No kidding - in the ruckus of the "waah waah the arctic ice is melting" hysteria, they also missed the fact that we had a brand-new chain of undersea volcanoes on the Gakkel Ridge, spreading heat right in the areas this kook was complaining about.
I don't think most people who look at this as a fraud disbelieve that the ice caps are changing, they just don't believe the hysterical rantings of scientists who can't predict the weather or a hurricane season with any certainty.
I don't disbelieve that the ice caps are changing, or that the climate changes. Climate always changes, we have warm and cool years. Mars is going through cycles that match ours exactly, because it's not just the Earth that does it - increased/decreased solar activity cycles change the amount of energy delivered to every single planet in the solar system.
What I disbelieve is the kookery and crap "science" pushed by the "end of the world is coming" Al Gore-types.
Of course, counting cards in your head is legal. For this reason, casinos will always have to do their own work to detect card-counters and enforce their own rules against them (by throwing them out and banning them from returning).
I find it incredibly interesting that casinos are allowed to kick you out and ban you from the business merely because you actually won money.
They have a perfectly good way to detect card counters -- they have their own people counting the cards and watching betting patterns. So in my view the law against card-counting devices is not strictly necessary, though perhaps it encourages more people to play nice (as it puts actual legal consequences on those who can't keep track in their heads).
"Playing nice" means playing to lose? I'm sorry, when I play a game, I play to win. The casinos already cheat by using 8-9 decks in the "shoe", trying to destroy the count of single-deck play (plus, they change out the "shoe" halfway down the stack). They run stacked, electronic slot machines that are designed to only pay out once in a blue moon, and have been known to welsh on it, lying and claiming "well the machine malfunctioned so we don't have to pay."
Casinos are the real fraudsters here. The fact that they get to "manage the odds" and kick out people who are winning is ridiculous.
Your model leaves open the possibility of independent artists getting popular on their own, rather than a concerted MafiAA forced-advertising and media conglomeration campaign (come on now, seriously - if the market worked on whether artists actually produced good music, as opposed to the MafiAA model, Britney Spears would never even have been a blip on the radar).
That still doesn't change the fact that the Democrats running the recount quite obviously failed to follow the state-provided recount procedure correctly and ensure the same standards of recounting in every county, instead picking and choosing standards county by county based solely on which one added votes for Franken...
Can someone please mod parent down as obvious nincompoop? GP was a very insightful post and it's shameful the way the left-wingers have abused moderator points in this discussion.
Yet the "by state law automatic recount" was not conducted according to state law - the reviewers picked and chose which counties to take the "recounted" vote from and which they left the "original" vote stand, despite glaring evidence that there were larger problems going on.
Look honestly at the system. In one county, they kept the "original" vote count even though they couldn't find 50 of the supposedly-originally-counted ballots. In another, they kept the "new" tally despite the fact that there was clear evidence someone had slipped extra ballots into the system (the number of ballots exceeded number of signed-in voters).
You can't pick and choose. If you do a recount, every county has to use the same standard. They failed to uphold state law and do this.
This wasn't "flamebait" - it was an insightful observation of the way things always turn out on "politics" discussions on Slashdot. Left wingers get mod points, and mod "flamebait" on things that are actually either just something they disagree with, or worse yet, an uncomfortable truth.
There have been instances of respected newspapers using The Onion as sources, not realizing that fine news source is humor. The Onion must hate that, it would be like when you make a joke comment on slashdot and it gets modded as "insightful".
But the best humor is humorous because it is insightful and witty. Compare an "all guys getting hit in the groin" show like America's Funniest Home Videos to some really, really good stand-up comedy, or to A Modest Proposal... nothing prevents something from being both insightful and humorous.
Obviously we are referring to the loose kind of journalism one would find in Der Spiegel.
Or the New York Times, or by CBS/ABC/NBC/CNN...
The point that the GP was getting at, that you so flippantly deride, is that too many "researchers" these days are willing to use the first three results from a Google search as the sum total of their research into a topic. While Der Spiegel may be a reputable news outlet, one cannot generally take its articles as primary sources, and certainly not for the purposes of engaging in encyclopedic grade research.
