He is not thin-skinned at all. He only acts thin skinned as part of his trolling.
No, the thin skinned is real. It's the intelligence that is fake. He seems like someone of marginal intelligence when in reality he's even dumber. Similarly his hair is real but his height is not; he wears 3" elevator shoes so he can claim to be 6'3" when in reality he is less than 6' even.
We elected a professional internet troll - and a thin-skinned one at that - to the highest office. He's a total and indisputable failure at the job but we're stuck with him. He thrives on attention, why are we giving it to him? Internet trolls don't tend to go away when they get attention. There is plenty going on in the world that doesn't involve him, in spite of his own claims to the contrary.
Increased education funding, increased social assistance, mental health funding, and generally working to change America's general culture of violence and confrontation.
I support all of that. I have mentioned after other mass shootings that mental health care is a glaring hole in our society in general right now, and the continued stigma attached to it does not help society.
But in America, the genie is out of the bottle, and continuing to concentrate on 'it's too easy to get a gun' and completely ignoring 'lets figure out why these people are driven to this extreme, and maybe see if we can lessen that' is just bloody stupid.
If I may elaborate a bit here, I wanted to focus on the fact that guns are astonishingly easy to get in this country, but I don't see it as the only way to reduce violence. I do see basic, reasonable restrictions on the sale of firearms as one thing that can help with this. I am a gun owner myself and I enjoy shooting for sport. I don't see why it would be unreasonable to extend waiting times to purchase a gun; I've never had a situation where I spontaneously went out to shoot without planning it days, weeks, or even months in advance. If you know even a couple days beforehand, you could go get the process started and your gun would be ready to go. This wouldn't stop the well-planned mass shootings but it could reduce the rage killings from people who snapped and went off the handle quickly, and it doesn't impede the right of the people to own and bear arms in accordance with their local laws.
But yes, we need to do more to figure out why these people are snapping like this and doing these things. It doesn't help though that we have a lot of people who are in various ways dead set against education funding, increased social assistance, mental health funding, and generally working to change America's general culture of violence and confrontation. I'd like to add to that list that we also have a real hard time getting more federal research dollars - even for fundamental mental health research that is not connected in any way to firearms - right now.
Except I walked through the process and asked you to correct me, and instead, you helped prove my point.
I was not aware that the point you were out to prove was that you don't know what you're talking about in terms of the amount of time it takes to buy a gun vs the amount of time it takes to buy sudafed, or that you weren't present when I bought either.
If the pharmacy is closed but the store is open, no sudafed for you. If the pharmacist is on break, no sudafed for you. If the pharmacist is helping someone else you have to wait.
And there is the additional information you left out, funny how I knew that was the case.
What information do you think I left out? I looked for you to back up that accusation, and you never did. Again you seem to be trying to convince someone (yourself, perhaps, as you certainly won't convince anyone else?) that you were able to observe my transactions from thousands of miles away when you weren't there.
Of course, there are additional controls on pseudoephedrine in some places, such as Oregon & Mississippi where you actually require a doctors prescription to get some. Hell of a thing if you are visiting from out of state and get hit by some congestion.
Perhaps you have forgotten that within our own lifetimes sudafed went from being Rx-only, to being OTC, to being controlled OTC. The allergy medicine market in particular has exploded as more and more drugs have been released from Rx-only to OTC status in the past 15 years in particular (sudafed even earlier than that). Just because the government says a drug can be OTC doesn't mean a state cannot change its status to something more restrictive, though.
and when you offered specifics, you revealed your lack of knowledge on the subject
That was a direct quote on what you wrote. I recommend you go back and read it again to see how silly it looks.
a bad experience of trying to buy sudafed and automatically assumed them both representative
Can you see your erroneous assumption there or do I need to point it out to you? You seem to believe yourself to be reasonably intelligent, hopefully you can find it on your own.
I didn't vote for Trump, but I certainly viewed him to be well described by those two words when he was running. While I agree with pretty well nothing he has done (especially as POTUS though generally throughout his life), if he embraced that as his next campaign slogan I would have to acknowledge "mission accomplished" for him.
