Launching thousands of rockets and bombs at civilians is an act of war too. Hamas exists, per its own government charter, in a state of perpetual genocide-seeking war with Israel.
You mean like Israel's founding document, the Hebrew Bible, that tells the Israelis to exterminate the neighboring tribes?
In fact, Hamas has made many peace offers to Israel. They could have had a deal years ago.
As for "hospitals"... you mean the one specifically evacuated well ahead of time and which had been used to fire weapons at Israeli civilians? That one?
I mean the hospitals where the Palestinian and western doctors were working, and giving first-hand accounts of how the Israelis were bombing them even as they were telling the Israeli officials on the phone that they were filled with non-combatant civilians. They reported all of this in the British medical journals, in Haaretz, and in the reports afterwards by human rights groups.
As I said, I used to work in Israeli PR. I used to write the lies that you now believe.
Cities which were virtually uninhabited, and you could travel through for days without seeing anyone, as per the peel commission and other first hand reports of the region.
"Virtually" uninhabited? That means inhabited, right?
Israel completely pulled out of gaza and left everything the settlers built, it got them nothing but Hamas in power and thousands upon thousands of rockets and mortars.
Israel didn't "completely" pull out. They imposed a blockade around Gaza. Under international law, a blockade is an act of war, and the Gazans have a legal right to defend themselves in that war.
The Israelis also attacked Gaza twice and bombed hospitals, which is a war crime.
A lot of us Jews thought of the Warsaw Ghetto.
The Israelis also destroyed everything the settlers built, except for a useless hydroponic plant.
I think you don't know the history here. This is land that was basically considered impossible to develop and Israel created methods to develop it and did so. After this is when all the sudden the "Palestinians" wanted it. Before and during the development it was a somewhat different story altogether.
I know a bit of the history. I used to do fund-raising for Israeli scientific research. I read Israeli patents. I played a small part in the huge Israeli government public relations machine, until I had to confront the injustice and brutality.
I played a small part in selling you on the myth of backward Arabs wasting the land, and brilliant Zionist agronomists "making the deserts bloom", with your help. Thank you for your generous contribution.
That land was occupied by traditional Arab farmers (and businessmen and professionals) who lived there as they had for hundreds or thousands of years, and were as comfortable as many pre-industrial people were, just as the Jews had lived there 2000 years ago without benefit of irrigation pumps.
Just because you can take over somebody's agricultural land, and make more money out of it, doesn't give you the right to do so. That's robbery.
Anyone could have come to those farmers, and offered them the money and technology to improve their land, and gotten the same improvement. It was standard modern farming methods, taught in agricultural colleges from Iowa to Moscow. That's what the Communists (the other Jews) did in other underdeveloped countries.
The Jews took control of the land and created a country in the time-honored tradition of fighting a war and coming out on top. Thousands of nation states have come into existence that exact same way, including virtually every single Arab-dominated country in the world. Just because the Jews did it relatively recently does not mean their method was illegitimate.
Yes, "might makes right."
If you believe that, then, if you're logically consistent:
-- You believe that the Germans had a right to their historical borders, formerly known as Belgium, France, Poland, Ukrainia, and Russia.
-- You believe that the Soviets had a right to everything up to Berlin when they came out on top.
-- You believe that Saddam Hussein had a right to Kuwait.
-- You believe that the U.S. has the right to take over the whole world, since we've got the bomb and the armies.
Actuall, after World War II, a team of international lawyers -- many of them Jewish -- wrote a set of laws and treaties, which most of the developed countries signed, which said that territories gained in a war of conquest were not the rightful property of the conquer.
Jews have gone to court, and gotten their property back (like the Klimt paintings in Austria) under those laws.
So "might makes right" was no longer the rule when the Israelis engaged in their wars of territorial conquest. Even Theodor Meron, the chief legal counsel of Israel's foreign ministry, agreed with that and wrote a memo to the Prime Minister telling him that the 1967 occupation was illegal, and the settlements were illegal. And they still are.
The Palestinians have always demanded that Israel settle their disputes in the international courts. The Israelis have always refused.
Under modern law, they're not victors. They're criminals.
You're assuming that workers have certain skills, and those skills have a certain value in the marketplace, unless institutions like unions distort that market.
I don't think that assumption holds up when you look at real-world markets.
