Those of you wondering, this article offers some answers to the question of why so many of these scams originate from this area."

No actually, it doesn't. Poverty is not a reason for scamming. It might be a reason for stealing food or other things. Scams show a particular mindset, and that the most common type of Nigerian scam has originated elsewhere is irrelevant. What matters is how many people do it, and the information I have is that scamming is commonplace in Nigerian culture, so they do it to themselves, not just to others with a 'lot' of money outside Nigeria. This means poverty has nothing to do with why they all seem to be Nigerians. Though I suppose, being a Nigerian, seeing some scammer from your country make a lot of money, might influence you to do the same thus giving a flood of such people, but as I said, it seems to be commonplace behaviour in Nigeria itself.

Just as with Richard Dawkins and the evolution vs creationism debate, there is no debate allowed. Either you accept the truths from the Scientific gods (Gleick and Dawkins) or you are exiled.

Somewhat agree with this.

Half the English academics involved in global warming have been found to be fudging the facts,

Bullshit. But you know what is a fact: All the global warming deniers are people who cannot reason, give bogus arguments and are usually paid for by groups who have an interest in keeping going on polluting.

We have a group here in the Netherlands called 'Groene rekenkamer' for example who provide a bunch of bullshit material so moronic, that the inhabitants of a mental asylum could not compete against them!

Slashdot is getting more and more such that the postings resemble those of a bunch of demented 5 year olds...

With the deniers here like Jane Q Public repeating their moronic crap over an over again, and learning nothing, it seems it's time for meta meta moderation: Keep repeating the same crap argument and your initial posts are valued at -1 lower each time. No lower limit! One of 'Jane Q Public's latest pieces of 'insight':

Nobody on the "skeptical" side has been doing any "suppressing". I repeat: it has been the skeptics who have kept calling for open debate. It is the AGW proponents who claim "consensus" and that "the science is settled."

His so called skeptics aren't skeptics but deniers. They aren't interested in science and never give real arguments. They are the ones not interested in debate, or if they do debate give moronic arguments that no scientist is interested in. Debating with a moron isn't helping science therefore scientists are not interested in most of these 'skeptics'. The fact that the real scientists have a concensus doesn't mean there is no interest in discussions or new ideas or new viewpoints or new interpretations, not at all, it just means there is a concensus, and you better have damn good arguments if you are to convince them. Not the garbage quality arguments of 'skeptics'/deniers.

Because only one document is scanned. And the one document that's scanned is scanned almost a month after everything else. And the one document that's scanned a month after everything else is the only one that uses inflammatory language like preventing people from "teaching science". It looks fake to me. There's plenty of stuff in the documents that are basically acknowledged as real to let people know how they work, and who they support, and where their money comes from... but the hot, sexy stuff just isn't there. Does your organization work like this? Unsigned, undated memos to people who aren't listed are scanned in from printouts to be put in the corporate file even though everything else you generate goes direct to PDF?

If I were an dishonest organisation out to influence an manipulate then yes of course, all the saucy stuff would never be kept as PDFs only as hardcopy/eyes only.

So these arguments that it's a PDF from scans in my view make it not less real. Specific type of language is also meaningless because esp. in such documents which are 'inflammatory', people (the one/ones writing it) tend to write in their own style, not a 'house style'. Therefore the argument that this Megan McArdle gave is not an argument at all.

Unless you count a 90% reduction in trading costs as âoenothingâ.

Back in the day Market Makers would take $.125 to $.25 for every share traded. And woe to you if you were trying to sell more than 10k because then you would really be scalped. And then you had to add broker commissions on top of that.

I would rather pay high frequency traders $.01 a share and have a deep liquid market then go back to the good old days

(- infinite, moronic)

Who gives a damn what percentage some trader wanted? For one it's all mostly automated so fees should be very low now, and for another, if you don't need to/want to buy/sell frequently then the small charges are a non issue. They are only an issue if you want to trade a lot because you want to gamble on changes in values of stock. So the original poster was right, high freqeuncy trading is valueless and should be disallowed. It's gambling, and not just simple gambling, but gambling that destabilizes economies.

