When we get as much Socialism here, as Israel has, we will not be able to offer as big salaries either... Maybe, another 10-20 years? One more Obama and we are done.
WOW... that's amazing...
A Slashdotter who calls the Likud - Yisrael Beitenu coalition government "socialist". Now I have seen everything.. I bet Avigdor Lieberman would not be impressed if you called him a pussy-footed Socialist to his face.
So see it this way then: you conflate bias and variance, which is a big no-no in experimentation:
The Guardian: noticeable left-wing bias, low variance signal
De Volkskrant: slight left-wing bias, moderate variance signal
BBC: slight right-wing bias, moderate variance signal
NRC Handelsblad: noticeable right-wing bias, low variance signal
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: strong right-wing bias, low variance signal
Elsevier Magazine: strong right-wing bias, high variance signal
I don't dare to comment on others because I haven't read them often enough. The idea is that you can subtract or add YOUR perception of known bias to calibrate a signal to approximate what you think the real value is, but with high variance the signal is just too noisy to bother.
I have never seen more than soundbytes of Fox News, but is it true that a reporter had to claim that he was legally insane, in order to continue to spew lies without being called on it? I.E. "everybody knows its only entertainment, we don't claim to produce real news". That's just... odd.. why don't they call it Fox Entertainment then. Truth in advertising.
I agree with everything in your comment (though that doesn't disprove my comment that I believe the war was about petrodollars, something which unfortunately I can't prove either). However I disagree with your last sentence "That is why the 2003 war was fought".
Because the tragedy that Saddam had lied about having WMD's in order to keep the neighbouring countries scared of him, was already found out by the U.N. weapons inspectors (not a very thankful job BTW). So, tha "casus belli" had already been removed; there was no need for an actual war anymore.
I clearly remember reading afterwards in the newspaper that some soldier did actually find a gas grenade by the side of the road somewhere in Iraq (but I can't find any links).
But now I give you my own personal conspiracy theory, which I've never shared with anyone yet;-) :
Saddam had to go, because he was old (66 at the time of the war). He would probably just have died of old age at one point, after which there would have been a messy succession between his sons, chaos ensues. There's no way to use plans and schemes when somebody just dies of old age. It's messy. Yet when the media changed their tune from "they have WMDs" to "well, he's an evil dictator anyway", I didn't read or see ANYWHERE the opinion that the rest of the world might just wait out his natural lifespan and then negotiate with the successors. It would probably have taken shorter.
Saddam had threatened to sell the Iraqi oil for Euros instead of U.S. Dollars. I thought everybody knew this already. It would set a precedent that U.S. Dollars are only needed for buying American products.
It's salamitaktik from Tepco and the nuclear power industry's reputation managers. .
They're releasing a steady stream of "meh" stories to desensitize the public in the leadup to a genuinely damaging story. Something has gone badly wrong, and they'll tell us about it when we're all thoroughly jaded with these puff-pieces.
I read somewhere that they're soon going to begin trying to pull the 1331 rods out of spent fuel pool #4 (the full one on the first floor), one by one, without dropping any to the bottom of the pool. That sounded like a very risky but necessary operation. I sincerely hope that there won't be *any* news about it except for before and after the successful operation. GO TEPCO! The world doesn't hate you, it cheers you on, guys and gals!
If you Fourier transform your heating bill, it probably looks more like a large cosine if you live kind of north in the Northern hemisphere (peak in N.H. winter).
n fact, the richest and most powerful Americans would probably like there to be not so many people who understand math: Those who understand math can understand how badly they're being screwed by the richest and most powerful Americans!
I think you're on to something there.. they certainly wouldn't want American voters to understand figure SPM.5 (Radiative Forcing) on page 31 of the IPCC WG1 AR5 Summary for Policymakers, because that would just stir up trouble for the 1%. Better if the plebs stick to News Corp. soundbytes, prepared before that report was published.
