Sorry, but no. Obama recognized that US health care is the most expensive in the world, while inefficient and cutting off a large fraction of the population, then went ahead and tried to change it. This is no "Democratic bias": The problems with US healthcare that is dominated by the large pharma companies is documented by international organizations and looked down upon by the rest of the developed world. Meanwhile R's deny there is a problem and wage a PR war against it spreading all kinds of FUD about it. Supposedly because they don't want tax money to be spent on helping less fortunate.
Same story with man-made climate change and global warming. Obama cares to listen to 90% of the scientists and the global consensus which says it is real, whereas R's still deny it, spreading their climate change conspiracies in the process. Supposedly because they don't want to hurt the easy money being made by their friends in big oil.
Remember, Trump was the guy first insisting that Obama was not a US citizen ("show me your birth certificate!") - which was false - then claiming that Obama was not born in the US - which was false - then spreading rumors that Obama was a muslim - which was false.
Your comparison is ridiculous. Obama is a president who takes his office seriously, whereas Trump is a clown who has found the circus which the Republican Party has become a fitting backdrop for his show.
Many people make fun of Donald Trump or don't take him seriously. What most don't realize is that he is represents the pinnacle of what the Republican Party has become. All that he says is little more than populist slurs and factually incorrect statements, barring any context. He is extremely anti social, anti socialist and very pro industry and military. He resents using government money for social programs but has no problems spending the same taxpayer money for military projects. His world view is an immature outlook where the US is at the center and the rest is a nuisance or a playground for the military. He willingly and knowingly misleads the public using fear, uncertainty and doubt tactics. When he's on television he revels in the attention and uses it to entertain people with outlandish rants and to polish his public image as an anti-establishment rebel, while saying absolutely nothing of consequence. He is the kind of person that can only appeal to, for lack of a better word: white trash and its scary that it has come so far that he reaches mass appeal in the US. Abraham Lincoln must be turning in his grave from what his party has become.
Nobody sees reality. Everybody "sees" the light that is reflected by objects, as perceived by the eye and interpreted by the brain. You could say what we see is a three-level abstraction of reality. And in this way we see only a tiny bubble of the things that reflect enough of the right light to be perceived by our eyes, that are unoccluded, and in our field of view. So reality is filtered three times before we are allowed to see it. Then of course we are limited to see the things sharing the same tiny bubble of time and space in the same dimensions we inhabit.
Instead of creating charities against diseases, inequality and whatnot, as they all do, maybe one of these billionaires should finally invest into the stuff that will actually save humanity as a whole. Such as large-scale investment in renewable energy and other means of dealing with climate change. Or a Space Elevator to finally start opening the solar system for humanity. Estimated cost of a Space Elevator: 20 billion $. Zuckerberg alone could build two of them.
Maybe the first step would be to build solar energy collectors at different points in orbit around the sun. Future spacecraft could then dock at these "space fuel stations" to refuel. The same should be done with communication arrays, to slowly but surely expand communication capabilities across the solar system.
Once you have the energy, and the communications then you can start thinking about interplanetary spaceships. These should probably be "manned" by remote controlled robots instead of humans though. At least until they have paved the way for us.
Most of the articles I read, especially on scientific topics, are written in a professional, yes, unbiased, matter-of-fact way.
But of course, if your perception has been decalibrated so much off common-sense that scientific statements seem "biased" to you, then there might be something wrong with your sensory input stimuli. I believe one of the most common cases of this psychological disorder in the US is prolonged exposure to Fox News channel.
North America has often been getting our (Europe) dose of winter the last couple of years. Last couple of years temperatures where I live never got below the freezing point. Now its mid November and we have been getting almost 20 degrees C (68F) on some days. In central Europe winters have been noticeably warmer and we barely get any snow anymore.
Seriously, anyone doubting climate change and global warming, simply educate yourself and read the Wikipedia articles on it. They are scientific, to the point and unbiased.
Unless you are one of those people who think that reality and science has a liberal bias... then there is no helping you.
