FlaSoxxJim

QUOTE(minors @ Jun 29, 2006 -> 03:06 AM) State to be more reasonable?? When your dealing with people who kill 5-10 . . . People who kill 5-10? s***, thoese are like bankers' hours. Nice work if you can get it, I guess.

QUOTE(minors @ Jun 29, 2006 -> 02:56 AM) Speaking about cowards here in John Kerry 1) Nice job staying on topic. 2) Nice job posting something that is both current and relevant. 3) Nothing chaps my ass more than those cowards like Kerry who weaseled their way out of service and never served a day in. . . . er, oops. . . never-mind. 4) If you need LCR to explain to you what sarcasm (sär-ka-zem) is too, I'll wait.

QUOTE(Kalapse @ Jun 29, 2006 -> 02:14 AM) Exactly what I thought, damn Tex looks exactly like Clemens. And he's been away from Sostalk doing a hehab stint down on the farm. Don't work too hard there, Tex.

QUOTE(Rex Kickass @ Jun 28, 2006 -> 07:20 PM) I am a three time academe washout. Lucky bastard. I got a life sentence.

QUOTE(minors @ Jun 29, 2006 -> 12:08 AM) What I should have said is seeing people posting around here thinking Liberals can do nothing wrong and while all Republicans are a bunch of fools that is what pisses me off. Bill Frist is a fine American if you agree with him on this issue or not he is still a great American. Is a flag and a napkin, boxers the same damn thing? Are you kidding me that has to be the worst analogy I have seen yet. The Flag was first created by Ross in Philly during the rev war and it was meant to be a calling something to be proud of. Some people just don't understand what kind of role history has. OK then, let's get back to defacing an actual, bona-fide, made-in-China official American flag. Only smelly liberal hippie scum would think of publicly defacing such a symbol of our freedom. So what would you say to this Birkenstock-wearing flower child, who may have defaced more American flags in the public eye than any other American? Most recently (last week) the coward had to go all the way in Austria to do it because I'm sure he knew fine citizens such as yourself would string him up for desecrating the symbol of our freedom. Why Oh Why does the President hate America so much?

"Protecting the symbol of our nation’s freedom is important." But what about protecting, you know, the actual FREEDOM the flag supposedly symbolizes and the country used to care about?? Well, that's apparently not all that important. Frist is a pandering, posturing tool. :headshake

QUOTE(LowerCaseRepublican @ Jun 28, 2006 -> 05:42 PM) So please spare me the NY SLIME!!!!11!1! SWIFT was in the public record (and also used since 1973) and the President was actively discussing the usage of finance tracking as a means of capturing terrorists. There were numerous public documents and even *gasp* Presidential press conferences and executive orders that detailed what we were doing regarding terrorist finance practices. The real reason the White House is upset has a whole lot less to do with TREASON(!!! - talk about shouting "fire" in a crowded theater. . . ), and a lot more to do with revealing just how many people are troubled by privacy aspects of tthe program. If the program is kept flying under the radar (whether it's truly secret or not), then the grumblings of any officials or ex-officials (who obviously don't know when to shut up!) or SWIFT co-op managers also stay under the radar.

QUOTE(WCSox @ Jun 28, 2006 -> 02:17 PM) Thanks, but the life of a postdoc isn't much better. You get paid more, but still not really enough to justify working 60 hours/week. Guess that's why I screw around on the Internet so much. I got paid less as a post-doc than as a county high school teacher - by about $10K!! Friggin' slave labor. To add insult to injury, the institution does not withhold taxes on postdoc salaries for some reason, so at the end of each year after I had to scrape by on about @24K, I got screwed because I couldn't sock away anything for taxes during the year. To science . . .

