godmode isn't needed, that's just the name of the folder (Cnet named thiers thankscnet). Also, that so-called 'godmode' folder probably isn't documented because it's broken on x64.
Music is protected by copyright. The unauthorized downloading or uploading of music is actionable as copyright infringement, even if not done for profit.
Where in copyright law does it say that downloading is illegal? My friggin' radio downloads music from the air for pete's sake.
That's because the radio transmission was authorized. The quote you posted specifically mentions unauthorized downloading.
Someone buys something for a couple bucks and suddenly you have to send payments of a few cents to three different places. Even if you save it all up and send it bi-yearly you could be looking at thousands of separate payments based on how widespread your client base is.
This is so on-point that it clearly doesn't belong on slashdot.
I'll do you one better, having collected multi-jurisdictional sales taxes in the past myself: You can't save it up and send it bi-yearly. Most places require monthly filing of sales taxes. That's right, every month. So if you made a few dozen sales per month as a small online retailer, you'd have to send sales tax payments to every jurisdiction involved in their own approved format with their own approved forms.
In my business in Georgia I had to file sales tax forms every single month, even if I didn't have any sales that month. So if I were a nationwide online retailer doing 20 transactions per month, I'd have to fill out sales tax forms for every single jurisdiction every single month, even though most of them were getting nothing and a few were getting a couple of bucks. The cost of compliance with the tax will easily far exceed the amount of tax paid, both for me as the retailer and for the government as tax collector. A true lose-lose situation.
The only way nationwide sales tax collections can possibly prove workable is via a centralized electronic tax clearinghouse. This would actually be of benefit to brick and mortar retailers as well, as it would simplify their compliance too. This is why it is so unlikely to happen. Online retailers enjoy the benefits of an internet tax haven and have no inclination to give up this advantage. Brick and Mortar stores want the advantage of localization without competing against a tax advantaged competitor - so they'd love to keep the barrier to entry high for non-local retailers.
It is a shame, because this would be a pretty simple system to implement by federal fiat - simply publish the XML schema for the data interchange and set up a deadline for implementation for states and for retailers. Retailers could roll their own or contract with a service provider. The whole thing would be trivial (-ish) with that top-down mandate. My dev team could definitely handle this project, probably going live within 30 days. The whole thing depends on having complete definitions from the states. Given that, the rest is a fairly trivial web service and database.
Wanting others to have to pay more so you can get free stuff is not altruism. It is greed.
Wanting others to pay more so others can become better off is altruism.
I think you might want to look up the definition of altruism. You helping the group, perhaps to your own personal detriment, is altruism. Forcing somebody else to help the group out for you is stretching that definition beyond recognition.
Of course, being altruistic doesn't necessarily equate to correct or moral. Even accepting your expanded definition, I could go out and axe-murder anyone with over a million bucks and give all their stuff to the poor and be altruistic without being moral or even "good". I could also go out and shoot everyone with a mental illness or physical disability that renders them unproductive - this could arguably benefit the overall group prosperity. Probably wouldn't be all that morally correct though.
Conversely, I could selfishly go out and build a business so that I can become rich beyond your wildest imagination. In the process I create a product that enhances the lives of millions and my company employs hundreds of workers who are able to feed their families because of these jobs. I have done nothing altruistic at all, but I have accomplished the result of "helping others" with a much higher degree of success than if I had simply given my money to a charitable organization or government to redistribute.
The New Deal, Welfare, etc has not changed the need for charity any more than the poor houses in England did, so obsession over taxes are not as relevant as the actual total spending towards society.
Actually, I'd disagree with you on this. I'd say that the evidence is pretty solid that the new deal programs have had a much greater impact on the need for charity than the poor houses in England ever did. Remember the "permanent underclass" discussions of the 80's-90's? The perverse incentives of the welfare society increase the probability that someone will need aid for extended periods of time (because it is available). The equally perverse "justice" of the poor house definitely carries incentives that discourage long term dependence (although in a manner that defies all common sense and human decency). So post New Deal we have a much greater need for charity (due to the successes of the new deal), although the individual charitable needs are much less acute than in days gone by (also due in large part to the successes of the new deal).
-----Hard to say, but it must be easy since there are lots of mods that are, at the very least, a bit challenged. If you know what I mean.-----
<The Tick>
Nope.
</The Tick>
Ok, that one was strictly for the two other people who would get a Warburton/Tick reference. But the three of us laughed our asses off..... "Yes, it is I, Bat-Manuel! I saved them three times later that night, if you know what I mean." Heh, funny... Ok, well, if you had watched the show you'd laugh too. And the stupid thing wouldn't have been canceled after a half-season. So basically it's doubly your fault that you didn't get it.
American cars manage straight lines perfectly well, but fail miserably around a small feature of most road networks - corners with a radius of under 300 yards.
