Actually, it is mainly because of the war on drugs -- black men are routinely arrested for selling and possessing marijuana, cocaine, and PCP. It is true that white people could also theoretically be targeted, but the enforcement tends to be heavier in black areas, and the penalty for crack (which is the popular form of cocaine in black communities) is much higher than the penalty for powder cocaine.
As for the racist motivations of the war on drugs, that is a historical fact. Congress was told that marijuana caused white women to want to have sex with black men. Congress was told that black men who used cocaine became lunatics, with improved accuracy with a pistol and a desire to rape white women. Congress was told that crack cocaine was a black man's drug.
As for your suburban friends, they are indeed an exception; the dozen or so black men you know do not constitute a statistically significant sample.
Yes, the first commandment God gives is "Be fruitful and multiply," in Genesis 1:28. The commandment not to eat from the tree of knowledge is given in Genesis 2:17. Additionally, after Noah and his family emerged from the ark, God commands them once again to be fruitful and multiply, Genesis 9:1.
Now, this is not to say that the old testament condones all kinds of sex. It certainly forbids incest (interesting how theologians reconcile this with the fact that after the creation there must have been a lot of incest), as well as male homosexual sex and bestiality. It also forbids adultery, although not pre-marital sex (not forbidden, but if a man has sex with an unmarried woman, he is required to marry her; if her father refuses to allow the marriage, the man is required to pay the father).
No we didn't; we just hide it better now. In black communities in America, it is common for 1 out of every 5 men to be imprisoned -- in some cases, the proportion is as high as 1 out of every 3. That is right now, in 2011.
opening up discussions on how to decriminalize posession and use of recreational drugs
We have opened up talks about how to decriminalize possession of one particular drug, marijuana. During the past year, at least five drugs were made illegal without any congressional action at all -- the DEA simply declared the drugs to be illegal (they are required to go through a formal scheduling process by the end of this year to keep the drugs illegal). We are nowhere near the end of the war on drugs; in fact, it is intensifying.
I'm sure that my grandchildren will look at me and say "you guys were still doing WHAT to -insert social group here- in your day? Wow what were you thinking?" and they'll probably be right.
More likely, they'll say, "You were allowed to speak out against the police back then?!"
I'm mucking up the data by saying, "I'm bland and I like nothing."
You are also telling Facebook who your friends are, and what you and your friends like to talk about. You are not mucking up anything; even boring people can generate valuable marketing data.
in general they too loath what they have to do as a part of their job
They signed up for the job, knowing that was what they were going to be told to do.
They could refuse to grope people, out of moral convictions about inappropriately touching total strangers. Of course, anyone with those sorts of convictions would never have signed up to be a TSA agent.
Sorry, but I feel no sympathy for them. The TSA officers who stand around groping people are not contributing anything of value to society, and deserve more scorn than they receive. We are talking about people who signed up to grope children, harass elderly women, and generally undermine whatever dignity America citizens had left.
"I didn't sign up to work for the TSA with the intention of groping little children! I just want to keep the country safe!"
Yeah, it is pretty hard to show that someone signed up to work for the TSA with the intention of getting away with groping people. The point is that we have established a system in which people with perverse urges have a sanctioned method of acting on those urges. I do not personally care whether or not the stranger touching my genitals is a TSA officer or a creep on a subway train: it is still a stranger touching my genitals. Unfortunately, while I would be within my rights to fight off the creep on the subway, I would likely be sent to prison if I tried to fight off a TSA officer.
Not to pull a Godwin or anything, but that is the argument that was used by Nazis: it was a job, and if they didn't take it the alternative was worse. Sorry, that argument didn't fly then, and it won't fly now. Nobody signs up for a job with the TSA without knowing what it is that the TSA does, not anymore. I have some serious questions about what sort of person would sign up for that kind of work.
The difference is that the TSA employees who are performing the pat-downs signed up for the job knowing that they would be inappropriately touching people. A corrupt politician making millions of dollars violating our rights is bad, sure; but it is much worse to be the person who knowingly signs up for a job that entails something that can only be described as legally sanctioned sexual misconduct, which includes otherwise illegal contact with children. The TSA employees are just as responsible for this lunacy as their superiors.
What I have been wondering about ever since the first stories about TSA employees giving children pat-downs is this: how many TSA employees are actually pedophiles, who have found a legal and sanctioned method of inappropriately touching children? Or more broadly, a legal and sanctioned method of inappropriately touching anyone? The TSA is allowing and ordering its employees to touch people in ways that would get an ordinary person arrested for sexual misconduct.
I have no doubt that the TSA gives some kind of psychological screening before having an employee touch other people, but I have doubts that the screening would actually detect the kind of perverts who would enjoy the job.
