You don't seem to realise that that's the point at which you crossed the line into bribery.
So you really do think that contributing to Obama's campaign for "hope and change" was actual bribery? That is obviously the reference I was making when talking about "hope and change". Thank God I didn't contribute, you'd probably want me to go to prison. But ok, everyone who did donate to Obama should go, I'll agree to that.
I wish I had mods points. And I wish I could understand why people who would scream bloody murder if their rights to free speech were curtailed are so fervently interested in taking those rights away from others. Maybe just a hint as to why they don't think that people who join together to spend their money more efficiently should have free speech rights after all. And why anyone would support a "legal fiction" that is calling for the stripping of free speech rights from every other legal fiction but itself. ("Move To Amend", spending money lobbying against their own right to spend money lobbying against spending their own money...)
2) Politicians who have a stated position received money from companies who benefit from that position. This is still distasteful in that it gives the people in control of the money a disproportionate say in government but doesn't rise to the same level of immorality.
Whew. I'm glad to know that my donation of money to support a candidate that says he will do what I think should be done is only distasteful and somewhat immoral. I was worried that the hope and change I paid for was something I wasn't really entitled to on moral grounds.
Hell, there's even a "tea party" group in Michigan that's run by Democrats, trying to influence Republican primaries by running judas goats.
This is one of the worst anti-conservative arguments I've seen here on/., and I've seen some really bad ones. You're branding conservatives groups as filled with rubes and proving it by talking about a Democrat scam?
There was no "harassment". The worst thing that could have happened to one of these groups is that they had to pay their taxes.
Let's really be honest here, ok? Not this "look how bad Tea Party people are because Democrats are running a scam...". If you are tax exempt, then the IRS investigating you is harassment, and being threatened with years of back taxes and penalties by an out-of-line IRS agent is more than just "being expected to pay your taxes.".
Their freedom of speech was not abridged.
You know this how? You don't think having to think twice or three times about expressing your opinion because an IRS agent is breathing down your neck threatening to remove your tax exempt status illegally, which could shut your entire organization down when you can't pay the penalties he'll assign, is a limitation on free speech? Be real.
Why are you defending the political use of the IRS? Oh, it's because it is being used against a group you don't like. I got it. Understand. Double standard.
I think it is a good thing that grad students review papers rather than the profs: they are less politically motivated, and closer to the experimental reality.
Also less likely to recognize rehashed old material and already debunked myths. There is a reason why grad students are grad students and professors are professors, and it doesn't have to do with good looks or a winning personality.
There is also an issue of grad students borrowing other people's research ideas. Grad students have no status to lose and may not even recognize that it's bad to do this.
Now, under supervision is a different matter, but "rather than"? No.
I have no idea. I claimed no specifics, only pointed out the fact.
regardless, why should private grants paying extra for Elsevier's profits be any better?
You complain that taxpayer funded research is being sold by journals. I pointed out that not all research is taxpayer funded. Where did I say the rates were good?
And, when you lock in a monopoly position (such as is granted through exclusive intellectual property rights to journal articles),
Journal articles are not the be-all end-all of scientific data. In fact, they contain very little of the actual data gathered in scientific research. They contain, for the most part, conclusions and theories. You want the data, contact the authors. The journals do not have a monopoly on the data.
Religious organizations do not pay taxes. They can not be the target of the IRS.
You are patently wrong. It is the IRS that determines the tax exempt status of an organization, and the IRS can easily target a currently tax-exempt organization by simply saying "prove you should keep your exemption".
However, in this case the political organizations are so commingled with religious organizations I am surprised they are not always targeted by the IRS.
If you think that religious organizations cannot be the targets of the IRS because they are tax-exempt, then it is hypocritical to think that political tax-exempt organizations could be the target. The fact that you know that loss of political tax-exemption is a big stick the IRS brandishes means you should know that religious exemptions are also subject to harassment. In fact, this very IRS tactic makes religious leaders hesitant about using their first amendment rights to express their own opinions, lest the IRS claim they are practicing politics from the pulpit. I.e., a pastor has every right to tell me what he thinks of a politician based on the first amendment without having to fear the IRS.
There was no calculation to hinder the election process, because, even at worst, you are talking about having to pay taxes.