Programming is an interesting example. Up to about the 1970s, programming was a skilled job and programmers could always make a good living. Then, starting in the 1970s, companies started firing their older (well-paid) programmers and hiring younger (cheaper) programmers in their place. The employers said that the older programmers, who included a lot of COBOL programmers, didn't know the new languages, and couldn't be trained. The older programmers said that they could and did learn new technology, but their employers didn't want to give them a chance.
It's interesting because there were a lot of age discrimination lawsuits, and the employers were forced to testify in court about their internal procedures that normally wouldn't be public, and they were forced to give their justifications for firing the workers, and then answer under cross-examination. I read some of the lawsuits, and they were also reported in Computerworld and other trade magazines.
It did seem that they were being fired because of age discrimination. Back in those days, employers used to openly admit it. In countries with more worker security, like Germany, programmers in thier position were kept on the job and (continuously) retrained.
In technology employment generally, your skill is one factor in your employabililty. Technology skills tend to be specialized. If your technology disappears, you won't be employable, and it's awfully hard to retrain somebody in a completely different skill. For example, during the Vietnam war, there was a great demand for aerospace engineers. After the war, the market collapsed, Boeing and Douglas laid off huge numbers of workers, and a lot of aerospace engineers couldn't get work. I met an aerospace engineer who had quit his profession and was selling real estate.
Another factor is international competition. If the American aircraft industry loses the market to France, the American aircraft engineers are going to be unemployed in their field, no matter how good they are.
There are so factors beyond the worker's skill that determines how much he can get paid in a job, or whether he can get a job at all. There are a lot of people who made reasonable career decisions, and wound up unemployed through no fault of their own. I used to read Milton Friedman and the other conservatives who made that argument, and it seemed to make sense. But when you go out in the real world, it doesn't always work that way. The free market is full of distortions, and unions are only a small part of it.
The problem is that in a free market, the rate of pay doesn't depend on the skill, it depends on the supply and demand.
Suppose you're a programmer making $50 an hour. Your job requires a significant amount of training, experience and skill.
Then the Indian government starts training programmers to do exactly your job. They come to the U.S. and compete with you for jobs in the programming market. With more supply of job applicants, your employer lowers your salary to $25 an hour.
What's the free market rate for your job? Is it the $50 an hour you made originally? Or is it the $25 an hour that your employer is offering you after the Indian government subsidized the education of programmers and sent them to the U.S.?
Make everyone not working do 10 hours of community service a week.
Making everybody do community service is one of those ideas that sounds like a good idea until people try to do it in reality.
In New York City under Mayor Giuliani, people on welfare were required to do commuinity service. There were several problems with that.
First of all, if they were doing anything useful, they were replacing a paid City worker who would have been making $15 an hour or more for it. But instead, they were getting "paid" in welfare payments that were the equivalent of about $3 an hour. Most people in the program liked working. That raises the question of, "If you want them to work and get off welfare, why not give them a job that pays enough to live on so they won't have to go on welfare?" (Answer: There were no jobs.)
Second, they weren't doing anything useful. It was a boondoggle. The welfare office would send people to city offices, like the Fire Department headquarters, and the managers at the fire department wouldn't know what to do with them. One guy in a municipal building said that they sent people around to empty his waste basket 12 times a day. They could get injured, they could injure other people, they could do damage. It would take more time for a supervisor to teach them how to do something useful than it would for the supervisor to do it himself.
There were other problems like, where does a mother on welfare get someone to look after her kids when she's working? A lot of those mothers would have been working, if they could have gotten child care.
A third problem is, who else is required to do "community service"? Criminals, who are sentenced by the courts. Giuliani was treating people on welfare as if they were criminals.
I think free-market ideologues should read less Ayn Rand and more IEEE Spectrum. And pay less attention to right-wing theories and more attention to what actually happens in the real world.
You ought to meet some government employees, as I did, who would rather serve their country than make a lot of money, corny as it sounds.
I found a lot of people like that in the military health care system.
I met a 60-year-old doctor who gave up a practice that was probably paying ~$300,000 a year to join the military and treat Marines in Iraq who had their feet blown off by land mines.
I met VA doctors who were really dedicated to cure patients with cancer and heart disease, or at least keep them alive and functioning as long as possible.
Of course, as Paul Krugman says, if the Republicans want to destroy government, in order to prove government never works, they can cause a lot of harm to their country and sometimes succeed. (Not that centerist Democrats are much better.)
Yes, let's spend money on something that is trivially achieved by using free software!
Medicare-aged non-techie here.
What's the trivial solution using free software?
