I personally think this deserves punishment, regardless of whose email account he happened to crack. It doesn't matter if it was the Republican nominee for VP or Joe Six-Pack's, and it doesn't matter what portentous revelations came of it.
If Palin was using a Yahoo! account for state business (as seems the case), and if Alaska law mandates that e-mail records of state business be public (as seems the case), then in fact no unauthorized access occurred - the information in question was public, under the law, and the criminal act here was Palin's in attempting to conceal it.
According to a lawsuit brought by a self-described "Republican watchdog", it is. "McLeod's lawsuit says state laws are clear: Palin and her staff are obligated to use a state-sponsored e-mail address to conduct state business that would properly preserve and protect public records."
Merely being aware enough to question whether or not you are really thinking is sufficient to establish that you are. Only an entity with self-awareness and the ability to think can ask that question.
You miss the point. I know that I am aware enough to question whether or not I am really thinking, because I have access to my own internal mental states. (That's actually skipping over quite a few questions about what "I" am, but let's move on.)
I have no evidence other than your physical actions in the world and your verbal output as to whether you are thinking. I can't see your physical actions, and I presume we agree that a human being deprived of the ability to move is still a thinking being, so verbal output is a sufficient condition.
So if a computer can provide the same sort of verbal output as a human being, we must either 1) conclude that it is a thinking being, 2) conclude that your verbal output is not sufficient evidence to know that you are a thinking being, or 3) engage in rank speciesism and arbitrarily define "thinking" as something that only human beings (and maybe, if we are generous, other meat-based computers) can do.
However, I don't at all think that a five minute test, as being described here, is adequate to say that a computer can provide the same sort of verbal output as a human being. And the transcript from "Ultra Hal" in TFA looked like little more than a smarter ELIZA plussome random typos thrown in to look more human.
Instead, any legislation against spammers will be at the federal level, and thus ineffective against those overseas.
Overseas spammers can only profit from spamming Americans if Americans buy their products.
Americans buying products from overseas is international commerce. One of the legitimate enumerated powers of the federal government is "To regulate commerce with foreign nations".
A "no commerce with spammers" law would be well within the powers of the federal government.
It embodies what is the worst about today's politics. You make the choices that get you elected, not the choices that are best for the country.
It's hardly a modern phenonemon, and certainly Obama has done a bit of it too. But the choice of Palin is particularly egregious.
Palin doesn't indicate McCain's judgement about who he thinks should take over when he dies. Palin is who the party advisors thought would be most likely to get him elected.
Doesn't matter. Palin is who McCain - not the party advisors, but McCain - picked to be a heartbeat away. If he knew how incompetent she is and chose her as a sop to the ignorati that constitute the Republican base, he chose to put politics over country, and therefore proves himself unworthy of election to the Presidency; if he chose her because he thought her competent, he proves his lack of judgment, and therefore proves himself unworthy of the office.
Honestly, I think we'll be ok with either Obama or McCain. The real scary part of this election is Palin.
But Palin was McCain's choice. She illustrates his judgment, or rather lack thereof; we would not be ok with the sort of president who chooses Palin for a running mate.
Sadly, when you look to countries which have more workable multi-party systems you often see far more political instability. Look at Japan, many European countries and so on - weak coalitions that are easily toppled as political allegiances change.
Conditions change and the government gets altered. That sounds like a system that's working. It's not "instable", it's not like the government collapses; it's fluid, it changes smoothly.
I have always thought that Black Holes are "leftover" from the Big Bang (well some of them anyway).
These would be "primordial black holes". AFAIK there's no hard evidence that they do - or don't - exist, as yet. (Of course it's not like stellar remnant black holes are totally proven either.)
according to environmental group ACEEE.org, an EV1 car is no more clean than a Prius or Civic Hybrid.
Citation needed. The EV1 was last produced in 1999. The Civic Hybrid was introduced in
2003; the Prius, while introduced in Japan in 1997, didn't get released to the world until 2001. So at the very least, any such comparison could not be between cars of the same model year using the same-generation technologies.
Might there exist, in large black holes, ones with atomic numbers in the thousands?
