Umm, you do understand the difference between correlation and causation, right? I was suggesting that any implication of a causative relationship may be spurious, due to the obvious correlation between rural counties and optical scanning machines. You do realize that rural voters in the South are more likely to be conservative Democrats? And that the Bush campaign focused a lot of cash and campaign effort on rural areas of Florida, including the I4 corridor, and this has been publicized since before the election occurred?
I don't claim to understand why it looks like the rural counties almost all ended up with optical scan machines, and the South Floridian "snowbird" counties, Broward, Dade and Palm Beach all ended up with the electronic touch voting systems.
I am just saying that without correcting for the other variables obvious to anybody who knows the state of Florida at all, you can't conclude that there is any causative relationship between the optical scanning machines and pro-Bush swing votes.
In what way are exit polls not anonymous? I would assume that the results are pretty much anonymous - that your personal information isn't collected, and that the people working for the polling organizations probably don't live anywhere near your voting district. And participation is of course voluntary, but my point is that why would you not participate when exit polls provide the ONLY independent means to verify voting results.
And I never suggested that exit polls override actual vote tallies. Just that vast and unusual discrepancies between exit polls and vote tallies are a red flag that an area deserves closer inspection for voter fraud.
Ah, that is a rather damning piece of information that I was not aware of. Looking at these numbers in light of that information gives a somewhat different perspective on them, and certainly removes some of my incredulity about fraud collaboration.
There is still a big question about how much of this is explained by geography and cultural differences between parts of Florida, but I'm willing to admit that there is at least a possibility that this could indicate large scale biases intentionally inserted into some of the voting systems used in key swing states.
I lived in Florida for 10 years, as I alluded to in my post which you clearly didn't read very carefully. In fact, I said this:
Furthermore, the most rural counties seem to be the ones that had the most radically Republican results, despite Democratic voter registrations. This just seems to be in pattern with the rest of the South - the thing about Florida as any long time resident will tell you is that southern Florida, and its urban parts in general are culturally much closer to the Northeast, while the rest of Florida is culturally much closer to the South (the accents follow the same pattern too - they speak with a Southern drawl in a lot of the rest of the state).
Don't judge the entirety of Florida by your experiences in Palm Beach, Broward and Dade counties. Though that's where I lived much of the time I was there, I have also lived for a year in Tampa and visited other parts of Florida enough to understand that your characterization is just not accurate for much of the state.
It absolutely deserves serious consideration if there's anything that's not explained by what I already mentioned in my other post going on here. A bunch of people posted random exit poll results for other states, but I'd really like to see exit poll results from Florida, broken down by county (assuming they gather enough data to do so).
But I still think it's very hard to imagine a three way conspiracy between companies that are competitors of each other to throw results in all the Florida counties using their optical scan machines only. If somebody can show more meaningful data, then I think it would be worth pursuing further.
It's generally considered more likely that provisional ballots would favor Democrats. I saw that mention too, but nothing there indicates to me any errors in Kerry's favor, which was the OP's point.
This post is not a troll at all. I'm not sure what conclusions to draw from this, but we should at least admit that this occurred, look at the methodology, talk to the pollsters and see if we can understand what happened here.
It's certainly troubling to me - I've heard many times that exit polls tend to favor Democrats by 2 or 3 percent because some people don't like to admit they voted Republican (a strange concept if you ask me - why would vote one way, then be ashamed of it 5 minutes later, and not willing to divulge that information, when exit polls serve as an absolutely vital check and balance to the integrity of our election process and one of our most useful tools in finding election fraud). But the radical differences would seem to suggest that somehow New Hampshire residents are far more prone to lying about who they voted for in an anonymous poll than are people of other states. That I find particularly hard to believe.
Actually, Tampa is more South than Northeast too. I lived there for a year, and it's very different from Palm Beach, Broward or Dade counties (the area where I lived for most of my childhood).
I just read the Newsday article you linked to and didn't see a discussion of Pennsylvania voting problems in Kerry's favor. Are you perhaps making shit up now?
I believe this. The electronic voting issues have been issues since well before this election however, and I'm not about to stop inquiring into the many documented problems just because I accept that Bush won this one any way you slice it.
As for why it takes a while for this stuff to start coming out, a lot of the detailed numbers and vote counts aren't released until at least a week or two after the election occurs. So it's not possible to find these serious errors on day 1.
I think a lot of this stuff is being overstated, like the Florida "inconsistencies", which don't seem so unreasonable to me when you correct for geography, cultural makeup, campaign time and other issues. And as you point out, the idea of 3 separate, _competing_ companies collaborating together to defraud the Florida electorate is pretty much completely laughable.
