No, I'm saying that running a social experiment 9 times and getting the same result (which you don't like), running it a 10th time is unlikely to get you a different result.
You really can't compare forced labour in a totalitarian state and an associated egalitarian income with a basic income in a (reasonably) free society, whereby you can earn as much on top as you want and are free to do whatever you want.
I'm predominantly Libertarian, and I'm all for a UBI -- and not because it makes the people more independent (although that may, in fact, have been what the documentarians wanted to hear in order to be willing to put a Libertarian on camera).
All the people they interviewed were people who have been studying or have been involved for basic income projects for years, and those people explained their reasons for why they thought it was a good idea. They didn't go to libertarian people to ask them what they think about it.
That said, I don't think any of them were predominantly libertarian, it was just one line of arguments that they used in favour. Others included
necessity: due to automated production and gradual/"natural" concentration of capital, you need a different system to redistribute wealth
mental health: more and more people get burnouts and depressions due to work and income related stress, to the point that their productivity reduces drastically or even become completely unable to work
removing the welfare trap: if you are on welfare and start part time working, you may earn less than if staying 100% on welfare, or the added income is not seen as worth it
getting rid of ridiculous situations and useless jobs: paying public servants to check that other people are/not/ working
creating an actually functioning job market: right now, employers generally have much more bargaining power than employees
giving people time and opportunities to do what they want and be creative
I'm doubting the veracity of the statement that it's resulted in more people working,
The most striking example is Otjivero, a ethnically diverse Namibian town in the middle of the desert. Before the basic income project, almost no one had a job. Virtually everyone survived on porridge made from corn flour donated by the government. With the basic income, pretty much everyone started their own business, because the basic income created a lot of local demand for goods and services. If people have money, they can spend it. If there is demand, supply will come.
and I'm doubting the speculation about the total job availability numbers, given that we are already in massive unemployment, according to World Bank numbers, since the U.S. Department of Labor only tracks eligible workers (those workers who are displaced, and eligible for unemployment benefits, whether or not they are receiving them).
I completely agree with you that there is a massive employment crisis almost everywhere, and that the actual numbers are worse than the ones reported due to the reasons you mention. The reason there are no jobs, is because many companies don't need more labour due to technical advances (fewer labourers needed for the same output) and lack of growing demand.
Basic income can increase demand in many ways, and not just from established companies. If people have more time (because they don't have to work two jobs to make ends meet) and more time, they have more money and time to spend. It's a bit like reinstating the Henry Ford model, but at a larger scale.
Don't get me wrong: I have *no problem whatsoever* with people on UBI *not* working. We have a looming "end to human labor" problem, and I don't think having a bunch of Unhappy Campers(tm), with nothing better to do with their time than smash things, is a sterling idea.
Does that include the soviet union? While it wasn't called basic income, it was a guaranteed unfireable for life job with a paycheck.
That's like someone saying "getting food for free is nice", and someone else asking "does that include the geese that get stuffed for fois gras production? While it's of course force-feeding, they still get fed all of their life and don't have to do anything for it".
One of the tenets of basic income is that it must serve to increase people's liberty. Guaranteeing people an income in a totalitarian police state without any room for personal initiative indeed doesn't solve anything. The problem may lie more with the totalitarian regime than with the guaranteed income though.
Moreover, I haven't heard any proponents claim that a basic income by itself would solve all (or even most) problems. Many see it as a necessary step due to various evolutions, such as technology starting to destroy more jobs than it creates, and the insanity of creating jobs that pay people to check on other people to make sure they are not working (allowance qualification). Just watch the documentary I linked, it's a nice introduction to the subject (it was for me, anyway).
In every experiment they've tried until now, it actually causes more people to start working rather than fewer.
Is this why the Soviet Union won the cold war, and the former United States has broken itself up into small nations, with no one wanting to get everyone back together but Massachusetts and their insane dictator?
I'm not sure, but are you arguing that a basic income would automatically lead to a totalitarian militarised police state? Several proponents in the documentary I linked actually argue for it from a libertarian point of view, because a basic income (as a fundamental right, rather than as pork granted by the state to specific interest or pressure groups) makes the people as a whole much more independent.
It really has nothing to do with communism. Nothing gets nationalised and people are still free (and in fact encouraged) to be individually enterprising.