They are just getting their comeuppance and they rightfully deserve it.

'They' (Kodak) are not getting their comeuppance.

What's important is whether the Kodak lawsuit was justified or not, and this one as well, although it seems Apple just acts more like its name was Wankle (pronounced by someone from China).

When a company goes bankrupt the money goes to creditors and this lawsuit will eat into that money, effectively fooking everyone over, who may depend on that (I don't know the situation precisely).

If you are talking about comeuppance, then you should talk about the people going for frivolous lawsuits and the direction companies take. This is always the board of directors etc. Perhaps the people in the legal department too. Have you ever seen such people getting thrown in jail and taken all their stuff away to (partly) pay for damage they did by wasting money (their company, the other and more) or even destroying the economy (esp. banks). No? I haven't either.

The US military are scum and soldiers are criminals. There was no reason for this war and yet the US won't take responsibility for the consequences. Fuck the US military and those who support it. Scumbags.

And that's all very true - but it still has jack shit to do with Iraqi's looting their own universities,

Of course it does. Take away the system that keeps the a-holes doing what they would really want to do, i.e. they don't give a damn about others, take want to take what they want but normally can't because they'd get caught quickly by the police.

Looting is what will happen, everywhere, in the USA. or Europe, or wherever. Just look at what happens with floods for example.

So the USA destroyed the infrastructure of power, thereby they enabled the looting. The USA is responsible.

Btw. this reminded me of something I wanted to say about a story, not long ago on slashdot, about being able to recognize serial killers. I didn't get round to writing it down then, so I will do it now: When I read that, I thought how pathetic this research was, because there are so much bigger problems that these people don't analyse at all. Esp. that a sociopath like George Wanker Bush, who was unbelievably actually elected to power by people in the USA (really? Why did anyone vote for this a-hole? I knew he was scum the first time I saw him talk on TV), and did thousands of times more damage and caused thousands of times more deaths (together with his sociapath cronies, but as the president has so much power in the US, he is responsible).

Why don't psychologists go analysing people in politics and say 'he is a sociopath and should be barred from being in any position in power'?

In the real world, a contractor damages $244,000,000.00 of someone's shit, the contractor is paying $244,000,000.00 plus loss of use costs until replacement. In the government run world, everyone will have a laugh and the taxpayers will pick up the tab.

In the real world, faced with $244,000,000 in lawsuits, the contractor folds up and declares bankruptcy. Then everyone will have a laugh and the taxpayers will pick up the tab.

In the real world, whatever happens, everyone will pay for this. What do you think happens if that firm is properly insured? The insurance company pays and will increase rates for everyone, not just that firm that made the mistake (you can't do stats on a single mistake anyway, and the insurance firm needs to get that money from somewhere if they are to remain as profitable).

So everyone pays more insurance, this means the companies who pay more insurance have more costs and increase their rates etc. This is not something insulated. Ditto for bankruptcies, not everyone pays as much everyone pays for it in the end.

Or to paraphrase "Family Guy", anything Rush Limbaugh says must be untrue and even if he says something that is true it becomes untrue because Rush Limbaugh says it. Oh, and insulting my intelligence while accusing me of ad hominems? Really? I wasn't making an ad hominem accusation. I was showing a flaw in the actual logic of the argument presented. While you decided to conclude that I didn't have a "brain capable of understanding skepticism expressed as a joke." That's not an ad hominem? Or is guilt by association not an ad hominem?

He didn't have a flaw in his logic. If a paper repeatedly writes untrustworthy stuff, the only logical thing to do is not pay attention to it. This is how everything works. Do you think mathematicians go through papers by amateurs 'proving' a as yet unproven theorem? In the beginning they may find it amusing and work through a few, then they get tired and don't waste their time. It could be one contains a proof, but the probability is near zero. And mathematicions do get such 'proofs', a lot...

