He also sees Slashdot as instrumental in helping start the Maker subculture. Do you agree?
The software side, maybe. Slashdot leaves much to be desired on the hardware side of the necessary skills in engaging in the Maker subculture.
If so, should influencing the future of technology be Slashdot's main mission?
Regardless of my prior answer: yes, please yes, oh for the love all things noodly yes.
Also: If so, how do you suggest we do it?
Well, I know that this is popular in the comments but probably not so popular with the new Dice overlords but I will be frank for the betterment of Slashdot. Slashdot BI is bad. The people that write for it aren't bad but the material they are told to cover is bad. It represents a lot of things that are wrong with technical journalism today: buzzwords, lists, how-tos that tell you how to do nothing, focus pieces on companies and the worst part about it all is that it's largely positive "news." I suggest that you swap this out and you go here and you ask yourself why it doesn't look more like this, this or even this.
Tell me, you have this formatted page for Business Intelligence with subdirectories and paid authors and all sorts of stuff. Where, oh where, is the equivalent for Makers? What, the exposition pieces you do for Amazon's latest cloud launch bring you more revenue than a how-to on hacking USB I/O with the Raspberry Pi? Well, if that's the truth, that's the truth!
Why is it that story submission has special entry fields for book reviews but not for Make projects? You get my book reviews because you have made a space for them. I feel like there is no space for Maker stuff on Slashdot and, most importantly, there is no space for non-news maker stuff. Your commitment so far is to hit the big things and that's very cool but the Maker subculture isn't only about high value targets. It's also about the small projects and replicating projects you find all over the place like here.
Let's face it: if somebody does a learning project and uploads a video to YouTube that shows how to integrate a very specific Arduino board with a very specific LED board and puts up some ugly source code on github, it's not going to make Slashdot's front page. And most of the comments will be "I could do better" and "congratulations, you're doing what I did in fifth grade." However these are some of the resources that get Makers started and drive the community. There's tons of not-news-worthy stuff going on in the background and right now the Slashdot front page isn't the place for this nor does there even exist a subpage for it.
Slashdot is only interested in hunting elephants and bringing one in once every six months while there are Makers trying to learn how to cultivate soy beans. You could try having a subpage like BI where people can grow ideas and share tutorials no matter how inane and besotted with errors they are. But that stuff will probably have to stay off the frontpage.
And more specifically, do you know any other non-famous Slashdot readers (or people in general) we should talk to because they are doing interesting things?
Why not reach out to the other pages I linked? They're doing it right but they lack the readership. You have the readership but lack the Maker diversity. Surely there could be some value shared there?
What about overtime, benefits, conditions for contractors and outsourcing concerns?
Disclaimer: I am pro unions for services that are needed but cannot operate in the manner of a traditional capitalistic model like teaching and nursing. I am anti-union when it comes to goods and services that are not a critical need for society and should survive by their own objective merit and quality.
As a software developer myself, wouldn't unions exacerbate outsourcing concerns? I mean the whole point of what a picket line and a scab was centered around the fact that unionized workers that went on strike would have to physically stop workers from accessing the factory floor to work for less than the unionized workers. I would think that if developers did this, the picket line would be virtual and foreign or even out of state developers would find it easy to work remotely to fulfill the customer's needs. So could someone explain to me how a union could address outsourcing concerns? I think a union would make a potential development house shy away from going local for fear that they would have to deal with a union and then once in that position would not be able to go elsewhere for development work.
A site that allows anyone but U.S. citizens vote seems to indicate that the rest of the world hopes these numbers are accurate.
Okay so you're talking about roughly six and a half billion people. As of the writing of this post, votevotevote.net's page says:
1050 VOTES have been received
Furthermore can someone point me to, say, a Chinese version of votevotevote.net's page? I mean, surely you'd want to represent the largest population of the world or are you simply relying on the rest of the world to speak English? And you're going to then utilize that as evidence that the rest of the world hopes that Obama wins? Surely this site isn't even worth mentioning in a news context.
Agreed, it's so weird that he's a person. Now if he was just a normal old drone, I'd be completely fine with it hovering next to me, watching me scratch my balls and walk out of 7-11 with three cases of beer, lottery tickets and an illegally sized Big Gulp. I mean, it's not like there's people behind those drones and security cameras watching me, right?
As the article explains: open fields, even when attached to homes, aren't normally covered by the 4th Amendment, because they're not in the plain-terms of the language. The 4th Amendment doesn't protect all property, but rather just the enumerated properties and spaces. Curtilage - the land immediately attached to a home - is sometimes covered, but separate fields such as these aren't.
The article itself is very odd. For example they open with:
Police are allowed in some circumstances to install hidden surveillance cameras on private property without obtaining a search warrant, a federal judge said yesterday.
[emphasis mine] Despite the fact that I can't find any reference to this in any of the quotes or any of the links in their article. In fact, the quote I can find in the article says:
"Placing a video camera in a location that allows law enforcement to record activities outside of a home and beyond protected curtilage does not violate the Fourth Amendment," Justice Department prosecutors James Santelle and William Lipscomb told Callahan.
My interpretation of this is that they think they can set up video cameras on public property to record activity on your personal property. Still not a great thing to have happen but not as bad as them installing something on your property without you knowing. Can anyone find where they explain further if the devices themselves were installed on the defendant's property?
