Precisely. Your point is proven by the fact that these trojans are finding their way onto Google AdSense: it definitively shows that the only remedy is to block all ads because the content providers, ad networks, and other facilitators, cannot be trusted to not serve malware to the end user.
But, a little context is also worth mentioning. The original web ads used to be things like banners, or animated GIFs, usually with cheesy flashing graphics. These are still around of course. They used to be nothing more than static content that would serve a link if clicked. But as they became ubiquitous, users quickly to ignore them. So advertisers resorted to increasingly intrusive ads, like the dreaded pop-ups, which users quickly learned to close, followed by pop-unders or persistent pop-ups powered by scripting that would simply load another pop-up if the original window was closed. These resulted in browser-side blocking of pop-ups. Advertisers then escalated to overlays and interstitial ads, intercepting or obscuring the desired content. Of course, in all of this, there was always some share of shady ads, things that tried to trick the user in some way by pretending to be something it was not. But the trend has always been an arms race of increasingly intrusive and difficult to block advertising, versus increasingly more sophisticated methods to block.
This is why we are where we are today. Online advertising has a long and consistent history of being untrustworthy, malicious, and disrespectful of user preferences. Blocking is the natural reaction to such tactics. On the other hand, when people follow certain kinds of online content--product reviews on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter--this is the way online advertising must evolve. It must evolve away from advertisers attempting to force-feed ads to users whether they wish to see it or not. Even when I know what I'm watching or reading is a paid endorsement or sponsored content, if I *choose* to look at it, that is worth far more than being forced to click through an overlay. If I cannot unblock the content without running some shady JavaScript, I simply move on.
It is a belief system that needs to cease to exist.
How do you suggest we achieve that?
There's this remarkable thing that humans are capable of. It's called education. Not just the education of fact, but of modes of thought; of critical thinking; of evidence-based reasoning. Lift minds above the chaos of superstition, fear, and ignorance. Religion exists because it fills the intellectual and emotional void: it is the way humankind has sought to explain the world around them before science, and people today continue to cling to religion because it purports to provide easy answers to everything.
The scourge of religion is eradicated only through our collective and tireless pursuit of rational knowledge, and the free dissemination thereof; but more importantly, we must teach each other the means of proper reasoning; the natural consequences of which is the abandonment of dogmas, violent or otherwise.
I wonder if, in forcing users who are blocking ads to load them anyway, Facebook is willing to accept liability for the inevitable occurrence of embedded malware infecting users through a browser exploit. This is no joke: we know for a fact that ads containing malicious code have been served to users, who then have their systems compromised. If Facebook makes money from selling these ads to users, then they should have a legal obligation to not circumvent ad blocking software as a security measure.
Of course, Facebook and its customers (read: the advertisers) will accept no such responsibility for their shitty security practices. It's all on the users. It's your fault, and yours alone, if there are any negative consequences of choosing to share information about yourself through the site; your fault if your system is compromised through an advertisement that hides malicious code, even if you try to protect yourself by blocking ads. And while many people who refuse to use Facebook (myself included) on principle might say caveat emptor and that you don't have to use Facebook, the practical reality is that that horse has long since left the barn and that the only logical position for ourselves is to protest Facebook's practices, because if our acquaintances get hacked, that has clear ramifications for the security of our own personal information even if we did not share it with Facebook.
Your knee-jerk reaction is overly simplistic. We in the US constantly read about patent trolls and the abuse of intellectual property law by various entities; however, this does not necessarily mean all notions of intellectual property as a legal construct should be abolished. Clearly, the issue goes both ways: some companies use IP as a cudgel, smashing down anyone who might dare to compete or innovate beyond them; but at the other end of the spectrum, you have for example Chinese copycats, who steal the inventions of others to make their own lower-quality knockoff products that frequently hide serious defects in workmanship.
To call the Chinese "wise" to ignore IP law because they prefer to copy the ideas of others fails to consider the fact that their copies are almost invariably inferior to the original. Some are actually fairly decent. But in the computing hardware/software space, I would not trust a Chinese manufacturer or developer any further than I could spit. They have consistently demonstrated that they make complete crap, and if it's not crap, it's infested with malware. Need I remind you of how major Chinese iOS app developers (WeChat, for example) infected their apps by using a compromised version of iOS developer tools? That is the kind of shit that you can expect from Chinese companies: everything is about taking as many shortcuts as possible, copying everyone else, and not speaking up when you find a problem for fear that you will become a scapegoat. It is ingrained into the culture. That's not to say non-Chinese companies are never guilty of the same. It's just that in China, this is the rule rather than the exception. There's zero focus on quality.
The overriding issue with doing business in China is corruption and intellectual property theft. In plain English, that means (1) the government runs on bribery, and (2) Chinese cultural values do not regard things like corporate espionage, patent infringement, bootlegging, and knockoffs, as being unethical. This is why non-Chinese companies tend to fail, because they allowed to enter the market only long enough until a Chinese company can copy their ideas and property.