However, the 4000 Bush votes that mysteriously appeared in an Ohio precinct with less than 1000 registred voters is a proven and acknowledged issue - that's why this story was carried by CNN, not just some crazy blogger. And other legitimate issues will crop up, I'm certain of it. Whether anything will indicate provable, large-scale fraud, I am very doubtful, but more evidence is surely forthcoming that indicates the inherent weaknesses of many of the black box electronic voting systems that have been put in place over the last few years.
The Florida Election "inconsistencies" page was emailed to me earlier. Here's what I sent to my friend in reply:
Well, it's interesting, but that's not a useful study, just a dump of a bunch of numbers. There has been at least one serious documented instance of major electronic voting machine failure/fraud in Ohio (the precinct that counted 4,000 too many Bush votes), but this isn't even an analysis let alone proof of anything in Florida.
They list number of registered Republicans and Democrats, but don't show how those same countries voted in the last Presidential election, and more importantly, they don't show any exit poll results.
Exit polls, bitching aside, are probably the most important way we have of validating actual voter result numbers county-by-county and precinct-by-precinct. The best way to flag fraud is to note when the exit polls are substantially out of line with actual returns, and particularly if they are out of line in a systematic (and unpredicted) way.
Beyond that, I have several questions about these numbers shown.
While I have every reason to distrust Diebold given their atrocious history of faulty machines and rabid partisanship, it's hard to believe that a conspiracy of three vendors, all of whom sold optical scan machines to different precincts, worked together to create this fraud.
Furthermore, the most rural counties seem to be the ones that had the most radically Republican results, despite Democratic voter registrations. This just seems to be in pattern with the rest of the South - the thing about Florida as any long time resident will tell you is that southern Florida, and its urban parts in general are culturally much closer to the Northeast, while the rest of Florida is culturally much closer to the South (the accents follow the same pattern too - they speak with a Southern drawl in a lot of the rest of the state).
And registered Democrats voting Republican in a Presidential election en masse is not news to the South.
So to demonstrate anything meaningful - show me the exit poll numbers side by side, and then let's see if there is any consistent and suspicious looking discrepancy not explained by the major cultural divides within Florida, or the extensive attention paid by Republicans to the I4 corridor area in their campaigning.
As a current resident of New York City who does support the right of citizens to keep and bear arms, I just want to say that I disagree with your contention. Waving a gun around at 5pm in NY, NY *IS* using that gun in an unsafe and irresponsible fashion. Baring it in an open carry fashion *IS* recklessly endangering the lives of innocent bystanders, given our population density here.
Guns in densely populated cities seem to end up getting used for street crime, especially handguns. I do own a rifle, but it's not here in New York, it's in another state, and I don't feel that I want or need it here. Furthermore, municipalities regulating guns in towns, cities and urban areas goes back at least 150 years that I know of in the US, probably much farther. It's simply unreasonable and unsafe to have gun racks on cars in the streets or people carrying handguns (concealed or open) and getting in packed subway cars where they can be grabbed away, etc. I simply cannot imagine the Founding Fathers had that kind of chaos in an urban environment in mind when they thought about the need of the populace as a whole to be able to resist invading forces and oppressive governments as a well-regulated militia.
And if the Founding Fathers really thought that, then you force me and many other moderate Democrats who support reasonable gun rights into the position of saying that I disagree with the Fouding Fathers and think they were a bunch of idiots. And that the Second Amendment should be repealed entirely. Since you don't want to do that, I suggest you rethink your position and consider why on earth bearing arms in Times Square would be beneficial to the keeping of a well-regulated militia.
Since your web site seems to indicate that you live in Maryland, I have to ask you if you think it would be a good idea to encourage the residents of Baltimore to all carry around handguns on their persons. Do you think you'd be more safe walking around Baltimore that way? Do you think those people constitute a well-regulated militia, or are they street thugs who wouldn't hesitate to use those weapons to shoot you and take your wallet?
Intelligent, well-educated, decent people can't be atheists? Wow, I'll have to tell the several Nobel prize winners I've met who were avowed atheists that they must be assholes, because some guy on Slashdot said these virtues are incompatible.
Yes, Clinton did sign a lot of bad legislation for our online rights. Nonetheless, I'd still choose him again over our current Republican administration when it comes to social issues any day - our current administration, and the Republican Congress is far more authoritarian than the Democrats ever were. Now, our civil liberties get stomped on in the real world, not just online.
In Clinton's defense, most of this stuff was completely unopposed in Congress by Democrats and Republicans. I wish he would have taken a principled stand too, but I think the Internet was so new that none of our elected officials knew what to do with it, and just bowed to the first special interest group that came along with large donations and said they needed this legislation to protect them from all the dangerous online pirates.