The point is, if you magically make all guns go away, gun violence goes down, knife violence goes up.
First of all, I didn't say anything about making "guns go away". I don't know where you came up with the idea to associate such a thing with me.
Second, I have not heard of a country that increased gun restrictions and then saw a statistically meaningful increase in knife violence. I certainly haven't heard of mass stabbings happening in Australia, for example.
But why do we insist on making it so easy for people to do this?
For fuck's sake, instead of making it HARDER to be a mass murderer, maybe figure out how to reduce the instances of mass murder?
Do you have any ideas you would like to propose to reduce the instances of mass murder? I can point out that mass murder is exceedingly rare in countries where guns are even slightly more difficult to get, but I haven't seen any reason to expect you would be receptive to that. How would you like to reduce mass murder?
Back in the olden days, people in car crashes generally died of head trauma. So they did something about then, then people started dying of chest trauma. So they did something about then, then people started dying of....
And none of that in any way refutes my point that hardly anyone is intentionally murdered by motor vehicle trauma.
the issue here is that somebody felt the need to take the lives of other human beings, and went ahead and did it.
The tool - which was far too easy for him to get access to - made that far too easy to do.
If he didn't have access to a gun, he'd have used another tool.
That's very highly debatable to say the least. If his only way to kill them had been with his bare hands, he likely would have felt it wasn't worth the effort. Even if he had a sharp knife, his chances of pulling it off would not have been very high and he probably wouldn't have done it. The gun made it very, very easy.
Was there something wrong with the person who killed the two other people before taking his own life? Without question. But why do we insist on making it so easy for people to do this?
What problem are you attempting to solve by making guns harder to acquire? Because it sure isn't 'violence,' 'murder,' or even 'death rate.'
How many people are intentionally killed by something other than a gun? Sure, more people die in traffic accidents than do by gun violence but it is exceedingly rare that someone dies in a car accident and afterwards we find the driver of the other vehicle specifically set out to kill that person. Same with swimming pools; yes a lot of people drown every year but very rare is the case of someone intentionally killing someone else by drowning.
No. You weren't at either, so I'm not sure why you think you are more aware of what went down than I was.
you would have been required to show a state issued photo id (which is racist when asked for to vote). For the shotgun purchase, Bas Pro Shop being an FFL, you would have filled out a 4473 and them called it into the FBI (or submitted online)
At Bass Pro Shops that entire process took less than 5 minutes. The form doesn't even cover a full side of one sheet of paper, the response took far less time than it took me to pick out a gun.
while the CVS would employee would have plugged your drivers license info into the computer for the federal list of frequent buyers.
Except the law won't allow just any "CVS [...] employee" to sell sudafed. They are required to be a registered pharmacist. If the pharmacy is closed but the store is open, no sudafed for you. If the pharmacist is on break, no sudafed for you. If the pharmacist is helping someone else you have to wait. This can easily and often take more than 5 minutes.
But go ahead and keep trying to paint me as a liar if you want. Tell me about what I experienced when I was thousands of miles away from you, apparently you knew the experience better than I did.
Or, put another way, why would you expect a gun ban to stop violence, when the existing bans against violence and murder don't?
I did not call for a gun ban. You went a bit past hyperbolic there to claim that I somehow did. I'm merely calling for more serious restrictions on who can buy guns and how they can be sold. I am a gun owner myself and I was appalled at the fact that I could buy a shotgun at Bass Pro Shops in less time than it takes me to buy sudafed at CVS. Why do we need to make it so easy for people to kill each other?
There are plenty of problems at play with this shooter for sure, but none of them were helped by how easy it was for him to get that gun. What problem are we solving by making guns so cheap and easy to acquire?
This person killed three people with a handgun that he purchased legally. As is the case with the overwhelming majority of mass shooting events it ended only when the shooter took his own life (trying to respond more quickly is a rather futile goal, generally we can't do that regardless of how many guns are around in any hands).
