I wasn't advocating for the for-profit medical model of the US, but pointing out the consequences of the incentives in the US. Personally, sign me up for single payer. I don't see how medical care could get worse than what we have now, I think the notion that private insurance somehow improves choice or outcomes is baloney.
Even in single payer countries, though, I would be hesitant to ascribe altruistic motivations to doctors. They may want to help people, but people are complex and even when money isn't a primary motivator, doctors are people and have complex motivations which include ego-driven motivations which may transcend the desire to help people.
(1) pissed off a judge who finds out about it, I don't know about the state level courts in Washington, but close to half of Federal judges are former prosecutors.
I'm not sure how "pissed off" these judges would be if their origin is anything like Federal court. More likely, as former prosecutors, they are sympathetic to the police and are willing to accept whatever reasoning the police have for probable cause.
Plus the warrant was handled with kid gloves by police standards -- no flashbangs, nothing taken arbitrarily, no pets shot, etc.
There's the question of incentives and unintended consequences.
The doctor who works for the state/institution may have the incentive to keep people institutionalized because the more people who are in the institution, the more money it gets and the more authority and prestige the doctors have working in a large institution.
The family hires a doctor for the diagnosis, chances are they will get the diagnosis they want.
Both will be likely to provide a truly unbiased diagnosis in extreme cases, but in the larger grey center where diagnosis can be more ambiguous their own biases will come into play.
Where it gets truly expensive is a third party hiring doctors for diagnosis who have no stake in either the institution or family, because who pays for that? Then it becomes the question of how good a one-time diagnosis is from a doctor unfamiliar with the patient.
Another expensive option is releasing patients whose diagnosis is marginal, but providing intensive therapy, monitoring and reintroduction services. This is truly expensive, families won't pay to have their nutty family member on the streets and government funding will never be adequate to cover it.
So you end up circling back just releasing people.
I thought the emojis were kind of a Japanese thing originally. Do they have any data on mixed perceptions of them? I'm assuming that as early adopters they didn't have a uniform version of the characters/icons and may also have suffered from lower resolution depictions of them.
I saw some documentary that sort of explained this.
It was about SWAT teams and storming rooms and how they like to move quickly in patterns the person in the room can't predict.
The movement creates a kind of cognitive problem for the adversary in the room which causes them to target center of mass. This kind of increases the utility of body armor because the adversary "can't" target their heads very well, making any shots likely to hit the body armor instead of more exposed extremities.
It seemed kind of reasonable to me, although I wonder if there's a "in real life" aspect to this that might weaken the tactic, like recoil or muzzle climb tending to cause point of impact on multiple shots to rise. My guess is that the movement of the SWAT guys is enough of a deterrent for secondary shots to not hit them.
The other possibly confounding factor would be just the random nature of poor marksmanship or the "spray and pray" effect. A presumably unskilled shooter may simply fire a lot of rounds in a way that disregards any aiming or target motion, possibly increasing the likelihood of some impact. My guess is that part of the goal of SWAT movement is rapid lateral movement relative to the adversary, making it difficult for the adversary to achieve a wide enough field of fire for even random shooting to be effective.
It does make me wonder if special forces type soldiers have a specifically trained countermeasure to defend against trained, skilled people storming a room, such as sweep firing from extreme lateral angles, combined with their own movement, to at least reduce any advantage in attacker methods.
[Standard polite company disclaimer: I am not a Trump supporter, etc.]
The local paper had a column by a civil engineer who claimed that a "Trump Wall" would have side loading which would require footings ~10 M deep, deep enough that it might make all but the most complex tunnels difficult.
For all the really good tunnels (deep, long, well-constructed), I'd guess the majority are shitty tunnels not that deep and not that long, and a well-built wall may make them obsolete. And there's limited places you can effectively tunnel without doing a first-world engineering project using serious resources; the geography doesn't permit it.
