I love the "more people die from X, so who cares if innocent civilians are slaughtered mid air" I mean hell they probably have Asthma Now here back on planet Earth, I would like to have a rational discussion. And since so many of you/.ers seem to think that the WEST is so evil lets make this discussion simpler for you simple minded folk.
[500 remaining unread lines deleted, mostly racist crap about Muslims, it looks like]
You know, if you work this hard on a rant, you shouldn't repel your readers in the first paragraph with a straw man attack and a counterargument supported only by an ad-hominem ("Now here back on planet Earth", etc.) Since nobody on Slashdot has ever said "the west is so evil", I had to assume you're some crazy person spouting nonsense and I stopped reading your post after this. I hope you didn't spend too long on it.
Terror is your election enemy. Say goodbye to '06 and '08.
You know when election season is finally upon us, because they start changing the DHS color and issuing alerts.
I'm going on a trip to the UK soon and I'm not going to be able to take any carry-on luggage on the plane now! Six hours of thumbing through Skymall. For the past few years I've usually tried to avoid scheduling flights before elections, but a wedding forced my hand this time. Still, I figured, it's only primary season- the general campaigning isn't until after my return flight. Now I'm facing a long flight from the UK without my usual accoutrements!
Screw you, Lieberman! How can an incumbent lose a primary!
It's not as if terrorism is the big deal we make it out to be anyway. More Americans died in 2001 from asthma.
Hey, when's Bush going to ban studying these embryos?
I hope he gives a press conference with a bunch of adopted embryo velociraptors on stage behind him. After all it's not like they wouldn't have time to re-evolve before his next press conference.
come on guys, what with wireless laptops, just pull up outside some 'innocent's' house and use thier unprotected wireless modem and search/download away
The world is full of sneaky people. But the fact is, nothing comes with a guarantee. I don't care if you're the Pope of Rome, President of the United States, or even Sex Offender of the Year--something can always go wrong. And go ahead, listen for broadcast SSIDs, try to send your incriminating packets to your neighbor--while he quietly sends his to you. Now in Russia, they got it mapped out so that everyone shares their wireless with everyone else-- that's the theory, anyway.
But what I can tell you about is Tennessee. And down here, you're on your own. There aren't many wireless networks, and nobody is innocent.
I tend to agree (90%+?) with your reaction to the parent comment, but I think you go too far in defining bias. "Water is wet" is not biased. But it's about something trivial enough that no sane person would disagree, unless it's a class on epistemological deconstruction or some bullshit like that.
OK, I'd also say (to throw some gas on this fire) "the Iraq War is not going well for the U.S." counts as a trivial opinion which no sane person would disagree with after three years- IMHO it approaches epistemological quality. Lieberman is in trouble because his ambivalent opinions on the war no longer sound credible- they appear so insufficiently biased, after what we have seen for the past several years, that he doesn't sound like he even believes what he's saying.
However, when something becomes important enough, we have to choose between terms like "terrorist" and "freedom fighter" to describe the same people, depending on our biases.
That's a false choice though. Neither "terrorist" nor "freedom fighter" is a neutral term- they are both examples of linguistic trickery used to introduce hysteria and shut down conversation. After 9/11, there's no defending a "terrorist", and you certainly can't badmouth a "freedom fighter". I've never heard anyone refer to a suicide bomber as a "freedom fighter" but I suppose in an Arab country there's some translation of "freedom fighter" that effectively short circuits debate the way "terrorist" does here. "Terrorist" is such an effective sledgehammer that you see people trying to slander all sorts of enemies with it, foreign and domestic. PBS was accused of economic terrorism for airing a documentary critical of Wal-Mart.
"Suicide bomber" is a more neutral term, I guess. They tried to replace that one with "homicide bomber", which never took off. When playing games with language, you win some and you lose some. But if you don't play you lose.
CBC is hard-left-leaning, anti-Israel, anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-big-business, anti-conservative...
That's interesting... would it be possible for a station to be pro-Christian and anti-big-business for example? (I used to be a Christian, but I chose to leave the corporate world.)
Regarding the Israel/Palestine conflict, CBC is famous for reporting briefly both sides of the story, then doing a deeper story about the family of the palestinan suicide bomber, and the terrible poverty that drove him to do what he did. I have _never_ seen, on CBC, a deeper story about the family of the Israelites that were riding the bus to work, shopping at the mall, or partying at the disco. That's not biased?!?