I like the periods... but I'm not sure of the need to require keeping a copy? Is this solving an actual problem? ie are creators deliberately destroying their work to prevent it falling into PD? That sounds bizarre and insane..
Well, this whole discussion is about the old Dr. Who episodes, so yes it is solving an actual problem.
Nobody is saying that creators or publishers are deliberately destroying works; I agree that sounds insane. I'm picturing more as an every-30-years "spring clean" where materail that hasn't sold a single copy for ages gets recycled as wood pulp or mattress stuffings or whatever.
Currently the law is biased so that the creators get the protection they want and need, but if they can't be arsed to keep their end of the bargain, preserve a copy for PD 70 years after they're dead, then their culture gets nothing. There is no financial incentive to keep copyrighted material that doesn't still sell well after e.g. 100 years; the publisher may have gone bankrupt in such a span of time as well (which percentage of the publishing houses outlast 100 years?). But if the author publishes the book when she's 32, lives until she's 80, then the book becomes PD after 80 - 32 + 70 = 118 years after publication, or 4 generations of readers. It wouldn't work to contact the publishing house in Anno Domini 2115 if they can upload a digital copy from 118 years ago to your library circle mind-construct, no. But 28 years after publication they may still have it, no problem.
What the fuck are you talking about? There is no requirement for someone to keep a copy of material they create. What sort of reality do you live in?
Why not, actually?
I mean, it's an equilibrium between the rights of the work's creator and the rights of the people: the people must forego their right to what has been added to their culture for a limited time, during which time the creator's income from distributing copies of the work is protected by the government.
After this period of time, the deal is that the people can freely distribute copies of that work of art. It probably works differently for e.g. sculptures than songs, but what's wrong with the following idea:
The work's creator may buy an additional 14 years of copyright in exchange for € 100 and a signed written statement that a certified digital copy exists
The work's creator may buy an additional 14 years of copyright in exchange for € 10 000 and a signed certified digital copy, to be put in the national library. Sue 'em for € 10 000 per work if they lost the certified digital copy or if the signature checksum doesn't match the one from 14 years before. (*)
After the second copyright extension, anyone can download the digital copy from europeana.eu or loc.gov etc.
(*) If the work's creator doesn't cough up the work after having bought one or two extensions, sue them for..... TADAA...
THEFT OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
(I've been looking forward to using that expression in a context where it actually makes sense). For indeed, if you have a contract with your culture to enrich it with your work after profiting from it yourself for a time, and after that time you or your descendants don't live up to your end of the bargain, then you have indeed *stolen* intellectual property from its rightful owners, the society that nurtured your creativity.
I'd like to add that there should be no penalties if the creator didn't buy an extension and lost their source code in a harddisk crash; let that 14 year copyright extension be a signal that the work is of commercial value.
What do you think? (Especially if you're Rufus Pollock)
86MBq of activity diluted in even a midsized pond is not really a big deal.
Have you ever heard of "bio-accumulation"? It's a process where e.g. a growing child drinks so much milk or eats so much fish, that part of the resulting Calcium intake can be used to grow her skeleton. Like the bits around her bone marrow. Where the blood cells are made. For the rest of her life (well, there is probably some replacement; one Calcium atom is as good as any other).
If you look at the periodic table, Sr is one below Ca. Beta radiation may not be very penetrating outside your skin, but you wouldn't want the source to be inside your bones, irradiating your marrow.
No, I don't. Perhaps because I have an idea of how much natural radioactivity is already in the oceans of the world (hint: grind up the four reactors in question, and dump them into the oceans, and you won't even be able to measure the increase over backgound).
The numbers for Fukushima sound really big, But once you spread them through 1,250,000T tons of water, they don't look so significant....
I suddenly have a mental image of Fat Bastard (from Austin Powers fame) in a full train waggon, having just farted, and kindly admonishing his fellow travelers: "Oops! Sorry that was a horrible fart! But, if you all breathe deeply for a few minutes, it will be filtered and diluted enough that nobody has to die from the concentrated stuff. Go on, then!"
