The only way to get the parents back on vaccine schedules is to determine the cause of autism.
Um, no. That's not the only way.
There are two public interests here. One is preventing the outbreak of infectious diseases. The other is protecting vulnerable members of our society who are unable to defend themselves against their parents' superstition and ignorance. For either or both reasons, we can and should use the law to force parents to vaccinate their children.
Parents are prosecuted for withholding other forms of medical care from their children. For example, 11-year-old Madeline Kara Neumann died from diabetes while her parents prayed over her, and those parents are now charged, as they should be, with reckless homicide. Why not meet deliberate failure to vaccinate a child with, say, a charge of child endangerment?
I've been told that DNSSEC is basically just a proof of concept when it's done on a single TLD, not providing much real security. If I understood it right, the main attack DNSSEC is intended to prevent is a man-in-the-middle returning a fake response to your computer's (or your ISP's computer's) DNS query, a fake that it accepts in place of the real response.
If so, then when your ISP queries one of the thirteen root servers for the.gov authority, the attacker could still return a fake response and set himself up as the DNS authority for.gov, at least as far as your ISP knew.
Anyone know how plausible that attack remains? Knowledgeable responses welcome:)
Of course, part of getting DNSSEC set up for the whole internet is seeing how well it plays out in real-world testing, and.gov is the logical place to start. I assume once any kinks are discovered from this rollout, we'll be one step closer to enabling it on the root servers, which will allow any TLD to achieve a real security gain.
The plain fact is that the economists surveyed think Obama would be better for the economy, by almost two-to-one. It's kind of sad how Adams had to dress the fact up by noting how many were Democrats vs. Republicans, essentially declaring it a tie:
...not surprisingly, 88% of Democratic economists think Obama would be best, while 80% of Republican economists pick McCain....
The economists in our survey favor Obama on 11 of the top 13 issues. But keep in mind that 48 percent are Democrats and only 17 percent are Republicans.
Despite his own strong evidence that the economists were being objective -- their own income levels did not correlate to whether they thought the rich should be taxed -- he doesn't even tell us the plain fact until after he dresses it up.
His CNN writeup was an excuse to repeat three times that he would have his taxes raised by Obama. Well yeah, he makes zillions of dollars. No mention of Obama's plan to cut taxes, for almost everyone, by more than McCain's plan.
I look forward to his next survey of economists, in which he asks which is better economically, capitalism or communism, and then weights the results before revealing them. ("Not surprisingly, 88% of market-favoring economists think capitalism would be best, while 80% of socialist economists pick communism. Our economists favor capitalism on 11 of the top 13 issues, but keep in mind that" etc.)
Since then DELL stock has gone up by 72%... while AAPL has gone up 3080%.
Dell's basic problem has been known for a while. They don't do anything unique. They were one of the first to "get" just-in-time custom manufacturing and they rode that horse for a long time, but everything they do, others can do better -- and apparently do.
Innovation, if it can be sustained, always wins over efficiency, because innovative hardware and software design can empower users by orders of magnitude, while efficiency gains approach an ideal asymptotically.
It's been sometime since I've followed WIPO domain-name issues...
...but I think I still know the most important rules.
The deck is stacked against you. But, you can still "win" (trade your domain for some money) if you know the rules.
The most important two rules are:
(1) Be prepared to document your legitimate uses of the site.
Since you've already been contacted, it won't help you now to put a bunch of "real content" up at the site's web address. But it sounds like you've been using it for email for some time now. You may want to search mailing list archives online to find old examples of your sending legitimate emails using the domain. If any are for vaguely-business purposes, so much the better.
I don't imagine you'll need notarized statements from friends and relatives confirming that you've been emailing them from this domain for X period of time. But if this goes to a UDRP action, you may want to get them anyway!
You're already on pretty good ground here if the domain really is just your last name. But it still doesn't hurt to have documentation ready.
(2) Don't make careless offers; know what "bad faith" is.
The other company approaching you is great. You don't have to do anything, they're the ones putting themselves out there.
But if you write back and say "I'll take a million dollars for it," or "how about a hundred dollars," you're putting yourself at a little risk. The risk in both cases is that now WIPO will treat you as attempting to profit from the domain. The specific risk of making an outrageously high offer is that you can be treated as not bargaining in good faith; the specific risk of making a lowball offer is that they may accept it and you'll (in the end) have to give it up for that.
Be very cagy about even beginning the bargaining process. Instead of naming a price, or even stating your serious intent to sell, you might begin with
"I wasn't planning on selling it, so I didn't have a price in mind. I'm using it and it would be inconvenient to give it up. But if you're really interested, make me an offer."
