No No No! The word "think" is doubleplus ungood and is not part of the Newspeak Dictionary 5th Edition. The correct statement is "All knowledge from MiniTrue is doubleplus good."
There were definitely voting irregularities in Ohio. Whether they swung the election is an entirely different question, but to give you some ideas as to what was going on: 1. Thousands of voter registrations were thrown out by Secretary of State / Bush Ohio campaign manager Ken Blackwell.
2. The time needed to vote varied from around 15 minutes in my suburban district to 7 hours in heavily black districts.
3. There were significantly more votes for Bush in districts using Diebold voting machines. This is the same company that promised the electoral votes of Ohio to Bush.
As far as whether there is corruption in the Ohio Republican Party, here's what's gone on since the 2004 election: 1. The governor has pled guilty to a number of misdemeanor charges relating to bribery and corruption. 2. There is an ongoing scandal regarding money funnelled from the state pension fund into the pockets of Republican donors, via a rare coin dealership. 3. A number of churches are under investigation by the IRS for illegally engaging in campaign activities for Ken Blackwell's run for governor.
It's bad enough that a friend of mine who has been active in Republican politics all his life has started voting for Democrats. Take that for whatever it's worth.
Sorry, the Bush Administration has a prior art claim on that business plan, although their version of it has "Step 3: Do whatever the hell we feel like".
So far, these sound like good guidelines on what makes a Slashdot story. I've got a couple of ideas on this one that might help the editors out:
1. The guidelines listed above should get listed in the story submission page, so that everyone knows what they are. A lot of them are there already, but a few aren't.
2. Clarify what "not too long, not too short" means. Maybe even implement something like the lameness filter to enforce the rules.
3. We should consider making use of spell-checker during the preview stage. This is obviously a fairly major undertaking if the tools don't already exist out there.
4. Finally, I'd recommend a place for the editors to provide feedback on rejected stories. The idea is that instead of the user seeing just "Rejected" next to a rejected story, they get "Rejected - bad grammer", "Rejected - broken link", "Rejected - dupe", etc. That encourages people to submit better stories and reduce complaints about rejected stories.
1. Get to know your boss's boss(es). It never hurts, and gives you some leverage over your boss.
2. The only thing a boss like that is going to know about what you're doing (and therefor what his job is) is what you tell him you're doing. Start leaving out information that your boss is likely to be asked about in his meetings with his bosses, without being obvious about it.
3. Eventually, due to step 2, your boss will find himself unable to answer questions on a regular basis, or have to call you in to answer questions for him. He will now be perceived as incompetant by his bosses. If the boss wants to yell at you or otherwise try to sanction you, make sure they do so in earshot of as many other people as possible, and be calm and subordinate, describing the problem as a lack of specifications on his part. This enhances your reputation, while making the boss look stupid and ineffective, the more angry he is the better.
4. As a result of 3, assuming your boss's boss(es) are reasonably smart, they'll realize that your boss is useless, and fire him. Since you're already a known factor (step 1), you're more likely to get promoted, or worst case your boss is replaced by someone else.
And yes, I haved used this process successfully. (My boss was called in front of the company president, was caught tongue-tied, and resigned 3 days later.)
Some important things to keep in mind: 1. The boss truly has to be useless for this to work. 2. It helps if you are the acknowledged senior member of the boss's staff. That will make things easier if you get the promotion. 3. Do not forget step 1 of this process. Otherwise your boss can just fire you. 4. Do NOT forget step 1 of this process.
Actually, these demographics don't surprise me in the least, and probably line up extremely well with the demographics of people watching daytime television. The people who engage in this sort of activity are those with the time to do so, which in most cases are those who aren't working on the weekdays. If we measured who uses the largest amount of internet use for recreational or personal purposes, I'd expect to find the following categories overrepresented:
As far as I can tell there are 3 major sources of math anxiety: 1. Parents who don't know math, and thus can't teach mathematical concepts to their kids beyond counting. 2. Elementary school teachers who deemphasize math in favor of reading and 'riting. 3. Popular culture.
The first cause is really only solveable if you solve the other 2 causes, because you need a generation of mathematically literate parents.
If you look at the people who are doing elementary school teaching, their primary focus tends to be teaching reading, handwriting, neatness, respect for authority, etc. Arithmetic tends to be taught more as rules to memorize than as ideas to understand (for instance memorizing that 3+4=7 rather than taking 3 things, taking 4 more things, and counting how many you have when you're done), leaving students with very little connection between math and reality.