I was trying to figure out how to do something like this myself. My idea was to save a disk image in a separate partition or drive, with something like Clonezilla, and then if anything goes wrong, restore the image back again to its original configuration.
I assume that's what these programs do, although there must be a more efficient way to do it.
I never said that DNA evidence alone is enough to convict for rape.
The cases of Nelson Bernard Clifford show that you also have to prove lack of consent. I don't have the details of the case, and I can't understand why the jury would acquit 4 times based on the evidence as reported by the Baltimore Sun. But it looks like he had a good defense lawyer.
I know some of the lawyers at the Innocence Project and the National Associaton of Chriminal Defense Lawyers (not "Attorneys," sorry), and I also know some public defenders. I've heard them speak and read their articles and books. I've read their case files. What you're saying is simply not true.
There are "expert" witnesses who work for the defense and the prosecution (the prosecution has more money to hire them) who can often distort the scientific evidence and convince juries, even though the facts go against it. There were expert witnesses who used to claim that DNA matches were infalliable.
Isn't this really easy? Mail in your sample with a unique ID and a money order (without return address), see results online via said unique ID and through a VPN so it doesn't get tied to your IP. Perhaps theoretically possible to deanonymize, but practically speaking should be good enough. In fact, I'm not sure why this isn't already an option (or is it? I've never looked into any of these services).
Indeed, the way to keep your medical information private is to go to the doctor or medical service anonymously and pay in cash. You don't need to identify yourself to get health care. You can go to a hospital and call yourself John Doe.
The weak link might be getting the money order. I don't know if you can get a postal money order anonymously any more. Post offices have cameras now that record every "patron." Maybe you could hire somebody off the street to go in and get a $25 money order for you.
because if your lawyer points out that their evidence could also apply to him there's 50% doubt, and generally Juries think 50% doubt is reasonable doubt.
You give me $10,000 and I'll get an expert witness who will convincingly argue before a jury that the DNA test is absolutely certain, and that the odds are a trillion to one against a mistake.
He will at least be able to throw enough confusion into the case to give the prosecutor a good chance of convincing the jury that the defendant was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
The files of The Innocence Project and the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys are filled with cases like that.
We haven't had privacy of medical records in this country since Monica Lewinsky's psychotherapist gave her treatment records to Kenneth Starr.
I talked to a few health care lawyers about the privacy of medical records. Bottom line: Any judge can order the production of records "in the interest of justice."
There are state protections for things like DNA tests, but they don't protect you against federal investigations.
The medical privacy law (HIPAA) allows doctors and hospitals to disclose medical records to law enforcement requests.
I knew a doctor who treated AIDS patients at the beginning of the epidemic, before they had good treatments, and patients could lose their jobs, their housing, and their families if that information got out.
He said that he had promised confidentiality to his patients, and "I will burn my records" before he would violate his promise.
The lawyers told me that you don't have to identify yourself to get medical treatment. You can pay in cash and use a pseudonym.
I was introduced to Forrest Mim's books, by browsing through a Radio Shack about 1974. I was into model rocketry and trying to learn basic electronics at the time and found his material very instructive. I consider him a gift to anyone trying to gain insight in electronics, from the level of a hobbyist all the way to a professional.
Me too. My father started out as an airline mechanic in World War II. He used to repair the instruments in the cockpits of supply planes and bombers, and (after the war) commercial airliners. They were like electromechanical cuckoo clocks. I used to play with electromagnets in my playpen.
They were constantly retraining him in the new technology, but after a while, the integrated circuit boards came in, and the transistors, and he couldn't keep up with the kids who just got out of the Air Force. So (thanks to his union) they gave him an easy job until he retired.
Also about 1974 I was working for an organization that was developing some 8086 products, and out of curiosity, I wanted to learn more about these new IC chips. I went to Radio Shack, picked up a few of Forrest Mimms' books, bought a breadboard and a few components, and tried some of his projects. The first non-trivial one was a 555 timer circuit. I had it flashing LEDs, and beeping a speaker, with the rate controlled by a variable resistor. That was my first IC circuit. Pretty impressive for those of us who programmed with punch cards and made radios with solder and electron tubes.
I didn't always get along too well with my father, but this was too much. I took it over to show it to him. I've never seen him look at something with such fascination before. It blew his mind. It was a father/son combination of wanting to one-up him and wanting to give him back what he gave me. It went back to the days when I would watch him at his workbench fixing a toaster or TV. I'll never forget it.
