Note that I didn't claim drivers do break on Windows upgrades, only that hardware developers would happily fix things if they did... Because otherwise no one would continue to buy their hardware. I completely understand the pragmatism. And yeah, the bewildering array of distros is a pain, but this is support for Xorg for video stuff... So I'm not sure that's relevant to the present case.
Look: I'm not an idealist by any means. I get exactly why it's a pain to support Linux. But I started replying in this thread to someone who was blaming Ubuntu and Linux Mint for AMD not supporting a new version of Xorg. To me, that's a completely BS argument. Get mad at AMD. Even get mad at the Xorg Devs. But this is nominally a thread on Linux Mint -- why the heck are we even having this discussion??
And why, as end-user, do i care this? I need something that works.
I completely understand your frustration. I was only pointing out that it may be misdirected.
A newer version of xorg was apparently more important to drivers compatibility for the package maintainers.
Probably because this was an LTS release. Ubuntu was forced to make a call about whether to include a newer, better-featured version of Xorg or support an older one for the next 5 years.
To elaborate on that: somewhere along the road the xorg developers decided to break something. How hard is it to design something and keep it (forward) compatible? Apparently for xorg very hard. I totally am ready to believe they had their reasons to do so, but you simply cannot expect all other involved developers to run behind them, within months, if they make make a change breaking stuff, totally ignoring the significant amount of testing the AMD developers would have to do.
Do you think other hardware companies make such excuses when Microsoft releases the next Windows version and stuff breaks? No, they are happy to provide support for their own devices. Also, the "months" thing is disingenuous -- the prospective changes to Xorg were likely known before this: that's just the date after the final version of Xorg was RELEASED.
But just take a second and consider what the implications of your proposal are. You complain that the developers for hardware should not be required to support their own products for some OSes because it's excessive work, but you have no problem asking the Canonical developers to spend the next 5 years supporting a deprecated version of Xorg on an LTS release, just over a video driver that will likely be obsolete in a year or two?
I'm absolutely sure that the Canonical developers didn't want this stuff to break, but they had to make a call on providing the best service for their product overall for the next 5 years.
In case of Ubuntu 16.04 the AMD user is left in the cold, no matter who to blame.
Okay, I might agree, but you clearly have strong feelings about who to blame.
And this is why people who say 'Linux will never be ready for the desktop' are proven right.
What you have proven is that developers for closed-source drivers are unwilling to provide the same resources for supporting Linux as they are for Windows. This fact was and is well-known. Linux does the best it can at spending HUGE amounts of trying to reverse engineer software to provide support for this kind of hardware, because the closed-source folks don't share their info.
If Linux could spend all the time they put into developing and maintaining reverse engineered drivers into actually MAINTAINING decent drivers based on specs direct from the manufacturers, Linux would likely have significantly better hardware support than Windows.
Someone decided that the open source drivers were 'good enough'. Well, they are not, at least for what i was doing.
Yep, that "someone" was AMD. They apparently decided to focus more on a new Linux driver project, as noted in the posts from AMD folks quoted in the above link. Ubuntu isn't able to offer "support" for a closed-source driver that apparently breaks with the newer versions of Xorg. (I'd note that AMD had months to prepare before the new version of Ubuntu upgraded to the newer version of Xorg, and it's been a year or more and AMD hasn't updated their driver.)
And the choice to use the drivers as released by AMD was removed
Because it might break your system.
Imho, Ubuntu, and all derivatives like Mint, suddenly alienate half their user base with that decision.
How was it Ubuntu's fault (let alone Mint's, who didn't do anything here) that AMD stopped updating their drivers for Linux? Ubuntu and its derivatives aren't the only distros that this created problems with -- anyone who is using a version of Xorg released in the past year will have the same problem. And since Xorg is standard across most Linux distros, this truly has nothing to do with Ubuntu (or Mint) per se.
So, i'm back to windows 10 which serves my need
Yep -- AMD decided to update their drivers for the latest Windows version. Ubuntu can't do so, because they don't have the source code.
Why are you angry at Ubuntu when the people who stopped the support are AMD?
I don't mean to sound insulting, but you do understand what the implications of "closed-source driver" are, right? Ubuntu would likely be happy to provide support and updates if they had the source code... but they don't, and AMD won't release it.
Fuck experts. You're not right because of a certificate or credential.
I think you make the common mistake of equating "experts" with "credentials." Experts are people who actually KNOW stuff. Credentials are sometimes useful for determining experts, sometimes not. There are plenty of people who don't have a certificate in X which nevertheless may BE an expert in X simply due to their experience, their own independent study, etc.
So, no -- the fact that you have a credential absolutely does not mean you're right. But the fact that you KNOW more stuff does make it more likely that you're right in that area than someone who doesn't know that stuff.
If you have a cogent argument, the argument is right.
Nope -- this is a return to Aristotelean and formal logic thinking. Just because I can create an argument that LOOKS valid according to whatever rules doesn't mean it is correct.
If you're good at your job (whatever you're an expert in) you can explain your argument persuasively.
Ah, now we're getting down to what you actually want to talk about, i.e., rhetoric and the art of persuasion. Back in the day (19th century, parts of the 20th especially in elite academies), high schools used to offer classes in rhetoric. Not only were you taught the art of persuasion, but you were also taught about a lot of logical fallacies in argumentation, so you could spot BS as well as deliver it. Rhetoric was a standard subject in formal education dating back to ancient Greek and Roman times, but it has fallen out of favor in the past few generations with rather disastrous results.
Being a good, persuasive speaker or writer actually is something you can be taught (at least somewhat). It's not just a "natural talent" or whatever, which many people think today. The problem is at some point in our quest for increasing specialization, we stopped teaching specialized "experts" rhetoric and good communication skills.
Can you see why "experts" are worthless, and what is needed is persuasive arguments?
Actually, far from being worthless, it's often very beneficial when an expert is also trained in the art of rhetoric and persuasion. The best people at persuasion are those who know the facts thoroughly -- i.e., experts.
How to persuade "I understand why you think that way, plenty of smart people would, knowing what you know. Here are some things you don't know, and why they're important".
If you think that's the key to persuasive argument, you're on the right track, but there's a LOT more to it. If you think that merely stating things that other people don't know and why they're important will win most arguments, you obviously haven't been involved in most arguments on the internet for example. People simply aren't very much into listening to detailed arguments anymore. They choose a "camp" and read 140-character tweets and hear 15-second soundbites. If you don't make your case, or if you don't seem on "their side," they tune you out and find a different source.
There are really only a couple ways to win in that culture: (1) redesign a rhetorical strategy that works in 140-character tweets. Trump seems to have mastered this, but it's hard to get across nuance. (2) Convince the "other side" that you are one of them, so they'll actually sit down and listen to you talk for more than 15 seconds. That often involves a LOT of work, if not outright pretending to be something you're not.
There are precious few places where you're going to get people's attention for an entire oration anymore -- at least not without half of your audience just tuning out or changing the channel or going to the next video clip on YouTube or whatever.
TLDR: saying "experts should be respected" is how you get Trump.
Partly -- that in itself is a rhetorical fallacy known as "appeal to authority" (or, i
But I have a hard time understanding how anybody could forget their laptop at a TSA checkpoint.
A lot of people experience anxiety and distraction when they're going through the security line. You're being led around like cattle and are subject to a bunch of random rules that could result in a pain and a bunch of delays (maybe worse) if you aren't careful to pay attention. Doing an extra check to make sure you have everything may not always be at the top of your list.
Just a few ways that immediately come to mind:
(1) You're getting on a 6am flight, so you're going through security at 5am and haven't had a cup of coffee yet because the TSA won't allow you to carry one. So you're just in a "haze."
(2) You have small children or are accompanying a person who can't take care of their own stuff for some reason, so you're juggling a huge number of bins and bags and trying not to forget anything, while also trying not to hold up the line.
(3) The TSA personnel distract you with some bogus extra search procedure that makes you feel uncomfortable... or they are overly brusque with you, which makes you a little paranoid (because they have the power to detain you). So you're distracted by this other stuff -- in ADDITION to having to deal with the indignities of putting back on your belt, shoes, packing up you little "baggie of liquids," etc. while people are crowding around trying to do the same.