Come to Europe and we'll explain concepts such as handling, fuel efficiency and build quality.
Right! That's why the Ford Focus RS (performance) and the Ford Fiesta Econotec (economy) have been winning so many "Car of the Year" awards in Europe lately. (actually, these american cars are not available for sale in america, but still...)
I'll add this: In the first five minutes of Star Wars, Vader walks into the carnage of battle, picks a captured soldier up by the neck, holds him dangling in midair at arm's length and questions him before offhandedly snapping his neck with one hand and tossing the body aside. Bad guy established in less than 2 minutes. While it is cheezy sci-fi schlock, it is also effective storytelling. You knew right off the bat that Darth Vader was an evil badass that you didn't want to get involved with.
Darth Maul gets introduced half way through the movie and despite the cool makeup we have to be told that he is a bad guy. Also, despite being a much better stunt man and athlete and having much cooler fight choreography, Maul never reaches the level that Vader does in that introductory scene. Therefore his defeat is no more intriguing than getting past the chompy things on the assembly line. He's not a character, he's just another obstacle for our hero to jump over.
While I understand your sensitivity having worked for a journal publisher, my personal experience comports with the grandparent and the science blogs link. Although perhaps not the norm, personal biases of the reviewers and/or editors is often a major factor in reviews of publications and grants. I personally dealt with a situation similar to the scienceblogs link back in the early 90's. During a journal club review of a paper published in a fairly prestigious tier two journal I spotted a major and fairly obvious error in data analysis that nullified the entire paper. After kicking it around in journal club for a while, we wound up contacting the lead and second authors to see if we were missing something. Well, long story short they were not amused and were not interested in discussing it further when we didn't take "you don't know what you are talking about" for an answer. Comments to the journal were reviewed and rejected for seemingly silly reasons and since we didn't really have a dog in that fight we dropped it after two revisions.
Your assurance that you'd love to publish a scoop is great, except the author of a paper never knows the connections of the reviewers who might be sitting on his paper because their buddy has a couple of big grants on the subject and wants to get his paper out first. The publisher might not know anything about it either. Because of the nature of peer review, finding reviewers that are sufficiently expert in the specific area of interest and not connected to the author or his competition in any way is exceedingly difficult in many areas of science. In my own specialty there were probably a few hundred principals around the world in that area, but when you broke it down to a specific line of inquiry there might only be 20 or so. Less if you want to be really specific. And most of these were heavily collaborating on one thing or another.
I don't think there was any fraud or corruption involved in the situations I witnessed, but people have natural biases in their perceptions that color their susceptibility to new ideas. In one grant proposal I made as a student, I relied heavily on a series of papers from a group in Sweden. After being heavily grilled by one of the review committee about the technique I was planning I finally asked what was going on. He replied that I should take everything from the Swedish group with a big grain of salt - he didn't believe they were reliable. I asked how in the world I was supposed to know that - he said that's what you have to be able to do to be in research - winnow the wheat from the chaff. So his perception was that peer-reviewed journal articles were no evidence of credibility - at least not in reference to a group that he obviously had a tiff with.
It is because of low sulfur emission requirements in the US which is much more restrictive than the EU. One of the rare exceptions to the rule. It makes diesel more expensive in the US, even accounting for the added economy.
C-Span is an example of something that doesn't have an opinion; not Fox or CNN or CBS or ABC or PBS or MSNBC or anybody.
Somebody find some mod points for C-span! If you really want unbiased coverage - at least in the coverage itself if not in the choice of what to cover - you need to watch C-span. If you spend a week or two following their coverage, you'll soon discover who is a talking-point party monkey and who isn't, because they air the briefings without edits.
You'll often see the spokesman for party X briefing reporters about the issue of the day using an obviously poll-tested turn of phrase that you've never heard before. That night on the news you can flip channels and hear all of your favorite unbiased news anchors using exactly that turn of phrase in their own "unbiased and objective" coverage of the news. (and I am talking about news here, not opinion pieces)
You'll even get to see source of the latest phenomenon in news - the story of the day or week. Ever hear those commentators telling you that "the White House will be focusing on Issue X this week"? Ever notice that the unbiased and objective news organization suddenly shifts their stories to cover Issue X, even though nobody at all was talking about it last week? Watch C-span and you'll actually see that sausage being made. You get to watch the policy makers tell the media what issues to cover and which sources and angles to cover. Then you can tune in your favorite stations and watch them do exactly as told.
I guess it might have always been that way, but C-span certainly gave us all a new level of visibility to the lack of personal initiative in the press corps. Both left and right you can come up with examples of this strategy at work.
