You seem to want it both ways - either the government is incompetent and can't design things reliably (dams, spcaecraft, nuclear power plants) or they are super competent and can approve every different design for nuclear power plants and thereby make them safe. Sorry, but that pretty much skewers your entire arguement, even without mentioning that I never said the government had to design them.
Your examples don't really work either - dams are each and every one different so a single design would never work, and spacecraft have unique requirements to minimize the mass that needs to be lifted. That's why they have a high falure rate - not because the government is incapable of building one guaranteed to work. Nuclear power plants neither have to be lifted into space nor designed to fit unique locations.
I still hold that a single-design power plant, built to robust standards, with multiple redundancies, and then replicated many times over the life of the design would be far safer than the current practice of building evey nuclear plant from scratch with each different from every other one.
When TMI happened, Carter went there, to illustrate that it was perfectly safe.
Except that it wasn't perfectly safe. What most people don't realize is that a major release of highly radioactive particles, and subsequent contamination of many square miles of PA, was averted only because workers had installed some butterfly valves wrong when TMI was constructed. Two large charcoal filter beds were installed in the plant's air handling system to filter radioactive particles to prevent their release outside the plant in case of an accident. During the accident the primary charcoal filter bed was reaching combustion temp due to high radioactivity levels (burning radioactive charcoal is a very bad thing), so operators closed it off and opened the #2 filter bed. What they didn't know was the indicator lights for the #2 bed were backwards and open really meant closed. Luckily for everyone the installers had installed #2's valve 60 degrees off and it only parially closed.
That is not he kind of thing that gives me warm feelings about the safety of nuclear power as done in the US where any company is free to design and sell its own unique nuclear power plant. This results in many different designs run by many different power companies and constructed by many iffy contractors. I would modify my opposition to nuclear power if we had a smart national program that developed a single highly safe reactor design to be constructed and manned by professionals who were not beholden to the bottom line of the power company.
Learning how many lives have been saved by tasers when the police would have otherwise shot the person would be a valuable statistic that we don't see. I'd also be interested to see how many people have been saved from simply being shot (not just shot and killed). Because tasers are so often mis-used I go back and forth in my mind as to whether it is a good idea to have police carry them.
The barrier to using tasers by police is far too low (I'm not going to deal with tasers purposefully used as torture devices, which is clearly wrong). For example, the student at the John Kerry speech should not have been tasered - just restrained (as I think he was at the time he was tasered). The police tasered him just to shut him up. That is mis-use of a device that has the potetial to kill. They would not have banged him on the head with a baton in front of witnesses to shut him up, would they? Then why should they feel comfortable tasering him?
There seems a useful cut-off point that any police officer could guage on the spot: if you are willing to pull out your gun and shoot the person then the use of a taser is justified - if you are not willing to shot him then don't taser him either. If that is too high a bar for some, then not using the taser if you aren't willing to hit the person in the head with a club would also greatly reduce taser abuse.
Get the laptops in the hands of 1st world schools and encourage users to develop open source lesson plans that can be freely shared and modified. If the cheap laptops really do help education in the 1st world they can then be adpted for 3rd world in phase 2. Offering a cheap but proven system will be a no brainier for the 3rd world.
I try not to jump on people too much here (with varying degrees of success), but that is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. Apparently your idea of the best way to bring children in Africa out of poverty is to give laptops to rich kids in America.
While I'm not an economist or stockbroker, it seems to me that if apple knows which shares iphoners are most interested in, at a given time, this is extremely valuable information, e.g. to spot trends.
While you have a good point - is Apple allowed to collect meta-data from user activity as well as phone ID data? (I suspect not) - your example is not so good.
Investors can already use Level II quotes to tell what is being bought and sold by the second in any stock. Even as a private investor with a small portfolio I have the ability to watch the trades of any stock in real time. If I am watching Apple and you buy 50 shares I will see your transaction on my Level II screen as it trades. The only unique thing I can see about iPhone data would be to tell what iPhone users are buying and selling. That would be of little value because it would be such a small subset of the market, and there is no indication that iPhone-owning investors have any more insight than anyone else.
BTW as rummy as this story is, it's also a good sign that the Feds doesn't possess some magical method of factoring enormous primes that they're not telling anyone about.
Ha ha, the more things change the more they stay the same. Say what you will about them, but the NSA is *very* good at keeping secrets. Sure, because they've asked for the keys it might make you think they don't have the ability to read the emails without them, but asking for the keys is exactly what they would do to keep the secret. If the government never asked for anyone's encryption keys we would know they didn't need them. On the other hand, asking for them imparts NO information to the public about whether or not they are really needed.
1. The overuse of profanity 2. The abuse of the word "fascist" 3. Expressing violence and wishing for murder 4. Excessive guilt-by-associating 5. Condoning of rape -- I take it back. He wasn't merely "condoning". He was actively wishing that someone be violently raped.
All of those were expressed in the parent post, and I see all of those and much more in most "progressive" writing today. I think that "progressivism" stands for all five of those things, and thus "progressivism" is evil
When I look at both your and the parent's posts I have to come to the concusion that you are by far the worst of the haters. The parent post was using hyperbole while you really mean it. Your crazy (and I use the word purposefully) rants have a logical problem in that you ascribe all the things you hate to "progressives". Progressives support rape and muder? Give me a break. People like you who are so holier than thou to call someone evil just because you don't like their politics or their language are a blight on the Earth. YOUR intolerance of anyone with ideas different than you is disgusting.
