I had a mechanic put a $6 "scanner" charge on his bill. I asked him about it and he said he had to pay for his new scanner somehow (after I had already told him the code from my $60 reader so it wasn't even necessary).
So you spent $60 to save yourself a $6 scanner charge. Sounds like a good expenditure to me.
It sounds like you know nothing about car repair. Let me explain: there are some people in the world who actually can repair their cars themselves. People who do more than change their own oil and brake jobs and such might actually invest in a cheap scanner to get diagnostic codes from their vehicle when something goes wrong, so that way they know what needs fixing. (That's why the manufacturers put those diagnostic codes in in the first place.)
I assume GP has probably used his scanner on a number of occasions and by doing his own car repair probably saves hundreds of dollars on every major repair. However, almost every home mechanic will reach a point when a repair is not worth his time or he doesn't have the equipment to deal with -- in which case, like GP, he might take his vehicle to a mechanic.
GP's point was: he could get a diagnostic code with a cheap $60 scanner, and his mechanic was claiming he needed to charge a $6 diagnostic fee PER SERVICE to recoup the cost of a scanner. Point being: unless the scanner only does 10 diagnostics before dying, the mechanic may be significantly overcharging for his "scanner fee." (In reality, many pro scanners can cost more -- often a few hundred dollars -- but a $6 fee still seems steep if a customer came in and told you exactly what needed to be fixed.)
It is not called Franchise but concession.
Mac Donalds etc. are Franchises.
Wrong -- by federal law, cable providers often operate as local franchises. That's the term the government uses:
A variety of laws and regulations for cable television exist at the state and local level. Some states, such as Massachusetts, regulate cable television on a comprehensive basis through a state commission or advisory board established for the sole purpose of cable television regulation. In Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont, the agencies are state public utility commissions. In Hawaii, regulation of cable television is the responsibility of the Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs. In other areas of the country, cable is regulated by local governments such as a city cable commission, city council, town council, or a board of supervisors. These regulatory entities are called "local franchising authorities."...
The Communications Act requires that no new cable operator may provide service without a franchise and establishes several policies relating to franchising requirements and franchise fees. The Communications Act authorizes local franchising authorities to grant one or more franchises within their jurisdiction.
Etc.
By the way, you may want to look up the original definition of "franchise," which had to do with governments granting the right to do business in a particular area or for a particular set of goods, services, etc. The word was later extended in meaning to refer to large corporations granting rights to individual owners to sell their company's products, etc. as in your McDonalds example.
When I bought my house, I specifically added a contract rider that said the deal was off if at least 30mbps was not available. I chose this limit because our areas are served by Charter cable and that was the standard service at the time. Some people just bitch and say they care. I put my money where my mouth was.
While I understand the desire to ensure you have adequate internet service at a new residence, I'm not sure I get how this constitutes "putting your money where your mouth is." If no local ISP has this service available, you're screwing over the previous owners of the house? It's certainly not going to have any impact on the cable company and where they tend to put service. And are you promising to pay someone something in event of a contract breach over this issue? Otherwise, how his is this "putting your money where your mouth is"?
Besides, exactly whom is this supposed to motivate? The previous owners of house have about as much control over getting decent internet service to the house as you would have as a new owner. Unless you're talking about buying a new house from a new development or the houses are partly managed by some sort of consortium (who has control over cable access??) I'm not sure I get why you'd bother entering such a buying contract in the first place.
I might really like my new house to be within 10-minute delivery of a gourmet pizza shop, but I wouldn't imagine any lawyer putting a contingency on a property sale based on the continued availability of that pizza delivery service. I understand (and agree) that internet service is more important, but it still seems like a bizarre thing to put in a sale agreement... isn't that something you should research or discuss with the ISP before agreeing to a house purchase?
The idea that a part of the brain "controls free will" just because there is activity there when certain decisions are made is pretty dumb when you think about it.
Agreed. I'm convinced that many people who discuss "free will" -- and particularly those who strongly object to the idea of determinism on the microscopic level (ignoring random quantum mechanical fluctuations) as destroying "free will" -- haven't always thought about what they really mean by terms.
From my perspective (and some philosophers would agree with this, particularly so-called "compatibilists"), trying to apply a concept like "free will" to microscopic behavior is an exercise in futility. It's like trying to define macroscopic "beauty" or a concept like "truth" or even a concept like a "chair" only in terms of atoms. You couldn't do it. Our human macroscopic concepts simply don't exist with that sort of granularity -- even if you tried to define what constitutes a "chair" compared with "not a chair" on the level of arrangements of individual molecules, you'd never get two humans to agree to that sort of level of precision.
It's a similar problem when we come to an idea of a "free choice." What do we really mean when we say, "I freely chose X instead of Y"? Usually in discussions of free will, we're talking about deliberate choices, not just random choices made with no reason. And that means we have reasons for choosing X over Y. We might enumerate them -- I had 5 reasons in favor of X but 3 in favor of Y, so I chose X. When we say, "But I could have freely chosen Y instead," we generally mean something about our reasoning would change -- maybe some of those reasons in favor of X would be undermined by something we read recently or something a friend said discounting those reasons. Or it could be something more subtle, like changes in our body chemistry -- maybe we had an extra cup of coffee which changed the mood and made Y seem more desirable, or maybe we had a headache and that shifted our priorities... or whatever.
But when we say "I could have freely chosen Y over X" in the context of a discussion about "free will," we generally do NOT mean, "If EVERYTHING in the universe had been exactly the same, including all of my subjective ratings and beliefs of the reasons for and against X and Y, along with all of my body chemistry and feelings... and every single atom EXACTLY in the same position, I COULD HAVE made a different choice."
We don't generally mean that, because that would be making a different choice for no reason, and "free will" is not about random choices, it's about having an ability to make a deliberate choice based on reasons. If all the reasons are the exact same (and every atom in the same place), why would it support "free will" to believe that a different choice would make sense? That's not conscious "free will" -- that's randomness or anarchy.
"Free will" is a macroscopic human concept -- an emergent phenomenon -- which has little to do with how deterministic (or not) the microscopic universe is. And whenever this topic comes up on Slashdot, there are always these fervent believers that "free will" has to exist in some way that the universe is not deterministic -- but where exactly does that "free will" happen? Quantum mechanics effects "bubbling up" to microscopic consequences can't be a reason, because that's based on randomness -- and proponents of "free will" usually insist that the alterations in decisions must be deliberative not based on random chance.
So, if everything in the universe down to the atom is precisely the same, and you still want to be able to make a "free choice" that's different, how precisely is that supposed to happen? Does some atom suddenly take a different turn for no apparent reason? It makes little sense in a scientific context, unless you're willing to postulate the existence of a separate "soul" or "consciousness" or whatever that doesn't obey the laws of science as we currently understand th
Honestly I could cancel the dvd plan and wouldn't notice, but certain members of my family insist on having it (even if they barely use it, go figure).
That's the way it's always been for most people, which is how Netflix was so successful for its first stretch in the early 2000s. Only a minority of customers would receive and send back multiple DVDs each week -- most people would get some movie they were told was "awesome" and it would sit on a shelf for a month. I remember some comedian even doing a shtick about people who'd get all these "classic movies" from Netflix on DVD that they never would have been able to find at a local Blockbuster, but then they'd end up sending them back unwatched a couple months later.
it was really the PC, running MS-DOS for the most part, when the vast majority of people were introduced to computers for the first time.
Some, but not "the vast majority". Many people were introduced by pre-DOS computers. Geeks were still buying non-DOS, non-Windows home (and work) computers through all the 1980's, for nearly 10 years after PC-DOS came out.
This is completely accurate. The "personal computer revolution" began ca. 1980, and it wasn't until sometime around 1989 or 1990 that DOS-compatible devices started to dominate the home PC market. For that first decade, DOS-based devices were often primarily for business. I still remember a friend whose dad (worked in some tech-savvy industry) got an IBM-compatible PC that ran DOS at home in 1986 or so... and it was seen by everyone else in the neighborhood as some weird novelty. Everybody else had cheap computers (often aimed at gaming) -- Atari computers, Commodore 64s, etc. as well as the more expensive Macs. And they mostly didn't run DOS. People who wanted to use such systems for stuff other than games had different OS options, like loading GEOS on a Commodore, which gave you a GUI and access to word processing, spreadsheets, etc.
It was Windows that introduced "the vast majority" of people to computers, unaware that DOS lay beneath the pre-Win95 versions. Even at work, most people did not get a PC on their desk until the Windows era.