Never been harassed by the IRS, have we? Been asked to provide lists of data to support legal activities? Knowing that if the lists and data you provide aren't "good enough" to meet the tax-man's criteria, you will be forced to pay what could amount to years of back taxes AND PENALTIES that would wipe your organization out. If you don't think threats of IRS action are hindering to an organization, you are a fool. But then you say:
This thing does not undermine free and fair elections: you are thinking of congressional redistricting and voter identification laws.
So we know it for a fact. In your upside-down universe, being asked to prove you have the right to vote is undemining free and fair elections, while allowing anyone who walks in the door and asks for a ballot to vote is how fair elections are run.
You've certainly never lived anywhere near Chicago where the common knowledge is that under Dailey the first the cemeteries would empty out on election day to vote for the Dailey machine. Not making the corpses prove they have a right to vote certainly resulted in free and fair elections there, didn't it?
Your position that this is indicative of some shadowy fascist empire makes you sound like a fanatical lunatic, and your comments are abysmally without use. Grow up.
Mike, you can engage in political activity and still be a 501c3 or 4, but it can't be your primary activity.
If only those two were the only ways of being tax exempt.
A political organization can be tax exempt if its primary activity is a tax exempt activity. Here:
The exempt function of a political organization is influencing or attempting to influence the selection, nomination, election or appointment of an individual to a federal, state, or local public office or office in a political organization. The election of Presidential or Vice-Presidential electors is also part of the exempt function of a political organization. Activities that directly or indirectly relate to or support an exempt function are exempt function activities.
As opposed to the taxpayer paying for all those things *plus* massive private profits by having private publishers do this?
You missed the point that not all grants are tax-funded. Corporations also provide grants to do research, as do private foundations.
Oooh, newspaper delivery prices!
Except there is no newspaper. There's a monthly magazine. How many magazines do you think would survive if they charged $185 per year? And I cannot think of a single newspaper I would subscribe to for $185/year, so "newspaper delivery prices" is a useless comparison.
If $185 is "wacky" on your engineer's salary,
How does the fact that the cost is much larger than the value have anything to do with the level of one's salary? Someone getting paid $150k/annum would still be getting as little out of the cost as someone making $1.
BTW, your slap at what you think my salary is is a waste of everyone's time, including mine. Knock off the insulting attitude.
Paying for the actual costs of providing said services is reasonable. But Elsevier also gets this thing called "profit,"
That's how capitalism works. People who risk money get to profit when the risk pays off. But before I go on a rant about obscene profits, I'd probably want a better source for the data than an article that is ranting about those obscene profits. Something more objective, perhaps.
Because maybe the author is dead, or might have better things to do than deal with personally handling the distribution of articles that a journal should be responsible for?
If the author is dead, his files have been passed on to someone else in the department, and EVERY author is happy to have people ask for the product of his efforts. It's stroking his ego.
If individual authors are supposed to handle archiving and distributing their own articles, then what are university libraries paying Elsevier's archive access extortion fees for?
You want the information for free, I just told you the easy way to get it. Individual authors aren't required to do this, they do it because it is of value to the community. The "extortion" fees are because they are making it more convenient for you to get the information, a service which costs real money.
Replacing for-profit publishers with non-profit university and professional associations puts more money (and, more importantly, access to knowledge) back in the hands of scientists,
Creating "non-profit" university publishers will cost every taxpayer more money, because the people that will have to be hired to do this work will not be doing it for free, and instead of being paid for indirectly by grants (which can be taxpayer or private), they'll be on the taxpayer payroll.
Association publishers will simply move the costs to the association members. The cost of belonging to some professional organizations is wacky already. IEEE is $185 a year, for which you get Spectrum and continual offers of life insurance. ACM is a more reasonable $99. ACS is $151. The only advantage to pushing the costs to the members is that some of them don't pay memberships from grant money, so you get to pull the money out of the member's pocket.
Whether you like it or not, the professional publishers do provide a service that isn't free, so paying them for that service isn't unreasonable. If you want free journal articles, perhaps you should write the author and get a preprint? When you pay for a journal, you aren't paying for the information, you're paying for the article itself.
I can tell you're a rank and file Democrat. You think that by catching someone in a minor misstatement or miss recalled fact you have prove to be their intellectual superior.
No, but catching someone who is writing flamebait demonstrating how stupid someone else is, thus claiming an intellectual superiority, in an obviously inaccurate statement does go to show the original flamer's lack of intellectual superiority. Minor misstatements by themselves are just mistakes. Major misstatements in an attack on someone else's intelligence are... disqualifying.
