Slashdot Mirror

Actually, recent research shows that "Morning After" pills tend to block conception (which often happens some days after sex) rather than preventing implantation.

This chemical could in theory do the same, though I'd wait for future studies to reproduce the "too good to be true" results.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

Princeton Election Consortium made a similar predition

http://election.princeton.edu/...

As a professional videogame programmer, I can assure you that I haven't heard functional programming discussed much at work or among other peers in the industry.

That's not to say that there hasn't been discussion at all though, see Tim Sweeney's talk "The Next Mainstream Programming Language: A Game Developer's Perspective" or John Carmack's views about Haskell.

The thread was about terrorism. Both are terrorists.

Actually, that's debatable — but irrelevant. We were discussing, whether the Irish terrorists were motivated by religion or other sentiment(s).

Out of the blue you switch the topic to Jews, claiming, incorrectly, that they were the first terrorists.

Even stipulating for a second, that targeting an occupier's administration is still terrorism, there certainly have been acts of terrorism before that. Your claim, that the Jews, somehow, were the first, was wrong. False. Liar, liar, pants on fire. Four Pinocchios. Full Stop.

And, of course, it was and remains off-topic. We are done here.

Diplomacy worked with the IRA.

Scores of people remain in prison — kept there on pain of violents.

you're wrong because the IRA advertised religious, not nationalist rhetoric

Now you are talking — back on topic again. Of course, you offer no citations and I'm already too tired of your lies, exaggerations, and topic-switching attempts. As I said, we are done here...

"So instead of repealing the law, how about extending to also apply to Google and Facebook?"

Not going to happen, I'll get to why in a moment... check out the links when you get the time. The brain doesn't see the world as it is, see the science on reasoning:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

This is former national security advisor of the united states Zbigniew Brezinski, worried about the political awakening of the masses, the rich and corporations fear the political awakening of the masses of the globe, so see what they really think behind closed doors here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7ZyJw_cHJY

On social media -- social media are connected to intelligence agencies... if you think you are going to get privacy it's all bs and optics for the masses.

Reddit and intelligence agencies

Wikileaks -- Reddit and intelligence agencies

These links will take a while to digest, but if you want to understand what's going on in the world, you owe it to yourself to become informed about the true state of the world.

"Intended as an internal document. Good reading to understand the nature of rich democracies and the fact that the common people are not allowed to play a role."

Crisis of democracy

Crisis of democracy - PDF

http://www.amazon.com/Crisis-D... ">Crisis of democracy - BOOK

Education as ignorance

Education as ignorance

Overthrowing other peoples governments

Overthrowing other peoples governments, the master list

Wikileaks on TTIP/TPP/ETC

Wikileaks

Energy subsidies

https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/survey/so/2015/NEW070215A.htm

Interference in other states when the rich/corporations dont get their way

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mxp_wgFWQo&feature=youtu.be&list=PLKR2GeygdHomOZeVKx3P0fqH58T3VghOj&t=724

Protectionism for the rich and big business by state intervention, radical market interference.

http://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Economy-Media/dp/0375714499/

Manufacturing consent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwU56Rv0OXM

https://vimeo.com/39566117

Manufacturing consent (book)

http://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Economy-Media/dp/0375714499/

Testing theories of representative government

https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf

Democracy Inc

http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Incorporated-Managed- Inverted-Totalitarianism/dp/069114589X

From war is a racket:

"I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil inter

Additional point: in the Seven Samurai movie, even Samurai could not agree on what was the best way to do a certain combat move -- until it was solved by the death of one of them when they did the move for real...

Another difficulty in good programmers recognizing others:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which low-ability individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability as much higher than it really is. Dunning and Kruger attributed this bias to a metacognitive incapacity, on the part of those with low ability, to recognize their ineptitude and evaluate their competence accurately. Their research also suggests corollaries: high-ability individuals may underestimate their relative competence and may erroneously assume that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others. Dunning and Kruger have postulated that the effect is the result of internal illusion in those of low ability, and external misperception in those of high ability: "The miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.""

Further, a good programming team in most situations may benefit from diversity. The same characteristics that make some people good at some programming tasks may make it more challenging for them to see some of this diversity.
"The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies" by
Scott E. Page
http://press.princeton.edu/tit...
"The Difference reveals that progress and innovation may depend less on lone thinkers with enormous IQs than on diverse people working together and capitalizing on their individuality. Page shows how groups that display a range of perspectives outperform groups of like-minded experts. "

An old African proverb says, "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."

So, there remain no easy answers.

Google is trying Big Data as rutabagaman linked to, which led to this conclusion:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06...
"A. On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don't predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.
    Instead, what works well are structured behavioral interviews, where you have a consistent rubric for how you assess people, rather than having each interviewer just make stuff up.
    Behavioral interviewing also works -- where you're not giving someone a hypothetical, but you're starting with a question like, "Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem." The interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of information. One is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the valuable "meta" information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be difficult."

But when you think about that, if you are not hiring programmers for their ability to hire other programmers by asking such questions and evaluating such answers, and you are not coaching them on that either, why would you expect they could do a good job of it?