I've heard musicians say that some of the happiest moments of their lives were playing music. Well, a lot of us could say the same thing about electronics.
So I consider Forrest Mimms a mentor too. And he gave me something that I could give back to my father. I owe Mimms a debt of gratitude for that. He was one of the greatest science educators this country has ever seen.
So they've figured out how to measure how well something works. This is fine for products where the outcome can be measured with natural numbers. What about products where they can have negative value even when they do work? If I improperly write code that works well when it works, but fails in unknown ways, then my product has a negative value when compared to another product the solves the same problems, but in a way where it fails in predictable ways and can be quickly fixed.
What if you're a cop and you arrest a lot of people for jaywalking? That's what happened when New York City went over to Comstat.
the pay gap between those who make more and those who make less grows
That line clearly comes from someone supporting the insane wages of top executives in this country under the illusion that they are actually productive. They rarely make anything in terms of actual productivity - they are paid a lot primarily in reward for being well-connected.
There is an entire publishing industry devoted to fawning over highly-compensated top executives and telling them that they are the geniuses who are responsible for all of America's accomplishments and can solve any problem.
You have to know your product and what makes for a quality product and tailor your production process to that.
The cult of management says that a good manager can manage anything -- and doesn't even have to understand the product. So the top manager of a potato chip company can move in and run a computer chip company.
Or the top manager of a computer company can reform the education system.
This metric would seem to be encouraging authors that write the clickbaitiest titles. Sounds wonderful.
Cowen's assumption is that the things that are easy to measure are also meaningful and contribute to the organizations' success. In journalism, that's not usually true.
I once worked for a weekly newspaper in Brooklyn. The publisher had more (family) money than brains. The paper was doing badly and he was getting desperate.
One week, we ran a British-style tabloid headline, "4-year-old girl raped, murdered." It had the highest newsstand circulation of any issue.
This was followed by a wave of angry subscription cancellations. One subscriber wrote, "I don't want this garbage coming into my house."
The paper continued on its downward trend and finally shut down.
The moral: following a meaningless metric can give you a boost in the short term, and harm the enterprise in the long term.
There's no evidence, or even rational theory, that says the "brain" of a 5-week old fetus is any more "human" than a clump of grass. It's alive (well, it was to get that far) but it surely isn't a human being. That takes a great deal more development physically, and frankly, I think it takes a great deal of interaction with parents and the environment as well. Potential? In the normal course of gestation, yes. When you're growing a lump of cells in a dish -- no.
By Stemwedel's logic, we should oppose abortion too.
It’s hard to escape the intuition that it would be wrong to impose conditions on naturally developing human brains that would keep them from having selves. Is there a principled reason to think it’s not just as wrong to grow human brains in a dish under conditions that keep those lab-grown brains from having selves?
>>>> The people who are firing those missiles and making those attacks are usually not controlled by Hamas, but... sabotage the peace efforts.
New York City and New Jersey are separated by the Hudson River. Imagine what would happen if someone in New Jersey were shooting rockets at New York City; one would expect the various New Jersey law enforcement agencies to try to find and stop them, rather than allowing them to hide their rockets in schools and houses of worship.
Suppose some Mafia members from New Jersey came to New York and killed a few rival drug dealers.
In response, New York State sent military forces to occupy New Jersey, sealed its borders, blocked its ports, bridges, roads and railways, bombed its airports, cut off its telephone and internet connections, shut its hospitals, made it impossible for anyone to earn a living, sent fighter jets to assassinate goverment officials from the sky, and responded to all disputes with more bombings.
I asked the Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer about the killings in the Goldstone report, and he told me that the Palestinians were lying and they never happened. He used the term "Pallywood." That's an authoritative answer, and I didn't think the Israeli government would allow their U.S. ambassador to go around saying things that were not true.
I'm going to follow up that 2010 statement by the IDF Military Advocate General.
But it seems as if the charges were dismissed.
http://mondoweiss.net/2012/05/... Israel closes investigation of those responsible for al Samouni family massacre, no legal action taken Israel/Palestine Adam Horowitz on May 1, 2012 From Haaretz: Israel’s military prosecution announced Tuesday that no legal steps will be taken against those responsible for the killing of 21 members of the Samouni family during the 2009 Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www2.ohchr.org/english/...
Launching thousands of rockets and bombs at civilians is an act of war too. Hamas exists, per its own government charter, in a state of perpetual genocide-seeking war with Israel.
You mean like Israel's founding document, the Hebrew Bible, that tells the Israelis to exterminate the neighboring tribes?