In every experiment they've tried until now, it actually causes more people to start working rather than fewer. There was a very interesting documentary about it by the Flemish public broadcaster, and it's available with English subtitles (if that doesn't play, there's a lower quality copy on Youtube). It does cause more people to become self-employed though, because they're less afraid of failure and hence are less likely to take on a job they don't like but accept anyway to have income security. And interestingly, those self-employed endeavours turn out to be often quite successful, simply because people are doing something like doing.
It's the same in computer science. Many measurement methodologies are plain wrong or misleading. And in many cases, the source code of what people did is not available, so independent evaluation is not possible (someone also published a paper about that, where the author couldn't even get the code in many cases after explicitly asking for it, but I forgot the title). It's not just a problem of alpha sciences.
I was just challenging a completely unsupported conclusion of someone trying to make people look through that skin colour lens.
Of course you have to look at the wider picture, and of course the cases of unjustified police violence garner the most public attention. Given that even when looking only at unarmed victims getting shot, black people appear to be 3 times as likely to be a victim as white people, your '"they end up having to use force" may rather be "they end up using force" though. And you also have to widen the picture even further, looking at why those particular neighbourhoods suffer so much from those issues in the first place, etc.
Using murder rate of population as a metric for danger to cops, in death by cop whites are overrepresented and latinos and blacks are underrepresented.
Did you read the entire article till the end? It concludes with
“The odds that a black man will be shot and killed by a police officer is about 1 in 60,000. For a white man those odds are 1 in 200,000.”
In absolute numbers, more white people are shot by police than black people, but the former also make up a significantly larger chunk of the population (63% white vs 12% black). What I find disturbing about the guy presenting those numbers is that he thinks those are very low chances, while I think that both are way too high.
The insets in the article pointing to "PHOTOS: 21 best guns for home protection" and "PHOTOS: Bang for your buck: Best handguns under $500" are also rather surreal to me in that context (but that's probably just me).
So neither the politician nor his son had the search results removed. Although if it had been removed when searching for the son's name, I would understand it. While politicians are public figures and cannot have such search results removed under the ruling (because there is a public interest in those results), I'm not sure the same holds for their family (it's not the son's choice that his father is a politician).
Just watch that episode, it is a.o. about big tobacco (ab)using similar "free trade" agreements. I don't remember if he explicitly mentions TPP, but I believe he does.
Apart from the pretty colors, it's pretty badly designed. There's only the one video explaining why it's bad, no text, no in-depth analysis, no outside opinions, no nothing. There isn't even (that I could find) a link to the text of the TPP.
Only members of the House and Senate are currently allowed to view the text of the deal, and even they are forbidden from discussing what it contains. As a new report from Politico published Monday details, "If you’re a member who wants to read the text, you’ve got to go to a room in the basement of the Capitol Visitor Center and be handed it one section at a time, watched over as you read, and forced to hand over any notes you make before leaving."
You basically have to be a negotiator or a representative of large business interests to get full access. Some chapters (5 out of 31) of the text have been made available via Wikileaks until now.
Anyone know and want to elaborate on what this TPP is?
The best, and definitely the most enjoyable, primer on the potential for abuse of the TPP (based on abuse of previously negotiated similar trade agreements) and the underhanded way it's being negotiated, is probably John Oliver's segment on it.
There is no external "system" system entity that works or does not work for us. We are all part of what I what would rather call "democratic society". It's true that there are entities with lots of money and influence, but "regular people" tend to severely underestimate their ability to achieve anything. We won for a large part because we were not cynical enough to "know" that we could not win anyway.
But you have to accept that the whole environment lined up for a favorable conclusion. At quick glance I identify: you were not alone, as you ganged up a scientific group with relevant background on the matter at hand (even if students);
You are never alone. Of course you have to find like-minded people. But as my simple email demonstrates, even an action by one person can achieve a lot (it doesn't mean that it always does), of course).
you admittedly wasted a lot of effort for a single measure in your professional area;
I did not waste anything, it was a very enlightening and educational experience, that went way beyond my professional area (both in terms of experience and in terms of effect).
you are also Belgium-based, which does have an influence, be it by language barriers, or the simple fact that if a member of EU counsel needed an in-person technical assertion, it would be much easier to just holler a local.
We were maybe 4 Belgians in a core group of about 50 people. We were from all over the EU, including from Portugal.
And in my defense, I didn't say there was nothing we could do to influence such decisions - I said it was difficult.
