I just wanted to call attention to a quote from one of the dissenting judges:
Of the two dissenting opinions, Justice Antonin Scalia's was the more apocalyptic, predicting "devastating" and "disastrous consequences" from the decision. "It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed," he said. "The nation will live to regret what the court has done today." Keep in mind that he's talking about allowing people who have been held in detention for 6 years without even having been charged (let alone convicted) to challenge their detention. So explain to me how a man who doesn't even understand the concept of presumption of innocence is allowed to sit on the supreme court.
Let me see if I have this straight: The Liberals have handed control over to the Conservatives because they're afraid of losing power that they don't even use? Or am I missing a key piece of political calculation here? No, you pretty much have it. The only possible advantage to keeping the status quo is that they can choose the time of the next election. But since they aren't voting on any major bills, there's really no reason for anyone to switch their vote to the Liberals. So they really have nothing to lose by voting out the government. They just seem to prefer hiding instead of fighting.
Just to clarify - there is no such thing as 'abstention' in Parliament. It's 'yes' or 'no'. You are technically correct. However, a MP who is present but does not rise to vote one way or another is considered to have abstained on the motion.
For a year or two, now, the Conservatives have been able to push through almost any legislation by making it a confidence motion. For those of you in the US, all major bills (budgets and any bills involving new spending), double as motions of confidence in the government. Their failure means the government falls. The main opposition in Canada, the Liberal party, has feared bringing the government down (even though they have the votes) because their party is not polling any better than they did in the last election. They either register a vote of 'abstain' or do not show up to vote where major legislation is concerned. The result is that the Liberals have given the Conservative government an effective majority in Parliament. So the major question here is whether defeating this legislation can bring down the government. Because if it is not a matter of confidence, then the Liberals will join with the other opposition parties to easily defeat it.
McCain 70-80% likely to pick up Florida? Obama 70-80% likely to grab Pennsylvania? Everyone is expecting those two to be big battleground states. Those probabilities seem pretty lofty to me. FL polls have shown a consistent lead for McCain since polling began in February. In PA, Obama's lead is smaller but steady. Neither of these is likely to be as big a battleground state as in 00 and 04. Ohio is the big toss-up for this election.
InTraders seem to be basing their predictions on demographics and economics more than historical results, which is why they strongly favour economically stagnant Michigan for the democrats even though polls show it as a dead heat. In fact, MI might be a good way to make a fast buck if the numbers stay this way into the fall.
NASA disagrees with Wikipedia then. They changed their mind on this and now think that 1934 was the warmest year on record. Something about that NOAA data not necessarily being very accurate...
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D.txthttp://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/2007/08/1998_no_longer_the_hottest_yea.html Look at the 5-yr mean in your own reference, and you'll see the problem with that argument. 1934 was clearly an anomaly year, while the last 7 years have all had very high 5 year averages. Remember that global warming is an average trend over large time scales (decades, even), and a single year bump is not evidence of a trend.
Incidentally this lull in solar activity coincides with there having been no discernable warming since 2000. But yeah, it's CO2 that's to blame for warming... nothing to do with solar activity.. *rolleyes*
No discernable warming since 2000? And this gets labeled informative? Sorry, but you can't just make up arguments. 2005 is the warmest year on record since records started being kept. In fact every one of the 7 years since 2000 is in the top 8 warmest years on record (NOAA data), and there is an obvious pattern of warming over that period as well. So sorry, you don't even have correlation, let alone causation.
It seems their method does rather poorly when looking at republican primaries. Overall, they comment: "In reality, only about half of the "predictions" before the 2/12 primaries were actually accurate. "
Still, one would expect logically that interest in a candidate is related to their poll numbers. But you need a better way to distinguish between negative interest and positive interest: how many people are searching "Obama AND Wright video" vs "Obama AND race speech"? With a more detailed model they could be on to something.
I would agree with you if there had been large swings between Clinton and Obama over the last few months, but that hasn't been the case. Instead there has been a clear trend favouring Clinton's performance in the general. See 538's win percentage tracker for instance (direct link to the file,if you prefer). In my view, if you refuse to count the conclusions of 4 months worth of polling, then there is no statistical argument that you will accept. All statistical arguments for the 2008 election can only contain information gathered up until the end of May 2008. If you argue that they are too imprecise to come to a conclusion, then you can't argue anything at this point.
I don't believe that the sky is falling, by the way. The Democrats clearly have a shot at the white house with Obama as the nominee, it will just be a closer race than it would have been if they had chosen Clinton. Too close, in my view, for a year where Democrats were supposed to sweep the elections and where the Republicans were thought to be in disarray.