I've often wondered if they wanted to really deal with tunneling if they couldn't create a monitoring vehicle with ground-penetrating radar that was simply driven over the border continuously looking for them. And if they found one, drill an inspection hole to verify, and then use the inspection hole to pump in a few hundred gallons of something to block it, like a concrete slurry or self-expanding foam (as well as tracing the exit). I've always wondered why the Israelis didn't flood tunnels in Gaza with a propane/acetylene/oxygen mix and ignite it.
I also wonder if the future of smuggling isn't drones anyway. With the cash that cartels have, they should be able to build good drones that could carry a kilo payload and fly several miles on GPS. They should be able to fly at night, high enough to not be heard, low enough to not show up on radar and maybe even cool enough for their size to not have a heat signature, either. A drone like that could land on a rooftop or other obscure/secure location.
From what I've read, cartels are now manufacturing their own fentanyl, which is 50x more potent than heroin. That makes a 1 kg payload into what would have been 50 kg before. That would make even a $10k drone into an economically viable disposable unit.
I don't doubt East Bloc design heavy machine guns are simple and reliable, but they're still machines, and in the case of Libya, being stored and operated in one of the worst environments for any machine with moving parts and mating surfaces.
And for the last couple of years, used, maintained and stored by irregulars without any specific education in their operation and maintenance. I'm sure even conscripts in Bulgaria were basically mechanical engineers in comparison to their recent Libyan operators.
Basically, they're gonna wear and at best become less reliable and at worst become unusable.
My guess, though, is that as long as any heavy machine gun fires semi-reliably, even if the barrel is shot, it's still a pretty formidable weapon out to a few hundred meters. 12.x mm HMG projectiles are lethal and destructive even at substandard velocity and in a lot of cases volume of fire will make up for what's lost in accuracy, at least at ground targets.
But those particular guns might be if they're that old. Barrels and the moving parts of the system can wear out, rendering them either less than useful or maybe even dangerous to the operator.
It's not like the military is necessarily fielding the *same*.50 Browning machine guns they used circa 1920. Even if they were, it would kind of be like ship of Theseus. The same gun, maybe, but with all new parts.
I'll mostly buy that argument, but one thing that seems weird is how the NY Times did almost no reporting on the topic. The silence was so deafening that the Public Editor or whatever the column is called actually wrote a column on why they hadn't reported much on it.
The closest non-conspiracy angles I could come with for this were:
1) They weren't invited to the journalism party on this "leak" so they could on report on it as the documents were released, and responsible journalism meant a lot of work trying to verify information. This was basically the Public Editor column.
This could also be called "not invented here", a deliberate attempt to downplay a story they weren't part of and had to play catch-up on.
2) It's *kind of* a non-story -- before the Panama Papers, did anyone go to bed at night assured that tin-pot dictators weren't somehow funneling money into overseas bank accounts? I believe Donald Trump is more honest about building a wall Mexico will pay for than I do that dictators aren't siphoning money into personal bank accounts.
I do think it's weird that Putin would funnel money overseas for personal use. Is he planning on retiring to Costa Rica or something? My guess is that Putin is boss and lives in Russia forever, which means he basically has the entire resources of the state at his personal disposal. Why bother moving money overseas at all? When a time comes that Putin isn't boss, he will either live in relative luxury at state expense or he will be taking a dirt nap, at state expense. There is no scenario where Putin lives in the South of France as a expat and has to cover his own caviar and vodka tab.
The paucity of influential Americans on the list I mostly just assign to the fact that influential Americans' wealth is already dollar denominated and doesn't need to be surreptitiously converted from local Monopoly money into dollars, rich Americans already set the tax code to their benefit and are far better off just parking it in whatever Congressionally approved tax sheltered investment they can buy.
There is nothing inherently superior, or inferior, or disadvantaged about being white or black. What *can* make you disadvantaged is your culture and how you look at life.
I think this is so true. My sense is that most black Americans are caught up in a psychology of failure and victimization which does far more damage than any systemic discrimination does these days.
Unfortunately, it's a mass culture/sociological phenomenon that entraps individuals in ways that are almost impossible to overcome without abandoning the culture entirely or at least consciously repudiating it in some conscious way.
