As fun as it is reading the blatherings of 17-year olds (please, for the sake of my own sanity, do not tell me you are an adult) trying to redirect traffic to a website which seems to put forward the argument that a few intensive viewings of Enemy of the State and a glancing look at Loose Change give one sufficient expertise to discuss the national security apparatus of the United States, I think I'll have a good bit of fun and jump in on this one:
1) There are U.S. government agencies that exist for the purpose of murdering, torturing, and otherwise breaking the law and showing no respect for the law.
You mean that U.S. agencies might - shudder - break the law? Do you really mean that? Honest and for true? Well, knock me over with a feather! It's not as if the CIA - an espionage agency - wasn't openly created for that very purpose in 1947.
Yes, the CIA breaks the laws of foreign countries regularly. All the time. It's part of the CIA's job.
HOLY CRAP, THE EVIL NEO-CON (my personal status as a neo-conservative is quite debatable) ADMITS IT!
OF COURSE the U.S. has an intelligence service devoted to getting information from others through illicit means. EVERY MEANINGFUL COUNTRY IN THE ENTIRE WORLD HAS ONE AS WELL! All of them! Espionage is an accepted part of international relations. It is simply expected. It is used by all sides. Grown-ups have come to deal with this. We also realize that what we see in the movies and what happens in real life are, quite often, different?
Also, why should a U.S. citizen be held liable for breaking the law of another country inside the U.S., while acting at the request of the U.S. government, in a location where, 9 times out of 10, the individual has been granted immunity by the HOST COUNTRY upon entry? Or are you unfamiliar with the Vienna convention of 1961? I'm going to assume so, since given this sort of logic on your own website:
Did the CIA aid in murder? Obviously BBC News thought the story was likely to be true, or it wouldn't have published it. There are certainly many pronouncements of other countries that the BBC ignores. Presumably if the BBC had supportive information, it would have presented it. Since there is no supportive information in the article, presumably there was none.
Since the BBC is the ultimate arbiter of fact and fiction, I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you don't.
Then there's this gem:
the problems discussed here seem to come only from one department of the CIA, the department that supports secret action. The other main department of the CIA collects information. There don't seem to be problems with collection of information.
Oh, but what department is it! I can't find any departments in the CIA! Oh, dang, that must be because it's organized in DIRECTORATES! At the time of this blathering, you were most likely speaking of the DIRECTORATE of Operations, presently subsumed into the National Clandestine Service. Perhaps you were simply too lazy to locate this information. Perhaps you were afraid that evil gamma-ray beams from the CIA would melt your brain if you researched it. Or, perhaps, you're discussing some super-secret organization that no one has ever heard of! Ooooh, scary!
2) Those agencies are secret. U.S. citizens must pay for the agencies, but citizens are not allowed to know what the agencies are doing or even how much they are paying.
So, do you advocate that the government make public all of the following information for all citizens?
Medical files for all who have received government funded health care
Academic records
Tax records
Voting records
Welfare records
Driving records
Social security information
Nuclear launch codes, the location of all nuclear weapons, the precise method of maintaining and arming nuclear weapons, security around these weapons, etc.
The prototypical state for the economic problem in this case is Saudi Arabia. Saudis obviously are not lacking for money - they pump it from the ground at alarming rates - and this is part of their problem.
The Saudi state distributes oil wealth among its people, and these distributions are a big problem.
When people receive fairly large amounts of money for doing nothing, they have little incentive for improving their technical skills. Subsequently, there is little reason for young Saudi men - who, incidentally, were likely raised by largely uneducated women - to go beyond what they already do and know. A great many will also not seek out employment of any kind (the CIA World Factbook puts unemployment in Saudi Arabia at between 13% and 25% - not to mention the massive hole women have left in the workforce). Living off of oil subsidies, there is little need for students to prepare to compete in the global economy - they already have a resource the rest of the world needs for survival and receive an annual cut sufficient to live quite nicely off of.
Pakistan is another example. With the state generally unwilling to invest serious amounts of money in education - and with teachers rightfully afraid for their lives in many areas - parents are given the terrible choice of choosing to provide little to no education at all for their children or sending them to a madrasa where their child will at least learn to read, write, as well as likely learn some basic math. The religious knowledge they will acquire will also help instill positive morals (they hope) and make them a beacon in the community as they grow older (also, they hope). While the later is admirable, it is when the religion overtakes ALL subject areas - as it does in many of these schools - that it becomes a problem.
I received my undergraduate degree at a religious university - BYU - in the U.S. Evolution was accepted as fact and discussed as such. I studied Plato, Socrates, Aristotle and other great philosophers. I took classes on deductive logic. I studied Islam and Judaism. I learned the laws of thermodynamics. Majors were offered in Biology, Chemistry, various engineering disciplines, and other quite scientific fields. There were, of course, religion classes as well, but the requirement to complete these - 12 credits - was a fairly minor part of the overall curriculum and I cannot recall any instance of religion being extensively mentioned in secular classes (the vast majority) with the exception of ethical issues - particularly in a National Security class and on the subject of war. If the Arab world could make a system like that work, it would be better than what they have now.
