Don't think so. First problem is you would never know who the house player is, or if there is one, and it could change constantly as players come and go. You would never have that many hands to analyze.
Again randomizing when you do it, what player is doing it, and picking any random winning hand out of the undealt cards would be impossible to spot with statistical analysis. If you did spot some trend your chances of making a case out of would be somewhere between slim and none. You start complaining you just look like a loser with a case of sour grapes.
First the caveat I wouldn't touch internet poker with a ten foot pole so I know not of what I speak, but I find it hard to believe that anyone would let anyone save every card dealt, so I assume all you can save is what you saw when you played right? If you could see all the cards you could analyze the secret behavior of players which would be bad. If you are only seeing the cards that were shown in the game I would think your ability to do statistical analysis would be weak.
I can really see no possible way you could tell if the deal was altered as long as they decide to cheat selectively and with some randomness. I can see you not wanting to stack the deck at the beginning because you might be able to detect that but every so often hitting a button that says house wants to win this hand, and letting an algorithm pick any random undealt card that would make that so would be nearly impossible to detect.
The challenging AI algorithm in this business is figuring out the optimal strategy for setting the hook (i.e. you want the sucke...player to win a lot early so they get hooked, then slowly turn them in to losers, and mix in an occasional win to keep them from giving up as you slowly break them.
I would agree there probably isn't much motivation for big reputable sites to cheat assuming they are making a killing already. What mix do they use to make their money and how do you know how much they make and how. As for a third party audit of the software, that is useless unless they have the power to secretly watch the server from inside, constantly checksum the binaries, watch everything on every server etc. Sounds like a tactic to make the sucke...players feel good about it without actually insuring its up and up.
I just can't see anything that would stop a site that was in a financial crunch or if owners decide they want to make a killing and cash out from cheating.
Poker is one of the few worth while gambling games, if you are good at it, because you are playing against other people instead of a house with the odds stacked in its favor. It would seem to me if you do it online you give up that assurance and are back to a game where the house can set the percentage they take.
Maybe thats because its impossible to catch the people running the servers cheating unless they are completely clueless or you have a regulatory body going in and scrutinizing their software and operations which I doubt there is especially for off shore sites.
The house software controls the deal. They can write software where they press a button and the program finds the undealt cards they need for the house player to win a pot they want, or assuming its well written software tell them it can't be done this hand without looking like its cheating. If you have your pick of the undealt cards you can arrange to win most hands.
It boggles the mind anyone would think they could catch a minimally well written piece of software cheating for the people who control the server and all its software.
A big chunk of NASA's budget goes in to the pockets of aerospace contractors, who are in fact a huge and powerful lobby group, Boeing and Lockheed in particular. I wager its the only reason the Shuttle and ISS haven't been axed, and why Bush is proposing going to the Moon and Mars. Well... there is a second reason, he needed every vote he could get to win Florida and and killing the space program could have cost him the election in 2004.
Boeing and Lockheed's NASA take is rather small compared to the tens of billions they rake in on DOD and intelligence satellite contracts but its still something.
Perhaps NASA's budget problems are that it does a lot of great research in everything but space flight. The one thing that is thier charter seems to be the one thing they can't seem to do well anymore at least as far as the manned space program goes. Perhaps NASA should be turned in to a materials, satellite and robotics research agency and let someone else do the launchers and manned space flight part.
I'm amazed anyone would play for anything resembling money online. Bots are just one of many ways for you to be scammed. I assume the big online sites either refrain from cheating or are doing it selectively to keep the sucke.... players coming back. I can see playing it for fun or penny ante online but anything beyond that...
At least in Vegas there is some oversight of the gaming tables and the one armed bandits. I'm inclined to think whomever controls the server on an online site can skim off as much as they feel like, they just need to keep it under control so people win enough to keep coming back since they need butts in the seats. How exactly do you know one of the players in a game isn't the house and they aren't clicking a mouse to pick the cards they need to win a big hand.
There is a reason poker is structured the way it is in meat space. You need to know you aren't getting dealt from a stacked deck, how exactly do you assure that online. Pocker is a marvelous game, and exercise in AI, but bad thing to play for money online.
Well the Republican's have devised a strategy for your problem with disruptive and unmotivated kids in public schools. Its called "No Child Left Behind". The name is classic big lie.
As I understand it, as an outsider, they are compelling public schools to take all children and they now MUST make them all learn and pass a certain testing level whether they have any motivation, aptitude or intellect. The deck is especially stacked against public schools in areas with a lot of low achievers (i.e. closely correlated to low income and some minorities), maybe a few will succeed but most will ultimately fail. Two things will happen. Schools will either:
- Cheat, in particular encourage people to dropout who are bringing down their test scores, which "Leaves Some Kids Behind" - The schools will fail to raise scores and be declared failed schools. The Republicans will then throw open the doors to transferring all the public funding to private schools.
The second case has a couple neat benefits:
- Private schools can have prayer and teach a heavy dose of religion
- Private schools don't have to take students they don't want, all the ones who are disruptive, have no interest in, aptitude for or motivation to learn. This is why private schools are insured of outperforming public schools, they are inherently selective.
There is irony in this system like many Republican schemes. They call it "No Child Left Behind" when in fact the long term plan is to leave behind all the kids who can't make the jump to private, especially religious, private schools. All the good students will end up in publicly funded private schools. All the rest end up smoldering ruins of public schools with no funding or as dead ender drop outs.
Its a brilliant strategy on the Bush administration. They build great publicly funded private schools for the kids that can get in them, and they demolish the church/state separation problem which prevents them from drilling religion in to kids in public schools. I'm amazed the Dems went along with it. I think they did because the Bush administration promised a massive increase in education funding which the Dems love, but the Republicans for the most part didn't deliver.
The Houston school system which was the Texas showcase on which "No Child Left Behind" was based and where former Education Secretary Rod Paige hailed from, actually produced their spectacular results by encouraging all the failing and disruptive students to drop out, and then forged the records to show them as transfers, or anything but drop outs. Lo and behold they produced great test score improvements, concealed their high drop out rate and looked like a raging success.
As for teaching history in schools you really don't need to teach history to kids unless you want them to be informed citizens, or future world or national leaders. I'm pretty sure political leaders would prefer most Americans are ignorant of history, politics, geography and world affairs. They are a lot easier to manipulate that way. Most people in fact have no use for history in real life, they would rather their politicians tell them what to think. For example if you have people ignorant of history, geography, world affairs its easier to con them in to going along when you want to start a war based on a bunch of lies.
Isn't that a sweet concept. You can inject a known dangerous substance in to millions of people and as long as its hard to prove that its causing damage big company is in the clear. When injecting Mercury in to young children I think the burden of proof should have been on the vaccine company to prove beyond a shadow of doubt it was safe, which they can't, rather than on the public to prove its dangerous, which they are doing their best to do. Simple fact, Thimerasol should have never been put on the market in the first place. I need to do me some research and find out which company though it was a good idea and profited from it.
The public probably used to think the FDA's job was to make sure dangerous things don't get on the market but I think recent events indicate that was naive, because the FDA like all aspects of government is being sold to the highest bidder.
Uh yea but how many autistic people are there today because they waited until people noticed a public health catastrophe and activists had to start lobbying and pressuring to force the change. They also probably removed it during an environment when there was still a huge potential liability. With tort reform and the liability risk gone they have little reason to make the change if the change would impact their profitability more than the liability risk does. Unless there is social responsibility in the board room or regulatory intervention executives are going to make the decision that is most profitable because its their duty to shareholders. So again if backlash or liability is more expensive than making the change they will make the change. If the liability risk is not there, they can contain public backlash and the change is expensive you run the risk they wont make the change even though its the right thing to do.
It also doesn't give me any confidence that a 6 year old can still get dosed with Mercury. Nothing magic happens on your siz birthday where you acquire immunity to mercury poisoning. Why exactly wouldn't the FDA have banned it out right in everything, it was used in contact lens solution, cosmetics, etc. where its going to migrate in to your body.
The other obvious problem is if they were willing to do something that misguided with Mercury, what ELSE might they be putting in stuff they inject or otherwise introduce in to people that is clearly dangerous. The problem here is the real thorough testing regime is inject it in millions of people for decades and wait until there is widespread damage to people health and people start whistleblowing... and then they remedy it.
The Vioxx case clear shows the FDA has abandoned its watchdog role and replaced it with one where they are partnering with drug companies to enhance their profitability. The testing is exhaustive and expensive but indications are whenever the drug company has billions riding on success they will suppress and ignore bad results.