QUOTE(WCSox @ Jun 28, 2006 -> 11:28 AM) Science funding by NSF has fallen across the board since 9/11 and NIH funding has stagnated significantly. Grant applications from research programs that have nothing to do with environmental or atmospheric sciences are getting thrown into the trash can (despite excellent reviews in many cases) because the money isn't there. This isn't a case of the Bush Administration selectively "picking" on people in your field. PIs in structural biology and materials science are having the same problems. Oh yeah, you are correct in the claim claim that it's a tough funding environment for science across the board. But there IS selectivity involved in what is being cut. In the case of NOAA, like you say, there are lots of proposals getting excellent reviews and being reccommended for funding, but they remain unfunded. The science advisory board makes reccommmendations as to what they think the research priorities should be. But it is OMB (A White House office) that signs off (or not) on it. Lautenbacher (the NOAA chief) has very little say in the matter, other than to tell the advisory board what foelds will and won't be funded per OMB. My point was not that the Bush Administration is selectively "picking" on people in any one field, merely that the White House is not at all divorced from setting policy for federal science funding.

QUOTE(southsider2k5 @ Jun 28, 2006 -> 10:27 AM) Or did they? .... Now, all of these criticisms, lodged by respected scientistts in the field, are valid. As is the tempering of Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” studies which were not the be-all of historic climate change reporting (and he has said so himself). But, a lot of that criticism seems to be aimed at the alarmism of the film (which I've not seen and doesn't start her until Friday), and the dumming down of the science for a general audience. In wanting to make a stir and sell tickets, the film may have taken unwise shortcuts on explaining soem findings more fully. Two of the big problems continue to be that climatologists generally ARE in concensus that human activity is influencing climate, but disagree about the amount of change is due to anthropogenic factors. Secondly, when 'global warming' is isolated in a vaccuum and presented as THE big issue, it is problematic. the 2004 Nature study about Kilimanjaro cited in the Senate press release is a perfect example. The study confirms a man-made decrease in Kilimanjaro snowfall due to deforestation. The press release spins this into a refutation of global warming, when in truth it is very good evidence that human activity does alter the Earth's climate. As a cautionary academic I always frame the issue as one of global climate change, and the Gore movie shouls have too. We know damn well that greenhouse emissions are not the sole cause of global climate change, and we've known for years that things like deforestation and diminishhed ocean health are also part of the equation. Global climate systems are pretty complicated things, and the sickness of the planet is systemic and due to many causes. Greenhouse emissions is one of the biggies, and it is something that is in our power to remediate, if only partially. Trying to distill a few decades of research by hundreds of individuals into a 90 minute movie for a popular audience is probably a losing proposition from the standpoint of the academics. A legitimate discussion of the film's merits and shortfalls is healthy (And completely different than the industry-funded smear campaigns of Seitz, Singer, et al). Probably more importantly, if the film gets a critical mass of people thinking about the issues then we can move toward some solutions. QUOTE(NorthSideSox72 @ Jun 28, 2006 -> 10:44 AM) "Majority Press Release" Hilarious. And not one thing in this article that I can see actually supports any falsehoods in the questioned article. Just makes opposite claims. Its simply a response column. Fine. Don't believe them. Don't believe the scores of scientists, and keep polluting and writing death sentences for millions. Yes, millions. Increase our health care costs, give us more heart and lung problems, destroy more crops... because God forbid we expect users of natural resources to do so responsibly. History is repleat with examples of what happens when any society, small or large, assumes the earth will just give us whatever we want regardless of how we treat it: decimation. The earth acts like a living thing, and it reacts in kind to threats. When we become the threat, we will suffer the consequences. One would have to be blind to not see this pattern in history. You are right in suspecting the motives of the source (The GOP Senate Majority). That is why I tried to separate the spin from some valid scientist concerns. And like you I agree that most of the concerns stem from the fact that the Gore film is only telling part of the story, probably doing it an an alarmist way that is anethemic to most scientists, and possibly short-changing other anthropogenic and natural (ie, cyclical) factors.

What Cheney finds offensive, not offensive. From the Daily Show.