I wonder how much of this divergence has to do with the embracing or refusal of logic. Christianity, after the dark ages, made various attempts to reconcile its beliefs with logic with varying and certainly debatable results. St. Thomas Acquians and Pascal are good examples. But the idea that things should conform to logic and reason has been deep seated for centuries now, even though it is certainly not universal. As Christianity embraced reason, Muslims philosophers such as Al-Ghazali sought to move away from it for whatever reason. The courses I took on logic and philosophy, although somewhat infuriating at the time (professor's fault, not the material) have been the most useful to me by far in life. I cannot imagine a life - or a culture - without these ideas.
I'm actually quite capitalistic, but one must give credit where credit is due. The Russians did a great deal to bring us to where we are today in terms of space exploration. One would hope that, 2,000 years from now, our descendants will all look back at Sputnik and see it as a great triumph of all mankind, not just the accomplishment of one tribe trying to best another. The likelihood of this occurring is, of course, quite small, but one can dream.
I mean, just think about it - these guys put an object in orbit. It's common place today, I know, but to think that they were able to get it to work the first time still amazes me.
Who were, and remain, worthy competitors and partners as we reach to the stars.
Congratulations are due on the anniversary of this achievement and to their many achievements since. May they have many more, and may they help elevate this world and all that are in it.
I realize that much, though certainly not all, of the Slashdot crowd is monolingual, and I do realize that there are great benefits to having a single lingua franca.
But as one who speaks 2 additional languages (Spanish and French) at an advanced conversational level and a third additional language (Arabic) at a very basic (and I mean very basic) level, I can't say I'm fond of this.
It's hard to understand if you haven't learned another language, but certain thoughts are more easily expressed in a foreign language once you've learned it. Certain phrases and words are simply idiomatic - they don't translate. "Che Pibe" is one that, for example, can kind of be explained in English, but loses its real meaning. I still want to say "trucho", a word without an adequate translation, when I see something that meets the characteristics. English contains a great deal of French words, true, but the real meaning, tied to cultural context, just can't be conveyed unless you are speaking in French. Arabic and, I imagine, Chinese are light years away from English.
I can accept a lingua franca, but language is an extremely important element of culture and expression. Most languages now dying were, arguably, dead long ago. But I shudder to think what would happen if the world adopted a "one language" stance rather than simply a lingua franca.
It would appear that, during my time here at Slashdot, I've picked up a stalker or two. While I obviously have no proof that a stalker was involved with this post, the pattern here would seem to follow. Otherwise, why would a post whose primary topic be journalism be modded down in a topic about journalism?
I would invite meta moderators to take a close look and decide for themselves before passing judgment.
Think about it - journalism is generally the result of a person in possession of what amounts to half of an English degree with a few communications and maybe an ethics class thrown in trying to explain complex issues from geographical and topical areas with which, odds are, the journalist has no training whatsoever.
Ask any professional - legal, medical, IT, academic, business, etc. - if journalists adequately explain the complexities of their work. I guarantee you that the answer will be a resounding "no" on almost all counts. Part of this is the nature of the media - the need to get stories that sound interesting (and life is often boring and must be juiced up) out very quickly - more quickly than the other guy. The other is simply the result of the fact that the person writing the article simply has no idea what he's talking about - they taught him about dangling participles and conflict of interest, not what a summary judgment, kidney, floating point or profit margin is.
Truly great journalism is written by experts in the field they are writing about. Many often complain that these experts are "biased", but I think it is plain that most journalists are as well - and most media outside of the U.S. recognizes this. While these experts may have biases, they also have one thing journalists lack entirely - intimate knowledge of the subject at hand. While one cannot necessarily accept what these experts says at face value, one can also be sure that the writer has done more in-depth research than browse the Wikipedia article for a few minutes or ask some other, often unnamed "expert" whose bias bleeds into the article but often without attribution, leaving the reader to assume that the idea of one expert is a consensus opinion.
It looks like a breadboard to anybody involved with electronics. Explosives have electronics attached to something that goes boom. Unless they thought her boobs were filled with plastic explosives there's really not much there.
Except:
1. The average security guard/police officer is not involved in electronics. If they were, they would more likely seek jobs that have better pay in these fields.
2. In a situation with a possible suicide bomber fractions of a second count. It is reasonable that even a person with reasonable training in electronics would make a quick call on this.
3. She had a play dough/putty like substance in her hand. To the unlearned or to those without time to analyze the situation - all involved in this case - she was certainly suspicious.
4. The grave threat of allowing someone on an aircraft with a bomb or exploding a bomb in a densely packed area provides additional reason for quick, decisive action on the part of security.
She did something very, very stupid and is lucky to have walked away alive. The police acted with great restraint and should be commended for it.
Do NOT EVER use an item that could, in a split second decision by someone without technical knowledge, be construed as a weapon, PERIOD.
Referring here to bombs or toy guns that look close enough to the untrained/unfamiliar eye, and referring specifically to instances where one could reasonably expect to have a run in with law enforcement/security.
Do NOT EVER use an item that could, in a split second decision by someone without technical knowledge, be construed as a weapon, PERIOD.
