presuming you're the same rocket scientist that posted the suggestion that someone claiming to be privy to inside information was likely full of shit, then I really don't know why you are writing this.
Also, your comment about jury nullification probably sucked. I remember wanting to mod down ranting morons in that discussion. Slashdot commentators are actually MUCH, MUCH better than the average schlubs on say youtube, cnn, time, etc. Those people make me REALLY scared for the future, but we have problems with people wanting bizzare extrajudicial and extralegal solutions to non-issues. That topic suggesting that the jury nullify the verdict and ignore instruction is about as sensical as the foaming at the mount anti-libertarian nonsense that shows up whenever a scapling thread exists.
Ding ding, ding. We have a winner. I love it how people make shit up and then obscure the source like I give a shit. OOOHHHHH, some random slashdot person has something on good authority. You'd have to have been living under a rock for the last 8 years to suspect anything OTHER than that the bush administration was up to no good. The fact that outside channels were used in order to skirt oversight should only highten that suspicion. No need to pretend like you're in on some cloak and dagger shit in order for us to be impressed with you.
Meh, the independent council law has actually lapsed. IT's too bad bush isn't crazy enough to pull a Sat. night massacre. Of course, given our sonambulant legislature, he could do so and get away with it for years.
That's because that wasn't part of an attempt to undermine our system of government. I don't care WHO you are, there hasn't been a president like gwb in office for at least 100 years. They have literally wrecked the place. I'm not talking about NCLB, Iraq, or whatever. That's all normal stuff. That's the kind of stuff that most of the presidents we remember would have done. Keenedy/Johnson got us into Vietnam. Roosevelt packed the supreme court. Hoover precipitated the great depressesion. Wilson effectily resegregated the federal government. Etc. That kind of stuff is easy to recover from.
They just smashed the joint up. They fired or forced to resign what amounts to hundreds to thousands of person-years of experience in government. They politicized every office they could get their hands on. they enriched cronies in brazen fashion. They used a national fucking tragedy to secure political control of congress. They pushed a TRIPLE FUCKING AMPUTEE who was a Vietnam veteran out of office because he had the temerity to stand up to their bullshit. They completed the circle of lobbyist control in congress started by Tom Delay. they made supine the court system and the legislature, and now they stand to do it again.
Getting dome in the white house doesn't begin to compare. We will go decades and not be able to access the wreckage honestly.
While I know you agree with me, the rub is of course that such treatment is a violation of treaties the US has entered in to and laws passed by congress in order to comply with those treaties. I don't think too many people are suggesting that 8th ammd. protection applies here. That is one of the reasons while Gitmo was chosen over Charleston (the original detainee site).
And, IMO, the imminent threat theory is a terrible, terrible, terrible legal justification, what a shame that no one is in a position to lecture this guy on it.:(
and what's the end result of that? Is karl rove in jail for violating presidential records acts? Are those emails in the hands of prosecutors? Is there a prosecutor assigned? Are we likely to have an honest answer as to what happened before 2009? No. Rove et al used RNC email addresses to avoid archiving requirements as they engineered US elections by steering justice dept actions. That much is patently clear. When it looked like this was going to backfire, those emails got deleted and the participants either 'forgot' their content or refused to testify.
We agree on one thing, there was (and still is), very little oversight. It should stand as our enduring shame that senate and house oversight committees are spending time going after baseball and football scandals while our constitution burns.
Because terrorists are stupid. That's the sad, sad, conclusion we have to reach. Some methods of communication and control are relatively sophisticated, but by and large, people get caught through old fashioned police work. We have trumped up this threat like we were fighting UNCLE. The administration doesn't want the fact that we easvsdrop leaked because the terrorists will adapt and conquer that threat. They don't want specific torture methods revealed because they will train to be resilient to them (tell me how you train to not crack when someone pulls your fingernails out). they can't tell us why the liquid ban is still in effect because Abdul MacGyver will fashion a fancy bomb based on a press release.
