Well judging by the lack of comments here and my own lack of knowledge he wasn't that well known among scifi geeks either.
Looking at his work he might have simply been a outside the main part of the genre, he obviously had some very major successes but never won any Hugos or Nebulas which tend to be fairly common among the top SF authors. He did good work but ended up in a small niche.
Actually I'm trolling. I'm trying to get some members of the biologic research community to do a little self-examination. I don't know much about the subject, but here is what I do know (now that I have been pushed into articulating it):
1. We are doing more biological research with what are basically 19th century approaches involving the death, pain, and mutilation of animals than we need to be doing. We do not know how much more (which is covered in greater detail in point 3)
I'd really like you to back up that "19th century approaches" claim.
2. To do this, we are training grad students, lab techs, and sometimes undergrads who need a biology credit in the intensive use of the ego defense mechanisms of "clinical objectivity" or "clinical detachment." Which is also the conscious suppression of normal human empathy. There is little to no screening done beforehand to determine if these persons have the emotional maturity and self-insight to limit the use of these mechanisms to the biology lab. There is no follow-up of these individuals; not even the ones who are given their walking papers because they are too unbalanced to do the work properly. Yet the clinical detachment that is needed to handle lab animals creates serious problems when it is used inappropriately in relationships, with children, in an office setting, among colleagues, etc.
You obviously shouldn't get emotionally attached to lab animals for a variety of reasons (not all bad ones). But people are good at compartmentalizing. As for your accusations about clinical detachment do you have any evidence for these claims?
3. No one in the biology research field is even seeing this as a problem. Despite the mass murders of the last few years, where the mechanisms of "clinical detachment" are taken to the pathological extreme. There is no discussion of whether it is time to start limiting training in these techniques, no discussion about how to reduce the number of individuals affected, there is not even an attempt to determine the scope of the problem. The closest is the USDA figures on the number of selected lab animals in active use in the USA: that is 1.3 million. But it excludes rats and mice and animals being bred for scientific use but not yet put to that use. The number of lab animals that lab techs and grad students are exposed to in this country has been estimated at between 10 and 50 million. But even with the 1.3 million figure, that is a large pool of persons being trained in the skills of clinical objectivity (with nothing being done to assure that they are capable of appropriately using those skills, or prevented from maybe obtaining a fully automatic rifle if they are not capable of policing their own psyches).
What seems to be necessary is to push the individuals in the biology research community into confronting the absurdity of their rationales and deliberate blindnesses, and get them looking for ways to move the research animal labs out of the 19th century and into the 21st century. Agitating for laws that would enforce limits upon the research communities seems to be necessary, just to get their attention.
Whether such laws are needed is a topic that is open for discussion. That the research community must be pushed into doing a scientific study on the effects of its practices on the psyches of its minions is definitely necessary.
Again all you've done is speculate, you've shown absolutely no evidence for psychological damage among researchers, you haven't even found an anecdote of some spree shooter being a biologist. People can eat meat without being sociopaths, they can look at cows in a field without being sociopaths, why are you assuming they can't deal with lab animals and avoid emotional attachment without incurring a mental illness?
Don't you know? As part of a collective you can steal from the rest and give yourself a nice subsidy. You can force an obligation upon the rest of the people and give yourself a nice entitlement.
That's what 'civil rights' are there is no such thing, there are only individual rights.
There are no 'women rights', there are no 'gay rights', there are no 'children rights', there are no 'minority rights', there are no 'disabled rights', there are no 'worker rights', etc.etc.
There are only individual rights and when some group (any group) is given what the modern collectivist state likes to call 'civil right' what it actually does it puts an obligation upon some people to provide entitlements to some group. This is the exact opposite of the meaning of the concept of 'right'.
A right is only a meaningful concept in the context of a relationship between an individual and the State, not 2 individuals, not an individual and a business. A right is limitation of authority of the collective to destroy rights of an individual.
'Civil right' is the exact opposite of an actual right, 'civil right' relies on destruction of actual real individual rights, it's Orwellian doublespeak.
No right is absolute, rights are an emergent property of our society, they're something we agreed on to help each other get along.
Individual rights are the most basic and the most important of these, but they' re not the only ones. Civil rights are an important infringement on individual rights if we want to live in a civil society. The loss of individual liberty suffered from a civil right is minimal (you can't fire that guy because he's gay), but the amount of welfare gained is huge (the gay guy doesn't have to lie).
And that is a strange phrase. I cannot think of any research that helps the survival of either Humans or Chimps.
My reading is that most of the research on chimps is either some kind of basic research or direct efforts to improve human health. This is the research this rule would eliminate.
But if some disease starts wiping out wild chimpanzee populations the researchers are still allowed to experiment on them to save other chimps.
WRT using chimps in testing, that is now so bogus. The automobile has replaced the horse and buggy and freed horses for their rightful place as pampered pets (there are now more horses in the USA than there were in 1899-- hoowoodathunkit?) The MRI and computer simulations are now replacing the old fashioned use of chimps in the laboratory. There is no question that sooner or later the nasty old ways of doing biological research are going to become history, just like the horse and buggy, replaced by technology that can do the job faster, better, and without exploiting some other species. The only question is when do we pass the laws that will force today's buggy whip manufacturers to find some better source of employment?
This will cause a shake-up in the research and development industry, as the employment opportunities of persons who have spent their careers developing skills in carving up the brains of primates will be out of work and unemployable. Along with a host of other specialists in supporting roles. A lot of these people are quite likely incapable of finding other work. It requires a certain kind of blockage of normal human empathy to slice and dice a chimpanzee, and without that a lot of job opportunities will be closed to these individuals with their self-inflicted damage to their psyches.