In fact, Hamas has made many peace offers to Israel. They could have had a deal years ago.
As for "hospitals"... you mean the one specifically evacuated well ahead of time and which had been used to fire weapons at Israeli civilians? That one?
I mean the hospitals where the Palestinian and western doctors were working, and giving first-hand accounts of how the Israelis were bombing them even as they were telling the Israeli officials on the phone that they were filled with non-combatant civilians. They reported all of this in the British medical journals, in Haaretz, and in the reports afterwards by human rights groups.
As I said, I used to work in Israeli PR. I used to write the lies that you now believe.
I hope to see a good Israel again in my lifetime.
Cities which were virtually uninhabited, and you could travel through for days without seeing anyone, as per the peel commission and other first hand reports of the region.
"Virtually" uninhabited? That means inhabited, right?
Israel completely pulled out of gaza and left everything the settlers built, it got them nothing but Hamas in power and thousands upon thousands of rockets and mortars.
Israel didn't "completely" pull out. They imposed a blockade around Gaza. Under international law, a blockade is an act of war, and the Gazans have a legal right to defend themselves in that war.
The Israelis also attacked Gaza twice and bombed hospitals, which is a war crime.
A lot of us Jews thought of the Warsaw Ghetto.
The Israelis also destroyed everything the settlers built, except for a useless hydroponic plant.
I think you don't know the history here. This is land that was basically considered impossible to develop and Israel created methods to develop it and did so. After this is when all the sudden the "Palestinians" wanted it. Before and during the development it was a somewhat different story altogether.
I know a bit of the history. I used to do fund-raising for Israeli scientific research. I read Israeli patents. I played a small part in the huge Israeli government public relations machine, until I had to confront the injustice and brutality.
I played a small part in selling you on the myth of backward Arabs wasting the land, and brilliant Zionist agronomists "making the deserts bloom", with your help. Thank you for your generous contribution.
That land was occupied by traditional Arab farmers (and businessmen and professionals) who lived there as they had for hundreds or thousands of years, and were as comfortable as many pre-industrial people were, just as the Jews had lived there 2000 years ago without benefit of irrigation pumps.
Just because you can take over somebody's agricultural land, and make more money out of it, doesn't give you the right to do so. That's robbery.
Anyone could have come to those farmers, and offered them the money and technology to improve their land, and gotten the same improvement. It was standard modern farming methods, taught in agricultural colleges from Iowa to Moscow. That's what the Communists (the other Jews) did in other underdeveloped countries.
I look forward to the day when Israel will be a good country again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The Jews took control of the land and created a country in the time-honored tradition of fighting a war and coming out on top. Thousands of nation states have come into existence that exact same way, including virtually every single Arab-dominated country in the world. Just because the Jews did it relatively recently does not mean their method was illegitimate.
Yes, "might makes right."
If you believe that, then, if you're logically consistent:
-- You believe that the Germans had a right to their historical borders, formerly known as Belgium, France, Poland, Ukrainia, and Russia.
-- You believe that the Soviets had a right to everything up to Berlin when they came out on top.
-- You believe that Saddam Hussein had a right to Kuwait.
-- You believe that the U.S. has the right to take over the whole world, since we've got the bomb and the armies.
Actuall, after World War II, a team of international lawyers -- many of them Jewish -- wrote a set of laws and treaties, which most of the developed countries signed, which said that territories gained in a war of conquest were not the rightful property of the conquer.
Jews have gone to court, and gotten their property back (like the Klimt paintings in Austria) under those laws.
So "might makes right" was no longer the rule when the Israelis engaged in their wars of territorial conquest. Even Theodor Meron, the chief legal counsel of Israel's foreign ministry, agreed with that and wrote a memo to the Prime Minister telling him that the 1967 occupation was illegal, and the settlements were illegal. And they still are.
The Palestinians have always demanded that Israel settle their disputes in the international courts. The Israelis have always refused.
Under modern law, they're not victors. They're criminals.
Then the Golan Heights, then everything from the Nile to the Euphrates.
Von der Maas bis an die Memel,
Von der Etsch bis an den Belt
You're assuming that workers have certain skills, and those skills have a certain value in the marketplace, unless institutions like unions distort that market.
I don't think that assumption holds up when you look at real-world markets.