There are situations where official silence is a good thing. "Dark Sun", the history of the hydrogen bomb, shows a good example of how the KGB mined a public report about nuclear energy before and after it was expurgated to see which important elements had been changed. They discovered one sentence had been deleted about fission product 'poisoning' of nuclear piles. From this one sentence they probably saved weeks to months of theoretical and practical work.
we are not in that situation. We can expect sophistication from our enemies--police and DA's dealing with mafia and gang lords in jail can tell you the elaborate and extensive measures taken by the gangs to ensure that control continued uninhibited through prison walls. What we should not expect is omnipotence. If we do that, they have won (and they practically have). We cannot expect them to reverse engineer every public model and therefore make public no models. We cannot expect them to exploit basic human rights needs and therefore keep those from them. We cannot expect them to be so sophisticated as to get through every net available and therefore treat every bottle of gatorade as a threat to national security. We have to establish competent policing, both here and abroad. We have to treat threats honestly and responsibly. We have to shun the notion that governmental secrecy is a necessary policy route.
The request was if the Atty. Gen. would enforce contempt citations against members of the exec branch who are said to be exercising executive privilege. Once given a direct and unambigious question, the atty. general (the new one, supposedly some great shakes compared to gonzo) said no.
Technically the congress could order the sgt. at arms to haul the people in to testify, but it is more likely that they will sue the white house, as I think the last time they compelled testimony w/o the DC US attorney was like 1860 something.
"They are missing, and we can't retrive them. We forget what was on them. Oops."
Sorry folks, but political operators learned from nixon. Don't keep evidence of malfeasance. Don't lie explicitly, just claim to not remember or not be in the loop. Delay, delay, delay, delay. This isn't going to be a watershed event. Odds are if those emails really ARE incriminating, then they are long, long gone.
People like you freak me out. What do you think science is? How, magically, does meteorology differ from Physics? Do we hold the same opinions about black holes, dark matter and the big bang as we used to? Hell, the term "big bang" was originally pejorative--scientists didn't fit that possiblity into their models. The data changed and so that forced a change in theory. It's how fucking science works. For fuck's sake.
Climate science is no different. What is different is that there are consequences for our actions on earth that matter depending on the outcome of the model. Because there are huge stakes involved, people tend to forms groups at the poles of opinion. You have companies with large stakes in suggesting that climate change is not man made paying for climate research by scientists who feel similarly. You have news organizations and political organizations (who know shit about science) taking the barest of abstracts from a study and runnign with it. You have sceince dumbed down by both sides in order to explain it to voters and policymakers. this sort of thing doesn't happen that much in some branches of science.
Evolutionary biology, genetics, labor economics, sociology, antropology. Those are a short list of disciplines whose conclusions draw people into camps. They also happen to be the same disciplines (not an exclusive list) that people accuse of unscientific practice (and then in doing so, describe the scientific method perfectly, as you have done). That those disciplines and only those disciplines would suffer from a failure to understand the scientific model alone while scores of other disciplines would execute that model perfectly strains credulity.
No one said anything about limiting the scope of study to iraq. I agree with you that the net drawn across violent attacks around the word that labels them as "terrorist" is a little broad, but that does not mean that there is no value to study of it. And so what if we just find a means to make aggregate guesses about 'insurgent' attacks? Isn't that a victory in itself? Doesn't that mean that the study is worthwhile? They aren't purporting to predict single events from raw data, they are suggesting that we can make general statements about risk using decent models of the actors involved.
Yeah, I mean I'm not foaming at the mouth because this is on here. It's funny, but it's kind of like "Large, ponderous company offers participants in hapless survey free stuff if they lie about how cool the company product is."
IMO, more laptop battery explosion videos need to be on here.
SOmetimes it is common sense. I haven't read the underlying study, but my thought is that they are putting a little too much faith in covariance. We might argue that large attacks spur copycat attacks and that those attacks occur on similar, but not identical targets. It might be a luddite perspective to dismiss this study as resulting in the same conclusions that ordinary police work would. I don't think this is the case. I also don't feel that this is the results of "patterns everywhere". It seems childish to me to dismiss works like this as pattern seeking out of randomness--it's not like attacks or crimes are statistically rendom, in the aggegate. They aren't like decomposition of radioactive isotopes. There are trends and predictions that can be made, there are links that can be broken. I would like to turn to the eaxmple of the change in crime statistics that helped PYC reduce its crime rate so dramatically.
This is slashdot, but I find myself a little surprised to see this as a headline. Sure, microsoft is giving crap away in order to boost sales of their new lackluster OS. Same story happens in every business. Marketing gets told to go make some sales happen and they often ocme up with things like this. It's not propaganda anymore than any advertising is propaganda. How about we stick to decrying the main and major faults in the OS, rather than poking fun at a common business tactic. It's not like we are short on low hanging fruit.
