The DEFAULT one should be sane for most use cases though.
It was. "Enable javascript" was on by default.
But as most of the web these days doesn't work without at least some level of javascript,
Most of the web works just fine without javascript. Those times I had to disable it to get away from a page that was using it maliciously, I often forgot to turn it back on and found the "browsing experience" to be much more pleasant.
Saying that "most of the web doesn't work" unless you have javascript is another way of saying that "your web experience should be what I tell you it has to be".
having a dumb toggle default to either position is pretty much useless.
That's just silly. Having a toggle that defaults to "on" gets you your "javascript enabled" experience that you want newbs to have while still allowing others a choice.
But the global toggle would be useless unless it was in your face,
That's also silly. You propose a complicated by-page or by-site manager, but decry a simple "off" toggle as... useless?
Think about ways of improving things, not ways of adding more options
I was already an option, quite simple. And it was a detriment to remove it, except to those who feel that controlling the viewer's "web experience" belongs in the hand of the site programmer and not the viewer.
that just cause things to break in yet more interesting ways.
I consider breaking malicious web pages to be a good thing. YMMV.
Let's bitch about them removing a nigh-useless toggle
If you've ever been stuck on a page that won't let you go anywhere and every attempt at leaving mucks up other tabs, then you wouldn't call turning off javascript at that point useless.
that messes up the experience for less-resourceful users
Oh, lord, here we go. Another idjit who thinks his definition of what "the experience" should be must be the experience for everyone else.
Why should I be the one to have to install addons, amirite?
If you don't want to install an addon, feel free not to install an addon. Don't tell others that they should be forced to install an addon to DISABLE something that could be disabled natively, and until someone decided that other people's "experiences" must be carefully controlled was a simple checkbox in a preferences window.
You can have one wife, who is beautiful, or four children who are wonderful, and adding the adjective is legit.
Using an adjective to differentiate between one thing is incorrect. It is unnecessary, and when it appears it implies that there is a differentiation to be made. If I say I have "a red apple", then you know it is not a green one, and that the difference is important.
To imply more than one, you need some sort of comparison:
No, all you need to imply more than one is to use an adjective to describe which one of more than one you are referring to. "My wife" needs no further specification because your use of the singular says there is only one. "My beautiful wife" implies there is a need to specify which wife you are talking about. In this case "my beautiful wife" truly is different than saying "my wife who is beautiful".
The next time someone asks for a "chocolate ice cream sundae", ask them if they think there is only one flavor of ice cream. Obviously not, otherwise they'd simply say "ice cream sundae". And they aren't comparing ice creams, they are specifying which of multiple flavors they want. That's the job of an adjective.
Yes, that's a strict interpretation of the language, but it's no stricter than pointing out to someone who has just said that "nobody can run as fast as I can" that they've just said they cannot run as fast as they do.
Unless they've put back the easy way of disabling javascript, their "security enhancements" are meaningless. There are too many web pages that hijack the browser using js and don't let you get to any "about:config" pages but will still allow preferences to be changed...
As for your stupidity regarding the second amendment: the second amendment was adopted to ensure that members of the state militias had weapons should they be called up.
As for your stupidity regarding the second amendment: it exists because the founders had just gone through a war where they found it convenient that the people had guns, and lived in a time when guns were a way of life and necessary for self-defense against not only criminals but wild beasts. They had just overthrown a repressive government and wanted to keep that option available for the new one they'd just fought to create, should it become necessary.
The "militia" clause is an explanatory clause, not a complete statement of the entire reason why the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Had they wanted to say that they could have easily done so. And that clause says nothing about state militias. It wasn't intended to because it was the federal constitution, not a state constitution.
Wonder what the Justice Department has to hold over their heads.
The same thing they have to hold over everyone's heads: a large number of lawyers looking to right the wrongs their employer tells them to. Also the IRS. They don't need any actual wrongdoing, just the lawyers.
There are fewer pieces of more obvious Newspeak than so-called "adult" content. When did "this is adult content" become synonymous with "for juveniles only" ?
Never. "Adult content" is an abbreviated version of "adult-oriented content", which is content that is NOT for juveniles. So, "adult content" has always been synonymous with "not for juveniles", and the fact that the adjective "adult" has been applied to the noun "content" should make that obvious. Content for everyone is called just "content"; the adjective is necessary to limit the scope.
Just like people who say "I'd like you to meet my beautiful wife..." are actually saying they have at least one ugly wife, too. And those "four wonderful children" means there is at least one more who isn't. It's great fun to point this out to the wife or children...
My point is that when conservatives attack the motivations of climate change scientists as being motivated by a desire to get grants, they are using an ad hominem argument against the scientists as persons, not against the science itself.
It is perfectly fair to point out that the slander of "your research is bought and paid for" applies to those who publish research opposed to the consensus as well as those who publish in agreement. It is not ad hominem to say that someone who has just attacked one scientist for publishing papers to get money is also attacking every other scientist that is paid to do research.