I think he phrased that wrong. What he probably meant to say is, that ISIS does not regard itself as being evil. For them, we are evil, with our pornography, homosexuality, atheism, idolism, liberalism and other lack of "morals". They consider themselves the righteous defenders of the one true faith, doing the right thing by punishing the unbelievers.
I think a large part of what is happening these days with islamic extremism can be attributed to "culture shock". Many people underestimate the importance of culture to societies, and with all the global news and social network of modern times, everyone on the globe is being confronted head on with liberal western culture. To many people who grow up in ultra-conservative, quasi medieval third world contries, a lot of that western stuff is perceived like pulling down your pants and shoving your dick in their face.
I'm a big fan of Civ games, and I think I have played them all, from Civ 1-5 to the Call of Powers, Freeciv, AlphaCentauri and C-evo. One thing I often wonder about is the striking disparity between the quality of the AI's in these games. Strangely enough, it seems that for some reason the AI of the community games is usually much, much stronger than the commercial versions. Experienced players can get a good challenge on even ground playing Freeciv or C-evo, whereas in commercial Civ games ramping up the difficulty usually means giving bonuses and cheats to the AI.
Why are game companies so bad at writing a decent AI for a civ game? Or why is the community so good at it? Freeciv is open source - and all Civ games are very similar in the core aspects. You'd think the problem of implementing a good AI has been "solved" for this type of game. Yet the AI of the latest game in the series Civ-5 is again ridiculously incompetent.
So, you are a British history graduate and a member of Mensa and yet an idiot if you truly believe any Russian news agency is more trustworthy than the BBC. Sorry.
Second, all the extra energy caused by man-made so-called Climate Change (renamed, because it was patently obvious that the "Global Warming" lie wasn't working anymore)
Why don't you first educate yourself, for example, you might want to read the Global Warming article on Wikipedia, before calling it a "lie". Makes you look like a moron.
I realize this sounds weird and paranoid, but from years of experience on Slashdot, I have gotten the strong impression that there is some kind of pro-nuclear lobbying going on on this site. Articles with a pro-nuclear tone, well formulated posts critical of nuclear energy being modded down rather insistently... But of course there is the possibility that its the Slashdot crowd itself who is on average very pro-nuclear, giving this kind of impression.
Doesn't all of this inflated cost mean it's time to MOVE? Shouldn't there be some market-correcting free capitalism thing going on? Companies moving elsewhere, where costs of living are not blown out of proportion? I'm sure there are plenty of other neat spots in Caly. Yeah, there's this great vibe and synergy going on there, but I thought cutting corners and being efficient with resources was one of the mantras of this whole startup craze. Seriously, is the place built on a cursed, native American graveyard or something? You can check out anytime you want, but you can never leave.
I broke a front USB port recently - my headphones were connected, I tripped on the cable and a jerk twisted the USB port. Windows 10 reported an error on screen that "There has been a power surge on a USB port and the device has been disabled" or some such. So perhaps, at least Windows 10, seems to be able to detect power surges.
Okay... so all of that is fine, because it has happened in the past?
So you won't mind if I whack your wife over the head with a wooden club and take her into my cave, because it has happened in the past? What kind of argument is that?
I was being extremely generous with the salaries and accounted 1 million for equipment, which is ridiculous unless London police are driving Ferrari's. Sure, there are management costs, but somebody was managing these police officers anyway, whether they were monitoring Assange or not.
Actually, I made a mistake above only considering the costs of one year. 18 million was the cost for three years of montoring.
But even if we double the labor costs of a police officer (200.000$ a year), and multiply by three, this still leaves 10 million unaccounted for.
I just can't believe it costs 6 million a year to have somebody who is stationary professionally monitored 24/7.
I work in IT industry, and we have a team of about 10 qualified and well paid professionals working on complex technical projects that cost our customers only a fraction of that.
Why does every piece of crap the government does always cost millions? What's the salary of a police officer? Lets be generous and for easy calculation say 100k in London. Say you have three police officers involved (2 in a car, monitoring, one in the office) working 8 hour shifts, so you need three shifts, meaning 9 police officers, lets make that 10.
10 police officers for 100k a year is a million bucks. How does it cost EIGHTEEN times as much? Give another million for the cars and surveillance equipment, office work, whatever. How are the other 16 million justified?