Programming is an interesting example. Up to about the 1970s, programming was a skilled job and programmers could always make a good living. Then, starting in the 1970s, companies started firing their older (well-paid) programmers and hiring younger (cheaper) programmers in their place. The employers said that the older programmers, who included a lot of COBOL programmers, didn't know the new languages, and couldn't be trained. The older programmers said that they could and did learn new technology, but their employers didn't want to give them a chance.
It's interesting because there were a lot of age discrimination lawsuits, and the employers were forced to testify in court about their internal procedures that normally wouldn't be public, and they were forced to give their justifications for firing the workers, and then answer under cross-examination. I read some of the lawsuits, and they were also reported in Computerworld and other trade magazines.
It did seem that they were being fired because of age discrimination. Back in those days, employers used to openly admit it. In countries with more worker security, like Germany, programmers in thier position were kept on the job and (continuously) retrained.
In technology employment generally, your skill is one factor in your employabililty. Technology skills tend to be specialized. If your technology disappears, you won't be employable, and it's awfully hard to retrain somebody in a completely different skill. For example, during the Vietnam war, there was a great demand for aerospace engineers. After the war, the market collapsed, Boeing and Douglas laid off huge numbers of workers, and a lot of aerospace engineers couldn't get work. I met an aerospace engineer who had quit his profession and was selling real estate.
Another factor is international competition. If the American aircraft industry loses the market to France, the American aircraft engineers are going to be unemployed in their field, no matter how good they are.
There are so factors beyond the worker's skill that determines how much he can get paid in a job, or whether he can get a job at all. There are a lot of people who made reasonable career decisions, and wound up unemployed through no fault of their own. I used to read Milton Friedman and the other conservatives who made that argument, and it seemed to make sense. But when you go out in the real world, it doesn't always work that way. The free market is full of distortions, and unions are only a small part of it.
The problem is that in a free market, the rate of pay doesn't depend on the skill, it depends on the supply and demand.
Suppose you're a programmer making $50 an hour. Your job requires a significant amount of training, experience and skill.
Then the Indian government starts training programmers to do exactly your job. They come to the U.S. and compete with you for jobs in the programming market. With more supply of job applicants, your employer lowers your salary to $25 an hour.
What's the free market rate for your job? Is it the $50 an hour you made originally? Or is it the $25 an hour that your employer is offering you after the Indian government subsidized the education of programmers and sent them to the U.S.?
Make everyone not working do 10 hours of community service a week.
Making everybody do community service is one of those ideas that sounds like a good idea until people try to do it in reality.
In New York City under Mayor Giuliani, people on welfare were required to do commuinity service. There were several problems with that.
First of all, if they were doing anything useful, they were replacing a paid City worker who would have been making $15 an hour or more for it. But instead, they were getting "paid" in welfare payments that were the equivalent of about $3 an hour. Most people in the program liked working. That raises the question of, "If you want them to work and get off welfare, why not give them a job that pays enough to live on so they won't have to go on welfare?" (Answer: There were no jobs.)
Second, they weren't doing anything useful. It was a boondoggle. The welfare office would send people to city offices, like the Fire Department headquarters, and the managers at the fire department wouldn't know what to do with them. One guy in a municipal building said that they sent people around to empty his waste basket 12 times a day. They could get injured, they could injure other people, they could do damage. It would take more time for a supervisor to teach them how to do something useful than it would for the supervisor to do it himself.
There were other problems like, where does a mother on welfare get someone to look after her kids when she's working? A lot of those mothers would have been working, if they could have gotten child care.
A third problem is, who else is required to do "community service"? Criminals, who are sentenced by the courts. Giuliani was treating people on welfare as if they were criminals.
You neglected "massive government waste who cares it isn't really my money being spent."
Actually, the Spectrum article says the opposite. The private sector wastes just as much money, and manages just as badly, as the government.
The "Software Hall of Shame" includes
http://spectrum.ieee.org/compu...
large companies and small; in commercial, nonprofit, and governmental organizations.
I think free-market ideologues should read less Ayn Rand and more IEEE Spectrum. And pay less attention to right-wing theories and more attention to what actually happens in the real world.
You ought to meet some government employees, as I did, who would rather serve their country than make a lot of money, corny as it sounds.
I found a lot of people like that in the military health care system.
I met a 60-year-old doctor who gave up a practice that was probably paying ~$300,000 a year to join the military and treat Marines in Iraq who had their feet blown off by land mines.
I met VA doctors who were really dedicated to cure patients with cancer and heart disease, or at least keep them alive and functioning as long as possible.
