Exactly. My initial reaction was against this, but self regulation never works. Do Not Track is simply an effort by the data aggregators to stave off real privacy regulation - "Look! We'll make a token gesture to respect the privacy of the tech savvy minority as long as we can run roughshod over the vast majority. See, we're honest folks."
Kudos to Microsoft for calling it like it is on this one.
You know, I'm not sure that it's the most depressing but it certainly does wear on you over time. Positive events are few and far between, and never really feel triumphant.
The point is that most of the arguments that people make against regulation (too much bureaucracy, too much overhead, barrier to entry, over complicated, etc.) don't apply to cap & trade, since companies are free to implement things in any way they'd like.
We're facing a real crisis in the federal government, and people are arguing about stupid crap like how much money Mitt Romney made or Obama's misquoted verbal gaffes. There's no unified leadership coming from anyone... the polarized media, the president, Congress, etc. By default, we're forced to rely upon the Supreme Court to solve issues now...
Now this just isn't true. Romney's alleged tax evasion is important and our leadership is designed to not be unified. Whether or not that's a good thing is debatable, competition does not produce an ideal result in every case. We're also not relying on the Supreme Court more than usual - they have always been an outlet for people who are unhappy with legislation passed by congress and their role now is no more than it has been since Marshall. Though you could make the argument that they've overstepped themselves a few too many times.
What we've lost in recent years is a willingness to compromise. Our system does nothing to encourage this and what's kept us going up until this point is the recognition that endless bickering does not actually accomplish anything. This has changed: an absolutist stance is now considered by many people including, crucially, a large block of voters, to be an acceptable form of governance.
A good governmental system should push legislators into accepting compromise, and that doesn't happen with only two effective political parties.
70% of nothing is still nothing. The complaint is that Gamestop is making fat wads off of used games by paying out nothing and selling them for only slightly less than the new price, while pushing used games sales instead of new ones. No one cares what Joe Gamer does with the pittance that he makes.
Of course, while Gamestop's behavior here is contemptible, leveraging its monopoly to undercut the very industry that supports it, there's nothing whatsoever wrong with used game sales in general. No more so than used books or other media. The real shame is that this is the direction that the big publishers are trying to push the debate into - blaming used game sales for their declining profits, to justify more and more DRM.
All animal products people tend to eat and drink come from vegetarian animals.
Most of what you said is true - it's foolish to claim that meat is necessary when it's been demonstrated so clearly, over thousands of years by many millions of people, that it is not. This last part though, is a non-sequitur. I suppose maybe you're claiming that all of the amino acids that we eat ultimately come from plants and that, therefore, we don't need to get any from animals? People and cows digest our foods differently. Because we can get protein from cows which themselves got it from grass, doesn't mean that we can cut out the middle man and just eat the grass. That's not how it works.
We certainly can get all the protein that we need from plants, but the one thing does not follow from the other.
Predators tend to be smarter than herbivores because their prey is smarter, it doesn't take brains to catch a plant. This does not imply a causative effect between meat and intelligence however - apes and monkeys, arguably the smartest non-human animals, are technically omnivores but with the exception of a few species that eat insects, they eat plants almost exclusively.
If you've got any information that suggests that meat was or is essential to brain development I'd like to see it.
His graph is of violent political upheaval within the United States. World War II was a point of very low violence and the Napoleonic Wars were just as the nation was starting out. Yes, war with China would probably reduce the internal strife that we're going through right now provided that it was them who attacked us and that they did so without provocation (or at least without provocation that was known to the public at large).
You're correct in general of course, the trouble isn't the filibuster itself. That encourages compromise and helps to prevent absolute rule of the majority. The trouble is that it only works when you have a minority that's willing to compromise. That has been the case to a greater or lessor degree in every senate up until now, but the number of filibusters since Obama took office has been more than double that of any previous senate.
An ideal solution wouldn't be to simply eliminate the filibuster but to replace it with some rule that would do a better job of requiring compromise rather than simply allowing it.
There's no rule that says it takes 60 votes to pass the senate, that's a GOP invention.
It was the Democrats' invention.
