My first inclination was to believe that this crime was a political. I went out and confirmed that the Congresswoman was indeed a Democrat. Then I cursed those damnable tea partiers. Then I read here about the threatening graphic from SarahPac (Ms Palin's PAC), and I read a bunch of invective on the Fox news website comments on the story. My theory about the ugly nature of political discourse being the cause of this crime was supported but not proven. Then I found a CNN story about the suspect shooter and his online comments. I watched his youtube videos. The real story is that Jared Loughner is as nutty as a fruitcake.
The videos are fairly strange, exhibiting a repeated use of arguments that beg the question (I use "beg the question" in the sense that I referring to the logical fallacy). Clearly they are not the product of a healthy mind. He seems to be stuck in some sort of rut. Common themes include a new currency, mind control, and confusion about the way we number our years.
Maybe you should re-read the post that you responded to. NeutronCowboy made a comparison between the comments on Huffpost and Fox News. He states, and my observations agree, that the posts on Fox were angry, bigoted, and generally disgusting, while the comments of Huffpost were useful. Then he extends that comparison to imply that the extreme wing of the Republicans espouse violence. NC does not at all encourage violence in his post. In fact he uses the suggestion of political violence a tool to smear the tea party types. Take a deep breath and relax, KingSkippus.
Not to mention the many dolphins slaving away on the cotton fields.
Sea World, and the business of exhibiting sea animals for entertainment is a multibillion dollar world wide industry. All the humans that work in that industry are paid. The dolphins, whales, etc. are captured and forced to perform in appalling conditions so Sea World can make a buck. So yeah you don't look to the cotton fields for enslaved dolphins you go to Marine World.
It has always been the job of people of conscience to say, "hey this is wrong and must stop." Almost always the key defenders of the wrong are religious people who are dominated by dogmatic thinking. It has always been the job of thinking and questioning humans to drag the rest of humanity into behaving more ethically. If it weren't for people rejecting dogma and other religious nonsense then we'd still own slaves, and we'd still stone kids at the city gates for being disrespectful, and we'd still do all sorts of abominable things (many of which you can find prescribed in the book of Deuteronomy) So I say, Who cares if a bunch of religious bigots will never accept it. If we change the law then in a generation it will seem obvious on the face of it to nearly everyone. It has always been thus.
Why don't we just leave them to their business, and keep to our own?
Are you asserting that dolphins have the right to be left alone?
Incidentally what you propose is a great idea, but is not currently happening and is also pretty unlikely. We (humans) hunt dolphins. We capture and enslave them. We pollute their environment and food sources. We kill them while hunting for other sea life. In some places we regularly trap and slaughter them by the score to provide mystery sea meat for the Asian markets and to provide Sea World with slave performers. If there is any "leaving alone" to be done it is we that need to do it.
Go to Japan, dolphin meat is not uncommon there though the true nature of the meat is obfuscated. However the concentration of mercury and other contaminants in their flesh is so high that I would recommend that a single taste is more than enough.
If you don't believe me see "The Cove." It's really entertaining, and disturbing.
You cannot prove a negative. There is no "scientific" way you can prove the house is not haunted. Regardless of what tools you use and what data you collect, you will convince no one. Science may be the most amazing tool for revealing truth about our universe, but it cannot answer every question. Go find a few people who believe in ghosts and ask them what proof they would accept to convince them there are no ghosts. This is a matter of changing the minds of people who are prone to magical thinking. Reason, logic, and evidence don't have much impact on people who are prone to magical thinking. Don't bother.
A near Earth orbital environment cannot be a self sustaining colony. Mars can. The project will capture the imagination of the world, well at least the imagination of those who have one. It will inspire a generation, probably several generations to become scientists and engineers. It will drive the development of nearly every type of technology to meet the challenges. It should be done, not because it will be easy but because it will be hard. It's time for humanity to take a lasting step into the rest of the universe. It's time for some of us to begin to make a life off this Earth.
But the main reason is this. I want to go there, and that will be much easier if someone else goes first and builds a hotel with a nice view.