That's also true, though I'd say a few years earlier with Windows 3.1 was when PCs really started to move beyond the hobbyist world. It really was the GUI that made it work for most folks (hence the reason why people in the 1980s liked Macs and GEOS on Commodores, etc.). DOS and other command-line OSes were just an annoyance to everyone but hobbyists, and the idea that "the vast majority" got to know computers through DOS is just misguided.
And seriously, if you need to go to McDonalds and configure a VPN to watch porn you should probably try to put that effort into improving your career prospects so you can afford an internet connection at home.
Agreed, though this does seem to be a minor setback for Starbucks in its path toward becoming "Coffee for Men" and the home of the full body latte. (One of the few ways it seems we may not be moving toward Idiocracy these days.)
This is indeed a bad day when a hate-filled post like this gets modded +5 Insightful.
Historically, the "good" ones are silent when Islamist terrorists act. How many mosques have you seen speak out against ISIS and Islamist terrorism?
Yeah, they speak out all the time, though you wouldn't know it by reading the mainstream media. Every major terrorist event is generally followed by loads of denunciations by prominent Muslim leaders. And then there's stuff like this, where 70,000 Muslim clerics have issued a fatwa against terrorist acts.
The Islamist terrorist activities are encouraged by their "holy" books..... I encourage everyone to read the Koran.
I'd encourage people to read other sacred texts written over a 1000 years ago when violence was much more common and compare. For example, have a look at the stuff in the Bible. Just one of those verses from Leviticus motivates dozens of killings of homosexuals every year, for example. But you don't tend to hear as much about them, because they tend to be individual killings. The main difference between Christianity/Judaism and Islam in terms of "holy" books (as you put it) is that the former tend to ignore the tenets of their scriptures more these days... compared to say a few centuries ago when they happily went around killing people in God's name too. (Heck, even in the 20th century you had genocides partially motivated by Christian sectarianism.)
The Western world has been shielded from this truth for too long. We can share a planet. We cannot share a country with these folks.
And it's people with views like this that are playing directly into the hands of the terrorists -- and by terrorists, I mean actual terrorist leaders and those motivated by political/religious ideology, not this numbnuts in France who from recent reports appears to be far from motivated by ideology. The reports are still early, but if recent media stories and interviews with family members and neighbors are to be believed, this guy was just a whackjob with a previous arrest for road rage and whose personal life had self-destructed. He doesn't appear to have been religious at all, drinking, doing drugs, eating pork, never attending services, etc.
So what about the reports that he shouted "Allahu akbar!" during the killings? Well, if he did, he was probably playing into the "terrorist" fantasy world you're putting him into.
If you don't mind, I'm not going to dignify him by calling him a "terrorist" -- that's insulting to actual politically motivated folks who feel the need to act violently in the name of an ideology. I'll just call this guy "Numbnuts," which is the level of respect he deserves.
From recent reports, it appears that Numbnuts was a depressed loner. In the past, some idiotic coward afraid of dealing with his own life might have quietly offed himself with a gun to the head in his own house, or maybe jumped off a bridge or something. Or maybe he would have "gone postal" and killed some family or coworkers just to take some of the people he hated with him. (Note that term go postal, remember that? Dozens of incidents of postal workers shooting up people over a decade, and I don't remember anyone calling for them all to be deported... sure no incidents on this scale, but still.)
Anyhow, Numbnuts here doesn't sound like a terrorist. He was just a screwed-up lunatic with a death wish. And if he shouted some Muslim phrase at the end, it's probably because he read some BS on the internet and people like you af
When humans stop eating meat and switch to whole-food plant based diets, the rates of all leading causes of death (obesity, cancer, heart disease, and pretty diseases of inflammation) drop. To anyone with a scientific mind, modern nutritional-science's data should pretty much indict animal based foods as the direct cause of obesity,
Before I reply further, I should note that I am NOT a major carnivore. I enjoy a good steak (sometimes a large one), but I actually only eat meat in maybe a couple meals each week. I've frequently gone several weeks without eating meat -- I just prefer to eat quality meat once in a while, rather than eating some industrial junk from a "tube" of hamburger every day.
So I have no strong reason to defend meat consumption, but I have been confronted with the vegetarian and vegan arguments from various people over the years, and I've spent a lot of time reading about the matter. For every study you cite, I could cite another that contradicts or qualifies the findings.
The problem with "modern nutritional science" is that it's trying to break down very complex systems and isolate a single variable within a huge set of possible human situations. Thus, there are literally hundreds of possible confounding factors that make the conclusions of your studies suspect.
Just for one major issue -- people who are vegetarian or vegan (at least in countries that don't have large religious populations that adhere to these) are disproportionately likely to have better lifestyles. They tend to be wealthier people who tend to exercise more and pay attention to what they eat and make deliberate choices not only to avoid meat but to avoid junk food in general, whereas the "default" person who eats meat in most modern societies probably also eats a lot of junk too.
along with the consumption of heavily processed foods.
And here you get at just one of the many possible confounding factors. Low fiber intake has also shown to be correlated with higher obesity, and that tends to be correlated with meat consumption. What if we did a study of people in the same socioeconomic status who shopped at similar supermarkets (often the pricier nicer ones with better quality stuff for the vegans) and controlled for the level of "processed food" (which itself isn't really the problem as much as additives like excess added sugar), level of fiber consumption, etc., etc.
If you actually compared "apples to apples" in terms of people and diets, just isolating meat consumption, would you see such an effect on obesity? I don't know, but I'd bet LOTS of money that if there is an effect, it's a LOT smaller than most of these studies claim. Maybe meat consumption is itself a contributing factor to obesity problems, but it's far from the only one... and I'm not convinced yet from studies that it's even a major one.
People are overweight because they consume more calories than they burn. It is that simple. Almost no amount of exercise will change that. Your body will burn more calories doing nothing all day than you running a mile. Exercise will improve your health but it's affect on your weight are minimal.
This is misguided. I think I understand where you are starting from, but your general conclusion doesn't follow. (Nor does it negate GP's argument that sedentary jobs, etc. may contribute to obesity.)
You're correct that calorie intake is generally much more significant in weight maintenance (or weight loss) than exercise. To lose a pound per week, for example, you'd have to have a calorie deficit of roughly 500 calories/day. That's much easier to achieve through dietary change than through exercise alone. And if you do it through exercise alone, you can negate that deficit simply by having a slice of cake for dessert.
That said, your next step doesn't follow. Sedentary lifestyles can easily contribute to obesity, since effects of no exercise can add up significantly over time. The fundamental problem with "dieting" is that people pack on pounds over years, but then expect to lose them all in a month or something. It may have taken you ten years to put on those 50 pounds, but you just can't lose it in a few weeks... it's impossible.
And the only way to lose weight at a significant rate is generally to reduce intake, as I said.
On the other hand, that does NOT mean there's no effect of exercise on weight maintenance. Take that 50 lbs. gain over 10 years -- that's an excess of approximately 50 calories per day. 50 calories per day is an amount of exercise that can easily be expended by having a job that just requires you to move around a little bit more. But that lack of exercise CAN add up significantly over the years.
All that said, the issue is much more complicated, since weight maintenance has to do with appetite and feedback mechanisms too, which are affected by mental state, physical fitness, level of exercise, and all sort of other things. But the main point is that lack of even a small amount of exercise CAN add up to significant weight shifts over time, at least in theory. So sedentary work lifestyle MAY be a contributing factor to a long-term trend. None of that has anything to do with the fact that diet can have a much larger effect than exercise when one is trying to make RAPID weight changes.
This just in idiots doing idiotic things with technology. I say no to disabling it. Stop protecting stupid people from themselves.
I might agree with this if these "idiots" only endangered themselves. But they can endanger passengers and other cars on the road as well.
This is like someone arguing in favor of letting people drive drunk or while texting or whatever... "Let the idiots kill themselves!" Except they can kill other people in the process when a multiton vehicle slams into another because of that "idiot." There's the problem here.
I appreciate the concise summary, since most times I've tried to look this up the articles just go on and on about it... "What was the big deal?" I would say as I read them, but this was the one question which they were apparently unwilling to answer. Turns out it wasn't a big deal, just a bunch of news fluff.
"Wasn't a big deal"??
A guy hijacks a plane under threat of an (apparent) bomb, takes over a million dollars in cash (in today's dollars) in exchange for hostages, and then parachutes out, and this "wasn't a big deal"?
Even if your standards of "big deal" are low enough that this wouldn't seem noteworthy, the case is also notable for the roughly 15 copycat hijackings it caused within the next year (also people extorting money on planes, requesting parachutes, etc.).