According to Wikipedia, "Finally, in 1975 the Democratic-controlled Senate[5] revised its cloture rule so that three-fifths of the senators sworn (usually 60 senators) could limit debate
What a stupid... you're claiming that when the Senate in 1975 reduced the requirement for cloture from a 2/3 majority to a 3/5 majority that is what made the Senate today so incapable of accomplishing anything? Because if only more people were required for cloture then the GOP wouldn't have hatched on this idea to filibuster everything?
Certain sports that involve much more raw intellect women could compete on, but if it significantly involves a physical challenge, forget about it.
There used to be Olympic poetry, singing, painting, city planning, etching, croquet... most of these were phased out in order to maintain the amateur status of the events - an Olympic poet would likely be a professional poet at home and this was felt to be contrary to the point of the Olympics. I don't know why they got rid of croquet though.
Do some experimentation - attend various service locations in differing levels of dress and pay attention to the body language and other sub-conscious queues you're given.
Not just your clothes, your shoes too. Don't forget those. It seems odd, but there are people out there who pay a lot of attention to shoes.
I don't know what his bias is, but the facts are that she granted an injunction against the sale of Samsung phones on the basis of a few very weak patents. The strongest of which, apparently, was a search function that could search both the local phone and the internet at the same time.
You have the old people and fox news watchers all locked up, you do not need a VP that will reassure them so stick with someone less crazy.
I'd expect him to pick an experienced old-timey republican from Pennsylvania or Florida or Ohio or one of the other swing states. Someone non-threatening, so he doesn't scare off people from elsewhere, but familiar and safe in the state that counts.
"Fear it could distort the field." Feh. Anyone who has gone through a physics education (or chemistry, for that matter) knows how much weight is given to Nobel prizes. (It's a huge amount - prize winners and their winning discoveries are mentioned constantly.) If this $3 million prize turned into a regular thing instead of a one-off, then it most certainly would distort things. The question is whether this prize would be a positive influence (like the Nobel), inspiring people who work in basic research, or a negative influence (like the Nobel), inciting petty bickering and prize whoring.
Thanks. According to Wikipedia, CW stands for CBS Warner Brothers and it's the successor to "The WB" and the United Paramount Network, both of which I was familiar with, but not the new thing. Maybe I'm just getting old.
Your post, GP, original submitter, original article in the Washington Post... every one of you using this CW acronym like it means something, not one of you defining what it is. I guess I'll have to look it up for myself. Shame on you for making me do work.
Arguably, the DirectX lock-in is probably why gaming on OS X hasn't really taken off either.
I agree with most of what you said, but this is off. The only OS X machine that you can buy which will accept a video card is a ridiculously expensive Power Mac. Everything else uses Apple's revolutionary "throw it away and buy a new one" upgrade system. Any other reason why gaming is limited on OS X is secondary.
They sell insurance intended to protect you from any financial ramifications of shooting people, and make sure that you have the lawyers you need to protect you from legal ramifications:
The NRA routinely champions gun ownership as a means of self-defense, despite the well demonstrated fact that gun ownership makes you (and your family) less safe:
There are some real reasons to own guns, but the NRA is a bunch of howling vigilantes. They not only want to make it legal to shoot people, they want to make it easy.
Moderators moderate, it's up to other people to refute. Sometimes you get a bad moderator, or maybe a good one makes a mistake, but complaining about it doesn't do anything positive. Go meta-moderate if you don't like it.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. My initial reaction was against this, but self regulation never works. Do Not Track is simply an effort by the data aggregators to stave off real privacy regulation - "Look! We'll make a token gesture to respect the privacy of the tech savvy minority as long as we can run roughshod over the vast majority. See, we're honest folks."
Kudos to Microsoft for calling it like it is on this one.
You know, I'm not sure that it's the most depressing but it certainly does wear on you over time. Positive events are few and far between, and never really feel triumphant.
The point is that most of the arguments that people make against regulation (too much bureaucracy, too much overhead, barrier to entry, over complicated, etc.) don't apply to cap & trade, since companies are free to implement things in any way they'd like.
We're facing a real crisis in the federal government, and people are arguing about stupid crap like how much money Mitt Romney made or Obama's misquoted verbal gaffes. There's no unified leadership coming from anyone... the polarized media, the president, Congress, etc. By default, we're forced to rely upon the Supreme Court to solve issues now...