I do vote with my wallet. I don't own a TV. I don't get cable. I don't go to sites that jam advertising down my throat. I buy DVD's of shows I like and watch. However, that doesn't stop media companies from developing for the large percentage of people who are insensitive to those sorts of things.
that's true, but it pretty well limits the scope of what we see at both sites if they persist in being echo chambers. I feel that the TYPE of information seen at ars should be substantively different from that we see at/.
Of course it sucks. My contention is that congestion pricing makes that commute easier, if more expensive. You take cars of the road on peak hours and don't penalize them for being on the road on offpeak hours. You have to access the congestion pricing as an alternative to flat pricing or (more likely in your case) taxation paying for roads. Both of those methods suck at getting money to where it needs to go in an efficient manner. Recognize that you are paying for that road right now, and that the congestion pricing just makes it more explicit.
Then they will pay more for it. The ones who don't want to pay more will change their behavior. The ones who wont will pay for the congestion they cause.
It is how externality taxation works, and it works wonders.
That's exactly my second point. Congestion pricing is not welfare maximizing (in other words, it doesn't make us all better off) if there aren't alternatives. If you don't have a mass transit system, the best congestion pricing can do is get most people to drive in at different times.
But that really doesn't have anything to do with the revulsion about people driving SUV's. When gas is at 5 dollars a gallon, people will still drive SUV's, they will just pay more for them. When there is a special tax rate for light trucks (not likely, imo), people will still drive them. They will just pay more. We CONTINUALLY underestimate the willingness of most consumers to pay a little extra in order to continue driving the car they like. We just have to accept that. Any regulation that would ban/fix that "problem" is likey to be way more authoritarian than I am interested in.
Either way, there is an upside. If GA refuses to build mass transit, eventually people will move away from that shithole. As gas prices get higher, people in their early 20's who are at their most productive will gravitate toward cities and states with affordable transportation, and the gains will be clear.
Slashdot Mirror
presuming you're the same rocket scientist that posted the suggestion that someone claiming to be privy to inside information was likely full of shit, then I really don't know why you are writing this.
There is some credence to this, or at least some history. 2 examples come to mind:
Larry Craig's accidental disclosure
FBI accidentally gives suspect evidence that they are illegaly wiretapping him, then asks for it back
Also, your comment about jury nullification probably sucked. I remember wanting to mod down ranting morons in that discussion. Slashdot commentators are actually MUCH, MUCH better than the average schlubs on say youtube, cnn, time, etc. Those people make me REALLY scared for the future, but we have problems with people wanting bizzare extrajudicial and extralegal solutions to non-issues. That topic suggesting that the jury nullify the verdict and ignore instruction is about as sensical as the foaming at the mount anti-libertarian nonsense that shows up whenever a scapling thread exists.
Ding ding, ding. We have a winner. I love it how people make shit up and then obscure the source like I give a shit. OOOHHHHH, some random slashdot person has something on good authority. You'd have to have been living under a rock for the last 8 years to suspect anything OTHER than that the bush administration was up to no good. The fact that outside channels were used in order to skirt oversight should only highten that suspicion. No need to pretend like you're in on some cloak and dagger shit in order for us to be impressed with you.
Meh, the independent council law has actually lapsed. IT's too bad bush isn't crazy enough to pull a Sat. night massacre. Of course, given our sonambulant legislature, he could do so and get away with it for years.
That's because that wasn't part of an attempt to undermine our system of government. I don't care WHO you are, there hasn't been a president like gwb in office for at least 100 years. They have literally wrecked the place. I'm not talking about NCLB, Iraq, or whatever. That's all normal stuff. That's the kind of stuff that most of the presidents we remember would have done. Keenedy/Johnson got us into Vietnam. Roosevelt packed the supreme court. Hoover precipitated the great depressesion. Wilson effectily resegregated the federal government. Etc. That kind of stuff is easy to recover from.
They just smashed the joint up. They fired or forced to resign what amounts to hundreds to thousands of person-years of experience in government. They politicized every office they could get their hands on. they enriched cronies in brazen fashion. They used a national fucking tragedy to secure political control of congress. They pushed a TRIPLE FUCKING AMPUTEE who was a Vietnam veteran out of office because he had the temerity to stand up to their bullshit. They completed the circle of lobbyist control in congress started by Tom Delay. they made supine the court system and the legislature, and now they stand to do it again.
