In this case, the files that attracted the attention of the techs allegedly had names that sounded pornographic and that also included something about ages, like "age 13". (See the link given by the poster, this is in there).
By other accounts, the tech watched the first bit of one video, saw an at least partially nude child, and then became convinced the material was hard core pornography when he saw a nude adult enter the scene. He stopped the video at that frame and called the police. This sounds like the tech took steps to verify that the video wasn't some innocuous 'baby on a bear skin rug' footage, and that he wouldn't be wasting the law's time or getting an innocent man falsely accused with a charge that can taint a person's reputation even if its dismissed. The courts are likely to view this sort of thing as responsible intent. The argument is the tech didn't really start searching around until he became aware of a possible crime just in the course of his normal practice. If he'd done that for files named "College girl threeway" or something perfectly legal sounding, he might have been snooping, but with "age 13-14" type cues in the titles, it's a different legal issue entirely.
I'm a bit concerned about inadvertently finding myself in the tech's situation. I do a certain amount of PC repair, and my reading speed is very fast, so if I look at say a list of 50 files in a directory for an instant, I've effectively read it. Show me a page with a lurid phrase like "Blow up the federal building" or "kiddee snuff film" in a mess of otherwise innocuous text, and my eye will be drawn to it within a fraction of a second, and by the time I've blinked, I've read the entire paragraph around it. So, to take a common tech troubleshooting situation, if I'm fixing a.DLL issue, and I open Explorer, with no intent to go anywhere but straight to the Windows directory and then Windows/System, and there's a folder off the root with a name like 'My Pony Pron', I can't help knowing it's there. I literally can't read slow enough to just scan a list in alphabetical order and only read the first character until I get to the W's. I read mirror reversed or upside down just as fast.
Relativistic mass doesn't matter. The threshold for a supernova is entirely a question of rest mass. Otherwise, whether a nova had occurred at all, or not would depend on the frame of reference, and not just when it occurred. Now if it was moving so fast relative to us that significant time dilation occurred, so that the star could already have been a star when it was ejected, and lived long enough to get that far from a galaxy before it supernovaed, that would indeed be cool. Also pretty obvious, because the post flash time decay curve would also be enormously stretched out, and we'd be thinking it was some universal record breaking gynormous 1,000 solar mass + star until we thought of relativistic dilation.
Galactic center black holes usually have masses of a billion sun-like stars or more, so there's definitely enough energy available to accelerate even the largest known stars (like VV Cephei or VY Canis Majoris) to the hypervelocity category. VV Cephei is about 100 solar masses, and is actually in a binary pair with a large blue-white star that is still on its own main sequence, so it's just the kind of star that could end up in a spectacular post-ejection supernova event if only it and its partner were at the center of our galaxy.
Saint Paul wrote about faith in his letter to the church in Corinth. His argument was (to paraphrase):
Some people are telling you that there is no life after death, and pointing to how people deteriorate with age and illness. But you know that there are people who behave more nobly and humanly with suffering, illness and age, people who gain wisdom as they grow older and frailer, so you have evidence that the spirit is not destroyed by the things that destroy the body - therefore you should believe, because you have evidence you are right!
Plenty of Christians are aware of the differences between believing with or against the preponderance of evidence, believing in the face of contradictory evidence, and believing without any evidence.
It must be wonderful to redefine anything you want and insist no one else can, just so you can win arguments.
My closing question was rhetorical. The point is, we can't afford to dismiss what the Democrats are doing as cowardice, when it is likely motivated much more by power-lust. We have gone pretty damned far down a bad road already, and can't afford many more mistakes about the motivations of those guys taking turns holding the lantern in front of us.
Expanding on what Gandalf did while he was away from the Dwarves and Bilbo, and better tieing the Hobbit to the LotR actually seems like a good thing, if the expansion really focuses on Sauron's temporary occupation of Mirkwood, etc. Jackson could stay pretty accurate to the original, just working off of parts found in the LotR appendices, Tolkien's notes, and the pre WW2 variant text of the Hobbit itself. There's a good story possible that would vary less from the original than his giving the female roles a larger part in LotR. (Something that I didn't mind, but seems to get some people all upset).
The real question is, would this involve a face to face conflict between Gandalf and a (still much weaker) Sauron? Would Sauron be visualized as an EYE or just a dark wraith-like presence? And does Jackson bring in some of the other 4 wizards, or other powers that be in middle earth, or make it a Gandalf solo mission? I'm afraid a 1 on 1, gunslingers in the streets style conflict, mostly involving flashy magic, is the easiest path there.
It's a matter of focus. Paul is for cutting out many departments entirely, such as the Dept. of Education, and the reason he gives is one of constitutionality - i.e. Federal control of highways is an unconstitutional override of states rights to control traffic within their borders. Some of his arguments are questionable on the grounds that the rights involved may belong to somebody else, i.e. sovereign individuals and not states. It's a recipe for Chaos to say that rights have to revert, including the right of the Supreme Court to decide whether the states are the place those rights revert to, or not.
Plus, Ron Paul is talking about areas such as Social Security, Fannie Mae programs, The Federal Reserve, and others in many of his most pushed examples, while the federal government has 17 agencies besides the military allowed to bear arms in the course of their practice. Many of us are more worried about an agency that can shoot us immediately than one that has to go to the police and have us arrested to really abuse us. So if Ron Paul starts out doing what he proposes, he is likely to spend all his political capital before he ever gets to most of the worst problems. Those problems will then use the tendency of things to swing back in the next administration to grow larger yet again just as they are now. We'll see big cuts in Medicare, but only token cuts in the CIA, if that.