You said that your condition "simply does not allow me to have that influence in communitary law-making". That is what triggered my reaction, because I know from experience it's not true.
Again, your own argument assumes that difficulty. I'll give you my example: I'm a 26yo CS Researcher based in Portugal, and I vape. I have no background on vape research except articles I read for personal development, which tell me vaping is so much better than smoking. I did what I could, and what I knew was relevant for EU anti-vaping directives to not go ahead - I signed petitions that nobody cared about.
Petitions can help, but only if accompanied by "real action": starting actual discussions with MEPs by mailing them, setting up websites collecting information and presenting it in a clear form, analysing amendments etc. Those petitions can then be used to attract attention to the "meat" that you have to offer. Note that personally, I have no real opinion on vaping, since I'm a smoker nor a vaper (I do wonder what the long term effects are of inhaling liters of formaldehyde though).
I'm not saying we are not to act. I am stating there are people for that. Elected officials are supposed to be those people, or the ones who connect the relevant parties so they can provide appropriate input (your specific case).
And the people *those people* get their input from. Getting elected does not make you all-knowing. Being an advisor, or group of advisers, to a politician doesn't either. It is part of our democratic duty to help inform those that have been elected ("duty" in the sense that if you don't do it, democracy doesn't work). While in part this is done by unions, NGOs, lobbyists etc, individuals also have an import part to play here.
But I know, for a fact, there are things worth investing your time, and others you might as well live with them. The privacy rights I lose to a US based company called Facebook are not one of them.
Maybe you don't mind, but the erosion of privacy rights is definitely harmful to society as a whole. Even if only because if companies are allowed to get away with it, then the extremists in the "intelligence commun
I do not disagree with you in your last 3 sentences. Other than that, I accept the fact that my social condition (that of a working, middle-class citizen, i.e. one vote) simply does not allow me to have that influence in communitary law-making.
As a 25 year old PhD student, together with a bunch of like-minded people that had no political clout or connections (many of which were students or PhD students), I managed to help block the EU software patents directive back in 2009. This directive had the full support of the European Commission, and initially also of the majority of the largest groups in the European Parliament (the Christian Democrats and the Socialists). Big IT companies (IBM, Microsoft, Nokia,...) spent over 4 million euro on lobbying. And yet in the end (after 7 years of procedure) they all decided to go for cancelling the directive rather than risking it might get amended do something we may like and they might not.
For me, it started in a very silly way: I sent a mail to all Belgian MEPs, explaining them my view on the directive and on software patents. A week later, I got a call from an assistant of a number of MEPs telling me it was the first mail on the topic that made any sense to her, and asking me (a random student that just mailed them) how they should vote on the report that was being tabled the next week. I kind of panicked, told her I'd get back to her, looked on the Internet who could help me with that, ended up at the FFII and the rest is history.
Seriously, politicians and their aides are also also just people, and if you say something that makes sense, many of them will pay attention. There are of course always those who have made up their mind and won't care, but in my experience of 5 years of talking with them, I did not come to the conclusion that it's the majority of them. Not even close. Especially at the European level, where they are often happy that finally someone from the home country actually cares about what they're doing (as long as you're not sending template mails).
And yes, in the end it did cost lot of effort. But it is patently (hah!) false that there is nothing you can do influence or achieve at the EU level.
Democracy allows me this vote every now and then
That is just one part of democracy. It's an important one, but still just a part. A functional democracy requires way more effort than just voting every couple of years. And you can do it just as well as anyone else.
The batteries are three-feet high by 2.5-feet wide
First 2D batteries ever! Advances in energy storage at a spooky distance made possible thanks to recently published ER = EPR discovery. Is Elon Musk really Ironman?
It doesn't make software patents legal - and in fact, software patenting is explicitly not allowed in Europe already, and this doesn't change anything about it
Formally, it doesn't. In practice, just as the European Patent Office creatively reinterpreted the European Patent Convention (EPC) over the years and as the US C.A.F.C. kept broadening software patentability (until the Supreme Court reigned it in a bit again — and yes, I know they started it in the first place), it is unlikely that a an incrowd of patent people will forever be very stringent regarding interpreting the boundaries of patentability (hammers, nails and all that).
