I guess I am that naive. I suspect/hope his thinking is that he won't need to kiss their asses once he's in power since people will see how much better things are. He isn't a perpetual campaigner in attitude. The likelihood of either party these days switching candidates after one term unless things are going horribly wrong is virtually nil, because the vast group of swing voters in the middle will always vote for the status quo if they're happy.
Even though he is against torture, he doesn't want the CIA limited to the Army manual. That's because the US Army is not in the business of interrogation. That's the CIA's job.
So he's against torture, except during interrogations? I guess it's good to know he's against the recreational use of torture, but it's hardly a principled stand.
John McCain is a member of the Republican party, but it's certainly not the Republicans that left him. He's one of the most left-leaning Republicans in national office at any level. John McCain is a 1950's era, JFK or Reagan Democrat which nows forms the centrist/left wing of the Republican party.
Oh, please. McCain is conservative, he just isn't a neoconservative. He stacks up quite well with Pat Buchanan and any other classic conservatives you'd care to name. The party left him and many other true conservatives in order to court the Religious Right, and pursue the disastrous (but politically successful) 50+1 strategy.
Joking aside I'd really like to know how this dramatic change came about.
I'm optimistic enough to think that he's simply playing the game of politics now the way he thinks he needs to, to get elected by his own party (after seeing the dirty tricks and bullshit of Bush 2000), and that once in office when he no longer needs to kiss up to the neocon idiots who still hold disproportionate influence in the party, we'll see the old, genuinely conservative McCain assert himself and tell them all to fuck off.
I just can't imagine he's genuinely changed so many attitudes at his age or with his well-known dislike of these folks.
what makes you so sure that it is NO longer possible?
It's no longer possible in the sense that both the passengers and crew are now aware that they're dead anyways, so there's nothing to lose by fighting back against hijackers. The conventional wisdom and official advice was always to be passive in a hijacking, now it is to fight back no matter the cost, and that makes the techniques pretty useless for hijackers in the future.
That article is full of crap. An average of 70 days to see a doctor?
If you need to see a specialist and don't have great insurance? Yeah, easily. Even most competent PCPs covered by "typical" insurance have wait times of several months, if they're accepting new patients at all. It's great that your brother (or your parents) have great insurance, if we all had the same level of care you're talking about, obviously people wouldn't be complaining about the US health care system.
No one waits for hours in the ER because its privatized and because there's competition.
You are so fucking wrong it hurts.
Private hospitals are only required to provide stabilizing care to anyone who walks through the door. If your life is not in danger, and you don't have insurance, a private ER will happily tell you to go fuck yourself and call an ambulance to send you to the closest public ER, which will then bill you $15,000 you can't afford, destroy your credit rating, which will lead to bankruptcy, and make it more difficult to get a job, insurance (of any kind), or loans in the future.
The ads you hear on the radio are targeted at you -- the fraction of Americans who have great insurance and good credit, and they'll be happy to treat you and your suburban friends in 30 minutes and give you a lollipop on your way out the door.
It's great that you and your buddies have good incomes and fantastic private insurance, but nobody is complaining about the state of health care for the well-off (except the companies who pay for it), it's the other 70%+ of the country that is faced with a lot more serious problems than the Canadian system has ever seen, and there's few people who think even the Canadian system should be emulated (primarily because it doesn't have the private options that it makes no sense to dispose of).
Everyone has a right to property they freely acquired from other freely-acting individual.
So no doubt you're going to return your land to the Native Americans it was taken from unwillingly, and reject all the other property you and your family have acquired from the society that prospered from that unlawful taking?
Then prosecute for fraud and make the fraudster pay.
OK, great, so the guy who committed the fraud has $1800 in the bank, a five-year old car worth $3000, and the company he worked for went bankrupt and has no assets but many liabilities. How do we get back the $26 million dollars worth of fraud they committed? Which stone do we draw that blood from? I mean, sure, send the fuckers to jail, but we're still left with the economic impact, and that negatively affects lots of people who took no part in the fraud and didn't sign any contracts.
You're living in a libertarian la-la-land where people exist in isolation, have no effect on each other, everyone has perfect knowledge of the possible consequences of any agreement they enter into, and is able to be held responsible for their mistakes.
Argumentum ad verecundiam. I've been seeing people make claims like this for almost 25 years now, and I have yet to see a single credible study that supports it.