Equally important is that not only are handguns comically easy to get in many states, but he could have pulled this off with other weapons that are even easier to get in many more states. A pump-action shotgun with a 6 shot magazine can be had in almost any state for under $500. All you need is a driver's license and to clear an exceptionally quick background check that is known to have issues. In many places it takes less time to buy this than it does to buy sudafed (and in some cases these are available over wider hours of business than sudafed as well).
Seriously, why do we need access to guns under such exceptionally loose terms? Why can't we slow down people just a little when they are literally making life and death decisions?
Here are the bottom 10, which lack basic capitalist qualities of property rights, efficient enforcement of contracts, rule of law, and fair regulations:
I think wikipedia is using a definition of capitalism that is no longer popular here in the USA - at least with the Paulower / Randian capitalist republicans who particularly dominate (in volume) the debate here on slashdot and in other places.
The verses we keep hearing are that capitalism should get government out of the way (ie, "government you can drown in a bathtub") in terms of property rights, contracts, regulations, and even rule of law. In other words the fact that those 10 countries scored so low on those categories makes them Randian capitalist paradise. Employers are free there to fuck each other and their employees to no end, which is exactly what US capitalists drool over today.
Does T-Mobile even have customers' social security numbers? Why??
I don't know if it is still their policy, but they used to ask for your SSN as a form of ID. A lot of people raised a stink over this, but I don't know that anything ever changed.
3.1 could just about work in 4Mb but it was barely usable with that little RAM.
That depends on what you were doing in 3.1. I had a 386 (SX, no less) with only 2mb and it ran 3.1 just fine. Word and Excel 5.0 worked fine in there, we dialed up (originally with a 2400 baud modem) using Prodigy for windows and that worked too. With 4mb I could load win32s and winG to really extend what it was capable of (though by then I upgraded to a 486DX2).
(windows 95) In practice, while 4Mb was the official memory floor, it definitely needed a hell of a lot more than 4Mb. 16Mb in practice was the absolute minimum.
I disagree with that as well. There was plenty you could do in 95 with 4mb, even if some of it may have been a little unpleasant unless you had at least 8. Now if you "upgraded" to win98 (and god help you if you fell for the atrocious first version) then you couldn't do anything useful until you had 8mb, but your applications usually crashed unless you had at least 16.
People who refuse to take responsibility and self-motivate are never going to achieve as much.
Really? Can you show me one failure that Donald Trump has taken responsibility for? He is constantly finding other people to blame. Even more so he constantly finds things to take credit for that are not significantly of his own doing.
At least, in the USA it is that way. Really all you need to do to know what's going to happen here is watch to see what top executives are doing with their stocks. If you can get advance notice on a CEO dumping stock, you'll be way ahead of the rest of the suckers.
A while back there was a discussion on how much effort Nintendo and others put in to make it difficult for people to play old games (Battletoads of course being a classic example of this) legally. If they would take a look at GOG they could see how they could do it, make money, and make the fans happy. There are plenty of games on there that date to the 90s (some even earlier) that people are happily paying small amounts of money for so they can play them on their newer PCs. Nindendo got close to this with Virtual Console but there were some glaring omissions - and of course it is close to shutting down for the WiiU.
Ask yourself this question; would you pay $5 to play your favorite 8 bit NES title on your newest Nintendo system? I know I would.
There's a handful of companies that control the online public square, by virtue of the network effect and natural monopolies.
Which is not free speech. Nobody is obligated to spread what you want to say. Twitter and facebook are not government or public entities, they are free to decide what messages they want traversing their systems. Similarly if you don't agree with their policies you are free to start you own system, or go stand on top of a soap box on the street corner, or use some other medium entirely.
Would you accept the top-3 mobile companies banning you from their services because they didn't like what you were saying?
If I violated the ToS that I agreed to when I signed up with them, then they have the right to ban me for doing that. I would have other systems I could go to for mobile service if that happened or if I didn't like their ToS.