Ultimately, this case (and the copycats) led to the institution of universal luggage searching on flights, the first step down the slippery slope to voiding the 4th amendment as we've seen with the TSA in recent years. Arguably, these cursory searches (for bombs, other explosive devices, and major weapons) were necessary to prevent the nearly weekly hijackings that were going on. But if nothing else, this case is notable for a string of hijackings contributing to setting us on that path. (Note there were other high-profile incidents requesting passage to Cuba that also contributed to the new search policy, but weekly demands for million-dollar ransoms must have also made an impact.)
There are only 12 semi-tones in Western scales. How can anything be original?
There are only 10 digits in decimal representations of numbers. How can any number be unique? That statement seems nonsensical.
To put it another way, suppose the most recognizable element of music is the melody (as court rulings generally use to determine copyright infringement), and suppose just an average first phrase of 15 notes. That's enough (12^15) for every human who has ever lived to compose thousands and thousands of unique melodies. If the main constraint is 12 notes, there are a LOT of possibilities for "originality."
Of course the size of the scale has little to do with it. Music is built on recognizable patterns and our brains have a real knack for matching similar motives even if the notes or intervals are not quite the same. Moreover, the vast majority of randomly chosen patterns from the 12-note chromatic scale sound like nonsense, just like randomly chosen strings of letters (only 26!) are mostly gibberish. Western tonal music is built mostly on a 7-note scale, but real melodies that " make sense" also tend to conform to a multitude of standard conventions about rhythm, form of melody, how repeated motives/notes are employed, etc.
Fun fact: scientists in the 1600s made major advances in the field of combinatorics (which was a new branch of math) by trying to enumerate all possible songs. They quickly found how vast that number is... But most don't make sense... (See Mersenne for example.)
The limited scale is one constraint, but by itself is doesn't limit unique melodies very much at all.
If I can put up banner ads. Seriously I don't see how that thing is worth $20M.
Obviously you didn't read TFA. And I'm not sure the submitter who wrote the "summary" understood what it said either. A couple clarifications:
(1) The $20 million refers to budget cuts to a number of cultural institutions, which include the library. The library cuts are only one portion of this $20 million, and I'm assuming that this Trove thing is only a small portion of the total library cuts. The real problem, as explained in TFA, is that the library is cutting 22 staff positions.
(2) Now, you might say, "but why do they need 22 staff positions to maintain an online archive?" They don't. And that's the second misleading thing here: No one appears to be talking about eliminating the online archive completely. TFA explicitly explains that all they will do is cease to add new materials. Basically, the library has to eliminate staff due to budget cuts, so they can't afford to keep the people that ADD new stuff to this archive and update it:
Although Trove, which was launched in late 2009, is funded by the library's budget, without government funding the library will not be able to update the material in the database.
So there's no need (at least at this point) for people to go around offering to host or creating torrents or whatever.
TL;DR -- TFS is BS. NOBODY is talking about elimination of material already in the archive. Budget cuts may just prevent adding future materials.
and just want a stable system on which I can get some work done. (I feel this way about trying to choose a distro too.) And want something I can use on both newer and older hardware
Those are precisely the reasons that I switched my primary home desktop OS from Ubuntu to Mint several years ago. (This was actually before the Unity debacle, but I could have seen something like that coming given poor choices Ubuntu had made before.)
I'm NOT trying to convert you. We all have our particular stories and needs. But Ubuntu for many years never actually satisfied the "just works" criterion I care most about -- they seemed too interested in showing off Wobbly Windows and other BS, while major functionality would often break on every upgrade. Particularly things like sound, video, codecs, etc. always seemed a pain to actually get working, and they were often unstable. (And I'm not kidding that EVERY new version broke things on my systems, and each time the breakage was different.)
I just got tired of it. I abandoned Ubuntu and went back to Debian for a while, though that had its own issues. Distro-hopped for a while, but nothing ever seemed stable and user-friendly. Then I tried Mint, and every computer I've installed it on in the past 6 years or so has "just worked." (And as for older hardware, the XFCE edition has worked great for me.)
I'm sure Ubuntu is probably more stable now, but I've seen no compelling reason to go back. Mint's interface is relatively stable and works. It's funny, but that's really all I give a crap about these days in an OS -- don't change stuff every year for no apparent reason, and make it work on standard hardware. And if possible give me a choice that runs as light as possible on system resources. I can get used to just about anything if it satisfies that criteria, but unfortunately most OSes don't.
What makes this even less impressive is that Linux was at 2% back in 2004, as reported by/. way back then. Although I do suppose that is better than 2009, when/. reported that Linux reached 1% "for the first time".
To be fair, the first story from 2004 you posted doesn't claim 2% active market share -- in fact the summary states they are waiting for those numbers -- but rather that 2% of NEW PCs were using Linux when they reached the user's desk. That's a rather different stat, and even if true, one would expect that stat to be greater than actual active market share if the market share is growing. That stat also wouldn't take into account how many people LATER installed a different OS on a machine that originally was purchased with Linux (or, conversely, how many people installed Linux on a machine purchased with a different OS).
And the second story you linked to is actually trying to measure active market share (like the present story), which was apparently at 1% in 2009 and now appears at 2%.
There's probably a margin of error in any of these measurements, but I don't think this constitutes the oscillation you think it does, because these measurements were taken in very different ways.
Because some people other than you find it interesting. Dislike stories as much as you want but don't call it pathetic and dumb, just ignore the story and read something else.
In general, I agree with you about just finding something else. On the other hand, this is what moderation is for. If someone wants to complain about editorial choices, let them. There are frequent posts complaining when there are spelling or grammar errors, missing links, etc. Why shouldn't someone feel free to express an opinion on the appropriateness of a story? Maybe (I know it's a crazy thought) -- if enough people mod such comments up, the editors might actually pay attention and not post similar stories.
But hey, you have a right to express your disapproval of the comment too, just like GP can express disapproval of editorial choices. We'll leave it to the mods to sort out which seems to better represent the consensus here.
Perhaps my sample size is too small, but my impression is that marriages that start with such frivolous wedding ceremonies tend to not last that long.
Conversely, I've seen a few "fairy tale" weddings where everything was the most "perfect" wedding you could imagine, but the marriages self-destructed within a few years.
The only thing that matters is whether the two people are "on the same page." If they both sincerely want some sort of wacky wedding, they've probably well-matched and it has at least a reasonable chance of lasting. If one wants something else but is cajoled/bullied/guilted into something else, that's not a good sign for a start.
If it's so safe, label it as GMO like other countries do and let people choose. Any time you have to hide something, there's usually a reason.
First of all, just because you don't list something doesn't mean you're "hiding" something. Food containers and labels have limited space. There's a basically infinite amount of facts about a food you could list on a label, but most of it is deemed irrelevant by companies. ("Gosh darn it! Where are the numbers listing the viscosity, specific gravity, and thermal diffusivity of my yogurt on the label!?! What are they hiding?!")
Second, the FDA and various government organizations regulate what companies can put on labels (including what they can NOT put on labels), often for very good reasons. Information taken out of context can be a problem. For example, a few years back there was this big scare about mercury in processed foods that contained HFCS, most of which had mercury amounts in the range of a part per billion. This got huge headlines -- "OMG -- HFCS puts mercury in our food!!" Except for one really basic problem: the levels of mercury in the HFCS-containing foods were actually LOWER than the mercury levels in most other "natural" foods you'd buy at the supermarket. See, mercury is a naturally occurring substance, and a level of a few parts per billion is typical for many foods. The "study" didn't even bother to isolate whether HFCS was the primary source of mercury in the processed foods, which it probably was not.
I mention all of this because I remember seeing some discussion on the internet that wanted to put labels about the "dangers" of HFCS on food too -- "WARNING: Foods with HFCS may contain mercury" or something like that. I don't think anyone ever considered taking this seriously, but there's a perfect example of a factually correct statement (HFCS foods may indeed contain mercury) but which gives a completely bogus impression about the role of HFCS or the normal expected amounts of mercury in food.
Are companies "hiding something" by refusing to put a factual but misleading label on food?? If GMOs are misunderstood by the majority of the population, then by forcing companies to put information on a label, aren't we promoting those misunderstandings rather than educating consumers?
Anyhow, all of that said, I also agree that in a democratic system, people have the right to lobby their legislators to promote whatever sort of product labeling they wish. If enough ignorant people want GMO labeling and convince their representatives to require it, that's the price companies pay for doing business in a democratic system. If they want to win over the "anti-GMO" wackos, they can lobby and run ads explaining it to the public themselves.