If a scientist says something you don't like, it must be because someone paid them to say it.
That is exactly the argument used against every scientist that publishes anything opposed to the consensus. It's slander, and it needs to stop. If science can be bought, the color of the money doesn't matter, and neither side can be immune. Deal with the science, not the scientist.
Science is fundamentally opposed to profit-motivation. That's very hard for conservatives to contemplate,
It's very easy for conservatives to contemplate, and this isn't a conservative/liberal issue. It's also not conservatives who leap up every time a scientist publishes something that questions the consensus result and shout "your research is paid for by oil companies."
The ONLY time I've seen anyone talk about the influence of the grant process on science is when they're trying to show the "your science is bought" accusers that a paycheck is a paycheck. It is a direct result of the silly claim that grants are somehow immune from political and social engineering and aren't impacted by the results obtained.
The Met Office worker can go to work and think "Great, I can just focus on the science, my job is secure regardless of what I find.".
The Met Office is, for lack of a better term, "production" science. That is, a scientist who is hired to process routine data and produce routine output. He has models to run and manage. His job is a line-item in the government budget.
That's significantly different than academic research. Those jobs are paid for by grants. Anyone who wants to study reasons other than anthropogenic for climate change are facing two hurdles. The first is the consensus challenge, but more important is that if they show that the problem isn't the horrific crisis that can justify billions more in grants to solve, they've cut the funding for a lot of people, themselves included.
I've been through the grant process enough to know that "problem solved" is a death-knell for further study of that problem. Anyone who publishes that kind of result regarding AGW is threatening a LOT of money going to a LOT of people. Themselves included.
While tenure does protect more senior research faculty from being fired, it does not mean they'll be doing work they like. A researcher without a grant will be teaching a lot of classes instead of spending lots of time in the lab. He'll have little money for new computers or other equipment, and any grad students who work for him will be funded as teaching assistants.
If you've never been in grad school and been funded on a grant and on TA money you might not realize the significant difference in status that carries. And the significant difference in quality of grad student a PI can attract.
If the money has come from a source that just needs to know the facts without seeing any benefit from an outcome one way or the other then that research is far less tainted than if it's come from a source that has a vested profit interest in one outcome over the other.
As someone who works in the field, I an tell you that the latter is a very common situation in academic climate science research, for the reasons I've already described.
Oh, this gets even better. When I started to post the previous comment, I was told I was posting as Anonymous Coward. When I post, it shows up as if I were logged in -- but I'm still not logged in when the main article page is displayed, and I have none of my configuration being used for display.
I am/am not logged in and can/cannot disable ads, and can/cannot access pages. This is fun. I just realized -- run by Dice, controlled by dice.
The first thing conservatives usually say to discredit climate scientists is, they are in thrall to their funders.
You have that 100% backwards. 100%. Every bit of science done by someone who works in industry and doesn't agree with the consensus is attacked as being "paid-for" science. Every single time. Here we have an example of someone who got $120k a year (pretty low salary for an upper level scientist) and is being slandered as producing "paid for" science. But you say that it's the other side that does this.
I've yet to see anyone disparage consensus scientists the same way. I've seen people point out that "salary = bought scientist" is a two-edged sword, but that's after the mud of slander has been thrown at those who don't toe the consensus line. This leaves the consensus supporters in the odd situation of having to defend a claim that someone is being paid to produce fake science but that those who agree with the consensus would never do the same kind of thing.
I'd rather people deal with the science and stop slandering scientists as a way of reaching consensus, but if you can't deal with science, attack the scientist.
Papers directly supported by funding/grants usually don't thank/credit sources (or maybe it's just so small that I never noticed it?).
Every paper I've ever seen in geosciences credits the public funding agency as part of the grant requirements. Not just "usually do", it's all do.
A paper funded by private sources will credit what is required by that source. Carnegie-Mellon, etc, usually do, but it isn't required. It's polite to do so as a way of saying "thanks". The fact that someone hasn't doesn't mean anything.
So.....$120k per year? That's not actually very much.
That's a pittance. It will cover salary and benefits for one researcher. It won't cover much in the way of travel.
Compare that to other grants that cover the salaries of five or six researchers and travel to conferences in Hawaii or Spain or other nice places...
This is another example of "if we can't discredit the science, discredit the scientist for being paid to do research." That ignores all the scientists who are part of the consensus who are also paid to do research. No, nobody is pocketing the loot, it just shows up as salary. Salary for research that means that the scientist doesn't have to be paid on state money so he doesn't have to teach or do other stuff that is attached to non-grant research salary. A stable source of funding means you can hire people and build a lab and build a reputation that helps get more money. The more people you pay, the higher your status. The more stuff you get from the University because your overhead fees benefit them, too.
