To be fair, the Challenger disaster actually preceeded NASA's slogan and procurement policy of "faster, better, cheaper" by a bit.
More to the point, Feynman's article should be a cautionary tale to ANYONE in a engineering field. It isn't a matter of one field being subject to unscientific pressures and another field being immune. No technology or industry is immune from the pressures and problems that caused the challenger disaster. Anyone who claims to be well adapted to safety concerns enough to not spend lots of time and effort on fixing them is foolish. The nuclear industry still has to practice strong QC on parts, procedures and maintenance and CONTINUE that practice. Same with commercial aviation, acute medical care, etc.
Constant vigilance is rewarded only with another uneventful day. That is the fundamental problem. Vigilance is expensive and time consuming. these are not pressures from the profit motive. They apply to government as well as civilian ventures.
Also, totally out of curiosity, where did you come upon the expression "same same"?:) I have a friend who used it constantly or said "same same, only different". It was also quite common in Hawaii.
It isn't censorship. It isn't illegal. It is totally within the scope of eBay's user agreements with sellers and buyers. eBay has negotiated an agreement with a large vendor who is interested in preventing the resale of their items. I HAVE to presume that whatever these items are they come with an agreement eliminating the possiblity of resale. They would then fall in to the category of attempting to resell items which have a non-transferrable license. It is totally within their rights to cancel any auction that they feel is outside their TOS. In this case, they have chosen to offload the work on to a more zealous party.
Just because it is withing their rights doesn't make it a good idea. As a matter of fact, it is a terrible idea. allowing a third party to void auctions without oversight is foolish for a few reasons:
1. Other large interests see these actions and will want the same treatment, as long as it does not offer significant negative publicity. The fact that ebay is WILLING to offer this service puts them in a bad barganing position with these other firms.
2. It only means lost revenue for ebay. Presumably, ebay was faced with a legal threat over allowing resale of these items. SOMEHOW, ebay made the determination that compliance was somehow too expensive and have offered to shift the cost of compliance to CoS. CoS does NOT have an incentive to be careful. They have an incentive to overextend their authority because the lost customer is not theirs.
3. As a corollary, this is like outsourcing your customer service to a motorcycle gang. CoS has every reason to be pernicious, litigious and overbroad. They have NO reason to see gray areas and offer the benefit of the doubt.
4. Compliance in good faith by ebay would probably not have hazarded a lawsuit. IANAL, but most of these suits stem from what is basically deliberate negligence on the part of the reselling authority (or serving authority). If ebay acts on their own standards they are likely to meet whatever tests exist.
ZOMG! You're right, I should just start dumping whatever doubles as tea in the 21st century into boston harbor. That will show the tories in charge that we mean business. How old are you? Do you realize that what you actually do doesn't impact a sitting president? We might have elected him in 2000 and he broke the fucking law repeatedly in a grab for power after 9/11. Our chance to stop him? A congress so cowed by fear that they would take 5 fucking years and an electoral shakeup in order to find a pair. 2004? Nope. We were so busy showing that we were tough on terror by buckling on issues that we didn't field a strong candidate. 2008? Maybe. There is one person in that field who didn't actually make a job of giving in to executive authority and that was partially because he wasn't in office yet. But what do we expect, that once Obama is in office he will roll back all of the authority granted to the bush administration? Hah.
Let me know when you grow up and know what you are talking about. Presidents breaking a law that ALREADY allows for secret spying in order to do ILLEGAL secret spying and a congress being ok with not only that but being lied to abot it for 4 years. That's almost a textbook case of out fo your control.
In this case we are talking about 2-3 different things:
First, the problem of formerly private information that your friends have willingly made public, either because of convienience (information given to a website that they use for shopping) or on a social networking website.
Second, the private information that they are unwittingly making public, or leaving themselves at risk of making it public.
Third, that governments may be helping themselves to information thought to be private.