QUOTE(LowerCaseRepublican @ Jun 28, 2006 -> 02:35 AM) If the state in which I live is not kinder, more human, more considerate, more intelligent than the mad act of these two boys, I am sorry that I have lived so long." ^^^ An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. -- That hippy-smellin' motherf***er Gandhi

QUOTE(Gregory Pratt @ Jun 27, 2006 -> 11:04 PM) First he gets caught with Oxycontin, now Viagra. I guess it's official: He's an insensitive prick! Or a massive raging cock with a low tolerance for pain.

QUOTE(EvilMonkey @ Jun 27, 2006 -> 10:26 PM) http://www.sitewave.net/PPROJECT/ That links to a petition signed by over 17,000 scientists that disagreed with Kyoto and some of the global warming alarmists. I'm at a loss that you can even site Frederick Seitz petetion as being relevant. No, if anything, this is a premiere example of how money can buy bad science and protect evildoers. Here's the quick history lesson: Seitz was the NAS President for a few years in the 60s, and he was one of the fathers of solid state physics, back in the 40s. So he has the credentials to be seen as a believable authority by those who don't know better (i.e., unsuspecting Joe Public). Before Seitz started shilling for Big Oil, guess who he shilled for? Big Tobacco. I s*** you not, look it all up as it is incredibly well documented. He was hired by RJ Reynolds because he had the credentials to dupe the Joe Publics into thinking he was an authority, and nbecause he was willing to sell his soul for a buck. He oversaw the awarding of more than $45 Million (!) in RJ Reynolds "research" money that was supposed to go to labs looking into the potential health risks of smoking (something we know know Big Tobacco had been aware of since the 50s). The catch? Seitz specifically looked for and awarded money to crappy researchers at lousy labs who would NOT look very hard for health issues. And he paid them millions to not look hard for it. It's no coincidence, then, that it was a Canadian and a Mexican lab (University of Toronto/Ontario Cancer Institute and the University of Mexico) that eventually blew the lid off of the Big Tobacco cover-up. TThat's because Seitz wasn't controlling the pursestrings of those institutions. There's a lot more to that story, but we have to move on to Seitz and Big Oil and the "Oregon Petition." First, I'm going to SHOCK you and tell you wo funded the "reseearch" underlying the petition: the American Petroleum Institute. I'll also tell you about the scientists who wrote the Robinson Report: Two (of five) of them had ties to the coal industry, and two others were senior scientists with a Washington conservative think-tank (the George C. Marshall Institute) supported by ExxonMobil and a slew of right wing and pro-industry foundations. Oh, yeah, they worked there under Seitz too. As for the Robinson Paper itself – sent out by Seitz along with his petition cards and made up to look like it was reprinted from the American Petroleum Institute. It wasn't. It was NEVER peer reviewed and NEVER published in a peer reviewed journal. Furthermore, for a paper titled "Environmental Effects of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide," it seems Robinson et al were not well-qualified. Robinson was a biochemist who had never published a thing in the fields of atmospheric science or climatology. None of the other four authors were climatologists either. What sid REAL atmospheric scientists have to say about Seitz and the Robinson Report? "The mailing is clearly designed to be deceptive by giving people the impression that the article, which is full of half-truths, is a reprint and has passed peer review." -- Raymond Pierrehumbert (U of C atmospheric chemist) "Researchers are wondering if someone is trying to hoodwink them." " -- F. Sherwood Rowland (atmospheric chemist and NAS Foreign Secretary) Well, it seems like 17K plus scientists who should have known better were indeed hoodwinked. And what did NAS say about its beloved former President? "The NAS Council would like to make it clear that this petition has nothing to do with the National Academy of Sciences and that the manuscript was not published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences or in any other peer-reviewed journal. The petition does not reflect the conclusions of expert reports of the Academy." I can go on, but I've got to get back to work. Suffice to say, you Googlemonkeyed about as bulls*** an "expert" as you could to evoke a fanciful climate change naysayer movement in relevant academic fields. Seitz is rivaled only by S. Fred Singer, whos story is remarkably similar (eg, used to be a relevant scientist, then shiiled for Big Tobacco until they could't keep up the lie – currently shilling for Big Oil and having a hard time keeping up the lie). In my opinion there is currently one scientific authority who remained a climate change naysayer and had (HAD) some science to back it up, and that is Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama in Huntsville/Marshall Space Flight Center. He's got all the integrity in teh world and his findings were just not showing the "hocky stick graph" effect Michael Mann and others were seeing. he even made cogent arguments that HE was ggetting funding short-shrift because all the global warming believers at NSF were screwing him over. Well, a year or so ago, his evidence came crashing down - and he admits it. He was using satellites and high altitude baloons to take sea surface and atmospheric readings, annd he was not seeing the evidence of atmospheric warming that others were seeing. Then some other researchers looked at his calculations and realized that there had been a half-day time shift somewhere and he was (get this) measuring temperatures at noght and thinking they were daytime temperatures! So, not surprizingly, his measurements always came out several degrees cooler than anybody else's Like I sauid tthough, Spencer has conceded the methodological error. He wasn't trying to hoodwink anybody, he just got it wrong. Sorry for the rant/ramble. But when I saw Friggin Fred Seitz posted as the big anti climate change authority, i had to respond.