What's worse is that politicians encourage it, reinforcing the idea that forces are conspiring to hold back the entire group. Worse than the pandering is the cynical way in which upholding this mindset not only validates it but encourages a patronage and dependency that perpetuates it.
What's really regrettable is that the worst kind of overt racism probably prevented integration of blacks as members of the mainstream, when aspiration to mainstream social values would have meant assimilation. Now we're stuck with a self-defeating rejection of those values, a demand for equality of a culture that paradoxically produces its own inequality.
If she could get so good at math back then, why anyone should be able to do it now, right? We don't need to worry about the so-called education gap or take a bunch of extra steps to help black people overcome so-called obstacles because obviously if she was able to do it then, it should be much easier for even less skilled people to do it now.
I think the money and power angle is where the real trouble is, not the idea of climate change itself is or isn't occurring.
I think the real hard questions boil down to: How much climate change is occurring? How accurately can we predict the changes in climate 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 years in the future? Is there any way of knowing what we could do that would make climate change less disruptive? Who will pay for it or have to make sacrifices for these actions?
There has to be proof of rape, or else it will get thrown out.
This may be *mostly* the way the criminal justice system works now, but if you follow the nonsense that has been happening on college campuses, you might have cause to worry.
Activists are vigorously pushing to have colleges' investigate and punish rape accusations internally, with their own investigations and their own "tribunals". Naturally these all lack any standard of due process rights for the accused, including no standard of proof, no ability to confront accusers, and "verdicts" are rendered in secret by college administrators.
Naturally, activists are asking for this because they want the ability to make one-sided accusations without any evidence, often for "crimes" committed months ago that they only now have recognized as rape. Why the Minneapolis paper today has an article about one such case:
"Raped" in May, accusation made to the college in October and a police report filed only in December. Really? What is she expecting? I think she's even quoted as "not realizing" it was rape until the middle of the summer. To me this sounds like reckless behavior coupled with regret.
If colleges get away with extrajudicial criminal proceedings for this, it will only serve to condition the public and ultimately the legislature to reduce standards of evidence for sexual assault to whatever accusation the victim wants to make, whenever she wants to make it.
I honestly don't quite understand what's driving this on campus. My only guess is that among freshmen, there's a culture of extreme promiscuity and heavy drinking and some of these people honestly don't know what they're doing until months later, and that a large part of this is regret. I don't doubt many of these women have been treated poorly, but I question how many of them meet any but a women's studies definition of sexual assault.
They don't have a sense of humor. It'd get suddenly hard to get on an airplane.
I was just in DC a couple of weeks ago as a tourist and the level of *visible* security is high. I can only surmise this means that the level of paranoia is higher yet, and that's kind of scary in and of itself.
(The FBI building has a bunch of squad cars labeled "FBI Police" -- I never realized the FBI had their own police force. I wasn't sure if it was a redundancy for people who wouldn't know that a squad car labeled FBI was a law enforcement vehicle, or if, indeed, the FBI has its own uniformed security force...)
What I don't understand is why they didn't provide an updated console mode/app/window with PowerShell and why they just threw it into the same dumb console that they had been throwing cmd.exe into.
I'm also curious why they didn't borrow more heavily from Unix. There are some things in PowerShell that are really awkward to do that are trivial in a Unix shell.
I'm sure there's some valid reasons but a lot of it simply seems like not invented here syndrome. I'm really annoyed with the default console window being so brain damaged, now I have to put ConEmu on everything if I want reasonable interaction with the console window.
I wonder how often black/grey/white hats have mailed compromised devices to offices.
If you started mailing compromised 5 port switches or something to random offices, especially branch offices, I would bet that lots of them would end up getting plugged in and used.
I won't disagree with your rant against Republicans, because I generally agree with it. But at the same time I didn't see you argue that "the left" doesn't actually use "racism" as a stick to suppress arguments.
Immigration is a great example -- I think there's lots of reasons to argue for less immigration, but if you do argue this point one of the first criticisms will be that it's not actually about immigration but racism against Latinos.
Even more interesting is the claim of racism when it comes to stricter border controls for Muslims, especially considering Islam isn't a race.
Criminal behavior? Discussing that will earn you a racist tag in a second.
