The “24 hour” contract is a pretty standard practice in the case of elite players and Eddie George qualifies without question.  It’s up to Bud Adams, of course, but he should do it without hesitation.  Eddie deserves that last chance to hear the sold-out crowd at LP Field chant “Ed-die” one more time.

Make it happen.

The government can get location data from the cellular/mobile carriers. The companies generally know the location of their subscribers when their mobile phones are turned on, accurate to within about the length of a football field.

At this point, however, we have only the governments “word” that they aren’t using the practice in a manner inconsistent with the Fourth Amendment, which doesn’t truly bother me until they start refusing to answer questions about the practice–then it starts to look like they have something to hide. Funny how often the government behaves like my children…

Sounds like a good program–I’ll have to do a little research and learn more about it. Let’s hope the judges actually walk away with a little “scientific method” and “baloney detection kit” to use on the bench.

Painfully visible are the inherent design deficiencies of a foundation that was never intended to support such weight. Windows seems to move an inch for every time that Mac OS X or Linux laps it.

The best solution to the multiple woes of Windows is starting over. Completely. Now.

But sticking with that same core architecture is the problem, not the solution. In April, Michael A. Silver and Neil MacDonald, analysts at Gartner, the research firm, presented a talk titled “Windows Is Collapsing.” Their argument isn’t that Windows will cease to function but that the accumulated complexity, as Microsoft tries to support 20 years of legacies, prevents timely delivery of advances. “The situation is untenable,” their joint presentation says. “Windows must change radically.”

In September, Seth MacFarlane, creator of “Family Guy” on television, will unveil a carefully guarded new project called “Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy.” Unlike “Family Guy,” which is broadcast on Fox, this animation series will appear exclusively on the Internet.

The innovative part involves the distribution plan. Google will syndicate the program using its AdSense advertising system to thousands of Web sites that are predetermined to be gathering spots for Mr. MacFarlane’s target audience, typically young men. Instead of placing a static ad on a Web page, Google will place a “Cavalcade” video clip.

[via The Apple Blog]

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority:

We are aware of the problem of handgun violence in this country, and we take seriously the concerns raised by the many amici who believe that prohibition of handgun ownership is a solution. The Constitution leaves the District of Columbia a variety of tools for combating that problem, including some measures regulating handguns [...] But the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table. These include the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home. Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride of our Nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security, and where gun violence is a serious problem. That is perhaps debatable, but what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this Court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct.

554 U. S. ____ (2008) slip opinion at 64.

Without expressing any opinion as to the merits, I must say that limiting punitive damages to the amount of compensatory damages is bad policy–period. Don’t get me wrong the jury’s award of $5 billion was excessive, and excessive punitive damage awards aren’t any better. But, punitive damages are meant to deter (the defendant or others similarly situated, as we say in legalese–or would that phrase more properly be described as boilerplate?).

But is $500 million going to have any effect? On Exxon? Exxon. As in the Exxon that reported $11.7 billion in quarterly profits just this past February. Let me restate that more deliberately so that you can glean the subtle points from what I just said. $11.7 billion in PROFIT in one QUARTER of a year². Profit, you know, as in what’s left after subtracting all operating costs from gross earnings.

Just for the sake of illustration let’s do a little math (and I’ll be the first to point out that those were record-setting profits-not only for Exxon but for any US company ever). At the current quarterly rate of profit–what am I thinking?–we don’t have to do that–we know Exxon’s profit for last year: $40.61 billion. To make the math simple to follow, all we have to do is divide $40 billion by $500 million and see that the punitive damage award represents a little less than ¹/₈₀th of a single year’s profits. Dividing 365 days³ by 80 we see that we are talking about the amount of profit that Exxon earned in four and one-half (4 ¹/₂) days of the last year.

Would the loss of 4.5 days’ profit deter you from much of anything⁴?

¹I don’t want to sound like I’m one of those whacked-out conspiracy theorists, but does it strike anyone else as peculiar that half the Court was nominated by the two Bushes? One family accounts for half the Supreme Court. Hmmm. Of course, my dad used to repeat the now-famous quote attributed to Will Rogers, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.”