"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important in the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish." -JFK
In many ways my job IS easier than "living on a beach while picking fruit and fishing." My job doesn't involve being thrown in jail for vagrancy, stealing fruit, fishing without a license. As a result of my job, and my whole society, I have a roof over my head when it rains, heat when it gets cold, access to delightful food from across the globe, and the beach is about a 40 minute drive.
How the hell do you take notes on a laptop in dynamics, linear algebra, thermodynamics, chemistry, or physics. WTF! can all of you so called geeks use LaTeX in real time? I saw one post above where the person wrote, "in math intensive courses like econ it might be hard to use a laptop..." Econ might seem "math intensive if you are a history major but on the scale of real geek classes econ is about as math intensive as 4th grade social studies is reading intensive. Give me a break and go haunt digg or something with your laptops.
Taken as a whole, however, a leak of this elephantine magnitude, which appears to demonstrate no misconduct by the U.S., is difficult to defend on any basis other than WikiLeaks' general disdain for any secrecy at all.
Just off the top of my head
Wikileaks has revealed that:
Then follow several nice examples which clearly disprove the OP's statement. A nicely made rational argument resting on firm evidence.
However it won't work on the OP because he is clearly "drinking the Cool-Aid."
Hmm, for an all powerful god to create everything, know everything and control everything, that god must necessarily be much larger and more complex than the universe. So, who created this god?
There have been more than a few cases where I wanted to participate in some online discussion. (for instance I need to know how to replace a part on a Tamiya RC car for my son) When I signed up for an "account" on that forum I got an email with my username and password in plaintext!
The lesson I took away from those experiences and the gawker story is this: The negative consequences of someone stealing my ID on some forum about RC cars are basically nil, especially if my profile on that forum doesn't really identify me. So I use the same useless totally insecure throwaway password for these sorts of accounts. It's easy for me to remember and I don't care if it gets stolen or revealed. Hell it's been emailed in plaintext a half a dozen times. Had I ever used gawker I would have used that throwaway passoword, and it's exposure to the whole world wouldn't have worried me for a moment.
For accounts that matter I use a different and entirely more robust scheme for passwords.
Now if a gawker disaster happened to gmail, facebook, or my bank, the damage would be limited to that site but could still be BAD. I hope gmail and my bank do a better job than gawker.
The security question issue is a bit different. They're supposed to be easy to remember, but they nearly provide an equivalent level of access as the login and password. It might be useful to map the questions to different questions. For instance a security question about where you grew up you could always answer as the location of your first job, or even where superman grew up. A question about your pet's name you could answer with your sibling's name. As long as you remember your scheme it works and won't be as obvious to guess
Hold on, hold on, you think it's the cables that led the arrests? 'scuse me? That cat is out of the bag and it's not like there's anything that can be done about it.
Actually as has been pointed out several times on this page, only about 2,000 of the 250,000 cables have been released so far. So only 1% of the cats are out of the bag. Though I agree that the bank leaks have been a big motivating factor in the rest of the world's institutional powers takings sides against wikileaks.
Who needs to RTFA when helpful people like billcopc are around to summarize. Thanx billcopc!
Of course he's right, and what's really odd about this story is that using PI's to investigate disability fraud and insurance fraud is about as old as the idea of disability or insurance. So...
And this can be done in the liberal arts as well. You make the test a short list of essay questions, say 6, each designed to take about 15 minutes to complete tell the student to answer 4 in the hour. Yeah it's more labor intensive to grade, but it actually measures understanding instead of memorization or ability to cheat.
This series from the 1990s is somehow owned by Disney, despite it being funded by the National Science Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (in otherwords the taxpayers should own it). I tried to find a way to buy the show on DVD but all I could find was the educational institution price of something like $700 for the whole series. That was obviously absurd, so I found it via bittorrent. Anyone who reads this site should also be able to find it.
It's great fun and educational. My son loves the show. He asks to watch it. We've been watching it since he was 2 or 3. Now in second grade he's way ahead of his class in science and math.
