Physics without functional analysis on pseudo-Riemannian manifolds is pointless.;-)
Remember, the set of Physics problems you can solve exactly (even with Calculus and more advanced math) is pretty much always a set of measure zero (speaking figuratively, though one can consider many specific cases where this is concretely true); things like non-linearities always get in the way of a neat calculation. However, one can learn a lot about how to construct mathematical models of the world and devise useful approximations. This is a meat of Physics, and you can start to learn those things without any need of Calculus.
I read some of the linked pages. The uproar seems to be over the fact that journalists are present with or follow insurgent groups. I don't think this is atypical, nor does it indicate they're in league with those groups. AFAIK, it's standard practice for journalists to go to a war zone and try to remain neutral in the conflict, covering actions and viewpoints of both sides where possible. The point of this is to give the public the most possible information about the conflict. The journalists cannot relay information to intelligence for their side, because if they did then they would be treated as agents of that military. This would mean that their access to the people and territory of the other side would be gone, so they could not gather as much information, and it would probably make them and all other journalists into targets. It also would be a self-defeating policy, because once the trust was gone they would no longer get any useful intelligence anyway.
You could debate the wisdom of that choice of operating procedure and the underlying ethical questions, but the fact remains that there is a clear underlying rationale that has nothing to do with being in league with the enemy.
Yeah, but the "some people" who are unconvinced are those with the most knowledge and expertise. Look, I don't suppose myself to have the expertise for intelligence analysis. The work of the Office of Special Plans in the run up to the Iraq War is an object lesson in the perils of having amateurs try to analyze intelligence. Among the problems with it is that you'll get evidence of all sorts of things, most of which turn out to be false. So, I don't doubt that someone with an agenda to push can put together some scraps to make a case for all sorts of things, but to really know whether any of it is true you'd have to be able to vet it, which I am not in a position to do and probably neither are you. So bearing all that in mind, I'll probably stick with the expert's appraisal.
Iraq may have been involved with 9/11, though maybe not.
Well, the bipartisan 9/11 commission said, "There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda also occurred after Bin Ladin had returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship. Two senior Bin Ladin associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States." [emphasis mine] And in case you think that was just politicized or the analysis incompetent, the Washington Post reported, "In testimony before the commission, CIA and FBI officials said they agreed with the staff report's assessment of the abortive relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq. A CIA counterterrorism analyst who testified using the pseudonym Ted Davis said, 'We're in full agreement with the staff statement,' which he said did 'an excellent job' of representing the agency's current understanding of the al Qaeda-Iraq relationship." Finally, even President Bush has said, "We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the 11 September attacks." So, essentially, the President, Congress, the CIA, and the FBI don't think there was a connection.
They were tied to the '93 WTC attack
Again, the experts disagree. As one article puts it, "In sum, by the mid-'90s, the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, the F.B.I., the U.S. Attorney's office in the Southern District of New York, the C.I.A., the N.S.C., and the State Department had all found no evidence implicating the Iraqi government in the first Trade Center attack."
the '95 OKC attack
Given McVeigh's ideology, this doesn't even make much sense. Also, remember, he fought against the Iraqis in the first Gulf War. Again, the investigation into the attack did not turn up such a link, and the only claims I can find for such a link are right in the run up to the most recent Iraq War (and not particularly credible).
But somehow, Clinton looks like a saint and Bush made it all up.
Saint BJ? Leaving aside irrelevant comparisons to Clinton, the fact is that the Bush administration made many false and misleading statements about Iraq in the run up to war. People who want to deny that try to focus on the question of whether Iraq was a threat, but that is not what they lied about. Many governments believed there was some level of threat from Iraq, but the lies from the Bush administration came in the details and the claimed level of certainty. They presented tenuous or already discredited (within the intelligence community) claims as solid. They had reason to believe some things based upon circumstantial evidence, but in describing them they used phrases like "no doubt," which you can find in the transcripts of interviews with multiple administration officials. Given that few outside the administration had access to classified intelligence, and only the administration had the ability to release (declassify) information, there was very little way for anyone to expose these falsehoods. All the false and misleading statements are way too numerous to list, but thankfully someone has gone to the trouble to catalog them.
When a public servant is in that position of power and trust and something as important as going to war is on the line, we the people must demand honesty and cannot tolerate that sort of deception. You can have a different opinion about th
I think Joe Biden actually said it best, "Rudy Giuliani. There's only three things he mentions in a sentence -- a noun, a verb, and 9/11. There's nothing else!"