In other democracies, it's an uncommon but perfectly legitimate thing that a member of parliament can write a motion to send the government home.
It's called a "Vote of No Confidence". *IF* that vote passes, the government falls.
The reason why it's uncommon is as follows: that MP or political party is saying "We must disregard the will of the majority of the people who elected this government. we don't care about our jobs and the jobs of the other parliamentarians we currently have. This issue is so important that we are willing to overrule everything to ensure the government can't enact this law: "over our dead bodies". If that means that the people won't trust us anymore and stop voting for us for 12 years, so be it. This issue is more important than us being ever re-elected again."
IOW, it's a good thing that this mechanism exists to contain excesses, but in a normal democracy it has a price
But it seems such a complicated and contrived thing they are doing.. In the Netherlands, for example, there exists the political weapon of a "Vote of No Confidence". Any political party can order such a vote if they're REALLY fed up with the government; it is a gamble; if the vote passes, the government falls, and becomes a caretaker government until the next elections which will be held ASAP. However, the party that calls for the vote of no confidence usually loses quite a lot of goodwill, because the other politicians hate their guts, and because the electorate is pissed off that they have to walk to the voting booth again.
But, it is a "clean" weapon in the sense that the political party that uses it clearly shows its intentions: this current government is not fit to rule, let's all vote them out, onto the breach! Not something sneaky like "oh yes we approved the budget but now we suddenly don't anymore so screw you".
The NSA database just tracks *everyone* on the grounds that they may possibly be a suspect at some point in the future.
And there's historical precedent for this: The Amsterdam city archive had detailed information about all its citizens, including "religion". When the Netherlands were occupied by the Nazis in 1940, the new government had a new query they wanted to run on this database.
OK it was manual card search in that time, but still... not many Jews in Amsterdam survived, thanks to a previous government's careful information gathering on its own people (only for beneficial reasons, but that doesn't matter to the people who will have their claws on that dataset in 20 years time).
Once the tool exists, once the mechanism is in place, it would be a waste of government money to shut it down and destroy the data, wouldn't it?
And I for one am glad that there is one holdout, because I simply will not use a phone with a micro-USB connector.
I hear there's a small village in France, in Bretagne, where they still resist the nefarious imperially dictated micro-USB connector, and use copper-plated wooden sticks instead.
Yes, because there are only two political parties in California, the Democrats and the Republicans.
<rant> Oh wait.. maybe that's actually true. I'm not American so I wouldn't know.
But from an outsider perspective, the fact that your Political Party of Power has more than 90% of the vote (about equally split between the slightly-more-right PPP-Republian wing and the slightly-more-left PPP-Democrat wing), is in fact your largest problem. You need a political party that promises just *ONE* thing: to reform elections to representative democracy; effective multi-party system, like all? non-Anglo-Saxon democracies have.
After that one change, it will at least become possible that other voices are heard in parliament. Because if your Democrats and Republicans are so bad, then the normal situation would be that less than half of your electorate would vote for them, not 95% as it is now. (I made that number 95% up BTW). The mechanisms of power wheeling-and-dealing change, when the voice of the people is occasionally heard in parliament. </rant>
Now that we're telling stories, there's this fragment of Terry Pratchett I've been wanting to share about this whole debâcle:
Terry Pratchett - Interesting Times (p. 243)
'Poison,' said Cohen. 'I hate poisoners. Just about the worst sort, poisoners. Creeping around, putting muck in a man's grub...'
He glared at the Chamberlain.
'Was it you?' He looked at Rincewind and jerked a thumb towards the cowering Chamberlain. 'Was it him? Because if it was he's going to get done to him what I did to the mad Snake Priests of Start, and this time I'll use both thumbs!'
'No,' said Rincewind. 'It was someone they called Lord Hong. But they all watched him do it.'
A little scream erupted from the Lord Chamberlain. He threw himself to the floor and was about to kiss Cohen's foot until he realized that this would have about the same effect as eating the pork.