QUOTE(SoxFan1 @ Jun 27, 2006 -> 09:41 PM) Uuuum, f*** yes. Bullpen:

QUOTE(NorthSideSox72 @ Jun 27, 2006 -> 08:52 PM) OK, I understand that some people think that the NYT went to far in publishing that information. I don't agree, but I understand it. But will you please point out the hypocrisy? Where is the uneven treatment? I think the perceived hypocrisy in kap's estimation is that the MSM stoked the Fitzmas fire in the wake of the Plame outing, but is now saying they did nothing wrong in outing this program. But nobody is giving the NYT any credit for the restraint they have shown the White House before only to get burned by it. They sat on the NSA story for a whole year - at the request of the White House. They could have broke the story before the 2004 election, quite possibly changing the outcome of the election if they did. But the White House begged them to kill the story and they did. A year later, the story finally broke and there are a whole lot of people who have seriosu reservations about power abuse in the Unitary Executive. Lots of people with Rs after their name as well as Ds. And of course the White House cried foul and blamed the messenger. So now NYT is in a position where they have a story that again has elements of administrative over-reach and disregard for privacy, and is by many ex-official accounts breaking the spirit if not the letter of the law. They know that the people running SWIFT thought their cooperation was a short-term thing and were ready to pull out until Greenspan and other financial bigwigs made some concessions and pulled them back in (somebody read the stiry, Rex). They weighed the pros and cons of running with the story, and they decided that nearly 5 years after Bush told the terrorists and the world that we would use every means available to track and choke off money flow to suspected terror groups it's probbably not divulging much to print a story confirming it.