And since the Unified Patent Court would be the highest authority regarding the interpretation of the EPC (the EPC is not EU law and hence would not be subject to appeals at the European Court of Justice), there would not be a body of people outside the patent system to overrule them. There is no need to look for conspiracies or bad faith in this. It's just that if you have a lot of deeply specialised people together that basically decide themselves about the rules governing their own domain, you get bad rules due to the narrow field of vision (no matter how openminded the people involved may be). Getting the EPC renogotiated would be even harder, and given that the people involved are mainly the specialists from national patent offices, it's mostly decided by the same incrowd anyway.
Automatically getting your account blocked and all of your games disabled if you log in again after having been offline for a very long time (regardless of what the reason was) has nothing to do with paranoia.
Apart from that, I just think I should have full control over with whom I want to share when and what I play, without any major or minor inconveniences. Juggling Steam copies and whatnot should not be necessary. Seriously, I already paid for the games.
You can connect once, buy the game, put Steam in offline mode and never connect again.
At least if you never ever want to buy a game on Steam again. Otherwise, as soon as you connect again, it will automatically upload to Steam statistics regarding how much you've played the game, what "achievements" you've unlocked etc (even if you disable SteamPlay/auto-synchronisation).
And if you have bad luck, Steam will have blocked your account in the mean time because you haven't logged in for over a year and when the Steam application detects that, it will block all games you have locally because it no longer has valid cached credentials (you can't got back to offline mode). And then you can't play anymore until you've contacted support to have them unblock/reset your account. And yes, that happened to me.
It's true, you don't have to be online all the time. But you better be online either regularly or never again at all.
But is there really a point of having ARM64 on an ultra low cost system? Its not like you are gonna be using the increased bandwidth or large memory amounts that 64bits brings to the table on a sub $150 SoC, hell I seriously doubt the board will have enough bandwidth on its I/O to even saturate a 32bit pipeline.
I think the main point is to have a low-cost development board that people can use to port their software to AArch64 and/or test it on that platform (as said by the AC I originally replied to). I'm also sure that even with bandwidth limitations, the octocore will prove its worth when running our compiler test suite.
Additionally, the AArch64 instruction set has been redesigned from scratch and a lot of historical baggage and special cases have been thrown out (e.g. no more arbitrary changing the PC with half of the available instructions, and no more two different instruction sets with dynamic switching between them), so it wouldn't surprise me if over time AArch64 processors could actually become more power-efficient than regular ARM cores. Right now the AArch64 cores still include the ability to run regular ARM code too, but I'm pretty sure that over time this functionality as well as the entire regular ARM line will be dropped in favour of AArch64.
This is the first low-cost aarch64 silicon on the market. There are piles of piles of developers that will get it just for porting their software for arm64
This. Just logged in because I wanted to say exactly the same. Until now, afaik the cheapest option was actually a jailbroken iPad Mini 2 (and you obviously can't run Linux on that).
Disclaimer: I am and have been one of the FPC developers for the past 17.5 years (also starting originally with Turbo Pascal, and then moving on to FPC once it became clear Borland wouldn't come out with a 32 bit DOS version).
If you are convinced that part of the population has the destruction of a lot of what you hold dear as their secret agenda
How it is a secret agenda? It seems pretty out in the open to me.
Well, I thought that in case of the moderate muslims it could be a secret agenda in your view. In any case, feel free to ignore the "secret" in that sentence.
And yet there large numbers of moderate muslims that do not feel at all obliged or even inclined to impose the sharia on the rest of the Western country they live in.
Are you sure?
About as sure as you can be from watching documentaries, listening to interviews, reading opinion pieces, talking to people etc.
Maybe they don't feel a need to do it by force, but that's not really the whole story, is it? That's far morally superior to those who do, but it's still going to be an unending source of conflict.
If you are convinced that part of the population has the destruction of a lot of what you hold dear as their secret agenda , then I don't see a possibility besides endless conflict either.
This is an inherent contradiction between Islam and western society, and it cannot be reconciled without either giving up on religious freedom, or throwing away the Quran. They're not allowed to edit it.
And yet there large numbers of moderate muslims that do not feel at all obliged or even inclined to impose the sharia on the rest of the Western country they live in. Maybe they're not real muslims in the eyes of fundamentalists, but why should we take the same view as fundamentalists in this regard while we reject them on all other points?
Slashdot Mirror
In spite of the gut feeling of the submitter, it's not much better in at least computer science: http://reproducibility.cs.ariz...