Read the Radley Balko article linked in the summary and follow the links to his coverage of the medical examiner scandal in Louisiana and Mississippi. His work is every bit the equal of Woodward et. al. and the scandal he covers is much more serious than Watergate, despite the Watergate scandal's ability to bring down a president. He uncovers the blatant framing of innocent men for murder and rape (perhaps numbering in the thousands). He then details the fight to change the system - which was unsuccessful for years, despite the obvious and easy to understand evidence and the simplicity of the solution. This scandal makes spying on your political enemies look like using the wrong salad fork at a formal dinner. Every murder case in the state went through a single coroner known to be corrupt and incompetent - yet the system continues to defend its own and insist that all of the convictions obtained are correct. Balko even obtained video of one of the coroner's incompetent consultants manufacturing evidence to frame a man as a child rapist and murderer in the death of a child. He's a real hero journalist in my book, whether on line or in print. His articles make for an outstanding read, even if you need to take your blood pressure medicine before reading.
So when I can keep all of my money because the rightists abolish income tax but I can't marry my partner because we're the same gender and their magic book says that's not allowed... how exactly is that personal freedom?
Ok, I'll explain it to you. Let's imagine a law that says gay guys cannot get married. It's not that hard to do - just look around you. In this imaginary world you are free to earn and spend your money as you please with no interference. So you and your "roommate" buy a house, cars, health insurance, vacations, etc. You keep your private life away from the government and although your theoretical freedoms are egregiously infringed, in a practical sense you are living life as you see fit. You can even use contract law to bridge the gaps that are left by the inability to actually marry.
Now let's imagine a world that makes gay marriage perfectly legal. In this imaginary world you are not free to earn and spend your money as you see fit. In this imaginary world all of your money goes to the government first, and they decide how you get to spend it. They decide where you rent your home, they decide what insurance you get, they decide how much you get for food. In this imaginary world, although gay marriage is perfectly legal, the government will not provide any funding for gay married couples housing. They declare gay sex a health hazard, and so they severely restrict the health care monies for gay couples.
The point of this is that economic strictures are much easier to impose and much more restrictive than "morality police" laws. Just look at sodomy laws in the US. They were the norm only a few decades ago, and although they were sometimes used to persecute particular individuals, by and large they were roundly ignored by the population at large. The same goes for bans on drugs right now. A huge portion of the population flouts the drug bans, and although there is a large cost and lots of incarcerations, most people go about their little recreational drug use quietly with no interference. In fact, it is the economic side of the transaction that is more easily detected.
The point I think the GP is trying to make is that if you are allowed to control your own economic life, you'll be much more able to control your personal life. The opposite is not true. In fact, if you surrender your economic freedom, it is very easy to take your personal freedoms as well.
Different industry, same problem. In fact, we are currently being forced to implement and support a crap "workflow" program that we specifically vetoed as insecure, inefficient, unmanageable and unmaintainable. Even better, the "evaluation committee" - all non-IT people - touts their success in automating their demonstration process in only 3 months!
They complained about having to click through to enter a date on a different screen (2 clicks on a very rare event occurrence - about 5-10 times per year). Their new solution replaces their one screen queue (with 2 extra clicks 5 times per year) with a 9-page scripted workflow that has to be followed for every single item - tens of thousands. Brilliant!!! And people wonder why they need IT help?
Even better, management is on board and very impressed that they were able to solve their problem without IT intervention. Now they have 9 input screens to maintain, as well as the connections between those input screens, as well as the integration to the existing system. I figure they probably cost themselves about 10-20 hours per week in end user "wait time" for the new process once it goes into production, plus another entire salary for maintenance on the system. Plus, they are demanding read-write access to every table in our carefully secured system - to be managed on the business side by an advanced clerical worker who is "good with computers." So much for data validation and security audits... But they are thrilled because their process manages "millions of dollars" and is too important to fail! Huh?
The complete inability of most people to follow even rudimentary logic astounds me. These are highly paid, well educated executives at a billion dollar company, not rubes. Even if they can't figure out tech stuff, they should at least be able to understand that they might want to listen to their CIO and his executive team who each have 20-30 years of experience in exactly this sort of system design. But I'm convinced that this capability just doesn't exist. Because they can enter data in a form on a web page, everyone thinks they are a systems architect.
Interesting. So, you're inferring that we are now in an ice age and that the retreat of the glaciers is just part of the natural cycle? Could be. If we were currently in an ice age.
I think that everyone acknowledges that we are currently on the tail end of an ice age cycle. Looking at historical data (last 400k years kind of historical) we are currently nearing but still below the peak temperatures for interglacial periods. The natural cycle theory would argue that the earth will continue to warm until it reaches temperatures at this historical peak and then begin falling as ice begins building. The warming cycle is much more rapid than the cooling cycle according to this model. When climate models are zoomed out to show hundreds of thousands of years rather than tens of years, the current warming rate and ice depletion rate actually look to be an abnormally slow rate of change for this part of the curve. I'm not sure what that means, but you can check it out on the graphs on the wikipedia ice age page.
