No, what you're doing is improving the window dressing on Facebook's censorship.
Of course they've always had the ability to remove posts for any reason they like, but they've generally been inhibited in the early years of the platform for a garden variety of motivations, such as not wanting to inhibit the network effect by discouraging users and a lack of a coherent justification outside the realm of the outer limits of decency (ie, porn or other visually explicit imagery).
By hopping on the "hate speech" train they're enhancing their ability to remove posts by giving them a "good reason" to do so.
My own sense of this these days is that once upon a time, European hate speech laws were largely a legacy of WWII/Nazism. I think now they're couched in terms of good intentions but in reality are an attempt by the ruling class to suppress opposition from those on the right.
By aligning itself with this, Facebook is really aligning itself with the existing ruling class in Europe.
I think it's a fallacy to conflate a legal right to freedom of speech with the moral right to freedom of expression, especially in a world filled with "optional" privately owned public spaces where freedom of expression is restricted by property rights.
Although I suppose the good news is you can stand on a crate in the public square and say anything you want because there's nobody left in the public square.
From what I understand, it was largely a forgotten practice even among Romans. I think it was Marcus Crassus who revived it after his personally funded army lost an initial battle with Spartacus' slave army.
Now Norton, I know that you know, that you know, that I want you to fuck me in the ass.
Eddie Murphy, "Delirious"
Seems to me that it's a bit of leap from insight into the matters of state from their views of the possible homosexual tendencies of 1950s TV characters.
If I used a laptop as a desktop in a generally fixed location, a dock or USB hub or something would make sense, but they're generally awful for portability, especially if you end up needing a power brick for them.
Total fucking clickbait publicity. I expect it will be blasted all over Facebook as more echo chamber noise for people opposed to Trump.
People *crave* the values reinforcement of having their own little constellation of important voices (usually celebrities) telling them that their choices are the right ones. The stand-up comedians who issue zingers, the out of context historical quotes from revered figures, the out-of-their-field intellectuals, the shamanic Native American, etc.
The stand-up comedians are the ones I don't get -- somebody whose idea of funny is a stream of profanity and sexual innuedno is someone whose ideas on politics matters?
The thing I can't quite figure out is if these people are just so suggestible that they'll let these "opinion leaders" tell them what to believe or if they just have so little confidence in their own decisions they need all the reinforcement they can get. Maybe both. Or maybe it's just herd mentality and they just don't want to somehow be out of the "in" crowd.
I can only imagine that the MBAs ran financial models that said they'd save $3 per machine shaving off all the ports but the combi port and pick up on average $3 per machine in accessory sales due to the ridiculously sparse ports.
Maybe they even did some kind of study that showed that 75% of the people never used more than one port at a time and that 90% of the time people didn't connect anything to the USB port (I made those numbers up, but chances are so did some product manager who earned a bonus if they cranked up the margin by a few percent).
The reality is I *don't* use all three ports at once, but I use one with a gig ethernet dongle at least half the time and chances are I use a second port on and off during that session.
I gave up a tablet for a laptop because I got ultimately frustrated by the lack of connectivity and now they're turning them into tablets.
I can definitely see some people wanting to move to Colorado for the mountains/outdoors and the legal pot.
I wonder, though, if the legal pot part of it would inhibit established corporations from adding or expanding operations in Colorado. I'm sure a lot of them have the usual corporate employee conduct section that prohibits drug use and some may have the whole company wide drug testing regime.
Would these kinds of companies not want to open/expand offices in Colorado because it creates conflicts in their drug stance or they're worried that it will limit the pool of applicants?
I wonder if any are opportunistic enough or cynical enough to make exceptions in Colorado over this or maybe even smart enough to consider changing their entire corporate policy over it. I would think companies in Silicon Valley would already have dealt with this somewhat considering how easy it is to get a medical marijuana card there.
It's not that they're white or Asian. It's that they're wealthier and can afford better neighborhoods, and even private schools.
That's the thing, though, the underperforming kids are predominantly black and the people leaving the school districts are white and it shifts the "debate" back into the usual racial conflict terms.