Why not waste 25% or 50%? That question was one that helped get us into the mess we are now in. Now here's somebody who still hasn't gotten a clue, proposing 99%. Is it just me? I feel like I've been told I don't understand the issues, by a guy who's just proposed that we fly to the Moon on the backs of giant swans!
If you don't want to read the whole thing, here's the basics: Base recividism rate was 34% - of that 22.3% was for new crimes, the other 1/3 of the total was for technical violations*. Of the 22.3%, sex offenses were 8%, non-sex offenses were 14.3% Rapists (of adult victims) had the highest chance of repeating, and intra-family molesters the lowest chances. Extra-family molesters were in the middle. That is again not just for the specific crime they were first charged with, or for a sexually related crime, but for criminal acts in general. Once convicted rapists had a 56% chance of commiting some crime within 10 years, but only 17.5% chance of recommitting rape.
Sex offenders who completed Ohio's basic sex offender programming course had about a 40% lower rate of general repeat offenses, and more than 50% lower chance of specifically sexual offenses.
Note too, this study compared numbers for people who were actually re-sentenced to prison, not just re-arrested. As they pointed out in explaining this, it was very unusual for a prior sex offender charged with a new sex crime to get a non-prison sentence, and presumably more common for a person charged with a non-sexual crime to get a probation only sentence.
This is a scientifically well prepared study. They give the number of cases considered very early, disclose their statistical analysis methods, and discuss possible flaws in their methodology in the opening section (the opening functions much like a standard scientific paper's abstract. It's longer than an abstract in a typical physic or astronomy paper, but probably quite within norms for a sociology publication.)
*technical violations may include legitimate causes for concern, such as the offender possessing violent or child pornography or hanging around places frequented by children. It is probably fair to add some fraction of these to any real risk assessment, just like it's fair to assume some people didn't get caught. But, in the same way, we should add cases of a prior burglar driving through a posh neighborhood at night or possessing burglary tools in assessing that risk.
Since I posted this, I've noted quite a number of replies. To clarify some of these: CSOM (mentioned below) is the Center for Sex Offender Management. Their website is a.org, and not directly a.gov site. They are associated with the US Justice Department by a grant, but also with the National Institute of Corrections, and their main focus is training for corrections officials, including probation and parole officers, rather than for either state governments and oversight entities, or education, or the general public. I don't like to quote them because 1. I'm not even sure from their site if they are technically a 501-c non-profit or not. I don't know how much of their funding comes from the DoJ and how much from other sources. 2. They tend to give raw figures without breaking them down into sexual and non-sexual repeat offenses. 3. They make a number of ambiguous statements on their main website and in their publications (i.e. frequently talking about short term and longer term without defining how many years those are). Their publications reference studies, rather than being, themselves studies.
Un-nua! Not me! I'm not going into the blue room until someone tells me all the little jelly things that poke you in the spine and take over your brain are gone.
This isn't about cowardice. The Democrats will easily sweep both houses and the presidency, and then they will have all the POWER the republicans have lovingly accumulated for them. Why fight that?
Wars are usually over general stupidity on at least one side. The nation that starts a war most frequently loses, in part because their government has made repeated miscalculations and miss-estimations, and they continue the same pattern through the actual war. Those mistakes do often reflect resource problems, i.e. the government screws up their economy, unemployment increases, inflation increases, the populace gets increasingly shrill, and so grabbing someone else's resources looks like a way out. Then the same idiots that 'misunderestimated' the impact of their last round of decisions 'misunderestimate' the resources they will have to burn trying to seize others, the chance of failure, and just how personally the other nation(s) will take it.
Even worse, I know of victims who just haven't gotten over all sorts of things. I know a man who won't drive a car, because he suffered relatively minor injuries in a car wreck over 20 years ago. He will ride with someone, but says driving is too traumatic.
Ideally, we want rape victims to get over it and on with their lives, and that's not going to happen if we, as a society, tell them no one ever gets over it. Maybe some people don't ever fully recover, but even some of those people sure cope a lot better than others. The support mechanisms to help more victims do that well are underfunded and undersupported in non-financial senses.
Also, has anyone ever noticed that the same people who claim victims never 'get over it', that claim that rapists or molesters never get over their problem either? And that all those kids who get molested always grow up to become molesters?
There were several studies that showed most molestors don't repeat, especially if given therapy in prison. Both US and Canadian versions looked at repeat arrest rates a full 10 years after the prisoner was released, and followed thousands of convicts over a decade or more of criminal acts and sentencing. Studies that ran 20 to 30 years total, that followed in some cases literally ever person convicted of rape or molestation in an entire state, and that carefully broke down their numbers by age of victim, gender orientation, ethnicity, IQ, and medical evaluation of treatment, have uniformly shown repeat rates less than for bank robbery or homicide, and repeatedly shown rates getting much lower with therapy.
For a while in the 1990s, there were some well credentialed people who were reporting some odd findings that might have supported homeopathy. This is described in brief on this webpage (#4).
who settled the question to at least my satisfaction (No it doesn't work).
However, the best explanation for homeopathic results left involves the placebo effect.
If you actually went to the first link I provided, then you may have noticed that the very first of the 13 things that do not make sense is our explanation of the placebo effect. There's a very strange flaw in the whole placebo model. This is why there's a need for crackpottery. Here, responsible science can say that homeopathy doesn't work, but it turns out there's a need to be very cautious in explaining why homeopathy sometimes appears to work. Justified confidence in the argument against homeopathy itself has tended to lead to much more than justified confidence in explaining why some people still believe in homeopathy.
in a geographically large country such as Australia, the US, or Canada, the wind is always blowing somewhere.
Because transmitting power over very long distances, and wasting the majority of it pushing the smaller part to its goal, didn't contribute to the current problem, and we should keep doing it, right?
