Obama voted for an amendment to strip the immunity provision. IIRC, he also voted against an early version of the Protect America Act that included the immunity provision. When they couldn't strip the immunity and Bush had let months go by refusing to vote on any version not including immunity, only then did he vote for the bill containing the immunity. He stated something to the effect that he opposed the immunity but felt that other portions of the bill continuing/clarifying certain surveillance powers were too important to vote against.
Essentially this was the standard game where supporters of the controversial provision tack it onto a larger, important bill. The president vows to veto any bill that does not contain the provision. Then the two sides play chicken as time goes on and the important bill is not passed to see who will flinch first. This is the same thing that happened with Iraq war funding, where the president would veto any bill with a time line and then complain about how the Democrats don't "support our troops". Bush would go on to criticize John Kerry on this, despite the fact that Kerry had voted for the funding, with a time line for withdrawal. Something similar happened over the budget, causing a government shutdown in the 90s. People in congress are then left with the choice of whether to delay something really important (legitimate surveillance, troop funding, funding government agencies) and play chicken with the other side or to relent and vote for something they don't agree with in order that other good and necessary things happen. You don't have to agree with the decision, but don't buy into the lobotomized sort of ignorant debate that gave us "he voted for it before he voted against it".
So, is Obama the messianic savior embodying everything that each of us wants in a politician? No, of course he's not. And I personally really wanted to see him fight harder on the FISA issue. Why didn't he? I'm not sure. It may be the stated reason, that he thought the other stuff was too important. Or it may be that he recognized it was an unwinnable battle (they didn't even have enough people for a filibuster, much less to strip the immunity) that would likely prove to be political suicide, because the already more hawkish Hillary Clinton could paint him as weak on defense (not to mention an eventual republican opponent). While I think that sometimes a good politician must fight the good fight no matter the cost, I understand that a smart and effective politician must pick his battles most of the time. I also recognize that a president must be representative of a wide national consensus, not the mirror of my positions on every issue. So, given the alternatives I'm still quite glad it will be Obama in the White House.
My real problem with your post is your acceptance of Christmas Tree Bills. I personally feel those are a crime because it allows our reps to slide anything they want into law without being able to be blamed -- after all, "I 'only voted for it as part of a larger bill, feeling that the benefits of having it pass outweighed the down side.'"
So basically you're against pretty much everyone in Congress (and probably state and federal executives who sign these bills). Let me guess, you voted for Ron Paul?
Well, I would hope that anyone could write a objective questions on the topic of civics. The point is just to stick to objective facts or at least points on which there is extremely broad agreement. So, a question like, "The 2nd Amendment to the Constitution guaranties: A) the right to keep and bear arms B) freedom of speech B) 40 acres and a mule d) free booze" is objective whereas the with answers like "A) a collective right to bear arms as part of a militia B) an individual right to bear arms C) a right to arm bears" it would not be, because it's not objective in the strictest sense (it requires some interpretation) and there's significant disagreement in our society over which interpretation is correct.
These guys didn't do too badly, but it looks to me like they definitely strayed outside the limits of totally objective questions on civics from time to time. They let their bias show through, because I picked up on it loud and clear.
Yeah, that could be interesting, and I wouldn't have anything against that in general, it's just that you couldn't then claim the raw results, including all the questions, as a "test of your knowledge of civics", which is what bugs me about this. The only other thing about doing what you're talking about is that you'd have to be careful in drawing conclusions.
For example, image a hypothetical world where there are two political viewpoints, each equally valid. Political philosophy A tends to benefit by the lower classes and so is generally favored by them, and philosophy B tends to benefit the upper classes and is generally favored by them. Suppose also that the amount and/or quality of education received is positively correlated to income. In this hypothetical world, your test would find less educated people favor philosophy A while more educated people favor philosophy B, but (by our assumption) it wouldn't actually be a causal relationship, just a spurious correlation.
It isn't clear to me whether this is an attempt at a sort of "push polling" as I was speculating or whether they're honestly trying to test what they see as the "important" part of civics, which is strongly colored by their world view. It's probably best to assume the latter. However, if they're not testing based on a wide consensus view of what's important in civics but rather based upon their particular ideological slant then they're not exactly testing peoples' knowledge of civics in a fair sense.
Actually, that was probably the one where I was most perplexed as to the "correct" answer, but precisely because it was as obvious as you say. I mean, it's not just obvious it is a totally vacuous tautology. So I selected that answer but with some doubt that I must be misunderstanding the question.
For what it's worth, I took the test just now and got 100%, but I find a few things about it questionable: First, there are several questions that I'm not sure really fall under the definition civics. Second, several of the questions are of a theoretical rather than factual nature and I got the distinct impression that the test makers were pushing a specific (libertarian/conservative) ideological agenda. Maybe my impression was incorrect; I haven't had a chance to look up the group yet.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines civics as, "a social science dealing with the rights and duties of citizens." Most of the questions deal with the structure of our government and the history of that structure, so they can reasonably be said to fall within civics. But consider the following questions:
13) Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas would concur that:
25) Free enterprise or capitalism exists insofar as:
27) Free markets typically secure more economic prosperity than government's centralized planning because:
30) Which of the following fiscal policy combinations would a government most likely follow to stimulate economic activity when the economy is in a severe recession?