Of course it's biased- and the bias got introduced by the suicide bomber. I don't understand why people strap bombs to themselves and blow themselves up. I'm naturally interested in hearing why people do that. I DO understand, however, why people ride the bus to work, shop at the mall, and party at discos. I'd imagine those would be pretty boring news stories:
"So as his mother... what do you feel drove him... to party at a disco? What sort of madness... would push a loving son to dance with a suicide bomber?" "Did she have... a habit of exposing herself to danger at the mall?" "We're going to examine what would make somebody ride their car to work, after these messages."
When a serial killer goes on a rampage and gets caught, you want to know what's up with the serial killer. You're not interested in finding out why his victims turned to prostitution, or even if their families are upset (duh). Would it count as bias in favor of serial killing?
And to think my tax dollars go to fund this crap.
You've spent something like $0.000001 on speech you don't agree with. As for me, I paid for "Mission Accomplished". I watched a statue get knocked over by Iraqis who were being paid to fool me. Every day for the past several years, I've seen spin and crap, that I've paid for, designed to deceive me. You're forced to pay for bias; I'm forced to pay for lies. So I'm inclined to take a dim view of your argument.
Bias and credibility are normally supposed to be antonyms, but with a concerted effort to redefine bias and balance, an opinion now needs to have incredible amounts of bias just to be credible anymore. Most of us by now understand by now how much bias has been introduced into these ludicrous "fair and balanced" opinions on TV and radio just in order to make them he-said-she-said-balanced. "Water is wet" is a biased, credible opinion. "Some people believe that water is wet, but many others disagree" is fair and balanced. It just isn't credible.
The anti-Americanism increased significantly after US invaded Iraq. (Not just anti-war, although that is already biased, anti-anything-American.) In the early stages of that conflict, I actually found BBC World News to be probably the least biased.
That wasn't CBC becoming biased- it was the whole world, of which CBC is a subset.
Check out Disturbing Search Requests where people search through their logs for interesting HTTP REFERER links from Google and submit the most disturbing. A common reaction is befuddlement from webmasters when Google returns their site in response to certain queries (such as "sweet as food delicious cheap dog fellatio").
Who hasn't typed "how to kill your wife" into a search box by now anyway? (That was a joke! Hi honey!)
"Well in case it wasn't, those galaxies don't look like anything to us because light from them has never and will never reach our portion of the Universe." And why is that? I expect it will happen, it'll just do so in reverse order.
If you're thinking it's "going to take the long way around to us instead", the long way is undoubtedly getting longer too, even faster than the short direct way.
Are you suggesting that space is formed faster than C (even considering relativistic effects),
Yes. Remember this is a long distance phenomenon, not a local one. Einstein's gedankenexperiments don't work like they do with timelike-related events. The guy on the train and the guy at the station run into trouble sending signals and comparing clocks and rulers! They can't meet up at a coffeeshop later to compare notes either. No event A on the train will ever influence any event B at the station because the track expands fast enough for all such events A and B to be spacelike related. Nobody will ever make a direct observation of superluminal motion between the train and the station and in fact the train can only infer that the station exists and vice versa. To directly measure their velocity relative to one another would require superluminal signal propagation. So you never have to worry about observing it.
Plus, look at how useless this phenomenon would be for sending superluminal messages. You simply can't send a message using faster-than-c space expansion- that is what would be forbidden by relativity. There's no way to harness it for that. If you go outside one night and shine a flashlight across the surface of the moon, you can get your beam to move across the moon's surface faster than the speed of light if you swing your arm fast enough. But that's not real motion either. You obviously couldn't send superluminal messages across the moon that way, for example.
so that photons are forever stranded?
Photons never get stranded, silly. They just lose momentum, change color, and continue moving at c in your reference frame. Or they simply never reach YOU in your frame. A photon couldn't care less.
Space is stretching out between the matter. There are galaxies receding faster than light, but you'll never be able to observe them in any sort of experiment, or measure their speed, so there is no problem. The only reason we know they exist is from inferring their existence, and it's a different kind of existence, one that can never be proven by direct observation and measurement. It's like the singularity of a black hole- you can infer it's in there, but you can't observe anything inside the event horizon in an experiment anyway, so it doesn't upset theory.
When a galaxy is receding almost at the speed of light it will appear with a large redshift. Occasionally astronomers find a galaxy that sets a redshift record, and they get all excited. If the faster-than-light galaxies appeared redshifted, they would cover the sky! The astronomers wouldn't be getting so excited. But those galaxies don't appear at all- they're outside the observable universe. The distance to them is so great that more than 300,000 km of brand new space is being shoehorned in between us and them every second. So we won't even see them redshifted because the photons never even reach us.