Let's clear up one thing: the word "decimate" has NEVER had a primary English meaning of "to destroy/kill/etc. 1 in 10 of something."
Of course it did. You putting that statement in bold doesn't change that.
Please note the word "primary." The word has never had that definition as its primary meaning.
Just because a definition is "rare" or "old" doesn't mean you get to ignore it.
Actually, if you read what I wrote, I was noting that your meaning is the newest sense, an argument meant to counter your claim that we've moved away from your definition over time. Does the meaning exist? Sure. But the vast majority of people who hear the word are unaware of it, and it has never been the case that most people hearing that word spoken in English would assume your meaning as the primary sense.
There are also places where tyrants reign, where bribes are normal, and the biggest bully wins.
TRUMP 2016
(...Okay, okay, both major party candidates are locked into the "bribes are normal" idea... and the U.S. seems to be heading down that inevitable Platonic path from democracy to tyranny. But Trump does seem to be running for the "biggest bully" award.)
If that isn't limited to Star Fleet, then how are people's human instincts suppressed? Is it indoctrination when they're children? Drugs? Medical procedures? Again Roddenberry just wishes for it and it's there! Of course as a work of fiction, that's what we expect.
I think a lot of what you call "human instincts" are profoundly shaped by society around you. Yes, people have natural urges, and many of them can be self-destructive or even destructive to an idealistic society if not "kept in check." But social mores can be powerful.
Yes, we all recognize that "human" traits like lust and envy and greed have always been around, but the kinds of behavior we view as acceptable in the pursuit of them have changed radically over time. Look back at the murder and violent crime rates of a few centuries ago. We tend to be myopic about history of such things, worrying about what's happening now vs. a decade ago, but if you take a long-term view, "civilization" has gradually tamed a LOT of "human instincts." It's no longer as acceptable to just beat a person to death as it was a couple centuries ago in "civilized" nations. Even the level of cruelty of punishments has decreased significantly -- we no longer saw people in half or disembowel them or whatever as part of a normal execution.
Does that mean we have NO murder or rape or whatever now? Of course not. But even a century ago it was commonly accepted that men should just be able to "have their way" with their women whenever they wanted, which was part of the reason for our complex moral code around marriage. Some people today think that code was mostly meant to be restrictive and demeaning to women (and it was), but it was also designed because social morality was much more permissive about what was acceptable behavior for men to do to satisfy their lust.
Does lust still exist? Of course it does. But despite the recent outcry over "rape culture" on college campuses, the incidence of forced sex today is probably significantly less than it was just a few generations ago. And that's because our social attitudes have changed.
We could talk the same way about money and greed, which seems your concern. The capitalist myth about the origin of money has done a lot of damage; in most "primitive" cultures, we don't tend to observe people bargaining in barter systems... instead, they tend to be built on elaborate systems of gift-giving and indebtedness. The natural human proclivity in many cultures has been to aid neighbors when needed, because the assumption in primitive societies is that "we all need to stick together," since otherwise you'll likely die of starvation or by wild animals or by neighboring tribes or whatever.
So you do things to help others, and they become indebted to you, and they later repay the debt. Humans are not necessarily naturally "bargainers" driven by capitalist greed. Can it happen? Obviously. But perhaps it's not as of an inevitable "human instinct" as we might think.
I agree that Roddenberry just ignored a lot of these issues. But I don't think they are as insurmountable as you seem to imagine. I mostly think the problems would occur in getting the Star Trek society set up in the first place -- but once it's in place, I don't necessarily think you'll need "indoctrination" or "drugs" or "medical procedures" to get rid of many undesirable social behaviors... I think once society has established new norms, it may be much more stable than you might imagine. (There obviously do need to be some protections with checks and balances to avoid people getting too much power, as you rightly point out, which is likely a much bigger issue that the "human instincts" of the general population.)
I used to be more cynical like you when I was younger. I certainly don't think it would be easy to solve all these problems. But I also don't think it's necessarily impossible or unsustainable.
The idea that businesses should actually train the workforce that they need, such as with apprenticeships, sponsoring employees in education on the job, or whatever, seems to be lost on Spanish businesses, I guess?
I think we're going to see more and more of that tension in a lot of places. The reality in the world is that for most jobs, "on the job education" is the most effective. We've created a system that tells young people to go to college, but traditional universities were never really designed for job training. That happens at technical schools. At a higher level where theory is required in addition to practice, it can happen at a "professional school," like med school, which tends to combine some theoretical coursework with apprenticeships (i.e., clinical training, often at a teaching hospital).
We're seeing a greater and greater problem for college graduates finding jobs, because they don't have practical skills that one will generally learn on the job over the course of several months or a few years. And it's also very inefficient because the theoretical material students learn in a college classroom is often forgotten quickly without practical reinforcement, forcing graduates to relearn the material needed on a daily basis when they finally find a job (rather than integrating it into more permanent and practical knowledge as they go). College was designed to be "higher education," not job training -- it was meant to expose students to a wide variety of ideas and disciplines, not teach only the specific skills for a job. It makes no sense to segregate theoretical and practical training if you actually want students to learn skills for a job.
If employers really wanted better (and more loyal) workers, they should stop just requiring a degree before getting a job and instead help train workers on the job, perhaps partnering with a higher-ed program to provide a bit of theoretical instruction as necessary to complement the work.
Why aren't they doing this?....
"We thought there'd just be the employees we needed out there somewhere. We didn't think we'd have to take responsibility for any of it!" seems to be their take.
Sort of. But I suspect this is primarily being driven by a desire to have lower-cost employees. A few decades ago, companies were mostly limited to whomever they could find locally. It was really expensive to look beyond the local labor market, let alone internationally, so it was mostly done only for major jobs in the company.
Nowadays, it's so much easier and faster to just find someone on the other side of the planet who has most of the skills already and is willing to work for a fraction of the cost of a local worker.
It's just like people drunk driving, texting while driving and so on: they do stupid shit and pay the price. It's merely one more way for them to win a Darwin Award.
I can understand that perspective if people were only endangering themselves. But when a driver gets behind the wheel and is drunk or texting or distracted while some inadequate "autopilot" is operating, they are also nominally in charge of a couple-ton machine that could easily become an out-of-control projectile moving at 100 feet per second.
So, they aren't just liable to take themselves out of the gene pool -- they could easily kill or seriously injure others in the process.
That, to me, is the real concern here. If a Tesla driver makes a poor choice and gets him/herself killed, fine. But when Tesla is releasing a system that they know is likely to be abused by people in such a way as to endanger others, that's a problem.
And before someone objects that "why shouldn't we ban alcohol or cell phones too," I'm NOT saying anything should be banned. But a responsible company will think about the morality of its actions. And the difference with alcohol and cell phones is that they have plenty of legitimate uses outside of driving a car, whereas Tesla's system is specifically related to driving the car and will likely create significant driver distraction (which endangers others). That's a problem.
Believe it or not, not all change is for the better. Further, this isn't a change in meaning, it's an additional meaning that confuses the existing meaning.
Let's clear up one thing: the word "decimate" has NEVER had a primary English meaning of "to destroy/kill/etc. 1 in 10 of something." That meaning is actually the most NOVEL English meaning, created by ill-informed language pedants in the late 1800s.
The word decimatio in Latin did refer to that ancient Roman practice of killing 1 in 10 soldiers as a punishment. Around 1600, the words decimate and decimation entered English and three ENGLISH meanings emerged:
(1) Referring to a tax or church tithe amounting to 1/10th of income (now obsolete)
(2) Referring to destruction of a LARGE PORTION (generally much greater than 10%) of something -- this meaning has been around since at least 1650 or so
(3) Referring to the ancient Roman military practice in specialist literature about military history (rare)
Because meaning (1) gradually faded out and meaning (3) was rare, the primary use of the word from about 1700 on was meaning (2) -- the one you find objectionable. But it wasn't until the mid-1800s when some random grammar weirdos started worrying about the etymology of the word that THEY decided there should be a fourth (and NEW) meaning:
(4) Figurative meaning, derived from senses (1) and (3) - referring to destroying 1/10th of something in general
That meaning never existed before language usage pedants just MADE IT UP in the late 1800s, and it never really caught on. 150 years later we still have people like you going around complaining about the decay of English, when you're actually endorsing a meaning that NEVER was the primary meaning of the word and actually NEVER was in use among anyone outside of weirdos who decided the standard use of the word for hundreds of years was "wrong" and made up a new English sense for fit with their classical etymological fantasies.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a mechanic put a $6 "scanner" charge on his bill. I asked him about it and he said he had to pay for his new scanner somehow (after I had already told him the code from my $60 reader so it wasn't even necessary).