Same here, but unfortunately a day will come when I am forced to fly, and the TSA knows it. The TSA knows that people cannot simply refuse to fly when their employers insist upon it, or when there is a family emergency, or when they want to travel across an ocean. That is why the TSA gets away with these attacks on our rights: there is no realistic chance of an effective boycott on air travel.
Citation needed; are you saying that all costs associated with the product, including not just the research,
Journals do not pay for research.
authoring,
Journals do not pay the authors of the papers they print.
editing/cite/fact-checking/vetting process,
The reviewers are almost always volunteers.
publication,
Almost all printed copies of journals are send to libraries that have the ability to print and bind an electronic copy of the journal, if need be. The only reason libraries don't is that the publishers hold the copyrights to the papers in the journal.
but also scanning/OCRing the work,
I don't know of many researchers who send printed copies of their work to journals. Everyone I know submits their papers electronically, sometimes sending TeX/LaTeX source. Additionally, when papers are accepted, researchers are often asked to do part of the work of formatting the paper for print, preparing a "camera ready" copy of the paper.
paying for hosting to make it available online,
There, finally something useful that journals do. Useful, but redundant -- this is not something we need the publishers to do, because major universities have all the computing power and bandwidth needed to do this.
paying for indexing systems, etc., are ALL on the public dime? Highly doubt that, sir.
Probably because you have no idea how research is published. Publishing companies don't have anything close to the kind of expenses you seem to think they have. Even running the servers on which electronic copies of papers reside, the one useful thing journals do, is not as expensive as you might think; an individual Slashdot story will be probably be viewed more times than a typical research paper (with the exception of revolutionary work, which is not very common).
If nobody paid the access fees, they wouldn't be making any money; their costs would not be zero; and therefore they would be losing money.
Except that universities and large companies pay for subscriptions to journals, and they pay a lot. Consider the following, from the University of Maryland:
$1 million per year, and $100 thousand on top of that, paid to Elsevier for journal subscriptions. That is regardless of whether or not anyone was actually reading the journals. This is not some kind of exceptional case; these sorts of fees are common for libraries.
The real question is, what exactly are universities paying for? Hosting an electronic archive, and maintaining a microfilm archive as a backup, is something that major universities are already equipped to do. For $1 million per year, a university could host an electronic archive for all research in an entire field; most of the cost of such an electronic archive is in storage (again, a single article is accessed fairly infrequently). If the top universities were working together on this, not only could electronic access be maintained without requiring the publishers, but they could cover the cost of microfilm backups, ensuring access far into the future.
There are billions of people to feed. We are going to start running out of oil eventually, and then most of the world's tractors are going to stop running, and we are going to have to put a lot of energy into the process of making fertilizers, plastics, medicines, and just about everything else we currently use oil to make. Where do you think that energy is going to come from? Wind? Hydroelectric? They need to be augmented with something else, and if not nuclear, what then? Coal? Natural gas? You really think that is better for the world than nuclear power?
You don't have to see how, you just have to pay attention. Google has confirmed that they are facing an antitrust inquiry from the FTC, right now, and I doubt that this sort of behavior is going to look very good.
It takes an extremely powerful disaster to actually create a dangerous situation. The earthquake that struck Japan was near-record setting. A typical natural disaster would put a nuclear power plant into an emergency mode, but to cause explosions and radiation releases takes something very unusual.
On the other hand, what other power source would you like to see deployed? Wind and hydroelectric need to be augmented with another source of energy. What would you like to use? Coal, with the slag piles that kill people who live near them? Natural gas, which leaves people living near the mines with flammable tapwater? There is not enough wood to burn, not when we are trying to sustain billions of people on the planet.
What we need is more investment in new reactor designs, which have passive safety features (they do not require a power source to maintain coolant flow and prevent meltdowns). We should also look more closely at the thorium fuel cycle, since there is more thorium available than uranium. Nuclear power is not going away; we need it, and when we can't get any more oil out of the Earth we are going to need even more nuclear power. This is not the time to throw away plans to deploy nuclear plants; this is the time to develop safer nuclear power plants and start deploying them.
Or we could continue to hope for cold fusion. I won't hold my breath on that one.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it is mainly because of the war on drugs -- black men are routinely arrested for selling and possessing marijuana, cocaine, and PCP. It is true that white people could also theoretically be targeted, but the enforcement tends to be heavier in black areas, and the penalty for crack (which is the popular form of cocaine in black communities) is much higher than the penalty for powder cocaine.
As for the racist motivations of the war on drugs, that is a historical fact. Congress was told that marijuana caused white women to want to have sex with black men. Congress was told that black men who used cocaine became lunatics, with improved accuracy with a pistol and a desire to rape white women. Congress was told that crack cocaine was a black man's drug.