I'm not sure that I'd rate a failure of the account rep to predict every issue that a "stakeholder" might come up with and tell the purchaser how to deal with it in advance a "lack of professionalism". That sounds a lot like trying to aim at a moving target to me. "Oh, can your product also do X? It has to do X, which I just thought of..."
Why a Republican Bill. This seems to go against the core Republican Ideals of less government and regulation.
Shocked! I'm SHOCKED, I say. To think that McCain would do something against the core Republican ideas. But, just remember the other name on the Feingold campaign finance legislation that puts ridiculous limits on free speech, then you won't be so shocked.
There is nothing ludicrous about a network bundling. It's a contract between two companies that are free to agree or not. The government should stick its nose out.
Even if this law passes, it will be just as effective as all the other cable regulation. For example, the laws that say that cable companies must provide services in a way that takes into consideration customer provided equipment. Back in the analog days, this was easy. CableCo used traps to keep you from getting things you didn't pay for. Everything else you paid for you could watch on your own TV.
Today, they encrypt almost everything, even what you pay for, so you can't use your own ClearQAM TV to watch it. Or your own DVR with a ClearQAM tuner. It's to keep people from stealing services, even though they scramble most of the basic digital tier. In other words, the lowest level of cable service you can get includes a bunch of channels that they won't let you watch on your own equipment because you might be stealing them. You don't get anything unless you have that tier, so how can you be stealing them? Comcast, scumcast.
I figure competition from Online streaming would force the companies to change.
Competition only forces change when it is effective. What percentage of people would drop cable for streaming internet video? This is/. and the numbers here are much higher than in the general population. And consider that this streaming internet has to come over something, which might just be cable internet. So they'll offer you a bundle to stay with them. Many people will do that. And will want to keep the local stations for local events. So, it will be awhile before competition gets to the level that the cable companies will do this on their own.
At least at universities, we are more (but not completely) immune to the whims of politicians.
Why do you think you are being forced to take these less educated students? Because the parents tell their politicians that they want Johnny to go to college even if he isn't well prepared by the high schools. The Uni presidents are playing a political game trying to build larger Universities with more prestige and more taxpayer funding, and anything that reduces the number of in-state bodies they accept cuts that funding/prestige/etc. Politicians tell the parents that they are concerned about getting Johnny a good education in today's world and that they support grants and federally backed loans to help them, if only they'll vote for me! (Those other guys want to cut...)
Solving the problem is a political game, too. Politicians demand more property tax money to pour into the schools, pretending that more money will fix things, and when the public says "enough" and doesn't hand them more, the politicians need to make things break so the public will vote for more money next time. They can't fire bad teachers because the teacher's unions hand out money to politicians...
The problem is very much a political one, and universities play right along.
But since there are laws about how you have to handle contests and the like, they need to really be able to prove that ignoring those votes had no effect on the outcome, or they could open themselves up for lawsuits.
TFA talks about "predicting" the impact of ignoring those votes. It doesn't take prediction or very much proof. It's simple.
"If we counted the discarded ballots and included them in the scores, Team B won, Team C was second and Team A was third. If we discard those ballots, Team B won, Team C was second and Team A was third." That's what the statement 'the results were not changed by discarding the ballots" means.
High school is simply so dumbed down college academics can be a large jump regardless of how well you did before.
Fix the high schools. That's where the problem is.
but so long as it doesn't become financially exploitative this will produce positive results for students from *all* spheres.
You don't see taking money from people for a year's worth of education (at college) that they should have gotten for free (as part of high school) as being "financially exploitative?"
Teaching students how to do proofs teaches them an abstract way of thinking that is universally applicable to solving open ended problems--problems of the form "Here's point A. Point B is over there. How do we get there?". Not every engineer needs this kind of thinking, but some do,...
Much more important is that they need to know how the tools WORK and not just what data goes in and comes out. If you don't know how the tools work and what their limiations are, then you can easily get garbage out because you've violated some of the assumptions made in that tool.
It's one thing to know the simplified equation for doing something, but much more important to know HOW it was simplified and WHAT was left out getting there. Oh, you want to deal with the specific thing that this equation ignores, but you think you should use that equation anyway?