“All I know is that I know nothing” is not an expression of skepticism, but of dogmatism. It asserts that I do in fact have positive knowledge of one and only one truth: that I do not have knowledge of any truths. This is obviously self-contradictory, and is a mistake often falsely attributed to Socrates. What Socrates does say is that he does not think or claim that he knows anything that he does not in fact really know. He has the “human wisdom” (20d) of recognizing his own ignorance, unlike his many unfortunate interlocutors. This is the attitude of an honest and sincere skeptic: he does not proclaim knowledge to be impossible, but merely is humble about his own and continues the search, always critically examining any knowledge claim.

This is a terribly interesting piece.  You should go read it now.

The Socratic Method has always been employed to expose falsity and to encourage rational thinking.  Socrates was skeptical, his student Plato was dogmatic (and, in today’s terminology: anti-science).  There’s a huge difference.

In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.” The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics — and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm.

“Even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools?” Obama said. “Would we go with James Dobson’s or Al Sharpton’s?” referring to the civil rights leader.

Dobson took aim at examples Obama cited in asking which Biblical passages should guide public policy — passages like Leviticus, which Obama said suggests slavery is OK and eating shellfish is an abomination, or Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, “a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application.”

[...]

“I think he’s deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology,” Dobson said.

The guilty dog, as they say, barks the loudest.

Herein lies the fundamental (pun intended) problem with the bible. While Dobson makes reference to a “traditional understanding,” exactly what is it? I hate to point this out, but referencing a “traditional understanding” doesn’t help (in fact, it’s nothing but bullshit). Anyone can see that catholics, methodists, baptists, pentacostals, etc., are all going to have different ideas about the “traditional understanding” just as they do about everything else related to christianity. Duh!

It is kind of funny hearing a fundagelical like Dobson saying that someone who disagrees with him is wrong because he’s not practicing what the media calls “buffet christianity” (I prefer the term “a la carte christianity”). I guess “picking-and-choosing your bible verses” is fine as long as it results in agreement with James Dobson’s beliefs, but is wrong if it results in disagreement, eh?

“Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits”

George Carlin died yesterday of heart failure.

He was as much a social commentator as comedian, and will be sorely missed. I think Jon Stewart summed it up best when he referred to Carlin as being a member of the “holy trinity of comedy,” along with Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor.

Yeah, sounds like he’s pulled his shit together.  Again, good luck Dallas!

“The past is the past. I made some bad decisions and I owned up to all my decisions,” Jones said [...] “Now I worry about the future.”

Great, it’s not like anyone’s ever heard that before.  Good luck, Dallas.

[via Unreasonable Faith]

This raises again the insistent question: who but a slave thanks his master for what his master has decided to do without bothering to consult him?

Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great, New York:Twelve/Warner (2007) at p.20.

It is available for free download (subject to a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial, no derivative works license) in iPod/iPhone, HD, and even DVD-image formats. Get it.  Watch it.  Tell others about it.

I don’t pretend to “know” what this world needs, but more critical thinking would be a good start, IMHO.

[via Bad Astronomy Blog]

Super-Earths are more massive than Earth but less massive than Uranus and Neptune. Spotting true Earth-sized planets is challenging with current technology, but the presence of super-Earths suggests finding a world like ours is just a matter of time, researchers say.

On a Monday morning last month, highway patrol officers visited 20 classrooms at El Camino High School to announce some horrible news: Several students had been killed in car wrecks over the weekend.

Classmates wept. Some became hysterical.

A few hours and many tears later, though, the pain turned to fury when the teenagers learned that it was all a hoax — a scared-straight exercise designed by school officials to dramatize the consequences of drinking and driving.

Way to go. I’m sure these teenagers were easily able to shake off the feelings of betrayal and focus on the content of your message. What a lame, stupid move. And what was the schools motive? To “traumatize” the kids!

Officials at the 3,100-student school officials defended the program.

“They were traumatized, but we wanted them to be traumatized,” said guidance counselor Lori Tauber, who helped organize the shocking exercise and got dozens of students to participate. “That’s how they get the message.”

