Lowering the score to get an acceptable pass rate doesn't suddenly create ability and understanding, it just lets you continue putting out an inferior product. The woman defending this had the right question, if not the right answer: why aren't Blacks starting out at 82%? If you want them to be educated in fact and not by declaration, that's what you have to fix. As for the question, "does [going back to Jim Crow-like attitudes regarding Blacks' abilities] make us Uncle Toms?", no, it makes you neo-Segregationists.
The UK has been trying to be America for some time now. We're like that scrawny kid who leans out from behind the bully, pathetically supporting everything the bully does.
Last I checked, we here in the states could post a pic of a burning poppy or insult people via Twitter without getting arrested by the thought police, so I guess you're saying that the scrawny kid is trying to out-bully us?
Even if everything in this is true, by 2080, we'll be capable of synthesizing most anything we want. Bonus: no vast tracts of land devoted to the production of a nonessential agricultural product.
The greatest apology ever written was one Mark Steyn wrote to himself, on behalf of a newspaper that had screwed up an earlier apology to him. The paper had to print Steyn's new apology as a settlement with him.
"The Ottawa Citizen and Southam News wish to apologize for our apology to Mark Steyn. In correcting the incorrect statements about Mr. Steyn, published Oct. 15, we incorrectly published the incorrect correction. We accept and regret that our original regrets were unacceptable, and we apologize to Mr. Steyn for any distress caused by our previous apology."
The defendants in the suit will use discovery to obtain everything under the sun from Mann, depose him about all of it, and then put him on the stand to answer questions publicly about it. Steyn in particular is pugnacious and once embarrassed the Ontario Human Rights Commission when it was considering a complaint that he had violated Muslim's human rights by criticizing Islam. Whatever pound of flesh Mann hopes to obtain from this, he'll find himself on the receiving end of far worse.
"What kind of lesson does it teach our children if they're chipped like cattle and their every movement tracked?" said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union. "It doesn't create the kind of independent, autonomous people that we want in our democratic society.
Says who? NYC thinks so highly of its "independent, autonomous people" that it wants to dictate how much soda they can buy in a single cup. I'd have a lot more faith in these pronouncements if the people making them applied their standards across the board and not just selectively to those things they dislike.
'The purple flare in the image provided is considered normal behavior for iPhone 5's camera.'"
This reminds me of Microsoft's Usenet response a long time ago to complaints about a flaw in their C library: "It's not a bug, it's a limitation." Or, as we took it at the time (and I still do to this day): "Doc, it hurts when I do this." "Well DON'T DO THAT!"
He said the MPAA isn't focused on getting similar legislation passed in the future, at the moment. 'I think we're better served by sitting down [with the tech sector and SOPA opponents] and seeing what we agree on.'
How reasonable-sounding. It'd be more convincing if you had tried that approach BEFORE you tried to shove this thing through. Given that your initial approach was to big-foot the opposition and you got your asses handed to you, the other side would be justified in looking at your outstretched hand and spitting in it.
If the output of scientific research is going to be used as input in the creation of public policy, as it increasingly is, then it's in the public interest to know exactly how the results were arrived at and any potential conflicts of interest that the researchers might have been subjected to. Scientists are just as capable of bias, conflicts, stupidity, and corruption as anyone else, and the way you uncover any of that is thru disclosure and, yes, an adversarial process. That process might take the form of aggressive peer review, or even skeptics demanding discovery during lawsuits. That's the system we have for getting everything out on the table where it can be examined.
If you think the Constitution (or tradition, or case law, or something) guarantees a secret ballot, how do you explain primaries in caucus states, where you have to physically show up and declare your vote for so-and-so? You don't get less secret than that.
However, this article in the Atlantic argues that the surest way to increase turnout is by making voting a matter of public record.
Making public the fact that you voted, not who or what you voted for. And as the article notes, it already is a matter of public record. I got the voter registration rolls for my county one year, and for each voter, it had a note of what elections they voted in, going back 20 elections. It's available, just not easy to access (I forget how much that list cost me, but it wasn't cheap).
My mail-in ballot has a barcode on the return envelope. For that matter, it has my name and address too. If somebody in power wanted to know how I voted, they'd have no problem finding out from that. Califorina SAYS they separate the ballot and envelope after they verify my registration and before they count my vote, but these Colorado officials SAY they're not going to associate names with barcodes and apparently they're not to be trusted, so should I distrust the California officials?
