I freaked out the people at my local Albertson's a few years back (side note: If it's "My store" why is it called "Albertson's"? My name isn't Albertson) when they started doing the valued customers card or what ever it was they called it. Every time I went in, they kept asking me if I had my card yet, if I wanted to get a card, and so forth. And they kept going on about how much I would save.
Every time, I said no.
Finally, I made a form asking for basically the same information they wanted, and offered to pay 10% more every time I shopped if they would just fill out the form and give little cards with bar codes of my choosing on them to all the checkers, so I could scan them with my cuecat each time I checked out. Easy as pie, and it would probably double their profit on my purchases.
This resulted in very amusing conversations with the supervisor, and assistant manager, and a manager--throughout which, I'm proud to say, I kept a straight face. The upshot was, they said no.
I said that was fine, but they really were passing up a good thing, and I'd be sure to make them the same offer the next time I came in. And the time after that.
Oddly, I don't think they ever tried to sign me up for their stupid program again.
I'm still waiting for evidence that they tapped someone because they were an anti-war protester.
So am I. I never said, or implied, that I had or knew of such evidence. I quite clearly said that, given the pattern of conduct for which we have evidence, it is the more likely inference. By setting up this straw man you are dodging the real question: what reason do you think he had for going outside the law when it would, by all accounts, have been just as easy and politically much less risky to get a warrant? The ideas I've seen floated so far:
He was doing it because he knew he couldn't get warrants
Because the targets were political opponents, not terrorists
Because they were based on evidence found through torture
Because they were for financial gain (e.g. stock information)
Because he wants to hand Hillary the presidency with no checks and balances left in the system
Because he's incompetent
Back on the bottle
Drunk with power
Criminally stupid
Because the taps were a side show in a much larger program of blatantly illegal domestic spying
Because he's trying to set up a dictatorship
Unless you can propose something better, I'm going to stick with the first option.
It's bullshit like that that embarrasses the Democratic party and helps boost Bush's approval ratings back up.
I am not a Democrat, and have never claimed to be. I am a fiscally (and constitutionally) conservative anti-war Republican, thank you.
I don't give a flying fig about Bush's approval ratings, one way or the other. I don't want him tried in the court of public opinion, I want him tried by the Senate after the House brings articles of impeachment as provided for in the constitution.
Before you start using the term "bullshit" you may want to check that your reading comprehension is up to snuff.
Wow, now that is a serious new conspiracy theory: The terrs had inside help, from as high as the White House itself.
Have you been living in a cave the last four years? That theory has been around so long that it has a name ("Let It Happen On Purpose"), that got shortened to "LIHOP", for which google shows almost twenty thousand matches. It's been mentioned on NPR, PBS, NBC, and Fox, as well as the BBC, and probably lots of others.
Basically, LIHOP is a sort of half-way point for people who want to have their cake and eat it too--they want to claim that the Bush administration isn't extremely evil, nor are they completely incompetent.
Agreed. The main reason that Rails's limitations don't sink it for me is how easy Ruby makes it to extend / modify the base to suit your needs. I didn't like the way ActiveRecord serialized some objects--so I wrote my own serialization in a few dozen lines of code.
I like Rails, but I love Ruby. The hardest part of learning Rails was (for me, an experienced Ruby coder) learning all of the things that you lose when you go to Rails. (One example out of many: in Ruby when you create a Hash you can provide a default function (rather than just a default value) to be used when an element is missing; with Rails, this generally doesn't work since the functions don't serialize).
Conversely, if you like Rails you really should explore standalone-Ruby to see what you are missing.
Because if you actually RTFNYTA (Read the fucking New York Times Article) the claim was that the NSA was monitoring calls to and from terrorists overseas.
And if you read today's news you'd see that the spying was much more extensive than originally revealed.
President Bush and his aides have said his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to monitoring international phone and e-mail communications linked to people with connections to al-Qaida. What has not been acknowledged, according to the Times, is that NSA technicians combed large amounts of phone and Internet traffic seeking patterns pointing to terrorism suspects.