'Mercy, o celestial being! We are all pawns in the hands of Lord Hong!'
'What's so special about Lord Hong, then?'
'He's... a fine man!' the Chamberlain gibbered. 'I won't say a word against Lord Hong! I certainly don't believe it's true that he has spies everywhere! Long life to Lord Hong, that's what I say!'
He risked looking up and found the point of Cohen's sword just in front of his eyes.
'Yeah, but right now who're you more frightened of? Me or this Lord Hong?'
'Uh... Lord Hong!'
Cohen raised an eyebrow. 'I'm impressed. Spies everywhere, eh?'
Slashdot Mirror
WOW... that's amazing...
A Slashdotter who calls the Likud - Yisrael Beitenu coalition government "socialist". Now I have seen everything.. I bet Avigdor Lieberman would not be impressed if you called him a pussy-footed Socialist to his face.
So see it this way then: you conflate bias and variance, which is a big no-no in experimentation:
I don't dare to comment on others because I haven't read them often enough. The idea is that you can subtract or add YOUR perception of known bias to calibrate a signal to approximate what you think the real value is, but with high variance the signal is just too noisy to bother.
... odd.. why don't they call it Fox Entertainment then. Truth in advertising.
I have never seen more than soundbytes of Fox News, but is it true that a reporter had to claim that he was legally insane, in order to continue to spew lies without being called on it? I.E. "everybody knows its only entertainment, we don't claim to produce real news". That's just
I agree with everything in your comment (though that doesn't disprove my comment that I believe the war was about petrodollars, something which unfortunately I can't prove either). However I disagree with your last sentence "That is why the 2003 war was fought".
;-) :
Because the tragedy that Saddam had lied about having WMD's in order to keep the neighbouring countries scared of him, was already found out by the U.N. weapons inspectors (not a very thankful job BTW). So, tha "casus belli" had already been removed; there was no need for an actual war anymore.
I clearly remember reading afterwards in the newspaper that some soldier did actually find a gas grenade by the side of the road somewhere in Iraq (but I can't find any links).
But now I give you my own personal conspiracy theory, which I've never shared with anyone yet
Saddam had to go, because he was old (66 at the time of the war). He would probably just have died of old age at one point, after which there would have been a messy succession between his sons, chaos ensues. There's no way to use plans and schemes when somebody just dies of old age. It's messy. Yet when the media changed their tune from "they have WMDs" to "well, he's an evil dictator anyway", I didn't read or see ANYWHERE the opinion that the rest of the world might just wait out his natural lifespan and then negotiate with the successors. It would probably have taken shorter.
Saddam had threatened to sell the Iraqi oil for Euros instead of U.S. Dollars. I thought everybody knew this already. It would set a precedent that U.S. Dollars are only needed for buying American products.
I read somewhere that they're soon going to begin trying to pull the 1331 rods out of spent fuel pool #4 (the full one on the first floor), one by one, without dropping any to the bottom of the pool. That sounded like a very risky but necessary operation. I sincerely hope that there won't be *any* news about it except for before and after the successful operation.
GO TEPCO! The world doesn't hate you, it cheers you on, guys and gals!
PS. Triskaidekaphobia is lame.
For Slashdot, the latter 2 figures are probably most interesting: which countries have more l33t hackers and which have more button-pushers.
If you Fourier transform your heating bill, it probably looks more like a large cosine if you live kind of north in the Northern hemisphere (peak in N.H. winter).
I think you're on to something there.. they certainly wouldn't want American voters to understand figure SPM.5 (Radiative Forcing) on page 31 of the IPCC WG1 AR5 Summary for Policymakers, because that would just stir up trouble for the 1%. Better if the plebs stick to News Corp. soundbytes, prepared before that report was published.
hmm... wouldn't it be nicer to return ( (*s) ? s : NULL ) , I wonder..