Thief! With your deft counter-argument you've clearly deprived the GP of his sense of self-assuredness. Not only that, but you've raped his self-confidence with the vile intrusion of your logic into his mind.
...Or perhaps we could abandon the colorful metaphor and agree that unless you go into a person's lab and abscond with his lab notebook you are not, in fact, committing theft. I've no doubt that one can use metaphor and idiom to stretch the meaning of any term to near uselessness, but if we wish to speak clearly of factual matters it's best not to.
You know, yours started out as a seemingly somewhat insightful comment. Then you come in with lines like, "The Associated (with terrorists) Press" and you unmask yourself as totally off your rocker. It also doesn't help that almost all of your links point to what is clearly essentially a political propaganda site.
However, I don't dispute that the mainstream press makes stuff up. I don't know how you missed mentioning the Jayson Blair incident, for example. Usually people have a tendency to notice the instances that go against their ideological preconceptions and interpret this as a [insert opposing group/ideology] media bias. I think it's good to remember Hanlon's Razor, never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity...or in this case laziness and greed. The simplest explanation for the observed phenomenon is simply that journalists try to churn out as much work as possible as quickly as possible and sometimes some of them get sloppy. Unfortunately, most of the people who would like to position themselves as the alternative to mainstream media are even worse, in terms of both accuracy and bias.
I wish there were more of a backlash against inaccurate reporting, but unfortunately most people are far too constrained by ideological blinders to do anything but turn it into some partisan fight over supposed media bias. Judging by your list of sources and the absence of any of the many many examples of misconduct by Fox News, it seems you probably fall into this category as well.
Fabrice, I don't know if you'll read these comments, but thanks for your forthcoming reply to my question. I forgot to add in the text of my question that I think what you're trying to do is very important, and I wish you the best of luck. I'll certainly be playing with the site to see how things develop. That being said, I think the problem of avoiding groupthink and ideological homogenization on user moderated sites is probably a really difficult problem, and I'm not at all confident you'll succeed with your current model. I think there probably have to be some good automatic feedback mechanisms to deal with it, if it's possible at all, and it probably requires a model that looks for broad consensus rather than "majority approve" or "majority disapprove".
It would probably be really interesting to the Slashdot audience to hear about the technical details of the algorithms and such that were mentioned in the interview. If the NewsTrust people are willing to talk about them, that might make for a good follow-up story.
I don't care about his assurances,... The problem is that he doesn't see the bias because its just every natural to think that way.
Um, he said, "Your point is well taken that many of the articles featured on our site tend to reflect liberal values," so it's fairly clear he does recognize it. And not only that, but he claims to be trying to deal with it. Now, I'm not at all confident that it will be able to be resolved (I actually think it's a pretty tough problem), but what you're saying doesn't seem to apply here. I admit being turned off by the appearance of, e.g., Huffington Post on the front page (because in my experience it is more partisan propaganda than news), but since the bias is recognized and they claim to be working on it, it seems to me the site it worth playing with.
I really think he has no clue as too how little trust many people put into media people anymore...
And you'd rather put your confidence in who exactly? Joe Randomblog? The infotainment gasbags of talk radio? Whatever objections one can level at establishment media seem like they go doubly for the alternatives. Try reading IndyMedia sometime, for example. Talk about bias! Journalism school/experience does at least give people some good guidelines on the ethics and methodology of good reporting. Whether they act on that advice, of course, is up to them.
Being without bias first requires knowing what you like isn't necessarily right.
And I return to a point from my question quoted in the summary, does some objective criterion for bias even exist? It seems to me people who convince themselves they're not biased are simply the most blind to their own bias. And in my experience you could replace the words "is biased" with "says stuff I don't like" in most people's statements without any loss of information. Anyway, that's why I think it's best to focus on getting the facts right and rules for fact-based reporting (e.g. attribute statements to actual people, not "some say", which is just a way to editorialize).
It's clear that some news sources are just plain bad at getting the facts correct. It's also true that many of us feel there are news sources out there that are very biased in their presentation of matters, in some cases (e.g. with state media) becoming little more than propaganda. But in talking about issues of fairness and balance isn't there a danger of getting bogged down in these more subjective matters, to the detriment of a focus on more objective things like factual accuracy?