The first is a cultural difference, the third is out of your control, and the second is the really important one. You aren't going to win the debate on the first one. We've seen this debate before, on anonymity for BBS users, later on the rise of cookies. On one side were the forces of good, arguing that these changes were very real invasions of privacy and made your computer do things you didn't know it was doing and wouldn't want it to do if you did know. On the other side was convenience. It sucks to have to log in to slashdot every time I open a new browser window. It's kind of nice that Amazon can make recommendations to me. Cookies let that happen and the public debate, for what it was worth was won pretty handily. Now, that doesn't mean that companies started using cookies as an outgrowth of the democratic will of internet users. It just means that the level of outrage was muted over cookies enough for image conscious companies to get by with using them.
the same thing is going on w/ facebook/myspace/etc. The tables may turn on them (and will probably turn on facebook soonish), but for now we like the fact that others can see our name/face/job/school more than we dislike that these things are no longer private. Part of that outlook comes from the fact that we are limited in imagination. We see facebook one screen at a time. We can't look at people who aren't in our group (I think, haven't used it in a while). It takes a non-trivial amount of time to look through information. Consequently, we see that as the ONLY way to grab data from facebook. We don't connect (or at least the non-IT ppl) the fact that someone broke down anon/aggregate survey data from aol and netflix to get private information automatically. We don't think about scraping programs that read sites like myspace/facebook and correlate names and zipcodes with other sources of inoformation on the web.
The last part of this failure of imagination is that there is a cost to privacy. If I want my personal information to be private wholly from facebook, I can't be on facebook. Relatively speaking, that is a large cost. There is no 'maximum privacy' level for facebook where you can post pics of you and your friends and make comments and it won't be recorded somewhere. That product doesn't exist.
Ok. I won't touch on the third point because that is a flame war waiting to happen. Needless to say, it is out of your direct control.
The second point. My advice is be direct when the situation calls for it, but don't bother when it doesn't. If you are out at a baseball game, don't strike up a conversation like "Gee bob, I noticed that your password for your computer is 1 2 3 4 5 and that you sure do have an awful lot of sensitive info on there. Don't you think that you ought to change that?".
And then just tell them to get a mac. If they aren't security conscious enough to get a virus scanner while running windows then they really should be using an OS that does everything for them.
Yeah, I mean the pragmatism is appreciated, but let's be fair. CO2 absorption is going to be a big business. Within the next 4 years you will either see a comprehensive greenhouse gas tax accessed on businesses based on tons of carbon equivalent emmitted or a means for businesses to trade permits to release tons of carbon equivalent. That means that corporations will NEED to abate and they will figure out the best way how. Turns out industry is really, really good at figuring out if something is efficient. In this case, if it takes more work (in terms of CO2 equivalent) to produce this stuff than what it removes, industry own't use it. You can look at the chemical refining industry for an example of some processes that would consume more of their desired output than they produce unless they were very carefully tweaked. The chemical engineering business spends a LOT of money and invests a LOT of time in tweaking those processes to make sure they aren't a waste.
The trick is that the companies need to be accessed for the costs they are imposing on the rest of us through the release of CO2, until then, they will make products without regard to the cleanliness of the output/input. But this fact doesn't mean that this prodcut is likely to see service without a cost-benefit analysis.
I'm that smartass. Most new capital investments by companies are at least partially taxpayer subsidized. If you'll recall, Fairfax county (in northern VA, one of the internet bubble loci) offer LARGE property tax offsets for new companies that would lease office space in buildings on the assumption that future tax revenue would offset the present loss. OOPS.
My point is that GIVEN those tax incentives, we generate seemingly nonsensical outcomes. The same is true of any economic problem. Even the internet itself is an outgrowth of strange economic conditions. The very notion that there is public discussion of google's energy consumption is new. 10 years ago we were still subjected to books about "The end of scarcity" and other nonsense. In the intervening time, companies realized that there is a very real marginal cost to computation: the kilowatt hour.
And we really overestimate how much taxpayers pay AND how much we don't know about the cost of running a server farm (in kW terms). Aluminum smelting is one of the most energy intensive activities on the PLANET. Do I need to know that as a consumer in order to make intelligent choices? No. Assuming that there aren't externalities (like pollution), the cost of smelting aluminum should be evident in the price for a can of coke. To think otherwise would be foolish.
I just don't buy the notion that retarding p2p video services is in any way an action motivated by the fear that they will compete with comcast's video on demand cable service. That is the intent of the analogy, to suggest intent without proof. I don't feel that is very valid at all.
