Why follow Microsoft's arbitrary release cycle if you don't have to?
The software they are using is just as functional now as the day it was installed (more so if you count bugfixes installed since) and the system integrations, testing and validation they have done are not inexpensive to repeat with a new operating system because Microsoft stopped supporting something, not because they had to -- but because they need to, to keep revenue flowing.
It's not hard to imagine complex installation scenarios where the cost/benefit of paying for extended security updates is better than replacing the OS, re-engineering third party solutions, fixing problems and so on.
I think your argument is more realistic for prosumers, small business, etc, where the main reintegration task is moving user profiles or replacing an old laser printer because drivers aren't provided for a new OS. Tracking MS release cycles in these environments ends up being easier to do, even if the rationale isn't that the users have/want/need new "features" but that the vendor yanks support after a period of time, even if the system still works as expected.
Smaller carry-ons would reduce their utility for many people, resulting in more mandatory checked back and more mandatory checked bag fees. The flight attendants would like it because there would be less boarding chaos with morons who fuck up the overhead bins. And the luggage industry would have a field day.
Really, if you stop and think about this it's a miracle they're not backing it, because if they did everybody but the consumer makes money off the deal.
Stop and think about that for a second. A tax refund implies they are taxing you beyond what you owe, up front, and keeping the money as long as possible. Depending on your filing timing, some of that money could have been held by the government for nearly 18 months before you get money the government shouldn't have taken back.
And they don't just "give it back" -- YOU have to follow their rules and their forms and justify to them that you deserve to get the money back.
The system is really "we'll take this money from you now, a year later you can use our forms and tables to figure out if we've taken too much, and then we'll give it back, based on our criteria".
You can't use the IRS tax refunds as a sign of the gentle benevolence of the government.
Dude, you are clueless on multiple levels. First, "spoofing" caller ID is normal - the ability to tell the phone company (this is a *high* level overview) what your number is when making outbound calls when using a non-POTS line. Due to the way the phone network works this can't easily be changed. And companies have done this for decades, it's not something new. Big multi-line companies typically want outbound calls to come from a single switchboard number.
I think there's two kinds of "spoofing" -- legitimate spoofing, where you own the DID number that you send out outbound trunks (eg, main phone number, etc) and bullshit spoofing, where at best you're obfuscating the source of your calls (eg, some hired call center that sends their client's DID info as caller ID) or worse, deliberately sending false or nonsense caller ID information to hide and obscure your call origin.
Telecoms providers could filter client outbound trunks and drop calls with bogus calling party information, where bogus is defined as something like "you don't control that DID and have no written permission to use it". The FCC could require telecoms providers to do this very thing.
I'm sure it would be messy and complicated to get setup, but so many calls are handled by the major carriers (ATT, Verizon, CenturyLink, etc) that you have a natural choke point that limits the ability of rogue providers to hand off calls.
I think Putin is capable of being photographed climbing onto a T-72 flying the Russian flag, surrounded by Russian soldiers while standing in front of the sign that says "Welcome to Donetsk, Ukraine! Population 944,000" while explaining to a NY Times correspondent that no Russian troops are in Ukraine.
I think it's only the pilots of big planes at major carriers that make the giant salaries. I knew a guy flying for one of the turboprop "puddlejumper" affiliates of a major carrier who was making like $19k a year.
It seems kind of ironic to me that pilots who arguably have to do more hands-on aviation in smaller planes (and often flying into smaller airports) get paid less than pilots who fly highly automated planes into major airports, even if the larger planes carry more people.
Or can it be less-than-sentient and borrow its sentience in the form of the will, motivation and biases of its creators, yet still be some kind of existential risk?
When I think about the global financial marketplace, I think of a relatively small number of people at the too-big-to-fail institutions making decisions that rely on information that comes from market analysis and modeling systems, and in some cases this information being fed back into automated trading systems. The machines aren't self aware, but they are imbued with the biases and motivations of those that designed them and set their parameters.
And since many of the major players have these systems and they act on largely overlapping data (market prices, major positions held by known investors, risk models with overlapping criteria), in some respects these independent systems kind of form a larger system since each system is capable of influencing the others' by the guidance they provide which influences the actions of the humans making major decisions and the automated trading systems themselves.
I sometimes wonder if maybe phenomena like wealth inequality isn't just capitalism's inevitable outcome, but perhaps the inbuilt motivation of these financial systems represented in the kinds of financial goals they've been programmed with.