This so-called "pattern analysis" on calls within the United States would often otherwise require a warrant if the government wanted to trace who calls whom.
And this may come as news to you, but the DOD is not the FBI or the NSA; the FBI is also, in this context, a red herring. My orginal point (which I stand by) is that given what we know about the actions of other executive branch agencies (the DOD, speifically, though the FBI could be used as well), and the history of similar claims (from "we are doing it to protect you from dirty bomber" to "we have had many successful prosecutions") and even in the current argument that have turned out to be false, we have basically two reasonable choices:
Assume that Bush is inconsistant, stupid, or both, taking a path in this instance that is both at odds with other executive branch actions and needlessly unconstitutional, or
Assume that Bush is both consistant and reasonably clever, in which case he had a good reason for not seeking the warrents in these cases, and (looking at the examples from elsewhere in the executive branch) we can make an educated guess what those reasons were.
So what are you claiming? That he's too dumb realize that it's a slam dunk to get the warrents and he risks major fallout within his own party to cut corners, or that he's smart enough not to take that risk unless he's covering up for a worse offense, in which case we're within reason to assume the existence of such an offense?
Dumb and honest or smart and corrupt. You can't have it both ways.
--MarkusQ
P.S. I suppose dumb and corrupt can't be rulled out either, if you don't like the other options.
It's been in the news that the DOD has been spying on anti-war protesters, civil rights leaders and so forth. While I don't have first hand evidence that the two programs overlap, to refuse to connect the dots and at least suspect the possibility you would have to be stunningly obtuse or shamelessly disingenuous.
It's kind of old (and oft duplicated) news that you can make the basic building blocks by just stewing goo; likewise, the fact that once you have "life" of some form it will evolve quite rapidly (if it breeds rapidly) is a pretty standard classroom demonstration.
The only part that is really recent is that replication itself starts easily from the goo. The only "trick" seems to be cycling the reagents in & out (think a tidal pool) and using lots of little samples (again, think a tidal pool) rather than one big one. A quick google turns up lots of examples which (if you piece them together) cover the whole gamut. A small sampling:
You don't want the average, no matter what you think. I can guarantee you that none of your users will have the average screen resolution (which is probably something like 1143.1814 x 869.6295). In fact, I'd bet all of them will be (some integer) x (some integer) where neither integer is particularly close to the average.
See, the chances of life spontaneously being created on a planet is so astronomically small as to be almost impossible.
That's nuts. The chances of life arising spontaneously (note: not "being created") are quite high. The individual steps are reproducible in the lab, and the overall process is quite simple. Given a heterogeneous goop capable of forming complex molecules (e.g. water with a normal assortment of space stuff), a flow of energy (source and sink) and enough time, life is pretty much inevitable.
Frankly, that's not true. Study the Nazi's, study the Russians, study whomever you want. Movements that start in violence end in violence.
I'm not sure what your point is. We (or rather, they, in our name) attacked a third world country that had no weapons to speak of, had nothing to do with any attacks on us, and was not a threat to anyone. They are operating a string of secret prisons, torturing and killing people who have done nothing worse than be in the wrong place with the wrong skin color. They have defied the laws of our nation, spat upon its principles. They (and I include both major parties in this) are complicit in arresting minority candidates to prevent their attendance at the "non=partisan" presidential debates, reducing the free press to a pathetic sham, establishing the Orwellian "free speech zones" and arresting peaceful protesters, spying on citizens...the list goes on and on.
If your point is that we should expect the neocom movement (and their Democrat foils) to continue in the same vein til it leads to their ultimate destruction, I fear you are correct. But I suspect you were in some way trying to defend them. If that is the case, you'll have to do a lot better than "is not!"
I'm not endorsing this in any way at all, in fact I'm ashamed that he did this, but you are saying that this is worse than murdering 15 million of your own people and depriving them of property and liberty as well? I understand this is a bad thing, but acting in this polarized manner is exactly why today's political climate is as vicious and childish as it is.