Lots of other scenarios. I had a good friend (not at all an idiot or scatter-brained) who forgot his once, but luckily realized it when he got to his gate and went to do some work. He came back and retrieved it in time. I had another acquaintance who lost his and did NOT recover it.
I actually ended up adopting my own crude "reminder procedure" after hearing about these -- I commonly carry my laptop in some sort of sleeve in my bag anyway. I used to just reach in my bag and grab the laptop to put in the separate bin. Now I take the sleeve out of the bag and put it in the bin with my laptop bag (but outside of it), and my laptop obviously in a separate bin. I obviously will need to deal with the sleeve before I depart the TSA area. Just in case I'm distracted, I think there's a much lower chance that I'll just unthinkingly place my empty laptop sleeve back into my bag without realizing my laptop's missing. I doubt I'd forget my laptop, but I know how often it happens, so a little extra precaution doesn't hurt.
The question is -- can you possibly imagine HOW such policies could be enforced? I mean, just read TFS:
[banning] under-18-year-olds texting sexually explicit images. Of course, he doesn't have the slightest idea about how to go about tackling these problems
I can just see tomorrow's news story:
HEALTH SECRETARY ANNOUNCES NEW PARTNERSHIPS TO CURB SEXTING AMONG TEENS
Jeremy Hunt has reported that he has not only found partnerships to reduce teen sexting -- he claims he can do it without costing the UK government anything. In an interview, Mr. Hunt said, "I was shocked at how easy this was! A U.S.-based organization contacted me within a few hours of my announcement saying they'd are 'highly experienced' with such materials and were willing to screen most of the images for no cost whatsoever. The organization is called NAMBLA, though I don't recall exactly what the acronym stands for; they said it very quickly in our conversation. I queried them about privacy concerns, and they said, I quote: 'We will treat these images as if they were a prized possession.' I was also concerned about security, and they said, 'We have a lot of experience handling such materials and keeping them secret.' "
Unfortunately, Mr. Hunt said the group will only handle male images for free, due to unspecified issues in their screening apparatus. But an open call on the Health Secretary's website for "Experienced people willing to screen images and search for nude teenage girls" has already received hundreds of applications from volunteer organizations.
How is it that whenever there is a discussion regarding low UIDs you guys seem to crop up. Is there like a mailing list that people report to that you're all subscribed to for notifications?
"Mailing list"? "Subscribed"? Ha!
No, I'm sure these guys predate all that new-fangled nonsense. The 4-digit UID guys have a 1980s-style robocall recorded message that goes out; the system that operates it runs on a beowulf cluster of Commodore 64s.
The 3-digit UID guys have a network of carrier pigeons that send out "notifications."
Lincoln's actions were ruled unconstitutional in the US Circuit Court of Appeals, by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and Lincoln just straight up IGNORED that ruling. And when people bitched about this, Lincoln had them thrown in prison too. Lincoln went on to throw a massive chunk of the Maryland Legislature in prison, just to keep them from voting, which is a MASSIVE stretch of the concept of "rebellion or invasion"
You forgot the most important element of the Constitution's passage on suspending Habeas corpus:
The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.
The Constitution's provision required not just "rebellion," but a state of rebellion where "the public safety" was endangered. There's simply no evidence that that was the case in Maryland at this time. If there was any danger to the "public safety," it was being caused by the massive build-up of armed troops that were responding to Lincoln's call for an aggressive invasion of the South. At best, the "public" in Maryland was responding with protests to destroy railways, etc. to PREVENT a threat to "public safety" in the form of full-blown armed conflict (which was most likely to result, as it eventually did, in invasion of border states by military troops).
One could probably argue that Lincoln had some right to arrest these protesters for disrupting troop movements or whatever, but there was no evidence of a threat to "public safety" being created, so therefore the suspension of Habeas corpus for such arrests was completely unjustified.
And the fact that Lincoln then started throwing the Maryland legislature and various judges in prison for trying to similarly act to PREVENT a building danger to public safety is a HUGE distortion of what the Constitution says.
I'm no "Southern apologist," but it's important to remember that there's little evidence that the South wanted an armed conflict in secession. Moreover, at this early stage, there were also still plenty of folks in the North who preferred to just let the Deep South leave peacefully. Then Fort Sumter happened, and that energized a lot of warmongering folks on both sides, but there were still plenty of voices in favor of a peaceful exit.
THOSE were largely the people whom Lincoln was throwing in jail -- not those in active "rebellion" that threatened "public safety," but those who wanted to prevent new violence. I sincerely doubt that's what the Framers of the Constitution had in mind when they allowed suspension of Habeas corpus when "the public safety may require it."
TBH, I would much prefer that *only* verified buyers review an item.
A few years back, I would have probably had a different opinion, but now I think I agree with you. Amazon used to benefit from the idea that anybody could write a review -- I think it helped to establish them as THE bookseller back in the day when they mostly dealt with books. Back in the 1990s, it was a central location to write and find reviews of a huge variety of books, which didn't really exist elsewhere at that time (at least on that scale).
But now Amazon has a huge customer base, reviews can be found for just about anything EVERYWHERE on the web, and I think the former benefits of random reviewers are now outweighed by the bad stuff that comes from them.
After all, what sort of person goes on Amazon to write a review for an item they haven't even purchased there? In the past 15 years, I can say that the few times I've done so, it was to rant about something. While I personally think my rants were justified for products I was really disappointed in, I've also read plenty of other reviews by people whose rants clearly didn't seem justified (or at all logical), but nevertheless dragged down the ratings of products or whatever.
Does Amazon really need to provide a forum for people who just want to vent about something they've bought? I suppose once I also really wanted to talk about something great I bought too, so I wrote a glowing review. But my point is that I doubt many people who haven't actually bought something on Amazon are going there to provide a "nuanced" perspective on a product.
Then you add in the potential for fake and paid reviews (both positive and negative ones aimed at competitors), and it seems like the majority of "non-verified" reviews are more likely to cause problems than to be helpful.
Not to mention the problems that happen when customers make mistakes about matching up products (as I've seen in a number of reviews). With books, it was usually pretty easy -- if it had the same title and author, you were usually good to go. (Yes, obviously comments about physical elements like layout or quality of binding or whatever might occasionally occur, and which might vary in different printings, but that was usually a minor issue in reviews.)
Even on Amazon itself, there are problems with 3rd party sellers and mixed up (or deliberately fake) products reviewed together, which is why I've said Amazon should make it easier to sort verified reviews by the seller you're actually contemplating buying something from. That problem is multiplied when you allow people to review a product bought from who knows where and which might not even match up with the product page they're on.
I've also had support from 3rd party sellers... hrm, maybe two times? One time a replacement unit was sent, and another time, I shipped the product back because it was defective, and I got a refund because they couldn't get a replacement.
3rd party sellers are really hit or miss with Amazon, even if they have generally positive "reviews." Two out of three times I've had problems, I have had to involve Amazon as an intermediary to resolve the dispute -- one was a case where someone sent me the wrong book but refused to believe they did so, and another was a seller who said a product would be delivered around Christmas but it took until early February to get it shipped (after a number of misleading status emails from them). The latter ultimately did give me a discount, but it took a lot of work to deal with it.
Amazon itself, on the other hand, has generally been very easy to deal with over the years. I still remember when i sent them a suggestion about improving their website way back in 1997 or so and got a $25 gift certificate just for the idea. In general, every other time I've contacted them, I've received prompt and effective service.
Then how would you recommend that people who purchase a product through a channel other than Amazon verify the purchase to Amazon? Photo of a receipt from Target, Toys R Us, etc.?
Why does Amazon need their input? Seriously. Is Amazon hosting a "review blogging community" or is it a merchant who wants reviews from customers who have bought stuff directly from it?