On even simpler levels, what about a building's management system that's allowed to set the building temperature on its own based on energy prices and doesn't let the occupants ever determine the temperature? Sure, the risk is low (too cold or too hot), but it's the kind of dumb AI control system that we trust to make the "right" decision but whose motivation ("reduce energy costs") and lack of human control ("no thermostat adjustment") that exposes a kind of risk from an AI even though it's not HAL9000-sentient.
Do they actually ask people about this stuff or is the result of background checks?
I would think the right answer for someone working on anything sensitive would be "Sure, I like to smoke pot, I like porn and kinky sex, and I don't give a shit who knows." The person who isn't hiding anything can't be blackmailed.
But I suppose many of these may be family problems -- my wife is a drunk and when she's on a bender I've caught her tag-teaming the Mexican lawn crew, or my son goes down to the park and sniffs bike seats. Or pathological behavior, like the married father of 4 who likes to hit cruising spots to blow other men.
Thank you for your polite and thoughtful responses, even though I'm sure my ideas may have been objectionable to you. I have found it thought provoking even if I can't say how it may change my thinking substantively.
Unfortunately I think that whatever is happening under the rubric of "transgender" has to be made as understandable and logically consistent as possible. Partly because people are wanting medical benefits and quite expensive medical benefits at that for therapy related to their transgender status. I think there needs to be some objective standards which need to be met to justify these therapies. I can't just walk into a doctor's office and make unsubstantiated claims about a condition and expect to walk out with painkillers, antibiotics, or most other medicines. And a lot of the therapies associated with gender reassignment have not insignificant risks of side effects, too.
And then there's the question of legal rights. We have a metric shit ton of laws and rules regarding gender. I think the transgender status concepts need to be logically understandable and communicable for the legal system to work with it. I don't think a legal standard that says "well, if a person has this idea about their gender, even if it makes no logical sense" can be made workable.
I don't expect the deep emotions transgender people experience to necessarily be explainable to anyone but themselves, but I think there's a reasonable expectation that at some level their condition has to be understandable to someone other than themselves to not be seen as some kind of a pathology.
And here I thought there would be a fire sale on storage systems and racks of CPU because they were literally powering it off and getting rid of the equipment.
Whatever the economic value of JIT logistics and long-distance supply chains, it seems pretty clear that these dramatically increase the risk of economic disruption, especially in the food supply.
Less economically efficient supply chains with more stockpiling, warehousing and local sourcing seems much more durable.
Excerpt: Numerous studies covering 140 years have shown that married persons tend to live longer than their unmarried counterparts.
I stand by my argument. I don't dispute my argument that "marriage" in and of itself isn't the determinant of longevity, but produced numerous lifestyle improvements that aided longevity and some of those lifestyle improvements were also a side effect of child bearing and rearing.
I think over the time period (and most of recorded history), marriage was an extremely practical relationship that focused heavily on specialization and division of labor, with women managing the household and men focusing on heavy agriculture and productive economic activity. Marriage likely enabled an improved diet and better household living conditions (eg, cleanliness). Men unburdened from domestic self-care earned were more economically productive and increased income has all kinds of health benefits, from better food, access to medicine, less squalor, and so on.
Childbearing and child rearing tends to make people more risk averse -- the demands of providing for children reduce the time available for engaging more risky behavior and probably some kind of biological imperative to invest time and energy into the lives of children.
There may even be a secondary effect from children-as-labor in societies with a high level of agrarianism. Large families have more available labor, and increasing the pool of labor tends to make agricultural output higher as well as enabling more diverse agriculture which produces a better and more reliable food supply.
Marriage may have some intrinsic psychological benefits which contributes to longer lifespans, but it's a stretch to think that marriage alone is the factor without examining the lifestyle improvements that follow from historical marriage relationships. Especially if you contrast the risks that non-married men may have taken -- soldier, explorer, fur hunter, long-distance ship crews, etc It would also be interesting to compare the lifespans of non-married women to married women and see if childbearing before modern medical practice didn't actually decrease lifespans to some degree, although I have also read that in societies with high birth rates, incidence of gynecological cancers is reduced and there are theories that reducing the number of menstrual cycles reduces the risk of gynecological cancers.
