I did a rewrite of a similar study back in January 2002 for the American Statistical Association. [PDF version. Google's HTML cache.]
It found, essentially, the same thing. That study looked at accident records and found that the effect of cell phone usage was similar to borderline legal intoxication, but less than the level of impairment suffered by the typical person busted for DWI.
The author is not an independent researcher. He is a paid shill for an-industry funded think tank founded by one of the more aggressively pro-corporate members of the House GOP leadership.
Let's not forget that "net neutrality" is the STATUS QUO. The telcoms want to change the system to take net neutrality AWAY. Recognize this, and the author's "straw man" argument collapses. Shame on the Mercury News for printing this corporate PR garbage on its op-ed pages.
I don't want to imagine the c--p that people will post if they think real money is available. And let's not get started on the click fraud incentive here.
I prefer to *quietly* reward top posters on my sites by offering them paid gigs, but only after they've proven themselves.
I was all riled up to post a rant, and went to go read the bill first to gather ammunition.
And what I found... wasn't as bad as the news reports made it out to be. Granted, it's still silly and won't stop kids from accessing sites they want to see. But it wouldn't, as now written, ban library access to all of Web 2.0.
The bill would require federally-funded libraries to ban access to Web 2.0 sites through which students:
(aa) may easily access or be presented with obscene or in decent material;
(bb) may easily be subject to unlawful sexual advances, unlawful requests for sexual favors, or repeated offensive comments of a sexual nature from adults; or
(cc) may easily access other material that is harmful to minors;
So if your Web 2.0 sites don't allow readers to "easily access" the bad stuff, you are clear.
*Of course* the devil be in dem der details. Which still makes this bill a lousy idea. But it wouldn't force librarians to shut down access to every discussion board and group blog on the Web.
"If I go to a website I want to see the content (if any), not the ads. If I can block ads I will block as many as possible."
Gee, you must be interested in reading content only from trust fund babies or rich folks who want you to think *their* way. Because other folks need some revenue to pay for that content you are looking at.
Hey, I'm not defending those jerks who use this as an excuse to hit you with pop-ups, flash ads and java junk that takes over your page. But Google finally came up with a system that text-based, highly targeted and unobstrusive.
Those text ads are making it possible for non-corporate voices to produce content full-time and expand websites. But they won't be able to continue to do that if the very people most likely to support non-corporate media (and I count Sladotters among them), undercut their revenue by blocking Google ads.
Look, block doubleclick, et al, all you want. Block popups on Firefox. But help out your brothers on the content side and leave the Google ads alone. You might be pleasantly surprised to find some ads that you are interested in.
And, by the way, publishers can block individual advertisers from their sites. Don't screw other publishers because you're mad at OSDN for not blocking the BSA ads.
Well, if you want to talk physical environment, the worst I can offer is driving a raft to Tom Sawyer's Island at Walt Disney World, while clad in long polyester "jeans" under bright skies in 98 degree heat with 90+ percent humidity. But hey, at least that was a great weight-loss program.
But the worst mental environment was at a shrill right-wing newspaper in the Midwest. I clumsily tried to write editorials, which the then-editor rarely ended up agreeing with as I stand somewhat to the left of folks like Michael Savage and Robert Bartley. (As does most of America....) The editor routinely spiked articles that might offend his buddies and insulted his staff in widely-leaked management memos that sometimes included graphic slurs. (Ah, journalism in the days before Romenesko!)
One day, after getting back a scathing set of reviews from an employee survey, the guy locked me and the other four writers from my department in a darkened room, where he harangued us for almost an hour about our "bad attitudes" and threatened us with even worse treatment unless our morale improved.
I swear, Scott Adams should have sued the guy for copyright infringement.
The key legal point here is that the Web posting appears to be *the evidence* that she appeared in public nude, in violation of Lincoln's backward, boring, typically lame Nebraskan ordinance.
The posting itself is not necessarily the violation. If she posted a nude picture *taken in her home* it is not clear from this article that she ever would have been charged.
If you count every ballot on which a candidate preference could be determined, including ballots in which a voter punched the chad and then wrote in the name of that same candidate, Al Gore wins Florida by 107 votes.
"You can't overtake Netscape at this point. It's too late. Netscape has been the undisputed king of browsers for over two years now, and it's simply too 'big' to be overtaken by Microsoft's or Amazon's attempts. The only thing that Netscape could possibly do to screw up their huge lead in marketshare is to do something incredibly stupid - much like what we need Microsoft to do before it loses the majority of the market (and, let's face it, DRM for Microsoft just might be the thing that kills it)."