Anyone who has spent a day answering phones on a tech support line can confirm that mixing up mouse buttons is a common issue.
"right click on the icon" "double click?" "no, ma'am, click the right button on your mouse" "how do I know which button is the right one?"
History tends to judge first on the outcome and secondarily on the method.
I agree completely, but think you underestimate the negative consequences of our recent military actions. The idea that they could simply be footnotes in history unless major changes occur is pretty unthinkable -- Vietnam certainly did nothing to change the geopolitics of SE Asia, but it is very much an historically significant action, and one that only diminishes the legacy of the leaders from both parties who endorsed it.
Sure, if Iraq blooms into a democracy in a few years and nothing else bad happens anywhere on Earth, we'll still grumble about the doubling of our national debt, but we can at least rationalize it. But if the most optimistic scenario doesn't come to pass (and when in the Middle East has the most optimistic scenario EVER come to pass?), we'll be stuck with a massively increased deficit for generations, increased anti-American activity (which could lead to more attacks on our home shores), and the loss of our ability to negotiate with a big stick for the near future, since everyone knows we have no ability to do anything but fire cruise missiles at them for at least several years.
"Worst" in what sense? He's been remarkably effective as a leader.
"Worst" in the sense of damaging the country more than helping it, and generally failing to uphold his responsibilities as well as failing to meet anything close to his stated goals in his largest presidential decision. But yes, he was certainly an effective leader, and he accomplished a great many things for his party, as well as running a very tight ship in terms of controlling Congress and the media. or, as Scott McClellan would put it, he was in perpetual campaign mode, and at that he was very successful. But perpetual campaign mode is not about success in substance, it's about success in contemporary perception.
Substance is what history will judge his term on, and barring any major changes in the Middle East, it's unlikely to be kind.
From a scientific standpoint, God does not play into evolutionary theory in any way, period. To say evolution is divinely guided is akin to saying that 2+2=4 because God willed it to be so. Well, 2+2 does indeed equal 4, whether or not the reality was "divinely willed" or not. The question of "compatibility," then, can only be allowed at a purely philosophical level.
Correct, I'm glad to see you agree. Whether or not someone wants to add God is only meaningful to that person on an emotional or philosophical level.
Beliefs can affect the quality of a person's work, but so can any number of other things, that's why the scientific process is built on repeatability by other experimenters. You can certainly chose to be more skeptical of the results of those who believe in divine intent, but if you want to protest their belief for no other reason than it offends your personal expectation of intellectual consistency, you're an extremist.
I thought that was "Intelligent Design", not "Creationism". Are the two terms interchangeable now?
Creationism generally means now what used to be called Young-Earth Creationism. It used to mean more generally anyone who believed that God created life, but it has been largely taken over by fundamentalists, so that old-school creationists who don't fit in the new definition are now believers of Theistic Evolution or an alternative. Modern Creationists hold that humanity, if not all life, is fairly static biologically, and may go so far as to say that all scientific evidence to the contrary is a test of faith.
Intelligent Design is the scientific-sounding version of Creationism that doesn't rely on Biblical authority, recognizes the scientific evidence of biology, and purports to prove that God is continually involved in the process of life purely by inference and implication. ID acknowledges that life changes through what they see as "microevolution", but says that large changes never occur without God's guidance.
I'm not sure how you managed to completely miss the whole second half of my post. You're right, the idea of an intelligence guiding evolution isn't science, and nobody sane advocates it being taught as science. But simply having that belief and even teaching it in the context of religious or philosophical studies is noncontroversial outside of those with an axe to grind (on both sides).
Depending on which surveys you trust and how you interpret them (since there's never been a direct apples-to-apples survey I know of), anywhere from 30%-70% of evolution-believing biologists working in the US believe in God, and presumably some large fraction of those believe that God set evolution in motion, either directly or indirectly (perhaps simply creating a universe where evolution was inevitable). But that has no bearing on their work -- why should it? The mechanism and process is the same regardless of whether it's random or guided, the only difference is in purpose, intent, and motivation, none of which are scientific variables.
God and evolution are only incompatible if you believe in literal, young-Earth Creationism. Most controversy over evolution is from people who don't understand it, and are misled by the Creationists (either purposely or not) into believing it is incompatible with more mainline theologies.