If you really dont think tax law, healthcare, the supreme court, women's rights, military spending and deployment, etc dont matter to you locally,
Wow, that's not at all what I meant by that statement... what I meant was that these two presidents will most likely do the same thing on these issues. Do you really think Romney's going to repeal women's rights? Do you really think Obama is going to cut military spending? And even if they don't, they have to fight congress and the house on some of them.
The onus is on you to prove to me that the delta between Romney and Obama on the issues you mentioned will affect me locally more than all of the resources this bond referendum could supply. Yes, there are important national issues but I am saying that local issues are also important and nobody seems to care about them nor does anyone seem to report on them! Can't the mighty Google acknowledge their existence?
Let's face it, Romney/Obama isn't really gonna make much difference to me locally compared to the bond referendum that sits on the November 6th ballot. So why is it that neither of these sites contain any information or reference to the my county's proposal to renovate three libraries, build a fourth, expand and improve county and regional parks, rebuild three fire stations, renovate twenty two courtrooms and build a levee and pumping station to protect a community from floods?
I was hoping that Google would have figured out a way to mine this and give me more news and opinions on it. Maybe news items on historical perspectives of what good and bad came from the 2009 referendum?
In Ballotpedia's defense they have the 2009 referendum but no mention of the 2012... why do I not find any tools for local government? Is that too difficult and expansive to tackle?
This raises the question: can Google influence the elections even more than it already does via lobbying?
Could you explain to me how this tool raises that question? If you felt that Google was telling you to vote for Obama or Romney with this tool, which one was it because I didn't get a strong feeling for either... it seems like they were just redisplaying CNN graphs and sending you to news articles. Take it up with the sites you land at and the popularity of their inflammatory headlines, not Google.
When I beg my coworkers, friends and family to vote, I'm not telling them who to vote for nor do I want to know afterwards. I only ask them to inform themselves and hit the booths on November 6th. How is Google's tool any different than that?
It says right in the ShenWei Wikipedia article that it's based on the DEC Alpha but something that strikes me as curious is that your article refers to a chip that lasted from 1995 to 1998. So I am to believe that by outright copying a fifteen year old chip from a processor line that has been extinct for a decade or more has yielded a modern day competitive multiprocessing chip?
You can convince me they copied DEC's work. You can convince me they violated IP laws. You can convince me that it is their societal norm to ignore restrictive IP laws. Hell, I'll tell you that right now. But to say that they are doing no work to build on top of these chips feels like it must be erroneous unless what we see is 1990s technology in the ShenWei processors.
This isn't a black and white scenario here. Yes, it's bad that IP laws have been violated. Yes, it's bad that DEC won't see a dime from any of their work being used. But it is also a good thing to have a competitive architecture arise in the world of computing and also it feels good to have a race with other countries for computing power. I can only hope our super computing budget is considered part of the onerous "defense budget" and our leaders who are concerned with a dick measuring contest can dump tons of money into supercomputers for modeling and simulation to scientists while at the same time being able to give the hallowed talking point of "I increased defense spending."
You can start with someone else's good idea, turn it into a great idea and share some credit, right?
I was more disturbed by the article and how the lady was just determined to hate her censor. Why?
Did you miss this part of the article:
This was not the relationship I wanted to have with Snow. I believed in free speech. I‘d spent a summer interning at the ACLU. I was beginning to question the morality of my paycheck, of playing any part, no matter how incidental, in a system of which I disapproved. Thinking of her as my adversary allowed me to feel I was fighting the system. But my adversary wanted to be friends.
I don't think the ACLU cares if you have a Western mindset or Eastern mindset, I think they see their values like freedom of the press as a universal human right (as I happen to as well). And when you start to challenge universal human rights, that's the point in time where I throw your politics and socialism/capitalism crap right out the window and tell you you're wrong.
Also, you might have glossed over the context this piece was written in:
This was easier back then; the August 2008 Beijing Olympics were a year-and-a-half away, and it behooved China to demonstrate that it was an open country.
So perhaps back then your color coding system was subdued to make Beijing look more appealing to the west and they concentrated on the merely the three T's. Do you mind revealing when (I don't want anyone losing their job) you ran an English magazine in China? Or where you operated? I'd imagine Beijing would be harder to operate in. If you're not afraid of releasing more details and proof, I'm almost certain the Foreign Policy magazine would be interested in talking to you -- I fine censorship around the world very interesting so you can spot it and reference ailments in other nations before it happens to your own.
But this journalist is so eager to be utterly depressed by seeing her tormentor exposed with feet of clay, she never bothers to question her preconceptions.
Odd, I read this whole piece as willful exposure of her preconceptions. She chose to keep those parts, you know. I think she disclosed all of this in an effort to be transparent. This wasn't written in an a absolutist "I'm 100% right and they're 100% wrong" way although that seems to be how you read it... It is what it is, it happened how it happened. She's not going to make herself look 100% righteous in this piece because there are things she can't rectify in here. A good person can work for a really shitty government. A bad person can work for a really good government. Etc etc etc, this is the spice of life and makes things interesting and worthy of discussion.
The aversion to flags is understandable if you remember that, according to the PRC government, Taiwan is a rogue province and not a separate country. Taiwan is part of the PRC (according to Beijing). Sovereign nations have flags, provinces don't. Showing a Taiwanese flag reminds people that there is a government in Taiwan that does not recognize that Taiwan is part of the PRC, and that government has enough control so that those flags are flown throughout the province of Taiwan.
