Perhaps if the EPA weren't so busy with reading tea leaves, they'd have more of their resources devoted to doing their f___ing job - like keeping an eye on the use and transport of dangerous chemicals.

No one is talking about reproducing the climate. It's about reproducing the STUDY or experiment. One guy working for Solyndra says these tree rings have a certain attribute? Fine, let someone else look at the tree rings too. Nobody else in the world can see the same thing in those tree rings? Then it's not science, it's tea reading.

I guess your comments also apply to the Democrats since Obama's stated policy is the same? The bill would give that policy the force law.

You'll have your answer if you first rewrite your questions in picture form, with no words. You may find it's much, much harder to write anything that way. There ARE purely graphical programming environments, like Lego Mindstorms. Using it, you can write a ten line program in only twenty minutes

Additionally, graphical environments actually are NOT simpler. They are far more complex. Standard C, the language operating systems are written in, consists of a couple dozen "words". Microsoft VISUAL C has hundreds or thousands of items to learn.

The visual approach only tries to HIDE the complexity, make it invisible. The thing is, if you can't see it, you can't understand it. Building a complex system out of complex parts that you cannot understand is extremely difficult. That way leads to madness, to healthcare.gov. The way to make it simple is to start with simple things - 30 or so simple words like "while" and "return". You take a few of those words to build a small function like "string_copy". The string copy function is simple because a) it does one simple job and b) you can understand it because it's composed of a few simple keywords. Take four or five of those simple functions like stringcopy and you can easily build a more powerful function like "find_student". Each stage is simple, so you build all this simple stuff, each simple layer built on another simple layer and soon you have powerful software that can do complex tasks. Graphical tools don't work like that. You can't have a "while" picture, because in even a fairly small program you soon end up with thousands of pictures, way too many to see and understand. So with graphical tools you have to have a "web browsing" picture - a complex object whose behavior you cannot intuitively know. Instead, you have to spend hundreds of hours reading textual descriptions of the details of how the "web browsing" picture and thousands of other pictures can be used. Learning a few dozen words if far, far simpler.

They should be forced to stream their OTA content.
In fact, they should put WAPs all over the country streaming it wirelessly. To do this efficiently, they should use multicast packets Better yet, use broadcast packets.

It could be called "broadcast television".

Useful vs posturing? I'd say that posturing is the primary and best use of military equipment. A strong military posture encourages other countries to be your ally. That's very useful.

It sounds like in this case Adobe is learning from one of their mistakes. Stack ranking was an error they made. I believe that, and there is probably something to learn from that.

Beyond that, about 7 million people, or 2% of the US, watches NBC news on a given night. 98% of Americans didn't watch that broadcast.

NBC News Confuses a Few Senior Citizens About Cybersecurity
Ftfy

TFS says:

> okay, we've got it — it's not ready. We have work to do on four big areas:
> feature parity (especially for commenting); the overall UI, especially in terms of information density and headline scanning;
> plain old bugs; and, lastly, the need for a better framework for communicating about the How and the Why of this process.

Let's pretend for a moment that the folks making the decisions aren't so dense that they can't hear what everyone is telling them
Let's pretend they don't want to pull a "new Coke". They DID put up the beta as an option for a long time and actively solicit feedback,
after all, so maybe they are trying to get it right. What, specifically, are the problems that bother YOU? Any idiot on Twitter can squeal
"omg it sucks!", but I think we have some people on Slashdot who are more capable and articulate than that. We can come up with
better, more specific feedback than "omg it sucks!", can't we?

For me, the biggest thing is I want to be able to see the subject lines of comments like I can on the classic site. If I down-modded
comment has "hosts file" in the subject line, I know why it's down-modded and hidden - it's not something anyone wants to read,
and I'm not going to read it. Conversely, a down-modded comment with "MPAA is right about ONE thing" in the subject line is probably
down-modded because it challenges the groupthink of the Slashdot herd. That's something I'll click to read.

OzPeter makes a great point in http://meta-beta.slashdot.org/... /.ers submit the stories, vote for the stories in the firehouse, comment, moderate the comments, and meta-moderate the moderation. We pretty well run the site, leaving Dice to just run the _server_. We are not the "current audience", we are a _community_, not an _audience_. An audience is passive. There are a ten thousand news aggregators trying to get an audience. If Dice wants yet another site chasing the audience, you can sure go build one. Don't throw away the Slashdot community first though. Just go build DiceNews.com and advertise it on Slashdot. You want to leverage the Slashdot brand for a site that's supposed to appeal to a broad audience? Sorry, if you turn Slashdot into yet another a broad audience site the Slashdot brand will immediately have the same value as the Enron brand. That brand value just won't transfer if you mess up the community that is loyal to that brand.

