Add to that, researching the 2005 bill that forced FM/FM to give out loans based on racial profiles instead of financial stability, and you'll have a good idea who to blame.
I'm gonna call bullshit unless you can back this up with a link or two including one pointing to the actual legislation.
Loans favoring people of a certain income class and demographic with interest rates that might not otherwise be available to them under conventional market proceedures, aren't particularly controversial, but *requiring* them to loan to a candidate who wouldn't qualify under normal market conditions would be.
However, anyone familiar knows that "normal market conditions" in 2005 included No Income, No Job, No Asset loans, which should make one *highly* skeptical about the assertion that congress twisted lender's arms.
Who was in charge of Fannie Mae when they "misreported" $10.8 billion in 2006?
The connection of Fannie Mae to Walter Mondale's campaign manager is supposed to be evidence of Democratic malfeasance here? It's been 20 years since Mondale ran. Focusing on Enron and its spectacular collapse that took down a colluding Big 5 accounting firm instead of FM's *understating* their earnings? I guess that's evidence of a massive media conspiracy... especially since the media DID report on problems with FM.
For those too lazy to find out, consider that Obama, despite being in the Senate for only 2 years is the #1 recipient of donations from FM/FM at $112,000.
A bit of further research reveals that this is out a total of a recent $390 million in lobbying dollars. So, Obama's the largest recipient... at.02% of FM donation dollars. I guess that means he's tight with FM, although he's also raised more money than anybody else from just about everybody.
"Fannie Mae Chairman Franklin Raines last week
That "last week" has got to be pre-2004, then, since that's when he was pushed out over the accounting issues.
called for continued efforts by Fannie Mae and mortgage lenders to reach out to those 'at the margins' of home ownership. Blacks, Hispanics and immigrants trying to buy homes would be a major focus of outreach, Raines said." Raines made no mention of assistance for the millions of white families who have difficulty purchasing home
Raines also made no mention of his support for the troops, ending Islamic Terrorism, and the state of Israel, which means he is against these things.
The results demonstrate that democratic economists lean left and republicans lean right.
That's actually not what it says. It says that among economists, those who believe Democrats are more likely to be good for the economy are likely to belong to that party and vote for that party's candidate, and those who believe Republicans are more likely to be good for the economy are likely to belong to that party and vote for that party's candidate. That's pretty rational behavior.
It also tells us a significant but not overwhelming majority believe Democrats are more likely to be good.
There is no real information about how biased the thinking process that helped them arrive at these conclusions was.
and found a 16 page write-up about how a guy broke into your house, disabled the motion detector
I agree this would be disturbing, but I hear these analogies to people's homes all the time and I've always been a little uncomfortable with them, and I think I've figured out why.
One of the key problems with a home invasion is that it's pretty reasonable to assume it threatens your personal safety. There are other places to threaten someone's personal safety, but it's one of the few places where just by dint of being there, it's reasonable to assume someone constitutes some kind of threat to you.
I think a better analogy would be some kind of storage unit or a locker. If you had stuff in this protected by a certain kind of lock, and somebody broke into your place and left a note that said "Dude. These locks are defective. They're easy to open by using this technique. Your stuff will be safer if you get something else!" and didn't take anything, that'd be closer to what happens when a system is compromised. You might be likely to be a bit surprised and perhaps wary, but it's not the place where you sleep.
Ahh, more responsibility, additional liability, same pay scale.
There's no opportunity that isn't potentially like this -- that isn't at the very least *new* responsibility, *potential* liability, and potentially even less rewarding than what you've currently got. So, if risk isn't for you, don't answer when opportunity knocks.
I think this is a potentially interesting opportunity. IT is essentially a subset of operations / infrastructure at the moment, and it contains a lot of smart people. I think right now one of the biggest liabilities becoming any kind of IT pro has is that people tend to pigeonhole you, especially, it sometimes seems, people with the soft skills that seem to make up management.
Any opportunity to move beyond that paradigm is a general win, I think. And for IT pros who *do* have some degree of soft skills, negotiating compensation for additional responsibility and risk is probably also within the realm of possibility.
If it's not, your problem is quite possibly the place you work at.
See, this is called NEGOTIATION. You have your terms, I have mine.
Look, this is America, we don't believe in "negotiation." That's a tactic that terrorists and community organizers use to lull us into complacency by making agreements they don't intend to keep.
It all turns out better if you give one party the power to dictate the agreement. Peace through strength.
As I've said elsewhere in the thread, expecting contracts to serve as effective communication to the customer is like expecting source code of a program to serve as a FAQ or a manual.
Contracts are not really intended for (nor good at) effective communication of agreement terms to a customer. Especially when drafted entirely by the legal department of one side agreement, their purpose is something else entirely, which is to communicate those terms to the legal system (and, maximize the interests of the side that drafts them under the fullest extent possible under the law).