Getting dome in the white house doesn't begin to compare. We will go decades and not be able to access the wreckage honestly.
While I know you agree with me, the rub is of course that such treatment is a violation of treaties the US has entered in to and laws passed by congress in order to comply with those treaties. I don't think too many people are suggesting that 8th ammd. protection applies here. That is one of the reasons while Gitmo was chosen over Charleston (the original detainee site).
:(
And, IMO, the imminent threat theory is a terrible, terrible, terrible legal justification, what a shame that no one is in a position to lecture this guy on it.
me too. Mustaches scare the bejesus out of me.
and what's the end result of that? Is karl rove in jail for violating presidential records acts? Are those emails in the hands of prosecutors? Is there a prosecutor assigned? Are we likely to have an honest answer as to what happened before 2009? No. Rove et al used RNC email addresses to avoid archiving requirements as they engineered US elections by steering justice dept actions. That much is patently clear. When it looked like this was going to backfire, those emails got deleted and the participants either 'forgot' their content or refused to testify.
We agree on one thing, there was (and still is), very little oversight. It should stand as our enduring shame that senate and house oversight committees are spending time going after baseball and football scandals while our constitution burns.
Because terrorists are stupid. That's the sad, sad, conclusion we have to reach. Some methods of communication and control are relatively sophisticated, but by and large, people get caught through old fashioned police work. We have trumped up this threat like we were fighting UNCLE. The administration doesn't want the fact that we easvsdrop leaked because the terrorists will adapt and conquer that threat. They don't want specific torture methods revealed because they will train to be resilient to them (tell me how you train to not crack when someone pulls your fingernails out). they can't tell us why the liquid ban is still in effect because Abdul MacGyver will fashion a fancy bomb based on a press release.
There are situations where official silence is a good thing. "Dark Sun", the history of the hydrogen bomb, shows a good example of how the KGB mined a public report about nuclear energy before and after it was expurgated to see which important elements had been changed. They discovered one sentence had been deleted about fission product 'poisoning' of nuclear piles. From this one sentence they probably saved weeks to months of theoretical and practical work.
we are not in that situation. We can expect sophistication from our enemies--police and DA's dealing with mafia and gang lords in jail can tell you the elaborate and extensive measures taken by the gangs to ensure that control continued uninhibited through prison walls. What we should not expect is omnipotence. If we do that, they have won (and they practically have). We cannot expect them to reverse engineer every public model and therefore make public no models. We cannot expect them to exploit basic human rights needs and therefore keep those from them. We cannot expect them to be so sophisticated as to get through every net available and therefore treat every bottle of gatorade as a threat to national security. We have to establish competent policing, both here and abroad. We have to treat threats honestly and responsibly. We have to shun the notion that governmental secrecy is a necessary policy route.
The request was if the Atty. Gen. would enforce contempt citations against members of the exec branch who are said to be exercising executive privilege. Once given a direct and unambigious question, the atty. general (the new one, supposedly some great shakes compared to gonzo) said no.
Technically the congress could order the sgt. at arms to haul the people in to testify, but it is more likely that they will sue the white house, as I think the last time they compelled testimony w/o the DC US attorney was like 1860 something.
I have. What's your point?
"They are missing, and we can't retrive them. We forget what was on them. Oops."
Sorry folks, but political operators learned from nixon. Don't keep evidence of malfeasance. Don't lie explicitly, just claim to not remember or not be in the loop. Delay, delay, delay, delay. This isn't going to be a watershed event. Odds are if those emails really ARE incriminating, then they are long, long gone.
People like you freak me out. What do you think science is? How, magically, does meteorology differ from Physics? Do we hold the same opinions about black holes, dark matter and the big bang as we used to? Hell, the term "big bang" was originally pejorative--scientists didn't fit that possiblity into their models. The data changed and so that forced a change in theory. It's how fucking science works. For fuck's sake.
Climate science is no different. What is different is that there are consequences for our actions on earth that matter depending on the outcome of the model. Because there are huge stakes involved, people tend to forms groups at the poles of opinion. You have companies with large stakes in suggesting that climate change is not man made paying for climate research by scientists who feel similarly. You have news organizations and political organizations (who know shit about science) taking the barest of abstracts from a study and runnign with it. You have sceince dumbed down by both sides in order to explain it to voters and policymakers. this sort of thing doesn't happen that much in some branches of science.