Having *really* good HR people specializing in evaluating developers for a role in a team might in theory be an answer... But then the question is, how do you hire really good HR people? :-)

My wife showed me this yesterday to make a point about exercise: http://www.refinery29.com/2017...
"To assist us in our ongoing battle to show the world that weight is just a number -- and that yes, for crissakes, women can and should lift heavy weights -- badass fit mom Adrienne Osuna is here with proof. The blogger posted a few before-and-after fitness pics on Instagram this week; her transformation is noticeable, but her weight is almost exactly the same.
"I lost 60 pounds then I quit dieting (always gaining and losing weight and yo-yo dieting and I was so over it)," Osuna wrote on her blog. "I started heavy lifting and feel in love. I recompositioned my body with out dieting. I lifted heavy 4x a week...Within a year or so...I was down 3 dress sizes and the scale still hadn't moved. But everyone kept telling me how I looked so good.""

On the move to settled agriculture 10000 years ago:
http://press.princeton.edu/tit...
"For instance, the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago has commonly been seen as a major advancement in the course of human evolution. However, as Larsen provocatively shows, this change may not have been so positive. Compared to their hunter-gatherer ancestors, many early farmers suffered more disease, had to work harder, and endured a poorer quality of life due to poorer diets and more marginal living conditions. Moreover, the past 10,000 years have seen dramatic changes in the human physiognomy as a result of alterations in our diet and lifestyle. Some modern health problems, including obesity and chronic disease, may also have their roots in these earlier changes."

See also my other comment on nutrigenomics and how different people may respond differently to the same food. One simple example is being lactose intolerant...

I'm merely informing you that the definition of race has improved since the 19th century when everyone was either Caucasian, Negroid or Mongoloid

I don't believe in either of your claims: neither that the definition has actually changed, nor that the change you assert would've been for the better, had it actually happened.

Race is most certainly not a "social construct" — the very reason, discrimination based on it is wrong (and illegal) is that it is immutable. A human being does not choose to be of particular race.

Now, there has always been the other meaning for the same word — a homonym, really — which would, indeed, make any grouping of people, including fans of a particular sports team, or cat-lovers, or Emacs-users a "race". That meaning is not at all new — it certainly existed in the 19th century — but it, quite clearly and self-evidently, is not what the anti-discrimination laws mean. A FreeBSD-bigot like myself can not claim "racial discrimination" after being turned away from an all-Windows shop, for example.

I'm not too familiar with the case [of Rachel Dolezal -mi]

Of course, you aren't — Blacks are given a pass by all your news-sources, when they discriminate or even murder based on race.

she resigned from her job because she had been caught lying about her background

Obviously, had she not lied, they would not have hired her in the first place — even though she was, obviously, qualified — it is Ok, for some reason, for Blacks to discriminate against Whites.

We try to fix this over time, but some people think that going back to the 'good old days , whenever they were supposed to be, will solve all of this.

What? Does this, somehow, justify the discrimination against Whites and Asians manifested by NAACP?

would not call it a "civil war". IMO, the term "civil war" should be reserved for situations where two or more factions within a nation are fighting to seize power over the whole nation [...] I refuse to refer to the 1861-1865 war in the USA as a "civil war" because the South was not trying to take over Washington DC

You are wrong, the term "civil war" in English means:

a war between factions in the same country

Note, that the objective does not matter... Wikipedia's expanded definition and explanation says:

A civil war is a war between organized groups within the same state or country, or, less commonly, between two countries created from a formerly united state. The aim of one side may be to take control of the country or a region, to achieve independence for a region or to change government policies.

No, what disqualifies Russian-Ukrainian conflict from being a "civil war" is that Russia — a foreign power — is among the belligerents.

This sounds reasonable, it was a deliberate, targeted attempt to cause physical harm to someone.

It is perfectly common for people arguing online to develop a sincere (if fleeting) desire to physically harm an opponent. The deliberation and targeting are very easy to find. Usually such rage is impotent — or is it? If, as we are told by TFA, speech can cause a seizure, how about less obvious but still detrimental effects of spiting words and even polite expressions of disagreement?

If simply seeing the name "Trump" written in chalk on campus made some students "feel unsafe", should the perpetrators be prosecuted for the assault?

Folks in college today graduate a few years later — bringing their bogus ideas out with them. The Left's attack on speech is spilling from campuses... It may already be too late.

Well this explains why you have a problem with the word "racism".

Trump and Obama are of different races. Internet Archive is treating the two men differently, ergo racism.

That has little to do with surveillance.

For the slow children in the audience, allow me to repeat the already-quoted excerpt from the official statement of the Internet Archive. With emphasis this time — to aid the underdeveloped pattern-recognition faculties of certain readers:

"It means serving patrons in a world in which government surveillance is not going away; indeed it looks like it will increase."

In terms of power.

If you gave me ten guys from a random selection in a line-up and asked who's here the ex-con, the best guess would probably be the black guy. Not because I'm racist, but because of the makeup of the US prison population compared to the general population.

You seem to have a hard time understanding math.

There are actually more white people with felony convictions(3.2M) than there are black people(2.8M). That's because the lower conviction rate is balanced out by the larger population.

Voting age population by race:
156M (69%) white
  27M (12%) black
  27M (12%) hispanic
  16M ( 7%) everybody else

Number of people with felony convictions by race:
white 2.1% x 156M = 3.2M
black 10.5% x 27M = 2.8M

So given a line-up of 2 randomly chosen people, one white and one black, there is essentially equal chance that either one is an ex-con. And if you have a line up of more than 2 people, one that is racial proportional to the general population, say 7 white guys, 1 hispanic guy, 1 black guy and one ethnically ambiguous-maybe-asian, then the chance that at least one of the white people is a felon is about 7x higher than the chance that the black guy is a felon.