It seems to me that any community rating system on "balance" or "fairness" runs a big risk of falling prey to groupthink. For one thing, if a majority of users favor one sort of bias, users with a minority viewpoint may feel marginalized and eventually stop contributing. I haven't seen any systematic research on the topic, but I think many of us feel we see this happen on various user-driven sites. It isn't even clear to me how one can have an objective standard for fairness or balance.
To put a fine point on it, I am part of the group that loathes Fox News (among others) for their exceeding bad news coverage. People seem to focus on the issue of bias, and this argument usually quickly devolves into a a stalemate between ideological camps, with people arguing about, for example, whether Fox News is worse than CNN. I wish people would just focus much more on all the facts they get wrong or make up: Obama's so-called "terrorist fist bump" and labeling Mark Foley as a democrat come to mind as two examples. I think most reasonable people can agree that these are simply false and constitute bad journalism, and we can agree to work against any source prone to such errors on that basis.
I thought one had to use repeaters every once and a while (every few km?) anyway in fiber optics, which AFIAK work by doing just what this is talking about avoiding, translate light into electrical signals back into light. Why is it so bad to have this conversion happen at the switch if it's already having to happen periodically anyway, and won't using this technique probably just result in more repeaters in the network? Or is it just that the process of multiplexing and de-multiplexing (if I have the term correct) is particularly slow? Can anyone with more detailed knowledge of these systems comment?
My memory is quite foggy on this point, but didn't nintendo use patents on their cartridge design to keep 3rd parties from making unauthorized games for the original NES or something? If so, then this seems to be a bit of USPTO karma.
I'm not sure about the people here, but I, for one, would rather lose a little bit of privacy than risk losing the people I care about.
You probably misunderstand the magnitude of the threat. That's not so surprising, because there's very little rational discussion of the risks involved. The short story is that the odds of someone you care about dying as a result of a terrorist attack here in the US are quite slim (e.g., even in 2001 there were something like 40,000 fatalities from traffic accidents and a little more than 3000 from terrorism in the US). For the long story you could, for example, look at this paper from the Cato Institute (normally not a fan, but this paper looks decent).
In America we like to call ourselves the land of the free and the home of the brave. The thing to understand is that these two qualities are not independent. Freedom means the existence of frightening possibilities (crime, terrorism, etc.), and so it takes some measure of courage to stand up for freedom and not opt for the comfort and simplicity of a big brother government. But anyway, I can't improve on the words of founding father Patrick Henry who said, "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"
I think the answer is that it depends on who is making the determination. I don't think many of us would have a problem with a law setting up a process that such and such group of experts in teaching and subject matter X will set the curriculum for subject matter X. That makes sense because deciding on this process is a public policy decision that law makers are ostensibly competent to make (leaving aside questions of whether they're actually competent or at what level of government the decision should be made). What is not acceptable is having law makers prescribe the content of the curriculum, because they have expertise in neither the subject matter nor education. As far as I can tell this law does not explicitly dictate content, though it's clear that the intention is to push content in a particular direction (which, again, would be opposed by any relevant experts).
Right, there's only protection from civil liability. However, the effect is to kill the civil suits that would have brought out the evidence that might have lead to criminal prosecutions. It's rather like catching a low-level mafioso and giving him immunity BEFORE he rats out his boss.
I happen to believe that companies acting in good faith to help after 9/11, and who were given assurances that they would be immune from legal sanction, should in fact be immune from legal sanction.
Under the preexisting law, "A good faith reliance on [the fact that the surveillance is legal] is a complete defense against any civil or criminal action brought under this chapter or any other law." Lawyer turned blogger Glenn Greenwald put it this way:
Telecoms already have immunity under existing FISA law where they acted pursuant to written government certification or where they prove they acted in good faith (see 18 USC 2520 (d)). There is no reason that the federal courts presiding over these cases can't simply make that determiniation, as they do in countless other cases involving classified information.
I think that only the reason they were potentially in trouble is that they were not acting on the good faith belief that what they were doing was legal.
I feel reasonable minds can disagree on matters of public policy. But to you I am a traitor?
I agree with the first part. But I think the point is that many of us feel this is an issue of fundamental liberty, the rule of law, and the basic structure of our government (the ability of congress to act as a check against the executive), so that this transcends an ordinary policy debate.
McCain didn't vote because he wasn't there. He has publicly supported telecom immunity is recent days, however, so it's safe to say he would have voted for it.