Some questions: How can you ascribe the use of obsenity to progressiveness after what Dick Cheney said on the Senate floor, and how Bush speaks when not in front of the camera. I happen to know that soldiers use very obsenity-laced speech, and their politics are primarily conservative. Logically your position makes no sense.
Expressing violence and wishing for murder. How many conservatives have I heard advocating the nuking of Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran "to blast them back into the stone age"? They are apparently willing to kill millions of men, women and children for their conservative political jingoistic cause. Now that's evil, but I don't tag all conservatives with that - just the evil ones.
Guilt by association? What irony! You blast all so-called progressives because of one post on/. Pot calling the kettle black? I assume you aren't a progressive so if we use your logic what does that say about conservatives. Does the word hypocrite come to mind?
Condoning of rape. Well, the fact that it was hyperbole makes it not so bad I think. No one but a crazy person would think he meant that anyone should REALLY be raped with razor wire. You do understand the purpose of hyperbole, right? To overstate in an obvious way to make a point?
And here is the last comment about your crazy, over-the-top, psychotic position: don't call me or my political views "evil" you dick-head.
The truth is that an employer is renting your time, there's no excuse for goofing off early and getting paid for it, unless they say you can.
It doesn't work that way because I am a professional, not an hourly worker. Employers don't rent my time, they pay for my skills and work-product. I was expected to work whatever hours it took to get my projects completed, and I didn't get extra pay or overtime if I worked weekends or nights. However, with all my work finished, docking me two hours for leaving at 3pm instead of 5pm on my final day was insulting, demeaning and cheezy (not to mention illegal).
Its not SOP. I've been through many companies, not a single one treated me or other employees this way
In the typical over-simplification of slashdot, in only ten posts this issue has become either total trust by employers (your point of view) or an insulting perp-walk (OP and other's view). In reality it IS standard procedure in many companies to pay resigning emplyees through their notification period, but to ask them not to report to work during that time. It isn't insulting - I've had it happen to me, and I prefer it.
I've also had an employer who tried to wring every last drop of work out of me by making me work to 5:00 PM on the last day of notice. I found the second approach much more demeaning - as if I were some sort of rental human. To show how insulting that can be, they docked me two hours of pay when I left early at 3pm on my last day of work even though I was a salaried professional.
With sophisticated enough technology, we'll be finding musical notes in Jackson Pollock's paintings. So Da Vinci was also a composer, yet hid it so well that only five centuries later it comes to light. He really kept that secret close to his breast! All of it light years away from Occam's Razor.
Not at all. Occam's razor would point us toward recognizing that painting and music are composed of patterns and rhythms pleasing to the human brain. In fact, it would be surprising if we didn't find pleasing auditory patterns in the visual patterns of either Pollack or Leonardo. The real question is did Leonardo know he was composing music as he painted, and even if he didn't, does it matter?
The interesting part to me is if this unintended music from the great painters' art is better than from ordinary artists. Has it opened a window on why we see some artists as great and others as not so good? If so, can we 1) use the technique to judge paintings in an impirical way, 2) use it to verify the authenticity of some disputed paintings, or 3) use it to enjoy these masterpieces on a very unexpected plane.
Ummm, obviously you don't work in telecom. Every time you call an IVR or reach an automated speech system, someone's worked at it to make it not just functional, but also usable and friendly. Given the quality of the automated voice interction I always get from telecoms I think every one of these people should be fired and some competent "senior voice specialists" hired. Functional, usable and friendly!? You gotta be kidding. Barely functional, annoying and irritating I say.
Re:Morale booster? No, contractor pleaser.
on
NASA Knows How To Party
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Yah, except if the article is correct, most of the people at this party are NASA contractors. Why NASA is spending money on wining and dining contractors instead of the other way around, I don't really understand.
Well mainly it's because contractors wining and dining government agencies is illegal. It's called kickbacks and bribery.
I used to plan conferences and although $400,000 to $600,000 sounds like a lot, isn't really for meetings of a few hundred people (although it's definately first-class). These meetings are called "parties" in the article, but I'm sure there is a lot of technical information being spread around and contractor interaction that would not otherwise take place. That is very valuable for NASA and I don't see any other way to effectively do it than meetings.
What really bothers me though, is the last paragraph of the OP! There was nothing in the article along those lines (a jab comparing useful, productive people to useless, unproductive people who receive government assistance.) That was pure editorial propaganda by the OP.
Next month's headlines: People who eat French cuisine profiled as likely supporters of socialized medicine. Names posted, extreme-right-wingers encouraged to kill them on sight. People eating Mexican food deemed lazy. Fired en mass. FBI struggles to find uniquely Canadian food: "How else will we know where they all are?" Says spokesperson.
You jest, but I can easily see "People eating Mexican food deemed to be possible illegal immigrants and subject to further investigation."
Let's face it - if this story is true then the FBI going through these records to identify individual members of ethnic groups is on its face racist and therefore illegal. I'm fast coming to the conclusion that the 9/11 attacks DID destroy America - just not in the way anyone expected.