31) International trade and specialization most often lead to which of the following?
Number 13 is a question of philosophy (or, if you like, history mostly far preceding US history). Questions 25, 27, 30, and 31 are questions of economics. I suppose you could include economics as part of civics, because it's important to governance, but on that rationale you could start including all sorts of things, like statistics. Also, the answers to the questions are largely theoretical in nature. While there may be a consensus view amongst economists, they don't really admit clear empirical answers due to the complexity of disentangling the various influences in macroeconomics. On the topic of how best to stimulate economic activity, there are various different schools of thought that advocate different approaches and have enjoyed popularity at different times.
The other point was more a vague feeling I got that the questions were pushing an agenda. The survey picks out "religion" as one of the constitutional rights, rather than "freedom of religion". It asks for the attribution of the phrase "wall of separation" between church and state, and highlighting that this is not from the constitution (even though it is from one of the framers) is a favorite past-time of those who advocate a larger role for Christianity in government. Questions 27 and 31 praise free trade criticize centralized economies. And answering one of the questions "correctly" points out that federal disaster aid is not guarantied by the constitution (relevant to disagreements over the aftermath of hurricane Katrina). It's not really pronounced and may be just coincidence, but I'm curious if anyone else got this feeling. I'll have to look up ISI and see if I've guessed correctly. In any case, it occurred to me that you could use the press release to get the general public to take it and use it as a push poll, stating your opinions as the "correct answer" or selecting factual information in such a way as to give the appearance for support of your argument.
Not really the same thing. Einstein derived it for non-quantum objects (ie large ones, or ones for which we can otherwise ignore quantum effects). This team verified it for quantum objects.
I don't think it really makes sense to say that. The QCD Lagrangian is manifestly covariant, meaning that special relativity (including E=mc^2) is built into it from the start. If you were to get results from QCD that did not agree with special relativity (SR), I think it would make more sense to say it showed either that your calculation was flawed or that QCD was inconsistent.
Another more subtle point is that anything performed on a lattice where space is discretized is frame dependent (unless you can show, which one hopes for lattice QCD, that the results are independent of lattice size), so it wouldn't make much sense as a way to test SR.
This is interesting because the two theories don't mesh well -- one works at small scales and the other at large scales.
Perhaps you're confusing General Relativity (GR) and Special Relativity (SR).
SR is the theory of how things move in spacetime and how measurements by different observers relate. It doesn't really depend on scale (whether in terms of space or mass) and at this point is viewed as being quite compatible with Quantum Mechanics (QM). In the beginning ('round about the 1930s, I think) people weren't so sure how to combine QM and SR, but with the development of relativistic quantum field theory, renormalization, and the success of quantum electrodynamics physicists now believe the two make sense together. GR, which extends the ideas of SR to non-inertial frames in order to describe gravity, is a whole different ball game, and it's true that we don't know how to make sense of situations where both QM and GR seem to be needed simultaneously to get an accurate description. But the physics of hadrons, which is what's being examined here, is not thought to be such a problem. The problems that require QM+GR are usually ones that happen at the Planck energy or the Planck length.
"Sorry, be we've decided to make Sony Blu-Ray players (and PS3s) only play on Sony brand televisions. After all:
When the HDCP support on the TV doesn't work and the connection is degraded, where do the complaints go? Sony.
..."
Does that sound reasonable? Look, the line of thinking you're using can be extended to all sorts of products. It's true that it's much easier to ensure a good user experience if you control all aspects of that experience, and it's true that when you have your products interacting with those of others there may be problems that are the fault of another company but get blamed partially on your company by the user. Apple does, indeed, have a rational motivation for trying to lock their hardware to their software, and it's not at all unique to them. However, where that leads is to a world where consumers don't have choices. How many contractual obligations are you going to accept with your purchases? How about a car with a contract that constrains where you're allowed to drive in order to maintain optimal ride satisfaction? As a consumer, we each ought to demand that when we buy a product it's ours to do with as we please (within the bounds of the law). We can accept that certain configurations or uses aren't supported, but we should not accept them being prevented.
Don't sign away your freedom to use the things you've bought just because it makes brand marketing more convenient for some corporation.
Two words, data quality. Computational physics models are calibrated against reliable test data by building REAL examples of what is being modeled. That's the only real way to know if the assumptions used are going to allow reliable results.
I'm not sure what precisely you're including in "computational physics", but I don't think this really applies to modeling the structure of stars and compact objects, modeling strong gravity phenomena (like compact object binary inspirals), lattice QCD calculations, quark gluon plasma modeling, structure formation in the Universe, etc. In most of those examples we cannot construct any sort of real controlled test of what's being modeled and in all of those cases much of the data on which our models are based comes from indirect inference. Do you similarly consider all of these areas of investigation (some of which are very active and well funded) to be invalid?
GCMs have energy conservation added to them by hand.
At least all the ones I've looked at do.