The argument that Clintonites will fall in line as soon as she drops out of the primary race is also incorrect. It will require some time for the party to heal. Obama has taken the right first steps, although it seems many of his supporters are still stuck in primary campaign mode, constantly bashing Clinton as if Obama was still fighting for the nomination. They will have to stop too for the party to truly unify. But that really won't affect the outcome in most states, with the possible exception of Michigan. Even if it stopped tomorrow, I'm worried that the bitterness will carry on to November.
And, lastly, since I imagine you're thinking it, no, I am not a Clinton supporter. I feel that the DLC has pushed Democratic policy far passed the middle and made them De facto Conservatives. But Clinton's and Obama's policies are almost identical (besides tiny differences in their health care plan and her last minute, desperation tactic support for the gas tax holiday), so I don't see any reason to support him either.
It is misinformation to suggest that the Nov 1st numbers were the final numbers, when there was an election day poll that was reported. You could have also picked numbers from May that showed Kerry was ahead that day, but they would be just as dishonest. It is also misinformation to suggest that they only use the most recent daily polls, when in fact, they work with a weekly poll average. In fact, they had a separate map using the same weekly poll average in 2004: it predicted Bush 278-245, which is pretty damn good.
You asked for statistics showing Clinton did better than Obama against McCain. I gave them to you. Now you say we can't trust any polls or statistics because we're too far away from the election. Then why did you ask for them in the first place? Did you expect someone to post from the future of an alternate reality where Clinton was the nominee with election day results?
By first demanding statistics and then refusing to acknowledge them, you are spouting nonsense, and while your posts may seem smart to the casual reader, they are not.
The election was held on November 2nd, last time I checked and the site predicted only that the race was too close to call, with neither candidate receiving the 270 votes needed. But you keep up with trying to discredit websites through misinformation. Maybe you'll get enough ignorant people to believe you.
First of all, unless you cherry-pick polls, there is no statistical evidence that Hillary (or some other candidate) would be more successful against McCain. This is a talking point of the Clinton campaign only.
No statistical evidence? Like an electoral vote map which show Clinton crushing McCain, while Obama merely squeaks in?
Is everyone in the US so effing polarized that you can even get your website hacked by someone supporting a person you're running against,/even if they are in same party/?!
be answered "No, it's just those horrible Hillary supporters who are polarized!" and be modded insightful and informative instead of funny.
Cosmologists use the term 'dust' to refer collectively to non-relativistic matter in the early universe.
In the most basic big bang model, there are only two kinds of matter which we consider: 'dust' and 'radiation'. All non-relativistic matter is treated as a pressureless fluid which we call 'dust', while all relativistic matter is lumped together as 'radiation' and treated as an ultralativistic fluid: one whose kinetic energy is so great that its rest energy is only a small correction to its total energy, and can be neglected (so we can treat them as if they were massless photons).
These definitions aren't used outside of cosmology, so generally you won't hear about them in this context.
There seem to be a lot of questions about dark matter, so I'll do my best to answer them.
1)Dark matter is indeed postulated to account for the discrepancy between gravitational measurements of the mass distribution of galaxies vs evidence from other sources.
2)We know that dark matter can't be accounted for by large mass objects (like planets, asteroids, dust, etc) because CMB measurements tell us that the total amount of baryonic matter ('normal' matter made up of protons and neutrons) is a small fraction of the total matter in the universe (around 15%). So it must be made of heavy non-baryonic particles. This, by the way, is the reason why the discovery mentioned in TFA has little impact on dark matter. There is already an upper limit on the amount of baryonic mass in the universe, irrespective of what we see with telescopes.
3) We know that these particles can't interact electromagnetically or with the strong force, otherwise they would end up in atoms (either as part of the nucleus or orbiting the nucleus). In this case, these atoms would be much heavier than normal atoms and we would see evidence of them in the spectral lines of stars.
4)That leaves us with particles which interact only through the weak force, like neutrinos. We have also found that dark matter plays an important role in the formation of structure in the universe, and in order for structure to form in the way it has, the dark matter must be moving at non-relativistic speeds at that time. This rules out the neutrino, which would be moving at speeds very close to the speed of light at that time.
There are already a bunch of wise-ass posts out there saying SUVs must have caused the Martian climate change.
Let me make the obvious point that this news is in no way an argument against anthropogenic climate change, not in the least because they're talking about events that are MILLIONS OF YEARS OLD.