Yes, because everyone needs to be treated like a two year-old. No, we can't expect people to act like adults and be responsible for their own actions.
Real grown-up responsibility has more than a watch-out-for-yourself component. There's both an individual and a social component.
And a reasonably convincing case to be made that among others, most cell carriers don't take enough responsibility in helping people signing contracts understand the whole thing. Or that a reasonable person would find it highly surprising there are corners of the covered terms of service which if you wander into can subject you to fees 2-3 orders of magnitude larger than your conventional bill.
Think about it this way: when the people in question got the data service, do you really think they *never* asked what the service cost? It's highly unlikely. What is highly likely is that they asked, got the standard answer about the most common usage, and were simply not informed about the additional usage fees. They took an incomplete answer as a complete one.
You can argue that the contract is a complete answer, but here we have a problem: contracts are not intended to be effective vehicles for communicating terms of agreement to consumers, they're designed to be effective vehicles for specifying terms to the legal machinery. If you want to argue that the contract is the answer, you may as well argue the source code of a piece of software serves as a FAQ or Manual.
You charged me exactly what it said in the contract I signed said you would! How dare you.
I expect that in a world where most either read their contracts in great detail (and are sufficiently educated to understand the ramifications) or refused to sign anything that took them more than a minute to read, this would work out great. I'm not sure which plan you're advocating, though, and I expect either plan would actually impede carrier sales.
I would think that in the interests of PR, AT&T might send you a text or something when you go international roaming and pass some threshold of use, just to warn you. But really, if you pay extra to call Canada long distance, don't you think your cell phone/data card would work the same way?
I think the particularly telling piece of information is that if you want a plan where they do limit your charges and notify you when you reach thresholds.... you have to pay extra. They're called prepaid plans, and there are no surprises (well, within limits), but for common use cases, it's guaranteed you'll pay 2-4 times the amount a customer on a given rate plan will.
Why the cell phone companies can't combine the limits on prepaid plans with conventional rate plans is an interesting question, but I suspect the answer is not a technical limitation.
The branding "Aircard" is close enough to "Airport" some readers may assume it refers to Apple equipment instead of stuff manufactured by Sierra Wireless.
"there appears to be no truth to the claim made by the commenter, and no further documentation or support for this has turned up."
It looks to me like Jessamyn's saying there is no evidence to back up the commenter's list, the one people are complaining contains books published after Baker left.
There doesn't appear, however, to be any evidence that Time's original claims regarding Palin's confrontations and threats against Baker are false.
Teaching non-science in a science class is not healthy debate.
Actually, I'm coming to believe a section in science class called "Challenges to the Theory of Evolution" could be extremely productive. You could take common problematic arguments like "If humans evolved from apes, why are there still apes?" and address some of the reasons why they're poor challenges.
And there's nothing wrong with exploring any legitimate challenges there may be. Some people will choose to stick God or some other intelligent actor in those gaps, but many might even choose to refine existing theory or explore other alternatives.
Either way, I think we'd end up with a more informed population less likely to be susceptible to fallacious arguments in the discussion on the topic.
The article basically has no proof, only speculation, and a record that ZERO books were actually banned.
However, there are individuals who seem to be vouching for the fact that the librarian's employment was threatened, and it appears to be indisputable that she eventually left for one reason or another.
The actual accomplished banning is not necessarily the only problem.
(Unless you subscribe to the unitary mayoral theory that city employees serve at the will and pleasure of the municipality's chief executive...)
While we may not agree with all of the legislation Joe Biden has been a part of, at least he is well informed and knows what he is doing.
I don't think you can necessarily argue this is true, considering how wrong a lot of his tech policy seems. I think the best thing you can say about his track record there is that Biden was probably well-informed by a lobby he decided to be sympathetic to, and frankly, if I'd had his education and professional background, it's entirely possibly *I'd* be impressed when Disney or Columbia Records representatives dropped by to talk about the industry. As it happens, I'm a centrist web developer with a slightly anti-authoritarian streak, so my perspective is different (and, naturally, more informed. About the internet, at any rate.:)
And I'm not impressed with Biden's tech record at all. It had a negative impact on my previously great impression of Obama based on his tech views. I don't accept the "he's just the VP" argument -- a VP might be relegated to a wide and empty orbit, but chances are, they're going to be a part of the inner circle of serious policy discussion inside the white house.
Overall, I think the potential saving grace of this pick is that if Biden's a smart and curious person, then he'll have the chance to really be exposed to the other side of these issues by being associated with Obama's team, and perhaps understand the technical points of the arguments about important things like net neutrality. Will it happen? I don't know. I hope so.