What's been interesting has been following some of the "campus debate" on Israel. "The left" has been agitating against support for Israel (say, divesting from Israeli companies or not inviting Israeli speakers [a different kind of dialog suppression]). A fair number of Jews have played the anti-Semitism card, and of course those critical of Israel have howled in protest -- like it's somehow *unfair* to play an accusation of bias trump card and have the substance of their arguments discredited as mere hatred.
I've laughed when I've read some of this, wondering how many refuting the accusations of anti-semitism have leveled the charge of racism to end a debate.
I wonder if the high level of technological obsolescence (whether planned or just practical) makes the notion of "lifetime support" kind of wink-and-a-nod sort of thing where most people think that lifetime only matters for the next three years and that nobody really expects support for the next 10 years.
If technology lasted as long as my washer-dryer, I might take lifetime more seriously.
(Yes, you in the back taking notes on a Palm Pilot, you are an outlier.)
Doesn't this create a moral hazard, where coders or QA testers have a perverse incentive to allow bad code to get established and then blow the whistle?
I think sometimes "bad projects" can take on a life of their own if they're allowed to get past some initial starting point. It reaches some critical mass where shared complicity, scale and external expectations cause it to seem unfixable without unjust blame, excessive work or external consequences.
It some ways, it's like the citizens of a nation electing douchebags for decades and then complaining about government douchebaggery and wanting a prize for highlighting a problem.
I'll bet they have something like data going back to the 1960s when you consider that "Carousel of Progress" dates to the 1964 World's Fair and the large number of "audio animatronics" in other attractions.
IMHO, "Carousel.." does a pretty good job with realism vs. unrealism considering how old it is, and they seemed to incrementally increase realism without really adding much of an uncanny effect with MK's "Hall of Presidents" and even more with the American pavilion at Epcot.
In some cases, though, they have the benefit of audience distance for their animatronics, uncanny cues may be lost beyond some distance.
I thought the uncanny valley was a broad enough concept that it could be applied to anything that tried for a sense of realism but had a hard-to-express unrealism that made it creepy.
Like some mannequins seem to have it, which would seem to apply to things like the Real Doll in particular since it tries for a close realism. I think I've even read it applied to something like a person with an amputated digit or some other physical change.
Isn't the uncanny valley part of what makes horror films about dolls or ventriloquist dummies work? Their apparent realism subverted by an artificiality? A child's doll dressed in realistic clothes and with realistic hair but the blank expression despite realistic features?
I would imagine demonstrating it scientifically would be hard to do because it's so subjective. Maybe if you showed people a range of images and had them judge how realistic they looked and then applied some objective measure of realism to the images you might find a correlation, but there would be a lot of individual variation.
Can you explain why it grinds a machine to a halt when it does a simple definition update? Why I can run the free Malwarebytes on a machine with Kaspersky on it and still find malware?
IMHO it's an OK product, probably no worse than anything else, but too often I think it tries too hard to be a management product instead of a security product, but doing both sometimes haphazardly.
The Lincoln and the Jefferson are symbols, though, and I do think that a blast inside either of them would do considerable damage. Lincoln is enclosed on three sides, and the statute itself is marble, which would likely break. Jefferson is more open but feels slightly smaller, but it still contained enough that a blast inside it would likely harm the structure. In either case, I would expect a certain amount of planning designed to actually do structural damage.
The symbolism is important -- ISIS ripped up Roman ruins at Palmyra, probably because the ruins represented "Western Imperialism" and an example of "Islamic" peoples subjugated by European rulers (yes, I know the logic is tortured and in many cases wrong, since Islam wasn't even a religion during the Roman colonization of Syria).
The monuments in DC are symbols in many ways of American exceptionalism and would have a huge symbolic value in being damaged, much more so than a museum. Most of the Smithsonian museums are so vast that you couldn't carry enough explosives in on foot to do more than very localized damage.
Slashdot Mirror
I wasn't advocating for the for-profit medical model of the US, but pointing out the consequences of the incentives in the US. Personally, sign me up for single payer. I don't see how medical care could get worse than what we have now, I think the notion that private insurance somehow improves choice or outcomes is baloney.