This establishes from the beginning that your purpose in originally acquiring the domain was not to profit by reselling it. In particular, not to profit by reselling it to someone who holds a trademark on the domain name -- that will definitely get it taken away from you on grounds of "bad faith." You further establish this by not stating a price, which could also be taken as evidence of bad faith.
If you get an offer that you're willing to accept, get them to send it in writing, not email, of course. Depending on how much money it is, it may be worth a trademark lawyer's fee to either draw up a quick contract or confirm that their offer is something you'd be willing to sign. (And do find a lawyer who knows something about trademark.)
If you get an offer that you're not willing to accept, do not make a counteroffer with a specific price. Don't even say you'd sell it for a higher amount. Say rather something like,
"I'm not interested in selling the domain at that price. If you'd like to make another offer, I'd be willing to consider it."
Until you have their signature on paper, your primary goal is not to do or say anything that could be taken as evidence that you have either registered or used the domain in bad faith, because that will let them simply take it away from you and you'll get nothing. And if they hold a trademark on your name, your asking for money is evidence of bad faith.
If you think you're able to bargain while following those rules, then first go read about the UDRP and get the real, formal definitions of the rules instead of my paraphrases. I'll let you google it; also, google on [udrp site:slashdot.org] for examples of how the deck has been stacked against individuals like yourself since 1999. Good luck.
Yeah, kdawson and I have been discussing this. This is an interesting story but of course the research needs to be duplicated and checked, objections need to be raised and addressed and so on.
Cassini is a good example... for the past 11 years it's carried 30 kg of Pu-238 from Earth (1 AU) to Saturn (10 AU), and its decay has been its only source of electrical power. If the Earth's 3% annual variation in distance from the Sun causes a 0.4% variation in the half-life of radioactive silicon, wouldn't the 900% change in Cassini's solar distance caused, at the very least, a head-scratcher for mission control?
So I'm super-skeptical about this.
The hard part about running tests to confirm this alleged effect here on Earth is that it may take years to get convincing results. One might also put a few samples of radioactive materials and sensitive detectors on HEO satellites and get a 0.1% change in solar distance every few days. If there's a detectable difference in radioactive decay it could be statistically significant in a matter of weeks. Rather expensive test, though. My guess is there's a better explanation for the observed effect (seasonal changes in temperature/humidity on the detection equipment maybe) and after a handful of grad students write papers about their inability to replicate the effect, this will be dismissed and filed away. Still interesting though.
For those of you who have never been lucky enough to witness the "pink page" we display to banned users, here's the text of the template we generate it with. I confess I'd never before thought about how offensive that might be to psychics.
He was mocking his own arrogance when he was young
Now ask yourself to what end.
He was mocking the "blogosphere" using (phony, smarmy) self-deprecation.
I'm not the one who sneered at those "infatuated with self-expression" -- those are McCain's words. The point of his extended joke was that young people have little valuable to say, and blogs are similarly worthless.
That's the conservative point of view: your elders are smarter than you, so just listen to them and shut your mouth until you're 50.
(The progressive point of view might be to thank the bigoted, ignorant, hidebound bastards who brought us up for the few good things they accomplished. Say, winning World War Two and inventing the transistor -- it's a short list. Then show them to a seat so they can watch in dismay while those of us who got a political education from someone other than Augustine, Hobbes, and Leviticus try to fix up the mess they stuck us with.)
Half the blogosphere was yelling its head off in 2002-2003 that the Iraq war was a horrible idea, sold to us with phony reasons. But our political system is run by white-hairs who sneer that blogging hippies are too young and foolish to listen to. Here in 2008, having been wrong about the war is still a qualification for getting on the TV, because it shows you were serious and wise, and having been right from the beginning is evidence of one's, as you say, arrogance.
How about a link from a site that doesn't have your own personal political axe to grind?
Yes, the link you give is ThinkProgress's primary source, so thank you for pointing out that TP and I do not rely on biased information. (That source is actually a story by Declan McCullagh, a libertarian whose politics I mostly strongly oppose except on matters of censorship.)
Did you read the link you gave? Here's what Declan wrote:
The other section of McCain's legislation targets convicted sex offenders. It would create a federal registry of "any e-mail address, instant-message address, or other similar Internet identifier" they use, and punish sex offenders with up to 10 years in prison if they don't supply it.
Then, any social-networking site must take "effective measures" to remove any Web page that's "associated" with a sex offender.