Looks like this study involved a questionable procedure I've seen in the past - feeding mice ad libitum either aspartame-sweetened water, or just plain water. The ones that had the sweetened water ate more and gained more weight. Great, except that's not comparing what you're claiming it's comparing. If you want to see the benefits of switching from sugary drinks to artificially sweetened ones, the control group should be drinking sugar sweetened water ad libitum, not plain water.
I'm not sure what the study is "claiming it's comparing," but at face value I think the study is claiming that artificial sweeteners may have an effect that causes weight gain, whereas water does not. That's a distinct claim from the way many such sweeteners are marketed, where they assume there is no calories, therefore no impact on digestion or metabolism and thus no impact on the way people eat otherwise. (Basically, the substances are assumed to be inert.)
You seem to want them to do a different study, comparing the effects of sugar-laden drinks to sweeteners. And that would be interesting too. But there is plenty of clinical and experimental evidence showing the consumption of sugary drinks leads to weight gain. Most people KNOW this already, so their choices are something not sweet and non-caloric (like water or unsweetened tea or whatever), or something sweet (like artificial sweeteners). This study clearly provides some insight into that choice.
I agree with much of your critique in general, but I don't see this as a methodological flaw or as a "questionable" procedure... it's just proving that drinking artificially sweetened drinks MAY cause more weight gain than something more inert like water. That's not a trivial claim.
I agree that the tech isn't yet ready for cities, but the same reason it isn't ready for cities is a reason to worry about its implementation on highways.
Why is the tech not ready for cities? Because city driving has too much unpredictable stuff going on -- unpredictable lane changes, pedestrians, cyclists, construction zones, delivery trucks double-parked, the random guy holding up a hand while a city vehicle maneuvers around, etc. Highway driving is 97% boring "stay in your lane, keep relatively constant speed."
The problem is that 3% of other stuff on the highway is like city driving. How do you react when that construction zone suddenly appears with unexpected lane closings, or someone makes unpredictable lane changes, or a merge or other traffic change causes unpredictable behavior, or an accident occurs and an officer has to direct traffic around until it's cleared, etc., etc.?
And even if a truck were somehow programmed to just "go to the side and come to a stop while waiting for help" in ALL situations like that (which seems impossible to anticipate for ALL cases), that strategy simply won't work in all cases where a shoulder to pull off is temporarily unavailable or whatever.
Bottom line is that we're probably going to need a LOT more testing to iron out those edge cases before trucks can move around "without a babysitter," even on the open highway. Plus the obvious point that trucks are HUGE and any malfunction could end up destroying dozens of cars and killing many people. And if that happened even in some extreme situation where a typical trucker wouldn't have been able to save people, I guarantee we'd be greeted to months of Congressional investigations and subsequent overregulation of the industry driving back that date when autonomous trucks without any passengers could be expected to drive on highways.
Requiring Electors to vote a certain way is blatantly unconstitutional.
"Blatantly unconstitutional"? Please point to the relevant passage of the Constitution that prohibits it. Oh, well... actually, the Constitution doesn't address that at all. What it DOES say about the requirements for Electors is in Article II, Section 1:
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.
Basically, state legislatures have authority to appoint Electors however they want, under whatever constraints they wish. This wording was deliberate, since the Founders intended a compromise to allow various states to choose different methods of selecting Electors. Before the Electoral College was settled on, various proposals were put forward for who should elect the President -- some wanted Congress to do it, some wanted Governors to do it, some wanted state legislatures to have a voice, some wanted popular elections. This vague wording deliberately allowed states great leeway in determining the qualifications and methods for selecting Electors -- as long as they weren't people holding an office or employed by the government.
And for roughly 40 years after the Constitution went into effect, states did have various methods for selecting Electors. In some states, the legislature simply appointed them, holding no popular vote at all. In fact, in some early elections, the majority of states chose not to hold a popular vote, instead just appointing Electors. (Under the Constitution, there's no requirement to hold a popular vote for President within any state.) Others had various hybrid systems.
My point is that Electors are basically appointees of the States, and there's no Constitutional proviso that says the Electors can't be put under various constraints for that appointment or required to carry out duties in a particular fashion, just as anybody else given a legal task by a state legislature might be under state law.
It goes against the very purpose of the Electoral College.
The "very purpose" of the Electoral College was rendered obsolete in 1796 after the emergence of political parties. Before political parties, the Founders assumed that there would be no national consensus on candidates, and each state would likely have a "favorite son" whom most of the Electors would vote for. (Hence the provision in the Constitution that each Elector got two votes, and at least one must be cast for a candidate who was NOT from his home state -- this was to ensure that we wouldn't just end up with 13 different candidates, each with a 10% or so of the vote. This was later tweaked with the 12th Amendment after the fiasco in 1800, which separated votes for President vs. VP, but that constraint still applies.)
Anyhow, the "free choice" of Electors basically NEVER worked according to its original purpose. For the first two elections, Washington was assumed to be the winner. After that, the vast majority of Electoral votes have always gone to candidates put forth by parties, not by a "free choice" for some random qualified person by the learned Electors acting on behalf of the people.
The theoretical idea that this COULD happen, though, continued for a few decades. But that ended more-or-less completely by the 1820s, when almost all states adopted a "general ticket" system for choosing Electors, where each party had its "slate" of electors that voters chose from. Any notion of following Hamilton's supposed free choice method from independent thinking Electors was completely done away wi
Yes -- this story and interview is quite similar to a Washington Post story from last week, when they interviewed a much more prominent creator of fake news, who also is a liberal and apparently followed the same "script."
The left wing outrage machinery is largely fed by self-created fake stories.
"Largely"? I don't think so. Partly, sure. I think there were more right-wing propagandists creating fake news than there were liberals floating hoaxes to later bash them.
More importantly, I think the opportunists who realized creating sensationalist news was a money-maker outnumbered all of them. I don't think these opportunists skew left-wing or right-wing or toward Balkan teenagers or whatever... they're just a bunch of random people making money off of crap.
Well, not giving a defeat speech is a little out of "best standard".
Oh really..I suppose the liberal media just staged this whole event then?
Indeed. And although I was never (and still am not) a fan of Clinton (nor Trump), I'm willing to cut her a break on this one. Whether or not you supported Trump and even if you believed media coverage and polls were biased against him, everything the Hillary campaign was going on indicated that she had a 95% or even 99% chance of winning. I'm sure they didn't adequately even prepare a draft of a concession speech until around 10pm the night of the election. Heck, we've heard reports from other countries that they didn't even prepare for the possibility of a Trump victory and only got around to trying to establish contacts with his campaign a week after the election! And Clinton and her family had been in the political limelight for the past 25 years or so -- and suddenly, she's looking at going home.
So, she called Trump and conceded. But rather than addressing a group of supporters in shock in the middle of the night with a half-assed speech, she waited for her speechwriters to sober up and write what was actually a reasonably good speech that actually called for an "open mind" to what Trump would do and a "peaceful transfer of power."
I may not like her, but I give her kudos for that speech. It may be more typical to give a concession speech in the middle of the night, but personally I'm glad she waited until the morning when it could be heard -- because it had important conciliatory messages... some of which haven't subsequently been heeded by her supporters.
Not sure what the point to that rant was. You claim the ingredients list can't be trusted. Then, as an example, you use a time that you read the ingredients list and it proved to be a handy resource.
I said an ingredients list is used for ADVERTISING and thus frequently contains distortions of what is actually there, intended to fool consumers.
Some people are scared of certain chemicals. In many cases, such fears may be irrational, but that's beside the point. They've decided that certain chemicals are things they'd prefer to not have in stuff they buy. Let's say there's a chemical they don't like called X.
So they go to a store, and they know most of the "regular" stuff contains X. They see it in the ingredients. So, they look for the "natural" product alternatives. They look at the ingredients. It does not say X in the ingredients. Instead, it says "plant-based Y," where Y is a superset of things that might contain X... but they don't know that, because they're not chemists. They're just looking for ingredient X.
So, what I did when a family member brought this home -- since I have some knowledge of chemistry -- was to say, "Huh... what's this Y stuff anyway?" And I couldn't tell from the ingredients list, so I needed to go to a corporate website and dig through several layers of links to find the REAL ingredients list... and guess what... X was there!