Which is a large reason Wikipedia is so shoddy: sources are taken on "reputation" and the arbitrary decision of what a "reliable source" is, usually as defined by whether or not (a) most of the left-winger edit warriors of Wikipedia agree with the source's conclusions and (b) whether anyone else can come up with something that passes the "reliable source" test to discredit it (interestingly vague; lies and nonsense have remained in Wikipedia sometimes for months because a "reliable source" said something wrong, a set of bloggers caught it and documented very well that it was wrong, but the left-wingers shouted it down, claimed the blogs were not "reliable sources", "No Original Research" when someone simply replicated the sources the blogs were using as proof that it was false, etc...)
I feel that Wikipedia needs to put in place policies that start selecting out those contributors who are unable to either engage in this level of research and those who are unable to produce encyclopedia grade writing.
Unfortunately, Wikipedia's policies are currently the reverse: they have a major problem with driving academics and good researchers away, and it doesn't help that those who are "unable to produce encyclopedia grade writing" instead wind up spending hours per day "reverting vandalism" and are eventually given admin tools.
Power corrupts: Absolute Power corrupts Absolutely: Petty Power corrupts all out of proportion. Wikipedia admins are the worst sort because they, and their power, are so petty. It doesn't help that they also routinely overestimate their own competence.
Many of the Wikipedia articles are, while informative and good as an introduction into a topic, very superficial and poorly written. Unsophisticated use of language is not a problem per se, however it can lead to ambiguity. The ability of a writer to consistently ensure that there is no other way their text could be interpreted is the difference between a mediocre researcher and a true scholar.
Most wikipedia articles are not "informative and good as an introduction into a topic" - the sourcing is routinely biased, and important countersourcing ignored or minimized if included at all.
Oddly enough, most so-called "conservatives" today are actually from what, classically, is the center of the political spectrum. It just doesn't look that way because so much of the major media outlets are hard-core lefties claiming that they are the "center."
Let's take a few examples:
- Health care. The "right wing" position would be hands-off government and competition between services. The "left wing" position is socialized medicine. The "center" would have a balance, with people going out of their own pocket for minor things and shopping for insurance for the major, and government assists for those who truly were unable to pay. Unfortunately, we effectively today almost have "socialized medicine" - when's the last time you had a choice of your HMO/insurance instead of having whatever your workplace provided? When's the last time you realized that yes, there are independent clinics out there that are actually cheaper (for the little stuff) than your copayment, except that for anything major you have to go see your bullshit "primary care provider" for a referral or the insurance company will dick you over?
- Immigration. The "right wing" position would be isolationism. The "left wing" position would be unfettered open borders. The "center" should be responsible, controlled, legal immigration so that we bring in people on (a) a sustainable level and (b) fill in spots in the economy where we need workers. Unfortunately, the left-wing open borders crowd insists that the responsible center are actually a bunch of "right-wing haters" when we say that hey, maybe we should know who's coming in to the country.
- Social services. The "right wing" position would be to do away with them altogether. The "left wing" position would be to stick everyone on them. In the center, we would try to provide the ones that are really needed, while getting rid of (or tightening down on) those that are either (a) being abused, (b) counterproductive, or (c) just plain unnecessary. Yet the moment you even try to have this debate, the left wing types call you a "hater."
I'm a proud member of the center. Where do you fall, honestly?
Put in for our household's DTV converter box coupons... someone stole them in the mail. Called up to ask where they were, was told "by the terms of the law, we aren't allowed to issue a replacement if yours are never delivered to you."
Yeah, I can probably "afford" the converter box. Still pisses me off to have that happen and the gov't say "too fucking bad" about it.
Only if they're looking none too closely, kind of like those "portraits made of a ton of other materials" that you can't make out if you're standing within 30 feet of them.
Wikipedia, in truth an actuality, is a pretty poor "encyclopedia" for anything other than lists of pokemon or ripped-off content stolen from other places (like IMDB).