My local water company was caught poisoning some of the citizens of our community with water that had high lead levels. The head of the water company made a public announcement that "our water is safe, there is no lead in the water when it leaves the treatment facility." Of course the lead leached into the water from pipes before it reached the customers because the water company had changed their treatment methods, and he knew it Now, to me he was lying but in the law he wasn't. He could not be prosecuted because "safe" is relative term not a technical definition, and they really didn't add any lead. He clearly intended to mislead the non-technical public by using the truth to give an incorrect impression, but technically he did not lie. That technique is the heart and soul of public relations.
Your example is the same thing. Any newspaper that wrote your description of Joe would be lying (in the non-legal definition) and trying to damage Joe. But in the law it would be impossible to win a case of libel because it is not the responsibility of the newspaper what facts people infer after reading their stories. The paper did not say that Joe was a murderer and did not say he was a drug dealer - therefore no libel. That's why TV news always describes a murderer as an "alleged" murderer even if there are 100 witnesses and film of his having done the deed.
The mistake you are making is in assuming that the law is based in logic - it is not. It is based on the letter of the law. You and I would know that the paper was lying, but in a courtroom they could prove that they were not. Since the definition of libel is falsehoods printed with malice, no libel.
A perfect example of the difference of "truth" in courtrooms and in real life is Clinton's denial of "having sex with that woman". Under examination he had asked for a definition of "sex" and was told by the judge that it meant sexual intercourse. He could then truthfully answer under oath that he did not have sex with Monica (he got a blow job, instead). He was not lying or committing perjury. However, when he got on TV and said the same thing to the American public he was lying because the definition of "having sex" was very different in that setting than it was in the courtroom.
Until a week ago I thought that truth was an absolute defence to libel. Not always so. Although the law differs by jurisdiction, what you say may have to be in the public interest. If a politician sleeps around with married people and then tries to outlaw adultery, that's in the public interest to report; if your neighbour sleeps around with married people, that's not in the public interest (unless the married person or that person's spouse is a public figure). People are entitled to their privacy, and if the public would not care about Joe Blow and you defame his character, you're going to get in trouble.
That's not libel - that's defamation. And anyway, speaking about it truthfully isn't illegal. Defamation is by definition a false accusation. If the affair is real then it is not defamation. You may be branded an interfering busy-body, but you would have committed no crime. Making the affair up would be illegal however, as would saying you *think* they are having an affair.
And lastly, the burden of truth (not just belief in truth of the statements, but actual truth) is on the person making the statements. That is absolutely false, at least in the US. The burden is on the person libeled to prove the statements are false AND that they were made with malice. It is the other way in the UK, and probably in Canada, where the writer has to prove the statements were true.
Also, on the jurisdictional issue, this site lists a few places where truth is not an absolute defence (including "some US states")
Oh yea...some parts of Australia, and in South Africa (Did you think no one would click the link?). Get real. Australian and South African law is not germain to this topic. I do not believe the "some US states" statement. Name them if you do.
Truth IS a defense. The truth cannot be libelous by definition. Your example: (As an example, says John with derisive inflection, "Of course, George Bush is qualified to be president. After all, he has a high school diploma." ) is in NO WAY libelous (technically it isn't slander, since he spoke it, but I nitpik). If John said Bush ONLY has a high school diploma then it could be libel, but that wouldn't be the truth so the 'truth as a defence' argument wouldn't apply.
It is not up to the writer to guess how a reader might interpret a true statement. Giving false impressions using only truthful statements is called public relations.
I find your easy and flippant "answer" to this problem to be very naive. Speaking out about one of these letters entails a very real risk of going to prison for 20 years, and it isn't a small chance - it's likely. It's no joke. You seem to live in some theoretical world where if you complain someone will listen and this great wrong done to you will be undone. Won't happen, dude.
I agree that these letters are wrong and far too authoritarian for our form of government, but openly fighting them is not for the people who receive them - it's for the rest of us. Secret laws, secret letters, secret signing statements, secret lists, secret prisons, secret renditions - they're all anti-democracy and anti-American, but daring the Fatherland's - oops I mean the Homeland's - security forces to stomp on you when they have all the cards is not a smart way to object.
You have held the founding fathers up as examples of announcing their intentions bravely to the world, but it just ain't so. To avoid arrest and imprisonment (or worse), the very non-naive Benjamin Franklin and the other founding fathers wrote their seditious articles and flyers under psuedonyms - not their own names, and distributed them at night, while the Boston Tea Party participants all wore disguises and disappeared anonymously into the night. They were idealists but they weren't stupid.
Indeed, why stop there? They should spend another 4 million and develop the Nude Bomb and shower the enemy skies with toys.
You jest, but we've been there already. Heard about the proposed [and cancelled] "gay bomb" to turn enemy soldiers gay? Or the unexploded cluster bomblets that were shaped and colored like childrens toys? That's one I'd like to think was unintentional. Taking it further, how about food bombs? In the Balkans war the US dropped pallets of relief supplies on top of people, killing many.
*That's* why Iraq has been so easy to pacify. How blind could I be?
Only damn reason I can think of for this stupid war: proving once and for all that the people who say random jerks with guns can't fight off an oppressive government with modern weapons and gazillions of dollars are completely full of shit.
False logic. First, we only have 130,000 troops in Iraq. Here in the US the government would have several million. So yes, you can hold a technological military at bay when you have a ten to one superiority in fighters which would not happen here. Second, the main tool of the Iraq insurgency isn't guns - its IEDs that came from the millions of high explosives packed artillery shells left lying around for the insurgency after the initial invasion. If the insurgents just had guns and fertilizer bombs they wouldn't stand a chance. In the 80's the Afghan mujahadeen with their guns were getting their butts kicked by the Russians until they were given the technologically advanced Stinger missles that negated the Russian's airpower.