While Clinton voted against it this time, she didn't bother to show up to vote when this came up earlier this year (to vote on the bill or to help with the filibuster). It still potentially speaks well of her that she was against this, but apparently she wouldn't stand up for it when it was really politically dangerous.
As for Obama, last time around he spoke out against it and voted to against cloture (i.e., to filibuster). He didn't show up to vote on the bill itself, but it's fair to say that that vote was probably seen to be a foregone conclusion (I'd still have rather he did vote, but it was a primary election day). This time he voted for cloture (i.e., against a filibuster). He did vote for various amendments to limit or strip the immunity provisions, but they all failed, and he voted for the final bill with immunity. It was well known he was going to do this but I, for one, am still quite disappointed.
The law has always stated that the telecoms and their agents had a complete defense in any civil or criminal actions resulting from any law if the government or a law enforcement agency/officer presented the telecoms with documentation claiming their acts were legal....the current claim is that they would be but Bush classified the documents they need to prove the effect of the law which means they would be committing a felony if they defended their actions with the defenses provided by law.
Glenn Greenwald already wrote about this issue over at Salon.com. He writes, "Rockefeller's claim that telecoms can't submit exculpatory evidence to the court is flat-out false, an absolute lie. There is no other accurate way to describe his statement. Under FISA (50 USC 1806(f)), telecoms are explicitly permitted to present any evidence in support of their defenses in secret (in camera, ex parte) to the judge and let the judge decide the case based on it." So it sound like this is not much of an issues.
But, of course, even if it were an issue the proper approach would be to provide a mechanism for them to present this evidence (as Sen. Feinstein's amendment, offered to an earlier version of the bill this year, to put the issue of legality before the FISA court might have done) or at the most extreme do as Sen. Specter's amendment (again offered earlier this year) suggested and make the government the defendant on the suits. Just granting a blanket immunity is clearly an unnecessary solution to this supposed technical problem. And, as I said, Greenwald (a former lawyer) suggests this problem is already solved by current law.
This has never really been about making the telecoms pay either. It has always been about gathering evidence on the administration which sort of seems like picking on the retarded neighbor kid in order to force his parents out of the house so someone else can rob them.
First of all, it's clearly ridiculous to paint the wealthy and quite politically powerful telecom corporations as "the retarded neighbor kid". Secondly, if they knowingly participated in illegal activity violating the privacy of thousands or millions of their customers I think it is about holding them accountable. And, as you said, that's the only scenario under which the liable under the law. This is also about using this as a tool to unearth evidence to hold government officials who engaged in criminal activity responsible. Sadly, this is necessary because the Department of Justice that would usually investigate a crime is controlled by the same people who ordered the illegal activity.
Any person who thinks someone should be held accountable for this illegal activity can't rationally support full immunity. One can argue for some compromise to deal with the technical issues that might exist, but just sweeping it under the rug is not acceptable. This is a matter of protecting civil liberties. This is a matter of maintaining the rule of law, demonstrating that we do not accept Nixon's premise that when the president authorizes it it's not illegal. Finally, it is about maintaining the balance of powers between the separate branches of our government. FISA was set down by the legislative branch to counter the excesses of the executive; if the legislature now allows the executive and those who aided it to brazenly violate those laws then it undermines the balance between the two branches.
Look, my grand parents and my parents to a similar degree are from a more responsible generation. They didn't burden themselves down with so many monthlies that marketing gurus have dreamed up to separate us from our money. I can't count the number of people I know who scrape by but refuse to acknowledge how they drain their income relentlessly through monthlies. Its only $1 dollar a day! Its only 1.49 a day! Its just $100 a month.
Sheesh. These same people wonder why I can drive and own a new car when I want it. They don't understand the magic of being able to buy something I want when I want it for CASH.
Ironically, buying a new car with cash is probably not an especially practical choice. If you can pay up front, you're likely to get a much better value for your dollar buying a used car. The main thing new cars having going for them is the cheaper financing (which still may be a dubious advantage) if you're going to be taking out a loan either way.
On my Speakeasy DSL line I consistently get the rated 1.5 Mbps downstream. Upstream I don't max out as often, but I definitely get something close to the nominal 384 kbps. I've even found this to be true during the day, which surprised me a little.