Because "social-networking site" isn't defined, it could encompass far more than just MySpace.com, Friendster and similar sites. The list could include: Slashdot, which permits public profiles; Amazon.com, which permits author profiles and personal lists; and blogs like RedState.com that show public profiles. In addition, media companies like News.com publisher CNET Networks permit users to create profiles of favorite games, gadgets and music.
"This constitutionally dubious proposal is being made apparently mostly based on fear or political considerations rather than on the facts," said EFF's Bankston. Studies by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children show the online sexual solicitation of minors has dropped in the past five years, despite the growth of social-networking services, he said.
A McCain aide, who did not want to be identified by name, said on Friday that the measure was targeted at any Web site that "you'd have to join up or become a member of to use." No payment would be necessary to qualify, the aide added.
McCain's bill would have chilled free expression on the internet to the point where very few blogs could have afforded to enable comments. Maybe McCain didn't realize the implications of his own bill for bloggers who want to engage their audience. Or, as his mockery at Liberty would suggest, maybe he just doesn't value open discussion on the internet.
Sorry, but you just quoted McCain being facetious as though he were serious, meaning you didn't get the joke. It's funny. Laugh.
McCain used exaggerated language to humorous effect. That part's hard to miss.
What I find more important is that the target of his humor is the ceaseless argumentation on all matters, political and otherwise, that the citizenry engages in when permitted freedom of speech. Contrary to what career politicians would have us believe, there are things worth discussing beyond the pronouncements of our daily papers. There are wrongs to be called out and acts of courage to be heralded. We dredge up our politicians' histories, we compare and contrast, we insult and mourn and challenge not only our opponents' beliefs but our own. We're not polite, because unlike the self-righteous papers' hallowed halls of pretend-land, we talk the way real people talk. Sometimes we persuade, often not, but in large ways or small, we do learn from each other.
The blogosphere is democracy at its most raw, a ceaseless conversation about the way things are and ought to be, led not from the "top" but by whatever ordinary people want to talk about each day. It's political conversation that, for the first time in thousands of years, actually comes from the people. That worries the entrenched media who for decades have built up undeserved reputations as the arbiters of the news cycle, and the politicians whose unspoken agreements with the media got them where they are.
I've been a programmer for Slashdot for eight years now. I've spent much of that time writing code to quash abuse without censoring contributions, and support thoughtful comments while discouraging "omg roftl," because goddammit I believe there's something vital and important about what ordinary people have to say. I want to give those people a soapbox, and give their readers the tools to find the most interesting and thought-provoking comments. People with something to say don't need a lecture on prudence and humility from their betters, they need to be encouraged to stand up and join the conversation.
And politicians like McCain mock them, and mock the way we argue. We're youngsters who show insufficient deference to the hard-won wisdom of our elders. Fuck that shit.
In 2006, John McCain gave the commencement address at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, and took the opportunity to mock individual expression:
When I was a young man, I was quite infatuated with self-expression, and rightly so because, if memory conveniently serves, I was so much more eloquent, well-informed, and wiser than anyone else I knew. It seemed I understood the world and the purpose of life so much more profoundly than most people. I believed that to be especially true with many of my elders, people whose only accomplishment, as far as I could tell, was that they had been born before me, and, consequently, had suffered some number of years deprived of my insights. I had opinions on everything, and I was always right. I loved to argue, and I could become understandably belligerent with people who lacked the grace and intelligence to agree with me. With my superior qualities so obvious, it was an intolerable hardship to have to suffer fools gladly. So I rarely did. All their resistance to my brilliantly conceived and cogently argued views proved was that they possessed an inferior intellect and a weaker character than God had blessed me with, and I felt it was my clear duty to so inform them. It's a pity that there wasn't a blogosphere then. I would have felt very much at home in the medium.
His contempt for citizens expressing their views is, presumably, why he introduced legislation that would basically have shut down comments on blogs and on sites like Slashdot. Under John McCain, if you are an individual blogger and you allow user comments or user profiles, you'd have to follow the same reporting rules as an ISP, but you'd be subject to even harsher penalties. The EFF called McCain's bill a "constitutionally dubious proposal... made apparently mostly based on fear or political considerations."
I kind of assumed the big win was that game development gets easier. If your game is rendered by ray-tracing can't you spend more time on building the models, lighting and gameplay and less on fine-tuning rendering tricks?
DoD producing propaganda for foreign (wink) audiences. Good evidence just came out that the White House forged a war-justification document. Stovepiped intelligence. Hush money to truth-tellers. Known-false public WMD claims. "This isn't about intelligence, it's about regime change." "Fuck Saddam, we're taking him out." Facts fixed around the policy. Leaks to "billboard" media to punish truth-tellers' families. Embedded reporters, sent home for publishing actual war photographs. Talking points piped from the White House to the top news corporations, often repeated as directives to the "journalists" who frame each day's news. Seven years of lapdog media pundits laughing along with the right-wingers who call for their assassination while they seriously discuss whether the 60% of Americans who still somehow hold political beliefs at odds with the ruling administration are traitors.