I don't know much about the people doing research on chimps (though found it fascinating that you couldn't resist essentially calling them sociopaths) but I do a little computational neuroscience. MRI has some serious limitations, and our simulations aren't anywhere close to replacing the need for live subjects and they probably won't be until we're post-singularity.
If you want to argue that the science isn't worth the cost then make that argument, but don't claim the same science can be done without the cost.
I'm sure a lot of pirated dev kits are floating around already, as for the source code, who cares? Another game company isn't going to go near it, I guess in the worst case if everything is there a bunch of devs could get together, strip out all the drm, and release a really good pirated version, but I just don't see this being a big risk for the game companies.
Oh yeah,
Recently, Kotaku reported that SuperDaE, a 17 year-old minor, was facing an array of eight legal charges, including "possession of cannabis and drug paraphernalia", "possession of a prohibited weapon", "possession of identification material with intent to commit an offence", and "possessing and copying an indecent or obscene article, possession of child exploitation material".
So an Australian, being charged by Australian police for crimes that have nothing to do with computers, apparently thinks a bunch of American and Japanese game companies can protect him if he blackmails them?
What exactly does it help if the world does know his name?
I guess the NSA already knew his name, and he figured that he'd be safer if the public knows it, too. If a person with a name nobody has ever heard of disappears somewhere in Hong Kong, nobody will care too much. If the person who is known to have leaked the NSA documents disappears, it might make the media notice.
I don't see why he'd get disappeared, it doesn't matter how ruthless the NSA is killing him has no upside. If anyone ever found out it would be a major black eye for the NSA, and it can't be a deterrent since nobody knows they got him! It would be brutal optics since all the outside world would see is that the leaker got away!
Best case for them is to catch him, discredit him, and put him in jail for a long time as a warning to anyone else.
If they got close Edward Snowden outting himself is a brilliant more, he has the first chance to write the narrative and take the moral highground.
He's just gone from a hidden figure being hunted by law enforcement to a concerned citizen giving public interviews and ready to face the music, he's framing the discussion as a political one instead of a criminal one. He's made it a lot harder politically for the Feds to throw the book at him.
Has anyone actually ever used the functionality? I haven't and I can't see myself changing. It could be they removed it with some malicious intent, or it could be someone said 'why are we supporting feature X that no body ever uses'. If I posted a lot I could see myself downloading an archive and doing some analysis of the content for fun, but for the most part the only people I see wanting an archive is people who use it as a micro-blogging service. On principal I like the idea of having it, I'm just curious if anyone here has ever used it.
So, let me get this straight. He didn't surreptitiously gain access to any area any random member of the public wouldn't have access to. He didn't plant any recording device to record in his absence. He stood outside a door and with a cel phone recorded what any passerby would have heard had they stopped to listen. Is that correct?
That doesn't even sound particularly unethical to me. A bit sleazy, but then if McConnell's careless enough to have that kind of discussion where anyone in the hallway can overhear the problem doesn't lie with the people in the hallway listening.
I think this is where the phrase 'reasonable expectation of privacy' comes into play. If I'm behind a closed door in my campaign HQ I think I have a reasonable expectation of privacy, I could do more, but most people would think me paranoid.
Now we usually think of bugging as recording something we can't hear ourselves, either because we can't be in the right location (ie planting a bug), or our hearing isn't sensitive enough (ie a parabolic mike), so ethically I don't think this is bugging. But the fact he recorded it makes it worse than eavesdropping, and as political dirty tricks go I'm comfortable with it being prosecuted.
I agree on that it would be nice with more philosophical dilemmas. However, do give the Hartnell years a go, he was wonderful; just imagine a grumpy, absentminded, xenophobic doctor that mainly wants to show his granddaughter the universe at all points in time:)
And yes, I agree on Star Trek, it has gone too much mission-of-the-week rather than mystery-of-the-week, and all of the missions are with cameras that are handled like they would explode if they were stationary for more than five seconds... Sad that one basically had to get rid of what made SciFi good in order to make it popular
I think the mistake with Star Trek was going to movies. In a series you can go philosophical but it's going to be a bit hit and miss (one of the reasons the old Star Trek movies had such a reputation for inconsistency) but you can lock into a core audience. With a movie you only get one shot so if you have the money and a built in audience it's a safer bet to just make an action flick.
For Doctor Who I do really like the idea of an old doctor. It seems all the current versions of brilliant eccentrics have some form of ADD, all the Sherlock Holmes versions (incl. House), and all the doctors getting more energetic as the age decreases. I'd love to see John Hurt as an older more ponderous doctor forced to deal with some philosophical dilemmas.
I'm not familiar with the original series so that may be true but I don't really want to mess with the current Dr Who too much. It doesn't educate and the science is completely laughable, but he's smart, and saves the day without using violence. In any other show where you're trying to save the world it's almost a given that the hero is simply the good guy who's the best at killing people. That we have a show that's immensely popular and has as its hero a pacifist nerd is pretty awesome, I'd like if they played with philosophical questions a bit more (I think most shows overdo character drama) but I'm happy enough with what we got that I don't want to mess with it.
Star Trek on the other hand has become a joke, what's one more action flick set in space?
Was Dr Who ever particularly smart? I've guess they've moved a bit more towards character drama as opposed to philosophical storylines, but never do I remember them ever anything remotely realistically scientific or a legitimate detective puzzle. It's always been crazy smart doctor figures out mystery only he has the knowledge to understand, then does a sciency solution that only he's smart enough to do. I figure the joy of Doctor Who is that it's like a nerd's action series. Except instead of saving the day with unrealistic fighting ability he saves it with unrealistic smartness and snappy dialogue.
Star Trek on the other hand has gone regularly exploring philosophical concepts in the first series to being a dumb action movie with the latest films.