What about an autonomous (or remotely piloted if necessary) 'copter drone that can be programmed to fly to the vicinity, identify a camera, and spray its lens with a blast of paint? That would be pretty unstoppable.
Yeah I don't see how they will do it. There's not a single car for sale that gets 54mpg on the highway. And since this is an average it means they have to sell several 75-80mpg cars to offset the low 35-40mpg SUVs. Not even my two-seat Insight scored that high (current rating is 64).
I seem to recall that an earlier tactic used by automakers was to manufacture what were essentially golf carts and practically give them away, which brought their 'average' mpg way down.
status conscious assholes should not drive our energy policy
You've used that term twice now, I assume because you need to demonize the people whose vehicle choices you disapprove of. Invective isn't much of a convincer.
but i guess some people want status conscious assholes driving our energy policy
Also known as "consumers". I'd rather have the market deciding what's needed than have it come from officious busybodies in a Politburo who want to dictate energy policy from on high, "for our own good" of course. If you want an example of what a more unfettered energy policy can do, North Dakota and natural gas fracking is one. Natural gas prices have fallen so low that manufacturers are relocating to the US just to take advantage of the new cheaper resource. Even car companies are looking into making vehicles that run on the stuff.
You don't need a big standing army when you have nukes.
Would you say that cops have guns so they don't need clubs, tasers, pepper spray, or their own fists? You need the ability to have gradations of response, you don't just go immediately to killing upon the first provocation because you have no other means at your disposal. With a large standing army you have the ability to try to get what you're after thru intimidation such as massing it on a border or by making the enemy think better of his plans by placing troops strategically where the enemy would have to attack them in order to achieve his objectives.
It's become a universal tactic in government these days: "Would you pay a little more for [insert popular item here]?" All government has to do is find Popular Item and then sell the people on the idea that they can have it if they'll just consent to having their pockets picked. Even better is if the pockets to be picked are 'their' pockets, 'they' being some unpopular group like 'the rich' or 'the smokers'. The first thought that ought to come to mind when hearing one of these solicitations is ":"What the hell did you do with the money I've already been paying you?" There already is a 'universal service fee' tacked on to your phone bill. If we're already funding deployment of phone service to rural areas, why can't we require that it be DSL? And then there's the gazillions in 'stimulus' that we've spent and are continuing to spend. If we have this worthy and 'shovel-ready' project of making broadband universal, why not use that money for that purpose instead of trying to wheedle more?
How many times do you hear of a company that gets bullied by a larger company and agrees to pay money to make the bully go away--even when the smaller company is clearly in the right--because paying the bully to go away is less expensive than fighting and winning against it in court?
Not just among companies, either. California has a litigation industry built around demanding settlements from small businesses under the Americans With Disabilities Act. Give them $5K and they'll go away. Fight it and it'll cost you several times that. So most of them settle, even when the alleged infraction is a crock. There was one case locally where a law firm wrote demand letters to every business in a small town near San Diego, at least some of which it could be proven the plaintiff could not possibly have entered because the businesses had been closed for weeks, or had gone out of business long before the date contained in the complaint.
A few years back I belatedly discovered (the hard way) that my web hoster had located its servers in Hurricane Alley. My site was down for over a week as they trucked their server farm to a new location because the local utilities weren't going to be back until God knew when. I've since been paying attention to where things are located, physically, and anything that might be threatening to that area.
If you are scared of others, what part of that is freedom? Stand up for yourself...
That's great until your neighbor decides that that easement you wanted isn't going to any damned [insert party affiliation here], or some guy and his buddies in the area who've been drinking until 1 am decide that they've had enough shit from [insert party affiliation here]s and decide to put a Molotov cocktail thru your front window. Having to go to the trouble of getting the info from the county registrar puts a big barrier in the way and most people won't bother, acting as a damper on impulse and emotion.
I've wondered if crowdsourcing might eventually result in auto-recognition of cop cars and a warning sent out to other drivers. Maybe even a system where the locations of all police vehicles are broadcast in real time.
If Apple trades another phone for a stolen one that someone brings in, isn't it now in possession of stolen property and couldn't the owner demand it back?