The biochemistry of the human body is vastly to complicated to be cavalierly introducing foreign compounds in to it. For compounds where there is a clear benefit that you can argue the benefit outweighs the risk you can justify it. Problem is drug companies are in such rabid pursuit of there next big multibillion dollar drug they are conning people in to ingest things where the benefit simply doesn't justify the risk, for example overprescribing ADD treatments to sedate problem kids, treating depression in kids with drugs that cause suicidal tendencies, Viagra which is a lifestyle drug for most taking it, or the the other day I saw a new add for a treatment for... what was it... active leg syndrome which according to the drug company inflicts 1 in 10.
Well quite a few American parents were put off by vaccines, especially MMR(Measles, Mumps, Rueblla) in particular, when it was discovered the manufacturers were putting a preservative in it called Thimerosal. Thimerosal is a compound containing Mercury and most people with a clue would have reservations about injecting Mercury in to little children, though apparently the vaccine manufacturers were OK with it. Now they and batteries of scientists and doctors on their side deny there is any link between this and rising autism rates among vaccinated children but at this point you can't really trust them, because if there is ever a definitive link proven to Autism their liability is going to be massive. Fortunately for them Autism is a poorly understood mental disorder so it will be really hard to prove a definitive link.
Though hopefully you can see why more and more people are having reservations about vaccines especially for diseases largely eradicated in the west.
WiMAX is such cool technology but that is exactly the problem. If the license falls in to the hands of greedy assholes who charge you through the nose to access it... like... oh... I don't know.... American cell phone companies... its going to end up sucking. At that point the only thing in its favor is the infrastructure costs are fairly low which means either prices might be a bit lower or the greedy asshole's profit margins will be higher.
WiMax is screaming out for cities to license it for their areas and provide wireless Internet access as a no charge, or low charge, public service.
Unless that happens, which is very unlikely in any country were for profit corporations dominate over government, I predict 802.11 will have a long and flourishing life simply because of the freedom it offers. You just wish it more range and more available frequencies.
Dude you just don't get it, no one cares that you hate Canada. If you love the U.S. so much live, there, shut the hell up and let Canada go its merry way. Like I said I don't care where you live, unless it happens to be next to me at which point I would move because you talk like a psycho with a gun fetish.
The extent of me caring about this whole waste of time thread was the extent to which you were willing to lie, and worse, obviously lie, about Canada to satiate your obsessive hatred for it. Get a clue, you live in the U.S. now, get over it and move on before it eats you up more than it obviously already has.
In this paragraph all you proved is you fell for the right wing propaganda, hook, line and sinker. Clinton's affairs counted for zip in the cosmic scheme of things. Again it was the ONLY thing they managed to pin on him after eight years, and hundreds of millions in taxpayer subsidized, witch hunting. You spend a hundred million going through George W.'s past with a fine tooth comb he wouldn't fare nearly so well. Its mostly a tribute to how tasteless the right win was in publishing in graph detail every aspect of a private sexual affair so school children could be subjected to it and the religious right could be pumped in to a frenzy. It was just character assassination and it obviously worked on the weak minded like yourself.
"He also is a pretty useless human being with no moral compass nor is his life a model for anyone."
Please explain to me again how it was the George W. spent the first 40 years of his life being a drunk, doing cocaine, ducking his guard duty, and chasing every skirt in sight but you consider him a pillar of morality. Is it because he decided he wanted to be President, quit drinking and claimed he found Jesus so you forgive him all past transgressions. Again very weak minded on your part to fall for his facade.
"I find him to be an honest human being,"
Every fact completely flies in the face of that. He's lied about his drug use, he lied about his guard record, his administration has been a non stop lie fest. Where exactly did you develop the delusion he was "honest", other than because he, his handlers and his TV ads told you he was. Geez man, wake up think for yourself for a change.
"In all of your comments you fall back on other dictators/problems, so what your saying is there are lots of bad guys doing bad things so why bother?"
No it classic conservatism. Conservatives oppose the U.S. playing nanny to the world, and spending our tax dollars and getting our citizens killed trying to rearrange sovereign governments to our liking. Its a never ending exercise in futility. Since the U.S. hasn't been able to resist this temptation for most of the last century its installed more bad governments and dictators than its removed. This leading to the obvious conclusion we would be better off staying out of it until and unless it actually impinges on American security which the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Afghanistan did.
"Don't get me wrong, I don't think this is America's fight... it should be a worldwide front against tyrrany and opression"
Thats nice because in the eyes of most of the world the U.S. has been a leading supporter and purveyor of tyranny and oppression for the last 100 years. Read about the Philippine-American war, a war American schools don't teach their kids about much, but which taught a lot of lessons about being an occupying power like we are in Iraq. Or Google TPAJAX the CIA sponsored coup in Iran that replaced a sovereign government with the Shah of Iran, a ruthless dictator rivalling Saddam, and which happened to transfer Iran's oil field contracts in to the hands of American oil companies. The Iranian people hated the Shah so bad they opted for a repressive Islamic regime over him and being a U.S. puppet, and hate the U.S. to this day. Interestingly it appears the Iranians were the real winners of the Iraq war, one they conned Bush and Co. in to by sending Chalibi to the White House to lie about WMD's.
Yes it is because you've never had a clean break with your monarchist past.
The founding fathers were among the first to throw off the yoke of one corrupt inbred royal family branches of which ruled most of the continent. For some reason Brits to this day still cling to that anachronism. You gradually whittle they royals in to irrelevancy but to this day you are still Tories at heart. So is the Bush family. Maybe it why you seem to be rushing back to authoritarian rule even faster than the U.S., you've never really valued, dare I say it, "Freedom and Democracy".
"Marx has probably had far more influence in Europe than the Founding Fathers."
While I'm sympathetic to Socialism at times, and it is a superior system in dealing with people with disabilities that prevent them from functioning, versus America where they land on the streets and quickly die. I'm not very sympathetic to a system where able bodied people are given a free ride at the expense of others. There is comedy that in Britain you have had until the last few weeks Muslim extremists who are immigrants, not citizens, living on the dole while they advocate the overthrow of the country that is supporting them.
I sure wish socialized medicine would work, its better than the U.S. where you go uninsured if you aren't affluent, but unfortunately if you give people something expensive for free they abuse it and wreck the whole system.
"But I suggest you spend some time in Britain, say, and listen to real political debate."
I've listened to the debate in the House of Commands on numerous occasions, its often covered on CSPAN when there is a particularly hot issue being debated. Its is vastly superior to anything the U.S. has, no argument. Our politicians just make empty speeches and are seldom directly challenged in debate. I keep hearing George W. was a good debater at Yale but I really doubt it and I imagine it was BS like so much of his life story. He would be a complete embarrassment if he had to spend a few hours in the House of Commons being challenged by the opposition in a no holds bar debate that isn't pulling any punches unlike the softballs he gets in his "town halls" and press conferences. It would great if he was challenged in this way because it it would burst the bubble he lives in.
You can add rigged show trials. Show trials with the outcome predetermined by the government are a classic characteristic of a police state. Two Arab men in Detroit were convicted on terrorism charges. The government's case rested on two pieces of evidence:
- A tourist video the men had made of their family's trip to Disneyland. The government insisted they were casing Disneyland for a terrorist attack, and they just cleverly made it look like a tourist video to conceal their nefarious plan.
- The testimony of a con man who was up on fraud charges. The government offered to reduce the charges in return for his testimony against the men. Needless to say a conman offered less jail time opted to lie and say whatever the DOJ wanted him to say.
The men were eventually freed after the conman started making jailhouse confessions to his cell mates that he had lied to get his charges reduced, otherwise two innocent men would still be rotting in jail thanks to zealous DOJ prosecutors trying to build terrorism cases their boss could parade on TV, even when there was no case. This case is described in the excellent BBC documentary, The Power of Nightmares on the similarities between neocons in the U.S. and Britain, and Al Qaeda and how they are using each other to institute repressive societies dominated by religious fanaticism.
You may recall another tourist tape made the news a while ago, where a Muslim tourist's video of Las Vegas was insanely declared by the government to be evidence of planning for an attack on Las Vega. Needless to say you are no longer free to video tape your vacation in America especially if you are Muslim, though the government can now video tape you every minute you are outside. They really need to start working on true Big Brotherism and make TV two way so they can watch us inside our homes (though they can already watch and listen to everything we do on the internet, telephone or our settop boxes, and the Patriot act gives them the right to secretly break in to our home and look at our personal possessions without ever telling us, this is referred to as "sneak and peek".
"Most other public school systems in the world just track their students early on and avoid the under-performing student issue entirely. They never see high school, they go to a trade school instead."
Good point. Its also an illuminating point as to why "No Child Left Behind" is a fatally and intentionally flawed program that is going to eventually cause an educational catastrophe.