All kidding aside, Brittanica has a legitimate gripe - Wikipedia's height in the search rankings is due mostly to the fact that it's coded as a gigantic linkfarm.
The difference between Wikipedia and every other linkfarm out there, however, is that porn-peddler Wales managed to fob Wikipedia off as a "nonprofit" site, and convinced Google not to downgrade its linking weight according to the formula they use for all the other linkfarms out there. If not for this preferential treatment, wikipedia wouldn't show up nearly as high in search results.
And of course, it doesn't help anyone that wikipedia actively took steps in recent months to screw with others, such as implementing automatic nofollow on external links, thus making sure that inter-wikipedia links are the only links that get help by being listed there.
I'd love to see Google treat wikipedia like they treat everyone else. Won't happen, but it would mean Google would have more meaningful search results.
- Schoolchum of Obama - Clerked for an odd combination of judges (wonder why?) - "Common Sense Media" - anything but, a thinly veiled left-wing group aiming to further tilt the media. Also involved in several highly anti-common sense issues regarding video games.
This isn't a rosy pick. Of course, I could be wrong. He might walk in first day, declare the RIAA/MPAA/MAFIAA to be a bunch of jerks, re-implement the necessary media-channel ownership laws so that we actually get competition (as opposed to the current ongoing death of local radio, thanks to relaxation of rules that took us from over 5000 station owners to a mere 5 conglomerates owning 99% of the market in a mere two years during the '90s), and recommend the DMCA be tossed out for the useless, anti-innovation pile of shit that it is.
But seeing his resume, I really doubt it. He looks like a lobbyist masquerading as a public servant and as Obama's already proven by appointing people whose spouses are lobbyists elsewhere, "the federal cash register is open for some 'honest graft' ka-ching!"
There's been far too little scrutiny of a number of Obama appointees... he seems to be stacking the cabinet with nothing but extreme left-wingers every chance he gets.
So much for people who thought he was "honest" or "centrist."
10.5 MB? What file format are you using? What resolution (DPI, that is) are you storing the image at? The images sent to my relatives have all been bigger than that.
The human eye isn't a microscope. So you don't need to scan an image to microscopic precision.
The human eye isn't a microscope, which is why we invented the microscope. That way, we can use optical lenses to enlarge things and get around the limitations of the human eye. You're more limited by the functional grain of your imaging film for things like photographs (whether in normal visual range, or outside it). And in most modern technology (including most of the radiological processes used today), we can enlarge the image quite a bit, allowing us to "see" extra detail before we lose the film's grain.
Did I say I was against digitizing records and then disposing of the originals? HELL YES.
All three people who've responded to me so far have made that same stupid mistake. I never said I was against digitizing records, I said that any retention plan we have needs to take into account the vulnerabilities and problems of the new(er) storage medium being switched to. If a single storage medium has problems, then keep the data in multiple places - keep a digital copy AND then store the originals in case the digital copy gets destroyed.
Vaccines work much the same way, I'm surprised it took until now to come up with this.
Of course, one has to wonder what the reprogrammed cells go after once the cancer's been eaten, since "cancer" is defined as the abnormal growth rate of otherwise-normal (at least for the location they were supposed to be in) cells. I could see an immune reconstitution-style problem popping up. Point a bunch of 'redirected' immune cells at lung cancer, for example, and there's a possibility they will "finish" the cancerous cells and decide the healthy lung tissue is "close enough" for a snack afterwards.
Slashdot Mirror
No kidding - in the ruckus of the "waah waah the arctic ice is melting" hysteria, they also missed the fact that we had a brand-new chain of undersea volcanoes on the Gakkel Ridge, spreading heat right in the areas this kook was complaining about.
I don't think most people who look at this as a fraud disbelieve that the ice caps are changing, they just don't believe the hysterical rantings of scientists who can't predict the weather or a hurricane season with any certainty.
I don't disbelieve that the ice caps are changing, or that the climate changes. Climate always changes, we have warm and cool years. Mars is going through cycles that match ours exactly, because it's not just the Earth that does it - increased/decreased solar activity cycles change the amount of energy delivered to every single planet in the solar system.