Even in single payer countries, though, I would be hesitant to ascribe altruistic motivations to doctors. They may want to help people, but people are complex and even when money isn't a primary motivator, doctors are people and have complex motivations which include ego-driven motivations which may transcend the desire to help people.
(1) pissed off a judge who finds out about it,
I don't know about the state level courts in Washington, but close to half of Federal judges are former prosecutors.
I'm not sure how "pissed off" these judges would be if their origin is anything like Federal court. More likely, as former prosecutors, they are sympathetic to the police and are willing to accept whatever reasoning the police have for probable cause.
Plus the warrant was handled with kid gloves by police standards -- no flashbangs, nothing taken arbitrarily, no pets shot, etc.
There's the question of incentives and unintended consequences.
The doctor who works for the state/institution may have the incentive to keep people institutionalized because the more people who are in the institution, the more money it gets and the more authority and prestige the doctors have working in a large institution.
The family hires a doctor for the diagnosis, chances are they will get the diagnosis they want.
Both will be likely to provide a truly unbiased diagnosis in extreme cases, but in the larger grey center where diagnosis can be more ambiguous their own biases will come into play.
Where it gets truly expensive is a third party hiring doctors for diagnosis who have no stake in either the institution or family, because who pays for that? Then it becomes the question of how good a one-time diagnosis is from a doctor unfamiliar with the patient.
Another expensive option is releasing patients whose diagnosis is marginal, but providing intensive therapy, monitoring and reintroduction services. This is truly expensive, families won't pay to have their nutty family member on the streets and government funding will never be adequate to cover it.
So you end up circling back just releasing people.
I thought the emojis were kind of a Japanese thing originally. Do they have any data on mixed perceptions of them? I'm assuming that as early adopters they didn't have a uniform version of the characters/icons and may also have suffered from lower resolution depictions of them.
I saw some documentary that sort of explained this.
It was about SWAT teams and storming rooms and how they like to move quickly in patterns the person in the room can't predict.
The movement creates a kind of cognitive problem for the adversary in the room which causes them to target center of mass. This kind of increases the utility of body armor because the adversary "can't" target their heads very well, making any shots likely to hit the body armor instead of more exposed extremities.
It seemed kind of reasonable to me, although I wonder if there's a "in real life" aspect to this that might weaken the tactic, like recoil or muzzle climb tending to cause point of impact on multiple shots to rise. My guess is that the movement of the SWAT guys is enough of a deterrent for secondary shots to not hit them.
The other possibly confounding factor would be just the random nature of poor marksmanship or the "spray and pray" effect. A presumably unskilled shooter may simply fire a lot of rounds in a way that disregards any aiming or target motion, possibly increasing the likelihood of some impact. My guess is that part of the goal of SWAT movement is rapid lateral movement relative to the adversary, making it difficult for the adversary to achieve a wide enough field of fire for even random shooting to be effective.
It does make me wonder if special forces type soldiers have a specifically trained countermeasure to defend against trained, skilled people storming a room, such as sweep firing from extreme lateral angles, combined with their own movement, to at least reduce any advantage in attacker methods.
[Standard polite company disclaimer: I am not a Trump supporter, etc.]
The local paper had a column by a civil engineer who claimed that a "Trump Wall" would have side loading which would require footings ~10 M deep, deep enough that it might make all but the most complex tunnels difficult.
For all the really good tunnels (deep, long, well-constructed), I'd guess the majority are shitty tunnels not that deep and not that long, and a well-built wall may make them obsolete. And there's limited places you can effectively tunnel without doing a first-world engineering project using serious resources; the geography doesn't permit it.
I've often wondered if they wanted to really deal with tunneling if they couldn't create a monitoring vehicle with ground-penetrating radar that was simply driven over the border continuously looking for them. And if they found one, drill an inspection hole to verify, and then use the inspection hole to pump in a few hundred gallons of something to block it, like a concrete slurry or self-expanding foam (as well as tracing the exit). I've always wondered why the Israelis didn't flood tunnels in Gaza with a propane/acetylene/oxygen mix and ignite it.