"You don't walk in, hand over a check and change a vote. Doesn't happen."
Of course. Because the process works the other way around. The politicians ask the corporations and their managers for the money. So it is *the politicians* who must position themselves as friendly to what the business folk want in order to get business' contributions.
Nice, except for the small fact that Gore got the most votes in Florida.
Yes, by the legal standard at the time, Bush won Florida, and thus, the electoral college. But Gore got the most votes in the state (based on every standard of vote-counting the media recount). That shows how f'-up the legal standard was. And is.
The electoral process gave us Bush. Legal? Yes. Moral, just and right? No.
Don't blame Kamen. In fact, he wanted to market the Segway as an assitance device for the diasbled.
Trouble is, in order to do that, he has to go through a rather lengthy product approval process with the U.S. government, as that marketing plan would make the Segway a "medical device."
Kamen decided he didn't want that hassle, or expense, so he opted to market the Segway as a general purpose transportation vehicle, figuring the *real* target market would see its appeal anyway.
(This info comes from relatives in Celebration, Fla. -- Segway's "test city" -- who own Segways and have talked personally to Dean about his marketing plans for the vehicle.)
If it "flies directly in the face of what the framers of the Constitution had in mind," then, yes, it is unconstitutional!
I swear, how can conservatives sit up straight, given the ways they're always twisting around to do the bidding of their corporate masters? Come on, Ms. O'Connor, you've answered your own question. Grow a backbone and tell your master to stuff it once in a while.
Let's Get Back Our Access to the Courts
on
Copyright as Cudgel
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
America's system of government is supposed to work on checks and balances. When the executive issues a hair-brained order, or when Congress passes an unconscionable law, people are supposed to have access to the courts to get those rules overturned.
But for the past 20 years, the right-wing in America, funded by their deep pocketed friends in Big Business(TM), have mounted a legal, political and social assault against individuals' right to sue.
Sometimes they use the moniker "tort reform." Othertimes, they talk about "greedy lawyers" and "runaway lawsuits" that inevitably hurt those poor, small business owners out there that can't afford to defend themselves against the tassel loafer set.
In the real world, it is the small business owner, the independent contrator, the worker and the consumer that gets screwed. When Big Business(TM) infringes upon on traditional rights, we are the ones who need the courts to come to our aid, to make up for the unfair advantage that wealthy campaign-contributing businesses enjoy in the Legislature and with th executive.
In this case, the minions of Big Business(TM) have enacted a law that places the burder of proof on the accused, rather than the accuser. Which perverts the system of checks and balances, and instead turns the full weight of all three branches of government against the little guy.
We are almost all in favor of gutting the DMCA on this site. But let's not forget this broader issue the next time some slick Republican starts carrying on about the need for tort reform, judicial appointments and restrictions on lawsuits.
When Big Business(TM) owns the Congress and the White House, the courts are our only hope don't let them take that away from us, too.
One has to look at the impact of visa holders on a broader level--companies didn't support the expansion of the program because they wanted to hire individual workers at cheap salaries. As a previous poster wrote, that would be illegal.
No, companies wanted the program expanded so that they could expand the pool of available labor, keeping overall labor expenses down.
Whether those marginal savings were used to fatten profits or remain competitive, I'll leave for those who can decipher Andersen's accounting tricks to discuss.
But, in a time when employment and wages are stagnant, or falling, it certainly is in workers' interested to tighten up the labor market, squeezing supply and increasing wages. Cutting back the visa program is one way to do that.
Of course, convincing all your former co-workers to get out of programming and open their own interior design firms would do that, too. (Heck, someone's gotta replace Martha "Slammer" Stewart.
Actuall, the judge is Rush's brother, I believe. The Limbaughs have been a prominent family in Missouri for some time. It's where Rush spent his early years, on the dole, divorcing wives.
Gee, I consider Rush's show offensive and without social merit--does that mean Rush has no First Amendment rights, too?
Lo-Q is neat stuff. (I first heard about it here.) The whole virtual queing thing is a hot IT topic in theme parks right now. Lo-Q is the most sophisticated system I've seen (Disney's FastPass is the system the public's seen the most, but it's pretty low-tech. Just stick your ticket in a slot and get a reservation time later in the day.)
Yes, it sucks that they are trying to charge for it. But that's Six Flags for you. Always doing stuff on the cheap. I'd love to see a better company, like Universal, Disney or Busch, incorporate this technology. Still, I'd pay a few bucks for the child-locating feature.