But *neither* member of the other likely ticket have demonstrated real facility with these issues. Obama's was strong early on if alloyed by adding Biden, and for that reason, I'm still inclined to go that direction.
her strong libertarian views means she would leave it up to states and local regions to decide what they teach.
Her other views -- and more importantly, McCain's other views -- make it highly likely that they'll be appointing more judges to the bench whose readings of the law allow *increasing* amount of power vesting in the federal executive and congress.
Do you really think they're going to pick people who are going to go with state's rights on abortion?
If you think habeas corpus and other procedural rights and civil liberties are important, do you remember how close Hamdan vs Rumsfeld actually was?
This is before we even touch the problems with Palin's qualifications as a candidate to even be in the whitehouse.
I think moving power more locally is a great idea, but I don't think handing the Presidency to Palin is really going to do the job.
The idea that facebook might redact or transform communications I send to my friends is pretty maddening, and certainly provides an incentive against using it for messages."
Do people realize that SS has, since the first year, taken in more money each year than it's paid out? Where did all this money go?
As you probably know, it's not exactly "gone", it's owed to the social security fund by the Federal Government, which borrowed from it to pay for programs that apparently weren't funded fully enough by tax revenues and fees.
The thing is, when you think about it, this means that FICA has essentially become another tax, used to keep *other* taxes lower. And a rather regressive one at that, when you consider that it only applies to individual middle and lower class earnings.
I still think that a social insurance program is a fairly essential part of any really stable retirement system, and there seem to be other countries we might even call "socialist" here in the states that apparently manage to implement them effectively while still having higher average savings rates per household than we do in the U.S.
But you don't make it a winner by slowly transmuting it into a regressive tax. If taxes need to be higher, make 'em higher, so that people can enjoy well-funded effective programs. Or squeal if the tax rates are too high and the funding for programs needs to be cut.
Javascript is a moderately painful language, yet we all have to use it. The object model is ill-designed; borrowing from Self was a mistake.
Why? After experimenting and then writing real applications in it, I really quite like the object model, and find the language most expressive and flexible thing I've really written anything in (C, C++, Java, Perl, PHP), so much so that I'm fearing the introduction of classes, even though it has some good reasons, is going to turn the language into a middle-morass ghetto like Java.
Too much use is made of "eval"
An over-used feature in a language is one of the easiest problems to address.
Because of this, Javascript has scaling problems.
Scoping and namespace collision issues are real, but there are pretty ready techniques for dealing with them. Scaling really only becomes a problem when you need to bring together two codebases written by programmers who didn't use those techniques.
There are definitely other security and other implementation issues, but increasingly, I'm finding that unless I need rich media features for which something else is more appropriate, I actually *prefer* working in Javascript.
Sorry, I must have missed the memo where Palin was running for President.
If experience matters for the Presidency, it matters for the Vice Presidency, given that it's a more than hypothetical possibility that the VP may assume office before the course of the President's term is up.
This is more probable for McCain than most, though with the discovery of actual people more or less plotting Obama's assasination, you could argue it's true of him as well.
Creationism is a one sides, faith based approach to explaining the universes origin. You have to throw logic out the window. You have to believe that there is a God. And not just any god. It has to be an all knowing, all powerful God who looks out for human beings because he is a good god.
Though those things come together in traditional judeo-christian beliefs (and I suspect many creationists hold their beliefs with this background), the postulated existence of a God doesn't at all imply that he looks after human beings. The Deists certainly didn't believe that. There's no particular requirement that he's necessarily omnipotent, either: a God capable of creating the world might be much as Twain's Satan in The Mysterious Stranger or The Architect from The Matrix movies.
It's definitely true that foreign policy is one of the areas in which the differences between the two parties narrow, despite the popular conceptions.
But there's a couple of problems with this thesis. The biggest one I can think of is the radically different nature of the wars on that list. Another one is the fact that the post-Vietnam Era Democratic party was already becoming fairly different from the pre-Vietnam Era Democratic party... and all your examples belong to the earlier period.
Ultimately, though, I think the biggest problematic assumption is that Democratic voters themselves are a bunch of Kumbaya hippies. I'm sure there's some real pacifist contingent that genuinely believes violence is never ever the answer, but my experience suggests that it's not particularly more common among the dems than isolationist philosophies are among the republicans.
Funny - seems to be the Democrats being the ones trying to ramrod the old "fairness doctrine", which was one of the worst anti-1st-amendment bits of nonsense we ever had around on the books, back into law.
The fairness doctrine has its problems, but it is hardly an unalloyed anti-1st-amendment evil. If you're interested in giving the matter some further reflection, there are some posts in my recent history which take on the discussion.
And of course, it's the Democrats who are usually the ones trying to outlaw the free speech of anyone who opposes them as "racist" or "sexist."