What I disbelieve is the kookery and crap "science" pushed by the "end of the world is coming" Al Gore-types.
Of course, counting cards in your head is legal. For this reason, casinos will always have to do their own work to detect card-counters and enforce their own rules against them (by throwing them out and banning them from returning).
I find it incredibly interesting that casinos are allowed to kick you out and ban you from the business merely because you actually won money.
They have a perfectly good way to detect card counters -- they have their own people counting the cards and watching betting patterns. So in my view the law against card-counting devices is not strictly necessary, though perhaps it encourages more people to play nice (as it puts actual legal consequences on those who can't keep track in their heads).
"Playing nice" means playing to lose? I'm sorry, when I play a game, I play to win. The casinos already cheat by using 8-9 decks in the "shoe", trying to destroy the count of single-deck play (plus, they change out the "shoe" halfway down the stack). They run stacked, electronic slot machines that are designed to only pay out once in a blue moon, and have been known to welsh on it, lying and claiming "well the machine malfunctioned so we don't have to pay."
Casinos are the real fraudsters here. The fact that they get to "manage the odds" and kick out people who are winning is ridiculous.
Steve Jobs can take his apple and stick it where the sun don't shine.
Your model leaves open the possibility of independent artists getting popular on their own, rather than a concerted MafiAA forced-advertising and media conglomeration campaign (come on now, seriously - if the market worked on whether artists actually produced good music, as opposed to the MafiAA model, Britney Spears would never even have been a blip on the radar).
That still doesn't change the fact that the Democrats running the recount quite obviously failed to follow the state-provided recount procedure correctly and ensure the same standards of recounting in every county, instead picking and choosing standards county by county based solely on which one added votes for Franken...
Yes but by splitting to two pages he made sure he "served" the ads twice, so gets paid for twice as many "pageviews..."
Can someone please mod parent down as obvious nincompoop? GP was a very insightful post and it's shameful the way the left-wingers have abused moderator points in this discussion.
Kthxbye.
Yet the "by state law automatic recount" was not conducted according to state law - the reviewers picked and chose which counties to take the "recounted" vote from and which they left the "original" vote stand, despite glaring evidence that there were larger problems going on.
Look honestly at the system. In one county, they kept the "original" vote count even though they couldn't find 50 of the supposedly-originally-counted ballots. In another, they kept the "new" tally despite the fact that there was clear evidence someone had slipped extra ballots into the system (the number of ballots exceeded number of signed-in voters).
You can't pick and choose. If you do a recount, every county has to use the same standard. They failed to uphold state law and do this.
This wasn't "flamebait" - it was an insightful observation of the way things always turn out on "politics" discussions on Slashdot. Left wingers get mod points, and mod "flamebait" on things that are actually either just something they disagree with, or worse yet, an uncomfortable truth.
See? That is why insightful is funnier than just someone getting kicked in the groin...
Basic suggestion: get 50 people. Go to the "Author's Guild" offices, stage a sit-in, and everyone start reading some book aloud.
To make it REALLY funny, make it a freely-available Creative Commons book. Maybe Free Culture by Lessig.
There have been instances of respected newspapers using The Onion as sources, not realizing that fine news source is humor. The Onion must hate that, it would be like when you make a joke comment on slashdot and it gets modded as "insightful".
But the best humor is humorous because it is insightful and witty. Compare an "all guys getting hit in the groin" show like America's Funniest Home Videos to some really, really good stand-up comedy, or to A Modest Proposal... nothing prevents something from being both insightful and humorous.
Obviously we are referring to the loose kind of journalism one would find in Der Spiegel.
Or the New York Times, or by CBS/ABC/NBC/CNN...
The point that the GP was getting at, that you so flippantly deride, is that too many "researchers" these days are willing to use the first three results from a Google search as the sum total of their research into a topic. While Der Spiegel may be a reputable news outlet, one cannot generally take its articles as primary sources, and certainly not for the purposes of engaging in encyclopedic grade research.