The answer to this is to find younger legislators, people running for Congress for the first time, rising state lawmakers and the like, and lobby them, give donations, and try to help secure a new generation of political leaders who are aware that Hollywood and big media's interest run directly counter to the interests of the populace on these issues, so there is a counterpoint. I don't really care if these legislators are Democrats or socially liberal Republicans, as long as they are open to the ideas involved.
You'll find that a few thousand dollars worth of donated money means a lot outside of big national races, and gets you a lot of eartime with people who aren't yet running for high profile offices but will be in the future.
Please shut the fuck up - you are the one who ends up sounding like a whiny bitch, as do most conservatives.
Now as to your lamely expressed point, we all agree completely here that the Democrats have done fuck all to protect our civil liberties in recent years and have run roughshod over them just as much as Republicans have. I am only a liberal in the sense of having generally socially liberal beliefs - meaning the opposite of an authoritarian. In fact, until several years ago I used to describe myself as a liberal Republican, until it became clear to me back in the late 90s that the Republican party was becoming the party of rural hicks without an education, and the party of religious authoritarianism.
But you don't have to be a socialist income redistributer to see that the Bush administration and the Republicans in Congress are even worse when it comes to civil liberties than the Democrats. Now, in addition to having our rights online trampled, our rights in the real world get trampled too. This is the party you suggest as an alternative? And you dare to use the word 'liberal' as if it were a dirty word because we believe that we have basic rights that must not be infringed?
So I say again: shut the fuck up, and leave if you don't like it around here.
I think there is great music made in every era. The issue is whether the mainstream, top 40, popular music, stuff you'd hear on mainstream FM stations, in any given era is stuff that has lasting appeal and merit of some sort, or is truly bad, meritless stuff.
For example, I think the early 90s were a great era for mainstream music, with artists from Dre and Snoop Dogg to Nirvana that produced not only commercial success but also lasting music with merit (whether or not it's all to your tastes). The late 90s produced boy bands like Backstreet Boys, which will be pretty much crappy music in any era. The 80s were a bit of a mixed bag, but I think a lot of it sucked, not comparable to the stuff from the 60s and 70s at all, even with a few gems in the rough.
Today's mainstream music seems to be, more than ever, produced for younger teens. I fail to see how anybody past the age of 16 could think a lot of the current top 40 stuff is even decent music (let's forget about whether it's good, let alone great). Maybe my aesthetic tastes are just stuck where they were 8 or 10 years ago, I'm not sure. But I'd like to think if I were 16 or 17 now (I'm 25), I'd hate a lot of this crap too.
Okay, but that's a silly, playful name for my personal website. I don't write articles in trade journals or mainstream press outlets about "grokking", or hold grandiose conferences called GrokCon. I have no problem with a bit of silliness in the world, but it has its place, and that ought not to be to describe a social or technological trend of some importance.
"Blogging" (admittedly a godawful word - I would never attend a tech industry event called BloggerCon, I'd have to hang my head in shame for the rest of my life) is just a move back to what the Internet was originally about anyway - namely, democratization of content production and publishing.
Blogging software is just simplified CMS software, a more accessible form of what's been around since the start of dynamic web content and database backed web sites. That's it. Nothing more or less. Let's not ascribe any gradiose proclamations to it. I don't think "blogging" is a fad that will ever go away, I just think a lot of boring people with nothing interesting to say will eventually lose interest in blogging.
Easy-to-use content management software has just made it more reasonable for people to keep well-updated, more relevant sites without having to laboriously manage static HTML pages. The plethora of good (or at least decent) blog software out there has also done a lot to increase the importance and use of web standards like CSS and XHTML, and actually finally pushed forward useful metadata on the web in the form of RSS/Atom. These are all good things.
As for the rantings or ramblings posted by people you disagree with, and generally stupid or sucky content that just don't interest you, you certainly don't have to read it. Slashdot has plenty of this too. While quite imperfect, moderation helps separate the wheat from the chaff. Given the development of standards like Trackback by the "blogging" community (god I hate that word, it really kills me to use it), I wouldn't be surprised to eventually see distributed moderation systems or communities and webs of trust factor more heavily into the culture of blogs too (hmm, maybe we can call it the "culture of distributed content" - I refuse to use the word 'blogosphere').
I just wish that somebody would get rid of the damned word blog, negative connotations, hokey sound and all. And get rid of the meaningless catchphrase "social software" while you're at it.
