Any institution will have jerks. And of course you will only see the most salacious emails. Compare it to this one which I found linked from a skeptic site as an example of how they were suppressing skeptics.

Email chain by department head - http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=1065&filename=1256765544.txt Sonja is a former colleague who quit to work for a skeptic organization she is editor for a skeptic magazine and Phil is writing to complain that she keeps usign the university's name on her publications/talks despite working elsewhere.

At 18:45 27/10/2009, Graham F Haughton wrote:
>
>Dear Phil, sorry to hear this. I don't see much
>of her these days, but when I do see Sonja next
>I'll try and have a quiet word with her about
>the way the affiliation to us is used, but at
>the moment in fairness she is entitled to use it
>in the way she does. Fortunately I don't get to
>see many of these email exchanges but I do
>occasionally hear about them or see them and
>frankly am rarely convinced by what I read. But
>as with all academics, I'd want to protect
>another academic's freedom to be contrary and
>critical, even if I personally believe she is
>probably wrong. I agree with you that it'd be
>better for these exchanges to be conducted
>through the peer review process but these forms
>of e-communication are now part of the public
>debate and its difficult to do much about it
>other than to defend your position in this and
>other fora, or just ignore it as being, in your words, malicious.
>
>I can understand your frustration and I am
>pretty sure I'd be feeling exactly the same in
>your shoes, but I am not sure at the moment that
>I can do much more. If you think I can and
>should do more then feel free to ring and I am happy to discuss the matter.
>
>Graham

Sounds like the head of the department is really cracking down on those skeptics. Boy he squelches them every chance he can, doesn't he? Despite having pro-climate stance he respects that she disagrees and feels that people should be able to debate.

It is also worth noting that he organizes conservation activities at the school. If he was part of a large scale climate hoax why would he be hot to reduce the school's environmental impact? Sounds to me he genuinely believes in climate change, is more knowledgeable than anyone posting here, and respects others with different opinion. Yes there will be mean spirited comments in some emails and people who massage data.

I will be happy if the full data becomes public so all researchers can analyze it. But while I see lots of sloppiness in evidence I see no "marching plan" from the "carbon cap industry".

A lot of these organizations represent musicians whether or not they would like. In the US there is no way to opt out of ASCAP and BMI, only sound exchange. The other organizations represent me whether or not I am registered with them and whether or not I would like them to. I have to register with them though to collect the fees they charge on my behalf though. See my earlier post on a club being threatened for letting me play original music there. Mostly these organizations run on are scare tactics. I have heard of them backing down several times when fought in court. Partially because it makes for great print for the local news and most people including judges are completely horrified to hear that local stores are being threatened with thousands of dollars of fees especially when the venue has a good case that the fees are not benefiting any of the musicians playing there.

I am a musician. I have had placed I play threatened with legal action because the club hadn't paid ASCAP & BMI to allow them a performing license to allow me to play original music in that venue. And despite me not being represented by BMI I have the "right" to opt in at a later time so they are "entitled" to collect money until I decide to do so. You can opt out of Sound Exchange but BMI and ASCAP are organizations that act on our behalf whether or not we would like.

The whole situation where all musicians are assumed to opt in and then must jump through hoops to get payments is a joke. As a small musician I am not showing up on the radio charts and since I have been in a dozen bands it would be a pain to collect checks for under a dollar for each group. It is not like the clubs report that I am playing there and that the set is all originals and that the BMI should not collect any fees from them that day. So the associations collect their fees and then figure that some major artist was being played because they base their calculations off of radio play.

It is also annoying as it makes it impossible to may a truly free college or internet radio station. Even if I only played my own tunes I would have to pay a fee to do so and then register to get it back minus administrative overhead.

To scan the rules without buying a copy check out the open gaming reference document.

http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/

But let me assure you that the book is well worth 35 dollars on amazon. Hell it is probably worth full price if you want the PDF.

The problem is that each add-on book adds abilities that are just mathematically superior to previous books so if you use only the base books and other player use splat books there are huge imbalances in the characters since a splat feat is many times as effective in combat.