Slashdot Mirror
Lowering the score to get an acceptable pass rate doesn't suddenly create ability and understanding, it just lets you continue putting out an inferior product. The woman defending this had the right question, if not the right answer: why aren't Blacks starting out at 82%? If you want them to be educated in fact and not by declaration, that's what you have to fix. As for the question, "does [going back to Jim Crow-like attitudes regarding Blacks' abilities] make us Uncle Toms?", no, it makes you neo-Segregationists.
The UK has been trying to be America for some time now. We're like that scrawny kid who leans out from behind the bully, pathetically supporting everything the bully does.
Last I checked, we here in the states could post a pic of a burning poppy or insult people via Twitter without getting arrested by the thought police, so I guess you're saying that the scrawny kid is trying to out-bully us?
Hitler was in admiration of the British and sought an aliance prior to WWII. Our (at least) freedom could've easily be secured without a fight
And such an alliance would have been the equivalent of a deal with an alligator to eat you last.
Even if everything in this is true, by 2080, we'll be capable of synthesizing most anything we want. Bonus: no vast tracts of land devoted to the production of a nonessential agricultural product.
The greatest apology ever written was one Mark Steyn wrote to himself, on behalf of a newspaper that had screwed up an earlier apology to him. The paper had to print Steyn's new apology as a settlement with him.
"The Ottawa Citizen and Southam News wish to apologize for our apology to Mark Steyn. In correcting the incorrect statements about Mr. Steyn, published Oct. 15, we incorrectly published the incorrect correction. We accept and regret that our original regrets were unacceptable, and we apologize to Mr. Steyn for any distress caused by our previous apology."
The defendants in the suit will use discovery to obtain everything under the sun from Mann, depose him about all of it, and then put him on the stand to answer questions publicly about it. Steyn in particular is pugnacious and once embarrassed the Ontario Human Rights Commission when it was considering a complaint that he had violated Muslim's human rights by criticizing Islam. Whatever pound of flesh Mann hopes to obtain from this, he'll find himself on the receiving end of far worse.
"What kind of lesson does it teach our children if they're chipped like cattle and their every movement tracked?" said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union. "It doesn't create the kind of independent, autonomous people that we want in our democratic society.
Says who? NYC thinks so highly of its "independent, autonomous people" that it wants to dictate how much soda they can buy in a single cup. I'd have a lot more faith in these pronouncements if the people making them applied their standards across the board and not just selectively to those things they dislike.
'The purple flare in the image provided is considered normal behavior for iPhone 5's camera.'"
This reminds me of Microsoft's Usenet response a long time ago to complaints about a flaw in their C library: "It's not a bug, it's a limitation." Or, as we took it at the time (and I still do to this day): "Doc, it hurts when I do this." "Well DON'T DO THAT!"
He said the MPAA isn't focused on getting similar legislation passed in the future, at the moment. 'I think we're better served by sitting down [with the tech sector and SOPA opponents] and seeing what we agree on.'
How reasonable-sounding. It'd be more convincing if you had tried that approach BEFORE you tried to shove this thing through. Given that your initial approach was to big-foot the opposition and you got your asses handed to you, the other side would be justified in looking at your outstretched hand and spitting in it.
If the output of scientific research is going to be used as input in the creation of public policy, as it increasingly is, then it's in the public interest to know exactly how the results were arrived at and any potential conflicts of interest that the researchers might have been subjected to. Scientists are just as capable of bias, conflicts, stupidity, and corruption as anyone else, and the way you uncover any of that is thru disclosure and, yes, an adversarial process. That process might take the form of aggressive peer review, or even skeptics demanding discovery during lawsuits. That's the system we have for getting everything out on the table where it can be examined.
If you think the Constitution (or tradition, or case law, or something) guarantees a secret ballot, how do you explain primaries in caucus states, where you have to physically show up and declare your vote for so-and-so? You don't get less secret than that.
However, this article in the Atlantic argues that the surest way to increase turnout is by making voting a matter of public record.
Making public the fact that you voted, not who or what you voted for. And as the article notes, it already is a matter of public record. I got the voter registration rolls for my county one year, and for each voter, it had a note of what elections they voted in, going back 20 elections. It's available, just not easy to access (I forget how much that list cost me, but it wasn't cheap).
My mail-in ballot has a barcode on the return envelope. For that matter, it has my name and address too. If somebody in power wanted to know how I voted, they'd have no problem finding out from that. Califorina SAYS they separate the ballot and envelope after they verify my registration and before they count my vote, but these Colorado officials SAY they're not going to associate names with barcodes and apparently they're not to be trusted, so should I distrust the California officials?