I'd argue those statistical outcomes are extremely broad-based lifestyle outcomes, not specifically tied to "marriage" per se and I would also bet a lot of those lifestyle outcomes grow out of child bearing, not just child rearing.
I think the entire homoesexual marriage "debate" is a fraud.
For all intents and purposes, "marriage" is merely a state-sponsored package of legal rights and obligations. Why shouldn't homoesexuals get married? But then again, I feel the same way about plural marriages. If 3+ people want to be married, who says they shouldn't?
That being said, I've always been surprised that homoesexuals WANT to get married. I had always figured that the last thing they would want to do is buy into the patriarchal and religiously grounded structure of marriage. Sure, they can live their marriage any way they choose but the legal package they buy into is a bit of a Pandora's box and I think there's a lot more baggage with "being married" than they assume. Some smart lawyers out there are going to get filthy rich in about 5 years when they're able to corner the market on homoesexual divorce.
I'm also inclined to think that homoesexuals sort of want to have it both ways (no pun intended). I think on one hand they want to be "just like everyone else" but at the same time want to posit themselves as being "different" in ways other than how and with whom they use their genitalia to achieve orgasm. Perhaps older homoesexuals have some kind hard-earned wisdom that comes from living life on the margins, but then again, so does a wino. I can't escape this notion that homoesexuals have sold (and many non-homoesexuals have bought into) an idea that there's something uniquely different about being homoesexual other than just their sexuality and that it's somehow special, too. Bullshit. Ideas are ideas, their merits should be judged on their merits, not given any special consideration because they come from someone with a specific sexual inkling.
I'm less sold on the newest iteration of this, transgenderism. I think there's a significant but minority percentage of people broadly labeled as "transgender" who really are transgender, actual neurobiological condition. I think a much larger percentage are just people with marginalized sexual proclivities hopping on the bandwagon, hoping that they, too, will gain the special aura that homoesexuals have largely obtained in the non-troglodyte part of the population. I also think that a small but not totally insignificant portion of the people claiming transgender status aren't, whether it's full blown mental illness or just a package of neuroses.
I also think there's a lot of conceptual problems to transgenderism. I'm thoroughly confused by the notion of, say, lesbians who glom onto transgenderism as the rationale for why they want to dress, look and act like men. Doesn't that kind of make you a heterosexual? There was even a NY Times article about some women's college having an existential crisis about a lesbian student going through gender reassignment asking if he/she should still be allowed at an all-women's college. I don't quite get the logic of how you can be woman, who's a man, but who wants to identify as a lesbian.
It's this kind of weird non-logic that makes me think these people really aren't "transgender" in the sense of having some kind of other-gender neurological affiliation, but are instead people that suffer from some kind of mental illness. "I'm a woman that likes women but I want to become a man who identifies as a woman who likes women" -- whys should I take that any more seriously than the guy who claims he's Napoleon?
Believe in god(s), demon(s), flying saucers, Cthulhu, animal spirits, whatever the fuck you want. I really don't care....until you want to shape the lives of others with rules or demands originated from your beliefs, at that point, kindly shut the fuck up and go back to whatever hole you crawled out of.
And I'm universally bigoted in this regard. Christian wants prayer or creationism in school? Fuck you. Muslim wants special meals served or no drawings of Mohammed? Fuck you. Buddhist doesn't want me to squash bugs in my house? Fuck you. Orthodox Jew won't sit next to a woman on a public airplane? Fuck you.
If your beliefs require anyone else to change their behavior in public, your beliefs are broken.
I will (sort of) agree that some groups (and not just the left) likes to use certain buzzwords to shutdown debate. Not 100% in agreement with some aspect of Israeli government policy? No, you're not an anti-semite.
Maybe the biggest failure of the IPv4 design was the integration of network prefixes with node addresses instead of a completely separate field for network prefixes.
IPv4 addressing seems like a certain kind of genius when you look at it, but if you look at some of the things that were missing, changed or bolted on after the fact, I'm less convinced.
Remember "classful addressing"? I can still remember when there were OS TCP/IP stacks that wouldn't support CIDR or VLSM.
It's hard to believe BOOTP was ever a good idea and I can remember a brief era pre-DHCP where it was that or pure static assignments, and while the 169 autoconf mostly works with really new operating systems, it's still pretty sketchy.