To a computational physicist that means they are non-physical. They don't and can't make any serious claim to modeling climate.
With the advent of LIGO and the future prospect of LISA, Physicists are currently very interested in detailed modeling of gravity in various processes involving compact objects that could be sources of gravitational waves those instruments would pick up. The result has been a lot of work on numerical solutions to General Relativity (GR). Einstein's equation can be divided into dynamical equations and constraint equations, and I know there are many computational models in which corrections must be added "by hand" at each time step (or, if you like, to the solution on each space-like hypersurface in the coordinates of choice) so that constraint equations equations are approximately obeyed. As far as I have seen, Physicists doing GR do not generally reject these methods, though they seem to fall prey to the same objections you're raising.
Right. Although 1992 and 1996 turn out to be somewhat anomalous too, because there was a third party candidate who actually got a significant amount of the vote (particularly in 1992). I was really interested to look at the electoral college maps for Reagan vs. Mondale and Nixon vs. McGovern to see the "distortion" at work. In each case I think the losers got only one state, despite having still something like 40% of the popular vote.
In any event, the popular vote was 52% to 47% - relatively close, and rather comparable to the 2004 election.
Currently the Washington Post has it at about 53% to 47% (looking at the actual vote totals, they've rounded each down by one percent for some reason). That makes it a 6% margin, which is double the margin of Bush's victory in 2004. That would probably put it in the category of considerably more decisive, but not a blowout. It could be argued, for example, that it's closer to the margin of, say, George H. W. Bush over Dukakis than that of George W. Bush over Kerry. But it's also nothing like a Reagan over Mondale victory.
Obama's much stronger electoral vote showing in 2008 than Bush's in 2004 is a testament to Obama's skills as a campaigner (and perhaps a little luck)
I think it probably says more about the distorting effects of the electoral college and the "first past the pole" system, actually. It'd be interesting to see what statistical distribution of the possible electoral margins would look like for other probable scenarios consistent with the observed popular vote, but I would guess that in most cases a 6% lead would translate into a relatively large electoral lead because of the aforementioned distorting effects. I guess something to look at is the electoral vote prediction histogram on Fivethirtyeight.com, which suggests that the vast majority of scenarios had Obama winning a considerably larger EV total than GWB.
he managed to carry virtually every battleground state by a slim margin, without losing any of his expected-to-win states.
It looks to me (from glancing at Fivethirtyeight.com and Electoral-vote.com that his performance was fairly consistent with the polls in a manner that's not all that shocking.
While it is not the right time to politically say this. It is a case where they don't really need government intervention as most companies will regulate themseles on this front especially if they don't have immunity to legal problems if something goes wrong.
Government can mandate certain actions to protect privacy, or they can pass laws forcing disclosure and establishing civil claims that can be filed by the injured, but either way government is going to be involved.
I can appreciate the merits of the latter system, but I have to say that I'm sort of skeptical about how well it will work in practice. I think that sort of thing works somewhat well where it concerns transactions between two businesses that are large enough to have a legal staff that can file suit and recoup losses, but individuals generally can't do that. They can be involved in class action lawsuits, but the supposed plaintiffs never seem to really see any significant compensation for their damages in those suits, and it's not even always clear to me that the awards are large enough to serve as a strong deterrent.
I imagine that the optimal solution is a hybrid, that establishes some basic minimum requirements (.e.g, something like that data must be held in a physically secured location and cannot be transported or transmitted from that location except if encrypted in a way consistent with NIST recommendations) but leaves a lot up to the company, while also establishing stringent transparency requirements and civil liability.
Before RMS spoke about it most of you were for Cloud Computing now you are against it. Your a bunch of sheep.
You know, if you're going to have an idiotic trolling sig, you could at least spell it right.
For anyone interested, FactCheck.org gives the real deal on this issue. Their short summary: "Q: Did Sarah Palin make rape victims pay for their own rape kits? A: Palin's police chief in Wasilla did that. Whether Palin supported this is not certain."
The slightly longer story is that woman in Wasilla were having their insurance charged for rape kits while Palin was mayor there. After she'd been mayor for four years, the state passed a law banning the practice. The Wasilla police chief spoke out in defense of the practice. Palin is not on record as taking a stand on the issue at the time. Since being the vice presidential candidate, Palin's spokesperson said, "the governor 'does not believe, nor has she ever believed, that rape victims should have to pay for an evidence-gathering test.' [The spokesperson] declined to answer questions about when Palin found out about the practice and what, if anything, she tried to do about it." So the bottom line is that this did happen in Wasilla while Palin was mayor and she did not stop it (or stop the police chief from supporting it), but there's no evidence that she actively encouraged it either.
In my view it's still a strike against her, but it's definitely been distorted. Then again, the idea of any politician who cannot name a single news publication she reads is all I need to see her as a liability.
I think there will also be a stream available from C-SPAN, which will probably be preferable to the abysmal journalism of Fox News one may be subjected to at the beginning or end. It looks like a local DC PBS affiliate is also offering a live webcast, but a) I'm not sure how much bandwidth they'll have and b) it looks like it's offered either as windows media video or through silverlight, so this may be tough if you're on Linux.