Twitter isn't stopping them, but the banks absolutely are, and they are working in concert with the big tech companies
What do the banks have to do with it? If you want to start your own microblogging service (which is what Twitter started as) you can start it in your house on your regular internet connection to show that there is demand. If you can show that people will use it as an alternative to Twitter and that you can bring in advertising revenue, then the banks and venture capitalists will trip over each other to give you money. That is how pretty well every business ever was started; you don't go to the bank asking for money before you demonstrate your ability to make money.
PS - HEY isn't it HILARIOUS how slashdot isn't covering ANY of this shit? Not even one article about Alex Jones despite conversation being rampant,
Alex Jones has his own social media empire. It isn't on slashdot because it is not relevant to tech. There are plenty of Alex Jones fans here at slashdot, but the editors here don't see a connection so they don't put it on the front page. You're welcomed to feature it in your journals here if you so choose.
Twitter is doing exactly nothing to stop people from starting their own service. If they don't like the terms at Twitter they are free to go start a new service where they can set the terms. Twitter is not obligated to bend to the whims of Trump or anyone else if they fear it would be bad for their bottom line. After all at the end of the day they exist to make money, not to be the mouthpiece of any one man.
And this fucked up "agree/disagree"-based moderation scoring that shows exactly why I browse at -1. I find more posts of truth at -1, and groupthink at +5.
Bull. Shit.
His posting at -1 has nothing to do with "groupthink" or "agree/disagree". Roman posts at -1 because the majority of his posts are either recruitment efforts for his religion, plainly insulting, or both. If he could participate in discussion here like a normal mature human being he would not have karma in the shitter. He's even started at least one sock puppet account in the interest of either increasing his karma or simply ignoring it, and that has been similarly moderated down.
If you see some grain of truth in roman's comments, feel free to log in and moderate them up to where you think they should be. Just don't be surprised if flamebait activity from him is moderated down as such.
The link doesn't even go to the right journal - it goes to a paper in Nature when it says it is a PNAS paper - and the paper doesn't have anything to do with bending any kind of rod. The correct paper is Controlling fracture cascades through twisting and quenching.
the journals contain a mix of actual research papers and total fiction.
It's really, really, exceptionally hard to come up with a ratio of how many are made up. They come up, and they come up in nearly every journal you can think of, but how often do they make it through is really hard to determine.
In part this is due to how peer review works. Reviewers are there to read the paper and check it to make sure it is scientifically sound and that it meets the criteria of the journal. However, the reviewers are not paid to actually reproduce the experiments in said paper; indeed some papers go through that are done under such unusual conditions that it can be exceptionally difficult for anyone other than the author to reproduce the work exactly.
What's the motivation? Personally I think it all boils down to fear or greed
I would say the former more so than the latter. When scientists find themselves with their backs against the wall - and publications can mean more than just tenure they can often determine whether or not the scientist has a job at all - they may find themselves doing things for self-preservation that they would not otherwise endorse. Sure, some may do it for vanity but those I have known who have been busted for misconduct all did it to try to keep their jobs.
As a scientist I run in to this all the time. Everyone would love to get all their work into Nature, Science, and Cell; but they know the reality is that very little gets published in those journals. Then they look in to other journals with lower impact factors and they have to weigh a lot of factors - including costs to publish and the expected length of time to get a publishing decision. Some journals aren't forthcoming with either of those, either.
Then we see new open-access journals popping up with official sounding names all the time. They promise quick turn-around, low publication costs (sometimes even free), and their open-access setup is generally already compliant with NIH and NSF requirements. If all we want to do is get the manuscript out and move on, these can look very tempting.
What's the answer then? I don't know. Nobody does. BioXiv (and others like it) offer an interesting possibility but that isn't without pitfalls (not the least of which is that a paper there that gets rejected in a journal is somewhat more difficult to resubmit elsewhere).
Slashdot Mirror
He is not thin-skinned at all. He only acts thin skinned as part of his trolling.