Which is while I still occasionally pine for the addressing scheme used by IPX/SPX. 32 bits of dedicated network space, node addresses made up of network plus MAC address which made for basically built-in node assignment. The rest of IPX/SPX was kind of mess, but had IP borrowed just the addressing scheme we wouldn't be talking about IPv6 at all, or if we did, we'd be talking about it as features being added into the stack, not a wholesale replacement or layered on top.
The administration savings would have been huge, too. Since a network:mac addressing scheme can scale to the functional limit of switched Ethernet, the zillions of man hours and dollars spent on expanding LANs that grew to outstrip the/24 they were first assigned would have been avoided completely.
It would also have meant a much smaller demand for "public" network prefixes since a single prefix could handle a nearly unlimited number of fully qualified network addresses. An ISP handing out/30s for clients who want a single static IP can get a maximum of 63 usable public addresses out of 8 bits of an IPv4 address, wasting 75% of the address space. That same amount of space would handle 255 public addresses with a network:mac scheme.
And NAT probably wouldn't even be a thing, saving untold hours of clusterfuckery merging networks with overlapping private address space or dealing with IPSec tunnels between locations sharing the same address space.
There was a moment (still avaialble if you want it) where the challenge was to see how close you could get to 100 IBU but it wasn't always true, either. Brooklyn Brewery's flagship is an amber Lager, and a lot of the local places here are doing great things with Pilsners, Lagers, Kolsch, several quite good Saisons, Blonde Ales, Helles. Indeed Brewing has a fabulous Imperial Lager. The list is endless and I don't even pay attention to the real dark beers like Stouts.
I think the key thing (and maybe it's local to Minnesota, but I don't think so) is that there's SO MUCH variety and most of it is really, really good. I could buy nearly 30 varieties of beer in cans and bottles brewed in the citiy limits. Not including seasonals or special releases and also not including a half-dozen or more places that are taproom/growler only, including one that has 5 different ciders.
I'm not kidding, I'd weigh 400 pounds and be a raging alcoholic if I even TRIED to keep up with just the good beer brewed in Minneapolis proper that was available retail. I'd be DEAD if I added in the craft breweries outstate. I'd be dead 3 times over if I included a fraction of the outstate stuff, and that's without even bothering with more generic IPAs.
But even some of the hoppy stuff can be good, especially so when it doesn't try to be a boiler plate IPA.
America used to be the home of mass-produced watery beer, but I don't know about that anymore.
There are so many good beers brewed at American small brewers that it's hard to imagine. There are nearly a dozen microbreweries (nearly all of them canning & bottling for retail sales) within the city limits of Minneapolis alone, each with 3-4 regular production brews.
The shelf space at two of the better stores around here is like 50% small brewery, 30% imports and the remaining 20% pretty much everything else, including all the major brands. It's astonishing how fast the beer market has changed. There are even a few places that have opened up that sell nothing but microbrews with an inventory bigger than a lot of other entire liquor stores.
And all of this is compounded by the small brewers who aren't distributing across state lines. Half the great beer we don't even get access to because its stranded by ridiculous national tax rules.
You might argue that their *Italianess* is what led to their downfall. The corruption, the killings for political advantage, the decadent wealth, there are times where I get the distinct impression that Rome was more or less the management style of the Sopranos done in togas and sandels.
While I find myself fascinated with the scale and sophistication of the Roman civilization and the reach of its empire, it often strikes me that it never quite stabilized. Maybe there was a period of stability in the Republic after the the Punic Wars but from about the time of Marius, through the Social Wars, the Serville Rebellion until the reign of Augustus there was a constant struggle between the aristocracy and the "new men" internally and constant warfare on its borders, sometimes victorious but often quite tenuous.
Anyway, I have not read other articles about him, so maybe he does deserve his apparently terrible reputation.
I am somewhat surprised that it has fallen to me to defend a 1%'er. This is not exactly my usual modus operandi.
My usual gut instinct is to think that many Wall St. guys are just greedy assholes, rigging the system for more profit. But quite often once you think about the economics of what some of them have done, it's not always quite that simple. Many of them actually see the broken basic economics on an institutional level and actually end up exploiting nothing other than the institutional greed and myopia of Wall Street.
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Why follow Microsoft's arbitrary release cycle if you don't have to?
The software they are using is just as functional now as the day it was installed (more so if you count bugfixes installed since) and the system integrations, testing and validation they have done are not inexpensive to repeat with a new operating system because Microsoft stopped supporting something, not because they had to -- but because they need to, to keep revenue flowing.