Tell people you are drilling and yeah, the oil won't enter the stream for 10, 15 years but the speculative properties alone will drop crude by another $20 or $40, easy.
There's no evidence supporting this.
The "price of oil" you read about in the papers is the price of a futures contract with delivery in one month. Your claim is -- that the highly-unlikely possibility of oil supply increasing by 0.2% and thus the price dropping insignificantly (the Bush DoE's word) 18 years from now has in substantive part caused the one-month futures contract price to fall by 20%.
That's simply preposterous.
Especially because oil is a global commodity. There are other producers besides the U.S. Hypothetically, if the U.S. announced today that in precisely 20 years, our nation would increase oil production by 10 Mbbl/day, then all the other oil-producing nations and corporations would take that into account when evaluating how much they should plan to produce. Since a significant increase in production might decrease the global price of oil, it might be the case that oil producers would reduce the amount of oil they plan to produce 20 years from now. It's quite possible that, as a result, total oil production in 20 years would be exactly the same as if the U.S. had made no such announcement.
In reality, whether other entities' production plans respond with an increase, decrease, or no change depends on complex projections of supply, demand, and other circumstances. My point is that it's ludicrous to assume that announcement of a definite increase in U.S. production would lead to an increase in supply and therefore a reduced price, 20 years in the future. And it's doubly ludicrous to think a highly speculative possibility of a 0.2% increase 20 years from now could make today's one-month futures contract nosedive.
But that's the kind of muddled, uneducated thinking that Republicans expect us to swallow.
What actually happened, of course, was that the House adjourned for its August recess. As scheduled. Just like it does every year. Presumably it was scheduled months in advance. Everyone knew it.
Except this time the minority party refused to, you know, leave. Though the government is not in session, the Republicans insist on hanging around anyway.
Why? Not to get any work done. They're sticking around in the hopes of getting some press simply for being stupid.
It may work. If the Democrats did this, the media would be happy to portray them as whiny little losers who didn't know when to go home. (Which would basically be accurate.)
But since it's Republicans doing it, the media -- including Slashdot, in this case -- will find amusement in what the Dems "did" to the GOP. Politico, which is generally an organ of the Republican Party, is true to form by calling Democrats "furious" and "complaing" [sic]. Slashdot says the Dems "turned out the lights on" them and giggles that the Democrats left even though "GOP leaders opposed a motion to adjourn." (It doesn't matter what "GOP leaders" wanted. The motion to adjourn passed. So the House adjourned. Learn 2 parliamentary procedure, noobs.)
Calling the House a "politburo" (meaning "the policymaking committee of a Communist party") because it adjourned on schedule is -- and here I have to agree with the Democrat who was quoted -- moronic.
And the issue the GOP is demagoguing is gasoline prices and offshore drilling. This pushes today's stunt from ridiculous to pathetic. The Department of Energy's
official projection
is that if offshore drilling were legalized immediately, "any impact on average wellhead prices is expected to be insignificant" -- even in 2030.
And that's an inflated stat, since its numbers include hypothetical drilling off the coast of California. The GOP is pushing to allow states to allow OCS drilling if they choose -- "states' rights," as the slogan goes. And California's politicians, including its Republican governor, have made it clear the state will not allow more drilling off its coast. So the actual benefit of the current GOP proposal would be about 2/3 of the DoE's hypothetical. In 2030:)
It's hard to believe that the Republicans would hang around a vacated government building after everyone's gone home, and yell into a bullhorn about how Congress needs to debate lower gas prices right now -- not in September! -- when Bush's own Department of Energy admits any changes would have zero effect on oil prices for 9 years and "insignificant" effect after that.
The GOP's twitter feed indicates their dogma du jour is: "drill here drill now to get us through the next 10 to 15 years." Again, the DoE's projections indicate zero effect on oil production or prices for the next 9 years, and "insignificant" effect after that.
It's unbelievable how pathetic our national politics has become. This embarrassment is why we need the grownups back in charge. And every media outlet that fails to make clear why the stunt is pathetic is part of the problem. Sadly, I include Slashdot in this.
Are you seriously going to sit there and tell me with a straight face that President Clinton's administration didn't weed out conservatives from executive branch jobs?
Yes, of course -- since it is illegal to take political views into consideration for certain kinds of career non-political jobs. Federal law is very clear on this. Read the PDF linked in the story for more information.