Administrators are, by and large, are too liberal to get down to the brass tacks of the matter -- ie, the fucked up social environment these kids are from -- because of their alignment with black victimhood politics.
This is why we got a letter in the school informing us that our son's standardized test scores in reading and math qualified him for the 'gifted and talented' category but that no programs were available in our school for such a qualification. But there are at least 3 programs at our school dedicated to serving the needs of various categories of hard to educate students.
This is why educated white people and intelligent immigrants abandon urban school districts. All the resources are tied up in the Sisyphean task of trying to get every last impoverished minority from failed families to meet some performance parity with children not from those backgrounds.
Moving some of that money to programs designed to challenge and enrich high achieving students is considered an act of racist white privilege designed to suppress minorities. Those children do just fine with the lowest common denominator curriculum and nothing should be done to further enhance their status position.
I'm not kidding, our own district had a school board member who wanted to block remodeling of a school because the "affluent white students" already "had enough advantages".
Since this is Slashdot, I shouldn't have maybe used the word "conspiracy". Rather than a deliberate plot by nefarious actors, what I meant was more of a series of like coincidental attitudes that treated signed certificates as more trustworthy and subsequent lack of tools and interfaces to make self-signed certificates easy and obvious to use.
Since I get paid to work with MS products, I setup my own CA with Windows Server and use it to generate certificates for use with anything that needs a certificate. Issuing certs from Windows CA is about the same user interface that it's been since Server 2003 and is kind of a clusterfuck to use.
And that's considering that Windows Server will do some nice things kind of automatically with certificates for domain members and with the operating system, yet the UI is kind of forgotten and it feels like one of those features that MS will just get rid of because they want to force people onto their cloud infrastructure where you'll just use a MS provided CA cert.
I did some work with S/MIME and Outlook. While I made it work, it was really user-hostile and inflexible. Why is it easier to work with signatures than encryption?
I wonder if some of the issue with self-signed certificates is due to somebody at some point deciding that the CA model was better than the federated, partial trust model of PGP keys and that makes it conceptually difficult to use x.509 certificates in the same way that PGP keys are used.
It's kind of ironic how "untrusted" self-signed certificates are becoming conceptually more secure than sign certificates. With most modern devices and some hoop-jumping, using self signed certificates isn't hard and can be made as transparent as commercial certificates.
That being said, I do think "the system" (the amorphous conglomeration of browser makers, most commercial software, etc) engages in something of a conspiracy to make it a confusing nuisance to use them. I'm kind of surprised that the overall user interface to certificates isn't generally better, with better tools for certificate creation, management, acceptance and integration with existing directory systems.
It's not that the tools aren't there, but they're suboptimal from a user experience perspective. Why can't Chome by default be configured to use a separate and configurable certificate store? Why doesn't a cell phone contacts app have a field for certificates? Why isn't S/MIME made more user friendly and encourage sharing of public keys?
There are some people who are going to be a problem, and will be on a self destructive course, perhaps not much at all can be done to treat them. But those might be outliers? Who knows - certainly worth a try.
There's a whole combination of magical thinking clustered around the idea that only total sobriety is acceptable and that alternative solutions (like maintenance dosing or harm reduction) are judged by their failures instead of their successes.
Total sobriety has a terrible track record of success, yet it is judged by its successes and viewed as a solution because of its adherence to the ideology of total sobriety. Maintenance dosing or harm reduction is at least as successful, but is judged for its failures and condemned for its acceptance of non-sobriety.
You would think they might consider going all in on illicit drug manufacturing.
It'd generate huge hard currency profits, PRK has the intellectual know-how and ability to setup a completely vertically integrated production process at large scale, is totally immune from any government sanction and has a security apparatus that no competing cartel could match.
I think its been rumored they have been linked to methamphetamine production in the past, but you wonder why they wouldn't ramp this up with a wider production.
As much as society struggles with drug addiction, I'm surprised we haven't figured out that maybe the better solution is invent better recreational drugs. Drugs purposefully engineered to provide euphoria similar to street drugs, but engineered to limit the risks of overdose and abuse.
