Oh, in that case the problem is shareholders and MBAs.
The shareholders want to make the most money possible, and the MBAs are trained to sell out the company's ethical goals for short term gains before moving on to a different company to repeat the parasitic process. Together they rob everything of unique value and turn everything into mass market mush.
That's why the science fiction channel airs wrestling and the history channel spends half it's time talking about aliens.
I think the problems you've outlined mostly come from American origins. Certainly the Christian Right has been actively involved in the war of science and education. We see that over and over again. Several other groups have been funding this because, well science eventually uncovers facts they don't like. Big Tobacco funds anti-global warming research. Why? Because it damages science in the eyes of the public and gets them off the hook for selling designed-to-be-addictive cancer tubes.
The U.S. government is at it's most anti-scientific it's even been. Bush has lackeys censoring and editing public science projects to make sure the results are only the pre-approved results. Of course, now these U.S. groups are helping to organize stupidity in the rest of the world too.
Out of 70,000 people that were harassed by these so-called "Airport Profilers", only about 700 of them were found to be guilty of anything at all. That's a pretty lousy false-positive rate of 99%, which means, of course, 69,300 of these people were needlessly bothered and harassed and humiliated and personally violated. After thinking about this a bit one thing stood out to me:
A lot of people criticizing the low "catch" rate of the profilers... But what's the normal "catch" rate? I mean they still do inspections, interviews and full body cavity searches even without "facial profiling". Are they harassing more or less people? Are they catching proportionally more or less people from those they harass?
The questions are probably the most important ones when addressing the effectiveness of the program. Because if they catch 700 people out of 70,000 that seems pretty bad, unless of course they normally catch 200 out of 100,000. And it might seem pretty good to some people, unless of course, the reverse is true and the normal rate is 200 out of 10,000 people. Yay, for failure of the reporter(s) to get the relevant facts once again!
Yeah, I'm not sure whether the media is being fed a line, or whether it's the people "implenting" the system that are being fed. I mean, it's obviously an exercise in plausibility. They know they shouldn't pull anyone who's not white out of line without a justifiable excuse because if they do and the person is found to be in possession of drugs or anything else, then the person's lawyer will charge that it's racial profiling. So they could be feeding the public a bunch of bull about facial expression reading to give them a due cause. Of course, they're actually going through with the facial expression training because they have to be able to answer with "yes" in case the lawyer asks "and are you specifically trained in the art of reading facial expressions?"
As someone else pointed out, this wouldn't stop a holywood-style professional international criminals, but then they're not really looking for them. They're looking for suicide squad terrorists, who never get the chance to become "professionals".
I really don't think it's terribly Orwellian, it sounds like training they should always have had. Because hopefully they are training to recognize behaviour that indicates normal travel anxiety and the like and be less likely to choose harmless people for a closer inspection. I mean it's not like interviews, inspections, and searches are new to airport security.
I just doubt that anything they're taught in the courses is going to stick, except maybe a plausible excuse for continuing to do racial profiling.
Interesting idea, but I expect clear channel would probably just shift most or all of their radio stations to syndicated talk radio. Because you and I should both know that the RIAA will sue any station that plays any kind of contemporary music and doesn't pay them, on the basis that it's their duty to ensure that all artists get paid for their music, even the ones who haven't signed with them.
I think they think this is cunning, they see declining CD sales, and think they can squeeze radio stations to make up that extra revenue. If fewer songs are played, they don't care, CD sales are already declining, what's to lose? Of course, if they won and radios stations were forced to pay for play, they'd just end up crying again over how much more CD sales have gone down and blaming "teh internets" for the sales declines.
No, not really. Serbia was actually conducting an ethnic cleansing program. That war was an interdiction to prevent a genocide, it's actually fairly well justified as far as wars go. The fact that the "other guys" were almost as bad as the Serbian forces, doesn't really fly, because it doesn't really matter.
I used to work with Serbians and they flat out asserted to me all the time that everything the international community reported on Serbia was false propaganda because Serbia wouldn't do that. And that the hudled masses of refuges were part of vast conspiracy to discredit and attack Serbia. You seem to be in the same boat of denial.