I think that, aside from questions of capacity, C-SPAN is probably the best option because you can get the debate relatively unfiltered. Looking at analysis can be useful, but do it after you've had some time to digest it and come to your own conclusions. Then getting another view can add some insights you missed. Most networks want to rush on with the "analysts" and interviews from spin alley to tell you what to think before you have a chance to consider it yourself. This can color your whole perception of an event, framing the terms in which you think about, in a way that has little to do with logic or the issues.
Now what seem really hard to find are audio podcasts of the debates. Often, when I miss a debate I just want to get an audio podcast to listen to while I'm going someplace or doing chores around the house, etc. I don't really need to see the debate, if anything that draws focus to irrelevant stuff and away from substantive issues. Unfortunately, these are hard to find, and in the past I've had to grab a video and then make the mp3 for myself.
I agree with the core of your argument, that intelligence gathering in a theater of war is a totally different thing than on domestic soil. I have to disagree with a few other things, though.
A spokesman for General Hayden said, "At NSA, the law was followed assiduously. The notion that General Hayden sanctioned or tolerated illegalities of any sort is ridiculous on its face." Those of you who laugh at this comment and think you know everything about the illegality of NSA surveillance would be well served to educate yourselves a bit.
Some fairly educated gentlemen seem to think it was illegal. So do I, for what it's worth. In addition, I can say that I think it's wrong. Using the "extraordinary" threat of terrorism as a justification is absurd, when you rationally appraise the magnitude of that threat, and the administration did everything possible to avoid going about getting those powers the right way (they decided not to go to congress specifically because they didn't think they'd get approval). When even Ashcroft, the guy who helped push through the USA PATRIOT Act, says you've gone too far, it raises alarm bells.
"'This story is to surveillance law what Abu Ghraib was to prison law,' Turley said."
Indeed. And we don't condone or support that kind of activity, either.
I'm not sure how much evidence there is for that statement. I guess, for one thing, it depends on what you mean by "that kind of activity". It also depends on who "we" is (the CIA, the military?) or what you consider condoning it. We do carry out extraordinary renditions to countries that practice various kinds of torture (I'm not sure how one can compare them to Abu Ghraib). Not to mention things like the incident in Afghanistan where, "[a] CIA case officer in charge of a secret prison just north of Kabul allegedly ordered guards to strip naked an uncooperative young Afghan detainee, chain him to the concrete floor and leave him there overnight without blankets" (after which he died of exposure).
Now, realistically, we the public have little way to get an accurate idea of how bad things are. It's reasonable to presume we hear about some of the cases where they screw up and go further than was intended, but we probably don't hear about all of those, and we probably hear about very few of the rest, where they go just as far as intended. Rendition makes it even harder to determine what sorts of things we may, ultimately, be responsible for. So I won't claim to know that Abu Ghraib was run of the mill, but I think it's foolish to assume without evidence that it was so exceptional or "just a few bad apples".
That's a good point. I realized that the other answer to my question is that many people will want to be able to play DRMed music (Plays For Sure, Fairplay, etc.) and won't be able to do that on Rockbox.
I got an Archos Ondio flash-based player years ago, but after the newness wore off I found the usability sorely lacking. I was really disappointed. I heard of Rockbox fairly early on, but I figured the last thing I wanted to deal with was troubleshooting problems with firmware on my mp3 player, so I thought "not now, but maybe some day". A year or so later, I was finally so fed up with the Ondio I figured I'd give it a try. Man was I sorry I'd waited so long. The Rockbox firmware made the player much more useful, and it even added features that had not existed at all before (e.g. grouping via ID3 tags). To top it all off, I don't recall ever really running into any bugs in the firmware.
What this really leads me to wonder is, why don't some of these player manufacturers team up with Rockbox to make that the official firmware of their player? It seems like, with people inside the company to help with the hardware interface part of it, Rockbox would be a very solid choice, and the company wouldn't have to pay a license fee or write firmware from scratch. And, of course, they could even make the version on the player branded and incorporates whatever eye candy they please.
It looks like you can follow this thread for some advice there. Or you could, you know, just take the, admittedly arduous, step of simply skipping the
I thought this was a tech site, so I'm surprised someone hasn't implemented a technical solution of their own. It'd be much preferable to subjecting the rest of us to all this whining.
I suspect it shows that pretty much anybody, subjected to enough scrutiny, will fall afoul of the law.
Distinctions between use of public and private resources and accountability to the citizens are not some minor legal technicality. This is an issue that pretty much anyone should be able to appreciate, certainly someone with a position as high as Governor of an entire state. More to the point, however, a recent New York Times article suggests this was not a simple oversight:
The governor and her top officials sometimes use personal e-mail accounts for state business; dozens of e-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that her staff members studied whether that could allow them to circumvent subpoenas seeking public records.
Based on the information I've seen, Palin was in favor of (and specifically lobbied for) the "Bridge to Nowhere" until after congress cut the earmark. So, her statement at the GOP convention that, "I told the Congress, 'Thanks, but no thanks,' on that bridge to nowhere" is nothing but a bald-faced lie.
