The issue in this case was not "background checks required for government positions", it was "background checks required for employees of firms with government contracts".
If you don't think they will play the network stability card and get a nod to tier the bandwidth you haven't really learned how govt and business work yet...
Insults are not a substitute for facts and evidence, which you do not have.
Even though the FCC just adopted rules which specifically prevent that.
They've already approved a merger of NBC and Comcast, despite Obama's rhetoric about being opposed to too much consolidation back in '08 on the election trail.
Obama's statements on the issue were about maintaining diversity in the ownership of outlets. NBC Universal owns outlets, pre-merger Comcast did not. Comcast buying a controlling interest in NBC Universal from GE doesn't reduce diversity in ownership of outlets. So there is no conflict there.
Content providers are at war with Netflix, and Netflix is differentiating Classes of Service depending on hardware used.
[...]
Start the Netflix viewer on each device. Note that they each have different data centers that they reach out to. Always.
That could be discrimination in class of service, it could be that they use platform-specific DRM systems on the user end, and that they support that with separate servers because its just easier to do that way.
Until....buffering......buffering..... pesky.....buffering...buffering.... Comcast et al does their dirty deeds.
Huh. If only the someone would adopt rules that specifically preventing ISPs from block, degrading, or discriminating against content providers that compete with services offered by the ISPs, particularly calling out voice and video services.
Except that, contrary to TFS, this has nothing to do with Obama's stated goal. It does nothing to affect diversity of ownership of outlets, and transferring NBC Universal from 80% GE/20% Vivendi to 51% Comcast/49% GE doesn't increase the concentration of power in the hands of any one corporation.
It increases vertical rather than horizontal integration in television, and shifts assets around between existing megacorporations.
The reason: the new grad knew a hot emerging technology that a client wanted.
This is certainly a factor weighing in favor of a pay differential, but if its the only thing that is being considered, there is probably a deep problem; "new technologies" in the sense of programming languages and platforms are comparatively easy to pick up, proficiency in applying good practices to produce quality that cross cuts platforms and languages are less easy to pick up. If the only thing you look at in deciding how to pay technology staff is whether they have experience with the current flavor-of-the-month implementation technology rather than broad cross-cutting knowledge of how to apply technology more generally, then you are going to tend to produce buzzword-compliant, superficially (at best) attractive, low-quality, brittle solutions.
I cant see how this helps drive down emissions if all the people of Europe - and the world for that matter start driving everywhere
As covered other articles on the push for self-driving cars as a green solution, the idea is that self-driving cars facilitate smaller numbers of cars serving the same number of people.
It reduces the resource consumption in building and storing cars, and makes autos better feeders to existing mass-transit systems.
Jury nullification can work both ways, for and against a defendant, or for and against the prosecution.
No, actually, it can't.
They're both asserting points in the law, and the jury can ignore the law in either direction.
Sure, but the jury acting inconsistently with the law in either direction in a civil trial can be overridden by the court (either the trial court or appellate court), and the jury ignoring the law in a way which benefits the prosecution in a criminal trial can similarly be overridden. The power of the jury to nullify the law -- to ignore it in a manner which cannot be overridden -- is restricted to one-direction (favoring the defense) in one context (criminal trials.)
That happened in the 70's. And the debate was pretty much exactly the same.
Well, except that the ice age fears in the 1970s were almost entirely driven from outside the scientific community in the media and then, as now, the scientific consensus was that warming would continue and was being driven by CO2 concentration.
So the similarities were superficial and stop with the portrayal in the popular media; the substance was completely different.
While this would be a big problem, the effects on humanity of an ice age would be much more catastrophic.
As the entire period of the existence of humanity has been within an ice age, and has included two major glacial periods. So continuing in the ice age, and even experiencing another major glacial period, would likely be less catastrophic than warming to the point of ending the current ice age.
But, yeah, that would suck, too. If there was a mass of evidence that human activities were driving us into another glacial period, people would be right to try to do something about that.
But it could be the complete opposite - we could have an increasing average global temperature without *any* additional ice melt.
You could, if the average global temperature changes were due to localized effects that are completely unrelated to the effects that are actually driving the observed changes in global temperature.
The effects attributed to a given average temperature change aren't attributed to it alone, they are the expected results of the given average change given the factors identified, through various means, as contributing to that temperature change, which do also determine the expected distribution that goes along with that average change.