No, I'm saying that running a social experiment 9 times and getting the same result (which you don't like), running it a 10th time is unlikely to get you a different result.
You really can't compare forced labour in a totalitarian state and an associated egalitarian income with a basic income in a (reasonably) free society, whereby you can earn as much on top as you want and are free to do whatever you want.
I'm predominantly Libertarian, and I'm all for a UBI -- and not because it makes the people more independent (although that may, in fact, have been what the documentarians wanted to hear in order to be willing to put a Libertarian on camera).
All the people they interviewed were people who have been studying or have been involved for basic income projects for years, and those people explained their reasons for why they thought it was a good idea. They didn't go to libertarian people to ask them what they think about it.
That said, I don't think any of them were predominantly libertarian, it was just one line of arguments that they used in favour. Others included
I'm doubting the veracity of the statement that it's resulted in more people working,
The most striking example is Otjivero, a ethnically diverse Namibian town in the middle of the desert. Before the basic income project, almost no one had a job. Virtually everyone survived on porridge made from corn flour donated by the government. With the basic income, pretty much everyone started their own business, because the basic income created a lot of local demand for goods and services. If people have money, they can spend it. If there is demand, supply will come.
and I'm doubting the speculation about the total job availability numbers, given that we are already in massive unemployment, according to World Bank numbers, since the U.S. Department of Labor only tracks eligible workers (those workers who are displaced, and eligible for unemployment benefits, whether or not they are receiving them).
I completely agree with you that there is a massive employment crisis almost everywhere, and that the actual numbers are worse than the ones reported due to the reasons you mention. The reason there are no jobs, is because many companies don't need more labour due to technical advances (fewer labourers needed for the same output) and lack of growing demand.
Basic income can increase demand in many ways, and not just from established companies. If people have more time (because they don't have to work two jobs to make ends meet) and more time, they have more money and time to spend. It's a bit like reinstating the Henry Ford model, but at a larger scale.
Don't get me wrong: I have *no problem whatsoever* with people on UBI *not* working. We have a looming "end to human labor" problem, and I don't think having a bunch of Unhappy Campers(tm), with nothing better to do with their time than smash things, is a sterling idea.
We agree that a UBI stopgaps that problem.
I think it
In every experiment they've tried until now
Does that include the soviet union? While it wasn't called basic income, it was a guaranteed unfireable for life job with a paycheck.
That's like someone saying "getting food for free is nice", and someone else asking "does that include the geese that get stuffed for fois gras production? While it's of course force-feeding, they still get fed all of their life and don't have to do anything for it".
One of the tenets of basic income is that it must serve to increase people's liberty. Guaranteeing people an income in a totalitarian police state without any room for personal initiative indeed doesn't solve anything. The problem may lie more with the totalitarian regime than with the guaranteed income though.
Moreover, I haven't heard any proponents claim that a basic income by itself would solve all (or even most) problems. Many see it as a necessary step due to various evolutions, such as technology starting to destroy more jobs than it creates, and the insanity of creating jobs that pay people to check on other people to make sure they are not working (allowance qualification). Just watch the documentary I linked, it's a nice introduction to the subject (it was for me, anyway).
In every experiment they've tried until now, it actually causes more people to start working rather than fewer.
Is this why the Soviet Union won the cold war, and the former United States has broken itself up into small nations, with no one wanting to get everyone back together but Massachusetts and their insane dictator?
I'm not sure, but are you arguing that a basic income would automatically lead to a totalitarian militarised police state? Several proponents in the documentary I linked actually argue for it from a libertarian point of view, because a basic income (as a fundamental right, rather than as pork granted by the state to specific interest or pressure groups) makes the people as a whole much more independent.
It really has nothing to do with communism. Nothing gets nationalised and people are still free (and in fact encouraged) to be individually enterprising.
In every experiment they've tried until now, it actually causes more people to start working rather than fewer. There was a very interesting documentary about it by the Flemish public broadcaster, and it's available with English subtitles (if that doesn't play, there's a lower quality copy on Youtube). It does cause more people to become self-employed though, because they're less afraid of failure and hence are less likely to take on a job they don't like but accept anyway to have income security. And interestingly, those self-employed endeavours turn out to be often quite successful, simply because people are doing something like doing.
It's the same in computer science. Many measurement methodologies are plain wrong or misleading. And in many cases, the source code of what people did is not available, so independent evaluation is not possible (someone also published a paper about that, where the author couldn't even get the code in many cases after explicitly asking for it, but I forgot the title). It's not just a problem of alpha sciences.
