Nah... it must have been Sophmore or Junior by my uid. Oh well.

I've been reading since at least 1997, when I was a High School Freshman and finally got a computer in my own room with an internet connection. I remember reading Slashdot daily, which eventually led to me trying Linux on my old 386/33 laptop and experimenting with other distros that were just no fun at all to install.

BUT, I learned so much from the different commentators that had an amazing breadth of backgrounds, whether it was an article about digital rights or some new finding by NASA. I loved that Rob and the others built this community of nerds, but that it encompassed so much more than just Linux or hard sciences, and became a real community. Heck, I even learned some HTML to make my few comments look better. SEE!?

Thanks for all the years and stories, Rob, and I pray the best for you.

The victims do care if their child was killed by accident, because the Americans apologize and offer condolences and money. Al Qaeda in Iraq or other terroristic militias just say "You deserved it."

Article 2 of the UCC is for goods, not for services. If you want to argue that you bought a phone, the UCC determines whether a transaction is for goods or services based on the majority of the worth of the transaction. If I buy a $1000 water heater and installation is faulty, but installation is a service of $200 worth, then it's still considered a contract for goods. Cell phone carriers make much more money on the service side than by selling subsidized phones.

IANAL also, but I did just finish my second semester of Contracts in law school.

Reading the higher moderated stuff, like 3+ on here, I don't see any people discussing the actual problem posed, which I repost below.

"How can we understand science, if we can't understand the language of science? 'We don't learn science by doing science, we learn science by reading and memorizing. The same way we learn history.'"

The larger problem is that there is a large dearth of explainable science in the world and a larger vacuum of people able to explain how these sciences work to the layman. That's what's important.

I'm somewhat educated having a bachelors and being in law school. I read a large range of material from scientific studies (if I can do it for free) to magazines, to text books, and occasionally have to learn the basics of something to be able to argue about the law on it since I plan on doing intellectual property law. According to census data, education and reading habit wise, I'm above normal. I mean, I figured out enough tags to make my paragraphs and add italics. You might not think that's great if you're reading Slashdot, but that's advanced coding to a lot of people using the Internet these days. But....

I know that there will never be increased funding for science unless there is some kind of popular understanding that can create a demand for it.

Ready for the car analogy? People will soon want affordable electric cars because gas, even in Texas, is getting closer and closer to $4 a gallon. But people understand the concept of batteries, transmissions, etc. Or, if they don't know how a gear box works, they at least know it's necessary to drive a car. These are things that impact them and are relevant, and are also things they can understand to a certain degree. If people can't understand it, they (in my anecdotal and statistically worthless experience) become curious (minority), apathetic (majority) or scared of it (many, but not majority).

If you tell the average person that Climatology is complex, and that they'll only understand it with 10 years of research even if they read the studies where this data is supposedly being presented, then people will not try to find out the details. Instead, they want easily handled chunks of information, which is why this specific issue is so politicized now. People don't have time, resources, and - most importantly - the desire to wade into the weeds and figure out what's going on.

It also doesn't help that there is a very real disdain for the plebes who don't have doctorates or who don't just trust the scientists' every word because they're scientists, damn you! That's possibly an exaggeration, but you can look at the comments for yourself. A good majority of the comments above in this slashdot article are nothing but very literate trolls, trotting out pithy statements about how Science is good, religion is Bad, and stupid people need to stop being stupid. No one is ever going to change their mind by being insulted.

Instead, people need to work, train, donate, and hope for a future where we have professionals that can explain their science in such a way that it becomes accessible. Discover and National Geographic usually do a good job of that, but are restrained by the commercial interests of needing to be interesting. If anything, scientists need to add advertising and marketing to their skills, or hire people who have those skills to drum up more resources for explaining and making science relevant to most people. It is impossible for someone to care how many great discoveries and modern luxuries came out of the space ship project if the person doesn't know that's how it came to be. People on Slashdot know this, but the average person, and especially the average high schooler, have no idea. (I substituted for a public school district for a year. There's history and science classes, but they don't ever talk about science and history in the same sentence.)

Make Science popular, then people will know enough to not have to accept the statements of Experts on faith. Make the science common sense.

I lost gas mileage. That tracker in the pictures was of substantial size. Did you see how many Rare Earth Magnets they had on it?

I lost exclusive access to my property (if I put it in a garage). Then it's just trespass without a warrant. Sounds like the person in the story had it in an apartment parking lot, though.

For the time that they "held" me in my apartment I wasn't able to use my items if they didn't have a warrant, which they seemed to not have according to the story.

I think you're right about the conversion.