Whenever I see a herd of cows, they are either standing still eating, or walking to the milking shed to be milked. Getting one to walk on a conveyer belt with no useful purpose for the cow is not going to be easy.
First, those are lazy rich-country dairy cows you see in fields. Most cows in the developing world do multple duty as milk producers and work animals - pulling carts, grinding grain, etc. Second, you wouldn't walk it on a treadmill (what a goofy idea) you put a yoke on its neck and walk it in a circle like people have been doing for centuries - it just turns a generator instead of (or simultaneously as) grinding grain or pumping water.
He has never voted to raise taxes. Sometimes increased taxes are necessary, such as in paying for a 200 billion/year war in Iraq rather than burden future generations with the cost, or to pay for necessary government services (bridge repair, air-safety, consumer protection against hazardous imports, food inspections, hurricane relief, etc) - every single one of which has deteriorated over the past 7 years due to the no tax insanity gripping the Republican party. He has never voted for an unbalanced budget. Good for him. He has never voted for a federal restriction on gun ownership. Let's don't even go there. He has never voted to raise congressional pay. Good, but did he ever vote against raising it or did he just abstain or miss the vote? He has never taken a government-paid junket (trip) Believe it or not, junkets are sometimes fact-finding trips and can be very informative and useful. I'm suspicious of any legislator who thinks he already knows it all without hearing from the horse's mouth occasionally. Also, government-paid junkets are fine - it's the privately-paid junkets that smack of pay-off and influence buying. Has he ever taken a junket that was paid for by an industry, special interest group, or private party with a legislative agenda? He has never voted to increase the power of the executive branch. Ah, but Congressional voting to increase the power of the presidency is very rare and isn't the problem, is it? This president just takes it. Has he voted (or better yet sponsored a bill) to restrict it when it has been unilaterally siezed by the President? No? Why not?
Sound bites, all sound bites and spin. Paul is no different than any other politician these days in hyper-interpreting and spinning of "facts" like these to make himself look good.
It is an undisputed fact that violent crime has been following the lead levels in teenagars. Lead levels up - crime rate up, lead levels down - crime rate down. Again, if you had RTFA you would know that the researchers themselves had pointed out that this is a correlation, and correlations by themselves do not prove causation. However, it is a very interesting idea and quite possibly true. Proof will come as more data arrive.
You, however, thought it was a ridiculous idea. That is not so - I find the idea very logical. You do the same old thing (Lord, how I get tired of people who only see black or white) - you took the black or white position that either lead had ALL the effect or it had NO effect. No middle ground for you.
As for smoking, drinking and pre-natal care...no, I don't think the crime rate drop had much to do with them because those factors all have to do with the overall health of children, not the aggressivness of children. And NO, I don't think that Christian fundamentalism has the slightest effect on the crime rate. Christian fundamentalism has "risen" in political power, not in significant numbers of practicing members (not to mention the ironic fact that the group is among the most hawkish, pro-war, intolerant and hateful groups around). Children of the lamb - riiiight. To use your term...sheesh.
A better economy - yes, I think that can have an effect on the crime rate although economic opportunities for the poor and minorities have changed very little over the past 20 years so would have had little effect there.
Yet despite a 56% reduction in violent crime, we increased our prison population faster than we increased the national population and have a record level of people in jail. How does unleaded gas explain that?
Because crimes are instantanous events, crime rates can rise and fall very quickly. Not so for prison terms which can be for decades. As a result, the number of people in prison is a decades-long following indicator that can stay high long after crime rates decrease. If you had RTFA you would know that most violent crimes are commited by young people, and since the population is constantly getting a new supply of unimprisoned young people, the crime rate has been dropping in that demographic in direct relation to the removal of lead from gasoline.
And please note that the membrane seperates CO2 from natural gas. Big deal. It isn't CO2 contamination in NG that's the problem, its the CO2 that's produced when the natural gas is burned. Now, does it take CO2 out of *exhaust* gases efficiently? If so it could be useful, but this smells of hype to me.
I'm going to jump into this. Your argument that you once had a Commodore 64 and it worked for you in 1980 so therefore it is better than the OLPC is simply stupid. You are letting your shortsightedness see only as far as the term "laptop", which you claim poor children don't need or deserve. The fact is that the laptop form is the best way to distribute a sealed, weatherproof, self-contained, rugged learning machine to some very tough evironments and expect it to work.
I don't think you understand what "poor" really means in the world where a single electric light is huge event in some villages, or where people have to get micro-loans to buy some needles and thread to set up a small sewing supply stall in that village. And your answer is that the C64 used AA batteries. Where are they going to get the money to pay for those batteries? I want to see you read an e-book on a Commodore 64 or share your work with your clasmates. I want to see you use a web browser on C64. You are being pedantic, obtuse and stubborn to the point of absurdity. Besides, just where do you think you are going to get all these millions of Commodore 64s?