If you'd call that a "handy resource," I suppose you have a different definition from me. I'd call that deliberate deception and distortion to try to market items that a company knows are disliked (however irrationally) to unsuspecting users for three times the price of the "normal" stuff. Maybe you think people interested in "natural products" are often irrational wackos and deserve to be parted from their money... as apparently these corporations do. I may think these folks are irrational, but I don't subscribe to the view that cheating them out of money through deceptive advertising is morally okay (even if legally okay).
None of this is remotely relevant to a product that lists Aloe Vera as the main ingredient and contains no Aloe Vera at all.
Ingredients lists are frequently misleading for unregulated products. While it may not be exactly like the case here, I'm pretty sure that's a fairly similar issue to what we're talking about.
That extends even beyond cases where an ingredient is actually missing. And note that I DID actually discuss cases where an ingredient might be missing -- due to the way manufacturers disguise similar chemicals by making the ingredient listed more vague and putting "natural" or "vegetable-based" in front of it. But even a basic lab test might not be able to tell you whether they had actually used a "natural" version of that chemical... HENCE there may be plenty more examples of things out there that say "contains X" but actually what you're getting is something different.
(P.S. Of course I recognize in such a case that there would no functional difference between the chemicals. My point is that some consumers apparently WANT the "plant-based" version of something, and often are willing to pay a significant premium for it. So if they aren't getting it, it's a similar scam to what's going on here.)
For some reason most people don't get this and actually think the change candidate can actually do anything different from anyone else.
Well, actually it IS possible to change SOME things.
The problem with Trump, more than perhaps most candidates, is that many of his biggest campaign claims were completely unrealistic, but supporters chose to believe them anyway.
Just because we might get out of the fire and back into the frying pan, that doesn't make it a good place to be.
Also, let's be clear what Trump actually said here. "Some connectivity." It's not like he's suddenly become an environmentalist.
I can just hear him tomorrow if he got too much push-back from conservatives: "Uh... yeah... I said 'some connectivity.' Not a lot. Like a phone -- when you got 'some connectivity' you might have one bar if you're out in the woods. Well, not on my phone, because my phone's awesome and I'm rich. But some people get one bar. That's 'some connectivity,' which is all there is with the climate change. Obama and ISIS, on the other hand -- there's FIVE bars of connectivity there."
How exactly are we supposed to be careful, as the summary suggests, if we cannot trust the ingredients list on the packaging to be accurate?
Well, I guess in this case, you should do an internet search for the report and check whether your chosen product has been found to be legit or not.
Frankly, I'd say if you trust the ingredients list "at face value" for almost any product, you're likely to be deceived. The ingredients list is often another place for advertising tactics. Take most "natural" products. Do you pay double for that "natural" soap? Chances are that some of the vague "vegetable and plant-sourced" gobbledygook listed in the "ingredients" list is basically the same chemicals you'd find in NORMAL ("bad chemical!") soap. Yes, there are exceptions, but I figured this out several years ago when a family member came home with some a few different cleaning products that cost 3 times the regular ones. In some cases, you didn't even have a complete ingredient list on the container, so I had to go to the product website to actually find out what some of it meant... and in most cases, it was the same old crap, just packaged with a bunch of "natural" and "vegetable" and "plant-based" in front of the words.
It doesn't surprise me at all that some manufacturers go the next step and don't even include those "natural" "plant-based" ingredients at all. And who would know in some cases? In the cases of the soaps I'm talking about, there's really no easy lab test to distinguish X chemical refined from plants vs. the same produced chemically in a lab.
Sorry to be the cynic here, but it wouldn't surprise me if many "natural" products are slightly diluted versions of the same chemical crap sold for a much different price, peppered with a little "grapefruit lavender" essence to make you feel all "earthy crunchy" when you spray it.
While I agree with much of your critique of GP, there are still some problems here:
Kids have learned plenty about cause and effect. See above. They've got the math skills to see they can't afford higher education. Why don't you?
Uh, if that were true, why do we currently have this "student loan crisis"? College costs are higher than ever. Percentage of young people enrolled in college has just declined slightly in the past year or two after achieving record levels in the past decade. The chances of getting entry-level jobs for young college grads have been decreasing, yet people keep going to college in numbers that are almost the highest in history.
Basically, I don't see evidence to support your assertion.
Moreover, if average people were able to use logic and reasoning for their finances, we wouldn't have had the mortgage meltdown a few years back. Yes, some people were tricked into loans with bad terms, but many never even bothered to read the terms in the first place -- probably because they couldn't understand them. And yes, I've taught high-school math. I KNOW from experience how many kids actually understand even basic loan terms, let along a complex mortgage. I see it as a huge failure of our educational system that we graduate so many kids who can't do basic financial math and other basic life skills.
Here are charts of A-level performance (national exams taken in the UK at the end of 12th grade) which have shown steady and significant improvements since the 1960s.
What you conveniently forget to mention is that there is a continuous and pervasive media discussion in the UK about whether A-level grades have been inflated over the past few decades. There are some studies suggesting inflation anywhere from two to three complete grade levels, but that may be media exaggeration. However, even more rigorous studies seem to indicate a decline in standards over the decades, even if things have been somewhat constant for the past 15 years or so. Even the first report you link starts out by talking about how A-level grades didn't increase as much as previously in 2012 due to adjustments made to try to hold standards constant.
And frankly, I'd be absolutely shocked if there weren't at least SOME decline. Back when A-levels were first introduced in the 60s, most people taking them were headed for elite colleges. The number of participants has increased something like 8-fold since that time. If the UK somehow managed to improve teaching THAT MUCH over the past 50 years while simultaneously increasing the number of students who previously wouldn't have even considered college to take the exam... well, it would be the greatest educational miracle in the history of the world!
Bottom line is that I don't think we can draw any conclusions about "kids overall" from such stats. Standards may have changed over time. More kids take the exam, which are pooled from different demographic groups. If I had to guess, I'd assume that UK kids are probably somewhat better off in terms of "book material" than their forebears, though independent assessments of reasoning skills (i.e., non-curricular tests similar to IQ tests), etc. seem to show mild declines.
Take from that what you will... but I wouldn't just look at those graphs and assume, "Oh, everybody's so much smarter!!"
The only way you can tell if something is fake or not, is if you already have at least some knowledge about the subject matter.
I wouldn't say it's the ONLY way. For example, if I get a link to a story from The Onion, I'm pretty sure it's fake. There are loads of similar -- but less well-known -- sources out there either putting out satire/parody or hoaxes or fake propaganda.
So, you can know something about your source. I agree that younger students likely won't know about these things (nor do most adults realize the difference -- some of these sites deliberately disguise themselves to look close to a real news site with a known name -- in that case, the URL is usually a clue that something is weird).
In fact, that's the main way I "vet" a news story. If I see a link to a media source I've never heard of before, I automatically assume it could be fake until proven otherwise. There are probably a couple hundred reasonably reputable media sources out there which I know of personally. (And here I'm not saying all "perfectly free from bias" or distortion -- I mean sources that don't publish entire stories they KNOW are false, parody, etc.) You link to a "news source" I've never heard of? I'm skeptical.
Beyond knowing something about your source, fake news can often be spotted because it's "too good to be true." Does a story sound like an exaggerated version of the perfect retort to someone with opposing views from you? Might be a good chance it was just made up. In that case, the easiest thing is to do a quick search for the story. Is anyone else in any media source you've heard of picking up the story? If not, it's more questionable -- doesn't mean it's automatically false, but I'd take a "wait and see" attitude on it.
Finally, you can look for internal clues. A lot of fake news is poorly written and poorly edited. As TFS points out, when it looks professional, though, it's harder to sort out. But if it's actually a parody or hoax site, there are often clues buried in the article that something silly is going on. If you learn to spot such things, it's harder to fall for hoaxes -- though that doesn't help with fake propaganda.
Anyhow, there are a lot of strategies you can use to evaluate news stories even if you know little about the subject beforehand. But it often requires a degree of skepticism about EVERYTHING you read online that most people don't have, as well as critical thinking skills, and a willingness to do a few quick searches to see whether anything in the story is corroborated anywhere more reputable.