A Primary User in radio spectrum jargon means the entity(s)/group(s) primarily licensed to use a specific piece of the radio spectrum.
You have just provided a perfect example of a tautology. Primary users have primary licenses. Ok. What I gave is the practical result of that definition. Primary users, no matter which agency they get their license from, can cause interference to secondary users. That's the correction to the original statement I replied to that NTIA cannot issue licenses to agencies that would interfere with FCC licensed users.
As such, the FBI is most definitely not a Primary User of the spectrum assigned to cellphones.
I didn't say they were.
Seeing as your primary premise is incorrect, the rest of your argument is moot.
Seeing as you didn't understand what was being said... show me where I said that the FBI was a primary user of any frequency allocated to cell phone services. Or are you saying I am incorrect in the fact that the NTIA can authorize agencies to use frequencies that will cause interference to other licensed users? That's my "primary premise" in what you replied to.
Now read again: what I said was 1) The FBI does not operate under FCC rules (a fact.) 2) The FBI operates under NTIA rules (another fact.) 3) Both the FCC and the NTIA can issue licenses for operations that will interfere with other licensed users (another fact). Stop trying to put words in my mouth.
ntia only gives them assignment(license) to use their bands, not to interfere with fcc licensed bands...
First, wrong. Primary users have authority to interfere with secondary users in any band, whether it is pure FCC, pure NTIA, or a mix. And secondary users must not cause interference to, and must accept any interference from, primary users. It depends on the services involved, but your blanket statement is incorrect in its breadth.
For example, the US Air Force (a federal agency operating under NTIA rules) is a primary user in a part of the amateur (FCC rules) 70cm radio band. USAF operates OTH radar in California in that band. Amateurs are thus required to reduce power or cease operation to prevent interference to that radar, and they must accept any interference from that radar. QED, NTIA rules absolutely allow a federal agency to interfere with FCC licensees.
intercepting and decoding private comms permission then again is acquired from a judge in the form of a warrant.
This has nothing to do with the one, very specific comment I made regarding the FBI (or any other federal agency, for that matter) breaking FCC rules.
the rules the fbi is breaking were not made for the fbi and the fbi shouldn't have a free pass to break 'em in the first place.
It appears you missed the point completely. The FBI is NOT SUBJECT TO FCC RULES. They are regulated by the NTIA. They don't need a "free pass" to break FCC rules any more than someone living in Germany needs a pass of any kind to break FCC rules.
Complaints that the FBI is breaking rules they aren't subject to are going to fall on deaf ears.
in your view fbi would be free to block all transmissions on a whim which clearly is not the case.
I did not say that, so do not try claiming that such a stupid statement is "in my view". I said that the FBI is not subject to FCC rules, not that they have no rules.
where they justify pissing all over the FCC's rules against operating an unlicensed transmitter.
The FBI is a federal agency, and as such are covered by NTIA rules, not the FCC. FBI radios don't need FCC licenses, and you will not find any in the FCC ULS. It's a waste of time to complain about how the FBI isn't following FCC rules.
The realtor told us that the property the cell tower is on is owned by a.
Owned by an "invisible agency"?
There are big black cables going right from the cell tower into the brick building and back out again. It's a DIRECT tap off the cell phone tower!
Makes for a great conspiracy theory, but all fluff and no bite. It is very common for towers to have several co-located radio systems. Every location I know of in this area has several agencies all on the same tower. One coastal site I work at has Verizon, Coast Guard, and state radios.
You should realize that the 700/800MHz antennas for public service and feds look identical to the same band antennas that cell phone carriers use, and even different bands can be hard to differentiate from a distance. Especially when the federal systems are trunking and need the same kind of directionality that cell systems do.
A "tap off the cell phone tower" is meaningless scare-mongering. You don't tap the tower.
So, in the end, my son had to wait an extra 15 minutes to get his milk because these idiots are still breathing air...
Oh My God, it's Armageddon in our Time. A catastrophe of biblical proportions.
A different view might be that your baby had to wait 15 minutes because his incompetent parent failed to keep a basic staple like milk on hand.
"Only a jackass would keep a person from buying milk for their baby"
Nobody kept you from buying milk for your baby. I suppose you'd be ranting about all those people ahead of you in line at the grocery store for wanting to buy steak or beer or bread or cheese because they kept you waiting a whole fifteen minutes, too. Or the jackass railroad that was deliberately starving your baby because a train blocked the intersection for fifteen minutes. Or those unacceptably selfish people who died in an automobile accident and the fire department had the road blocked for fifteen minutes cleaning it up.
Everyone's to blame for your baby's hunger except you.
I can honestly say, I've never seen anyone other than fixed-income granny buy a single lottery ticket.
I am not a granny, I do not have a fixed income, and I buy single lottery tickets from time to time as the fancy strikes.