A) It's the Mozilla Public License, not the GPL, and this clickthrough was a relatively recent addition to Firefox (and there was a thread of serious debate in Bugzilla about an earlier, far more restrictive EULA that was proposed). B) It's a well known, well analyzed license that's been approved by the OSI, so you don't have to get the willies from it C) Most importantly, even the nastiest EULA for a binary installation of a piece of software can't claim to restrict your rights to do what you will with your own code. So when I click through on something for Mozilla, or for Microsoft Word, I'm not usually too worried. This is a source code license, which claims to restrict your ability to do stuff with patches for the code - basically, it virally gives Sun ownership rights over code you write. I consider that willie-inducing.
Strawman argument. Work on your reading comprehension skills.
I didn't say they should open source it, nor did I ever use the phrase "open source". I merely commented on some objectionable concepts in their research license that appear to lay claim to stuff I write if it can be used as a patch to their source code, and the fact that I have an issue with clickthrough licensing agreements for software (or rather, that if somebody insists on a clickthrough license, you can guess that they are about to restrict some other rights that you would normally have).
I have no problem with closed source software in general that is honest about what it is. As for Sun, I certainly appreciate the value of their Java platform and I definitely don't blame them for wanting to protect their trademark and protect the value of a compatible platform. That doesn't related in any way to the points I raised, however.
Of course it is. I never said "here's what they should do with it". I was reacting to the fanboyism in the Slashdot submission (who described it as an exciting new licensing option), not saying that Sun was doing anything inherently wrong.
I don't blame them for being fearful about letting people fragment Java into incompatible factions and the like. Nonetheless, I still don't like clickthrough licenses, and I still think that telling somebody what they can do with their own copyrighted code is actually worse than not letting them look at the code in the first place. Their code is theirs, my code is mine, period. If they don't like that, they can write their own version of my code which they can do whatever they want with. I consider null and void any clickthrough license claiming ownership of my code.
7. Does this license require a click-through acceptance of terms?
Yes. For enforceability, Sun requires a click-through license.
This should tell you something - only a license that plans to restrict your rights in some unpleasant way requires a clickthrough. Seriously - I always get the willies from having to clickthrough to accept anything.
14. Can I share my modifications with other researchers?
Yes, provided that the other researchers have accepted the JRL.
Cool, even my patches are subject to the license. I knew some doozy was coming that was going to restrict my usual rights. Thus the clickthrough love.
8. When do I need to get a commercial license?
This research license is only for initial research and development projects. If you decide to use your project internally for a productive use, and/or distribute your product to others, you must sign a commercial agreement and meet the java compatibility requirements.
Uhhh... so let's see, I can use the Sun JRE free for any use. I can download the SCSL Java SDK source code, and while I can't redistribute it or do other Open Source style things with it, I can at least play with it and use it for internal things if I want (I think). But I can't even do that with the Java Research License, if it consists of 'productive use'? That sounds really... useful to me.
Cars may or may not be your type of movie, but talking cars and NASCAR racing will play well to a lot of the country. Just look at an electoral vote map - see all those red states? All the daddies in those red states will take their kids to see this movie, I guarantee you.
I like a lot of the Pixar movies. I don't have to like all of them. They are a company, they will make movies that people want to see, and hopefully that are creative and fun. The Incredibles looks quite awesome, and I'm looking forward to seeing it. If they make one that I don't like, fine, I won't go watch it.
I don't really see your point about bugs, toys, monsters and fish - other than all being things that kids are curious and can relate to in some way, what the hell do they have in common? The stories undoubtedly had some common elements, but were hardly clones of each other. The reason these movies do so well is kids can relate to them and enjoy watching them, but the stories are interesting and funny for adults too. So parents actually look forward to going to these movies with their kids (and some people like me use them as date movies because chicks melt when they see cute animated characters).
By comparison to these "boring" movies about bugs, toys, monsters and fish, try watching Shark Tale (what's that about? fish?). It was nearly painful to watch. The animation was decent enough I guess, but the acting and the directing were just terrible. Makes you appreciate what Pixar does well with their movies.
The problem is not motion capture technology in general. Motion capture, done properly (with real-time feedback for actors, and some tweaking by animators) can look very good for gross body movement. At least 90% of the problem here is as others have pointed out the uncanny valley effect in the facial animations. I'm not sure if they actually tried to do motion capture of some sort on facial movements, but the technology just isn't fine grained enough for that yet. Facial animations need to be done manually still to get a pleasing effect.
The body animations in Polar Express may not be fantastic, but this didn't stick out like a sore thumb in the trailer. I'm not sure if it was the rendering, movement or combination of both on the faces, but boy, this is a textbook example of how terribly distracting the uncanny valley can be - you just spend the whole time staring at the faces trying to figure out why they creep you out so much.