Now, just because you are bad at math does not make you racist. But in my experience everybody who is racist is also really bad at math when they think about race. And that is why "Big Data" is not color-blind. The algorithms literally hardcode the assumptions of the people designing them. And if those people are bad at math the same way racists are bad at math, then the end results are algorithms that implement racism and do so under the false cover of being objectively neutral.

Communism is quite the opposite, because it is about local direct democracy

BS. Once you choose the Glorious Collective over the Deplorable Individual, an authoritarian at the top becomes inevitable.

It is no surprise, that all attempts to build Communism/Socialism in earnest — from Stalin to Chavez — resulted in just such a situation.

You could even describe Stalin as history's most successful fascist

You can't. Fascism allows private property and leaves the means of production in private hands — as long as the businesses do the State's bidding, they can manage the details on their own and can even compete with each other — this degree of freedom and the competition is what makes Fascism more efficient. Communism and Socialism (a.k.a. Communism-lite) do not allow any means of production in private hands at all. By definition.

The whole goddamned point was an online network not controlled by a big telco or the government.

You don't know much about the history of the internet, do you? The internet was invented by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency with the goal of networking military computers in a failsafe fashion. The stated goals were:

1. Internet communication must continue despite loss of networks or gateways.
2. The Internet must support multiple types of communications service.
3. The Internet architecture must accommodate a variety of networks.
4. The Internet architecture must permit distributed management of its resources.
5. The Internet architecture must be cost effective.
6. The Internet architecture must permit host attachment with a low level of effort.
7. The resources used in the internet architecture must be accountable.

None of these have any thing to do with "not being controlled by government". Sorry.

Venus could still have life like this life on Earth, which can survive any surface conditions.

A Princeton-led research group has discovered an isolated community of bacteria nearly two miles underground that derives all of its energy from the decay of radioactive rocks rather than from sunlight. According to members of the team, the finding suggests life might exist in similarly extreme conditions even on other worlds.

In the end nothing the DNC or Clinton did made much difference

The point is, they tried. Which means, their ethics allow it. So they'll try again — Clinton ain't hurting for money and is not afraid to spend it.

From the sexual assault

Sexual assault is rape. Kissing, however unwanted, is not sexual assault. Besides, there is no evidence, he's ever actually done even that much — only talked.

Raising your fist and threatening to hit someone is "assault". Spitting at someone and missing is "assault".

Yes! Moreover, simply telling someone, you'll kick his ass is an assault.

But that is not, what Trump is accused of doing. Kissing, even if unwelcome, does not qualify as any of that. The ladies may not have actively wanted him to kiss them, but, as the same recording says, they haven't objected either: "When you are a celebrity, they let you do it." So, no, it was not an assault.

Moreover, this sudden — and synchronized — swiftboating is rather suspicious in itself. If Trump was such a sexual assaulter, as NBC knew for 11 years (they've had the tape for all this time), why did they bring him to run the "Apprentice" show? Why have the ladies involved been quiet until now — Clinton's accusers, for example, have tried to make their case for years even before, he became President.

Sorry, it just does not add up — unless you are a cog in the Hillary's tank, of course, and wish her to win no matter what...

Yeah, "an unwanted kiss" is assault and battery. That is calling it what it is.

If that's what it really were, you wouldn't have had this need to substitute one term for another, and waste cycles convincing the audience, the substitute is valid and the terms — equivlanet. What you are doing is spin — carefully choosing synonyms and almost-but-not-quite equivalent words to make something appear worse or better than it really is, depending on your goals.

What it is is "unwanted kiss". End it right there and talk about that, if you can. But you can not — "unwanted kiss" just does not have the same ring to it, as "sexual assault" (the term Anderson Cooper used during the debate) does, does it? So, with a dishonest sleigh of hand, you substitute one for the other...

There's no 'careful manipulation being done by 'professional word jugglers'.

In denial much? It is right here, laughing in your face with perfectly white teeth crediting a highly paid dentist. Here is, how it works:

• Some dictionaries would define, what Trump boasted of doing in 2005, as assault. Because it involved physical contact, it would also be considered battery in the court of law.
• Therefore, Trump should disgust you, dear viewer, as if he were boasting of beating women.
• Because it involved kissing, it must've been sexual assault too, which is, according to some other dictionaries, a synonym for rape.
• Therefore, dear viewer, you should also reject Trump as rapist. That there was no actual penetration involved is of no consequence — the above sequence logical arguments clearly shows, unwanted kissing to be equivalent of rape — only an illogical redneck would disagreee. We will now go to commercials, while you try to imaging your daughter being kissed by Trump.
• PROFIT!!

You don't need to be anything of Anderson Cooper's caliber to put the above together — a Slashdot junkie with some experience could do it...

It is not even an assault.

It really is. Raising your fist and threatening to hit someone is "assault". Spitting at someone and missing is "assault".

My dictionary defines it somewhat differently:

Yours isn't a legal dictionary. Actually... yours isn't even a dictionary at all. (see below).

And nobody got beaten

Legally, where assault is merely the apprehension of harmful or offensive contact, battery is harmful or offensive contact actually taking place.
Taking your raised fist and striking someone is battery. Spitting at them and hitting them is battery. Pinching someone is battery. etc.

which is the usual understanding of the term "battery".

Even wordnet nails it:

"S: (n) battery, assault and battery (an assault in which the assailant makes physical contact)"

And wordnet isn't completely wrong about assault either, not really... it gets that it is threatened or attempted physical contact.