It's a tax
It's a fee for entertainment. It isn't a tax. Not even close. And it has nothing to do with casinos or online gambling.
I simply have no patience for those people
And CPS has no patience with parents who let their children go hungry because they forgot to buy milk.
Under a "normal" system, the 2008 housing crisis should have caused all the banks holding the loans to go under. The threat of this happening is what is supposed to prevent the banks from making risky investments in the first place.
That's true. But the banks weren't allowed to properly evaluate the risks.
In this scenario, where you are essentially gambling with someone else's money (i.e. the tax payers)
Yes. And that's fair since it is the representatives of the taxpayer who forced the banks to ignore the risks and make the loans anyway. The Community Reinvestment Act was a legislative act that forced banks to make loans despite well-known and patently obvious risks. When a bank was required to include things like unemployment payments and ignore past credit histories when deciding which loans to approve (and how much money could be loaned), then those who forced the high risk loans should be the ones responsible when they fail.
That the "community activists" (ACORN, PUSH, etc.) jumped on the CRA bandwagon to threaten banks that didn't make enough risky loans with legal action is still a side-effect of the legislative regulations that our politicians enacted. Their actions led to the collapse. Be angry at them, not the people they forced to make the loans.
Read "Architects of Ruin" by Peter Schweitzer. It will open your eyes.
but get to keep the profits, the best move is to be as risky as you are able to get away with. In this light, the risky behavior of the banks makes a lot more sense.
Of course, businesses are in business to be as risky as they can get away with. Businesses that don't take risks don't remain in business -- the risk takers come eat their lunch. Heck, business that don't take risks don't become businesses in the first place.
But as ibid talks about, the environment of early bailouts was a contributing factor to the problem, but not the proximate cause. The fact that the US bailed out MEXICAN banks is, once again, a legislative failure that led to the collapse.
The amount people spend on lottery tickets per year seems inversely proportional to their income (to a point).... The problem is not *a* $2 ticket, it's the people who end up spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on lottery tickets every year...
A purely voluntary expenditure, by the way. Is it not good that we live in a country where we can spend money on lottery tickets if we choose? Is it Good for a government to tell us that we cannot? Should $2 lottery tickets join 64 oz carbonated beverages in the list of prohibited items?
And in the meantime you are shelling out for taxes, maintenance, and being rooted in one area.
If you think that rental rates don't include the taxes and maintenance, you're naive.
And in many areas, house prices go down. So when you buy a house for an investment, you are really speculating
The question is not one of absolute values but of relative. "Buy instead of rent", not "buy for investment". When you leave a house, even if the value goes down, you still likely have some equity. When you rent you walk away with nothing.
The OP was saying that he was buying not for the investment but because he could install air conditioning and a hot tub even if he couldn't get his money back on them when he sells. He won't get his money back on them when he rents, either, so what's the reason to buy?
Yes, I know everyone in the media and our politicians calls home ownership an investment, but they are wrong. 2008 proved that.
2008 proved that people who bought houses they couldn't afford lost money. My house has doubled in value. When my bank offered me two options (fixed and ARM) I opted for the one I could afford. That meant looking five years down the road and seeing the balloon. There was no gun held to my head to pick the wrong option.
The people making money or I should say, making the decent returns, on your house are the banks.
Why yes, they make money off the loan (as they should -- they take a risk loaning money and they don't have it until I pay it back), but I will still have a good chunk of change should I ever decide to sell. Not as much money as I spent total, but nothing to sneeze at. And at no point in my loan was I ever upside down, simply because my eyes weren't bigger than my stomach.
I won't be able to get my investment back when I sell it...but it's worth it for me personally as an owner.
If you can't get your investment in a hot tub or air conditioning back when you sell, then how does it differ in any practical sense from renting?
The reason to buy instead of rent is specifically for the investment in the property itself. At the end of ten years of renting you have no equity; it is the equity in a purchased home that makes it different.
Therefore, it's worth my trading $2 for the prospect of $200 million because I give away something I don't value ($2) for the chance of having something I do value ($200 million)
Why would you want something that is a hundred million times more worthless than what you already have?
I normally wouldn't be this generous, but I like you and you sound like a nice guy. If you ever find yourself in this situation, I'll only charge you $10 to take that useless $200 million off your hands. My normal rate for such cleanup would be $100.
Get your wife an "I've fallen and I can't get up button" that she wears. Your wife is unlikely to false-trigger it, and if she's wearing it then your daughter is unlikely to, either. Tell your daughter to push it when there's trouble, and teach your wife to stop her from pushing it if she can. If she cannot, then there's something wrong. In fact, your wife can probably activate it herself when she feels a problem coming on.
This means you don't have to snoop on your family using remote cameras. Certainly you must have cameras in the bathroom just in case she seizes while taking a leak, right? And the bedroom, too (sleeping or changing clothes, not taking a leak, d'oh).