Didn't they feature a similar experiment of one of those "Mythbusters" knockoff shows? IIRC, they used pickup truck bed liner sprayed on the test walls, and had similar results.
I think the show was "Smash Lab" and the bed liner test was much better. They built a small concrete block building and sprayed it with bed bed liner - kind of like a stucco treatment. Then they hit the building with a car bomb outside. Not some bowling ball on a chain, but an actual car bomb. That's how you do it!
The results were remarkable, and the bed liner material is probably cheaper, more readily available and easier to apply. When I saw this wallpaper being pimped in Discover this month I thought the same thing... why on earth would you go with this difficult to apply stuff when a spray-on treatment appears to work better? Particularly if you notice that the wallpaper requires bolts and plates to hold the header and footer to the floor and ceiling. Not exactly the most aesthetic product... Meanwhile the bed liner idea from some B-grade TV show could actually come in any color, provide an attractive exterior finish and act like vinyl siding in resisting moisture and degradation and not requiring painting. Score one for the B team!
You think every state's sales tax is a single flat rate? Good luck with that. Now it is true that it's a less-than-overwhelming amount of data, but if you haven't thought the problem through enough to know that it's not just a table of 50 rates, then you shouldn't be trying to estimate the difficulty.
Seconded..... I used to have a small business selling computer equipment and services only in one state and I had more than 50 different rates to deal with. Taxes even vary based on entities you've never heard of, like regional transit authority. My monthly sales tax filing included filling out a 4 page grid of every entity and its tax allocation, that's just for one state! I spent more time on filing sales taxes than I did on my own accounting. In fact, it is one reason I got out of the business. With the state (and local govt) making 8% on every transaction and me having less than a 10% markup, the state was making more than I was after taxes.... and it was costing me a lot of hours to handle, not to mention the potential liability. Sales tax collection for a business that is not a fixed location storefront really doesn't scale down below a certain volume of business. A small eBay shop doing a few dozen sales a month nationwide would have a hard time justifying its existence if they had to track and pay sales tax for everything they sold. Maybe if there was an online tax clearinghouse for every state that would handle all of the filing, paperwork, etc. if you just plug in the address and sale amount - but barring that you couldn't make it work.
Anyway, I live in a sales tax free state. My state recognizes the burden that sales tax adds to businesses and to the state (collecting it and enforcing it) and has chosen a much simpler, more efficient, and more progressive tax policy (income tax).
Holy crap dude, all other arguments aside: calling an income tax simpler than a sales tax!?? How in the world is collecting a fixed rate tax from a few thousand outlets more simple than collecting a variable rate, deduction/credit/exemption filled tax from millions of individuals?
Sorry you have to deal with the negative stereotypes. There's also positive Colombian stereotypes too - being from south Florida I can tell you that the girls from Columbia are universally HOT! Ok, maybe only the ones that come to the US are that hot, but the one's I've met on South Beach have been stunning. And they tend to run in packs of 4-6 supermodel-hot ladies all from Columbia. It's like a lazy susan of hotness! So there's your positive stereotype:)
Actually, one of my neighbors is from Columbia. Her father is a big-time judge in Colombia. Nice guy too. He got his job when his predecessor was assassinated, presumably by drug dealers. So I guess there could be a reason for stereotypes, even if they aren't universally applicable.
But I guess to historically-illiterate morons like yourself, it can all be solved by just sending in more troops, because that worked for the Brits and the Russians oh so very well.
Actually, that was the prescription offered up repeatedly by candidate Obama only last year.
if I were a manager and one of my employees came to me with an ultimatum like that, I'd fire them on the spot.
If you were a manager and you were to fire them on the spot - you'd likely find yourself in deep doo-doo. In most jurisdictions there are laws that protect employees in these situations and levy huge penalties for retaliation of that sort.
'Cause that would seem to be an important preliminary to your definition of science?
The problem: existence is the thing that *everything that *exists has in common, and scientific articulation of its meaning would require a comparison between the things that do and don't exist. Which comparison it cannot make, because as you rightly point out scientific inquiry cannot be made into non-existent things.
btw the 'which' in "things which don't exist" is a funny word misusage in this context -- do you see why?
That's just silly. A 3,000 meter tall solid gold badger watching over Madison Wisconsin doesn't exist. We can easily compare it to a small ceramic badger from the University of Wisconsin gift shop that in fact does exist. Now, there is no logical reason that the giant golden badger cannot exist, it just doesn't. However, a square with only 3 sides does not exist anywhere in the universe, because it is logically impossible for such a thing to exist. It is easy to compare this with an equilateral triangle which in fact might exist, or one that does exist.
This is related to the history of argument about the existence of God. Thomas Aquinas made a similar distinction between things which exist and things which don't exist, things which cannot exist and things which just happen not to exist. In this ontological argument he attempts to prove that God logically must exist.
