I'm trying to say this in the kindest way possible, but please stop using B.S. science conclusions to stop economic progress in the name of environmentalism just because your liberal friends have decided fracking is evil.

Correlation != Causation.

It sort of stands to reason that people looking to drill for methane would do it in locations where there is more methane available and close to the surface, doesn't it?

All your study says is that they found higher levels of methane near methane mining operations. Well, duh!

Let me give you a comparison using the same methodology:
A study of sunlight found that higher concentrations of sunlight in the air were found near solar farms. Scientists conclude that solar farms cause sunlight to pollute the air.
Of course, while people place solar farms with the intention of being near more sunlight, I'm sure you can't blame the solar farm for producing the sunlight for everyone else in the area....

Call us back when a study looks at pre-and post- fracking methane levels over time at the same wells, rather then taking a correlation and assuming causation.

Oh wait, the PA legislature already paid for a study like that on pre- and post- drilling sites and using control sites and "the research found no statistically significant increases in methane levels after drilling and no significant correlation to distance from drilling."

Wait, you're complaining about Romney's dog? What about Obama literally eating a dog???

Obviously your reaction isn't indicative of a typical American reaction, since all the post-debate polls showed Romney won hands down.

As for the VP debate, Biden spent most of his time trying to bully Ryan in order to distract from his lack of any ideas for the future and lack of any excuse for the Obama administration's failures.

Gee, sorry if I took "A lot of people (particularly I'm discussing western political leaders, but not just them) state as a matter of blind faith that markets are effective allocators of capital." as a negative comment toward using markets for allocating capital.

I mean, I can see where you could slide in saying that's not exactly what he meant, but you've got to admit that it's a reasonable default assumption. All I did was compare it to the most commonly advocated alternative. What else would you compare it to in order to decide if it's "effective" or not, if not an alternative method?

That, I can agree with. :)

Fortunately, it's a self-correcting problem as fools are parted from their money. Sort of a virtuous cycle of creation/destruction.

It doesn't become necessary for the government to step in and bail them out.

It only happens when you give government too much power and control so that the industry inevitably takes over the government regulatory body and then uses taxpayer's money for the bail out. Again, see Public Choice economics. This is all a well-understood process.

[...] the idea that investors will run to invest in markets they patently dont understand doesnt speak well for the efficiency of the capital markets.

No, this speaks very well for the efficiency of the capital markets. The investors risked their own money, not my money. It was a bad idea and people who invest in bad ideas lose their money. As a result of companies they invest in losing their money, ultimately, they don't have money anymore to invest. The people who end up with money to keep investing are the ones who are better at it.

Posit a theoretical public/government technological investment equiv. What makes you think the members of that board wouldn't have invested just as poorly? All the evidence points to them making worse investment choices, not better ones. After all, it's not their money, it's your money, so they have a different incentive in their investing. A much more political incentive with goals other than simply finding the most useful technology that people will want to pay for. And after this government equiv.'s investment failed? They'd either keep pumping in money to prop it up, or at the very least, the people making the bad investment decisions would just keep making them. After all, the government has more of your money to spend, right?

Please go learn some Public Choice economics. You'll understand the world a lot better.

I've been to Philadelphia. Granted, as I've lived mostly in the western U.S., so for maybe a total of a week of my life, but I have been there. 18% of Philly voters not having ID still seems high to me. Do none of them ever get bank accounts? In most states I've checked, you need an ID to get welfare or cash welfare checks, you need it to qualify for income-restricted public housing, etc... Certainly you need it to buy alcohol or cigarettes. You're trying to tell me that 18% of people in Philly are adults that rely on other people to buy their booze?

The expiration date is easily explained by wanting people to actually be current PA residents, not just "have lived there sometime in the past". Not sure that's much of a smoking gun for your explanation. It does make it harder, but then, they're also offering free ids to compensate.

Just because there is a higher risk of being caught by robbing a bank than by doing online identity theft, doesn't mean there aren't bank robbers and doesn't mean we shouldn't take measures against them.

As for "ignoring" the other instances of voter fraud, why do you suggest I'm doing that?

Quite to the contrary, I'm personally in favor of lots of things to control election fraud. Why would being against fraud across the board mean I shouldn't also be against this specific type of fraud?

Personally, I think they should ban electronic voting as anything other than a way to fill out a machine countable piece of paper that a voter can also easily visually verify themselves. I think the counting should be a separate process and the ballots counted should be totaled and matched to the number of signed-in voters in each precinct to ensure stuffing isn't occurring. The counting should be done by machine and then randomly done by hand for specific precincts to verify the machine counts match. Also, each candidate with either the 2nd highest votes or within 30% of the votes of the winner should be able to challenge for a hand count and/or a machine recount. The ballots should be kept under lock and seal (lock and seal from each candidate who desires to provide a lock and seal) until after all appeals have been exhausted... maybe until at least the next election prep is starting.

As for absentee ballots, I think any request for an absentee ballot should also require verifying that address in a state database with a matching address for the address the ballot is to be sent to. I also think that absentee ballots with more than X going to the same address should be proactively investigated by a fraud unit to validate those people actually living there. Set X to some multiple of the max number of adults you'd reasonably expect to live in a particular location. i.e. a two bedroom apartment isn't going to have 50 adults living in it...

I could go on, but you get the point that I am against all the various forms of voter fraud, don't you?

Because with HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of registered voters in PA who don't have state-issued ID, [...]

Honestly, this makes me suspect fraud much more. There are really hundreds of thousands of legitimate adults registered to vote who don't have an ID?

I'm sure some are real, but it sounds much more like there are people registered who aren't really valid voters. They're maybe real people who actually live elsewhere and have ID elsewhere, but like to also vote in PA, or people who are simply made up completely, but registered to vote.