You make a lot of good points. Yes the current plans involve who is retaining or expanding political power, often more than any considerations of physical power generation. Some types of resources lend themselves to political domination much more than others. Oil and Uranium are two that do.
Further, I agree wind has good potential to be a fast switch source similar to hydro. Yes, and nuclear doesn't lend itself to fast switch at all, at least in its current emphasis. The best prospective nuclear designs, i.e. pebble bed, are going to be much better at replacing coal and oil plants than any other sources.
Still, the 'red herring' opinion ignores a very important, indeed fundamental point - wasting huge portions of generated power to cross continental distances is such a serious part of the reason we have a mess on our collective hands, that it should always matter a great deal to the final opinion. No solution that treats typical 1,000 km + transmission losses as a minor consequence is going to be a good solution.
I hate to use an "All or Every", but every single person I have heard claim people should be able to follow the no voice-over version, without a single exception so far, has read quite a bit of serious SF. Not watched Star Trek, not seen other SF films, not read Tolkien or Steven King, but read real SF, and specifically hard SF by people such as A. C. Clarke, Larry Niven, or Alfred Bester. Personally, I rate Blade Runner as somewhat superior to 2001, much superior to CE3K, and like the 'no happy endings, no voice over' cuts better too, but I also know what I brought to the first viewing was statistically anomalous, and I'm still waiting for someone to say they had no real SF fluency, saw the film first in the no voice-over version, and either liked it or understood it.
Let's see. ORNL's phishing attacks began OCT 29th, a bit more than a month ago. over 1,100 distinct attacks resulted in possibly as many as 11 persons biting (a less than 1% failure rate for what began as a social engineering scam, although it appears it also involved attempts to directly infiltrate the machines). Data released included no classified information at all, but may well have included Social Security numbers and/or DOB's of some visitors to the lab (not regular employees. The only database that appears to have been compromised contained only information on visitors, but there were some SSNs and dates of birth on file in it, so it should be assumed the intruder got that data). This one database included information going back to 1990 (not 1999), and as recent as 2004. More recent visitor data was compartmentalized from this older data, apparently successfully.
The source of the information used to craft the phishing attack e-mails? According to ORNL Director Thom Mason, in an interview Dec 7th, a database from Los Alamos was compromised earlier in the year, and provided the names and inside details used to lend authenticity to the new round of spurious e-mails used on ORNL. Los Alamos notified employees of this intrusion on Nov 4th (according to Kevin Roark at LA). In August of this year, it was revealed that the LANL had released sensitive nuclear research data by e-mail.
So, Los Alamos could have been subjected to a new round of attacks, beginning near or just before the time of ORNL's, and could have responded very quickly this time (i.e. the few days between OCT 29th and NOV 4th). Alternately, the phishers could have used information obtained in the August LA attacks to craft the Oak Ridge attacks. I'd submit it's more likely that they worked on the new wave of attacks for a month or so than just a few days, but it's not certain. What is certain though is that the data in August included classified information specifically relating to nuclear weapons.
My daughter was diagnosed with ADHD and treated with Ritalin for a number of years. We eventually took her off it, against the school system's collective advice, and her grades and behavior improved remarkably, and she proved to be quite able to control and motivate herself. I question whether the diagnosis was ever really correct, but assuming it was, I'd like to add the following incident.
Daughter was 9, and hiking in the Great Smoky Mountains. Daughter pointed, and whispered "See that deer?" We looked, puzzled. Daughter: "That deer on the hill - no not that hill, the hill behind the other hill behind that hill." Focused 12x binoculars right where she pointed. Yep, there was a deer there, laying down in high grass, about 2 1/2 miles away. With binoculars, you could see just her head and neck. Daughter "She's pregnant!". Deer stood up, waddled a few feet - appeared either preggers or seriously overweight. Asked daughter "Was she standing up when you first saw her?". Daughter: "You can tell she's retaining fluids, like mommy did with me!".
We've tested this various ways since. Take my daughter to a place where there are exposed fossils, and she can find dozens of specimens in the time it takes most people to find one. Fill a tabletop with a hundred intricate knick-knacks, glass figurines and such, let her look at it casually for a few seconds, and then leave. Let people rearrange a few items, take a few, or add a few new ones, then let her reenter the room and ask her to describe the changes (Do this without telling her it's a test).
So it's nice you regard the speculation about 'great hunters' as amusing. I've heard it and similar from a lot of observers who think it is often objectively true. Doubtless not in nearly all cases, and yes, I have seen ADHD children whose behavior was eternally annoying to simply intolerable for even the shortest exposures, but given your remarks, you would doubtless be amazed by how often this sort of claim comes up. Many of the reports aren't from parents or guardians of the subjects in question. There's a large subset of ADHD kids that focus quite well to absolutely superlatively in some other settings, just not in school.
While we're at it, a lot of these kids are regarded as needing medication by some female teacher, and any male teachers in the environment disagree, often strongly. Male teachers are 80% less likely to recommend an initial physician's visit than women, and even more likely to have the opinion that the child needs an outlet for his or her energies more than medication. Guess which gender was historically likely to be leading a hunting party?
In my daughter's case, there is only one group of people who were shown objectively to be wrong. That's the teaching staff who repeatedly warned that her behavior would only worsen if she was taken off Ritalin, who were 180 degrees off axis. The exceptional 7th grade math teacher who saw her at a midnight public astronomy workshop, and said, "If she's like this when she hasn't had a pill since noon, get her off the pills and she can skip bonehead math and be learning calculus by her junior year." was apparently right. The people who dealt with her in the summer that year, and were offering her chances to volunteer at a local museum were right (and sad that their insurance wouldn't let them offer an apprenticeship to a child with her diagnosis). Outside of school, we saw very little ostracism, either by other children or adults. Sure there was some, she's a geek of the old block after all.
