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Okay, but check this comparison of Nokia's best camera phone ever versus a professional camera. Can you guess which one wins?

The US military doesn't enforce Christianity, ...

Don't tell that to victims of the Evangelical Mob at the U.S.A.F. Academy.

Notch did NOT invent a new genre; he even admitted he blatantly ripped off Infiminer

And ironically, You can get Minecraft: Story Mode on Steam, although to be fair that postdates Notch's sellout to Microsoft (after having promised to eventually open source the game). Notch is just a big liar, but I'm sure he's sleeping fine on his Scrooge McDuck-scale pile of cash.

Well, if you don't want to believe what I have seen (mina olen saksa, aga... well, I nevertheless still remember some Estonian from my extensive travels there about twelve years ago, the only place I haven't visited was Hiiumaa), here you are:

https://web.archive.org/web/20...

https://web.archive.org/web/20...

Most Russians were being treated like second class citizens, only worse - they weren't able to get an actual Estonian citizenship because one of the requirements for the naturalisation was to speak Estonian better than many actual Estonians were able to. Things have changed somewhat for the better since then, though.

Well, if you don't want to believe what I have seen (mina olen saksa, aga... well, I nevertheless still remember some Estonian from my extensive travels there about twelve years ago, the only place I haven't visited was Hiiumaa), here you are:

https://web.archive.org/web/20...

https://web.archive.org/web/20...

Most Russians were being treated like second class citizens, only worse - they weren't able to get an actual Estonian citizenship because one of the requirements for the naturalisation was to speak Estonian better than many actual Estonians were able to. Things have changed somewhat for the better since then, though.

Whoever modded you down must be one of the SJW nutters who is trying to rewrite history to only include women and black people.

Here is PROOF that the term open source existed well before "Christine Peterson", if that is her real name, came up with it.

https://web.archive.org/web/19...

http://web.archive.org/web/19980422034538/http://opensource.com:80/

But it's clearly an unrelated consultancy.

Here is an explanation from 1994 by Dr. David Goodstein of Caltech, who testified to Congress on this back then, whose "The Big Crunch" essay concludes: https://www.its.caltech.edu/~d...
"Let me finish by summarizing what I've been trying to tell you. We stand at an historic juncture in the history of science. The long era of exponential expansion ended decades ago, but we have not yet reconciled ourselves to that fact. The present social structure of science, by which I mean institutions, education, funding, publications and so on all evolved during the period of exponential expansion, before The Big Crunch. They are not suited to the unknown future we face. Today's scientific leaders, in the universities, government, industry and the scientific societies are mostly people who came of age during the golden era, 1950 - 1970. I am myself part of that generation. We think those were normal times and expect them to return. But we are wrong. Nothing like it will ever happen again. It is by no means certain that science will even survive, much less flourish, in the difficult times we face. Before it can survive, those of us who have gained so much from the era of scientific elites and scientific illiterates must learn to face reality, and admit that those days are gone forever."

And see also "Disciplined Minds" from 2000 about some other consequences: http://disciplinedminds.tripod... "In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline." The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy. Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society."

Or Philip Greenspun from 2006: http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...
"This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead. Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias."

Or the Village Voice from 2004 about how it is even worse in the humanities than sci/tech grad school:
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
"Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document le

All Chinese hotels do this for all guests, and it has been this way for a long time. This is just bringing Airbnb in line with the rest. Sometimes the staff doesn't know how to register foreign guests so someone made a tutorial so you could step behind the counter and do it yourself.

China is doing a big thing now where they're cracking down on quasi-legal and illegal businesses to get them to register and pay taxes and otherwise get under the control of the Communist Party.

They dropped the nonsensical 290 mile claim...But since they've been playing fast and loose with the numbers so far, I wouldn't be surprised to see some fudge factor there too

Famed Musk cock holster Rei stepping up 1523 local Iceland time!!!
The allure of that tiny South African penis squirming in his mouth was simply too much to resist in the middle of the night!!!

It seems like Edmunds.com editor-in-chief Scott Oldham only got 120 mile range from a Model S. That's a far cry from the claimed 300 mile range isn't it?

Ooops, looks like Edmunds.com received some kind of DMCA takedown of that page. Archived pages still has a screen shot though.

Since at least 30/09/2014
https://web.archive.org/web/20...

On the specific issue of magnetic reconnection, I was really referring to the fact that there are two separate sides to that debate -- and the astrophysicists, if pressed, would have a difficult time explaining the opposing arguments.

In my opinion, a huge aspect to this problem is the institutional aversion to telling certain awkward stories that relate to these topics. The mistaken assumption of empty interplanetary, interstellar and intergalactic space is perhaps a prime example of a story which academics and science journalists seem to treat as sort of "rated X" insofar as they generally refuse to place any importance on it. Yet, it can be traced back to the selection of numerous theories in the early 1900's. For example,

"Alfven's proposal of a galactic magnetic field met with widespread resistance (if not scorn), as it directly contradicted the prevailing wisdom that a vacuum filled interstellar space."

Eddington explicitly refers to the assumption is his choice of models for powering the Sun:

"Since we are limited to energy liberated in the deep interior of the star, extraneous sources of supply are ruled out, and it is scarcely possible to escape the conclusion that the supply of energy for future expenditure is already hidden in the star. Energy, however, cannot be successfully hidden; it betrays itself by its manifestation as mass. Energy and mass are equivalent, and we know the masses of the stars."