They won't. The whole point of IE was to build a browser that would be incompatible with standards and tied to Microsoft's OS. They didn't go through all that trouble to kill Netscape just because they thought it'd be fun. They did it to stall the growth of the Web. Microsoft was seriously worried that Netscape's vision of thin-client linux-like boxes running just a web browser becoming the new standard for computers. But more importantly they were worried that they would get 95% of the marketshare in this new world.
Microsoft will fight tooth and nail to keep IE closed source so that they can continue to use it strategically to throw a wrench into the standards. As long as stuff doesn't quite work right on IE and IE is the majority browser Microsoft can continue to stall and delay anything that challenges their dominance.
You need to think bigger. A healthy film industry means more opportunities and less competition for those opportunities to work which directly means more money for the people working on contract. High demand also means higher wages.
The vast majority of the people who work on a film set (caterers, electricians, photographers, camera crew, hairdressers, costume managers, props masters, set builders, etc.) are all paid up front. They do a job and are paid for it, just like any other contractor. Once they are finished, they receive no more money. That's naive and lazy thinking there. The majority of the people who work on a film have a variety of vested interests in it's success. These can range from pride and bragging rights, because you get more respect from having worked on a sucessful film to simply looking forward, it also looks better on your resume. It's also cheaper to do repeat business than it is to dig up new business.
I've talked to some amatuer musicians they were vehemently for every kind of restriction you could put on copying. They practically went off on a tirade about how people were stealing their music and it wasn't right or fair and how fair use was just an excuse to steal. They simply refused to listen to any viewpoint that differed from theirs. And they were only protecting the possibility that they might one day get a royalty check.
My point? Do not underestimate the level of group think that may exist in an area that is heavily dependent on the health of one industry. As much as I hate everything this guy has proposed, I also have to consider the fact that he is probably representing what he think are the best interests of his constituents, and that many of the people in his district might agree with what he's doing.
That doesn't make him right, but you're looking at the people who work in the film industry as some sort of robot who can be packed up and boxed away. You have to remember that they're people and can easily be scared into believing laws like the DMCA are necessarily to protect their livelyhoods, even if they aren't.
Ironically, this is actually true. The down side of the short election term for congress is that most of them spent 3-4 hours a day all year round begging for money. That's time they should be spending doing their jobs. However 95% of them are appointed to safe districts so if they want to get re-elected they have to do what the party (not the voters) wants them to do. Which is campaign and raise money.
It the current system is a failure and t used to be the way you'd prefer it to be, then it should be obvious that that the model you prefer has already failed. After all, we're here now and the system you'd prefer led us here.
I think the problem with the current U.S. governmental systems are not ones of who can vote or who can not vote. Saying "Poor people shouldn't be allowed to vote" is just code for "I'm a Republican asshole". The problem is quite clearly systematic.
Because of gerrymandering 95% of your elected representatives are guaranteed to be elected. This is why your government is run like a plutocracy. It's because only 1 in 20 congress critters are democratically elected, the rest are appointed by wealthy interest groups.
I'm sure you have, however, it doesn't mean anything. You're falling prey to a logical fallacy formally called "Cum Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc" (http://www.fallacyfiles.org/cumhocfa.html). The immunization rate is 95%, there are approximate 73.7 million children in the united states. There are approximately 4.1 million children in between the age of 1 and 2. On the only hand about 1.5% of those children, or about 62,000, will develop autism on the other 3.9 million children will get immunized during the year. That's 168 cases of autism each day and about 11,000 immunizations a day assuming each child gets exactly 1 shot between the age of 1 and 2. The odds are pretty good that by random chance some children will develop autism with 2 days of getting an immunization. Those odds of developing autism immediately after an immunization go up the more immunizations a child gets, while the odds of developing autism stay flat which is a contra-indicator that vaccines are the culprit.
There is significant evidence that points against vaccines being the culprit. For instance, medical imaging of the brains of autistic children has shown that they tend to have abnormal brain structures, something which a vaccination could not cause to develop over night, there's also evidence that genetics plays a role in it based on the fact that there's a higher rate of incidence of autism if someone else in your family developed it. Also, there's the simple fact that the vast majority of children do not develop autism after receiving an immunization shot, and the majority of children who develop autism do not do so immediately after an immunization shot.