Is there a legitimate need for a EULA? I basically always thought EULAs were about taking away your rights, including restrictions on resale, benchmarking, modification, examination, etc. There's no need to agree to the copyright restrictions, because by default you have no right to redistribution unless it's explicitly granted. I would have thought that there's no need to have anything about trademarks in there, because again I thought you'd have to have explicit permission to use the mark. Even for disclaimer of warranty I would think it would only be required to be displayed, but no agreement from the user would be needed.
Of course, like most people on/. IANAL, so are there some legitimate, non-evil (i.e. not depriving you of rights you'd have with any other product you buy) uses for the EULA? And will a EULA for firefox provide any significant additional protection for their trademarks?
One of the real pleasures of switching to Linux from Windows was no longer being confronted with EULAs for every damned thing, so I'd really hate to see them come into vogue here too. I also really just like the idea that FOSS software is mine (like any other product) to do with what I please, within the bounds of the law (e.g., copyright law). With EULAs it always feels like corporate lawyers are gradually chipping away at all the freedoms I used to enjoy.
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Obama voted for an amendment to strip the immunity provision. IIRC, he also voted against an early version of the Protect America Act that included the immunity provision. When they couldn't strip the immunity and Bush had let months go by refusing to vote on any version not including immunity, only then did he vote for the bill containing the immunity. He stated something to the effect that he opposed the immunity but felt that other portions of the bill continuing/clarifying certain surveillance powers were too important to vote against.
Essentially this was the standard game where supporters of the controversial provision tack it onto a larger, important bill. The president vows to veto any bill that does not contain the provision. Then the two sides play chicken as time goes on and the important bill is not passed to see who will flinch first. This is the same thing that happened with Iraq war funding, where the president would veto any bill with a time line and then complain about how the Democrats don't "support our troops". Bush would go on to criticize John Kerry on this, despite the fact that Kerry had voted for the funding, with a time line for withdrawal. Something similar happened over the budget, causing a government shutdown in the 90s. People in congress are then left with the choice of whether to delay something really important (legitimate surveillance, troop funding, funding government agencies) and play chicken with the other side or to relent and vote for something they don't agree with in order that other good and necessary things happen. You don't have to agree with the decision, but don't buy into the lobotomized sort of ignorant debate that gave us "he voted for it before he voted against it".
So, is Obama the messianic savior embodying everything that each of us wants in a politician? No, of course he's not. And I personally really wanted to see him fight harder on the FISA issue. Why didn't he? I'm not sure. It may be the stated reason, that he thought the other stuff was too important. Or it may be that he recognized it was an unwinnable battle (they didn't even have enough people for a filibuster, much less to strip the immunity) that would likely prove to be political suicide, because the already more hawkish Hillary Clinton could paint him as weak on defense (not to mention an eventual republican opponent). While I think that sometimes a good politician must fight the good fight no matter the cost, I understand that a smart and effective politician must pick his battles most of the time. I also recognize that a president must be representative of a wide national consensus, not the mirror of my positions on every issue. So, given the alternatives I'm still quite glad it will be Obama in the White House.
So basically you're against pretty much everyone in Congress (and probably state and federal executives who sign these bills). Let me guess, you voted for Ron Paul?
Very true.
Well, I would hope that anyone could write a objective questions on the topic of civics. The point is just to stick to objective facts or at least points on which there is extremely broad agreement. So, a question like, "The 2nd Amendment to the Constitution guaranties: A) the right to keep and bear arms B) freedom of speech B) 40 acres and a mule d) free booze" is objective whereas the with answers like "A) a collective right to bear arms as part of a militia B) an individual right to bear arms C) a right to arm bears" it would not be, because it's not objective in the strictest sense (it requires some interpretation) and there's significant disagreement in our society over which interpretation is correct.
These guys didn't do too badly, but it looks to me like they definitely strayed outside the limits of totally objective questions on civics from time to time. They let their bias show through, because I picked up on it loud and clear.
Yeah, that could be interesting, and I wouldn't have anything against that in general, it's just that you couldn't then claim the raw results, including all the questions, as a "test of your knowledge of civics", which is what bugs me about this. The only other thing about doing what you're talking about is that you'd have to be careful in drawing conclusions.
For example, image a hypothetical world where there are two political viewpoints, each equally valid. Political philosophy A tends to benefit by the lower classes and so is generally favored by them, and philosophy B tends to benefit the upper classes and is generally favored by them. Suppose also that the amount and/or quality of education received is positively correlated to income. In this hypothetical world, your test would find less educated people favor philosophy A while more educated people favor philosophy B, but (by our assumption) it wouldn't actually be a causal relationship, just a spurious correlation.
Okay, I got a chance to look at the ISI website, and it is, indeed, a politically conservative organization as I was able to guess from the content of their quiz. One portion of the site is hawking a book about "American Intellectual Conservatism" . Also looking at the mission statement is instructive.
It isn't clear to me whether this is an attempt at a sort of "push polling" as I was speculating or whether they're honestly trying to test what they see as the "important" part of civics, which is strongly colored by their world view. It's probably best to assume the latter. However, if they're not testing based on a wide consensus view of what's important in civics but rather based upon their particular ideological slant then they're not exactly testing peoples' knowledge of civics in a fair sense.