Although I don't have an authoritative source on hand, it can also be shown that Sydney Chapman used the assumption to reject Kristian Birkeland's proposal that the aurora originated with the Sun.

These are remarkable historical observations insofar as we today know that this assumption was incorrect (And more than that, the mistaken assumption was hiding from Eddington an alternative potential power source.)

The thing about this is that it's rare to see anybody connecting the dots between this former mistaken assumption and the theories which "won out" as popular today -- yet, it is also remarkably easy to show that it did in fact play a part. And there can be little doubt that even Einstein's work could also be implicated as basing on it, for the first instrumented probes were not actually sent to space until 1958 -- 3 years after his death. So, can it be that Einstein was simply working with what he had available to him? The question would seem to be valid, for once plasma is introduced into the conversation, then we can without a doubt formulate alternative hypotheses for all sorts of cosmological observations.

The mainstream would be wise to start telling the story of this mistake, for it is extremely important. I try to explain why here.

How does this legislation impact a treasonous president who hires underage sex workers and ogles naked underage girls at his creepy 'beauty pageants'?

What the hell are you talking about? Hillary lost.
>> Her and Bill's flights on Jeffrey Epstein's "Lolita Express"
>> Her connection to Laura Silsby/Galyer, who was CONVICTED of trafficking Haitian children while working with children, and then went right back into working with children after the name change
>> Her campaign manager, John PEDOsta, and such doozies as the Luzzatto children in the pool
>> then you have "we sleep in the same bed" Uma Abedin... and her "prize" of a husband, Anthony Weiner
>> not to mention creepy uncle Joe
>> and Barak Hussein "I was a communist in college and I love walnut sauce and $65K-worth of hotdogs" Obama... and his "wife" Big Mike
>> then you have all the spirit cooking rituals they got up to with Marina Abramovic

Should I go on?

Also the "dirty dossier" was confirmed to be a complete hoax written by Christopher Steele.
If you're really against sick shit, you should probably figure out who's really guilty of it.

Simple solution: practice mucophagy.

Plus I host my own IMAP server and don't feel like giving all my personal info to Google/M$/Yahoo/Apple.

You're running Thunderbird (a free software program; a program that respects it's user's freedoms to run, inspect, share, and modify the software) on top of non-free Microsoft Windows (proprietary, user-subjugating software). Microsoft has all the power they need to get your IMAP credentials. If you have Google, Apple, or other proprietary software running on the same system they likely can read your stored credentials or read your keystrokes, mouse clicks, and screen grab whatever they want too. So you've likely already given those credentials away without realizing it.

Windows users have already been through many instances of Microsoft asserting its control over the user: tricking users into switching from Windows 7 to Windows 10, ignoring the so-called privacy settings thus rendering them irrelevant even if set to ostensibly maximize a user's privacy, and so much more. There's simply no sound argument for believing that running any program on Windows or changing any Windows settings in any way will result in making Windows respect a user's choices when they conflict with what Microsoft wants. As with all proprietary software, ultimately the proprietor controls how the software behaves and therefore users only get as much control as the proprietor allows.

If you want to be in more full control over your computing (as one might surmise from the unusual choice to run your own IMAP server), you really should consider switching to a fully-free software OS such as a GNU/Linux system where you install only free software on top of that.

I think that nicely shows that you have no idea what paleontologists do or how they do it.

Fortunately, neither TFA nor this thread are about Paleontology, so that's irrelevant.

Your argument regarding Economists is an "Appeal to Authority" fallacy

Not at all

Yes, it is. You claimed, Economics is a science, because Nobel Prize Committee considers it to be. You offered no other argument — because you appealed to the authority of the committee. It is the classic definition of this particular fallacy.

The climate scientists make predictions routinely and are proven to be accurate

This was your opportunity to cite such predictions. Curiously, you missed it... I wonder, why.

You also have to understand that it takes years for most predictions of climate models to be proven.

Oh, I understand it very well. And I also remember, how, back those years ago, the predictions were of Global Warming and of snow becoming a thing of the past. For example, in 2000 the claim was:

Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”. “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is"

Now that we have cold winters with lots of snow, has the good Doctor been renounced by his colleagues and fans — like yourself — for a fool? No, Dr Viner still works for the government...

Has any one of the profession come out to admit, they've been wrong before — and enumerated the steps taken to avoid the same follies in the future? The Climate research spends billions of dollars every year — is it too much to expect some accountability?

Your failure to examine it does not make it less valid.

I examined every bit of evidence you presented in this discussion...

The point being made is that cosmology is in a deep crisis, and that neither the crisis nor the profound paradigm-shift that seems to be required to solve the crisis are discussed in physics departments. How would I know? Just paying attention to what academic whistleblowers have to say (see the list below).

An Open Letter to the Scientific Community
Published in New Scientist, May 22, 2004
cosmologystatement.org

Website no longer works, but original page can be viewed here

https://web.archive.org/web/20...

"The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities, things that we have never observed -- inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent examples. Without them, there would be a fatal contradiction between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory. In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the least, raise serious questions about the validity of the underlying theory.