My last campaign was a system test. We ran 3.0 and 3.5 from 1st to 20th level only using official rules and errata to see how the system worked at all power levels. (I also tried 4.0 but quit by 9th level)

WotC released plenty of broken splat books. In 3.0 and 3.5 I had players hit 50 AC at level 10 via combining various core abilities allowed by the rules, I had people find cheaty hax allowing individuals to open with 200 damage on an surprise round killing anything even close to their level. What was scary is I had a low magic campaign with roughly a quarter of the magic and wealth a regular campaign is supposed to have. Be happy my group of munchkins never decided to visit your table. They would have destroyed a lesser GM's mind with their encyclopedic knowledge of the rules. *heh*

I must admit I enjoyed it. They were a group of really brilliant people who optimized as a team. I was excited when 3.5 fixed some of the problems of 3.0 and again when 4.0 fixed some of the core problems in 3.5. But they lost me utterly and forever with Players handbook 2 for 4.0.

Now please understand that I play with a bunch of engineers. They mathematically model every feat and ability and run combinations through simulations to check how they fare against other classes. PHB2 feats and abilities were 2 to 3 times more effective than the base book abilities. I pay WotC to give me a rule system to build a game around. Yet they have proven to be incapable of releasing a balanced system. Even very simple to balance feats require so much work form me that I could just rewrite the rules more easily. (I have done that before) WotC has always had problems balancing abilities but 4.0 just took it to humorous levels.

I know 5 GMs who switched to Pathfinder (often referred to as 3.6 by fans) rather than the official 4.0 release. (http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG.)

Paiso released a "fixed" version of 3.5 rules where a lot of the chronic balence issues were addressed. They basically did what I always hoped WotC would manage. Now I have a much tighter system by people who understand rule balance and are not obsessed with selling me the splat book of the month.

  My former players are excited about the new rules where 4.0 was driving them away. I highly suggest fans of DnD to check out the pathfinder system. The book is beautiful and the PDF means I have a personal copy on my key-chain usb-drive for quick reference between games. (Amazon has a $35 version without the PDF) Well worth the money for a system that is very simular to 3.5 for players and DMs.

Last I heard he was blocked in his plans to bring them on US soil by the Kansas representatives who didn't like the idea of them being transferred into Kansas. I thought I read yesterday of him winning a legal battle to at least have them tried on US soil but the paper I read that in has no article search feature so I can't look it up now.

quote> Health Care Reform?

Not an international issue. But the fact that his policy was trying to reduce the disparity of coverage between the ultra rich and the working class is admirable. I am not sure that current plans are far reaching enough to actually improve things. Current medical policy in US is a disaster. Having had a family member work in NIH for several years I am of the strong opinion that socialized care would be a large improvement over the current system. Though malpractice reform is a huge driver of costs in US system and needs to be controlled somehow.

Definitely - http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/FreedomofInformationAct/ The example you gave was bad. It is very hard to remove classification from already classified documents. And honestly he has higher priorities than going through bad decisions of the previous president. I mean he is trying to get something done.

And from what I see he is being fought every step of the way in each of these areas. Woudl I like more disclosure, more progress, more results? Yeah. But he is working on it and even listening to his critics. Something I can not say about certain past presidents.

IBM has long had a tradition of leveraging a small number of competent employees to float a team of cogs that follow written instructions that a competent employee generates. The competent employee is often told that they are paid way more than "others in your job category" and the expert will be paged/called during night/vacation because no one else can solve issues that has not been seen and documented.

My first week there my team lead took me aside and told me "You are too bright to work here, you should go work at a small company in a big city" It took me years to realize that he was spot on. Basically I was exploited to float an entire department. I was underpaid and overworked. I did have an excellent manager and received many awards and recognitions, but I was offered 30% more to work the same job somewhere else with many more benefits.

In general IBM loves replaceable cogs because it gives stability. They are inexpensive and very easy to replace with any recent graduate. You could think of many jobs being very simular to help desk where you have levels of competence which funnel up to one or two people who are generally underpaid and overworked as they support an entire department worth of work.

My best friend and I both had technical expert roles at IBM. Our experience was that most employees have no ability to research new issues. I could send a person to the correct page of the correct manual and they still could not understand the problem from reading the manual. My friend was flown all around and given any project that used any device new to the team. (Which he then wrote the red papers on) But it was a kick in the nuts to find that half the team was paid more than you due to seniority and yet had to follow the instructions you left behind.

I automated a full department's worth of work. When I left I literally had 10 minutes of work each day because if I had automated the scripts so my colleagues would stop screwing them up. The team managed to justify its continued existence for a couple years after I left by making graphs to explain the data my scripts had collected. With that level of "innovation" you can hardly afford not to outsource.