A perfect example of this is from chemistry dealing with pH of buffer solutions based on the pKa of the buffer. There is a simple equation that you can use to determine the pH. BUT if the buffer dissociates more than a certain amount, that equation is not applicable and you must use the full quadratic equation to get the answer. If you don't realize the limits on the simple version, you don't know when your answer is going to be garbage. You think being wrong is unusual? I even caught the TA for a chemistry class who was TEACHING us these equations using the wrong one, on a quiz, when he marked my full quadratic answer as wrong. (The full quadratic answer is ALWAYS right, it's just more complicated than the simple one.)
How about oceanography? Is your wave model based on the mild slope equations and you've got discontinuities? Are you in shallow water so you use the shallow water approximation? Are you in a region where diffraction is important and the tool you are using ignores it?
If you don't know the limitations of a hammer, every problem is a nail.
I may seem like a fuddy-duddy to some other parents with the ~somewhat~ early (or at least not late) bedtimes we have established for our grade school aged kids during the week, but the further I go, the more I believe we're doing the right thing. I may not be able to control whether they get sick or not, or if they always eat all their veggies, but the one thing I CAN make sure of is that they always get a good night's sleep.
You could also make sure they eat a healthy nutritious breakfast. However, in many school districts, the failures of the parents to feed their children properly has resulted in free breakfast and lunch for every student. The rationale is that they don't learn if they are hungry, and you cannot single out the poor kids to feed for free because that would hurt their self-esteem.
This free lunch even extends, in some places, to the SUMMER, when they aren't in school and the excuse that they won't be able to learn as well is absent. At this point, it's a "think of the children" emotional argument. TANSTAAFL be damned.
So, with that said, and now this sleep deprivation data, the path forward seems clear. All children must report for school at 9PM the previous night so they can be put into taxpayer provided beds and get the right amount of sleep, prior to being fed a healthy nutritious breakfast and then going to class. But since some parents will not be available to drive their children to school at that time of day, the schools must make services available to house students from the close of one school day (3-4PM) until their appointed return time (9PM), and so dinner and a movie must be provided for free, as well.
No. They lost Moscow; we lost New York, the President's wife, and Slim Pickens. But my, didn't Henry Fonda look swell as Mr. President, with J.R. Ewing translating.
I find that to be an indefensible position. Just because Google has my data on their servers does NOT mean that the government has the right to access that data (or at least, according to a simple reading of the 4th amendment, SHOULD not mean so). Things are different if Google decides to give my data to the government--
You're contradicting yourself here. If the government says to Google "please show me the email for Zak3056" and Google says "would you like that as a zip or tar file?", then they've decided to give up your data without a warrant. Where's your fourth amendment now? You admit that the government isn't violating your privacy.
Right, you can sue them. For what? Here's the relevant current privacy policy statement on this, which you have agreed to:
We will share personal information with companies, organizations or individuals outside of Google if we have a good-faith belief that access, use, preservation or disclosure of the information is reasonably necessary to:
meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request.
enforce applicable Terms of Service, including investigation of potential violations.
detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues.
protect against harm to the rights, property or safety of Google, our users or the public as required or permitted by law.
When the government asks, Google believes they are helping detect or prevent security issues. End of your lawsuit, you agree to this. Sorry. Or they are meeting an applicable law or regulation. Or protecting the public. Whatever.
You have no expectation of privacy when you hand your data over to a company that makes a living using data from people who use their services.
I must've missed some of the news. How many people had their limbs blown off by the police during the search? How many children were killed during the optional curfew?
Is it your argument that as long as the government is not dismembering children whatever else they do is ok?
What "optional curfew"? There was a mandatory lockdown. People could not go to work, they could not earn their paychecks, they could not leave home. Buses and trains were shut down. They spent a good part of the day that way. And the suspect was found after people were allowed to go outside and someone saw bloody footprints around his boat. A member of the public, who had been prevented from leaving his house, did what the entire police force could not.
Bullshit argument. If I store my bag in a locker at the gym it does not give right to the govt to search that simply because the locker is technically owned by the gym. I have procured the authority to use that locker as my personal space.
So you know that you've rented that locked space with the expectation of privacy and extension of your personal space. Storage lockers, ditto. When you rent an apartment, ditto.
But if you simply give your stuff to someone else, you lose that protection. I pay nothing to Google for their gmail. It's on their servers.
And now IEEE has announced that they will be moving their mail alias services to Google and giving members free access to Google Stuff (I forget all the details.) So, here's another example of someone handing your data over to a company where it loses any expectation of privacy or limits on search.