Slashdot Mirror
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee330741(VS.85).aspx
godmode isn't needed, that's just the name of the folder (Cnet named thiers thankscnet). Also, that so-called 'godmode' folder probably isn't documented because it's broken on x64.
Works fine on my copy of Win7 x64.
I knew I'd find it if I looked hard enough...
RIAA ispnotice
Music is protected by copyright. The unauthorized downloading or uploading of music is actionable as copyright infringement, even if not done for profit.
Where in copyright law does it say that downloading is illegal? My friggin' radio downloads music from the air for pete's sake.
That's because the radio transmission was authorized. The quote you posted specifically mentions unauthorized downloading.
And when the engine goes in your plane you glide to the ground.
Guy 1: "How far do you think this plane will fly without an engine?"
Guy 2: "All the way to the crash site."
Someone buys something for a couple bucks and suddenly you have to send payments of a few cents to three different places. Even if you save it all up and send it bi-yearly you could be looking at thousands of separate payments based on how widespread your client base is.
This is so on-point that it clearly doesn't belong on slashdot.
I'll do you one better, having collected multi-jurisdictional sales taxes in the past myself: You can't save it up and send it bi-yearly. Most places require monthly filing of sales taxes. That's right, every month. So if you made a few dozen sales per month as a small online retailer, you'd have to send sales tax payments to every jurisdiction involved in their own approved format with their own approved forms.
In my business in Georgia I had to file sales tax forms every single month, even if I didn't have any sales that month. So if I were a nationwide online retailer doing 20 transactions per month, I'd have to fill out sales tax forms for every single jurisdiction every single month, even though most of them were getting nothing and a few were getting a couple of bucks. The cost of compliance with the tax will easily far exceed the amount of tax paid, both for me as the retailer and for the government as tax collector. A true lose-lose situation.
The only way nationwide sales tax collections can possibly prove workable is via a centralized electronic tax clearinghouse. This would actually be of benefit to brick and mortar retailers as well, as it would simplify their compliance too. This is why it is so unlikely to happen. Online retailers enjoy the benefits of an internet tax haven and have no inclination to give up this advantage. Brick and Mortar stores want the advantage of localization without competing against a tax advantaged competitor - so they'd love to keep the barrier to entry high for non-local retailers.
It is a shame, because this would be a pretty simple system to implement by federal fiat - simply publish the XML schema for the data interchange and set up a deadline for implementation for states and for retailers. Retailers could roll their own or contract with a service provider. The whole thing would be trivial (-ish) with that top-down mandate. My dev team could definitely handle this project, probably going live within 30 days. The whole thing depends on having complete definitions from the states. Given that, the rest is a fairly trivial web service and database.
Wanting others to pay more so others can become better off is altruism.
I think you might want to look up the definition of altruism. You helping the group, perhaps to your own personal detriment, is altruism. Forcing somebody else to help the group out for you is stretching that definition beyond recognition.
Of course, being altruistic doesn't necessarily equate to correct or moral. Even accepting your expanded definition, I could go out and axe-murder anyone with over a million bucks and give all their stuff to the poor and be altruistic without being moral or even "good". I could also go out and shoot everyone with a mental illness or physical disability that renders them unproductive - this could arguably benefit the overall group prosperity. Probably wouldn't be all that morally correct though.
Conversely, I could selfishly go out and build a business so that I can become rich beyond your wildest imagination. In the process I create a product that enhances the lives of millions and my company employs hundreds of workers who are able to feed their families because of these jobs. I have done nothing altruistic at all, but I have accomplished the result of "helping others" with a much higher degree of success than if I had simply given my money to a charitable organization or government to redistribute.
Actually, I'd disagree with you on this. I'd say that the evidence is pretty solid that the new deal programs have had a much greater impact on the need for charity than the poor houses in England ever did. Remember the "permanent underclass" discussions of the 80's-90's? The perverse incentives of the welfare society increase the probability that someone will need aid for extended periods of time (because it is available). The equally perverse "justice" of the poor house definitely carries incentives that discourage long term dependence (although in a manner that defies all common sense and human decency). So post New Deal we have a much greater need for charity (due to the successes of the new deal), although the individual charitable needs are much less acute than in days gone by (also due in large part to the successes of the new deal).
Iocain powder immunity, FTW!
-----Hard to say, but it must be easy since there are lots of mods that are, at the very least, a bit challenged. If you know what I mean.-----
<The Tick>
Nope.
</The Tick>
Ok, that one was strictly for the two other people who would get a Warburton/Tick reference. But the three of us laughed our asses off..... "Yes, it is I, Bat-Manuel! I saved them three times later that night, if you know what I mean." Heh, funny... Ok, well, if you had watched the show you'd laugh too. And the stupid thing wouldn't have been canceled after a half-season. So basically it's doubly your fault that you didn't get it.