I live fairly near the Oak Ridge (TN) area. The National Labs there have done the same sort of work as Los Alamos since both sites were founded in the 40's. Contracts keep tending to go preferentially to Los Alamos - it currently gets roughly 4 times the government dollars overall, 5 times the spending on specifically Nuclear Deterrent related research, and is getting over 10 times the historical preservation funding to preserve its historic buildings. (That's just from the public record, without taking black budget spending into account. I don't know if that distorts the figures or not, obviously).
The Oak Ridge labs safety and security records are both far superior to Los Alamos. (While neither location has a perfect record, even non-serious rated incidents at ORNL have averaged many years apart. There has never been a security incident involving the ORNL facilities that didn't end up with the FBI at least knowing exactly what information was compromised, who did it, and who got it in the end, while there are three incidents on record for LA that no investigator can tell the congressional oversight committee just what may have been stolen, if they are confident they found everyone who did it or not, or if a particular hostile foreign government may possibly have ended up getting the info.).
There's also the Argonne labs in the Chicago area. Arguably, if there's some reason not to transfer more of LAs work to OR, they are also a better prospect if the US really cares about security. Los Alamos has had several opportunities to clean up their act - the problems are apparently systemic, and nothing short of major funding losses seems at all likely to motivate them at this point.
Way to misinterpret! You were just looking for a chance to say something vicious, even when it's in response to a complement. The British legal system is designed to keep lawsuits focused more on the party primarily at fault. This community is proposing something that may help do just that, by keeping some guilty parties from using the "but its a computer -they're infallible!" distraction until the data is actually brought up to at least acceptable accuracy. That's smart. Not cynical or sardonic 'smart', but good, honest, authentic smart.
Still, I will gladly never complement the UK again, since that seems to be what you want. Self-hate much?
This being slashdot, I'm expecting lots of people to post either agreeing that a few road signs are all that's needed, or some sort of opposite position, like hide the signs behind bushes and then ticket the hell out of the truckers.
The real problem is, for every trucker that actually is clueless and 'innocently' relies totally on the GPS info, there's another one who has heard the road is too narrow and difficult for trucks, but will try it anyway, and then claim he never heard any other driver say differently. The ones that will lie like hell about having foreknowledge are also the ones who will claim they made the decision to go that way based only on GPS info, and they assumed the GPS wouldn't mislead them. They may well claim that their dispatcher didn't say anything either, to shield their firm from potential liability, and try to make it look like the gadjet is the real source of the whole problem.
Now what happens if the truck didn't just clip a historic building or two (Which are pence a dozen in the UK), but, e.g., ran over a kid?
This is really about the difference in UK and US law. In the US, there are plenty of precedents that let the child's parents sue the trucker's firm, the GPS maker, or whomever has the deepest pockets. In the UK, there's much less ability to extend liability to someone only peripherally involved. A tangled mess of a case, with lots of arguments about just who is responsible for what percentage of total damages, tends to result in much more modest settlements there. One thing both locations share is that all too often average people tend to assume a computer based system doesn't make mistakes.
This means the town may be playing it smart - take away the GPS info, and the driver has to justify his decision based on paper maps, talking with the corporate dispatcher, or some other source of info, and if that's not a computer, the driver can't weasel out of much by claiming he assumed the source of info was infallible.
Right, plus they aren't making the sort of profits they saw when CDs first came out and a lot of people upgraded their old record collections to CDs. Even if they could force everyone to both stick with CDs and buy them honestly, their profits would still be lower than their peak years.
Your definition is closer to the one used by most military intelligence types than most definitions, but that's just the problem. Normally, efficiency in military parlance is a measure of how well the unit accomplishes its missions. Goals such as minimizing collateral damage, preventing all friendly fire incidents, preserving existing international relationships, and avoiding loss of life or health among troops are ALL supposed to be incorporated at various decision points if civilian oversight doesn't specifically override them. Goals such as following the Geneva conventions are included, and these are not supposed to be countermanded even by the highest levels of civilian oversight.
Technically, killing the enemy isn't a goal - defeating him is. Of course this reduces to killing in many cases, but by no means even nearly all. In the Desert Storm era, and the early stages of this war there was a lot of quite satisfactory victory by mass surrender, and in general, the whole area of Psy-ops is about bloodless victories.
If the military internally has a problem, it's that third tier or lower goals such as reducing events with negative propaganda potential can end up pretty far down the checklist for some commanders and very high for others. (Whatever you think of the morality of torture, allowing the prison abuses was operationally stupid in that it was a result of rating propaganda potential way too low, while giving a blanket order never to stop and search any Mullah, for example, would be putting it too high.). First tier goals such as winning battles, and second tier such as conserving material and avoiding unnecessary damage to civilians, infrastructure, and culture, usually get dealt with pretty darned well.
There are a high percentage of civilian overseers who don't get the idea that efficiency is a measure of overall success by at least a dozen criteria and often more, and think it's reducible to a simple measure of bodycounts. I rate the percentages of congresscritters and DOD staffers who are totally clueless here much higher than the percentage of incompetent field commanders, based on face to face meetings with some substantial numbers of all sorts during both the Bush 1 and Clinton administrations, and judging by public remarks I have seen for Rumsfeld, Rice, and others since I got out, it's gotten worse.