Yes, there is much more warming in the Arctic than in other locations. There's also lots of ice there. Some of it is in the ocean already so that ice melting will not increase sea level.
No, but it will decrease the amount of ice, which is more reflective than the ocean; by so doing, it will increase the amount of retained heat, and accelerate the overall warming trend.
Re:Isn't AGW supposed to be about _rate_ of change
on
Bastardi's Wager
·
· Score: 1
So somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but what I _think_ I've heard from the AGW proponents once you get past the ad-hominems (on both sides!), is that yes, we are between ice ages
Actually, we are in an ice age, we are between glacial periods.
When we don't have extensive ice sheets on land in both the northern and southern hemispheres (the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets), we'll be out of the ice age that we've been in for the last ~2.5 million years (i.e., more than the entire existence of humanity.)
but AGW is about the global average temp increasing _faster_ than it should be naturally.
Nope, anthropogenic global warming -- like any scientific theory -- doesn't take any stance on what should happen. Its about cause-and-effect, specifically that specific human actions, principally through increases in atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases, are producing a rapid and accelerating increase in global temperatures.
It isn't central to the theory whether or not the earth would be warming without those changes (IIRC, the calculated amount of change due to other sources has meant that in some parts of the warming period, the change due to sources other than human activity would be positive, in others it would have been negative.)
So am I wrong in seeing "this was the warmest decade recorded"-type headlines lately and thinking "yeah, so?"?
You are almost never long in seeing any popular media headline on any scientific issue and saying "yeah, so?". You usually need to read beyond the headline and, even more than that, beyond what is in the popular media to get to the significance.
So....why do the climate scientists keep citing specific decades if 10 years isn't long enough for it to be climate?
Because the specific decades add to the support for the long-term trend evidence by many different measuring methods showing a rapid and accelerating rise in global average temperatures with a strong link to atmospheric CO2 since at least the industrial revolution.
Why are the 2000's cited as the hottest decade and called evidence for global warming if it's too short a time period to be used for that?
A specific decade can add weight to the mountain of evidence for a trend without one decade standing alone (without more detailed examination of factors beyond temperature) doing much to refute the relationship identified by the longer-term trend.
Faster only because every single product they make is only half completed.
Actually, faster because Google employs lean methods and doesn't subscribe to the false notion that the kind of products it produces -- whether its own or those of its competitors -- are ever "completed". Since both they and their competitors have products which are updated over time, the one who gets the product in the hands of interested users and gets them attached and involved and receiving value early, gets feedback quicker, and gets the improvements important to its user base out quicker wins.
Any effort that is expended but is waiting on a release schedule to get into the hands of consumers where it delivers value is a form of waste, and Google's approach is to minimize that kind of waste.
Actually, jury nullification works one way (in favor of criminal defendants) and in one context (criminal trials.) A criminal jury trial is the only case where a judge cannot overrule, in either direction, a jury verdict if it is, in the opinion of the judge, not reasonable given the applicable law and the facts presented. And, in a criminal jury trial, it works only in the defendants favor; a judge can throw out a conviction reached by the jury if it is not reasonable (though in practice, if a conviction on one or more of the charges would not be reasonable, the judge is more likely to dismiss before sending the case to the jury.)
And jury nullification is more distant from a motion for a TRO, which is always decided on by a judge and doesn't go to the jury in any case.
Then I shall stand correct. I still think it is kinda silly, but I didn't make the laws, and I'm sure in other cases it makes more clear sense.
The important thing to remember about a TRO is that it isn't the final judgement in the case; instead, its simply something that is available because lawsuits take time, and so courts need a way to restrain actions that might cause irreparable harm while the case is working its way through the system.
Its not primarily about what people ought to be allowed to do in a general, permanent sense (because those questions are what is decided in the resolution of the case), its about what do we need to do to make it so that one party or the other doesn't have their interest crushed by the other in the time it takes to resolve the case.
If there's no further harm expected from the action sought to be restrained, then there is no basis for a TRO, even though the final order when all the legal arguments are done and evidence is reviewed in the case might well be to declare that that action is illegal and order it stopped.
People who bring their own tools are called contractors, not employees.
Incorrect. Using your own tools is one of the indicators that is looked out in resolving whether someone is an independent contractor or an employee, but its not the most important.