Right, because treating same sex couples equally under the law--that is to say, not kicking them out of the ambulance; not having their homophobic relatives contest their wills and leave their widows and widowers nothing--somehow instantaneously nullifies and "fucks up" your heterosexual marriage, your rights, your recognized status under the law.
Are those rights now DENIED to you simply because they are recognized for same sex couples? You still don't understand. Your so-called "right" to be a pompous, bigoted asshole; your right to treat a group of people as inferior under the law, is not a right. The only thing that gets fucked up here is that you don't get to take out your prejudices against gays and lesbians and call that your "religious freedom."
This idea of needing to "protect heterosexual marriage" because it is somehow "threatened" by men marrying men, and women marrying women, is really a statement to the effect that straights regard their own marital bonds to be so fragile, so tenuous, that they need the security of denying other people their rights, to say to other people how THEY should be recognized when that has no bearing on their own status in society. How pathetic for you that you feel that way.
Separately, I would like to also address the theological claims you imply about Islam. Given my previous responses, you might be surprised to read that to a large extent, I concur with your assessment that Islam is not a peaceful religion. The proof is in the Koran and the Hadith. As a number of prominent scholars (Sam Harris comes to mind) have pointed out, and what we can actually witness in reality if one chooses to do so, is that, in Islam, the penalty for apostasy is death. In short, any Muslim who renounces his or her faith must be killed for that betrayal, according to Islam. And this is obviously completely morally unacceptable.
I have little patience for anyone, Muslim or otherwise, who professes that this is not "real Islam," or that it is "taken out of context," or that Muslims "don't actually kill apostates." Such statements are willful deceptions and an attempt to hide or ignore the true state of affairs.
It is ironic, then, that it is so often those who profess to be "liberal" that rush so eagerly to defend Islam as the right of its believers to follow, when Islam as it is practiced in the vast majority of the world regularly brutalizes women and sexual minorities, not to mention the vicious sectarianism that has driven the entire Syrian civil war. Apologists of the faith conveniently ignore the fundamental reality that Islamic doctrine is, at its fundamental core, corrupted by a violent ideology for the reason I have provided above, and that if Muslims worldwide really wish to have their faith respected and accepted for being peace-loving as they claim, then they will need to do work to reform their religion. Not to make any claims about Christianity being more mature, but they had their Reformation. Islam has yet to figure out that a faith that threatens its adherents with death if they dare to question it, is a very juvenile and insecure way to believe in a God, if you're going to believe in one at all.
You conflate behavior with mindset. They are not the same. Thinking about committing a crime is not, in itself, a crime. If, however, one takes concrete actions with the purpose of committing a crime...that's is when ideation becomes action. If a state decides to criminalize thoughts--no matter how odious or offensive they may be--how would they propose to enact such policies?
Again, this comes down to the point I made earlier. If the goal is to stop terrorism, then the solution is to make their cause unappealing, not to try to catch them in the act, because the latter is impossible unless you turn the nation into a totalitarian police state. To the vast majority of people, the ideology espoused by ISIS is reprehensible. But what do you think will happen once you start criminalizing Muslims left and right? History has shown time and time again, that ostracizing the ideologically vulnerable only produces more resentment and hatred, and this is exactly what pushes them to join the ranks of the terrorists.
Gingrich's proposal, like that of many Republicans, stems from a paternalistic and simplistic ideology: that there is always a "right way" and "wrong way," that morality is quantifiable and absolute, that there is a single simple solution that could be enacted that would solve everyone else's problems. That's a big reason why Donald Trump is so appealing to many Americans: he makes some bold, sweeping, simple claim--irrespective of whether it is true or realistic--and says that this is THE solution to everyone's woes. And that is exactly what ignorant and scared people want to hear--they want to hear that someone is going to come along with all the answers and fix everything. That's why so many voted for Brexit, too: politicians promised it was the fix. Now, many who voted to leave the EU are waking up to the reality that life is not so simple.
How easily the lessons of history are lost upon the ignorant. When you threaten to imprison people for:
1. Having certain thoughts 2. Belonging to a specific ethnic, religious, or social group 3. Viewing, possessing, or accessing information
This is exactly the sort of thing that leads to totalitarianism and genocide. That is not to say that the dissemination of certain ideas are not dangerous (e.g. incitement to mass murder), or that certain forms of information/content should not be illegal to possess or distribute (e.g., child pornography). Yes, ISIS materials and websites that promote terrorism are awful, but merely *accessing* these, in of themselves, should not and cannot be regarded as criminal, since you would not only criminalize their supporters and sympathizers, but you'd criminalize anyone attempting to investigate them for the purposes of covert surveillance or academic research.
Terrorism, by its nature, is not the incitement of terror in a society for its own sake; no. Terrorism is a strategy by which individuals seek to overthrow a state by attacking its civilians; who, in their fear, appeal to the state to protect them through ever-increasingly draconian policies, such as those proposed by Mr. Gingrich. The state, whose interests are not to protect the people but to consolidate power and wealth into its own hands, makes the deliberate choice to restrict freedoms, until the people become so oppressed that they overthrow the government. This is how terrorism wins.