Actually, I did refuse the governmental authorities all the time when I was in the Military. I worked in JAG (as a paralegal) and routinely told officers who outranked me, from Special Forces down to some supply Sergeant, to respectfully go stuff their orders in their ear because I knew my rights and what they were doing/requesting was wrong. I don't care how awesome some LTC in the Green Berets is, I'm not giving him blank, notarized documents. I'm not allowing that company commander to handcuff a soldier to the CQ desk and thereby make him AND me liable for some investigation.

Also, in Texas, I can record conversations people have with me without their notice. I am unfamiliar with other states, which is why I was vague.

...to the flag, of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands...

From the article: "The Obama administration asked the court to change its ruling, calling the decision "vague and unworkable" and arguing that investigators will lose access to a tool they now use "with great frequency." -This is not a reassuring trend. If the objection was that it was vague and unworkable, that'd be fine. But their objection seems to be that it disallows them from using the GPS without a warrant - which is not fine. Voting for change wasn't supposed to mean "Change my ideals back to what the previous people did."

Also: ". . . the agents who showed up to collect the device were "hostile," threatening to charge Afifi if he didn't immediately cooperate and refusing his request to have a lawyer present" and earlier stated, the agents "demanded their property back." I might just be a first year law student, but if you leave your property in my car, and make no claims to it and abandon it, then it could be mine. Also, the agents only "pulled him over as he drove away from his apartment" probably to avoid the whole warrant issue of collecting it from his apartment. Yet, any time law enforcement shows up, it is my understanding that you don't have to give them any information besides the identify statutes require, like name and maybe ID if your state says so. So I'd sit in the parking lot, and not invite them into my home and tell them I don't want them to search my car without some kind of pretense. Also, I'd turn my smart phone recorder on since we were having the discussions in public.

Perhaps they could have just followed him with a tail to get all the GPS type info, or put a drone over him. I don't think there's an expectation of privacy for the outside of your car, but if it was found in the engine compartment, that might be different. I don't like adding to the car with a device... that seems like some kind of alteration, or trespass to chattels (personal property). Government tort exemptions probably apply for this kind of thing, whether it's constitutional or not.

I'm much more concerned with the adding a device to the personal property than I am the expectation of privacy claim. IF I wanted to follow someone all day, I could collect all the information about their whereabouts.

"Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images. -- Jean Cocteau"

Is this about Obama, or the Myth Busters? I'm confused...

...because my mom brought my tray of food down into my basement so I wouldn't have to sit with the rest of the family. My mom and I think this is a win-win situation.

Oh, also, misrepresentation is different than hiding. I don't allege the guardian was hiding things. That means they're deliberately trying to suppress something, like not ever publishing the longer story or denying that something true happened. They didn't do that. They misrepresented, as in, they had the facts and picked the ones they liked to present to further some kind of purpose.

Lie? That infers malice.

Here is the story they had on their front page on the day the leak was publicized.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/22/iraq-war-logs-military-leaks

Here is the excerpt from the story mentioning the helicopter.

A US helicopter gunship involved in a notorious Baghdad incident had previously killed Iraqi insurgents after they tried to surrender.

I can probably safely assume the guardian had the story you linked to on the same day I read the story they published on the front of their webpage because it was published on the same day (I'm not saying the Guardian is so lacking of credit that they would falsify publication dates).

If they had all this information and choose to leave out the relevant parts on the story that is going to be linked and read by the majority of the people, then they need to do a thorough scrub of their editorial principles and just report things as they happened in the future, even in their summaries.

The longer story states "enemy gunners try to make their escape in a dumper truck," then "then they came out wanting to surrender" and finally "The two Iraqis try to take refuge in a shack." There were several 2-13 minute delays in between each of those actions. All this language in this more specific story is more or less pulled straight from the actual documents. I am glad they published the details in full, but it doesn't absolve them of their lack of accuracy in other stories. You're assuming everyone read every story this place publishes, instead of just reading the summary article. The internet is a big place, and I'm glad there's people like you who can spend time researching all these things. People like the Guardian who research these things should spend the extra 20 words to be accurate.

Time magazine gave a similar one sentence summary that the Guardian did and didn't mention the second time the combatants fled. I didn't even misrepresent the facts in my one sentence statement that you claim is a lie. No reasonable person would think I have to read every single story the Guardian ever published when there are 399,999 other documents as well to read with facts in them. If I can't trust a publication to summarize something correctly when I have superior knowledge easily available, then I have no duty to continue reading the rest of their stuff.

...just did it and all I got were Slashdot posts. That's probably supposed to be depressing, but my Karma says it's good...