Popular culture contributes as well. For instance, it creates an image of math as the province of strange or crazy people who work with ideas us peons can only dream of understanding. Even places where math comes into play, such as sports statistics, business news, government budgets, etc there's a big effort to avoid making the math understandable.
Actually, to be a bit more pendantic Calvin later modified the Duplicator so that he could make good and evil clones of himself at will. Calvin ended up sending good clones to school while he goofed off, and had good clones cleaning his room, doing his chores, etc.
Eventually the good Calvin got angry at the real Calvin, and disappeared in a puff of logic because a good Calvin cannot have a bad thought.
CmdrTaco, thanks for finally getting this issue out in the open.
What I gather are the facts: 1. Slashdot has a high page rank. This is due largely to its popularity, comments, etc. 2. Bad People who run shady websites want to increase their page rank. 3. Slashdot readers do not want Slashdot to be associated with Bad People. 4. Bad People have used Slashdot articles to increase the page rank of their shady websites. 5. Slashdot readers and editors want useful articles to be submitted.
From my perspective, the ideal goal is to prevent the pagerank of Slashdot affecting the pagerank of Bad People, while still providing interesting stories. Therefor I recommend the nofollow solution, as well as a basic check to ensure that the story does not link to the personal website of the user in question. Just do that as part of the link checking that editors already do.
It seems like a fair trade to me that personal websites may appear in comments, on personal pages, journals, etc, but not in story submissions. If the real purpose of the story submission is to provide information and discussion topics to the Slashdot community, then a potential story submitter shouldn't be upset about links to their own website getting a nofollow link.
I've admittedly only been around here a few years, but this problem is definitely getting out of hand.
The SUV craze is actually the same phenomenon as the crowded theater phenomenon (where someone stands up to get a better view, so soon everyone is standing to see at all, and no one sees any better than when they were sitting). The idea is "If my vehicle is heavier than the other guy's, then in an accident I'll be in better shape than him." End result: Everyone will go out and get a bigger vehicle, because it appears that will make them better off, and as a result no one is safer.
Of course, the heavier vehicles always create a false sense of security. Trucks and large vehicles are more prone to rollovers, can't stop or swerve easily to avoid trouble, and hit stationary objects with more momentum. But like Homeland Security or MS Windows, it makes you feel safe, so people choose to go with it even if the facts are completely against them.
Really your best defense while driving is to actually use everything you learned in Driver's Ed, or if you don't remember than find books or classes on safe driving. And if there are any teenagers reading this, remember that Driver's Ed is the one class most likely to determine at some point whether you survive a situation. You know, driving at reasonable speeds (somewhere around the speed limit is usually good), slowing down before you take corners, being aware of the drivers around you, good signalling so other drivers are aware of you, etc.
Here's the fundamental problem: Why is the male figure labeled as obscene, while the female figure is exalted?
Straight men are the ones making the decision about what's obscene, so if straight men have been indoctrinated into believing that "seeing a penis" = "gay", they'll avoid seeing a penis to prove their straightness. In societies where homosexuality wasn't a problem, notably ancient Greece, there are as many if not more male nudes than female nudes.
Actually, there's a decent chance that the President has never won an election fair-and-square.
Texas governorship: One of the most corrupt states politically. Case in point: Tom Delay, who guilty or not has a habit of bending the rules. I don't have the details handy on his gubenatorial elections, someone else probably does.
2000 presidential election: As you pointed out, a blatently political decision that fails to meet the impartiality test (would the same Justices vote the same way if Bush's and Gore's positions had been reversed?)
2004 presidential election: Voting irregularities, especially in districts using Diebold ("I promise to deliver the electoral votes of Ohio to Bush") were the norm in Ohio and other closely contested states. Notable were the discrepencies between the normally extremely accurate exit polls and the actual results, as well as the difference between time needed to vote in various districts (suburbs: 15-20 minutes, cities: 3-5 hours). Not to mention the widespread corruption in the Ohio government (governor convicted of some crimes, several officials currently being tried), and the CEO of Diebold's recent resignation.
The page you linked to is not illegal in the least. It's protected under the right of parody, without which Weird Al Yankovic would have had a rough time.
As far as your post is concerned, I'm not entirely sure who's got the rights to Alice's Restaurant. Given the kind of guy that Arlo Guthrie was, it could easily have been any of these: 1. Arlo 2. Arlo, with a copyright notice similar to the kind his dad liked to use (Sort of a Creative Commons thing) 3. nobody at all 4. Alice 5. Richard M Nixon
This sounds to me like a CYA effort by Wikipedia more than a change that will actually affect users all that much.