I was just challenging a completely unsupported conclusion of someone trying to make people look through that skin colour lens.
Of course you have to look at the wider picture, and of course the cases of unjustified police violence garner the most public attention. Given that even when looking only at unarmed victims getting shot, black people appear to be 3 times as likely to be a victim as white people, your '"they end up having to use force" may rather be "they end up using force" though. And you also have to widen the picture even further, looking at why those particular neighbourhoods suffer so much from those issues in the first place, etc.
Using murder rate of population as a metric for danger to cops, in death by cop whites are overrepresented and latinos and blacks are underrepresented.
Did you read the entire article till the end? It concludes with
“The odds that a black man will be shot and killed by a police officer is about 1 in 60,000. For a white man those odds are 1 in 200,000.”
In absolute numbers, more white people are shot by police than black people, but the former also make up a significantly larger chunk of the population (63% white vs 12% black). What I find disturbing about the guy presenting those numbers is that he thinks those are very low chances, while I think that both are way too high.
The insets in the article pointing to "PHOTOS: 21 best guns for home protection" and "PHOTOS: Bang for your buck: Best handguns under $500" are also rather surreal to me in that context (but that's probably just me).
Here's the first link I found related to a politician.
And guess what: if you search either for the politician or his son, the article is still found (first hit on the BBC site, in fact):
* https://www.google.com/search?...
* https://www.google.com/search?...
So neither the politician nor his son had the search results removed. Although if it had been removed when searching for the son's name, I would understand it. While politicians are public figures and cannot have such search results removed under the ruling (because there is a public interest in those results), I'm not sure the same holds for their family (it's not the son's choice that his father is a politician).
Service announcement: we already have another story for GHCQ aliases wanting to talk to themselves.
Just watch that episode, it is a.o. about big tobacco (ab)using similar "free trade" agreements. I don't remember if he explicitly mentions TPP, but I believe he does.
Apart from the pretty colors, it's pretty badly designed. There's only the one video explaining why it's bad, no text, no in-depth analysis, no outside opinions, no nothing. There isn't even (that I could find) a link to the text of the TPP.
Even members of the US Congress only get extremely limited access to the text of the TPP:
Only members of the House and Senate are currently allowed to view the text of the deal, and even they are forbidden from discussing what it contains. As a new report from Politico published Monday details, "If you’re a member who wants to read the text, you’ve got to go to a room in the basement of the Capitol Visitor Center and be handed it one section at a time, watched over as you read, and forced to hand over any notes you make before leaving."
You basically have to be a negotiator or a representative of large business interests to get full access. Some chapters (5 out of 31) of the text have been made available via Wikileaks until now.
Anyone know and want to elaborate on what this TPP is?
The best, and definitely the most enjoyable, primer on the potential for abuse of the TPP (based on abuse of previously negotiated similar trade agreements) and the underhanded way it's being negotiated, is probably John Oliver's segment on it.
It's very nice to hear the system worked for you.
There is no external "system" system entity that works or does not work for us. We are all part of what I what would rather call "democratic society". It's true that there are entities with lots of money and influence, but "regular people" tend to severely underestimate their ability to achieve anything. We won for a large part because we were not cynical enough to "know" that we could not win anyway.
But you have to accept that the whole environment lined up for a favorable conclusion. At quick glance I identify: you were not alone, as you ganged up a scientific group with relevant background on the matter at hand (even if students);
You are never alone. Of course you have to find like-minded people. But as my simple email demonstrates, even an action by one person can achieve a lot (it doesn't mean that it always does), of course).
you admittedly wasted a lot of effort for a single measure in your professional area;
I did not waste anything, it was a very enlightening and educational experience, that went way beyond my professional area (both in terms of experience and in terms of effect).
you are also Belgium-based, which does have an influence, be it by language barriers, or the simple fact that if a member of EU counsel needed an in-person technical assertion, it would be much easier to just holler a local.
We were maybe 4 Belgians in a core group of about 50 people. We were from all over the EU, including from Portugal.
And in my defense, I didn't say there was nothing we could do to influence such decisions - I said it was difficult.
You said that your condition "simply does not allow me to have that influence in communitary law-making". That is what triggered my reaction, because I know from experience it's not true.