If the world wants to defeat ISIS and the like, the solution is to prevent their ideas from having any appeal. By threatening the same people that ISIS is trying to attract, all in the name of "national security," those who run the government are sending a very clear signal to anyone with a brain that in fact, they are not interested in stopping terrorism, but are all too happy to leverage fear as a way to gain power.
I've got a Mac and an iPhone, and although I would say I tend to favor Apple products, I would not call myself a fan.
I just heard about this "rich links" feature in Messages where links to images or video will display in a preview attached to the link. My immediate reaction was one of revulsion and disbelief. That kind of "feature" is a security nightmare and there better be a way to disable it or else I am NOT going to upgrade. Whoever thought this was a good idea is a fucking idiot. Your phone should NEVER pre-emptively download the content of a hyperlink that someone else sends you. I don't care if it's a trusted site or not.
Stopping disease progression in MS does not automatically mean that a patient regains some amount of functioning that was lost to the disease. It simply means that the disease does not get worse, not that the patient is healed of the damage. Some cases of MS do not have acute phases with subsequent remission at all; and of those that do exhibit remission, sometimes it is not complete.
Therefore, one should not expect those percentages to add, since some patients would be counted in multiple categories.
Sorry, but "elevating the debate?" NOTHING has changed. The NSA is still illegally conducting mass surveillance on innocent American citizens. There has been ZERO accountability for the NSA and CIA's blatant and PROVEN lies to Congress under oath. There has been no systemic reform nor even the slightest attempt to adhere to Constitutional principles.
And all this while the US government is still seeking to blame Snowden for endangering national security, haul him back to the US and put him on trial? Should we feel comforted by the statements of a FORMER US Attorney General who has no actual power, just because he says that a judge would consider the ends of Snowden's actions when punishing him for the means by which those ends were achieved--mind you, never once actually admitting that such disclosures would NEVER have come to light by any other way? So we are now to believe Eric Holder's facetious claims of leniency, when NOT ONCE has he said anything to the effect of needing to investigate the NSA for breaking the law and for lying to Congress?
Fuck you and the high horse you rode in on. This is why we can't trust the government. This is why nobody with a brain believes you for a second, because we KNOW what happened in the past and we are not so stupid as to forget actual concrete outcomes. The harassment of past NSA whistleblowers, ruining their ability to work in anything but the most menial jobs for having dared to expose the corruption of those higher up; the incarceration and inhumane treatment of Chelsea Manning for her involvement in Wikileaks' exposing the indiscriminate behavior of the American military; and the complete arrogance of the FBI in attempting to force Apple to write source code to circumvent iOS encryption that would allow them to access all data on any iPhone--these are just a FEW of the demonstrably true actions on the part of the government that show that they cannot be trusted and are hopelessly corrupt in their thirst for power.
Snowden was correct to expose the NSA. However, he was wrong to believe that his actions could have possibly shamed the US government and it citizens into holding it accountable.
Originally, when Apple planned to renovate the Union Square retail location, they intended to remove the fountain that was on the property. Regardless of the aesthetic/cultural value of that fountain (personally, I think it's kind of an eyesore but I absolutely respect that others might not feel the same way), the public protested, and as a result, Apple changed their plan, and the fountain remains.
I think that says something about a corporation--even one as large and influential as Apple is--that they are willing to listen to the community. That they designed the store with the intent--whether or not it is realized--to integrate with the community, is something that I doubt many other major tech companies really care about. But in typical pessimist Slashdot "nothing is ever good enough and every action has some sinister and ulterior motive" fashion, people seem to always find some reason to complain.
Yes, it's a retail store. Yes, it's for Apple to make money. Yes, there was an environmental impact. No, Apple doesn't sell your beloved Android system. No, Apple isn't God, and they don't let their iPhones run anything you want. No, Apple doesn't do everything you want them to do exactly how you want them to do it and for free. No, the building is not some miracle of architecture designed to be perfect in every way, even if Apple hopes you might think so. Yes, Apple has their cult following.
Given all that, just take a deep breath, relax, and admit that it's a decent renovation, that there will be people who will enjoy the new store, and that Apple, unlike a lot of other companies and for whatever reason, at least tries to care about doing the right thing in this case. That is neither a case for sainthood nor demonization.
The essence of the problem is that when a government and media incite fear and paranoia in an undereducated society, and when the true prevalence of threats is already very low, all this does is magnify (in dramatic fashion) the incidence of false positives. And the government knows this, and exploits this, because they are able to leverage that fear to accumulate ever more draconian powers, until the government becomes a police state. The most efficient means of amassing power is to ensure the denial of knowledge to those who have less power than you.
You can't expect the average citizen to have an understanding of differential equations, but we should expect the average citizen to be able to reason logically rather than emotionally. But people don't because they have been manipulated into becoming fearful sheep, whose unthinking compliance is all but assured by stoking their xenophobia.