IANAA (I am not an astrophysicist) but IIRC before a collapsing star gets to the black hole stage it would (however briefly) go through a point where gravity was sufficient to collapse atoms - a neutron star. So I don't think there are any atoms in such a black hole. (Of course, that's theory, no one has made the observation to check!)
However, not all black holes from from stellar collapse. I have no idea what the theory says about what the super-massive black hole at the galaxy's center might be made of.
Because a lie caused lots of people to lose money on Apple stock.
So? They gambled, they lost. Tough tittie. Sometimes some stocks go up, sometime some go down; sometimes that movement is based on sound reasons, sometimes it's on rumors.
You don't have some right to win in the stock market any more than you have a right to win at the craps table.
Yes. and the end result of this anti-intellectualism is an inability
to back up your own data or keep your computer safe from malware.
The poster mentioned "fixing up [his] house" as an alternate activity with more value. How many "computer geeks" out there who fault people who don't know basic computer operations, don't know how to sweat copper pipe, or replace a light fixture and so don't have the skills to maintain their home?
How many "computer geeks" out there who complain about users who lack basic knowledge of their PCs, can't change their car's oil? How many can, but say "I have other, more interesting things to spend my time doing"?
I doubt (but could be wrong) that there is anything inherently better about Linux that makes it more immune to malware...?
Yes, Linux's design is more secure than Windows, at least through XP. (I exclude Vista only because I don't know much about it, not because I believe it secure.)
If you look above you can see polls done by a variety of non-partisan agencies, uniformly showing a perceived liberal bias.
Because people have been told for almost forty years that there is one. The big lie technique works; the polls you link to show that.
The question is not, "Do many people believe that a liberal bias exists"? The question is, "Does a liberal bias exist?"
Asking whether people believe there is a bias is like asking whether people believe in god(s); it says nothing about the actual reality of the entity under consideration.
Using studies and reports from one a single admittedly "progressive" media watchdog organization does not really do too much to strengthen you case.
If you have other studies that address this question - studies that look at the politcial orientations of journalists, and that look at whether they get their information from sources aligned with labor or with capital - please, present them. The ones you link to show only that the myth of "liberal media" is widely believed, not that it is accurate.
The problem isn't who is being asked questions or giving the reporters the answers. It is the over tones of the reporting from the reporters themselves.
But what you describe has nothing to do with left/right bias. It's all about - as you say - creating controversy and selling papers.
They rolled over on it because for the previous 10 to 15 years, the exact same saber rattling stuff had been said but the previous administration and administration officials. I suspect you were too busy popping zits and chasing Suzie Shallowthroat around to have been paying attention.
Excuse me, sonny, but I marched against the first Gulf War. (I'm not saying I did a lot, that I was some great activist. But I was there.) The Congressional fsck-up that authorized it occurred on my 21st birthday. By the time Clinton came along, my zits were pretty much cleared up.
And I watched with dismay (and did a little minor activism) as Clinton pulled the Democratic party to the right and into an aggressive, brutal, and stupid foreign policy in the GOP mode. (It's not just on economic issues that "Bill Clinton was the best Republican president we've had in a while.")
The real opposition to the invasion didn't start becoming apparent until after it.
Bullshit. Millions of people demonstrated against W's war before the invasion. I was one of them. (Again, I'm not saying I did a lot. But I was there, and probably got my name on a list somewhere when I organized an anti-war poetry reading and sent recordings of it to Baltimore's congresscritters.)
Coverage of the pre-invasion protests in the corporate media: diddly-squat.
Don't even TRY to tell me I wasn't paying attention, when you apparently didn't even know that there was a significant anti-war movement until after the invasion.
And why didn't you know? Because the conservative MSM was totally on board with the war.
That ultrasocialist view of natural resources completely and totally ignores the economic problem of scarcity.
The point is that the problem of "scarcity" is to some degree - a large degree - a human construction. We've chosen political and economic structures with vast inequities, and we've chosen to expand our population past the sustainable carrying capacity of the planet.
Noone studies or plays music when they have to spend all of their time trying to find food, clean water, and so on.
In hunter-gatherer cultures, people typically worked fewer hours than they do in farming and industrial ones. We were making flutes 40,000 years ago; people were making music long before the Industrial, or even Paleolithic, Revolutions.