If Seigenthaler sues, now Wikipedia can respond that when Seigenthaler sent them a request to take down the article, they did so, and instituted changes to prevent something similar from happening again. That's a pretty good way to get a lawsuit dismissed.
Some other real suggestions of useful statistics: 1. Maximum brace nesting level for each function (might be difficult, but a good metric for determining the complexity of a function) 2. Percentages of control structures that are while, for, switch, if, etc. 3. Number of embedded constants that aren't 0 or 1 4. Count of references to each function/constant within in a single project
When you put the Commerce Clause in historical context, it actually makes perfect sense. One of the reasons Federalists such as James Madison wanted a constitution in the first place was because of the confusion of interstate trade under the Articles of Confederation. There were separate currencies in the various states, and regulations by each state regarding what could and couldn't be transported over state lines.
Yes, it's abused. For instance, I'd say that a drug dealer could legitimately claim that his case could not be tried under federal law if his products did not cross state lines when the drugs were in his posession, because his activities did not qualify as interstate commerce, and thus could not be legitimately regulated by the federal government. I don't think that argument has ever won a case, but IANAL or Paralegal, so I don't have the case law either way on that one.
The better arguments against drug laws include:
1. They're overly invasive (notice the curbing of Fourth Amendment rights in the name of fighting drugs)
2. The choice of which drugs are illegal is racist (opiates were illegal in part because they were used by Chinese-Americans, marijuana because it was used by immigrants from the carribean, while tobacco and alcohol were fine because they were used by rich white guys)
3. Enforcement is arbitrary and racist (rich and/or white gets rehab, poor and/or non-white gets jail time, see also the difference in treatment of cocaine and crack).
Minor point here: The "Everyone Else" you refer to clearly is limited to those the press had decided were "mainstream" candidates: Kerry, Edwards, Lieberman, Clark and (very reluctantly) Dean. Other candidates (Sharpton, Mosely-Braun, and Kucinich) definitely did not stick to the nice centrist line, because they weren't trying to win, they were trying to make a point.
To paraphrase Jon Stewart, only a politician who knows he can't win can really say what they want to say.
Of course, the great irony is that candidates who concern themselves too much with being 'electable' often fail to stand for much, and then get labelled as a waffler/flip-flopper, and lose. Gore/Lieberman was an excellent example of that phenomenon.
Slashdot Mirror
No No No! The word "think" is doubleplus ungood and is not part of the Newspeak Dictionary 5th Edition. The correct statement is "All knowledge from MiniTrue is doubleplus good."
There were definitely voting irregularities in Ohio. Whether they swung the election is an entirely different question, but to give you some ideas as to what was going on:
1. Thousands of voter registrations were thrown out by Secretary of State / Bush Ohio campaign manager Ken Blackwell.
2. The time needed to vote varied from around 15 minutes in my suburban district to 7 hours in heavily black districts.
3. There were significantly more votes for Bush in districts using Diebold voting machines. This is the same company that promised the electoral votes of Ohio to Bush.
As far as whether there is corruption in the Ohio Republican Party, here's what's gone on since the 2004 election:
1. The governor has pled guilty to a number of misdemeanor charges relating to bribery and corruption.
2. There is an ongoing scandal regarding money funnelled from the state pension fund into the pockets of Republican donors, via a rare coin dealership.
3. A number of churches are under investigation by the IRS for illegally engaging in campaign activities for Ken Blackwell's run for governor.
It's bad enough that a friend of mine who has been active in Republican politics all his life has started voting for Democrats. Take that for whatever it's worth.
You're right. They should have used Arnold Rimmer instead.
Sorry, the Bush Administration has a prior art claim on that business plan, although their version of it has "Step 3: Do whatever the hell we feel like".
Current mood: 0wned
So far, these sound like good guidelines on what makes a Slashdot story. I've got a couple of ideas on this one that might help the editors out:
1. The guidelines listed above should get listed in the story submission page, so that everyone knows what they are. A lot of them are there already, but a few aren't.
2. Clarify what "not too long, not too short" means. Maybe even implement something like the lameness filter to enforce the rules.
3. We should consider making use of spell-checker during the preview stage. This is obviously a fairly major undertaking if the tools don't already exist out there.
4. Finally, I'd recommend a place for the editors to provide feedback on rejected stories. The idea is that instead of the user seeing just "Rejected" next to a rejected story, they get "Rejected - bad grammer", "Rejected - broken link", "Rejected - dupe", etc. That encourages people to submit better stories and reduce complaints about rejected stories.