Slashdot Mirror
Look: I'm not an idealist by any means. I get exactly why it's a pain to support Linux. But I started replying in this thread to someone who was blaming Ubuntu and Linux Mint for AMD not supporting a new version of Xorg. To me, that's a completely BS argument. Get mad at AMD. Even get mad at the Xorg Devs. But this is nominally a thread on Linux Mint -- why the heck are we even having this discussion??
And why, as end-user, do i care this? I need something that works.
I completely understand your frustration. I was only pointing out that it may be misdirected.
A newer version of xorg was apparently more important to drivers compatibility for the package maintainers.
Probably because this was an LTS release. Ubuntu was forced to make a call about whether to include a newer, better-featured version of Xorg or support an older one for the next 5 years.
To elaborate on that: somewhere along the road the xorg developers decided to break something. How hard is it to design something and keep it (forward) compatible? Apparently for xorg very hard. I totally am ready to believe they had their reasons to do so, but you simply cannot expect all other involved developers to run behind them, within months, if they make make a change breaking stuff, totally ignoring the significant amount of testing the AMD developers would have to do.
Do you think other hardware companies make such excuses when Microsoft releases the next Windows version and stuff breaks? No, they are happy to provide support for their own devices. Also, the "months" thing is disingenuous -- the prospective changes to Xorg were likely known before this: that's just the date after the final version of Xorg was RELEASED.
But just take a second and consider what the implications of your proposal are. You complain that the developers for hardware should not be required to support their own products for some OSes because it's excessive work, but you have no problem asking the Canonical developers to spend the next 5 years supporting a deprecated version of Xorg on an LTS release, just over a video driver that will likely be obsolete in a year or two?
I'm absolutely sure that the Canonical developers didn't want this stuff to break, but they had to make a call on providing the best service for their product overall for the next 5 years.
In case of Ubuntu 16.04 the AMD user is left in the cold, no matter who to blame.
Okay, I might agree, but you clearly have strong feelings about who to blame.
And this is why people who say 'Linux will never be ready for the desktop' are proven right.
What you have proven is that developers for closed-source drivers are unwilling to provide the same resources for supporting Linux as they are for Windows. This fact was and is well-known. Linux does the best it can at spending HUGE amounts of trying to reverse engineer software to provide support for this kind of hardware, because the closed-source folks don't share their info.
If Linux could spend all the time they put into developing and maintaining reverse engineered drivers into actually MAINTAINING decent drivers based on specs direct from the manufacturers, Linux would likely have significantly better hardware support than Windows.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Unless you lost your laptop, in which case you may want to look closely at the photo and maybe try to get it back.
After many years of Ubuntu use as primary desktop, the thing that drove me away was ending the support for the closed source AMD video drivers.
What does this have to do with Ubuntu? AMD ended their support.
Someone decided that the open source drivers were 'good enough'. Well, they are not, at least for what i was doing.
Yep, that "someone" was AMD. They apparently decided to focus more on a new Linux driver project, as noted in the posts from AMD folks quoted in the above link. Ubuntu isn't able to offer "support" for a closed-source driver that apparently breaks with the newer versions of Xorg. (I'd note that AMD had months to prepare before the new version of Ubuntu upgraded to the newer version of Xorg, and it's been a year or more and AMD hasn't updated their driver.)
And the choice to use the drivers as released by AMD was removed
Because it might break your system.
Imho, Ubuntu, and all derivatives like Mint, suddenly alienate half their user base with that decision.
How was it Ubuntu's fault (let alone Mint's, who didn't do anything here) that AMD stopped updating their drivers for Linux? Ubuntu and its derivatives aren't the only distros that this created problems with -- anyone who is using a version of Xorg released in the past year will have the same problem. And since Xorg is standard across most Linux distros, this truly has nothing to do with Ubuntu (or Mint) per se.
So, i'm back to windows 10 which serves my need
Yep -- AMD decided to update their drivers for the latest Windows version. Ubuntu can't do so, because they don't have the source code.
Why are you angry at Ubuntu when the people who stopped the support are AMD?
I don't mean to sound insulting, but you do understand what the implications of "closed-source driver" are, right? Ubuntu would likely be happy to provide support and updates if they had the source code... but they don't, and AMD won't release it.
Fuck experts. You're not right because of a certificate or credential.
I think you make the common mistake of equating "experts" with "credentials." Experts are people who actually KNOW stuff. Credentials are sometimes useful for determining experts, sometimes not. There are plenty of people who don't have a certificate in X which nevertheless may BE an expert in X simply due to their experience, their own independent study, etc.
So, no -- the fact that you have a credential absolutely does not mean you're right. But the fact that you KNOW more stuff does make it more likely that you're right in that area than someone who doesn't know that stuff.
If you have a cogent argument, the argument is right.
Nope -- this is a return to Aristotelean and formal logic thinking. Just because I can create an argument that LOOKS valid according to whatever rules doesn't mean it is correct.
If you're good at your job (whatever you're an expert in) you can explain your argument persuasively.
Ah, now we're getting down to what you actually want to talk about, i.e., rhetoric and the art of persuasion. Back in the day (19th century, parts of the 20th especially in elite academies), high schools used to offer classes in rhetoric. Not only were you taught the art of persuasion, but you were also taught about a lot of logical fallacies in argumentation, so you could spot BS as well as deliver it. Rhetoric was a standard subject in formal education dating back to ancient Greek and Roman times, but it has fallen out of favor in the past few generations with rather disastrous results.
Being a good, persuasive speaker or writer actually is something you can be taught (at least somewhat). It's not just a "natural talent" or whatever, which many people think today. The problem is at some point in our quest for increasing specialization, we stopped teaching specialized "experts" rhetoric and good communication skills.
Can you see why "experts" are worthless, and what is needed is persuasive arguments?
Actually, far from being worthless, it's often very beneficial when an expert is also trained in the art of rhetoric and persuasion. The best people at persuasion are those who know the facts thoroughly -- i.e., experts.
How to persuade "I understand why you think that way, plenty of smart people would, knowing what you know. Here are some things you don't know, and why they're important".
If you think that's the key to persuasive argument, you're on the right track, but there's a LOT more to it. If you think that merely stating things that other people don't know and why they're important will win most arguments, you obviously haven't been involved in most arguments on the internet for example. People simply aren't very much into listening to detailed arguments anymore. They choose a "camp" and read 140-character tweets and hear 15-second soundbites. If you don't make your case, or if you don't seem on "their side," they tune you out and find a different source.
There are really only a couple ways to win in that culture: (1) redesign a rhetorical strategy that works in 140-character tweets. Trump seems to have mastered this, but it's hard to get across nuance. (2) Convince the "other side" that you are one of them, so they'll actually sit down and listen to you talk for more than 15 seconds. That often involves a LOT of work, if not outright pretending to be something you're not.
There are precious few places where you're going to get people's attention for an entire oration anymore -- at least not without half of your audience just tuning out or changing the channel or going to the next video clip on YouTube or whatever.
TLDR: saying "experts should be respected" is how you get Trump.
Partly -- that in itself is a rhetorical fallacy known as "appeal to authority" (or, i
But I have a hard time understanding how anybody could forget their laptop at a TSA checkpoint.
A lot of people experience anxiety and distraction when they're going through the security line. You're being led around like cattle and are subject to a bunch of random rules that could result in a pain and a bunch of delays (maybe worse) if you aren't careful to pay attention. Doing an extra check to make sure you have everything may not always be at the top of your list.
Just a few ways that immediately come to mind:
(1) You're getting on a 6am flight, so you're going through security at 5am and haven't had a cup of coffee yet because the TSA won't allow you to carry one. So you're just in a "haze."
(2) You have small children or are accompanying a person who can't take care of their own stuff for some reason, so you're juggling a huge number of bins and bags and trying not to forget anything, while also trying not to hold up the line.