I guess I never felt that slashdot will bring the important news to me. OR.....I should be more clear. I feel that slashdot should be aggregating news that isn't showing up in other major venues. I should see a story about some weird linux nonsense or something about the ESA or some such. I don't want to see something from "ars" or "cnet" every other day. That appears to be a very narrowly held viewpoint.
All I can say is I love this country and I spent the better part of these past 8 years fuming that it was being systematically fucked over. You're going to have an excuse for everything. You're going to tell us to "get over it" just like you did the mess in florida in 2000, just like the illegal wiretapping of americans, etc. etc. etc.
Thank you for assuming that only the absence of bias confirms the truth. none of those organizations have any reason to sugarcoat the clinton presidency. Media matters, commondreams (although you may have a point there) have all run articles highly critical of the clinton white house and several democratic members of congress. This may surpise you, but most of the highly critical blogger/liberal left doesn't like clinton. That is at least one reason why obama is so popular, he isn't a clinton.
I don't really care if you are a rush listener or not. I also don't care if you have looked up Ad hominem enough on wikipedia to feel comfortable using it in conversation. When people say things like "liberal media" as a means to discount factual information, I have learned that they are usually operating from a standpoint of ignorance.
I know what the clinton whitehouse did. I know what the clintons did before getting to DC. I don't feel that those 8 years were good ones for politics. I feel that a number (though not most) of their policy decisions were bad and I feel that they continued down the same line of expansionist imperial executive thinking that continued into the bush administration. I feel that the clinton's shared mendacity cost this nation many things, not least among them the political capital to impeach bush in his second term.
None of this somehow equates the two email scandals or the scandals of the two presidencies. I really don't care WHO you are, as long as you aren't willfully ignorant, you can't help but see the bush administration as demonstrably worse on all accounts. WE may actually never know how bad they were, as republican loyalties run deep and there arne't likely to be substantive tell all stories. Regardless, this email fiasco is a small subset of the wreckage of our democracy wraught by the gang in charge--the real mess isn't likely to be sorted out with a change in the guard.
IT's cool. we won't convince you. Keep listening to rush and telling yourself that the only reason GWB isn't carved into mount rushmore is because of the 'liberal' media. Keep lying about clinton and trumping up the 'effect' of his presidency on the nations morals in order to avoid the fact that your party sacrificed this country for political loyalty. 100 years from now, we will look at these past 8 years as some of the worst in the country's history, and not because of 9/11.
I am on topic. I appreciate your willingness to muckrake through old Clinton administration email coverups while steadfastly denying yourself the benefit of context in the discussion at hand. Why did the whitehouse tell the court the emails had been lost? why is the court looking for the emails in the first place? Why were they not on a.gov server? What were they about. The answers to those questions are right before you, and they will explain why the limited fuss about this is justified, frankly, why a much larger fuss would have been justified.
ears might have perked up, but that isn't strictly the case. That is what is wrong w/ the analogy. This is the REASON we want net neutrality provisions but it is not what is actually happening. To call comcast's video on demand service a direct competitor to other p2p and video systems is laughable. It is a potential competitor to some small sectors of the market.
I agree that the horserace analogy is pretty stupid. I had to read it twice to figure out if that was all there was to it. I don't agree that comcast's policy is akin to protection money (another analogy), nor do I agree that the use of analogies in general is bad.
The false advertising claim is probably baseless. The laws on what constitutes false advertising vary state to state and aren't as strict as one might imagine. The breach of contract might also be shaky. I don't have a comcast contract on hand, but I'm more than 50% sure that I won't find a bandwidth or QoS gaurantee written into a residential high speed internet agreement. No lawyer in his right mind would offer that much to a customer.
Fine then, as long as I sign a contract that says my traffic can be interrupted by forging packet requests. That's totally cool. turns out my contract DOESN'T say that. Also, the fact that cable companies represent something of a natural monopoly means that regulation in this sense might be the right answer.