Slashdot Mirror
In this case, the files that attracted the attention of the techs allegedly had names that sounded pornographic and that also included something about ages, like "age 13". (See the link given by the poster, this is in there). .DLL issue, and I open Explorer, with no intent to go anywhere but straight to the Windows directory and then Windows/System, and there's a folder off the root with a name like 'My Pony Pron', I can't help knowing it's there. I literally can't read slow enough to just scan a list in alphabetical order and only read the first character until I get to the W's. I read mirror reversed or upside down just as fast.
By other accounts, the tech watched the first bit of one video, saw an at least partially nude child, and then became convinced the material was hard core pornography when he saw a nude adult enter the scene. He stopped the video at that frame and called the police. This sounds like the tech took steps to verify that the video wasn't some innocuous 'baby on a bear skin rug' footage, and that he wouldn't be wasting the law's time or getting an innocent man falsely accused with a charge that can taint a person's reputation even if its dismissed. The courts are likely to view this sort of thing as responsible intent. The argument is the tech didn't really start searching around until he became aware of a possible crime just in the course of his normal practice. If he'd done that for files named "College girl threeway" or something perfectly legal sounding, he might have been snooping, but with "age 13-14" type cues in the titles, it's a different legal issue entirely.
I'm a bit concerned about inadvertently finding myself in the tech's situation. I do a certain amount of PC repair, and my reading speed is very fast, so if I look at say a list of 50 files in a directory for an instant, I've effectively read it. Show me a page with a lurid phrase like "Blow up the federal building" or "kiddee snuff film" in a mess of otherwise innocuous text, and my eye will be drawn to it within a fraction of a second, and by the time I've blinked, I've read the entire paragraph around it. So, to take a common tech troubleshooting situation, if I'm fixing a
Relativistic mass doesn't matter. The threshold for a supernova is entirely a question of rest mass. Otherwise, whether a nova had occurred at all, or not would depend on the frame of reference, and not just when it occurred. Now if it was moving so fast relative to us that significant time dilation occurred, so that the star could already have been a star when it was ejected, and lived long enough to get that far from a galaxy before it supernovaed, that would indeed be cool. Also pretty obvious, because the post flash time decay curve would also be enormously stretched out, and we'd be thinking it was some universal record breaking gynormous 1,000 solar mass + star until we thought of relativistic dilation.
Galactic center black holes usually have masses of a billion sun-like stars or more, so there's definitely enough energy available to accelerate even the largest known stars (like VV Cephei or VY Canis Majoris) to the hypervelocity category. VV Cephei is about 100 solar masses, and is actually in a binary pair with a large blue-white star that is still on its own main sequence, so it's just the kind of star that could end up in a spectacular post-ejection supernova event if only it and its partner were at the center of our galaxy.
Saint Paul wrote about faith in his letter to the church in Corinth. His argument was (to paraphrase):
Some people are telling you that there is no life after death, and pointing to how people deteriorate with age and illness. But you know that there are people who behave more nobly and humanly with suffering, illness and age, people who gain wisdom as they grow older and frailer, so you have evidence that the spirit is not destroyed by the things that destroy the body - therefore you should believe, because you have evidence you are right!
Plenty of Christians are aware of the differences between believing with or against the preponderance of evidence, believing in the face of contradictory evidence, and believing without any evidence.
It must be wonderful to redefine anything you want and insist no one else can, just so you can win arguments.
My closing question was rhetorical. The point is, we can't afford to dismiss what the Democrats are doing as cowardice, when it is likely motivated much more by power-lust. We have gone pretty damned far down a bad road already, and can't afford many more mistakes about the motivations of those guys taking turns holding the lantern in front of us.
Expanding on what Gandalf did while he was away from the Dwarves and Bilbo, and better tieing the Hobbit to the LotR actually seems like a good thing, if the expansion really focuses on Sauron's temporary occupation of Mirkwood, etc. Jackson could stay pretty accurate to the original, just working off of parts found in the LotR appendices, Tolkien's notes, and the pre WW2 variant text of the Hobbit itself. There's a good story possible that would vary less from the original than his giving the female roles a larger part in LotR. (Something that I didn't mind, but seems to get some people all upset).
The real question is, would this involve a face to face conflict between Gandalf and a (still much weaker) Sauron? Would Sauron be visualized as an EYE or just a dark wraith-like presence? And does Jackson bring in some of the other 4 wizards, or other powers that be in middle earth, or make it a Gandalf solo mission? I'm afraid a 1 on 1, gunslingers in the streets style conflict, mostly involving flashy magic, is the easiest path there.
It's a matter of focus. Paul is for cutting out many departments entirely, such as the Dept. of Education, and the reason he gives is one of constitutionality - i.e. Federal control of highways is an unconstitutional override of states rights to control traffic within their borders. Some of his arguments are questionable on the grounds that the rights involved may belong to somebody else, i.e. sovereign individuals and not states. It's a recipe for Chaos to say that rights have to revert, including the right of the Supreme Court to decide whether the states are the place those rights revert to, or not.
Plus, Ron Paul is talking about areas such as Social Security, Fannie Mae programs, The Federal Reserve, and others in many of his most pushed examples, while the federal government has 17 agencies besides the military allowed to bear arms in the course of their practice. Many of us are more worried about an agency that can shoot us immediately than one that has to go to the police and have us arrested to really abuse us. So if Ron Paul starts out doing what he proposes, he is likely to spend all his political capital before he ever gets to most of the worst problems. Those problems will then use the tendency of things to swing back in the next administration to grow larger yet again just as they are now. We'll see big cuts in Medicare, but only token cuts in the CIA, if that.
Why not waste 25% or 50%? That question was one that helped get us into the mess we are now in. Now here's somebody who still hasn't gotten a clue, proposing 99%. Is it just me? I feel like I've been told I don't understand the issues, by a guy who's just proposed that we fly to the Moon on the backs of giant swans!