No, the time it takes for a stellar black hole to evaporate is much, much longer than the age of the universe, even assuming that no matter is falling into it. For a mass this large, the time is on the order of 10^69 years. It is only microscopic black holes that decay quickly. For instance, if we take a proton-proton collision at the LHC, where each proton has an energy of 7 TeV, and form a black hole out of it, it would have a mass of 10^-23 kilograms and would evaporate in 10^-84 seconds, which is the main reason we don't need to worry about them.
Actually, I'm with Rogers as well, and where I am (downtown Toronto) I've noticed no problem with encrypted traffic. So it seems that the degree to which they throttle traffic varies from region to region.
Other alternatives being explored generally rely on alternatives to General Relativity (for instance, TeVeS) to describe results that are attributed to dark matter.
I was actually at a day of seminars at the Perimeter Institute last fall where Katherine Freese gave a talk on this subject. The next speaker was actually talking about alternatives to GR and offered an interesting analogy. Early on, when astronomers were still mapping out the solar system, they noticed that Uranus' orbit did not conform to what was predicted by Newtonian gravity. As a result, they predicted a 'dark' body farther out who's orbit was influencing Uranus. This turned out to be Neptune. On the other hand, the precession of the perihelion of Mercury, which was also believed initially to have been caused by an unseen planet (which they called Vulcan), was found to be the result of the failure of Newtonian gravity, and is now seen as confirmation of General Relativity. He concluded that both avenues of enquiry are valid and should both be followed.
US President George W Bush said the news should mark the beginning of a transition towards democracy for Cuba.
"The international community should work with the Cuban people to begin to build institutions that are necessary for a democracy, and eventually this transition ought to lead to free and fair elections," he told reporters in Rwanda.
"And we're going to help. The United States will help the people of Cuba realize the blessings of liberty."
How did it go last time they tried to make a country realize the blessings of liberty?
The summary mentions that only one candidate has spoken about science issues during the campaign, without mentioning who it is. I'm sure you'll be as surprised as I was:
"It's hard to get 12,000 scientists to agree on anything," says Alan Leschner, chief of AAAS and former director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. "But science is the biggest issue facing modern society, and we are concerned that only one candidate--Hillary Clinton--has so far devoted any energy to science."
I would argue that any company set up in a society should be required to assist in the upkeep of that society. They benefit from the services that taxes provide, so they should contribute to keep those services available.
It's hard to argue that it's unfair for a company that can put out 44 billion dollars in cash for a takeover to contribute a measly 1% of that sum toward the community.
Corps wouldn't just sit on the money they saved. They would invest it by hiring more people and spending more money where they are actually based.
Or they would move the money offshore. Or they would move to give their top executives raises and stock options. Or they would throw it on the big pile of money they're offering to buy Yahoo. Or they would pass that money on to shareholders at the end of the quarter. Or any one of a hundred other things they could do which takes the money out of the state.
All moves which deprive the residents of Washington money they need for social services. Do you think that Microsoft is required to spend money in their home state? That they will do it out of the goodness of their hearts? Their job is to make money for the shareholders, and unless you specifically tax them, then there is no guarantee that any money Washington gives them will be reinvested back in the state.
Slashdot Mirror
For a year or two, now, the Conservatives have been able to push through almost any legislation by making it a confidence motion. For those of you in the US, all major bills (budgets and any bills involving new spending), double as motions of confidence in the government. Their failure means the government falls. The main opposition in Canada, the Liberal party, has feared bringing the government down (even though they have the votes) because their party is not polling any better than they did in the last election. They either register a vote of 'abstain' or do not show up to vote where major legislation is concerned. The result is that the Liberals have given the Conservative government an effective majority in Parliament. So the major question here is whether defeating this legislation can bring down the government. Because if it is not a matter of confidence, then the Liberals will join with the other opposition parties to easily defeat it.
InTraders seem to be basing their predictions on demographics and economics more than historical results, which is why they strongly favour economically stagnant Michigan for the democrats even though polls show it as a dead heat. In fact, MI might be a good way to make a fast buck if the numbers stay this way into the fall.
No discernable warming since 2000? And this gets labeled informative? Sorry, but you can't just make up arguments. 2005 is the warmest year on record since records started being kept. In fact every one of the 7 years since 2000 is in the top 8 warmest years on record (NOAA data), and there is an obvious pattern of warming over that period as well. So sorry, you don't even have correlation, let alone causation.
