Disappointing though not a really indicative of a wider problem on its own.
Two keys facts, 1) both athletes were living (and presumably training) in the US, thus they're not really part of the group of Jamaicans like Bolt who live and train in Jamaica. 2) In both cases the drugs were shipped directly to the athlete, this indicates that they were doing it on their own initiative since a coach or doctor would have shipped the drugs to themself, and would have been smart enough to use a mailbox not linked to their own name.
Two athletes, living and training in another country, and doping on their own isn't what I mean by a history (or culture) of doping.
The Roman's were very open about Religion, look at the hubbub about a Mormon running for office, now consider this Emperor [wikipedia.org] deciding to rewrite the Roman religion and add his god to the top of pantheon.
They were "open" to religion as long as everyone worshiped Caesar as a god. This was an unacceptable violation of human rights.
I don't know the full nuance of what they wanted, but they definitely tolerated other religions as long as they made certain concessions. I didn't claim it was acceptable, but it's certainly better than what the Christians did later.
The only thing Romans really cared about was that whatever religion you were you gave the Emperor a blessing, the Jews got harsh treatment since their monotheistic religion caused them to denounce other gods, the Christians got it worse because they had the same incompatibility as the Jews, but they didn't have the excuse of following their ancestors religion and the Romans considered them a cult.
I haven't studied enough history, but I would imagine that another reason for anti-Christian hatred is that Christians proselytize.
But if you want to look at the history of religious strife, intolerance, and state-sponsored persecution, look to the Christianization of the Roman empire. That's the point at which all of Rome's conflicts, external and internal, start taking on a big religious tone
Let's skip this part because my History of the Roman Christianization is poor.
Two of the first actions when the Empire became Christian were the Council of Nicaea which tried to establish common Christian doctrine (if you don't agree you're no longer part of the church) and a debate about whether to let back in people who had renounced Christ when threatened by the Romans. I'm pretty sure the Christian Empire crucified way more Christians than the pre-Christian Empire.
and it hasn't really ended till this day.
Hasn't ended to this day? How so?
When have the Abrahamic religions ever been at peace even with variants of themselves?
Lance is (or was) doping. Every top athlete is doping. Bolt, Phelps; they're dopers too (and I don't mean marijuana). That's just what it takes to be at that level unless you're a genetic freak.
Good genes and a great training/diet program can only take someone so far.
Phelps is from a clean sport from a program with no history of drug abuse, has a genetic advantage, and a sport where good technique (ie training $$) can make a huge difference.
Bolt comes from a dirty sport, but a slightly cleaner era in that sport, but we know he's a huge genetic freak, comes from a country without a history of doping, and has a very good training group.
Extreme performance is a reason to consider drug abuse, but can't be considered as evidence by itself.
Most of the cheaters have been doping for years when they get caught, why should he be different?
- How can all the technological innovation that went into his cycling be ignored? The wind-tunnel testing, the water-tank-in-frame, the unique bike designs, those all were serious efforts that AFAIK were unique, why spend that effort if you're already doping?
Who's ignoring it? Doping doesn't give you a free win, not when your top competition is doping too. Besides, I'm guessing a lot of that wasn't as unique as you suspect (though maybe he had the resources to do more).
- How were others not able to cheat as well as he did?
He had some combination of better doping resources, better training, and better natural gifts.
- How was he not caught cheating in 2009 when he placed 3rd after not racing for 2 years? Wouldn't he be expected to be a total doper taking a standing that high after being retired for so long?
Well they do have some apparent positive tests from '09 (I don't know the details) but doping is still hard to detect.
- How can the fact that he trained for only 1 race each year, the Tour de France, be ignored as explaining his stellar performance? Most other competition would do more racing per year, Lance focused like a laser beam on the Tour de France. How can this not help explain his insane performances?
It can explain some.
- Lance packed his team with certifiably world-class climbers to set pace for him and run strategy on the large parts of big climbs. Other squads did not. Can't this help explain it?
2) Assume lance did not cheat
It helps, but there's still a lot of evidence of doping.
- Why are so many people out to discredit him? How big of an a-hole must Lance be to have this many people willing to take him down by lying?
Why do you think they're lying? There's a lot of circumstantial evidence surrounding Armstrong, and someone who's gotten that much success while cheating is a tempting target.
- Why not fight these charges to the last?
Because he doesn't have a good defence in court so he'll fight the PR battle instead.
- Why wasn't Lance more open in his Tours? The technology existed during his run to simply put Lance on camera 24-hours-a-day for the world to see he wasn't cheating. Why not do this, especially in 2009 when he took 3rd?