This is nice for you contacting all your friends, but if your friends are posting on facebook instead of keeping their own list of friend's email addresses like you do, you lose out. You can tell them you miss them, but they'll be wondering why you never respond to poke or wall messages.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't seem to realise that that's the point at which you crossed the line into bribery.
So you really do think that contributing to Obama's campaign for "hope and change" was actual bribery? That is obviously the reference I was making when talking about "hope and change". Thank God I didn't contribute, you'd probably want me to go to prison. But ok, everyone who did donate to Obama should go, I'll agree to that.
I wish I had mods points. And I wish I could understand why people who would scream bloody murder if their rights to free speech were curtailed are so fervently interested in taking those rights away from others. Maybe just a hint as to why they don't think that people who join together to spend their money more efficiently should have free speech rights after all. And why anyone would support a "legal fiction" that is calling for the stripping of free speech rights from every other legal fiction but itself. ("Move To Amend", spending money lobbying against their own right to spend money lobbying against spending their own money...)
2) Politicians who have a stated position received money from companies who benefit from that position. This is still distasteful in that it gives the people in control of the money a disproportionate say in government but doesn't rise to the same level of immorality.
Whew. I'm glad to know that my donation of money to support a candidate that says he will do what I think should be done is only distasteful and somewhat immoral. I was worried that the hope and change I paid for was something I wasn't really entitled to on moral grounds.
Hell, there's even a "tea party" group in Michigan that's run by Democrats, trying to influence Republican primaries by running judas goats.
This is one of the worst anti-conservative arguments I've seen here on /., and I've seen some really bad ones. You're branding conservatives groups as filled with rubes and proving it by talking about a Democrat scam?
There was no "harassment". The worst thing that could have happened to one of these groups is that they had to pay their taxes.
Let's really be honest here, ok? Not this "look how bad Tea Party people are because Democrats are running a scam...". If you are tax exempt, then the IRS investigating you is harassment, and being threatened with years of back taxes and penalties by an out-of-line IRS agent is more than just "being expected to pay your taxes.".
Their freedom of speech was not abridged.
You know this how? You don't think having to think twice or three times about expressing your opinion because an IRS agent is breathing down your neck threatening to remove your tax exempt status illegally, which could shut your entire organization down when you can't pay the penalties he'll assign, is a limitation on free speech? Be real.
Why are you defending the political use of the IRS? Oh, it's because it is being used against a group you don't like. I got it. Understand. Double standard.
I think it is a good thing that grad students review papers rather than the profs: they are less politically motivated, and closer to the experimental reality.
Also less likely to recognize rehashed old material and already debunked myths. There is a reason why grad students are grad students and professors are professors, and it doesn't have to do with good looks or a winning personality.
There is also an issue of grad students borrowing other people's research ideas. Grad students have no status to lose and may not even recognize that it's bad to do this.
Now, under supervision is a different matter, but "rather than"? No.
(a) what fraction is this in most fields?
I have no idea. I claimed no specifics, only pointed out the fact.
regardless, why should private grants paying extra for Elsevier's profits be any better?
You complain that taxpayer funded research is being sold by journals. I pointed out that not all research is taxpayer funded. Where did I say the rates were good?
And, when you lock in a monopoly position (such as is granted through exclusive intellectual property rights to journal articles),
Journal articles are not the be-all end-all of scientific data. In fact, they contain very little of the actual data gathered in scientific research. They contain, for the most part, conclusions and theories. You want the data, contact the authors. The journals do not have a monopoly on the data.
Religious organizations do not pay taxes. They can not be the target of the IRS.
You are patently wrong. It is the IRS that determines the tax exempt status of an organization, and the IRS can easily target a currently tax-exempt organization by simply saying "prove you should keep your exemption".
However, in this case the political organizations are so commingled with religious organizations I am surprised they are not always targeted by the IRS.
If you think that religious organizations cannot be the targets of the IRS because they are tax-exempt, then it is hypocritical to think that political tax-exempt organizations could be the target. The fact that you know that loss of political tax-exemption is a big stick the IRS brandishes means you should know that religious exemptions are also subject to harassment. In fact, this very IRS tactic makes religious leaders hesitant about using their first amendment rights to express their own opinions, lest the IRS claim they are practicing politics from the pulpit. I.e., a pastor has every right to tell me what he thinks of a politician based on the first amendment without having to fear the IRS.
There was no calculation to hinder the election process, because, even at worst, you are talking about having to pay taxes.