Indeed, such an event would completely disprove evolution, and should be noted. Such an event would be a miracle outside of biology, not macroevolution.
I often find it amazing how people are stereotyped. Not all people who believe God is responsible for creation of the universe have a problem with evolutionary theory
Nor are such people called Creationists, so I'm not sure why you think they're being stereotyped in the message you're responding to. Creationists believe God created life (or at least Man) from whole cloth. Believing in Guided Evolution (which is what Catholics and many/most contemporary Protestants believe) isn't remotely controversial except to the most staunch anti-religionists, since the presence or absence of a guiding intelligence to evolution is a matter of philosophy/religion rather than one of science.
People are plenty willing to pay for tools, even just code editors. MS makes a pretty penny from Visual Studio, and TextMate is considered the must-have editor on the Mac. The real lesson is that there are plenty of open source tools for basic tasks, you have to offer something unique in terms of integration or usability to be a commercial success. Sounds like this company is upset that their "good enough" tools can't compete with free tools that are also "good enough".
Yeah, but you don't want the reactor shutting down because the computer system is shit. That is most definitely not reassuring to me.
On, the contrary, shutting down because the system is shit sounds like a much better option than continuing to run despite the shittiness of the computer monitoring everything.
Of course, the ideal situation would be to have good computers that only get updated in scheduled, planned ways so that you don't have the issue at all. But shutting everything down when something is amiss is the only sensible response.
This is like the NRA saying I wander how familiar the new president will be with regards to the barrel modification on my new Desert Eagle.
No, it's more like electing a president in the 1940s who had never operated a horseless carriage and thought learning about transportation issues was for eggheads. The internet is not some trivial matter in life, it's the infrastructure for a significant and growing portion of our economy. Tech legislation could quite literally make or break a 21st century economy, just as surely as telephones, roads and air transport created the 20th century.
Most of them still do. That's how shakedown artists like Jesse Jackson make their living.
Two different things -- companies nowadays are simply worried about bad publicity affecting quarterly profits.
What the poster was talking about was an era where companies very truly worried that if they did something too offensive to the public, the entire company and much of their individual personal wealth would simply be taken away from them.
Seagate is announcing two seperate products. One is a SSD and the OTHER is a 2TB hdd.
Wow, I saw the headline in my RSS feed and misread it the same way everyone else did. I expected the next story to be about the new finance company Seagate was opening to provide mortgages on 2TB SSDs.
The other way of looking at it are that the ISO is naturally really, really slow and these appeals are the appropriate first step in showing that there was a problem.
The purpose of being a slow, deliberative body is to prevent major errors from being made in the first place.
Making errors quickly and then fixing them slowly is the worst possible combination of attributes for a governing body to have.
...but what the hell is up with these users starting their replies with something like: "I'll probably get modded down for trolling, but..." Are you saying you know your answer will not be appreciated, but you're just the kind of crazy, out-there, don't-give-a-damn, cool guy that says it anyway? Just say what you have to say and stand by it. Stop showing off your insecurity, and/or lack of knowledge on the subject.
In modern America, everyone has the right to feel persecuted by their ideological opponents, and state that anyone who doesn't find them insightful and brilliant is clearly just biased against the truth. There is no irony recognized in the US anymore when a member of a massive majority claims that some small minority is "oppressing" him.
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I guess I am that naive. I suspect/hope his thinking is that he won't need to kiss their asses once he's in power since people will see how much better things are. He isn't a perpetual campaigner in attitude. The likelihood of either party these days switching candidates after one term unless things are going horribly wrong is virtually nil, because the vast group of swing voters in the middle will always vote for the status quo if they're happy.
So he's against torture, except during interrogations? I guess it's good to know he's against the recreational use of torture, but it's hardly a principled stand.
Oh, please. McCain is conservative, he just isn't a neoconservative. He stacks up quite well with Pat Buchanan and any other classic conservatives you'd care to name. The party left him and many other true conservatives in order to court the Religious Right, and pursue the disastrous (but politically successful) 50+1 strategy.
I'm optimistic enough to think that he's simply playing the game of politics now the way he thinks he needs to, to get elected by his own party (after seeing the dirty tricks and bullshit of Bush 2000), and that once in office when he no longer needs to kiss up to the neocon idiots who still hold disproportionate influence in the party, we'll see the old, genuinely conservative McCain assert himself and tell them all to fuck off.