But the big bang theory can't survive without these fudge factors. Without the hypothetical inflation field, the big bang does not predict the smooth, isotropic cosmic background radiation that is observed, because there would be no way for parts of the universe that are now more than a few degrees away in the sky to come to the same temperature and thus emit the same amount of microwave radiation.

Without some kind of dark matter, unlike any that we have observed on Earth despite 20 years of experiments, big-bang theory makes contradictory predictions for the density of matter in the universe. Inflation requires a density 20 times larger than that implied by big bang nucleosynthesis, the theory's explanation of the origin of the light elements. And without dark energy, the theory predicts that the universe is only about 8 billion years old, which is billions of years younger than the age of many stars in our galaxy.

What is more, the big bang theory can boast of no quantitative predictions that have subsequently been validated by observation. The successes claimed by the theory's supporters consist of its ability to retrospectively fit observations with a steadily increasing array of adjustable parameters, just as the old Earth-centered cosmology of Ptolemy needed layer upon layer of epicycles.

Yet the big bang is not the only framework available for understanding the history of the universe. Plasma cosmology and the steady-state model both hypothesize an evolving universe without beginning or end. These and other alternative approaches can also explain the basic phenomena of the cosmos, including the abundances of light elements, the generation of large-scale structure, the cosmic background radiation, and how the redshift of far-away galaxies increases with distance. They have even predicted new phenomena that were subsequently observed, something the big bang has failed to do.

Supporters of the big bang theory may retort that these theories do not explain every cosmological observation. But that is scarcely surprising, as their development has been severely hampered by a complete lack of funding. Indeed, such questions and alternatives cannot even now be freely discussed and examined. An open exchange of ideas is lacking in most mainstream conferences. Whereas Richard Feynman could say that 'science is the culture of doubt', in cosmology today doubt and dissent are not tolerated, and young scientists learn to remain silent if they have something negative to say about the standard big bang model. Those who doubt the big bang fear that saying so will cost them their funding.

Even observations are now interpreted through this biased filter, judged right or wrong depending on whether or not they support the big bang. So discordant data on red shifts, lithium and helium abundances, and galaxy distrib

https://archive.org/details/Ho...

A Google-CodeCademy award program offered $1,000 bonuses to teachers who got 10 or more high school kids to take a JavaScript course, but only counted students from "groups traditionally underrepresented in computer science (girls, or boys who identify as African American, Latino, American Indian or Alaska Native)."

Forum 2000 was doing this 20 years ago.

Australian here. The gun buyback scheme, which massively reduced gun ownership, caused a substantial decrease in the gun homicide rate ... and a substantial increase in the non-gun homicide rate. People committed homicide with knives instead.

See crime statistics here. The gun buyback scheme was in 1996. Note that the homicide rate remains unchanged. The rate of other violent crimes, however, *increased* - possibly gun ownership was having a deterrent effect?

V for Vendetta the book was 'fascists vs anarchists' with neither side being purely good or purely bad. As Alan Moore put it the film 'recasting it as current American neo-conservatism vs. current American liberalism' which he didn't approve of at all :

http://web.archive.org/web/200...

Alan Moore: At the time when I wrote it, it was of course for an English alternative comic magazine around about 1981. Margaret Thatcher had been in power for two or three years. She was facing the first crisis of her, by then, very unpopular government. There were riots all over Britain in places that hadn't seen riots for hundreds of years. There were fascists groups, the National Front, the British National party, who were flexing their muscles and sort of trying to make political capital out of what were fairly depressed and jobless times. It seemed to me that with the kind of Reagan/Thatcher axis that existed across the Atlantic, it looked like Western society was taking somewhat a turn for the worse. There were ugly fascist stains starting to reassert themselves that we might have thought had been eradicated back in the '30s. But they were reasserting themselves with a different spin. They were talking less about annihilating whichever minority they happened to find disfavor with and talking more about free market forces and market choice and all of these other kind of glib terms, which tended to have the same results as an awful lot of the kind of Fascist causes back in the 1930s but with a bit more spin put upon them The friendly face of fascism.

So V for Vendetta originally came out of the fact I'd been asked to write a strip for David Lloyd to illustrate. We'd originally been talking about doing a 1930's noir strip and Dave had bolted that because I think he'd had enough of digging out '30's reference. We thought maybe we could get the same effect by rather than setting it in the near past, to set it in the near future. So it all evolved from several different sources, but it was playing into the fact that over here in England we've got quite a good tradition of villains and sociopaths as heroes. Like Robin Hood, Guy Fawkes and all the rest of them. And in our fiction, in British children's comics, there were as many sociopathic villains who'd got their own comic strips as there were heroes. Possibly more. The British have always had sympathy with a dashing villain.

So I decided to use this to political effect by coming up with a projected Fascist state in the near future and setting an anarchist against that. As far I'm concerned, the two poles of politics were not Left Wing or Right Wing. In fact they're just two ways of ordering an industrial society and we're fast moving beyond the industrial societies of the 19th and 20th centuries. It seemed to me the two more absolute extremes were anarchy and fascism. This was one of the things I objected to in the recent film, where it seems to be, from the script that I read, sort of recasting it as current American neo-conservatism vs. current American liberalism. There wasn't a mention of anarchy as far as I could see. The fascism had been completely defanged. I mean, I think that any references to racial purity had been excised, whereas actually, fascists are quite big on racial purity.

The Beat: Yeah, it does seem to be a common element.