Sadly, this is not going to get better. Punishing the stupid for being stupid may be viscerally satisfying, but ultimately it will be ineffective, because the real reason for their stupidity has far more to do with the overwhelming control exerted by those entities that encourage such stupidity. Expecting the general public to police itself and shame each other ignores the fact that it is the government and the media, all controlled by wealthy elites (who, as you might note, don't need to fly in commercial aircraft), who are orchestrating this sort of behavior in order to ensure their grip on power.
I didn't mention Ivanpah because my point was to provide examples of mismanagement and corruption in San Diego politics. Has nothing to do with nuclear vs. solar. I'm open to considering any energy production method that isn't based on fossil fuels. Of course, these may have other environmental impacts, but the whole idea is to weigh those impacts against each other and the benefits.
You incorrectly presume that when someone is voted in to replace the incumbents, that they are immune to the corrupting influences of the political system. Do you really think that the mere threat of voting someone out of office, even if executed, is enough to deter politicians from being corrupt? You must have an incredibly idealistic and naive view of the way American government works.
Oh, and how could I have forgotten the San Onofre nuclear power plant? Edison/SDGE mismanages the plant, ignores documentation of design flaws, causes the plant to become unusable, and then the cost of decommissioning is passed on ratepayers, when this plant was supposed to continue providing energy for decades. Who fucked up the plant? The utilities. Why did they fuck it up? Greed. They didn't want to pay for the fix, and thought that the design flaws posed an acceptable risk. And who is paying for their negligence/fraud? We are. They gambled, we lost. And who is it that is allowing the ratepayers to be shafted...? The San Diego and California State politicians and regulators who "negotiated" this "deal" and is obstructing law enforcement and taxpayers from investigating the collusion that took place.
I live in San Diego and these plans are just the usual political bullshit. All talk and no substance. The city couldn't even pull together an actual centennial celebration of Balboa Park--millions of taxpayer dollars were spent and it all just disappeared into the hands of various marketing companies and consultant firms, and nothing ever materialized. Meanwhile, the park's buildings and infrastructure are crumbling. And this is just one example of gross political mismanagement. The whole SD Chargers debacle is another. Why are taxpayers asked to foot the bill to help build a new football stadium just to prevent a mediocre team from leaving?
Having previously lived in LA, San Diego politics makes Los Angeles look like a well-oiled machine. "Climate Action Plan" is just another euphemism for "taxpayers will somehow get shafted by the time this is all said and done." 2035 will roll around and people will have paid for smoke and mirrors, like they have done time and time again. People are willing to fund projects, but only if the costs come under the budget, and what is promised is what is delivered. But there's not mechanism in place to hold officials accountable should they fail to make good on their promises, just as is the case with the rest of the US government.
To answer your last question, the primary reason why there are not more open access journals, and why the outrageous pricing of journals exists, is because of the issue of reputability.
The system of knowledge dissemination in academia, historically, has largely relied on peer review, but as the corpus of that knowledge has grown explosively, it has become increasingly challenging for individual researchers to quickly identify influential and important discoveries. Consequently, academics relied on journal editors to elevate the status of certain papers through the reputation of their journals. Getting published in Nature or Cell carries far more prestige than some "second-" or "third-tier" journal, and through this mechanism, companies like Elsevier realized they could use this as leverage.
In short, the pressure to publish in reputable and highly visible journals is what created the market opportunity for monopolists to extort huge sums of money from the academics who created this flawed and dysfunctional system. The publishers exploited this flaw, but it is the researchers and the institutions which employ them that largely created the flaw in the first place.
The move to an open-access model is not one that can be done in a short period of time, because it takes time for journals to develop the reputation that is the basis for their value. Elsevier knows this, and in response, they know they can't tighten the screws too much. But they are greedy bastards too. Sci-Hub threatens to topple their house of cards rather than letting them milk the system as long as they can until academics collectively wake up and decide that enough is enough.
This is rather disingenuous and not indicative of the popular attitudes of Russian society under Vladimir Putin's rule. As corrupt as he is, he has not gotten this far simply by demonstrating the futility of opposing him. He has extremely widespread support among the Russian people. They don't support him because they're afraid of him. They support him for reasons that are very similar to why a certain segment of American society supports Donald Trump.
Moreover, if you look at the history of other nations whose people had long been oppressed but later experienced democratization, it is not as if they too have merely resigned themselves to their fate. Look at Myanmar, for instance. People know how to enact change if they really care about it, even if it takes time. It is just as possible to overthrow totalitarian regimes as it is to become enslaved by one. The deciding factor is not whether a population believes it is hopeless, but rather, whether the population gives support to the regime. Putin is able to keep his grip on power precisely because for the most part, Russian society LIKES him, even if that sentiment is based upon lies and manipulation.
Slashdot Mirror
Too old (and fat) to be a twink, too smooth (I presume, judging from lack of facial hair) to be a bear.
In gay male social circles, the most fitting animal subculture would be "manatee," but that's a horrible thing to say about actual manatees.