Most of the voter registration fraud that requiring an ID would catch is people would actually have to prove the name they're voting under exists somewhere other than their imagination and/or that they actually live in the state they're registering in.

Currently, if you have a dozen absentee ballots sent to the same mailing address, someone may notice, but if you register under a fake name using whatever address you want in every district in the state, you'll be able to just walk in and vote as many times as you have the time to travel between the polling places.

You claim that someone is going to notice that "you don't live in the district", but polling place people don't know most of the people they see. If you can walk in and get the Attorney General's ballot as a someone who looks nothing like him, then it's unlikely "people know their neighbors" is a big deterrent.

Polling people are going to be extremely reluctant to challenge anyone's right to vote unless someone else walks in at the same time and claims the same name.

[...] brown people should probably avoid the past beyond about fifty years, particularly in North America (unless you go back _before_ slavery, [...]

Why wouldn't you just go back in time to someplace where the appropriate color race were the slave-owners/masters?

Don't tell me you believe that slavery was invented in North America and only ever practiced by whites?

As for going back before slavery... what makes you think that time period exists at the same time any humans were around?

If you have a large enough team, then you have at least one person (and likely more people as your team is larger) on that team with is an architect personality type. Many tend to migrate to IT areas. This will be the people who designs your IT systems, who can tell you how to structure your load balancer and your networks and your firewalls and your servers to get the most out of your applications.

On the development side, they're likely to be a lead developer who always seems to be planning ahead for their team in terms of tools and structure. On the infrastructure/server side they're the guy always automating stuff and creating systems that run themselves.

This is 5% of the population, max. Maybe closer to 1-2%. But even if you only have 50 IT guys, that gives you good odds of one or more. You're looking for the people who are the ones always automating stuff and creating not only new IT systems, but new process systems for how people do stuff and making suggestions on existing systems for how to make them better.

One of those guys in each of the major IT areas of your company is who you want to look for. They'll already have an understanding of how the "people" systems in that IT area works. They haven't told you how to make it better yet because their past experience is that management has their own ideas and typically doesn't care for theirs, or ends up poorly implementing theirs. They may not believe you at first when you tell them you want them to give you a plan on how to improve things. Don't take no for an answer. Tell them you'll most likely do whatever they say, they just have to outline it for you and help create the details.

Tell them you just want them to improve the end results of their IT department, whatever that is. It's typically something like the service the customer receives, or depending on your company, maybe internal customers instead. You don't need to go into different effort levels by people. They know all that. You aren't really looking to improve person X's work ethic with incentives, right? You really just want better overall results. Focus on that goal.

They won't be able to resist. They'll design something for you. If they are less experienced in the workplace, it may take a couple of iterations as they figure out how people respond. Bring up the individualization options so that they don't focus on a one-size-fits-all option. Make sure they understand the option to throw out existing process requirements, not just add new ones. Those might be blind-spots for them otherwise.

Asking for ideas/feedback in a group meeting isn't going to work. These guys will have enough experience to know that they could only at best suggest an incremental improvement to what you already have. Anything more than that and it's going to get screwed up in the implementation details. No, give someone individual responsibility for creating an entire system framework for improving your desired overall goal, then stand back and watch the ultimate results. You'll be surprised at how well they know the business of what their IT department already does and how to improve it. You'll be shocked at how much pointless waste and inefficiency you have that can be gotten rid of.

Or, if you really don't think you have someone who can do that in your group, then feel free to hire someone like me to come in and interview people to get the same answers and put something together for you, but that costs more money than an Ask Slashdot. :)

"Guru" Jim is asking the wrong people.

If he really wants to know what incentive structure would be better for his IT staff, he should ask them to design one for him. Give them a budget limitation, as appropriate.

Seriously, they'll be happy to do it and they'll do a much better job than either his management or someone answering generically who doesn't understand his employees and his business.

If he calls the people he considers his best workers "guns" and so on from the question, he doesn't understand IT well enough to create a good environment on his own anyway. However, I'm sure the experienced folks in his IT department know exactly who is worth their salary in the department and how to measure that for the managers to be able to figure it out also.

You've hired experts in the field, and you're asking on the web for how to manage them? They're supposed to be the experts on the IT needs of your company. Try asking them. Of course, I suppose that's a little too obvious and may produce too much information that reflects poorly on their management. So Caveat Emptor!

So, to correct the Unknown Lamer's attempted correction of the original submission, Brazilian police have actually arrested the President of Google Brazil.

Just thought that should be noted somewhere in the comment threads, even though it'll likely be lost in oblivion.

Google should still be appealing the rulings, but they should also just "forget" all the official Brazilian government websites, all the political websites of current Brazilian officials, etc... until the appeals go through... add a big blank spot at all their official locations on google maps... and blacklist any brazilian government email addresses for sending and receiving via gmail, registering on any of the google sites, etc...

I mean, if they don't want Google to publish stuff on the internet on their politicians, Google should comply wholeheartedly, like above.

Call it a censorship blacklist and encourage other groups and companies to do the same thing.

One problem is that most existing media was exempted under McCain-Feingold, even though it's really also "paid" speech. It's not like the NY Times wasn't paying it's employees, wasn't paid by advertisers, etc... The bill seemed to imply that the media was unbiased, but someone else who wanted to publish something would be horrible.

Of course, the media was all for that distinction, since it increased their power relative to everyone else who was hobbled by the law. So all the media reports were about how wonderful the "reform" was. The politicians knew that the media would always be biased in favor of the "newsmakers" who could automatically get coverage because of their positions in government, while challengers would be stuck trying to convince the media that they were worth covering.

Fortunately, the USSC rejected most of that and more pieces may fall later as other cases make their way up through circuit splits.