Never been harassed by the IRS, have we? Been asked to provide lists of data to support legal activities? Knowing that if the lists and data you provide aren't "good enough" to meet the tax-man's criteria, you will be forced to pay what could amount to years of back taxes AND PENALTIES that would wipe your organization out. If you don't think threats of IRS action are hindering to an organization, you are a fool. But then you say:
This thing does not undermine free and fair elections: you are thinking of congressional redistricting and voter identification laws.
So we know it for a fact. In your upside-down universe, being asked to prove you have the right to vote is undemining free and fair elections, while allowing anyone who walks in the door and asks for a ballot to vote is how fair elections are run.
You've certainly never lived anywhere near Chicago where the common knowledge is that under Dailey the first the cemeteries would empty out on election day to vote for the Dailey machine. Not making the corpses prove they have a right to vote certainly resulted in free and fair elections there, didn't it?
Your position that this is indicative of some shadowy fascist empire makes you sound like a fanatical lunatic, and your comments are abysmally without use. Grow up.
Oh, my, I think I just fed the troll. My bad.
Mike, you can engage in political activity and still be a 501c3 or 4, but it can't be your primary activity.
If only those two were the only ways of being tax exempt. A political organization can be tax exempt if its primary activity is a tax exempt activity. Here:
I'd say the Tea Party meets that requirement.
As opposed to the taxpayer paying for all those things *plus* massive private profits by having private publishers do this?
You missed the point that not all grants are tax-funded. Corporations also provide grants to do research, as do private foundations.
Oooh, newspaper delivery prices!
Except there is no newspaper. There's a monthly magazine. How many magazines do you think would survive if they charged $185 per year? And I cannot think of a single newspaper I would subscribe to for $185/year, so "newspaper delivery prices" is a useless comparison.
If $185 is "wacky" on your engineer's salary,
How does the fact that the cost is much larger than the value have anything to do with the level of one's salary? Someone getting paid $150k/annum would still be getting as little out of the cost as someone making $1.
BTW, your slap at what you think my salary is is a waste of everyone's time, including mine. Knock off the insulting attitude.
Paying for the actual costs of providing said services is reasonable. But Elsevier also gets this thing called "profit,"
That's how capitalism works. People who risk money get to profit when the risk pays off. But before I go on a rant about obscene profits, I'd probably want a better source for the data than an article that is ranting about those obscene profits. Something more objective, perhaps.
Because maybe the author is dead, or might have better things to do than deal with personally handling the distribution of articles that a journal should be responsible for?
If the author is dead, his files have been passed on to someone else in the department, and EVERY author is happy to have people ask for the product of his efforts. It's stroking his ego.
If individual authors are supposed to handle archiving and distributing their own articles, then what are university libraries paying Elsevier's archive access extortion fees for?
You want the information for free, I just told you the easy way to get it. Individual authors aren't required to do this, they do it because it is of value to the community. The "extortion" fees are because they are making it more convenient for you to get the information, a service which costs real money.
Replacing for-profit publishers with non-profit university and professional associations puts more money (and, more importantly, access to knowledge) back in the hands of scientists,
Creating "non-profit" university publishers will cost every taxpayer more money, because the people that will have to be hired to do this work will not be doing it for free, and instead of being paid for indirectly by grants (which can be taxpayer or private), they'll be on the taxpayer payroll.
Association publishers will simply move the costs to the association members. The cost of belonging to some professional organizations is wacky already. IEEE is $185 a year, for which you get Spectrum and continual offers of life insurance. ACM is a more reasonable $99. ACS is $151. The only advantage to pushing the costs to the members is that some of them don't pay memberships from grant money, so you get to pull the money out of the member's pocket.
Whether you like it or not, the professional publishers do provide a service that isn't free, so paying them for that service isn't unreasonable. If you want free journal articles, perhaps you should write the author and get a preprint? When you pay for a journal, you aren't paying for the information, you're paying for the article itself.
I can tell you're a rank and file Democrat. You think that by catching someone in a minor misstatement or miss recalled fact you have prove to be their intellectual superior.
No, but catching someone who is writing flamebait demonstrating how stupid someone else is, thus claiming an intellectual superiority, in an obviously inaccurate statement does go to show the original flamer's lack of intellectual superiority. Minor misstatements by themselves are just mistakes. Major misstatements in an attack on someone else's intelligence are ... disqualifying.