Precisely. Your point is proven by the fact that these trojans are finding their way onto Google AdSense: it definitively shows that the only remedy is to block all ads because the content providers, ad networks, and other facilitators, cannot be trusted to not serve malware to the end user.
But, a little context is also worth mentioning. The original web ads used to be things like banners, or animated GIFs, usually with cheesy flashing graphics. These are still around of course. They used to be nothing more than static content that would serve a link if clicked. But as they became ubiquitous, users quickly to ignore them. So advertisers resorted to increasingly intrusive ads, like the dreaded pop-ups, which users quickly learned to close, followed by pop-unders or persistent pop-ups powered by scripting that would simply load another pop-up if the original window was closed. These resulted in browser-side blocking of pop-ups. Advertisers then escalated to overlays and interstitial ads, intercepting or obscuring the desired content. Of course, in all of this, there was always some share of shady ads, things that tried to trick the user in some way by pretending to be something it was not. But the trend has always been an arms race of increasingly intrusive and difficult to block advertising, versus increasingly more sophisticated methods to block.
This is why we are where we are today. Online advertising has a long and consistent history of being untrustworthy, malicious, and disrespectful of user preferences. Blocking is the natural reaction to such tactics. On the other hand, when people follow certain kinds of online content--product reviews on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter--this is the way online advertising must evolve. It must evolve away from advertisers attempting to force-feed ads to users whether they wish to see it or not. Even when I know what I'm watching or reading is a paid endorsement or sponsored content, if I *choose* to look at it, that is worth far more than being forced to click through an overlay. If I cannot unblock the content without running some shady JavaScript, I simply move on.
It is a belief system that needs to cease to exist.
How do you suggest we achieve that?
There's this remarkable thing that humans are capable of. It's called education. Not just the education of fact, but of modes of thought; of critical thinking; of evidence-based reasoning. Lift minds above the chaos of superstition, fear, and ignorance. Religion exists because it fills the intellectual and emotional void: it is the way humankind has sought to explain the world around them before science, and people today continue to cling to religion because it purports to provide easy answers to everything.
The scourge of religion is eradicated only through our collective and tireless pursuit of rational knowledge, and the free dissemination thereof; but more importantly, we must teach each other the means of proper reasoning; the natural consequences of which is the abandonment of dogmas, violent or otherwise.
I wonder if, in forcing users who are blocking ads to load them anyway, Facebook is willing to accept liability for the inevitable occurrence of embedded malware infecting users through a browser exploit. This is no joke: we know for a fact that ads containing malicious code have been served to users, who then have their systems compromised. If Facebook makes money from selling these ads to users, then they should have a legal obligation to not circumvent ad blocking software as a security measure.
Of course, Facebook and its customers (read: the advertisers) will accept no such responsibility for their shitty security practices. It's all on the users. It's your fault, and yours alone, if there are any negative consequences of choosing to share information about yourself through the site; your fault if your system is compromised through an advertisement that hides malicious code, even if you try to protect yourself by blocking ads. And while many people who refuse to use Facebook (myself included) on principle might say caveat emptor and that you don't have to use Facebook, the practical reality is that that horse has long since left the barn and that the only logical position for ourselves is to protest Facebook's practices, because if our acquaintances get hacked, that has clear ramifications for the security of our own personal information even if we did not share it with Facebook.
Your knee-jerk reaction is overly simplistic. We in the US constantly read about patent trolls and the abuse of intellectual property law by various entities; however, this does not necessarily mean all notions of intellectual property as a legal construct should be abolished. Clearly, the issue goes both ways: some companies use IP as a cudgel, smashing down anyone who might dare to compete or innovate beyond them; but at the other end of the spectrum, you have for example Chinese copycats, who steal the inventions of others to make their own lower-quality knockoff products that frequently hide serious defects in workmanship.
To call the Chinese "wise" to ignore IP law because they prefer to copy the ideas of others fails to consider the fact that their copies are almost invariably inferior to the original. Some are actually fairly decent. But in the computing hardware/software space, I would not trust a Chinese manufacturer or developer any further than I could spit. They have consistently demonstrated that they make complete crap, and if it's not crap, it's infested with malware. Need I remind you of how major Chinese iOS app developers (WeChat, for example) infected their apps by using a compromised version of iOS developer tools? That is the kind of shit that you can expect from Chinese companies: everything is about taking as many shortcuts as possible, copying everyone else, and not speaking up when you find a problem for fear that you will become a scapegoat. It is ingrained into the culture. That's not to say non-Chinese companies are never guilty of the same. It's just that in China, this is the rule rather than the exception. There's zero focus on quality.
The overriding issue with doing business in China is corruption and intellectual property theft. In plain English, that means (1) the government runs on bribery, and (2) Chinese cultural values do not regard things like corporate espionage, patent infringement, bootlegging, and knockoffs, as being unethical. This is why non-Chinese companies tend to fail, because they allowed to enter the market only long enough until a Chinese company can copy their ideas and property.
According to this study, they're gonna give a shit pretty soon, it would seem. A lot of very, very unpleasant shits.