Of course, as Paul Krugman says, if the Republicans want to destroy government, in order to prove government never works, they can cause a lot of harm to their country and sometimes succeed. (Not that centerist Democrats are much better.)
Oh boo fucking hoo, those poor criminals. Maybe don't steal shit and kill people next time.
Maybe don't be driving while black.
Yes, let's spend money on something that is trivially achieved by using free software!
Medicare-aged non-techie here.
What's the trivial solution using free software?
I was trying to figure out how to do something like this myself. My idea was to save a disk image in a separate partition or drive, with something like Clonezilla, and then if anything goes wrong, restore the image back again to its original configuration.
I assume that's what these programs do, although there must be a more efficient way to do it.
I never said that DNA evidence alone is enough to convict for rape.
The cases of Nelson Bernard Clifford show that you also have to prove lack of consent. I don't have the details of the case, and I can't understand why the jury would acquit 4 times based on the evidence as reported by the Baltimore Sun. But it looks like he had a good defense lawyer.
I know some of the lawyers at the Innocence Project and the National Associaton of Chriminal Defense Lawyers (not "Attorneys," sorry), and I also know some public defenders. I've heard them speak and read their articles and books. I've read their case files. What you're saying is simply not true.
There are "expert" witnesses who work for the defense and the prosecution (the prosecution has more money to hire them) who can often distort the scientific evidence and convince juries, even though the facts go against it. There were expert witnesses who used to claim that DNA matches were infalliable.
Isn't this really easy? Mail in your sample with a unique ID and a money order (without return address), see results online via said unique ID and through a VPN so it doesn't get tied to your IP. Perhaps theoretically possible to deanonymize, but practically speaking should be good enough. In fact, I'm not sure why this isn't already an option (or is it? I've never looked into any of these services).
Indeed, the way to keep your medical information private is to go to the doctor or medical service anonymously and pay in cash. You don't need to identify yourself to get health care. You can go to a hospital and call yourself John Doe.
The weak link might be getting the money order. I don't know if you can get a postal money order anonymously any more. Post offices have cameras now that record every "patron." Maybe you could hire somebody off the street to go in and get a $25 money order for you.
because if your lawyer points out that their evidence could also apply to him there's 50% doubt, and generally Juries think 50% doubt is reasonable doubt.
You give me $10,000 and I'll get an expert witness who will convincingly argue before a jury that the DNA test is absolutely certain, and that the odds are a trillion to one against a mistake.
He will at least be able to throw enough confusion into the case to give the prosecutor a good chance of convincing the jury that the defendant was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
The files of The Innocence Project and the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys are filled with cases like that.
We haven't had privacy of medical records in this country since Monica Lewinsky's psychotherapist gave her treatment records to Kenneth Starr.
I talked to a few health care lawyers about the privacy of medical records. Bottom line: Any judge can order the production of records "in the interest of justice."
There are state protections for things like DNA tests, but they don't protect you against federal investigations.
The medical privacy law (HIPAA) allows doctors and hospitals to disclose medical records to law enforcement requests.
I knew a doctor who treated AIDS patients at the beginning of the epidemic, before they had good treatments, and patients could lose their jobs, their housing, and their families if that information got out.
He said that he had promised confidentiality to his patients, and "I will burn my records" before he would violate his promise.
The lawyers told me that you don't have to identify yourself to get medical treatment. You can pay in cash and use a pseudonym.
I was introduced to Forrest Mim's books, by browsing through a Radio Shack about 1974. I was into model rocketry and trying to learn basic electronics at the time and found his material very instructive. I consider him a gift to anyone trying to gain insight in electronics, from the level of a hobbyist all the way to a professional.
Me too. My father started out as an airline mechanic in World War II. He used to repair the instruments in the cockpits of supply planes and bombers, and (after the war) commercial airliners. They were like electromechanical cuckoo clocks. I used to play with electromagnets in my playpen.
They were constantly retraining him in the new technology, but after a while, the integrated circuit boards came in, and the transistors, and he couldn't keep up with the kids who just got out of the Air Force. So (thanks to his union) they gave him an easy job until he retired.
Also about 1974 I was working for an organization that was developing some 8086 products, and out of curiosity, I wanted to learn more about these new IC chips. I went to Radio Shack, picked up a few of Forrest Mimms' books, bought a breadboard and a few components, and tried some of his projects. The first non-trivial one was a 555 timer circuit. I had it flashing LEDs, and beeping a speaker, with the rate controlled by a variable resistor. That was my first IC circuit. Pretty impressive for those of us who programmed with punch cards and made radios with solder and electron tubes.