Which is a large reason Wikipedia is so shoddy: sources are taken on "reputation" and the arbitrary decision of what a "reliable source" is, usually as defined by whether or not (a) most of the left-winger edit warriors of Wikipedia agree with the source's conclusions and (b) whether anyone else can come up with something that passes the "reliable source" test to discredit it (interestingly vague; lies and nonsense have remained in Wikipedia sometimes for months because a "reliable source" said something wrong, a set of bloggers caught it and documented very well that it was wrong, but the left-wingers shouted it down, claimed the blogs were not "reliable sources", "No Original Research" when someone simply replicated the sources the blogs were using as proof that it was false, etc...)
I feel that Wikipedia needs to put in place policies that start selecting out those contributors who are unable to either engage in this level of research and those who are unable to produce encyclopedia grade writing.
Unfortunately, Wikipedia's policies are currently the reverse: they have a major problem with driving academics and good researchers away, and it doesn't help that those who are "unable to produce encyclopedia grade writing" instead wind up spending hours per day "reverting vandalism" and are eventually given admin tools.
Power corrupts: Absolute Power corrupts Absolutely: Petty Power corrupts all out of proportion. Wikipedia admins are the worst sort because they, and their power, are so petty. It doesn't help that they also routinely overestimate their own competence.
Many of the Wikipedia articles are, while informative and good as an introduction into a topic, very superficial and poorly written. Unsophisticated use of language is not a problem per se, however it can lead to ambiguity. The ability of a writer to consistently ensure that there is no other way their text could be interpreted is the difference between a mediocre researcher and a true scholar.
How to lie with statistics. Also, Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit.
Most wikipedia articles are not "informative and good as an introduction into a topic" - the sourcing is routinely biased, and important countersourcing ignored or minimized if included at all.
Oddly enough, most so-called "conservatives" today are actually from what, classically, is the center of the political spectrum. It just doesn't look that way because so much of the major media outlets are hard-core lefties claiming that they are the "center."
Let's take a few examples:
- Health care. The "right wing" position would be hands-off government and competition between services. The "left wing" position is socialized medicine. The "center" would have a balance, with people going out of their own pocket for minor things and shopping for insurance for the major, and government assists for those who truly were unable to pay. Unfortunately, we effectively today almost have "socialized medicine" - when's the last time you had a choice of your HMO/insurance instead of having whatever your workplace provided? When's the last time you realized that yes, there are independent clinics out there that are actually cheaper (for the little stuff) than your copayment, except that for anything major you have to go see your bullshit "primary care provider" for a referral or the insurance company will dick you over?
- Immigration. The "right wing" position would be isolationism. The "left wing" position would be unfettered open borders. The "center" should be responsible, controlled, legal immigration so that we bring in people on (a) a sustainable level and (b) fill in spots in the economy where we need workers. Unfortunately, the left-wing open borders crowd insists that the responsible center are actually a bunch of "right-wing haters" when we say that hey, maybe we should know who's coming in to the country.
- Social services. The "right wing" position would be to do away with them altogether. The "left wing" position would be to stick everyone on them. In the center, we would try to provide the ones that are really needed, while getting rid of (or tightening down on) those that are either (a) being abused, (b) counterproductive, or (c) just plain unnecessary. Yet the moment you even try to have this debate, the left wing types call you a "hater."
I'm a proud member of the center. Where do you fall, honestly?
Try asking the average American to tell you what a "bog roll" is and watch the steam come out of their ears thinking about it.
I got fucked by this crappy legislation.
Put in for our household's DTV converter box coupons... someone stole them in the mail. Called up to ask where they were, was told "by the terms of the law, we aren't allowed to issue a replacement if yours are never delivered to you."
Yeah, I can probably "afford" the converter box. Still pisses me off to have that happen and the gov't say "too fucking bad" about it.
I couldn't disagree more.
Links are far too prevalent in every single page. I've seen wikipedia pages with whole paragraphs that were nothing but links.
It's a linkfarm, plain and simple.