I would argue that forced rectal insertion of a copy of 1984 is more dystopian.
Right, because treating same sex couples equally under the law--that is to say, not kicking them out of the ambulance; not having their homophobic relatives contest their wills and leave their widows and widowers nothing--somehow instantaneously nullifies and "fucks up" your heterosexual marriage, your rights, your recognized status under the law.
Are those rights now DENIED to you simply because they are recognized for same sex couples? You still don't understand. Your so-called "right" to be a pompous, bigoted asshole; your right to treat a group of people as inferior under the law, is not a right. The only thing that gets fucked up here is that you don't get to take out your prejudices against gays and lesbians and call that your "religious freedom."
This idea of needing to "protect heterosexual marriage" because it is somehow "threatened" by men marrying men, and women marrying women, is really a statement to the effect that straights regard their own marital bonds to be so fragile, so tenuous, that they need the security of denying other people their rights, to say to other people how THEY should be recognized when that has no bearing on their own status in society. How pathetic for you that you feel that way.
Separately, I would like to also address the theological claims you imply about Islam. Given my previous responses, you might be surprised to read that to a large extent, I concur with your assessment that Islam is not a peaceful religion. The proof is in the Koran and the Hadith. As a number of prominent scholars (Sam Harris comes to mind) have pointed out, and what we can actually witness in reality if one chooses to do so, is that, in Islam, the penalty for apostasy is death. In short, any Muslim who renounces his or her faith must be killed for that betrayal, according to Islam. And this is obviously completely morally unacceptable.
I have little patience for anyone, Muslim or otherwise, who professes that this is not "real Islam," or that it is "taken out of context," or that Muslims "don't actually kill apostates." Such statements are willful deceptions and an attempt to hide or ignore the true state of affairs.
It is ironic, then, that it is so often those who profess to be "liberal" that rush so eagerly to defend Islam as the right of its believers to follow, when Islam as it is practiced in the vast majority of the world regularly brutalizes women and sexual minorities, not to mention the vicious sectarianism that has driven the entire Syrian civil war. Apologists of the faith conveniently ignore the fundamental reality that Islamic doctrine is, at its fundamental core, corrupted by a violent ideology for the reason I have provided above, and that if Muslims worldwide really wish to have their faith respected and accepted for being peace-loving as they claim, then they will need to do work to reform their religion. Not to make any claims about Christianity being more mature, but they had their Reformation. Islam has yet to figure out that a faith that threatens its adherents with death if they dare to question it, is a very juvenile and insecure way to believe in a God, if you're going to believe in one at all.
You conflate behavior with mindset. They are not the same. Thinking about committing a crime is not, in itself, a crime. If, however, one takes concrete actions with the purpose of committing a crime...that's is when ideation becomes action. If a state decides to criminalize thoughts--no matter how odious or offensive they may be--how would they propose to enact such policies?
Again, this comes down to the point I made earlier. If the goal is to stop terrorism, then the solution is to make their cause unappealing, not to try to catch them in the act, because the latter is impossible unless you turn the nation into a totalitarian police state. To the vast majority of people, the ideology espoused by ISIS is reprehensible. But what do you think will happen once you start criminalizing Muslims left and right? History has shown time and time again, that ostracizing the ideologically vulnerable only produces more resentment and hatred, and this is exactly what pushes them to join the ranks of the terrorists.
Gingrich's proposal, like that of many Republicans, stems from a paternalistic and simplistic ideology: that there is always a "right way" and "wrong way," that morality is quantifiable and absolute, that there is a single simple solution that could be enacted that would solve everyone else's problems. That's a big reason why Donald Trump is so appealing to many Americans: he makes some bold, sweeping, simple claim--irrespective of whether it is true or realistic--and says that this is THE solution to everyone's woes. And that is exactly what ignorant and scared people want to hear--they want to hear that someone is going to come along with all the answers and fix everything. That's why so many voted for Brexit, too: politicians promised it was the fix. Now, many who voted to leave the EU are waking up to the reality that life is not so simple.
How easily the lessons of history are lost upon the ignorant. When you threaten to imprison people for:
1. Having certain thoughts
2. Belonging to a specific ethnic, religious, or social group
3. Viewing, possessing, or accessing information
This is exactly the sort of thing that leads to totalitarianism and genocide. That is not to say that the dissemination of certain ideas are not dangerous (e.g. incitement to mass murder), or that certain forms of information/content should not be illegal to possess or distribute (e.g., child pornography). Yes, ISIS materials and websites that promote terrorism are awful, but merely *accessing* these, in of themselves, should not and cannot be regarded as criminal, since you would not only criminalize their supporters and sympathizers, but you'd criminalize anyone attempting to investigate them for the purposes of covert surveillance or academic research.
Terrorism, by its nature, is not the incitement of terror in a society for its own sake; no. Terrorism is a strategy by which individuals seek to overthrow a state by attacking its civilians; who, in their fear, appeal to the state to protect them through ever-increasingly draconian policies, such as those proposed by Mr. Gingrich. The state, whose interests are not to protect the people but to consolidate power and wealth into its own hands, makes the deliberate choice to restrict freedoms, until the people become so oppressed that they overthrow the government. This is how terrorism wins.