Could they engineer a drug that provided a high with the first dose but for which subsequent doses had an exponentially decreasing marginal utility or which couldn't be taken again for any increase or new high until some hours had passed? Some of this may just be a question of formulation, with a dose of a time-release longer-life agonist that both eventually reduced the high and blocked any new high from happening.
You can come up with a bunch of engineering goals that would allow for a person to take such drug and make abuse very difficult due to limited repeat use, lack of overdose potential, etc.
The biggest part problem we seem to have with drugs is the relentless notion that taking any substance to enjoy a euphoria is wrong, leading us to just hang onto a whole panoply of drugs that have nasty side effects or risks. What if instead of continuing to fail to eliminate them, we simply out-competed the old drugs in the market by replacing them with better, cheaper safer drugs?
I think legalizing marijuana is part of this, because it actually has a lot of the qualities of a better drug -- once you're stoned, it's less useful to smoke more pot while you're stoned and at a certain point more pot doesn't really make you more high. It has an extremely low overdose potential, is non-addictive and doesn't produce much in the way of chronic health problems (smoking aside).
There's a reason we don't treat alcoholics with whiskey.
I suspect it's not a very good reason or a reason whose motivation is derived from Calvinistic moral calculus.
My friend's step mother is an alcoholic and has been through a half-dozen treatment programs, most of them in-patient programs and still hasn't stopped drinking.
What if we just acknowledged that alcoholics drink, and instead of trying to foist abstinence we instead eliminated the shame associated with "failing" to become a teetotaler and instead put some effort into just getting their drinking down to less-destructive levels?
There were at least two NYTimes articles about this kind of thing in the past year, including a Dutch program that gave chronic alcoholics jobs *and* beer, providing them with structure that got them into a productive life cycle but acknowledged that they could drink, too? From the looks of it, it appeared to be fairly successful. The key things seem to be getting into life patterns that provide meaning and teaching them to drink at levels that are much less destructive. Eliminating the shame associated with drinking seems to be important to this.
From everything I've read, psychiatrists consider buprenorphine an extremely good treatment for opioid addiction. If getting opioid addicts on a stable maintenance dose and back into constructive life habits works for them, why couldn't something similar work for alcoholics?
The relentless focus on total abstinence seems bizarre in comparison to, say, people with depression whom we *encourage* to take maintenance doses of anti-depressants without relentless shaming of those who can't "just get better" and stop taking them.
It would not surprise me at all if we ever found out that some people are biologically susceptible to alcoholism or opioid addiction due to brain chemistry imbalances, just as some people are prone to depression for the same reasons.
It's obviously way more complicated than the armchair designer can imagine, but I wonder if:
1) The black box could be made to be ejected in the case of an airplane crash 2) Made buoyant somehow so that it will float once ejected 3) Configured with a GPS receiver and logger so that when it was found, even if it had drifted many miles from the crash site, it would give a pretty good idea of where it crashed
(1) is probably a tougher condition than it sounds to define. The last thing you want is DL123 ejecting a fucking 10 pound black box randomly over a populated area. Maybe some kind of multiple-monitoring setup in the black box of airplane systems combined with a 30 minute delay and cockpit warning of pending ejection so it can be aborted before it ends up embedded in someone's attic. Of course there's no guarantee the section housing it will be oriented in a way that allows for ejection -- it may get stuck or eject into the seabed.
(2) This seems like it shouldn't be that hard, maybe like a self-inflating lifejacket.
(3) This seems also less than hard if you can get the thing to ejected and floated to the surface.
I'm sure they've also grown up in an environment where every fucking thing has a password and many things have grown more hostile to crappy passwords or not allowing saved passwords.
Yet at the same time, there's this constant sense that those passwords don't matter, as some other vulnerability in a browser, an operating system or some other link in the chain has rendered those passwords essentially useless. And Snowden, too.
So maybe they've just gotten to the point where they see through it as some kind of TSA-like security theater, where you enter 37 passwords every time you turn around, yet none of it fucking matters because your credit card number still gets stolen.
It's almost like they're kind of right, but for the wrong reasons.