Privacy, because he was cheating, because it wouldn't prove he wasn't cheating (you can take drugs weeks or months before and still benefit).
- How was Lance so good at simply laying the hammer down at the ends of big climbing stages? Is he just a freak of nature? Were his teammates really capable of simply relieving all the stress of keeping in the pack long enough for him to go balls out at the end?
All of the above (plus doping).
- Why were later tests on his samples so dodgy? What was the motivation in even testing them?
The tests were good enough to catch many many many other cyclists. Including the greatest cyclist ever, Edy Merckx back in the 60s.
Notice how whenever they catch one of these athletes it turns out the doping has been going on for years before? That tells me that catching someone is really hard, harder for someone who has the resources to afford better medical expertise to beat the tests.
Even if you follow their testimony to conclude he cheated...so did literally everybody else. The vast numbers of actual drug test fails speak to that clearly.
So in the end, he was perhaps better at hiding the cheating, but he was still massively better at actual cycling than any other cyclist at the time who was also very likely cheating as well.
How many riders were doping? How good was their doping program, how much did it help them? How much did it help him? Who was the best clean cyclist? We guess is that Armstrong was the best, or one of the best cyclists, with or without drugs. But combining his superior resources to get a better doping program, and less competition from the clean athletes, that took him from a top rider to a perennial winner, and from slightly famous to A-list celebrity.
The Roman's were very open about Religion, look at the hubbub about a Mormon running for office, now consider this Emperor deciding to rewrite the Roman religion and add his god to the top of pantheon.
The only thing Romans really cared about was that whatever religion you were you gave the Emperor a blessing, the Jews got harsh treatment since their monotheistic religion caused them to denounce other gods, the Christians got it worse because they had the same incompatibility as the Jews, but they didn't have the excuse of following their ancestors religion and the Romans considered them a cult.
But if you want to look at the history of religious strife, intolerance, and state-sponsored persecution, look to the Christianization of the Roman empire. That's the point at which all of Rome's conflicts, external and internal, start taking on a big religious tone and it hasn't really ended till this day.
In competition riders could be pulled for testing before or after a stage. Pretty hard to give yourself EPO while riding and all the cameras on you, it has to be injected, not taken as food, drink or from a patch. If tested before a stage a tested rider cannot return to his hotel or disappear into a team bus, but must go to the starting area. Out in the open it's pretty darn har to hide needles, bags of transfusion blood, etc.
It's a pretty weak whack the USADA is taking at Armstrong and I'm quite surprised he's not going into their den and ripping up the accusations in the faces of his accusers. But USADA having his wins, income, medal, etc, all yanked for all competitions from 1998 on based upon the word of people, but no hard evidence is something I expected Lance could have overturned in court... probably in a couple more years. Which makes much of this "tired of fighting, not going to fight anymore" understandable.
As pointed out in various sources, every time he gets one accuser discredited another one pops up in a never ending game of whack-a-mole. He's chosing to ignore USADA, which is probably the only defence he saw at some point. His attorneys served a letter to USADA stating he doesn't accept their findings. Wait to see what the UCI has to say.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. EPO isn't some temporary stimulant, it's a drug that increases the production of red blood cells, he could take it weeks, or even months before the competition and still get the benefit, I don't think you intended for him to have a personal cameraman 24/7.
As for no hard evidence, drug tests are only one piece of evidence, and it's well known that they can be fooled. Fortunately the USADA has a ton of circumstantial evidence including a lot of eye witnesses who were associated with Armstrong's team, I think it would be an easy case to make in criminal court.
As for stripping all of Armstrong's results. Do you know the name of the guys who would have won those tours if Armstrong and those other guys didn't cheat? The guys who were incredibly talented and hard working, but were too ethical to cheat? No? Well neither do I. We'll probably never know who those guys were and even with this action by the USADA Armstrong will still be rich and famous, while these other guys who probably deserved it more, will remain unknown, probably not even knowing that they should have been the real winner.
Not to mention the fuel emissions from going out and doing the collection, or even the current system of driving around and collecting by-catch, than sorting and processing the material into furniture. Unless it's a lot more feasible than I suspect I have a hunch this project will do more harm than good for the environment.
Over and over, people have made the same point: internet ads wouldn't be objectionable if they were like ads in a newspaper or magazine, but because they aren't like that, any user with enough know-how is going to block them. I'm sorry, but I just can't read an article while an animated monkey is jumping up and down next to it on the screen.
Text-oriented sites like slashdot are relatively cheap to run, on a per-user basis, so as long as some percentage of their users don't use ad blockers, these sites are viable.