The huge-redshift galaxies exist just inside a thin shell around us, about 15 billion light years in radius, that defines the observable universe. The observable universe and the universe sound like the same thing but are not. Most of the universe is outside the observable part- outside the shell. If a galaxy is outside the shell, we'll never see it. If a galaxy is just inside the shell they eventually find it and it might set a new z record depending on its redshift (i.e. how close it is to the inside of the shell). In theory if they found a galaxy that straddled the shell itself it would be redshifted from microwaves down through radio all the way to infinite wavelengths. In reality you'll never see that- the furthest thing you see is the cosmic microwave background, which is still coming from 400000 light years inside the shell. Even closer to the shell, you can "see" the early universe just along the inner surface, and the early universe was more opaque- light coming from there would have to have been emitted shortly after the Big Bang, when scattering was much more efficient, so that light doesn't make it here. FYI IANAA.
Critics claim that the pharmaceuticals spend 10x as much on advertising as they do on research. Ultimately the patent merely fuels the saturation advertising that hits you every time you turn your television on to check the news.
You know that dude in those saturation coverage Crestor commercials, who's always walking down the stairs and saying "down with the bad, up with the good"?
That's Mandy Patinkin. He played Inigo Montoya in the Princess Bride.
"My name is Inigo Montoya. You raised my father's bad cholesterol and lowered his good cholesterol. Prepare to die."
Typical. Ad hominem attacks. Why am I not surprised that when I say something bad about communism around here I am immediately called disparaging names.
People who have a fetish or an axe to grind about something like to wander off topic and try to turn every conversation into one about whatever it is they are obsessed with. This is bad enough even when they know what they are talking about.
When they hijack worthwhile threads in order to parrot the same nonsensical stereotype-driven propaganda we can already hear on mass media all around us, they can rightly expect to be called disparaging names as this crap does not add to the conversation in a meaningful way. Sorry.
I probably would have been harder on the police department, but one has to wonder about the 12-year-old's responses to their experience
No one doesn't. Kids climb trees. They don't normally get arrested for it. Their responses were normal.
These infant-willed "preteens" didn't belong in a 20 foot cherry tree.
Maybe you've never seen a tree before. So you might want to sit down for this.
20 feet is actually quite short for a tree. Most people would consider that a shrub, not a tree.
When you climb a shrub or a tree, it is not necessary or even possible to climb up to the very highest leaves at the top. They won't hold your weight. Therefore the fact that the tree height is 20 feet strongly indicates that these kids were at a much lower height at the time of their arrest. They were probably at varying heights from zero to about ten- the article doesn't say. This would further indicate that emotional stability (as determined by an arrest) need not be a prerequisite for climbing shrubbery.
The reaction to RFK Jr.'s article about the 2004 election wasn't as stong as I personally would have hoped for, but from a few things that I have read, I get the impression that it's far from over.
I liked that illustration by Matt Mahurin. Election fraud must be really hard to draw.
I'm not sure why they didn't give you a state issued id when they yanked you license. A close friend recently had the same situation and they sent him an ID card and then told him to return the drivers license in the accompanied envelope.
Nah, I got the envelope, but no replacement ID. The letter said put the license in the envelope and send it back. You'd think with something like that, they'd at least spring for postage, but they make you buy your own stamp. This was in one of the states that has mandatory reporting requirements for neurologists- if you have a seizure, the neurologist is required by law to report it to the DMV. So unless you want to lose your license, you stay away from neurologists. I can tell you there are a lot of undermedicated epileptics driving around because of those laws.
Of course fraud could still be active but the ease of it has just droped a notch. Also there could be a trail of people to be held acountable for the fraud and an investigation trial if ever questioned.... What we need is penalties of life in prison or death if the fraud resulted in an issue getting passed or failing or someone becoming elected that wouldn't have been without the fraud. If it didn't effect the outcome of the election, then half a life sentence plus 10 years in a "federal pound me in the ass prison" should be a manditory punishment.
Why are we wanting to police this type of ballot fraud so heavily? By "this type" I mean "one fraudster = one vote", i.e. the type of fraud where someone votes who shouldn't be voting. That type of fraud always happens and there is no more need to be concerned about it than there has always been. And it certainly doesn't explain the irregularities in our elections. For example the discrepancy between the exit polls and the vote count cannot be attributed to that type of fraud. Many rural districts don't announce their vote counts until everyone knows how many votes [a certain candidate] needs- and then there is amazing turnout in those districts for [that candidate] that just pushes him over the top. Again, many many votes per fraudster. Meanwhile all the talk about "fraud" centers on single vote fraud- i.e. illegal aliens, etc. These issues are designed to be distractions from the real fraud that is going on.
Then there would be a lot less voter-fraud happening. Or at least a lot ledd people willing to do the act.