What this genius did could be compared to walking up to the guards with an air soft pistol in hand. Does the item present any serious risk? No. Could the item be easily construed to present such a threat? Yes. Granted, a gun is a universally understood object, and something designed to appear like a gun should reasonably be taken as one at face value.
She did not, obviously, use an airsoft gun in this case. She instead wired a board to a bunch of putty/play dough. A reasonable person, with a split second to make the judgment, could - and in my opinion, should - stop this person right in their tracks. Unlike a gun, which takes on a generally easy to determine shape, a bomb can exist in many forms and a person without adequate training cannot be expected to identify them all. So, it is reasonable - particularly given the grave threat of allowing a bomb to enter an aircraft with hundreds of people on board - for untrained personnel to cast a very wide net, particularly when an idiot who not only straps a few circuit boards to herself but then wires them to PUTTY. I mean how STUPID can you possibly be?
Think about it from the TSA's point of view. A person walks up to the security line with what looks like a SUICIDE WEAPON strapped to her. A suicide bomber, by definition willing to give up his own life, can generally only be stopped by the immediate use of deadly force. The TSA acted with remarkable restraint in this situation and, unlike every other time I have personally had to deal with them (took them an hour to decide if I could put a paintball gun which looked nothing like a real gun in my check baggage without a mountain of paperwork, mistook bottle of souvenir sand for liquid, the list goes on), I must say they did a very good job here. This girl was lucky to walk away alive.
You hear the officer charge him with inciting a riot, while the county records listed his charge as resisting arrest. No charge of iciting a riot was filed, which would definately make this a false arrest. Inciting a riot it a felony, and could have been downgraded to resisting, but there was NO listing of the original charge. I smell lawsuit.
Last I heard, a police officer can't charge anyone with anything - that's for a prosecutor to do. A police officer can make an arrest under whatever statute or common law principle he or she wants to, but it is ultimately up to the prosecutor and the prosecutor alone to actually file the charges.
This is why there needs to be a willful compliance law, that allows a person to say "Please do not touch me as I have not been charged with anything, nor broken any laws. I will cooperate peacefully, but if you violate my personal space again, I will be forced to defend myself.". Of course it needs to be worked out a little better than that, I'm sure.
Uh, no.
If you want to defend yourself against the police, you do that in court. Your argument would allow anyone to treat the police as if they were a simple citizen. They are not. They have been set apart by government and have special privileges and responsibilities. This isn't a television show, you know.
At any point in this hypothetical person's protests, he could conceivably do the same thing: go home, calm down, or go do something much more relaxing. Why wouldn't he? Can you imagine conditions under which you might become upset and act out for long periods of time?
Personally, I couldn't possibly care less. I am a home owner who lives peaceably and doesn't bother other people. All I expect is the same - leave me be and do not make my home unlivable.
As a society, instead of tazing people when the starbucks, mcdonalds, youtube, myspace, and slashdot don't seem to make their problems go away, maybe we would do better to regard their behavior as indices of a much larger problem.
Or perhaps people have lost all sense of self-control and are now firmly of the belief that acting like screaming 5-year olds to gain attention is appropriate?
I have not made my mind up about taser use on this particular case, but these arguments that it's some sort of greater societal problem are nonsense when it comes to individual actions. Do not try to blame society for your own shortfallings. Do not try to pin your idiotic behavior on an election lost nearly 3 years ago that this kid may not have even been old enough to vote in. Moral of the story in this case is don't rush up screaming and acting like a madman to a national politician and then resist arrest. Never resist arrest. You're a fool to resist arrest. We have a judicial branch to handle false arrests after all, and if he wants to object to his arrest that would've been the place to do it. Now, even if he isn't guilty of any other crime, he's most certainly guilty of resisting arrest and refusing to obey the orders of a peace officer. This kid's an idiot.
While working tech support for an elementary school, I encountered a G3 iMac that wouldn't boot properly and "sad mac-d". I was able to get the error codes and it showed bad motherboard. I called up Apple tech support, explained the situation and gave the phone tech the codes I'd received and mentioned the symptoms I'd noticed. I was then asked what software we were running. The school happened to have an older version of Microsoft works or some such (this was over 8 years ago, forgive me if I'm foggy on the details) and, humoring the phone support tech, I mentioned the software. I was promptly informed that Microsoft Works was clearly causing the computer not to boot, Apple didn't support it, and not to call again with this problem. Figuring I wouldn't get anywhere with this guy, I hung up, called again, explained the problem to the new tech and Apple had a man on site in 48 hours to replace the motherboard. Unsurprisingly, the computer with the new motherboard worked fine with the old version of works - just like the 100+ other iMacs on the campus.
I assume the tech was simply lazy and was looking for a way out. Had to be pretty lazy to not want to fill out a simple form. He also could've been extremely stupid. But in any case, it's not unheard of, even from a company supposedly known for customer service like Apple.
We're all screwed unless the government can track small aircraft flying over entirely unpopulated land in the middle of nowhere near absolutely no valuable targets. So remote, in fact, that no one has noticed a plane go down in the last week.