I haven't tracked the IRS scandal but it looks like it definitely goes beyond the Cincinnati office. That still doesn't mean it will reach anywhere close to Obama though they need to investigate and figure out where it does reach.
How is the IRS scandal getting worse? I haven't seen a single bit of evidence that says this was anything more than a couple employees at a particular IRS office (and it was stopped by the higher ups as soon as they found out).
I also think there's also a malfunctioning heuristic too.
Take organic foods. People think they're healthier, better for the environment, tastier, and are harder to grow, therefore people pay a premium.
I'm actually a bit skeptical about the first two claims, so if I see something labelled organic my main thought is it costs more than its non-organic counterpart, or if the cost is the same they cut some other corner to bring the prices in line. I'm basically assuming there's no free lunch, that the feature I don't really care about came at the price of something I do care about. This makes me less likely to buy organic.
I suspect that's what's happening here. Conservatives expect that something labelled 'green' gained that feature at a cost, if it's not in the sticker price then maybe in the reliability or the quality of light. Since they don't care about being green and they're not sure what the hidden cost might be they figure it's a better deal to get something else.
Beat me to it. The farmer is clearly violating Monsanto's patents, even though he didn't plant the stuff.
[seriously now] This is why all the current court rulings on Monsanto's stuff are insane.
AFAIK all the current court rulings on Monsanto's stuff involve farmers deliberately using Monsanto's seeds without a license. You can disagree with those rulings but don't imply they're something they're not.
The president and his political allies were making a big deal about American guns reaching cartels at the time (dishonestly, of course). Would I put it past Obama to deliberately send guns to Mexico in order to generate political support for his gun control policies? No. No I wouldn't.
I'm sorry, but you just placed yourself somewhere between "Bush caused/allowed 9/11" and "Obama is a Muslim". That's a conspiracy theory, and not even a good one.
One of their primary jobs is to stop gun smugglers, they tried to do this job by letting through a few shipments so they could shut down the network, letting small fish go to catch the big fish, a very common investigative tactic. They failed badly.
Failed? No, not really. It wouldn't be a big scandal if they were trying something legitimate and failed. They forced retailers to break the law and then they closed the operation. They didn't even try to follow the guns, and nobody seems to know what the point of the operation was supposed to be or what the plan was. Nobody seems to know anything at all.
The point was to shut down the gun smuggling ring, the DOJ has long said they preferred to shut down smuggling networks instead of gun buyers, the Phoenix ATF tried to do this and failed badly.
Were they woefully incompetent and disorganized? Sure. But to claim they didn't have the basic intent of stopping gun smuggling is absurd. You're making it sound like they had some other nefarious motive (which you can't even identify) instead of the obvious explanation of incompetency.
Your description of the operation is false. I guess that is where your interpretation differs from mine. They let a lot more than "a few shipments" go, and they made no effort to catch the small fish or the big fish.
If they made no effort to catch anyone than what's your theory on what they were doing?
So, rather than admit they made no effort to catch the criminals, you want to sidetrack the conversation to what my theory is. As if you care what my theory is.
My theory is they wanted to track the guns across the entire supply chain so they could nab everyone, but the effed up badly, lost track of the guns, and got no one. My theory fits the evidence.
Your theory is they let smugglers smuggle the guns because....
I don't want to sidetrack the conversation, but I'm not even sure what you're arguing. What was the motive of the ATF or whoever you think authorized this operation?
And, NO, stopping smuggling does not become smuggling. Smuggling is smuggling in itself. As there was no attempt to stop said smuggling, I'm not even sure what your argument really is.
I agree that not stopping smuggling doesn't become smuggling, which makes me really confused at to how you changing your tune agreeing with that point makes you wonder what my argument is.
I didn't change my tune. I specified there is a difference between "stopping smuggling" and "smuggling". I guess that is too complicated of a theory.
Ok, when you wrote "And, NO, stopping smuggling does not become smuggling." I assumed you made a typo and meant to write "And, NO, [not] stopping smuggling does not become smuggling."
So in response to that the ATF did not smuggle, they did not let guns by smuggled across the border. They saw a bunch of straw buyers, instead of arresting the straw buyers and grabbing the guns they investigated so they could get the top level guys hiring the straw buyers and the running the whole network.
They failed, they lost track of the guns, and the guns got across the border.
By your logic any cop who lets a street dealer go in order to catch their boss is now a drug dealer themselves.
And I still have seen no reason to believe a field office would try such a half assed scheme without someone in Washington knowing about it. Since Holder and Obama have claimed documents about it are covered by Executive Privilege, I think my argument is stronger than yours.
They claim EVERYTHING is covered by Executive Privilege, as did Bush, and would Clinton if he were in office now.
That's because these operations are coordinated in conjunction with the national headquarters, and if not necessarily authorized by the head of the department, in this case the Attorney General, they are at least known by someone under him. At the least, lawyers are consulted for clarification of what is legal and what isn't. You don't seem to understand that international law isn't something to be ignored by a regional leader in Arizona.
So I don't know ATF regs to know how much of that is accurate. But lets assume that's true and some random attorney in the DOJ was consulted about it. Does that make it an administration scandal? What if that random attorney was working there when Bush was in office and so was their boss, is it still an administration scandal?
Besides, I'm not sure if international law comes into play since they didn't involve the Mexicans.
They claim executive privilege with or without a real scandal because a) So claiming Executive Privilege doesn't become evidence of a scandal the next time when there's a real scandal they're trying to keep hidden b) It's safer because someone in the DOJ may have known something they didn't know about, or some other scandal might exist buried i
Your description of the operation is false. I guess that is where your interpretation differs from mine. They let a lot more than "a few shipments" go, and they made no effort to catch the small fish or the big fish.
If they made no effort to catch anyone than what's your theory on what they were doing?