I didn't always get along too well with my father, but this was too much. I took it over to show it to him. I've never seen him look at something with such fascination before. It blew his mind. It was a father/son combination of wanting to one-up him and wanting to give him back what he gave me. It went back to the days when I would watch him at his workbench fixing a toaster or TV. I'll never forget it.
I've heard musicians say that some of the happiest moments of their lives were playing music. Well, a lot of us could say the same thing about electronics.
So I consider Forrest Mimms a mentor too. And he gave me something that I could give back to my father. I owe Mimms a debt of gratitude for that. He was one of the greatest science educators this country has ever seen.
P.S. We won the war.
So they've figured out how to measure how well something works. This is fine for products where the outcome can be measured with natural numbers. What about products where they can have negative value even when they do work? If I improperly write code that works well when it works, but fails in unknown ways, then my product has a negative value when compared to another product the solves the same problems, but in a way where it fails in predictable ways and can be quickly fixed.
What if you're a cop and you arrest a lot of people for jaywalking? That's what happened when New York City went over to Comstat.
the pay gap between those who make more and those who make less grows
That line clearly comes from someone supporting the insane wages of top executives in this country under the illusion that they are actually productive. They rarely make anything in terms of actual productivity - they are paid a lot primarily in reward for being well-connected.
There is an entire publishing industry devoted to fawning over highly-compensated top executives and telling them that they are the geniuses who are responsible for all of America's accomplishments and can solve any problem.
You have to know your product and what makes for a quality product and tailor your production process to that.
The cult of management says that a good manager can manage anything -- and doesn't even have to understand the product. So the top manager of a potato chip company can move in and run a computer chip company.
Or the top manager of a computer company can reform the education system.
This metric would seem to be encouraging authors that write the clickbaitiest titles. Sounds wonderful.
Cowen's assumption is that the things that are easy to measure are also meaningful and contribute to the organizations' success. In journalism, that's not usually true.
I once worked for a weekly newspaper in Brooklyn. The publisher had more (family) money than brains. The paper was doing badly and he was getting desperate.
One week, we ran a British-style tabloid headline, "4-year-old girl raped, murdered." It had the highest newsstand circulation of any issue.
This was followed by a wave of angry subscription cancellations. One subscriber wrote, "I don't want this garbage coming into my house."
The paper continued on its downward trend and finally shut down.
The moral: following a meaningless metric can give you a boost in the short term, and harm the enterprise in the long term.
Like VW's emission test results....
There's no evidence, or even rational theory, that says the "brain" of a 5-week old fetus is any more "human" than a clump of grass. It's alive (well, it was to get that far) but it surely isn't a human being. That takes a great deal more development physically, and frankly, I think it takes a great deal of interaction with parents and the environment as well. Potential? In the normal course of gestation, yes. When you're growing a lump of cells in a dish -- no.
By Stemwedel's logic, we should oppose abortion too.
>>>> The people who are firing those missiles and making those attacks are usually not controlled by Hamas, but ... sabotage the peace efforts.
New York City and New Jersey are separated by the Hudson River. Imagine what would happen if someone in New Jersey were shooting rockets at New York City; one would expect the various New Jersey law enforcement agencies to try to find and stop them, rather than allowing them to hide their rockets in schools and houses of worship.
Suppose some Mafia members from New Jersey came to New York and killed a few rival drug dealers.
In response, New York State sent military forces to occupy New Jersey, sealed its borders, blocked its ports, bridges, roads and railways, bombed its airports, cut off its telephone and internet connections, shut its hospitals, made it impossible for anyone to earn a living, sent fighter jets to assassinate goverment officials from the sky, and responded to all disputes with more bombings.
I asked the Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer about the killings in the Goldstone report, and he told me that the Palestinians were lying and they never happened. He used the term "Pallywood." That's an authoritative answer, and I didn't think the Israeli government would allow their U.S. ambassador to go around saying things that were not true.
I'm going to follow up that 2010 statement by the IDF Military Advocate General.
But it seems as if the charges were dismissed.
http://mondoweiss.net/2012/05/...
Israel closes investigation of those responsible for al Samouni family massacre, no legal action taken
Israel/Palestine
Adam Horowitz on May 1, 2012
From Haaretz:
Israel’s military prosecution announced Tuesday that no legal steps will be taken against those responsible for the killing of 21 members of the Samouni family during the 2009 Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.