This flawed scheme is compelling public schools to MAKE people with low intelligence, low motivation or learning disabilities achieve parity with their peers. In most cases it simply wont happen and isn't happening. After a few more years all the public schools saddled with low achievers will be accused of being failed public schools and their funding gets yanked. The Republicans will decimate the public education system and the teachers unions, and replace them with vouchers, private schools, and especially religious schools that can drill religion in to students every day, without all those bothersome church state separation issues that bug them so much about public schools. The under achievers will be cut adrift at that point because private schools wont take them so chances are a whole bunch of kids will get "Left Behind" by the new system once the Republicans have destroyed public education.
The dirty secret of the Houston school system which was the "model" for no child left behind was they were just encouraging, if not forcing, all the underachievers to drop out and concealing their high drop out rate by marking them as transfers etc. Their test scores looked great but they in fact were leaving vast numbers of children behind as road kill of their twisted scheme.
I'm sure you will appreciate this, here is how the world would have ended slavery without the need to kill hundreds of thousands of people and lay waste to an entire nation. Maybe if America had invested all the blood and treasure it squandered on the civil war in to this instead it would have come to fruition years earlier. I amazingly here managed to get back on topic after a long detour on how America has declined in technology. Tractors are kind of a forgotten innovation but they probably more than any other have fed the world, and freed people to build cities and develop all those other innovations instead of struggling with subsistence farming.
The first engine-powered farm tractors used steam and were introduced in 1868. These engines were built as small road locomotives, and were operated by one man, if the engine weighed less than 5 tons. They were used for general road haulage and in particular by the timber trade. The most popular steam tractor was the Garrett 4CD. According to "Vintage Farm Tractors" by Ralph W. Sanders (ISBN 1-55192-031-X) "Credit goes to the Charter Gasoline Engine Company of Sterling, Illinois, for first successfully using gasoline as fuel. Charter's creation of a gasoline fueled engine in 1887 soon led to early gasoline traction engines before the term "tractor" was coined by others. Charter adapted its engine to a Rumley steam-traction-engine chassis, and in 1889 produced six of the machines to become one of the first working gasoline traction engines." "Vintage Farm Tractors" discusses several other early gas-powered tractors" "John Froelich, a custom thresherman from Iowa,decided to try gasoline power for threshing. He mounted a Van Duzen gasoline engine on a Robinson chassis and rigged his own gearing for propulsion. Froelich used the machine successfully to power a threshing machine by belt during his fifty-two day harvest season of 1892 in South Dakota. The Froelich tractor, forerunner of the later Waterloo Boy tractor, is considered by many to be the first successful gasoline tractor known. Froelich's machine fathered a long line of stationary gasoline engines and, eventually, the famous John Deere two cylinder tractor... J.I. Case's first pioneering efforts at producing a gas tracion engine date to 1894, or maybe earlier, when William Paterson of Stockton, California, came to Racine to make an experimental engine for Case. Case ads in the 1940s, harking back to the firm's history in the gas tractor field, claimed 1892 as the date for Paterson's gas traction engine: patent dates suggest 1894. The early machine ran, but not well enough to be produced... Charles W. Hart and Charles H. Parr began their pioneering work on gas engines in the late 1800s while studying mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In 1897, the two men formed the Hart-Parr Gasoline Engine Company of Madison. In 1900, they moved their operation to Hart's hometown of Charles City, Iowa, where they found financing to make gas traction engines based on their innovative ideas. Their efforts led them to erect the first factory in the United States dedicated to the production of gas traction engines. Hart-Parr is also credited with coining the word "tractor" for machines that had previously been called gas traction engines. The firm's first tractor effort, Hart-Parr No.1, was made in 1901." Henry Ford produced his first experimental gasoline powered tractor in 1907, under the direction of chief engineer Joseph Galamb. It was referred to as an "automobile plow." After 1910, gasoline powered tractors were used extensively in farming.
Wooohooo, nice rant dude, first take a deep breath you are completely losing it and starting to look like a complete fanatic.
"But if slavery hadn't been abolished, why would they have industrialized?"
Maybe industrialized wasn't the correct word, how about mechanized to be more precise. Have you heard about these things called tractors which tow farm equipment. Once the internal combustion engine was developed, early versions were built in 1854 and 1860, the world rapidly lost the need for slaves to pick cotton (though some farming still requires massive manual labor today, but we have illegal immigrants to fill the slave role now).
How about this for a better solution, all those industrious and industrialized Northern abolitionists pitched in to develop machines to pick cotton, ideally faster and better than humans, ship them to the South in exchange for Southern plantation owners freeing their slaves. Win-Win.
I guess I can see how that makes me sound like a lunatic versus the abolitionist approach which was to coerce the Federal government in to overnight freeing all the slaves and leaving the South's economy in a smoldering ruin or instead force the South to secede and start a war that killed 700,000 people. The problem with fanatics is they only see the issue they are fanatics about and not all the collateral damage their fanaticism is going to cause.
"Your anti-religious prejudice and hatred has now put you in the admirable position of defending slavery and criticizing the abolition therof. Good job."
Woa, dude. That is a complete twisting of everything I said. I didn't defend slavery I just criticized the way the abolitionists went about ending it. I find it hard to believe that you think a civil war with 700,000 dead and that lay waste to the nation was the right way to solve a problem, ANY PROBLEM.
"nobody's used that word but you,"
I think the founding fathers did, you know "all men are created equal", you gonna start ranting at them too. Your sect uses the term inherent worth, which I guess you can say isn't exactly the same as equal worth though it sure sounds to me like at some point everyone is assigned a worth quota whether they deserve it or not.
"Every living person has value, no matter how little or how much, no living person is completely worthless or irredeemable."
Thats silly. I'm guessing at this point you are the one saying slavers and Adolph Hitler have inherent worth. Any inherent worth Hitler had was cancelled out by the time he killed the first 100,000 of the tens of millions of people he killed. How exactly can you completely obsesses over the horrors slavers perpetrated on their fellow man and say, oh but they still had inherent worth and me and God LOVES them.
I've always found it humorous that I could be evil incarnate, a mass murder, a blight on the planet, and as long as I pet my dog and he smiles I have inherent worth, or as long as I repent of my sins after I kill 20 million people all is forgiven and you will welcome me in to your church and your heaven.
"Slavery,... ended by any means fucking necessary."
Dude you don't even mean that. You've achieved self contradiction at this point. So what if the only means available is you either shoot the slavers or shoot the slaves. There goes your "right to life". Hey before you start ranting you said "by any means necessary". In fact thats basically what the abolitionist did, they provoked a war which freed the slaves, oh, after they killed 700,000 people, "any means necessary"..... rrrrrrright.
"Do you think that all humans have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?"
Nope. And I wager you don't either. I hate to break it to you but that is a feel good slogan, most people wont argue with, but if you actually thought about it, you would realize its an impossible fantasy when it comes to execution.
The U.S. of A. among others executes people pretty much every day which is a pretty strong indicator tha
The decline of science and technology in the U.S is a two part phenomenon. The first and longest running part is the quality of American elementary and secondary education has been waning for the last 50 years, along with a flagging drive to excel thanks to decades of affluence. Thats led to a situation where American universities have become increasingly dependent on foreign students and professors in the most demanding fields and American corporations have been very dependent on imported tech workers.
The U.S. was a mighty beneficiary of waves of immigrants who fled Nazi Germany in the 30's, including Einstein and a host of other top flight physicists and other assorting scientists and technologists. Its unlikely the Manhattan project would have succeeded without this influx of brain power. The U.S. benefited mightily again when a cadre of top German rocket scientists came to the U.S. after the war. Without them its unlikely Apollo would have happened.
Now for the second part of the phenomenon. Since 2000 and especially since 2001 the U.S. has become an extremely unattractive place for foreign talent to come. The fact is the highly educated and highly intelligent have a strong tendency to be liberal and indifferent to religion. America since 2000 has become the antithesis of the kind of place that class of people will immigrate to. The government is increasingly right wing, increasingly willing to trample civil rights and due process especially of foreigners and is increasingly dominated by the anti-intellectual and intolerant religious right. The U.S. has acquired many of the same traits that caused intellectuals to flee Germany in the 30's though in a much milder form. Another factor is the post 9/11 panic has just made it dramatically harder to get a visa to work or study in the U.S.
The end result is the flood of foreign talent on which America depends is drying up, and the indigenous education system isn't producing Americans to fill the gap. Most American students would rather study business and marketing where the money is and the class load is easier than technology and science where, with the exception of the bubble, the money is not so great and the work is hard. Technology is also perceived as a field being outsourced and no Americans students want to pursue a field going to China and India anyway.
I forget there is a third and fourth part to the phenomenon. The third part, multinationals are opening R&D labs in places like India, China and Ireland so all the talent in India and China can stay at home and not risk the gauntlet that is emigration to the U.S. these days.