It was a part of the scheme that STEVENS, while during that same time period
that he was concealing his continuing receipt of things of value from ALLEN and VECO from
1999 to 2006, received and accepted solicitations for multiple official actions from ALLEN and
other VECO employees, and knowing that STEVENS could and did use his official position and
his office on behalf of VECO during that same time period.
That sounds like good old-fashioned bribery to me, but with our screwed-up laws it's probably a lot easier to convict a politician for lying about the bribes than for taking the bribes.
Slashdot Mirror
The only way to get the parents back on vaccine schedules is to determine the cause of autism.
Um, no. That's not the only way.
There are two public interests here. One is preventing the outbreak of infectious diseases. The other is protecting vulnerable members of our society who are unable to defend themselves against their parents' superstition and ignorance. For either or both reasons, we can and should use the law to force parents to vaccinate their children.
Parents are prosecuted for withholding other forms of medical care from their children. For example, 11-year-old Madeline Kara Neumann died from diabetes while her parents prayed over her, and those parents are now charged, as they should be, with reckless homicide. Why not meet deliberate failure to vaccinate a child with, say, a charge of child endangerment?
I've been told that DNSSEC is basically just a proof of concept when it's done on a single TLD, not providing much real security. If I understood it right, the main attack DNSSEC is intended to prevent is a man-in-the-middle returning a fake response to your computer's (or your ISP's computer's) DNS query, a fake that it accepts in place of the real response.
If so, then when your ISP queries one of the thirteen root servers for the .gov authority, the attacker could still return a fake response and set himself up as the DNS authority for .gov, at least as far as your ISP knew.
Anyone know how plausible that attack remains? Knowledgeable responses welcome :)
Of course, part of getting DNSSEC set up for the whole internet is seeing how well it plays out in real-world testing, and .gov is the logical place to start. I assume once any kinks are discovered from this rollout, we'll be one step closer to enabling it on the root servers, which will allow any TLD to achieve a real security gain.
The plain fact is that the economists surveyed think Obama would be better for the economy, by almost two-to-one. It's kind of sad how Adams had to dress the fact up by noting how many were Democrats vs. Republicans, essentially declaring it a tie:
Despite his own strong evidence that the economists were being objective -- their own income levels did not correlate to whether they thought the rich should be taxed -- he doesn't even tell us the plain fact until after he dresses it up.
His CNN writeup was an excuse to repeat three times that he would have his taxes raised by Obama. Well yeah, he makes zillions of dollars. No mention of Obama's plan to cut taxes, for almost everyone, by more than McCain's plan.
I look forward to his next survey of economists, in which he asks which is better economically, capitalism or communism, and then weights the results before revealing them. ("Not surprisingly, 88% of market-favoring economists think capitalism would be best, while 80% of socialist economists pick communism. Our economists favor capitalism on 11 of the top 13 issues, but keep in mind that" etc.)
Big Pharma Spends More On Advertising Than Research And Development, Study Finds, Jan. 7, 2008
Oops sorry, I typoed 2007 when I meant 1997.
CEO Michael Dell, October 2007, on being asked what he'd do if he were CEO of Apple:
Since then DELL stock has gone up by 72%... while AAPL has gone up 3080%.
Dell's basic problem has been known for a while. They don't do anything unique. They were one of the first to "get" just-in-time custom manufacturing and they rode that horse for a long time, but everything they do, others can do better -- and apparently do.
Innovation, if it can be sustained, always wins over efficiency, because innovative hardware and software design can empower users by orders of magnitude, while efficiency gains approach an ideal asymptotically.
It's been some time since I've followed WIPO domain-name issues...
...but I think I still know the most important rules.
The deck is stacked against you. But, you can still "win" (trade your domain for some money) if you know the rules.
The most important two rules are:
(1) Be prepared to document your legitimate uses of the site.
Since you've already been contacted, it won't help you now to put a bunch of "real content" up at the site's web address. But it sounds like you've been using it for email for some time now. You may want to search mailing list archives online to find old examples of your sending legitimate emails using the domain. If any are for vaguely-business purposes, so much the better.
I don't imagine you'll need notarized statements from friends and relatives confirming that you've been emailing them from this domain for X period of time. But if this goes to a UDRP action, you may want to get them anyway!
You're already on pretty good ground here if the domain really is just your last name. But it still doesn't hurt to have documentation ready.
(2) Don't make careless offers; know what "bad faith" is.
The other company approaching you is great. You don't have to do anything, they're the ones putting themselves out there.