Now this just isn't true. Romney's alleged tax evasion is important and our leadership is designed to not be unified. Whether or not that's a good thing is debatable, competition does not produce an ideal result in every case. We're also not relying on the Supreme Court more than usual - they have always been an outlet for people who are unhappy with legislation passed by congress and their role now is no more than it has been since Marshall. Though you could make the argument that they've overstepped themselves a few too many times.
What we've lost in recent years is a willingness to compromise. Our system does nothing to encourage this and what's kept us going up until this point is the recognition that endless bickering does not actually accomplish anything. This has changed: an absolutist stance is now considered by many people including, crucially, a large block of voters, to be an acceptable form of governance.
A good governmental system should push legislators into accepting compromise, and that doesn't happen with only two effective political parties.
That was well said.
70% of nothing is still nothing. The complaint is that Gamestop is making fat wads off of used games by paying out nothing and selling them for only slightly less than the new price, while pushing used games sales instead of new ones. No one cares what Joe Gamer does with the pittance that he makes.
Of course, while Gamestop's behavior here is contemptible, leveraging its monopoly to undercut the very industry that supports it, there's nothing whatsoever wrong with used game sales in general. No more so than used books or other media. The real shame is that this is the direction that the big publishers are trying to push the debate into - blaming used game sales for their declining profits, to justify more and more DRM.
Bullshit.
Um. Well, the headline is: "First Proof Gorillas Eat Monkeys?" but like all headlines that end in a question mark, the answer is no:
"There's plenty of opportunities" for adding mammal DNA to gorilla scat after the fact, Schubert said. "I don't really think they're eating meat."
That said, the article does say that chimps and bonobos have been known to eat mammals. Something of which I was not aware. So that's interesting.
And this article:
How about that I eat meat, and I can use Google?
Starts with the headline "Meat-Based Diet Made Us Smarter" and then goes on to say that what really did it was learning how to cook:
Wrangham explains that even after we started eating meat, raw food just didn't pack the energy to build the big-brained, small-toothed modern human.
Although it does say the the meat was important as well, sorta. Point for you there I guess. I appreciate the links, at any rate.
All animal products people tend to eat and drink come from vegetarian animals.
Most of what you said is true - it's foolish to claim that meat is necessary when it's been demonstrated so clearly, over thousands of years by many millions of people, that it is not. This last part though, is a non-sequitur. I suppose maybe you're claiming that all of the amino acids that we eat ultimately come from plants and that, therefore, we don't need to get any from animals? People and cows digest our foods differently. Because we can get protein from cows which themselves got it from grass, doesn't mean that we can cut out the middle man and just eat the grass. That's not how it works.
We certainly can get all the protein that we need from plants, but the one thing does not follow from the other.
Predators tend to be smarter than herbivores because their prey is smarter, it doesn't take brains to catch a plant. This does not imply a causative effect between meat and intelligence however - apes and monkeys, arguably the smartest non-human animals, are technically omnivores but with the exception of a few species that eat insects, they eat plants almost exclusively.
If you've got any information that suggests that meat was or is essential to brain development I'd like to see it.
His graph is of violent political upheaval within the United States. World War II was a point of very low violence and the Napoleonic Wars were just as the nation was starting out. Yes, war with China would probably reduce the internal strife that we're going through right now provided that it was them who attacked us and that they did so without provocation (or at least without provocation that was known to the public at large).
You're correct in general of course, the trouble isn't the filibuster itself. That encourages compromise and helps to prevent absolute rule of the majority. The trouble is that it only works when you have a minority that's willing to compromise. That has been the case to a greater or lessor degree in every senate up until now, but the number of filibusters since Obama took office has been more than double that of any previous senate.
An ideal solution wouldn't be to simply eliminate the filibuster but to replace it with some rule that would do a better job of requiring compromise rather than simply allowing it.
There's no rule that says it takes 60 votes to pass the senate, that's a GOP invention.