Your argument here shows me you have not studied natural sciences or economics.
I didn't make an argument in my previous post, just pointed out some facts. Food literally does grow on trees. So does wood, a great material for making shelter and for fueling fires. Water falls from the sky. The planet has incredible bounty.
And yet every poll shows that more and more people see a very liberal bias in the media
When you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes widely believed.
The far right has been spreading this "liberal media" bullshit since the late 1960s, as an excuse for Nixon's problems.
Mainstream media is owned by large corporations. It is unabashedly capitalist. Its journalists are center to right on economic issues, and go to business leaders for their information - almost never do we hear from labor leaders or from consumer advocates in the mainstream press.
The corporate media is firmly on the right.
On foreign policy, the way the MSM rolled over during the Iraq invasion shows that again, they go with the conservatives, loving that aggressive and militaristic policy. War makes good stories, you know?
However, mainstream media is based in cities, and journalism is (or at least used to be) practiced largely by educated professionals. Its perspective is therefore more cosmopolitan, and less likely to follow the stream of ignorance and bigotry that constitutes most of "social conservatism" - the homophobia, the racism, the sexism, the preference for superstition over science. So if you're a social conservative, you see the media as biased against you.
Well I'd rather be convinced that cheaper medicine is better or the same as expensive medicine:).
The problem is that convincing "you" - your conscious mind, the voice in your head - isn't enough. You have to convince the deeper layers of the nervous system.
The liberal is only liberal and accepting of other liberals, they will not recognize the conservative's right to their ideals and will fight in a court of law to enforce their ideals.
To be a social liberal, one must accept social conservatives' right to hold and express their their ideas, however stupid. The ACLU stands up for the free speech rights of even those on the far far right, neo-Nazis and the KKK.
Being a social liberal does not, however, mean refraining from exercising your own free speech rights to tell these people that they are full of shit.
Social conservatives, on the other hand, advocate inequality under the law for people whose opinions or actions they find distasteful. In their eyes, those who believe in and practice "traditional values" should be granted special legal rights.
Sounds to me like exactly what you don't want to do(unless you like yeast infections and other such STIs)
As a regular method of birth control? No. As an emergency contraceptive? Risking a yeast infection might well be worth it to reduce the risk of pregnancy after a rape, a condom failure, or a momentary bit of stupidity.
Same way governments get money for anything else: taxes.
I know those on the far right like to believe that somehow if we keep cutting taxes we'll raise government revenue - sort of like how internet bubble entrepreneurs would lose money on every sale, but make it up in volume. But it doesn't work that way.
Now, later, maybe some of that expense can be made up with lawsuits against the companies that provided the defective voting machines. And maybe money will have to be moved out of other expenditures to balance the books. But right now, in the next month New Jersey must take on this expense of replacing those defective machines; hand-counted paper ballots are the cheapest way to do so.
The Constitution guarantees each state a republican (small-r!) form of government; accurate balloting is a necessary precondition for that. If necessary, then, the federal government must provide emergency funding (probably in the form of a loan).
Reliable voting is not an option, it is a necessity. The money can be raised.
to 1) print all the ballots, on machines we don;t have to print them on
What, the state government doesn't have fscking laser printers? Or couldn't get a rush order done at a commercial printer? C'mon.
and get them to all the polling centers.
What, the state government doesn't have fscking cars and trucks? Or couldn't get FedEx to do the deliveries? C'mon.
Then, we'd have to manually recount all those ballots, twice.
So? Canada does it; if a nation of 33 million can do it, a state of 8 1/2 million can too.
Of course, all this is what what happen in a sane and democratic society. In our crazy corporate plutocracy, I expect that New Jersey will somehow end up giving more money to the vendors and will go ahead and conduct a meaningless, unreliable election.
Much easier if we know the machines faults, can take the elction on existing equipment, then cross check the machine's security
Cross-check them against what? If we had verifiable receipts to validate the machines against, there wouldn't be a problem in the first place.
Besides, there's not enough certified election officials to handle it, and we could not get enough volunteers in time trained and ready to handle the counting.