OTOH, for regular employees, the cost of tools you are specifically required to purchase for a job is essentially a negative part of your wages under the FLSA, which may have FLSA impacts (for low-paid employees, it may bring them below the minimum wage; for employees in potentially-exempt job types where the exemption has a minimum wage threshold -- e.g., the $455/wk or $27.63/hr exemption threshold for computer-related professions -- it could bring them below the threshold for the FLSA exemption.)
(I do agree that the headline is poorly worded but it's derived from a technically-correct but also poorly worded line in TFA).
No, its not. TFA -- and not just in the sentence excerpted in TFS, which is technically wrong but which might, on its own, have just been an error in pronoun use -- presents the legal issue in dispute as being whether Sony (not the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California) has jurisdiction.
In addition to the first sentence in TFS, which might be explained away as an error in pronoun use in a sentence intended to convey the correct issue of the court's jurisdiction, TFA states: "Hotz's lawyer, Stewart Kellar, filed an objection stating that Sony has no jurisdiction in the case, as Hotz lives in New Jersey and the complaint was filed in California." [emphasis added]
This makes it clear that the error is not just one of pronoun use in the earlier sentence, its that TFA completely misrepresents the legal issue as being one of Sony's "jurisdiction".
That doesn't completely excuse the author of TFS and the editor posting the story, who should have recognized that the claim made in TFA was not reasonable and sought better sources before posting the story. But it does explain that they aren't the root source of the misrepresentation.
It directly addresses the legal standard for issuing a temporary restraining order, which is issued before the legalities at issue are determined to prevent ongoing harm that might otherwise occur while the case is progressing. That there is no reasonable basis to believe that the TRO would prevent any ongoing harm is the strongest possible argument against a TRO, not a "darn weak" one.
Sony knows that they can't put the cat back in the bag, but that's not the point. The point is to make life as hellish as possible for the person who let the cat out, so the next bloke who considers doing it might find something else to do.
Unfortunately for Sony's motion for a TRO, such orders are allowed only for specified purposes (largely, to prevent irreversible harm), and punitive purposes are not an acceptable reason for a TRO.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, sorry: TFS is misleading; TFA is not.
The issue in this case was not "background checks required for government positions", it was "background checks required for employees of firms with government contracts".
If you don't think they will play the network stability card and get a nod to tier the bandwidth you haven't really learned how govt and business work yet...
Insults are not a substitute for facts and evidence, which you do not have.
Obama's FCC is opposed to network neutrality
Which is why they adopted rules which mandate it.
so pretty soon the ISPs WILL be blocking Netflix.
Even though the FCC just adopted rules which specifically prevent that.
They've already approved a merger of NBC and Comcast, despite Obama's rhetoric about being opposed to too much consolidation back in '08 on the election trail.
Obama's statements on the issue were about maintaining diversity in the ownership of outlets. NBC Universal owns outlets, pre-merger Comcast did not. Comcast buying a controlling interest in NBC Universal from GE doesn't reduce diversity in ownership of outlets. So there is no conflict there.
And this is where we are headed in the US... Oh, wait, already there in most ways....
NO incentive at all to move off the government dole.
Please explain how your claim is not outdated at least since the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996.
Content providers are at war with Netflix, and Netflix is differentiating Classes of Service depending on hardware used.
[...]
Start the Netflix viewer on each device. Note that they each have different data centers that they reach out to. Always.
That could be discrimination in class of service, it could be that they use platform-specific DRM systems on the user end, and that they support that with separate servers because its just easier to do that way.
Until....buffering......buffering..... pesky.....buffering...buffering.... Comcast et al does their dirty deeds.
Huh. If only the someone would adopt rules that specifically preventing ISPs from block, degrading, or discriminating against content providers that compete with services offered by the ISPs, particularly calling out voice and video services.
Oh, wait, they did.
One reason could be that Yahoo still provides co-branded DSL services through SBC.
That's AT&T, for the last several years, but yeah.
It's Obama ignoring his own goal.
Except that, contrary to TFS, this has nothing to do with Obama's stated goal. It does nothing to affect diversity of ownership of outlets, and transferring NBC Universal from 80% GE/20% Vivendi to 51% Comcast/49% GE doesn't increase the concentration of power in the hands of any one corporation.
It increases vertical rather than horizontal integration in television, and shifts assets around between existing megacorporations.
The reason: the new grad knew a hot emerging technology that a client wanted.