Spooooon!
American cars manage straight lines perfectly well, but fail miserably around a small feature of most road networks - corners with a radius of under 300 yards.
Come to Europe and we'll explain concepts such as handling, fuel efficiency and build quality.
Right! That's why the Ford Focus RS (performance) and the Ford Fiesta Econotec (economy) have been winning so many "Car of the Year" awards in Europe lately. (actually, these american cars are not available for sale in america, but still...)
I'll add this: In the first five minutes of Star Wars, Vader walks into the carnage of battle, picks a captured soldier up by the neck, holds him dangling in midair at arm's length and questions him before offhandedly snapping his neck with one hand and tossing the body aside. Bad guy established in less than 2 minutes. While it is cheezy sci-fi schlock, it is also effective storytelling. You knew right off the bat that Darth Vader was an evil badass that you didn't want to get involved with.
Darth Maul gets introduced half way through the movie and despite the cool makeup we have to be told that he is a bad guy. Also, despite being a much better stunt man and athlete and having much cooler fight choreography, Maul never reaches the level that Vader does in that introductory scene. Therefore his defeat is no more intriguing than getting past the chompy things on the assembly line. He's not a character, he's just another obstacle for our hero to jump over.
While I understand your sensitivity having worked for a journal publisher, my personal experience comports with the grandparent and the science blogs link. Although perhaps not the norm, personal biases of the reviewers and/or editors is often a major factor in reviews of publications and grants. I personally dealt with a situation similar to the scienceblogs link back in the early 90's. During a journal club review of a paper published in a fairly prestigious tier two journal I spotted a major and fairly obvious error in data analysis that nullified the entire paper. After kicking it around in journal club for a while, we wound up contacting the lead and second authors to see if we were missing something. Well, long story short they were not amused and were not interested in discussing it further when we didn't take "you don't know what you are talking about" for an answer. Comments to the journal were reviewed and rejected for seemingly silly reasons and since we didn't really have a dog in that fight we dropped it after two revisions.
Your assurance that you'd love to publish a scoop is great, except the author of a paper never knows the connections of the reviewers who might be sitting on his paper because their buddy has a couple of big grants on the subject and wants to get his paper out first. The publisher might not know anything about it either. Because of the nature of peer review, finding reviewers that are sufficiently expert in the specific area of interest and not connected to the author or his competition in any way is exceedingly difficult in many areas of science. In my own specialty there were probably a few hundred principals around the world in that area, but when you broke it down to a specific line of inquiry there might only be 20 or so. Less if you want to be really specific. And most of these were heavily collaborating on one thing or another.
I don't think there was any fraud or corruption involved in the situations I witnessed, but people have natural biases in their perceptions that color their susceptibility to new ideas. In one grant proposal I made as a student, I relied heavily on a series of papers from a group in Sweden. After being heavily grilled by one of the review committee about the technique I was planning I finally asked what was going on. He replied that I should take everything from the Swedish group with a big grain of salt - he didn't believe they were reliable. I asked how in the world I was supposed to know that - he said that's what you have to be able to do to be in research - winnow the wheat from the chaff. So his perception was that peer-reviewed journal articles were no evidence of credibility - at least not in reference to a group that he obviously had a tiff with.
It is because of low sulfur emission requirements in the US which is much more restrictive than the EU. One of the rare exceptions to the rule. It makes diesel more expensive in the US, even accounting for the added economy.
A company selling plumbing supplies or semi-trucks, or guitars, will never get featured on Oprah .
Right! There's no way in hell a blender company could possibly go viral and get a mention on Oprah.
Sorry, I actually agree with your point, I just enjoyed the irony...
C-Span is an example of something that doesn't have an opinion; not Fox or CNN or CBS or ABC or PBS or MSNBC or anybody.
Somebody find some mod points for C-span! If you really want unbiased coverage - at least in the coverage itself if not in the choice of what to cover - you need to watch C-span. If you spend a week or two following their coverage, you'll soon discover who is a talking-point party monkey and who isn't, because they air the briefings without edits.
You'll often see the spokesman for party X briefing reporters about the issue of the day using an obviously poll-tested turn of phrase that you've never heard before. That night on the news you can flip channels and hear all of your favorite unbiased news anchors using exactly that turn of phrase in their own "unbiased and objective" coverage of the news. (and I am talking about news here, not opinion pieces)
You'll even get to see source of the latest phenomenon in news - the story of the day or week. Ever hear those commentators telling you that "the White House will be focusing on Issue X this week"? Ever notice that the unbiased and objective news organization suddenly shifts their stories to cover Issue X, even though nobody at all was talking about it last week? Watch C-span and you'll actually see that sausage being made. You get to watch the policy makers tell the media what issues to cover and which sources and angles to cover. Then you can tune in your favorite stations and watch them do exactly as told.