The type of fraud that truly influences elections is perpetrated by a very small number of people who could show you plenty of phone and utility bills.
This whole debacle only requires 2 things to fix it. #1, a paper trail that's checked against the vote tallies. #2 Driver's license or preferably some sort of free voting id where they vet your citizenship.
#2 is unacceptable. DMV took my license for medical reasons (epilepsy). And we all know how this stuff is intended to work. To get a "free voting ID", I'll have to have someone drive me a couple hundred miles to some remote office set up in the reddest, most inaccessible, most desolate goddamned corner of the state, and once I'm there I'll end up needing some stupid document that will require another trip.
If I can even find information about which office is the correct one to go to on the one day they're open. I'm sure it will be readily available in a filing cabinet in City Hall under a sign down in the basement with the stairs missing behind the locked door with "Beware of the Tiger" written on it.
Now if I had a driver's license, I could just park in a bad (blue) neighborhood and find a helpful flyer under my windshield wiper telling me which wrong office to go to a day late.
We would never have national ID cards in the America I grew up in anyway. You must be from some other country.
With Diebold, anyone can tamper with an election outcome- even you, yes you. Refer to my current sig. It is truly an empowering experience to tamper with an election- you'll be more enfranchised than all your neighbors on your street put together.
The government moved in, and like in other areas, anything similar that people were doing privately withered away. Everybody pays for the government to do it, so why should they continue?
Maybe that's a good thing.
Would you rather have AOL + Compuserve + Prodigy, or the Internet?
How is this a violation of civil liberties? If anything, his taking a picture was a violation of the officer's and the person being arrested's privacy.
As a public servant acting as a state actor in making an arrest, a police officer has no privacy rights to consider. Privacy is for off-duty hours.
The privacy angle makes a better argument if you restrict it to the person being arrested, but after watching all the COPS episodes I've seen, I'm guessing that isn't a legally compelling argument either.
What if one of the people arrested turns out to be not guilty, but their are still tons of pictures of them being arrested circulating? There is no right to take a picture of whatever and whomever you want.
Maybe in the country where you live, but not in the United States I grew up in.
The Chilean hackers blocked the flow of information from the websites attacked to the users wishing to access it. This is what the Chinese government is doing to their citizens.
And if you get around their block, these Chilean hackers have the power to throw you in prison, right?:P
Obviously with a vote of 410-15, the Democratic party has had their forum and agrees with the legislation.
I don't know if it's the case here, but when a bill is known to have poor or no chances of getting through the other house of Congress, it starts looking like a "freebie" for legislators since it won't become law anyway and presents an opportunity to posture with no consequences. The lopsided vote suggests this might be a possibility. Although technical illiteracy and incompetence certainly played a role.
If someone's trying to trick kids to come to a porn site, so what?
I mean WTF is the big deal if kids see a little porn?
Does it "damage" them somehow? I found the magazines in my father's nightstand and I'm still OK. In fact I found them just in time because I was starting to have a really hard time at school for not knowing about all that stuff, what all the dirty words meant, etc. (The "Letters to Playboy" section was especially helpful for figuring out the words.)
If you're thinking you're going to have some conversation with your kid when he's 20, about birds and bees and when a man and a woman really love each other and all that flowery stuff, you can just disabuse yourself of that notion right now. If your kid has any friends his age at all, one of them will find out the "wrong" way, he'll tell his friends, and soon all the kids are divided into those who are aware of sex and those who need to find out what everyone is giggling about and making fun of them for not knowing. Then it's just a matter of whether you've put your kid at a disadvantage at school.
If your kids can't be exposed to an environment with free expression of ideas, then you're a bad parent for getting them an Internet connection in the first place. Install a filter if you're really neurotic enough to care about your kid seeing porn. If you're smart you'll let your kids look at all the porn they want as early as possible.
If you find out about sex when you're older, your neural plasticity is gone and as an adult you will have an immature attitude towards sex. Instead of just being a part of life, it will always be something filthy to be giggled about, obsessed over, thrust into politics, and kept hidden from the young so they can inherit the same neurosis you've got. You won't be able to see past sex on any issue where it is even tangentially involved. Just look at this recent gay marriage debate. Some people (both sides) are talking about restricting the institution, marriage as a civil rights issue, the courts, etc. Then there are people who approach the issue from the angle of "so the husband puts it where?" and they continue to argue at that level. That's what happens when you don't find out about sex in time during your development.
The thing to worry about is chat. Porn won't damage your kid, but there are lots of people you don't want your kid chatting with.
Slashdot Mirror
I love the "more people die from X, so who cares if innocent civilians are slaughtered mid air" I mean hell they probably have Asthma /.ers seem to think that the WEST is so evil lets make this discussion simpler for you simple minded folk.