Unfortunately this is not butthurt, apologetic behaviour. There is some truth to that. In other developed countries, e.g. Western Europe, we didn't torture people (waterboarding, electrocution, solitary confinement). We don't have an extrajudicial concentration camp for "terrorists" where innocent people are being held for years without hope of justice (Guantanamo). We don't have police killing minorities on a regular basis. We don't bomb and declare war on other nations, spreading chaos and desaster across whole regions, at the whim of a leader (GW Bush's illegal war in Iraq). We are not involved in a huge, paranoid mass surveillance scheme against everyone and everything, including our own citizens...
Why? Annoying and insecure ads are the biggest reason to use an AdBlocker. If this message finally got through and we will start seeing "acceptable" ads, which for me would mean a simple, clickable image or text, without sound, animation, popup, or tracking, then I wouldn't mind seeing them if it supports the sites.
Depends on the game and the graphics settings. You could easily run a game with Lawnmower Man style graphics with a mid range card in 120FPS on each eye. I think VR can be very interesting even without the super fancy hyper realistic graphics of the latest generaton games.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but no. Obama recognized that US health care is the most expensive in the world, while inefficient and cutting off a large fraction of the population, then went ahead and tried to change it. This is no "Democratic bias": The problems with US healthcare that is dominated by the large pharma companies is documented by international organizations and looked down upon by the rest of the developed world.
Meanwhile R's deny there is a problem and wage a PR war against it spreading all kinds of FUD about it. Supposedly because they don't want tax money to be spent on helping less fortunate.
Same story with man-made climate change and global warming. Obama cares to listen to 90% of the scientists and the global consensus which says it is real, whereas R's still deny it, spreading their climate change conspiracies in the process. Supposedly because they don't want to hurt the easy money being made by their friends in big oil.
Remember, Trump was the guy first insisting that Obama was not a US citizen ("show me your birth certificate!") - which was false - then claiming that Obama was not born in the US - which was false - then spreading rumors that Obama was a muslim - which was false.
Your comparison is ridiculous. Obama is a president who takes his office seriously, whereas Trump is a clown who has found the circus which the Republican Party has become a fitting backdrop for his show.
Many people make fun of Donald Trump or don't take him seriously. What most don't realize is that he is represents the pinnacle of what the Republican Party has become. All that he says is little more than populist slurs and factually incorrect statements, barring any context. He is extremely anti social, anti socialist and very pro industry and military. He resents using government money for social programs but has no problems spending the same taxpayer money for military projects. His world view is an immature outlook where the US is at the center and the rest is a nuisance or a playground for the military. He willingly and knowingly misleads the public using fear, uncertainty and doubt tactics. When he's on television he revels in the attention and uses it to entertain people with outlandish rants and to polish his public image as an anti-establishment rebel, while saying absolutely nothing of consequence. He is the kind of person that can only appeal to, for lack of a better word: white trash and its scary that it has come so far that he reaches mass appeal in the US. Abraham Lincoln must be turning in his grave from what his party has become.
Nobody sees reality. Everybody "sees" the light that is reflected by objects, as perceived by the eye and interpreted by the brain. You could say what we see is a three-level abstraction of reality. And in this way we see only a tiny bubble of the things that reflect enough of the right light to be perceived by our eyes, that are unoccluded, and in our field of view. So reality is filtered three times before we are allowed to see it. Then of course we are limited to see the things sharing the same tiny bubble of time and space in the same dimensions we inhabit.
This body is a great filter!
Java actually compares favorably against C# and C++ when you rank it based on the number if critical flaws:
1. Classic ASP - with 1,686 flaws/MB (1,112 critical flaws/MB) .NET - with 32 flaws/MB (9.7 critical flaws/MB)
2. ColdFusion - with 262 flaws/MB (227 critical flaws/MB)
3. PHP - with 184 flaws/MB (47 critical flaws/MB)
4.