So what you've shown is your ignorance of how things really work, this is NOT about some simplistic logic argument that "he says it therefore it's not true", not it's "he says it therefore it's almost certainly worthless and not worth spending time on".

Oh and this argument those 16 nutters in WSJ gave is old hat. Here in NL this has been used for many years by crackpot groups (which are paid by airtravel industry, oil industry etc.).

The only logical thing to do if there could be a problem with man made changes to the environment that are deemed 'not desireable' is to take action. This isn't about some stupid short term ecenomic thing, this is about long term, about all life on this planet.

It annoys the minority of businesses who feel entitled to the free labor of strangers and don't want to give anything back. You see, some people are childish and the most visible mark of childishness is a sense of entitlement. This causes them to feel somehow cheated if you place a few conditions on code that is otherwise free, that no one is forcing them to use if the conditions don't suit them. I think phrases like "you mean I have to actually HIRE my OWN PROGRAMMERS if I really must insist that everything be done exactly the way I want?!" are often uttered with outrage during their corporate meetings.

I mean hey, launching a commercial product with most of the work already done for you, for free, is a nice racket if you can get it. But if the developers intend to allow this, they wouldn't use GPL, they would use a BSD-type license. For reasonable people, this is not a problem. Reasonable people think either "hey, this code is available for free and we have no problem complying with the license, so we can enjoy all the effort that has already been done for us and build on that", or they think "the terms of that license aren't compatible with our business model, or we're afraid of how a court may interpret them, so we can't use that code, oh well, this has not harmed us in any way so we really have no complaint".

For everyone else, there is a need to demonize whatever it is that doesn't perfectly suit them even though they are under no obligation to use it. Sort of like the Puritannical types who want to shut down "offensive" shows that no one is making them watch and criminalize victimless behaviors among consenting adults that no one is forcing them to participate in. The mentality is never this direct and honest, and always covers itself up with a phony excuse, but if not for that its motto would be "it's not good enough that *I* don't do something I don't like, oh no, I have to make certain no one else can do it either!"

You are not +5 insightful but more -1 moron. (or Linux/GPL zealot)

There are reasons not to use GPL not having to do with modifying code, but simply running the code. E.g. GPL'd libraries. I haven't followed what the issue is with GPL v3 as I simply avoid any GPL code due to the zealotry of most of those who advocate it.

In the late 1990s I thought about a 'what if' scenario: Say most people run Linux with a lot of GPL'ed libraries, then I am sure some provisions in the GPL would have to be altered as it would force people to do things in a certain way for which there is no reason. So suppose GPL'd libraries are required because they are used in the system and rewriting it all would be pointless, a waste of time, but especially means having to follow all changes and reimplement them too.

A commercial company is about selling a product for a given system, not reimplementing that system.

I am sure that legal action would take place and rule some parts of the GPL invalid, IN THAT CASE.

For me, I don't care much about interaction issues, because after the late 1990s I had enough of the inane whining about GPL misuse and zealotry of Linux users. I use FreeBSD and am free of all that rubbish, and of all the different versions of lInux with their idiosyncrasies.

FreeBSD has flaws, but I'm not going back to linux...

And about the GPL licence, what annoys me a lot is the lie in the preamble, which btw. should be removed from the licence itself as it is propaganda:

The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it.

What was not present cannot be taken away. Most commercial software is designed to do something specific, and the license is for that. When you don't get source, you don't get the ability to modify that source and modifying binaries is a lot of work. So, you never really had the freedom to change it, therefore it cannot be taken away. I guess it was meant as 'most licences are not intended to give the freedom to alter the program', but then it should be written in that way. But no, it's written in this adversarial way, and from what I read by Moglun, at least the licence section. Well, he should have objected to this and if it was not changed, not allowed use of the licence text that he used by the FSF. But perhaps he's just happy to go along with this nonsense by the FSF...

I like the idea of the GPL, but not the propaganda in the licence, nor the attitude of the proponents...