I asked someone I know, who works in online advertising, whether ad blocking is an issue for her company. I told her I never saw ads on the internet and was surprised that anyone was... well, dumb enough... to fail to install ad blocking software. Her response: "Do you use Hulu?"
Not necessarily. In generally I don't find ads, or the implied contract that I should view the website ads along with the content, particularly offensive, thus I've never used ad-block. In the case of sites where the ads are annoying enough I generally leave the site and don't come back, this is one of the behaviours that keeps webmasters in check.
Whether the Facebook page is private or not is irrelevant, his friends reported him to the authorities and easily could have shown them the Facebook page.
I'm not sure I see anything in this story that makes me worry about civil liberties, it's just an unusual news story.
I've been watching climate change debates most of my life.
First, it was the threat of nucler wear, and the nuclear winter to follow. This was well explained, and there wa polenty of data to back it up, and anotehr good reason to abandon nuclear weapons. In the midst of the destruction and poisoning, we would be huddled around burning straw, freezing to death. Women and children would be affected the most.
Has the Nuclear winter hypothesis fallen out of favour? If it hasn't, then science warned about a catastrophe that could occur if we had a large scale nuclear war, fortunately for a variety of reasons, including the warnings of scientists, nuclear war was averted.
Looks like the science did good there.
Then, it was the new Ice Age, inevitable due to climate cycles that were very well explained and with plenty of data.
No it wasn't. The new Ice Age was never a popular hypothesis, there were a small handful of papers when scientists were still trying to figure out the long term effects of atmospheric CO2. The Ice Age made a bit of a splash in the media as hypothesis sometimes do, and then it was very quickly discarded when science settled on the AGW consensus.
Next, it's Global Warming, with now massive evidence of the causes and impacts, much more data, and warnings that we need to do everything to both prevent and adapt to it.
Unlike Nuclear winter we haven't solved this problem, and unlike the new Ice Age there's not only a consensus, but a consensus that has lasted for decades.
We need to abandon our technology, improve it, change fuel sources, use fuels that don't cause other harms, and do it all now. NOW. Oh, and women and children will be affected the most, and the soonest.
Well, if AGW is real, which it seems to be, then I'm ready to both prevent it and mitigate the consequences of what is going to happen no matter what we do.
Just one thing.
So far, most of the solutions to AGW rely on taking from me pretty much eveyrthing that makes my life, as a middle-class U.S. citizen, special.
Yeah, that sucks, but unfortunately that's reality. Cheap energy has side effects and if you want to reduce those side effects either the energy has to cost more, or you need to use less.
I can deal with that, but so far ther eis little real discussion of the problems of the rest of world hell-bent on achieving the same special life as I have. I don't begrudge them that. But I'm concerned that they are going to tip the climate over the edge sooner than I could have, and will not readily listen to complaints that they are ruining things for all of us.
There's been a ton of discussion, the world can't sustain 6 billion 2012 American lifestyles. And saying the rest of the world has to stay poor because the first world already screwed the planet is really unfair, and saying the first world has to lower their standard of living is a very tough pill to swallow. Probably the reason you haven't heard discussion is because taking a serious look at the topic means that we need to lower our standard of living a lot, while they raise theirs, and that's not a conclusion many people want to come to so it's often undiscussed.
I expect to give up a lot - I will have to change my diet, my transportation, pay way more taxes, do with less or most everything, and in the end all it will get me is a feeling of contribution. I will not live long enough to see the results. No, I am not that young.
And I will get the nagging feeling that deep inside this, the truth is, that most of the AGW movement is very, very happy that I am paying for my profiligate lifestyle. Because I neither deserve it, nor shoudl it be even permitted. That bunch has been at it since the Nuclear Winter debate, in one fashion or another.
Because that is the way it's going. The so-called 98% are taking it in the sho
This is they key point. "Freaks of nature" are over-represented in the elite athlete community already. That's part of what makes them elite. Why should abnormalities related to sex chromosomes or hormones be any different?
Say you had separate a basketball event for people under 6 feet tall.
Than anyone in that event who seemed to have excess height would need to be carefully tested.
As it is we have separate events for men and women.
So any woman who gets too close to the line defining male needs to be carefully tested.
And make no mistake, you need to draw that line somewhere, and where ever you draw it there are going to be people who straddle it.
Anyone who hasn't concluded that the US is the enemy of good copyright policy is frankly too ignorant to conduct a fair trial.
The problem isn't that he concluded the US is the enemy of good copyright policy, the problem is that he cares enough about this issue to express/argue this conclusion, and it might be hard to separate his opinions on US copyright law from the issue he's supposed to be deliberating on.
That being said there's not a lot on the original context so it's hard to say if there is a reasonable concern about bias or if he's just being overly cautious.