The fourth part, places like China and India are pulling themselves in to the technology age through better education in particular. They have a vast statistical advantage of having more than 2 billion people to choose from as they search for the best and brightest minds so they can with a good selection program count on finding good minds at a rate of 8 to 1 versus the U.S. The ratio is probably much worse thanks to the bad U.S. education system and the low regard American students have for science and technology.
"The belief that the Founding Fathers (capitalized of course) were gods and that every litle thing they said actually matters today"
Maybe this is because they were revolutionaries and they are the only revolutionaries America has really had. All our leaders since have been plodding along in their footsteps and not doing a very good job of it.
Here is a simple experiment, put the words of these people alongside those of George W. Bush or Bill Clinton. The words of our founding father drip with education, intellect, eloquence, insight and revolution. Their lives burst with with the desire and ability to completely challenge the status quo, change it for the better, and they put their lives and fortunes on the line to do it.
I've heard George Bush speak about a 100 times in the last couple years and every speech sounds the same, he repeats the same tired phrases over and over again, his speeches are ones of fear and division, strident ideology, devoid of any real meaning or insight. If he is creating any revolution at all its a backward one, taking America back to where it was 50 years ago when McCarthyism reigned.
We still revel in quoting the founding fathers simply because they were head and shoulders better than anything we've had since and you can tell it by their prose. JFK is the only contemporary I can think of who even came close in inspiring the same enthusiasm and idealism and his reign was brief and checkered.
Not sure we will lose our passion for the words of the founding fathers until and unless we find a new generation of revolutionaries to undo all the wrong turns we've taken in the last 200 years and especially in the last five.
"are at least on a par with some European countries."
With the exception of spasms of chaos in France you forget that when these people were penning these words Europe was almost totally under the domination of kings and state religions. People who attempted to practice religions deviating from state religions or no religion at all were usually victims of extreme persecution, which is why many of them fled to the Americas.
Most of todays "free European countries" you are talking about adopted with revision the form of government these revolutionaries were the first to actually successfully implement, though the founding fathers did own something to the Magna Carta too. All the relatively free countries in the world today don't owe much to America today but they owe a lot to these people from 200 years ago.
"Private Catholic schools (for instance) have higher aptitude scores for math and science"
Private Catholic schools like all private schools naturally select the cream of the crop of students.
Public schools are saddled with all the kids that are just trying to survive to get a high school diploma, and have no scholastic aptitude.
Saying Catholic schools inherently produce superior students due to their religiosity is a non sequitur.
There are some other things in their favor, they can get away with stronger discipline and most are essentially college prep schools so the curriculum is substantially tougher. I am pretty confident if you retained everything about Catholic schools but eliminated all the time they waste on religion they would probably produce even better students.
The parent didn't say equal opportunity, he said "equal worth".
Elsewhere he said "all people...were worth God's love" which unless you subscribe to the monotheistic religion in play is worth exactly zip.
As for equal opportunity I'm all for doing our best to insure there are no artificial barriers placed in front of one person versus another, but I have no enthusiasm for a system where "equal opportunity" is an artifical creation of government resembling quotas.
Here is a link that hints at all the complexities of the Buy American Act as of 2001. In its simplest form it mandates:
"The BAA restricts the purchase by the government of supplies that are not "domestic end products." To qualify as a domestic end product, the article (1) must be manufactured in the United States, and (2) the cost of its components mined, produced, or manufactured in the United States must exceed 50% the cost of all its components"
In practice though there are a host of exemptions for NAFTA countries, Caribean basin countries, and a whole bunch of others. Here are a bunch of them if you want to wade through them. In the end its an act that is more like Swiss cheese.
You can tell because the President's new fleet of Marine Corps helicopters are largely of European design and manufacturer, there is just a U.S. prime contractor (Lockheed I think) who is going to do the final assembly and delivery.
I guess your right. It was about at as ambiguous wording as you could put in a sentence. Your interpretration must be correct one since the Black Death certainly did crash Europe's population and probably knocked Europe out of the Catholicism induced dark ages.
"chances are slavery would still exist here today."
Not really sure about that. Industrialization would have gradually eliminated the need for slaves, though industrialization brought us wage slaves and sweat shops instead. Its not like slavery is really gone, its just morphed in to a somewhat gentler form.
The thing you gloss over about abolition is that the fanatically religious abolitionists pushed their cause to far to fast. It produced a backlash in the South as it became clear the abolitionists were bent on forcing abolition on the South and decimating the cotton industry on which the South was completely dependent. It was a lot easier for the North, where all those Methodist abolitionist were, to free slaves since its economy was more industrialized and diversified and not dependent on slaves. Whitney's invention of the cotton gin helped transform the South in to a cotton economy which led to a slave dependent economy.
By pushing their agenda to fast the abolitionists pushed the U.S. in to a war that killed around 600,000-700,000, more than any other war in its history, and devastated most of the country, especially the South. It also decimated state's rights and lead to the excessively powerful Federal government we have today
All in all it was very mixed achievement for Christianity. If abolition had taken a more gradual pace, and let engines displace the need for human labor, so the South could have weaned its economy from slaver before abolition the U.S. could have averted one of its darkest eras.
The fundamental problem you find throughout the history of monotheistic religions are how frequently religion seems to be at the root of bloody conflicts that have claimed millions of lives.
"Christianity was the first to claim the inherent worth and dignity of every person."
If you were to ask me I would say both sides you are covering here are wrong. The racist slavers were wrong in uniformly treating all blacks as subhuman and worthless. Unitarian's are equally wrong in uniformly treating all peoples as equals and of equal worth. The reality is every human being is different. We start with different strengths and weaknesses, and our life experience creates people across a complete spectrum of worth. Some end up saints and some end up evil incarnate. Some are tireless in self betterment, education, invention and achievement. Some are completely lazy, useless, worthless burdens on society. If you operate under the assumption all are equal you completely drain motivation out of struggling to achieve in life and you give everyone a free pass to be practically worthless because you tell them they have inherent worth by just being alive.
"kicked Christian Europe out of its downward spiral into an increasingly overpopulated, socially-stratified Dark Ages II."
Uh, how did the Black Death lead to overpopulation, it caused a population crash?
Granted I oversimplified the decline of Arab culture. But, its pretty clear Christianity has done very little that is positive for Western culture and has done it vast harm.
I think you can thank the Crusades more than the Black Death for decimating both Christendom and Islam. Arab civilization was relatively moderate before century after century of brutality from wave after wave of Crusaders radicalized and militarized both sides, and turned them wildly intolerant which is something they still are today (though the Christians were wildly intolerant when they started the Crusades).
Arab civilization was at its best when mosques were centers of all facets of learning, but as they radicalized the Koran and the theology drowned out all other fields.
In some books the dark ages ran from the end of the Roman empire around 400 AD until the renaissance. The Black Death came towards the end, not the beginning. The dark ages for western civilization were a period in which the great Greek and Roman civilizations were gone and replaced by the Catholic church in ascendence which was a decidely anti-intellectual institution to the extreme.
An argument could be made the Black Death in fact cleansed an overcrowded Europe, broke the back of institutions that were completely failing, in particular the Catholic church and lead to the renaissance, though it was a long time in coming. Unfortunately the form of the revolt against Catholicism was the Protestant reformation which its turned out was nearly as bad, and today is probably worse if you've seen Pat Robertson at work today.
A passage from Wikipedia I like:
"The Black Death should have opened the way to increased peasant prosperity. Europe had been overpopulated before the plague, and a reduction of 30% to 50% of the population should have meant less competition for resources: more available land and food, and higher wages. However, for reasons that are still debated, population levels in fact continued to decline until around 1420 and did not begin to rise again until 1470, so the initial Black Death event on its own does not entirely provide a satisfactory explanation to this extended period of decline in prosperity. See Medieval demography for a more complete treatment of this issue and current theories on why improvements in living standards took longer to evolve. The great population loss brought economic changes based on increased social mobility, as depopulation further eroded the peasants' already weakened obligations to remain on their traditional holdings. In Western Europe, the sudden scarcity of cheap labor provided an incentive for landlords to compete for peasants with wages and freedoms, an innovation that, some argue, represents the roots of capitalism, and the resulting social upheaval caused the Renaissance and even Reformation. In many ways the Black Death was good for peasants, at least in Western Europe, because of the shortage of labor they were in more demand and had more power, and because of the reduced population, there was more fertile land available; however, the benefits would not be fully realized until 1470, nearly 120 years later, when overall population levels finally began to rise again."
Slashdot Mirror
"It might take many thousands of hand..."