Here's a specifically 10 year post release study (State of Ohio's) in PDF
.org, and not directly a .gov site. They are associated with the US Justice Department by a grant, but also with the National Institute of Corrections, and their main focus is training for corrections officials, including probation and parole officers, rather than for either state governments and oversight entities, or education, or the general public. I don't like to quote them because 1. I'm not even sure from their site if they are technically a 501-c non-profit or not. I don't know how much of their funding comes from the DoJ and how much from other sources. 2. They tend to give raw figures without breaking them down into sexual and non-sexual repeat offenses. 3. They make a number of ambiguous statements on their main website and in their publications (i.e. frequently talking about short term and longer term without defining how many years those are). Their publications reference studies, rather than being, themselves studies.
http://www.ojp.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/rsorp94.pdf
If you don't want to read the whole thing, here's the basics:
Base recividism rate was 34% - of that 22.3% was for new crimes, the other 1/3 of the total was for technical violations*. Of the 22.3%, sex offenses were 8%, non-sex offenses were 14.3%
Rapists (of adult victims) had the highest chance of repeating, and intra-family molesters the lowest chances. Extra-family molesters were in the middle. That is again not just for the specific crime they were first charged with, or for a sexually related crime, but for criminal acts in general. Once convicted rapists had a 56% chance of commiting some crime within 10 years, but only 17.5% chance of recommitting rape.
Sex offenders who completed Ohio's basic sex offender programming course had about a 40% lower rate of general repeat offenses, and more than 50% lower chance of specifically sexual offenses.
Note too, this study compared numbers for people who were actually re-sentenced to prison, not just re-arrested. As they pointed out in explaining this, it was very unusual for a prior sex offender charged with a new sex crime to get a non-prison sentence, and presumably more common for a person charged with a non-sexual crime to get a probation only sentence.
This is a scientifically well prepared study. They give the number of cases considered very early, disclose their statistical analysis methods, and discuss possible flaws in their methodology in
the opening section (the opening functions much like a standard scientific paper's abstract. It's longer than an abstract in a typical physic or astronomy paper, but probably quite within norms for a sociology publication.)
*technical violations may include legitimate causes for concern, such as the offender possessing violent or child pornography or hanging around places frequented by children. It is probably fair to add some fraction of these to any real risk assessment, just like it's fair to assume some people didn't get caught. But, in the same way, we should add cases of a prior burglar driving through a posh neighborhood at night or possessing burglary tools in assessing that risk.
Since I posted this, I've noted quite a number of replies. To clarify some of these: CSOM (mentioned below) is the Center for Sex Offender Management. Their website is a
Name another show from 40 years ago that people still talk about and watch. Derp.
Doctor Who (Did I win something?)
Un-nua! Not me! I'm not going into the blue room until someone tells me all the little jelly things that poke you in the spine and take over your brain are gone.
This isn't about cowardice. The Democrats will easily sweep both houses and the presidency, and then they will have all the POWER the republicans have lovingly accumulated for them. Why fight that?
Wars are usually over general stupidity on at least one side. The nation that starts a war most frequently loses, in part because their government has made repeated miscalculations and miss-estimations, and they continue the same pattern through the actual war. Those mistakes do often reflect resource problems, i.e. the government screws up their economy, unemployment increases, inflation increases, the populace gets increasingly shrill, and so grabbing someone else's resources looks like a way out. Then the same idiots that 'misunderestimated' the impact of their last round of decisions 'misunderestimate' the resources they will have to burn trying to seize others, the chance of failure, and just how personally the other nation(s) will take it.
Even worse, I know of victims who just haven't gotten over all sorts of things. I know a man who won't drive a car, because he suffered relatively minor injuries in a car wreck over 20 years ago. He will ride with someone, but says driving is too traumatic.
Ideally, we want rape victims to get over it and on with their lives, and that's not going to happen if we, as a society, tell them no one ever gets over it. Maybe some people don't ever fully recover, but even some of those people sure cope a lot better than others. The support mechanisms to help more victims do that well are underfunded and undersupported in non-financial senses.
Also, has anyone ever noticed that the same people who claim victims never 'get over it', that claim that rapists or molesters never get over their problem either? And that all those kids who get molested always grow up to become molesters?
There were several studies that showed most molestors don't repeat, especially if given therapy in prison. Both US and Canadian versions looked at repeat arrest rates a full 10 years after the prisoner was released, and followed thousands of convicts over a decade or more of criminal acts and sentencing. Studies that ran 20 to 30 years total, that followed in some cases literally ever person convicted of rape or molestation in an entire state, and that carefully broke down their numbers by age of victim, gender orientation, ethnicity, IQ, and medical evaluation of treatment, have uniformly shown repeat rates less than for bank robbery or homicide, and repeatedly shown rates getting much lower with therapy.
For a while in the 1990s, there were some well credentialed people who were reporting some odd findings that might have supported homeopathy. This is described in brief on this webpage (#4).
http://www.sixside.com/13_things_that_do_not_make_sense.htm
Eventually, the argument was tested by James Randi and Horizon:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2002/homeopathy.shtml
who settled the question to at least my satisfaction (No it doesn't work).
However, the best explanation for homeopathic results left involves the placebo effect.
If you actually went to the first link I provided, then you may have noticed that the very first of the 13 things that do not make sense is our explanation of the placebo effect. There's a very strange flaw in the whole placebo model. This is why there's a need for crackpottery. Here, responsible science can say that homeopathy doesn't work, but it turns out there's a need to be very cautious in explaining why homeopathy sometimes appears to work. Justified confidence in the argument against homeopathy itself has tended to lead to much more than justified confidence in explaining why some people still believe in homeopathy.
in a geographically large country such as Australia, the US, or Canada, the wind is always blowing somewhere.