Actually, that was probably the one where I was most perplexed as to the "correct" answer, but precisely because it was as obvious as you say. I mean, it's not just obvious it is a totally vacuous tautology. So I selected that answer but with some doubt that I must be misunderstanding the question.
For what it's worth, I took the test just now and got 100%, but I find a few things about it questionable: First, there are several questions that I'm not sure really fall under the definition civics. Second, several of the questions are of a theoretical rather than factual nature and I got the distinct impression that the test makers were pushing a specific (libertarian/conservative) ideological agenda. Maybe my impression was incorrect; I haven't had a chance to look up the group yet.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines civics as, "a social science dealing with the rights and duties of citizens." Most of the questions deal with the structure of our government and the history of that structure, so they can reasonably be said to fall within civics. But consider the following questions:
Number 13 is a question of philosophy (or, if you like, history mostly far preceding US history). Questions 25, 27, 30, and 31 are questions of economics. I suppose you could include economics as part of civics, because it's important to governance, but on that rationale you could start including all sorts of things, like statistics. Also, the answers to the questions are largely theoretical in nature. While there may be a consensus view amongst economists, they don't really admit clear empirical answers due to the complexity of disentangling the various influences in macroeconomics. On the topic of how best to stimulate economic activity, there are various different schools of thought that advocate different approaches and have enjoyed popularity at different times.
The other point was more a vague feeling I got that the questions were pushing an agenda. The survey picks out "religion" as one of the constitutional rights, rather than "freedom of religion". It asks for the attribution of the phrase "wall of separation" between church and state, and highlighting that this is not from the constitution (even though it is from one of the framers) is a favorite past-time of those who advocate a larger role for Christianity in government. Questions 27 and 31 praise free trade criticize centralized economies. And answering one of the questions "correctly" points out that federal disaster aid is not guarantied by the constitution (relevant to disagreements over the aftermath of hurricane Katrina). It's not really pronounced and may be just coincidence, but I'm curious if anyone else got this feeling. I'll have to look up ISI and see if I've guessed correctly. In any case, it occurred to me that you could use the press release to get the general public to take it and use it as a push poll, stating your opinions as the "correct answer" or selecting factual information in such a way as to give the appearance for support of your argument.
I don't think it really makes sense to say that. The QCD Lagrangian is manifestly covariant, meaning that special relativity (including E=mc^2) is built into it from the start. If you were to get results from QCD that did not agree with special relativity (SR), I think it would make more sense to say it showed either that your calculation was flawed or that QCD was inconsistent.
Another more subtle point is that anything performed on a lattice where space is discretized is frame dependent (unless you can show, which one hopes for lattice QCD, that the results are independent of lattice size), so it wouldn't make much sense as a way to test SR.
Perhaps you're confusing General Relativity (GR) and Special Relativity (SR).
SR is the theory of how things move in spacetime and how measurements by different observers relate. It doesn't really depend on scale (whether in terms of space or mass) and at this point is viewed as being quite compatible with Quantum Mechanics (QM). In the beginning ('round about the 1930s, I think) people weren't so sure how to combine QM and SR, but with the development of relativistic quantum field theory, renormalization, and the success of quantum electrodynamics physicists now believe the two make sense together. GR, which extends the ideas of SR to non-inertial frames in order to describe gravity, is a whole different ball game, and it's true that we don't know how to make sense of situations where both QM and GR seem to be needed simultaneously to get an accurate description. But the physics of hadrons, which is what's being examined here, is not thought to be such a problem. The problems that require QM+GR are usually ones that happen at the Planck energy or the Planck length.
"Sorry, be we've decided to make Sony Blu-Ray players (and PS3s) only play on Sony brand televisions. After all:
..."
When the HDCP support on the TV doesn't work and the connection is degraded, where do the complaints go? Sony.
Does that sound reasonable? Look, the line of thinking you're using can be extended to all sorts of products. It's true that it's much easier to ensure a good user experience if you control all aspects of that experience, and it's true that when you have your products interacting with those of others there may be problems that are the fault of another company but get blamed partially on your company by the user. Apple does, indeed, have a rational motivation for trying to lock their hardware to their software, and it's not at all unique to them. However, where that leads is to a world where consumers don't have choices. How many contractual obligations are you going to accept with your purchases? How about a car with a contract that constrains where you're allowed to drive in order to maintain optimal ride satisfaction? As a consumer, we each ought to demand that when we buy a product it's ours to do with as we please (within the bounds of the law). We can accept that certain configurations or uses aren't supported, but we should not accept them being prevented.
Don't sign away your freedom to use the things you've bought just because it makes brand marketing more convenient for some corporation.
I'm not sure what precisely you're including in "computational physics", but I don't think this really applies to modeling the structure of stars and compact objects, modeling strong gravity phenomena (like compact object binary inspirals), lattice QCD calculations, quark gluon plasma modeling, structure formation in the Universe, etc. In most of those examples we cannot construct any sort of real controlled test of what's being modeled and in all of those cases much of the data on which our models are based comes from indirect inference. Do you similarly consider all of these areas of investigation (some of which are very active and well funded) to be invalid?