Don't think so. First problem is you would never know who the house player is, or if there is one, and it could change constantly as players come and go. You would never have that many hands to analyze.
Again randomizing when you do it, what player is doing it, and picking any random winning hand out of the undealt cards would be impossible to spot with statistical analysis. If you did spot some trend your chances of making a case out of would be somewhere between slim and none. You start complaining you just look like a loser with a case of sour grapes.
First the caveat I wouldn't touch internet poker with a ten foot pole so I know not of what I speak, but I find it hard to believe that anyone would let anyone save every card dealt, so I assume all you can save is what you saw when you played right? If you could see all the cards you could analyze the secret behavior of players which would be bad. If you are only seeing the cards that were shown in the game I would think your ability to do statistical analysis would be weak.
I can really see no possible way you could tell if the deal was altered as long as they decide to cheat selectively and with some randomness. I can see you not wanting to stack the deck at the beginning because you might be able to detect that but every so often hitting a button that says house wants to win this hand, and letting an algorithm pick any random undealt card that would make that so would be nearly impossible to detect.
The challenging AI algorithm in this business is figuring out the optimal strategy for setting the hook (i.e. you want the sucke...player to win a lot early so they get hooked, then slowly turn them in to losers, and mix in an occasional win to keep them from giving up as you slowly break them.
I would agree there probably isn't much motivation for big reputable sites to cheat assuming they are making a killing already. What mix do they use to make their money and how do you know how much they make and how. As for a third party audit of the software, that is useless unless they have the power to secretly watch the server from inside, constantly checksum the binaries, watch everything on every server etc. Sounds like a tactic to make the sucke...players feel good about it without actually insuring its up and up.
I just can't see anything that would stop a site that was in a financial crunch or if owners decide they want to make a killing and cash out from cheating.
Poker is one of the few worth while gambling games, if you are good at it, because you are playing against other people instead of a house with the odds stacked in its favor. It would seem to me if you do it online you give up that assurance and are back to a game where the house can set the percentage they take.
Maybe thats because its impossible to catch the people running the servers cheating unless they are completely clueless or you have a regulatory body going in and scrutinizing their software and operations which I doubt there is especially for off shore sites.
The house software controls the deal. They can write software where they press a button and the program finds the undealt cards they need for the house player to win a pot they want, or assuming its well written software tell them it can't be done this hand without looking like its cheating. If you have your pick of the undealt cards you can arrange to win most hands.
It boggles the mind anyone would think they could catch a minimally well written piece of software cheating for the people who control the server and all its software.
A big chunk of NASA's budget goes in to the pockets of aerospace contractors, who are in fact a huge and powerful lobby group, Boeing and Lockheed in particular. I wager its the only reason the Shuttle and ISS haven't been axed, and why Bush is proposing going to the Moon and Mars. Well... there is a second reason, he needed every vote he could get to win Florida and and killing the space program could have cost him the election in 2004.
Boeing and Lockheed's NASA take is rather small compared to the tens of billions they rake in on DOD and intelligence satellite contracts but its still something.
Perhaps NASA's budget problems are that it does a lot of great research in everything but space flight. The one thing that is thier charter seems to be the one thing they can't seem to do well anymore at least as far as the manned space program goes. Perhaps NASA should be turned in to a materials, satellite and robotics research agency and let someone else do the launchers and manned space flight part.
I'm amazed anyone would play for anything resembling money online. Bots are just one of many ways for you to be scammed. I assume the big online sites either refrain from cheating or are doing it selectively to keep the sucke .... players coming back. I can see playing it for fun or penny ante online but anything beyond that...
At least in Vegas there is some oversight of the gaming tables and the one armed bandits. I'm inclined to think whomever controls the server on an online site can skim off as much as they feel like, they just need to keep it under control so people win enough to keep coming back since they need butts in the seats. How exactly do you know one of the players in a game isn't the house and they aren't clicking a mouse to pick the cards they need to win a big hand.
There is a reason poker is structured the way it is in meat space. You need to know you aren't getting dealt from a stacked deck, how exactly do you assure that online. Pocker is a marvelous game, and exercise in AI, but bad thing to play for money online.
Well the Republican's have devised a strategy for your problem with disruptive and unmotivated kids in public schools. Its called "No Child Left Behind". The name is classic big lie.
As I understand it, as an outsider, they are compelling public schools to take all children and they now MUST make them all learn and pass a certain testing level whether they have any motivation, aptitude or intellect. The deck is especially stacked against public schools in areas with a lot of low achievers (i.e. closely correlated to low income and some minorities), maybe a few will succeed but most will ultimately fail. Two things will happen. Schools will either:
- Cheat, in particular encourage people to dropout who are bringing down their test scores, which "Leaves Some Kids Behind"
- The schools will fail to raise scores and be declared failed schools. The Republicans will then throw open the doors to transferring all the public funding to private schools.
The second case has a couple neat benefits:
- Private schools can have prayer and teach a heavy dose of religion
- Private schools don't have to take students they don't want, all the ones who are disruptive, have no interest in, aptitude for or motivation to learn. This is why private schools are insured of outperforming public schools, they are inherently selective.
There is irony in this system like many Republican schemes. They call it "No Child Left Behind" when in fact the long term plan is to leave behind all the kids who can't make the jump to private, especially religious, private schools. All the good students will end up in publicly funded private schools. All the rest end up smoldering ruins of public schools with no funding or as dead ender drop outs.
Its a brilliant strategy on the Bush administration. They build great publicly funded private schools for the kids that can get in them, and they demolish the church/state separation problem which prevents them from drilling religion in to kids in public schools. I'm amazed the Dems went along with it. I think they did because the Bush administration promised a massive increase in education funding which the Dems love, but the Republicans for the most part didn't deliver.
The Houston school system which was the Texas showcase on which "No Child Left Behind" was based and where former Education Secretary Rod Paige hailed from, actually produced their spectacular results by encouraging all the failing and disruptive students to drop out, and then forged the records to show them as transfers, or anything but drop outs. Lo and behold they produced great test score improvements, concealed their high drop out rate and looked like a raging success.
As for teaching history in schools you really don't need to teach history to kids unless you want them to be informed citizens, or future world or national leaders. I'm pretty sure political leaders would prefer most Americans are ignorant of history, politics, geography and world affairs. They are a lot easier to manipulate that way. Most people in fact have no use for history in real life, they would rather their politicians tell them what to think. For example if you have people ignorant of history, geography, world affairs its easier to con them in to going along when you want to start a war based on a bunch of lies.
Isn't that a sweet concept. You can inject a known dangerous substance in to millions of people and as long as its hard to prove that its causing damage big company is in the clear. When injecting Mercury in to young children I think the burden of proof should have been on the vaccine company to prove beyond a shadow of doubt it was safe, which they can't, rather than on the public to prove its dangerous, which they are doing their best to do. Simple fact, Thimerasol should have never been put on the market in the first place. I need to do me some research and find out which company though it was a good idea and profited from it.
The public probably used to think the FDA's job was to make sure dangerous things don't get on the market but I think recent events indicate that was naive, because the FDA like all aspects of government is being sold to the highest bidder.
Uh yea but how many autistic people are there today because they waited until people noticed a public health catastrophe and activists had to start lobbying and pressuring to force the change. They also probably removed it during an environment when there was still a huge potential liability. With tort reform and the liability risk gone they have little reason to make the change if the change would impact their profitability more than the liability risk does. Unless there is social responsibility in the board room or regulatory intervention executives are going to make the decision that is most profitable because its their duty to shareholders. So again if backlash or liability is more expensive than making the change they will make the change. If the liability risk is not there, they can contain public backlash and the change is expensive you run the risk they wont make the change even though its the right thing to do.
... and then they remedy it.
... what was it ... active leg syndrome which according to the drug company inflicts 1 in 10.
It also doesn't give me any confidence that a 6 year old can still get dosed with Mercury. Nothing magic happens on your siz birthday where you acquire immunity to mercury poisoning. Why exactly wouldn't the FDA have banned it out right in everything, it was used in contact lens solution, cosmetics, etc. where its going to migrate in to your body.
The other obvious problem is if they were willing to do something that misguided with Mercury, what ELSE might they be putting in stuff they inject or otherwise introduce in to people that is clearly dangerous. The problem here is the real thorough testing regime is inject it in millions of people for decades and wait until there is widespread damage to people health and people start whistleblowing
The Vioxx case clear shows the FDA has abandoned its watchdog role and replaced it with one where they are partnering with drug companies to enhance their profitability. The testing is exhaustive and expensive but indications are whenever the drug company has billions riding on success they will suppress and ignore bad results.