But the problem is, they never start with killing 15 million people (side note: it doesn't matter "who's people" they are). They start with a little spying here, a little bending the rules there. Lie a bit a cause a few tens of thousands of people to die. Get your people into the positions of power, eviscerate the press (if it hasn't rolled over already). Come to some accommodation with the "opposition" ("play it our way or we'll ruin you" is always popular).
In short, make it so that no one dares move against you.
Then you can kill 15 million people, or even twenty if you're in the mood.
--MarkusQ
P.S. The polarization isn't causing the problem. The polarization is a consequence of some people realizing what is going on, and others squeezing their eyes shut and hoping it goes away.
There are only two types of radiative phenomenon that are relevant to the discussion:
1.Self propogating waves of an electromagnetic field
2.Little bits of stuff going really, really fast
The two phenonema are fundamentally different. Whether the stuff is one bit or four bits stuck together is not.
No, as we learned from QM they are fundamentally the same. Photons can be viewed as little bits of stuff going really really fast. And atomic nuclei can be treated as propagating waves. Fundementally, they are the same.
In practice, there are some significant practical differences, but that's exactly where the sort of nagging little details you so blithely dismiss come in.
The problem with that theory is, there's no credible indication that we've captured any terrorists to get address books from in the first place. Instead (from related reports) it seems more likely that they're going after administration critics, anti-war protesters, and others who they would be hard pressed to come up with probably cause for.
--MarkusQ
P.S. Another hole in the theory ("The administration may not be able to convince a FISA judge that simply being in someone's phone list is "probable cause" that the person is themselves a foreign agent or terrorist.") is that the problem isn't that they asked for permission, were denied, and went ahead anyway. They never asked in the first place, which makes it look a lot like they knew they were in the wrong from the very start.
The "straw man" accusation was targeted at the post above it, not the wikipedia, so the anonymity of the Wikipedia community has no bearing on the point.
In any case, anonymity has nothing to do with straw man arguments.
And even if it did, print encyclopedias do not provide their readers with information on the authorship of individual articles
In fact, Wikipedia actually provides more (and more accessible) information on the revision history and editorial decisions leading to the present state of an article than any print encyclopedia I've ever heard of.
Wikipedia may not provide a strong or prominent enough disclaimer to suit you, but the obvious question would be: what does? TV news? The New York Times? Can you name a single "authoritative" source of information that either 1) Prominently disclaims their status as authoritative or 2) provides some substantive guarantee of the accuracy of the information?
Wikipedia is not and never will be an authoritative source on anything. It's the very nature of the beast that makes all information found there suspect. Anyone who uses wikipedia as an authoritative source is a fool.
I of course agree with you. I'd be a fool not to. But I don't think you go far enough. The way you've worded this it sounds like Wikipedia isn't an authoritative source, but that something else is.
What might that be exactly? Not The New York Times, not The encyclopedia Britannica and surely not public officials. Personally, I tend to trust the OED and the CRC, but with dictionaries including intentional errors and any book potentially containing typos I don't trust them absolutely. I'm quite comfortable using Wikipedia as a source, something I consider about as trustworthy as a newspaper or a college professor.
But I can't think of a single source that I would consider absolutely authoritative, can you?
6. Voters never get to see every candidate in the debates as the debate committees are run by authoritarian parties unwilling to give up their powers.
I'm amazed out how many people don't realize that, in the last presidential election, two minority candidates who were on the ballot were arrested because they were trying to participate in the "non-partisan" debates (they'd gotten as far as getting a court order before they were stopped).
Uh, by the time it gets to your PC it should be digital. So "noise" is not a worry unless you're planning on doing the A-to-D on the PC, in which case you need a psychiatrist, not/.
the RIAA will need to show...that the infringement occured at your IP address. At that point...the burden then shifts to YOU to prove...that it was somebody else and not you that did the infringing.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but why single out the IP address as such a watershed in the chain of accountability that the burden of proof flips? To see what I'm getting at, what makes IP addresses so special, as compared to (for example):
the RIAA will need to show...that the infringement occurred in your city. At that point...the burden then shifts to YOU to prove...that it was somebody else and not you that did the infringing.