Where do you get the notion that using p2p software is immoral or illegal? This is a funny one. I don't care if you can't keep a VPN connection up. that sounds like a problem you need to take up with your carrier. If they can't provide you w/ qos gaurantees, then maybe you shoudl find another carrier. It's as simple as that. If comcast wants to make badnwidth limits or appropriately throttle traffic in order to provide those QoS gaurantees, greate. If they want to illegally forge packets and impersonate parties in a conversation, that is a legal manner.
Just like the tag says. Mod me down/offtopic/whatever, but I'm tired of seeing every other story from ars on slashdot. I understand that the discussion system here is relatively unique and we might benefit from community wisdom on a subject where the discussion system on ars tends to be very obscured and not the focus. I get that not EVERY article there is copied here. I just wonder how much of the slashdot readership sees ars as well as/. and would rather not see a story on both. I can almost always expect to see a story on ars here within a day or so, like clockwork. I'd rather see it stop.
No, it doesn't. I've never seen anything so patently absurd in my whole life, and I've seen a lot of absurd things. To accuse the democratic congress of organizing a witch hunt is preposterous. Show me the witch hunt. Show me the weeks of dogged congressional action. Show me the impeachment proceedings. Show me the honest, hardworking americans forced into jail because of the partisan hackery of the democrats, I defy you.
There isn't a witch hunt. The fact that the democrats are willing to excercise a modicum of oversight should come as a slight relief, not rejected. Think about it:
This is what CLinton did:
Lied about getting dome in the white house while under oath. Suggested that his mistress lie under oath in order to protect him.
This is what bush did:
Used political operatives in the white house and the justice department to prosecute democrats during election seasons. Fired uncooperative prosecutors.
Used 9/11 to illegally wiretap large volumes of conversations over telephone and email. Didn't even use a secret court designed for such surveilance SIMPLY TO DECLARE THAT THE WH WAS BEYOND THE REACH OF THAT COURT. Lied about it even after it was discovered by the NY times 4 years later.
Deliberately moved a detention facility outside of US court jurisdiction in order to prevent detainees from getting basic human rights afforded to them. Violated the geneva conventions. authorized and lied about torture.
Replaced government professionals with political operatives and like minded conservatives. Used appointed officials to stifle press releases AND to eliminate oversight, resulting in (likely) the mine collapse disasters and the mismanagement of Katrina.
The list could go on. Those aren't partisan accusations. They aren't crazy conspiracies. They aren't unsubstantiated attacks. they are fucking facts, confirmed by former WH officials, members of congress, informants, or statements of the presidents adivsors while still in office. I didn't even include most of John Woo and David Addington's rape of our constitution or the iraq war. How has the partisan, liberal, democratic congress responded to these blatant examples of misconduct? About as meekly as a churchmouse.
Prediction: The earth is warming due to man made effects.
Test: Take given data (earth warming) and attempt to sort out all possible other effects.
These models are EXCEEDINGLY complicated. The early ones were pretty damn complicated but were basic by comparison. Models suggested for years that climate change was man made without a doubt. Later, models were revised with the addition of new data and new processes. this means that NEW information was found that NO ONE had before, like the actual oxygen content in ice cores. Like the feedback nature of ocean currents. Those were taken into account and the model changed. We became less sure of the impact of man in the scheme. As the models grew more sophisicated the confidence intervals got better and more information was added. We are now MUCH, MUCH more sure that climate change is real, man made and will impact us in a significant fashion.
All we have left are people like you. People who claim that their rejection of climate change is based on some scientific principle, like they are galileo before the church. I've got news for you. It's isn't some religious theocracy. It isn't an unscientific crusade. It is just science that leads to an unfortunate conclusion. We don't WANT to have this conclusion. We don't WANT to come to the conclusion that life will get demonstrably worse in the next 100 years rather than better. We don't WANT to live on a warming planet. These are just conclusions from the model and evidenced by the world around us.