You're right - this is obviously yet another demonstration of our inability to defend against terrorism./sarcasm
Sorry, not a math or physics example. I'm a beginning law school student, and the best use I've seen so far is by the TA in my criminal law class. The professor has put the TA in charge of the PowerPoint presentation (he's the only professor there to actually use PowerPoint that I've seen) and the TA has this tendency of putting up the answers to whatever questions the prof is asking when some hapless student is getting grilled to death (and this prof loves to grill students). The TA always has a little grin on his face, and the Prof never turns around to find out... I imagine he'll force us all to pay a fee at the end of the semester for his services - a fee I would gladly pay =)
Costs could be as much at $14 billion, but only 40 million...
In other words, it isn't going to happen. While the article makes an excellent example of how to use "weasel words", it's not particularly useful otherwise.
C'mon. You didn't expect kdawson to post an article without some sort of dig on Republicans, did you?
My experience with the gifted program was abortive... but pretty funny as well. About two-thirds into my test to enter the gifted program in elementary school I asked what I was being tested for. All I knew at the time was that I had been pulled away from my class which was doing something fun at the time. I was told not to worry about the test, it was just for fun, and to just relax about it - it wouldn't count, and it wouldn't hurt me if I did badly, and I could go as soon as I finished. Let's just say that my effort on the last bit of the test was less than stellar. It turns out I missed being in the gifted program by about 2 points... and I've never had the guts to tell my mother why that was the case since =)
I wonder how much of this I could pin on the "we must make all children feel equally special, so we can't hint that smarter kids are, indeed, smarter" attitude popular in education. Then again, if I had been told what the test was for, I might have become very, very nervous and done poorly as well. Still, I wish I had been told the truth. It would have hurt if I hadn't made the cut for some reason, but it still feels as if I were stuck in a championship football game and told it was simply a game of catch with no consequences.
The state has taken over for the parents in so many ways that parents are scarcely allowed to teach their children.
Some kids never learn about the birds and the bees and basic responsibility from their folks - so now, all kids must spend countless hours of their education learning not to sleep around or they'll get sick and to use birth control or they'll have kids. So now, the teachers unions have made themselves the gateway of sexual knowledge. The schools have picked it up, so why should the parents have to keep teaching it?
My mother has been an elementary school teacher for her entire professional life. As she's moved from school to school, the only difference she has ever seen in final outcomes of students learning is the involvement of parents. Not funding. Not fancy new teaching styles. Not even necessarily the number of students per child. You could tell how well a class would do by the number of parents that showed up at orientation and at other meetings.
She spent a few years at an elementary school in one of the poorest areas of our hometown. It was almost entirely black, but race (unsurprisngly) played absolutely no role in achievement. The only real marker was parental involvement. If a child came to orientation with two parents or an obviously responsible single parent or grandparent, the child would do well. If the child did not show up at all, odds were that the 22 year old mother of an 8 year old child would show up and demand to know why her "baby" was not going to be passing on to the next grade. On multiple occasions, she even heard parents advise their children that they "didn't need to listen to no white lady" anyways - there was no need to maintain discipline or order in the classroom because the teacher was white. After finding out that little junior was failing, some went so far as to demand their child be switched to a black teacher, a demand the school, to its credit, denied.
The schools and the teachers unions running them seem determined to take over all previously parental roles - to become the teachers of all morality and to form kids in their very likeness. Schools should give kids the skills they need to succeed in the real world and prepare them to be good citizens. Schools need to spend a lot less time on "so and so has two mommies" and "guidance" counselling, teaching children to feel good about themselves without pesky little things like acheivement getting in the way, and spend a whole hell of a lot more time actually TEACHING rather than coddling children.
That reminds me of something a professor of mine used to say.
He required that all assignments be turned in to him in both paper and PDF format. When asked why, he simply responded: "because I love convenience and hate trees."
One day I had pink eye and requested to turn it in only via PDF. He responded by saying "my love of convenience outweighs my hatred of the dirty trees. PDF only, you sicko."
I had the opportunity to take a course on U.S. Intelligence and National Security from a gentleman who had worked on the Senate Intelligence Committee as a staffer for 10 years during the Cold War, specifically during the Carter and Reagan administrations.
Discussing the politics of funding, he pointed out that it was easy - very, very easy - to get funding for new photo and signals intelligence sattelites, listening equipment, spy planes, and toys. He noted that, yes, some lobbying went on for these projects, but the lobbying isn't what swayed Congress - it was the new and shiny. They could all go home and say to themselves "wow, I put up a massive spy sattelite that can photograph buttons on Russian officers!"
However, when it came to support for this equipment - analysts to look at the data they gathered, technicians to keep them running, maintenance facilities, etc. - they always came up short. In some instances, multi-million dollar pieces of equipment were purchased and deployed only to have the data they gathered analyzed only long after it was too old to be useful, assuming it was ever analyzed at all.
I realize that this post is a bit off topic, but the problem of not supporting what is already there exists all through government. In the case of this bridge, shutting it down would have met with massive protest from all involved. Projects would have caused inconvenience, just as increased personnel staffing creates great cost for the government in many areas. People do the same thing all the time - buy new cars and toys, but never spend the money on maintenance, it all went to the toy. But if we build it or buy it we better be able to keep it in good shape.
Slashdot Mirror
1) There are U.S. government agencies that exist for the purpose of murdering, torturing, and otherwise breaking the law and showing no respect for the law.