...or...
the RIAA will need to show...that the infringement occurred under a screen name you frequently use. At that point...the burden then shifts to YOU to prove...that it was somebody else and not you that did the infringing.
...and so forth. What's so magic about IP addresses that puts them up there with DNA?
That's no big deal, most people on either coast fail to see any moral distinction between the two anyway.
And you do? I'm not on either coast, but I don't see that much difference between killing innocent Iraqis for God and/or to retaliate for past injustices and killing innocent Americans for Alla and/or to retaliate for past injustices. For that matter, I don't see that much difference between torturing people because they might be plotting against your pseudo-Islamic regime and torturing people because they might be plotting against your pseudo-Christian regime. Or keeping people in secret prisons in your own country, vs. keeping them in secret prisons in other countries...
Oh wait, I've drifted into confusing Bin Laden and Sadam again. I don't know how they got so muddled in my mind.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno; I'm willing to bet that he knows his wife better than you do.
I certainly hope I do!
--MarkusQ
Use short glasses when someone else is buying the liquor, tall when you are.
Use short for your date, tall for you.
--MarkusQ
P.S, To my wife (who also reads /.): I'm just kidding of course. I never did that. Especially since I met you.
I freaked out the people at my local Albertson's a few years back (side note: If it's "My store" why is it called "Albertson's"? My name isn't Albertson) when they started doing the valued customers card or what ever it was they called it. Every time I went in, they kept asking me if I had my card yet, if I wanted to get a card, and so forth. And they kept going on about how much I would save.
Every time, I said no.
Finally, I made a form asking for basically the same information they wanted, and offered to pay 10% more every time I shopped if they would just fill out the form and give little cards with bar codes of my choosing on them to all the checkers, so I could scan them with my cuecat each time I checked out. Easy as pie, and it would probably double their profit on my purchases.
This resulted in very amusing conversations with the supervisor, and assistant manager, and a manager--throughout which, I'm proud to say, I kept a straight face. The upshot was, they said no.
I said that was fine, but they really were passing up a good thing, and I'd be sure to make them the same offer the next time I came in. And the time after that.
Oddly, I don't think they ever tried to sign me up for their stupid program again.
--MarkusQ
I'm still waiting for evidence that they tapped someone because they were an anti-war protester.
So am I. I never said, or implied, that I had or knew of such evidence. I quite clearly said that, given the pattern of conduct for which we have evidence, it is the more likely inference. By setting up this straw man you are dodging the real question: what reason do you think he had for going outside the law when it would, by all accounts, have been just as easy and politically much less risky to get a warrant? The ideas I've seen floated so far:
Unless you can propose something better, I'm going to stick with the first option.
It's bullshit like that that embarrasses the Democratic party and helps boost Bush's approval ratings back up.
--MarkusQ
Wow, now that is a serious new conspiracy theory: The terrs had inside help, from as high as the White House itself.
Have you been living in a cave the last four years? That theory has been around so long that it has a name ("Let It Happen On Purpose"), that got shortened to "LIHOP", for which google shows almost twenty thousand matches. It's been mentioned on NPR, PBS, NBC, and Fox, as well as the BBC, and probably lots of others.
Basically, LIHOP is a sort of half-way point for people who want to have their cake and eat it too--they want to claim that the Bush administration isn't extremely evil, nor are they completely incompetent.
--MarkusQ
Agreed. The main reason that Rails's limitations don't sink it for me is how easy Ruby makes it to extend / modify the base to suit your needs. I didn't like the way ActiveRecord serialized some objects--so I wrote my own serialization in a few dozen lines of code.
--MarkusQ
I like Rails, but I love Ruby. The hardest part of learning Rails was (for me, an experienced Ruby coder) learning all of the things that you lose when you go to Rails. (One example out of many: in Ruby when you create a Hash you can provide a default function (rather than just a default value) to be used when an element is missing; with Rails, this generally doesn't work since the functions don't serialize).
Conversely, if you like Rails you really should explore standalone-Ruby to see what you are missing.
--MarkusQ
Because if you actually RTFNYTA (Read the fucking New York Times Article) the claim was that the NSA was monitoring calls to and from terrorists overseas.