I also wonder if the future of smuggling isn't drones anyway. With the cash that cartels have, they should be able to build good drones that could carry a kilo payload and fly several miles on GPS. They should be able to fly at night, high enough to not be heard, low enough to not show up on radar and maybe even cool enough for their size to not have a heat signature, either. A drone like that could land on a rooftop or other obscure/secure location.
From what I've read, cartels are now manufacturing their own fentanyl, which is 50x more potent than heroin. That makes a 1 kg payload into what would have been 50 kg before. That would make even a $10k drone into an economically viable disposable unit.
I don't doubt East Bloc design heavy machine guns are simple and reliable, but they're still machines, and in the case of Libya, being stored and operated in one of the worst environments for any machine with moving parts and mating surfaces.
And for the last couple of years, used, maintained and stored by irregulars without any specific education in their operation and maintenance. I'm sure even conscripts in Bulgaria were basically mechanical engineers in comparison to their recent Libyan operators.
Basically, they're gonna wear and at best become less reliable and at worst become unusable.
My guess, though, is that as long as any heavy machine gun fires semi-reliably, even if the barrel is shot, it's still a pretty formidable weapon out to a few hundred meters. 12.x mm HMG projectiles are lethal and destructive even at substandard velocity and in a lot of cases volume of fire will make up for what's lost in accuracy, at least at ground targets.
But those particular guns might be if they're that old. Barrels and the moving parts of the system can wear out, rendering them either less than useful or maybe even dangerous to the operator.
It's not like the military is necessarily fielding the *same* .50 Browning machine guns they used circa 1920. Even if they were, it would kind of be like ship of Theseus. The same gun, maybe, but with all new parts.
I'll mostly buy that argument, but one thing that seems weird is how the NY Times did almost no reporting on the topic. The silence was so deafening that the Public Editor or whatever the column is called actually wrote a column on why they hadn't reported much on it.
The closest non-conspiracy angles I could come with for this were:
1) They weren't invited to the journalism party on this "leak" so they could on report on it as the documents were released, and responsible journalism meant a lot of work trying to verify information. This was basically the Public Editor column.
This could also be called "not invented here", a deliberate attempt to downplay a story they weren't part of and had to play catch-up on.
2) It's *kind of* a non-story -- before the Panama Papers, did anyone go to bed at night assured that tin-pot dictators weren't somehow funneling money into overseas bank accounts? I believe Donald Trump is more honest about building a wall Mexico will pay for than I do that dictators aren't siphoning money into personal bank accounts.
I do think it's weird that Putin would funnel money overseas for personal use. Is he planning on retiring to Costa Rica or something? My guess is that Putin is boss and lives in Russia forever, which means he basically has the entire resources of the state at his personal disposal. Why bother moving money overseas at all? When a time comes that Putin isn't boss, he will either live in relative luxury at state expense or he will be taking a dirt nap, at state expense. There is no scenario where Putin lives in the South of France as a expat and has to cover his own caviar and vodka tab.
The paucity of influential Americans on the list I mostly just assign to the fact that influential Americans' wealth is already dollar denominated and doesn't need to be surreptitiously converted from local Monopoly money into dollars, rich Americans already set the tax code to their benefit and are far better off just parking it in whatever Congressionally approved tax sheltered investment they can buy.
There is nothing inherently superior, or inferior, or disadvantaged about being white or black. What *can* make you disadvantaged is your culture and how you look at life.
I think this is so true. My sense is that most black Americans are caught up in a psychology of failure and victimization which does far more damage than any systemic discrimination does these days.
Unfortunately, it's a mass culture/sociological phenomenon that entraps individuals in ways that are almost impossible to overcome without abandoning the culture entirely or at least consciously repudiating it in some conscious way.
What's worse is that politicians encourage it, reinforcing the idea that forces are conspiring to hold back the entire group. Worse than the pandering is the cynical way in which upholding this mindset not only validates it but encourages a patronage and dependency that perpetuates it.