Now here back on planet Earth, I would like to have a rational discussion. And since so many of you
[500 remaining unread lines deleted, mostly racist crap about Muslims, it looks like]
You know, if you work this hard on a rant, you shouldn't repel your readers in the first paragraph with a straw man attack and a counterargument supported only by an ad-hominem ("Now here back on planet Earth", etc.) Since nobody on Slashdot has ever said "the west is so evil", I had to assume you're some crazy person spouting nonsense and I stopped reading your post after this. I hope you didn't spend too long on it.
Terror is your election enemy. Say goodbye to '06 and '08.
You know when election season is finally upon us, because they start changing the DHS color and issuing alerts.
I'm going on a trip to the UK soon and I'm not going to be able to take any carry-on luggage on the plane now! Six hours of thumbing through Skymall. For the past few years I've usually tried to avoid scheduling flights before elections, but a wedding forced my hand this time. Still, I figured, it's only primary season- the general campaigning isn't until after my return flight. Now I'm facing a long flight from the UK without my usual accoutrements!
Screw you, Lieberman! How can an incumbent lose a primary!
It's not as if terrorism is the big deal we make it out to be anyway. More Americans died in 2001 from asthma.
Never mind; it was a joke that was a little too subtle. (Obscure movie reference.)
Flair : Excellent
Hey, when's Bush going to ban studying these embryos?
I hope he gives a press conference with a bunch of adopted embryo velociraptors on stage behind him. After all it's not like they wouldn't have time to re-evolve before his next press conference.
come on guys, what with wireless laptops, just pull up outside some 'innocent's' house and use thier unprotected wireless modem and search/download away
The world is full of sneaky people. But the fact is, nothing comes with a guarantee. I don't care if you're the Pope of Rome, President of the United States, or even Sex Offender of the Year--something can always go wrong. And go ahead, listen for broadcast SSIDs, try to send your incriminating packets to your neighbor--while he quietly sends his to you. Now in Russia, they got it mapped out so that everyone shares their wireless with everyone else-- that's the theory, anyway.
But what I can tell you about is Tennessee. And down here, you're on your own. There aren't many wireless networks, and nobody is innocent.
I tend to agree (90%+?) with your reaction to the parent comment, but I think you go too far in defining bias. "Water is wet" is not biased. But it's about something trivial enough that no sane person would disagree, unless it's a class on epistemological deconstruction or some bullshit like that.
OK, I'd also say (to throw some gas on this fire) "the Iraq War is not going well for the U.S." counts as a trivial opinion which no sane person would disagree with after three years- IMHO it approaches epistemological quality. Lieberman is in trouble because his ambivalent opinions on the war no longer sound credible- they appear so insufficiently biased, after what we have seen for the past several years, that he doesn't sound like he even believes what he's saying.
However, when something becomes important enough, we have to choose between terms like "terrorist" and "freedom fighter" to describe the same people, depending on our biases.
That's a false choice though. Neither "terrorist" nor "freedom fighter" is a neutral term- they are both examples of linguistic trickery used to introduce hysteria and shut down conversation. After 9/11, there's no defending a "terrorist", and you certainly can't badmouth a "freedom fighter". I've never heard anyone refer to a suicide bomber as a "freedom fighter" but I suppose in an Arab country there's some translation of "freedom fighter" that effectively short circuits debate the way "terrorist" does here. "Terrorist" is such an effective sledgehammer that you see people trying to slander all sorts of enemies with it, foreign and domestic. PBS was accused of economic terrorism for airing a documentary critical of Wal-Mart.
"Suicide bomber" is a more neutral term, I guess. They tried to replace that one with "homicide bomber", which never took off. When playing games with language, you win some and you lose some. But if you don't play you lose.
CBC is hard-left-leaning, anti-Israel, anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-big-business, anti-conservative...
That's interesting... would it be possible for a station to be pro-Christian and anti-big-business for example? (I used to be a Christian, but I chose to leave the corporate world.)
Regarding the Israel/Palestine conflict, CBC is famous for reporting briefly both sides of the story, then doing a deeper story about the family of the palestinan suicide bomber, and the terrible poverty that drove him to do what he did. I have _never_ seen, on CBC, a deeper story about the family of the Israelites that were riding the bus to work, shopping at the mall, or partying at the disco. That's not biased?!?
Of course it's biased- and the bias got introduced by the suicide bomber. I don't understand why people strap bombs to themselves and blow themselves up. I'm naturally interested in hearing why people do that. I DO understand, however, why people ride the bus to work, shop at the mall, and party at discos. I'd imagine those would be pretty boring news stories:
"So as his mother... what do you feel drove him... to party at a disco? What sort of madness... would push a loving son to dance with a suicide bomber?"