One argument that I've heard - and I have to admit that there may be some merit to it - is that women had very few career choices at the time. Since teaching was almost exclusively a woman's job, it represented pretty much the top position that a woman in the workforce could attain. As a result, you had the best and brightest working women doing the teaching. Now, they are doctors and lawyers. I don't know if I buy it and I've never seen data to support or refute the notion.
An interesting idea, but you have to figure that the best educated and most well off women of the era were married and not working at all. I would still imagine there was a cream of the crop filtering process anyway for the remaining population of unmarried educated women in the workforce to end up in education, at least in less industrialized areas where there wasn't clerical work.
What will that really get them? Most any place with enough infrastructure and rule of law to run a datacenter at that scale is also vulnerable to the NSA indirectly through the local security services, outright black ops or vulnerable to the kind diplomatic pressure that would give the NSA carte blanche.
Fucking Switzerland caved on bank secrecy -- and that was SWITZERLAND and BANK SECRECY. The rest of Western Europe lacks neither the stated neutrality nor the tradition to stop them.
I gots to keep up with the leet vaperz on the intertubz.
I got me a 20kWh unregulated battery, a.1 ohm coil made from kanthal I bought direct from de China mail order place and some 3.6% nic juice I brewed from botanicals at the local hippie shop.
Best part is, if my car dies I can get so cranked on nicotine I can push it the last 10 miles or my mod can jump start it.
I think the "as long as it takes" concept makes sense for higher education, but its complicated by social development issues in lower grades. A 15 year old in 8th grade is a whole bunch of challenges for everyone, as is a 20 year old in 12th grade.
And the only standard you can really apply is a "minimum standards" -- you can't produce top 20% outcomes for every student, and many of them will never achieve it even if you keep them in high school until they're 25. So all you'd end up doing is exiting smarter students early, dumbing down the process for everyone else.
Maybe this is a good idea, but my guess is that the top 5% actually end up raising up the entire top 20% just by being there, and that they force the curriculum and teachers to aim slightly higher than the bare minimum.
I think throwing shit at the wall is largely a byproduct of the teacher education system. I think there was a time where "teacher's colleges" focused on pedagogy. Now it's all caught up in postmodern systemic analysis. In order to gain the essential M.Ed. necessary for the union contract guaranteed raise for just having an M.Ed., education departments have had to churn out masses of Education PhDs to bulk up the faculty.
These PhDs need to write a dissertation on a unique topic, which ends up being some new theme and variation on whatever the latest system is.So you end up with an education process that churns out teachers over-educated in systems and under-educated in concrete pedagogy, plus an entire Greek Chorus of academics deeply invested in systemic thinking.
We've been teaching people to read and write en masse for a couple of hundred years now, is it *that* hard? Based on the historical essays written by elementary school students 75-100 years ago that turn up in the paper every so often, I'm guessing we were doing a fine job of it back then -- and that was probably with worse raw material than we have now, more immigrants, more illiterate or uneducated parents, and at least as much poverty as now (certainly more material deprivation).
Slashdot Mirror
No, what you're doing is improving the window dressing on Facebook's censorship.
Of course they've always had the ability to remove posts for any reason they like, but they've generally been inhibited in the early years of the platform for a garden variety of motivations, such as not wanting to inhibit the network effect by discouraging users and a lack of a coherent justification outside the realm of the outer limits of decency (ie, porn or other visually explicit imagery).
By hopping on the "hate speech" train they're enhancing their ability to remove posts by giving them a "good reason" to do so.
My own sense of this these days is that once upon a time, European hate speech laws were largely a legacy of WWII/Nazism. I think now they're couched in terms of good intentions but in reality are an attempt by the ruling class to suppress opposition from those on the right.
By aligning itself with this, Facebook is really aligning itself with the existing ruling class in Europe.
I think it's a fallacy to conflate a legal right to freedom of speech with the moral right to freedom of expression, especially in a world filled with "optional" privately owned public spaces where freedom of expression is restricted by property rights.
Although I suppose the good news is you can stand on a crate in the public square and say anything you want because there's nobody left in the public square.
