>> ^Stormsinger:

@marbles
If you put in remote control that can override the pilot, how long do you think it's going to take before some hacker takes over a plane? And considering that it's a -whole- lot safer for the hijacker than doing it in person, I'm pretty sure it will happen more often than terrorist hijackings have.


What are you talking about? It's already there. It's called remote access. The autopilot software has had remote access capabilities for decades. Read the essay you quoted.

On a side note, the NORAD computers probably were hacked.

Ptech software (loaded with back-doors and trojans) was on pretty much all the government's computer systems. Ptech clients included the FAA, NATO, United States Armed Forces, Congress, Dept. Of Energy, Dept. of Justice, FBI, Customs, the IRS, the Secret Service, and even the White House.

>> ^criticalthud:

look, let's say i suspect my neighbor down the street is a terrorist, and i'm real real sure he is, cause he sure looks like one...and i'm fairly certain he is plotting against me. And under the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war, continued and enhanced under Obama, I should be justified in planting a 45 caliber bullet in his forehead. right?
or maybe that is ridiculous.
and maybe it's ridiculous that we think it's just peachy to hopscotch around the world, blowing up people who disagree with our policies.


You may need your eyes checked. Here are the two 'suspects' you are comparing:

1.Neighbor that looks suspicious, they maybe even wear a turban.
2.Man who's written multiple books and essays on how and why to wage Jihad against America on it's own streets. A man who we have phone records for his mentoring of a person that shot and killed multiple Americans on American soil.

Do those two look the same or remotely comparable to you? There's no question the precedent is troublesome, but you don't think your example is a touch.... extreme?

I've added winston to the conversation now. Let's see if he can say the words.

>> ^shagen454:

I think he hates actual debate even if that debate is a yes or no question. Is he trolling for "balance" or is he for real?
>> ^bareboards2:
@quantumushroom
Straight out, yes or no answer, please.
Is it okay with you if people wrongfully convicted and placed on death row are executed by the state?
This isn't asking for a long essay.
Yes. Or no.
Is it okay with you if people wrongfully convicted and placed on death row are executed by the state?

Yes, I am okay with innocent people being imprisoned. The world isn't perfect. Caca occurs.

I am NOT okay with the state taking an action that is permanent. I am NOT okay with the state executing an innocent person. There is no coming back from that.

So Winston Pennypacker.

I'll ask you, yes or no, since @quantumushroom neglected to answer the question.

Are you okay with an innocent person being executed by the state? It is a yes or no question because guess what, it is fuck all a yes or no question. It is the ultimate in yes or no questions.

If you don't have the balls to answer it, then you should just back out of this conversation.

Say it. Say yes you are okay with an innocent person getting executed. It is a helluva a lot easier to say it is okay than it is ACTUALLY KILL SOMEONE.

Say it. Which you did not in your essay. Say you are okay with an innocent person being killed.

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:

Are you OK with the criminal justice system inprisoning people who are innocent? Yes or no.

I think he hates actual debate even if that debate is a yes or no question. Is he trolling for "balance" or is he for real?

>> ^bareboards2:

@quantumushroom
Straight out, yes or no answer, please.
Is it okay with you if people wrongfully convicted and placed on death row are executed by the state?
This isn't asking for a long essay.
Yes. Or no.
Is it okay with you if people wrongfully convicted and placed on death row are executed by the state?

I don't think these hallucinations are exclusive to those going through physiological trauma. I know people that have experienced some of these things hours and days after they've lost a really close loved one (brother, mother, etc). I would hypothesize that this would be related to the abnormal dopamine function noted in the essay. Death is such a heavy and permanent thing that it has a very real physiological effect(for those of you that have experienced this can attest to it being akin to being "hit in the gut").

Here's a well written, well referenced essay on what's going on in the "Eurozone":

What’s Happening In Europe … Does It Impact American Investors and Taxpayers?

@quantumushroom

Straight out, yes or no answer, please.