This is certainly a factor weighing in favor of a pay differential, but if its the only thing that is being considered, there is probably a deep problem; "new technologies" in the sense of programming languages and platforms are comparatively easy to pick up, proficiency in applying good practices to produce quality that cross cuts platforms and languages are less easy to pick up. If the only thing you look at in deciding how to pay technology staff is whether they have experience with the current flavor-of-the-month implementation technology rather than broad cross-cutting knowledge of how to apply technology more generally, then you are going to tend to produce buzzword-compliant, superficially (at best) attractive, low-quality, brittle solutions.
I cant see how this helps drive down emissions if all the people of Europe - and the world for that matter start driving everywhere
As covered other articles on the push for self-driving cars as a green solution, the idea is that self-driving cars facilitate smaller numbers of cars serving the same number of people.
It reduces the resource consumption in building and storing cars, and makes autos better feeders to existing mass-transit systems.
Jury nullification can work both ways, for and against a defendant, or for and against the prosecution.
No, actually, it can't.
They're both asserting points in the law, and the jury can ignore the law in either direction.
Sure, but the jury acting inconsistently with the law in either direction in a civil trial can be overridden by the court (either the trial court or appellate court), and the jury ignoring the law in a way which benefits the prosecution in a criminal trial can similarly be overridden. The power of the jury to nullify the law -- to ignore it in a manner which cannot be overridden -- is restricted to one-direction (favoring the defense) in one context (criminal trials.)
That happened in the 70's. And the debate was pretty much exactly the same.
Well, except that the ice age fears in the 1970s were almost entirely driven from outside the scientific community in the media and then, as now, the scientific consensus was that warming would continue and was being driven by CO2 concentration.
So the similarities were superficial and stop with the portrayal in the popular media; the substance was completely different.
While this would be a big problem, the effects on humanity of an ice age would be much more catastrophic.
As the entire period of the existence of humanity has been within an ice age, and has included two major glacial periods. So continuing in the ice age, and even experiencing another major glacial period, would likely be less catastrophic than warming to the point of ending the current ice age.
But, yeah, that would suck, too. If there was a mass of evidence that human activities were driving us into another glacial period, people would be right to try to do something about that.
But it could be the complete opposite - we could have an increasing average global temperature without *any* additional ice melt.
You could, if the average global temperature changes were due to localized effects that are completely unrelated to the effects that are actually driving the observed changes in global temperature.
The effects attributed to a given average temperature change aren't attributed to it alone, they are the expected results of the given average change given the factors identified, through various means, as contributing to that temperature change, which do also determine the expected distribution that goes along with that average change.
Yes, there is much more warming in the Arctic than in other locations. There's also lots of ice there. Some of it is in the ocean already so that ice melting will not increase sea level.
No, but it will decrease the amount of ice, which is more reflective than the ocean; by so doing, it will increase the amount of retained heat, and accelerate the overall warming trend.
So somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but what I _think_ I've heard from the AGW proponents once you get past the ad-hominems (on both sides!), is that yes, we are between ice ages
Actually, we are in an ice age, we are between glacial periods.
When we don't have extensive ice sheets on land in both the northern and southern hemispheres (the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets), we'll be out of the ice age that we've been in for the last ~2.5 million years (i.e., more than the entire existence of humanity.)
but AGW is about the global average temp increasing _faster_ than it should be naturally.
Nope, anthropogenic global warming -- like any scientific theory -- doesn't take any stance on what should happen. Its about cause-and-effect, specifically that specific human actions, principally through increases in atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases, are producing a rapid and accelerating increase in global temperatures.
It isn't central to the theory whether or not the earth would be warming without those changes (IIRC, the calculated amount of change due to other sources has meant that in some parts of the warming period, the change due to sources other than human activity would be positive, in others it would have been negative.)
So am I wrong in seeing "this was the warmest decade recorded"-type headlines lately and thinking "yeah, so?"?
You are almost never long in seeing any popular media headline on any scientific issue and saying "yeah, so?". You usually need to read beyond the headline and, even more than that, beyond what is in the popular media to get to the significance.
So....why do the climate scientists keep citing specific decades if 10 years isn't long enough for it to be climate?
Because the specific decades add to the support for the long-term trend evidence by many different measuring methods showing a rapid and accelerating rise in global average temperatures with a strong link to atmospheric CO2 since at least the industrial revolution.
Why are the 2000's cited as the hottest decade and called evidence for global warming if it's too short a time period to be used for that?