From what I understand, it was largely a forgotten practice even among Romans. I think it was Marcus Crassus who revived it after his personally funded army lost an initial battle with Spartacus' slave army.
Now Norton, I know that you know, that you know, that I want you to fuck me in the ass.
Eddie Murphy, "Delirious"
Seems to me that it's a bit of leap from insight into the matters of state from their views of the possible homosexual tendencies of 1950s TV characters.
I always thought trolling was just stirring the pot, using inflammatory ideas and language to incite arguments.
"iPhone users are just egocentric hipsters."
"Linux users are dorks."
"FreeBSD is dying."
"Bernie Sanders is a communist."
"SystemD is taking over."
If I used a laptop as a desktop in a generally fixed location, a dock or USB hub or something would make sense, but they're generally awful for portability, especially if you end up needing a power brick for them.
Total fucking clickbait publicity. I expect it will be blasted all over Facebook as more echo chamber noise for people opposed to Trump.
People *crave* the values reinforcement of having their own little constellation of important voices (usually celebrities) telling them that their choices are the right ones. The stand-up comedians who issue zingers, the out of context historical quotes from revered figures, the out-of-their-field intellectuals, the shamanic Native American, etc.
The stand-up comedians are the ones I don't get -- somebody whose idea of funny is a stream of profanity and sexual innuedno is someone whose ideas on politics matters?
The thing I can't quite figure out is if these people are just so suggestible that they'll let these "opinion leaders" tell them what to believe or if they just have so little confidence in their own decisions they need all the reinforcement they can get. Maybe both. Or maybe it's just herd mentality and they just don't want to somehow be out of the "in" crowd.
I can only imagine that the MBAs ran financial models that said they'd save $3 per machine shaving off all the ports but the combi port and pick up on average $3 per machine in accessory sales due to the ridiculously sparse ports.
Maybe they even did some kind of study that showed that 75% of the people never used more than one port at a time and that 90% of the time people didn't connect anything to the USB port (I made those numbers up, but chances are so did some product manager who earned a bonus if they cranked up the margin by a few percent).
The reality is I *don't* use all three ports at once, but I use one with a gig ethernet dongle at least half the time and chances are I use a second port on and off during that session.
I gave up a tablet for a laptop because I got ultimately frustrated by the lack of connectivity and now they're turning them into tablets.
If skinny eliminates all but one USB port, fuck right off.
I have the previous Zenbook and it has 3 ports. Too skinny for an Ethernet Jack, but I was willing to live with that. One USB port isn't enough.
I can definitely see some people wanting to move to Colorado for the mountains/outdoors and the legal pot.
I wonder, though, if the legal pot part of it would inhibit established corporations from adding or expanding operations in Colorado. I'm sure a lot of them have the usual corporate employee conduct section that prohibits drug use and some may have the whole company wide drug testing regime.
Would these kinds of companies not want to open/expand offices in Colorado because it creates conflicts in their drug stance or they're worried that it will limit the pool of applicants?
I wonder if any are opportunistic enough or cynical enough to make exceptions in Colorado over this or maybe even smart enough to consider changing their entire corporate policy over it. I would think companies in Silicon Valley would already have dealt with this somewhat considering how easy it is to get a medical marijuana card there.
It's not that they're white or Asian. It's that they're wealthier and can afford better neighborhoods, and even private schools.
That's the thing, though, the underperforming kids are predominantly black and the people leaving the school districts are white and it shifts the "debate" back into the usual racial conflict terms.
Administrators are, by and large, are too liberal to get down to the brass tacks of the matter -- ie, the fucked up social environment these kids are from -- because of their alignment with black victimhood politics.
This is why we got a letter in the school informing us that our son's standardized test scores in reading and math qualified him for the 'gifted and talented' category but that no programs were available in our school for such a qualification. But there are at least 3 programs at our school dedicated to serving the needs of various categories of hard to educate students.
This is why educated white people and intelligent immigrants abandon urban school districts. All the resources are tied up in the Sisyphean task of trying to get every last impoverished minority from failed families to meet some performance parity with children not from those backgrounds.