I have no knowledge of why you don't get this or don't want to get this. All I can say is I'm sorry for you.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, the Challenger disaster actually preceeded NASA's slogan and procurement policy of "faster, better, cheaper" by a bit. More to the point, Feynman's article should be a cautionary tale to ANYONE in a engineering field. It isn't a matter of one field being subject to unscientific pressures and another field being immune. No technology or industry is immune from the pressures and problems that caused the challenger disaster. Anyone who claims to be well adapted to safety concerns enough to not spend lots of time and effort on fixing them is foolish. The nuclear industry still has to practice strong QC on parts, procedures and maintenance and CONTINUE that practice. Same with commercial aviation, acute medical care, etc. Constant vigilance is rewarded only with another uneventful day. That is the fundamental problem. Vigilance is expensive and time consuming. these are not pressures from the profit motive. They apply to government as well as civilian ventures.
Also, totally out of curiosity, where did you come upon the expression "same same"? :) I have a friend who used it constantly or said "same same, only different". It was also quite common in Hawaii.
Cool, that what was I was thinking, but the article was pretty slim on details. Thanks. :)
Is this just a frontend for the same technology that exists now? I mean, is this just a program that centralizes DRM cracks for common media?
It isn't censorship. It isn't illegal. It is totally within the scope of eBay's user agreements with sellers and buyers. eBay has negotiated an agreement with a large vendor who is interested in preventing the resale of their items. I HAVE to presume that whatever these items are they come with an agreement eliminating the possiblity of resale. They would then fall in to the category of attempting to resell items which have a non-transferrable license. It is totally within their rights to cancel any auction that they feel is outside their TOS. In this case, they have chosen to offload the work on to a more zealous party.
Just because it is withing their rights doesn't make it a good idea. As a matter of fact, it is a terrible idea. allowing a third party to void auctions without oversight is foolish for a few reasons:
1. Other large interests see these actions and will want the same treatment, as long as it does not offer significant negative publicity. The fact that ebay is WILLING to offer this service puts them in a bad barganing position with these other firms.
2. It only means lost revenue for ebay. Presumably, ebay was faced with a legal threat over allowing resale of these items. SOMEHOW, ebay made the determination that compliance was somehow too expensive and have offered to shift the cost of compliance to CoS. CoS does NOT have an incentive to be careful. They have an incentive to overextend their authority because the lost customer is not theirs.
3. As a corollary, this is like outsourcing your customer service to a motorcycle gang. CoS has every reason to be pernicious, litigious and overbroad. They have NO reason to see gray areas and offer the benefit of the doubt.
4. Compliance in good faith by ebay would probably not have hazarded a lawsuit. IANAL, but most of these suits stem from what is basically deliberate negligence on the part of the reselling authority (or serving authority). If ebay acts on their own standards they are likely to meet whatever tests exist.
ZOMG! You're right, I should just start dumping whatever doubles as tea in the 21st century into boston harbor. That will show the tories in charge that we mean business. How old are you? Do you realize that what you actually do doesn't impact a sitting president? We might have elected him in 2000 and he broke the fucking law repeatedly in a grab for power after 9/11. Our chance to stop him? A congress so cowed by fear that they would take 5 fucking years and an electoral shakeup in order to find a pair. 2004? Nope. We were so busy showing that we were tough on terror by buckling on issues that we didn't field a strong candidate. 2008? Maybe. There is one person in that field who didn't actually make a job of giving in to executive authority and that was partially because he wasn't in office yet. But what do we expect, that once Obama is in office he will roll back all of the authority granted to the bush administration? Hah.
Let me know when you grow up and know what you are talking about. Presidents breaking a law that ALREADY allows for secret spying in order to do ILLEGAL secret spying and a congress being ok with not only that but being lied to abot it for 4 years. That's almost a textbook case of out fo your control.
In this case we are talking about 2-3 different things:
First, the problem of formerly private information that your friends have willingly made public, either because of convienience (information given to a website that they use for shopping) or on a social networking website.
Second, the private information that they are unwittingly making public, or leaving themselves at risk of making it public.
Third, that governments may be helping themselves to information thought to be private.