Encarta: traumatize
1. cause somebody emotional shock: to cause somebody to experience severe emotional shock or distress, often resulting in long-lasting psychological damage
2. injure somebody or something: to cause physical injury to somebody or something

Well, looks like they got what they wanted–a school full of traumatized kids:

As seniors prepare for graduation parties Friday, school officials in the largely prosperous San Diego suburb are defending themselves against allegations they went too far.

At school assemblies, some students held up posters that read: “Death is real. Don’t play with our emotions.”

And nobody ever grabs a beer when they’ve been dealt a severe emotional shock, right? Right, only when they learn that the severe emotional shock was intentionally inflicted–and needlessly at that!

Now don’t get me wrong, nobody wants teenagers drinking and driving and nobody wants to see them die needlessly in horrific car wrecks. I have two kids of my own and quite obviously I don’t want that for either of them (I also don’t want this for either of them). But you know what I do? I talk to my kids–ABOUT EVERYTHING–nothing, and I mean nothing is “off limits” or “taboo”. Knowledge is the greatest weapon with which you can arm your kids. (Well, unless you want them to believe that the universe is 6000 years old and that human beings used to have to run away from dinosaurs…but that’s a topic for another day.)

You want your kids to make good decisions? Then you had better teach them how to make good decisions, and it starts with teaching them how to think and not merely focusing on what to think.

Saying that atheism requires faith because you do not understand science is a non sequitur.

Well said. But, I think his explanation of what atheism is and isn’t is very apt:

To believe the creation story requires faith because there is insufficient evidence to support the belief. Most Christians readily acknowledge this and do not see it as a problem. If ample evidence existed, faith would not be necessary. In fact, it would be entirely irrelevant. The mountains of evidence supporting the naturalistic worldview are undeniable, even by most Christians. One needs no faith the accept gravity, evolution, or many other basic scientific concepts. No faith is needed to accept naturalism; considerable faith is required to argue for any alternative.

Now consider atheism itself. An atheist is one who does not accept the theistic belief claim (i.e., a god or gods exist). The theist accepts this claim on faith; the atheist in unwilling to do so. The atheist [does not] need to argue that no gods do (or could) exist. The atheistic position is simply that the theist has not met an acceptable burden of proof that is his or hers to meet. In other words, an atheist is an atheist precisely because he or she is not willing to accept the theist’s claim on faith.

[via Atheist Revolution]

The species had been known to eat fruit and forage for crabs and insects, but never before fish from rivers.

Many Christians seem so hung up on the idea of worship that they cannot comprehend how anyone could not worship something. We atheists are routinely accused of worshiping Darwin, science, humanity, and even ourselves. Nothing could be further from the truth. We do not worship anything, and it baffles me why this is so difficult for some Christians to understand.

Worshiping makes no sense to me, and I’m not sure it ever has. Even as a Christian, it bothered me that the sort of god who demanded worship could be deserving of it. I dealt with this gnawing doubt the same way many Christians do - by trying not to think about it.

Nailed it! “by trying not to think about it.”

Psychologically, the common tendency of Christians to denigrate atheists by making us seem more like them is fascinating. We see it with the claims that atheists must worship something and that atheism requires faith. There are many ways in which atheists and Christians are similar, but these are not among them.

How true.

[via Atheist Revolution]

Limited?  Why are they worried about Mrs. Clinton?  I mean, all she needs to do is make a few more $1000 investments in futures markets and she’ll be fine.  And, even if not, she can just have Bill give a few more speeches!

Weren’t the Clintons “reportedly” nearly destitute with bills and legal fees when they left the White House?  Hell, eight years later, Hillary is able to lend her campaign $11.4 million.  She’ll be fine–really.  Stop worrying.

Check out the new ad!

How’s that for “breaking news?”

I predict:

* That I’ll be totally ecstatic and awed during the Keynote Address,

Yep. Nailed that one. I was riveted–in fact, I was giggly happy–during the whole Keynote. So, I’ll count that as one correct prediction.

* That I’ll be following along with no fewer than four (4) browser tabs tuned to my favorite of the various liveblogging sites,

Yes and no. I did follow along to four (4) of my favorite liveblogging sites: MacRumorsLive, MacObserver Live Coverage, Engadget and Gizmodo. However, the MacObserver feed stopped automatically refreshing for me only a few minutes in, and nothing I tried could get updates from their site. So, I gave up on them and went with only the other three (3). I’ll count this one as half-right and half-wrong.