And, NO, stopping smuggling does not become smuggling. Smuggling is smuggling in itself. As there was no attempt to stop said smuggling, I'm not even sure what your argument really is.
I agree that not stopping smuggling doesn't become smuggling, which makes me really confused at to how you changing your tune agreeing with that point makes you wonder what my argument is.
And I still have seen no reason to believe a field office would try such a half assed scheme without someone in Washington knowing about it. Since Holder and Obama have claimed documents about it are covered by Executive Privilege, I think my argument is stronger than yours.
They claim EVERYTHING is covered by Executive Privilege, as did Bush, and would Clinton if he were in office now. They claim executive privilege with or without a real scandal because a) So claiming Executive Privilege doesn't become evidence of a scandal the next time when there's a real scandal they're trying to keep hidden b) It's safer because someone in the DOJ may have known something they didn't know about, or some other scandal might exist buried in the docs c) Even if the docs are clean it's not that hard to twist something out of context (re climategate) d) Even if the DOJ is completely innocent, a news cycle consisting of "the DOJ has released documents in the investigation into the Fast & Furious scandal and investigators are looking through them" is super damaging to the ears of the uninformed voter.
Just consider, if a rival group with no other objective than to get you in as much trouble as possible asked to look through all your work emails for evidence that you did something wrong would you agree to it?
And my sig is very relevant here. You are the gymnast, hoping to play down scandals of your political side. You have stated no "obvious fact" about the ATF office in Phoenix and what they don't tell Washington. Unless you work for the ATF, you know no more than I do about their inner workings. At least I'm basing my reasoning on their actions and testimony before Congress. You are basing yours on political affiliation.
I'm basing mine on the most likely scenario based on the available evidence. Snooping on Fox News' email or the AP's email, that's a scandal. Claiming states secrets in every terror related court case against the government, that's a scandal. A really bad police op executed by the ATF branch in Arizona over multiple Presidential administrations, that's a scandal, but one for the Phoenix ATF, not Washington.
The primary job of the ATF is not to smuggle guns to drug cartels in foreign countries, which is in effect what took place.
One of their primary jobs is to stop gun smugglers, they tried to do this job by letting through a few shipments so they could shut down the network, letting small fish go to catch the big fish, a very common investigative tactic. They failed badly.
Therefor it's reasonable to believe an ATF office wouldn't violate international law on their own.
So not stopping smugglers becomes, smuggling, which then becomes violating international law, I suppose next you'll say that by violating international law they were trying to start a war which obviously was decided by the executive branch?
Your sig says you hate hypocrisy, yet you're doing mental gymnastics to avoid the obvious fact that an ATF office could decide on and execute a big operation without telling Washington.
If the guy who runs the division of the Post Office in my area decides it makes sense to smuggle drugs as an attempt at catching drug smugglers, I would assume someone working in a position directly under the Postmaster General would have been queried if the plan was sensible. That person would have then brought it up to the Postmaster General at a staff meeting. Since that is the whole point of having a hierarchy in an organization.
I would have used a mail metaphor. Either way hierarchies sometimes mean information doesn't travel as high as it should, particularly in law enforcement where telling more people can jeopardize the operation.
Sorry, I thought that was implied. The "guy who runs the division of the Post Office" would be using official mail and postal planes/semi-trailers in his sting operation. Did you think I meant that the "guy who runs the division of the Post Office" buys a ticket on Delta to personally smuggle drugs as an attempt at a drug sting operation?
I assume the guy who runs the division of the Post Office would be mainly concerned with delivering mail, a sting operation (even for people smuggling through the mail) would be far enough outside his regular duties it would go up a couple rungs. The primary job of the ATF to catch firearm smugglers, therefore it's reasonable to think that an ATF office wouldn't bother to ask Washington, that's why I was complaining about the metaphor.
If the guy who runs the division of the Post Office in my area decides it makes sense to smuggle drugs as an attempt at catching drug smugglers, I would assume someone working in a position directly under the Postmaster General would have been queried if the plan was sensible. That person would have then brought it up to the Postmaster General at a staff meeting. Since that is the whole point of having a hierarchy in an organization.
I would have used a mail metaphor. Either way hierarchies sometimes mean information doesn't travel as high as it should, particularly in law enforcement where telling more people can jeopardize the operation.
I don't for one second believe it was a department chief in Phoenix that decided to dust off the folder from Bush's administration, decided the failure of the previous operation was caused by having control of the situation, and so removed the control and came up with Fast and Furious, with no notice going up the chain of responsibility.
Here's another story, they tried the operation a couple times before (not giving a damn about what administration it was), they tried to do it one more time cutting out the Mexicans this time because they thought there might have been a leak there. And they didn't report up the chain of responsibility because they weren't required to and they can do things themselves without Washington bureaucrats double checking everything they do.
Sure you can assume everyone is lying and there's some big conspiracy. Or you can accept that it was screwup in the Phoenix office and Washington had nothing to do with it.
But the actions of a Phoenix ATF director over multiple administrations doesn't have a damn thing to do with Obama.
He just heard about it on the news, I guess -- like a lot of other things his administration has done lately.
Why stonewall the congressional investigation then? Why withhold documents? Why should people believe the Administration's story when they're hiding evidence from congressional investigators?
Does the Obama administration withhold documents they shouldn't? Yes, so do all other administrations whenever a scandal pops up, but the Obama administration is just as bad if not worse in a lot of cases and deserves a ton of blame and criticism for not being more transparent.
But you didn't say they were withholding info or obstructing the investigation, you said "hundreds of innocent Mexicans murdered by guns the administration supplied to drug cartels", a claim that is false.
Slashdot Mirror
Well judging by the lack of comments here and my own lack of knowledge he wasn't that well known among scifi geeks either.