With the advent of LIGO and the future prospect of LISA, Physicists are currently very interested in detailed modeling of gravity in various processes involving compact objects that could be sources of gravitational waves those instruments would pick up. The result has been a lot of work on numerical solutions to General Relativity (GR). Einstein's equation can be divided into dynamical equations and constraint equations, and I know there are many computational models in which corrections must be added "by hand" at each time step (or, if you like, to the solution on each space-like hypersurface in the coordinates of choice) so that constraint equations equations are approximately obeyed. As far as I have seen, Physicists doing GR do not generally reject these methods, though they seem to fall prey to the same objections you're raising.
Ah yes, like the dreaded Ronulans.
Once you drink the Ronulan ale, you'll be under their power.
Right. Although 1992 and 1996 turn out to be somewhat anomalous too, because there was a third party candidate who actually got a significant amount of the vote (particularly in 1992). I was really interested to look at the electoral college maps for Reagan vs. Mondale and Nixon vs. McGovern to see the "distortion" at work. In each case I think the losers got only one state, despite having still something like 40% of the popular vote.
Currently the Washington Post has it at about 53% to 47% (looking at the actual vote totals, they've rounded each down by one percent for some reason). That makes it a 6% margin, which is double the margin of Bush's victory in 2004. That would probably put it in the category of considerably more decisive, but not a blowout. It could be argued, for example, that it's closer to the margin of, say, George H. W. Bush over Dukakis than that of George W. Bush over Kerry. But it's also nothing like a Reagan over Mondale victory.
I think it probably says more about the distorting effects of the electoral college and the "first past the pole" system, actually. It'd be interesting to see what statistical distribution of the possible electoral margins would look like for other probable scenarios consistent with the observed popular vote, but I would guess that in most cases a 6% lead would translate into a relatively large electoral lead because of the aforementioned distorting effects. I guess something to look at is the electoral vote prediction histogram on Fivethirtyeight.com, which suggests that the vast majority of scenarios had Obama winning a considerably larger EV total than GWB.
It looks to me (from glancing at Fivethirtyeight.com and Electoral-vote.com that his performance was fairly consistent with the polls in a manner that's not all that shocking.
Government can mandate certain actions to protect privacy, or they can pass laws forcing disclosure and establishing civil claims that can be filed by the injured, but either way government is going to be involved.
I can appreciate the merits of the latter system, but I have to say that I'm sort of skeptical about how well it will work in practice. I think that sort of thing works somewhat well where it concerns transactions between two businesses that are large enough to have a legal staff that can file suit and recoup losses, but individuals generally can't do that. They can be involved in class action lawsuits, but the supposed plaintiffs never seem to really see any significant compensation for their damages in those suits, and it's not even always clear to me that the awards are large enough to serve as a strong deterrent.
I imagine that the optimal solution is a hybrid, that establishes some basic minimum requirements (.e.g, something like that data must be held in a physically secured location and cannot be transported or transmitted from that location except if encrypted in a way consistent with NIST recommendations) but leaves a lot up to the company, while also establishing stringent transparency requirements and civil liability.
You know, if you're going to have an idiotic trolling sig, you could at least spell it right.
For anyone interested, FactCheck.org gives the real deal on this issue. Their short summary: "Q: Did Sarah Palin make rape victims pay for their own rape kits? A: Palin's police chief in Wasilla did that. Whether Palin supported this is not certain."
The slightly longer story is that woman in Wasilla were having their insurance charged for rape kits while Palin was mayor there. After she'd been mayor for four years, the state passed a law banning the practice. The Wasilla police chief spoke out in defense of the practice. Palin is not on record as taking a stand on the issue at the time. Since being the vice presidential candidate, Palin's spokesperson said, "the governor 'does not believe, nor has she ever believed, that rape victims should have to pay for an evidence-gathering test.' [The spokesperson] declined to answer questions about when Palin found out about the practice and what, if anything, she tried to do about it." So the bottom line is that this did happen in Wasilla while Palin was mayor and she did not stop it (or stop the police chief from supporting it), but there's no evidence that she actively encouraged it either.
In my view it's still a strike against her, but it's definitely been distorted. Then again, the idea of any politician who cannot name a single news publication she reads is all I need to see her as a liability.
I think there will also be a stream available from C-SPAN, which will probably be preferable to the abysmal journalism of Fox News one may be subjected to at the beginning or end. It looks like a local DC PBS affiliate is also offering a live webcast, but a) I'm not sure how much bandwidth they'll have and b) it looks like it's offered either as windows media video or through silverlight, so this may be tough if you're on Linux.
I think that, aside from questions of capacity, C-SPAN is probably the best option because you can get the debate relatively unfiltered. Looking at analysis can be useful, but do it after you've had some time to digest it and come to your own conclusions. Then getting another view can add some insights you missed. Most networks want to rush on with the "analysts" and interviews from spin alley to tell you what to think before you have a chance to consider it yourself. This can color your whole perception of an event, framing the terms in which you think about, in a way that has little to do with logic or the issues.