But if you write back and say "I'll take a million dollars for it," or "how about a hundred dollars," you're putting yourself at a little risk. The risk in both cases is that now WIPO will treat you as attempting to profit from the domain. The specific risk of making an outrageously high offer is that you can be treated as not bargaining in good faith; the specific risk of making a lowball offer is that they may accept it and you'll (in the end) have to give it up for that.
Be very cagy about even beginning the bargaining process. Instead of naming a price, or even stating your serious intent to sell, you might begin with
"I wasn't planning on selling it, so I didn't have a price in mind. I'm using it and it would be inconvenient to give it up. But if you're really interested, make me an offer."
This establishes from the beginning that your purpose in originally acquiring the domain was not to profit by reselling it. In particular, not to profit by reselling it to someone who holds a trademark on the domain name -- that will definitely get it taken away from you on grounds of "bad faith." You further establish this by not stating a price, which could also be taken as evidence of bad faith.
If you get an offer that you're willing to accept, get them to send it in writing, not email, of course. Depending on how much money it is, it may be worth a trademark lawyer's fee to either draw up a quick contract or confirm that their offer is something you'd be willing to sign. (And do find a lawyer who knows something about trademark.)
If you get an offer that you're not willing to accept, do not make a counteroffer with a specific price. Don't even say you'd sell it for a higher amount. Say rather something like,
"I'm not interested in selling the domain at that price. If you'd like to make another offer, I'd be willing to consider it."
Until you have their signature on paper, your primary goal is not to do or say anything that could be taken as evidence that you have either registered or used the domain in bad faith, because that will let them simply take it away from you and you'll get nothing. And if they hold a trademark on your name, your asking for money is evidence of bad faith.
If you think you're able to bargain while following those rules, then first go read about the UDRP and get the real, formal definitions of the rules instead of my paraphrases. I'll let you google it; also, google on [udrp site:slashdot.org] for examples of how the deck has been stacked against individuals like yourself since 1999. Good luck.
* Slashdot sues you for your nickel *
Hey, we have to make that money back somehow...
Yeah, kdawson and I have been discussing this. This is an interesting story but of course the research needs to be duplicated and checked, objections need to be raised and addressed and so on.
Cassini is a good example... for the past 11 years it's carried 30 kg of Pu-238 from Earth (1 AU) to Saturn (10 AU), and its decay has been its only source of electrical power. If the Earth's 3% annual variation in distance from the Sun causes a 0.4% variation in the half-life of radioactive silicon, wouldn't the 900% change in Cassini's solar distance caused, at the very least, a head-scratcher for mission control?
So I'm super-skeptical about this.
The hard part about running tests to confirm this alleged effect here on Earth is that it may take years to get convincing results. One might also put a few samples of radioactive materials and sensitive detectors on HEO satellites and get a 0.1% change in solar distance every few days. If there's a detectable difference in radioactive decay it could be statistically significant in a matter of weeks. Rather expensive test, though. My guess is there's a better explanation for the observed effect (seasonal changes in temperature/humidity on the detection equipment maybe) and after a handful of grad students write papers about their inability to replicate the effect, this will be dismissed and filed away. Still interesting though.
We may have CSS issues... I'm pasting your comment's URL to our UI guys right now :)
For those of you who have never been lucky enough to witness the "pink page" we display to banned users, here's the text of the template we generate it with. I confess I'd never before thought about how offensive that might be to psychics.
He was mocking his own arrogance when he was young
Now ask yourself to what end.
He was mocking the "blogosphere" using (phony, smarmy) self-deprecation.
I'm not the one who sneered at those "infatuated with self-expression" -- those are McCain's words. The point of his extended joke was that young people have little valuable to say, and blogs are similarly worthless.
That's the conservative point of view: your elders are smarter than you, so just listen to them and shut your mouth until you're 50.
(The progressive point of view might be to thank the bigoted, ignorant, hidebound bastards who brought us up for the few good things they accomplished. Say, winning World War Two and inventing the transistor -- it's a short list. Then show them to a seat so they can watch in dismay while those of us who got a political education from someone other than Augustine, Hobbes, and Leviticus try to fix up the mess they stuck us with.)
Half the blogosphere was yelling its head off in 2002-2003 that the Iraq war was a horrible idea, sold to us with phony reasons. But our political system is run by white-hairs who sneer that blogging hippies are too young and foolish to listen to. Here in 2008, having been wrong about the war is still a qualification for getting on the TV, because it shows you were serious and wise, and having been right from the beginning is evidence of one's, as you say, arrogance.
How about a link from a site that doesn't have your own personal political axe to grind?