No, the thin skinned is real. It's the intelligence that is fake. He seems like someone of marginal intelligence when in reality he's even dumber. Similarly his hair is real but his height is not; he wears 3" elevator shoes so he can claim to be 6'3" when in reality he is less than 6' even.
We elected a professional internet troll - and a thin-skinned one at that - to the highest office. He's a total and indisputable failure at the job but we're stuck with him. He thrives on attention, why are we giving it to him? Internet trolls don't tend to go away when they get attention. There is plenty going on in the world that doesn't involve him, in spite of his own claims to the contrary.
Increased education funding, increased social assistance, mental health funding, and generally working to change America's general culture of violence and confrontation.
I support all of that. I have mentioned after other mass shootings that mental health care is a glaring hole in our society in general right now, and the continued stigma attached to it does not help society.
But in America, the genie is out of the bottle, and continuing to concentrate on 'it's too easy to get a gun' and completely ignoring 'lets figure out why these people are driven to this extreme, and maybe see if we can lessen that' is just bloody stupid.
If I may elaborate a bit here, I wanted to focus on the fact that guns are astonishingly easy to get in this country, but I don't see it as the only way to reduce violence. I do see basic, reasonable restrictions on the sale of firearms as one thing that can help with this. I am a gun owner myself and I enjoy shooting for sport. I don't see why it would be unreasonable to extend waiting times to purchase a gun; I've never had a situation where I spontaneously went out to shoot without planning it days, weeks, or even months in advance. If you know even a couple days beforehand, you could go get the process started and your gun would be ready to go. This wouldn't stop the well-planned mass shootings but it could reduce the rage killings from people who snapped and went off the handle quickly, and it doesn't impede the right of the people to own and bear arms in accordance with their local laws.
But yes, we need to do more to figure out why these people are snapping like this and doing these things. It doesn't help though that we have a lot of people who are in various ways dead set against education funding, increased social assistance, mental health funding, and generally working to change America's general culture of violence and confrontation. I'd like to add to that list that we also have a real hard time getting more federal research dollars - even for fundamental mental health research that is not connected in any way to firearms - right now.
No. You weren't at either,
Except I walked through the process and asked you to correct me, and instead, you helped prove my point.
I was not aware that the point you were out to prove was that you don't know what you're talking about in terms of the amount of time it takes to buy a gun vs the amount of time it takes to buy sudafed, or that you weren't present when I bought either.
If the pharmacy is closed but the store is open, no sudafed for you. If the pharmacist is on break, no sudafed for you. If the pharmacist is helping someone else you have to wait.
And there is the additional information you left out, funny how I knew that was the case.
What information do you think I left out? I looked for you to back up that accusation, and you never did. Again you seem to be trying to convince someone (yourself, perhaps, as you certainly won't convince anyone else?) that you were able to observe my transactions from thousands of miles away when you weren't there.
Of course, there are additional controls on pseudoephedrine in some places, such as Oregon & Mississippi where you actually require a doctors prescription to get some. Hell of a thing if you are visiting from out of state and get hit by some congestion.
Perhaps you have forgotten that within our own lifetimes sudafed went from being Rx-only, to being OTC, to being controlled OTC. The allergy medicine market in particular has exploded as more and more drugs have been released from Rx-only to OTC status in the past 15 years in particular (sudafed even earlier than that). Just because the government says a drug can be OTC doesn't mean a state cannot change its status to something more restrictive, though.
and when you offered specifics, you revealed your lack of knowledge on the subject
That was a direct quote on what you wrote. I recommend you go back and read it again to see how silly it looks.
a bad experience of trying to buy sudafed and automatically assumed them both representative
Can you see your erroneous assumption there or do I need to point it out to you? You seem to believe yourself to be reasonably intelligent, hopefully you can find it on your own.
dangerous and incompetent.
I didn't vote for Trump, but I certainly viewed him to be well described by those two words when he was running. While I agree with pretty well nothing he has done (especially as POTUS though generally throughout his life), if he embraced that as his next campaign slogan I would have to acknowledge "mission accomplished" for him.