The first is a cultural difference, the third is out of your control, and the second is the really important one. You aren't going to win the debate on the first one. We've seen this debate before, on anonymity for BBS users, later on the rise of cookies. On one side were the forces of good, arguing that these changes were very real invasions of privacy and made your computer do things you didn't know it was doing and wouldn't want it to do if you did know. On the other side was convenience. It sucks to have to log in to slashdot every time I open a new browser window. It's kind of nice that Amazon can make recommendations to me. Cookies let that happen and the public debate, for what it was worth was won pretty handily. Now, that doesn't mean that companies started using cookies as an outgrowth of the democratic will of internet users. It just means that the level of outrage was muted over cookies enough for image conscious companies to get by with using them.
the same thing is going on w/ facebook/myspace/etc. The tables may turn on them (and will probably turn on facebook soonish), but for now we like the fact that others can see our name/face/job/school more than we dislike that these things are no longer private. Part of that outlook comes from the fact that we are limited in imagination. We see facebook one screen at a time. We can't look at people who aren't in our group (I think, haven't used it in a while). It takes a non-trivial amount of time to look through information. Consequently, we see that as the ONLY way to grab data from facebook. We don't connect (or at least the non-IT ppl) the fact that someone broke down anon/aggregate survey data from aol and netflix to get private information automatically. We don't think about scraping programs that read sites like myspace/facebook and correlate names and zipcodes with other sources of inoformation on the web.
The last part of this failure of imagination is that there is a cost to privacy. If I want my personal information to be private wholly from facebook, I can't be on facebook. Relatively speaking, that is a large cost. There is no 'maximum privacy' level for facebook where you can post pics of you and your friends and make comments and it won't be recorded somewhere. That product doesn't exist.
Ok. I won't touch on the third point because that is a flame war waiting to happen. Needless to say, it is out of your direct control.
The second point. My advice is be direct when the situation calls for it, but don't bother when it doesn't. If you are out at a baseball game, don't strike up a conversation like "Gee bob, I noticed that your password for your computer is 1 2 3 4 5 and that you sure do have an awful lot of sensitive info on there. Don't you think that you ought to change that?".
And then just tell them to get a mac. If they aren't security conscious enough to get a virus scanner while running windows then they really should be using an OS that does everything for them.
Yeah, I mean the pragmatism is appreciated, but let's be fair. CO2 absorption is going to be a big business. Within the next 4 years you will either see a comprehensive greenhouse gas tax accessed on businesses based on tons of carbon equivalent emmitted or a means for businesses to trade permits to release tons of carbon equivalent. That means that corporations will NEED to abate and they will figure out the best way how. Turns out industry is really, really good at figuring out if something is efficient. In this case, if it takes more work (in terms of CO2 equivalent) to produce this stuff than what it removes, industry own't use it. You can look at the chemical refining industry for an example of some processes that would consume more of their desired output than they produce unless they were very carefully tweaked. The chemical engineering business spends a LOT of money and invests a LOT of time in tweaking those processes to make sure they aren't a waste.
The trick is that the companies need to be accessed for the costs they are imposing on the rest of us through the release of CO2, until then, they will make products without regard to the cleanliness of the output/input. But this fact doesn't mean that this prodcut is likely to see service without a cost-benefit analysis.
I'm that smartass. Most new capital investments by companies are at least partially taxpayer subsidized. If you'll recall, Fairfax county (in northern VA, one of the internet bubble loci) offer LARGE property tax offsets for new companies that would lease office space in buildings on the assumption that future tax revenue would offset the present loss. OOPS.
My point is that GIVEN those tax incentives, we generate seemingly nonsensical outcomes. The same is true of any economic problem. Even the internet itself is an outgrowth of strange economic conditions. The very notion that there is public discussion of google's energy consumption is new. 10 years ago we were still subjected to books about "The end of scarcity" and other nonsense. In the intervening time, companies realized that there is a very real marginal cost to computation: the kilowatt hour.
And we really overestimate how much taxpayers pay AND how much we don't know about the cost of running a server farm (in kW terms). Aluminum smelting is one of the most energy intensive activities on the PLANET. Do I need to know that as a consumer in order to make intelligent choices? No. Assuming that there aren't externalities (like pollution), the cost of smelting aluminum should be evident in the price for a can of coke. To think otherwise would be foolish.
That's my point.
News at 11.
I just don't buy the notion that retarding p2p video services is in any way an action motivated by the fear that they will compete with comcast's video on demand cable service. That is the intent of the analogy, to suggest intent without proof. I don't feel that is very valid at all.