I'm aware of proposed legislation on "hate speech", I am not, however, aware of any legislation attempting to outlaw criticism or opposition to the Democratic party. I would be highly interested in citations toward such legislation, however.
No, my "thing" against Obama is that I've personally witnessed his corruption.
Sounds... dirty.
I'm interested. You were in the room?
Maybe we can swap. I'm privy to some firsthand accounts of McCain's unstable personality.
You make sure neither party has complete power, and we MIGHT just have a shot at turning things around
Well, it's certainly true that it forces both parties to either market/strategize harder, or to be more responsive.
although it's been getting fuck-all harder to tell the two parties apart as the years have gone by.
I agree on a raft of issues there's not as much diversity of representation in office as there ought to be. But philosophically, I can see some pretty big differences that still matter.
Actually he is a libertarian, he once told me that he was just interested in knocking down both sides.
Perhaps someone in the know could bolster this claim with examples of his hit pieces on Republicans.
Not that the absence of these things means he's necessarily a Republican. Many economic libertarians -- especially the capital-L sort that genuinely believe that markets are the transcendant mediating social institution -- tend to see the Democrats as the greater of two evils because Dems have a greater tendency to also see state/public institutions as part of the toolset of active policy, while Republicans tend to at least pay lip service in opposition to this.
At any rate, the problem with knocking down both sides is that human society really doesn't allow for a power vacuum. You create something else to fill it first, or you reckon with the unintended consequences of whatever emerges. And you either have private power checked only by other private power, or you come up with a mediating public social institution. I'd be fascinated to hear what Declan's particular proposal is, if he's not so busy manipulating things that he's taken the time to genuinely think things through.
Sarbanes-Oxley has already wreaked havoc on the business world.
Have the costs of having to do better accounting and do better data warehousing really been crippling and/or provided no other return beyond compliance?
Extending culpability for data breaches to criminal prosecution would be even more destructive in terms of the changes and security costs involved in protecting the company from financial damages in the event of a data breach.
Exactly. This is 100% intentional, but it's not because the people who've conceived it are anti-business communists, it's because they realize that markets aren't magical elves. In this case, markets aren't really seeing the cost of data security -- or rather, the costs of poor data security practices are externalized from businesses who don't engage in it across their customer bases. Legally recognizing an obligation to protect customer data and connecting it with a cost structure means the market can start to value it.
I really don't see anything wrong with this.... except one big honkin' problem: most business entities are going to have as hard a time as your average consumer determining whether or not they've got good security. It takes a data security expert to know a data security expert. Businesses with no genuine security seed talent will be pretty much flying blind with regard to their liability until something bad happens to show them they've got a problem.
Right. Congressional staffers have "inside scoop" on the media's bias, and they share it with you.
Congressional staffers have a benefit of being part of the congressional workplace. They have some degree of personal contact with elected reps and senators and get a chance to observe what these people are like in day to day interaction with their colleagues, and get to hear opinions of one another. And to quote from an email where this was explained to me: "As the months went by, I discovered an almost universal contempt for McCain among his fellow senators and their staffs. It seemed strange to me that the national media could be so in love with someone who was so despised by the people who knew him best." Why? Uncalled for belligerence, personal attacks in closed door meetings, refusing to concede points in face of overwhelming evidence, even public humiliation of his own staff.
You really must come up with something better than "unnamed sources" who provide "unnamed you" with "non-specific inside scoop."
I don't have any illusions about being an authoritative source myself, I've seen none of this myself. I trust those who've passed it on to me, but I'm uncomfortable giving names of people who haven't publicly shared the opinions they've given me in private. So I can't blame you for being skeptical.
So, what do *you* do with something like this? Just "trust me?" I hardly expect that. But if you've got any connection with similar sources, I encourage you to ask around, and if you don't, I'd encourage you to look a little harder to see if you're really sure you can't find anything to corroborate this. There's definitely information out there about McCain's irascible and potentially unstable nature, and if you poke into it, you may be surprised to find that McCain, like most other politicans, works as hard at creating a cozy relationship with the press and projecting a good image as anybody else.
Yeah, I hate the way the media have manufactured this McCainmania
You're jesting, but in all seriousness, the inside scoop I'm getting from the *republican* congressional staffers I know is that McCain *does* get an undeserved shine from the press.
portraying him as almost the Messiah and so on whilst giving no coverage to Obama.
The Obama coverage is interesting. Some of it is fawning -- is it because of a hidden agenda, or are people genuinely impressed with him? Some of it is inane -- is he wearing a flag pin? Some of it is insane -- terrorist fist jabs, anyone?
Slashdot Mirror
Add to that, researching the 2005 bill that forced FM/FM to give out loans based on racial profiles instead of financial stability, and you'll have a good idea who to blame.