The point is, if you magically make all guns go away, gun violence goes down, knife violence goes up.
First of all, I didn't say anything about making "guns go away". I don't know where you came up with the idea to associate such a thing with me.
Second, I have not heard of a country that increased gun restrictions and then saw a statistically meaningful increase in knife violence. I certainly haven't heard of mass stabbings happening in Australia, for example.
But why do we insist on making it so easy for people to do this?
For fuck's sake, instead of making it HARDER to be a mass murderer, maybe figure out how to reduce the instances of mass murder?
Do you have any ideas you would like to propose to reduce the instances of mass murder? I can point out that mass murder is exceedingly rare in countries where guns are even slightly more difficult to get, but I haven't seen any reason to expect you would be receptive to that. How would you like to reduce mass murder?
Back in the olden days, people in car crashes generally died of head trauma. So they did something about then, then people started dying of chest trauma. So they did something about then, then people started dying of....
And none of that in any way refutes my point that hardly anyone is intentionally murdered by motor vehicle trauma.
the issue here is that somebody felt the need to take the lives of other human beings, and went ahead and did it.
The tool - which was far too easy for him to get access to - made that far too easy to do.
If he didn't have access to a gun, he'd have used another tool.
That's very highly debatable to say the least. If his only way to kill them had been with his bare hands, he likely would have felt it wasn't worth the effort. Even if he had a sharp knife, his chances of pulling it off would not have been very high and he probably wouldn't have done it. The gun made it very, very easy.
Was there something wrong with the person who killed the two other people before taking his own life? Without question. But why do we insist on making it so easy for people to do this?
What problem are you attempting to solve by making guns harder to acquire? Because it sure isn't 'violence,' 'murder,' or even 'death rate.'
How many people are intentionally killed by something other than a gun? Sure, more people die in traffic accidents than do by gun violence but it is exceedingly rare that someone dies in a car accident and afterwards we find the driver of the other vehicle specifically set out to kill that person. Same with swimming pools; yes a lot of people drown every year but very rare is the case of someone intentionally killing someone else by drowning.
I suspect... you are leaving out some details
No. You weren't at either, so I'm not sure why you think you are more aware of what went down than I was.
you would have been required to show a state issued photo id (which is racist when asked for to vote). For the shotgun purchase, Bas Pro Shop being an FFL, you would have filled out a 4473 and them called it into the FBI (or submitted online)
At Bass Pro Shops that entire process took less than 5 minutes. The form doesn't even cover a full side of one sheet of paper, the response took far less time than it took me to pick out a gun.
while the CVS would employee would have plugged your drivers license info into the computer for the federal list of frequent buyers.
Except the law won't allow just any "CVS [...] employee" to sell sudafed. They are required to be a registered pharmacist. If the pharmacy is closed but the store is open, no sudafed for you. If the pharmacist is on break, no sudafed for you. If the pharmacist is helping someone else you have to wait. This can easily and often take more than 5 minutes.
But go ahead and keep trying to paint me as a liar if you want. Tell me about what I experienced when I was thousands of miles away from you, apparently you knew the experience better than I did.
Or, put another way, why would you expect a gun ban to stop violence, when the existing bans against violence and murder don't?
I did not call for a gun ban. You went a bit past hyperbolic there to claim that I somehow did. I'm merely calling for more serious restrictions on who can buy guns and how they can be sold. I am a gun owner myself and I was appalled at the fact that I could buy a shotgun at Bass Pro Shops in less time than it takes me to buy sudafed at CVS. Why do we need to make it so easy for people to kill each other?
There are plenty of problems at play with this shooter for sure, but none of them were helped by how easy it was for him to get that gun. What problem are we solving by making guns so cheap and easy to acquire?
This person killed three people with a handgun that he purchased legally. As is the case with the overwhelming majority of mass shooting events it ended only when the shooter took his own life (trying to respond more quickly is a rather futile goal, generally we can't do that regardless of how many guns are around in any hands).