The strong implication in TFA is that the perpetrators were McDonald's employees. Perp 3 was sweeping the floor while wearing a McDonald's uniform, and from the description of the incident the other two were likely some sort of managers who apparently decided he wasn't allowed to wear his digital glasses.
People were concerned about their privacy so they subscribed to a breach notification list, instead they had their privacy potentially violated as a result of the list that was supposed to notify them.
I suppose a better irony would be if they were subscribers to some sort of breach avoidance system but it's still a pretty ironic situation.
If anybody could have thought of it why didn't they?
They did. My dining room table has rounded edge. So did my old TV. So does my keyboard. They all predated the iPad. Apple patented "round corners on a table form factor". They weren't the first ones to think of it, just the first ones to patent it.
The fact Apple's products consistently have some of the best designs
That's not a fact, that's an opinion. Facts need to objective, that is subjective.
suggests that they are doing something innovative, non-obvious
No, no it doesn't. It could also mean they are doing progressive, iterative improvements, that may be better than the competition, but only because they have taken the next logical step in product development. Every time someone brings out a product that is a little faster, smaller, cheaper or shinier doesn't necessarily mean they've suddenly come up with an innovative new concept.
putting in some real work
Wonderful. So's the guy who collects my garbage. He doesn't get a patent on that either, even if he does it really well.
I agreed that they shouldn't be patented, but my beef is that you seem to be denigrating the value and innovativeness of design. Personally I'm not an Apple fan, but I can see they generally have superior design and aesthetics. As for innovation in specific, you refer to "the next logical step", but nearly everyone here, including myself, mocked the iPad when it was first introduced.
I don't believe that design deserves patents, just like a lot of software doesn't, but to dismiss the value and innovation in Apple's design is really ignoring the evidence.
Most of Apple's design patents that relate to the aesthetics of a device are just stupid. Anybody could have thought of it, it is incredibly obvious, and would you really want to do it differently?
If anybody could have thought of it why didn't they? The fact Apple's products consistently have some of the best designs suggests that they are doing something innovative, non-obvious, and they're putting in some real work and talent.
That being said I don't feel that design is worthy of patent protection, your reward for having the best design is that when competitors rip it off consumers remember you're just ripping it off.
deflation pumps wealth from those producing it to those who sit on their money in a fucking growing economy.
You know, I have to ask. Do you get paid to spew this Orwellian bullshit?
There is absolutely no such thing as a "growing economy." There is an economy that is more interdependent and more risky and failure-prone, and there is an economy that is more stable and less interdependent and less risky.
Have you ever had a job? At that job did you create something of value? If you did than you created wealth and the economy grew.
I, for one, am perfectly capable of determining the amount of risk I am willing to take with my money, without central bankers fraudulently printing and manipulating interest rates in order to subsidize the reckless criminals on Wall Street and artificially increase risk by "growing the economy."
I'm not a fan of the amount of the economy tied up in the banking industry, but a healthy economy does need some kind of apparatus to allocate capital towards good investment opportunities, at least it does if you believe in loans.
And since all currencies in the entire history of the world have been inflationary, including Bitcoin, there is absolutely no chance of your ridiculously misguided fearmongering about "deflation" ever coming to pass, even if they were even remotely grounded in reality.
Yes, it's part of the dynamic of the traitorous banksters in the Federal Reserve using fraudulent counterfeit money to suck up all valuable capital while telling us that we are just as well-off today because one dollar will buy the same amount of pink slime as it would ground beef a few years ago.
Another faceless bureaucrat put in charge of something to which he has a vague comprehension. So if he worked national security for OMB, does that mean he is an accountant that finds terrorists?
I'm sure Al-Qaeda is shaking in their boots. "Please don't audit me!"
Would you prefer a political appointee who comes in due to nepotism, or to appease some political allies?
I'm not saying this guy isn't necessarily one of those things, but being in the "Office of Management and Budget's national security division for 17 years" doesn't mean he doesn't know cybersecurity. In general if a faceless bureaucrat gets appointed to an important position I'd expect it's because they're damn good at it.
The only thing I wonder about is the intelligence of a guy who felt the need to lie about his degree when it matters so little given his work experience and which can easily be checked. Sadly I question the competence of a CEO who can't lie well. Maybe that's what the board is really investigating.
This went back at least to his time at Paypal.
Most likely I'm guessing the lie started years, probably decades back, when he applied for some entry level position. Once that lie was on the record and known to associates he was stuck with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Disappointing though not a really indicative of a wider problem on its own.