That's a bit from "Elegy written in a country church-yard", Thomas Gray, 1751.
Hehe when I was a kid I wasn't allowed to watch dr. Who, because my granny found it too scary.
Then my parents gave in, and the first episode I saw was when someone was skinned alive IIRC.
Don't remember if we still had the black & white TV or already the shiny color TV..
Well, this whole discussion is about the old Dr. Who episodes, so yes it is solving an actual problem.
Nobody is saying that creators or publishers are deliberately destroying works; I agree that sounds insane. I'm picturing more as an every-30-years "spring clean" where materail that hasn't sold a single copy for ages gets recycled as wood pulp or mattress stuffings or whatever.
Currently the law is biased so that the creators get the protection they want and need, but if they can't be arsed to keep their end of the bargain, preserve a copy for PD 70 years after they're dead, then their culture gets nothing. There is no financial incentive to keep copyrighted material that doesn't still sell well after e.g. 100 years; the publisher may have gone bankrupt in such a span of time as well (which percentage of the publishing houses outlast 100 years?). But if the author publishes the book when she's 32, lives until she's 80, then the book becomes PD after 80 - 32 + 70 = 118 years after publication, or 4 generations of readers. It wouldn't work to contact the publishing house in Anno Domini 2115 if they can upload a digital copy from 118 years ago to your library circle mind-construct, no. But 28 years after publication they may still have it, no problem.
<troll>
Dunno, maybe because of George Michael?
</troll>
Why not, actually?
I mean, it's an equilibrium between the rights of the work's creator and the rights of the people: the people must forego their right to what has been added to their culture for a limited time, during which time the creator's income from distributing copies of the work is protected by the government.
After this period of time, the deal is that the people can freely distribute copies of that work of art. It probably works differently for e.g. sculptures than songs, but what's wrong with the following idea:
(*) If the work's creator doesn't cough up the work after having bought one or two extensions, sue them for ..... TADAA...
THEFT OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
(I've been looking forward to using that expression in a context where it actually makes sense). For indeed, if you have a contract with your culture to enrich it with your work after profiting from it yourself for a time, and after that time you or your descendants don't live up to your end of the bargain, then you have indeed *stolen* intellectual property from its rightful owners, the society that nurtured your creativity.
I'd like to add that there should be no penalties if the creator didn't buy an extension and lost their source code in a harddisk crash; let that 14 year copyright extension be a signal that the work is of commercial value.
What do you think? (Especially if you're Rufus Pollock)
Have you ever heard of "bio-accumulation"? It's a process where e.g. a growing child drinks so much milk or eats so much fish, that part of the resulting Calcium intake can be used to grow her skeleton. Like the bits around her bone marrow. Where the blood cells are made. For the rest of her life (well, there is probably some replacement; one Calcium atom is as good as any other).
If you look at the periodic table, Sr is one below Ca. Beta radiation may not be very penetrating outside your skin, but you wouldn't want the source to be inside your bones, irradiating your marrow.
I suddenly have a mental image of Fat Bastard (from Austin Powers fame) in a full train waggon, having just farted, and kindly admonishing his fellow travelers: "Oops! Sorry that was a horrible fart! But, if you all breathe deeply for a few minutes, it will be filtered and diluted enough that nobody has to die from the concentrated stuff. Go on, then!"
In other democracies, it's an uncommon but perfectly legitimate thing that a member of parliament can write a motion to send the government home.
It's called a "Vote of No Confidence". *IF* that vote passes, the government falls.
The reason why it's uncommon is as follows: that MP or political party is saying "We must disregard the will of the majority of the people who elected this government. we don't care about our jobs and the jobs of the other parliamentarians we currently have. This issue is so important that we are willing to overrule everything to ensure the government can't enact this law: "over our dead bodies". If that means that the people won't trust us anymore and stop voting for us for 12 years, so be it. This issue is more important than us being ever re-elected again."