Looking at his work he might have simply been a outside the main part of the genre, he obviously had some very major successes but never won any Hugos or Nebulas which tend to be fairly common among the top SF authors. He did good work but ended up in a small niche.
Actually I'm trolling. I'm trying to get some members of the biologic research community to do a little self-examination. I don't know much about the subject, but here is what I do know (now that I have been pushed into articulating it):
1. We are doing more biological research with what are basically 19th century approaches involving the death, pain, and mutilation of animals than we need to be doing. We do not know how much more (which is covered in greater detail in point 3)
I'd really like you to back up that "19th century approaches" claim.
2. To do this, we are training grad students, lab techs, and sometimes undergrads who need a biology credit in the intensive use of the ego defense mechanisms of "clinical objectivity" or "clinical detachment." Which is also the conscious suppression of normal human empathy. There is little to no screening done beforehand to determine if these persons have the emotional maturity and self-insight to limit the use of these mechanisms to the biology lab. There is no follow-up of these individuals; not even the ones who are given their walking papers because they are too unbalanced to do the work properly. Yet the clinical detachment that is needed to handle lab animals creates serious problems when it is used inappropriately in relationships, with children, in an office setting, among colleagues, etc.
You obviously shouldn't get emotionally attached to lab animals for a variety of reasons (not all bad ones). But people are good at compartmentalizing. As for your accusations about clinical detachment do you have any evidence for these claims?
3. No one in the biology research field is even seeing this as a problem. Despite the mass murders of the last few years, where the mechanisms of "clinical detachment" are taken to the pathological extreme. There is no discussion of whether it is time to start limiting training in these techniques, no discussion about how to reduce the number of individuals affected, there is not even an attempt to determine the scope of the problem. The closest is the USDA figures on the number of selected lab animals in active use in the USA: that is 1.3 million. But it excludes rats and mice and animals being bred for scientific use but not yet put to that use. The number of lab animals that lab techs and grad students are exposed to in this country has been estimated at between 10 and 50 million. But even with the 1.3 million figure, that is a large pool of persons being trained in the skills of clinical objectivity (with nothing being done to assure that they are capable of appropriately using those skills, or prevented from maybe obtaining a fully automatic rifle if they are not capable of policing their own psyches).
What seems to be necessary is to push the individuals in the biology research community into confronting the absurdity of their rationales and deliberate blindnesses, and get them looking for ways to move the research animal labs out of the 19th century and into the 21st century. Agitating for laws that would enforce limits upon the research communities seems to be necessary, just to get their attention.
Whether such laws are needed is a topic that is open for discussion. That the research community must be pushed into doing a scientific study on the effects of its practices on the psyches of its minions is definitely necessary.
Again all you've done is speculate, you've shown absolutely no evidence for psychological damage among researchers, you haven't even found an anecdote of some spree shooter being a biologist. People can eat meat without being sociopaths, they can look at cows in a field without being sociopaths, why are you assuming they can't deal with lab animals and avoid emotional attachment without incurring a mental illness?
Don't you know? As part of a collective you can steal from the rest and give yourself a nice subsidy. You can force an obligation upon the rest of the people and give yourself a nice entitlement.
That's what 'civil rights' are there is no such thing, there are only individual rights.
There are no 'women rights', there are no 'gay rights', there are no 'children rights', there are no 'minority rights', there are no 'disabled rights', there are no 'worker rights', etc.etc.
There are only individual rights and when some group (any group) is given what the modern collectivist state likes to call 'civil right' what it actually does it puts an obligation upon some people to provide entitlements to some group. This is the exact opposite of the meaning of the concept of 'right'.
A right is only a meaningful concept in the context of a relationship between an individual and the State, not 2 individuals, not an individual and a business. A right is limitation of authority of the collective to destroy rights of an individual.
'Civil right' is the exact opposite of an actual right, 'civil right' relies on destruction of actual real individual rights, it's Orwellian doublespeak.
roman_mir
No right is absolute, rights are an emergent property of our society, they're something we agreed on to help each other get along.
Individual rights are the most basic and the most important of these, but they' re not the only ones. Civil rights are an important infringement on individual rights if we want to live in a civil society. The loss of individual liberty suffered from a civil right is minimal (you can't fire that guy because he's gay), but the amount of welfare gained is huge (the gay guy doesn't have to lie).
Which species?
And that is a strange phrase. I cannot think of any research that helps the survival of either Humans or Chimps.
My reading is that most of the research on chimps is either some kind of basic research or direct efforts to improve human health. This is the research this rule would eliminate.
But if some disease starts wiping out wild chimpanzee populations the researchers are still allowed to experiment on them to save other chimps.
WRT using chimps in testing, that is now so bogus. The automobile has replaced the horse and buggy and freed horses for their rightful place as pampered pets (there are now more horses in the USA than there were in 1899-- hoowoodathunkit?) The MRI and computer simulations are now replacing the old fashioned use of chimps in the laboratory. There is no question that sooner or later the nasty old ways of doing biological research are going to become history, just like the horse and buggy, replaced by technology that can do the job faster, better, and without exploiting some other species. The only question is when do we pass the laws that will force today's buggy whip manufacturers to find some better source of employment?
This will cause a shake-up in the research and development industry, as the employment opportunities of persons who have spent their careers developing skills in carving up the brains of primates will be out of work and unemployable. Along with a host of other specialists in supporting roles. A lot of these people are quite likely incapable of finding other work. It requires a certain kind of blockage of normal human empathy to slice and dice a chimpanzee, and without that a lot of job opportunities will be closed to these individuals with their self-inflicted damage to their psyches.