It's not hard to imagine complex installation scenarios where the cost/benefit of paying for extended security updates is better than replacing the OS, re-engineering third party solutions, fixing problems and so on.
I think your argument is more realistic for prosumers, small business, etc, where the main reintegration task is moving user profiles or replacing an old laser printer because drivers aren't provided for a new OS. Tracking MS release cycles in these environments ends up being easier to do, even if the rationale isn't that the users have/want/need new "features" but that the vendor yanks support after a period of time, even if the system still works as expected.
Smaller carry-ons would reduce their utility for many people, resulting in more mandatory checked back and more mandatory checked bag fees. The flight attendants would like it because there would be less boarding chaos with morons who fuck up the overhead bins. And the luggage industry would have a field day.
Really, if you stop and think about this it's a miracle they're not backing it, because if they did everybody but the consumer makes money off the deal.
Stop and think about that for a second. A tax refund implies they are taxing you beyond what you owe, up front, and keeping the money as long as possible. Depending on your filing timing, some of that money could have been held by the government for nearly 18 months before you get money the government shouldn't have taken back.
And they don't just "give it back" -- YOU have to follow their rules and their forms and justify to them that you deserve to get the money back.
The system is really "we'll take this money from you now, a year later you can use our forms and tables to figure out if we've taken too much, and then we'll give it back, based on our criteria".
You can't use the IRS tax refunds as a sign of the gentle benevolence of the government.
Dude, you are clueless on multiple levels. First, "spoofing" caller ID is normal - the ability to tell the phone company (this is a *high* level overview) what your number is when making outbound calls when using a non-POTS line. Due to the way the phone network works this can't easily be changed. And companies have done this for decades, it's not something new. Big multi-line companies typically want outbound calls to come from a single switchboard number.
I think there's two kinds of "spoofing" -- legitimate spoofing, where you own the DID number that you send out outbound trunks (eg, main phone number, etc) and bullshit spoofing, where at best you're obfuscating the source of your calls (eg, some hired call center that sends their client's DID info as caller ID) or worse, deliberately sending false or nonsense caller ID information to hide and obscure your call origin.
Telecoms providers could filter client outbound trunks and drop calls with bogus calling party information, where bogus is defined as something like "you don't control that DID and have no written permission to use it". The FCC could require telecoms providers to do this very thing.
I'm sure it would be messy and complicated to get setup, but so many calls are handled by the major carriers (ATT, Verizon, CenturyLink, etc) that you have a natural choke point that limits the ability of rogue providers to hand off calls.
I think he should go to Vegas and play poker. My guess is he'd probably end up winning enough to offset the effect of sanctions.
I think Putin is capable of being photographed climbing onto a T-72 flying the Russian flag, surrounded by Russian soldiers while standing in front of the sign that says "Welcome to Donetsk, Ukraine! Population 944,000" while explaining to a NY Times correspondent that no Russian troops are in Ukraine.
And do it all with a straight face.
I think it's only the pilots of big planes at major carriers that make the giant salaries. I knew a guy flying for one of the turboprop "puddlejumper" affiliates of a major carrier who was making like $19k a year.
It seems kind of ironic to me that pilots who arguably have to do more hands-on aviation in smaller planes (and often flying into smaller airports) get paid less than pilots who fly highly automated planes into major airports, even if the larger planes carry more people.
Or can it be less-than-sentient and borrow its sentience in the form of the will, motivation and biases of its creators, yet still be some kind of existential risk?
When I think about the global financial marketplace, I think of a relatively small number of people at the too-big-to-fail institutions making decisions that rely on information that comes from market analysis and modeling systems, and in some cases this information being fed back into automated trading systems. The machines aren't self aware, but they are imbued with the biases and motivations of those that designed them and set their parameters.
And since many of the major players have these systems and they act on largely overlapping data (market prices, major positions held by known investors, risk models with overlapping criteria), in some respects these independent systems kind of form a larger system since each system is capable of influencing the others' by the guidance they provide which influences the actions of the humans making major decisions and the automated trading systems themselves.
I sometimes wonder if maybe phenomena like wealth inequality isn't just capitalism's inevitable outcome, but perhaps the inbuilt motivation of these financial systems represented in the kinds of financial goals they've been programmed with.