Poking fun at religion is a good reason in its own right. Mockery is the best response to silliness.
I would agree if religion were just silliness. It isn't. It is horribly damaging. The key teaching of religions is that believing in things that are provably false is a virtue. They call it faith. What's worse is that the more absurd a thing that you can believe in the more virtuous you are. A person who believes that the earth is literally about 7,000 years old has much stronger faith than a person who equivocates and says that Genesis is metaphorical. Faith is the one basic teaching that is at the root of so much suffering. It leads directly to fundamentalism. Fundamentalist Islam is the Taliban, and the intensely repressive regimes in Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc. Fundamentalist Judaism believes that despite being largely absent for a thousand or so years they have a right given them by some sky guy to possess to the exclusion of all others a bit of real estate at the East end of the Mediterranean Sea. Christian fundamentalists lead America into unwinnable wars that sap our spirits and drain our treasury. Fundamentalist personality cult is the twisted crap that has lead to decades of starvation and tyranny in North Korea.
Please teach your children this: if you have seen it proven then believe it until you see it dis-proven. Be skeptical about everything else.
The quiz fails because it fails to load with Firefox, using nosript and adblock. Hell even after "temporarily allow all scripts on this page" it failed to load and I saw that "firefox has blocked 2 popups." So the quiz procedure self selects rather aggressively against allowing geeks to take the quiz at all.
But I pass because obviously the REAL test was this: if you are a genuine geek you won't even take the test because you can't stand to "temporarily allow doubleclick.com."
Slashdot Mirror
My first inclination was to believe that this crime was a political. I went out and confirmed that the Congresswoman was indeed a Democrat. Then I cursed those damnable tea partiers. Then I read here about the threatening graphic from SarahPac (Ms Palin's PAC), and I read a bunch of invective on the Fox news website comments on the story. My theory about the ugly nature of political discourse being the cause of this crime was supported but not proven. Then I found a CNN story about the suspect shooter and his online comments. I watched his youtube videos. The real story is that Jared Loughner is as nutty as a fruitcake.
CNN already has a story up with quotes from the suspect's various online accounts
http://www.cnn.com/2011/CRIME/01/08/arizona.shootings.suspect.social/index.html
Interesting, the suspect has a youtube account and has 5 videos posted. They are here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/Classitup10#p/u/0/7uRjwPWaxiY
The videos are fairly strange, exhibiting a repeated use of arguments that beg the question (I use "beg the question" in the sense that I referring to the logical fallacy). Clearly they are not the product of a healthy mind. He seems to be stuck in some sort of rut. Common themes include a new currency, mind control, and confusion about the way we number our years.
Maybe you should re-read the post that you responded to. NeutronCowboy made a comparison between the comments on Huffpost and Fox News. He states, and my observations agree, that the posts on Fox were angry, bigoted, and generally disgusting, while the comments of Huffpost were useful. Then he extends that comparison to imply that the extreme wing of the Republicans espouse violence. NC does not at all encourage violence in his post. In fact he uses the suggestion of political violence a tool to smear the tea party types. Take a deep breath and relax, KingSkippus.
Not to mention the many dolphins slaving away on the cotton fields.
Sea World, and the business of exhibiting sea animals for entertainment is a multibillion dollar world wide industry. All the humans that work in that industry are paid. The dolphins, whales, etc. are captured and forced to perform in appalling conditions so Sea World can make a buck. So yeah you don't look to the cotton fields for enslaved dolphins you go to Marine World.
It has always been the job of people of conscience to say, "hey this is wrong and must stop." Almost always the key defenders of the wrong are religious people who are dominated by dogmatic thinking. It has always been the job of thinking and questioning humans to drag the rest of humanity into behaving more ethically. If it weren't for people rejecting dogma and other religious nonsense then we'd still own slaves, and we'd still stone kids at the city gates for being disrespectful, and we'd still do all sorts of abominable things (many of which you can find prescribed in the book of Deuteronomy) So I say, Who cares if a bunch of religious bigots will never accept it. If we change the law then in a generation it will seem obvious on the face of it to nearly everyone. It has always been thus.