I don't know much about the people doing research on chimps (though found it fascinating that you couldn't resist essentially calling them sociopaths) but I do a little computational neuroscience. MRI has some serious limitations, and our simulations aren't anywhere close to replacing the need for live subjects and they probably won't be until we're post-singularity.
If you want to argue that the science isn't worth the cost then make that argument, but don't claim the same science can be done without the cost.
I'm sure a lot of pirated dev kits are floating around already, as for the source code, who cares? Another game company isn't going to go near it, I guess in the worst case if everything is there a bunch of devs could get together, strip out all the drm, and release a really good pirated version, but I just don't see this being a big risk for the game companies.
Oh yeah,
Recently, Kotaku reported that SuperDaE, a 17 year-old minor, was facing an array of eight legal charges, including "possession of cannabis and drug paraphernalia", "possession of a prohibited weapon", "possession of identification material with intent to commit an offence", and "possessing and copying an indecent or obscene article, possession of child exploitation material".
So an Australian, being charged by Australian police for crimes that have nothing to do with computers, apparently thinks a bunch of American and Japanese game companies can protect him if he blackmails them?
Good luck with that...
I guess the NSA already knew his name, and he figured that he'd be safer if the public knows it, too. If a person with a name nobody has ever heard of disappears somewhere in Hong Kong, nobody will care too much. If the person who is known to have leaked the NSA documents disappears, it might make the media notice.
I don't see why he'd get disappeared, it doesn't matter how ruthless the NSA is killing him has no upside. If anyone ever found out it would be a major black eye for the NSA, and it can't be a deterrent since nobody knows they got him! It would be brutal optics since all the outside world would see is that the leaker got away!
Best case for them is to catch him, discredit him, and put him in jail for a long time as a warning to anyone else.
If they got close Edward Snowden outting himself is a brilliant more, he has the first chance to write the narrative and take the moral highground.
He's just gone from a hidden figure being hunted by law enforcement to a concerned citizen giving public interviews and ready to face the music, he's framing the discussion as a political one instead of a criminal one. He's made it a lot harder politically for the Feds to throw the book at him.
Has anyone actually ever used the functionality? I haven't and I can't see myself changing. It could be they removed it with some malicious intent, or it could be someone said 'why are we supporting feature X that no body ever uses'. If I posted a lot I could see myself downloading an archive and doing some analysis of the content for fun, but for the most part the only people I see wanting an archive is people who use it as a micro-blogging service. On principal I like the idea of having it, I'm just curious if anyone here has ever used it.
So, let me get this straight. He didn't surreptitiously gain access to any area any random member of the public wouldn't have access to. He didn't plant any recording device to record in his absence. He stood outside a door and with a cel phone recorded what any passerby would have heard had they stopped to listen. Is that correct?
That doesn't even sound particularly unethical to me. A bit sleazy, but then if McConnell's careless enough to have that kind of discussion where anyone in the hallway can overhear the problem doesn't lie with the people in the hallway listening.
I think this is where the phrase 'reasonable expectation of privacy' comes into play. If I'm behind a closed door in my campaign HQ I think I have a reasonable expectation of privacy, I could do more, but most people would think me paranoid.
Now we usually think of bugging as recording something we can't hear ourselves, either because we can't be in the right location (ie planting a bug), or our hearing isn't sensitive enough (ie a parabolic mike), so ethically I don't think this is bugging. But the fact he recorded it makes it worse than eavesdropping, and as political dirty tricks go I'm comfortable with it being prosecuted.
(Same AC here)
I agree on that it would be nice with more philosophical dilemmas. However, do give the Hartnell years a go, he was wonderful; just imagine a grumpy, absentminded, xenophobic doctor that mainly wants to show his granddaughter the universe at all points in time :)
And yes, I agree on Star Trek, it has gone too much mission-of-the-week rather than mystery-of-the-week, and all of the missions are with cameras that are handled like they would explode if they were stationary for more than five seconds...
Sad that one basically had to get rid of what made SciFi good in order to make it popular
I think the mistake with Star Trek was going to movies. In a series you can go philosophical but it's going to be a bit hit and miss (one of the reasons the old Star Trek movies had such a reputation for inconsistency) but you can lock into a core audience. With a movie you only get one shot so if you have the money and a built in audience it's a safer bet to just make an action flick.
For Doctor Who I do really like the idea of an old doctor. It seems all the current versions of brilliant eccentrics have some form of ADD, all the Sherlock Holmes versions (incl. House), and all the doctors getting more energetic as the age decreases. I'd love to see John Hurt as an older more ponderous doctor forced to deal with some philosophical dilemmas.
I'm not familiar with the original series so that may be true but I don't really want to mess with the current Dr Who too much. It doesn't educate and the science is completely laughable, but he's smart, and saves the day without using violence. In any other show where you're trying to save the world it's almost a given that the hero is simply the good guy who's the best at killing people. That we have a show that's immensely popular and has as its hero a pacifist nerd is pretty awesome, I'd like if they played with philosophical questions a bit more (I think most shows overdo character drama) but I'm happy enough with what we got that I don't want to mess with it.
Star Trek on the other hand has become a joke, what's one more action flick set in space?
Was Dr Who ever particularly smart? I've guess they've moved a bit more towards character drama as opposed to philosophical storylines, but never do I remember them ever anything remotely realistically scientific or a legitimate detective puzzle. It's always been crazy smart doctor figures out mystery only he has the knowledge to understand, then does a sciency solution that only he's smart enough to do. I figure the joy of Doctor Who is that it's like a nerd's action series. Except instead of saving the day with unrealistic fighting ability he saves it with unrealistic smartness and snappy dialogue.
Star Trek on the other hand has gone regularly exploring philosophical concepts in the first series to being a dumb action movie with the latest films.
I haven't tracked the IRS scandal but it looks like it definitely goes beyond the Cincinnati office. That still doesn't mean it will reach anywhere close to Obama though they need to investigate and figure out where it does reach.