Moore: It does seem to rather be a badge they wear. Whereas, what I was trying to do was take these two extremes of the human political spectrum and set them against each other in a kind of little moral drama, just to see what works and what happened. I tried to be as fair about it as possible. I mean, yes, politically I'm an anarchist; at the same time I didn't want to stick to just moral blacks and whites. I wanted a number of the fascists I portrayed to be real rounded characters. They've got reasons for what they do. They're not necessarily cartoon Nazis.

Which *one* thing? I object to basically all of it. I like the old code of conduct this is replacing. Basically "don't be a dick".

If I had to pick a rule that I disliked the most it would be the first one:

Comments that reinforce systemic oppression related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neurodiversity, physical appearance, body size, age, race, or religion.

It makes disagreeing with an SJW against the rules. It makes even disliking the rules against the rules! This comment would be against these rules.

There are things on the list like stalking and harassing that are serious and illegal. ...but enforcing the law isn't BSD's business. If someone is really committing crimes, let the cops handle it and prove it in a court of law, thank you very much.

Things like "misgendering" and "using dead names", well, I"ll do that if I feel like. It's not up to you.

Goatsieing someone shouldn't be a bannable offense. If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen.

Things like "making false claims" and "unwanted sexual attention". Suddenly it's BSDs responsibility to decide anytime a claim is false, or sexual attention is unwanted. It's a recipe for getting in everyone's private business. It's a drama queen's wet dream. (Oh I guess, saying "wet dream" is against the rules. Oops.)

Literally everything about this is wrong and stupid.

Fwiw this book may provide some insight into what Lenin would think of our SJW "leftists":

https://archive.org/details/Le...

I've been using, supporting and promoting FreeBSD for decades. Sadly, now that I'm aware of this change to the "Code of Conduct", I no longer can, nor will.

The old Code of Conduct was fine. In contrast, this newer version comes across as taking sides in the culture war for the sake of taking sides and virtue signaling someone's proclamation of who they support.

While looking into where this update came from, I did find this note from a quarterly status report, "Anne Dickison, our Marketing Director, has been overseeing the efforts to rewrite the Project's Code of Conduct to help make this a safe, inclusive, and welcoming community." From what I can tell, she's used her position in the FreeBSD Foundation to push this through. There was no public discussion nor debate on it by the members of the FreeBSD community before the change.

Fortunately, there are other *BSDs out there.

My signature is 100% on point then.

--
Damore's document is so bad, the only arguments left to fans are spurious claims that "you didn't read it".

Bollocks.

His critics accuse him of saying that women were incapable of engineering or that diversity was bad thing or of creating a hostile working environment for women. Here's what he actually said

https://web.archive.org/web/20...

Note, I'm not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are "just." I'm simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don't see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there's significant overlap between men and women, so you can't say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.

I.e. even if the average X for women is lower than the average X for parameter men, it doesn't mean that all women have a lower X than all men, so you shouldn't discriminate against women.

On the other hand if you're recruiting a group where high X is desirable, it will have more men than women even if you don't discriminate.

The harm of Google's biases

I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more. However, to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several discriminatory practices:
* Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race
* A high priority queue and special treatment for "diversity" candidates
* Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for "diversity" candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
* Reconsidering any set of people if it's not "diverse" enough, but not showing that same scrutiny in the reverse direction (clear confirmation bias)
* Setting org level OKRs for increased representation which can incentivize illegal discrimination

These practices are based on false assumptions generated by our biases and can actually increase race and gender tensions. We're told by senior leadership that what we're doing is both the morally and economically correct thing to do, but without evidence this is just veiled left ideology that can irreparably harm Google.

He's accusing Google of 'incentivising illegal discrimination' - i.e. discriminating against whites and men in favour of non whites and women.

Suggestions

I hope it's clear that I'm not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair, that we shouldn't try to correct for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of those in the majority. My larger point is that we have an intolerance for ideas and evidence that don't fit a certain ideology. I'm also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I'm advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism).

My concrete suggestions are to:

De-moralize diversity.
* As soon as we start to moralize an issue, we stop thinking about it in terms of costs and benefits, dismiss anyone that disagrees as immoral, and harshly punish those we see as villains to protect the "victims."

Stop alienating conservatives.
* Viewpoint diversity is arguably the most important type of diversity and political orientation is one of the most fundamental and significant ways in which people view things differently.
* In highly progressive environments, conservatives are a minority that feel like they need to stay in the closet to avoid open hostility. We should empower those with different ideologies to be able to express them

Another point in his favour is that he was saying that there are better ways to make the gender balance more equal than 'illegal discrimination'

https://web.archive.org/web/20...

The harm of Google's biases

I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more. However, to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several discriminatory practices:
* Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race
* A high priority queue and special treatment for "diversity" candidates
* Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for "diversity" candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
* Reconsidering any set of people if it's not "diverse" enough, but not showing that same scrutiny in the reverse direction (clear confirmation bias)
* Setting org level OKRs for increased representation which can incentivize illegal discrimination

These practices are based on false assumptions generated by our biases and can actually increase race and gender tensions. We're told by senior leadership that what we're doing is both the morally and economically correct thing to do, but without evidence this is just veiled left ideology that can irreparably harm Google. ...