In a country with over 300 million people, a more than $13 trillion dollar economy, worlds largest military, and many global interests and programs, there are simply too many important issues for the candidates to have a nuanced knowledge of all of them. Realistically, they must all rely on advisors, so I would take the views of their advisers fairly seriously. You can also get at least a sense of a candidate's general leanings, which suggests which advisors they are likely to listen to. It's also useful to look at the opinions of people who you respect on these issues that have actually talked to the candidates, e.g., Lessig's endorsement of Obama.
Now, let me add that, while a candidate must rely on advisors for detailed positions, he must know something about the issues himself, otherwise he cannot reasonably assess whose advice to take. We have in recent years seen a stark object lesson in the disastrous consequences when the decision maker really doesn't know anything at all and is simply led by whichever advisors are the loudest, most persistent, or the most clever at politicking.
The last point worth making is that the biggest problem on tech issues is that money talks. Lobbist access, fundraising, and political ads by large corporations have a tendency to drown out the public interest. I do think that on at least one of these points Obama has a clear advantage: His fundraising is based much more in small donations from ordinary people, so he is less beholden to these corporate interests and has less obligation to spend time listening to their lobbyists at fundraisers. I think this may make a bigger difference in the end than people realize.
...the bread and wine are and have always been meant as symbols, so it's not supposed to even be cannibalistic, just symbolic.
Remember just because some people are retarded doesn't mean you get to make up idiotic rituals on their behalf.
In fact, this isn't made up: Look up transubstatiation. It seems this has been an issue of some controversy among various Christian sects, but some, including, notably, the Catholic Church, believe that the bread and wine really become the body and blood of Christ in essence, though they retain their former sensory appearance.
Slashdot Mirror
Physics without functional analysis on pseudo-Riemannian manifolds is pointless. ;-)
Remember, the set of Physics problems you can solve exactly (even with Calculus and more advanced math) is pretty much always a set of measure zero (speaking figuratively, though one can consider many specific cases where this is concretely true); things like non-linearities always get in the way of a neat calculation. However, one can learn a lot about how to construct mathematical models of the world and devise useful approximations. This is a meat of Physics, and you can start to learn those things without any need of Calculus.
I read some of the linked pages. The uproar seems to be over the fact that journalists are present with or follow insurgent groups. I don't think this is atypical, nor does it indicate they're in league with those groups. AFAIK, it's standard practice for journalists to go to a war zone and try to remain neutral in the conflict, covering actions and viewpoints of both sides where possible. The point of this is to give the public the most possible information about the conflict. The journalists cannot relay information to intelligence for their side, because if they did then they would be treated as agents of that military. This would mean that their access to the people and territory of the other side would be gone, so they could not gather as much information, and it would probably make them and all other journalists into targets. It also would be a self-defeating policy, because once the trust was gone they would no longer get any useful intelligence anyway.
You could debate the wisdom of that choice of operating procedure and the underlying ethical questions, but the fact remains that there is a clear underlying rationale that has nothing to do with being in league with the enemy.
Yeah, but the "some people" who are unconvinced are those with the most knowledge and expertise. Look, I don't suppose myself to have the expertise for intelligence analysis. The work of the Office of Special Plans in the run up to the Iraq War is an object lesson in the perils of having amateurs try to analyze intelligence. Among the problems with it is that you'll get evidence of all sorts of things, most of which turn out to be false. So, I don't doubt that someone with an agenda to push can put together some scraps to make a case for all sorts of things, but to really know whether any of it is true you'd have to be able to vet it, which I am not in a position to do and probably neither are you. So bearing all that in mind, I'll probably stick with the expert's appraisal.
Well, the bipartisan 9/11 commission said, "There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda also occurred after Bin Ladin had returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship. Two senior Bin Ladin associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States." [emphasis mine] And in case you think that was just politicized or the analysis incompetent, the Washington Post reported, "In testimony before the commission, CIA and FBI officials said they agreed with the staff report's assessment of the abortive relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq. A CIA counterterrorism analyst who testified using the pseudonym Ted Davis said, 'We're in full agreement with the staff statement,' which he said did 'an excellent job' of representing the agency's current understanding of the al Qaeda-Iraq relationship." Finally, even President Bush has said, "We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the 11 September attacks." So, essentially, the President, Congress, the CIA, and the FBI don't think there was a connection.
Again, the experts disagree. As one article puts it, "In sum, by the mid-'90s, the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, the F.B.I., the U.S. Attorney's office in the Southern District of New York, the C.I.A., the N.S.C., and the State Department had all found no evidence implicating the Iraqi government in the first Trade Center attack."