It was the Democrats' invention. According to Wikipedia, "Finally, in 1975 the Democratic-controlled Senate[5] revised its cloture rule so that three-fifths of the senators sworn (usually 60 senators) could limit debate
What a stupid... you're claiming that when the Senate in 1975 reduced the requirement for cloture from a 2/3 majority to a 3/5 majority that is what made the Senate today so incapable of accomplishing anything? Because if only more people were required for cloture then the GOP wouldn't have hatched on this idea to filibuster everything?
Thank you, came here to say the same thing. There's no rule that says it takes 60 votes to pass the senate, that's a GOP invention.
Certain sports that involve much more raw intellect women could compete on, but if it significantly involves a physical challenge, forget about it.
There used to be Olympic poetry, singing, painting, city planning, etching, croquet... most of these were phased out in order to maintain the amateur status of the events - an Olympic poet would likely be a professional poet at home and this was felt to be contrary to the point of the Olympics. I don't know why they got rid of croquet though.
Tug-of-War used to be a track and field event.
Do some experimentation - attend various service locations in differing levels of dress and pay attention to the body language and other sub-conscious queues you're given.
Not just your clothes, your shoes too. Don't forget those. It seems odd, but there are people out there who pay a lot of attention to shoes.
I don't know what his bias is, but the facts are that she granted an injunction against the sale of Samsung phones on the basis of a few very weak patents. The strongest of which, apparently, was a search function that could search both the local phone and the internet at the same time.
I am not optimistic about this case.
You have the old people and fox news watchers all locked up, you do not need a VP that will reassure them so stick with someone less crazy.
I'd expect him to pick an experienced old-timey republican from Pennsylvania or Florida or Ohio or one of the other swing states. Someone non-threatening, so he doesn't scare off people from elsewhere, but familiar and safe in the state that counts.
"Fear it could distort the field." Feh. Anyone who has gone through a physics education (or chemistry, for that matter) knows how much weight is given to Nobel prizes. (It's a huge amount - prize winners and their winning discoveries are mentioned constantly.) If this $3 million prize turned into a regular thing instead of a one-off, then it most certainly would distort things. The question is whether this prize would be a positive influence (like the Nobel), inspiring people who work in basic research, or a negative influence (like the Nobel), inciting petty bickering and prize whoring.
Thanks. According to Wikipedia, CW stands for CBS Warner Brothers and it's the successor to "The WB" and the United Paramount Network, both of which I was familiar with, but not the new thing. Maybe I'm just getting old.
Your post, GP, original submitter, original article in the Washington Post... every one of you using this CW acronym like it means something, not one of you defining what it is. I guess I'll have to look it up for myself. Shame on you for making me do work.
Global warming is not just, it will be hotter in some cold place and a bit too hot for comfort in some hot place.
That's why they stopped calling it global warming and started calling it climate change.
And god, and gold, right?
Arguably, the DirectX lock-in is probably why gaming on OS X hasn't really taken off either.
I agree with most of what you said, but this is off. The only OS X machine that you can buy which will accept a video card is a ridiculously expensive Power Mac. Everything else uses Apple's revolutionary "throw it away and buy a new one" upgrade system. Any other reason why gaming is limited on OS X is secondary.
The NRA doesn't want to make it legal to shoot people.
Bullshit. The NRA is one of the most prominent backers of the Stand Your Ground laws:
http://www.prwatch.org/news/2012/07/11628/studies-show-more-people-shot-death-%E2%80%9Cstand-your-ground%E2%80%9D-laws
They sell insurance intended to protect you from any financial ramifications of shooting people, and make sure that you have the lawyers you need to protect you from legal ramifications:
http://www.indecisionforever.com/blog/2012/06/14/nra-sells-insurance-covering-legal-costs-of-shooting-people
The NRA routinely champions gun ownership as a means of self-defense, despite the well demonstrated fact that gun ownership makes you (and your family) less safe:
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199310073291506
There are some real reasons to own guns, but the NRA is a bunch of howling vigilantes. They not only want to make it legal to shoot people, they want to make it easy.
Moderators moderate, it's up to other people to refute. Sometimes you get a bad moderator, or maybe a good one makes a mistake, but complaining about it doesn't do anything positive. Go meta-moderate if you don't like it.