On even simpler levels, what about a building's management system that's allowed to set the building temperature on its own based on energy prices and doesn't let the occupants ever determine the temperature? Sure, the risk is low (too cold or too hot), but it's the kind of dumb AI control system that we trust to make the "right" decision but whose motivation ("reduce energy costs") and lack of human control ("no thermostat adjustment") that exposes a kind of risk from an AI even though it's not HAL9000-sentient.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08...
I guess it was a power substation, not a fiber optic link, but it was kind of in the same area.
I want her as a real doll, not a wax figure.
Do they actually ask people about this stuff or is the result of background checks?
I would think the right answer for someone working on anything sensitive would be "Sure, I like to smoke pot, I like porn and kinky sex, and I don't give a shit who knows." The person who isn't hiding anything can't be blackmailed.
But I suppose many of these may be family problems -- my wife is a drunk and when she's on a bender I've caught her tag-teaming the Mexican lawn crew, or my son goes down to the park and sniffs bike seats. Or pathological behavior, like the married father of 4 who likes to hit cruising spots to blow other men.
You mean like the mass market drug dealing done by Anheuser Busch, Starbucks, and Pfizer?
Even under the old Silk Road it seemed a lot less unpleasant than some of the inner city liquor stores I've been to.
Thank you for your polite and thoughtful responses, even though I'm sure my ideas may have been objectionable to you. I have found it thought provoking even if I can't say how it may change my thinking substantively.
Unfortunately I think that whatever is happening under the rubric of "transgender" has to be made as understandable and logically consistent as possible. Partly because people are wanting medical benefits and quite expensive medical benefits at that for therapy related to their transgender status. I think there needs to be some objective standards which need to be met to justify these therapies. I can't just walk into a doctor's office and make unsubstantiated claims about a condition and expect to walk out with painkillers, antibiotics, or most other medicines. And a lot of the therapies associated with gender reassignment have not insignificant risks of side effects, too.
And then there's the question of legal rights. We have a metric shit ton of laws and rules regarding gender. I think the transgender status concepts need to be logically understandable and communicable for the legal system to work with it. I don't think a legal standard that says "well, if a person has this idea about their gender, even if it makes no logical sense" can be made workable.
I don't expect the deep emotions transgender people experience to necessarily be explainable to anyone but themselves, but I think there's a reasonable expectation that at some level their condition has to be understandable to someone other than themselves to not be seen as some kind of a pathology.
And here I thought there would be a fire sale on storage systems and racks of CPU because they were literally powering it off and getting rid of the equipment.
Whatever the economic value of JIT logistics and long-distance supply chains, it seems pretty clear that these dramatically increase the risk of economic disruption, especially in the food supply.
Less economically efficient supply chains with more stockpiling, warehousing and local sourcing seems much more durable.
Excerpt: Numerous studies covering 140 years have shown that married persons tend to live longer than their unmarried counterparts.
I stand by my argument. I don't dispute my argument that "marriage" in and of itself isn't the determinant of longevity, but produced numerous lifestyle improvements that aided longevity and some of those lifestyle improvements were also a side effect of child bearing and rearing.
I think over the time period (and most of recorded history), marriage was an extremely practical relationship that focused heavily on specialization and division of labor, with women managing the household and men focusing on heavy agriculture and productive economic activity. Marriage likely enabled an improved diet and better household living conditions (eg, cleanliness). Men unburdened from domestic self-care earned were more economically productive and increased income has all kinds of health benefits, from better food, access to medicine, less squalor, and so on.
Childbearing and child rearing tends to make people more risk averse -- the demands of providing for children reduce the time available for engaging more risky behavior and probably some kind of biological imperative to invest time and energy into the lives of children.
There may even be a secondary effect from children-as-labor in societies with a high level of agrarianism. Large families have more available labor, and increasing the pool of labor tends to make agricultural output higher as well as enabling more diverse agriculture which produces a better and more reliable food supply.
Marriage may have some intrinsic psychological benefits which contributes to longer lifespans, but it's a stretch to think that marriage alone is the factor without examining the lifestyle improvements that follow from historical marriage relationships. Especially if you contrast the risks that non-married men may have taken -- soldier, explorer, fur hunter, long-distance ship crews, etc It would also be interesting to compare the lifespans of non-married women to married women and see if childbearing before modern medical practice didn't actually decrease lifespans to some degree, although I have also read that in societies with high birth rates, incidence of gynecological cancers is reduced and there are theories that reducing the number of menstrual cycles reduces the risk of gynecological cancers.