Before immunizations became the scapegoat for autism, it was blamed on mothers who didn't love their children enough.
That's probably not a bad idea, I know enough about the AECL to know that they do have significant problems. Despite the fact that I think this shut down is pretty much a non-issue, I also know that AECL could probably use a bit of scrutiny. They employ a lot of American contractors and enough of those contractors view safety regulations as a nuisance that they are actually causing bigger problems for the company. There's a lot of internal politics at the company and there's some very nasty people who are entrenched in their little company kingdoms.
The inquest might not improve things at the company, but it would at least shake things up a little, and present an opportunity for change.
If both of the regular pumps die and the backup pump dies, then yes, the second backup pump will not come on. That failure will result in the reactor shutting down. So to prevent an unplanned shutdown, the regulator shut down the reactor.
In this case, it's been on for 50 years. What's another 120 days?
The pumps that they're adding are, as I understand, to keep the reactor operating during a natural disaster (Richter 6 and up earthquake specifically). That's right they're shutting it down because they didn't make the changes that would prevent it from shutting down during a natural disaster.
Just to add to the your point. It's a backup water pump that wasn't in the original design of the plant, there was an agreement to a schedule about 10 years ago to install a backup water pump, however, as often happens someone got the schedule screwed up and thought the pump was supposed to be installed for December 2008 instead of 2007. The reactor's only been running for 50 years without the backup pump because it's not critical to operational safety. If the main water pump goes down, the control rods slam shut and the reactor goes offline hard and fast.
Ironically the water pump is needed in case of a massive earthquake in a relativley geologically stable area. It's needed to keep the plant operating during and after the earthquake, not to guarantee the plants safety but it's ability to operate. The safety comittee shut them down because they hadn't performed the upgrade they agreed to do and thus were in breach of their licence to operate the reactor.
In other words, they made a mistake on their upgrade schedule and got shut down on a technicality.
Frankly, i don't think it's worth trying to name a GotY for 2007 until it's January 1st, 2008. That's why people would suggest games that haven't been released yet, because they're predicting what will be the best game of the year once it's over. December isn't over yet.
For what purpose would someone try to limit and diminish their own country? I mean, even for a psychopath it's much more rewarding to empower it and destroy someone else's country. That way you get to eat your cake and have it too!
Of course there is villainly in government and the medical establishment. They're made up of people, sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad, sometimes they're right and sometimes they're wrong. However, big things like vaccinations don't leave much room for villainly. Much like open source software, there's too many eyes of vaccinations. In fact, the very ambulance chasing lawyers that everyone despises also help to protect the system from abuse, because they're their every time anything goes wrong. Mistakes are cost money and in a capitalist environment that means there some corporate darwinism in effect. Sloppy companies get sued out of business.
Throw in the fact that vaccinations are low margin business, there's little incentive for a conspiracy based on financial gain and anything based on making people more "docile" just isn't supported at all by real medicine. So, frankly it looks to me like you're just paranoid.
Most politicians look at themselves as the leaders of the herd, not the wolves that feed off it.
Indeed there is "something causing this wave of autism". It's the diagnosis of autism. Autism didn't exists as a childhood diagnosis until the 1960s, autistic children were thought to be suffering from a childhood variant of schizophrenia because the symptoms are somewhat similar. If I understand correctly, in the 1980s the scope of autism diagnoses in the United States was expanded to include milder cases of authism, all the way down to the borderline autism known as Asperger's syndrome. So over the last 40 years doctors have become more familiar with autism as a disease and the definition of what autism is has been expanded, this naturally increases the number of cases that are reported over that time period.
Let me repeat the rise in the rate is based on improved diagnosis technique not a rise in incidence of the syndrome. If you take the mentally handicapped and autistic rates from schools, you'll find the rise of autism matches the decline in mentally handicapped children. Combined the rate is pretty much constant (accounting for noise).