It's simple- you have a group of people who say that they've done the science and have the answers. That group then says that noone should ever challenge their science or examine it (the science is settled). And that the only people who can perform the science are people who already agree with the conclusions and who are close friends to the current researchers - and if you come to any other conclusion then will be personally and professionally destroyed.

I deleted the rest from the quote because there's not point. The above already shows you are insane or a paid-for-by-assholes troll.

This is not +4 Interesting but lame. You don't understand the essence of Christianity. And that is what Christ says. And that is in some ways very similar to what Buddha says. It's about a set of rules by which to live to make the world a better place. All the rest is added onto that. Forget the old testament which has for example eye-for-an-eye, as it's incompatible with Christ's 'turn the other cheek'. Also forget about Christ being there to set people against each other, which is in one part of the bible but which is obviously meant to show that he wants each of us to think for ourselves. This can be found elsewhere too IIRC with a saying about slaves where he says that no one should be a slave of anyone else, and implies that that means for him too, i.e. he doesn't want anyone to blindly follow him, but understand the reasoning for 'turn the other cheek' etc. so that they understand why these rules are good ones to live by, and thus they are are not dependant on Christ for giving 'arbitrary' rules...

The bible is a collection of stories from pre-Christ, with a world view from that time, plus a bunch of stories and explanations of what Christ said/did. I was never really interested in Christianity nor any religion, but after reading Christ I saw how what he says makes sense. It's not stuff some drunk or guy using drugs said...

Why doesn't the USA just buy Sukhoi 35B, or PAK-FA or whatever the latest model is, and in the spirit of cooperation make the world a better place: Everyone buying war equipment from each other, what could be better? Surely Christmas would be a fantastic time to announce this deal!

"In its continuing endeavor to serve its 800 million users as quickly as possible, Facebook is once again revamping the way it handles its PHP-based Web pages.

I've had a page made for me by a relative for business purposes and since then I visited a few pages on facebook related to my interests/business and I have to say, that I hate Facebook. Facebook is one of the worst pieces of crap I've ever seen. It's so unbelievably unintuitive, obscure and inconvenient (in all aspects, trying to set things for my own page, or looking at other pages, pictures, tehn going back, whatever), that it drives me nuts ever time I visit it (which is not a lot and I intend to keep it that way!)

Apple doesn't understand that Microsoft won because they were very responsive to what customers wanted. They bent over backwards to give what (the biggest segment of) customers wanted. They were on top of it all throughout the 80s and 90s. Of course, they didn't have a problem playing sharp business games (ie, all their unethical stuff), either.

Apple still doesn't get it. They don't get that enterprise wants backwards compatibility, for example. Who would ever build an enterprise app to run on OSX, when it may be obseleted and ejected from OSX (like Carbon was in Lion, and a bunch of others)?

Apple did see the unethical stuff Microsoft did, and they thought that is why Microsoft must have won. So they decided to follow the unethical stuff.

I think you are crazy!

Microsoft were not 'on top of it all throughout the 80s and 90s'. Microsoft 'won' only because they were the only mainstream choice on PCs. People bought PCs because they were much cheaper than Macs. OS/2 didn't catch on I think because it really needed 8MB and it made PCs a lot more expensive (this was a big deal in 1994-1995). It is true that for some reason people didn't really want OS/2. Not sure why, as it was available before win95 and it was better, but the reason people didn't go with OS/s was definitely not because MS gave people what they wanted. Misleading advertising perhaps in similar vain as some of the error messages in MS software that it might not work correctly (when running on other DOS like OSes). Even in the 1980s it was well known MS put out crappy software. I didn't have a PC then but I knew this from reading mags. People only used MS software because they thought it was 'good enough', certainly not because MS gave them what they wanted. If MS did that they would have made good operating systems that give useful information on booting and hangs less.

As to Apple doing what MS did in unethical tactics: This could be true.

A good thing may come of this crash caused by the Iranians: The 'unknown', 'estimated' etc. in that Wikipedia article can hopefully soon be replaced by facts/measurements!