Also, what makes you think that children in poorer countries don't deserve modern technology? I have an old Osborne PC in the garage, why don't I send it to you to replace your computers? After all, it worked in the 80s for me, so I know its good enough for you today.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to want it both ways - either the government is incompetent and can't design things reliably (dams, spcaecraft, nuclear power plants) or they are super competent and can approve every different design for nuclear power plants and thereby make them safe. Sorry, but that pretty much skewers your entire arguement, even without mentioning that I never said the government had to design them.
Your examples don't really work either - dams are each and every one different so a single design would never work, and spacecraft have unique requirements to minimize the mass that needs to be lifted. That's why they have a high falure rate - not because the government is incapable of building one guaranteed to work. Nuclear power plants neither have to be lifted into space nor designed to fit unique locations.
I still hold that a single-design power plant, built to robust standards, with multiple redundancies, and then replicated many times over the life of the design would be far safer than the current practice of building evey nuclear plant from scratch with each different from every other one.
When TMI happened, Carter went there, to illustrate that it was perfectly safe.
Except that it wasn't perfectly safe. What most people don't realize is that a major release of highly radioactive particles, and subsequent contamination of many square miles of PA, was averted only because workers had installed some butterfly valves wrong when TMI was constructed. Two large charcoal filter beds were installed in the plant's air handling system to filter radioactive particles to prevent their release outside the plant in case of an accident. During the accident the primary charcoal filter bed was reaching combustion temp due to high radioactivity levels (burning radioactive charcoal is a very bad thing), so operators closed it off and opened the #2 filter bed. What they didn't know was the indicator lights for the #2 bed were backwards and open really meant closed. Luckily for everyone the installers had installed #2's valve 60 degrees off and it only parially closed.
That is not he kind of thing that gives me warm feelings about the safety of nuclear power as done in the US where any company is free to design and sell its own unique nuclear power plant. This results in many different designs run by many different power companies and constructed by many iffy contractors. I would modify my opposition to nuclear power if we had a smart national program that developed a single highly safe reactor design to be constructed and manned by professionals who were not beholden to the bottom line of the power company.
Learning how many lives have been saved by tasers when the police would have otherwise shot the person would be a valuable statistic that we don't see. I'd also be interested to see how many people have been saved from simply being shot (not just shot and killed). Because tasers are so often mis-used I go back and forth in my mind as to whether it is a good idea to have police carry them.
The barrier to using tasers by police is far too low (I'm not going to deal with tasers purposefully used as torture devices, which is clearly wrong). For example, the student at the John Kerry speech should not have been tasered - just restrained (as I think he was at the time he was tasered). The police tasered him just to shut him up. That is mis-use of a device that has the potetial to kill. They would not have banged him on the head with a baton in front of witnesses to shut him up, would they? Then why should they feel comfortable tasering him?
There seems a useful cut-off point that any police officer could guage on the spot: if you are willing to pull out your gun and shoot the person then the use of a taser is justified - if you are not willing to shot him then don't taser him either. If that is too high a bar for some, then not using the taser if you aren't willing to hit the person in the head with a club would also greatly reduce taser abuse.
Get the laptops in the hands of 1st world schools and encourage users to develop open source lesson plans that can be freely shared and modified. If the cheap laptops really do help education in the 1st world they can then be adpted for 3rd world in phase 2. Offering a cheap but proven system will be a no brainier for the 3rd world.
I try not to jump on people too much here (with varying degrees of success), but that is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. Apparently your idea of the best way to bring children in Africa out of poverty is to give laptops to rich kids in America.
While I'm not an economist or stockbroker, it seems to me that if apple knows which shares iphoners are most interested in, at a given time, this is extremely valuable information, e.g. to spot trends.
While you have a good point - is Apple allowed to collect meta-data from user activity as well as phone ID data? (I suspect not) - your example is not so good.
Investors can already use Level II quotes to tell what is being bought and sold by the second in any stock. Even as a private investor with a small portfolio I have the ability to watch the trades of any stock in real time. If I am watching Apple and you buy 50 shares I will see your transaction on my Level II screen as it trades. The only unique thing I can see about iPhone data would be to tell what iPhone users are buying and selling. That would be of little value because it would be such a small subset of the market, and there is no indication that iPhone-owning investors have any more insight than anyone else.
BTW as rummy as this story is, it's also a good sign that the Feds doesn't possess some magical method of factoring enormous primes that they're not telling anyone about.
Ha ha, the more things change the more they stay the same. Say what you will about them, but the NSA is *very* good at keeping secrets. Sure, because they've asked for the keys it might make you think they don't have the ability to read the emails without them, but asking for the keys is exactly what they would do to keep the secret. If the government never asked for anyone's encryption keys we would know they didn't need them. On the other hand, asking for them imparts NO information to the public about whether or not they are really needed.
1. The overuse of profanity
/. Pot calling the kettle black? I assume you aren't a progressive so if we use your logic what does that say about conservatives. Does the word hypocrite come to mind?
2. The abuse of the word "fascist"
3. Expressing violence and wishing for murder
4. Excessive guilt-by-associating
5. Condoning of rape -- I take it back. He wasn't merely "condoning". He was actively wishing that someone be violently raped.
All of those were expressed in the parent post, and I see all of those and much more in most "progressive" writing today. I think that "progressivism" stands for all five of those things, and thus "progressivism" is evil
When I look at both your and the parent's posts I have to come to the concusion that you are by far the worst of the haters. The parent post was using hyperbole while you really mean it. Your crazy (and I use the word purposefully) rants have a logical problem in that you ascribe all the things you hate to "progressives". Progressives support rape and muder? Give me a break. People like you who are so holier than thou to call someone evil just because you don't like their politics or their language are a blight on the Earth. YOUR intolerance of anyone with ideas different than you is disgusting.