I guess I never felt that slashdot will bring the important news to me. OR.....I should be more clear. I feel that slashdot should be aggregating news that isn't showing up in other major venues. I should see a story about some weird linux nonsense or something about the ESA or some such. I don't want to see something from "ars" or "cnet" every other day. That appears to be a very narrowly held viewpoint.
You are really well and truly sad.
We aren't going to see eye to eye. Ever.
All I can say is I love this country and I spent the better part of these past 8 years fuming that it was being systematically fucked over. You're going to have an excuse for everything. You're going to tell us to "get over it" just like you did the mess in florida in 2000, just like the illegal wiretapping of americans, etc. etc. etc.
Thank you for assuming that only the absence of bias confirms the truth. none of those organizations have any reason to sugarcoat the clinton presidency. Media matters, commondreams (although you may have a point there) have all run articles highly critical of the clinton white house and several democratic members of congress. This may surpise you, but most of the highly critical blogger/liberal left doesn't like clinton. That is at least one reason why obama is so popular, he isn't a clinton.
I don't really care if you are a rush listener or not. I also don't care if you have looked up Ad hominem enough on wikipedia to feel comfortable using it in conversation. When people say things like "liberal media" as a means to discount factual information, I have learned that they are usually operating from a standpoint of ignorance.
I know what the clinton whitehouse did. I know what the clintons did before getting to DC. I don't feel that those 8 years were good ones for politics. I feel that a number (though not most) of their policy decisions were bad and I feel that they continued down the same line of expansionist imperial executive thinking that continued into the bush administration. I feel that the clinton's shared mendacity cost this nation many things, not least among them the political capital to impeach bush in his second term.
None of this somehow equates the two email scandals or the scandals of the two presidencies. I really don't care WHO you are, as long as you aren't willfully ignorant, you can't help but see the bush administration as demonstrably worse on all accounts. WE may actually never know how bad they were, as republican loyalties run deep and there arne't likely to be substantive tell all stories. Regardless, this email fiasco is a small subset of the wreckage of our democracy wraught by the gang in charge--the real mess isn't likely to be sorted out with a change in the guard.
IT's cool. we won't convince you. Keep listening to rush and telling yourself that the only reason GWB isn't carved into mount rushmore is because of the 'liberal' media. Keep lying about clinton and trumping up the 'effect' of his presidency on the nations morals in order to avoid the fact that your party sacrificed this country for political loyalty. 100 years from now, we will look at these past 8 years as some of the worst in the country's history, and not because of 9/11.
I am on topic. I appreciate your willingness to muckrake through old Clinton administration email coverups while steadfastly denying yourself the benefit of context in the discussion at hand. Why did the whitehouse tell the court the emails had been lost? why is the court looking for the emails in the first place? Why were they not on a .gov server? What were they about. The answers to those questions are right before you, and they will explain why the limited fuss about this is justified, frankly, why a much larger fuss would have been justified.
ears might have perked up, but that isn't strictly the case. That is what is wrong w/ the analogy. This is the REASON we want net neutrality provisions but it is not what is actually happening. To call comcast's video on demand service a direct competitor to other p2p and video systems is laughable. It is a potential competitor to some small sectors of the market.
I agree that the horserace analogy is pretty stupid. I had to read it twice to figure out if that was all there was to it. I don't agree that comcast's policy is akin to protection money (another analogy), nor do I agree that the use of analogies in general is bad.
The false advertising claim is probably baseless. The laws on what constitutes false advertising vary state to state and aren't as strict as one might imagine. The breach of contract might also be shaky. I don't have a comcast contract on hand, but I'm more than 50% sure that I won't find a bandwidth or QoS gaurantee written into a residential high speed internet agreement. No lawyer in his right mind would offer that much to a customer.
Fine then, as long as I sign a contract that says my traffic can be interrupted by forging packet requests. That's totally cool. turns out my contract DOESN'T say that. Also, the fact that cable companies represent something of a natural monopoly means that regulation in this sense might be the right answer.
