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Comment Re:maybe because it's a quote (Score 1) 308

Example: "It needs fixed" vs. "It seems fixed"

A poor choice of things to compare.

"It needs to be fixed" can read like "It needs to be changed from its current state to a new state, in which is has been fixed." What it needs is something that, once done, will put the act of fixing it in the past tense. "It needs some fixing, so that it will then be fixed." If you're going with the shorter "It needs to be fixed," the "to be" needs to be there if you're going to used that future-sense changed state of "fixed." Or, one should just use: "It needs fixing," where "fixing," a gerund, acts like any other noun that would serve as the object of the sentence.

"It seems fixed," on the other hand, is a completely different construction. There is no assertion of the need for an action (like needing TO BE fixed). It's an observation about its current state (it's in the state of already having been fixed). The "seems" casts mild doubt on the quality of the assertion, but that's just modifying the word "fixed" in this case, which is acting as an adjective (the thing is fast, the thing is light weight, the thing is expensive, the thing is fixed). Think of saying, "It looks blue." Normal usage is rarely, "It looks to be blue," any more than it is, "It seems to be fixed." You could replace "seems" with "feels," knowing that you'd also be far more likely to say, "It's no longer wobbly. It feels fixed," than you would "It feels to be fixed."

So, are you one of those grammatical hypocrites

No, it seems I'm not.

Inquiring minds want to know.

No, an inquiring mind would have thought it through before trotting that one out.

Submission + - Cancer researcher vanishes with tens of millions of dollars (goerie.com)

jd writes: Steven Curley, MD, who ran the Akesogenx corporation (and may indeed have been the sole employee after the dismissal of Robert Zavala) had been working on a radio-frequency cure for cancer with an engineer by the name of John Kanzius.

Kanzius died, Steven Curley set up the aforementioned parallel company that bought all the rights and patents to the technology before shuttering the John Kanzius Foundation. So far, so very uncool.

Last year, just as the company started aproaching the FDA about clinical trials, Dr Curley got blasted with lawsuits accusing him of loading his shortly-to-be ex-wife's computer with spyware.

Two weeks ago, there was to be a major announcement "within two weeks". Shortly after, the company dropped off the Internet and Dr Curley dropped off the face of the planet.

Robert Zavala is the only name mentioned that could be a fit for the company's DNS record owner. The company does not appear to have any employees other than Dr Curley, making it very unlikely he could have ever run a complex engineering project well enough to get to trial stage. His wife doubtless has a few scores to settle. Donors, some providing several millions, were getting frustrated — and as we know from McAfee, not all in IT are terribly sane. There are many people who might want the money and have no confidence any results were forthcoming.

So, what precisely was the device? Simple enough. Every molecule has an absorption line. It can absorb energy on any other frequency. A technique widely exploited in physics, chemistry and astronomy. People have looked into various ways of using it in medicine for a long time.

The idea was to inject patients with nanoparticles on an absorption line well clear of anything the human body cares about. These particles would be preferentially picked up by cancer cells because they're greedy. Once that's done, you blast the body at the specified frequency. The cancer cells are charbroiled and healthy cells remain intact.

It's an idea that's so obvious I was posting about it here and elsewhere in 1998. The difference is, they had a prototype that seemed to work.

But now there is nothing but the sound of Silence, a suspect list of thousands and a list of things they could be suspected of stretching off to infinity. Most likely, there's a doctor sipping champaign on some island with no extradition treaty. Or a future next-door neighbour to Hans Reiser. Regardless, this will set back cancer research. Money is limited and so is trust. It was, in effect, crowdsource funded and that, too, will feel a blow if theft was involved.

Or it could just be the usual absent-minded scientist discovering he hasn't the skills or awesomeness needed, but has got too much pride to admit it, as has happened in so many science fraud cases.

Comment Re:News for nerds (Score 2) 308

But why didn't the FBI's country-wide license plate trackers not catch them?

Hint: not everything you see on NCIS or CSI:Wherever actually works like it dos on TV.

Or is that only to trace their movements after they do something bad?

It can definitely help to be able follow the trail after someone does something especially awful - sometimes bad guys actually have accomplices.

But more to the point in this case: reports are that the vehicle they used was stolen, along with its license plates.