One pet peeve: It's always frustrating to see reporters blow simple facts in a story. The is no "Little Mermaid" ride at Universal, since "The Little Mermaid" is a Disney property. Makes you wonder what other "facts" the reporter got wrong. Grrrr.
Slashdot Mirror
I did a rewrite of a similar study back in January 2002 for the American Statistical Association. [PDF version. Google's HTML cache.]
It found, essentially, the same thing. That study looked at accident records and found that the effect of cell phone usage was similar to borderline legal intoxication, but less than the level of impairment suffered by the typical person busted for DWI.
The author is not an independent researcher. He is a paid shill for an-industry funded think tank founded by one of the more aggressively pro-corporate members of the House GOP leadership.
Let's not forget that "net neutrality" is the STATUS QUO. The telcoms want to change the system to take net neutrality AWAY. Recognize this, and the author's "straw man" argument collapses. Shame on the Mercury News for printing this corporate PR garbage on its op-ed pages.
I don't want to imagine the c--p that people will post if they think real money is available. And let's not get started on the click fraud incentive here.
I prefer to *quietly* reward top posters on my sites by offering them paid gigs, but only after they've proven themselves.
And what I found... wasn't as bad as the news reports made it out to be. Granted, it's still silly and won't stop kids from accessing sites they want to see. But it wouldn't, as now written, ban library access to all of Web 2.0.
The bill would require federally-funded libraries to ban access to Web 2.0 sites through which students:
So if your Web 2.0 sites don't allow readers to "easily access" the bad stuff, you are clear.
*Of course* the devil be in dem der details. Which still makes this bill a lousy idea. But it wouldn't force librarians to shut down access to every discussion board and group blog on the Web.
"If I go to a website I want to see the content (if any), not the ads. If I can block ads I will block as many as possible."
Gee, you must be interested in reading content only from trust fund babies or rich folks who want you to think *their* way. Because other folks need some revenue to pay for that content you are looking at.
Hey, I'm not defending those jerks who use this as an excuse to hit you with pop-ups, flash ads and java junk that takes over your page. But Google finally came up with a system that text-based, highly targeted and unobstrusive.
Those text ads are making it possible for non-corporate voices to produce content full-time and expand websites. But they won't be able to continue to do that if the very people most likely to support non-corporate media (and I count Sladotters among them), undercut their revenue by blocking Google ads.
Look, block doubleclick, et al, all you want. Block popups on Firefox. But help out your brothers on the content side and leave the Google ads alone. You might be pleasantly surprised to find some ads that you are interested in.
And, by the way, publishers can block individual advertisers from their sites. Don't screw other publishers because you're mad at OSDN for not blocking the BSA ads.
...that this website seems to be hosted on a server with all the power of a TRS-80.
But the worst mental environment was at a shrill right-wing newspaper in the Midwest. I clumsily tried to write editorials, which the then-editor rarely ended up agreeing with as I stand somewhat to the left of folks like Michael Savage and Robert Bartley. (As does most of America....) The editor routinely spiked articles that might offend his buddies and insulted his staff in widely-leaked management memos that sometimes included graphic slurs. (Ah, journalism in the days before Romenesko!)
One day, after getting back a scathing set of reviews from an employee survey, the guy locked me and the other four writers from my department in a darkened room, where he harangued us for almost an hour about our "bad attitudes" and threatened us with even worse treatment unless our morale improved.
I swear, Scott Adams should have sued the guy for copyright infringement.
The key legal point here is that the Web posting appears to be *the evidence* that she appeared in public nude, in violation of Lincoln's backward, boring, typically lame Nebraskan ordinance.
The posting itself is not necessarily the violation. If she posted a nude picture *taken in her home* it is not clear from this article that she ever would have been charged.
http://www.latimes.com/media/graphic/2001-11/10879 74.gif
If you count every ballot on which a candidate preference could be determined, including ballots in which a voter punched the chad and then wrote in the name of that same candidate, Al Gore wins Florida by 107 votes.
"You can't overtake Netscape at this point. It's too late. Netscape has been the undisputed king of browsers for over two years now, and it's simply too 'big' to be overtaken by Microsoft's or Amazon's attempts. The only thing that Netscape could possibly do to screw up their huge lead in marketshare is to do something incredibly stupid - much like what we need Microsoft to do before it loses the majority of the market (and, let's face it, DRM for Microsoft just might be the thing that kills it)."