So you spent $60 to save yourself a $6 scanner charge. Sounds like a good expenditure to me.
It sounds like you know nothing about car repair. Let me explain: there are some people in the world who actually can repair their cars themselves. People who do more than change their own oil and brake jobs and such might actually invest in a cheap scanner to get diagnostic codes from their vehicle when something goes wrong, so that way they know what needs fixing. (That's why the manufacturers put those diagnostic codes in in the first place.)
I assume GP has probably used his scanner on a number of occasions and by doing his own car repair probably saves hundreds of dollars on every major repair. However, almost every home mechanic will reach a point when a repair is not worth his time or he doesn't have the equipment to deal with -- in which case, like GP, he might take his vehicle to a mechanic.
GP's point was: he could get a diagnostic code with a cheap $60 scanner, and his mechanic was claiming he needed to charge a $6 diagnostic fee PER SERVICE to recoup the cost of a scanner. Point being: unless the scanner only does 10 diagnostics before dying, the mechanic may be significantly overcharging for his "scanner fee." (In reality, many pro scanners can cost more -- often a few hundred dollars -- but a $6 fee still seems steep if a customer came in and told you exactly what needed to be fixed.)
It is not called Franchise but concession.
Mac Donalds etc. are Franchises.
Wrong -- by federal law, cable providers often operate as local franchises. That's the term the government uses:
A variety of laws and regulations for cable television exist at the state and local level. Some states, such as Massachusetts, regulate cable television on a comprehensive basis through a state commission or advisory board established for the sole purpose of cable television regulation. In Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont, the agencies are state public utility commissions. In Hawaii, regulation of cable television is the responsibility of the Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs. In other areas of the country, cable is regulated by local governments such as a city cable commission, city council, town council, or a board of supervisors. These regulatory entities are called "local franchising authorities." ...
The Communications Act requires that no new cable operator may provide service without a franchise and establishes several policies relating to franchising requirements and franchise fees. The Communications Act authorizes local franchising authorities to grant one or more franchises within their jurisdiction.
Etc.
By the way, you may want to look up the original definition of "franchise," which had to do with governments granting the right to do business in a particular area or for a particular set of goods, services, etc. The word was later extended in meaning to refer to large corporations granting rights to individual owners to sell their company's products, etc. as in your McDonalds example.
When I bought my house, I specifically added a contract rider that said the deal was off if at least 30mbps was not available. I chose this limit because our areas are served by Charter cable and that was the standard service at the time. Some people just bitch and say they care. I put my money where my mouth was.
While I understand the desire to ensure you have adequate internet service at a new residence, I'm not sure I get how this constitutes "putting your money where your mouth is." If no local ISP has this service available, you're screwing over the previous owners of the house? It's certainly not going to have any impact on the cable company and where they tend to put service. And are you promising to pay someone something in event of a contract breach over this issue? Otherwise, how his is this "putting your money where your mouth is"?
Besides, exactly whom is this supposed to motivate? The previous owners of house have about as much control over getting decent internet service to the house as you would have as a new owner. Unless you're talking about buying a new house from a new development or the houses are partly managed by some sort of consortium (who has control over cable access??) I'm not sure I get why you'd bother entering such a buying contract in the first place.
I might really like my new house to be within 10-minute delivery of a gourmet pizza shop, but I wouldn't imagine any lawyer putting a contingency on a property sale based on the continued availability of that pizza delivery service. I understand (and agree) that internet service is more important, but it still seems like a bizarre thing to put in a sale agreement... isn't that something you should research or discuss with the ISP before agreeing to a house purchase?
The idea that a part of the brain "controls free will" just because there is activity there when certain decisions are made is pretty dumb when you think about it.
Agreed. I'm convinced that many people who discuss "free will" -- and particularly those who strongly object to the idea of determinism on the microscopic level (ignoring random quantum mechanical fluctuations) as destroying "free will" -- haven't always thought about what they really mean by terms.
From my perspective (and some philosophers would agree with this, particularly so-called "compatibilists"), trying to apply a concept like "free will" to microscopic behavior is an exercise in futility. It's like trying to define macroscopic "beauty" or a concept like "truth" or even a concept like a "chair" only in terms of atoms. You couldn't do it. Our human macroscopic concepts simply don't exist with that sort of granularity -- even if you tried to define what constitutes a "chair" compared with "not a chair" on the level of arrangements of individual molecules, you'd never get two humans to agree to that sort of level of precision.
It's a similar problem when we come to an idea of a "free choice." What do we really mean when we say, "I freely chose X instead of Y"? Usually in discussions of free will, we're talking about deliberate choices, not just random choices made with no reason. And that means we have reasons for choosing X over Y. We might enumerate them -- I had 5 reasons in favor of X but 3 in favor of Y, so I chose X. When we say, "But I could have freely chosen Y instead," we generally mean something about our reasoning would change -- maybe some of those reasons in favor of X would be undermined by something we read recently or something a friend said discounting those reasons. Or it could be something more subtle, like changes in our body chemistry -- maybe we had an extra cup of coffee which changed the mood and made Y seem more desirable, or maybe we had a headache and that shifted our priorities... or whatever.
But when we say "I could have freely chosen Y over X" in the context of a discussion about "free will," we generally do NOT mean, "If EVERYTHING in the universe had been exactly the same, including all of my subjective ratings and beliefs of the reasons for and against X and Y, along with all of my body chemistry and feelings... and every single atom EXACTLY in the same position, I COULD HAVE made a different choice."
We don't generally mean that, because that would be making a different choice for no reason, and "free will" is not about random choices, it's about having an ability to make a deliberate choice based on reasons. If all the reasons are the exact same (and every atom in the same place), why would it support "free will" to believe that a different choice would make sense? That's not conscious "free will" -- that's randomness or anarchy.
"Free will" is a macroscopic human concept -- an emergent phenomenon -- which has little to do with how deterministic (or not) the microscopic universe is. And whenever this topic comes up on Slashdot, there are always these fervent believers that "free will" has to exist in some way that the universe is not deterministic -- but where exactly does that "free will" happen? Quantum mechanics effects "bubbling up" to microscopic consequences can't be a reason, because that's based on randomness -- and proponents of "free will" usually insist that the alterations in decisions must be deliberative not based on random chance.
So, if everything in the universe down to the atom is precisely the same, and you still want to be able to make a "free choice" that's different, how precisely is that supposed to happen? Does some atom suddenly take a different turn for no apparent reason? It makes little sense in a scientific context, unless you're willing to postulate the existence of a separate "soul" or "consciousness" or whatever that doesn't obey the laws of science as we currently understand th
Honestly I could cancel the dvd plan and wouldn't notice, but certain members of my family insist on having it (even if they barely use it, go figure).
That's the way it's always been for most people, which is how Netflix was so successful for its first stretch in the early 2000s. Only a minority of customers would receive and send back multiple DVDs each week -- most people would get some movie they were told was "awesome" and it would sit on a shelf for a month. I remember some comedian even doing a shtick about people who'd get all these "classic movies" from Netflix on DVD that they never would have been able to find at a local Blockbuster, but then they'd end up sending them back unwatched a couple months later.
it was really the PC, running MS-DOS for the most part, when the vast majority of people were introduced to computers for the first time.
Some, but not "the vast majority". Many people were introduced by pre-DOS computers. Geeks were still buying non-DOS, non-Windows home (and work) computers through all the 1980's, for nearly 10 years after PC-DOS came out.
This is completely accurate. The "personal computer revolution" began ca. 1980, and it wasn't until sometime around 1989 or 1990 that DOS-compatible devices started to dominate the home PC market. For that first decade, DOS-based devices were often primarily for business. I still remember a friend whose dad (worked in some tech-savvy industry) got an IBM-compatible PC that ran DOS at home in 1986 or so... and it was seen by everyone else in the neighborhood as some weird novelty. Everybody else had cheap computers (often aimed at gaming) -- Atari computers, Commodore 64s, etc. as well as the more expensive Macs. And they mostly didn't run DOS. People who wanted to use such systems for stuff other than games had different OS options, like loading GEOS on a Commodore, which gave you a GUI and access to word processing, spreadsheets, etc.
It was Windows that introduced "the vast majority" of people to computers, unaware that DOS lay beneath the pre-Win95 versions. Even at work, most people did not get a PC on their desk until the Windows era.