I'd argue those statistical outcomes are extremely broad-based lifestyle outcomes, not specifically tied to "marriage" per se and I would also bet a lot of those lifestyle outcomes grow out of child bearing, not just child rearing.
I think the entire homoesexual marriage "debate" is a fraud.
For all intents and purposes, "marriage" is merely a state-sponsored package of legal rights and obligations. Why shouldn't homoesexuals get married? But then again, I feel the same way about plural marriages. If 3+ people want to be married, who says they shouldn't?
That being said, I've always been surprised that homoesexuals WANT to get married. I had always figured that the last thing they would want to do is buy into the patriarchal and religiously grounded structure of marriage. Sure, they can live their marriage any way they choose but the legal package they buy into is a bit of a Pandora's box and I think there's a lot more baggage with "being married" than they assume. Some smart lawyers out there are going to get filthy rich in about 5 years when they're able to corner the market on homoesexual divorce.
I'm also inclined to think that homoesexuals sort of want to have it both ways (no pun intended). I think on one hand they want to be "just like everyone else" but at the same time want to posit themselves as being "different" in ways other than how and with whom they use their genitalia to achieve orgasm. Perhaps older homoesexuals have some kind hard-earned wisdom that comes from living life on the margins, but then again, so does a wino. I can't escape this notion that homoesexuals have sold (and many non-homoesexuals have bought into) an idea that there's something uniquely different about being homoesexual other than just their sexuality and that it's somehow special, too. Bullshit. Ideas are ideas, their merits should be judged on their merits, not given any special consideration because they come from someone with a specific sexual inkling.
I'm less sold on the newest iteration of this, transgenderism. I think there's a significant but minority percentage of people broadly labeled as "transgender" who really are transgender, actual neurobiological condition. I think a much larger percentage are just people with marginalized sexual proclivities hopping on the bandwagon, hoping that they, too, will gain the special aura that homoesexuals have largely obtained in the non-troglodyte part of the population. I also think that a small but not totally insignificant portion of the people claiming transgender status aren't, whether it's full blown mental illness or just a package of neuroses.
I also think there's a lot of conceptual problems to transgenderism. I'm thoroughly confused by the notion of, say, lesbians who glom onto transgenderism as the rationale for why they want to dress, look and act like men. Doesn't that kind of make you a heterosexual? There was even a NY Times article about some women's college having an existential crisis about a lesbian student going through gender reassignment asking if he/she should still be allowed at an all-women's college. I don't quite get the logic of how you can be woman, who's a man, but who wants to identify as a lesbian.
It's this kind of weird non-logic that makes me think these people really aren't "transgender" in the sense of having some kind of other-gender neurological affiliation, but are instead people that suffer from some kind of mental illness. "I'm a woman that likes women but I want to become a man who identifies as a woman who likes women" -- whys should I take that any more seriously than the guy who claims he's Napoleon?
Believe in god(s), demon(s), flying saucers, Cthulhu, animal spirits, whatever the fuck you want. I really don't care. ...until you want to shape the lives of others with rules or demands originated from your beliefs, at that point, kindly shut the fuck up and go back to whatever hole you crawled out of.
And I'm universally bigoted in this regard. Christian wants prayer or creationism in school? Fuck you. Muslim wants special meals served or no drawings of Mohammed? Fuck you. Buddhist doesn't want me to squash bugs in my house? Fuck you. Orthodox Jew won't sit next to a woman on a public airplane? Fuck you.
If your beliefs require anyone else to change their behavior in public, your beliefs are broken.
I will (sort of) agree that some groups (and not just the left) likes to use certain buzzwords to shutdown debate. Not 100% in agreement with some aspect of Israeli government policy? No, you're not an anti-semite.
Maybe the biggest failure of the IPv4 design was the integration of network prefixes with node addresses instead of a completely separate field for network prefixes.
IPv4 addressing seems like a certain kind of genius when you look at it, but if you look at some of the things that were missing, changed or bolted on after the fact, I'm less convinced.
Remember "classful addressing"? I can still remember when there were OS TCP/IP stacks that wouldn't support CIDR or VLSM.