"S: (n) assault (a threatened or attempted physical attack by someone who appears to be able to cause bodily harm if not stopped)"

Its just a shitty example. A quadriplegic in a wheelchair spitting at you is an attempted physical attack by someone who appears to be able to cause bodily harm (landing spit on you) if not stopped. (Bodily harm is just any injury to your body -- including the injury of violating your right not to be spat upon.)

In any case all dictionaries are imperfect, but wordnet isn't even really a dictionary. Its a hypertext of synonym groups. The definitions are more illustrative than robust; as that isn't the focus of the project.

Plus its not exactly in good shape...

"Due to funding and staffing issues, we are no longer able to accept comment and suggestions."
"Due to limited staffing, there are currently no plans for future WordNet releases."
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/

Which is why it is better (as in "more honest") to simply call it, what it is: "a kiss" or, maybe, "an unwanted kiss".

http://www.rotlaw.com/legal-li...

Although the words âoeassault and batteryâ usually conjure up images of clearly hurtful and unwanted touches like being punched or kicked, a plaintiff does not have to prove she actually suffered injury to win an assault or battery case. Rather, she must merely prove that the touching was unwanted. Hugging, kissing, or providing seemingly helpful touches like first aid can count as assault and battery if the plaintiff does not want to be touched. In the torts of assault and battery, what matters is what the plaintiff does or does not want, not what the defendantâ(TM)s motives are in touching the plaintiff.

Yeah, "an unwanted kiss" is assault and battery. That is calling it what it is. This isn't obscure. Its been well established forever legally; and they've been teaching it in corporate sexual harrassment training sessions for decades now. I'm pretty sure even McDonalds covers it in their new employee orientations.

By carefully manipulating dictionaries, a professional word-juggler like Anderson Cooper could really convince the audience, Trump is approving of assault as defined in your dictionary, and then casually switch to mine to start calling him "rapist".

Huh? There's no 'careful manipulation being done by 'professional word jugglers'.

"an intentional act by one person that creates an apprehension in another of an imminent harmful or offensive contact."

Interesting... Subtle changes in semantics can really alter the meaning, can't they? My dictionary defines it somewhat differently:

1. a threatened or attempted physical attack by someone who appears to be able to cause bodily harm if not stopped
2. the crime of forcing a person to submit to sexual intercourse against his or her will

By carefully manipulating dictionaries, a professional word-juggler like Anderson Cooper could really convince the audience, Trump is approving of assault as defined in your dictionary, and then casually switch to mine to start calling him "rapist".

An unwanted kiss is actually assault AND battery

It is not even an assault. And nobody got beaten, which is the usual understanding of the term "battery".

Which is why it is better (as in "more honest") to simply call it, what it is: "a kiss" or, maybe, "an unwanted kiss".

This is why he is not prosecuted for espionage, but rather for rape . Of course, "rape" had to be redefined to include "unprotected sex when the woman consented only to condom-protected penetration".

It wasn't "redefined", kiddo, it's a matter of established Swedish law.

But that's even less of a stretch than the feat Anderson Cooper accomplished recently by redefining assault to include unappreciated kiss.

And here we have some more willful intellectual dishonesty. First off, yeah, kissing someone would be sexual assault. More importantly, though, is that the larger problem lies elsewhere in the conversation. You know, the whole "grab them by the pussy" part? I'm sure you didn't forget about that, right? So why leave it out?

This is why he is not prosecuted for espionage, but rather for rape . Of course, "rape" had to be redefined to include "unprotected sex when the woman consented only to condom-protected penetration". But that's even less of a stretch than the feat Anderson Cooper accomplished recently by redefining assault to include unappreciated kiss.

Yes we should save all our outrage and news of it until the day before it's due to be a problem

False dichotomy. No, it does not have to be "day before". A year or two before would do.

As things stand, though, we aren't at all certain, this particular one will ever be a problem — the stuff may remain buried in ice for eons. "Climate Science" and related alarmism (Peak Oil, anyone?) is rather notorious for unsuccessful predictions, while successful ones are rather hard to come by — people have tried...

To worry about what even the "proponents" say is decades ahead, one must really have dispensed with contemporary issues — such as, indeed, whether bogus accusations of sexual misconduct — and attempts to redefine unapproved kissing as assault — will allow a deceitful and crooked person become president this year.

Yes it is if its not wanted

No, actually, not even then. I linked to the definition of assault before — unwanted kiss does not qualify, even if Anderson Cooper thinks it does.

User Mi apparently thinks celebrities should be able to sexually assault women

User mi does not think, a kiss equates to an assault. Not in English language.

Lied? I think you mean, at best, was mistaken.

Thanks to the links I offered above, you too know, she spoke an untruth.

Maybe, you are too young to have paid attention, when these facts broke out, but Hillary Clinton was already very active in politics — she can not possibly not have heard about it. Therefore, she knew. Deliberately telling an untruth is the very definition of lying.

I am reluctant to accept something from a KGB archive as fact.

Well, what would you accept as fact? There are folks, who still question Moon-landing, for example, and they too can explain in detail, why everything known about it was not "fact". In the early 1990-ies, when the archives were (briefly) made accessible, the KGB was in disarray...

KGB might have still borne some grudges against the Kennedy family.