I'm not sure that I'd rate a failure of the account rep to predict every issue that a "stakeholder" might come up with and tell the purchaser how to deal with it in advance a "lack of professionalism". That sounds a lot like trying to aim at a moving target to me. "Oh, can your product also do X? It has to do X, which I just thought of..."
Why a Republican Bill. This seems to go against the core Republican Ideals of less government and regulation.
Shocked! I'm SHOCKED, I say. To think that McCain would do something against the core Republican ideas. But, just remember the other name on the Feingold campaign finance legislation that puts ridiculous limits on free speech, then you won't be so shocked.
There is nothing ludicrous about a network bundling. It's a contract between two companies that are free to agree or not. The government should stick its nose out.
Even if this law passes, it will be just as effective as all the other cable regulation. For example, the laws that say that cable companies must provide services in a way that takes into consideration customer provided equipment. Back in the analog days, this was easy. CableCo used traps to keep you from getting things you didn't pay for. Everything else you paid for you could watch on your own TV.
Today, they encrypt almost everything, even what you pay for, so you can't use your own ClearQAM TV to watch it. Or your own DVR with a ClearQAM tuner. It's to keep people from stealing services, even though they scramble most of the basic digital tier. In other words, the lowest level of cable service you can get includes a bunch of channels that they won't let you watch on your own equipment because you might be stealing them. You don't get anything unless you have that tier, so how can you be stealing them? Comcast, scumcast.
I figure competition from Online streaming would force the companies to change.
Competition only forces change when it is effective. What percentage of people would drop cable for streaming internet video? This is /. and the numbers here are much higher than in the general population. And consider that this streaming internet has to come over something, which might just be cable internet. So they'll offer you a bundle to stay with them. Many people will do that. And will want to keep the local stations for local events. So, it will be awhile before competition gets to the level that the cable companies will do this on their own.
At least at universities, we are more (but not completely) immune to the whims of politicians.
Why do you think you are being forced to take these less educated students? Because the parents tell their politicians that they want Johnny to go to college even if he isn't well prepared by the high schools. The Uni presidents are playing a political game trying to build larger Universities with more prestige and more taxpayer funding, and anything that reduces the number of in-state bodies they accept cuts that funding/prestige/etc. Politicians tell the parents that they are concerned about getting Johnny a good education in today's world and that they support grants and federally backed loans to help them, if only they'll vote for me! (Those other guys want to cut ...)
Solving the problem is a political game, too. Politicians demand more property tax money to pour into the schools, pretending that more money will fix things, and when the public says "enough" and doesn't hand them more, the politicians need to make things break so the public will vote for more money next time. They can't fire bad teachers because the teacher's unions hand out money to politicians ...
The problem is very much a political one, and universities play right along.
But since there are laws about how you have to handle contests and the like, they need to really be able to prove that ignoring those votes had no effect on the outcome, or they could open themselves up for lawsuits.
TFA talks about "predicting" the impact of ignoring those votes. It doesn't take prediction or very much proof. It's simple.
"If we counted the discarded ballots and included them in the scores, Team B won, Team C was second and Team A was third. If we discard those ballots, Team B won, Team C was second and Team A was third." That's what the statement 'the results were not changed by discarding the ballots" means.
What a tempest in a teapot.
High school is simply so dumbed down college academics can be a large jump regardless of how well you did before.
Fix the high schools. That's where the problem is.
but so long as it doesn't become financially exploitative this will produce positive results for students from *all* spheres.
You don't see taking money from people for a year's worth of education (at college) that they should have gotten for free (as part of high school) as being "financially exploitative?"
Teaching students how to do proofs teaches them an abstract way of thinking that is universally applicable to solving open ended problems--problems of the form "Here's point A. Point B is over there. How do we get there?". Not every engineer needs this kind of thinking, but some do,...
Much more important is that they need to know how the tools WORK and not just what data goes in and comes out. If you don't know how the tools work and what their limiations are, then you can easily get garbage out because you've violated some of the assumptions made in that tool.
It's one thing to know the simplified equation for doing something, but much more important to know HOW it was simplified and WHAT was left out getting there. Oh, you want to deal with the specific thing that this equation ignores, but you think you should use that equation anyway?