I'm gonna call bullshit unless you can back this up with a link or two including one pointing to the actual legislation.
Loans favoring people of a certain income class and demographic with interest rates that might not otherwise be available to them under conventional market proceedures, aren't particularly controversial, but *requiring* them to loan to a candidate who wouldn't qualify under normal market conditions would be.
However, anyone familiar knows that "normal market conditions" in 2005 included No Income, No Job, No Asset loans, which should make one *highly* skeptical about the assertion that congress twisted lender's arms.
Who was in charge of Fannie Mae when they "misreported" $10.8 billion in 2006?
The connection of Fannie Mae to Walter Mondale's campaign manager is supposed to be evidence of Democratic malfeasance here? It's been 20 years since Mondale ran. Focusing on Enron and its spectacular collapse that took down a colluding Big 5 accounting firm instead of FM's *understating* their earnings? I guess that's evidence of a massive media conspiracy... especially since the media DID report on problems with FM.
For those too lazy to find out, consider that Obama, despite being in the Senate for only 2 years is the #1 recipient of donations from FM/FM at $112,000.
A bit of further research reveals that this is out a total of a recent $390 million in lobbying dollars. So, Obama's the largest recipient... at .02% of FM donation dollars. I guess that means he's tight with FM, although he's also raised more money than anybody else from just about everybody.
"Fannie Mae Chairman Franklin Raines last week
That "last week" has got to be pre-2004, then, since that's when he was pushed out over the accounting issues.
called for continued efforts by Fannie Mae and mortgage lenders to reach out to those 'at the margins' of home ownership. Blacks, Hispanics and immigrants trying to buy homes would be a major focus of outreach, Raines said." Raines made no mention of assistance for the millions of white families who have difficulty purchasing home
Raines also made no mention of his support for the troops, ending Islamic Terrorism, and the state of Israel, which means he is against these things.
And yet
The results demonstrate that democratic economists lean left and republicans lean right.
That's actually not what it says. It says that among economists, those who believe Democrats are more likely to be good for the economy are likely to belong to that party and vote for that party's candidate, and those who believe Republicans are more likely to be good for the economy are likely to belong to that party and vote for that party's candidate. That's pretty rational behavior.
It also tells us a significant but not overwhelming majority believe Democrats are more likely to be good.
There is no real information about how biased the thinking process that helped them arrive at these conclusions was.
and found a 16 page write-up about how a guy broke into your house, disabled the motion detector
I agree this would be disturbing, but I hear these analogies to people's homes all the time and I've always been a little uncomfortable with them, and I think I've figured out why.
One of the key problems with a home invasion is that it's pretty reasonable to assume it threatens your personal safety. There are other places to threaten someone's personal safety, but it's one of the few places where just by dint of being there, it's reasonable to assume someone constitutes some kind of threat to you.
I think a better analogy would be some kind of storage unit or a locker. If you had stuff in this protected by a certain kind of lock, and somebody broke into your place and left a note that said "Dude. These locks are defective. They're easy to open by using this technique. Your stuff will be safer if you get something else!" and didn't take anything, that'd be closer to what happens when a system is compromised. You might be likely to be a bit surprised and perhaps wary, but it's not the place where you sleep.
Ahh, more responsibility, additional liability, same pay scale.
There's no opportunity that isn't potentially like this -- that isn't at the very least *new* responsibility, *potential* liability, and potentially even less rewarding than what you've currently got. So, if risk isn't for you, don't answer when opportunity knocks.
I think this is a potentially interesting opportunity. IT is essentially a subset of operations / infrastructure at the moment, and it contains a lot of smart people. I think right now one of the biggest liabilities becoming any kind of IT pro has is that people tend to pigeonhole you, especially, it sometimes seems, people with the soft skills that seem to make up management.
Any opportunity to move beyond that paradigm is a general win, I think. And for IT pros who *do* have some degree of soft skills, negotiating compensation for additional responsibility and risk is probably also within the realm of possibility.
If it's not, your problem is quite possibly the place you work at.
See, this is called NEGOTIATION. You have your terms, I have mine.
Look, this is America, we don't believe in "negotiation." That's a tactic that terrorists and community organizers use to lull us into complacency by making agreements they don't intend to keep.
It all turns out better if you give one party the power to dictate the agreement. Peace through strength.
As I've said elsewhere in the thread, expecting contracts to serve as effective communication to the customer is like expecting source code of a program to serve as a FAQ or a manual.
Contracts are not really intended for (nor good at) effective communication of agreement terms to a customer. Especially when drafted entirely by the legal department of one side agreement, their purpose is something else entirely, which is to communicate those terms to the legal system (and, maximize the interests of the side that drafts them under the fullest extent possible under the law).
Yes, because everyone needs to be treated like a two year-old. No, we can't expect people to act like adults and be responsible for their own actions.