American Left have always been good to the USSR and Russia... It was because of them, the US was humiliated in Vietnam, defeated not by military might, but by discontent back at home. Later, when the USSR collapsed, it was Bill Clinton, who didn't push for Nurneberg-style of the Communists, allowing their prosecution to fizzle — that during the time, when Moscow was barely avoiding famine thanks to America's help. Later, it were Barack and Hillary, who offered Putin a "Reset" — and poured billions of dollars into Russian scientific research — not selflessly, of course. The duo also completely forgave Putin his invasion of Georgia by ending all sanctions in 2010 (thus encouraging him to invade Ukraine, as predicted).

Why would Putin seek to undermine such an asset as Hillary — whom he could've instead controlled with a combination of continuing bribery and blackmail over the bribes already taken?

Sure enough, Democrats would like Trump to look like Putin's favorite, but history points rather strongly at them...

NSA has never seized anything either.

They collected records, which could be considered a seizure.

Not by anyone with a regular English dictionary.

I see, so if a police officer saw your iPhone on the table in a public park, copied all the data and left it you would not consider that a seizure since no force was involved? Interesting way to let the NSA off the hook.

NSA has never seized anything either.

They collected records, which could be considered a seizure.

Not by anyone with a regular English dictionary.

Our political system is, like most, set up to protect the rights of our ruling class. The working class, by and large, has little or no say in such matters .

In case someone is about to say they need a citation for your claim, here it is.

https://scholar.princeton.edu/...

People should stop showing their distaste for this rigged system by sitting out elections, and instead vote for the third party of their choice. Voting your conscience is a great way to voice your actual opinion, rather than going along with the two corporate owned parties. And if the other half of the country that don't vote each election actually voted, instead of giving up, it would change things.

was purely motivated by his mixed race.

Could you offer some proof of this — something the rest of us, who do not have your powers of telepathy, can verify on their own? Something, that makes Trump's suspecting Obama's eligibility uniquely different from Clinton suspecting same? Or suspecting that McCain or Ted Cruz may not be eligible either?

You will need to provide substantial proof that the judge is racist before you can make a statement like that.

That judge has just awarded a scholarship to an illegal immigrant . Is it not fair to suspect, he may be biased against someone, who wishes to deport such illegal immigrants?

White judges are suspected of bias against Black defendants all the time (as are White juries) — why is it "racist" to suspect a Latino judge of similar bias against other races?

That Judge is apart of a group called "San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association", not the "La Raza" association

Distinction without difference. Any attempts to promote people based on their race automatically discriminates against other races and is thus racist — by definition.

That's pretty much racist.

"Pretty much" does not count.

directly attributed to anybody from the Middle East, who's appearances are starkly contrasted to caucasians.

The biggest Muslim country in the world is Indonesia, which is about as far from the Middle East as is the US. Fail.

That happened in 1973. He took over his father's business in 1971.

So, he inherited a problem from his father. Big deal. Hillary Clinton's father was racist too

Except that was a lie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

A YouTube clip with some talking-head talking about Trump is not proof, sorry. Maybe, he really forgot, who it was. Or, maybe, he lied. But that's not racism either way.

As for "disavowing" David Duke — wake me up, when Hillary Clinton "disavows" Al Sharpton, who is no less a racist than David Duke... Except she would not do that, because, whereas Duke's endorsement of Trump was unsolicited, Hillary actively sought Sharpton's. Maybe, if Trump ever went to a Duke's rally, you'd have had a point...

Fail.

That's one paper that climate science deniers like to cite but evidence from the GRACE satellites contradicts it showing a net loss from the whole Antarctic ice sheet. Here's a story about the GRACE research that covers 2003-2014.

Spent years suggesting that a black president wasn't born in the US, despite a ton of excellent evidence to the contrary.

How is that racism?

It's an example extra layer of scrutiny applied only when the candidate is black. One only needs see the relative disinterest with which the birthers treated the fact that the exact scenario they were speculating about applied directly to Cruz.

I know the answer is "no", but do you realize that McCain's eligibility was challenged in the same manner? Despite what revisionists have been trying to tell you, in the 2008 pre-election, Hillary Clinton challenged both McCain and Obama on the claim that neither were "Natural Born Citizens" in accordance with the Constitutional requirement. McCain showed the certificate that he was born to two US service members in a Panamanian hospital while they were on deployment, asked the Supreme Court if that was enough, and they said "yes." Obama stalled and delayed, giving the appearance of hiding something, released newspaper clippings, and then eventually showed a birth certificate after taking enough time that any politically connected individual could've bought favors to fake one.

Spent years suggesting that a black president wasn't born in the US, despite a ton of excellent evidence to the contrary.

How is that racism?

It's an example extra layer of scrutiny applied only when the candidate is black. One only needs see the relative disinterest with which the birthers treated the fact that the exact scenario they were speculating about applied directly to Cruz.

Said a judge of Mexican heritage wasn't fit to judge him due to his heritage.

I did ask for actual quotes didn't I? And yet, you chose to paraphrase... What are you trying to slip here, uhm?

Nothing, I just don't want to waste time.

What Trump actually said, was that the judge — a Mexican racist himself ("La Raza" member) — may have a conflict of interest.

Which was dumb, despite the fact they kept confusing different "La Raza"s. But more to the point lots of white judges are members of ethnic professional groups, no one accuses them of being racist, so only making it an issue when it's a Mexican judge in a group for Mexican judges is racist.

If it is Ok to suspect, that an All-white jury may be unfair to a Black defendant, why is it "racist" to suspect, a Mexican may be unfair to a White one?