You mean that U.S. agencies might - shudder - break the law? Do you really mean that? Honest and for true? Well, knock me over with a feather! It's not as if the CIA - an espionage agency - wasn't openly created for that very purpose in 1947.
Yes, the CIA breaks the laws of foreign countries regularly. All the time. It's part of the CIA's job.
HOLY CRAP, THE EVIL NEO-CON (my personal status as a neo-conservative is quite debatable) ADMITS IT!
OF COURSE the U.S. has an intelligence service devoted to getting information from others through illicit means. EVERY MEANINGFUL COUNTRY IN THE ENTIRE WORLD HAS ONE AS WELL! All of them! Espionage is an accepted part of international relations. It is simply expected. It is used by all sides. Grown-ups have come to deal with this. We also realize that what we see in the movies and what happens in real life are, quite often, different?
Also, why should a U.S. citizen be held liable for breaking the law of another country inside the U.S., while acting at the request of the U.S. government, in a location where, 9 times out of 10, the individual has been granted immunity by the HOST COUNTRY upon entry? Or are you unfamiliar with the Vienna convention of 1961? I'm going to assume so, since given this sort of logic on your own website:
Did the CIA aid in murder? Obviously BBC News thought the story was likely to be true, or it wouldn't have published it. There are certainly many pronouncements of other countries that the BBC ignores. Presumably if the BBC had supportive information, it would have presented it. Since there is no supportive information in the article, presumably there was none.
Since the BBC is the ultimate arbiter of fact and fiction, I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you don't.
Then there's this gem:
the problems discussed here seem to come only from one department of the CIA, the department that supports secret action. The other main department of the CIA collects information. There don't seem to be problems with collection of information.
Oh, but what department is it! I can't find any departments in the CIA! Oh, dang, that must be because it's organized in DIRECTORATES! At the time of this blathering, you were most likely speaking of the DIRECTORATE of Operations, presently subsumed into the National Clandestine Service. Perhaps you were simply too lazy to locate this information. Perhaps you were afraid that evil gamma-ray beams from the CIA would melt your brain if you researched it. Or, perhaps, you're discussing some super-secret organization that no one has ever heard of! Ooooh, scary!
2) Those agencies are secret. U.S. citizens must pay for the agencies, but citizens are not allowed to know what the agencies are doing or even how much they are paying.
So, do you advocate that the government make public all of the following information for all citizens?
If not, wh
Much of the problem is economic, not religious.
The prototypical state for the economic problem in this case is Saudi Arabia. Saudis obviously are not lacking for money - they pump it from the ground at alarming rates - and this is part of their problem.
The Saudi state distributes oil wealth among its people, and these distributions are a big problem.
When people receive fairly large amounts of money for doing nothing, they have little incentive for improving their technical skills. Subsequently, there is little reason for young Saudi men - who, incidentally, were likely raised by largely uneducated women - to go beyond what they already do and know. A great many will also not seek out employment of any kind (the CIA World Factbook puts unemployment in Saudi Arabia at between 13% and 25% - not to mention the massive hole women have left in the workforce). Living off of oil subsidies, there is little need for students to prepare to compete in the global economy - they already have a resource the rest of the world needs for survival and receive an annual cut sufficient to live quite nicely off of.
Pakistan is another example. With the state generally unwilling to invest serious amounts of money in education - and with teachers rightfully afraid for their lives in many areas - parents are given the terrible choice of choosing to provide little to no education at all for their children or sending them to a madrasa where their child will at least learn to read, write, as well as likely learn some basic math. The religious knowledge they will acquire will also help instill positive morals (they hope) and make them a beacon in the community as they grow older (also, they hope). While the later is admirable, it is when the religion overtakes ALL subject areas - as it does in many of these schools - that it becomes a problem.
I received my undergraduate degree at a religious university - BYU - in the U.S. Evolution was accepted as fact and discussed as such. I studied Plato, Socrates, Aristotle and other great philosophers. I took classes on deductive logic. I studied Islam and Judaism. I learned the laws of thermodynamics. Majors were offered in Biology, Chemistry, various engineering disciplines, and other quite scientific fields. There were, of course, religion classes as well, but the requirement to complete these - 12 credits - was a fairly minor part of the overall curriculum and I cannot recall any instance of religion being extensively mentioned in secular classes (the vast majority) with the exception of ethical issues - particularly in a National Security class and on the subject of war. If the Arab world could make a system like that work, it would be better than what they have now.
I wonder how much of this divergence has to do with the embracing or refusal of logic. Christianity, after the dark ages, made various attempts to reconcile its beliefs with logic with varying and certainly debatable results. St. Thomas Acquians and Pascal are good examples. But the idea that things should conform to logic and reason has been deep seated for centuries now, even though it is certainly not universal. As Christianity embraced reason, Muslims philosophers such as Al-Ghazali sought to move away from it for whatever reason. The courses I took on logic and philosophy, although somewhat infuriating at the time (professor's fault, not the material) have been the most useful to me by far in life. I cannot imagine a life - or a culture - without these ideas.
Yes, yes, I know!