The biochemistry of the human body is vastly to complicated to be cavalierly introducing foreign compounds in to it. For compounds where there is a clear benefit that you can argue the benefit outweighs the risk you can justify it. Problem is drug companies are in such rabid pursuit of there next big multibillion dollar drug they are conning people in to ingest things where the benefit simply doesn't justify the risk, for example overprescribing ADD treatments to sedate problem kids, treating depression in kids with drugs that cause suicidal tendencies, Viagra which is a lifestyle drug for most taking it, or the the other day I saw a new add for a treatment for
"Do you Americans not immunise your children?"
Well quite a few American parents were put off by vaccines, especially MMR(Measles, Mumps, Rueblla) in particular, when it was discovered the manufacturers were putting a preservative in it called Thimerosal. Thimerosal is a compound containing Mercury and most people with a clue would have reservations about injecting Mercury in to little children, though apparently the vaccine manufacturers were OK with it. Now they and batteries of scientists and doctors on their side deny there is any link between this and rising autism rates among vaccinated children but at this point you can't really trust them, because if there is ever a definitive link proven to Autism their liability is going to be massive. Fortunately for them Autism is a poorly understood mental disorder so it will be really hard to prove a definitive link.
Though hopefully you can see why more and more people are having reservations about vaccines especially for diseases largely eradicated in the west.
WiMAX is such cool technology but that is exactly the problem. If the license falls in to the hands of greedy assholes who charge you through the nose to access it ... like ... oh ... I don't know .... American cell phone companies ... its going to end up sucking. At that point the only thing in its favor is the infrastructure costs are fairly low which means either prices might be a bit lower or the greedy asshole's profit margins will be higher.
WiMax is screaming out for cities to license it for their areas and provide wireless Internet access as a no charge, or low charge, public service.
Unless that happens, which is very unlikely in any country were for profit corporations dominate over government, I predict 802.11 will have a long and flourishing life simply because of the freedom it offers. You just wish it more range and more available frequencies.
Dude you just don't get it, no one cares that you hate Canada. If you love the U.S. so much live, there, shut the hell up and let Canada go its merry way. Like I said I don't care where you live, unless it happens to be next to me at which point I would move because you talk like a psycho with a gun fetish.
The extent of me caring about this whole waste of time thread was the extent to which you were willing to lie, and worse, obviously lie, about Canada to satiate your obsessive hatred for it. Get a clue, you live in the U.S. now, get over it and move on before it eats you up more than it obviously already has.
"Clinton was an ass, plain and simple.."
In this paragraph all you proved is you fell for the right wing propaganda, hook, line and sinker. Clinton's affairs counted for zip in the cosmic scheme of things. Again it was the ONLY thing they managed to pin on him after eight years, and hundreds of millions in taxpayer subsidized, witch hunting. You spend a hundred million going through George W.'s past with a fine tooth comb he wouldn't fare nearly so well. Its mostly a tribute to how tasteless the right win was in publishing in graph detail every aspect of a private sexual affair so school children could be subjected to it and the religious right could be pumped in to a frenzy. It was just character assassination and it obviously worked on the weak minded like yourself.
"He also is a pretty useless human being with no moral compass nor is his life a model for anyone."
Please explain to me again how it was the George W. spent the first 40 years of his life being a drunk, doing cocaine, ducking his guard duty, and chasing every skirt in sight but you consider him a pillar of morality. Is it because he decided he wanted to be President, quit drinking and claimed he found Jesus so you forgive him all past transgressions. Again very weak minded on your part to fall for his facade.
"I find him to be an honest human being,"
Every fact completely flies in the face of that. He's lied about his drug use, he lied about his guard record, his administration has been a non stop lie fest. Where exactly did you develop the delusion he was "honest", other than because he, his handlers and his TV ads told you he was. Geez man, wake up think for yourself for a change.
"In all of your comments you fall back on other dictators/problems, so what your saying is there are lots of bad guys doing bad things so why bother?"
No it classic conservatism. Conservatives oppose the U.S. playing nanny to the world, and spending our tax dollars and getting our citizens killed trying to rearrange sovereign governments to our liking. Its a never ending exercise in futility. Since the U.S. hasn't been able to resist this temptation for most of the last century its installed more bad governments and dictators than its removed. This leading to the obvious conclusion we would be better off staying out of it until and unless it actually impinges on American security which the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Afghanistan did.
"Don't get me wrong, I don't think this is America's fight... it should be a worldwide front against tyrrany and opression"
Thats nice because in the eyes of most of the world the U.S. has been a leading supporter and purveyor of tyranny and oppression for the last 100 years. Read about the Philippine-American war, a war American schools don't teach their kids about much, but which taught a lot of lessons about being an occupying power like we are in Iraq. Or Google TPAJAX the CIA sponsored coup in Iran that replaced a sovereign government with the Shah of Iran, a ruthless dictator rivalling Saddam, and which happened to transfer Iran's oil field contracts in to the hands of American oil companies. The Iranian people hated the Shah so bad they opted for a repressive Islamic regime over him and being a U.S. puppet, and hate the U.S. to this day. Interestingly it appears the Iranians were the real winners of the Iraq war, one they conned Bush and Co. in to by sending Chalibi to the White House to lie about WMD's.
"Things are very different in the UK."
Yes it is because you've never had a clean break with your monarchist past.
The founding fathers were among the first to throw off the yoke of one corrupt inbred royal family branches of which ruled most of the continent. For some reason Brits to this day still cling to that anachronism. You gradually whittle they royals in to irrelevancy but to this day you are still Tories at heart. So is the Bush family. Maybe it why you seem to be rushing back to authoritarian rule even faster than the U.S., you've never really valued, dare I say it, "Freedom and Democracy".
"Marx has probably had far more influence in Europe than the Founding Fathers."
While I'm sympathetic to Socialism at times, and it is a superior system in dealing with people with disabilities that prevent them from functioning, versus America where they land on the streets and quickly die. I'm not very sympathetic to a system where able bodied people are given a free ride at the expense of others. There is comedy that in Britain you have had until the last few weeks Muslim extremists who are immigrants, not citizens, living on the dole while they advocate the overthrow of the country that is supporting them.
I sure wish socialized medicine would work, its better than the U.S. where you go uninsured if you aren't affluent, but unfortunately if you give people something expensive for free they abuse it and wreck the whole system.
"But I suggest you spend some time in Britain, say, and listen to real political debate."
I've listened to the debate in the House of Commands on numerous occasions, its often covered on CSPAN when there is a particularly hot issue being debated. Its is vastly superior to anything the U.S. has, no argument. Our politicians just make empty speeches and are seldom directly challenged in debate. I keep hearing George W. was a good debater at Yale but I really doubt it and I imagine it was BS like so much of his life story. He would be a complete embarrassment if he had to spend a few hours in the House of Commons being challenged by the opposition in a no holds bar debate that isn't pulling any punches unlike the softballs he gets in his "town halls" and press conferences. It would great if he was challenged in this way because it it would burst the bubble he lives in.
You can add rigged show trials. Show trials with the outcome predetermined by the government are a classic characteristic of a police state. Two Arab men in Detroit were convicted on terrorism charges. The government's case rested on two pieces of evidence:
- A tourist video the men had made of their family's trip to Disneyland. The government insisted they were casing Disneyland for a terrorist attack, and they just cleverly made it look like a tourist video to conceal their nefarious plan.
- The testimony of a con man who was up on fraud charges. The government offered to reduce the charges in return for his testimony against the men. Needless to say a conman offered less jail time opted to lie and say whatever the DOJ wanted him to say.
The men were eventually freed after the conman started making jailhouse confessions to his cell mates that he had lied to get his charges reduced, otherwise two innocent men would still be rotting in jail thanks to zealous DOJ prosecutors trying to build terrorism cases their boss could parade on TV, even when there was no case. This case is described in the excellent BBC documentary, The Power of Nightmares on the similarities between neocons in the U.S. and Britain, and Al Qaeda and how they are using each other to institute repressive societies dominated by religious fanaticism.
You may recall another tourist tape made the news a while ago, where a Muslim tourist's video of Las Vegas was insanely declared by the government to be evidence of planning for an attack on Las Vega. Needless to say you are no longer free to video tape your vacation in America especially if you are Muslim, though the government can now video tape you every minute you are outside. They really need to start working on true Big Brotherism and make TV two way so they can watch us inside our homes (though they can already watch and listen to everything we do on the internet, telephone or our settop boxes, and the Patriot act gives them the right to secretly break in to our home and look at our personal possessions without ever telling us, this is referred to as "sneak and peek".
"Most other public school systems in the world just track their students early on and avoid the under-performing student issue entirely. They never see high school, they go to a trade school instead."
Good point. Its also an illuminating point as to why "No Child Left Behind" is a fatally and intentionally flawed program that is going to eventually cause an educational catastrophe.