It's rather simply, you can believe in Evolution and God. You don't have to take my world for it, you can take the Pope's word for it, though. I've heard he's often considered to be an expert on religion. The official stance of the Catholic church is that evolution and the Bible are compatible: ie. God's days are not human days.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, in that case the problem is shareholders and MBAs.
The shareholders want to make the most money possible, and the MBAs are trained to sell out the company's ethical goals for short term gains before moving on to a different company to repeat the parasitic process. Together they rob everything of unique value and turn everything into mass market mush.
That's why the science fiction channel airs wrestling and the history channel spends half it's time talking about aliens.
I think the problems you've outlined mostly come from American origins. Certainly the Christian Right has been actively involved in the war of science and education. We see that over and over again. Several other groups have been funding this because, well science eventually uncovers facts they don't like. Big Tobacco funds anti-global warming research. Why? Because it damages science in the eyes of the public and gets them off the hook for selling designed-to-be-addictive cancer tubes.
The U.S. government is at it's most anti-scientific it's even been. Bush has lackeys censoring and editing public science projects to make sure the results are only the pre-approved results. Of course, now these U.S. groups are helping to organize stupidity in the rest of the world too.
A lot of people criticizing the low "catch" rate of the profilers... But what's the normal "catch" rate? I mean they still do inspections, interviews and full body cavity searches even without "facial profiling". Are they harassing more or less people? Are they catching proportionally more or less people from those they harass?
The questions are probably the most important ones when addressing the effectiveness of the program. Because if they catch 700 people out of 70,000 that seems pretty bad, unless of course they normally catch 200 out of 100,000. And it might seem pretty good to some people, unless of course, the reverse is true and the normal rate is 200 out of 10,000 people. Yay, for failure of the reporter(s) to get the relevant facts once again!
Yeah, I'm not sure whether the media is being fed a line, or whether it's the people "implenting" the system that are being fed. I mean, it's obviously an exercise in plausibility. They know they shouldn't pull anyone who's not white out of line without a justifiable excuse because if they do and the person is found to be in possession of drugs or anything else, then the person's lawyer will charge that it's racial profiling. So they could be feeding the public a bunch of bull about facial expression reading to give them a due cause. Of course, they're actually going through with the facial expression training because they have to be able to answer with "yes" in case the lawyer asks "and are you specifically trained in the art of reading facial expressions?"
As someone else pointed out, this wouldn't stop a holywood-style professional international criminals, but then they're not really looking for them. They're looking for suicide squad terrorists, who never get the chance to become "professionals".
I really don't think it's terribly Orwellian, it sounds like training they should always have had. Because hopefully they are training to recognize behaviour that indicates normal travel anxiety and the like and be less likely to choose harmless people for a closer inspection. I mean it's not like interviews, inspections, and searches are new to airport security.
I just doubt that anything they're taught in the courses is going to stick, except maybe a plausible excuse for continuing to do racial profiling.
Interesting idea, but I expect clear channel would probably just shift most or all of their radio stations to syndicated talk radio. Because you and I should both know that the RIAA will sue any station that plays any kind of contemporary music and doesn't pay them, on the basis that it's their duty to ensure that all artists get paid for their music, even the ones who haven't signed with them.
I think they think this is cunning, they see declining CD sales, and think they can squeeze radio stations to make up that extra revenue. If fewer songs are played, they don't care, CD sales are already declining, what's to lose? Of course, if they won and radios stations were forced to pay for play, they'd just end up crying again over how much more CD sales have gone down and blaming "teh internets" for the sales declines.
Therefore, all ascetics are criminals? Be careful before you ascribe malice to anyone who disagress with your world view.
Many men may falsely claim virtue, but that doesn't mean all men who claim virtue are false.
No, not really. Serbia was actually conducting an ethnic cleansing program. That war was an interdiction to prevent a genocide, it's actually fairly well justified as far as wars go. The fact that the "other guys" were almost as bad as the Serbian forces, doesn't really fly, because it doesn't really matter.
I used to work with Serbians and they flat out asserted to me all the time that everything the international community reported on Serbia was false propaganda because Serbia wouldn't do that. And that the hudled masses of refuges were part of vast conspiracy to discredit and attack Serbia. You seem to be in the same boat of denial.