That one button will be so much better at teaching your kids about the concept of "privacy" than 24 hour video surveillance of their, and their mother's, every movement (B or otherwise).
Slashdot Mirror
The DEFAULT one should be sane for most use cases though.
It was. "Enable javascript" was on by default.
But as most of the web these days doesn't work without at least some level of javascript,
Most of the web works just fine without javascript. Those times I had to disable it to get away from a page that was using it maliciously, I often forgot to turn it back on and found the "browsing experience" to be much more pleasant.
Saying that "most of the web doesn't work" unless you have javascript is another way of saying that "your web experience should be what I tell you it has to be".
having a dumb toggle default to either position is pretty much useless.
That's just silly. Having a toggle that defaults to "on" gets you your "javascript enabled" experience that you want newbs to have while still allowing others a choice.
But the global toggle would be useless unless it was in your face,
That's also silly. You propose a complicated by-page or by-site manager, but decry a simple "off" toggle as ... useless?
Think about ways of improving things, not ways of adding more options
I was already an option, quite simple. And it was a detriment to remove it, except to those who feel that controlling the viewer's "web experience" belongs in the hand of the site programmer and not the viewer.
that just cause things to break in yet more interesting ways.
I consider breaking malicious web pages to be a good thing. YMMV.
Let's bitch about them removing a nigh-useless toggle
If you've ever been stuck on a page that won't let you go anywhere and every attempt at leaving mucks up other tabs, then you wouldn't call turning off javascript at that point useless.
that messes up the experience for less-resourceful users
Oh, lord, here we go. Another idjit who thinks his definition of what "the experience" should be must be the experience for everyone else.
Why should I be the one to have to install addons, amirite?
If you don't want to install an addon, feel free not to install an addon. Don't tell others that they should be forced to install an addon to DISABLE something that could be disabled natively, and until someone decided that other people's "experiences" must be carefully controlled was a simple checkbox in a preferences window.
I printed it out and read it at length. I still don't know what the article is about. I'm waiting for the movie version.
You can have one wife, who is beautiful, or four children who are wonderful, and adding the adjective is legit.
Using an adjective to differentiate between one thing is incorrect. It is unnecessary, and when it appears it implies that there is a differentiation to be made. If I say I have "a red apple", then you know it is not a green one, and that the difference is important.
To imply more than one, you need some sort of comparison:
No, all you need to imply more than one is to use an adjective to describe which one of more than one you are referring to. "My wife" needs no further specification because your use of the singular says there is only one. "My beautiful wife" implies there is a need to specify which wife you are talking about. In this case "my beautiful wife" truly is different than saying "my wife who is beautiful".
The next time someone asks for a "chocolate ice cream sundae", ask them if they think there is only one flavor of ice cream. Obviously not, otherwise they'd simply say "ice cream sundae". And they aren't comparing ice creams, they are specifying which of multiple flavors they want. That's the job of an adjective.
Yes, that's a strict interpretation of the language, but it's no stricter than pointing out to someone who has just said that "nobody can run as fast as I can" that they've just said they cannot run as fast as they do.
Unless they've put back the easy way of disabling javascript, their "security enhancements" are meaningless. There are too many web pages that hijack the browser using js and don't let you get to any "about:config" pages but will still allow preferences to be changed...
As for your stupidity regarding the second amendment: the second amendment was adopted to ensure that members of the state militias had weapons should they be called up.
As for your stupidity regarding the second amendment: it exists because the founders had just gone through a war where they found it convenient that the people had guns, and lived in a time when guns were a way of life and necessary for self-defense against not only criminals but wild beasts. They had just overthrown a repressive government and wanted to keep that option available for the new one they'd just fought to create, should it become necessary.
The "militia" clause is an explanatory clause, not a complete statement of the entire reason why the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Had they wanted to say that they could have easily done so. And that clause says nothing about state militias. It wasn't intended to because it was the federal constitution, not a state constitution.
Wonder what the Justice Department has to hold over their heads.
The same thing they have to hold over everyone's heads: a large number of lawyers looking to right the wrongs their employer tells them to. Also the IRS. They don't need any actual wrongdoing, just the lawyers.
There are fewer pieces of more obvious Newspeak than so-called "adult" content. When did "this is adult content" become synonymous with "for juveniles only" ?
Never. "Adult content" is an abbreviated version of "adult-oriented content", which is content that is NOT for juveniles. So, "adult content" has always been synonymous with "not for juveniles", and the fact that the adjective "adult" has been applied to the noun "content" should make that obvious. Content for everyone is called just "content"; the adjective is necessary to limit the scope.
Just like people who say "I'd like you to meet my beautiful wife ..." are actually saying they have at least one ugly wife, too. And those "four wonderful children" means there is at least one more who isn't. It's great fun to point this out to the wife or children ...