I'm posting as an AC because I don't want to be slammed because someone didn't bother to read my post carefully. I am neither agreeing nor disagreeing with the PRCs or Taiwan's stance on this issue. I'm simply stating the situation as someone who has spent a considerable amount of time in the PRC and has discussed the whole Taiwan issue with numerous PRC citizens.
I'm not going to slam you for talking about Taiwan, I'm going to slam you for not reading the article. From the article:
In addition to the uptick in phone calls, her emails, too, grew more expansive and personal. She had told me once that we couldn't put a Chinese flag on the cover (I still don't understand why), and so I wrote her to ask if we could run a cover image that suggested a flag more abstractly, with yellow stars against a wash of red. She wrote back in Chinese:
Dear Little One,
Stars are definitely not okay either, please please do not take the risk.
I once published, in a newspaper, a picture of a book put out by the German embassy, introducing China and Germany's investment cooperation. The book's cover had a big stream on it, half of it the colors of the German flag, half of it red with yellow stars. I decided since it wasn't a flag it was okay, and sent it to print. Our newspaper office was slapped with a fine of 180,000 yuan [today, around $28,000] and I had to write a self-criticism and take a big salary cut.
Quite a lesson, yes? Sigh -- we must remember it well.
Could you please explain to me why the Chinese flag couldn't be on the cover? Or why some elements of the German flag cost them around $28,000 in fines? Are they not recognized governments by the Chinese governments?
But capitalism sucks and socialism is the way to go!
What part of the article indicated or led you to believe that this is a problem of socialism or capitalism and not one of basic human rights and government corruption?
Also, can you tell me which country is more socialist and which is more capitalist, USA or China? Both are working hard to meet each other in the middle.
Representation can be achieved in capitalism as well as socialism. Ethical versus morally corrupt politicians can arise in either system with ease. Why do you change the focus from one of criticism of abuse of universal human rights to some bullshit political thing?
Well, the ban on big gulps is not a ban on soda or even how much soda you can buy, it's a ban on the convenience of selling massive amounts of soda in the interest of public health. Also, the ban is clearly defined and written into law. If you read the article, you would get a taste of the ambiguity and the surprising way that censorship in China can bite you in the ass. It's neither codified nor tested in a court of law, it just happens.
Big overweening governments do things like this "for your own good".
Big overweening governments also require you to have car insurance and wear seat belts and now it's illegal to smoke in bars almost everywhere and dump your fecal matter in rivers -- on top of a number of other things that you're not bitching about. You are free not to live in NYC where Big Gulps are banned but if that experiment turns out to have a positive effect on health, you'll see a lot of other cities follow (similar to no smoking in public restaurants and dumping fecal matter in rivers). That fine line may be felt out by governments but at least it's well defined when they tell you what is and is not legal.
Are you really comparing your rights to buy soda in 64 oz containers with your right to free speech and free criticism of the government? Really? You see those as two equivocal "overweening" acts? Please.
The idea that pieces of software and one way communication videos can compete with responsive human beings and solely provide first world education is laughable.
The idea that a third world nation can spend little and utilizes said technologies is critical to their economic success and transitioning to second and first world status.
Yes, these things will successfully replace teachers where there were no teachers in the first place. Everywhere else they are important as augmenting tools on the path of education but the place where they will make the most progress for us is where they need teachers but have none.
... now I know why they continually destroyed the Library of Alexandria.
I was confused earlier. Now more so.
Damnit, if only there was some way to look up the history of the Library of Alexandria... some online resource that could instantly serve us up a good enough but referenced version of history and.... NO no, do not give in! Remain strong brother, we can rely on things we think we heard in history class 20 years ago. That will suffice! I'm pretty sure that the Library of Alexandria was brought to ruins several times and I will fight you if you accuse me of being wrong. Let us settle this with fisticuffs like we did in the long long ago before Wikipedia in the time of Whiskey where pedantry was relegated to nerds' basements and we were safe to carouse about drunk on ignorance and were correct-ish in our retelling of history! 'Tis a far far better fate than to let senior editors revert our edits to some snobbish central repository.
Point taken, but just because a product that was half baked didn't sell the first time, does that mean we just sort of give up and never try selling the product again now that it is further along? Certainly, we don't keep trying for a win after the fourth or fifth loss but just giving up on the concept entirely seems somewhat premature?
And people continually try to fork it. The earliest instance of this that I remember is citizendium but often what spurs a fork is a very specific thing (okay sometimes they change multiple things but usually it's one big factor). And the reason for that is that Wikipedia has done very well. It's easy to criticize anything claiming to be the nexus of "good enough" human knowledge because any label like that is inherently flammable.
A more recent example is Conservapedia which changes one big thing: NPOV now stands for Nixon's Point of View:
Barack Hussein Obama II (b. August 4, 1961, either in Kenya or Honolulu, Hawaii) was elected the 44th President. Promoted heavily by liberals, as demonstrated by his unjustified receipt of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, Obama won the presidency despite a short and unremarkable political career by outspending his opponent, John McCain, by hundreds of millions of dollars in 2008.
Now, aside from the entertainment value of that line, you have to tell me what your fork is going to do differently and how is that going to be better for your fork? I think that any attempts to fix this could result in even bigger problems for your newer-Pedia and would simply succumb to being a less popular Wikipedia. So what are your change(s) and what negative effects could arise from them?
Whelp, here I am trapped for all eternity listening to Jimmy Wales sing a 12.7 second fair use clip of "American Pie" at 64kbit/s in ogg vorbis as punishment. I guess I deserve this.