Two keys facts, 1) both athletes were living (and presumably training) in the US, thus they're not really part of the group of Jamaicans like Bolt who live and train in Jamaica. 2) In both cases the drugs were shipped directly to the athlete, this indicates that they were doing it on their own initiative since a coach or doctor would have shipped the drugs to themself, and would have been smart enough to use a mailbox not linked to their own name.
Two athletes, living and training in another country, and doping on their own isn't what I mean by a history (or culture) of doping.
They were "open" to religion as long as everyone worshiped Caesar as a god. This was an unacceptable violation of human rights.
I don't know the full nuance of what they wanted, but they definitely tolerated other religions as long as they made certain concessions. I didn't claim it was acceptable, but it's certainly better than what the Christians did later.
I haven't studied enough history, but I would imagine that another reason for anti-Christian hatred is that Christians proselytize.
Let's skip this part because my History of the Roman Christianization is poor.
Two of the first actions when the Empire became Christian were the Council of Nicaea which tried to establish common Christian doctrine (if you don't agree you're no longer part of the church) and a debate about whether to let back in people who had renounced Christ when threatened by the Romans. I'm pretty sure the Christian Empire crucified way more Christians than the pre-Christian Empire.
Hasn't ended to this day? How so?
When have the Abrahamic religions ever been at peace even with variants of themselves?
Lance is (or was) doping. Every top athlete is doping. Bolt, Phelps; they're dopers too (and I don't mean marijuana). That's just what it takes to be at that level unless you're a genetic freak.
Good genes and a great training/diet program can only take someone so far.
Phelps is from a clean sport from a program with no history of drug abuse, has a genetic advantage, and a sport where good technique (ie training $$) can make a huge difference.
Bolt comes from a dirty sport, but a slightly cleaner era in that sport, but we know he's a huge genetic freak, comes from a country without a history of doping, and has a very good training group.
Extreme performance is a reason to consider drug abuse, but can't be considered as evidence by itself.
1) Assume Lance cheated
- How wasn't he caught in the act for so long?
Most of the cheaters have been doping for years when they get caught, why should he be different?
- How can all the technological innovation that went into his cycling be ignored? The wind-tunnel testing, the water-tank-in-frame, the unique bike designs, those all were serious efforts that AFAIK were unique, why spend that effort if you're already doping?
Who's ignoring it? Doping doesn't give you a free win, not when your top competition is doping too. Besides, I'm guessing a lot of that wasn't as unique as you suspect (though maybe he had the resources to do more).
- How were others not able to cheat as well as he did?
He had some combination of better doping resources, better training, and better natural gifts.
- How was he not caught cheating in 2009 when he placed 3rd after not racing for 2 years? Wouldn't he be expected to be a total doper taking a standing that high after being retired for so long?
Well they do have some apparent positive tests from '09 (I don't know the details) but doping is still hard to detect.
- How can the fact that he trained for only 1 race each year, the Tour de France, be ignored as explaining his stellar performance? Most other competition would do more racing per year, Lance focused like a laser beam on the Tour de France. How can this not help explain his insane performances?
It can explain some.
- Lance packed his team with certifiably world-class climbers to set pace for him and run strategy on the large parts of big climbs. Other squads did not. Can't this help explain it?
2) Assume lance did not cheat
It helps, but there's still a lot of evidence of doping.
- Why are so many people out to discredit him? How big of an a-hole must Lance be to have this many people willing to take him down by lying?
Why do you think they're lying? There's a lot of circumstantial evidence surrounding Armstrong, and someone who's gotten that much success while cheating is a tempting target.
- Why not fight these charges to the last?
Because he doesn't have a good defence in court so he'll fight the PR battle instead.
- Why wasn't Lance more open in his Tours? The technology existed during his run to simply put Lance on camera 24-hours-a-day for the world to see he wasn't cheating. Why not do this, especially in 2009 when he took 3rd?
Privacy, because he was cheating, because it wouldn't prove he wasn't cheating (you can take drugs weeks or months before and still benefit).
- How was Lance so good at simply laying the hammer down at the ends of big climbing stages? Is he just a freak of nature? Were his teammates really capable of simply relieving all the stress of keeping in the pack long enough for him to go balls out at the end?
All of the above (plus doping).
- Why were later tests on his samples so dodgy? What was the motivation in even testing them?
The tests were good enough to catch many many many other cyclists. Including the greatest cyclist ever, Edy Merckx back in the 60s.
Notice how whenever they catch one of these athletes it turns out the doping has been going on for years before? That tells me that catching someone is really hard, harder for someone who has the resources to afford better medical expertise to beat the tests.
Even if you follow their testimony to conclude he cheated...so did literally everybody else. The vast numbers of actual drug test fails speak to that clearly.