Comment Re:*sigh* (Score 0) 306

Sending to the Senate and Congress would ALSO likely qualify, since they are Federal systems.

No, that doesn't cut it. Each agency/department has its own archiving systems, especially those that deal (as State does) with sensitive and frequently compartmentalized information. That's why FOIA requests go to the agency and to "the government." And of course that still doesn't have anything to do with all of her correspondence with other governments and other non-State.gov parties.

Let's ignore Blumenthal, since you have lots of patience still waiting for him to say that's not his correspondence with Clinton. He's only had a couple of years, so I'm sure he's still gathering his notes. Happily, he's apparently not nearly as clever as Clinton herself, and used an AOL mailbox while routinely sending her his intel memos. And AOL will have retained all of that, and is very responsive to subpoenas.

Thus, it just may be impossible to prove that Mrs. H "never sent a compliant copy of message X"

But the existence of a single piece of correspondence with her long-time aide/confidant Blumenthal or anyone else outside of State will show where she was violating the law. Why? Because two years worth of FOIA requests to State turned up no such emails. You're saying that maybe she CC'd them to unknown mailboxes at State in order to archive them. If so, multiple exhaustive FOIA requests would have turned up perhaps ONE email, yes? State's mail servers contain untold thousands of messages between staffers there and correspondents throughout the rest of the government and other third parties around the world. But not a single one tucked away as a CC or BCC from Clinton's home-based private server that shows sending or receiving such mail. State's IT people responded to FOIA requests saying there was no such data. They have her notes to staff, but nothing between her and third parties that she CC'd in the way you're suggesting. None.

Comment Re:How about (Score 0) 175

How about getting a president that isn't so unpopular he needs protecting from anything and everything?

Because with some crazy people, the fact there even is a president is enough to want to kill him/her. Or the fact that the president is whoever is in that role on a given day when Crazy Person suddenly decides they've had enough of the fact that the US allows people to grow and cut down trees ... or allows women to go to school ... or allows anyone to own domestic animals ... or allows men to walk around without beards or not protect everyone from the Space Aliens, whatever.

Comment Re:*sigh* (Score 0) 306

Those rules only specified they be stored on gov't systems ... I've explained this already.

No, what you've done is continued to avoid the actual issue. Are you really suggesting that all of a secretary of state's sensitive and official communication is with her own staff? That she has no communication with people in the senate, the congress, with other federal agencies? That she has no communication with anyone in the White House (you know, where her boss works), and - as the country's top diplomat - no communication with other diplomats, heads of state, or foreign ministers? No communication with the people in other countries who then turned around and wrote huge checks to her family enterprise? Is that your assessment of how little she did in that role? Or are you really going to keep up the charade that all of her email was with, and only with, people who reported to her at State? If she sent a single email outside of those bounds, then your blanket assertion of her compliance is incorrect. So, do you really think not a single email was sent to her from outside of State? You're convinced that, for example, Blumenthal's emails are all fake? Be specific. He hasn't said the leaked mail was fake, but you seem to know something he doesn't.

There wasn't what?

Any mechanism in place to automatically mirror her correspondence with third parties. None.

No it's not. The debate is not about GENERAL party accuracy. My debate points don't depend on prior partisan accuracy.

So, you'd be all for what the current investigation proposed: handing her server over to completely neutral third party for forensic analysis, and review of her tens of thousands of hidden emails by the same archivists that already review the mixed-with-private emails of other government officials to decide what's relevant as public records? Sounds pretty satisfactory, doesn't it? Woops, too late, her lawyer says that she has deliberately destroyed all of those records with no chance for said archivists to review them, and that they will never let anyone else look at the server.

Until that happens, I'm not going to guess out of my ass.

Except in the ways you already have, which contradict things she's saying in public, you mean.

I originally asked for specific laws, not opinions about them.

The laws that matter? How about the Federal Records Act? It requires federal officials to proactively keep their public documents available for things like FOIA searches. She actively hid her records from such searches, and in fact multiple FOIA requests came and went both during and following her tenure that absolutely would have included correspondence to and from her - but came up dry because she had not provided the records, even after she left office. When a federal official deliberately keeps their records out of public scrutiny, it's a violation of the US Code (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2071), a criminal offense.