I just can't imagine he's genuinely changed so many attitudes at his age or with his well-known dislike of these folks.
It's no longer possible in the sense that both the passengers and crew are now aware that they're dead anyways, so there's nothing to lose by fighting back against hijackers. The conventional wisdom and official advice was always to be passive in a hijacking, now it is to fight back no matter the cost, and that makes the techniques pretty useless for hijackers in the future.
If you need to see a specialist and don't have great insurance? Yeah, easily. Even most competent PCPs covered by "typical" insurance have wait times of several months, if they're accepting new patients at all. It's great that your brother (or your parents) have great insurance, if we all had the same level of care you're talking about, obviously people wouldn't be complaining about the US health care system.
You are so fucking wrong it hurts.
Private hospitals are only required to provide stabilizing care to anyone who walks through the door. If your life is not in danger, and you don't have insurance, a private ER will happily tell you to go fuck yourself and call an ambulance to send you to the closest public ER, which will then bill you $15,000 you can't afford, destroy your credit rating, which will lead to bankruptcy, and make it more difficult to get a job, insurance (of any kind), or loans in the future.
The ads you hear on the radio are targeted at you -- the fraction of Americans who have great insurance and good credit, and they'll be happy to treat you and your suburban friends in 30 minutes and give you a lollipop on your way out the door.
It's great that you and your buddies have good incomes and fantastic private insurance, but nobody is complaining about the state of health care for the well-off (except the companies who pay for it), it's the other 70%+ of the country that is faced with a lot more serious problems than the Canadian system has ever seen, and there's few people who think even the Canadian system should be emulated (primarily because it doesn't have the private options that it makes no sense to dispose of).
So no doubt you're going to return your land to the Native Americans it was taken from unwillingly, and reject all the other property you and your family have acquired from the society that prospered from that unlawful taking?
OK, great, so the guy who committed the fraud has $1800 in the bank, a five-year old car worth $3000, and the company he worked for went bankrupt and has no assets but many liabilities. How do we get back the $26 million dollars worth of fraud they committed? Which stone do we draw that blood from? I mean, sure, send the fuckers to jail, but we're still left with the economic impact, and that negatively affects lots of people who took no part in the fraud and didn't sign any contracts.
You're living in a libertarian la-la-land where people exist in isolation, have no effect on each other, everyone has perfect knowledge of the possible consequences of any agreement they enter into, and is able to be held responsible for their mistakes.
Anyone who has spent a day answering phones on a tech support line can confirm that mixing up mouse buttons is a common issue.
"right click on the icon"
"double click?"
"no, ma'am, click the right button on your mouse"
"how do I know which button is the right one?"
I agree completely, but think you underestimate the negative consequences of our recent military actions. The idea that they could simply be footnotes in history unless major changes occur is pretty unthinkable -- Vietnam certainly did nothing to change the geopolitics of SE Asia, but it is very much an historically significant action, and one that only diminishes the legacy of the leaders from both parties who endorsed it.
Sure, if Iraq blooms into a democracy in a few years and nothing else bad happens anywhere on Earth, we'll still grumble about the doubling of our national debt, but we can at least rationalize it. But if the most optimistic scenario doesn't come to pass (and when in the Middle East has the most optimistic scenario EVER come to pass?), we'll be stuck with a massively increased deficit for generations, increased anti-American activity (which could lead to more attacks on our home shores), and the loss of our ability to negotiate with a big stick for the near future, since everyone knows we have no ability to do anything but fire cruise missiles at them for at least several years.
"Worst" in the sense of damaging the country more than helping it, and generally failing to uphold his responsibilities as well as failing to meet anything close to his stated goals in his largest presidential decision. But yes, he was certainly an effective leader, and he accomplished a great many things for his party, as well as running a very tight ship in terms of controlling Congress and the media. or, as Scott McClellan would put it, he was in perpetual campaign mode, and at that he was very successful. But perpetual campaign mode is not about success in substance, it's about success in contemporary perception.
Substance is what history will judge his term on, and barring any major changes in the Middle East, it's unlikely to be kind.
Correct, I'm glad to see you agree. Whether or not someone wants to add God is only meaningful to that person on an emotional or philosophical level.