This is somewhat tangential to your point, but conspiracy requires "an overt act in furtherance of the agreement". To use your murder example, discussing a price with a someone is not sufficient. The subject normally also makes a down payment. It's the agreement PLUS the down payment that makes it conspiracy.

When the supposed hit man is actually a cop, they'll get at least two of each component - wait until the person says twice, in two different conversations, that they actually want the person murdered, and they do two overt acts, such as paying the down payment and also buying a gun for the hitman to use, or buying plane tickets to be out of state at the time (alibi).

That's a good description. You show how people change their opinion depending on how it's described. They may switch.back to being against when you point out "may not discriminate based on content or origin" means no more spam filters. That denial of service attack must be delivered with the same priority as the tele-medicine feed, the way one bill was drafted.

This There are several other similar problems. They probably CAN be solved if the bill is written VERY carefully, but it's tricky. Comcast may decide that YouTube ads are spam

You make a good point. Also saying "it is often not a good idea for the government to _______, generally speaking" neither means that one opposes a certain specific instance of that, nor that that opposition is your top priority and you won't consider any other factors.

There is nothing inconsistent about this:
A) I generally oppose walking around naked in public.
B) If Jason Voorhees attacks me while I'm in the shower, I'll run outside - naked.

For Washington politicians, pork for their district is just as high of a priority as Jason Voorhees. There's nothing inconsistent about opposing wasteful and counter productive spending, while also placing an even higher priority on bringing home the bacon. It's sad, but it's not inconsistent.

That's an interesting thought. I had read his point as "those damn republicans like pork". That would be naive and misleading, because the fact is POLITICIANS like pork, and republicans slightly LESS so than others.

Perhaps his point is point was "republicans oppose wasteful spending; however like all politicians, they too like pork". If that's what he intended to say, that's true.

> all you've accomplished with your complaints is to make yourself look like a fool in public.

It's a good thing you're not making yourself look like an asshole in public.

What you describe has a long chain of "if this, then maybe that, so maybe that, which could mean ..."

It's just as likely that a sudden demand for a huge amount of solar panels, followed by that demand suddenly dropping to ~ zero when the project is complete would be a BAD thing. In general, instabilities are bad for an economy.

So the assumption isn't that there are NO network effects. The assumption is that there could be good and bad network effects, and there's no reason to think that politicians accurately predict third order network effects 10 years out, then have everything play out exactly according to this elaborate plan.

Sure there could be good side effects. There could be bad side effects. Once you get to the side effects of the side effects of the side effects, you're just guessing.

You brought up a good point. I think they're are three other significant, valid problems with the net neutrality bills that have been put forth by Democrats.

First - they say, in effect, "an ISP must treat all video the same, all images the same, all email the same, etc., WITHOUT regard to it's content or source".
Yay, sounds fair, right? You just made it illegal to block a flood of Viagra spam from a major Russian spammer. The proposed law was that the ISP must deliver the spam to you in exactly the same way that they deliver email from your important contacts. This issue couldd probably be fixed, if the dems don't insist that the law needs ro be passed before anyone can finish reading it. It's hard, though - Comcast might call YouTube a spammer.

That last sentence foreshadows the second problem. The argument FOR a bunch of new federal restrictions is that ISPs might ... Well, they haven't. It's an imaginary problem. Does it make sense to make up imaginary problems and build more government bureaucracy to deal with a problem that does not exists, or should we hold off and see if any actual issue develops, then address it?

Another proposed bill made it illegal to sell tiered service - to offer a better quality of service for those for those who want it. I work from home. That's how I make me living. I would LOVE to be able to get a guaranteed xMbps rather than "up to x Mbps", and would gladly pay another $10-$20 to cover the cost of guaranteed 24/7 speed. I could earn an extra $200 / month by not having my work slowed down during busy periods, so it would be a great deal for me. The democrats intend to make that illegal. The professional who works from home and the struggling single mother who only wants to check her. Facebook are forced to buy the same quality of service. That's dumb. SOME democrats realize that part is stupid.