Some questions:
How can you ascribe the use of obsenity to progressiveness after what Dick Cheney said on the Senate floor, and how Bush speaks when not in front of the camera. I happen to know that soldiers use very obsenity-laced speech, and their politics are primarily conservative. Logically your position makes no sense.
Expressing violence and wishing for murder. How many conservatives have I heard advocating the nuking of Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran "to blast them back into the stone age"? They are apparently willing to kill millions of men, women and children for their conservative political jingoistic cause. Now that's evil, but I don't tag all conservatives with that - just the evil ones.
Guilt by association? What irony! You blast all so-called progressives because of one post on
Condoning of rape. Well, the fact that it was hyperbole makes it not so bad I think. No one but a crazy person would think he meant that anyone should REALLY be raped with razor wire. You do understand the purpose of hyperbole, right? To overstate in an obvious way to make a point?
And here is the last comment about your crazy, over-the-top, psychotic position: don't call me or my political views "evil" you dick-head.
The truth is that an employer is renting your time, there's no excuse for goofing off early and getting paid for it, unless they say you can.
It doesn't work that way because I am a professional, not an hourly worker. Employers don't rent my time, they pay for my skills and work-product. I was expected to work whatever hours it took to get my projects completed, and I didn't get extra pay or overtime if I worked weekends or nights. However, with all my work finished, docking me two hours for leaving at 3pm instead of 5pm on my final day was insulting, demeaning and cheezy (not to mention illegal).
Its not SOP. I've been through many companies, not a single one treated me or other employees this way
In the typical over-simplification of slashdot, in only ten posts this issue has become either total trust by employers (your point of view) or an insulting perp-walk (OP and other's view). In reality it IS standard procedure in many companies to pay resigning emplyees through their notification period, but to ask them not to report to work during that time. It isn't insulting - I've had it happen to me, and I prefer it.
I've also had an employer who tried to wring every last drop of work out of me by making me work to 5:00 PM on the last day of notice. I found the second approach much more demeaning - as if I were some sort of rental human. To show how insulting that can be, they docked me two hours of pay when I left early at 3pm on my last day of work even though I was a salaried professional.
With sophisticated enough technology, we'll be finding musical notes in Jackson Pollock's paintings. So Da Vinci was also a composer, yet hid it so well that only five centuries later it comes to light. He really kept that secret close to his breast! All of it light years away from Occam's Razor.
Not at all. Occam's razor would point us toward recognizing that painting and music are composed of patterns and rhythms pleasing to the human brain. In fact, it would be surprising if we didn't find pleasing auditory patterns in the visual patterns of either Pollack or Leonardo. The real question is did Leonardo know he was composing music as he painted, and even if he didn't, does it matter?
The interesting part to me is if this unintended music from the great painters' art is better than from ordinary artists. Has it opened a window on why we see some artists as great and others as not so good? If so, can we 1) use the technique to judge paintings in an impirical way, 2) use it to verify the authenticity of some disputed paintings, or 3) use it to enjoy these masterpieces on a very unexpected plane.
Ummm, obviously you don't work in telecom.
Every time you call an IVR or reach an automated speech system, someone's worked at it to make it not just functional, but also usable and friendly.
Given the quality of the automated voice interction I always get from telecoms I think every one of these people should be fired and some competent "senior voice specialists" hired. Functional, usable and friendly!? You gotta be kidding. Barely functional, annoying and irritating I say.
Yah, except if the article is correct, most of the people at this party are NASA contractors. Why NASA is spending money on wining and dining contractors instead of the other way around, I don't really understand.
Well mainly it's because contractors wining and dining government agencies is illegal. It's called kickbacks and bribery.
I used to plan conferences and although $400,000 to $600,000 sounds like a lot, isn't really for meetings of a few hundred people (although it's definately first-class). These meetings are called "parties" in the article, but I'm sure there is a lot of technical information being spread around and contractor interaction that would not otherwise take place. That is very valuable for NASA and I don't see any other way to effectively do it than meetings.
What really bothers me though, is the last paragraph of the OP! There was nothing in the article along those lines (a jab comparing useful, productive people to useless, unproductive people who receive government assistance.) That was pure editorial propaganda by the OP.
Next month's headlines:
People who eat French cuisine profiled as likely supporters of socialized medicine. Names posted, extreme-right-wingers encouraged to kill them on sight.
People eating Mexican food deemed lazy. Fired en mass.
FBI struggles to find uniquely Canadian food: "How else will we know where they all are?" Says spokesperson.
You jest, but I can easily see "People eating Mexican food deemed to be possible illegal immigrants and subject to further investigation."
Let's face it - if this story is true then the FBI going through these records to identify individual members of ethnic groups is on its face racist and therefore illegal. I'm fast coming to the conclusion that the 9/11 attacks DID destroy America - just not in the way anyone expected.