(3) The TSA personnel distract you with some bogus extra search procedure that makes you feel uncomfortable... or they are overly brusque with you, which makes you a little paranoid (because they have the power to detain you). So you're distracted by this other stuff -- in ADDITION to having to deal with the indignities of putting back on your belt, shoes, packing up you little "baggie of liquids," etc. while people are crowding around trying to do the same.
Lots of other scenarios. I had a good friend (not at all an idiot or scatter-brained) who forgot his once, but luckily realized it when he got to his gate and went to do some work. He came back and retrieved it in time. I had another acquaintance who lost his and did NOT recover it.
I actually ended up adopting my own crude "reminder procedure" after hearing about these -- I commonly carry my laptop in some sort of sleeve in my bag anyway. I used to just reach in my bag and grab the laptop to put in the separate bin. Now I take the sleeve out of the bag and put it in the bin with my laptop bag (but outside of it), and my laptop obviously in a separate bin. I obviously will need to deal with the sleeve before I depart the TSA area. Just in case I'm distracted, I think there's a much lower chance that I'll just unthinkingly place my empty laptop sleeve back into my bag without realizing my laptop's missing. I doubt I'd forget my laptop, but I know how often it happens, so a little extra precaution doesn't hurt.
[banning] under-18-year-olds texting sexually explicit images. Of course, he doesn't have the slightest idea about how to go about tackling these problems
I can just see tomorrow's news story:
HEALTH SECRETARY ANNOUNCES NEW PARTNERSHIPS TO CURB SEXTING AMONG TEENS
Jeremy Hunt has reported that he has not only found partnerships to reduce teen sexting -- he claims he can do it without costing the UK government anything. In an interview, Mr. Hunt said, "I was shocked at how easy this was! A U.S.-based organization contacted me within a few hours of my announcement saying they'd are 'highly experienced' with such materials and were willing to screen most of the images for no cost whatsoever. The organization is called NAMBLA, though I don't recall exactly what the acronym stands for; they said it very quickly in our conversation. I queried them about privacy concerns, and they said, I quote: 'We will treat these images as if they were a prized possession.' I was also concerned about security, and they said, 'We have a lot of experience handling such materials and keeping them secret.' "
Unfortunately, Mr. Hunt said the group will only handle male images for free, due to unspecified issues in their screening apparatus. But an open call on the Health Secretary's website for "Experienced people willing to screen images and search for nude teenage girls" has already received hundreds of applications from volunteer organizations.
How is it that whenever there is a discussion regarding low UIDs you guys seem to crop up. Is there like a mailing list that people report to that you're all subscribed to for notifications?
"Mailing list"? "Subscribed"? Ha!
No, I'm sure these guys predate all that new-fangled nonsense. The 4-digit UID guys have a 1980s-style robocall recorded message that goes out; the system that operates it runs on a beowulf cluster of Commodore 64s.
The 3-digit UID guys have a network of carrier pigeons that send out "notifications."
Lincoln's actions were ruled unconstitutional in the US Circuit Court of Appeals, by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and Lincoln just straight up IGNORED that ruling. And when people bitched about this, Lincoln had them thrown in prison too. Lincoln went on to throw a massive chunk of the Maryland Legislature in prison, just to keep them from voting, which is a MASSIVE stretch of the concept of "rebellion or invasion"
You forgot the most important element of the Constitution's passage on suspending Habeas corpus:
The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.
The Constitution's provision required not just "rebellion," but a state of rebellion where "the public safety" was endangered. There's simply no evidence that that was the case in Maryland at this time. If there was any danger to the "public safety," it was being caused by the massive build-up of armed troops that were responding to Lincoln's call for an aggressive invasion of the South. At best, the "public" in Maryland was responding with protests to destroy railways, etc. to PREVENT a threat to "public safety" in the form of full-blown armed conflict (which was most likely to result, as it eventually did, in invasion of border states by military troops).
One could probably argue that Lincoln had some right to arrest these protesters for disrupting troop movements or whatever, but there was no evidence of a threat to "public safety" being created, so therefore the suspension of Habeas corpus for such arrests was completely unjustified.
And the fact that Lincoln then started throwing the Maryland legislature and various judges in prison for trying to similarly act to PREVENT a building danger to public safety is a HUGE distortion of what the Constitution says.
I'm no "Southern apologist," but it's important to remember that there's little evidence that the South wanted an armed conflict in secession. Moreover, at this early stage, there were also still plenty of folks in the North who preferred to just let the Deep South leave peacefully. Then Fort Sumter happened, and that energized a lot of warmongering folks on both sides, but there were still plenty of voices in favor of a peaceful exit.
THOSE were largely the people whom Lincoln was throwing in jail -- not those in active "rebellion" that threatened "public safety," but those who wanted to prevent new violence. I sincerely doubt that's what the Framers of the Constitution had in mind when they allowed suspension of Habeas corpus when "the public safety may require it."
TBH, I would much prefer that *only* verified buyers review an item.
A few years back, I would have probably had a different opinion, but now I think I agree with you. Amazon used to benefit from the idea that anybody could write a review -- I think it helped to establish them as THE bookseller back in the day when they mostly dealt with books. Back in the 1990s, it was a central location to write and find reviews of a huge variety of books, which didn't really exist elsewhere at that time (at least on that scale).
But now Amazon has a huge customer base, reviews can be found for just about anything EVERYWHERE on the web, and I think the former benefits of random reviewers are now outweighed by the bad stuff that comes from them.
After all, what sort of person goes on Amazon to write a review for an item they haven't even purchased there? In the past 15 years, I can say that the few times I've done so, it was to rant about something. While I personally think my rants were justified for products I was really disappointed in, I've also read plenty of other reviews by people whose rants clearly didn't seem justified (or at all logical), but nevertheless dragged down the ratings of products or whatever.
Does Amazon really need to provide a forum for people who just want to vent about something they've bought? I suppose once I also really wanted to talk about something great I bought too, so I wrote a glowing review. But my point is that I doubt many people who haven't actually bought something on Amazon are going there to provide a "nuanced" perspective on a product.
Then you add in the potential for fake and paid reviews (both positive and negative ones aimed at competitors), and it seems like the majority of "non-verified" reviews are more likely to cause problems than to be helpful.
Not to mention the problems that happen when customers make mistakes about matching up products (as I've seen in a number of reviews). With books, it was usually pretty easy -- if it had the same title and author, you were usually good to go. (Yes, obviously comments about physical elements like layout or quality of binding or whatever might occasionally occur, and which might vary in different printings, but that was usually a minor issue in reviews.)
Even on Amazon itself, there are problems with 3rd party sellers and mixed up (or deliberately fake) products reviewed together, which is why I've said Amazon should make it easier to sort verified reviews by the seller you're actually contemplating buying something from. That problem is multiplied when you allow people to review a product bought from who knows where and which might not even match up with the product page they're on.
I've also had support from 3rd party sellers... hrm, maybe two times? One time a replacement unit was sent, and another time, I shipped the product back because it was defective, and I got a refund because they couldn't get a replacement.
3rd party sellers are really hit or miss with Amazon, even if they have generally positive "reviews." Two out of three times I've had problems, I have had to involve Amazon as an intermediary to resolve the dispute -- one was a case where someone sent me the wrong book but refused to believe they did so, and another was a seller who said a product would be delivered around Christmas but it took until early February to get it shipped (after a number of misleading status emails from them). The latter ultimately did give me a discount, but it took a lot of work to deal with it.
Amazon itself, on the other hand, has generally been very easy to deal with over the years. I still remember when i sent them a suggestion about improving their website way back in 1997 or so and got a $25 gift certificate just for the idea. In general, every other time I've contacted them, I've received prompt and effective service.
Then how would you recommend that people who purchase a product through a channel other than Amazon verify the purchase to Amazon? Photo of a receipt from Target, Toys R Us, etc.?
Why does Amazon need their input? Seriously. Is Amazon hosting a "review blogging community" or is it a merchant who wants reviews from customers who have bought stuff directly from it?
Just posing the question.
Looks like this study involved a questionable procedure I've seen in the past - feeding mice ad libitum either aspartame-sweetened water, or just plain water. The ones that had the sweetened water ate more and gained more weight. Great, except that's not comparing what you're claiming it's comparing. If you want to see the benefits of switching from sugary drinks to artificially sweetened ones, the control group should be drinking sugar sweetened water ad libitum, not plain water.