Equally important is that not only are handguns comically easy to get in many states, but he could have pulled this off with other weapons that are even easier to get in many more states. A pump-action shotgun with a 6 shot magazine can be had in almost any state for under $500. All you need is a driver's license and to clear an exceptionally quick background check that is known to have issues. In many places it takes less time to buy this than it does to buy sudafed (and in some cases these are available over wider hours of business than sudafed as well).
Seriously, why do we need access to guns under such exceptionally loose terms? Why can't we slow down people just a little when they are literally making life and death decisions?
Here are the bottom 10, which lack basic capitalist qualities of property rights, efficient enforcement of contracts, rule of law, and fair regulations:
I think wikipedia is using a definition of capitalism that is no longer popular here in the USA - at least with the Paulower / Randian capitalist republicans who particularly dominate (in volume) the debate here on slashdot and in other places.
The verses we keep hearing are that capitalism should get government out of the way (ie, "government you can drown in a bathtub") in terms of property rights, contracts, regulations, and even rule of law. In other words the fact that those 10 countries scored so low on those categories makes them Randian capitalist paradise. Employers are free there to fuck each other and their employees to no end, which is exactly what US capitalists drool over today.
Does T-Mobile even have customers' social security numbers? Why??
I don't know if it is still their policy, but they used to ask for your SSN as a form of ID. A lot of people raised a stink over this, but I don't know that anything ever changed.
Could you be thinking of OS2 Warp? I'm pretty sure its floppy count was somewhere past 30.
3.1 could just about work in 4Mb but it was barely usable with that little RAM.
That depends on what you were doing in 3.1. I had a 386 (SX, no less) with only 2mb and it ran 3.1 just fine. Word and Excel 5.0 worked fine in there, we dialed up (originally with a 2400 baud modem) using Prodigy for windows and that worked too. With 4mb I could load win32s and winG to really extend what it was capable of (though by then I upgraded to a 486DX2).
(windows 95) In practice, while 4Mb was the official memory floor, it definitely needed a hell of a lot more than 4Mb. 16Mb in practice was the absolute minimum.
I disagree with that as well. There was plenty you could do in 95 with 4mb, even if some of it may have been a little unpleasant unless you had at least 8. Now if you "upgraded" to win98 (and god help you if you fell for the atrocious first version) then you couldn't do anything useful until you had 8mb, but your applications usually crashed unless you had at least 16.
People who refuse to take responsibility and self-motivate are never going to achieve as much.
Really? Can you show me one failure that Donald Trump has taken responsibility for? He is constantly finding other people to blame. Even more so he constantly finds things to take credit for that are not significantly of his own doing.
At least, in the USA it is that way. Really all you need to do to know what's going to happen here is watch to see what top executives are doing with their stocks. If you can get advance notice on a CEO dumping stock, you'll be way ahead of the rest of the suckers.
A while back there was a discussion on how much effort Nintendo and others put in to make it difficult for people to play old games (Battletoads of course being a classic example of this) legally. If they would take a look at GOG they could see how they could do it, make money, and make the fans happy. There are plenty of games on there that date to the 90s (some even earlier) that people are happily paying small amounts of money for so they can play them on their newer PCs. Nindendo got close to this with Virtual Console but there were some glaring omissions - and of course it is close to shutting down for the WiiU.
Ask yourself this question; would you pay $5 to play your favorite 8 bit NES title on your newest Nintendo system? I know I would.
There's a handful of companies that control the online public square, by virtue of the network effect and natural monopolies.
Which is not free speech. Nobody is obligated to spread what you want to say. Twitter and facebook are not government or public entities, they are free to decide what messages they want traversing their systems. Similarly if you don't agree with their policies you are free to start you own system, or go stand on top of a soap box on the street corner, or use some other medium entirely.
Would you accept the top-3 mobile companies banning you from their services because they didn't like what you were saying?