My point is that when conservatives attack the motivations of climate change scientists as being motivated by a desire to get grants, they are using an ad hominem argument against the scientists as persons, not against the science itself.
It is perfectly fair to point out that the slander of "your research is bought and paid for" applies to those who publish research opposed to the consensus as well as those who publish in agreement. It is not ad hominem to say that someone who has just attacked one scientist for publishing papers to get money is also attacking every other scientist that is paid to do research.
If a scientist says something you don't like, it must be because someone paid them to say it.
That is exactly the argument used against every scientist that publishes anything opposed to the consensus. It's slander, and it needs to stop. If science can be bought, the color of the money doesn't matter, and neither side can be immune. Deal with the science, not the scientist.
Science is fundamentally opposed to profit-motivation. That's very hard for conservatives to contemplate,
It's very easy for conservatives to contemplate, and this isn't a conservative/liberal issue. It's also not conservatives who leap up every time a scientist publishes something that questions the consensus result and shout "your research is paid for by oil companies."
The ONLY time I've seen anyone talk about the influence of the grant process on science is when they're trying to show the "your science is bought" accusers that a paycheck is a paycheck. It is a direct result of the silly claim that grants are somehow immune from political and social engineering and aren't impacted by the results obtained.
The Met Office worker can go to work and think "Great, I can just focus on the science, my job is secure regardless of what I find.".
The Met Office is, for lack of a better term, "production" science. That is, a scientist who is hired to process routine data and produce routine output. He has models to run and manage. His job is a line-item in the government budget.
That's significantly different than academic research. Those jobs are paid for by grants. Anyone who wants to study reasons other than anthropogenic for climate change are facing two hurdles. The first is the consensus challenge, but more important is that if they show that the problem isn't the horrific crisis that can justify billions more in grants to solve, they've cut the funding for a lot of people, themselves included.
I've been through the grant process enough to know that "problem solved" is a death-knell for further study of that problem. Anyone who publishes that kind of result regarding AGW is threatening a LOT of money going to a LOT of people. Themselves included.
While tenure does protect more senior research faculty from being fired, it does not mean they'll be doing work they like. A researcher without a grant will be teaching a lot of classes instead of spending lots of time in the lab. He'll have little money for new computers or other equipment, and any grad students who work for him will be funded as teaching assistants.
If you've never been in grad school and been funded on a grant and on TA money you might not realize the significant difference in status that carries. And the significant difference in quality of grad student a PI can attract.
If the money has come from a source that just needs to know the facts without seeing any benefit from an outcome one way or the other then that research is far less tainted than if it's come from a source that has a vested profit interest in one outcome over the other.
As someone who works in the field, I an tell you that the latter is a very common situation in academic climate science research, for the reasons I've already described.
I am/am not logged in and can/cannot disable ads, and can/cannot access pages. This is fun. I just realized -- run by Dice, controlled by dice.
So I check it and reload the page. They have logged me out. If I choose to disable ads, I get logged out.
I log back in, check disable ads again. Now the site is "error 503". Same page I was just looking at, no longer available.
What a lovely way to run a techy website.
The first thing conservatives usually say to discredit climate scientists is, they are in thrall to their funders.
You have that 100% backwards. 100%. Every bit of science done by someone who works in industry and doesn't agree with the consensus is attacked as being "paid-for" science. Every single time. Here we have an example of someone who got $120k a year (pretty low salary for an upper level scientist) and is being slandered as producing "paid for" science. But you say that it's the other side that does this.
I've yet to see anyone disparage consensus scientists the same way. I've seen people point out that "salary = bought scientist" is a two-edged sword, but that's after the mud of slander has been thrown at those who don't toe the consensus line. This leaves the consensus supporters in the odd situation of having to defend a claim that someone is being paid to produce fake science but that those who agree with the consensus would never do the same kind of thing.
I'd rather people deal with the science and stop slandering scientists as a way of reaching consensus, but if you can't deal with science, attack the scientist.
Papers directly supported by funding/grants usually don't thank/credit sources (or maybe it's just so small that I never noticed it?).
Every paper I've ever seen in geosciences credits the public funding agency as part of the grant requirements. Not just "usually do", it's all do.
A paper funded by private sources will credit what is required by that source. Carnegie-Mellon, etc, usually do, but it isn't required. It's polite to do so as a way of saying "thanks". The fact that someone hasn't doesn't mean anything.
So.....$120k per year? That's not actually very much.
That's a pittance. It will cover salary and benefits for one researcher. It won't cover much in the way of travel.
Compare that to other grants that cover the salaries of five or six researchers and travel to conferences in Hawaii or Spain or other nice places...
This is another example of "if we can't discredit the science, discredit the scientist for being paid to do research." That ignores all the scientists who are part of the consensus who are also paid to do research. No, nobody is pocketing the loot, it just shows up as salary. Salary for research that means that the scientist doesn't have to be paid on state money so he doesn't have to teach or do other stuff that is attached to non-grant research salary. A stable source of funding means you can hire people and build a lab and build a reputation that helps get more money. The more people you pay, the higher your status. The more stuff you get from the University because your overhead fees benefit them, too.