Judges, unlike juries, have specific training on how to deal with biases. And there's no reason to think that a Mexican would have a negative stereotype about a German.

Has proposed banning members of a religion from the US (very similar to racism).

Not racism. Stick to the topic.

Muslim and Arab are highly correlated, particularly in the minds of Islamaphobes.

Regularly stereotypes blacks "you've got nothing to lose", suggesting that they're one monolithic underclass.

Never heard of it. Actual quotes, please.

Meh, why not.

Notice the stream of negative stereotypes and a false claim of 58% black youth unemployment.

He's not even talking to a black crowd, he's making his "outreach" to a white crowd.

Why is every Republican supposed to "disavow" Duke — except to play into the opponents trap of accepting some guilt (sort of like disavowing beating of one's wife)?

If you're explicitly asked about it? Yes.

If David Duke and other white supremacists have repeatedly and enthusiastically endorsed you unlike anyone else in decades? Definitely yes.

There's a reason Duke and the other white supremacists continue to support Trump so much, he refuses to convincingly say they're wrong.

Would Bernie Sanders disavow Lenin?

Not sure, there's a reason I didn't support Sanders.

Has Hillary Clinton disavowed Al Sharpton, who, unlike Duke, actually encouraged racial violence

It was a lot more BLM than anti-Semitism, the anger was the perception that the life of a black child was treated as secondary to the life of the white (and Jewish) driver who had killed him.

Spent years suggesting that a black president wasn't born in the US, despite a ton of excellent evidence to the contrary.

How is that racism?

Said a judge of Mexican heritage wasn't fit to judge him due to his heritage.

I did ask for actual quotes didn't I? And yet, you chose to paraphrase... What are you trying to slip here, uhm?

What Trump actually said, was that the judge — a Mexican racist himself ("La Raza" member) — may have a conflict of interest. If it is Ok to suspect, that an All-white jury may be unfair to a Black defendant, why is it "racist" to suspect, a Mexican may be unfair to a White one?

Has proposed banning members of a religion from the US (very similar to racism).

Not racism. Stick to the topic.

Regularly stereotypes blacks "you've got nothing to lose", suggesting that they're one monolithic underclass.

Never heard of it. Actual quotes, please.

Extreme reluctance to reject or disavow David Duke or other white supremacists

Why is every Republican supposed to "disavow" Duke — except to play into the opponents trap of accepting some guilt (sort of like disavowing beating of one's wife)?

Would Bernie Sanders disavow Lenin? Has Hillary Clinton disavowed Al Sharpton, who, unlike Duke, actually encouraged racial violence and is responsible for at least one Jew getting killed by a Black mob? No, she not only didn't disavow the asshole, she actively sought his endorsement and attended a rally at his organization.

but many of the things he says and does are quite racist.

So far, the number of actual racist quotes is a perfect zero... Keep trying...

Basic CS is stuff like algorithm design and complexity analysis

Seriously? That's not really high-schooler stuff. The prerequisites alone are undergraduate university math. It may be basic for CS but it's definitely not basic for the well-rounded knowledge one should get out of high school.

What I DO think people are saying is that the correlation between increasing use of HFCS, and increasing obesity, is suggestive of a link.

The problem with that "study" is that it really is just "suggestive." It cites a lot of research showing the problems of increased sweetener consumption in general, including studies that show obesity problems with sucrose too. (That includes a European study on cane sugar-sweetened soft drinks, which your link says indicates we need a study on HFCS since that's more dominant in the U.S., since none existed at that time.) And the problem is that most of its argument is based on the circumstantial data that HFCS became available in the 1970s, and its rise correlates with the the rise in obesity in America. The problem with that argument is that per capita sugar consumption overall increased something like 40% from the 1950s to the year 2000. So yeah, obesity rose at the same time HFCS rose, but it also rose along with sugar consumption in general.

In addition to that, there is strong clinical evidence, not just of correlation, but of causation.

Yes, that's one of the studies I've seen, along with 2 or 3 others. I've also seen quite a few showing no significant difference between HFCS vs. sucrose. It's fair to say the "jury is still out" in scientific terms, but there MAY be a minor effect for HFCS. I'm NOT trying to downplay that possibility, but the hysteria around HFCS seems mostly based on chemophobia and its name, rather than actual evidence.

Also, when you think about it, a 10% increase in content is not trivial. If you were to raise the caloric content of your diet by 10% and change nothing else, you would expect steady weight gain to ensue.

Yep, kinda like how Americans raised their per capita sugar consumption in general by roughly 40% over the past 50 years. Again, HFCS may have some greater impact here, but arguing about which sugar is the "true demon" is overlooking the much larger issue... people just need to consume less sugar, whatever the source.

The real question is whether 55% fructose HFCS is meaningfully different from 50% fructose cane sugar. That's a difference of 2 grams (21.5 vs 19.5) in a 12 ounce soda. It seems intuitively silly to say that 19.5g of fructose in a cane-sugar sweetened soda is just fine, but that 21.5 in an HFCS soda is deadly.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that "19.5g of fructose in a cane-sugar sweetened soda is just fine, but that 21.5 in an HFCS soda is deadly". What I DO think people are saying is that the correlation between increasing use of HFCS, and increasing obesity, is suggestive of a link. In addition to that, there is strong clinical evidence, not just of correlation, but of causation.