What's really regrettable is that the worst kind of overt racism probably prevented integration of blacks as members of the mainstream, when aspiration to mainstream social values would have meant assimilation. Now we're stuck with a self-defeating rejection of those values, a demand for equality of a culture that paradoxically produces its own inequality.
If she could get so good at math back then, why anyone should be able to do it now, right? We don't need to worry about the so-called education gap or take a bunch of extra steps to help black people overcome so-called obstacles because obviously if she was able to do it then, it should be much easier for even less skilled people to do it now.
I think the money and power angle is where the real trouble is, not the idea of climate change itself is or isn't occurring.
I think the real hard questions boil down to: How much climate change is occurring? How accurately can we predict the changes in climate 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 years in the future? Is there any way of knowing what we could do that would make climate change less disruptive? Who will pay for it or have to make sacrifices for these actions?
This is what the real struggle is about.
You act as if the various GUIs are somehow dramatically different. In fact, if you can use one, you can use them all.
It takes a Microsoft to make a GUI that makes what you used to know how to do obsolete.
There has to be proof of rape, or else it will get thrown out.
This may be *mostly* the way the criminal justice system works now, but if you follow the nonsense that has been happening on college campuses, you might have cause to worry.
Activists are vigorously pushing to have colleges' investigate and punish rape accusations internally, with their own investigations and their own "tribunals". Naturally these all lack any standard of due process rights for the accused, including no standard of proof, no ability to confront accusers, and "verdicts" are rendered in secret by college administrators.
Naturally, activists are asking for this because they want the ability to make one-sided accusations without any evidence, often for "crimes" committed months ago that they only now have recognized as rape. Why the Minneapolis paper today has an article about one such case:
http://www.startribune.com/st-...
"Raped" in May, accusation made to the college in October and a police report filed only in December. Really? What is she expecting? I think she's even quoted as "not realizing" it was rape until the middle of the summer. To me this sounds like reckless behavior coupled with regret.
If colleges get away with extrajudicial criminal proceedings for this, it will only serve to condition the public and ultimately the legislature to reduce standards of evidence for sexual assault to whatever accusation the victim wants to make, whenever she wants to make it.
I honestly don't quite understand what's driving this on campus. My only guess is that among freshmen, there's a culture of extreme promiscuity and heavy drinking and some of these people honestly don't know what they're doing until months later, and that a large part of this is regret. I don't doubt many of these women have been treated poorly, but I question how many of them meet any but a women's studies definition of sexual assault.
They don't have a sense of humor. It'd get suddenly hard to get on an airplane.
I was just in DC a couple of weeks ago as a tourist and the level of *visible* security is high. I can only surmise this means that the level of paranoia is higher yet, and that's kind of scary in and of itself.
(The FBI building has a bunch of squad cars labeled "FBI Police" -- I never realized the FBI had their own police force. I wasn't sure if it was a redundancy for people who wouldn't know that a squad car labeled FBI was a law enforcement vehicle, or if, indeed, the FBI has its own uniformed security force...)
Be careful, or they will outlaw mathematics.
What I don't understand is why they didn't provide an updated console mode/app/window with PowerShell and why they just threw it into the same dumb console that they had been throwing cmd.exe into.
I'm also curious why they didn't borrow more heavily from Unix. There are some things in PowerShell that are really awkward to do that are trivial in a Unix shell.
I'm sure there's some valid reasons but a lot of it simply seems like not invented here syndrome. I'm really annoyed with the default console window being so brain damaged, now I have to put ConEmu on everything if I want reasonable interaction with the console window.
Why can't we have nice things?
I wonder how often black/grey/white hats have mailed compromised devices to offices.
If you started mailing compromised 5 port switches or something to random offices, especially branch offices, I would bet that lots of them would end up getting plugged in and used.
I won't disagree with your rant against Republicans, because I generally agree with it. But at the same time I didn't see you argue that "the left" doesn't actually use "racism" as a stick to suppress arguments.
Immigration is a great example -- I think there's lots of reasons to argue for less immigration, but if you do argue this point one of the first criticisms will be that it's not actually about immigration but racism against Latinos.