Real grown-up responsibility has more than a watch-out-for-yourself component. There's both an individual and a social component.
And a reasonably convincing case to be made that among others, most cell carriers don't take enough responsibility in helping people signing contracts understand the whole thing. Or that a reasonable person would find it highly surprising there are corners of the covered terms of service which if you wander into can subject you to fees 2-3 orders of magnitude larger than your conventional bill.
Think about it this way: when the people in question got the data service, do you really think they *never* asked what the service cost? It's highly unlikely. What is highly likely is that they asked, got the standard answer about the most common usage, and were simply not informed about the additional usage fees. They took an incomplete answer as a complete one.
You can argue that the contract is a complete answer, but here we have a problem: contracts are not intended to be effective vehicles for communicating terms of agreement to consumers, they're designed to be effective vehicles for specifying terms to the legal machinery. If you want to argue that the contract is the answer, you may as well argue the source code of a piece of software serves as a FAQ or Manual.
You charged me exactly what it said in the contract I signed said you would! How dare you.
I expect that in a world where most either read their contracts in great detail (and are sufficiently educated to understand the ramifications) or refused to sign anything that took them more than a minute to read, this would work out great. I'm not sure which plan you're advocating, though, and I expect either plan would actually impede carrier sales.
I would think that in the interests of PR, AT&T might send you a text or something when you go international roaming and pass some threshold of use, just to warn you. But really, if you pay extra to call Canada long distance, don't you think your cell phone/data card would work the same way?
I think the particularly telling piece of information is that if you want a plan where they do limit your charges and notify you when you reach thresholds.... you have to pay extra. They're called prepaid plans, and there are no surprises (well, within limits), but for common use cases, it's guaranteed you'll pay 2-4 times the amount a customer on a given rate plan will.
Why the cell phone companies can't combine the limits on prepaid plans with conventional rate plans is an interesting question, but I suspect the answer is not a technical limitation.
The branding "Aircard" is close enough to "Airport" some readers may assume it refers to Apple equipment instead of stuff manufactured by Sierra Wireless.
"there appears to be no truth to the claim made by the commenter, and no further documentation or support for this has turned up."
It looks to me like Jessamyn's saying there is no evidence to back up the commenter's list, the one people are complaining contains books published after Baker left.
There doesn't appear, however, to be any evidence that Time's original claims regarding Palin's confrontations and threats against Baker are false.
Teaching non-science in a science class is not healthy debate.
Actually, I'm coming to believe a section in science class called "Challenges to the Theory of Evolution" could be extremely productive. You could take common problematic arguments like "If humans evolved from apes, why are there still apes?" and address some of the reasons why they're poor challenges.
And there's nothing wrong with exploring any legitimate challenges there may be. Some people will choose to stick God or some other intelligent actor in those gaps, but many might even choose to refine existing theory or explore other alternatives.
Either way, I think we'd end up with a more informed population less likely to be susceptible to fallacious arguments in the discussion on the topic.
The article basically has no proof, only speculation, and a record that ZERO books were actually banned.
However, there are individuals who seem to be vouching for the fact that the librarian's employment was threatened, and it appears to be indisputable that she eventually left for one reason or another.
The actual accomplished banning is not necessarily the only problem.
(Unless you subscribe to the unitary mayoral theory that city employees serve at the will and pleasure of the municipality's chief executive...)
While we may not agree with all of the legislation Joe Biden has been a part of, at least he is well informed and knows what he is doing.
I don't think you can necessarily argue this is true, considering how wrong a lot of his tech policy seems. I think the best thing you can say about his track record there is that Biden was probably well-informed by a lobby he decided to be sympathetic to, and frankly, if I'd had his education and professional background, it's entirely possibly *I'd* be impressed when Disney or Columbia Records representatives dropped by to talk about the industry. As it happens, I'm a centrist web developer with a slightly anti-authoritarian streak, so my perspective is different (and, naturally, more informed. About the internet, at any rate. :)
And I'm not impressed with Biden's tech record at all. It had a negative impact on my previously great impression of Obama based on his tech views. I don't accept the "he's just the VP" argument -- a VP might be relegated to a wide and empty orbit, but chances are, they're going to be a part of the inner circle of serious policy discussion inside the white house.
Overall, I think the potential saving grace of this pick is that if Biden's a smart and curious person, then he'll have the chance to really be exposed to the other side of these issues by being associated with Obama's team, and perhaps understand the technical points of the arguments about important things like net neutrality. Will it happen? I don't know. I hope so.
But *neither* member of the other likely ticket have demonstrated real facility with these issues. Obama's was strong early on if alloyed by adding Biden, and for that reason, I'm still inclined to go that direction.
her strong libertarian views means she would leave it up to states and local regions to decide what they teach.