"Did she have... a habit of exposing herself to danger at the mall?"
"We're going to examine what would make somebody ride their car to work, after these messages."
When a serial killer goes on a rampage and gets caught, you want to know what's up with the serial killer. You're not interested in finding out why his victims turned to prostitution, or even if their families are upset (duh). Would it count as bias in favor of serial killing?
And to think my tax dollars go to fund this crap.
You've spent something like $0.000001 on speech you don't agree with. As for me, I paid for "Mission Accomplished". I watched a statue get knocked over by Iraqis who were being paid to fool me. Every day for the past several years, I've seen spin and crap, that I've paid for, designed to deceive me. You're forced to pay for bias; I'm forced to pay for lies. So I'm inclined to take a dim view of your argument.
Bias and credibility are normally supposed to be antonyms, but with a concerted effort to redefine bias and balance, an opinion now needs to have incredible amounts of bias just to be credible anymore. Most of us by now understand by now how much bias has been introduced into these ludicrous "fair and balanced" opinions on TV and radio just in order to make them he-said-she-said-balanced. "Water is wet" is a biased, credible opinion. "Some people believe that water is wet, but many others disagree" is fair and balanced. It just isn't credible.
The anti-Americanism increased significantly after US invaded Iraq. (Not just anti-war, although that is already biased, anti-anything-American.) In the early stages of that conflict, I actually found BBC World News to be probably the least biased.
That wasn't CBC becoming biased- it was the whole world, of which CBC is a subset.
Check out Disturbing Search Requests where people search through their logs for interesting HTTP REFERER links from Google and submit the most disturbing. A common reaction is befuddlement from webmasters when Google returns their site in response to certain queries (such as "sweet as food delicious cheap dog fellatio").
Who hasn't typed "how to kill your wife" into a search box by now anyway? (That was a joke! Hi honey!)
"Well in case it wasn't, those galaxies don't look like anything to us because light from them has never and will never reach our portion of the Universe."
And why is that? I expect it will happen, it'll just do so in reverse order.
If you're thinking it's "going to take the long way around to us instead", the long way is undoubtedly getting longer too, even faster than the short direct way.
Are you suggesting that space is formed faster than C (even considering relativistic effects),
Yes. Remember this is a long distance phenomenon, not a local one. Einstein's gedankenexperiments don't work like they do with timelike-related events. The guy on the train and the guy at the station run into trouble sending signals and comparing clocks and rulers! They can't meet up at a coffeeshop later to compare notes either. No event A on the train will ever influence any event B at the station because the track expands fast enough for all such events A and B to be spacelike related. Nobody will ever make a direct observation of superluminal motion between the train and the station and in fact the train can only infer that the station exists and vice versa. To directly measure their velocity relative to one another would require superluminal signal propagation. So you never have to worry about observing it.
Plus, look at how useless this phenomenon would be for sending superluminal messages. You simply can't send a message using faster-than-c space expansion- that is what would be forbidden by relativity. There's no way to harness it for that. If you go outside one night and shine a flashlight across the surface of the moon, you can get your beam to move across the moon's surface faster than the speed of light if you swing your arm fast enough. But that's not real motion either. You obviously couldn't send superluminal messages across the moon that way, for example.
so that photons are forever stranded?
Photons never get stranded, silly. They just lose momentum, change color, and continue moving at c in your reference frame. Or they simply never reach YOU in your frame. A photon couldn't care less.
Space is stretching out between the matter. There are galaxies receding faster than light, but you'll never be able to observe them in any sort of experiment, or measure their speed, so there is no problem. The only reason we know they exist is from inferring their existence, and it's a different kind of existence, one that can never be proven by direct observation and measurement. It's like the singularity of a black hole- you can infer it's in there, but you can't observe anything inside the event horizon in an experiment anyway, so it doesn't upset theory.
When a galaxy is receding almost at the speed of light it will appear with a large redshift. Occasionally astronomers find a galaxy that sets a redshift record, and they get all excited. If the faster-than-light galaxies appeared redshifted, they would cover the sky! The astronomers wouldn't be getting so excited. But those galaxies don't appear at all- they're outside the observable universe. The distance to them is so great that more than 300,000 km of brand new space is being shoehorned in between us and them every second. So we won't even see them redshifted because the photons never even reach us.