What about an autonomous (or remotely piloted if necessary) 'copter drone that can be programmed to fly to the vicinity, identify a camera, and spray its lens with a blast of paint? That would be pretty unstoppable.
Yeah I don't see how they will do it. There's not a single car for sale that gets 54mpg on the highway. And since this is an average it means they have to sell several 75-80mpg cars to offset the low 35-40mpg SUVs. Not even my two-seat Insight scored that high (current rating is 64).
I seem to recall that an earlier tactic used by automakers was to manufacture what were essentially golf carts and practically give them away, which brought their 'average' mpg way down.
status conscious assholes should not drive our energy policy
You've used that term twice now, I assume because you need to demonize the people whose vehicle choices you disapprove of. Invective isn't much of a convincer.
but i guess some people want status conscious assholes driving our energy policy
Also known as "consumers". I'd rather have the market deciding what's needed than have it come from officious busybodies in a Politburo who want to dictate energy policy from on high, "for our own good" of course. If you want an example of what a more unfettered energy policy can do, North Dakota and natural gas fracking is one. Natural gas prices have fallen so low that manufacturers are relocating to the US just to take advantage of the new cheaper resource. Even car companies are looking into making vehicles that run on the stuff.
You don't need a big standing army when you have nukes.
Would you say that cops have guns so they don't need clubs, tasers, pepper spray, or their own fists? You need the ability to have gradations of response, you don't just go immediately to killing upon the first provocation because you have no other means at your disposal. With a large standing army you have the ability to try to get what you're after thru intimidation such as massing it on a border or by making the enemy think better of his plans by placing troops strategically where the enemy would have to attack them in order to achieve his objectives.
It's become a universal tactic in government these days: "Would you pay a little more for [insert popular item here]?" All government has to do is find Popular Item and then sell the people on the idea that they can have it if they'll just consent to having their pockets picked. Even better is if the pockets to be picked are 'their' pockets, 'they' being some unpopular group like 'the rich' or 'the smokers'. The first thought that ought to come to mind when hearing one of these solicitations is ":"What the hell did you do with the money I've already been paying you?" There already is a 'universal service fee' tacked on to your phone bill. If we're already funding deployment of phone service to rural areas, why can't we require that it be DSL? And then there's the gazillions in 'stimulus' that we've spent and are continuing to spend. If we have this worthy and 'shovel-ready' project of making broadband universal, why not use that money for that purpose instead of trying to wheedle more?
How many times do you hear of a company that gets bullied by a larger company and agrees to pay money to make the bully go away--even when the smaller company is clearly in the right--because paying the bully to go away is less expensive than fighting and winning against it in court?
Not just among companies, either. California has a litigation industry built around demanding settlements from small businesses under the Americans With Disabilities Act. Give them $5K and they'll go away. Fight it and it'll cost you several times that. So most of them settle, even when the alleged infraction is a crock. There was one case locally where a law firm wrote demand letters to every business in a small town near San Diego, at least some of which it could be proven the plaintiff could not possibly have entered because the businesses had been closed for weeks, or had gone out of business long before the date contained in the complaint.
A few years back I belatedly discovered (the hard way) that my web hoster had located its servers in Hurricane Alley. My site was down for over a week as they trucked their server farm to a new location because the local utilities weren't going to be back until God knew when. I've since been paying attention to where things are located, physically, and anything that might be threatening to that area.
If you are scared of others, what part of that is freedom? Stand up for yourself...
That's great until your neighbor decides that that easement you wanted isn't going to any damned [insert party affiliation here], or some guy and his buddies in the area who've been drinking until 1 am decide that they've had enough shit from [insert party affiliation here]s and decide to put a Molotov cocktail thru your front window. Having to go to the trouble of getting the info from the county registrar puts a big barrier in the way and most people won't bother, acting as a damper on impulse and emotion.
When debugging a web page, there's nothing I like better than the Firebug plugin.
I've wondered if crowdsourcing might eventually result in auto-recognition of cop cars and a warning sent out to other drivers. Maybe even a system where the locations of all police vehicles are broadcast in real time.
If Apple trades another phone for a stolen one that someone brings in, isn't it now in possession of stolen property and couldn't the owner demand it back?