Nonsense. Counting ballots hardly requires extensive training. Hire a bunch of teenagers at a bit above minimum wage. Or, does NJ have a "volunteer" hour requirement for high school students? I'm opposed to them, but if it's in place, this would be a great opportunity for the kids to burn that off.
These machines are not centrally networked, so to have en effect on even 5% of the election total, someone would have to hacke dozens of machines each at hundreds of polling sites.
Corporations seek environments where they can generate the most profit. Get over it.
Corporations are not a natural phenomenon; it's not like continental drift, something that we just have to accept. They are created by acts of government.
If the government is creating entities that engage in a "race to the bottom" in terms of exploitation of people and the environment, that's not something we need to "get over", that's something we need to change the government in order to prevent. Corporations should only be allowed to exist if and only if their existence is of long term benefit to the public, not just the short-term interest of the current stockholders.
anyone has problems since yesterday with the layout? the tagging words appear too close to the read more links on firefox 3.
Yes, the tagging looks like crap to me too.
More on-topic, it would be great if you explained a little bit about the difference between a system administrator and a software developer, let the kids know there are many different sorts of jobs in the computer field .
He's playing on the right team here. It's far too late to fix it, we have to ride this election through.
Nonsense. It's far to important to "ride it through". Decertify the machines, print a bunch of paper ballots, and hire a bunch of people to count them. Expensive? Yes. Worth it? If accurate elections aren't worth spending government money on, nothing is.
Slashdot Mirror
If Palin was using a Yahoo! account for state business (as seems the case), and if Alaska law mandates that e-mail records of state business be public (as seems the case), then in fact no unauthorized access occurred - the information in question was public, under the law, and the criminal act here was Palin's in attempting to conceal it.
According to a lawsuit brought by a self-described "Republican watchdog", it is. "McLeod's lawsuit says state laws are clear: Palin and her staff are obligated to use a state-sponsored e-mail address to conduct state business that would properly preserve and protect public records."
You miss the point. I know that I am aware enough to question whether or not I am really thinking, because I have access to my own internal mental states. (That's actually skipping over quite a few questions about what "I" am, but let's move on.)
I have no evidence other than your physical actions in the world and your verbal output as to whether you are thinking. I can't see your physical actions, and I presume we agree that a human being deprived of the ability to move is still a thinking being, so verbal output is a sufficient condition.
So if a computer can provide the same sort of verbal output as a human being, we must either 1) conclude that it is a thinking being, 2) conclude that your verbal output is not sufficient evidence to know that you are a thinking being, or 3) engage in rank speciesism and arbitrarily define "thinking" as something that only human beings (and maybe, if we are generous, other meat-based computers) can do.
However, I don't at all think that a five minute test, as being described here, is adequate to say that a computer can provide the same sort of verbal output as a human being. And the transcript from "Ultra Hal" in TFA looked like little more than a smarter ELIZA plussome random typos thrown in to look more human.
Overseas spammers can only profit from spamming Americans if Americans buy their products.
Americans buying products from overseas is international commerce. One of the legitimate enumerated powers of the federal government is "To regulate commerce with foreign nations".
A "no commerce with spammers" law would be well within the powers of the federal government.
It's hardly a modern phenonemon, and certainly Obama has done a bit of it too. But the choice of Palin is particularly egregious.
Doesn't matter. Palin is who McCain - not the party advisors, but McCain - picked to be a heartbeat away. If he knew how incompetent she is and chose her as a sop to the ignorati that constitute the Republican base, he chose to put politics over country, and therefore proves himself unworthy of election to the Presidency; if he chose her because he thought her competent, he proves his lack of judgment, and therefore proves himself unworthy of the office.
But Palin was McCain's choice. She illustrates his judgment, or rather lack thereof; we would not be ok with the sort of president who chooses Palin for a running mate.
Conditions change and the government gets altered. That sounds like a system that's working. It's not "instable", it's not like the government collapses; it's fluid, it changes smoothly.
These would be "primordial black holes". AFAIK there's no hard evidence that they do - or don't - exist, as yet. (Of course it's not like stellar remnant black holes are totally proven either.)
Citation needed. The EV1 was last produced in 1999. The Civic Hybrid was introduced in 2003; the Prius, while introduced in Japan in 1997, didn't get released to the world until 2001. So at the very least, any such comparison could not be between cars of the same model year using the same-generation technologies.