I'm actually quite capitalistic, but one must give credit where credit is due. The Russians did a great deal to bring us to where we are today in terms of space exploration. One would hope that, 2,000 years from now, our descendants will all look back at Sputnik and see it as a great triumph of all mankind, not just the accomplishment of one tribe trying to best another. The likelihood of this occurring is, of course, quite small, but one can dream.
I mean, just think about it - these guys put an object in orbit. It's common place today, I know, but to think that they were able to get it to work the first time still amazes me.
Excellent work, comrades. Excellent work!
Who were, and remain, worthy competitors and partners as we reach to the stars.
Congratulations are due on the anniversary of this achievement and to their many achievements since. May they have many more, and may they help elevate this world and all that are in it.
I realize that much, though certainly not all, of the Slashdot crowd is monolingual, and I do realize that there are great benefits to having a single lingua franca.
But as one who speaks 2 additional languages (Spanish and French) at an advanced conversational level and a third additional language (Arabic) at a very basic (and I mean very basic) level, I can't say I'm fond of this.
It's hard to understand if you haven't learned another language, but certain thoughts are more easily expressed in a foreign language once you've learned it. Certain phrases and words are simply idiomatic - they don't translate. "Che Pibe" is one that, for example, can kind of be explained in English, but loses its real meaning. I still want to say "trucho", a word without an adequate translation, when I see something that meets the characteristics. English contains a great deal of French words, true, but the real meaning, tied to cultural context, just can't be conveyed unless you are speaking in French. Arabic and, I imagine, Chinese are light years away from English.
I can accept a lingua franca, but language is an extremely important element of culture and expression. Most languages now dying were, arguably, dead long ago. But I shudder to think what would happen if the world adopted a "one language" stance rather than simply a lingua franca.
It would appear that, during my time here at Slashdot, I've picked up a stalker or two. While I obviously have no proof that a stalker was involved with this post, the pattern here would seem to follow. Otherwise, why would a post whose primary topic be journalism be modded down in a topic about journalism?
I would invite meta moderators to take a close look and decide for themselves before passing judgment.
Thank you.
Think about it - journalism is generally the result of a person in possession of what amounts to half of an English degree with a few communications and maybe an ethics class thrown in trying to explain complex issues from geographical and topical areas with which, odds are, the journalist has no training whatsoever.
Ask any professional - legal, medical, IT, academic, business, etc. - if journalists adequately explain the complexities of their work. I guarantee you that the answer will be a resounding "no" on almost all counts. Part of this is the nature of the media - the need to get stories that sound interesting (and life is often boring and must be juiced up) out very quickly - more quickly than the other guy. The other is simply the result of the fact that the person writing the article simply has no idea what he's talking about - they taught him about dangling participles and conflict of interest, not what a summary judgment, kidney, floating point or profit margin is.
Truly great journalism is written by experts in the field they are writing about. Many often complain that these experts are "biased", but I think it is plain that most journalists are as well - and most media outside of the U.S. recognizes this. While these experts may have biases, they also have one thing journalists lack entirely - intimate knowledge of the subject at hand. While one cannot necessarily accept what these experts says at face value, one can also be sure that the writer has done more in-depth research than browse the Wikipedia article for a few minutes or ask some other, often unnamed "expert" whose bias bleeds into the article but often without attribution, leaving the reader to assume that the idea of one expert is a consensus opinion.
It looks like a breadboard to anybody involved with electronics. Explosives have electronics attached to something that goes boom. Unless they thought her boobs were filled with plastic explosives there's really not much there.
Except:
1. The average security guard/police officer is not involved in electronics. If they were, they would more likely seek jobs that have better pay in these fields.
2. In a situation with a possible suicide bomber fractions of a second count. It is reasonable that even a person with reasonable training in electronics would make a quick call on this.
3. She had a play dough/putty like substance in her hand. To the unlearned or to those without time to analyze the situation - all involved in this case - she was certainly suspicious.
4. The grave threat of allowing someone on an aircraft with a bomb or exploding a bomb in a densely packed area provides additional reason for quick, decisive action on the part of security.
She did something very, very stupid and is lucky to have walked away alive. The police acted with great restraint and should be commended for it.
(yes, responding to my own post)
Do NOT EVER use an item that could, in a split second decision by someone without technical knowledge, be construed as a weapon, PERIOD.
Referring here to bombs or toy guns that look close enough to the untrained/unfamiliar eye, and referring specifically to instances where one could reasonably expect to have a run in with law enforcement/security.
Do NOT EVER use an item that could, in a split second decision by someone without technical knowledge, be construed as a weapon, PERIOD.
What this genius did could be compared to walking up to the guards with an air soft pistol in hand. Does the item present any serious risk? No. Could the item be easily construed to present such a threat? Yes. Granted, a gun is a universally understood object, and something designed to appear like a gun should reasonably be taken as one at face value.
She did not, obviously, use an airsoft gun in this case. She instead wired a board to a bunch of putty/play dough. A reasonable person, with a split second to make the judgment, could - and in my opinion, should - stop this person right in their tracks. Unlike a gun, which takes on a generally easy to determine shape, a bomb can exist in many forms and a person without adequate training cannot be expected to identify them all. So, it is reasonable - particularly given the grave threat of allowing a bomb to enter an aircraft with hundreds of people on board - for untrained personnel to cast a very wide net, particularly when an idiot who not only straps a few circuit boards to herself but then wires them to PUTTY. I mean how STUPID can you possibly be?