Her other views -- and more importantly, McCain's other views -- make it highly likely that they'll be appointing more judges to the bench whose readings of the law allow *increasing* amount of power vesting in the federal executive and congress.
Do you really think they're going to pick people who are going to go with state's rights on abortion?
If you think habeas corpus and other procedural rights and civil liberties are important, do you remember how close Hamdan vs Rumsfeld actually was?
This is before we even touch the problems with Palin's qualifications as a candidate to even be in the whitehouse.
I think moving power more locally is a great idea, but I don't think handing the Presidency to Palin is really going to do the job.
there is no reason why they cannot do this. it is their website, their policy.
Certainly true. However, there's no reason everybody shouldn't be mad at them for an abusive and manipulative policy like this.
Facebook has a feedback/suggestions form:
http://www.facebook.com/help.php?suggest
I just sent 'em the following message:
"Is the recent story on Slashdot true?
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/05/1741207
The idea that facebook might redact or transform communications I send to my friends is pretty maddening, and certainly provides an incentive against using it for messages."
Do people realize that SS has, since the first year, taken in more money each year than it's paid out? Where did all this money go?
As you probably know, it's not exactly "gone", it's owed to the social security fund by the Federal Government, which borrowed from it to pay for programs that apparently weren't funded fully enough by tax revenues and fees.
The thing is, when you think about it, this means that FICA has essentially become another tax, used to keep *other* taxes lower. And a rather regressive one at that, when you consider that it only applies to individual middle and lower class earnings.
I still think that a social insurance program is a fairly essential part of any really stable retirement system, and there seem to be other countries we might even call "socialist" here in the states that apparently manage to implement them effectively while still having higher average savings rates per household than we do in the U.S.
But you don't make it a winner by slowly transmuting it into a regressive tax. If taxes need to be higher, make 'em higher, so that people can enjoy well-funded effective programs. Or squeal if the tax rates are too high and the funding for programs needs to be cut.
Javascript is a moderately painful language, yet we all have to use it. The object model is ill-designed; borrowing from Self was a mistake.
Why? After experimenting and then writing real applications in it, I really quite like the object model, and find the language most expressive and flexible thing I've really written anything in (C, C++, Java, Perl, PHP), so much so that I'm fearing the introduction of classes, even though it has some good reasons, is going to turn the language into a middle-morass ghetto like Java.
Too much use is made of "eval"
An over-used feature in a language is one of the easiest problems to address.
Because of this, Javascript has scaling problems.
Scoping and namespace collision issues are real, but there are pretty ready techniques for dealing with them. Scaling really only becomes a problem when you need to bring together two codebases written by programmers who didn't use those techniques.
There are definitely other security and other implementation issues, but increasingly, I'm finding that unless I need rich media features for which something else is more appropriate, I actually *prefer* working in Javascript.
Sorry, I must have missed the memo where Palin was running for President.
If experience matters for the Presidency, it matters for the Vice Presidency, given that it's a more than hypothetical possibility that the VP may assume office before the course of the President's term is up.
This is more probable for McCain than most, though with the discovery of actual people more or less plotting Obama's assasination, you could argue it's true of him as well.
Creationism is a one sides, faith based approach to explaining the universes origin. You have to throw logic out the window. You have to believe that there is a God. And not just any god. It has to be an all knowing, all powerful God who looks out for human beings because he is a good god.
Though those things come together in traditional judeo-christian beliefs (and I suspect many creationists hold their beliefs with this background), the postulated existence of a God doesn't at all imply that he looks after human beings. The Deists certainly didn't believe that. There's no particular requirement that he's necessarily omnipotent, either: a God capable of creating the world might be much as Twain's Satan in The Mysterious Stranger or The Architect from The Matrix movies.
WWI
WWII
Korea
Vietnam
It's definitely true that foreign policy is one of the areas in which the differences between the two parties narrow, despite the popular conceptions.
But there's a couple of problems with this thesis. The biggest one I can think of is the radically different nature of the wars on that list. Another one is the fact that the post-Vietnam Era Democratic party was already becoming fairly different from the pre-Vietnam Era Democratic party... and all your examples belong to the earlier period.
Ultimately, though, I think the biggest problematic assumption is that Democratic voters themselves are a bunch of Kumbaya hippies. I'm sure there's some real pacifist contingent that genuinely believes violence is never ever the answer, but my experience suggests that it's not particularly more common among the dems than isolationist philosophies are among the republicans.
Funny - seems to be the Democrats being the ones trying to ramrod the old "fairness doctrine", which was one of the worst anti-1st-amendment bits of nonsense we ever had around on the books, back into law.
The fairness doctrine has its problems, but it is hardly an unalloyed anti-1st-amendment evil. If you're interested in giving the matter some further reflection, there are some posts in my recent history which take on the discussion.