ACEEE's 1999 ratings put electric vehicles in 6 of the top 7 slots (a CNG Civic is 4th), with the GM EV-1 in first with a score of 57. The Prius isn't on the list, probably since it was not available in the U.S.
IANAA (I am not an astrophysicist) but IIRC before a collapsing star gets to the black hole stage it would (however briefly) go through a point where gravity was sufficient to collapse atoms - a neutron star. So I don't think there are any atoms in such a black hole. (Of course, that's theory, no one has made the observation to check!)
However, not all black holes from from stellar collapse. I have no idea what the theory says about what the super-massive black hole at the galaxy's center might be made of.
So? They gambled, they lost. Tough tittie. Sometimes some stocks go up, sometime some go down; sometimes that movement is based on sound reasons, sometimes it's on rumors.
You don't have some right to win in the stock market any more than you have a right to win at the craps table.
The poster mentioned "fixing up [his] house" as an alternate activity with more value. How many "computer geeks" out there who fault people who don't know basic computer operations, don't know how to sweat copper pipe, or replace a light fixture and so don't have the skills to maintain their home?
How many "computer geeks" out there who complain about users who lack basic knowledge of their PCs, can't change their car's oil? How many can, but say "I have other, more interesting things to spend my time doing"?
Yes, Linux's design is more secure than Windows, at least through XP. (I exclude Vista only because I don't know much about it, not because I believe it secure.)
See here and here and here for more information.
Because people have been told for almost forty years that there is one. The big lie technique works; the polls you link to show that.
The question is not, "Do many people believe that a liberal bias exists"? The question is, "Does a liberal bias exist?"
Asking whether people believe there is a bias is like asking whether people believe in god(s); it says nothing about the actual reality of the entity under consideration.
If you have other studies that address this question - studies that look at the politcial orientations of journalists, and that look at whether they get their information from sources aligned with labor or with capital - please, present them. The ones you link to show only that the myth of "liberal media" is widely believed, not that it is accurate.
But what you describe has nothing to do with left/right bias. It's all about - as you say - creating controversy and selling papers.
Excuse me, sonny, but I marched against the first Gulf War. (I'm not saying I did a lot, that I was some great activist. But I was there.) The Congressional fsck-up that authorized it occurred on my 21st birthday. By the time Clinton came along, my zits were pretty much cleared up.
And I watched with dismay (and did a little minor activism) as Clinton pulled the Democratic party to the right and into an aggressive, brutal, and stupid foreign policy in the GOP mode. (It's not just on economic issues that "Bill Clinton was the best Republican president we've had in a while.")
Bullshit. Millions of people demonstrated against W's war before the invasion. I was one of them. (Again, I'm not saying I did a lot. But I was there, and probably got my name on a list somewhere when I organized an anti-war poetry reading and sent recordings of it to Baltimore's congresscritters.)
Coverage of the pre-invasion protests in the corporate media: diddly-squat.
Don't even TRY to tell me I wasn't paying attention, when you apparently didn't even know that there was a significant anti-war movement until after the invasion.
And why didn't you know? Because the conservative MSM was totally on board with the war.
The point is that the problem of "scarcity" is to some degree - a large degree - a human construction. We've chosen political and economic structures with vast inequities, and we've chosen to expand our population past the sustainable carrying capacity of the planet.
In hunter-gatherer cultures, people typically worked fewer hours than they do in farming and industrial ones. We were making flutes 40,000 years ago; people were making music long before the Industrial, or even Paleolithic, Revolutions.
I didn't make an argument in my previous post, just pointed out some facts. Food literally does grow on trees. So does wood, a great material for making shelter and for fueling fires. Water falls from the sky. The planet has incredible bounty.
When you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes widely believed.
The far right has been spreading this "liberal media" bullshit since the late 1960s, as an excuse for Nixon's problems.
Mainstream media is owned by large corporations. It is unabashedly capitalist. Its journalists are center to right on economic issues, and go to business leaders for their information - almost never do we hear from labor leaders or from consumer advocates in the mainstream press.