How is the IRS scandal getting worse? I haven't seen a single bit of evidence that says this was anything more than a couple employees at a particular IRS office (and it was stopped by the higher ups as soon as they found out).
At first glance I thought it said Avatars Help Schizophrenics Gain Control of Vehicles with Their Heads
Needless to say upon re-reading the headline I was sorely disappointed.
I also think there's also a malfunctioning heuristic too.
Take organic foods. People think they're healthier, better for the environment, tastier, and are harder to grow, therefore people pay a premium.
I'm actually a bit skeptical about the first two claims, so if I see something labelled organic my main thought is it costs more than its non-organic counterpart, or if the cost is the same they cut some other corner to bring the prices in line. I'm basically assuming there's no free lunch, that the feature I don't really care about came at the price of something I do care about. This makes me less likely to buy organic.
I suspect that's what's happening here. Conservatives expect that something labelled 'green' gained that feature at a cost, if it's not in the sticker price then maybe in the reliability or the quality of light. Since they don't care about being green and they're not sure what the hidden cost might be they figure it's a better deal to get something else.
Beat me to it. The farmer is clearly violating Monsanto's patents, even though he didn't plant the stuff.
[seriously now]
This is why all the current court rulings on Monsanto's stuff are insane.
AFAIK all the current court rulings on Monsanto's stuff involve farmers deliberately using Monsanto's seeds without a license. You can disagree with those rulings but don't imply they're something they're not.
The president and his political allies were making a big deal about American guns reaching cartels at the time (dishonestly, of course). Would I put it past Obama to deliberately send guns to Mexico in order to generate political support for his gun control policies? No. No I wouldn't.
I'm sorry, but you just placed yourself somewhere between "Bush caused/allowed 9/11" and "Obama is a Muslim". That's a conspiracy theory, and not even a good one.
One of their primary jobs is to stop gun smugglers, they tried to do this job by letting through a few shipments so they could shut down the network, letting small fish go to catch the big fish, a very common investigative tactic. They failed badly.
Failed? No, not really. It wouldn't be a big scandal if they were trying something legitimate and failed. They forced retailers to break the law and then they closed the operation. They didn't even try to follow the guns, and nobody seems to know what the point of the operation was supposed to be or what the plan was. Nobody seems to know anything at all.
The point was to shut down the gun smuggling ring, the DOJ has long said they preferred to shut down smuggling networks instead of gun buyers, the Phoenix ATF tried to do this and failed badly.
Were they woefully incompetent and disorganized? Sure. But to claim they didn't have the basic intent of stopping gun smuggling is absurd. You're making it sound like they had some other nefarious motive (which you can't even identify) instead of the obvious explanation of incompetency.
Your description of the operation is false. I guess that is where your interpretation differs from mine. They let a lot more than "a few shipments" go, and they made no effort to catch the small fish or the big fish.
If they made no effort to catch anyone than what's your theory on what they were doing?
So, rather than admit they made no effort to catch the criminals, you want to sidetrack the conversation to what my theory is. As if you care what my theory is.
My theory is they wanted to track the guns across the entire supply chain so they could nab everyone, but the effed up badly, lost track of the guns, and got no one. My theory fits the evidence.
Your theory is they let smugglers smuggle the guns because....
I don't want to sidetrack the conversation, but I'm not even sure what you're arguing. What was the motive of the ATF or whoever you think authorized this operation?
And, NO, stopping smuggling does not become smuggling. Smuggling is smuggling in itself. As there was no attempt to stop said smuggling, I'm not even sure what your argument really is.
I agree that not stopping smuggling doesn't become smuggling, which makes me really confused at to how you changing your tune agreeing with that point makes you wonder what my argument is.
I didn't change my tune. I specified there is a difference between "stopping smuggling" and "smuggling". I guess that is too complicated of a theory.
Ok, when you wrote "And, NO, stopping smuggling does not become smuggling." I assumed you made a typo and meant to write "And, NO, [not] stopping smuggling does not become smuggling."
So in response to that the ATF did not smuggle, they did not let guns by smuggled across the border. They saw a bunch of straw buyers, instead of arresting the straw buyers and grabbing the guns they investigated so they could get the top level guys hiring the straw buyers and the running the whole network.
They failed, they lost track of the guns, and the guns got across the border.
By your logic any cop who lets a street dealer go in order to catch their boss is now a drug dealer themselves.
And I still have seen no reason to believe a field office would try such a half assed scheme without someone in Washington knowing about it. Since Holder and Obama have claimed documents about it are covered by Executive Privilege, I think my argument is stronger than yours.
They claim EVERYTHING is covered by Executive Privilege, as did Bush, and would Clinton if he were in office now.
That's because these operations are coordinated in conjunction with the national headquarters, and if not necessarily authorized by the head of the department, in this case the Attorney General, they are at least known by someone under him. At the least, lawyers are consulted for clarification of what is legal and what isn't. You don't seem to understand that international law isn't something to be ignored by a regional leader in Arizona.
So I don't know ATF regs to know how much of that is accurate. But lets assume that's true and some random attorney in the DOJ was consulted about it. Does that make it an administration scandal? What if that random attorney was working there when Bush was in office and so was their boss, is it still an administration scandal?
Besides, I'm not sure if international law comes into play since they didn't involve the Mexicans.
They claim executive privilege with or without a real scandal because
a) So claiming Executive Privilege doesn't become evidence of a scandal the next time when there's a real scandal they're trying to keep hidden
b) It's safer because someone in the DOJ may have known something they didn't know about, or some other scandal might exist buried i
Your description of the operation is false. I guess that is where your interpretation differs from mine. They let a lot more than "a few shipments" go, and they made no effort to catch the small fish or the big fish.