Why don't we just leave them to their business, and keep to our own?
Are you asserting that dolphins have the right to be left alone?
Incidentally what you propose is a great idea, but is not currently happening and is also pretty unlikely. We (humans) hunt dolphins. We capture and enslave them. We pollute their environment and food sources. We kill them while hunting for other sea life. In some places we regularly trap and slaughter them by the score to provide mystery sea meat for the Asian markets and to provide Sea World with slave performers. If there is any "leaving alone" to be done it is we that need to do it.
Go to Japan, dolphin meat is not uncommon there though the true nature of the meat is obfuscated. However the concentration of mercury and other contaminants in their flesh is so high that I would recommend that a single taste is more than enough.
If you don't believe me see "The Cove." It's really entertaining, and disturbing.
No. Slaves were fully human, and humans already had "personhood".
You are mistaken about this. You don't have to look any further than the United States Constitution. Slaves were counted as 3/5 of a person.
You cannot prove a negative. There is no "scientific" way you can prove the house is not haunted. Regardless of what tools you use and what data you collect, you will convince no one. Science may be the most amazing tool for revealing truth about our universe, but it cannot answer every question. Go find a few people who believe in ghosts and ask them what proof they would accept to convince them there are no ghosts. This is a matter of changing the minds of people who are prone to magical thinking. Reason, logic, and evidence don't have much impact on people who are prone to magical thinking. Don't bother.
A near Earth orbital environment cannot be a self sustaining colony. Mars can. The project will capture the imagination of the world, well at least the imagination of those who have one. It will inspire a generation, probably several generations to become scientists and engineers. It will drive the development of nearly every type of technology to meet the challenges. It should be done, not because it will be easy but because it will be hard. It's time for humanity to take a lasting step into the rest of the universe. It's time for some of us to begin to make a life off this Earth.
But the main reason is this. I want to go there, and that will be much easier if someone else goes first and builds a hotel with a nice view.
"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important in the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish." -JFK
In many ways my job IS easier than "living on a beach while picking fruit and fishing." My job doesn't involve being thrown in jail for vagrancy, stealing fruit, fishing without a license. As a result of my job, and my whole society, I have a roof over my head when it rains, heat when it gets cold, access to delightful food from across the globe, and the beach is about a 40 minute drive.
How the hell do you take notes on a laptop in dynamics, linear algebra, thermodynamics, chemistry, or physics. WTF! can all of you so called geeks use LaTeX in real time? I saw one post above where the person wrote, "in math intensive courses like econ it might be hard to use a laptop..." Econ might seem "math intensive if you are a history major but on the scale of real geek classes econ is about as math intensive as 4th grade social studies is reading intensive. Give me a break and go haunt digg or something with your laptops.
bracing for troll mod, and karma hit
Taken as a whole, however, a leak of this elephantine magnitude, which appears to demonstrate no misconduct by the U.S., is difficult to defend on any basis other than WikiLeaks' general disdain for any secrecy at all.
Just off the top of my head Wikileaks has revealed that:
Then follow several nice examples which clearly disprove the OP's statement. A nicely made rational argument resting on firm evidence.
However it won't work on the OP because he is clearly "drinking the Cool-Aid."
I am not going to take any action myself, but it sure is nice to see them taken down a peg or two.
The very definition of Anonymous Coward.
Hmm, for an all powerful god to create everything, know everything and control everything, that god must necessarily be much larger and more complex than the universe. So, who created this god?
He evolved.
There have been more than a few cases where I wanted to participate in some online discussion. (for instance I need to know how to replace a part on a Tamiya RC car for my son) When I signed up for an "account" on that forum I got an email with my username and password in plaintext!
The lesson I took away from those experiences and the gawker story is this: The negative consequences of someone stealing my ID on some forum about RC cars are basically nil, especially if my profile on that forum doesn't really identify me. So I use the same useless totally insecure throwaway password for these sorts of accounts. It's easy for me to remember and I don't care if it gets stolen or revealed. Hell it's been emailed in plaintext a half a dozen times. Had I ever used gawker I would have used that throwaway passoword, and it's exposure to the whole world wouldn't have worried me for a moment.