Again, your own argument assumes that difficulty. I'll give you my example: I'm a 26yo CS Researcher based in Portugal, and I vape. I have no background on vape research except articles I read for personal development, which tell me vaping is so much better than smoking. I did what I could, and what I knew was relevant for EU anti-vaping directives to not go ahead - I signed petitions that nobody cared about.
Petitions can help, but only if accompanied by "real action": starting actual discussions with MEPs by mailing them, setting up websites collecting information and presenting it in a clear form, analysing amendments etc. Those petitions can then be used to attract attention to the "meat" that you have to offer. Note that personally, I have no real opinion on vaping, since I'm a smoker nor a vaper (I do wonder what the long term effects are of inhaling liters of formaldehyde though).
I'm not saying we are not to act. I am stating there are people for that. Elected officials are supposed to be those people, or the ones who connect the relevant parties so they can provide appropriate input (your specific case).
And the people *those people* get their input from. Getting elected does not make you all-knowing. Being an advisor, or group of advisers, to a politician doesn't either. It is part of our democratic duty to help inform those that have been elected ("duty" in the sense that if you don't do it, democracy doesn't work). While in part this is done by unions, NGOs, lobbyists etc, individuals also have an import part to play here.
But I know, for a fact, there are things worth investing your time, and others you might as well live with them. The privacy rights I lose to a US based company called Facebook are not one of them.
Maybe you don't mind, but the erosion of privacy rights is definitely harmful to society as a whole. Even if only because if companies are allowed to get away with it, then the extremists in the "intelligence commun
I do not disagree with you in your last 3 sentences. Other than that, I accept the fact that my social condition (that of a working, middle-class citizen, i.e. one vote) simply does not allow me to have that influence in communitary law-making.
As a 25 year old PhD student, together with a bunch of like-minded people that had no political clout or connections (many of which were students or PhD students), I managed to help block the EU software patents directive back in 2009. This directive had the full support of the European Commission, and initially also of the majority of the largest groups in the European Parliament (the Christian Democrats and the Socialists). Big IT companies (IBM, Microsoft, Nokia, ...) spent over 4 million euro on lobbying. And yet in the end (after 7 years of procedure) they all decided to go for cancelling the directive rather than risking it might get amended do something we may like and they might not.
For me, it started in a very silly way: I sent a mail to all Belgian MEPs, explaining them my view on the directive and on software patents. A week later, I got a call from an assistant of a number of MEPs telling me it was the first mail on the topic that made any sense to her, and asking me (a random student that just mailed them) how they should vote on the report that was being tabled the next week. I kind of panicked, told her I'd get back to her, looked on the Internet who could help me with that, ended up at the FFII and the rest is history.
Seriously, politicians and their aides are also also just people, and if you say something that makes sense, many of them will pay attention. There are of course always those who have made up their mind and won't care, but in my experience of 5 years of talking with them, I did not come to the conclusion that it's the majority of them. Not even close. Especially at the European level, where they are often happy that finally someone from the home country actually cares about what they're doing (as long as you're not sending template mails).
And yes, in the end it did cost lot of effort. But it is patently (hah!) false that there is nothing you can do influence or achieve at the EU level.
Democracy allows me this vote every now and then
That is just one part of democracy. It's an important one, but still just a part. A functional democracy requires way more effort than just voting every couple of years. And you can do it just as well as anyone else.
The batteries are three-feet high by 2.5-feet wide
First 2D batteries ever! Advances in energy storage at a spooky distance made possible thanks to recently published ER = EPR discovery. Is Elon Musk really Ironman?
It doesn't make software patents legal - and in fact, software patenting is explicitly not allowed in Europe already, and this doesn't change anything about it
Formally, it doesn't. In practice, just as the European Patent Office creatively reinterpreted the European Patent Convention (EPC) over the years and as the US C.A.F.C. kept broadening software patentability (until the Supreme Court reigned it in a bit again — and yes, I know they started it in the first place), it is unlikely that a an incrowd of patent people will forever be very stringent regarding interpreting the boundaries of patentability (hammers, nails and all that).
And since the Unified Patent Court would be the highest authority regarding the interpretation of the EPC (the EPC is not EU law and hence would not be subject to appeals at the European Court of Justice), there would not be a body of people outside the patent system to overrule them. There is no need to look for conspiracies or bad faith in this. It's just that if you have a lot of deeply specialised people together that basically decide themselves about the rules governing their own domain, you get bad rules due to the narrow field of vision (no matter how openminded the people involved may be). Getting the EPC renogotiated would be even harder, and given that the people involved are mainly the specialists from national patent offices, it's mostly decided by the same incrowd anyway.