Given McVeigh's ideology, this doesn't even make much sense. Also, remember, he fought against the Iraqis in the first Gulf War. Again, the investigation into the attack did not turn up such a link, and the only claims I can find for such a link are right in the run up to the most recent Iraq War (and not particularly credible).
Saint BJ? Leaving aside irrelevant comparisons to Clinton, the fact is that the Bush administration made many false and misleading statements about Iraq in the run up to war. People who want to deny that try to focus on the question of whether Iraq was a threat, but that is not what they lied about. Many governments believed there was some level of threat from Iraq, but the lies from the Bush administration came in the details and the claimed level of certainty. They presented tenuous or already discredited (within the intelligence community) claims as solid. They had reason to believe some things based upon circumstantial evidence, but in describing them they used phrases like "no doubt," which you can find in the transcripts of interviews with multiple administration officials. Given that few outside the administration had access to classified intelligence, and only the administration had the ability to release (declassify) information, there was very little way for anyone to expose these falsehoods. All the false and misleading statements are way too numerous to list, but thankfully someone has gone to the trouble to catalog them.
When a public servant is in that position of power and trust and something as important as going to war is on the line, we the people must demand honesty and cannot tolerate that sort of deception. You can have a different opinion about th
I think Joe Biden actually said it best, "Rudy Giuliani. There's only three things he mentions in a sentence -- a noun, a verb, and 9/11. There's nothing else!"
Thief! With your deft counter-argument you've clearly deprived the GP of his sense of self-assuredness. Not only that, but you've raped his self-confidence with the vile intrusion of your logic into his mind.
You know, yours started out as a seemingly somewhat insightful comment. Then you come in with lines like, "The Associated (with terrorists) Press" and you unmask yourself as totally off your rocker. It also doesn't help that almost all of your links point to what is clearly essentially a political propaganda site.
However, I don't dispute that the mainstream press makes stuff up. I don't know how you missed mentioning the Jayson Blair incident, for example. Usually people have a tendency to notice the instances that go against their ideological preconceptions and interpret this as a [insert opposing group/ideology] media bias. I think it's good to remember Hanlon's Razor, never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity...or in this case laziness and greed. The simplest explanation for the observed phenomenon is simply that journalists try to churn out as much work as possible as quickly as possible and sometimes some of them get sloppy. Unfortunately, most of the people who would like to position themselves as the alternative to mainstream media are even worse, in terms of both accuracy and bias.
I wish there were more of a backlash against inaccurate reporting, but unfortunately most people are far too constrained by ideological blinders to do anything but turn it into some partisan fight over supposed media bias. Judging by your list of sources and the absence of any of the many many examples of misconduct by Fox News, it seems you probably fall into this category as well.
Fabrice, I don't know if you'll read these comments, but thanks for your forthcoming reply to my question. I forgot to add in the text of my question that I think what you're trying to do is very important, and I wish you the best of luck. I'll certainly be playing with the site to see how things develop. That being said, I think the problem of avoiding groupthink and ideological homogenization on user moderated sites is probably a really difficult problem, and I'm not at all confident you'll succeed with your current model. I think there probably have to be some good automatic feedback mechanisms to deal with it, if it's possible at all, and it probably requires a model that looks for broad consensus rather than "majority approve" or "majority disapprove".
It would probably be really interesting to the Slashdot audience to hear about the technical details of the algorithms and such that were mentioned in the interview. If the NewsTrust people are willing to talk about them, that might make for a good follow-up story.
Um, he said, "Your point is well taken that many of the articles featured on our site tend to reflect liberal values," so it's fairly clear he does recognize it. And not only that, but he claims to be trying to deal with it. Now, I'm not at all confident that it will be able to be resolved (I actually think it's a pretty tough problem), but what you're saying doesn't seem to apply here. I admit being turned off by the appearance of, e.g., Huffington Post on the front page (because in my experience it is more partisan propaganda than news), but since the bias is recognized and they claim to be working on it, it seems to me the site it worth playing with.
And you'd rather put your confidence in who exactly? Joe Randomblog? The infotainment gasbags of talk radio? Whatever objections one can level at establishment media seem like they go doubly for the alternatives. Try reading IndyMedia sometime, for example. Talk about bias! Journalism school/experience does at least give people some good guidelines on the ethics and methodology of good reporting. Whether they act on that advice, of course, is up to them.