A possible response to this situation:
1. Get to know your boss's boss(es). It never hurts, and gives you some leverage over your boss.
2. The only thing a boss like that is going to know about what you're doing (and therefor what his job is) is what you tell him you're doing. Start leaving out information that your boss is likely to be asked about in his meetings with his bosses, without being obvious about it.
3. Eventually, due to step 2, your boss will find himself unable to answer questions on a regular basis, or have to call you in to answer questions for him. He will now be perceived as incompetant by his bosses. If the boss wants to yell at you or otherwise try to sanction you, make sure they do so in earshot of as many other people as possible, and be calm and subordinate, describing the problem as a lack of specifications on his part. This enhances your reputation, while making the boss look stupid and ineffective, the more angry he is the better.
4. As a result of 3, assuming your boss's boss(es) are reasonably smart, they'll realize that your boss is useless, and fire him. Since you're already a known factor (step 1), you're more likely to get promoted, or worst case your boss is replaced by someone else.
And yes, I haved used this process successfully. (My boss was called in front of the company president, was caught tongue-tied, and resigned 3 days later.)
Some important things to keep in mind:
1. The boss truly has to be useless for this to work.
2. It helps if you are the acknowledged senior member of the boss's staff. That will make things easier if you get the promotion.
3. Do not forget step 1 of this process. Otherwise your boss can just fire you.
4. Do NOT forget step 1 of this process.
Retirees
Homemakers
Students (of all ages)
Geeks
As far as I can tell there are 3 major sources of math anxiety:
1. Parents who don't know math, and thus can't teach mathematical concepts to their kids beyond counting.
2. Elementary school teachers who deemphasize math in favor of reading and 'riting.
3. Popular culture.
The first cause is really only solveable if you solve the other 2 causes, because you need a generation of mathematically literate parents.
If you look at the people who are doing elementary school teaching, their primary focus tends to be teaching reading, handwriting, neatness, respect for authority, etc. Arithmetic tends to be taught more as rules to memorize than as ideas to understand (for instance memorizing that 3+4=7 rather than taking 3 things, taking 4 more things, and counting how many you have when you're done), leaving students with very little connection between math and reality.
Popular culture contributes as well. For instance, it creates an image of math as the province of strange or crazy people who work with ideas us peons can only dream of understanding. Even places where math comes into play, such as sports statistics, business news, government budgets, etc there's a big effort to avoid making the math understandable.
Actually, to be a bit more pendantic Calvin later modified the Duplicator so that he could make good and evil clones of himself at will. Calvin ended up sending good clones to school while he goofed off, and had good clones cleaning his room, doing his chores, etc.
Eventually the good Calvin got angry at the real Calvin, and disappeared in a puff of logic because a good Calvin cannot have a bad thought.
CmdrTaco, thanks for finally getting this issue out in the open.
What I gather are the facts:
1. Slashdot has a high page rank. This is due largely to its popularity, comments, etc.
2. Bad People who run shady websites want to increase their page rank.
3. Slashdot readers do not want Slashdot to be associated with Bad People.
4. Bad People have used Slashdot articles to increase the page rank of their shady websites.
5. Slashdot readers and editors want useful articles to be submitted.
From my perspective, the ideal goal is to prevent the pagerank of Slashdot affecting the pagerank of Bad People, while still providing interesting stories. Therefor I recommend the nofollow solution, as well as a basic check to ensure that the story does not link to the personal website of the user in question. Just do that as part of the link checking that editors already do.
It seems like a fair trade to me that personal websites may appear in comments, on personal pages, journals, etc, but not in story submissions. If the real purpose of the story submission is to provide information and discussion topics to the Slashdot community, then a potential story submitter shouldn't be upset about links to their own website getting a nofollow link.
I've admittedly only been around here a few years, but this problem is definitely getting out of hand.
The SUV craze is actually the same phenomenon as the crowded theater phenomenon (where someone stands up to get a better view, so soon everyone is standing to see at all, and no one sees any better than when they were sitting). The idea is "If my vehicle is heavier than the other guy's, then in an accident I'll be in better shape than him." End result: Everyone will go out and get a bigger vehicle, because it appears that will make them better off, and as a result no one is safer.
Of course, the heavier vehicles always create a false sense of security. Trucks and large vehicles are more prone to rollovers, can't stop or swerve easily to avoid trouble, and hit stationary objects with more momentum. But like Homeland Security or MS Windows, it makes you feel safe, so people choose to go with it even if the facts are completely against them.
Really your best defense while driving is to actually use everything you learned in Driver's Ed, or if you don't remember than find books or classes on safe driving. And if there are any teenagers reading this, remember that Driver's Ed is the one class most likely to determine at some point whether you survive a situation. You know, driving at reasonable speeds (somewhere around the speed limit is usually good), slowing down before you take corners, being aware of the drivers around you, good signalling so other drivers are aware of you, etc.