Think about it from the TSA's point of view. A person walks up to the security line with what looks like a SUICIDE WEAPON strapped to her. A suicide bomber, by definition willing to give up his own life, can generally only be stopped by the immediate use of deadly force. The TSA acted with remarkable restraint in this situation and, unlike every other time I have personally had to deal with them (took them an hour to decide if I could put a paintball gun which looked nothing like a real gun in my check baggage without a mountain of paperwork, mistook bottle of souvenir sand for liquid, the list goes on), I must say they did a very good job here. This girl was lucky to walk away alive.
You hear the officer charge him with inciting a riot, while the county records listed his charge as resisting arrest. No charge of iciting a riot was filed, which would definately make this a false arrest. Inciting a riot it a felony, and could have been downgraded to resisting, but there was NO listing of the original charge. I smell lawsuit.
Last I heard, a police officer can't charge anyone with anything - that's for a prosecutor to do. A police officer can make an arrest under whatever statute or common law principle he or she wants to, but it is ultimately up to the prosecutor and the prosecutor alone to actually file the charges.
This is why there needs to be a willful compliance law, that allows a person to say "Please do not touch me as I have not been charged with anything, nor broken any laws. I will cooperate peacefully, but if you violate my personal space again, I will be forced to defend myself.". Of course it needs to be worked out a little better than that, I'm sure.
Uh, no.
If you want to defend yourself against the police, you do that in court. Your argument would allow anyone to treat the police as if they were a simple citizen. They are not. They have been set apart by government and have special privileges and responsibilities. This isn't a television show, you know.
How about a little individual responsibility?
At any point in this hypothetical person's protests, he could conceivably do the same thing: go home, calm down, or go do something much more relaxing. Why wouldn't he? Can you imagine conditions under which you might become upset and act out for long periods of time?
Personally, I couldn't possibly care less. I am a home owner who lives peaceably and doesn't bother other people. All I expect is the same - leave me be and do not make my home unlivable.
As a society, instead of tazing people when the starbucks, mcdonalds, youtube, myspace, and slashdot don't seem to make their problems go away, maybe we would do better to regard their behavior as indices of a much larger problem.
Or perhaps people have lost all sense of self-control and are now firmly of the belief that acting like screaming 5-year olds to gain attention is appropriate?
I have not made my mind up about taser use on this particular case, but these arguments that it's some sort of greater societal problem are nonsense when it comes to individual actions. Do not try to blame society for your own shortfallings. Do not try to pin your idiotic behavior on an election lost nearly 3 years ago that this kid may not have even been old enough to vote in. Moral of the story in this case is don't rush up screaming and acting like a madman to a national politician and then resist arrest. Never resist arrest. You're a fool to resist arrest. We have a judicial branch to handle false arrests after all, and if he wants to object to his arrest that would've been the place to do it. Now, even if he isn't guilty of any other crime, he's most certainly guilty of resisting arrest and refusing to obey the orders of a peace officer. This kid's an idiot.
and that seems to be their MO now a days - looking for sound bites and doing anything to cause a scene.
He should do well out there.
While working tech support for an elementary school, I encountered a G3 iMac that wouldn't boot properly and "sad mac-d". I was able to get the error codes and it showed bad motherboard. I called up Apple tech support, explained the situation and gave the phone tech the codes I'd received and mentioned the symptoms I'd noticed. I was then asked what software we were running. The school happened to have an older version of Microsoft works or some such (this was over 8 years ago, forgive me if I'm foggy on the details) and, humoring the phone support tech, I mentioned the software. I was promptly informed that Microsoft Works was clearly causing the computer not to boot, Apple didn't support it, and not to call again with this problem. Figuring I wouldn't get anywhere with this guy, I hung up, called again, explained the problem to the new tech and Apple had a man on site in 48 hours to replace the motherboard. Unsurprisingly, the computer with the new motherboard worked fine with the old version of works - just like the 100+ other iMacs on the campus.
I assume the tech was simply lazy and was looking for a way out. Had to be pretty lazy to not want to fill out a simple form. He also could've been extremely stupid. But in any case, it's not unheard of, even from a company supposedly known for customer service like Apple.
Yes, after all, Nevada is an all-important border state. We must prevent those Arizonans from sneaking into the U.S. with WMD...
Oh, wait...
(I disagree with you on this particular issue. On the larger matter, however, I must say that I do agree.)
We're all screwed unless the government can track small aircraft flying over entirely unpopulated land in the middle of nowhere near absolutely no valuable targets. So remote, in fact, that no one has noticed a plane go down in the last week.
/sarcasm
You're right - this is obviously yet another demonstration of our inability to defend against terrorism.