Is it okay with you if people wrongfully convicted and placed on death row are executed by the state?

This isn't asking for a long essay.

Yes. Or no.

Is it okay with you if people wrongfully convicted and placed on death row are executed by the state?

From www.washingtonsblog.com:

... Dick Cheney was in charge of all counter-terrorism exercises, activities and responses on 9/11. See this Department of State announcement; this CNN article; and this essay.

In fact, 5 war games were scheduled for 9/11, including games that included the insertion of false radar blips onto air traffic contollers’ screens. Specifically, on the very morning of September 11th, five war games and terror drills were being conducted by several U.S. defense agencies, including one “live fly” exercise using REAL planes.

Then-Acting Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General Richard B. Myers, admitted to 4 of the war games in congressional testimony — see transcript here or http://www.spiegltech.com/media/McKinney2.rm">video here (6 minutes and 12 seconds into the video).

Norad had run drills for several years of planes being used as weapons against the World Trade Center and other U.S. high-profile buildings, and “numerous types of civilian and military aircraft were used as mock hijacked aircraft”. In other words, drills using REAL AIRCRAFT simulating terrorist attacks crashing jets into buildings, including the twin towers, were run. See also http://www.mdw.army.mil/news/news_photos/Contingency_Planning_Photos.html">official military website showing 2000 military drill, using miniatures, involving a plane crashing into the Pentagon.

Indeed, a former Los Angeles police department investigator, whose newsletter is read by 45 members of congress, both the house and senate intelligence committees, and professors at more than 40 universities around the world, claims that he obtained an on-the-record confirmation from NORAD that on 9/11, NORAD and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were conducting a joint, live-fly, hijack exercise which involved government-operated aircraft posing as hijacked airliners.

On September 11th, the government also happened to be running a simulation of a plane crashing into a building.

In addition, a December 9, 2001 Toronto Star article (pay-per-view; reprinted here), stated that “Operation Northern Vigilance is called off. Any simulated information, what’s known as an ‘inject,’ is purged from the screens”. This indicates that there were false radar blips inserted onto air traffic controllers’ screens as part of the war game exercises.

Moreover, there are indications that some of the major war games previously scheduled for October 2001 were moved up to September 11th by persons unknown.

Now here’s where it gets interesting … Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta testified to the 9/11 Commission:

“During the time that the airplane was coming into the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President … the plane is 50 miles out…the plane is 30 miles out….and when it got down to the plane is 10 miles out, the young man also said to the vice president “do the orders still stand?” And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said “Of course the orders still stand, have you heard anything to the contrary!?”

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDfdOwt2v3Y]

(this testimony is confirmed here and here).

So even if 9/11 wasn’t foreseeable before 9/11, it was foreseeable to Dick Cheney – who had been attacking democracy for nearly 40 years – as the plane was still 50 miles away from the Pentagon.

>> ^deathcow:

I have no use for a low resolution, awkwardly small device which you must crane your neck to use or hold in front of your eyes eternally. I like computing on the edge baby, with ultra high resolution big screen and a comfortable chair. And maybe most of all.... a REAL keyboard with buttons. I am sure there are some fast screen typists out there, but its not for me... I like tactile feedback and lit keys in a dark room. The tablet may be ideal for going to the bathroom however...


The stock keyboard on these devices are crap and do not work. But add Swype or Slide-it and they work just great for short amounts of text. Once you start typing an essay then move back to the laptop.

Percey Shelley has a funny passage on God's curse against the snake in his essay "On the Devil, and Devils":

The Jewish account is that the Serpent, that is the animal, persuaded the original pair of human beings to eat of a fruit from which God had commanded them to abstain, and that in consequence God expelled them from the pleasant garden where he had before permitted them to reside. God on this occasion, it is said, assigned a punishment to the Serpent that its motion should be as it now is along the ground upon its belly. We are given to suppose that, before this misconduct, it hopped along upon its tail, a mode of progression which, if I was a serpent, I should think the severer punishment of the two.