So far, I’m at 1.5 out of 2, so that’s not terrible… The results of the other two predictions won’t be in until at least tomorrow morning…

So, it’s time for my never-annual predictions. So, without further ado, let my grab my crystal ball… and, I predict:

• That I’ll be totally ecstatic and awed during the Keynote Address,
• That I’ll be following along with no fewer than four (4) browser tabs tuned to my favorite of the various liveblogging sites,
• That I’ll watch the Keynote Address tonight at home and be even more ecstatic and awed than I was following along with the livebloggers,
• That when the Keynote Address is available for download as a podcast, I’ll watch it yet again.

Well, those are my predictions concerning the WWDC08 Keynote Address. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens to know how accurate my predictions are this time around.

It’s so hard to believe in anything anymore, you know what I mean? It’s like – religion – I mean, you can’t really take it seriously ‘cause it seems so mythological and it seems so arbitrary. And then, on the other hand, science, you know, is just pure empiricism and by virtue of its method it excludes metaphysics. I guess I wouldn’t believe in anything if it weren’t for my lucky astrology mood watch.

Steve Martin, A Wild and Crazy Guy, 1978.

Final e-mails from vanished subscribers will be triggered when three of the site’s five Christian staffers fail to log in for six days in a row.

Personally, I’d need some sort of assurance (ha! an unintentional pun! get it? I can’t simply “take it on faith”) that three of the site’s five Christian staffers are actually going to make the cut!

So, what is my advice to evangelical Christians on “witnessing” to atheists? Don’t do it. Told you is was simple.

Here is why you should not “witness” to atheists:

[...]

5. We don’t come to your home and evangelize atheism. Maybe we should, but we don’t. Reflect on how you would like an atheist interrupting your family time or attempting to promote atheism with your children. How about treating us how you would like to be treated?

You know, I’m pretty sure I’ve heard that last sentence somewhere before… I think maybe it was worded a little differently, but I know I’ve heard that before. [/sarcasm]

[via Atheist Revolution]

What Baptist leaders have known for years is finally public: The Southern Baptist Convention is a denomination in decline. Half of the SBC’s 43,000 churches will have shut their doors by 2030 if current trends continue.

Evangelical faith has been dropping since 1900, when 42 percent of the U.S. claimed that distinction. Every year, Religious Right evangelicals, such as those who lead the Southern Baptists, are a smaller proportion of the country. Every year, their core values are violated more flagrantly by the media, scientific discovery and mainstream behavior. Every election, politicians promise to serve them and then don’t because evangelicals lack the power to make them.

What all this means is that we were duped.

All the hype proclaiming an evangelical resurgence was merely that–hype, a furious shout from a faith losing its grip, manipulation by a relatively small group of dedicated, focused, political power-seekers.

The second-largest evangelical group, the National Association of Evangelicals, has claimed 30 million members. Their churches actually have 7.6 million, tops. Most of those are having the same problems the Baptists are having.

Who knew?  Go read the whole article.

[via NoGodBlog]

Opponents of teaching evolution, in a natural selection of sorts, have gradually shed those strategies that have not survived the courts. Over the last decade, creationism has given rise to “creation science,” which became “intelligent design,” which in 2005 was banned from the public school curriculum in Pennsylvania by a federal judge.

Now a battle looms in Texas over science textbooks that teach evolution, and the wrestle for control seizes on three words. None of them are “creationism” or “intelligent design” or even “creator.”

The words are “strengths and weaknesses.”

Starting this summer, the state education board will determine the curriculum for the next decade and decide whether the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution should be taught. The benign-sounding phrase, some argue, is a reasonable effort at balance. But critics say it is a new strategy taking shape across the nation to undermine the teaching of evolution, a way for students to hear religious objections under the heading of scientific discourse.

The critics are right.  This is just the latest attempt by the Creationists to stuff a wolf into sheep’s clothing.  It’s nothing new–as Intelligent Design was nothing new–they’ve just changed the name again.  Creation Science begat Intelligent Design which now begets “strengths and weaknesses”.  Same old shit, different day.

[via Evolving in Kansas]