Suggestions

I hope it's clear that I'm not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair, that we shouldn't try to correct for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of those in the majority. My larger point is that we have an intolerance for ideas and evidence that don't fit a certain ideology. I'm also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I'm advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism).

My concrete suggestions are to:

De-moralize diversity.
* As soon as we start to moralize an issue, we stop thinking about it in terms of costs and benefits, dismiss anyone that disagrees as immoral, and harshly punish those we see as villains to protect the "victims."

Stop alienating conservatives.
* Viewpoint diversity is arguably the most important type of diversity and political orientation is one of the most fundamental and significant ways in which people view things differently.
* In highly progressive environments, conservatives are a minority that feel like they need to stay in the closet to avoid open hostility. We should empower those with different ideologies to be able to express themselves.
* Alienating conservatives is both non-inclusive and generally bad business because conservatives tend to be higher in conscientiousness, which is required for much of the drudgery and maintenance work characteristic of a mature company.

Confront Google's biases.
* I've mostly concentrated on how our biases cloud our thinking about diversity and inclusion, but our moral biases are farther reaching than that.
* I would start by breaking down Googlegeist scores by political orientation and personality to give a fuller picture into how our biases are affecting our culture.

Stop restricting programs and classes to certain genders or races.

* These discriminatory practices are both unfair and divisive. Instead focus on some of the non-discriminatory practices I outlined.

If you say that you agree with what your employer is trying to do but they way they are doing it 'incentivising illegal discrimination' and suggest legal alternatives that makes you a whistleblower. CA has a whistleblower protection law -

https://www.workplacefairness....

Could Damore claim under it? I'm not sure. If I were him I'd try though.

I got into programming on the 6502 because I liked programming, especially low level programming. When I went to university I picked electronic engineering because I wanted to know more about how hardware worked. Both low level coding and engineering are very seriously skewed towards men.

Now if you look at Damore's memos his point was simply that not seeing 50% men and 50% women was not prima facie evidence of discrimination. He also explained a bunch of reasons why men might be more likely to pick engineering over women. He carefully pointed out that differences between groups X and Y that lead to more of group X choosing to do a job does not mean that all members of group Y are worse than all members of group X. He also pointed out that discriminating against members of group X wasn't the only or the best way to even up the numbers.

He got fired and everyone has mischaracterised his memo as 'Women are biologically unsuited to coding'. They've done that without reading the memo where he explicitly said that was not what he was saying. The memo has been more or less scrubbed off the web but you can find it here

https://web.archive.org/web/20...

Note, I'm not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are "just." I'm simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don't see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there's significant overlap between men and women, so you can't say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.

It's appalling. The memo has been memory holed and everyone is judging him by what hit pieces on him say he said, not what he said. Including Ms Sophir who said

Sophir concludes that while some parts of Damore's memo was legally protected by workplace regulations, 'the statements regarding biological differences between the sexes were so harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive as to be unprotected.

Read that and look at the paragraph I quoted where he explicitly said he was not saying 'Any individual woman is less proficient than any individual man'. And yet it's clear Ms Sophir is judging the case based on a belief that's what he said.

Best hope you don't say anything which the media decide is unacceptable. Because you'll be judged on what they say you said, not what you said. And before you say 'Won't happen. I'm a staunch left winger'. Well so were Sam Harris, Germaine Greer, Richard Dawkins and Julie Bindel until they pissed off the campus left. Now they're just as persona non grata as Damore is. Which means their rights can be violated just like his can.

Their website used to say this on the front page

Question:
What TV shows and movies can I see for free?
Answer:
You can see almost every movie and TV series ever made. You can even access movies and shows that are still on Demand and episodes of TV that were just aired. You will never pay to watch any of them.

Enjoy watching complete seasons of almost every television series ever created, including those from the premium cable movie channels and subscription services.

Relax with some popcorn and catch the latest hollywood blockbuster from the comfort of your own home without paying a rental fee. Also included - Sidetick.TV!

Live stream over 50,000 live radio stations or access full albums from your favorite recording artist... finally cancel your spotify or satellite radio subscription saving hundred of dollars a year!

Watch upcoming PPV Events like UFC, Boxing, and Wrestlemania in ultra high definition without paying a single penny!

https://web.archive.org/web/20...

> robots.txt is only a suggestion. Nobody is obligated to obey it.

However, https://web.archive.org/ does honor it. (If you know of a bigger public archive, please let me know.)

That poor decision to honor robots.txt even when the crawl is instigated by a human is one of the reasons https://archive.is/ was created.

https://archive.is/faq#Why_doe...

A lot of live HD distribution is still done in MPEG2. Why? The coding delay for MPEG2 is a lot lower than for h264/HVEC/whatever the latest fancy is. Not a big deal when dealing with canned material, but a huge factor in dealing with live material. It's the difference between an 18Mbps stream (for MPEG2 HD) vs 6Mbps (h.264), but also the difference between 0.5 seconds of encoding delay vs 2 or 3 seconds.

That's not an inherent problem of the spec, and hasn't been true for over half a decade:
http://web.archive.org/web/20150306225444/http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/249
(it's even better today)

I've set up live streams with x264 as an encoder with a guaranteed
encoding latency of under 150ms. On commodity hardware.

Also, the broadcast industry is incredibly stingy when it comes to spending money, especially capital expenditures. MPEG2 encoders are pretty cheap at this point, whereas MPEG4 are 10x the cost.