That's also true, though I'd say a few years earlier with Windows 3.1 was when PCs really started to move beyond the hobbyist world. It really was the GUI that made it work for most folks (hence the reason why people in the 1980s liked Macs and GEOS on Commodores, etc.). DOS and other command-line OSes were just an annoyance to everyone but hobbyists, and the idea that "the vast majority" got to know computers through DOS is just misguided.
And seriously, if you need to go to McDonalds and configure a VPN to watch porn you should probably try to put that effort into improving your career prospects so you can afford an internet connection at home.
Agreed, though this does seem to be a minor setback for Starbucks in its path toward becoming "Coffee for Men" and the home of the full body latte. (One of the few ways it seems we may not be moving toward Idiocracy these days.)
This is indeed a bad day when a hate-filled post like this gets modded +5 Insightful.
Historically, the "good" ones are silent when Islamist terrorists act. How many mosques have you seen speak out against ISIS and Islamist terrorism?
Yeah, they speak out all the time, though you wouldn't know it by reading the mainstream media. Every major terrorist event is generally followed by loads of denunciations by prominent Muslim leaders. And then there's stuff like this, where 70,000 Muslim clerics have issued a fatwa against terrorist acts.
The Islamist terrorist activities are encouraged by their "holy" books. .... I encourage everyone to read the Koran.
I'd encourage people to read other sacred texts written over a 1000 years ago when violence was much more common and compare. For example, have a look at the stuff in the Bible. Just one of those verses from Leviticus motivates dozens of killings of homosexuals every year, for example. But you don't tend to hear as much about them, because they tend to be individual killings. The main difference between Christianity/Judaism and Islam in terms of "holy" books (as you put it) is that the former tend to ignore the tenets of their scriptures more these days... compared to say a few centuries ago when they happily went around killing people in God's name too. (Heck, even in the 20th century you had genocides partially motivated by Christian sectarianism.)
The Western world has been shielded from this truth for too long. We can share a planet. We cannot share a country with these folks.
And it's people with views like this that are playing directly into the hands of the terrorists -- and by terrorists, I mean actual terrorist leaders and those motivated by political/religious ideology, not this numbnuts in France who from recent reports appears to be far from motivated by ideology. The reports are still early, but if recent media stories and interviews with family members and neighbors are to be believed, this guy was just a whackjob with a previous arrest for road rage and whose personal life had self-destructed. He doesn't appear to have been religious at all, drinking, doing drugs, eating pork, never attending services, etc.
So what about the reports that he shouted "Allahu akbar!" during the killings? Well, if he did, he was probably playing into the "terrorist" fantasy world you're putting him into.
If you don't mind, I'm not going to dignify him by calling him a "terrorist" -- that's insulting to actual politically motivated folks who feel the need to act violently in the name of an ideology. I'll just call this guy "Numbnuts," which is the level of respect he deserves.
From recent reports, it appears that Numbnuts was a depressed loner. In the past, some idiotic coward afraid of dealing with his own life might have quietly offed himself with a gun to the head in his own house, or maybe jumped off a bridge or something. Or maybe he would have "gone postal" and killed some family or coworkers just to take some of the people he hated with him. (Note that term go postal, remember that? Dozens of incidents of postal workers shooting up people over a decade, and I don't remember anyone calling for them all to be deported... sure no incidents on this scale, but still.)
Anyhow, Numbnuts here doesn't sound like a terrorist. He was just a screwed-up lunatic with a death wish. And if he shouted some Muslim phrase at the end, it's probably because he read some BS on the internet and people like you af
When humans stop eating meat and switch to whole-food plant based diets, the rates of all leading causes of death (obesity, cancer, heart disease, and pretty diseases of inflammation) drop. To anyone with a scientific mind, modern nutritional-science's data should pretty much indict animal based foods as the direct cause of obesity,
Before I reply further, I should note that I am NOT a major carnivore. I enjoy a good steak (sometimes a large one), but I actually only eat meat in maybe a couple meals each week. I've frequently gone several weeks without eating meat -- I just prefer to eat quality meat once in a while, rather than eating some industrial junk from a "tube" of hamburger every day.
So I have no strong reason to defend meat consumption, but I have been confronted with the vegetarian and vegan arguments from various people over the years, and I've spent a lot of time reading about the matter. For every study you cite, I could cite another that contradicts or qualifies the findings.
The problem with "modern nutritional science" is that it's trying to break down very complex systems and isolate a single variable within a huge set of possible human situations. Thus, there are literally hundreds of possible confounding factors that make the conclusions of your studies suspect.
Just for one major issue -- people who are vegetarian or vegan (at least in countries that don't have large religious populations that adhere to these) are disproportionately likely to have better lifestyles. They tend to be wealthier people who tend to exercise more and pay attention to what they eat and make deliberate choices not only to avoid meat but to avoid junk food in general, whereas the "default" person who eats meat in most modern societies probably also eats a lot of junk too.
along with the consumption of heavily processed foods.
And here you get at just one of the many possible confounding factors. Low fiber intake has also shown to be correlated with higher obesity, and that tends to be correlated with meat consumption. What if we did a study of people in the same socioeconomic status who shopped at similar supermarkets (often the pricier nicer ones with better quality stuff for the vegans) and controlled for the level of "processed food" (which itself isn't really the problem as much as additives like excess added sugar), level of fiber consumption, etc., etc.
If you actually compared "apples to apples" in terms of people and diets, just isolating meat consumption, would you see such an effect on obesity? I don't know, but I'd bet LOTS of money that if there is an effect, it's a LOT smaller than most of these studies claim. Maybe meat consumption is itself a contributing factor to obesity problems, but it's far from the only one... and I'm not convinced yet from studies that it's even a major one.
People are overweight because they consume more calories than they burn. It is that simple. Almost no amount of exercise will change that. Your body will burn more calories doing nothing all day than you running a mile. Exercise will improve your health but it's affect on your weight are minimal.
This is misguided. I think I understand where you are starting from, but your general conclusion doesn't follow. (Nor does it negate GP's argument that sedentary jobs, etc. may contribute to obesity.)
You're correct that calorie intake is generally much more significant in weight maintenance (or weight loss) than exercise. To lose a pound per week, for example, you'd have to have a calorie deficit of roughly 500 calories/day. That's much easier to achieve through dietary change than through exercise alone. And if you do it through exercise alone, you can negate that deficit simply by having a slice of cake for dessert.
That said, your next step doesn't follow. Sedentary lifestyles can easily contribute to obesity, since effects of no exercise can add up significantly over time. The fundamental problem with "dieting" is that people pack on pounds over years, but then expect to lose them all in a month or something. It may have taken you ten years to put on those 50 pounds, but you just can't lose it in a few weeks... it's impossible.
And the only way to lose weight at a significant rate is generally to reduce intake, as I said.
On the other hand, that does NOT mean there's no effect of exercise on weight maintenance. Take that 50 lbs. gain over 10 years -- that's an excess of approximately 50 calories per day. 50 calories per day is an amount of exercise that can easily be expended by having a job that just requires you to move around a little bit more. But that lack of exercise CAN add up significantly over the years.
All that said, the issue is much more complicated, since weight maintenance has to do with appetite and feedback mechanisms too, which are affected by mental state, physical fitness, level of exercise, and all sort of other things. But the main point is that lack of even a small amount of exercise CAN add up to significant weight shifts over time, at least in theory. So sedentary work lifestyle MAY be a contributing factor to a long-term trend. None of that has anything to do with the fact that diet can have a much larger effect than exercise when one is trying to make RAPID weight changes.
This just in idiots doing idiotic things with technology. I say no to disabling it. Stop protecting stupid people from themselves.
I might agree with this if these "idiots" only endangered themselves. But they can endanger passengers and other cars on the road as well.
This is like someone arguing in favor of letting people drive drunk or while texting or whatever... "Let the idiots kill themselves!" Except they can kill other people in the process when a multiton vehicle slams into another because of that "idiot." There's the problem here.
I appreciate the concise summary, since most times I've tried to look this up the articles just go on and on about it... "What was the big deal?" I would say as I read them, but this was the one question which they were apparently unwilling to answer. Turns out it wasn't a big deal, just a bunch of news fluff.
"Wasn't a big deal"??
A guy hijacks a plane under threat of an (apparent) bomb, takes over a million dollars in cash (in today's dollars) in exchange for hostages, and then parachutes out, and this "wasn't a big deal"?
Even if your standards of "big deal" are low enough that this wouldn't seem noteworthy, the case is also notable for the roughly 15 copycat hijackings it caused within the next year (also people extorting money on planes, requesting parachutes, etc.).