And of course, it's the Democrats who are usually the ones trying to outlaw the free speech of anyone who opposes them as "racist" or "sexist."
I'm aware of proposed legislation on "hate speech", I am not, however, aware of any legislation attempting to outlaw criticism or opposition to the Democratic party. I would be highly interested in citations toward such legislation, however.
No, my "thing" against Obama is that I've personally witnessed his corruption.
Sounds... dirty.
I'm interested. You were in the room?
Maybe we can swap. I'm privy to some firsthand accounts of McCain's unstable personality.
You make sure neither party has complete power, and we MIGHT just have a shot at turning things around
Well, it's certainly true that it forces both parties to either market/strategize harder, or to be more responsive.
although it's been getting fuck-all harder to tell the two parties apart as the years have gone by.
I agree on a raft of issues there's not as much diversity of representation in office as there ought to be. But philosophically, I can see some pretty big differences that still matter.
Actually he is a libertarian, he once told me that he was just interested in knocking down both sides.
Perhaps someone in the know could bolster this claim with examples of his hit pieces on Republicans.
Not that the absence of these things means he's necessarily a Republican. Many economic libertarians -- especially the capital-L sort that genuinely believe that markets are the transcendant mediating social institution -- tend to see the Democrats as the greater of two evils because Dems have a greater tendency to also see state/public institutions as part of the toolset of active policy, while Republicans tend to at least pay lip service in opposition to this.
At any rate, the problem with knocking down both sides is that human society really doesn't allow for a power vacuum. You create something else to fill it first, or you reckon with the unintended consequences of whatever emerges. And you either have private power checked only by other private power, or you come up with a mediating public social institution. I'd be fascinated to hear what Declan's particular proposal is, if he's not so busy manipulating things that he's taken the time to genuinely think things through.
Sarbanes-Oxley has already wreaked havoc on the business world.
Have the costs of having to do better accounting and do better data warehousing really been crippling and/or provided no other return beyond compliance?
Extending culpability for data breaches to criminal prosecution would be even more destructive in terms of the changes and security costs involved in protecting the company from financial damages in the event of a data breach.
Exactly. This is 100% intentional, but it's not because the people who've conceived it are anti-business communists, it's because they realize that markets aren't magical elves. In this case, markets aren't really seeing the cost of data security -- or rather, the costs of poor data security practices are externalized from businesses who don't engage in it across their customer bases. Legally recognizing an obligation to protect customer data and connecting it with a cost structure means the market can start to value it.
I really don't see anything wrong with this.... except one big honkin' problem: most business entities are going to have as hard a time as your average consumer determining whether or not they've got good security. It takes a data security expert to know a data security expert. Businesses with no genuine security seed talent will be pretty much flying blind with regard to their liability until something bad happens to show them they've got a problem.
Right. Congressional staffers have "inside scoop" on the media's bias, and they share it with you.
Congressional staffers have a benefit of being part of the congressional workplace. They have some degree of personal contact with elected reps and senators and get a chance to observe what these people are like in day to day interaction with their colleagues, and get to hear opinions of one another. And to quote from an email where this was explained to me: "As the months went by, I discovered an almost universal contempt for McCain among his fellow senators and their staffs. It seemed strange to me that the national media could be so in love with someone who was so despised by the people who knew him best." Why? Uncalled for belligerence, personal attacks in closed door meetings, refusing to concede points in face of overwhelming evidence, even public humiliation of his own staff.
You really must come up with something better than "unnamed sources" who provide "unnamed you" with "non-specific inside scoop."
I don't have any illusions about being an authoritative source myself, I've seen none of this myself. I trust those who've passed it on to me, but I'm uncomfortable giving names of people who haven't publicly shared the opinions they've given me in private. So I can't blame you for being skeptical.
So, what do *you* do with something like this? Just "trust me?" I hardly expect that. But if you've got any connection with similar sources, I encourage you to ask around, and if you don't, I'd encourage you to look a little harder to see if you're really sure you can't find anything to corroborate this. There's definitely information out there about McCain's irascible and potentially unstable nature, and if you poke into it, you may be surprised to find that McCain, like most other politicans, works as hard at creating a cozy relationship with the press and projecting a good image as anybody else.
Yeah, I hate the way the media have manufactured this McCainmania
You're jesting, but in all seriousness, the inside scoop I'm getting from the *republican* congressional staffers I know is that McCain *does* get an undeserved shine from the press.
portraying him as almost the Messiah and so on whilst giving no coverage to Obama.
The Obama coverage is interesting. Some of it is fawning -- is it because of a hidden agenda, or are people genuinely impressed with him? Some of it is inane -- is he wearing a flag pin? Some of it is insane -- terrorist fist jabs, anyone?