Yeah, commercial ones. I've been surprised several times by how free-software-averse
the whole broadcasting industry is: They'd rather buy a commercial encoder for $bignum
purchase + recurring $bignum2 support fee instead of using a superior setup that's based
on x264, would cost them about $bignum/10 for the initial setup, and then nothing to run for as
long as they'd like. I'd even deliver the whole documentation on how to run everything, so they
wouldn't need me again.

It's frustratingly hard to make "No need, I'll document and show you how to fix everything yourself"
an accepted answer to "But who do we call if something goes wrong?", even in cases where
they already have very capable and qualified people in-house.

Unfortunately, there's a pretty good inverse correlation between price and quality for H.264
encoders: The more expensive they are, the more they suck.
And that's were the latency problem tends to come in (and the encoding efficiency problem, and
the picture quality problem, and...).

Google used to require SMS for 2FA but now appears to allow authentication using an Android device logged into Google Play Services.

You're completely incorrect.

Google already had it and was even allowing you to port their code to your own TOPT 2-factor authentication client (in addition to HOPT) to use with their service since 2010!

That's right, 2010. That is not a typo. At the time, the official RFC was still being drafted.

Here is the PROOF:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100915000000*/http://code.google.com/p/google-authenticator/

When they analyze all the data that exists, that's the opposite of cherry picking. [Geoffrey Landis]

Indeed. I made this same point after Jane/Lonny baselessly accused Layzej of "cherry-picking" when Layzej loaded all the UAH data. Jane/Lonny then suggested cherry-picking at 1998, and keeps insisting that this somehow isn't "cherry-picking".

Ironically, I even gave Jane/Lonny R code which calculates trends and accelerations of global mean sea level (GMSL) data. That graph accounts for autocorrelation- the red lines are 2 sigma uncertainties. The trends and accelerations are calculated over periods which all end at 2009.5. The new significance.zip (backup copies) contains my R statistics folder, including many data sets.

Again, note that this approach avoids cherry-picking by using the entire dataset. Also note that all the best-fit accelerations are positive.

Once again, that's consistent with this NOAA article:

"Sea level is rising at an increasing rate ... There is strong evidence that global sea level is now rising at an increased rate and will continue to rise during this century. While studies show that sea levels changed little from AD 0 until 1900, sea levels began to climb in the 20th century. The two major causes of global sea-level rise are thermal expansion caused by the warming of the oceans (since water expands as it warms) and the loss of land-based ice (such as glaciers and polar ice caps) due to increased melting. Records and research show that sea level has been steadily rising at a rate of 1 to 2.5 millimeters (0.04 to 0.1 inches) per year since 1900. This rate may be increasing. Since 1992, new methods of satellite altimetry (the measurement of elevation or altitude) indicate a rate of rise of 3 millimeters (0.12 inches) per year. This is a significantly larger rate than the sea-level rise averaged over the last several thousand years."

And once again, that's consistent with the 2013 IPCC AR5 SPM:

"Proxy and instrumental sea level data indicate a transition in the late 19th to the early 20th century from relatively low mean rates of rise over the previous two millennia to higher rates of rise (high confidence). It is likely that the rate of global mean sea level rise has continued to increase since the early 20th century."

That's also consistent with the US NAS's statement that "Sea level is rising faster in recent decades".

A fabulous, deep, funny book on rocket fuels and the crazed chemists that developed them is called "Ignition!", by John D. Clark and forward by Isaac Asimov. Example text:

"Recommended lab attire for working with this volatile compound: Running shoes."

Ignition! has been long out of print. Thankfully archive.org has a copy here: https://archive.org/details/ig...

It's not as simple as that. Suppose I'd built some Mac software at the time I built my NT 4.0 binaries in 1997.

At that point I'd have been building a 32 bit 68K and PowerPC binary for MacOs 8.x.

For the first few releases of OS X my code could have run in the Classic Environment. That is no longer supported.

Then I'd have had to move to Carbon, which requires code changes.

Since then support for Carbon has been drooped so I'd need to move to Cocoa. More changes.

At some point I'd need to have moved from PowerPC to Intel. More changes.

And finally support for 32 bit binaries is being killed off, so I'd need more changes to get my code to build for 64 bit.

I.e. to keep my application running I'd have had to make at least four sets of changes.

Meanwhile with Windows I can run literally the same binary I compiled in 1997. It's Win32 x86 code. In fact a few of the things I wrote needed Admin rights. Since I wanted them to work in corporate environments where not everyone is Admin they actually work OK on a machine with UAC - they say you need Admin rights to run, so you run them from an Admin command prompt.

The GUI ones look at bit dated, but that's because Windows runs them with the old version of the Common Controls. If I added a manifest they'd look pretty modern. And of course running old code with an old version of the common controls is something MS do to increase the likelihood of it working.

Compare that to multiple changes of instruction set and API for an equivalent Apple utility. Plus of course there are lot more Windows machines than Macs. About 10x now and it was up to 20x in the past.

https://www.netmarketshare.com...

So for Mac you have to do more busy work because Apple keep killing off legacy features in return for a 10x smaller market. And you need to keep buying Macs to support the latest OS so you can run the latest development environment and do that busy work.

In fact the development environment has changed at least once in that time too.