Ultimately, this case (and the copycats) led to the institution of universal luggage searching on flights, the first step down the slippery slope to voiding the 4th amendment as we've seen with the TSA in recent years. Arguably, these cursory searches (for bombs, other explosive devices, and major weapons) were necessary to prevent the nearly weekly hijackings that were going on. But if nothing else, this case is notable for a string of hijackings contributing to setting us on that path. (Note there were other high-profile incidents requesting passage to Cuba that also contributed to the new search policy, but weekly demands for million-dollar ransoms must have also made an impact.)
Also, obligatory xkcd.
There are only 12 semi-tones in Western scales. How can anything be original?
There are only 10 digits in decimal representations of numbers. How can any number be unique? That statement seems nonsensical.
To put it another way, suppose the most recognizable element of music is the melody (as court rulings generally use to determine copyright infringement), and suppose just an average first phrase of 15 notes. That's enough (12^15) for every human who has ever lived to compose thousands and thousands of unique melodies. If the main constraint is 12 notes, there are a LOT of possibilities for "originality."
Of course the size of the scale has little to do with it. Music is built on recognizable patterns and our brains have a real knack for matching similar motives even if the notes or intervals are not quite the same. Moreover, the vast majority of randomly chosen patterns from the 12-note chromatic scale sound like nonsense, just like randomly chosen strings of letters (only 26!) are mostly gibberish. Western tonal music is built mostly on a 7-note scale, but real melodies that " make sense" also tend to conform to a multitude of standard conventions about rhythm, form of melody, how repeated motives/notes are employed, etc.
Fun fact: scientists in the 1600s made major advances in the field of combinatorics (which was a new branch of math) by trying to enumerate all possible songs. They quickly found how vast that number is... But most don't make sense... (See Mersenne for example.)
The limited scale is one constraint, but by itself is doesn't limit unique melodies very much at all.
If I can put up banner ads. Seriously I don't see how that thing is worth $20M.
Obviously you didn't read TFA. And I'm not sure the submitter who wrote the "summary" understood what it said either. A couple clarifications:
(1) The $20 million refers to budget cuts to a number of cultural institutions, which include the library. The library cuts are only one portion of this $20 million, and I'm assuming that this Trove thing is only a small portion of the total library cuts. The real problem, as explained in TFA, is that the library is cutting 22 staff positions.
(2) Now, you might say, "but why do they need 22 staff positions to maintain an online archive?" They don't. And that's the second misleading thing here: No one appears to be talking about eliminating the online archive completely. TFA explicitly explains that all they will do is cease to add new materials. Basically, the library has to eliminate staff due to budget cuts, so they can't afford to keep the people that ADD new stuff to this archive and update it:
Although Trove, which was launched in late 2009, is funded by the library's budget, without government funding the library will not be able to update the material in the database.
So there's no need (at least at this point) for people to go around offering to host or creating torrents or whatever.
TL;DR -- TFS is BS. NOBODY is talking about elimination of material already in the archive. Budget cuts may just prevent adding future materials.
and just want a stable system on which I can get some work done. (I feel this way about trying to choose a distro too.) And want something I can use on both newer and older hardware
Those are precisely the reasons that I switched my primary home desktop OS from Ubuntu to Mint several years ago. (This was actually before the Unity debacle, but I could have seen something like that coming given poor choices Ubuntu had made before.)
I'm NOT trying to convert you. We all have our particular stories and needs. But Ubuntu for many years never actually satisfied the "just works" criterion I care most about -- they seemed too interested in showing off Wobbly Windows and other BS, while major functionality would often break on every upgrade. Particularly things like sound, video, codecs, etc. always seemed a pain to actually get working, and they were often unstable. (And I'm not kidding that EVERY new version broke things on my systems, and each time the breakage was different.)
I just got tired of it. I abandoned Ubuntu and went back to Debian for a while, though that had its own issues. Distro-hopped for a while, but nothing ever seemed stable and user-friendly. Then I tried Mint, and every computer I've installed it on in the past 6 years or so has "just worked." (And as for older hardware, the XFCE edition has worked great for me.)
I'm sure Ubuntu is probably more stable now, but I've seen no compelling reason to go back. Mint's interface is relatively stable and works. It's funny, but that's really all I give a crap about these days in an OS -- don't change stuff every year for no apparent reason, and make it work on standard hardware. And if possible give me a choice that runs as light as possible on system resources. I can get used to just about anything if it satisfies that criteria, but unfortunately most OSes don't.
What makes this even less impressive is that Linux was at 2% back in 2004, as reported by /. way back then. Although I do suppose that is better than 2009, when /. reported that Linux reached 1% "for the first time".
To be fair, the first story from 2004 you posted doesn't claim 2% active market share -- in fact the summary states they are waiting for those numbers -- but rather that 2% of NEW PCs were using Linux when they reached the user's desk. That's a rather different stat, and even if true, one would expect that stat to be greater than actual active market share if the market share is growing. That stat also wouldn't take into account how many people LATER installed a different OS on a machine that originally was purchased with Linux (or, conversely, how many people installed Linux on a machine purchased with a different OS).
And the second story you linked to is actually trying to measure active market share (like the present story), which was apparently at 1% in 2009 and now appears at 2%.
There's probably a margin of error in any of these measurements, but I don't think this constitutes the oscillation you think it does, because these measurements were taken in very different ways.
Because some people other than you find it interesting. Dislike stories as much as you want but don't call it pathetic and dumb, just ignore the story and read something else.
In general, I agree with you about just finding something else. On the other hand, this is what moderation is for. If someone wants to complain about editorial choices, let them. There are frequent posts complaining when there are spelling or grammar errors, missing links, etc. Why shouldn't someone feel free to express an opinion on the appropriateness of a story? Maybe (I know it's a crazy thought) -- if enough people mod such comments up, the editors might actually pay attention and not post similar stories.
But hey, you have a right to express your disapproval of the comment too, just like GP can express disapproval of editorial choices. We'll leave it to the mods to sort out which seems to better represent the consensus here.
Perhaps my sample size is too small, but my impression is that marriages that start with such frivolous wedding ceremonies tend to not last that long.
Conversely, I've seen a few "fairy tale" weddings where everything was the most "perfect" wedding you could imagine, but the marriages self-destructed within a few years.
The only thing that matters is whether the two people are "on the same page." If they both sincerely want some sort of wacky wedding, they've probably well-matched and it has at least a reasonable chance of lasting. If one wants something else but is cajoled/bullied/guilted into something else, that's not a good sign for a start.
If it's so safe, label it as GMO like other countries do and let people choose. Any time you have to hide something, there's usually a reason.
First of all, just because you don't list something doesn't mean you're "hiding" something. Food containers and labels have limited space. There's a basically infinite amount of facts about a food you could list on a label, but most of it is deemed irrelevant by companies. ("Gosh darn it! Where are the numbers listing the viscosity, specific gravity, and thermal diffusivity of my yogurt on the label!?! What are they hiding?!")
Second, the FDA and various government organizations regulate what companies can put on labels (including what they can NOT put on labels), often for very good reasons. Information taken out of context can be a problem. For example, a few years back there was this big scare about mercury in processed foods that contained HFCS, most of which had mercury amounts in the range of a part per billion. This got huge headlines -- "OMG -- HFCS puts mercury in our food!!" Except for one really basic problem: the levels of mercury in the HFCS-containing foods were actually LOWER than the mercury levels in most other "natural" foods you'd buy at the supermarket. See, mercury is a naturally occurring substance, and a level of a few parts per billion is typical for many foods. The "study" didn't even bother to isolate whether HFCS was the primary source of mercury in the processed foods, which it probably was not.
I mention all of this because I remember seeing some discussion on the internet that wanted to put labels about the "dangers" of HFCS on food too -- "WARNING: Foods with HFCS may contain mercury" or something like that. I don't think anyone ever considered taking this seriously, but there's a perfect example of a factually correct statement (HFCS foods may indeed contain mercury) but which gives a completely bogus impression about the role of HFCS or the normal expected amounts of mercury in food.
Are companies "hiding something" by refusing to put a factual but misleading label on food?? If GMOs are misunderstood by the majority of the population, then by forcing companies to put information on a label, aren't we promoting those misunderstandings rather than educating consumers?
Anyhow, all of that said, I also agree that in a democratic system, people have the right to lobby their legislators to promote whatever sort of product labeling they wish. If enough ignorant people want GMO labeling and convince their representatives to require it, that's the price companies pay for doing business in a democratic system. If they want to win over the "anti-GMO" wackos, they can lobby and run ads explaining it to the public themselves.