Because transmitting power over very long distances, and wasting the majority of it pushing the smaller part to its goal, didn't contribute to the current problem, and we should keep doing it, right?
You make a lot of good points. Yes the current plans involve who is retaining or expanding political power, often more than any considerations of physical power generation. Some types of resources lend themselves to political domination much more than others. Oil and Uranium are two that do.
Further, I agree wind has good potential to be a fast switch source similar to hydro. Yes, and nuclear doesn't lend itself to fast switch at all, at least in its current emphasis. The best prospective nuclear designs, i.e. pebble bed, are going to be much better at replacing coal and oil plants than any other sources.
Still, the 'red herring' opinion ignores a very important, indeed fundamental point - wasting huge portions of generated power to cross continental distances is such a serious part of the reason we have a mess on our collective hands, that it should always matter a great deal to the final opinion. No solution that treats typical 1,000 km + transmission losses as a minor consequence is going to be a good solution.
I hate to use an "All or Every", but every single person I have heard claim people should be able to follow the no voice-over version, without a single exception so far, has read quite a bit of serious SF. Not watched Star Trek, not seen other SF films, not read Tolkien or Steven King, but read real SF, and specifically hard SF by people such as A. C. Clarke, Larry Niven, or Alfred Bester. Personally, I rate Blade Runner as somewhat superior to 2001, much superior to CE3K, and like the 'no happy endings, no voice over' cuts better too, but I also know what I brought to the first viewing was statistically anomalous, and I'm still waiting for someone to say they had no real SF fluency, saw the film first in the no voice-over version, and either liked it or understood it.
Darnit! I didn't even get to do my Perfidious Albion skit!
Let's see. ORNL's phishing attacks began OCT 29th, a bit more than a month ago. over 1,100 distinct attacks resulted in possibly as many as 11 persons biting (a less than 1% failure rate for what began as a social engineering scam, although it appears it also involved attempts to directly infiltrate the machines). Data released included no classified information at all, but may well have included Social Security numbers and/or DOB's of some visitors to the lab (not regular employees. The only database that appears to have been compromised contained only information on visitors, but there were some SSNs and dates of birth on file in it, so it should be assumed the intruder got that data). This one database included information going back to 1990 (not 1999), and as recent as 2004. More recent visitor data was compartmentalized from this older data, apparently successfully.
The source of the information used to craft the phishing attack e-mails? According to ORNL Director Thom Mason, in an interview Dec 7th, a database from Los Alamos was compromised earlier in the year, and provided the names and inside details used to lend authenticity to the new round of spurious e-mails used on ORNL. Los Alamos notified employees of this intrusion on Nov 4th (according to Kevin Roark at LA). In August of this year, it was revealed that the LANL had released sensitive nuclear research data by e-mail.
So, Los Alamos could have been subjected to a new round of attacks, beginning near or just before the time of ORNL's, and could have responded very quickly this time (i.e. the few days between OCT 29th and NOV 4th). Alternately, the phishers could have used information obtained in the August LA attacks to craft the Oak Ridge attacks. I'd submit it's more likely that they worked on the new wave of attacks for a month or so than just a few days, but it's not certain. What is certain though is that the data in August included classified information specifically relating to nuclear weapons.
My daughter was diagnosed with ADHD and treated with Ritalin for a number of years. We eventually took her off it, against the school system's collective advice, and her grades and behavior improved remarkably, and she proved to be quite able to control and motivate herself. I question whether the diagnosis was ever really correct, but assuming it was, I'd like to add the following incident.
Daughter was 9, and hiking in the Great Smoky Mountains. Daughter pointed, and whispered "See that deer?" We looked, puzzled. Daughter: "That deer on the hill - no not that hill, the hill behind the other hill behind that hill." Focused 12x binoculars right where she pointed. Yep, there was a deer there, laying down in high grass, about 2 1/2 miles away. With binoculars, you could see just her head and neck. Daughter "She's pregnant!". Deer stood up, waddled a few feet - appeared either preggers or seriously overweight. Asked daughter "Was she standing up when you first saw her?". Daughter: "You can tell she's retaining fluids, like mommy did with me!".
We've tested this various ways since. Take my daughter to a place where there are exposed fossils, and she can find dozens of specimens in the time it takes most people to find one. Fill a tabletop with a hundred intricate knick-knacks, glass figurines and such, let her look at it casually for a few seconds, and then leave. Let people rearrange a few items, take a few, or add a few new ones, then let her reenter the room and ask her to describe the changes (Do this without telling her it's a test).
So it's nice you regard the speculation about 'great hunters' as amusing. I've heard it and similar from a lot of observers who think it is often objectively true. Doubtless not in nearly all cases, and yes, I have seen ADHD children whose behavior was eternally annoying to simply intolerable for even the shortest exposures, but given your remarks, you would doubtless be amazed by how often this sort of claim comes up. Many of the reports aren't from parents or guardians of the subjects in question. There's a large subset of ADHD kids that focus quite well to absolutely superlatively in some other settings, just not in school.
While we're at it, a lot of these kids are regarded as needing medication by some female teacher, and any male teachers in the environment disagree, often strongly. Male teachers are 80% less likely to recommend an initial physician's visit than women, and even more likely to have the opinion that the child needs an outlet for his or her energies more than medication. Guess which gender was historically likely to be leading a hunting party?