And he used citations! That's a total give away! You know you're talking to one of them when they embed properly formatted URLs into their posts. It instantly invalidates anything they're trying to tell you, too!
But seriously, when you try to argue with a senior editor know what everyone tells you? Read the 20 awesome Wikipedia entries that validate their statements, however unjustifiable they are in real arguement.
Oh you are preaching to the choir! Sometimes when I'm in one of those Northern states I have to wonder if a senior Wikipedia editor ever used the same drinking fountain I'm using! I mean, what if they were talking about the 20 awesome Wikipedia entries just before their dirty dirty mouths touched that faucet?! Gross!
Something needs to be done about them people... now I know why they continually destroyed the Library of Alexandria. Let's get Jimmy Wales' address from his Florida public voting registration and burn a W on his front lawn!
This is the one where upon completion of recording all worthwhile knowledge, Wikipedia writes the final article describing Wikipedia itself. Following that, it detonates a bomb that implodes the universe back to a singularity so that no new information can be created and its volumes are complete for eternity. Luckily, as a Slashdot user, Wikipedia knows absolutely nothing about me or my intentions so I'll just take my Scooty Puff Jr. here over to the Wikimedia Foundation's servers...
The reason he's fought it is that a scientists work should be judged by the science they produce, the published results of their work, not some gotcha quote mining of working papers and communications with peers.
The reason he fights it is clearer to me. It's the same reason why, if a law enforcement officer showed up at my house and demanded to rifle through all of my blongings looking for anything that might be illegal I would tell him to go pound sand. Not because I'm guilty, not because I hate the police but because he has no right to without a warrant! Furthermore, if 90% of people in our society allowed this and it became expected or, worse yet, legal then you would have effectively forfeited your right to privacy.
Scientists are human beings that work long hours at their jobs. Demanding the publication of everything is a bit dehumanizing and Mann is correct to fight it lest other scientists find themselves under the same expectations after it has been established as the norm. I think it will be acceptable to release it during the discovery phase of a case like this but it should not be given up lightly.
This is a clear attempt to intimidate and repress scientists and researchers.
Well, if you desire a citation for my claims of independent verification, check out Richard Muller who previously attacked said graph and consequent IPCC claims (the results of which earned them the 2007 Nobel Prize). Pay attention to these first three paragraphs. That 2007 IPCC report is important because that is what Mann contributed to.
If I'm not mistaken, Muller tackled the same problem from a as different an approach as possible and came to the same conclusion.
The studies approving Vioxx were "peer reviewed" as well...
Sure, just because something is peer reviewed doesn't mean it is without fault but it sure is a good deliminator between a crackpot on the internet and someone trying very hard to participate in a community that also tries to hold itself to a higher standard than baseless claims and unreproducible results, wouldn't you agree?
It sounds like their argument is that the Penn State administration has a tendency to cover-up embarrassing stuff and protect their own.
The Penn State Hershey Medical Center brings in over a billion dollars a year in revenue to Penn State. The same university president who resigned in the wake of the Sandusky scandal also presided over said medical center with obvious financial interests that were easily orders of magnitudes higher than the football program. When will we re-investigate all of their malpractice suits? When will we bring their alleged (just now) organ trafficking ring from China to justice? Should we suppose, in light of what we now know, they would do any less to hide treatment and medical misconduct, with so much at stake?
Dr. Mann complains about two statements: 1) that as "the man behind the fraudulent climate-change 'hockey-stick' graph," he is "the very ringmaster of the three ring circus" on climate change; and 2) that he "could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet." Neither of these statements is actionable. Moreover, if Dr. Mann decides to pursue this matter, he and his research would be subjected to a very extensive discovery of materials that he has fought so hard to protect in other proceedings. Such materials would be required for National Review to defend itself.
Mitt Romney wants to create world peace? By arming the Syrian rebels? Because that's never bit us in the ass. I'm sick and tired of this mentality that the United States needs to police the entire world and Romney keeps saying crap like "it's an honor that we didn't ask for but we have." What the hell?
Oh! But yeah, go ahead and arm Syrian rebels! Iran totally won't view that as an aggressive act! No, they'll sit by and watch that happen! And just say "Gee, I guess the people of Syria have spoken!" Try meeting with them then and using diplomacy to reduce their nuclear efforts!
Something that's always troubled me about memes is that I cannot understand what the core language or data is for a meme. I know that our genes can be pinned down to be DNA but with memes it's troubling for me to try to imagine a language that conveys what is happening in them. We can observe a meme's transmission, we can observe a meme's mutation, we can observe a meme's fitness and we can observe its extinction -- but what we can't do is break those things down to some finite chunk of information such that we can analyze them on a empirical level. For instance, mutations of memes appear to be limited to only the human imagination and physics. It feels as though I would have as much luck describing how art went from cave paintings to film CGI with only mathematics as the language. So what is the concrete language of memes or are they destined to be more of a curious observation than a falsifiable and reproducible analysis like genetics?
Slashdot Mirror
He also sees Slashdot as instrumental in helping start the Maker subculture. Do you agree?
The software side, maybe. Slashdot leaves much to be desired on the hardware side of the necessary skills in engaging in the Maker subculture.
If so, should influencing the future of technology be Slashdot's main mission?
Regardless of my prior answer: yes, please yes, oh for the love all things noodly yes.