Another good explanation of the lack of Java hyper-enthusiasts: They graduated.
Hey, at least due to the fact that it's ham, we know that it's not Jews in Space (as was part of Mel Brooks' History of the World Part 2).
So really, the answer is that old programmers are now Soylent Green.
Actually, there's a decent chance that the President has never won an election fair-and-square. Texas governorship: One of the most corrupt states politically. Case in point: Tom Delay, who guilty or not has a habit of bending the rules. I don't have the details handy on his gubenatorial elections, someone else probably does. 2000 presidential election: As you pointed out, a blatently political decision that fails to meet the impartiality test (would the same Justices vote the same way if Bush's and Gore's positions had been reversed?) 2004 presidential election: Voting irregularities, especially in districts using Diebold ("I promise to deliver the electoral votes of Ohio to Bush") were the norm in Ohio and other closely contested states. Notable were the discrepencies between the normally extremely accurate exit polls and the actual results, as well as the difference between time needed to vote in various districts (suburbs: 15-20 minutes, cities: 3-5 hours). Not to mention the widespread corruption in the Ohio government (governor convicted of some crimes, several officials currently being tried), and the CEO of Diebold's recent resignation.
Because, Zonk, not ScuttleMonkey, is working today.
And of course, the use of the term "feminazi" in a post complaining about sexism.
Wow, 15 minutes or so and no old people joke, so here you go:
In Korea, only old people have their bank account information stolen.
(And in real life old people are frequently the target of scams, because they have money and tend to be easier to fool)
The page you linked to is not illegal in the least. It's protected under the right of parody, without which Weird Al Yankovic would have had a rough time.
As far as your post is concerned, I'm not entirely sure who's got the rights to Alice's Restaurant. Given the kind of guy that Arlo Guthrie was, it could easily have been any of these:
1. Arlo
2. Arlo, with a copyright notice similar to the kind his dad liked to use (Sort of a Creative Commons thing)
3. nobody at all
4. Alice
5. Richard M Nixon
This sounds to me like a CYA effort by Wikipedia more than a change that will actually affect users all that much.
If Seigenthaler sues, now Wikipedia can respond that when Seigenthaler sent them a request to take down the article, they did so, and instituted changes to prevent something similar from happening again. That's a pretty good way to get a lawsuit dismissed.
Some other real suggestions of useful statistics:
1. Maximum brace nesting level for each function (might be difficult, but a good metric for determining the complexity of a function)
2. Percentages of control structures that are while, for, switch, if, etc.
3. Number of embedded constants that aren't 0 or 1
4. Count of references to each function/constant within in a single project
When you put the Commerce Clause in historical context, it actually makes perfect sense. One of the reasons Federalists such as James Madison wanted a constitution in the first place was because of the confusion of interstate trade under the Articles of Confederation. There were separate currencies in the various states, and regulations by each state regarding what could and couldn't be transported over state lines.
Yes, it's abused. For instance, I'd say that a drug dealer could legitimately claim that his case could not be tried under federal law if his products did not cross state lines when the drugs were in his posession, because his activities did not qualify as interstate commerce, and thus could not be legitimately regulated by the federal government. I don't think that argument has ever won a case, but IANAL or Paralegal, so I don't have the case law either way on that one.
The better arguments against drug laws include:
1. They're overly invasive (notice the curbing of Fourth Amendment rights in the name of fighting drugs)
2. The choice of which drugs are illegal is racist (opiates were illegal in part because they were used by Chinese-Americans, marijuana because it was used by immigrants from the carribean, while tobacco and alcohol were fine because they were used by rich white guys)
3. Enforcement is arbitrary and racist (rich and/or white gets rehab, poor and/or non-white gets jail time, see also the difference in treatment of cocaine and crack).
Minor point here: The "Everyone Else" you refer to clearly is limited to those the press had decided were "mainstream" candidates: Kerry, Edwards, Lieberman, Clark and (very reluctantly) Dean. Other candidates (Sharpton, Mosely-Braun, and Kucinich) definitely did not stick to the nice centrist line, because they weren't trying to win, they were trying to make a point.
To paraphrase Jon Stewart, only a politician who knows he can't win can really say what they want to say.
Of course, the great irony is that candidates who concern themselves too much with being 'electable' often fail to stand for much, and then get labelled as a waffler/flip-flopper, and lose. Gore/Lieberman was an excellent example of that phenomenon.