Where do you get the notion that using p2p software is immoral or illegal? This is a funny one. I don't care if you can't keep a VPN connection up. that sounds like a problem you need to take up with your carrier. If they can't provide you w/ qos gaurantees, then maybe you shoudl find another carrier. It's as simple as that. If comcast wants to make badnwidth limits or appropriately throttle traffic in order to provide those QoS gaurantees, greate. If they want to illegally forge packets and impersonate parties in a conversation, that is a legal manner.
Just like the tag says. Mod me down/offtopic/whatever, but I'm tired of seeing every other story from ars on slashdot. I understand that the discussion system here is relatively unique and we might benefit from community wisdom on a subject where the discussion system on ars tends to be very obscured and not the focus. I get that not EVERY article there is copied here. I just wonder how much of the slashdot readership sees ars as well as /. and would rather not see a story on both. I can almost always expect to see a story on ars here within a day or so, like clockwork. I'd rather see it stop.
No, it doesn't. I've never seen anything so patently absurd in my whole life, and I've seen a lot of absurd things. To accuse the democratic congress of organizing a witch hunt is preposterous. Show me the witch hunt. Show me the weeks of dogged congressional action. Show me the impeachment proceedings. Show me the honest, hardworking americans forced into jail because of the partisan hackery of the democrats, I defy you.
There isn't a witch hunt. The fact that the democrats are willing to excercise a modicum of oversight should come as a slight relief, not rejected. Think about it:
This is what CLinton did:
Lied about getting dome in the white house while under oath. Suggested that his mistress lie under oath in order to protect him.
This is what bush did:
Used political operatives in the white house and the justice department to prosecute democrats during election seasons. Fired uncooperative prosecutors.
Used 9/11 to illegally wiretap large volumes of conversations over telephone and email. Didn't even use a secret court designed for such surveilance SIMPLY TO DECLARE THAT THE WH WAS BEYOND THE REACH OF THAT COURT. Lied about it even after it was discovered by the NY times 4 years later.
Deliberately moved a detention facility outside of US court jurisdiction in order to prevent detainees from getting basic human rights afforded to them. Violated the geneva conventions. authorized and lied about torture.
Replaced government professionals with political operatives and like minded conservatives. Used appointed officials to stifle press releases AND to eliminate oversight, resulting in (likely) the mine collapse disasters and the mismanagement of Katrina.
The list could go on. Those aren't partisan accusations. They aren't crazy conspiracies. They aren't unsubstantiated attacks. they are fucking facts, confirmed by former WH officials, members of congress, informants, or statements of the presidents adivsors while still in office. I didn't even include most of John Woo and David Addington's rape of our constitution or the iraq war. How has the partisan, liberal, democratic congress responded to these blatant examples of misconduct? About as meekly as a churchmouse.
They do. All the time.
Prediction: The earth is warming due to man made effects.
Test: Take given data (earth warming) and attempt to sort out all possible other effects.
These models are EXCEEDINGLY complicated. The early ones were pretty damn complicated but were basic by comparison. Models suggested for years that climate change was man made without a doubt. Later, models were revised with the addition of new data and new processes. this means that NEW information was found that NO ONE had before, like the actual oxygen content in ice cores. Like the feedback nature of ocean currents. Those were taken into account and the model changed. We became less sure of the impact of man in the scheme. As the models grew more sophisicated the confidence intervals got better and more information was added. We are now MUCH, MUCH more sure that climate change is real, man made and will impact us in a significant fashion.
All we have left are people like you. People who claim that their rejection of climate change is based on some scientific principle, like they are galileo before the church. I've got news for you. It's isn't some religious theocracy. It isn't an unscientific crusade. It is just science that leads to an unfortunate conclusion. We don't WANT to have this conclusion. We don't WANT to come to the conclusion that life will get demonstrably worse in the next 100 years rather than better. We don't WANT to live on a warming planet. These are just conclusions from the model and evidenced by the world around us.
I have no knowledge of why you don't get this or don't want to get this. All I can say is I'm sorry for you.
Fair enough.
Ahhh. That makes MUCH more sense.
Oops. I committed my least favorite linguistic error. I used literally where I meant figuratively. I must hang my head in shame.
Best I could find, as I'm not digging up the daily show excerpt where stewart goes on about sportcasters and the word literally