And I return to a point from my question quoted in the summary, does some objective criterion for bias even exist? It seems to me people who convince themselves they're not biased are simply the most blind to their own bias. And in my experience you could replace the words "is biased" with "says stuff I don't like" in most people's statements without any loss of information. Anyway, that's why I think it's best to focus on getting the facts right and rules for fact-based reporting (e.g. attribute statements to actual people, not "some say", which is just a way to editorialize).
It's clear that some news sources are just plain bad at getting the facts correct. It's also true that many of us feel there are news sources out there that are very biased in their presentation of matters, in some cases (e.g. with state media) becoming little more than propaganda. But in talking about issues of fairness and balance isn't there a danger of getting bogged down in these more subjective matters, to the detriment of a focus on more objective things like factual accuracy?
It seems to me that any community rating system on "balance" or "fairness" runs a big risk of falling prey to groupthink. For one thing, if a majority of users favor one sort of bias, users with a minority viewpoint may feel marginalized and eventually stop contributing. I haven't seen any systematic research on the topic, but I think many of us feel we see this happen on various user-driven sites. It isn't even clear to me how one can have an objective standard for fairness or balance.
To put a fine point on it, I am part of the group that loathes Fox News (among others) for their exceeding bad news coverage. People seem to focus on the issue of bias, and this argument usually quickly devolves into a a stalemate between ideological camps, with people arguing about, for example, whether Fox News is worse than CNN. I wish people would just focus much more on all the facts they get wrong or make up: Obama's so-called "terrorist fist bump" and labeling Mark Foley as a democrat come to mind as two examples. I think most reasonable people can agree that these are simply false and constitute bad journalism, and we can agree to work against any source prone to such errors on that basis.
I thought one had to use repeaters every once and a while (every few km?) anyway in fiber optics, which AFIAK work by doing just what this is talking about avoiding, translate light into electrical signals back into light. Why is it so bad to have this conversion happen at the switch if it's already having to happen periodically anyway, and won't using this technique probably just result in more repeaters in the network? Or is it just that the process of multiplexing and de-multiplexing (if I have the term correct) is particularly slow? Can anyone with more detailed knowledge of these systems comment?
My memory is quite foggy on this point, but didn't nintendo use patents on their cartridge design to keep 3rd parties from making unauthorized games for the original NES or something? If so, then this seems to be a bit of USPTO karma.
You probably misunderstand the magnitude of the threat. That's not so surprising, because there's very little rational discussion of the risks involved. The short story is that the odds of someone you care about dying as a result of a terrorist attack here in the US are quite slim (e.g., even in 2001 there were something like 40,000 fatalities from traffic accidents and a little more than 3000 from terrorism in the US). For the long story you could, for example, look at this paper from the Cato Institute (normally not a fan, but this paper looks decent).
In America we like to call ourselves the land of the free and the home of the brave. The thing to understand is that these two qualities are not independent. Freedom means the existence of frightening possibilities (crime, terrorism, etc.), and so it takes some measure of courage to stand up for freedom and not opt for the comfort and simplicity of a big brother government. But anyway, I can't improve on the words of founding father Patrick Henry who said, "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"
I think the answer is that it depends on who is making the determination. I don't think many of us would have a problem with a law setting up a process that such and such group of experts in teaching and subject matter X will set the curriculum for subject matter X. That makes sense because deciding on this process is a public policy decision that law makers are ostensibly competent to make (leaving aside questions of whether they're actually competent or at what level of government the decision should be made). What is not acceptable is having law makers prescribe the content of the curriculum, because they have expertise in neither the subject matter nor education. As far as I can tell this law does not explicitly dictate content, though it's clear that the intention is to push content in a particular direction (which, again, would be opposed by any relevant experts).
It is.
That is interesting. Source?
Right, there's only protection from civil liability. However, the effect is to kill the civil suits that would have brought out the evidence that might have lead to criminal prosecutions. It's rather like catching a low-level mafioso and giving him immunity BEFORE he rats out his boss.
Under the preexisting law, "A good faith reliance on [the fact that the surveillance is legal] is a complete defense against any civil or criminal action brought under this chapter or any other law." Lawyer turned blogger Glenn Greenwald put it this way:
I think that only the reason they were potentially in trouble is that they were not acting on the good faith belief that what they were doing was legal.