IOW, it's a good thing that this mechanism exists to contain excesses, but in a normal democracy it has a price
But it seems such a complicated and contrived thing they are doing.. In the Netherlands, for example, there exists the political weapon of a "Vote of No Confidence". Any political party can order such a vote if they're REALLY fed up with the government; it is a gamble; if the vote passes, the government falls, and becomes a caretaker government until the next elections which will be held ASAP. However, the party that calls for the vote of no confidence usually loses quite a lot of goodwill, because the other politicians hate their guts, and because the electorate is pissed off that they have to walk to the voting booth again.
But, it is a "clean" weapon in the sense that the political party that uses it clearly shows its intentions: this current government is not fit to rule, let's all vote them out, onto the breach! Not something sneaky like "oh yes we approved the budget but now we suddenly don't anymore so screw you".
Well, good luck with it, since this is the best and most workable and non-violent idea I could come up with. It's your country.
And there's historical precedent for this: The Amsterdam city archive had detailed information about all its citizens, including "religion". When the Netherlands were occupied by the Nazis in 1940, the new government had a new query they wanted to run on this database.
OK it was manual card search in that time, but still... not many Jews in Amsterdam survived, thanks to a previous government's careful information gathering on its own people (only for beneficial reasons, but that doesn't matter to the people who will have their claws on that dataset in 20 years time).
Once the tool exists, once the mechanism is in place, it would be a waste of government money to shut it down and destroy the data, wouldn't it?
I hear there's a small village in France, in Bretagne, where they still resist the nefarious imperially dictated micro-USB connector, and use copper-plated wooden sticks instead.
I'm sorry, I probably said something stupid (wouldn't be the first time), but I don't get you: please elaborate.
Yes, because there are only two political parties in California, the Democrats and the Republicans.
<rant>
Oh wait.. maybe that's actually true. I'm not American so I wouldn't know.
But from an outsider perspective, the fact that your Political Party of Power has more than 90% of the vote (about equally split between the slightly-more-right PPP-Republian wing and the slightly-more-left PPP-Democrat wing), is in fact your largest problem. You need a political party that promises just *ONE* thing: to reform elections to representative democracy; effective multi-party system, like all? non-Anglo-Saxon democracies have.
After that one change, it will at least become possible that other voices are heard in parliament. Because if your Democrats and Republicans are so bad, then the normal situation would be that less than half of your electorate would vote for them, not 95% as it is now. (I made that number 95% up BTW). The mechanisms of power wheeling-and-dealing change, when the voice of the people is occasionally heard in parliament.
</rant>
Now that we're telling stories, there's this fragment of Terry Pratchett I've been wanting to share about this whole debâcle:
...'
... a fine man!' the Chamberlain gibbered. 'I won't say a word against Lord Hong! I certainly don't believe it's true that he has spies everywhere! Long life to Lord Hong, that's what I say!'
... Lord Hong!'
Terry Pratchett - Interesting Times (p. 243)
'Poison,' said Cohen. 'I hate poisoners. Just about the worst sort, poisoners. Creeping around, putting muck in a man's grub
He glared at the Chamberlain.
'Was it you?' He looked at Rincewind and jerked a thumb towards the cowering Chamberlain. 'Was it him? Because if it was he's going to get done to him what I did to the mad Snake Priests of Start, and this time I'll use both thumbs!'
'No,' said Rincewind. 'It was someone they called Lord Hong. But they all watched him do it.'
A little scream erupted from the Lord Chamberlain. He threw himself to the floor and was about to kiss Cohen's foot until he realized that this would have about the same effect as eating the pork.
'Mercy, o celestial being! We are all pawns in the hands of Lord Hong!'
'What's so special about Lord Hong, then?'
'He's
He risked looking up and found the point of Cohen's sword just in front of his eyes.
'Yeah, but right now who're you more frightened of? Me or this Lord Hong?'
'Uh
Cohen raised an eyebrow. 'I'm impressed. Spies everywhere, eh?'
And don't you see a problem with those two statements?