I guess it might have always been that way, but C-span certainly gave us all a new level of visibility to the lack of personal initiative in the press corps. Both left and right you can come up with examples of this strategy at work.
Read the Radley Balko article linked in the summary and follow the links to his coverage of the medical examiner scandal in Louisiana and Mississippi. His work is every bit the equal of Woodward et. al. and the scandal he covers is much more serious than Watergate, despite the Watergate scandal's ability to bring down a president. He uncovers the blatant framing of innocent men for murder and rape (perhaps numbering in the thousands). He then details the fight to change the system - which was unsuccessful for years, despite the obvious and easy to understand evidence and the simplicity of the solution. This scandal makes spying on your political enemies look like using the wrong salad fork at a formal dinner. Every murder case in the state went through a single coroner known to be corrupt and incompetent - yet the system continues to defend its own and insist that all of the convictions obtained are correct. Balko even obtained video of one of the coroner's incompetent consultants manufacturing evidence to frame a man as a child rapist and murderer in the death of a child. He's a real hero journalist in my book, whether on line or in print. His articles make for an outstanding read, even if you need to take your blood pressure medicine before reading.
So when I can keep all of my money because the rightists abolish income tax but I can't marry my partner because we're the same gender and their magic book says that's not allowed... how exactly is that personal freedom?
Ok, I'll explain it to you. Let's imagine a law that says gay guys cannot get married. It's not that hard to do - just look around you. In this imaginary world you are free to earn and spend your money as you please with no interference. So you and your "roommate" buy a house, cars, health insurance, vacations, etc. You keep your private life away from the government and although your theoretical freedoms are egregiously infringed, in a practical sense you are living life as you see fit. You can even use contract law to bridge the gaps that are left by the inability to actually marry.
Now let's imagine a world that makes gay marriage perfectly legal. In this imaginary world you are not free to earn and spend your money as you see fit. In this imaginary world all of your money goes to the government first, and they decide how you get to spend it. They decide where you rent your home, they decide what insurance you get, they decide how much you get for food. In this imaginary world, although gay marriage is perfectly legal, the government will not provide any funding for gay married couples housing. They declare gay sex a health hazard, and so they severely restrict the health care monies for gay couples.
The point of this is that economic strictures are much easier to impose and much more restrictive than "morality police" laws. Just look at sodomy laws in the US. They were the norm only a few decades ago, and although they were sometimes used to persecute particular individuals, by and large they were roundly ignored by the population at large. The same goes for bans on drugs right now. A huge portion of the population flouts the drug bans, and although there is a large cost and lots of incarcerations, most people go about their little recreational drug use quietly with no interference. In fact, it is the economic side of the transaction that is more easily detected.
The point I think the GP is trying to make is that if you are allowed to control your own economic life, you'll be much more able to control your personal life. The opposite is not true. In fact, if you surrender your economic freedom, it is very easy to take your personal freedoms as well.
Different industry, same problem. In fact, we are currently being forced to implement and support a crap "workflow" program that we specifically vetoed as insecure, inefficient, unmanageable and unmaintainable. Even better, the "evaluation committee" - all non-IT people - touts their success in automating their demonstration process in only 3 months!
They complained about having to click through to enter a date on a different screen (2 clicks on a very rare event occurrence - about 5-10 times per year). Their new solution replaces their one screen queue (with 2 extra clicks 5 times per year) with a 9-page scripted workflow that has to be followed for every single item - tens of thousands. Brilliant!!! And people wonder why they need IT help?
Even better, management is on board and very impressed that they were able to solve their problem without IT intervention. Now they have 9 input screens to maintain, as well as the connections between those input screens, as well as the integration to the existing system. I figure they probably cost themselves about 10-20 hours per week in end user "wait time" for the new process once it goes into production, plus another entire salary for maintenance on the system. Plus, they are demanding read-write access to every table in our carefully secured system - to be managed on the business side by an advanced clerical worker who is "good with computers." So much for data validation and security audits... But they are thrilled because their process manages "millions of dollars" and is too important to fail! Huh?
The complete inability of most people to follow even rudimentary logic astounds me. These are highly paid, well educated executives at a billion dollar company, not rubes. Even if they can't figure out tech stuff, they should at least be able to understand that they might want to listen to their CIO and his executive team who each have 20-30 years of experience in exactly this sort of system design. But I'm convinced that this capability just doesn't exist. Because they can enter data in a form on a web page, everyone thinks they are a systems architect.
Interesting. So, you're inferring that we are now in an ice age and that the retreat of the glaciers is just part of the natural cycle? Could be. If we were currently in an ice age.