Yes, the link you give is ThinkProgress's primary source, so thank you for pointing out that TP and I do not rely on biased information. (That source is actually a story by Declan McCullagh, a libertarian whose politics I mostly strongly oppose except on matters of censorship.)
Did you read the link you gave? Here's what Declan wrote:
McCain's bill would have chilled free expression on the internet to the point where very few blogs could have afforded to enable comments. Maybe McCain didn't realize the implications of his own bill for bloggers who want to engage their audience. Or, as his mockery at Liberty would suggest, maybe he just doesn't value open discussion on the internet.
Making fun of me is fine (and I think I'm all those things, except "young"!)
McCain was mocking and denigrating unsanctioned argument as a whole.
Sorry, but you just quoted McCain being facetious as though he were serious, meaning you didn't get the joke. It's funny. Laugh.
McCain used exaggerated language to humorous effect. That part's hard to miss.
What I find more important is that the target of his humor is the ceaseless argumentation on all matters, political and otherwise, that the citizenry engages in when permitted freedom of speech. Contrary to what career politicians would have us believe, there are things worth discussing beyond the pronouncements of our daily papers. There are wrongs to be called out and acts of courage to be heralded. We dredge up our politicians' histories, we compare and contrast, we insult and mourn and challenge not only our opponents' beliefs but our own. We're not polite, because unlike the self-righteous papers' hallowed halls of pretend-land, we talk the way real people talk. Sometimes we persuade, often not, but in large ways or small, we do learn from each other.
The blogosphere is democracy at its most raw, a ceaseless conversation about the way things are and ought to be, led not from the "top" but by whatever ordinary people want to talk about each day. It's political conversation that, for the first time in thousands of years, actually comes from the people. That worries the entrenched media who for decades have built up undeserved reputations as the arbiters of the news cycle, and the politicians whose unspoken agreements with the media got them where they are.
I've been a programmer for Slashdot for eight years now. I've spent much of that time writing code to quash abuse without censoring contributions, and support thoughtful comments while discouraging "omg roftl," because goddammit I believe there's something vital and important about what ordinary people have to say. I want to give those people a soapbox, and give their readers the tools to find the most interesting and thought-provoking comments. People with something to say don't need a lecture on prudence and humility from their betters, they need to be encouraged to stand up and join the conversation.
And politicians like McCain mock them, and mock the way we argue. We're youngsters who show insufficient deference to the hard-won wisdom of our elders. Fuck that shit.
In 2006, John McCain gave the commencement address at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, and took the opportunity to mock individual expression:
His contempt for citizens expressing their views is, presumably, why he introduced legislation that would basically have shut down comments on blogs and on sites like Slashdot. Under John McCain, if you are an individual blogger and you allow user comments or user profiles, you'd have to follow the same reporting rules as an ISP, but you'd be subject to even harsher penalties. The EFF called McCain's bill a "constitutionally dubious proposal ... made apparently mostly based on fear or political considerations."
I kind of assumed the big win was that game development gets easier. If your game is rendered by ray-tracing can't you spend more time on building the models, lighting and gameplay and less on fine-tuning rendering tricks?
either timothy never used a Linux distro and thinks this is newsworthy, or this is the slowest news day ever
Timothy was last seen putting Ubuntu on an XO. He's been using Linux at least since I met him in 1999.
It's August, every day is a slow news day :)
Actually, it's every other new feature of Slashdot that we hate. This one we actually think is fun.
DoD producing propaganda for foreign (wink) audiences. Good evidence just came out that the White House forged a war-justification document. Stovepiped intelligence. Hush money to truth-tellers. Known-false public WMD claims. "This isn't about intelligence, it's about regime change." "Fuck Saddam, we're taking him out." Facts fixed around the policy. Leaks to "billboard" media to punish truth-tellers' families. Embedded reporters, sent home for publishing actual war photographs. Talking points piped from the White House to the top news corporations, often repeated as directives to the "journalists" who frame each day's news. Seven years of lapdog media pundits laughing along with the right-wingers who call for their assassination while they seriously discuss whether the 60% of Americans who still somehow hold political beliefs at odds with the ruling administration are traitors.
But the fireworks show China is deceptive.
When Bush lifted the presidential ban on drilling, oil prices dropped $9 in a day... Read my other posts in this thread.
I suspect that would be a waste of time, since you can't figure out the post hoc fallacy, even when it's explained to you.
Tell people you are drilling and yeah, the oil won't enter the stream for 10, 15 years but the speculative properties alone will drop crude by another $20 or $40, easy.
There's no evidence supporting this.