You're probably going to contend that her violation of that law was magically un-done by her eventual coughing up of her cherry-picked hardcopies when she was hounded, years later, by investigators. No go. This isn't the Presidential Records Act, which provides for a "cooling off" period before those records are subject to FOIA. Her correspondence with people like Blumenthal, or with the entities in Saudi Arabia that handed her millions of dollars, are subject to immediate FOIA scrutiny. She took deliberate actions that made that impossible. https://www.law.cornell.edu/us...

Comment Re:Gimick (Score 1) 167

The street circuits are mainly used because they raise greater awareness that a race is being held than if they went to an existing race track and relied on traditional marketing for the races.

Also, how about you take your undue criticism and stick it - how about you come up with a better formula and make it work? The entire point of starting it now is because the technologies aren't mature enough - getting manufacturers to push development in order to win races is what drives the technologies here (see how much stuff has come out of F1).

Comment Re:It may survive a court challenge... (Score 1) 84

I'm personally not so sure about it surviving a court challenge anyway - the FCC decided suddenly to substantially change the regulatory system for an established, massive market, bring in a huge swathe of new rules and regulations for existing major players. I don't feel comfortable where a government agency can something of that scale to an established market without any new laws passed.

Comment Re:*sigh* (Score 1) 306

I don't believe you

That's not true. You're just doing your best to play like you really think all of this is just a misunderstanding. It's not, and you know it. I know you've already spent ten seconds and Googled for things like this, but I'll play along if it makes you feel better. Here's just one random first-on-Google example:

http://america.aljazeera.com/a...

I never claimed that. I don't know where you got that idea.

You've speculated that her records were kept correctly (despite what she and everyone else says), and that there's no evidence she's done anything wrong. The implication then, by you, is that she did things correctly - and the ONLY way that could be, is if there was some sort of mechanism in place to do what the 2009 NARA and other rules required. But there wasn't. SHE SAID THERE WASN'T. So you are tap-dancing around the whole "show me proof" thing in order to avoid just plain facing what the woman involved has herself been saying. Why, I can't imagine. Are you working for her or her party?

What's this question have to do with anything? I see no relation.

Yeah, sure. It was someone else hacking your account when you complained that the current people looking at the matter weren't objective and a-political enough for you. It's perfectly reasonable to ask you if you found the prior investigation - which was run by HER party - to be likewise. You're implying it's not, which means you're being hypocritical on the subject. Only the party you don't like can be political in such matters, or only the party you favor can be objective?

Politicians often spin for short-term gain and don't care about fact-checkers much

The politicians doing the spin, here, are the ones relying on the fact that the person they're backing has conveniently destroyed records. The politicians conducting the investigation are relying on the documents SHE cherry-picked, and those are the ones that show the date gaps, a matter which they (unlike her, with tens of thousand of mixed-in emails we'll never see) will be placing right in front of your nose to review. Asserting that they're probably lying as they talk about public records you can review, while proposing the exact opposite about a stridently partisan person who has just been caught avoiding the very rules she said her department employees must all follow, shows how objective you're (not) being.

Where is this rule written?

This has been the case for a long time. Jason Baron, former director of litigation with the National Archives, explains the problem here. He said in an interview that "Clinton’s use of a private server gave her exclusive control, thus preventing the department from having full access to emails she sent and received while a federal employee. Government employees have no right to privacy on government computers and even personal emails are subject to review and perhaps release at the department’s discretion. Setting up a private server to conduct public business inappropriately shifts control of what is accessible to the end user alone rather than allowing the institution to decide threshold questions.” That's been true of federal records for decades: the agency archivists decide what's private, not the person running her official email on a server she's keeping in her home.

When cornered you seem to get wordy

Who's cornered? Not me. I'm just explaining the facts to someone who seems really desperate for them to go away.

Comment Re:The Better, Longer Lasting, Cheaper Bulb (Score 1) 169

No. Pretending that market pressures don't drive companies updating their products and their pricing is ridiculous. You have to know that. So what are you trying say, by pretending that it's otherwise? My "argument" isn't wrong: companies continue to improve their products and adjust their pricing because markets require that. It's very reasonable to wonder about someone's experience and awareness of economics and business realities when they say otherwise.

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