As mentioned two levels up, they did lock my account after several years of not logging in, and I had to mail support to get it unlocked again.
Automatically getting your account blocked and all of your games disabled if you log in again after having been offline for a very long time (regardless of what the reason was) has nothing to do with paranoia.
Apart from that, I just think I should have full control over with whom I want to share when and what I play, without any major or minor inconveniences. Juggling Steam copies and whatnot should not be necessary. Seriously, I already paid for the games.
You can connect once, buy the game, put Steam in offline mode and never connect again.
At least if you never ever want to buy a game on Steam again. Otherwise, as soon as you connect again, it will automatically upload to Steam statistics regarding how much you've played the game, what "achievements" you've unlocked etc (even if you disable SteamPlay/auto-synchronisation).
And if you have bad luck, Steam will have blocked your account in the mean time because you haven't logged in for over a year and when the Steam application detects that, it will block all games you have locally because it no longer has valid cached credentials (you can't got back to offline mode). And then you can't play anymore until you've contacted support to have them unblock/reset your account. And yes, that happened to me.
It's true, you don't have to be online all the time. But you better be online either regularly or never again at all.
But is there really a point of having ARM64 on an ultra low cost system? Its not like you are gonna be using the increased bandwidth or large memory amounts that 64bits brings to the table on a sub $150 SoC, hell I seriously doubt the board will have enough bandwidth on its I/O to even saturate a 32bit pipeline.
I think the main point is to have a low-cost development board that people can use to port their software to AArch64 and/or test it on that platform (as said by the AC I originally replied to). I'm also sure that even with bandwidth limitations, the octocore will prove its worth when running our compiler test suite.
Additionally, the AArch64 instruction set has been redesigned from scratch and a lot of historical baggage and special cases have been thrown out (e.g. no more arbitrary changing the PC with half of the available instructions, and no more two different instruction sets with dynamic switching between them), so it wouldn't surprise me if over time AArch64 processors could actually become more power-efficient than regular ARM cores. Right now the AArch64 cores still include the ability to run regular ARM code too, but I'm pretty sure that over time this functionality as well as the entire regular ARM line will be dropped in favour of AArch64.
This is the first low-cost aarch64 silicon on the market. There are piles of piles of developers that will get it just for porting their software for arm64
This. Just logged in because I wanted to say exactly the same. Until now, afaik the cheapest option was actually a jailbroken iPad Mini 2 (and you obviously can't run Linux on that).
It teaches good habits (but with the demise of Turbo Pascal I am unable to suggest a worthy compiler).
May I suggest the Free Pascal Compiler with Lazarus as IDE. There's even a Lazarus add-on to automatically configure it for pupils/beginners.
Disclaimer: I am and have been one of the FPC developers for the past 17.5 years (also starting originally with Turbo Pascal, and then moving on to FPC once it became clear Borland wouldn't come out with a 32 bit DOS version).
If you are convinced that part of the population has the destruction of a lot of what you hold dear as their secret agenda
How it is a secret agenda? It seems pretty out in the open to me.
Well, I thought that in case of the moderate muslims it could be a secret agenda in your view. In any case, feel free to ignore the "secret" in that sentence.
And yet there large numbers of moderate muslims that do not feel at all obliged or even inclined to impose the sharia on the rest of the Western country they live in.
Are you sure?
About as sure as you can be from watching documentaries, listening to interviews, reading opinion pieces, talking to people etc.
Maybe they don't feel a need to do it by force, but that's not really the whole story, is it? That's far morally superior to those who do, but it's still going to be an unending source of conflict.
If you are convinced that part of the population has the destruction of a lot of what you hold dear as their secret agenda , then I don't see a possibility besides endless conflict either.
This is an inherent contradiction between Islam and western society, and it cannot be reconciled without either giving up on religious freedom, or throwing away the Quran. They're not allowed to edit it.
And yet there large numbers of moderate muslims that do not feel at all obliged or even inclined to impose the sharia on the rest of the Western country they live in. Maybe they're not real muslims in the eyes of fundamentalists, but why should we take the same view as fundamentalists in this regard while we reject them on all other points?