A Primary User in radio spectrum jargon means the entity(s)/group(s) primarily licensed to use a specific piece of the radio spectrum.
You have just provided a perfect example of a tautology. Primary users have primary licenses. Ok. What I gave is the practical result of that definition. Primary users, no matter which agency they get their license from, can cause interference to secondary users. That's the correction to the original statement I replied to that NTIA cannot issue licenses to agencies that would interfere with FCC licensed users.
As such, the FBI is most definitely not a Primary User of the spectrum assigned to cellphones.
I didn't say they were.
Seeing as your primary premise is incorrect, the rest of your argument is moot.
Seeing as you didn't understand what was being said ... show me where I said that the FBI was a primary user of any frequency allocated to cell phone services. Or are you saying I am incorrect in the fact that the NTIA can authorize agencies to use frequencies that will cause interference to other licensed users? That's my "primary premise" in what you replied to.
Now read again: what I said was 1) The FBI does not operate under FCC rules (a fact.) 2) The FBI operates under NTIA rules (another fact.) 3) Both the FCC and the NTIA can issue licenses for operations that will interfere with other licensed users (another fact). Stop trying to put words in my mouth.
ntia only gives them assignment(license) to use their bands, not to interfere with fcc licensed bands...
First, wrong. Primary users have authority to interfere with secondary users in any band, whether it is pure FCC, pure NTIA, or a mix. And secondary users must not cause interference to, and must accept any interference from, primary users. It depends on the services involved, but your blanket statement is incorrect in its breadth.
For example, the US Air Force (a federal agency operating under NTIA rules) is a primary user in a part of the amateur (FCC rules) 70cm radio band. USAF operates OTH radar in California in that band. Amateurs are thus required to reduce power or cease operation to prevent interference to that radar, and they must accept any interference from that radar. QED, NTIA rules absolutely allow a federal agency to interfere with FCC licensees.
intercepting and decoding private comms permission then again is acquired from a judge in the form of a warrant.
This has nothing to do with the one, very specific comment I made regarding the FBI (or any other federal agency, for that matter) breaking FCC rules.
the rules the fbi is breaking were not made for the fbi and the fbi shouldn't have a free pass to break 'em in the first place.
It appears you missed the point completely. The FBI is NOT SUBJECT TO FCC RULES. They are regulated by the NTIA. They don't need a "free pass" to break FCC rules any more than someone living in Germany needs a pass of any kind to break FCC rules.
Complaints that the FBI is breaking rules they aren't subject to are going to fall on deaf ears.
in your view fbi would be free to block all transmissions on a whim which clearly is not the case.
I did not say that, so do not try claiming that such a stupid statement is "in my view". I said that the FBI is not subject to FCC rules, not that they have no rules.
where they justify pissing all over the FCC's rules against operating an unlicensed transmitter.
The FBI is a federal agency, and as such are covered by NTIA rules, not the FCC. FBI radios don't need FCC licenses, and you will not find any in the FCC ULS. It's a waste of time to complain about how the FBI isn't following FCC rules.
The realtor told us that the property the cell tower is on is owned by a .
Owned by an "invisible agency"?
There are big black cables going right from the cell tower into the brick building and back out again. It's a DIRECT tap off the cell phone tower!
Makes for a great conspiracy theory, but all fluff and no bite. It is very common for towers to have several co-located radio systems. Every location I know of in this area has several agencies all on the same tower. One coastal site I work at has Verizon, Coast Guard, and state radios.
You should realize that the 700/800MHz antennas for public service and feds look identical to the same band antennas that cell phone carriers use, and even different bands can be hard to differentiate from a distance. Especially when the federal systems are trunking and need the same kind of directionality that cell systems do. A "tap off the cell phone tower" is meaningless scare-mongering. You don't tap the tower.
So, in the end, my son had to wait an extra 15 minutes to get his milk because these idiots are still breathing air ...
Oh My God, it's Armageddon in our Time. A catastrophe of biblical proportions.
A different view might be that your baby had to wait 15 minutes because his incompetent parent failed to keep a basic staple like milk on hand.
"Only a jackass would keep a person from buying milk for their baby"
Nobody kept you from buying milk for your baby. I suppose you'd be ranting about all those people ahead of you in line at the grocery store for wanting to buy steak or beer or bread or cheese because they kept you waiting a whole fifteen minutes, too. Or the jackass railroad that was deliberately starving your baby because a train blocked the intersection for fifteen minutes. Or those unacceptably selfish people who died in an automobile accident and the fire department had the road blocked for fifteen minutes cleaning it up.
Everyone's to blame for your baby's hunger except you.