A perfect example of this is from chemistry dealing with pH of buffer solutions based on the pKa of the buffer. There is a simple equation that you can use to determine the pH. BUT if the buffer dissociates more than a certain amount, that equation is not applicable and you must use the full quadratic equation to get the answer. If you don't realize the limits on the simple version, you don't know when your answer is going to be garbage. You think being wrong is unusual? I even caught the TA for a chemistry class who was TEACHING us these equations using the wrong one, on a quiz, when he marked my full quadratic answer as wrong. (The full quadratic answer is ALWAYS right, it's just more complicated than the simple one.)
How about oceanography? Is your wave model based on the mild slope equations and you've got discontinuities? Are you in shallow water so you use the shallow water approximation? Are you in a region where diffraction is important and the tool you are using ignores it?
If you don't know the limitations of a hammer, every problem is a nail.
I may seem like a fuddy-duddy to some other parents with the ~somewhat~ early (or at least not late) bedtimes we have established for our grade school aged kids during the week, but the further I go, the more I believe we're doing the right thing. I may not be able to control whether they get sick or not, or if they always eat all their veggies, but the one thing I CAN make sure of is that they always get a good night's sleep.
You could also make sure they eat a healthy nutritious breakfast. However, in many school districts, the failures of the parents to feed their children properly has resulted in free breakfast and lunch for every student. The rationale is that they don't learn if they are hungry, and you cannot single out the poor kids to feed for free because that would hurt their self-esteem.
This free lunch even extends, in some places, to the SUMMER, when they aren't in school and the excuse that they won't be able to learn as well is absent. At this point, it's a "think of the children" emotional argument. TANSTAAFL be damned.
So, with that said, and now this sleep deprivation data, the path forward seems clear. All children must report for school at 9PM the previous night so they can be put into taxpayer provided beds and get the right amount of sleep, prior to being fed a healthy nutritious breakfast and then going to class. But since some parents will not be available to drive their children to school at that time of day, the schools must make services available to house students from the close of one school day (3-4PM) until their appointed return time (9PM), and so dinner and a movie must be provided for free, as well.
The USAF is, as you say, the gold standard. Civilian nuclear power is considerably less motivated and less well funded, with less oversight.
You're right. I'm all for removing nuclear launch authority from the operators of civilian nuclear power plants.
No. They lost Moscow; we lost New York, the President's wife, and Slim Pickens. But my, didn't Henry Fonda look swell as Mr. President, with J.R. Ewing translating.
I find that to be an indefensible position. Just because Google has my data on their servers does NOT mean that the government has the right to access that data (or at least, according to a simple reading of the 4th amendment, SHOULD not mean so). Things are different if Google decides to give my data to the government--
You're contradicting yourself here. If the government says to Google "please show me the email for Zak3056" and Google says "would you like that as a zip or tar file?", then they've decided to give up your data without a warrant. Where's your fourth amendment now? You admit that the government isn't violating your privacy.
Right, you can sue them. For what? Here's the relevant current privacy policy statement on this, which you have agreed to:
When the government asks, Google believes they are helping detect or prevent security issues. End of your lawsuit, you agree to this. Sorry. Or they are meeting an applicable law or regulation. Or protecting the public. Whatever.
You have no expectation of privacy when you hand your data over to a company that makes a living using data from people who use their services.
I must've missed some of the news. How many people had their limbs blown off by the police during the search? How many children were killed during the optional curfew?
Is it your argument that as long as the government is not dismembering children whatever else they do is ok?
What "optional curfew"? There was a mandatory lockdown. People could not go to work, they could not earn their paychecks, they could not leave home. Buses and trains were shut down. They spent a good part of the day that way. And the suspect was found after people were allowed to go outside and someone saw bloody footprints around his boat. A member of the public, who had been prevented from leaving his house, did what the entire police force could not.
Bullshit argument. If I store my bag in a locker at the gym it does not give right to the govt to search that simply because the locker is technically owned by the gym. I have procured the authority to use that locker as my personal space.
So you know that you've rented that locked space with the expectation of privacy and extension of your personal space. Storage lockers, ditto. When you rent an apartment, ditto.
But if you simply give your stuff to someone else, you lose that protection. I pay nothing to Google for their gmail. It's on their servers.
And now IEEE has announced that they will be moving their mail alias services to Google and giving members free access to Google Stuff (I forget all the details.) So, here's another example of someone handing your data over to a company where it loses any expectation of privacy or limits on search.
This is nice for you contacting all your friends, but if your friends are posting on facebook instead of keeping their own list of friend's email addresses like you do, you lose out. You can tell them you miss them, but they'll be wondering why you never respond to poke or wall messages.