Also: If so, how do you suggest we do it?
Well, I know that this is popular in the comments but probably not so popular with the new Dice overlords but I will be frank for the betterment of Slashdot. Slashdot BI is bad. The people that write for it aren't bad but the material they are told to cover is bad. It represents a lot of things that are wrong with technical journalism today: buzzwords, lists, how-tos that tell you how to do nothing, focus pieces on companies and the worst part about it all is that it's largely positive "news." I suggest that you swap this out and you go here and you ask yourself why it doesn't look more like this, this or even this.
Tell me, you have this formatted page for Business Intelligence with subdirectories and paid authors and all sorts of stuff. Where, oh where, is the equivalent for Makers? What, the exposition pieces you do for Amazon's latest cloud launch bring you more revenue than a how-to on hacking USB I/O with the Raspberry Pi? Well, if that's the truth, that's the truth!
Why is it that story submission has special entry fields for book reviews but not for Make projects? You get my book reviews because you have made a space for them. I feel like there is no space for Maker stuff on Slashdot and, most importantly, there is no space for non-news maker stuff. Your commitment so far is to hit the big things and that's very cool but the Maker subculture isn't only about high value targets. It's also about the small projects and replicating projects you find all over the place like here.
Let's face it: if somebody does a learning project and uploads a video to YouTube that shows how to integrate a very specific Arduino board with a very specific LED board and puts up some ugly source code on github, it's not going to make Slashdot's front page. And most of the comments will be "I could do better" and "congratulations, you're doing what I did in fifth grade." However these are some of the resources that get Makers started and drive the community. There's tons of not-news-worthy stuff going on in the background and right now the Slashdot front page isn't the place for this nor does there even exist a subpage for it.
Slashdot is only interested in hunting elephants and bringing one in once every six months while there are Makers trying to learn how to cultivate soy beans. You could try having a subpage like BI where people can grow ideas and share tutorials no matter how inane and besotted with errors they are. But that stuff will probably have to stay off the frontpage.
And more specifically, do you know any other non-famous Slashdot readers (or people in general) we should talk to because they are doing interesting things?
Why not reach out to the other pages I linked? They're doing it right but they lack the readership. You have the readership but lack the Maker diversity. Surely there could be some value shared there?
What about overtime, benefits, conditions for contractors and outsourcing concerns?
Disclaimer: I am pro unions for services that are needed but cannot operate in the manner of a traditional capitalistic model like teaching and nursing. I am anti-union when it comes to goods and services that are not a critical need for society and should survive by their own objective merit and quality.
As a software developer myself, wouldn't unions exacerbate outsourcing concerns? I mean the whole point of what a picket line and a scab was centered around the fact that unionized workers that went on strike would have to physically stop workers from accessing the factory floor to work for less than the unionized workers. I would think that if developers did this, the picket line would be virtual and foreign or even out of state developers would find it easy to work remotely to fulfill the customer's needs. So could someone explain to me how a union could address outsourcing concerns? I think a union would make a potential development house shy away from going local for fear that they would have to deal with a union and then once in that position would not be able to go elsewhere for development work.
A site that allows anyone but U.S. citizens vote seems to indicate that the rest of the world hopes these numbers are accurate.
Okay so you're talking about roughly six and a half billion people. As of the writing of this post, votevotevote.net's page says:
1050 VOTES have been received
Furthermore can someone point me to, say, a Chinese version of votevotevote.net's page? I mean, surely you'd want to represent the largest population of the world or are you simply relying on the rest of the world to speak English? And you're going to then utilize that as evidence that the rest of the world hopes that Obama wins? Surely this site isn't even worth mentioning in a news context.
His antics are DIFFERENT because he is a PERSON
Agreed, it's so weird that he's a person. Now if he was just a normal old drone, I'd be completely fine with it hovering next to me, watching me scratch my balls and walk out of 7-11 with three cases of beer, lottery tickets and an illegally sized Big Gulp. I mean, it's not like there's people behind those drones and security cameras watching me, right?
As the article explains: open fields, even when attached to homes, aren't normally covered by the 4th Amendment, because they're not in the plain-terms of the language. The 4th Amendment doesn't protect all property, but rather just the enumerated properties and spaces. Curtilage - the land immediately attached to a home - is sometimes covered, but separate fields such as these aren't.
The article itself is very odd. For example they open with:
Police are allowed in some circumstances to install hidden surveillance cameras on private property without obtaining a search warrant, a federal judge said yesterday.
[emphasis mine] Despite the fact that I can't find any reference to this in any of the quotes or any of the links in their article. In fact, the quote I can find in the article says:
"Placing a video camera in a location that allows law enforcement to record activities outside of a home and beyond protected curtilage does not violate the Fourth Amendment," Justice Department prosecutors James Santelle and William Lipscomb told Callahan.
My interpretation of this is that they think they can set up video cameras on public property to record activity on your personal property. Still not a great thing to have happen but not as bad as them installing something on your property without you knowing. Can anyone find where they explain further if the devices themselves were installed on the defendant's property?
If you really dont think tax law, healthcare, the supreme court, women's rights, military spending and deployment, etc dont matter to you locally,
Wow, that's not at all what I meant by that statement ... what I meant was that these two presidents will most likely do the same thing on these issues. Do you really think Romney's going to repeal women's rights? Do you really think Obama is going to cut military spending? And even if they don't, they have to fight congress and the house on some of them.