If the world wants to defeat ISIS and the like, the solution is to prevent their ideas from having any appeal. By threatening the same people that ISIS is trying to attract, all in the name of "national security," those who run the government are sending a very clear signal to anyone with a brain that in fact, they are not interested in stopping terrorism, but are all too happy to leverage fear as a way to gain power.
I've got a Mac and an iPhone, and although I would say I tend to favor Apple products, I would not call myself a fan.
I just heard about this "rich links" feature in Messages where links to images or video will display in a preview attached to the link. My immediate reaction was one of revulsion and disbelief. That kind of "feature" is a security nightmare and there better be a way to disable it or else I am NOT going to upgrade. Whoever thought this was a good idea is a fucking idiot. Your phone should NEVER pre-emptively download the content of a hyperlink that someone else sends you. I don't care if it's a trusted site or not.
Stopping disease progression in MS does not automatically mean that a patient regains some amount of functioning that was lost to the disease. It simply means that the disease does not get worse, not that the patient is healed of the damage. Some cases of MS do not have acute phases with subsequent remission at all; and of those that do exhibit remission, sometimes it is not complete.
Therefore, one should not expect those percentages to add, since some patients would be counted in multiple categories.
Sorry, but "elevating the debate?" NOTHING has changed. The NSA is still illegally conducting mass surveillance on innocent American citizens. There has been ZERO accountability for the NSA and CIA's blatant and PROVEN lies to Congress under oath. There has been no systemic reform nor even the slightest attempt to adhere to Constitutional principles.
And all this while the US government is still seeking to blame Snowden for endangering national security, haul him back to the US and put him on trial? Should we feel comforted by the statements of a FORMER US Attorney General who has no actual power, just because he says that a judge would consider the ends of Snowden's actions when punishing him for the means by which those ends were achieved--mind you, never once actually admitting that such disclosures would NEVER have come to light by any other way? So we are now to believe Eric Holder's facetious claims of leniency, when NOT ONCE has he said anything to the effect of needing to investigate the NSA for breaking the law and for lying to Congress?
Fuck you and the high horse you rode in on. This is why we can't trust the government. This is why nobody with a brain believes you for a second, because we KNOW what happened in the past and we are not so stupid as to forget actual concrete outcomes. The harassment of past NSA whistleblowers, ruining their ability to work in anything but the most menial jobs for having dared to expose the corruption of those higher up; the incarceration and inhumane treatment of Chelsea Manning for her involvement in Wikileaks' exposing the indiscriminate behavior of the American military; and the complete arrogance of the FBI in attempting to force Apple to write source code to circumvent iOS encryption that would allow them to access all data on any iPhone--these are just a FEW of the demonstrably true actions on the part of the government that show that they cannot be trusted and are hopelessly corrupt in their thirst for power.
Snowden was correct to expose the NSA. However, he was wrong to believe that his actions could have possibly shamed the US government and it citizens into holding it accountable.
Thanks for proving my point.
Originally, when Apple planned to renovate the Union Square retail location, they intended to remove the fountain that was on the property. Regardless of the aesthetic/cultural value of that fountain (personally, I think it's kind of an eyesore but I absolutely respect that others might not feel the same way), the public protested, and as a result, Apple changed their plan, and the fountain remains.
I think that says something about a corporation--even one as large and influential as Apple is--that they are willing to listen to the community. That they designed the store with the intent--whether or not it is realized--to integrate with the community, is something that I doubt many other major tech companies really care about. But in typical pessimist Slashdot "nothing is ever good enough and every action has some sinister and ulterior motive" fashion, people seem to always find some reason to complain.
Yes, it's a retail store. Yes, it's for Apple to make money. Yes, there was an environmental impact. No, Apple doesn't sell your beloved Android system. No, Apple isn't God, and they don't let their iPhones run anything you want. No, Apple doesn't do everything you want them to do exactly how you want them to do it and for free. No, the building is not some miracle of architecture designed to be perfect in every way, even if Apple hopes you might think so. Yes, Apple has their cult following.
Given all that, just take a deep breath, relax, and admit that it's a decent renovation, that there will be people who will enjoy the new store, and that Apple, unlike a lot of other companies and for whatever reason, at least tries to care about doing the right thing in this case. That is neither a case for sainthood nor demonization.
The essence of the problem is that when a government and media incite fear and paranoia in an undereducated society, and when the true prevalence of threats is already very low, all this does is magnify (in dramatic fashion) the incidence of false positives. And the government knows this, and exploits this, because they are able to leverage that fear to accumulate ever more draconian powers, until the government becomes a police state. The most efficient means of amassing power is to ensure the denial of knowledge to those who have less power than you.
You can't expect the average citizen to have an understanding of differential equations, but we should expect the average citizen to be able to reason logically rather than emotionally. But people don't because they have been manipulated into becoming fearful sheep, whose unthinking compliance is all but assured by stoking their xenophobia.