Slashdot Mirror
Umm, you do understand the difference between correlation and causation, right? I was suggesting that any implication of a causative relationship may be spurious, due to the obvious correlation between rural counties and optical scanning machines. You do realize that rural voters in the South are more likely to be conservative Democrats? And that the Bush campaign focused a lot of cash and campaign effort on rural areas of Florida, including the I4 corridor, and this has been publicized since before the election occurred?
I don't claim to understand why it looks like the rural counties almost all ended up with optical scan machines, and the South Floridian "snowbird" counties, Broward, Dade and Palm Beach all ended up with the electronic touch voting systems.
I am just saying that without correcting for the other variables obvious to anybody who knows the state of Florida at all, you can't conclude that there is any causative relationship between the optical scanning machines and pro-Bush swing votes.
In what way are exit polls not anonymous? I would assume that the results are pretty much anonymous - that your personal information isn't collected, and that the people working for the polling organizations probably don't live anywhere near your voting district. And participation is of course voluntary, but my point is that why would you not participate when exit polls provide the ONLY independent means to verify voting results.
And I never suggested that exit polls override actual vote tallies. Just that vast and unusual discrepancies between exit polls and vote tallies are a red flag that an area deserves closer inspection for voter fraud.
Ah, that is a rather damning piece of information that I was not aware of. Looking at these numbers in light of that information gives a somewhat different perspective on them, and certainly removes some of my incredulity about fraud collaboration.
There is still a big question about how much of this is explained by geography and cultural differences between parts of Florida, but I'm willing to admit that there is at least a possibility that this could indicate large scale biases intentionally inserted into some of the voting systems used in key swing states.
I lived in Florida for 10 years, as I alluded to in my post which you clearly didn't read very carefully. In fact, I said this:
Furthermore, the most rural counties seem to be the ones that had the most radically Republican results, despite Democratic voter registrations. This just seems to be in pattern with the rest of the South - the thing about Florida as any long time resident will tell you is that southern Florida, and its urban parts in general are culturally much closer to the Northeast, while the rest of Florida is culturally much closer to the South (the accents follow the same pattern too - they speak with a Southern drawl in a lot of the rest of the state).
Don't judge the entirety of Florida by your experiences in Palm Beach, Broward and Dade counties. Though that's where I lived much of the time I was there, I have also lived for a year in Tampa and visited other parts of Florida enough to understand that your characterization is just not accurate for much of the state.
I already did.
It absolutely deserves serious consideration if there's anything that's not explained by what I already mentioned in my other post going on here. A bunch of people posted random exit poll results for other states, but I'd really like to see exit poll results from Florida, broken down by county (assuming they gather enough data to do so).
But I still think it's very hard to imagine a three way conspiracy between companies that are competitors of each other to throw results in all the Florida counties using their optical scan machines only. If somebody can show more meaningful data, then I think it would be worth pursuing further.
It's generally considered more likely that provisional ballots would favor Democrats. I saw that mention too, but nothing there indicates to me any errors in Kerry's favor, which was the OP's point.
This post is not a troll at all. I'm not sure what conclusions to draw from this, but we should at least admit that this occurred, look at the methodology, talk to the pollsters and see if we can understand what happened here.
It's certainly troubling to me - I've heard many times that exit polls tend to favor Democrats by 2 or 3 percent because some people don't like to admit they voted Republican (a strange concept if you ask me - why would vote one way, then be ashamed of it 5 minutes later, and not willing to divulge that information, when exit polls serve as an absolutely vital check and balance to the integrity of our election process and one of our most useful tools in finding election fraud). But the radical differences would seem to suggest that somehow New Hampshire residents are far more prone to lying about who they voted for in an anonymous poll than are people of other states. That I find particularly hard to believe.
Actually, Tampa is more South than Northeast too. I lived there for a year, and it's very different from Palm Beach, Broward or Dade counties (the area where I lived for most of my childhood).
I just read the Newsday article you linked to and didn't see a discussion of Pennsylvania voting problems in Kerry's favor. Are you perhaps making shit up now?
Bush won. Again. Get over it.
I believe this. The electronic voting issues have been issues since well before this election however, and I'm not about to stop inquiring into the many documented problems just because I accept that Bush won this one any way you slice it.
As for why it takes a while for this stuff to start coming out, a lot of the detailed numbers and vote counts aren't released until at least a week or two after the election occurs. So it's not possible to find these serious errors on day 1.
I think a lot of this stuff is being overstated, like the Florida "inconsistencies", which don't seem so unreasonable to me when you correct for geography, cultural makeup, campaign time and other issues. And as you point out, the idea of 3 separate, _competing_ companies collaborating together to defraud the Florida electorate is pretty much completely laughable.