5. C++ - with 26 flaws/MB (8.8 critical flaws/MB)
6. Java - with 51 flaws/MB (5.2 critical flaws/MB)
7. iOS - with 23 flaws/MB (0.9 critical flaws/MB)
8. Android - with 11 flaws/MB (0.4 critical flaws/MB)
9. JavaScript - with 8 flaws/MB (0.09 critical flaws/MB)
I think there is something wrong with their test method, skewing the JavaScript results.
Instead of creating charities against diseases, inequality and whatnot, as they all do, maybe one of these billionaires should finally invest into the stuff that will actually save humanity as a whole. Such as large-scale investment in renewable energy and other means of dealing with climate change. Or a Space Elevator to finally start opening the solar system for humanity.
Estimated cost of a Space Elevator: 20 billion $. Zuckerberg alone could build two of them.
Maybe the first step would be to build solar energy collectors at different points in orbit around the sun. Future spacecraft could then dock at these "space fuel stations" to refuel. The same should be done with communication arrays, to slowly but surely expand communication capabilities across the solar system.
Once you have the energy, and the communications then you can start thinking about interplanetary spaceships. These should probably be "manned" by remote controlled robots instead of humans though. At least until they have paved the way for us.
Most of the articles I read, especially on scientific topics, are written in a professional, yes, unbiased, matter-of-fact way.
But of course, if your perception has been decalibrated so much off common-sense that scientific statements seem "biased" to you, then there might be something wrong with your sensory input stimuli. I believe one of the most common cases of this psychological disorder in the US is prolonged exposure to Fox News channel.
North America has often been getting our (Europe) dose of winter the last couple of years. Last couple of years temperatures where I live never got below the freezing point. Now its mid November and we have been getting almost 20 degrees C (68F) on some days. In central Europe winters have been noticeably warmer and we barely get any snow anymore.
Seriously, anyone doubting climate change and global warming, simply educate yourself and read the Wikipedia articles on it. They are scientific, to the point and unbiased.
Unless you are one of those people who think that reality and science has a liberal bias... then there is no helping you.
I think he phrased that wrong. What he probably meant to say is, that ISIS does not regard itself as being evil. For them, we are evil, with our pornography, homosexuality, atheism, idolism, liberalism and other lack of "morals". They consider themselves the righteous defenders of the one true faith, doing the right thing by punishing the unbelievers.
I think a large part of what is happening these days with islamic extremism can be attributed to "culture shock". Many people underestimate the importance of culture to societies, and with all the global news and social network of modern times, everyone on the globe is being confronted head on with liberal western culture. To many people who grow up in ultra-conservative, quasi medieval third world contries, a lot of that western stuff is perceived like pulling down your pants and shoving your dick in their face.
Hi Andreas,
I'm a big fan of Civ games, and I think I have played them all, from Civ 1-5 to the Call of Powers, Freeciv, AlphaCentauri and C-evo. One thing I often wonder about is the striking disparity between the quality of the AI's in these games. Strangely enough, it seems that for some reason the AI of the community games is usually much, much stronger than the commercial versions. Experienced players can get a good challenge on even ground playing Freeciv or C-evo, whereas in commercial Civ games ramping up the difficulty usually means giving bonuses and cheats to the AI.
Why are game companies so bad at writing a decent AI for a civ game? Or why is the community so good at it?
Freeciv is open source - and all Civ games are very similar in the core aspects. You'd think the problem of implementing a good AI has been "solved" for this type of game. Yet the AI of the latest game in the series Civ-5 is again ridiculously incompetent.
And I am supposed to accept your verdict based on what evidence? Your say-so?
Based on the facts that
- Russia is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists
- Russia has one of the lowest press freedom indices in the world
- There is a clampdown taking place in Russia on all independent media
- there are confirmed "Troll Factories" in Russia spreading lies and propaganda on social media across the world
Really, I could provide 500 other sources on all that's wrong with Russian media, but frankly I'm getting tired of fiddling with the A HREF's.
But let me guess, you're Russian (or from a Russian-friendly nation, such as Serbia) and you consume your news mainly from Russian sources?
So, you are a British history graduate and a member of Mensa and yet an idiot if you truly believe any Russian news agency is more trustworthy than the BBC. Sorry.