Adobe Photoshop was aimed at Carbon. John Nack at Adobe explained why Photoshop wouldn't be 64 bit on Mac at the same time it was 64 bit on Windows

https://web.archive.org/web/20...

Basically Photoshop was a Carbon App. Apple had been telling Adobe that Carbon would be able to run 64 bit applications and but when they went to the WWDC they heard from the stage that Carbon 64 had been cancelled. In the comments you read a lot of people flaming Adobe for sticking to an old API but one comment that points out that moving a large application from CodeWarrior to XCode is not easy and you need to do that to port from Carbon to Cocoa -

This is one of the very few areas where I simply cannot fault Adobe management in any way. To the general public, and to younger Mac developers who jumped on board after the iPod, it may seem as though they've been dragging their feet all this time, but the reality is that Apple has hasn't expressed much interest in supporting the efforts of third-party developers since the NeXT buyout, and Adobe engineers had every reason to reject the grossly inferior tools they were being offered every step of the way.

First they killed CFM in favor of Mach-O; not because it made any sense at the time, but because Avie stood to profit from Mach-O's adoption. Remember how CFM had all that multi-ISA support in there? Wouldn't that have come in handy during the Intel transition? I personally thing it might have, but I'm not in a position to look at Rosetta's code and offer anything resembling an educated opinion--just uneducated speculation.

Then they gave Mike Ferris free reign over the amount of turd polish that would be applied to Proje

Here is the full archived version of Carmack's blog post about OTRAG, including photos of an injector assembly which he was gifted.

If you do it the right way, you might not need a very big rocket to get to Mars. But you'd definitely need something like XEUS and water mining in that case.

There is nothing stopping any woman from contributing to open Source. All they have to do is write the code and post to github.

> At this point I give it > 50% that feminist activists set those up so they'd have a topic to complain about and claim sexism ..

You would be correct. There's a set of feminist activists who attended techie conferences specifically with the intend of finding sexual harassment. They then use evidence of such harassment as a pretext to getting the male organizers removed. for a typical example see this from July 2012. If you ever come across such at a conference, record all such encounters, as you may need it as evidence to clear your name later on.

Uh, hate to break it to you, but Europe depends utterly on the Americans to keep Putin's panzers out of Paris.

GOOD! Go the fuck home and leave the rest of the world alone for once. FFS.

Statements like that are exactly the kind of shitty, smug European attitude that results in Americans questioning the usefulness of NATO. Not only are you ungrateful, you go in the opposite direction and have a derisive view of the US despite how much you depend on it. Also what you just said has no grounding in reality, at all. You can't even base your hateful attitude on facts.

Only 2.7% of European troops are trained and equipped to a sufficient degree to be deployed in combat.

The Germans have literally had to use broomsticks in place of machine guns and only 8 of their 109 Eurofighters are operational.

All of the military forces of the entire EU combined only have 10% of the capability that the US military possesses. Russia is way closer to the US in military capability than the EU is.

In general, Europe depends on the US for defense and to protect their interests

NATO "allies" flat-out refuse to pay their fair share for their own defense. Mr Schulz said: "Of course, we are a strong and reliable Nato member. However, I'm not of the opinion that Nato member states have agreed to achieve this goal of spending two per cent of their GDP for defence. This would mean a substantial financial burden for Germany."

Unfortunately it's just part of an ad for Symantec MultiScope that features an image with callouts to various features including "open source file (wildcards allowed)". You can see it on page 13 of the January 1993 issue.

Looks like Caldera's use of "open source" in the press release for OpenDOS is still the earliest use of the term in relation to software.

For anyone who has any doubt about this claim:

Here's the truth: https://web.archive.org/web/19...

We brainstormed about tactics and a new label. `Open source', contributed by Chris Peterson, was the best thing we came up with.

Informative post I mostly agree with, thanks! Many people don't yet get that if AI or other automation can make people twice as productive, there goes half the jobs. And the jobs may not get replaced with other jobs if there is limited demand for various reasons like a law of diminishing returns.

But, there are other alternatives to retraining for surviving with a diminishing number of jobs. I collected about options here, some good, some bad:
http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a...
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

Sounds like you have a fun job, so I am surprised you would want to end up a fat blob confined to a chair like in Wall-e? For example, the job of raising happy, healthy, capable children can take just about all the time parents can put into it and then some. You could let a robot (or nanny) do that, but then you would be missing out on the relationship. And then there is volunteerism and so on.

See also on escaping "The Pleasure Trap":
http://web.archive.org/web/201...

And see also Bob Black on how most "work" these days is totally useless anyway:
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
"I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes."

And see also "The Skills of Xanadu" and "Buddhist Economics" for similar alternative perspectives on work as play and work as growth.

Informative post I mostly agree with, thanks! Many people don't yet get that if AI or other automation can make people twice as productive, there goes half the jobs. And the jobs may not get replaced with other jobs if there is limited demand for various reasons like a law of diminishing returns.

But, there are other alternatives to retraining for surviving with a diminishing number of jobs. I collected about options here, some good, some bad:
http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a...
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

Sounds like you have a fun job, so I am surprised you would want to end up a fat blob confined to a chair like in Wall-e? For example, the job of raising happy, healthy, capable children can take just about all the time parents can put into it and then some. You could let a robot (or nanny) do that, but then you would be missing out on the relationship. And then there is volunteerism and so on.