My local water company was caught poisoning some of the citizens of our community with water that had high lead levels. The head of the water company made a public announcement that "our water is safe, there is no lead in the water when it leaves the treatment facility." Of course the lead leached into the water from pipes before it reached the customers because the water company had changed their treatment methods, and he knew it Now, to me he was lying but in the law he wasn't. He could not be prosecuted because "safe" is relative term not a technical definition, and they really didn't add any lead. He clearly intended to mislead the non-technical public by using the truth to give an incorrect impression, but technically he did not lie. That technique is the heart and soul of public relations.
Your example is the same thing. Any newspaper that wrote your description of Joe would be lying (in the non-legal definition) and trying to damage Joe. But in the law it would be impossible to win a case of libel because it is not the responsibility of the newspaper what facts people infer after reading their stories. The paper did not say that Joe was a murderer and did not say he was a drug dealer - therefore no libel. That's why TV news always describes a murderer as an "alleged" murderer even if there are 100 witnesses and film of his having done the deed.
The mistake you are making is in assuming that the law is based in logic - it is not. It is based on the letter of the law. You and I would know that the paper was lying, but in a courtroom they could prove that they were not. Since the definition of libel is falsehoods printed with malice, no libel.
A perfect example of the difference of "truth" in courtrooms and in real life is Clinton's denial of "having sex with that woman". Under examination he had asked for a definition of "sex" and was told by the judge that it meant sexual intercourse. He could then truthfully answer under oath that he did not have sex with Monica (he got a blow job, instead). He was not lying or committing perjury. However, when he got on TV and said the same thing to the American public he was lying because the definition of "having sex" was very different in that setting than it was in the courtroom.
Until a week ago I thought that truth was an absolute defence to libel. Not always so. Although the law differs by jurisdiction, what you say may have to be in the public interest. If a politician sleeps around with married people and then tries to outlaw adultery, that's in the public interest to report; if your neighbour sleeps around with married people, that's not in the public interest (unless the married person or that person's spouse is a public figure). People are entitled to their privacy, and if the public would not care about Joe Blow and you defame his character, you're going to get in trouble.
That's not libel - that's defamation. And anyway, speaking about it truthfully isn't illegal. Defamation is by definition a false accusation. If the affair is real then it is not defamation. You may be branded an interfering busy-body, but you would have committed no crime. Making the affair up would be illegal however, as would saying you *think* they are having an affair.
And lastly, the burden of truth (not just belief in truth of the statements, but actual truth) is on the person making the statements. That is absolutely false, at least in the US. The burden is on the person libeled to prove the statements are false AND that they were made with malice. It is the other way in the UK, and probably in Canada, where the writer has to prove the statements were true.
Also, on the jurisdictional issue, this site lists a few places where truth is not an absolute defence (including "some US states")
Oh yea...some parts of Australia, and in South Africa (Did you think no one would click the link?). Get real. Australian and South African law is not germain to this topic. I do not believe the "some US states" statement. Name them if you do.
Truth IS a defense. The truth cannot be libelous by definition. Your example: (As an example, says John with derisive inflection, "Of course, George Bush is qualified to be president. After all, he has a high school diploma." ) is in NO WAY libelous (technically it isn't slander, since he spoke it, but I nitpik). If John said Bush ONLY has a high school diploma then it could be libel, but that wouldn't be the truth so the 'truth as a defence' argument wouldn't apply.
It is not up to the writer to guess how a reader might interpret a true statement. Giving false impressions using only truthful statements is called public relations.
I find your easy and flippant "answer" to this problem to be very naive. Speaking out about one of these letters entails a very real risk of going to prison for 20 years, and it isn't a small chance - it's likely. It's no joke. You seem to live in some theoretical world where if you complain someone will listen and this great wrong done to you will be undone. Won't happen, dude.
I agree that these letters are wrong and far too authoritarian for our form of government, but openly fighting them is not for the people who receive them - it's for the rest of us. Secret laws, secret letters, secret signing statements, secret lists, secret prisons, secret renditions - they're all anti-democracy and anti-American, but daring the Fatherland's - oops I mean the Homeland's - security forces to stomp on you when they have all the cards is not a smart way to object.
You have held the founding fathers up as examples of announcing their intentions bravely to the world, but it just ain't so. To avoid arrest and imprisonment (or worse), the very non-naive Benjamin Franklin and the other founding fathers wrote their seditious articles and flyers under psuedonyms - not their own names, and distributed them at night, while the Boston Tea Party participants all wore disguises and disappeared anonymously into the night. They were idealists but they weren't stupid.
Indeed, why stop there? They should spend another 4 million and develop the Nude Bomb and shower the enemy skies with toys.
You jest, but we've been there already. Heard about the proposed [and cancelled] "gay bomb" to turn enemy soldiers gay? Or the unexploded cluster bomblets that were shaped and colored like childrens toys? That's one I'd like to think was unintentional. Taking it further, how about food bombs? In the Balkans war the US dropped pallets of relief supplies on top of people, killing many.
*That's* why Iraq has been so easy to pacify. How blind could I be?
Only damn reason I can think of for this stupid war: proving once and for all that the people who say random jerks with guns can't fight off an oppressive government with modern weapons and gazillions of dollars are completely full of shit.
False logic. First, we only have 130,000 troops in Iraq. Here in the US the government would have several million. So yes, you can hold a technological military at bay when you have a ten to one superiority in fighters which would not happen here. Second, the main tool of the Iraq insurgency isn't guns - its IEDs that came from the millions of high explosives packed artillery shells left lying around for the insurgency after the initial invasion. If the insurgents just had guns and fertilizer bombs they wouldn't stand a chance. In the 80's the Afghan mujahadeen with their guns were getting their butts kicked by the Russians until they were given the technologically advanced Stinger missles that negated the Russian's airpower.