I'm not sure what the study is "claiming it's comparing," but at face value I think the study is claiming that artificial sweeteners may have an effect that causes weight gain, whereas water does not. That's a distinct claim from the way many such sweeteners are marketed, where they assume there is no calories, therefore no impact on digestion or metabolism and thus no impact on the way people eat otherwise. (Basically, the substances are assumed to be inert.)
You seem to want them to do a different study, comparing the effects of sugar-laden drinks to sweeteners. And that would be interesting too. But there is plenty of clinical and experimental evidence showing the consumption of sugary drinks leads to weight gain. Most people KNOW this already, so their choices are something not sweet and non-caloric (like water or unsweetened tea or whatever), or something sweet (like artificial sweeteners). This study clearly provides some insight into that choice.
I agree with much of your critique in general, but I don't see this as a methodological flaw or as a "questionable" procedure... it's just proving that drinking artificially sweetened drinks MAY cause more weight gain than something more inert like water. That's not a trivial claim.
I agree that the tech isn't yet ready for cities, but the same reason it isn't ready for cities is a reason to worry about its implementation on highways.
Why is the tech not ready for cities? Because city driving has too much unpredictable stuff going on -- unpredictable lane changes, pedestrians, cyclists, construction zones, delivery trucks double-parked, the random guy holding up a hand while a city vehicle maneuvers around, etc. Highway driving is 97% boring "stay in your lane, keep relatively constant speed."
The problem is that 3% of other stuff on the highway is like city driving. How do you react when that construction zone suddenly appears with unexpected lane closings, or someone makes unpredictable lane changes, or a merge or other traffic change causes unpredictable behavior, or an accident occurs and an officer has to direct traffic around until it's cleared, etc., etc.?
And even if a truck were somehow programmed to just "go to the side and come to a stop while waiting for help" in ALL situations like that (which seems impossible to anticipate for ALL cases), that strategy simply won't work in all cases where a shoulder to pull off is temporarily unavailable or whatever.
Bottom line is that we're probably going to need a LOT more testing to iron out those edge cases before trucks can move around "without a babysitter," even on the open highway. Plus the obvious point that trucks are HUGE and any malfunction could end up destroying dozens of cars and killing many people. And if that happened even in some extreme situation where a typical trucker wouldn't have been able to save people, I guarantee we'd be greeted to months of Congressional investigations and subsequent overregulation of the industry driving back that date when autonomous trucks without any passengers could be expected to drive on highways.
Requiring Electors to vote a certain way is blatantly unconstitutional.
"Blatantly unconstitutional"? Please point to the relevant passage of the Constitution that prohibits it. Oh, well... actually, the Constitution doesn't address that at all. What it DOES say about the requirements for Electors is in Article II, Section 1:
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.
Basically, state legislatures have authority to appoint Electors however they want, under whatever constraints they wish. This wording was deliberate, since the Founders intended a compromise to allow various states to choose different methods of selecting Electors. Before the Electoral College was settled on, various proposals were put forward for who should elect the President -- some wanted Congress to do it, some wanted Governors to do it, some wanted state legislatures to have a voice, some wanted popular elections. This vague wording deliberately allowed states great leeway in determining the qualifications and methods for selecting Electors -- as long as they weren't people holding an office or employed by the government.
And for roughly 40 years after the Constitution went into effect, states did have various methods for selecting Electors. In some states, the legislature simply appointed them, holding no popular vote at all. In fact, in some early elections, the majority of states chose not to hold a popular vote, instead just appointing Electors. (Under the Constitution, there's no requirement to hold a popular vote for President within any state.) Others had various hybrid systems.
My point is that Electors are basically appointees of the States, and there's no Constitutional proviso that says the Electors can't be put under various constraints for that appointment or required to carry out duties in a particular fashion, just as anybody else given a legal task by a state legislature might be under state law.
It goes against the very purpose of the Electoral College.
The "very purpose" of the Electoral College was rendered obsolete in 1796 after the emergence of political parties. Before political parties, the Founders assumed that there would be no national consensus on candidates, and each state would likely have a "favorite son" whom most of the Electors would vote for. (Hence the provision in the Constitution that each Elector got two votes, and at least one must be cast for a candidate who was NOT from his home state -- this was to ensure that we wouldn't just end up with 13 different candidates, each with a 10% or so of the vote. This was later tweaked with the 12th Amendment after the fiasco in 1800, which separated votes for President vs. VP, but that constraint still applies.)
Anyhow, the "free choice" of Electors basically NEVER worked according to its original purpose. For the first two elections, Washington was assumed to be the winner. After that, the vast majority of Electoral votes have always gone to candidates put forth by parties, not by a "free choice" for some random qualified person by the learned Electors acting on behalf of the people.
The theoretical idea that this COULD happen, though, continued for a few decades. But that ended more-or-less completely by the 1820s, when almost all states adopted a "general ticket" system for choosing Electors, where each party had its "slate" of electors that voters chose from. Any notion of following Hamilton's supposed free choice method from independent thinking Electors was completely done away wi
Yes -- this story and interview is quite similar to a Washington Post story from last week, when they interviewed a much more prominent creator of fake news, who also is a liberal and apparently followed the same "script."
The left wing outrage machinery is largely fed by self-created fake stories.
"Largely"? I don't think so. Partly, sure. I think there were more right-wing propagandists creating fake news than there were liberals floating hoaxes to later bash them. More importantly, I think the opportunists who realized creating sensationalist news was a money-maker outnumbered all of them. I don't think these opportunists skew left-wing or right-wing or toward Balkan teenagers or whatever... they're just a bunch of random people making money off of crap.
Well, not giving a defeat speech is a little out of "best standard".
Oh really..I suppose the liberal media just staged this whole event then?
Indeed. And although I was never (and still am not) a fan of Clinton (nor Trump), I'm willing to cut her a break on this one. Whether or not you supported Trump and even if you believed media coverage and polls were biased against him, everything the Hillary campaign was going on indicated that she had a 95% or even 99% chance of winning. I'm sure they didn't adequately even prepare a draft of a concession speech until around 10pm the night of the election. Heck, we've heard reports from other countries that they didn't even prepare for the possibility of a Trump victory and only got around to trying to establish contacts with his campaign a week after the election! And Clinton and her family had been in the political limelight for the past 25 years or so -- and suddenly, she's looking at going home.
So, she called Trump and conceded. But rather than addressing a group of supporters in shock in the middle of the night with a half-assed speech, she waited for her speechwriters to sober up and write what was actually a reasonably good speech that actually called for an "open mind" to what Trump would do and a "peaceful transfer of power."
I may not like her, but I give her kudos for that speech. It may be more typical to give a concession speech in the middle of the night, but personally I'm glad she waited until the morning when it could be heard -- because it had important conciliatory messages... some of which haven't subsequently been heeded by her supporters.
Not sure what the point to that rant was. You claim the ingredients list can't be trusted. Then, as an example, you use a time that you read the ingredients list and it proved to be a handy resource.
I said an ingredients list is used for ADVERTISING and thus frequently contains distortions of what is actually there, intended to fool consumers.
Some people are scared of certain chemicals. In many cases, such fears may be irrational, but that's beside the point. They've decided that certain chemicals are things they'd prefer to not have in stuff they buy. Let's say there's a chemical they don't like called X.
So they go to a store, and they know most of the "regular" stuff contains X. They see it in the ingredients. So, they look for the "natural" product alternatives. They look at the ingredients. It does not say X in the ingredients. Instead, it says "plant-based Y," where Y is a superset of things that might contain X... but they don't know that, because they're not chemists. They're just looking for ingredient X.
So, what I did when a family member brought this home -- since I have some knowledge of chemistry -- was to say, "Huh... what's this Y stuff anyway?" And I couldn't tell from the ingredients list, so I needed to go to a corporate website and dig through several layers of links to find the REAL ingredients list... and guess what... X was there!