A specific decade can add weight to the mountain of evidence for a trend without one decade standing alone (without more detailed examination of factors beyond temperature) doing much to refute the relationship identified by the longer-term trend.
Faster only because every single product they make is only half completed.
Actually, faster because Google employs lean methods and doesn't subscribe to the false notion that the kind of products it produces -- whether its own or those of its competitors -- are ever "completed". Since both they and their competitors have products which are updated over time, the one who gets the product in the hands of interested users and gets them attached and involved and receiving value early, gets feedback quicker, and gets the improvements important to its user base out quicker wins.
Any effort that is expended but is waiting on a release schedule to get into the hands of consumers where it delivers value is a form of waste, and Google's approach is to minimize that kind of waste.
Jury nullification works both ways.
Actually, jury nullification works one way (in favor of criminal defendants) and in one context (criminal trials.) A criminal jury trial is the only case where a judge cannot overrule, in either direction, a jury verdict if it is, in the opinion of the judge, not reasonable given the applicable law and the facts presented. And, in a criminal jury trial, it works only in the defendants favor; a judge can throw out a conviction reached by the jury if it is not reasonable (though in practice, if a conviction on one or more of the charges would not be reasonable, the judge is more likely to dismiss before sending the case to the jury.)
And jury nullification is more distant from a motion for a TRO, which is always decided on by
a judge and doesn't go to the jury in any case.
Then I shall stand correct. I still think it is kinda silly, but I didn't make the laws, and I'm sure in other cases it makes more clear sense.
The important thing to remember about a TRO is that it isn't the final judgement in the case; instead, its simply something that is available because lawsuits take time, and so courts need a way to restrain actions that might cause irreparable harm while the case is working its way through the system.
Its not primarily about what people ought to be allowed to do in a general, permanent sense (because those questions are what is decided in the resolution of the case), its about what do we need to do to make it so that one party or the other doesn't have their interest crushed by the other in the time it takes to resolve the case.
If there's no further harm expected from the action sought to be restrained, then there is no basis for a TRO, even though the final order when all the legal arguments are done and evidence is reviewed in the case might well be to declare that that action is illegal and order it stopped.
People who bring their own tools are called contractors, not employees.
Incorrect. Using your own tools is one of the indicators that is looked out in resolving whether someone is an independent contractor or an employee, but its not the most important.
OTOH, for regular employees, the cost of tools you are specifically required to purchase for a job is essentially a negative part of your wages under the FLSA, which may have FLSA impacts (for low-paid employees, it may bring them below the minimum wage; for employees in potentially-exempt job types where the exemption has a minimum wage threshold -- e.g., the $455/wk or $27.63/hr exemption threshold for computer-related professions -- it could bring them below the threshold for the FLSA exemption.)
(I do agree that the headline is poorly worded but it's derived from a technically-correct but also poorly worded line in TFA).
No, its not. TFA -- and not just in the sentence excerpted in TFS, which is technically wrong but which might, on its own, have just been an error in pronoun use -- presents the legal issue in dispute as being whether Sony (not the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California) has jurisdiction.
In addition to the first sentence in TFS, which might be explained away as an error in pronoun use in a sentence intended to convey the correct issue of the court's jurisdiction, TFA states: "Hotz's lawyer, Stewart Kellar, filed an objection stating that Sony has no jurisdiction in the case, as Hotz lives in New Jersey and the complaint was filed in California." [emphasis added]
This makes it clear that the error is not just one of pronoun use in the earlier sentence, its that TFA completely misrepresents the legal issue as being one of Sony's "jurisdiction".
That doesn't completely excuse the author of TFS and the editor posting the story, who should have recognized that the claim made in TFA was not reasonable and sought better sources before posting the story. But it does explain that they aren't the root source of the misrepresentation.
I suppose, but still seems darn weak.
It directly addresses the legal standard for issuing a temporary restraining order, which is issued before the legalities at issue are determined to prevent ongoing harm that might otherwise occur while the case is progressing. That there is no reasonable basis to believe that the TRO would prevent any ongoing harm is the strongest possible argument against a TRO, not a "darn weak" one.
Sony knows that they can't put the cat back in the bag, but that's not the point. The point is to make life as hellish as possible for the person who let the cat out, so the next bloke who considers doing it might find something else to do.
Unfortunately for Sony's motion for a TRO, such orders are allowed only for specified purposes (largely, to prevent irreversible harm), and punitive purposes are not an acceptable reason for a TRO.