And if you read today's news you'd see that the spying was much more extensive than originally revealed.
--MarkusQAnd this may come as news to you, but the DOD is not the FBI or the NSA; the FBI is also, in this context, a red herring. My orginal point (which I stand by) is that given what we know about the actions of other executive branch agencies (the DOD, speifically, though the FBI could be used as well), and the history of similar claims (from "we are doing it to protect you from dirty bomber" to "we have had many successful prosecutions") and even in the current argument that have turned out to be false, we have basically two reasonable choices:
So what are you claiming? That he's too dumb realize that it's a slam dunk to get the warrents and he risks major fallout within his own party to cut corners, or that he's smart enough not to take that risk unless he's covering up for a worse offense, in which case we're within reason to assume the existence of such an offense?
Dumb and honest or smart and corrupt. You can't have it both ways.
--MarkusQ
P.S. I suppose dumb and corrupt can't be rulled out either, if you don't like the other options.
It's been in the news that the DOD has been spying on anti-war protesters, civil rights leaders and so forth. While I don't have first hand evidence that the two programs overlap, to refuse to connect the dots and at least suspect the possibility you would have to be stunningly obtuse or shamelessly disingenuous.
--MarkusQ
It's kind of old (and oft duplicated) news that you can make the basic building blocks by just stewing goo; likewise, the fact that once you have "life" of some form it will evolve quite rapidly (if it breeds rapidly) is a pretty standard classroom demonstration.
The only part that is really recent is that replication itself starts easily from the goo. The only "trick" seems to be cycling the reagents in & out (think a tidal pool) and using lots of little samples (again, think a tidal pool) rather than one big one. A quick google turns up lots of examples which (if you piece them together) cover the whole gamut. A small sampling:
--MarkusQ
You don't want the average, no matter what you think. I can guarantee you that none of your users will have the average screen resolution (which is probably something like 1143.1814 x 869.6295). In fact, I'd bet all of them will be (some integer) x (some integer) where neither integer is particularly close to the average.
--MarkusQ
See, the chances of life spontaneously being created on a planet is so astronomically small as to be almost impossible.
That's nuts. The chances of life arising spontaneously (note: not "being created") are quite high. The individual steps are reproducible in the lab, and the overall process is quite simple. Given a heterogeneous goop capable of forming complex molecules (e.g. water with a normal assortment of space stuff), a flow of energy (source and sink) and enough time, life is pretty much inevitable.
-- MarkusQ
--MarkusQ
Wrong.
We're in charge.
That's the one and only thing that differentiates us from a dictatorship.
The fact that they seem to think that "THEY'RE IN CHARGE" is exactly what's got so many people who love this country so upset at them.
--MarkusQ
Frankly, that's not true. Study the Nazi's, study the Russians, study whomever you want. Movements that start in violence end in violence.
I'm not sure what your point is. We (or rather, they, in our name) attacked a third world country that had no weapons to speak of, had nothing to do with any attacks on us, and was not a threat to anyone. They are operating a string of secret prisons, torturing and killing people who have done nothing worse than be in the wrong place with the wrong skin color. They have defied the laws of our nation, spat upon its principles. They (and I include both major parties in this) are complicit in arresting minority candidates to prevent their attendance at the "non=partisan" presidential debates, reducing the free press to a pathetic sham, establishing the Orwellian "free speech zones" and arresting peaceful protesters, spying on citizens...the list goes on and on.
If your point is that we should expect the neocom movement (and their Democrat foils) to continue in the same vein til it leads to their ultimate destruction, I fear you are correct. But I suspect you were in some way trying to defend them. If that is the case, you'll have to do a lot better than "is not!"
--MarkusQ
I'm not endorsing this in any way at all, in fact I'm ashamed that he did this, but you are saying that this is worse than murdering 15 million of your own people and depriving them of property and liberty as well? I understand this is a bad thing, but acting in this polarized manner is exactly why today's political climate is as vicious and childish as it is.