The corporate media is firmly on the right.
On foreign policy, the way the MSM rolled over during the Iraq invasion shows that again, they go with the conservatives, loving that aggressive and militaristic policy. War makes good stories, you know?
However, mainstream media is based in cities, and journalism is (or at least used to be) practiced largely by educated professionals. Its perspective is therefore more cosmopolitan, and less likely to follow the stream of ignorance and bigotry that constitutes most of "social conservatism" - the homophobia, the racism, the sexism, the preference for superstition over science. So if you're a social conservative, you see the media as biased against you.
Of course, if you're a conservative, you see reality as biased against you. Sorry.
The problem is that convincing "you" - your conscious mind, the voice in your head - isn't enough. You have to convince the deeper layers of the nervous system.
To be a social liberal, one must accept social conservatives' right to hold and express their their ideas, however stupid. The ACLU stands up for the free speech rights of even those on the far far right, neo-Nazis and the KKK.
Being a social liberal does not, however, mean refraining from exercising your own free speech rights to tell these people that they are full of shit.
Social conservatives, on the other hand, advocate inequality under the law for people whose opinions or actions they find distasteful. In their eyes, those who believe in and practice "traditional values" should be granted special legal rights.
As a regular method of birth control? No. As an emergency contraceptive? Risking a yeast infection might well be worth it to reduce the risk of pregnancy after a rape, a condom failure, or a momentary bit of stupidity.
That movie does not exist! My fingers are in my ears, I can't hear you! LA LA LA LA LA!
I don't recall any law of eights in David Brin's excellent novel The Postman.
Same way governments get money for anything else: taxes.
I know those on the far right like to believe that somehow if we keep cutting taxes we'll raise government revenue - sort of like how internet bubble entrepreneurs would lose money on every sale, but make it up in volume. But it doesn't work that way.
Now, later, maybe some of that expense can be made up with lawsuits against the companies that provided the defective voting machines. And maybe money will have to be moved out of other expenditures to balance the books. But right now, in the next month New Jersey must take on this expense of replacing those defective machines; hand-counted paper ballots are the cheapest way to do so.
The Constitution guarantees each state a republican (small-r!) form of government; accurate balloting is a necessary precondition for that. If necessary, then, the federal government must provide emergency funding (probably in the form of a loan).
Reliable voting is not an option, it is a necessity. The money can be raised.
What, the state government doesn't have fscking laser printers? Or couldn't get a rush order done at a commercial printer? C'mon.
What, the state government doesn't have fscking cars and trucks? Or couldn't get FedEx to do the deliveries? C'mon.
So? Canada does it; if a nation of 33 million can do it, a state of 8 1/2 million can too.
Of course, all this is what what happen in a sane and democratic society. In our crazy corporate plutocracy, I expect that New Jersey will somehow end up giving more money to the vendors and will go ahead and conduct a meaningless, unreliable election.
Cross-check them against what? If we had verifiable receipts to validate the machines against, there wouldn't be a problem in the first place.
Nonsense. Counting ballots hardly requires extensive training. Hire a bunch of teenagers at a bit above minimum wage. Or, does NJ have a "volunteer" hour requirement for high school students? I'm opposed to them, but if it's in place, this would be a great opportunity for the kids to burn that off.
The problem is not, or at least not just, "hackers" messing with these machines. The problem is that they are broken when they leave the factory, as New Jersey's past experience with them shows.
Corporations are not a natural phenomenon; it's not like continental drift, something that we just have to accept. They are created by acts of government.
If the government is creating entities that engage in a "race to the bottom" in terms of exploitation of people and the environment, that's not something we need to "get over", that's something we need to change the government in order to prevent. Corporations should only be allowed to exist if and only if their existence is of long term benefit to the public, not just the short-term interest of the current stockholders.
Yes, the tagging looks like crap to me too.
More on-topic, it would be great if you explained a little bit about the difference between a system administrator and a software developer, let the kids know there are many different sorts of jobs in the computer field .
Nonsense. It's far to important to "ride it through". Decertify the machines, print a bunch of paper ballots, and hire a bunch of people to count them. Expensive? Yes. Worth it? If accurate elections aren't worth spending government money on, nothing is.