Whenever I see a herd of cows, they are either standing still eating, or walking to the milking shed to be milked. Getting one to walk on a conveyer belt with no useful purpose for the cow is not going to be easy.
First, those are lazy rich-country dairy cows you see in fields. Most cows in the developing world do multple duty as milk producers and work animals - pulling carts, grinding grain, etc. Second, you wouldn't walk it on a treadmill (what a goofy idea) you put a yoke on its neck and walk it in a circle like people have been doing for centuries - it just turns a generator instead of (or simultaneously as) grinding grain or pumping water.
You seem to think these are always good things...
He has never voted to raise taxes.
Sometimes increased taxes are necessary, such as in paying for a 200 billion/year war in Iraq rather than burden future generations with the cost, or to pay for necessary government services (bridge repair, air-safety, consumer protection against hazardous imports, food inspections, hurricane relief, etc) - every single one of which has deteriorated over the past 7 years due to the no tax insanity gripping the Republican party.
He has never voted for an unbalanced budget.
Good for him.
He has never voted for a federal restriction on gun ownership.
Let's don't even go there.
He has never voted to raise congressional pay.
Good, but did he ever vote against raising it or did he just abstain or miss the vote?
He has never taken a government-paid junket (trip)
Believe it or not, junkets are sometimes fact-finding trips and can be very informative and useful. I'm suspicious of any legislator who thinks he already knows it all without hearing from the horse's mouth occasionally. Also, government-paid junkets are fine - it's the privately-paid junkets that smack of pay-off and influence buying. Has he ever taken a junket that was paid for by an industry, special interest group, or private party with a legislative agenda?
He has never voted to increase the power of the executive branch.
Ah, but Congressional voting to increase the power of the presidency is very rare and isn't the problem, is it? This president just takes it. Has he voted (or better yet sponsored a bill) to restrict it when it has been unilaterally siezed by the President? No? Why not?
Sound bites, all sound bites and spin. Paul is no different than any other politician these days in hyper-interpreting and spinning of "facts" like these to make himself look good.
It is an undisputed fact that violent crime has been following the lead levels in teenagars. Lead levels up - crime rate up, lead levels down - crime rate down. Again, if you had RTFA you would know that the researchers themselves had pointed out that this is a correlation, and correlations by themselves do not prove causation. However, it is a very interesting idea and quite possibly true. Proof will come as more data arrive.
You, however, thought it was a ridiculous idea. That is not so - I find the idea very logical. You do the same old thing (Lord, how I get tired of people who only see black or white) - you took the black or white position that either lead had ALL the effect or it had NO effect. No middle ground for you.
As for smoking, drinking and pre-natal care...no, I don't think the crime rate drop had much to do with them because those factors all have to do with the overall health of children, not the aggressivness of children. And NO, I don't think that Christian fundamentalism has the slightest effect on the crime rate. Christian fundamentalism has "risen" in political power, not in significant numbers of practicing members (not to mention the ironic fact that the group is among the most hawkish, pro-war, intolerant and hateful groups around). Children of the lamb - riiiight. To use your term...sheesh.
A better economy - yes, I think that can have an effect on the crime rate although economic opportunities for the poor and minorities have changed very little over the past 20 years so would have had little effect there.
Yet despite a 56% reduction in violent crime, we increased our prison population faster than we increased the national population and have a record level of people in jail. How does unleaded gas explain that?
Because crimes are instantanous events, crime rates can rise and fall very quickly. Not so for prison terms which can be for decades. As a result, the number of people in prison is a decades-long following indicator that can stay high long after crime rates decrease. If you had RTFA you would know that most violent crimes are commited by young people, and since the population is constantly getting a new supply of unimprisoned young people, the crime rate has been dropping in that demographic in direct relation to the removal of lead from gasoline.
And please note that the membrane seperates CO2 from natural gas. Big deal. It isn't CO2 contamination in NG that's the problem, its the CO2 that's produced when the natural gas is burned. Now, does it take CO2 out of *exhaust* gases efficiently? If so it could be useful, but this smells of hype to me.
I'm going to jump into this. Your argument that you once had a Commodore 64 and it worked for you in 1980 so therefore it is better than the OLPC is simply stupid. You are letting your shortsightedness see only as far as the term "laptop", which you claim poor children don't need or deserve. The fact is that the laptop form is the best way to distribute a sealed, weatherproof, self-contained, rugged learning machine to some very tough evironments and expect it to work.
I don't think you understand what "poor" really means in the world where a single electric light is huge event in some villages, or where people have to get micro-loans to buy some needles and thread to set up a small sewing supply stall in that village. And your answer is that the C64 used AA batteries. Where are they going to get the money to pay for those batteries? I want to see you read an e-book on a Commodore 64 or share your work with your clasmates. I want to see you use a web browser on C64. You are being pedantic, obtuse and stubborn to the point of absurdity. Besides, just where do you think you are going to get all these millions of Commodore 64s?
Also, what makes you think that children in poorer countries don't deserve modern technology? I have an old Osborne PC in the garage, why don't I send it to you to replace your computers? After all, it worked in the 80s for me, so I know its good enough for you today.