So in the end, he was perhaps better at hiding the cheating, but he was still massively better at actual cycling than any other cyclist at the time who was also very likely cheating as well.
How many riders were doping? How good was their doping program, how much did it help them? How much did it help him? Who was the best clean cyclist? We guess is that Armstrong was the best, or one of the best cyclists, with or without drugs. But combining his superior resources to get a better doping program, and less competition from the clean athletes, that took him from a top rider to a perennial winner, and from slightly famous to A-list celebrity.
The Roman's were very open about Religion, look at the hubbub about a Mormon running for office, now consider this Emperor deciding to rewrite the Roman religion and add his god to the top of pantheon.
The only thing Romans really cared about was that whatever religion you were you gave the Emperor a blessing, the Jews got harsh treatment since their monotheistic religion caused them to denounce other gods, the Christians got it worse because they had the same incompatibility as the Jews, but they didn't have the excuse of following their ancestors religion and the Romans considered them a cult.
But if you want to look at the history of religious strife, intolerance, and state-sponsored persecution, look to the Christianization of the Roman empire. That's the point at which all of Rome's conflicts, external and internal, start taking on a big religious tone and it hasn't really ended till this day.
In competition riders could be pulled for testing before or after a stage. Pretty hard to give yourself EPO while riding and all the cameras on you, it has to be injected, not taken as food, drink or from a patch. If tested before a stage a tested rider cannot return to his hotel or disappear into a team bus, but must go to the starting area. Out in the open it's pretty darn har to hide needles, bags of transfusion blood, etc.
It's a pretty weak whack the USADA is taking at Armstrong and I'm quite surprised he's not going into their den and ripping up the accusations in the faces of his accusers. But USADA having his wins, income, medal, etc, all yanked for all competitions from 1998 on based upon the word of people, but no hard evidence is something I expected Lance could have overturned in court ... probably in a couple more years. Which makes much of this "tired of fighting, not going to fight anymore" understandable.
As pointed out in various sources, every time he gets one accuser discredited another one pops up in a never ending game of whack-a-mole. He's chosing to ignore USADA, which is probably the only defence he saw at some point. His attorneys served a letter to USADA stating he doesn't accept their findings. Wait to see what the UCI has to say.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. EPO isn't some temporary stimulant, it's a drug that increases the production of red blood cells, he could take it weeks, or even months before the competition and still get the benefit, I don't think you intended for him to have a personal cameraman 24/7.
As for no hard evidence, drug tests are only one piece of evidence, and it's well known that they can be fooled. Fortunately the USADA has a ton of circumstantial evidence including a lot of eye witnesses who were associated with Armstrong's team, I think it would be an easy case to make in criminal court.
As for stripping all of Armstrong's results. Do you know the name of the guys who would have won those tours if Armstrong and those other guys didn't cheat? The guys who were incredibly talented and hard working, but were too ethical to cheat? No? Well neither do I. We'll probably never know who those guys were and even with this action by the USADA Armstrong will still be rich and famous, while these other guys who probably deserved it more, will remain unknown, probably not even knowing that they should have been the real winner.
Not to mention the fuel emissions from going out and doing the collection, or even the current system of driving around and collecting by-catch, than sorting and processing the material into furniture. Unless it's a lot more feasible than I suspect I have a hunch this project will do more harm than good for the environment.
Over and over, people have made the same point: internet ads wouldn't be objectionable if they were like ads in a newspaper or magazine, but because they aren't like that, any user with enough know-how is going to block them. I'm sorry, but I just can't read an article while an animated monkey is jumping up and down next to it on the screen.
Text-oriented sites like slashdot are relatively cheap to run, on a per-user basis, so as long as some percentage of their users don't use ad blockers, these sites are viable.
I asked someone I know, who works in online advertising, whether ad blocking is an issue for her company. I told her I never saw ads on the internet and was surprised that anyone was ... well, dumb enough ... to fail to install ad blocking software. Her response: "Do you use Hulu?"
Not necessarily. In generally I don't find ads, or the implied contract that I should view the website ads along with the content, particularly offensive, thus I've never used ad-block. In the case of sites where the ads are annoying enough I generally leave the site and don't come back, this is one of the behaviours that keeps webmasters in check.
So what's the business model you'd prefer then?
So you're subscribing to /. then?
Whether the Facebook page is private or not is irrelevant, his friends reported him to the authorities and easily could have shown them the Facebook page.
I'm not sure I see anything in this story that makes me worry about civil liberties, it's just an unusual news story.
I've been watching climate change debates most of my life.
