough proof of chicanery to justify an investigation into the problem, but that hasn't happened. And there's definitely, shall we say, "cause for concern" about the integrity of American elections. Debra Bowen's election to Secretary of State of California has been one of the few bright spots in recent years.
Why wouldn't we want to talk about them? Is this the old "but democrats do it to!" defense? Even if that were true, it's hardly reassuring.
Oh bullshit. I was following the Washington story and it hardly deserved to be called a "fix". It was however, entertaining to watch the Republicans get nailed in a close election ala Florida, and take a completely different line when it was their ass getting screwed.
They have absolutely no shame. It's amazing what the media let's them get away with.
"Well you see, we're not going to talk the slashdot crowd into voting Republican, but they're a paranoid bunch, and if you play up that you can make them apathetic about going out and voting Democrat..."; "Okay, that sounds good. Play it that way."
You're jumping to the conclusion that because you understand one aspect of the situation, you understand all of them. There's some statistical evidence that there were some funny things going on with electronic voting machines in the 2004 election: Who won?.
The notion that the Republicans stole one (or two?) presidential elections in a row might be wrong, but doesn't deserve to be dismissed as "paranoid nonsense". At the very least, you'd think it would be a high priority to make sure that such things aren't remotely possible in the future...
Anyone who buys one of these things now deservers to have "sucker" tattooed on their forehead -- these things look like they're made to rip people off with continual "upgrades" as they gradually turn into something useable.
The e-paper displays sound interesting, I suppose, but if I'm going to spend $800 on a linux gadget I'd want it to have the full functionality of a laptop... paying that much for a crippled laptop doesn't make a lot of sense to me...
cheezedawg wrote:
Just off the top of my head -- since it's not like anyone is going to read this at this point -- I think you're blowing smoke like crazy wtih a lot of details that even if true are incomplete, and fundamentally don't matter.
Uh, so now all of a sudden the Bush regime cares about compliance with UN mandates? If the Bush regime cared about what the UN said, we wouldn't have invaded Iraq at all: that was in defiance of the UN.
If you actually look at what the UN weapons inspectors were saying at the time, they were saying they needed "not weeks, not years, but months" to complete inspections. The Bush regime rushed into the invasion without waiting for them to complete inspections -- presumably because they were afraid they wouldn't find anything, and hence undermine the main rationale the US public was given for the invasion, namely that Iraq had "WMD"s, and was going to nuke our babies if we didn't watch out.
It was also strongly implied that Iraq had some connection with Al Qaeda and the 9/11 attack, without actually saying so -- this was a brilliant job of guilt established by repetitive association: the poll numbers kept showing that everyone thought this connection existed, and those numbers kept going up every time Bush opened his mouth. To this day, I would venture to say that many people think this connection exists in some form (more recently the game has been to talk about fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq -- and sweep under the rug the point that there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq before we got there).
Uh huh. Were they involved with Al Qaeda? More so than Saudi Arabia? Were they more involved with "international terrorist groups" more so than Pakistan?
The point is not that Saddam Hussein was a Nice Guy, the point is that none of the rationales for invasion we were given have stood up to scruitny.
Right -- so the idea is we conquer every dictatorship in the world, and let them hold free elections and experience the joys of democracy. The trouble with that notion is that conquered people are not often well disposed toward the great US "liberators" and they tend to want to elect people who are as bad or worse as the people we just booted out. So the US "solution" is to play games with the elections to make sure that only "our" people get elected. And this game playing does not exactly impress the locals with the j
In any case, the point stands: bloggers are full of pretensions about the great role they're playing on the world stage, but my attitude is "Call me when you fix democracy".
No political analysis is complete without a dash of mind-reading, though it's obviously a tricky business. For example, nothing the Bush regime has said about the motive for the invasion of Iraq stands up to any scruitiny, so we're left with nothing but speculation as to they whys and wherefores.
We know politicians don't always say precisely what they think so predicting future behavior by looking at surface meanings isn't adequate (look up "dog-whistle politics" some time).
For example: I would contend that Hillary Clinton is essentially a pro-war Democrat, and Barack Obama is essentially anti-war -- but you can find statements where Hillary is at least trying to moderate her pro-war stance and you will look in vain for Barack Obama saying "bring 'em home now".
I'm tempted to make this my new .sig:
Its pathetic, and it only undermines legitimate debate. America is worse off because of pussies like you. You should be ashamed of yourself. -- "Anonymous Coward" of slashdot.org
Now, if internet bloggers managed to prevent the Bush regime from manipulating the US into attacking Iran in the same way that they got the US into Iraq, that would be something to be proud of.
Hell, it would be great if they could just get the mainstream media to stop referring to Denis Kucinich as some sort of crazy extremist because he's advocating what most of the US citizenry wants...
Presumably because they own the media at this point, and they new they could count on their bitch barking their way no matter what gets said in an impeachment hearing.
And they probably realized Pelosi would panic at the thought of having to do some real work, and they knew they could make her look bad this way.
(1) There's a difference between choosing to not impeach (or for that matter, choosing to fund the war) and swearing that that's the way things are going to be, no ifs ands or buts. Pelosi has thrown away any possible stick she could use to bargain with the Republicans, not surprisingly they're walking all over her.
(2) The idea that an impeachment is "against the will of the majority" is wrong in a number of respects. Polls on the subject range around 35% to 55% in favor of impeachment (wonder why there's such a big spread there, eh?): if the majority is not in favor (and I suspect it is), at the very least this is hardly a risky extreme proposition. Note that many people who don't say yes on the "I" word are still very unhappy with Bush and co, and are unlikely to be upset at someone trying to check them. Further, Nancy Pelosi's constituency is San Francisco. She doesn't have to guess if the electorate here is in favor of impeachment, we voted for a proposition directing congress to impeach.
(3) Even if removing Cheney/Bush from office via an impeachment hearing is politically unlikely, the investigation into the grounds for impeachment would hardly be a "waste". Under Bush, the executive branch has been raging out of control, these people deserve to be hauled on the carpet, whatever the actual outcome of the process.
sconeu wrote:
Cool. But now you need to explain why, back in 2004, unusual numbers of people started lying to pollsters in a particular way, in patterns that correlate with (a) battle ground states (b) the presence of Republican governors, and so on.
I don't say that you can't construct some such hypothetical after the fact, but no one would've predicted that behavior before the fact.
Myself, I think 2004 was a first in history: large-scale, automated voting fraud.
For that matter, the idea that Poe merely "prepared the way" for the detective story, you're greatly underestimating "Murders in the Rue Morgue", which pinned down nearly every detail of the detective story, right down to the completely absurd "solution" to the mystery. Dupin was the template for nearly every fictional detective until the advent of competition from the hardboiled genre in the mid-1920s.