The "price of oil" you read about in the papers is the price of a futures contract with delivery in one month. Your claim is -- that the highly-unlikely possibility of oil supply increasing by 0.2% and thus the price dropping insignificantly (the Bush DoE's word) 18 years from now has in substantive part caused the one-month futures contract price to fall by 20%.
That's simply preposterous.
Especially because oil is a global commodity. There are other producers besides the U.S. Hypothetically, if the U.S. announced today that in precisely 20 years, our nation would increase oil production by 10 Mbbl/day, then all the other oil-producing nations and corporations would take that into account when evaluating how much they should plan to produce. Since a significant increase in production might decrease the global price of oil, it might be the case that oil producers would reduce the amount of oil they plan to produce 20 years from now. It's quite possible that, as a result, total oil production in 20 years would be exactly the same as if the U.S. had made no such announcement.
In reality, whether other entities' production plans respond with an increase, decrease, or no change depends on complex projections of supply, demand, and other circumstances. My point is that it's ludicrous to assume that announcement of a definite increase in U.S. production would lead to an increase in supply and therefore a reduced price, 20 years in the future. And it's doubly ludicrous to think a highly speculative possibility of a 0.2% increase 20 years from now could make today's one-month futures contract nosedive.
But that's the kind of muddled, uneducated thinking that Republicans expect us to swallow.
What actually happened, of course, was that the House adjourned for its August recess. As scheduled. Just like it does every year. Presumably it was scheduled months in advance. Everyone knew it.
Except this time the minority party refused to, you know, leave. Though the government is not in session, the Republicans insist on hanging around anyway.
Why? Not to get any work done. They're sticking around in the hopes of getting some press simply for being stupid.
It may work. If the Democrats did this, the media would be happy to portray them as whiny little losers who didn't know when to go home. (Which would basically be accurate.)
But since it's Republicans doing it, the media -- including Slashdot, in this case -- will find amusement in what the Dems "did" to the GOP. Politico, which is generally an organ of the Republican Party, is true to form by calling Democrats "furious" and "complaing" [sic]. Slashdot says the Dems "turned out the lights on" them and giggles that the Democrats left even though "GOP leaders opposed a motion to adjourn." (It doesn't matter what "GOP leaders" wanted. The motion to adjourn passed. So the House adjourned. Learn 2 parliamentary procedure, noobs.)
Calling the House a "politburo" (meaning "the policymaking committee of a Communist party") because it adjourned on schedule is -- and here I have to agree with the Democrat who was quoted -- moronic.
And the issue the GOP is demagoguing is gasoline prices and offshore drilling. This pushes today's stunt from ridiculous to pathetic. The Department of Energy's official projection is that if offshore drilling were legalized immediately, "any impact on average wellhead prices is expected to be insignificant" -- even in 2030.
And that's an inflated stat, since its numbers include hypothetical drilling off the coast of California. The GOP is pushing to allow states to allow OCS drilling if they choose -- "states' rights," as the slogan goes. And California's politicians, including its Republican governor, have made it clear the state will not allow more drilling off its coast. So the actual benefit of the current GOP proposal would be about 2/3 of the DoE's hypothetical. In 2030 :)
It's hard to believe that the Republicans would hang around a vacated government building after everyone's gone home, and yell into a bullhorn about how Congress needs to debate lower gas prices right now -- not in September! -- when Bush's own Department of Energy admits any changes would have zero effect on oil prices for 9 years and "insignificant" effect after that.
The GOP's twitter feed indicates their dogma du jour is: "drill here drill now to get us through the next 10 to 15 years." Again, the DoE's projections indicate zero effect on oil production or prices for the next 9 years, and "insignificant" effect after that.
It's unbelievable how pathetic our national politics has become. This embarrassment is why we need the grownups back in charge. And every media outlet that fails to make clear why the stunt is pathetic is part of the problem. Sadly, I include Slashdot in this.
Are you seriously going to sit there and tell me with a straight face that President Clinton's administration didn't weed out conservatives from executive branch jobs?
Yes, of course -- since it is illegal to take political views into consideration for certain kinds of career non-political jobs. Federal law is very clear on this. Read the PDF linked in the story for more information.
text of the indictment is now available.
It was a part of the scheme that STEVENS, while during that same time period that he was concealing his continuing receipt of things of value from ALLEN and VECO from 1999 to 2006, received and accepted solicitations for multiple official actions from ALLEN and other VECO employees, and knowing that STEVENS could and did use his official position and his office on behalf of VECO during that same time period.
That sounds like good old-fashioned bribery to me, but with our screwed-up laws it's probably a lot easier to convict a politician for lying about the bribes than for taking the bribes.
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