@GeeSussFreeK

I'm not sure where you're going with this... we don't hold machines liable because machines don't make choices--their users do. If you shoot someone with a gun or run them over with an automobile, your choices and actions caused the injury--the machine was merely the instrument through which the injury was caused. The gun/car cannot hurt anyone if left in the case/garage.

Of course we don't hold people responsible in the case of a malfunction that is beyond the control of the user. If a car's brakes fail and it can be shown the owner did his/her best to maintain the car and it was purely a mechanical failure, then no--the human would not be at fault. And since the car can't pay damages and doing jail time is meaningless for a machine that's pretty much where the case ends. In the case of an alarm malfunctioning, unless the state can prove that the alarm went off due to gross negligence (or even intentionality) on the part of the maker, it ends up being nothing but a tragic (and incredibly rare) story of mechanical failure. I think we agree on all this, don't we? That's why I'm confused why we're still talking about it.

As for your 2nd, 3rd, and 4th paragraphs, I think you'd be interested in reading this essay (warning: it's long) detailing the major legal cases that currently inform 1st amendment case law. Just to give one quote which should help answer some of your questions, in Brandenburg v. Ohio case the Supreme Court determined:

words themselves were largely void of real significance; it was the surrounding circumstances that gave them meaning. Clear and present danger lay in neither the words chosen nor the behavior encouraged; it lay in the immediacy of the speaker's intentions and the likelihood that his words would achieve results.

The drunken man's actions were achieving their desired effect--enraging the dog--and the likelihood that his actions could cause serious injury to himself or others was high. I don't see how you can argue that because the dog hadn't bitten anyone yet the man should not have been arrested. By that argument no one can be arrested until they commit harm. You have no problem with arresting someone who points a gun at someone and threatens to shoot them before they have the chance to pull the trigger, correct? You agree with arresting drunk drivers before they cause an accident, correct? I'm not sure I understand your argument here.

I stand by what I said about the judge, because its clear from the clip he didn't bother to look at the facts of the case even (he claimed the guy was arrested for animal abuse) and he appears to think (I have no idea what he actually thinks, I only have his comments on this clip to go on)the 1st amendment means you can say whatever you like, whenever you like.

Sure, we should continue to debate what is covered by the 1st amendment but it doesn't do anybody any good to ignore what has already been decided by the courts. As that link I posted above will show, the "clear and present danger" test has been continually refined over the years through many, many cases and is fairly well sorted out. I don't see this case presenting anything that would make the Supreme Court suddenly do a 180 and void all that precedent.

Here's another insightful article about the madman's motivations:

http://essays.bearstrong.net/2011/07/25/manifesto-for-a-european-civil-war/

Being all into numbers, I put the numbers in the video into my own spreadsheet and discovered that the graph for the number of words/SAT score is of course not linear. They appear very much correlated, but not linear like the graphic showed. That's the fault of the video editor, not the MIT professor, because he never says anything about linear correlation.

As long as at least one of the factors doesn't correlate linearly (and I think we know that neither do), it's possible there is still a correlation between income and length of essay, but not necessarily a causative relationship. It's more likely that buried in the income statistic is the level of the student's English -- the poorer you are, the more likely it is your first language isn't English, so the more likely you are to write a shorter essay, and drag your economic demographic down.

On second viewing, I have to take issue with some of the statistics because it is claimed that there is a perfect linear correlation both between household income and SAT score, and between length of essay and SAT score.

First, any claims of linear correlation between any two items is highly suspect. Almost nothing is ever linear. An 'S' curve is far more probable. This would imply that billionaire students outperform millionaire students by the same factor millionaire students outperform completely broke students.

Second, since these two "linear" correlations both correlate to the same factor, SAT score, this means that there must also be a linear correlation between them as well. That's to say, there's a perfect linear correlation between household income and how long your essay is. So, the richer you are, the longer you like to write your essays. That's highly unlikely.