It seems their method does rather poorly when looking at republican primaries. Overall, they comment: "In reality, only about half of the "predictions" before the 2/12 primaries were actually accurate. "
Still, one would expect logically that interest in a candidate is related to their poll numbers. But you need a better way to distinguish between negative interest and positive interest: how many people are searching "Obama AND Wright video" vs "Obama AND race speech"? With a more detailed model they could be on to something.
I would agree with you if there had been large swings between Clinton and Obama over the last few months, but that hasn't been the case. Instead there has been a clear trend favouring Clinton's performance in the general. See 538's win percentage tracker for instance (direct link to the file,if you prefer). In my view, if you refuse to count the conclusions of 4 months worth of polling, then there is no statistical argument that you will accept. All statistical arguments for the 2008 election can only contain information gathered up until the end of May 2008. If you argue that they are too imprecise to come to a conclusion, then you can't argue anything at this point.
I don't believe that the sky is falling, by the way. The Democrats clearly have a shot at the white house with Obama as the nominee, it will just be a closer race than it would have been if they had chosen Clinton. Too close, in my view, for a year where Democrats were supposed to sweep the elections and where the Republicans were thought to be in disarray.
The argument that Clintonites will fall in line as soon as she drops out of the primary race is also incorrect. It will require some time for the party to heal. Obama has taken the right first steps, although it seems many of his supporters are still stuck in primary campaign mode, constantly bashing Clinton as if Obama was still fighting for the nomination. They will have to stop too for the party to truly unify. But that really won't affect the outcome in most states, with the possible exception of Michigan. Even if it stopped tomorrow, I'm worried that the bitterness will carry on to November.
And, lastly, since I imagine you're thinking it, no, I am not a Clinton supporter. I feel that the DLC has pushed Democratic policy far passed the middle and made them De facto Conservatives. But Clinton's and Obama's policies are almost identical (besides tiny differences in their health care plan and her last minute, desperation tactic support for the gas tax holiday), so I don't see any reason to support him either.
It is misinformation to suggest that the Nov 1st numbers were the final numbers, when there was an election day poll that was reported. You could have also picked numbers from May that showed Kerry was ahead that day, but they would be just as dishonest. It is also misinformation to suggest that they only use the most recent daily polls, when in fact, they work with a weekly poll average. In fact, they had a separate map using the same weekly poll average in 2004: it predicted Bush 278-245, which is pretty damn good.
You asked for statistics showing Clinton did better than Obama against McCain. I gave them to you. Now you say we can't trust any polls or statistics because we're too far away from the election. Then why did you ask for them in the first place? Did you expect someone to post from the future of an alternate reality where Clinton was the nominee with election day results?
By first demanding statistics and then refusing to acknowledge them, you are spouting nonsense, and while your posts may seem smart to the casual reader, they are not.
The election was held on November 2nd, last time I checked and the site predicted only that the race was too close to call, with neither candidate receiving the 270 votes needed. But you keep up with trying to discredit websites through misinformation. Maybe you'll get enough ignorant people to believe you.
First of all, unless you cherry-pick polls, there is no statistical evidence that Hillary (or some other candidate) would be more successful against McCain. This is a talking point of the Clinton campaign only.
No statistical evidence? Like an electoral vote map which show Clinton crushing McCain, while Obama merely squeaks in?
Only on /. could the question
/even if they are in same party/?!
Is everyone in the US so effing polarized that you can even get your website hacked by someone supporting a person you're running against,
be answered "No, it's just those horrible Hillary supporters who are polarized!" and be modded insightful and informative instead of funny.
Cosmologists use the term 'dust' to refer collectively to non-relativistic matter in the early universe.
In the most basic big bang model, there are only two kinds of matter which we consider: 'dust' and 'radiation'. All non-relativistic matter is treated as a pressureless fluid which we call 'dust', while all relativistic matter is lumped together as 'radiation' and treated as an ultralativistic fluid: one whose kinetic energy is so great that its rest energy is only a small correction to its total energy, and can be neglected (so we can treat them as if they were massless photons).
These definitions aren't used outside of cosmology, so generally you won't hear about them in this context.
There seem to be a lot of questions about dark matter, so I'll do my best to answer them.
1)Dark matter is indeed postulated to account for the discrepancy between gravitational measurements of the mass distribution of galaxies vs evidence from other sources.
2)We know that dark matter can't be accounted for by large mass objects (like planets, asteroids, dust, etc) because CMB measurements tell us that the total amount of baryonic matter ('normal' matter made up of protons and neutrons) is a small fraction of the total matter in the universe (around 15%). So it must be made of heavy non-baryonic particles. This, by the way, is the reason why the discovery mentioned in TFA has little impact on dark matter. There is already an upper limit on the amount of baryonic mass in the universe, irrespective of what we see with telescopes.