The onus is on you to prove to me that the delta between Romney and Obama on the issues you mentioned will affect me locally more than all of the resources this bond referendum could supply. Yes, there are important national issues but I am saying that local issues are also important and nobody seems to care about them nor does anyone seem to report on them! Can't the mighty Google acknowledge their existence?
then please just dont vote.
Thanks, I respect you and your right to vote too.
Let's face it, Romney/Obama isn't really gonna make much difference to me locally compared to the bond referendum that sits on the November 6th ballot. So why is it that neither of these sites contain any information or reference to the my county's proposal to renovate three libraries, build a fourth, expand and improve county and regional parks, rebuild three fire stations, renovate twenty two courtrooms and build a levee and pumping station to protect a community from floods?
... why do I not find any tools for local government? Is that too difficult and expansive to tackle?
I was hoping that Google would have figured out a way to mine this and give me more news and opinions on it. Maybe news items on historical perspectives of what good and bad came from the 2009 referendum?
In Ballotpedia's defense they have the 2009 referendum but no mention of the 2012
This raises the question: can Google influence the elections even more than it already does via lobbying?
Could you explain to me how this tool raises that question? If you felt that Google was telling you to vote for Obama or Romney with this tool, which one was it because I didn't get a strong feeling for either ... it seems like they were just redisplaying CNN graphs and sending you to news articles. Take it up with the sites you land at and the popularity of their inflammatory headlines, not Google.
When I beg my coworkers, friends and family to vote, I'm not telling them who to vote for nor do I want to know afterwards. I only ask them to inform themselves and hit the booths on November 6th. How is Google's tool any different than that?
You're right, but it looks like they've done the latter. http://laotsao.wordpress.com/2011/10/29/sw1600-and-alpha-21164/
It says right in the ShenWei Wikipedia article that it's based on the DEC Alpha but something that strikes me as curious is that your article refers to a chip that lasted from 1995 to 1998. So I am to believe that by outright copying a fifteen year old chip from a processor line that has been extinct for a decade or more has yielded a modern day competitive multiprocessing chip?
You can convince me they copied DEC's work. You can convince me they violated IP laws. You can convince me that it is their societal norm to ignore restrictive IP laws. Hell, I'll tell you that right now. But to say that they are doing no work to build on top of these chips feels like it must be erroneous unless what we see is 1990s technology in the ShenWei processors.
This isn't a black and white scenario here. Yes, it's bad that IP laws have been violated. Yes, it's bad that DEC won't see a dime from any of their work being used. But it is also a good thing to have a competitive architecture arise in the world of computing and also it feels good to have a race with other countries for computing power. I can only hope our super computing budget is considered part of the onerous "defense budget" and our leaders who are concerned with a dick measuring contest can dump tons of money into supercomputers for modeling and simulation to scientists while at the same time being able to give the hallowed talking point of "I increased defense spending."
You can start with someone else's good idea, turn it into a great idea and share some credit, right?
I was more disturbed by the article and how the lady was just determined to hate her censor. Why?
Did you miss this part of the article:
This was not the relationship I wanted to have with Snow. I believed in free speech. I‘d spent a summer interning at the ACLU. I was beginning to question the morality of my paycheck, of playing any part, no matter how incidental, in a system of which I disapproved. Thinking of her as my adversary allowed me to feel I was fighting the system. But my adversary wanted to be friends.
I don't think the ACLU cares if you have a Western mindset or Eastern mindset, I think they see their values like freedom of the press as a universal human right (as I happen to as well). And when you start to challenge universal human rights, that's the point in time where I throw your politics and socialism/capitalism crap right out the window and tell you you're wrong.
Also, you might have glossed over the context this piece was written in:
This was easier back then; the August 2008 Beijing Olympics were a year-and-a-half away, and it behooved China to demonstrate that it was an open country.
So perhaps back then your color coding system was subdued to make Beijing look more appealing to the west and they concentrated on the merely the three T's. Do you mind revealing when (I don't want anyone losing their job) you ran an English magazine in China? Or where you operated? I'd imagine Beijing would be harder to operate in. If you're not afraid of releasing more details and proof, I'm almost certain the Foreign Policy magazine would be interested in talking to you -- I fine censorship around the world very interesting so you can spot it and reference ailments in other nations before it happens to your own.
But this journalist is so eager to be utterly depressed by seeing her tormentor exposed with feet of clay, she never bothers to question her preconceptions.
Odd, I read this whole piece as willful exposure of her preconceptions. She chose to keep those parts, you know. I think she disclosed all of this in an effort to be transparent. This wasn't written in an a absolutist "I'm 100% right and they're 100% wrong" way although that seems to be how you read it ... It is what it is, it happened how it happened. She's not going to make herself look 100% righteous in this piece because there are things she can't rectify in here. A good person can work for a really shitty government. A bad person can work for a really good government. Etc etc etc, this is the spice of life and makes things interesting and worthy of discussion.
The aversion to flags is understandable if you remember that, according to the PRC government, Taiwan is a rogue province and not a separate country. Taiwan is part of the PRC (according to Beijing). Sovereign nations have flags, provinces don't. Showing a Taiwanese flag reminds people that there is a government in Taiwan that does not recognize that Taiwan is part of the PRC, and that government has enough control so that those flags are flown throughout the province of Taiwan.