However, the 4000 Bush votes that mysteriously appeared in an Ohio precinct with less than 1000 registred voters is a proven and acknowledged issue - that's why this story was carried by CNN, not just some crazy blogger. And other legitimate issues will crop up, I'm certain of it. Whether anything will indicate provable, large-scale fraud, I am very doubtful, but more evidence is surely forthcoming that indicates the inherent weaknesses of many of the black box electronic voting systems that have been put in place over the last few years.
The Florida Election "inconsistencies" page was emailed to me earlier. Here's what I sent to my friend in reply:
Well, it's interesting, but that's not a useful study, just a dump of a bunch of numbers. There has been at least one serious documented instance of major electronic voting machine failure/fraud in Ohio (the precinct that counted 4,000 too many Bush votes), but this isn't even an analysis let alone proof of anything in Florida.
They list number of registered Republicans and Democrats, but don't show how those same countries voted in the last Presidential election, and more importantly, they don't show any exit poll results.
Exit polls, bitching aside, are probably the most important way we have of validating actual voter result numbers county-by-county and precinct-by-precinct. The best way to flag fraud is to note when the exit polls are substantially out of line with actual returns, and particularly if they are out of line in a systematic (and unpredicted) way.
Beyond that, I have several questions about these numbers shown.
While I have every reason to distrust Diebold given their atrocious history of faulty machines and rabid partisanship, it's hard to believe that a conspiracy of three vendors, all of whom sold optical scan machines to different precincts, worked together to create this fraud.
Furthermore, the most rural counties seem to be the ones that had the most radically Republican results, despite Democratic voter registrations. This just seems to be in pattern with the rest of the South - the thing about Florida as any long time resident will tell you is that southern Florida, and its urban parts in general are culturally much closer to the Northeast, while the rest of Florida is culturally much closer to the South (the accents follow the same pattern too - they speak with a Southern drawl in a lot of the rest of the state).
And registered Democrats voting Republican in a Presidential election en masse is not news to the South.
So to demonstrate anything meaningful - show me the exit poll numbers side by side, and then let's see if there is any consistent and suspicious looking discrepancy not explained by the major cultural divides within Florida, or the extensive attention paid by Republicans to the I4 corridor area in their campaigning.
As a current resident of New York City who does support the right of citizens to keep and bear arms, I just want to say that I disagree with your contention. Waving a gun around at 5pm in NY, NY *IS* using that gun in an unsafe and irresponsible fashion. Baring it in an open carry fashion *IS* recklessly endangering the lives of innocent bystanders, given our population density here.
Guns in densely populated cities seem to end up getting used for street crime, especially handguns. I do own a rifle, but it's not here in New York, it's in another state, and I don't feel that I want or need it here. Furthermore, municipalities regulating guns in towns, cities and urban areas goes back at least 150 years that I know of in the US, probably much farther. It's simply unreasonable and unsafe to have gun racks on cars in the streets or people carrying handguns (concealed or open) and getting in packed subway cars where they can be grabbed away, etc. I simply cannot imagine the Founding Fathers had that kind of chaos in an urban environment in mind when they thought about the need of the populace as a whole to be able to resist invading forces and oppressive governments as a well-regulated militia.
And if the Founding Fathers really thought that, then you force me and many other moderate Democrats who support reasonable gun rights into the position of saying that I disagree with the Fouding Fathers and think they were a bunch of idiots. And that the Second Amendment should be repealed entirely. Since you don't want to do that, I suggest you rethink your position and consider why on earth bearing arms in Times Square would be beneficial to the keeping of a well-regulated militia.
Since your web site seems to indicate that you live in Maryland, I have to ask you if you think it would be a good idea to encourage the residents of Baltimore to all carry around handguns on their persons. Do you think you'd be more safe walking around Baltimore that way? Do you think those people constitute a well-regulated militia, or are they street thugs who wouldn't hesitate to use those weapons to shoot you and take your wallet?
Intelligent, well-educated, decent people can't be atheists? Wow, I'll have to tell the several Nobel prize winners I've met who were avowed atheists that they must be assholes, because some guy on Slashdot said these virtues are incompatible.
Yes, Clinton did sign a lot of bad legislation for our online rights. Nonetheless, I'd still choose him again over our current Republican administration when it comes to social issues any day - our current administration, and the Republican Congress is far more authoritarian than the Democrats ever were. Now, our civil liberties get stomped on in the real world, not just online.
In Clinton's defense, most of this stuff was completely unopposed in Congress by Democrats and Republicans. I wish he would have taken a principled stand too, but I think the Internet was so new that none of our elected officials knew what to do with it, and just bowed to the first special interest group that came along with large donations and said they needed this legislation to protect them from all the dangerous online pirates.