Let's clear up one thing: the word "decimate" has NEVER had a primary English meaning of "to destroy/kill/etc. 1 in 10 of something."
Of course it did. You putting that statement in bold doesn't change that.
Please note the word "primary." The word has never had that definition as its primary meaning.
Just because a definition is "rare" or "old" doesn't mean you get to ignore it.
Actually, if you read what I wrote, I was noting that your meaning is the newest sense, an argument meant to counter your claim that we've moved away from your definition over time. Does the meaning exist? Sure. But the vast majority of people who hear the word are unaware of it, and it has never been the case that most people hearing that word spoken in English would assume your meaning as the primary sense.
There are also places where tyrants reign, where bribes are normal, and the biggest bully wins.
TRUMP 2016
(...Okay, okay, both major party candidates are locked into the "bribes are normal" idea... and the U.S. seems to be heading down that inevitable Platonic path from democracy to tyranny. But Trump does seem to be running for the "biggest bully" award.)
If that isn't limited to Star Fleet, then how are people's human instincts suppressed? Is it indoctrination when they're children? Drugs? Medical procedures? Again Roddenberry just wishes for it and it's there! Of course as a work of fiction, that's what we expect.
I think a lot of what you call "human instincts" are profoundly shaped by society around you. Yes, people have natural urges, and many of them can be self-destructive or even destructive to an idealistic society if not "kept in check." But social mores can be powerful.
Yes, we all recognize that "human" traits like lust and envy and greed have always been around, but the kinds of behavior we view as acceptable in the pursuit of them have changed radically over time. Look back at the murder and violent crime rates of a few centuries ago. We tend to be myopic about history of such things, worrying about what's happening now vs. a decade ago, but if you take a long-term view, "civilization" has gradually tamed a LOT of "human instincts." It's no longer as acceptable to just beat a person to death as it was a couple centuries ago in "civilized" nations. Even the level of cruelty of punishments has decreased significantly -- we no longer saw people in half or disembowel them or whatever as part of a normal execution.
Does that mean we have NO murder or rape or whatever now? Of course not. But even a century ago it was commonly accepted that men should just be able to "have their way" with their women whenever they wanted, which was part of the reason for our complex moral code around marriage. Some people today think that code was mostly meant to be restrictive and demeaning to women (and it was), but it was also designed because social morality was much more permissive about what was acceptable behavior for men to do to satisfy their lust.
Does lust still exist? Of course it does. But despite the recent outcry over "rape culture" on college campuses, the incidence of forced sex today is probably significantly less than it was just a few generations ago. And that's because our social attitudes have changed.
We could talk the same way about money and greed, which seems your concern. The capitalist myth about the origin of money has done a lot of damage; in most "primitive" cultures, we don't tend to observe people bargaining in barter systems... instead, they tend to be built on elaborate systems of gift-giving and indebtedness. The natural human proclivity in many cultures has been to aid neighbors when needed, because the assumption in primitive societies is that "we all need to stick together," since otherwise you'll likely die of starvation or by wild animals or by neighboring tribes or whatever.
So you do things to help others, and they become indebted to you, and they later repay the debt. Humans are not necessarily naturally "bargainers" driven by capitalist greed. Can it happen? Obviously. But perhaps it's not as of an inevitable "human instinct" as we might think.
I agree that Roddenberry just ignored a lot of these issues. But I don't think they are as insurmountable as you seem to imagine. I mostly think the problems would occur in getting the Star Trek society set up in the first place -- but once it's in place, I don't necessarily think you'll need "indoctrination" or "drugs" or "medical procedures" to get rid of many undesirable social behaviors... I think once society has established new norms, it may be much more stable than you might imagine. (There obviously do need to be some protections with checks and balances to avoid people getting too much power, as you rightly point out, which is likely a much bigger issue that the "human instincts" of the general population.)
I used to be more cynical like you when I was younger. I certainly don't think it would be easy to solve all these problems. But I also don't think it's necessarily impossible or unsustainable.
The idea that businesses should actually train the workforce that they need, such as with apprenticeships, sponsoring employees in education on the job, or whatever, seems to be lost on Spanish businesses, I guess?
I think we're going to see more and more of that tension in a lot of places. The reality in the world is that for most jobs, "on the job education" is the most effective. We've created a system that tells young people to go to college, but traditional universities were never really designed for job training. That happens at technical schools. At a higher level where theory is required in addition to practice, it can happen at a "professional school," like med school, which tends to combine some theoretical coursework with apprenticeships (i.e., clinical training, often at a teaching hospital).
We're seeing a greater and greater problem for college graduates finding jobs, because they don't have practical skills that one will generally learn on the job over the course of several months or a few years. And it's also very inefficient because the theoretical material students learn in a college classroom is often forgotten quickly without practical reinforcement, forcing graduates to relearn the material needed on a daily basis when they finally find a job (rather than integrating it into more permanent and practical knowledge as they go). College was designed to be "higher education," not job training -- it was meant to expose students to a wide variety of ideas and disciplines, not teach only the specific skills for a job. It makes no sense to segregate theoretical and practical training if you actually want students to learn skills for a job.
If employers really wanted better (and more loyal) workers, they should stop just requiring a degree before getting a job and instead help train workers on the job, perhaps partnering with a higher-ed program to provide a bit of theoretical instruction as necessary to complement the work.
Why aren't they doing this?....
"We thought there'd just be the employees we needed out there somewhere. We didn't think we'd have to take responsibility for any of it!" seems to be their take.
Sort of. But I suspect this is primarily being driven by a desire to have lower-cost employees. A few decades ago, companies were mostly limited to whomever they could find locally. It was really expensive to look beyond the local labor market, let alone internationally, so it was mostly done only for major jobs in the company.
Nowadays, it's so much easier and faster to just find someone on the other side of the planet who has most of the skills already and is willing to work for a fraction of the cost of a local worker.
It's just like people drunk driving, texting while driving and so on: they do stupid shit and pay the price. It's merely one more way for them to win a Darwin Award.
I can understand that perspective if people were only endangering themselves. But when a driver gets behind the wheel and is drunk or texting or distracted while some inadequate "autopilot" is operating, they are also nominally in charge of a couple-ton machine that could easily become an out-of-control projectile moving at 100 feet per second.
So, they aren't just liable to take themselves out of the gene pool -- they could easily kill or seriously injure others in the process.
That, to me, is the real concern here. If a Tesla driver makes a poor choice and gets him/herself killed, fine. But when Tesla is releasing a system that they know is likely to be abused by people in such a way as to endanger others, that's a problem.
And before someone objects that "why shouldn't we ban alcohol or cell phones too," I'm NOT saying anything should be banned. But a responsible company will think about the morality of its actions. And the difference with alcohol and cell phones is that they have plenty of legitimate uses outside of driving a car, whereas Tesla's system is specifically related to driving the car and will likely create significant driver distraction (which endangers others). That's a problem.
Believe it or not, not all change is for the better. Further, this isn't a change in meaning, it's an additional meaning that confuses the existing meaning.
Let's clear up one thing: the word "decimate" has NEVER had a primary English meaning of "to destroy/kill/etc. 1 in 10 of something." That meaning is actually the most NOVEL English meaning, created by ill-informed language pedants in the late 1800s.
The word decimatio in Latin did refer to that ancient Roman practice of killing 1 in 10 soldiers as a punishment. Around 1600, the words decimate and decimation entered English and three ENGLISH meanings emerged:
(1) Referring to a tax or church tithe amounting to 1/10th of income (now obsolete)
(2) Referring to destruction of a LARGE PORTION (generally much greater than 10%) of something -- this meaning has been around since at least 1650 or so
(3) Referring to the ancient Roman military practice in specialist literature about military history (rare)
Because meaning (1) gradually faded out and meaning (3) was rare, the primary use of the word from about 1700 on was meaning (2) -- the one you find objectionable. But it wasn't until the mid-1800s when some random grammar weirdos started worrying about the etymology of the word that THEY decided there should be a fourth (and NEW) meaning:
(4) Figurative meaning, derived from senses (1) and (3) - referring to destroying 1/10th of something in general
That meaning never existed before language usage pedants just MADE IT UP in the late 1800s, and it never really caught on. 150 years later we still have people like you going around complaining about the decay of English, when you're actually endorsing a meaning that NEVER was the primary meaning of the word and actually NEVER was in use among anyone outside of weirdos who decided the standard use of the word for hundreds of years was "wrong" and made up a new English sense for fit with their classical etymological fantasies.