Ghandi was a crook? I knew you couldn't trust guys in togas!
Seriously, money isn't everything.
They won't. The whole point of IE was to build a browser that would be incompatible with standards and tied to Microsoft's OS. They didn't go through all that trouble to kill Netscape just because they thought it'd be fun. They did it to stall the growth of the Web. Microsoft was seriously worried that Netscape's vision of thin-client linux-like boxes running just a web browser becoming the new standard for computers. But more importantly they were worried that they would get 95% of the marketshare in this new world.
Microsoft will fight tooth and nail to keep IE closed source so that they can continue to use it strategically to throw a wrench into the standards. As long as stuff doesn't quite work right on IE and IE is the majority browser Microsoft can continue to stall and delay anything that challenges their dominance.
You need to think bigger. A healthy film industry means more opportunities and less competition for those opportunities to work which directly means more money for the people working on contract. High demand also means higher wages.
I've talked to some amatuer musicians they were vehemently for every kind of restriction you could put on copying. They practically went off on a tirade about how people were stealing their music and it wasn't right or fair and how fair use was just an excuse to steal. They simply refused to listen to any viewpoint that differed from theirs. And they were only protecting the possibility that they might one day get a royalty check.
My point? Do not underestimate the level of group think that may exist in an area that is heavily dependent on the health of one industry. As much as I hate everything this guy has proposed, I also have to consider the fact that he is probably representing what he think are the best interests of his constituents, and that many of the people in his district might agree with what he's doing.
That doesn't make him right, but you're looking at the people who work in the film industry as some sort of robot who can be packed up and boxed away. You have to remember that they're people and can easily be scared into believing laws like the DMCA are necessarily to protect their livelyhoods, even if they aren't.
Depending on your ideology one of them is less worse than the other.
Ironically, this is actually true. The down side of the short election term for congress is that most of them spent 3-4 hours a day all year round begging for money. That's time they should be spending doing their jobs. However 95% of them are appointed to safe districts so if they want to get re-elected they have to do what the party (not the voters) wants them to do. Which is campaign and raise money.
...
It the current system is a failure and t used to be the way you'd prefer it to be, then it should be obvious that that the model you prefer has already failed. After all, we're here now and the system you'd prefer led us here.
I think the problem with the current U.S. governmental systems are not ones of who can vote or who can not vote. Saying "Poor people shouldn't be allowed to vote" is just code for "I'm a Republican asshole". The problem is quite clearly systematic.
Because of gerrymandering 95% of your elected representatives are guaranteed to be elected. This is why your government is run like a plutocracy. It's because only 1 in 20 congress critters are democratically elected, the rest are appointed by wealthy interest groups.
I'm sure you have, however, it doesn't mean anything. You're falling prey to a logical fallacy formally called "Cum Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc" (http://www.fallacyfiles.org/cumhocfa.html). The immunization rate is 95%, there are approximate 73.7 million children in the united states. There are approximately 4.1 million children in between the age of 1 and 2. On the only hand about 1.5% of those children, or about 62,000, will develop autism on the other 3.9 million children will get immunized during the year. That's 168 cases of autism each day and about 11,000 immunizations a day assuming each child gets exactly 1 shot between the age of 1 and 2. The odds are pretty good that by random chance some children will develop autism with 2 days of getting an immunization. Those odds of developing autism immediately after an immunization go up the more immunizations a child gets, while the odds of developing autism stay flat which is a contra-indicator that vaccines are the culprit.
There is significant evidence that points against vaccines being the culprit. For instance, medical imaging of the brains of autistic children has shown that they tend to have abnormal brain structures, something which a vaccination could not cause to develop over night, there's also evidence that genetics plays a role in it based on the fact that there's a higher rate of incidence of autism if someone else in your family developed it. Also, there's the simple fact that the vast majority of children do not develop autism after receiving an immunization shot, and the majority of children who develop autism do not do so immediately after an immunization shot.
Before immunizations became the scapegoat for autism, it was blamed on mothers who didn't love their children enough.