As for your suburban friends, they are indeed an exception; the dozen or so black men you know do not constitute a statistically significant sample.
Yes, the first commandment God gives is "Be fruitful and multiply," in Genesis 1:28. The commandment not to eat from the tree of knowledge is given in Genesis 2:17. Additionally, after Noah and his family emerged from the ark, God commands them once again to be fruitful and multiply, Genesis 9:1.
Now, this is not to say that the old testament condones all kinds of sex. It certainly forbids incest (interesting how theologians reconcile this with the fact that after the creation there must have been a lot of incest), as well as male homosexual sex and bestiality. It also forbids adultery, although not pre-marital sex (not forbidden, but if a man has sex with an unmarried woman, he is required to marry her; if her father refuses to allow the marriage, the man is required to pay the father).
we then struck down institutionalized racism
No we didn't; we just hide it better now. In black communities in America, it is common for 1 out of every 5 men to be imprisoned -- in some cases, the proportion is as high as 1 out of every 3. That is right now, in 2011.
opening up discussions on how to decriminalize posession and use of recreational drugs
We have opened up talks about how to decriminalize possession of one particular drug, marijuana. During the past year, at least five drugs were made illegal without any congressional action at all -- the DEA simply declared the drugs to be illegal (they are required to go through a formal scheduling process by the end of this year to keep the drugs illegal). We are nowhere near the end of the war on drugs; in fact, it is intensifying.
I'm sure that my grandchildren will look at me and say "you guys were still doing WHAT to -insert social group here- in your day? Wow what were you thinking?" and they'll probably be right.
More likely, they'll say, "You were allowed to speak out against the police back then?!"
Have you actually read the old testament? The very first commandment that God gives to the world is "be fruitful and multiply."
http://www.thedailytransmission.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Alabama_Special.jpg Relevant.
So, we keep reducing the barriers to wiretaps and surveillance, and the police engage in more wiretapping and surveillance. Is this a surprise?
The first computer worm was the CREEPER, which appeared on ARPANET in 1971.
I'm mucking up the data by saying, "I'm bland and I like nothing."
You are also telling Facebook who your friends are, and what you and your friends like to talk about. You are not mucking up anything; even boring people can generate valuable marketing data.
A circle is the set of all points in a plane which are equidistant from a given point called the center. "Circles" would be a collection of such sets.
As a free software and Playstation 3 user, I was disappointed to. Some companies really have no respect for you.
in general they too loath what they have to do as a part of their job
Sorry, but I feel no sympathy for them. The TSA officers who stand around groping people are not contributing anything of value to society, and deserve more scorn than they receive. We are talking about people who signed up to grope children, harass elderly women, and generally undermine whatever dignity America citizens had left.
"I didn't sign up to work for the TSA with the intention of groping little children! I just want to keep the country safe!"
Yeah, it is pretty hard to show that someone signed up to work for the TSA with the intention of getting away with groping people. The point is that we have established a system in which people with perverse urges have a sanctioned method of acting on those urges. I do not personally care whether or not the stranger touching my genitals is a TSA officer or a creep on a subway train: it is still a stranger touching my genitals. Unfortunately, while I would be within my rights to fight off the creep on the subway, I would likely be sent to prison if I tried to fight off a TSA officer.
Not to pull a Godwin or anything, but that is the argument that was used by Nazis: it was a job, and if they didn't take it the alternative was worse. Sorry, that argument didn't fly then, and it won't fly now. Nobody signs up for a job with the TSA without knowing what it is that the TSA does, not anymore. I have some serious questions about what sort of person would sign up for that kind of work.
The difference is that the TSA employees who are performing the pat-downs signed up for the job knowing that they would be inappropriately touching people. A corrupt politician making millions of dollars violating our rights is bad, sure; but it is much worse to be the person who knowingly signs up for a job that entails something that can only be described as legally sanctioned sexual misconduct, which includes otherwise illegal contact with children. The TSA employees are just as responsible for this lunacy as their superiors.
Why, that would be like demanding that the children of politicians enlist in the army when we are at war!
What I have been wondering about ever since the first stories about TSA employees giving children pat-downs is this: how many TSA employees are actually pedophiles, who have found a legal and sanctioned method of inappropriately touching children? Or more broadly, a legal and sanctioned method of inappropriately touching anyone? The TSA is allowing and ordering its employees to touch people in ways that would get an ordinary person arrested for sexual misconduct.
I have no doubt that the TSA gives some kind of psychological screening before having an employee touch other people, but I have doubts that the screening would actually detect the kind of perverts who would enjoy the job.