Second, all the extra energy caused by man-made so-called Climate Change (renamed, because it was patently obvious that the "Global Warming" lie wasn't working anymore)
Why don't you first educate yourself, for example, you might want to read the Global Warming article on Wikipedia, before calling it a "lie". Makes you look like a moron.
I realize this sounds weird and paranoid, but from years of experience on Slashdot, I have gotten the strong impression that there is some kind of pro-nuclear lobbying going on on this site. Articles with a pro-nuclear tone, well formulated posts critical of nuclear energy being modded down rather insistently...
But of course there is the possibility that its the Slashdot crowd itself who is on average very pro-nuclear, giving this kind of impression.
Doesn't all of this inflated cost mean it's time to MOVE?
Shouldn't there be some market-correcting free capitalism thing going on? Companies moving elsewhere, where costs of living are not blown out of proportion? I'm sure there are plenty of other neat spots in Caly. Yeah, there's this great vibe and synergy going on there, but I thought cutting corners and being efficient with resources was one of the mantras of this whole startup craze.
Seriously, is the place built on a cursed, native American graveyard or something? You can check out anytime you want, but you can never leave.
I broke a front USB port recently - my headphones were connected, I tripped on the cable and a jerk twisted the USB port.
Windows 10 reported an error on screen that "There has been a power surge on a USB port and the device has been disabled" or some such. So perhaps, at least Windows 10, seems to be able to detect power surges.
Now they're, what exactly? I just don't see people wanting to buy Playboy with no nudity. At that point, get a Victoria's Secret catalog.
What are you talking about? Everyone buys it for the articles.
Okay... so all of that is fine, because it has happened in the past?
So you won't mind if I whack your wife over the head with a wooden club and take her into my cave, because it has happened in the past? What kind of argument is that?
I was being extremely generous with the salaries and accounted 1 million for equipment, which is ridiculous unless London police are driving Ferrari's. Sure, there are management costs, but somebody was managing these police officers anyway, whether they were monitoring Assange or not.
Actually, I made a mistake above only considering the costs of one year. 18 million was the cost for three years of montoring.
But even if we double the labor costs of a police officer (200.000$ a year), and multiply by three, this still leaves
10 million unaccounted for.
I just can't believe it costs 6 million a year to have somebody who is stationary professionally monitored 24/7.
I work in IT industry, and we have a team of about 10 qualified and well paid professionals working on complex technical projects that cost our customers only a fraction of that.
Why does every piece of crap the government does always cost millions? What's the salary of a police officer? Lets be generous and for easy calculation say 100k in London. Say you have three police officers involved (2 in a car, monitoring, one in the office) working 8 hour shifts, so you need three shifts, meaning 9 police officers, lets make that 10.
10 police officers for 100k a year is a million bucks. How does it cost EIGHTEEN times as much? Give another million for the cars and surveillance equipment, office work, whatever. How are the other 16 million justified?
Unfortunately this is not butthurt, apologetic behaviour. There is some truth to that.
In other developed countries, e.g. Western Europe, we didn't torture people (waterboarding, electrocution, solitary confinement). We don't have an extrajudicial concentration camp for "terrorists" where innocent people are being held for years without hope of justice (Guantanamo). We don't have police killing minorities on a regular basis. We don't bomb and declare war on other nations, spreading chaos and desaster across whole regions, at the whim of a leader (GW Bush's illegal war in Iraq). We are not involved in a huge, paranoid mass surveillance scheme against everyone and everything, including our own citizens...
Spelling it correctly would be a worthwhile milestone on your quest.
Why? Annoying and insecure ads are the biggest reason to use an AdBlocker. If this message finally got through and we will start seeing "acceptable" ads, which for me would mean a simple, clickable image or text, without sound, animation, popup, or tracking, then I wouldn't mind seeing them if it supports the sites.
It's not so great. I've seen an image of the new display on the Internet and it has the same pixel density as my monitor.
Depends on the game and the graphics settings. You could easily run a game with Lawnmower Man style graphics with a mid range card in 120FPS on each eye.
I think VR can be very interesting even without the super fancy hyper realistic graphics of the latest generaton games.