If I violated the ToS that I agreed to when I signed up with them, then they have the right to ban me for doing that. I would have other systems I could go to for mobile service if that happened or if I didn't like their ToS.
Twitter isn't stopping them, but the banks absolutely are, and they are working in concert with the big tech companies
What do the banks have to do with it? If you want to start your own microblogging service (which is what Twitter started as) you can start it in your house on your regular internet connection to show that there is demand. If you can show that people will use it as an alternative to Twitter and that you can bring in advertising revenue, then the banks and venture capitalists will trip over each other to give you money. That is how pretty well every business ever was started; you don't go to the bank asking for money before you demonstrate your ability to make money.
PS - HEY isn't it HILARIOUS how slashdot isn't covering ANY of this shit? Not even one article about Alex Jones despite conversation being rampant,
Alex Jones has his own social media empire. It isn't on slashdot because it is not relevant to tech. There are plenty of Alex Jones fans here at slashdot, but the editors here don't see a connection so they don't put it on the front page. You're welcomed to feature it in your journals here if you so choose.
Twitter is doing exactly nothing to stop people from starting their own service. If they don't like the terms at Twitter they are free to go start a new service where they can set the terms. Twitter is not obligated to bend to the whims of Trump or anyone else if they fear it would be bad for their bottom line. After all at the end of the day they exist to make money, not to be the mouthpiece of any one man.
And this fucked up "agree/disagree"-based moderation scoring that shows exactly why I browse at -1. I find more posts of truth at -1, and groupthink at +5.
Bull. Shit.
His posting at -1 has nothing to do with "groupthink" or "agree/disagree". Roman posts at -1 because the majority of his posts are either recruitment efforts for his religion, plainly insulting, or both. If he could participate in discussion here like a normal mature human being he would not have karma in the shitter. He's even started at least one sock puppet account in the interest of either increasing his karma or simply ignoring it, and that has been similarly moderated down.
If you see some grain of truth in roman's comments, feel free to log in and moderate them up to where you think they should be. Just don't be surprised if flamebait activity from him is moderated down as such.
The link doesn't even go to the right journal - it goes to a paper in Nature when it says it is a PNAS paper - and the paper doesn't have anything to do with bending any kind of rod. The correct paper is Controlling fracture cascades through twisting and quenching.
the journals contain a mix of actual research papers and total fiction.
It's really, really, exceptionally hard to come up with a ratio of how many are made up. They come up, and they come up in nearly every journal you can think of, but how often do they make it through is really hard to determine.
In part this is due to how peer review works. Reviewers are there to read the paper and check it to make sure it is scientifically sound and that it meets the criteria of the journal. However, the reviewers are not paid to actually reproduce the experiments in said paper; indeed some papers go through that are done under such unusual conditions that it can be exceptionally difficult for anyone other than the author to reproduce the work exactly.
What's the motivation? Personally I think it all boils down to fear or greed
I would say the former more so than the latter. When scientists find themselves with their backs against the wall - and publications can mean more than just tenure they can often determine whether or not the scientist has a job at all - they may find themselves doing things for self-preservation that they would not otherwise endorse. Sure, some may do it for vanity but those I have known who have been busted for misconduct all did it to try to keep their jobs.
As a scientist I run in to this all the time. Everyone would love to get all their work into Nature, Science, and Cell; but they know the reality is that very little gets published in those journals. Then they look in to other journals with lower impact factors and they have to weigh a lot of factors - including costs to publish and the expected length of time to get a publishing decision. Some journals aren't forthcoming with either of those, either.
Then we see new open-access journals popping up with official sounding names all the time. They promise quick turn-around, low publication costs (sometimes even free), and their open-access setup is generally already compliant with NIH and NSF requirements. If all we want to do is get the manuscript out and move on, these can look very tempting.
What's the answer then? I don't know. Nobody does. BioXiv (and others like it) offer an interesting possibility but that isn't without pitfalls (not the least of which is that a paper there that gets rejected in a journal is somewhat more difficult to resubmit elsewhere).