Sadly, this is not going to get better. Punishing the stupid for being stupid may be viscerally satisfying, but ultimately it will be ineffective, because the real reason for their stupidity has far more to do with the overwhelming control exerted by those entities that encourage such stupidity. Expecting the general public to police itself and shame each other ignores the fact that it is the government and the media, all controlled by wealthy elites (who, as you might note, don't need to fly in commercial aircraft), who are orchestrating this sort of behavior in order to ensure their grip on power.
I didn't mention Ivanpah because my point was to provide examples of mismanagement and corruption in San Diego politics. Has nothing to do with nuclear vs. solar. I'm open to considering any energy production method that isn't based on fossil fuels. Of course, these may have other environmental impacts, but the whole idea is to weigh those impacts against each other and the benefits.
You incorrectly presume that when someone is voted in to replace the incumbents, that they are immune to the corrupting influences of the political system. Do you really think that the mere threat of voting someone out of office, even if executed, is enough to deter politicians from being corrupt? You must have an incredibly idealistic and naive view of the way American government works.
Oh, and how could I have forgotten the San Onofre nuclear power plant? Edison/SDGE mismanages the plant, ignores documentation of design flaws, causes the plant to become unusable, and then the cost of decommissioning is passed on ratepayers, when this plant was supposed to continue providing energy for decades. Who fucked up the plant? The utilities. Why did they fuck it up? Greed. They didn't want to pay for the fix, and thought that the design flaws posed an acceptable risk. And who is paying for their negligence/fraud? We are. They gambled, we lost. And who is it that is allowing the ratepayers to be shafted...? The San Diego and California State politicians and regulators who "negotiated" this "deal" and is obstructing law enforcement and taxpayers from investigating the collusion that took place.
I live in San Diego and these plans are just the usual political bullshit. All talk and no substance. The city couldn't even pull together an actual centennial celebration of Balboa Park--millions of taxpayer dollars were spent and it all just disappeared into the hands of various marketing companies and consultant firms, and nothing ever materialized. Meanwhile, the park's buildings and infrastructure are crumbling. And this is just one example of gross political mismanagement. The whole SD Chargers debacle is another. Why are taxpayers asked to foot the bill to help build a new football stadium just to prevent a mediocre team from leaving?
Having previously lived in LA, San Diego politics makes Los Angeles look like a well-oiled machine. "Climate Action Plan" is just another euphemism for "taxpayers will somehow get shafted by the time this is all said and done." 2035 will roll around and people will have paid for smoke and mirrors, like they have done time and time again. People are willing to fund projects, but only if the costs come under the budget, and what is promised is what is delivered. But there's not mechanism in place to hold officials accountable should they fail to make good on their promises, just as is the case with the rest of the US government.
To answer your last question, the primary reason why there are not more open access journals, and why the outrageous pricing of journals exists, is because of the issue of reputability.
The system of knowledge dissemination in academia, historically, has largely relied on peer review, but as the corpus of that knowledge has grown explosively, it has become increasingly challenging for individual researchers to quickly identify influential and important discoveries. Consequently, academics relied on journal editors to elevate the status of certain papers through the reputation of their journals. Getting published in Nature or Cell carries far more prestige than some "second-" or "third-tier" journal, and through this mechanism, companies like Elsevier realized they could use this as leverage.
In short, the pressure to publish in reputable and highly visible journals is what created the market opportunity for monopolists to extort huge sums of money from the academics who created this flawed and dysfunctional system. The publishers exploited this flaw, but it is the researchers and the institutions which employ them that largely created the flaw in the first place.
The move to an open-access model is not one that can be done in a short period of time, because it takes time for journals to develop the reputation that is the basis for their value. Elsevier knows this, and in response, they know they can't tighten the screws too much. But they are greedy bastards too. Sci-Hub threatens to topple their house of cards rather than letting them milk the system as long as they can until academics collectively wake up and decide that enough is enough.
Only an hour to boot up? That's pretty fast for Win95, even after excluding all the times I can count when that shitty OS wouldn't even boot at all.
This is rather disingenuous and not indicative of the popular attitudes of Russian society under Vladimir Putin's rule. As corrupt as he is, he has not gotten this far simply by demonstrating the futility of opposing him. He has extremely widespread support among the Russian people. They don't support him because they're afraid of him. They support him for reasons that are very similar to why a certain segment of American society supports Donald Trump.
Moreover, if you look at the history of other nations whose people had long been oppressed but later experienced democratization, it is not as if they too have merely resigned themselves to their fate. Look at Myanmar, for instance. People know how to enact change if they really care about it, even if it takes time. It is just as possible to overthrow totalitarian regimes as it is to become enslaved by one. The deciding factor is not whether a population believes it is hopeless, but rather, whether the population gives support to the regime. Putin is able to keep his grip on power precisely because for the most part, Russian society LIKES him, even if that sentiment is based upon lies and manipulation.