The answer to this is to find younger legislators, people running for Congress for the first time, rising state lawmakers and the like, and lobby them, give donations, and try to help secure a new generation of political leaders who are aware that Hollywood and big media's interest run directly counter to the interests of the populace on these issues, so there is a counterpoint. I don't really care if these legislators are Democrats or socially liberal Republicans, as long as they are open to the ideas involved.
You'll find that a few thousand dollars worth of donated money means a lot outside of big national races, and gets you a lot of eartime with people who aren't yet running for high profile offices but will be in the future.
Please shut the fuck up - you are the one who ends up sounding like a whiny bitch, as do most conservatives.
Now as to your lamely expressed point, we all agree completely here that the Democrats have done fuck all to protect our civil liberties in recent years and have run roughshod over them just as much as Republicans have. I am only a liberal in the sense of having generally socially liberal beliefs - meaning the opposite of an authoritarian. In fact, until several years ago I used to describe myself as a liberal Republican, until it became clear to me back in the late 90s that the Republican party was becoming the party of rural hicks without an education, and the party of religious authoritarianism.
But you don't have to be a socialist income redistributer to see that the Bush administration and the Republicans in Congress are even worse when it comes to civil liberties than the Democrats. Now, in addition to having our rights online trampled, our rights in the real world get trampled too. This is the party you suggest as an alternative? And you dare to use the word 'liberal' as if it were a dirty word because we believe that we have basic rights that must not be infringed?
So I say again: shut the fuck up, and leave if you don't like it around here.
I think there is great music made in every era. The issue is whether the mainstream, top 40, popular music, stuff you'd hear on mainstream FM stations, in any given era is stuff that has lasting appeal and merit of some sort, or is truly bad, meritless stuff.
For example, I think the early 90s were a great era for mainstream music, with artists from Dre and Snoop Dogg to Nirvana that produced not only commercial success but also lasting music with merit (whether or not it's all to your tastes). The late 90s produced boy bands like Backstreet Boys, which will be pretty much crappy music in any era. The 80s were a bit of a mixed bag, but I think a lot of it sucked, not comparable to the stuff from the 60s and 70s at all, even with a few gems in the rough.
Today's mainstream music seems to be, more than ever, produced for younger teens. I fail to see how anybody past the age of 16 could think a lot of the current top 40 stuff is even decent music (let's forget about whether it's good, let alone great). Maybe my aesthetic tastes are just stuck where they were 8 or 10 years ago, I'm not sure. But I'd like to think if I were 16 or 17 now (I'm 25), I'd hate a lot of this crap too.
Okay, but that's a silly, playful name for my personal website. I don't write articles in trade journals or mainstream press outlets about "grokking", or hold grandiose conferences called GrokCon. I have no problem with a bit of silliness in the world, but it has its place, and that ought not to be to describe a social or technological trend of some importance.
"Blogging" (admittedly a godawful word - I would never attend a tech industry event called BloggerCon, I'd have to hang my head in shame for the rest of my life) is just a move back to what the Internet was originally about anyway - namely, democratization of content production and publishing.
Blogging software is just simplified CMS software, a more accessible form of what's been around since the start of dynamic web content and database backed web sites. That's it. Nothing more or less. Let's not ascribe any gradiose proclamations to it. I don't think "blogging" is a fad that will ever go away, I just think a lot of boring people with nothing interesting to say will eventually lose interest in blogging.
Easy-to-use content management software has just made it more reasonable for people to keep well-updated, more relevant sites without having to laboriously manage static HTML pages. The plethora of good (or at least decent) blog software out there has also done a lot to increase the importance and use of web standards like CSS and XHTML, and actually finally pushed forward useful metadata on the web in the form of RSS/Atom. These are all good things.
As for the rantings or ramblings posted by people you disagree with, and generally stupid or sucky content that just don't interest you, you certainly don't have to read it. Slashdot has plenty of this too. While quite imperfect, moderation helps separate the wheat from the chaff. Given the development of standards like Trackback by the "blogging" community (god I hate that word, it really kills me to use it), I wouldn't be surprised to eventually see distributed moderation systems or communities and webs of trust factor more heavily into the culture of blogs too (hmm, maybe we can call it the "culture of distributed content" - I refuse to use the word 'blogosphere').
I just wish that somebody would get rid of the damned word blog, negative connotations, hokey sound and all. And get rid of the meaningless catchphrase "social software" while you're at it.