So he was arrested after setting himself as only admin on network devices, and then setting network devices so "they could not be administratively reset". Article I read last week said "booby trapped" but honestly it could have just been that he didn't commit changes to flash memory so that if devices were power cycled they had to be reconfigured from scratch. (It is not like reporters really understand configuring these devices) Another poster commented that locking down against admin reset is a common practice at facilities if you don't want users reconfiguring devices so maybe that was what was happening. *shrug*

I believe that a lot of this boiled down to corporate politics. (group infighting , etc) The following is a fictional account of what happened based on background from Wikipedia and various newspaper articles :

"There was a political fight between a couple of groups. His group was losing headcount and shrinking, admins were getting fired and duties transferred to another group that he didn't feel were capable but who were politically connected and growing in power. Someone junior to him in his group was defecting to other side, Childs catches defector in an unauthorized area carrying a harddrive and claiming to be doing a security audit that Childs had never heard of... A week later defector is promoted above Childs due to having joined the winning side. Childs had anticipated this and locked out other admin and maybe other people in his group that he considered likely to jump sides. Defector used superior position to demand the passwords back. Childs lied as he didn't want other group to take over and finish gutting the technical proficient but politically weak group he was part of.

The politically savvy group used his refusal as opportunity to totally eliminate Childs group and spins Childs actions as a hostile attempt to seize control of the gov't network. They grow in size, his group is eliminated, defector has nice new management job.

Basically once a workplace is big enough to have political infighting it is a race to the bottom.

A simular thing happened with a friend who was a technical expert but not politically connected. He was network architect and got a few people fired for pure incompetence. One fired fellow was politically connected, and seen by my friend taking his college buddy (director at company) to some whorehouses. A month later director is appointed VP, fired fellow is new director. My friend is fired for incompetence while the new director seizes control of my friend the architect's pet project weeks from its completion and got a nice bonus check for completion of a multi-year project with outstanding reviews. Everyone except the technical fellow is happy.

What is this TV thing people talk about? I haven't used my TV (except for video games and DVDs) for over a decade. I know no one outside work who talks about TV. It is much more common to hear about what is new on hulu or netflix. Are my friends just too techie? I always thought this was a growing trend among the younger more tech savvy audience.

Japan has public health insurance. My Mom, who has US based health insurance happened to get sick while visiting in Japan and they fixed her up in a hospital courtesy of the Japanese taxpayers for free or close to it. She said the care was excellent.

jmossis: You make a good point on the taxes. I have read studies that suggest there is a positive correlation but my rant was pretty cheap.

Shiftless: You apparently failed to check the part of my post where I included the links showing an easier time getting ahead if other countries. Or you could have done some searching and found the other documents I did not include that had simular findings. I just picked the easiest to follow summary.

Yes, I did manage to break even in class.... You see as a kid my family plunged from the upper middle class into poverty. The American system is ruthless to anyone who happens to have debt dumped on them through divorce, medical emergencies, legal proceedings, etc.

The American safety net is pretty thin and once you fall through it is extremely hard to get up again. The studies I linked are evidence. Fixing the medical system and then the court system might go a long way to fixing the problem since those are usually what bankrupt families.

Before any claims that "you have never traveled so you don't know jack". My immediate family has visited every continent bar Antarctica and I can recall 28 countries off the top of my head. (3 new countries this month) Most of the world is not the hellhole that Americans believe. There are some awful places (Zimbabwe right now) but even that country was quite nice under a decade ago.

As a family member recently went to the best specialist at the best place to treat his disease I can say we have a great system if you can afford the 55 thousand dollar copay required for the hospital visit. Most people are poor enough that they would just die instead of raising that kind of money with a few weeks notice... (Condition onset was fast with no family history)

Nothing say that their will not be paid specialists even if we go to fully socialized coverage. There will always be expert surgeons who treat athletes, royalty, and politicians. Honestly most Americans do not get access to the best coverage. It is too expensive, it is hard to get a booking between the Sultan and Rich millionaire. We were only seen because we knew his protege and happened to be at Mayo hospital when a cancellation occurred.

But I guess everyone knows the top surgeon in the country for the form of cancer they are suffering and has enough money to pay for the treatment... right?

1. After cutting the upper-class taxes there was a recession. Regan did it in the 80s and Bush did it in the last decade. Each time the economy stagnated. Progressive policies are very good for the economy as Poor people spend money. That money revs up the economy and keeps it going. People saving money or investing money does not actually rev the economy in the same way but they get all the benefits (see link on growth of economy later in this post)

2. I agree that there is some problem in American school systems. But most of the problem is that American culture of apathy and short attention spans. Kids don't have the attention span to finis...