But the problem is, they never start with killing 15 million people (side note: it doesn't matter "who's people" they are). They start with a little spying here, a little bending the rules there. Lie a bit a cause a few tens of thousands of people to die. Get your people into the positions of power, eviscerate the press (if it hasn't rolled over already). Come to some accommodation with the "opposition" ("play it our way or we'll ruin you" is always popular).
In short, make it so that no one dares move against you.
Then you can kill 15 million people, or even twenty if you're in the mood.
--MarkusQ
P.S. The polarization isn't causing the problem. The polarization is a consequence of some people realizing what is going on, and others squeezing their eyes shut and hoping it goes away.
No, as we learned from QM they are fundamentally the same. Photons can be viewed as little bits of stuff going really really fast. And atomic nuclei can be treated as propagating waves. Fundementally, they are the same.
In practice, there are some significant practical differences, but that's exactly where the sort of nagging little details you so blithely dismiss come in.
--MarkusQ
The problem with that theory is, there's no credible indication that we've captured any terrorists to get address books from in the first place. Instead (from related reports) it seems more likely that they're going after administration critics, anti-war protesters, and others who they would be hard pressed to come up with probably cause for.
--MarkusQ
P.S. Another hole in the theory ("The administration may not be able to convince a FISA judge that simply being in someone's phone list is "probable cause" that the person is themselves a foreign agent or terrorist.") is that the problem isn't that they asked for permission, were denied, and went ahead anyway. They never asked in the first place, which makes it look a lot like they knew they were in the wrong from the very start.
I'm probably wasting my time, but:
--MarkusQ
Wikipedia is not and never will be an authoritative source on anything. It's the very nature of the beast that makes all information found there suspect. Anyone who uses wikipedia as an authoritative source is a fool.
I of course agree with you. I'd be a fool not to. But I don't think you go far enough. The way you've worded this it sounds like Wikipedia isn't an authoritative source, but that something else is.
What might that be exactly? Not The New York Times, not The encyclopedia Britannica and surely not public officials. Personally, I tend to trust the OED and the CRC, but with dictionaries including intentional errors and any book potentially containing typos I don't trust them absolutely. I'm quite comfortable using Wikipedia as a source, something I consider about as trustworthy as a newspaper or a college professor.
But I can't think of a single source that I would consider absolutely authoritative, can you?
--MarkusQ
6. Voters never get to see every candidate in the debates as the debate committees are run by authoritarian parties unwilling to give up their powers.
I'm amazed out how many people don't realize that, in the last presidential election, two minority candidates who were on the ballot were arrested because they were trying to participate in the "non-partisan" debates (they'd gotten as far as getting a court order before they were stopped).
--MarkusQ
Uh, by the time it gets to your PC it should be digital. So "noise" is not a worry unless you're planning on doing the A-to-D on the PC, in which case you need a psychiatrist, not
--MarkusQ
the RIAA will need to show...that the infringement occured at your IP address. At that point...the burden then shifts to YOU to prove...that it was somebody else and not you that did the infringing.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but why single out the IP address as such a watershed in the chain of accountability that the burden of proof flips? To see what I'm getting at, what makes IP addresses so special, as compared to (for example):
the RIAA will need to show...that the infringement occurred in your city. At that point...the burden then shifts to YOU to prove...that it was somebody else and not you that did the infringing.
the RIAA will need to show...that the infringement occurred under a screen name you frequently use. At that point...the burden then shifts to YOU to prove...that it was somebody else and not you that did the infringing.
--MarkusQ
That's no big deal, most people on either coast fail to see any moral distinction between the two anyway.
And you do? I'm not on either coast, but I don't see that much difference between killing innocent Iraqis for God and/or to retaliate for past injustices and killing innocent Americans for Alla and/or to retaliate for past injustices. For that matter, I don't see that much difference between torturing people because they might be plotting against your pseudo-Islamic regime and torturing people because they might be plotting against your pseudo-Christian regime. Or keeping people in secret prisons in your own country, vs. keeping them in secret prisons in other countries...
Oh wait, I've drifted into confusing Bin Laden and Sadam again. I don't know how they got so muddled in my mind.
--MarkusQ