The huge-redshift galaxies exist just inside a thin shell around us, about 15 billion light years in radius, that defines the observable universe. The observable universe and the universe sound like the same thing but are not. Most of the universe is outside the observable part- outside the shell. If a galaxy is outside the shell, we'll never see it. If a galaxy is just inside the shell they eventually find it and it might set a new z record depending on its redshift (i.e. how close it is to the inside of the shell). In theory if they found a galaxy that straddled the shell itself it would be redshifted from microwaves down through radio all the way to infinite wavelengths. In reality you'll never see that- the furthest thing you see is the cosmic microwave background, which is still coming from 400000 light years inside the shell. Even closer to the shell, you can "see" the early universe just along the inner surface, and the early universe was more opaque- light coming from there would have to have been emitted shortly after the Big Bang, when scattering was much more efficient, so that light doesn't make it here. FYI IANAA.
Critics claim that the pharmaceuticals spend 10x as much on advertising as they do on research. Ultimately the patent merely fuels the saturation advertising that hits you every time you turn your television on to check the news.
You know that dude in those saturation coverage Crestor commercials, who's always walking down the stairs and saying "down with the bad, up with the good"?
That's Mandy Patinkin. He played Inigo Montoya in the Princess Bride.
"My name is Inigo Montoya. You raised my father's bad cholesterol and lowered his good cholesterol. Prepare to die."
Typical. Ad hominem attacks. Why am I not surprised that when I say something bad about communism around here I am immediately called disparaging names.
People who have a fetish or an axe to grind about something like to wander off topic and try to turn every conversation into one about whatever it is they are obsessed with. This is bad enough even when they know what they are talking about.
When they hijack worthwhile threads in order to parrot the same nonsensical stereotype-driven propaganda we can already hear on mass media all around us, they can rightly expect to be called disparaging names as this crap does not add to the conversation in a meaningful way. Sorry.
I probably would have been harder on the police department, but one has to wonder about the 12-year-old's responses to their experience
No one doesn't. Kids climb trees. They don't normally get arrested for it. Their responses were normal.
These infant-willed "preteens" didn't belong in a 20 foot cherry tree.
Maybe you've never seen a tree before. So you might want to sit down for this.
20 feet is actually quite short for a tree. Most people would consider that a shrub, not a tree.
When you climb a shrub or a tree, it is not necessary or even possible to climb up to the very highest leaves at the top. They won't hold your weight. Therefore the fact that the tree height is 20 feet strongly indicates that these kids were at a much lower height at the time of their arrest. They were probably at varying heights from zero to about ten- the article doesn't say. This would further indicate that emotional stability (as determined by an arrest) need not be a prerequisite for climbing shrubbery.
The reaction to RFK Jr.'s article about the 2004 election wasn't as stong as I personally would have hoped for, but from a few things that I have read, I get the impression that it's far from over.
I liked that illustration by Matt Mahurin. Election fraud must be really hard to draw.
Yes, you're right!
I'm not sure why they didn't give you a state issued id when they yanked you license. A close friend recently had the same situation and they sent him an ID card and then told him to return the drivers license in the accompanied envelope.
Nah, I got the envelope, but no replacement ID. The letter said put the license in the envelope and send it back. You'd think with something like that, they'd at least spring for postage, but they make you buy your own stamp. This was in one of the states that has mandatory reporting requirements for neurologists- if you have a seizure, the neurologist is required by law to report it to the DMV. So unless you want to lose your license, you stay away from neurologists. I can tell you there are a lot of undermedicated epileptics driving around because of those laws.
Of course fraud could still be active but the ease of it has just droped a notch. Also there could be a trail of people to be held acountable for the fraud and an investigation trial if ever questioned.... What we need is penalties of life in prison or death if the fraud resulted in an issue getting passed or failing or someone becoming elected that wouldn't have been without the fraud. If it didn't effect the outcome of the election, then half a life sentence plus 10 years in a "federal pound me in the ass prison" should be a manditory punishment.
Why are we wanting to police this type of ballot fraud so heavily? By "this type" I mean "one fraudster = one vote", i.e. the type of fraud where someone votes who shouldn't be voting. That type of fraud always happens and there is no more need to be concerned about it than there has always been. And it certainly doesn't explain the irregularities in our elections. For example the discrepancy between the exit polls and the vote count cannot be attributed to that type of fraud. Many rural districts don't announce their vote counts until everyone knows how many votes [a certain candidate] needs- and then there is amazing turnout in those districts for [that candidate] that just pushes him over the top. Again, many many votes per fraudster. Meanwhile all the talk about "fraud" centers on single vote fraud- i.e. illegal aliens, etc. These issues are designed to be distractions from the real fraud that is going on.
Then there would be a lot less voter-fraud happening. Or at least a lot ledd people willing to do the act.