That's probably not a bad idea, I know enough about the AECL to know that they do have significant problems. Despite the fact that I think this shut down is pretty much a non-issue, I also know that AECL could probably use a bit of scrutiny. They employ a lot of American contractors and enough of those contractors view safety regulations as a nuisance that they are actually causing bigger problems for the company. There's a lot of internal politics at the company and there's some very nasty people who are entrenched in their little company kingdoms.
The inquest might not improve things at the company, but it would at least shake things up a little, and present an opportunity for change.
If both of the regular pumps die and the backup pump dies, then yes, the second backup pump will not come on. That failure will result in the reactor shutting down. So to prevent an unplanned shutdown, the regulator shut down the reactor.
This is a new safety feature they're adding, not a current one that's not working.
In this case, it's been on for 50 years. What's another 120 days?
The pumps that they're adding are, as I understand, to keep the reactor operating during a natural disaster (Richter 6 and up earthquake specifically). That's right they're shutting it down because they didn't make the changes that would prevent it from shutting down during a natural disaster.
Just to add to the your point. It's a backup water pump that wasn't in the original design of the plant, there was an agreement to a schedule about 10 years ago to install a backup water pump, however, as often happens someone got the schedule screwed up and thought the pump was supposed to be installed for December 2008 instead of 2007. The reactor's only been running for 50 years without the backup pump because it's not critical to operational safety. If the main water pump goes down, the control rods slam shut and the reactor goes offline hard and fast.
Ironically the water pump is needed in case of a massive earthquake in a relativley geologically stable area. It's needed to keep the plant operating during and after the earthquake, not to guarantee the plants safety but it's ability to operate. The safety comittee shut them down because they hadn't performed the upgrade they agreed to do and thus were in breach of their licence to operate the reactor.
In other words, they made a mistake on their upgrade schedule and got shut down on a technicality.
Frankly, i don't think it's worth trying to name a GotY for 2007 until it's January 1st, 2008. That's why people would suggest games that haven't been released yet, because they're predicting what will be the best game of the year once it's over. December isn't over yet.
Then your legal system is broken.
I know that's not news, but still...
For what purpose would someone try to limit and diminish their own country? I mean, even for a psychopath it's much more rewarding to empower it and destroy someone else's country. That way you get to eat your cake and have it too!
Of course there is villainly in government and the medical establishment. They're made up of people, sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad, sometimes they're right and sometimes they're wrong. However, big things like vaccinations don't leave much room for villainly. Much like open source software, there's too many eyes of vaccinations. In fact, the very ambulance chasing lawyers that everyone despises also help to protect the system from abuse, because they're their every time anything goes wrong. Mistakes are cost money and in a capitalist environment that means there some corporate darwinism in effect. Sloppy companies get sued out of business.
Throw in the fact that vaccinations are low margin business, there's little incentive for a conspiracy based on financial gain and anything based on making people more "docile" just isn't supported at all by real medicine. So, frankly it looks to me like you're just paranoid.
Most politicians look at themselves as the leaders of the herd, not the wolves that feed off it.
Indeed there is "something causing this wave of autism". It's the diagnosis of autism. Autism didn't exists as a childhood diagnosis until the 1960s, autistic children were thought to be suffering from a childhood variant of schizophrenia because the symptoms are somewhat similar. If I understand correctly, in the 1980s the scope of autism diagnoses in the United States was expanded to include milder cases of authism, all the way down to the borderline autism known as Asperger's syndrome. So over the last 40 years doctors have become more familiar with autism as a disease and the definition of what autism is has been expanded, this naturally increases the number of cases that are reported over that time period.
Let me repeat the rise in the rate is based on improved diagnosis technique not a rise in incidence of the syndrome. If you take the mentally handicapped and autistic rates from schools, you'll find the rise of autism matches the decline in mentally handicapped children. Combined the rate is pretty much constant (accounting for noise).
It's rather simply, you can believe in Evolution and God. You don't have to take my world for it, you can take the Pope's word for it, though. I've heard he's often considered to be an expert on religion. The official stance of the Catholic church is that evolution and the Bible are compatible: ie. God's days are not human days.
Evolution isn't a code word for athiesm.