QUOTE(WCSox @ Jun 27, 2006 -> 07:48 PM) I was talking about professors (like the ones cited in the article), not government employees. Their applications for federal grants are reviewed by their peers... not Dick Cheney and Condoleeza Rice. The Administration does not attempt to stop them from publishing their results in independent, peer-reviewed journals. An important point you are neglecting to consider is that the Administration and Congress DO set the research agenda for the nation by approving federal funding. Science funding by NSF, DOE, and NOAA (three of the bigggies for climate shange research dollars) has already fallen precipitously since 9/11 and the Iraq War. NOAA funding for my fields (ocean sciences) has all but disappeared these last few funding cycles. Aa a matter of fact, I'm sitting at my desk at work right now, writing a final report for NOAA Sea Grant trying to convince them that I made wise use of the $296K they've given my group for over the last three years. I certainly believe we have, and all our interim reviews have been favorable. But we've been told in no uncertain terms not to count on a similar project grant any time in the foreseeable future because the funding just ain't there. For now, the atmospheric side of NOAA is in better shape, funding-wise (we ocean heads cynically lament that NOAA now stands for "No Ocean, All Atmosphere"). But who is to say that the administration and their Congressional lackeys won't change tthe rresearch priorities if the don't like seeing mountains of anthropogenic climate change evidence continue to pile up? Several prominent AAAS members already stuck their necks way out a couple of years ago when they signed an open letter to GWB admonishing him for being strongly anti-science, for caving to industry instead of crafting policy based on sound science. Now tell me the stage is not now set for abuse and coercion. Is it really so far fetched that the White House might have a list of blacklisted scientists that start losing their funding 'for budgetary reasons?' There also is hesitancy at the institutional level in some places to let scientists publish certain findings because it may thrreaten funding sources. Thtat's a chilling thing to contemplate as a scientist who believes in free information exchange. QUOTE(WCSox @ Jun 27, 2006 -> 08:28 PM) (3) The Bush Administration has little control over scientists not directly employed by the federal government. They can't "silence" their results and they don't control whose grants get funded. Not true, see above post. If congress says NSF, NOAA, DOE get gutted, they get gutted. If the White House and Congress decide to fund NASA or more cancer research instead of atmospheric research, they get gutted.

Two words: Lockbox.

QUOTE(WCSox @ Jun 27, 2006 -> 07:10 PM) I've attended school/worked at four of them and can't say that I don't know of any. Which means that you Do know of Some. So what are you arguing about?.

QUOTE(rventura23 @ Jun 27, 2006 -> 06:41 PM) is it feasible to put a new video card on a laptop? will try new drivers Yes, by adding a PCMCIA card, or a PCI card using a PCI:PCMCIA adapter. I did read that in Windows XP you have to make sure you get the latest drivers because the default drivers may not have multi-monitor support. So try that first. Disclaimer: As a mac guy, i've enjoyed multiple-monitor support since forever, so I'm not necessarily the best source of information.

QUOTE(jackie hayes @ Jun 27, 2006 -> 05:42 PM) Bush said he would not see it? Wow. Am I the only one who thinks that's a tonedeaf move, politically? There are a million ways to dismiss the idea without making it look as if you're shielding yourself from outside ideas. I have to paraphrase because I can't find it now, but GWB said that while he is "concerned" about global warming he thinks it's time to "move beyond" who/what to blame for it. That tells you how concerned the Administration really is right there, as solutions can only emerge when the causes are identified by science and then governments do what is necessary to affect solutions. With the Supremes ready to hear arguments and eventually rule on whether the Administration has a legal obligation under the Clean Air Act to curb greenhouse emissions, it's certainly no wonder they would like to move beyond assessing principal causes. And, while not diminishing the significance of the GWB conservation move a couple of weeks back at declaration of the NW Hawaiian Islands a National Monument, the cynic in me now sees that the timing of that pro-environment move makes sense in light of the anti-conservation move the Administration knew they would soon be taking in defending their refusal to enforce the Clean water Act.

New video card?? Maybe new drivers will do it if the drivers are out of date.

I think I know how this happened. I bet somebody asked him, "Rush, how long are you going to be such a big dick?", and then he started popping the Viagra was just to prove he could be a big dick for as long as it takes.

QUOTE(DABearSoX @ Jun 27, 2006 -> 04:02 AM) They played the NL west last year, and at Coors, so the next time we play the Rockies it will be at home Ach. well at least the beer will still be there.

QUOTE(Gregory Pratt @ Jun 27, 2006 -> 01:22 AM) I don't buy Harry as a horcrux, but we'll see. A stretch probably, but it seems like it could explain a lot of things. The psychic connection, parselmouth ability, near-sorting into Slytherin, etc. . . Of course, if it was the case I don't believe Voldemort would be aware of it - it would have happened accidentally when he was trying to horcrux something else at the time of his defeat.