Beliefs can affect the quality of a person's work, but so can any number of other things, that's why the scientific process is built on repeatability by other experimenters. You can certainly chose to be more skeptical of the results of those who believe in divine intent, but if you want to protest their belief for no other reason than it offends your personal expectation of intellectual consistency, you're an extremist.
Creationism generally means now what used to be called Young-Earth Creationism. It used to mean more generally anyone who believed that God created life, but it has been largely taken over by fundamentalists, so that old-school creationists who don't fit in the new definition are now believers of Theistic Evolution or an alternative. Modern Creationists hold that humanity, if not all life, is fairly static biologically, and may go so far as to say that all scientific evidence to the contrary is a test of faith.
Intelligent Design is the scientific-sounding version of Creationism that doesn't rely on Biblical authority, recognizes the scientific evidence of biology, and purports to prove that God is continually involved in the process of life purely by inference and implication. ID acknowledges that life changes through what they see as "microevolution", but says that large changes never occur without God's guidance.
I'm not sure how you managed to completely miss the whole second half of my post. You're right, the idea of an intelligence guiding evolution isn't science, and nobody sane advocates it being taught as science. But simply having that belief and even teaching it in the context of religious or philosophical studies is noncontroversial outside of those with an axe to grind (on both sides).
Depending on which surveys you trust and how you interpret them (since there's never been a direct apples-to-apples survey I know of), anywhere from 30%-70% of evolution-believing biologists working in the US believe in God, and presumably some large fraction of those believe that God set evolution in motion, either directly or indirectly (perhaps simply creating a universe where evolution was inevitable). But that has no bearing on their work -- why should it? The mechanism and process is the same regardless of whether it's random or guided, the only difference is in purpose, intent, and motivation, none of which are scientific variables.
God and evolution are only incompatible if you believe in literal, young-Earth Creationism. Most controversy over evolution is from people who don't understand it, and are misled by the Creationists (either purposely or not) into believing it is incompatible with more mainline theologies.
Indeed, such an event would completely disprove evolution, and should be noted. Such an event would be a miracle outside of biology, not macroevolution.
Nor are such people called Creationists, so I'm not sure why you think they're being stereotyped in the message you're responding to. Creationists believe God created life (or at least Man) from whole cloth. Believing in Guided Evolution (which is what Catholics and many/most contemporary Protestants believe) isn't remotely controversial except to the most staunch anti-religionists, since the presence or absence of a guiding intelligence to evolution is a matter of philosophy/religion rather than one of science.
People are plenty willing to pay for tools, even just code editors. MS makes a pretty penny from Visual Studio, and TextMate is considered the must-have editor on the Mac. The real lesson is that there are plenty of open source tools for basic tasks, you have to offer something unique in terms of integration or usability to be a commercial success. Sounds like this company is upset that their "good enough" tools can't compete with free tools that are also "good enough".
On, the contrary, shutting down because the system is shit sounds like a much better option than continuing to run despite the shittiness of the computer monitoring everything.
Of course, the ideal situation would be to have good computers that only get updated in scheduled, planned ways so that you don't have the issue at all. But shutting everything down when something is amiss is the only sensible response.
No, it's more like electing a president in the 1940s who had never operated a horseless carriage and thought learning about transportation issues was for eggheads. The internet is not some trivial matter in life, it's the infrastructure for a significant and growing portion of our economy. Tech legislation could quite literally make or break a 21st century economy, just as surely as telephones, roads and air transport created the 20th century.
Two different things -- companies nowadays are simply worried about bad publicity affecting quarterly profits.
What the poster was talking about was an era where companies very truly worried that if they did something too offensive to the public, the entire company and much of their individual personal wealth would simply be taken away from them.
Somehow I doubt importing billions of tons of frozen CO2 is going to help us reduce greenhouse gasses
Wow, I saw the headline in my RSS feed and misread it the same way everyone else did. I expected the next story to be about the new finance company Seagate was opening to provide mortgages on 2TB SSDs.
The purpose of being a slow, deliberative body is to prevent major errors from being made in the first place.
Making errors quickly and then fixing them slowly is the worst possible combination of attributes for a governing body to have.
In modern America, everyone has the right to feel persecuted by their ideological opponents, and state that anyone who doesn't find them insightful and brilliant is clearly just biased against the truth. There is no irony recognized in the US anymore when a member of a massive majority claims that some small minority is "oppressing" him.