Also, when you think about it, a 10% increase in content is not trivial. If you were to raise the caloric content of your diet by 10% and change nothing else, you would expect steady weight gain to ensue. (No, I'm not saying that fructose is more calorie dense - I'm just using an example of the significance of 10% that's relevant to the current discussion). Even looking at the most visible and quantifiable effects of excessive fructose consumption, (fatty liver and increased insulin resistance), 10% may be quite important. Add in the less tangible effects, (lower satiation, increased craving, inflammation and the related immune system response, etc), and the net result might be far more ominous than the 10% increase would initially suggest.

There is nothing that limits it to strictly military or police.

Ok, I'll throw in your beloved NSA and CIA to it — though, obviously, the agencies, despite being nominally civilian, are quite military in nature and modus operandi. You are wrong in insisting "there is nothing" limiting the term defense to "military" — it is the very meaning of the word "defence". The following three (related) meanings qualify:

• an organization of defenders that provides resistance against attack; "he joined the defense against invasion"
• a structure used to defend against attack; "the artillery battered down the defenses"
• (military) military action or resources protecting a country against potential enemies; "they died in the defense of Stalingrad"; "they were developed for the defense program"

We are arguing semantics. Are you really of the opinion, that the authors of the Constitution — and the people voting to adopt it — meant anything other than armed forces, when the wrote and read the term "common Defence"?

We can and do obligate our government to take proper care of its citizens

No, we don't. The push comes the unholy alliance of rent-seeking government types seeking to justify their existence and expanding monopoly powers and bad-with-math do-gooders playing into the latters' hands. If you really are worried about someone, you can give the money to him or to a charity organization. But there is no justification for you to send an armed man to take my money for it.

All that said, my original point stands — bringing up police-spending in a debate on taxes is dishonest. Contrary to the AC's above allusion, there is no "hypocrisy" in calling 9-11 while objecting to having to pay for somebody else's education, food, and healthcare.

Maybe you should take a time out from being bitter and read the paper.
I've linked it below so you don't get even more grouchy having to look for it.
They've taken the OpenSparc T1 core as their base and built off of it, modifying the L1 cache and given each core an FPU.

I'm well out of my depth here but it doesn't look like this is some pointless research-only project just to get grant money. They've released a full test suite, an Xilink FPGA-ready implementation and its looks like there's also specs for a complete chipset.

https://parallel.princeton.edu...

Right, because it's not as if California is having enough drought to have a government site for it, or western canada. Or how about the oceans, where marine-life can be *very* temperature sensitive.

Or how about a change in parasites, which affects both humans and food-chain animals? The good news is that some parasites that like it cool may die out, but those that prefer warmer temperatures (the majority) will spread more readily.

I'm not sure we have a transmitter though that we can blast over the distance and still be captured, so we can add a few more years to that.

In order for us to be able to measure a signal from a probe, it would have to be not just bright enough for us to detect it, it would also have to be bright enough to discernably change the light we get from the star.

This page says that it is possible to outshine a star for brief moments (few nanoseconds) using lasers: https://www.princeton.edu/~wil...

I've done some back of the envelope calculations to verify that. And while its totally wrong that one 10 000 th of the output of a star is 4 joules per ns, it should still be possible to build a laser that outshines proxima centauri.

According to wikipedia, proxima centauri has a luminosity of 0.0017 times the luminosity of the sun, which is 382.8 * 10^24 Watts. So it has 6.5 * 10^23 Watts of luminosity.

Let's assume the laser has a beam divergence of .1 millirad.
This page has an example for a red (1064 nm) laser, but we want to shoot a blue one as proxima centauri is mostly red so doesn't have much blue luminosity: https://www.rp-photonics.com/b...

On .1 milirad, the star would emit approx 2.5*10^-10 of its total output (2.2*10^-10 = (.1/(1000*pi*2)^2). That would mean 1.6*^10^14 Watts for proxima centauri.

If you say that .1% of the star's total emitted light is blue at the specific wavelength you are sending, you have to divide by 1000.

Per nanosecond, it would be 163 joule. Theoretically possible, but question is whether you can build a sender and receiver (and get the sender into the right place).

Without warning, a third soldier emerged from inside the tank and started shooting at the three girls and then also at their grandmother.

This may or may not have been a horrible war crime, but it was not an Act of Terror. There is a fairly clear definition: civilians must be the targets (not bystanders) of calculated (not accidental or mistaken) violence for the purpose of intimidation or coercion or instilling fear.

The IDF refused to let an ambulance bring them to the hospital

Hamas has uses ambulances to transport troops and ammunition. They also use children for suicide attacks — a common practice by Islamists in Palestine and world-wide. Children are also used as human shields — because it works on impressionable useful idiots like yourself. Whether the women, who stepped out, were innocent, or were about to throw a tank-disabling bomb under the tracks, may not have been obvious.

But, again whether the IDF soldier had justifiable suspicions in his shooting of the family, or committed a war crime, it was not an act of terror.

And I did ask for three examples — certainly, a country labeled "terrorist" by detractors would have at least three acts of terror to its name...

Hamas averages dozens of such acts every year — their whole strategy is based on targeting Israeli civilians, because they are impotent at targeting IDF. And yet, you'd like to pretend, Israel is "worse" or "just as bad". Fail.

Posting Israeli/US/UK propaganda is also evidence of their support for terrorism

Name three acts of terror committed by the State of Israel...

What's your point in singling out Hamas?