Sorry, not a math or physics example. I'm a beginning law school student, and the best use I've seen so far is by the TA in my criminal law class. The professor has put the TA in charge of the PowerPoint presentation (he's the only professor there to actually use PowerPoint that I've seen) and the TA has this tendency of putting up the answers to whatever questions the prof is asking when some hapless student is getting grilled to death (and this prof loves to grill students). The TA always has a little grin on his face, and the Prof never turns around to find out... I imagine he'll force us all to pay a fee at the end of the semester for his services - a fee I would gladly pay =)
Costs could be as much at $14 billion, but only 40 million...
In other words, it isn't going to happen. While the article makes an excellent example of how to use "weasel words", it's not particularly useful otherwise.
Slashdot just got trolled.
C'mon. You didn't expect kdawson to post an article without some sort of dig on Republicans, did you?
My experience with the gifted program was abortive... but pretty funny as well. About two-thirds into my test to enter the gifted program in elementary school I asked what I was being tested for. All I knew at the time was that I had been pulled away from my class which was doing something fun at the time. I was told not to worry about the test, it was just for fun, and to just relax about it - it wouldn't count, and it wouldn't hurt me if I did badly, and I could go as soon as I finished. Let's just say that my effort on the last bit of the test was less than stellar. It turns out I missed being in the gifted program by about 2 points... and I've never had the guts to tell my mother why that was the case since =)
I wonder how much of this I could pin on the "we must make all children feel equally special, so we can't hint that smarter kids are, indeed, smarter" attitude popular in education. Then again, if I had been told what the test was for, I might have become very, very nervous and done poorly as well. Still, I wish I had been told the truth. It would have hurt if I hadn't made the cut for some reason, but it still feels as if I were stuck in a championship football game and told it was simply a game of catch with no consequences.
You might mess with kdawson's "narrative"! Can't have that!
The state has taken over for the parents in so many ways that parents are scarcely allowed to teach their children.
Some kids never learn about the birds and the bees and basic responsibility from their folks - so now, all kids must spend countless hours of their education learning not to sleep around or they'll get sick and to use birth control or they'll have kids. So now, the teachers unions have made themselves the gateway of sexual knowledge. The schools have picked it up, so why should the parents have to keep teaching it?
My mother has been an elementary school teacher for her entire professional life. As she's moved from school to school, the only difference she has ever seen in final outcomes of students learning is the involvement of parents. Not funding. Not fancy new teaching styles. Not even necessarily the number of students per child. You could tell how well a class would do by the number of parents that showed up at orientation and at other meetings.
She spent a few years at an elementary school in one of the poorest areas of our hometown. It was almost entirely black, but race (unsurprisngly) played absolutely no role in achievement. The only real marker was parental involvement. If a child came to orientation with two parents or an obviously responsible single parent or grandparent, the child would do well. If the child did not show up at all, odds were that the 22 year old mother of an 8 year old child would show up and demand to know why her "baby" was not going to be passing on to the next grade. On multiple occasions, she even heard parents advise their children that they "didn't need to listen to no white lady" anyways - there was no need to maintain discipline or order in the classroom because the teacher was white. After finding out that little junior was failing, some went so far as to demand their child be switched to a black teacher, a demand the school, to its credit, denied.
The schools and the teachers unions running them seem determined to take over all previously parental roles - to become the teachers of all morality and to form kids in their very likeness. Schools should give kids the skills they need to succeed in the real world and prepare them to be good citizens. Schools need to spend a lot less time on "so and so has two mommies" and "guidance" counselling, teaching children to feel good about themselves without pesky little things like acheivement getting in the way, and spend a whole hell of a lot more time actually TEACHING rather than coddling children.
That reminds me of something a professor of mine used to say.
He required that all assignments be turned in to him in both paper and PDF format. When asked why, he simply responded: "because I love convenience and hate trees."
One day I had pink eye and requested to turn it in only via PDF. He responded by saying "my love of convenience outweighs my hatred of the dirty trees. PDF only, you sicko."
True. But then the frog could boastfully say, "I even piss perfection."
Did they grow the crystals INSIDE of a levitating frog?
Now that would be cool.
Mmmm... frog crystals...
I had the opportunity to take a course on U.S. Intelligence and National Security from a gentleman who had worked on the Senate Intelligence Committee as a staffer for 10 years during the Cold War, specifically during the Carter and Reagan administrations.
Discussing the politics of funding, he pointed out that it was easy - very, very easy - to get funding for new photo and signals intelligence sattelites, listening equipment, spy planes, and toys. He noted that, yes, some lobbying went on for these projects, but the lobbying isn't what swayed Congress - it was the new and shiny. They could all go home and say to themselves "wow, I put up a massive spy sattelite that can photograph buttons on Russian officers!"
However, when it came to support for this equipment - analysts to look at the data they gathered, technicians to keep them running, maintenance facilities, etc. - they always came up short. In some instances, multi-million dollar pieces of equipment were purchased and deployed only to have the data they gathered analyzed only long after it was too old to be useful, assuming it was ever analyzed at all.
I realize that this post is a bit off topic, but the problem of not supporting what is already there exists all through government. In the case of this bridge, shutting it down would have met with massive protest from all involved. Projects would have caused inconvenience, just as increased personnel staffing creates great cost for the government in many areas. People do the same thing all the time - buy new cars and toys, but never spend the money on maintenance, it all went to the toy. But if we build it or buy it we better be able to keep it in good shape.