Even more interesting is the claim of racism when it comes to stricter border controls for Muslims, especially considering Islam isn't a race.
Criminal behavior? Discussing that will earn you a racist tag in a second.
What's been interesting has been following some of the "campus debate" on Israel. "The left" has been agitating against support for Israel (say, divesting from Israeli companies or not inviting Israeli speakers [a different kind of dialog suppression]). A fair number of Jews have played the anti-Semitism card, and of course those critical of Israel have howled in protest -- like it's somehow *unfair* to play an accusation of bias trump card and have the substance of their arguments discredited as mere hatred.
I've laughed when I've read some of this, wondering how many refuting the accusations of anti-semitism have leveled the charge of racism to end a debate.
I wonder if the high level of technological obsolescence (whether planned or just practical) makes the notion of "lifetime support" kind of wink-and-a-nod sort of thing where most people think that lifetime only matters for the next three years and that nobody really expects support for the next 10 years.
If technology lasted as long as my washer-dryer, I might take lifetime more seriously.
(Yes, you in the back taking notes on a Palm Pilot, you are an outlier.)
Doesn't this create a moral hazard, where coders or QA testers have a perverse incentive to allow bad code to get established and then blow the whistle?
I think sometimes "bad projects" can take on a life of their own if they're allowed to get past some initial starting point. It reaches some critical mass where shared complicity, scale and external expectations cause it to seem unfixable without unjust blame, excessive work or external consequences.
It some ways, it's like the citizens of a nation electing douchebags for decades and then complaining about government douchebaggery and wanting a prize for highlighting a problem.
I'll bet they have something like data going back to the 1960s when you consider that "Carousel of Progress" dates to the 1964 World's Fair and the large number of "audio animatronics" in other attractions.
IMHO, "Carousel.." does a pretty good job with realism vs. unrealism considering how old it is, and they seemed to incrementally increase realism without really adding much of an uncanny effect with MK's "Hall of Presidents" and even more with the American pavilion at Epcot.
In some cases, though, they have the benefit of audience distance for their animatronics, uncanny cues may be lost beyond some distance.
I thought the uncanny valley was a broad enough concept that it could be applied to anything that tried for a sense of realism but had a hard-to-express unrealism that made it creepy.
Like some mannequins seem to have it, which would seem to apply to things like the Real Doll in particular since it tries for a close realism. I think I've even read it applied to something like a person with an amputated digit or some other physical change.
Isn't the uncanny valley part of what makes horror films about dolls or ventriloquist dummies work? Their apparent realism subverted by an artificiality? A child's doll dressed in realistic clothes and with realistic hair but the blank expression despite realistic features?
I would imagine demonstrating it scientifically would be hard to do because it's so subjective. Maybe if you showed people a range of images and had them judge how realistic they looked and then applied some objective measure of realism to the images you might find a correlation, but there would be a lot of individual variation.
We understand 100% of what it's doing
Can you explain why it grinds a machine to a halt when it does a simple definition update? Why I can run the free Malwarebytes on a machine with Kaspersky on it and still find malware?
IMHO it's an OK product, probably no worse than anything else, but too often I think it tries too hard to be a management product instead of a security product, but doing both sometimes haphazardly.
The Lincoln and the Jefferson are symbols, though, and I do think that a blast inside either of them would do considerable damage. Lincoln is enclosed on three sides, and the statute itself is marble, which would likely break. Jefferson is more open but feels slightly smaller, but it still contained enough that a blast inside it would likely harm the structure. In either case, I would expect a certain amount of planning designed to actually do structural damage.
The symbolism is important -- ISIS ripped up Roman ruins at Palmyra, probably because the ruins represented "Western Imperialism" and an example of "Islamic" peoples subjugated by European rulers (yes, I know the logic is tortured and in many cases wrong, since Islam wasn't even a religion during the Roman colonization of Syria).
The monuments in DC are symbols in many ways of American exceptionalism and would have a huge symbolic value in being damaged, much more so than a museum. Most of the Smithsonian museums are so vast that you couldn't carry enough explosives in on foot to do more than very localized damage.