The type of fraud that truly influences elections is perpetrated by a very small number of people who could show you plenty of phone and utility bills.
This whole debacle only requires 2 things to fix it. #1, a paper trail that's checked against the vote tallies. #2 Driver's license or preferably some sort of free voting id where they vet your citizenship.
#2 is unacceptable. DMV took my license for medical reasons (epilepsy). And we all know how this stuff is intended to work. To get a "free voting ID", I'll have to have someone drive me a couple hundred miles to some remote office set up in the reddest, most inaccessible, most desolate goddamned corner of the state, and once I'm there I'll end up needing some stupid document that will require another trip.
If I can even find information about which office is the correct one to go to on the one day they're open. I'm sure it will be readily available in a filing cabinet in City Hall under a sign down in the basement with the stairs missing behind the locked door with "Beware of the Tiger" written on it.
Now if I had a driver's license, I could just park in a bad (blue) neighborhood and find a helpful flyer under my windshield wiper telling me which wrong office to go to a day late.
We would never have national ID cards in the America I grew up in anyway. You must be from some other country.
With Diebold, anyone can tamper with an election outcome- even you, yes you. Refer to my current sig.
It is truly an empowering experience to tamper with an election- you'll be more enfranchised than all your neighbors on your street put together.
The government moved in, and like in other areas, anything similar that people were doing privately withered away. Everybody pays for the government to do it, so why should they continue?
Maybe that's a good thing.
Would you rather have AOL + Compuserve + Prodigy, or the Internet?
How is this a violation of civil liberties? If anything, his taking a picture was a violation of the officer's and the person being arrested's privacy.
As a public servant acting as a state actor in making an arrest, a police officer has no privacy rights to consider. Privacy is for off-duty hours.
The privacy angle makes a better argument if you restrict it to the person being arrested, but after watching all the COPS episodes I've seen, I'm guessing that isn't a legally compelling argument either.
What if one of the people arrested turns out to be not guilty, but their are still tons of pictures of them being arrested circulating? There is no right to take a picture of whatever and whomever you want.
Maybe in the country where you live, but not in the United States I grew up in.
The Chilean hackers blocked the flow of information from the websites attacked to the users wishing to access it. This is what the Chinese government is doing to their citizens.
:P
And if you get around their block, these Chilean hackers have the power to throw you in prison, right?
I can't wait to change my password to the empty string! Who can remember those things!
Obviously with a vote of 410-15, the Democratic party has had their forum and agrees with the legislation.
I don't know if it's the case here, but when a bill is known to have poor or no chances of getting through the other house of Congress, it starts looking like a "freebie" for legislators since it won't become law anyway and presents an opportunity to posture with no consequences. The lopsided vote suggests this might be a possibility. Although technical illiteracy and incompetence certainly played a role.
FWIW, all 15 nays were from Democrats. All the House Republicans voted unanimously for this bill.
If someone's trying to trick kids to come to a porn site, so what?
I mean WTF is the big deal if kids see a little porn?
Does it "damage" them somehow? I found the magazines in my father's nightstand and I'm still OK. In fact I found them just in time because I was starting to have a really hard time at school for not knowing about all that stuff, what all the dirty words meant, etc. (The "Letters to Playboy" section was especially helpful for figuring out the words.)
If you're thinking you're going to have some conversation with your kid when he's 20, about birds and bees and when a man and a woman really love each other and all that flowery stuff, you can just disabuse yourself of that notion right now. If your kid has any friends his age at all, one of them will find out the "wrong" way, he'll tell his friends, and soon all the kids are divided into those who are aware of sex and those who need to find out what everyone is giggling about and making fun of them for not knowing. Then it's just a matter of whether you've put your kid at a disadvantage at school.
If your kids can't be exposed to an environment with free expression of ideas, then you're a bad parent for getting them an Internet connection in the first place. Install a filter if you're really neurotic enough to care about your kid seeing porn. If you're smart you'll let your kids look at all the porn they want as early as possible.
If you find out about sex when you're older, your neural plasticity is gone and as an adult you will have an immature attitude towards sex. Instead of just being a part of life, it will always be something filthy to be giggled about, obsessed over, thrust into politics, and kept hidden from the young so they can inherit the same neurosis you've got. You won't be able to see past sex on any issue where it is even tangentially involved. Just look at this recent gay marriage debate. Some people (both sides) are talking about restricting the institution, marriage as a civil rights issue, the courts, etc. Then there are people who approach the issue from the angle of "so the husband puts it where?" and they continue to argue at that level. That's what happens when you don't find out about sex in time during your development.
The thing to worry about is chat. Porn won't damage your kid, but there are lots of people you don't want your kid chatting with.