Only if they're looking none too closely, kind of like those "portraits made of a ton of other materials" that you can't make out if you're standing within 30 feet of them.
Wikipedia, in truth an actuality, is a pretty poor "encyclopedia" for anything other than lists of pokemon or ripped-off content stolen from other places (like IMDB).
All kidding aside, Brittanica has a legitimate gripe - Wikipedia's height in the search rankings is due mostly to the fact that it's coded as a gigantic linkfarm.
The difference between Wikipedia and every other linkfarm out there, however, is that porn-peddler Wales managed to fob Wikipedia off as a "nonprofit" site, and convinced Google not to downgrade its linking weight according to the formula they use for all the other linkfarms out there. If not for this preferential treatment, wikipedia wouldn't show up nearly as high in search results.
And of course, it doesn't help anyone that wikipedia actively took steps in recent months to screw with others, such as implementing automatic nofollow on external links, thus making sure that inter-wikipedia links are the only links that get help by being listed there.
I'd love to see Google treat wikipedia like they treat everyone else. Won't happen, but it would mean Google would have more meaningful search results.
Here's A Bio of the guy.
Note why he's really being hired:
- Schoolchum of Obama
- Clerked for an odd combination of judges (wonder why?)
- "Common Sense Media" - anything but, a thinly veiled left-wing group aiming to further tilt the media. Also involved in several highly anti-common sense issues regarding video games.
This isn't a rosy pick. Of course, I could be wrong. He might walk in first day, declare the RIAA/MPAA/MAFIAA to be a bunch of jerks, re-implement the necessary media-channel ownership laws so that we actually get competition (as opposed to the current ongoing death of local radio, thanks to relaxation of rules that took us from over 5000 station owners to a mere 5 conglomerates owning 99% of the market in a mere two years during the '90s), and recommend the DMCA be tossed out for the useless, anti-innovation pile of shit that it is.
But seeing his resume, I really doubt it. He looks like a lobbyist masquerading as a public servant and as Obama's already proven by appointing people whose spouses are lobbyists elsewhere, "the federal cash register is open for some 'honest graft' ka-ching!"
Just imagine if someone in the Bush administration had acted like this.
Wouldn't you be screaming bloody murder? Wouldn't you be demanding an investigation into what was being hidden?
What's the difference?
There's been far too little scrutiny of a number of Obama appointees... he seems to be stacking the cabinet with nothing but extreme left-wingers every chance he gets.
So much for people who thought he was "honest" or "centrist."
10.5 MB? What file format are you using? What resolution (DPI, that is) are you storing the image at? The images sent to my relatives have all been bigger than that.
The human eye isn't a microscope. So you don't need to scan an image to microscopic precision.
The human eye isn't a microscope, which is why we invented the microscope. That way, we can use optical lenses to enlarge things and get around the limitations of the human eye. You're more limited by the functional grain of your imaging film for things like photographs (whether in normal visual range, or outside it). And in most modern technology (including most of the radiological processes used today), we can enlarge the image quite a bit, allowing us to "see" extra detail before we lose the film's grain.
10.5 MB? I think that's rather undercutting it.
Did I say I was against digitizing records? No.
Did I say I was against digitizing records and then disposing of the originals? HELL YES.
All three people who've responded to me so far have made that same stupid mistake. I never said I was against digitizing records, I said that any retention plan we have needs to take into account the vulnerabilities and problems of the new(er) storage medium being switched to. If a single storage medium has problems, then keep the data in multiple places - keep a digital copy AND then store the originals in case the digital copy gets destroyed.
Vaccines work much the same way, I'm surprised it took until now to come up with this.
Of course, one has to wonder what the reprogrammed cells go after once the cancer's been eaten, since "cancer" is defined as the abnormal growth rate of otherwise-normal (at least for the location they were supposed to be in) cells. I could see an immune reconstitution-style problem popping up. Point a bunch of 'redirected' immune cells at lung cancer, for example, and there's a possibility they will "finish" the cancerous cells and decide the healthy lung tissue is "close enough" for a snack afterwards.