First, it was the threat of nucler wear, and the nuclear winter to follow. This was well explained, and there wa polenty of data to back it up, and anotehr good reason to abandon nuclear weapons. In the midst of the destruction and poisoning, we would be huddled around burning straw, freezing to death. Women and children would be affected the most.
Has the Nuclear winter hypothesis fallen out of favour? If it hasn't, then science warned about a catastrophe that could occur if we had a large scale nuclear war, fortunately for a variety of reasons, including the warnings of scientists, nuclear war was averted.
Looks like the science did good there.
Then, it was the new Ice Age, inevitable due to climate cycles that were very well explained and with plenty of data.
No it wasn't. The new Ice Age was never a popular hypothesis, there were a small handful of papers when scientists were still trying to figure out the long term effects of atmospheric CO2. The Ice Age made a bit of a splash in the media as hypothesis sometimes do, and then it was very quickly discarded when science settled on the AGW consensus.
Next, it's Global Warming, with now massive evidence of the causes and impacts, much more data, and warnings that we need to do everything to both prevent and adapt to it.
Unlike Nuclear winter we haven't solved this problem, and unlike the new Ice Age there's not only a consensus, but a consensus that has lasted for decades.
We need to abandon our technology, improve it, change fuel sources, use fuels that don't cause other harms, and do it all now. NOW. Oh, and women and children will be affected the most, and the soonest.
Well, if AGW is real, which it seems to be, then I'm ready to both prevent it and mitigate the consequences of what is going to happen no matter what we do.
Just one thing.
So far, most of the solutions to AGW rely on taking from me pretty much eveyrthing that makes my life, as a middle-class U.S. citizen, special.
Yeah, that sucks, but unfortunately that's reality. Cheap energy has side effects and if you want to reduce those side effects either the energy has to cost more, or you need to use less.
I can deal with that, but so far ther eis little real discussion of the problems of the rest of world hell-bent on achieving the same special life as I have. I don't begrudge them that. But I'm concerned that they are going to tip the climate over the edge sooner than I could have, and will not readily listen to complaints that they are ruining things for all of us.
There's been a ton of discussion, the world can't sustain 6 billion 2012 American lifestyles. And saying the rest of the world has to stay poor because the first world already screwed the planet is really unfair, and saying the first world has to lower their standard of living is a very tough pill to swallow. Probably the reason you haven't heard discussion is because taking a serious look at the topic means that we need to lower our standard of living a lot, while they raise theirs, and that's not a conclusion many people want to come to so it's often undiscussed.
I expect to give up a lot - I will have to change my diet, my transportation, pay way more taxes, do with less or most everything, and in the end all it will get me is a feeling of contribution. I will not live long enough to see the results. No, I am not that young.
And I will get the nagging feeling that deep inside this, the truth is, that most of the AGW movement is very, very happy that I am paying for my profiligate lifestyle. Because I neither deserve it, nor shoudl it be even permitted. That bunch has been at it since the Nuclear Winter debate, in one fashion or another.
Because that is the way it's going. The so-called 98% are taking it in the sho
This is they key point. "Freaks of nature" are over-represented in the elite athlete community already. That's part of what makes them elite. Why should abnormalities related to sex chromosomes or hormones be any different?
Say you had separate a basketball event for people under 6 feet tall.
Than anyone in that event who seemed to have excess height would need to be carefully tested.
As it is we have separate events for men and women.
So any woman who gets too close to the line defining male needs to be carefully tested.
And make no mistake, you need to draw that line somewhere, and where ever you draw it there are going to be people who straddle it.
Anyone who hasn't concluded that the US is the enemy of good copyright policy is frankly too ignorant to conduct a fair trial.
The problem isn't that he concluded the US is the enemy of good copyright policy, the problem is that he cares enough about this issue to express/argue this conclusion, and it might be hard to separate his opinions on US copyright law from the issue he's supposed to be deliberating on.
That being said there's not a lot on the original context so it's hard to say if there is a reasonable concern about bias or if he's just being overly cautious.
The strong implication in TFA is that the perpetrators were McDonald's employees. Perp 3 was sweeping the floor while wearing a McDonald's uniform, and from the description of the incident the other two were likely some sort of managers who apparently decided he wasn't allowed to wear his digital glasses.
I'd say it's a pretty good example of irony, from wikipedia "A situation is often said to be ironic (situational irony) if the actions taken have an effect exactly opposite from what was intended".
People were concerned about their privacy so they subscribed to a breach notification list, instead they had their privacy potentially violated as a result of the list that was supposed to notify them.
I suppose a better irony would be if they were subscribers to some sort of breach avoidance system but it's still a pretty ironic situation.
If anybody could have thought of it why didn't they?