I think that everyone acknowledges that we are currently on the tail end of an ice age cycle. Looking at historical data (last 400k years kind of historical) we are currently nearing but still below the peak temperatures for interglacial periods. The natural cycle theory would argue that the earth will continue to warm until it reaches temperatures at this historical peak and then begin falling as ice begins building. The warming cycle is much more rapid than the cooling cycle according to this model. When climate models are zoomed out to show hundreds of thousands of years rather than tens of years, the current warming rate and ice depletion rate actually look to be an abnormally slow rate of change for this part of the curve. I'm not sure what that means, but you can check it out on the graphs on the wikipedia ice age page.
Didn't they feature a similar experiment of one of those "Mythbusters" knockoff shows? IIRC, they used pickup truck bed liner sprayed on the test walls, and had similar results.
I think the show was "Smash Lab" and the bed liner test was much better. They built a small concrete block building and sprayed it with bed bed liner - kind of like a stucco treatment. Then they hit the building with a car bomb outside. Not some bowling ball on a chain, but an actual car bomb. That's how you do it!
The results were remarkable, and the bed liner material is probably cheaper, more readily available and easier to apply. When I saw this wallpaper being pimped in Discover this month I thought the same thing... why on earth would you go with this difficult to apply stuff when a spray-on treatment appears to work better? Particularly if you notice that the wallpaper requires bolts and plates to hold the header and footer to the floor and ceiling. Not exactly the most aesthetic product... Meanwhile the bed liner idea from some B-grade TV show could actually come in any color, provide an attractive exterior finish and act like vinyl siding in resisting moisture and degradation and not requiring painting. Score one for the B team!
You think every state's sales tax is a single flat rate? Good luck with that. Now it is true that it's a less-than-overwhelming amount of data, but if you haven't thought the problem through enough to know that it's not just a table of 50 rates, then you shouldn't be trying to estimate the difficulty.
Seconded..... I used to have a small business selling computer equipment and services only in one state and I had more than 50 different rates to deal with. Taxes even vary based on entities you've never heard of, like regional transit authority. My monthly sales tax filing included filling out a 4 page grid of every entity and its tax allocation, that's just for one state! I spent more time on filing sales taxes than I did on my own accounting. In fact, it is one reason I got out of the business. With the state (and local govt) making 8% on every transaction and me having less than a 10% markup, the state was making more than I was after taxes.... and it was costing me a lot of hours to handle, not to mention the potential liability. Sales tax collection for a business that is not a fixed location storefront really doesn't scale down below a certain volume of business. A small eBay shop doing a few dozen sales a month nationwide would have a hard time justifying its existence if they had to track and pay sales tax for everything they sold. Maybe if there was an online tax clearinghouse for every state that would handle all of the filing, paperwork, etc. if you just plug in the address and sale amount - but barring that you couldn't make it work.
Anyway, I live in a sales tax free state. My state recognizes the burden that sales tax adds to businesses and to the state (collecting it and enforcing it) and has chosen a much simpler, more efficient, and more progressive tax policy (income tax).
Holy crap dude, all other arguments aside: calling an income tax simpler than a sales tax!?? How in the world is collecting a fixed rate tax from a few thousand outlets more simple than collecting a variable rate, deduction/credit/exemption filled tax from millions of individuals?
Actually, one of my neighbors is from Columbia. Her father is a big-time judge in Colombia. Nice guy too. He got his job when his predecessor was assassinated, presumably by drug dealers. So I guess there could be a reason for stereotypes, even if they aren't universally applicable.
But I guess to historically-illiterate morons like yourself, it can all be solved by just sending in more troops, because that worked for the Brits and the Russians oh so very well.
Actually, that was the prescription offered up repeatedly by candidate Obama only last year.
if I were a manager and one of my employees came to me with an ultimatum like that, I'd fire them on the spot.
If you were a manager and you were to fire them on the spot - you'd likely find yourself in deep doo-doo. In most jurisdictions there are laws that protect employees in these situations and levy huge penalties for retaliation of that sort.
'Cause that would seem to be an important preliminary to your definition of science?
The problem: existence is the thing that *everything that *exists has in common, and scientific articulation of its meaning would require a comparison between the things that do and don't exist. Which comparison it cannot make, because as you rightly point out scientific inquiry cannot be made into non-existent things.
btw the 'which' in "things which don't exist" is a funny word misusage in this context -- do you see why?
That's just silly. A 3,000 meter tall solid gold badger watching over Madison Wisconsin doesn't exist. We can easily compare it to a small ceramic badger from the University of Wisconsin gift shop that in fact does exist. Now, there is no logical reason that the giant golden badger cannot exist, it just doesn't. However, a square with only 3 sides does not exist anywhere in the universe, because it is logically impossible for such a thing to exist. It is easy to compare this with an equilateral triangle which in fact might exist, or one that does exist.
This is related to the history of argument about the existence of God. Thomas Aquinas made a similar distinction between things which exist and things which don't exist, things which cannot exist and things which just happen not to exist. In this ontological argument he attempts to prove that God logically must exist.
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