This flawed scheme is compelling public schools to MAKE people with low intelligence, low motivation or learning disabilities achieve parity with their peers. In most cases it simply wont happen and isn't happening. After a few more years all the public schools saddled with low achievers will be accused of being failed public schools and their funding gets yanked. The Republicans will decimate the public education system and the teachers unions, and replace them with vouchers, private schools, and especially religious schools that can drill religion in to students every day, without all those bothersome church state separation issues that bug them so much about public schools. The under achievers will be cut adrift at that point because private schools wont take them so chances are a whole bunch of kids will get "Left Behind" by the new system once the Republicans have destroyed public education.
The dirty secret of the Houston school system which was the "model" for no child left behind was they were just encouraging, if not forcing, all the underachievers to drop out and concealing their high drop out rate by marking them as transfers etc. Their test scores looked great but they in fact were leaving vast numbers of children behind as road kill of their twisted scheme.
I'm sure you will appreciate this, here is how the world would have ended slavery without the need to kill hundreds of thousands of people and lay waste to an entire nation. Maybe if America had invested all the blood and treasure it squandered on the civil war in to this instead it would have come to fruition years earlier. I amazingly here managed to get back on topic after a long detour on how America has declined in technology. Tractors are kind of a forgotten innovation but they probably more than any other have fed the world, and freed people to build cities and develop all those other innovations instead of struggling with subsistence farming.
From Here.
The first engine-powered farm tractors used steam and were introduced in 1868. These engines were built as small road locomotives, and were operated by one man, if the engine weighed less than 5 tons. They were used for general road haulage and in particular by the timber trade. The most popular steam tractor was the Garrett 4CD.
According to "Vintage Farm Tractors" by Ralph W. Sanders (ISBN 1-55192-031-X)
"Credit goes to the Charter Gasoline Engine Company of Sterling, Illinois, for first successfully using gasoline as fuel. Charter's creation of a gasoline fueled engine in 1887 soon led to early gasoline traction engines before the term "tractor" was coined by others. Charter adapted its engine to a Rumley steam-traction-engine chassis, and in 1889 produced six of the machines to become one of the first working gasoline traction engines."
"Vintage Farm Tractors" discusses several other early gas-powered tractors"
"John Froelich, a custom thresherman from Iowa,decided to try gasoline power for threshing. He mounted a Van Duzen gasoline engine on a Robinson chassis and rigged his own gearing for propulsion. Froelich used the machine successfully to power a threshing machine by belt during his fifty-two day harvest season of 1892 in South Dakota. The Froelich tractor, forerunner of the later Waterloo Boy tractor, is considered by many to be the first successful gasoline tractor known. Froelich's machine fathered a long line of stationary gasoline engines and, eventually, the famous John Deere two cylinder tractor...
J.I. Case's first pioneering efforts at producing a gas tracion engine date to 1894, or maybe earlier, when William Paterson of Stockton, California, came to Racine to make an experimental engine for Case. Case ads in the 1940s, harking back to the firm's history in the gas tractor field, claimed 1892 as the date for Paterson's gas traction engine: patent dates suggest 1894. The early machine ran, but not well enough to be produced...
Charles W. Hart and Charles H. Parr began their pioneering work on gas engines in the late 1800s while studying mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In 1897, the two men formed the Hart-Parr Gasoline Engine Company of Madison. In 1900, they moved their operation to Hart's hometown of Charles City, Iowa, where they found financing to make gas traction engines based on their innovative ideas.
Their efforts led them to erect the first factory in the United States dedicated to the production of gas traction engines. Hart-Parr is also credited with coining the word "tractor" for machines that had previously been called gas traction engines. The firm's first tractor effort, Hart-Parr No.1, was made in 1901."
Henry Ford produced his first experimental gasoline powered tractor in 1907, under the direction of chief engineer Joseph Galamb. It was referred to as an "automobile plow." After 1910, gasoline powered tractors were used extensively in farming.
Wooohooo, nice rant dude, first take a deep breath you are completely losing it and starting to look like a complete fanatic.
"But if slavery hadn't been abolished, why would they have industrialized?"
Maybe industrialized wasn't the correct word, how about mechanized to be more precise. Have you heard about these things called tractors which tow farm equipment. Once the internal combustion engine was developed, early versions were built in 1854 and 1860, the world rapidly lost the need for slaves to pick cotton (though some farming still requires massive manual labor today, but we have illegal immigrants to fill the slave role now).
How about this for a better solution, all those industrious and industrialized Northern abolitionists pitched in to develop machines to pick cotton, ideally faster and better than humans, ship them to the South in exchange for Southern plantation owners freeing their slaves. Win-Win.
I guess I can see how that makes me sound like a lunatic versus the abolitionist approach which was to coerce the Federal government in to overnight freeing all the slaves and leaving the South's economy in a smoldering ruin or instead force the South to secede and start a war that killed 700,000 people. The problem with fanatics is they only see the issue they are fanatics about and not all the collateral damage their fanaticism is going to cause.
"Your anti-religious prejudice and hatred has now put you in the admirable position of defending slavery and criticizing the abolition therof. Good job."
Woa, dude. That is a complete twisting of everything I said. I didn't defend slavery I just criticized the way the abolitionists went about ending it. I find it hard to believe that you think a civil war with 700,000 dead and that lay waste to the nation was the right way to solve a problem, ANY PROBLEM.
"nobody's used that word but you,"
I think the founding fathers did, you know "all men are created equal", you gonna start ranting at them too. Your sect uses the term inherent worth, which I guess you can say isn't exactly the same as equal worth though it sure sounds to me like at some point everyone is assigned a worth quota whether they deserve it or not.
"Every living person has value, no matter how little or how much, no living person is completely worthless or irredeemable."
Thats silly. I'm guessing at this point you are the one saying slavers and Adolph Hitler have inherent worth. Any inherent worth Hitler had was cancelled out by the time he killed the first 100,000 of the tens of millions of people he killed. How exactly can you completely obsesses over the horrors slavers perpetrated on their fellow man and say, oh but they still had inherent worth and me and God LOVES them.
I've always found it humorous that I could be evil incarnate, a mass murder, a blight on the planet, and as long as I pet my dog and he smiles I have inherent worth, or as long as I repent of my sins after I kill 20 million people all is forgiven and you will welcome me in to your church and your heaven.
"Slavery,... ended by any means fucking necessary."
Dude you don't even mean that. You've achieved self contradiction at this point. So what if the only means available is you either shoot the slavers or shoot the slaves. There goes your "right to life". Hey before you start ranting you said "by any means necessary". In fact thats basically what the abolitionist did, they provoked a war which freed the slaves, oh, after they killed 700,000 people, "any means necessary"..... rrrrrrright.
"Do you think that all humans have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?"
Nope. And I wager you don't either. I hate to break it to you but that is a feel good slogan, most people wont argue with, but if you actually thought about it, you would realize its an impossible fantasy when it comes to execution.
The U.S. of A. among others executes people pretty much every day which is a pretty strong indicator tha
The decline of science and technology in the U.S is a two part phenomenon. The first and longest running part is the quality of American elementary and secondary education has been waning for the last 50 years, along with a flagging drive to excel thanks to decades of affluence. Thats led to a situation where American universities have become increasingly dependent on foreign students and professors in the most demanding fields and American corporations have been very dependent on imported tech workers.
The U.S. was a mighty beneficiary of waves of immigrants who fled Nazi Germany in the 30's, including Einstein and a host of other top flight physicists and other assorting scientists and technologists. Its unlikely the Manhattan project would have succeeded without this influx of brain power. The U.S. benefited mightily again when a cadre of top German rocket scientists came to the U.S. after the war. Without them its unlikely Apollo would have happened.
Now for the second part of the phenomenon. Since 2000 and especially since 2001 the U.S. has become an extremely unattractive place for foreign talent to come. The fact is the highly educated and highly intelligent have a strong tendency to be liberal and indifferent to religion. America since 2000 has become the antithesis of the kind of place that class of people will immigrate to. The government is increasingly right wing, increasingly willing to trample civil rights and due process especially of foreigners and is increasingly dominated by the anti-intellectual and intolerant religious right. The U.S. has acquired many of the same traits that caused intellectuals to flee Germany in the 30's though in a much milder form. Another factor is the post 9/11 panic has just made it dramatically harder to get a visa to work or study in the U.S.
The end result is the flood of foreign talent on which America depends is drying up, and the indigenous education system isn't producing Americans to fill the gap. Most American students would rather study business and marketing where the money is and the class load is easier than technology and science where, with the exception of the bubble, the money is not so great and the work is hard. Technology is also perceived as a field being outsourced and no Americans students want to pursue a field going to China and India anyway.