Heck, take 100 percent. Anything I can do to help.
Of course. Because the process works the other way around. The politicians ask the corporations and their managers for the money. So it is *the politicians* who must position themselves as friendly to what the business folk want in order to get business' contributions.
Nice, except for the small fact that Gore got the most votes in Florida.
Yes, by the legal standard at the time, Bush won Florida, and thus, the electoral college. But Gore got the most votes in the state (based on every standard of vote-counting the media recount). That shows how f'-up the legal standard was. And is.
The electoral process gave us Bush. Legal? Yes. Moral, just and right? No.
..after the guy who wrote the original "Firebird Suite"?
Don't blame Kamen. In fact, he wanted to market the Segway as an assitance device for the diasbled.
Trouble is, in order to do that, he has to go through a rather lengthy product approval process with the U.S. government, as that marketing plan would make the Segway a "medical device."
Kamen decided he didn't want that hassle, or expense, so he opted to market the Segway as a general purpose transportation vehicle, figuring the *real* target market would see its appeal anyway.
(This info comes from relatives in Celebration, Fla. -- Segway's "test city" -- who own Segways and have talked personally to Dean about his marketing plans for the vehicle.)
I swear, how can conservatives sit up straight, given the ways they're always twisting around to do the bidding of their corporate masters? Come on, Ms. O'Connor, you've answered your own question. Grow a backbone and tell your master to stuff it once in a while.
All LA Times entertainment stories are available without registration at http://www.calendarlive.com.
People in larger states get screwed in the Electoral College: http://www.robertniles.com/response.cfm?ID=1.
But for the past 20 years, the right-wing in America, funded by their deep pocketed friends in Big Business(TM), have mounted a legal, political and social assault against individuals' right to sue. Sometimes they use the moniker "tort reform." Othertimes, they talk about "greedy lawyers" and "runaway lawsuits" that inevitably hurt those poor, small business owners out there that can't afford to defend themselves against the tassel loafer set.
In the real world, it is the small business owner, the independent contrator, the worker and the consumer that gets screwed. When Big Business(TM) infringes upon on traditional rights, we are the ones who need the courts to come to our aid, to make up for the unfair advantage that wealthy campaign-contributing businesses enjoy in the Legislature and with th executive.
In this case, the minions of Big Business(TM) have enacted a law that places the burder of proof on the accused, rather than the accuser. Which perverts the system of checks and balances, and instead turns the full weight of all three branches of government against the little guy.
We are almost all in favor of gutting the DMCA on this site. But let's not forget this broader issue the next time some slick Republican starts carrying on about the need for tort reform, judicial appointments and restrictions on lawsuits.
When Big Business(TM) owns the Congress and the White House, the courts are our only hope don't let them take that away from us, too.
One has to look at the impact of visa holders on a broader level--companies didn't support the expansion of the program because they wanted to hire individual workers at cheap salaries. As a previous poster wrote, that would be illegal.
No, companies wanted the program expanded so that they could expand the pool of available labor, keeping overall labor expenses down.
Whether those marginal savings were used to fatten profits or remain competitive, I'll leave for those who can decipher Andersen's accounting tricks to discuss.
But, in a time when employment and wages are stagnant, or falling, it certainly is in workers' interested to tighten up the labor market, squeezing supply and increasing wages. Cutting back the visa program is one way to do that.
Of course, convincing all your former co-workers to get out of programming and open their own interior design firms would do that, too. (Heck, someone's gotta replace Martha "Slammer" Stewart.
Mathematical Atlas
Statistics Every Writer Should Know
Actuall, the judge is Rush's brother, I believe. The Limbaughs have been a prominent family in Missouri for some time. It's where Rush spent his early years, on the dole, divorcing wives.
Gee, I consider Rush's show offensive and without social merit--does that mean Rush has no First Amendment rights, too?
Yes, it sucks that they are trying to charge for it. But that's Six Flags for you. Always doing stuff on the cheap. I'd love to see a better company, like Universal, Disney or Busch, incorporate this technology. Still, I'd pay a few bucks for the child-locating feature.
One pet peeve: It's always frustrating to see reporters blow simple facts in a story. The is no "Little Mermaid" ride at Universal, since "The Little Mermaid" is a Disney property. Makes you wonder what other "facts" the reporter got wrong. Grrrr.
"The ideas are free... but the median can be charged for."
So give away books that are really good, or ones that really suck. It's just the ones in the middle people have to pay for.