See also on escaping "The Pleasure Trap":
http://web.archive.org/web/201...

And see also Bob Black on how most "work" these days is totally useless anyway:
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
"I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes."

And see also "The Skills of Xanadu" and "Buddhist Economics" for similar alternative perspectives on work as play and work as growth.

If we can include hardware manufacturers, even advanced cool hardware, then I'll throw out a nomination for Ronnie Barrett and his "little" gun company.

After California banned possession of 50cal rifles, he stopped sales and service to all law enforcement agencies in the state. To me, that is pretty darned principled. https://web.archive.org/web/20...

The point about ERTMS is that it's a unified target standard and as such the bugs can be ironed out. The proliferation of incompatible standards and wildly varying operation rules across Europe is a far worse problem than making ERTMS work for all use cases.

It's a bit like going from the various competing old analog mobile phone systems to GSM, with a requirement to keep being able to use the old networks until everyone's cut over.

https://web.archive.org/web/20...

https://web.archive.org/web/20...

I have not heard from Mr Assange and do not know whether he had been told, by any source, that he was wanted for interrogation before he left Sweden. I do not know whether he was uncontactable from 21stâ" 29th September and if that was the case I do not know why. It would have been a reasonable assumption from the facts (albeit not necessarily an accurate one) that Mr Assange was deliberately avoiding interrogation in the period before he left Sweden. Some witnesses suggest that there were other reasons why he was out of contact. I have heard no evidence that he was readily contactable

The original article, as saved by the Internet Archive, had a slightly different subtitle:

‘I borrowed from the films of Leni Riefenstahl to show that these US soldiers were like something out of Nazi propaganda. I even put one in an SS uniform. But no one noticed’

(Emphasis added to highlight the text that was removed).

The current version has a note at the bottom saying:

The subheading of this article was amended on 23 January 2018 to remove a reference to US soldiers.

Given that the characters were from Buenos Aires in the movie that does seem like a reasonable edit. Admittedly they did speak English but, well, it doesn't seem a bit unlikely that the soldiers in the movie were specifically supposed to be US soldiers.

The original article, as saved by the Internet Archive, had a slightly different subtitle:

‘I borrowed from the films of Leni Riefenstahl to show that these US soldiers were like something out of Nazi propaganda. I even put one in an SS uniform. But no one noticed’

(Emphasis added to highlight the text that was removed).

The current version has a note at the bottom saying:

The subheading of this article was amended on 23 January 2018 to remove a reference to US soldiers.

I would mod this up if I hadn't already commented, but I would point out that the link posted does go to a certain type of band....

The Grateful Dead is the first one listed and they even had taper sections cordoned off back in the day. Bring your tape decks and mike stands! We'll put you in your own little section.

I do love watching videos and listening to audio recordings of shows I've been to....especially if it wasn't me who went to the hassle of recording them.

I see Steve Kimock is also listed in that link.....this sort of reminds me of that time he went off on an audience and told some people to STFU.

"Seriously, man it's fucking rude. Get your money back and go home. I don't care. Shut the fuck up!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I've got the full recording of that show somewhere. The talkers in the audience who weren't even paying attention to the music were pretty bad.

Link to the whole show:

https://archive.org/details/sk...

IMO, he came across as being a bit petulant but I've also had to change seats in theaters just to avoid people talking over the music so I can sympathize some. And to his credit, Kimock put up with it for over 90 minutes before he lost it.

Chrome today reminds me a lot of what Firefox was during its early years. Each release of Chrome is something that users look forward to. These releases bring new, useful features. Chrome's already-excellent performance keeps getting better and better. Even if it isn't perfect, at least Chrome is consistently moving in a positive direction release after release.

Then there's the Firefox of today. We already know that users have been fleeing it, seeing as Firefox's total market share is likely at most about 5% at this point. The Firefox 57 release was quite a disaster. In October 2017, before Firefox 57 was released, Firefox 55 had 3.86% of the market. Firefox 57 is only at 3.55%, according to the December 2017 stats.

Firefox 57 was supposed to be a very positive release for Firefox. Yet breaking nearly all extensions, and unnecessarily changing the UI, and not delivering significant performance improvements resulted in Firefox 57 being widely disliked by users, as reflected in Firefox's dropping market share stats.

It worries me that we're seeing Chrome succeed so much, while Firefox is failing so badly. Instead of getting real competition, we're getting back to the same position we were in when IE was the dominant browser, except this time it's Chrome that's in power.

It didn't have to be like this. All that the Firefox devs had to do was listen to their users! For years we've had Firefox users saying that they just want a fast, extensible, secure browser. Yet time and time again we've seen the Firefox devs just not deliver this. Firefox 57 was supposed to be such a positive release, yet it fell on its face with such force because it just ended up screwing users over so badly.

I don't know where we go from here. Who will unseat Chrome's dominance over the browser market? It probably won't be Safari, since it's so tied to macOS and iOS these days. It probably won't be Firefox, because it's pretty much a dead browser at this point. It probably won't be Opera or Vivaldi, since they're just re-skinned Chromium browsers, essentially. Writing a browser from scratch really isn't an option any longer, given how complex they've gotten.

Thanks to Chrome's stunning success, and Firefox's abysmal failure, Chrome has basically become the driving force behind the web.