If you'd call that a "handy resource," I suppose you have a different definition from me. I'd call that deliberate deception and distortion to try to market items that a company knows are disliked (however irrationally) to unsuspecting users for three times the price of the "normal" stuff. Maybe you think people interested in "natural products" are often irrational wackos and deserve to be parted from their money... as apparently these corporations do. I may think these folks are irrational, but I don't subscribe to the view that cheating them out of money through deceptive advertising is morally okay (even if legally okay).
None of this is remotely relevant to a product that lists Aloe Vera as the main ingredient and contains no Aloe Vera at all.
Ingredients lists are frequently misleading for unregulated products. While it may not be exactly like the case here, I'm pretty sure that's a fairly similar issue to what we're talking about.
That extends even beyond cases where an ingredient is actually missing. And note that I DID actually discuss cases where an ingredient might be missing -- due to the way manufacturers disguise similar chemicals by making the ingredient listed more vague and putting "natural" or "vegetable-based" in front of it. But even a basic lab test might not be able to tell you whether they had actually used a "natural" version of that chemical... HENCE there may be plenty more examples of things out there that say "contains X" but actually what you're getting is something different.
(P.S. Of course I recognize in such a case that there would no functional difference between the chemicals. My point is that some consumers apparently WANT the "plant-based" version of something, and often are willing to pay a significant premium for it. So if they aren't getting it, it's a similar scam to what's going on here.)
For some reason most people don't get this and actually think the change candidate can actually do anything different from anyone else.
Well, actually it IS possible to change SOME things.
The problem with Trump, more than perhaps most candidates, is that many of his biggest campaign claims were completely unrealistic, but supporters chose to believe them anyway.
Just because we might get out of the fire and back into the frying pan, that doesn't make it a good place to be.
Also, let's be clear what Trump actually said here. "Some connectivity." It's not like he's suddenly become an environmentalist.
I can just hear him tomorrow if he got too much push-back from conservatives: "Uh... yeah... I said 'some connectivity.' Not a lot. Like a phone -- when you got 'some connectivity' you might have one bar if you're out in the woods. Well, not on my phone, because my phone's awesome and I'm rich. But some people get one bar. That's 'some connectivity,' which is all there is with the climate change. Obama and ISIS, on the other hand -- there's FIVE bars of connectivity there."
How exactly are we supposed to be careful, as the summary suggests, if we cannot trust the ingredients list on the packaging to be accurate?
Well, I guess in this case, you should do an internet search for the report and check whether your chosen product has been found to be legit or not.
Frankly, I'd say if you trust the ingredients list "at face value" for almost any product, you're likely to be deceived. The ingredients list is often another place for advertising tactics. Take most "natural" products. Do you pay double for that "natural" soap? Chances are that some of the vague "vegetable and plant-sourced" gobbledygook listed in the "ingredients" list is basically the same chemicals you'd find in NORMAL ("bad chemical!") soap. Yes, there are exceptions, but I figured this out several years ago when a family member came home with some a few different cleaning products that cost 3 times the regular ones. In some cases, you didn't even have a complete ingredient list on the container, so I had to go to the product website to actually find out what some of it meant... and in most cases, it was the same old crap, just packaged with a bunch of "natural" and "vegetable" and "plant-based" in front of the words.
It doesn't surprise me at all that some manufacturers go the next step and don't even include those "natural" "plant-based" ingredients at all. And who would know in some cases? In the cases of the soaps I'm talking about, there's really no easy lab test to distinguish X chemical refined from plants vs. the same produced chemically in a lab.
Sorry to be the cynic here, but it wouldn't surprise me if many "natural" products are slightly diluted versions of the same chemical crap sold for a much different price, peppered with a little "grapefruit lavender" essence to make you feel all "earthy crunchy" when you spray it.
Kids have learned plenty about cause and effect. See above. They've got the math skills to see they can't afford higher education. Why don't you?
Uh, if that were true, why do we currently have this "student loan crisis"? College costs are higher than ever. Percentage of young people enrolled in college has just declined slightly in the past year or two after achieving record levels in the past decade. The chances of getting entry-level jobs for young college grads have been decreasing, yet people keep going to college in numbers that are almost the highest in history.
Basically, I don't see evidence to support your assertion.
Moreover, if average people were able to use logic and reasoning for their finances, we wouldn't have had the mortgage meltdown a few years back. Yes, some people were tricked into loans with bad terms, but many never even bothered to read the terms in the first place -- probably because they couldn't understand them. And yes, I've taught high-school math. I KNOW from experience how many kids actually understand even basic loan terms, let along a complex mortgage. I see it as a huge failure of our educational system that we graduate so many kids who can't do basic financial math and other basic life skills.
Here are charts of A-level performance (national exams taken in the UK at the end of 12th grade) which have shown steady and significant improvements since the 1960s.
What you conveniently forget to mention is that there is a continuous and pervasive media discussion in the UK about whether A-level grades have been inflated over the past few decades. There are some studies suggesting inflation anywhere from two to three complete grade levels, but that may be media exaggeration. However, even more rigorous studies seem to indicate a decline in standards over the decades, even if things have been somewhat constant for the past 15 years or so. Even the first report you link starts out by talking about how A-level grades didn't increase as much as previously in 2012 due to adjustments made to try to hold standards constant.
And frankly, I'd be absolutely shocked if there weren't at least SOME decline. Back when A-levels were first introduced in the 60s, most people taking them were headed for elite colleges. The number of participants has increased something like 8-fold since that time. If the UK somehow managed to improve teaching THAT MUCH over the past 50 years while simultaneously increasing the number of students who previously wouldn't have even considered college to take the exam... well, it would be the greatest educational miracle in the history of the world!
Bottom line is that I don't think we can draw any conclusions about "kids overall" from such stats. Standards may have changed over time. More kids take the exam, which are pooled from different demographic groups. If I had to guess, I'd assume that UK kids are probably somewhat better off in terms of "book material" than their forebears, though independent assessments of reasoning skills (i.e., non-curricular tests similar to IQ tests), etc. seem to show mild declines.
Take from that what you will... but I wouldn't just look at those graphs and assume, "Oh, everybody's so much smarter!!"
The only way you can tell if something is fake or not, is if you already have at least some knowledge about the subject matter.
I wouldn't say it's the ONLY way. For example, if I get a link to a story from The Onion, I'm pretty sure it's fake. There are loads of similar -- but less well-known -- sources out there either putting out satire/parody or hoaxes or fake propaganda.
So, you can know something about your source. I agree that younger students likely won't know about these things (nor do most adults realize the difference -- some of these sites deliberately disguise themselves to look close to a real news site with a known name -- in that case, the URL is usually a clue that something is weird).
In fact, that's the main way I "vet" a news story. If I see a link to a media source I've never heard of before, I automatically assume it could be fake until proven otherwise. There are probably a couple hundred reasonably reputable media sources out there which I know of personally. (And here I'm not saying all "perfectly free from bias" or distortion -- I mean sources that don't publish entire stories they KNOW are false, parody, etc.) You link to a "news source" I've never heard of? I'm skeptical.
Beyond knowing something about your source, fake news can often be spotted because it's "too good to be true." Does a story sound like an exaggerated version of the perfect retort to someone with opposing views from you? Might be a good chance it was just made up. In that case, the easiest thing is to do a quick search for the story. Is anyone else in any media source you've heard of picking up the story? If not, it's more questionable -- doesn't mean it's automatically false, but I'd take a "wait and see" attitude on it.
Finally, you can look for internal clues. A lot of fake news is poorly written and poorly edited. As TFS points out, when it looks professional, though, it's harder to sort out. But if it's actually a parody or hoax site, there are often clues buried in the article that something silly is going on. If you learn to spot such things, it's harder to fall for hoaxes -- though that doesn't help with fake propaganda.
Anyhow, there are a lot of strategies you can use to evaluate news stories even if you know little about the subject beforehand. But it often requires a degree of skepticism about EVERYTHING you read online that most people don't have, as well as critical thinking skills, and a willingness to do a few quick searches to see whether anything in the story is corroborated anywhere more reputable.