For accounts that matter I use a different and entirely more robust scheme for passwords. Now if a gawker disaster happened to gmail, facebook, or my bank, the damage would be limited to that site but could still be BAD. I hope gmail and my bank do a better job than gawker.
The security question issue is a bit different. They're supposed to be easy to remember, but they nearly provide an equivalent level of access as the login and password. It might be useful to map the questions to different questions. For instance a security question about where you grew up you could always answer as the location of your first job, or even where superman grew up. A question about your pet's name you could answer with your sibling's name. As long as you remember your scheme it works and won't be as obvious to guess
Hold on, hold on, you think it's the cables that led the arrests? 'scuse me? That cat is out of the bag and it's not like there's anything that can be done about it.
Actually as has been pointed out several times on this page, only about 2,000 of the 250,000 cables have been released so far. So only 1% of the cats are out of the bag. Though I agree that the bank leaks have been a big motivating factor in the rest of the world's institutional powers takings sides against wikileaks.
Now there is a way for you to look like a complete dork with an analog controller instead of a digital microprocessor!
Who needs to RTFA when helpful people like billcopc are around to summarize. Thanx billcopc!
Of course he's right, and what's really odd about this story is that using PI's to investigate disability fraud and insurance fraud is about as old as the idea of disability or insurance. So...
Nothing to see here. Move along
did you see how fat the keyboard section of the phone was!!?? There was plenty of room for a big fat battery.
And this can be done in the liberal arts as well. You make the test a short list of essay questions, say 6, each designed to take about 15 minutes to complete tell the student to answer 4 in the hour. Yeah it's more labor intensive to grade, but it actually measures understanding instead of memorization or ability to cheat.
This series from the 1990s is somehow owned by Disney, despite it being funded by the National Science Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (in otherwords the taxpayers should own it). I tried to find a way to buy the show on DVD but all I could find was the educational institution price of something like $700 for the whole series. That was obviously absurd, so I found it via bittorrent. Anyone who reads this site should also be able to find it.
It's great fun and educational. My son loves the show. He asks to watch it. We've been watching it since he was 2 or 3. Now in second grade he's way ahead of his class in science and math.
Bill Nye! Bill! Bill! Bill!
you treat my offhand comment as if it is the only response we should make.
Didn't mean it that way, it just seemed like a nice springboard quote to give me a chance to say my fill.
Poking fun at religion is a good reason in its own right. Mockery is the best response to silliness.
I would agree if religion were just silliness. It isn't. It is horribly damaging. The key teaching of religions is that believing in things that are provably false is a virtue. They call it faith. What's worse is that the more absurd a thing that you can believe in the more virtuous you are. A person who believes that the earth is literally about 7,000 years old has much stronger faith than a person who equivocates and says that Genesis is metaphorical. Faith is the one basic teaching that is at the root of so much suffering. It leads directly to fundamentalism. Fundamentalist Islam is the Taliban, and the intensely repressive regimes in Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc. Fundamentalist Judaism believes that despite being largely absent for a thousand or so years they have a right given them by some sky guy to possess to the exclusion of all others a bit of real estate at the East end of the Mediterranean Sea. Christian fundamentalists lead America into unwinnable wars that sap our spirits and drain our treasury. Fundamentalist personality cult is the twisted crap that has lead to decades of starvation and tyranny in North Korea.
Please teach your children this: if you have seen it proven then believe it until you see it dis-proven. Be skeptical about everything else.
The quiz fails because it fails to load with Firefox, using nosript and adblock. Hell even after "temporarily allow all scripts on this page" it failed to load and I saw that "firefox has blocked 2 popups." So the quiz procedure self selects rather aggressively against allowing geeks to take the quiz at all.
But I pass because obviously the REAL test was this: if you are a genuine geek you won't even take the test because you can't stand to "temporarily allow doubleclick.com."