I forget there is a third and fourth part to the phenomenon. The third part, multinationals are opening R&D labs in places like India, China and Ireland so all the talent in India and China can stay at home and not risk the gauntlet that is emigration to the U.S. these days.
The fourth part, places like China and India are pulling themselves in to the technology age through better education in particular. They have a vast statistical advantage of having more than 2 billion people to choose from as they search for the best and brightest minds so they can with a good selection program count on finding good minds at a rate of 8 to 1 versus the U.S. The ratio is probably much worse thanks to the bad U.S. education system and the low regard American students have for science and technology.
"The belief that the Founding Fathers (capitalized of course) were gods and that every litle thing they said actually matters today"
Maybe this is because they were revolutionaries and they are the only revolutionaries America has really had. All our leaders since have been plodding along in their footsteps and not doing a very good job of it.
Here is a simple experiment, put the words of these people alongside those of George W. Bush or Bill Clinton. The words of our founding father drip with education, intellect, eloquence, insight and revolution. Their lives burst with with the desire and ability to completely challenge the status quo, change it for the better, and they put their lives and fortunes on the line to do it.
I've heard George Bush speak about a 100 times in the last couple years and every speech sounds the same, he repeats the same tired phrases over and over again, his speeches are ones of fear and division, strident ideology, devoid of any real meaning or insight. If he is creating any revolution at all its a backward one, taking America back to where it was 50 years ago when McCarthyism reigned.
We still revel in quoting the founding fathers simply because they were head and shoulders better than anything we've had since and you can tell it by their prose. JFK is the only contemporary I can think of who even came close in inspiring the same enthusiasm and idealism and his reign was brief and checkered.
Not sure we will lose our passion for the words of the founding fathers until and unless we find a new generation of revolutionaries to undo all the wrong turns we've taken in the last 200 years and especially in the last five.
"are at least on a par with some European countries."
With the exception of spasms of chaos in France you forget that when these people were penning these words Europe was almost totally under the domination of kings and state religions. People who attempted to practice religions deviating from state religions or no religion at all were usually victims of extreme persecution, which is why many of them fled to the Americas.
Most of todays "free European countries" you are talking about adopted with revision the form of government these revolutionaries were the first to actually successfully implement, though the founding fathers did own something to the Magna Carta too. All the relatively free countries in the world today don't owe much to America today but they owe a lot to these people from 200 years ago.
"Private Catholic schools (for instance) have higher aptitude scores for math and science"
Private Catholic schools like all private schools naturally select the cream of the crop of students.
Public schools are saddled with all the kids that are just trying to survive to get a high school diploma, and have no scholastic aptitude.
Saying Catholic schools inherently produce superior students due to their religiosity is a non sequitur.
There are some other things in their favor, they can get away with stronger discipline and most are essentially college prep schools so the curriculum is substantially tougher. I am pretty confident if you retained everything about Catholic schools but eliminated all the time they waste on religion they would probably produce even better students.
The parent didn't say equal opportunity, he said "equal worth".
Elsewhere he said "all people...were worth God's love" which unless you subscribe to the monotheistic religion in play is worth exactly zip.
As for equal opportunity I'm all for doing our best to insure there are no artificial barriers placed in front of one person versus another, but I have no enthusiasm for a system where "equal opportunity" is an artifical creation of government resembling quotas.
Its not quite that simple.
Here is a link that hints at all the complexities of the Buy American Act as of 2001. In its simplest form it mandates:
"The BAA restricts the purchase by the government of supplies that are not "domestic end products." To qualify as a domestic end product, the article (1) must be manufactured in the United States, and (2) the cost of its components mined, produced, or manufactured in the United States must exceed 50% the cost of all its components"
In practice though there are a host of exemptions for NAFTA countries, Caribean basin countries, and a whole bunch of others. Here are a bunch of them if you want to wade through them. In the end its an act that is more like Swiss cheese.
You can tell because the President's new fleet of Marine Corps helicopters are largely of European design and manufacturer, there is just a U.S. prime contractor (Lockheed I think) who is going to do the final assembly and delivery.
I guess your right. It was about at as ambiguous wording as you could put in a sentence. Your interpretration must be correct one since the Black Death certainly did crash Europe's population and probably knocked Europe out of the Catholicism induced dark ages.
"chances are slavery would still exist here today."
Not really sure about that. Industrialization would have gradually eliminated the need for slaves, though industrialization brought us wage slaves and sweat shops instead. Its not like slavery is really gone, its just morphed in to a somewhat gentler form.
The thing you gloss over about abolition is that the fanatically religious abolitionists pushed their cause to far to fast. It produced a backlash in the South as it became clear the abolitionists were bent on forcing abolition on the South and decimating the cotton industry on which the South was completely dependent. It was a lot easier for the North, where all those Methodist abolitionist were, to free slaves since its economy was more industrialized and diversified and not dependent on slaves. Whitney's invention of the cotton gin helped transform the South in to a cotton economy which led to a slave dependent economy.
By pushing their agenda to fast the abolitionists pushed the U.S. in to a war that killed around 600,000-700,000, more than any other war in its history, and devastated most of the country, especially the South. It also decimated state's rights and lead to the excessively powerful Federal government we have today
All in all it was very mixed achievement for Christianity. If abolition had taken a more gradual pace, and let engines displace the need for human labor, so the South could have weaned its economy from slaver before abolition the U.S. could have averted one of its darkest eras.
The fundamental problem you find throughout the history of monotheistic religions are how frequently religion seems to be at the root of bloody conflicts that have claimed millions of lives.
"Christianity was the first to claim the inherent worth and dignity of every person."
If you were to ask me I would say both sides you are covering here are wrong. The racist slavers were wrong in uniformly treating all blacks as subhuman and worthless. Unitarian's are equally wrong in uniformly treating all peoples as equals and of equal worth. The reality is every human being is different. We start with different strengths and weaknesses, and our life experience creates people across a complete spectrum of worth. Some end up saints and some end up evil incarnate. Some are tireless in self betterment, education, invention and achievement. Some are completely lazy, useless, worthless burdens on society. If you operate under the assumption all are equal you completely drain motivation out of struggling to achieve in life and you give everyone a free pass to be practically worthless because you tell them they have inherent worth by just being alive.
"kicked Christian Europe out of its downward spiral into an increasingly overpopulated, socially-stratified Dark Ages II."
Uh, how did the Black Death lead to overpopulation, it caused a population crash?
Granted I oversimplified the decline of Arab culture. But, its pretty clear Christianity has done very little that is positive for Western culture and has done it vast harm.
I think you can thank the Crusades more than the Black Death for decimating both Christendom and Islam. Arab civilization was relatively moderate before century after century of brutality from wave after wave of Crusaders radicalized and militarized both sides, and turned them wildly intolerant which is something they still are today (though the Christians were wildly intolerant when they started the Crusades).
Arab civilization was at its best when mosques were centers of all facets of learning, but as they radicalized the Koran and the theology drowned out all other fields.
In some books the dark ages ran from the end of the Roman empire around 400 AD until the renaissance. The Black Death came towards the end, not the beginning. The dark ages for western civilization were a period in which the great Greek and Roman civilizations were gone and replaced by the Catholic church in ascendence which was a decidely anti-intellectual institution to the extreme.
An argument could be made the Black Death in fact cleansed an overcrowded Europe, broke the back of institutions that were completely failing, in particular the Catholic church and lead to the renaissance, though it was a long time in coming.
Unfortunately the form of the revolt against Catholicism was the Protestant reformation which its turned out was nearly as bad, and today is probably worse if you've seen Pat Robertson at work today.
A passage from Wikipedia I like:
"The Black Death should have opened the way to increased peasant prosperity. Europe had been overpopulated before the plague, and a reduction of 30% to 50% of the population should have meant less competition for resources: more available land and food, and higher wages. However, for reasons that are still debated, population levels in fact continued to decline until around 1420 and did not begin to rise again until 1470, so the initial Black Death event on its own does not entirely provide a satisfactory explanation to this extended period of decline in prosperity. See Medieval demography for a more complete treatment of this issue and current theories on why improvements in living standards took longer to evolve. The great population loss brought economic changes based on increased social mobility, as depopulation further eroded the peasants' already weakened obligations to remain on their traditional holdings. In Western Europe, the sudden scarcity of cheap labor provided an incentive for landlords to compete for peasants with wages and freedoms, an innovation that, some argue, represents the roots of capitalism, and the resulting social upheaval caused the Renaissance and even Reformation. In many ways the Black Death was good for peasants, at least in Western Europe, because of the shortage of labor they were in more demand and had more power, and because of the reduced population, there was more fertile land available; however, the benefits would not be fully realized until 1470, nearly 120 years later, when overall population levels finally began to rise again."