Hamas is distinguished by, for example, being designated "terrorist organization" by various governments — a diverse bunch from US to European Union to Egypt.

And not for nothing — whatever you may think of their goals, their methods are terroristic. By definition.

facebook spoon feeds news to its subscribers.

You know, I've gotten incredibly cynical these last few years. If I see somewhere - anywhere - in the media that the sky is blue, I will stick my head out the window to check.

For issues that really concern me, I am on constant fact checking - as best I can. There are some issues like human caused global warming that I don't have the background for nor the time (or intelligence) to achieve one. I have to rely on folks at Discover, Science and Scientific American to dumb it down for me to understand.

I have to rely on trust here.

I do have an elementary understanding of non-linear dynamical systems and thermodynamics. But to say to someone who has made their life study that stuff that their right or wrong is beyond me.

It's just sickening that uneducated pundits are believed while scientists who spent the years of study, data gathering and scientific discipline are basically called frauds - all over politics.

And as Princton found out ...our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts.

Quite often, "median" and "average" are used interchangeably, though that is not always correct.

But first about "racism": the term was never used in a stricly genetic sense

Ah, once again, Illiberal "Progressives" redefine terms to suit their agenda...

hence the British Race, the Spanish Race, the Jewish Race

Sorry, would not fly. The dictionary says (emphasis mine):

race: people who are believed to belong to the same genetic stock;

The fact that you defend youself against being called a racist shows that you are aware of this

I am aware of folks like yourself, who would — incorrectly — claim "racism", where there is not any.

worth looking back at the history of America or UK. The Wild West was lousy with quacks and other fraudsters

Citations?

until the dreaded state stepped in and forced some rules on them

I'm yet to see evidence, the state's rules are helping.

the unregulated, free market encourages cheating, fraud and ruthless exploitation

You promise, I'll find evidence of this, but you aren't offering any such evidence yourself. The burden of proof is on you — put up or shut up.

even if you think Communism is a bad thing in itself, its failings have less to do with the state control and more to do with poor administration and inability to build trust between individuals and the state

Despite several attempts — by people of various racial, cultural, and religious backgrounds, Communism has failed spectacularly. Despite killing over 90 million people in 20th century and left the destitute survivors with neither human rights nor material wealth. It really is a "bad thing in itself", whatever spin you may attempt to put on it as you not-so-subtly attempt to justify "trying again".

http://www.rollingstone.com/po... [rollingstone.com]

Broken link.

"It's sleep deprivation, basically," says Brandon Neely, a former Army MP who was posted at Guantanamo.

Yeah, and Windows is basically Unix. And humans are basically monkeys — I'm sure, you can find an ex MP to tell you any of that.

"Sometimes, said Tankersley, POI status inmates were found snoozing. "And we catch them and wake them back up," he said. "

Jailers may be assholes, but there just "no there there". Nothing happened to him, that would not happen to any inmate. It sucks, but that's what jail is about... Certainly nothing "far worse".

Solitary confinement IS torture

Not in my dictionary. Thousands of inmates are subjected to that regularly in prisons nation-wide. It is not pleasant, but it is perfectly justified.

"He was forced to sleep from 1 PM to 11 PM, naked, and was allowed to do so only when facing his lamp." Ah yes, forcing someone to sleep facing a lamp--clearing a measure undertaken by those who care deeply about his health.

They aren't his parents. Their task was to make him survive to stand trial — so that no jerk ever claims, Manning was "killed in prison". Making him feel good was not part of the task.

put Manning on suicide risk, or SR, three times, despite the protests of his prison psychologist, Capt. William Hocter

Oh, wow, listening to the psychologist's protests must've been torturous indeed.

This guy put Manning back in solitary because Manning was being "disrespectful" by asking why Averhart was shouting.

Yes, an officer may impose punishment on a disrespectful underling. Welcome to military.

On top of this already being an example of torture

Darling, you can redefine studying Calculus as torture, but that will not make Math professors subject to prosecution. It is not torture.

that detail totally blows away your claim that none of this is punishment

I said nothing about solitary confinement — only the sleep-deprivation, which you alleged has taken place. That was imposed, because the traitor was deemed security risk — not as punishment.

Again, I'm sure none of this bothers you!

Conditions and treatment of prisoners in America's prisons bother me a great deal — but nothing happened to Manning (or may happen to Snowden), that is particularly out of the ordinary.

If it is acceptable to treat rapists and murderers that way, it is doubly acceptable for traitors.

Conscious, not conscientious.

Indeed. And the "conscious" is defined as (emphasis mine):

knowing and perceiving; having awareness of surroundings and sensations and thoughts

And cows are pretty universally considered both conscious and sentient

A cross-dressing man may be "regarded" as a woman by well-meaning strangers, without being one. Show me a thinking cow...

insects will simply adjust their gate and attempt to carry on

Gait, not gate.

Or did you mean sapient (thinking) rather than sentient (feeling)?

My dictionary defines "sentient" as consciously perceiving — cows may feel pain, but they aren't conscientious and so it is Ok to eat them.

Men Are Sabotaging The Online Reviews Of TV Shows Aimed At Women

"Sabotaging"? I certainly love the word, but it is decidedly non-applicable... Let's see:

sabotage -- destroy property or hinder normal operations; "The Resistance sabotaged railroad operations during the war"

How do the reviews — however negative — destroy or hinder anything?

Once again the terms are chosen not for accuracy, but for a spin — to build up our emotional reaction to the story...