Now what seem really hard to find are audio podcasts of the debates. Often, when I miss a debate I just want to get an audio podcast to listen to while I'm going someplace or doing chores around the house, etc. I don't really need to see the debate, if anything that draws focus to irrelevant stuff and away from substantive issues. Unfortunately, these are hard to find, and in the past I've had to grab a video and then make the mp3 for myself.
I agree with the core of your argument, that intelligence gathering in a theater of war is a totally different thing than on domestic soil. I have to disagree with a few other things, though.
Some fairly educated gentlemen seem to think it was illegal. So do I, for what it's worth. In addition, I can say that I think it's wrong. Using the "extraordinary" threat of terrorism as a justification is absurd, when you rationally appraise the magnitude of that threat, and the administration did everything possible to avoid going about getting those powers the right way (they decided not to go to congress specifically because they didn't think they'd get approval). When even Ashcroft, the guy who helped push through the USA PATRIOT Act, says you've gone too far, it raises alarm bells.
I'm not sure how much evidence there is for that statement. I guess, for one thing, it depends on what you mean by "that kind of activity". It also depends on who "we" is (the CIA, the military?) or what you consider condoning it. We do carry out extraordinary renditions to countries that practice various kinds of torture (I'm not sure how one can compare them to Abu Ghraib). Not to mention things like the incident in Afghanistan where, "[a] CIA case officer in charge of a secret prison just north of Kabul allegedly ordered guards to strip naked an uncooperative young Afghan detainee, chain him to the concrete floor and leave him there overnight without blankets" (after which he died of exposure).
Now, realistically, we the public have little way to get an accurate idea of how bad things are. It's reasonable to presume we hear about some of the cases where they screw up and go further than was intended, but we probably don't hear about all of those, and we probably hear about very few of the rest, where they go just as far as intended. Rendition makes it even harder to determine what sorts of things we may, ultimately, be responsible for. So I won't claim to know that Abu Ghraib was run of the mill, but I think it's foolish to assume without evidence that it was so exceptional or "just a few bad apples".
That's a good point. I realized that the other answer to my question is that many people will want to be able to play DRMed music (Plays For Sure, Fairplay, etc.) and won't be able to do that on Rockbox.
I got an Archos Ondio flash-based player years ago, but after the newness wore off I found the usability sorely lacking. I was really disappointed. I heard of Rockbox fairly early on, but I figured the last thing I wanted to deal with was troubleshooting problems with firmware on my mp3 player, so I thought "not now, but maybe some day". A year or so later, I was finally so fed up with the Ondio I figured I'd give it a try. Man was I sorry I'd waited so long. The Rockbox firmware made the player much more useful, and it even added features that had not existed at all before (e.g. grouping via ID3 tags). To top it all off, I don't recall ever really running into any bugs in the firmware.
What this really leads me to wonder is, why don't some of these player manufacturers team up with Rockbox to make that the official firmware of their player? It seems like, with people inside the company to help with the hardware interface part of it, Rockbox would be a very solid choice, and the company wouldn't have to pay a license fee or write firmware from scratch. And, of course, they could even make the version on the player branded and incorporates whatever eye candy they please.
It looks like you can follow this thread for some advice there. Or you could, you know, just take the, admittedly arduous, step of simply skipping the
I thought this was a tech site, so I'm surprised someone hasn't implemented a technical solution of their own. It'd be much preferable to subjecting the rest of us to all this whining.
Distinctions between use of public and private resources and accountability to the citizens are not some minor legal technicality. This is an issue that pretty much anyone should be able to appreciate, certainly someone with a position as high as Governor of an entire state. More to the point, however, a recent New York Times article suggests this was not a simple oversight:
Based on the information I've seen, Palin was in favor of (and specifically lobbied for) the "Bridge to Nowhere" until after congress cut the earmark. So, her statement at the GOP convention that, "I told the Congress, 'Thanks, but no thanks,' on that bridge to nowhere" is nothing but a bald-faced lie.
Is there a legitimate need for a EULA? I basically always thought EULAs were about taking away your rights, including restrictions on resale, benchmarking, modification, examination, etc. There's no need to agree to the copyright restrictions, because by default you have no right to redistribution unless it's explicitly granted. I would have thought that there's no need to have anything about trademarks in there, because again I thought you'd have to have explicit permission to use the mark. Even for disclaimer of warranty I would think it would only be required to be displayed, but no agreement from the user would be needed.
Of course, like most people on /. IANAL, so are there some legitimate, non-evil (i.e. not depriving you of rights you'd have with any other product you buy) uses for the EULA? And will a EULA for firefox provide any significant additional protection for their trademarks?
One of the real pleasures of switching to Linux from Windows was no longer being confronted with EULAs for every damned thing, so I'd really hate to see them come into vogue here too. I also really just like the idea that FOSS software is mine (like any other product) to do with what I please, within the bounds of the law (e.g., copyright law). With EULAs it always feels like corporate lawyers are gradually chipping away at all the freedoms I used to enjoy.