3. You talk abut how socialism is such a weak systems but Russia had essentially 3rd world infrastructure and yet was a superpower on par with the US for most of our lifes. I don't think we could have done the same given the same infrastructure as them with government that we have. Also most of Europe does quite well with higher standards of living. Also I grew up on welfare. None of my family is on welfare anymore but it was a critical service when dad walked off and refused to pay child support. Since my family has worked directly with the poor (Health services and counseling) I think I have a better idea of who receives welfare than you do. It is often those with medical problems, mental problems, or even drug problems. Drug problems you say? Well let them rot! Well that is the problem. You have a drug conviction and suddenly you can't get many jobs, or and you can't get funding for college. How and the hell do you handle these people? You either put them on welfare or you throw them in jail which is still state funded living. But yay you are still hard on crime and the war on drugs goes on! Rah rah!

But what really incensed me with your post was your assertion that people have an easier time getting ahead in America. BZZZT! Nice try the US is harder to advance out of poverty and it is getting harder all the time. For all our vaunted freedom you can move around in the middle class, but if you want to be an executive you really NEED be in the right class or society to get your funding or to land that job due to your uncle's connection. There are some people who manage to found a company and build it to that level, but what are we talking about one in ten million? I get better odds at the lottery.... Every company founder I personally have known has gotten kicked out when the company stabilized and an interm CEO (who gets along with the VC and board) has been appointed to manage the continued growth of the company. I have yet to personally meet someone who actually manages to fight off the wolves and make it past upper middle class. But hey, they exist, I mean we see them on TV.

And before you rip on my liberal ideal with no real world backing let me drop some links. http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/national/20050515_CLASS_GRAPHIC/index_03.html I see those darn Scandinavian countries are more upward mobile despite their socialist trends and higher standard of living! Yes click around on that link and you will see the US is actually HARDER to climb out of poverty. But don't worry your capitalistic master are having a great time jerking your leash. You know that when the economy is growing rapidly the middle class still shows no upward mobility? http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/b1579981.html but I guess the upper class sees great returns on their investments.

Basically the American dream is a great PR piece to help insure there is cheap labor to fill factories. But Rah Rah for Capitalism. The idea that giving the money to private companies is also fallacious they tend to be very good at maximizing profit. (FOR THEM) Right now there are plenty of private companies in medicine but they do not cover people who are sick, need coverage, lose work, etc. That is why we need a public plan as companies have already shown they do not cover these people. We can pay the current companies the prohibitive rates to cover the "un-insurable" but the healthcare analyst I spoke with today at lunch said public institutions are almost always cheaper than outsourcing. But hell, what does she know?

Yeah I would feel much safer with that drunk jerk behind me packing heat. And when you get delayed on the tarmac for 6 hours I am sure he won't take out his frustration on the staff. It isn't like they already have to land planes to drag off people who freak out...

Lets look at some gun stats - http://www.metro.us/us/article/2009/06/16/03/5431-82/index.xml Looks like big pro-gun southern states see 300-500% more gun related deaths than states with strong gun control like Massachusetts. Problem with giving everyone guns is that obnoxious bully or mentally damaged teen also want guns, and when one person fires or misfires do you think grandma will keep her cool and not accidentally shoot the guy who stands up to look around pulling his own gun out? As a cope I wouldn't want to enter a plin with a couple hundred panicked gun toting passengers.

The last thing they need is a pitched gun battle with 30-40 people on a plane all trying to help by shooting at that other guy who must be a bad guy, I mean everyone can spot an Afghan/Saudi. No one will mistake that darkskinned guy, or jewish lady. No one will shoot that Arabic dude "just in case". Hell, only half of Americans know who was involved in 9/11 attacks and most of them couldn't identify a Saudi Arabian on sight.

Anyone Jewish, Arabic, Dark-skinned, would be an "obvious" threat. And it isn't like that bullet will go through multiple chairs and people before stopping... http://www.theboxotruth.com/docs/theboxotruth.htm I mean their tests only went through a dozen plywood walls and its not like anyone would miss while panicked and shooting at a human for the first time.

*shakes head* Keep the guns off the plane. Carrying in public is asking for trouble... People may panick when they see you packing heat, and if something does happen the right response is almost always to not use the gun. Yet that wasn't your first justification for bringing one, was it? It was to use in case of an attack , not as a deterrent. And hundreds of people shooting towards the cockpit won't cause any issues, right? I mean avionic electronics are not sensitive machines with wires running all over the plane... /end rant