I'm posting as an AC because I don't want to be slammed because someone didn't bother to read my post carefully. I am neither agreeing nor disagreeing with the PRCs or Taiwan's stance on this issue. I'm simply stating the situation as someone who has spent a considerable amount of time in the PRC and has discussed the whole Taiwan issue with numerous PRC citizens.
I'm not going to slam you for talking about Taiwan, I'm going to slam you for not reading the article. From the article:
In addition to the uptick in phone calls, her emails, too, grew more expansive and personal. She had told me once that we couldn't put a Chinese flag on the cover (I still don't understand why), and so I wrote her to ask if we could run a cover image that suggested a flag more abstractly, with yellow stars against a wash of red. She wrote back in Chinese:
Dear Little One,
Stars are definitely not okay either, please please do not take the risk.
I once published, in a newspaper, a picture of a book put out by the German embassy, introducing China and Germany's investment cooperation. The book's cover had a big stream on it, half of it the colors of the German flag, half of it red with yellow stars. I decided since it wasn't a flag it was okay, and sent it to print. Our newspaper office was slapped with a fine of 180,000 yuan [today, around $28,000] and I had to write a self-criticism and take a big salary cut.
Quite a lesson, yes? Sigh -- we must remember it well.
Could you please explain to me why the Chinese flag couldn't be on the cover? Or why some elements of the German flag cost them around $28,000 in fines? Are they not recognized governments by the Chinese governments?
But capitalism sucks and socialism is the way to go!
What part of the article indicated or led you to believe that this is a problem of socialism or capitalism and not one of basic human rights and government corruption?
Also, can you tell me which country is more socialist and which is more capitalist, USA or China? Both are working hard to meet each other in the middle.
Representation can be achieved in capitalism as well as socialism. Ethical versus morally corrupt politicians can arise in either system with ease. Why do you change the focus from one of criticism of abuse of universal human rights to some bullshit political thing?
How's this any different from banning Big Gulps?
Well, the ban on big gulps is not a ban on soda or even how much soda you can buy, it's a ban on the convenience of selling massive amounts of soda in the interest of public health. Also, the ban is clearly defined and written into law. If you read the article, you would get a taste of the ambiguity and the surprising way that censorship in China can bite you in the ass. It's neither codified nor tested in a court of law, it just happens.
Big overweening governments do things like this "for your own good".
Big overweening governments also require you to have car insurance and wear seat belts and now it's illegal to smoke in bars almost everywhere and dump your fecal matter in rivers -- on top of a number of other things that you're not bitching about. You are free not to live in NYC where Big Gulps are banned but if that experiment turns out to have a positive effect on health, you'll see a lot of other cities follow (similar to no smoking in public restaurants and dumping fecal matter in rivers). That fine line may be felt out by governments but at least it's well defined when they tell you what is and is not legal.
Are you really comparing your rights to buy soda in 64 oz containers with your right to free speech and free criticism of the government? Really? You see those as two equivocal "overweening" acts? Please.
The idea that pieces of software and one way communication videos can compete with responsive human beings and solely provide first world education is laughable.
The idea that a third world nation can spend little and utilizes said technologies is critical to their economic success and transitioning to second and first world status.
Yes, these things will successfully replace teachers where there were no teachers in the first place. Everywhere else they are important as augmenting tools on the path of education but the place where they will make the most progress for us is where they need teachers but have none.
... now I know why they continually destroyed the Library of Alexandria.
I was confused earlier. Now more so.
Damnit, if only there was some way to look up the history of the Library of Alexandria ... some online resource that could instantly serve us up a good enough but referenced version of history and .... NO no, do not give in! Remain strong brother, we can rely on things we think we heard in history class 20 years ago. That will suffice! I'm pretty sure that the Library of Alexandria was brought to ruins several times and I will fight you if you accuse me of being wrong. Let us settle this with fisticuffs like we did in the long long ago before Wikipedia in the time of Whiskey where pedantry was relegated to nerds' basements and we were safe to carouse about drunk on ignorance and were correct-ish in our retelling of history! 'Tis a far far better fate than to let senior editors revert our edits to some snobbish central repository.
Point taken, but just because a product that was half baked didn't sell the first time, does that mean we just sort of give up and never try selling the product again now that it is further along? Certainly, we don't keep trying for a win after the fourth or fifth loss but just giving up on the concept entirely seems somewhat premature?
And people continually try to fork it. The earliest instance of this that I remember is citizendium but often what spurs a fork is a very specific thing (okay sometimes they change multiple things but usually it's one big factor). And the reason for that is that Wikipedia has done very well. It's easy to criticize anything claiming to be the nexus of "good enough" human knowledge because any label like that is inherently flammable.
A more recent example is Conservapedia which changes one big thing: NPOV now stands for Nixon's Point of View:
Barack Hussein Obama II (b. August 4, 1961, either in Kenya or Honolulu, Hawaii) was elected the 44th President. Promoted heavily by liberals, as demonstrated by his unjustified receipt of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, Obama won the presidency despite a short and unremarkable political career by outspending his opponent, John McCain, by hundreds of millions of dollars in 2008.
Now, aside from the entertainment value of that line, you have to tell me what your fork is going to do differently and how is that going to be better for your fork? I think that any attempts to fix this could result in even bigger problems for your newer-Pedia and would simply succumb to being a less popular Wikipedia. So what are your change(s) and what negative effects could arise from them?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Eldavojohn
Hoisted by my own petard!
Whelp, here I am trapped for all eternity listening to Jimmy Wales sing a 12.7 second fair use clip of "American Pie" at 64kbit/s in ogg vorbis as punishment. I guess I deserve this.