In my daughter's case, there is only one group of people who were shown objectively to be wrong. That's the teaching staff who repeatedly warned that her behavior would only worsen if she was taken off Ritalin, who were 180 degrees off axis. The exceptional 7th grade math teacher who saw her at a midnight public astronomy workshop, and said, "If she's like this when she hasn't had a pill since noon, get her off the pills and she can skip bonehead math and be learning calculus by her junior year." was apparently right. The people who dealt with her in the summer that year, and were offering her chances to volunteer at a local museum were right (and sad that their insurance wouldn't let them offer an apprenticeship to a child with her diagnosis). Outside of school, we saw very little ostracism, either by other children or adults. Sure there was some, she's a geek of the old block after all.
I live fairly near the Oak Ridge (TN) area. The National Labs there have done the same sort of work as Los Alamos since both sites were founded in the 40's. Contracts keep tending to go preferentially to Los Alamos - it currently gets roughly 4 times the government dollars overall, 5 times the spending on specifically Nuclear Deterrent related research, and is getting over 10 times the historical preservation funding to preserve its historic buildings. (That's just from the public record, without taking black budget spending into account. I don't know if that distorts the figures or not, obviously).
The Oak Ridge labs safety and security records are both far superior to Los Alamos. (While neither location has a perfect record, even non-serious rated incidents at ORNL have averaged many years apart. There has never been a security incident involving the ORNL facilities that didn't end up with the FBI at least knowing exactly what information was compromised, who did it, and who got it in the end, while there are three incidents on record for LA that no investigator can tell the congressional oversight committee just what may have been stolen, if they are confident they found everyone who did it or not, or if a particular hostile foreign government may possibly have ended up getting the info.).
There's also the Argonne labs in the Chicago area. Arguably, if there's some reason not to transfer more of LAs work to OR, they are also a better prospect if the US really cares about security. Los Alamos has had several opportunities to clean up their act - the problems are apparently systemic, and nothing short of major funding losses seems at all likely to motivate them at this point.
Way to misinterpret! You were just looking for a chance to say something vicious, even when it's in response to a complement. The British legal system is designed to keep lawsuits focused more on the party primarily at fault. This community is proposing something that may help do just that, by keeping some guilty parties from using the "but its a computer -they're infallible!" distraction until the data is actually brought up to at least acceptable accuracy. That's smart. Not cynical or sardonic 'smart', but good, honest, authentic smart.
Still, I will gladly never complement the UK again, since that seems to be what you want. Self-hate much?
This being slashdot, I'm expecting lots of people to post either agreeing that a few road signs are all that's needed, or some sort of opposite position, like hide the signs behind bushes and then ticket the hell out of the truckers.
The real problem is, for every trucker that actually is clueless and 'innocently' relies totally on the GPS info, there's another one who has heard the road is too narrow and difficult for trucks, but will try it anyway, and then claim he never heard any other driver say differently. The ones that will lie like hell about having foreknowledge are also the ones who will claim they made the decision to go that way based only on GPS info, and they assumed the GPS wouldn't mislead them. They may well claim that their dispatcher didn't say anything either, to shield their firm from potential liability, and try to make it look like the gadjet is the real source of the whole problem.
Now what happens if the truck didn't just clip a historic building or two (Which are pence a dozen in the UK), but, e.g., ran over a kid?
This is really about the difference in UK and US law. In the US, there are plenty of precedents that let the child's parents sue the trucker's firm, the GPS maker, or whomever has the deepest pockets. In the UK, there's much less ability to extend liability to someone only peripherally involved. A tangled mess of a case, with lots of arguments about just who is responsible for what percentage of total damages, tends to result in much more modest settlements there. One thing both locations share is that all too often average people tend to assume a computer based system doesn't make mistakes.
This means the town may be playing it smart - take away the GPS info, and the driver has to justify his decision based on paper maps, talking with the corporate dispatcher, or some other source of info, and if that's not a computer, the driver can't weasel out of much by claiming he assumed the source of info was infallible.
Right, plus they aren't making the sort of profits they saw when CDs first came out and a lot of people upgraded their old record collections to CDs. Even if they could force everyone to both stick with CDs and buy them honestly, their profits would still be lower than their peak years.
Your definition is closer to the one used by most military intelligence types than most definitions, but that's just the problem. Normally, efficiency in military parlance is a measure of how well the unit accomplishes its missions. Goals such as minimizing collateral damage, preventing all friendly fire incidents, preserving existing international relationships, and avoiding loss of life or health among troops are ALL supposed to be incorporated at various decision points if civilian oversight doesn't specifically override them. Goals such as following the Geneva conventions are included, and these are not supposed to be countermanded even by the highest levels of civilian oversight.
Technically, killing the enemy isn't a goal - defeating him is. Of course this reduces to killing in many cases, but by no means even nearly all. In the Desert Storm era, and the early stages of this war there was a lot of quite satisfactory victory by mass surrender, and in general, the whole area of Psy-ops is about bloodless victories.
If the military internally has a problem, it's that third tier or lower goals such as reducing events with negative propaganda potential can end up pretty far down the checklist for some commanders and very high for others. (Whatever you think of the morality of torture, allowing the prison abuses was operationally stupid in that it was a result of rating propaganda potential way too low, while giving a blanket order never to stop and search any Mullah, for example, would be putting it too high.). First tier goals such as winning battles, and second tier such as conserving material and avoiding unnecessary damage to civilians, infrastructure, and culture, usually get dealt with pretty darned well.
There are a high percentage of civilian overseers who don't get the idea that efficiency is a measure of overall success by at least a dozen criteria and often more, and think it's reducible to a simple measure of bodycounts. I rate the percentages of congresscritters and DOD staffers who are totally clueless here much higher than the percentage of incompetent field commanders, based on face to face meetings with some substantial numbers of all sorts during both the Bush 1 and Clinton administrations, and judging by public remarks I have seen for Rumsfeld, Rice, and others since I got out, it's gotten worse.