If they made no effort to catch anyone than what's your theory on what they were doing?
And, NO, stopping smuggling does not become smuggling. Smuggling is smuggling in itself. As there was no attempt to stop said smuggling, I'm not even sure what your argument really is.
I agree that not stopping smuggling doesn't become smuggling, which makes me really confused at to how you changing your tune agreeing with that point makes you wonder what my argument is.
And I still have seen no reason to believe a field office would try such a half assed scheme without someone in Washington knowing about it. Since Holder and Obama have claimed documents about it are covered by Executive Privilege, I think my argument is stronger than yours.
They claim EVERYTHING is covered by Executive Privilege, as did Bush, and would Clinton if he were in office now. They claim executive privilege with or without a real scandal because
a) So claiming Executive Privilege doesn't become evidence of a scandal the next time when there's a real scandal they're trying to keep hidden
b) It's safer because someone in the DOJ may have known something they didn't know about, or some other scandal might exist buried in the docs
c) Even if the docs are clean it's not that hard to twist something out of context (re climategate)
d) Even if the DOJ is completely innocent, a news cycle consisting of "the DOJ has released documents in the investigation into the Fast & Furious scandal and investigators are looking through them" is super damaging to the ears of the uninformed voter.
Just consider, if a rival group with no other objective than to get you in as much trouble as possible asked to look through all your work emails for evidence that you did something wrong would you agree to it?
And my sig is very relevant here. You are the gymnast, hoping to play down scandals of your political side. You have stated no "obvious fact" about the ATF office in Phoenix and what they don't tell Washington. Unless you work for the ATF, you know no more than I do about their inner workings. At least I'm basing my reasoning on their actions and testimony before Congress. You are basing yours on political affiliation.
I'm basing mine on the most likely scenario based on the available evidence. Snooping on Fox News' email or the AP's email, that's a scandal. Claiming states secrets in every terror related court case against the government, that's a scandal. A really bad police op executed by the ATF branch in Arizona over multiple Presidential administrations, that's a scandal, but one for the Phoenix ATF, not Washington.
The primary job of the ATF is not to smuggle guns to drug cartels in foreign countries, which is in effect what took place.
One of their primary jobs is to stop gun smugglers, they tried to do this job by letting through a few shipments so they could shut down the network, letting small fish go to catch the big fish, a very common investigative tactic. They failed badly.
Therefor it's reasonable to believe an ATF office wouldn't violate international law on their own.
So not stopping smugglers becomes, smuggling, which then becomes violating international law, I suppose next you'll say that by violating international law they were trying to start a war which obviously was decided by the executive branch?
Your sig says you hate hypocrisy, yet you're doing mental gymnastics to avoid the obvious fact that an ATF office could decide on and execute a big operation without telling Washington.
If the guy who runs the division of the Post Office in my area decides it makes sense to smuggle drugs as an attempt at catching drug smugglers, I would assume someone working in a position directly under the Postmaster General would have been queried if the plan was sensible. That person would have then brought it up to the Postmaster General at a staff meeting. Since that is the whole point of having a hierarchy in an organization.
I would have used a mail metaphor. Either way hierarchies sometimes mean information doesn't travel as high as it should, particularly in law enforcement where telling more people can jeopardize the operation.
Sorry, I thought that was implied. The "guy who runs the division of the Post Office" would be using official mail and postal planes/semi-trailers in his sting operation. Did you think I meant that the "guy who runs the division of the Post Office" buys a ticket on Delta to personally smuggle drugs as an attempt at a drug sting operation?
I assume the guy who runs the division of the Post Office would be mainly concerned with delivering mail, a sting operation (even for people smuggling through the mail) would be far enough outside his regular duties it would go up a couple rungs. The primary job of the ATF to catch firearm smugglers, therefore it's reasonable to think that an ATF office wouldn't bother to ask Washington, that's why I was complaining about the metaphor.
If the guy who runs the division of the Post Office in my area decides it makes sense to smuggle drugs as an attempt at catching drug smugglers, I would assume someone working in a position directly under the Postmaster General would have been queried if the plan was sensible. That person would have then brought it up to the Postmaster General at a staff meeting. Since that is the whole point of having a hierarchy in an organization.
I would have used a mail metaphor. Either way hierarchies sometimes mean information doesn't travel as high as it should, particularly in law enforcement where telling more people can jeopardize the operation.
I don't for one second believe it was a department chief in Phoenix that decided to dust off the folder from Bush's administration, decided the failure of the previous operation was caused by having control of the situation, and so removed the control and came up with Fast and Furious, with no notice going up the chain of responsibility.
Here's another story, they tried the operation a couple times before (not giving a damn about what administration it was), they tried to do it one more time cutting out the Mexicans this time because they thought there might have been a leak there. And they didn't report up the chain of responsibility because they weren't required to and they can do things themselves without Washington bureaucrats double checking everything they do.
Sure you can assume everyone is lying and there's some big conspiracy. Or you can accept that it was screwup in the Phoenix office and Washington had nothing to do with it.
But the actions of a Phoenix ATF director over multiple administrations doesn't have a damn thing to do with Obama.
He just heard about it on the news, I guess -- like a lot of other things his administration has done lately.
Why stonewall the congressional investigation then? Why withhold documents? Why should people believe the Administration's story when they're hiding evidence from congressional investigators?
Does the Obama administration withhold documents they shouldn't? Yes, so do all other administrations whenever a scandal pops up, but the Obama administration is just as bad if not worse in a lot of cases and deserves a ton of blame and criticism for not being more transparent.
But you didn't say they were withholding info or obstructing the investigation, you said "hundreds of innocent Mexicans murdered by guns the administration supplied to drug cartels", a claim that is false.