Same here, but unfortunately a day will come when I am forced to fly, and the TSA knows it. The TSA knows that people cannot simply refuse to fly when their employers insist upon it, or when there is a family emergency, or when they want to travel across an ocean. That is why the TSA gets away with these attacks on our rights: there is no realistic chance of an effective boycott on air travel.
From yourself, of course. Imagine how chaotic it would be if everyone suddenly claimed their dignity!
Citation needed; are you saying that all costs associated with the product, including not just the research,
Journals do not pay for research.
authoring,
Journals do not pay the authors of the papers they print.
editing/cite/fact-checking/vetting process,
The reviewers are almost always volunteers.
publication,
Almost all printed copies of journals are send to libraries that have the ability to print and bind an electronic copy of the journal, if need be. The only reason libraries don't is that the publishers hold the copyrights to the papers in the journal.
but also scanning/OCRing the work,
I don't know of many researchers who send printed copies of their work to journals. Everyone I know submits their papers electronically, sometimes sending TeX/LaTeX source. Additionally, when papers are accepted, researchers are often asked to do part of the work of formatting the paper for print, preparing a "camera ready" copy of the paper.
paying for hosting to make it available online,
There, finally something useful that journals do. Useful, but redundant -- this is not something we need the publishers to do, because major universities have all the computing power and bandwidth needed to do this.
paying for indexing systems, etc., are ALL on the public dime? Highly doubt that, sir.
Probably because you have no idea how research is published. Publishing companies don't have anything close to the kind of expenses you seem to think they have. Even running the servers on which electronic copies of papers reside, the one useful thing journals do, is not as expensive as you might think; an individual Slashdot story will be probably be viewed more times than a typical research paper (with the exception of revolutionary work, which is not very common).
If nobody paid the access fees, they wouldn't be making any money; their costs would not be zero; and therefore they would be losing money.
Except that universities and large companies pay for subscriptions to journals, and they pay a lot. Consider the following, from the University of Maryland:
http://www.lib.umd.edu/CLMD/Faculty/provost.html
$1 million per year, and $100 thousand on top of that, paid to Elsevier for journal subscriptions. That is regardless of whether or not anyone was actually reading the journals. This is not some kind of exceptional case; these sorts of fees are common for libraries.
The real question is, what exactly are universities paying for? Hosting an electronic archive, and maintaining a microfilm archive as a backup, is something that major universities are already equipped to do. For $1 million per year, a university could host an electronic archive for all research in an entire field; most of the cost of such an electronic archive is in storage (again, a single article is accessed fairly infrequently). If the top universities were working together on this, not only could electronic access be maintained without requiring the publishers, but they could cover the cost of microfilm backups, ensuring access far into the future.
Except that he was not a contractor, he was hired full-time and received all the benefits of a full-time employee.
There are billions of people to feed. We are going to start running out of oil eventually, and then most of the world's tractors are going to stop running, and we are going to have to put a lot of energy into the process of making fertilizers, plastics, medicines, and just about everything else we currently use oil to make. Where do you think that energy is going to come from? Wind? Hydroelectric? They need to be augmented with something else, and if not nuclear, what then? Coal? Natural gas? You really think that is better for the world than nuclear power?
Google is already facing an inquiry from the FTC. All you need to do is pay attention to the news:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/06/ftc-launching-antitrust-probe-over-google-search-ad-businesses.ars
This sort of thing is not going to look very good to the FTC.
You don't have to see how, you just have to pay attention. Google has confirmed that they are facing an antitrust inquiry from the FTC, right now, and I doubt that this sort of behavior is going to look very good.
...just in time for an antitrust investigation. Who at Google thought this was a good idea, anyway?
It takes an extremely powerful disaster to actually create a dangerous situation. The earthquake that struck Japan was near-record setting. A typical natural disaster would put a nuclear power plant into an emergency mode, but to cause explosions and radiation releases takes something very unusual.
On the other hand, what other power source would you like to see deployed? Wind and hydroelectric need to be augmented with another source of energy. What would you like to use? Coal, with the slag piles that kill people who live near them? Natural gas, which leaves people living near the mines with flammable tapwater? There is not enough wood to burn, not when we are trying to sustain billions of people on the planet.
What we need is more investment in new reactor designs, which have passive safety features (they do not require a power source to maintain coolant flow and prevent meltdowns). We should also look more closely at the thorium fuel cycle, since there is more thorium available than uranium. Nuclear power is not going away; we need it, and when we can't get any more oil out of the Earth we are going to need even more nuclear power. This is not the time to throw away plans to deploy nuclear plants; this is the time to develop safer nuclear power plants and start deploying them.
Or we could continue to hope for cold fusion. I won't hold my breath on that one.