A) It's the Mozilla Public License, not the GPL, and this clickthrough was a relatively recent addition to Firefox (and there was a thread of serious debate in Bugzilla about an earlier, far more restrictive EULA that was proposed). B) It's a well known, well analyzed license that's been approved by the OSI, so you don't have to get the willies from it C) Most importantly, even the nastiest EULA for a binary installation of a piece of software can't claim to restrict your rights to do what you will with your own code. So when I click through on something for Mozilla, or for Microsoft Word, I'm not usually too worried. This is a source code license, which claims to restrict your ability to do stuff with patches for the code - basically, it virally gives Sun ownership rights over code you write. I consider that willie-inducing.
Can you please tell me what "rights" you have to the Java source code?
My rights to *MY SOURCE CODE*, not the Java source code. Did you even read what you just quoted?
Strawman argument. Work on your reading comprehension skills.
I didn't say they should open source it, nor did I ever use the phrase "open source". I merely commented on some objectionable concepts in their research license that appear to lay claim to stuff I write if it can be used as a patch to their source code, and the fact that I have an issue with clickthrough licensing agreements for software (or rather, that if somebody insists on a clickthrough license, you can guess that they are about to restrict some other rights that you would normally have).
I have no problem with closed source software in general that is honest about what it is. As for Sun, I certainly appreciate the value of their Java platform and I definitely don't blame them for wanting to protect their trademark and protect the value of a compatible platform. That doesn't related in any way to the points I raised, however.
Of course it is. I never said "here's what they should do with it". I was reacting to the fanboyism in the Slashdot submission (who described it as an exciting new licensing option), not saying that Sun was doing anything inherently wrong.
I don't blame them for being fearful about letting people fragment Java into incompatible factions and the like. Nonetheless, I still don't like clickthrough licenses, and I still think that telling somebody what they can do with their own copyrighted code is actually worse than not letting them look at the code in the first place. Their code is theirs, my code is mine, period. If they don't like that, they can write their own version of my code which they can do whatever they want with. I consider null and void any clickthrough license claiming ownership of my code.
7. Does this license require a click-through acceptance of terms?
... useful to me.
Yes. For enforceability, Sun requires a click-through license.
This should tell you something - only a license that plans to restrict your rights in some unpleasant way requires a clickthrough. Seriously - I always get the willies from having to clickthrough to accept anything.
14. Can I share my modifications with other researchers?
Yes, provided that the other researchers have accepted the JRL.
Cool, even my patches are subject to the license. I knew some doozy was coming that was going to restrict my usual rights. Thus the clickthrough love.
8. When do I need to get a commercial license?
This research license is only for initial research and development projects. If you decide to use your project internally for a productive use, and/or distribute your product to others, you must sign a commercial agreement and meet the java compatibility requirements.
Uhhh... so let's see, I can use the Sun JRE free for any use. I can download the SCSL Java SDK source code, and while I can't redistribute it or do other Open Source style things with it, I can at least play with it and use it for internal things if I want (I think). But I can't even do that with the Java Research License, if it consists of 'productive use'? That sounds really
Cars may or may not be your type of movie, but talking cars and NASCAR racing will play well to a lot of the country. Just look at an electoral vote map - see all those red states? All the daddies in those red states will take their kids to see this movie, I guarantee you.
I like a lot of the Pixar movies. I don't have to like all of them. They are a company, they will make movies that people want to see, and hopefully that are creative and fun. The Incredibles looks quite awesome, and I'm looking forward to seeing it. If they make one that I don't like, fine, I won't go watch it.
I don't really see your point about bugs, toys, monsters and fish - other than all being things that kids are curious and can relate to in some way, what the hell do they have in common? The stories undoubtedly had some common elements, but were hardly clones of each other. The reason these movies do so well is kids can relate to them and enjoy watching them, but the stories are interesting and funny for adults too. So parents actually look forward to going to these movies with their kids (and some people like me use them as date movies because chicks melt when they see cute animated characters).
By comparison to these "boring" movies about bugs, toys, monsters and fish, try watching Shark Tale (what's that about? fish?). It was nearly painful to watch. The animation was decent enough I guess, but the acting and the directing were just terrible. Makes you appreciate what Pixar does well with their movies.
The problem is not motion capture technology in general. Motion capture, done properly (with real-time feedback for actors, and some tweaking by animators) can look very good for gross body movement. At least 90% of the problem here is as others have pointed out the uncanny valley effect in the facial animations. I'm not sure if they actually tried to do motion capture of some sort on facial movements, but the technology just isn't fine grained enough for that yet. Facial animations need to be done manually still to get a pleasing effect.
The body animations in Polar Express may not be fantastic, but this didn't stick out like a sore thumb in the trailer. I'm not sure if it was the rendering, movement or combination of both on the faces, but boy, this is a textbook example of how terribly distracting the uncanny valley can be - you just spend the whole time staring at the faces trying to figure out why they creep you out so much.