They did. My dining room table has rounded edge. So did my old TV. So does my keyboard. They all predated the iPad. Apple patented "round corners on a table form factor". They weren't the first ones to think of it, just the first ones to patent it.
The fact Apple's products consistently have some of the best designs
That's not a fact, that's an opinion. Facts need to objective, that is subjective.
suggests that they are doing something innovative, non-obvious
No, no it doesn't. It could also mean they are doing progressive, iterative improvements, that may be better than the competition, but only because they have taken the next logical step in product development. Every time someone brings out a product that is a little faster, smaller, cheaper or shinier doesn't necessarily mean they've suddenly come up with an innovative new concept.
putting in some real work
Wonderful. So's the guy who collects my garbage. He doesn't get a patent on that either, even if he does it really well.
I agreed that they shouldn't be patented, but my beef is that you seem to be denigrating the value and innovativeness of design. Personally I'm not an Apple fan, but I can see they generally have superior design and aesthetics. As for innovation in specific, you refer to "the next logical step", but nearly everyone here, including myself, mocked the iPad when it was first introduced.
I don't believe that design deserves patents, just like a lot of software doesn't, but to dismiss the value and innovation in Apple's design is really ignoring the evidence.
Most of Apple's design patents that relate to the aesthetics of a device are just stupid. Anybody could have thought of it, it is incredibly obvious, and would you really want to do it differently?
If anybody could have thought of it why didn't they? The fact Apple's products consistently have some of the best designs suggests that they are doing something innovative, non-obvious, and they're putting in some real work and talent.
That being said I don't feel that design is worthy of patent protection, your reward for having the best design is that when competitors rip it off consumers remember you're just ripping it off.
I think that's partly the problem, when one side of the debate is way outside the consensus than an unbiased summary now looks highly partisan.
It's very hard to build a bridge when the opposite shore looks like crazyland.
I'd take you a lot more seriously if you didn't sound like you were giving a halftime speech.
Most ideas have passionate dedicated believers, most ideas also fail.
deflation pumps wealth from those producing it to those who sit on their money in a fucking growing economy.
You know, I have to ask. Do you get paid to spew this Orwellian bullshit?
There is absolutely no such thing as a "growing economy." There is an economy that is more interdependent and more risky and failure-prone, and there is an economy that is more stable and less interdependent and less risky.
Have you ever had a job? At that job did you create something of value? If you did than you created wealth and the economy grew.
I, for one, am perfectly capable of determining the amount of risk I am willing to take with my money, without central bankers fraudulently printing and manipulating interest rates in order to subsidize the reckless criminals on Wall Street and artificially increase risk by "growing the economy."
I'm not a fan of the amount of the economy tied up in the banking industry, but a healthy economy does need some kind of apparatus to allocate capital towards good investment opportunities, at least it does if you believe in loans.
And since all currencies in the entire history of the world have been inflationary, including Bitcoin, there is absolutely no chance of your ridiculously misguided fearmongering about "deflation" ever coming to pass, even if they were even remotely grounded in reality.
Deflation does occur
Money is part of a larger market dynamic
Yes, it's part of the dynamic of the traitorous banksters in the Federal Reserve using fraudulent counterfeit money to suck up all valuable capital while telling us that we are just as well-off today because one dollar will buy the same amount of pink slime as it would ground beef a few years ago.
So what do you advocate? A gold standard?
Another faceless bureaucrat put in charge of something to which he has a vague comprehension. So if he worked national security for OMB, does that mean he is an accountant that finds terrorists?
I'm sure Al-Qaeda is shaking in their boots. "Please don't audit me!"
Would you prefer a political appointee who comes in due to nepotism, or to appease some political allies?
I'm not saying this guy isn't necessarily one of those things, but being in the "Office of Management and Budget's national security division for 17 years" doesn't mean he doesn't know cybersecurity. In general if a faceless bureaucrat gets appointed to an important position I'd expect it's because they're damn good at it.
Taxes are voluntary in the same way home rent is voluntary - you're free to not pay it, but you need to move out then.
So if the government starts a tax on the air you breathe, you can free not to breathe?
Taxation is unjust. Forced taxation is unjust.
You're free to move to another country.
Can't find a country without taxes to your liking?
Maybe those taxes are actually doing something worthwhile.
The only thing I wonder about is the intelligence of a guy who felt the need to lie about his degree when it matters so little given his work experience and which can easily be checked. Sadly I question the competence of a CEO who can't lie well. Maybe that's what the board is really investigating.
This went back at least to his time at Paypal.
Most likely I'm guessing the lie started years, probably decades back, when he applied for some entry level position. Once that lie was on the record and known to associates he was stuck with it.