I can honestly say, I've never seen anyone other than fixed-income granny buy a single lottery ticket.
I am not a granny, I do not have a fixed income, and I buy single lottery tickets from time to time as the fancy strikes.
It's a tax
It's a fee for entertainment. It isn't a tax. Not even close. And it has nothing to do with casinos or online gambling.
I simply have no patience for those people
And CPS has no patience with parents who let their children go hungry because they forgot to buy milk.
Under a "normal" system, the 2008 housing crisis should have caused all the banks holding the loans to go under. The threat of this happening is what is supposed to prevent the banks from making risky investments in the first place.
That's true. But the banks weren't allowed to properly evaluate the risks.
In this scenario, where you are essentially gambling with someone else's money (i.e. the tax payers)
Yes. And that's fair since it is the representatives of the taxpayer who forced the banks to ignore the risks and make the loans anyway. The Community Reinvestment Act was a legislative act that forced banks to make loans despite well-known and patently obvious risks. When a bank was required to include things like unemployment payments and ignore past credit histories when deciding which loans to approve (and how much money could be loaned), then those who forced the high risk loans should be the ones responsible when they fail.
That the "community activists" (ACORN, PUSH, etc.) jumped on the CRA bandwagon to threaten banks that didn't make enough risky loans with legal action is still a side-effect of the legislative regulations that our politicians enacted. Their actions led to the collapse. Be angry at them, not the people they forced to make the loans.
Read "Architects of Ruin" by Peter Schweitzer. It will open your eyes.
but get to keep the profits, the best move is to be as risky as you are able to get away with. In this light, the risky behavior of the banks makes a lot more sense.
Of course, businesses are in business to be as risky as they can get away with. Businesses that don't take risks don't remain in business -- the risk takers come eat their lunch. Heck, business that don't take risks don't become businesses in the first place.
But as ibid talks about, the environment of early bailouts was a contributing factor to the problem, but not the proximate cause. The fact that the US bailed out MEXICAN banks is, once again, a legislative failure that led to the collapse.
The amount people spend on lottery tickets per year seems inversely proportional to their income (to a point). ... The problem is not *a* $2 ticket, it's the people who end up spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on lottery tickets every year ...
A purely voluntary expenditure, by the way. Is it not good that we live in a country where we can spend money on lottery tickets if we choose? Is it Good for a government to tell us that we cannot? Should $2 lottery tickets join 64 oz carbonated beverages in the list of prohibited items?
And in the meantime you are shelling out for taxes, maintenance, and being rooted in one area.
If you think that rental rates don't include the taxes and maintenance, you're naive.
And in many areas, house prices go down. So when you buy a house for an investment, you are really speculating
The question is not one of absolute values but of relative. "Buy instead of rent", not "buy for investment". When you leave a house, even if the value goes down, you still likely have some equity. When you rent you walk away with nothing.
The OP was saying that he was buying not for the investment but because he could install air conditioning and a hot tub even if he couldn't get his money back on them when he sells. He won't get his money back on them when he rents, either, so what's the reason to buy?
Yes, I know everyone in the media and our politicians calls home ownership an investment, but they are wrong. 2008 proved that.
2008 proved that people who bought houses they couldn't afford lost money. My house has doubled in value. When my bank offered me two options (fixed and ARM) I opted for the one I could afford. That meant looking five years down the road and seeing the balloon. There was no gun held to my head to pick the wrong option.
The people making money or I should say, making the decent returns, on your house are the banks.
Why yes, they make money off the loan (as they should -- they take a risk loaning money and they don't have it until I pay it back), but I will still have a good chunk of change should I ever decide to sell. Not as much money as I spent total, but nothing to sneeze at. And at no point in my loan was I ever upside down, simply because my eyes weren't bigger than my stomach.
I won't be able to get my investment back when I sell it...but it's worth it for me personally as an owner.
If you can't get your investment in a hot tub or air conditioning back when you sell, then how does it differ in any practical sense from renting?
The reason to buy instead of rent is specifically for the investment in the property itself. At the end of ten years of renting you have no equity; it is the equity in a purchased home that makes it different.
Therefore, it's worth my trading $2 for the prospect of $200 million because I give away something I don't value ($2) for the chance of having something I do value ($200 million)
Why would you want something that is a hundred million times more worthless than what you already have?
I normally wouldn't be this generous, but I like you and you sound like a nice guy. If you ever find yourself in this situation, I'll only charge you $10 to take that useless $200 million off your hands. My normal rate for such cleanup would be $100.
This means you don't have to snoop on your family using remote cameras. Certainly you must have cameras in the bathroom just in case she seizes while taking a leak, right? And the bedroom, too (sleeping or changing clothes, not taking a leak, d'oh).
That one button will be so much better at teaching your kids about the concept of "privacy" than 24 hour video surveillance of their, and their mother's, every movement (B or otherwise).