Evolutionary biology, genetics, labor economics, sociology, antropology. Those are a short list of disciplines whose conclusions draw people into camps. They also happen to be the same disciplines (not an exclusive list) that people accuse of unscientific practice (and then in doing so, describe the scientific method perfectly, as you have done). That those disciplines and only those disciplines would suffer from a failure to understand the scientific model alone while scores of other disciplines would execute that model perfectly strains credulity.
godwin's law.
No one said anything about limiting the scope of study to iraq. I agree with you that the net drawn across violent attacks around the word that labels them as "terrorist" is a little broad, but that does not mean that there is no value to study of it. And so what if we just find a means to make aggregate guesses about 'insurgent' attacks? Isn't that a victory in itself? Doesn't that mean that the study is worthwhile? They aren't purporting to predict single events from raw data, they are suggesting that we can make general statements about risk using decent models of the actors involved.
Yeah, I mean I'm not foaming at the mouth because this is on here. It's funny, but it's kind of like "Large, ponderous company offers participants in hapless survey free stuff if they lie about how cool the company product is."
IMO, more laptop battery explosion videos need to be on here.
SOmetimes it is common sense. I haven't read the underlying study, but my thought is that they are putting a little too much faith in covariance. We might argue that large attacks spur copycat attacks and that those attacks occur on similar, but not identical targets. It might be a luddite perspective to dismiss this study as resulting in the same conclusions that ordinary police work would. I don't think this is the case. I also don't feel that this is the results of "patterns everywhere". It seems childish to me to dismiss works like this as pattern seeking out of randomness--it's not like attacks or crimes are statistically rendom, in the aggegate. They aren't like decomposition of radioactive isotopes. There are trends and predictions that can be made, there are links that can be broken. I would like to turn to the eaxmple of the change in crime statistics that helped PYC reduce its crime rate so dramatically.
This is slashdot, but I find myself a little surprised to see this as a headline. Sure, microsoft is giving crap away in order to boost sales of their new lackluster OS. Same story happens in every business. Marketing gets told to go make some sales happen and they often ocme up with things like this. It's not propaganda anymore than any advertising is propaganda. How about we stick to decrying the main and major faults in the OS, rather than poking fun at a common business tactic. It's not like we are short on low hanging fruit.
I'm not exactly cheering for OSC. And what has Sealaunch done that is so revolutionary?
I do vote with my wallet. I don't own a TV. I don't get cable. I don't go to sites that jam advertising down my throat. I buy DVD's of shows I like and watch. However, that doesn't stop media companies from developing for the large percentage of people who are insensitive to those sorts of things.
that's true, but it pretty well limits the scope of what we see at both sites if they persist in being echo chambers. I feel that the TYPE of information seen at ars should be substantively different from that we see at /.
Of course it sucks. My contention is that congestion pricing makes that commute easier, if more expensive. You take cars of the road on peak hours and don't penalize them for being on the road on offpeak hours. You have to access the congestion pricing as an alternative to flat pricing or (more likely in your case) taxation paying for roads. Both of those methods suck at getting money to where it needs to go in an efficient manner. Recognize that you are paying for that road right now, and that the congestion pricing just makes it more explicit.
Then they will pay more for it. The ones who don't want to pay more will change their behavior. The ones who wont will pay for the congestion they cause. It is how externality taxation works, and it works wonders.
That's exactly my second point. Congestion pricing is not welfare maximizing (in other words, it doesn't make us all better off) if there aren't alternatives. If you don't have a mass transit system, the best congestion pricing can do is get most people to drive in at different times.
But that really doesn't have anything to do with the revulsion about people driving SUV's. When gas is at 5 dollars a gallon, people will still drive SUV's, they will just pay more for them. When there is a special tax rate for light trucks (not likely, imo), people will still drive them. They will just pay more. We CONTINUALLY underestimate the willingness of most consumers to pay a little extra in order to continue driving the car they like. We just have to accept that. Any regulation that would ban/fix that "problem" is likey to be way more authoritarian than I am interested in.
Either way, there is an upside. If GA refuses to build mass transit, eventually people will move away from that shithole. As gas prices get higher, people in their early 20's who are at their most productive will gravitate toward cities and states with affordable transportation, and the gains will be clear.