It's hard to believe BOOTP was ever a good idea and I can remember a brief era pre-DHCP where it was that or pure static assignments, and while the 169 autoconf mostly works with really new operating systems, it's still pretty sketchy.
Which is while I still occasionally pine for the addressing scheme used by IPX/SPX. 32 bits of dedicated network space, node addresses made up of network plus MAC address which made for basically built-in node assignment. The rest of IPX/SPX was kind of mess, but had IP borrowed just the addressing scheme we wouldn't be talking about IPv6 at all, or if we did, we'd be talking about it as features being added into the stack, not a wholesale replacement or layered on top.
The administration savings would have been huge, too. Since a network:mac addressing scheme can scale to the functional limit of switched Ethernet, the zillions of man hours and dollars spent on expanding LANs that grew to outstrip the /24 they were first assigned would have been avoided completely.
It would also have meant a much smaller demand for "public" network prefixes since a single prefix could handle a nearly unlimited number of fully qualified network addresses. An ISP handing out /30s for clients who want a single static IP can get a maximum of 63 usable public addresses out of 8 bits of an IPv4 address, wasting 75% of the address space. That same amount of space would handle 255 public addresses with a network:mac scheme.
And NAT probably wouldn't even be a thing, saving untold hours of clusterfuckery merging networks with overlapping private address space or dealing with IPSec tunnels between locations sharing the same address space.
There was a moment (still avaialble if you want it) where the challenge was to see how close you could get to 100 IBU but it wasn't always true, either. Brooklyn Brewery's flagship is an amber Lager, and a lot of the local places here are doing great things with Pilsners, Lagers, Kolsch, several quite good Saisons, Blonde Ales, Helles. Indeed Brewing has a fabulous Imperial Lager. The list is endless and I don't even pay attention to the real dark beers like Stouts.
I think the key thing (and maybe it's local to Minnesota, but I don't think so) is that there's SO MUCH variety and most of it is really, really good. I could buy nearly 30 varieties of beer in cans and bottles brewed in the citiy limits. Not including seasonals or special releases and also not including a half-dozen or more places that are taproom/growler only, including one that has 5 different ciders.
I'm not kidding, I'd weigh 400 pounds and be a raging alcoholic if I even TRIED to keep up with just the good beer brewed in Minneapolis proper that was available retail. I'd be DEAD if I added in the craft breweries outstate. I'd be dead 3 times over if I included a fraction of the outstate stuff, and that's without even bothering with more generic IPAs.
But even some of the hoppy stuff can be good, especially so when it doesn't try to be a boiler plate IPA.
America used to be the home of mass-produced watery beer, but I don't know about that anymore.
There are so many good beers brewed at American small brewers that it's hard to imagine. There are nearly a dozen microbreweries (nearly all of them canning & bottling for retail sales) within the city limits of Minneapolis alone, each with 3-4 regular production brews.
The shelf space at two of the better stores around here is like 50% small brewery, 30% imports and the remaining 20% pretty much everything else, including all the major brands. It's astonishing how fast the beer market has changed. There are even a few places that have opened up that sell nothing but microbrews with an inventory bigger than a lot of other entire liquor stores.
And all of this is compounded by the small brewers who aren't distributing across state lines. Half the great beer we don't even get access to because its stranded by ridiculous national tax rules.
Ha!
You might argue that their *Italianess* is what led to their downfall. The corruption, the killings for political advantage, the decadent wealth, there are times where I get the distinct impression that Rome was more or less the management style of the Sopranos done in togas and sandels.
While I find myself fascinated with the scale and sophistication of the Roman civilization and the reach of its empire, it often strikes me that it never quite stabilized. Maybe there was a period of stability in the Republic after the the Punic Wars but from about the time of Marius, through the Social Wars, the Serville Rebellion until the reign of Augustus there was a constant struggle between the aristocracy and the "new men" internally and constant warfare on its borders, sometimes victorious but often quite tenuous.
Anyway, I have not read other articles about him, so maybe he does deserve his apparently terrible reputation.
I am somewhat surprised that it has fallen to me to defend a 1%'er. This is not exactly my usual modus operandi.
My usual gut instinct is to think that many Wall St. guys are just greedy assholes, rigging the system for more profit. But quite often once you think about the economics of what some of them have done, it's not always quite that simple. Many of them actually see the broken basic economics on an institutional level and actually end up exploiting nothing other than the institutional greed and myopia of Wall Street.