I agree with the first part. But I think the point is that many of us feel this is an issue of fundamental liberty, the rule of law, and the basic structure of our government (the ability of congress to act as a check against the executive), so that this transcends an ordinary policy debate.
Further notes:
Glenn Greenwald already wrote about this issue over at Salon.com. He writes, "Rockefeller's claim that telecoms can't submit exculpatory evidence to the court is flat-out false, an absolute lie. There is no other accurate way to describe his statement. Under FISA (50 USC 1806(f)), telecoms are explicitly permitted to present any evidence in support of their defenses in secret (in camera, ex parte) to the judge and let the judge decide the case based on it." So it sound like this is not much of an issues.
But, of course, even if it were an issue the proper approach would be to provide a mechanism for them to present this evidence (as Sen. Feinstein's amendment, offered to an earlier version of the bill this year, to put the issue of legality before the FISA court might have done) or at the most extreme do as Sen. Specter's amendment (again offered earlier this year) suggested and make the government the defendant on the suits. Just granting a blanket immunity is clearly an unnecessary solution to this supposed technical problem. And, as I said, Greenwald (a former lawyer) suggests this problem is already solved by current law.
First of all, it's clearly ridiculous to paint the wealthy and quite politically powerful telecom corporations as "the retarded neighbor kid". Secondly, if they knowingly participated in illegal activity violating the privacy of thousands or millions of their customers I think it is about holding them accountable. And, as you said, that's the only scenario under which the liable under the law. This is also about using this as a tool to unearth evidence to hold government officials who engaged in criminal activity responsible. Sadly, this is necessary because the Department of Justice that would usually investigate a crime is controlled by the same people who ordered the illegal activity.
Any person who thinks someone should be held accountable for this illegal activity can't rationally support full immunity. One can argue for some compromise to deal with the technical issues that might exist, but just sweeping it under the rug is not acceptable. This is a matter of protecting civil liberties. This is a matter of maintaining the rule of law, demonstrating that we do not accept Nixon's premise that when the president authorizes it it's not illegal. Finally, it is about maintaining the balance of powers between the separate branches of our government. FISA was set down by the legislative branch to counter the excesses of the executive; if the legislature now allows the executive and those who aided it to brazenly violate those laws then it undermines the balance between the two branches.
Ironically, buying a new car with cash is probably not an especially practical choice. If you can pay up front, you're likely to get a much better value for your dollar buying a used car. The main thing new cars having going for them is the cheaper financing (which still may be a dubious advantage) if you're going to be taking out a loan either way.
Oh really? Because O'Reill seems to think it is, and I thought he was the main pusher of this terminology. Is the term Web 2.0 actually meaningful?
On my Speakeasy DSL line I consistently get the rated 1.5 Mbps downstream. Upstream I don't max out as often, but I definitely get something close to the nominal 384 kbps. I've even found this to be true during the day, which surprised me a little.
In a country with over 300 million people, a more than $13 trillion dollar economy, worlds largest military, and many global interests and programs, there are simply too many important issues for the candidates to have a nuanced knowledge of all of them. Realistically, they must all rely on advisors, so I would take the views of their advisers fairly seriously. You can also get at least a sense of a candidate's general leanings, which suggests which advisors they are likely to listen to. It's also useful to look at the opinions of people who you respect on these issues that have actually talked to the candidates, e.g., Lessig's endorsement of Obama.
Now, let me add that, while a candidate must rely on advisors for detailed positions, he must know something about the issues himself, otherwise he cannot reasonably assess whose advice to take. We have in recent years seen a stark object lesson in the disastrous consequences when the decision maker really doesn't know anything at all and is simply led by whichever advisors are the loudest, most persistent, or the most clever at politicking.
The last point worth making is that the biggest problem on tech issues is that money talks. Lobbist access, fundraising, and political ads by large corporations have a tendency to drown out the public interest. I do think that on at least one of these points Obama has a clear advantage: His fundraising is based much more in small donations from ordinary people, so he is less beholden to these corporate interests and has less obligation to spend time listening to their lobbyists at fundraisers. I think this may make a bigger difference in the end than people realize.
In fact, this isn't made up: Look up transubstatiation. It seems this has been an issue of some controversy among various Christian sects, but some, including, notably, the Catholic Church, believe that the bread and wine really become the body and blood of Christ in essence, though they retain their former sensory appearance.