3) We know that these particles can't interact electromagnetically or with the strong force, otherwise they would end up in atoms (either as part of the nucleus or orbiting the nucleus). In this case, these atoms would be much heavier than normal atoms and we would see evidence of them in the spectral lines of stars.
4)That leaves us with particles which interact only through the weak force, like neutrinos. We have also found that dark matter plays an important role in the formation of structure in the universe, and in order for structure to form in the way it has, the dark matter must be moving at non-relativistic speeds at that time. This rules out the neutrino, which would be moving at speeds very close to the speed of light at that time.
I doubt it's worse than the other forms of torture practised there.
Still, simply because the US has done worse doesn't mean that Syria should be excused for this kind of action.
By the way, does anyone know what he said that got him imprisoned? It would be a small, but significant, act of justice to see it reprinted here.
There are already a bunch of wise-ass posts out there saying SUVs must have caused the Martian climate change.
Let me make the obvious point that this news is in no way an argument against anthropogenic climate change, not in the least because they're talking about events that are MILLIONS OF YEARS OLD.
Just think of the damage the US could do with the Canadarm. That's right... GIANT WEDGIES FROM SPACE!
No, the time it takes for a stellar black hole to evaporate is much, much longer than the age of the universe, even assuming that no matter is falling into it. For a mass this large, the time is on the order of 10^69 years. It is only microscopic black holes that decay quickly. For instance, if we take a proton-proton collision at the LHC, where each proton has an energy of 7 TeV, and form a black hole out of it, it would have a mass of 10^-23 kilograms and would evaporate in 10^-84 seconds, which is the main reason we don't need to worry about them.
Actually, I'm with Rogers as well, and where I am (downtown Toronto) I've noticed no problem with encrypted traffic. So it seems that the degree to which they throttle traffic varies from region to region.
Other alternatives being explored generally rely on alternatives to General Relativity (for instance, TeVeS) to describe results that are attributed to dark matter. I was actually at a day of seminars at the Perimeter Institute last fall where Katherine Freese gave a talk on this subject. The next speaker was actually talking about alternatives to GR and offered an interesting analogy. Early on, when astronomers were still mapping out the solar system, they noticed that Uranus' orbit did not conform to what was predicted by Newtonian gravity. As a result, they predicted a 'dark' body farther out who's orbit was influencing Uranus. This turned out to be Neptune. On the other hand, the precession of the perihelion of Mercury, which was also believed initially to have been caused by an unseen planet (which they called Vulcan), was found to be the result of the failure of Newtonian gravity, and is now seen as confirmation of General Relativity. He concluded that both avenues of enquiry are valid and should both be followed.
Or worse, they might try another invasion:
US President George W Bush said the news should mark the beginning of a transition towards democracy for Cuba.
"The international community should work with the Cuban people to begin to build institutions that are necessary for a democracy, and eventually this transition ought to lead to free and fair elections," he told reporters in Rwanda.
"And we're going to help. The United States will help the people of Cuba realize the blessings of liberty."
How did it go last time they tried to make a country realize the blessings of liberty?
The summary mentions that only one candidate has spoken about science issues during the campaign, without mentioning who it is. I'm sure you'll be as surprised as I was:
"It's hard to get 12,000 scientists to agree on anything," says Alan Leschner, chief of AAAS and former director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. "But science is the biggest issue facing modern society, and we are concerned that only one candidate--Hillary Clinton--has so far devoted any energy to science."
I would argue that any company set up in a society should be required to assist in the upkeep of that society. They benefit from the services that taxes provide, so they should contribute to keep those services available.
It's hard to argue that it's unfair for a company that can put out 44 billion dollars in cash for a takeover to contribute a measly 1% of that sum toward the community.
Corps wouldn't just sit on the money they saved. They would invest it by hiring more people and spending more money where they are actually based.
Or they would move the money offshore. Or they would move to give their top executives raises and stock options. Or they would throw it on the big pile of money they're offering to buy Yahoo. Or they would pass that money on to shareholders at the end of the quarter. Or any one of a hundred other things they could do which takes the money out of the state.
All moves which deprive the residents of Washington money they need for social services. Do you think that Microsoft is required to spend money in their home state? That they will do it out of the goodness of their hearts? Their job is to make money for the shareholders, and unless you specifically tax them, then there is no guarantee that any money Washington gives them will be reinvested back in the state.