Not all Wikipedia editors are as obtuse as you claim. Let me reiterate the comment I made on the submission: If particular editors are violating Wikipedia's policy against ownership-like behavior by not allowing a consensus to form after discussion of a reverted edit on an article's talk page, consider using the various dispute resolution means in the Wikipedia community.
Exactly what a Wikipedia editor would post.
And he used citations! That's a total give away! You know you're talking to one of them when they embed properly formatted URLs into their posts. It instantly invalidates anything they're trying to tell you, too!
But seriously, when you try to argue with a senior editor know what everyone tells you? Read the 20 awesome Wikipedia entries that validate their statements, however unjustifiable they are in real arguement.
Oh you are preaching to the choir! Sometimes when I'm in one of those Northern states I have to wonder if a senior Wikipedia editor ever used the same drinking fountain I'm using! I mean, what if they were talking about the 20 awesome Wikipedia entries just before their dirty dirty mouths touched that faucet?! Gross!
... now I know why they continually destroyed the Library of Alexandria. Let's get Jimmy Wales' address from his Florida public voting registration and burn a W on his front lawn!
Something needs to be done about them people
This is the one where upon completion of recording all worthwhile knowledge, Wikipedia writes the final article describing Wikipedia itself. Following that, it detonates a bomb that implodes the universe back to a singularity so that no new information can be created and its volumes are complete for eternity. Luckily, as a Slashdot user, Wikipedia knows absolutely nothing about me or my intentions so I'll just take my Scooty Puff Jr. here over to the Wikimedia Foundation's servers ...
The reason he's fought it is that a scientists work should be judged by the science they produce, the published results of their work, not some gotcha quote mining of working papers and communications with peers.
The reason he fights it is clearer to me. It's the same reason why, if a law enforcement officer showed up at my house and demanded to rifle through all of my blongings looking for anything that might be illegal I would tell him to go pound sand. Not because I'm guilty, not because I hate the police but because he has no right to without a warrant! Furthermore, if 90% of people in our society allowed this and it became expected or, worse yet, legal then you would have effectively forfeited your right to privacy.
Scientists are human beings that work long hours at their jobs. Demanding the publication of everything is a bit dehumanizing and Mann is correct to fight it lest other scientists find themselves under the same expectations after it has been established as the norm. I think it will be acceptable to release it during the discovery phase of a case like this but it should not be given up lightly.
This is a clear attempt to intimidate and repress scientists and researchers.
Hockey stick is proven fabrication.
Well, if you desire a citation for my claims of independent verification, check out Richard Muller who previously attacked said graph and consequent IPCC claims (the results of which earned them the 2007 Nobel Prize). Pay attention to these first three paragraphs. That 2007 IPCC report is important because that is what Mann contributed to.
If I'm not mistaken, Muller tackled the same problem from a as different an approach as possible and came to the same conclusion.
The studies approving Vioxx were "peer reviewed" as well...
Sure, just because something is peer reviewed doesn't mean it is without fault but it sure is a good deliminator between a crackpot on the internet and someone trying very hard to participate in a community that also tries to hold itself to a higher standard than baseless claims and unreproducible results, wouldn't you agree?
It sounds like their argument is that the Penn State administration has a tendency to cover-up embarrassing stuff and protect their own.
The Penn State Hershey Medical Center brings in over a billion dollars a year in revenue to Penn State. The same university president who resigned in the wake of the Sandusky scandal also presided over said medical center with obvious financial interests that were easily orders of magnitudes higher than the football program. When will we re-investigate all of their malpractice suits? When will we bring their alleged (just now) organ trafficking ring from China to justice? Should we suppose, in light of what we now know, they would do any less to hide treatment and medical misconduct, with so much at stake?
Dr. Mann complains about two statements: 1) that as "the man behind the fraudulent climate-change 'hockey-stick' graph," he is "the very ringmaster of the three ring circus" on climate change; and 2) that he "could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet." Neither of these statements is actionable. Moreover, if Dr. Mann decides to pursue this matter, he and his research would be subjected to a very extensive discovery of materials that he has fought so hard to protect in other proceedings. Such materials would be required for National Review to defend itself.
Mitt Romney wants to create world peace? By arming the Syrian rebels? Because that's never bit us in the ass. I'm sick and tired of this mentality that the United States needs to police the entire world and Romney keeps saying crap like "it's an honor that we didn't ask for but we have." What the hell?
Oh! But yeah, go ahead and arm Syrian rebels! Iran totally won't view that as an aggressive act! No, they'll sit by and watch that happen! And just say "Gee, I guess the people of Syria have spoken!" Try meeting with them then and using diplomacy to reduce their nuclear efforts!
Something that's always troubled me about memes is that I cannot understand what the core language or data is for a meme. I know that our genes can be pinned down to be DNA but with memes it's troubling for me to try to imagine a language that conveys what is happening in them. We can observe a meme's transmission, we can observe a meme's mutation, we can observe a meme's fitness and we can observe its extinction -- but what we can't do is break those things down to some finite chunk of information such that we can analyze them on a empirical level. For instance, mutations of memes appear to be limited to only the human imagination and physics. It feels as though I would have as much luck describing how art went from cave paintings to film CGI with only mathematics as the language. So what is the concrete language of memes or are they destined to be more of a curious observation than a falsifiable and reproducible analysis like genetics?