Moving some of that money to programs designed to challenge and enrich high achieving students is considered an act of racist white privilege designed to suppress minorities. Those children do just fine with the lowest common denominator curriculum and nothing should be done to further enhance their status position.
I'm not kidding, our own district had a school board member who wanted to block remodeling of a school because the "affluent white students" already "had enough advantages".
Since this is Slashdot, I shouldn't have maybe used the word "conspiracy". Rather than a deliberate plot by nefarious actors, what I meant was more of a series of like coincidental attitudes that treated signed certificates as more trustworthy and subsequent lack of tools and interfaces to make self-signed certificates easy and obvious to use.
Since I get paid to work with MS products, I setup my own CA with Windows Server and use it to generate certificates for use with anything that needs a certificate. Issuing certs from Windows CA is about the same user interface that it's been since Server 2003 and is kind of a clusterfuck to use.
And that's considering that Windows Server will do some nice things kind of automatically with certificates for domain members and with the operating system, yet the UI is kind of forgotten and it feels like one of those features that MS will just get rid of because they want to force people onto their cloud infrastructure where you'll just use a MS provided CA cert.
I did some work with S/MIME and Outlook. While I made it work, it was really user-hostile and inflexible. Why is it easier to work with signatures than encryption?
I wonder if some of the issue with self-signed certificates is due to somebody at some point deciding that the CA model was better than the federated, partial trust model of PGP keys and that makes it conceptually difficult to use x.509 certificates in the same way that PGP keys are used.
That was a good description.
It's kind of ironic how "untrusted" self-signed certificates are becoming conceptually more secure than sign certificates. With most modern devices and some hoop-jumping, using self signed certificates isn't hard and can be made as transparent as commercial certificates.
That being said, I do think "the system" (the amorphous conglomeration of browser makers, most commercial software, etc) engages in something of a conspiracy to make it a confusing nuisance to use them. I'm kind of surprised that the overall user interface to certificates isn't generally better, with better tools for certificate creation, management, acceptance and integration with existing directory systems.
It's not that the tools aren't there, but they're suboptimal from a user experience perspective. Why can't Chome by default be configured to use a separate and configurable certificate store? Why doesn't a cell phone contacts app have a field for certificates? Why isn't S/MIME made more user friendly and encourage sharing of public keys?
There are some people who are going to be a problem, and will be on a self destructive course, perhaps not much at all can be done to treat them. But those might be outliers? Who knows - certainly worth a try.
There's a whole combination of magical thinking clustered around the idea that only total sobriety is acceptable and that alternative solutions (like maintenance dosing or harm reduction) are judged by their failures instead of their successes.
Total sobriety has a terrible track record of success, yet it is judged by its successes and viewed as a solution because of its adherence to the ideology of total sobriety. Maintenance dosing or harm reduction is at least as successful, but is judged for its failures and condemned for its acceptance of non-sobriety.
You would think they might consider going all in on illicit drug manufacturing.
It'd generate huge hard currency profits, PRK has the intellectual know-how and ability to setup a completely vertically integrated production process at large scale, is totally immune from any government sanction and has a security apparatus that no competing cartel could match.
I think its been rumored they have been linked to methamphetamine production in the past, but you wonder why they wouldn't ramp this up with a wider production.
As much as society struggles with drug addiction, I'm surprised we haven't figured out that maybe the better solution is invent better recreational drugs. Drugs purposefully engineered to provide euphoria similar to street drugs, but engineered to limit the risks of overdose and abuse.
Could they engineer a drug that provided a high with the first dose but for which subsequent doses had an exponentially decreasing marginal utility or which couldn't be taken again for any increase or new high until some hours had passed? Some of this may just be a question of formulation, with a dose of a time-release longer-life agonist that both eventually reduced the high and blocked any new high from happening.
You can come up with a bunch of engineering goals that would allow for a person to take such drug and make abuse very difficult due to limited repeat use, lack of overdose potential, etc.
The biggest part problem we seem to have with drugs is the relentless notion that taking any substance to enjoy a euphoria is wrong, leading us to just hang onto a whole panoply of drugs that have nasty side effects or risks. What if instead of continuing to fail to eliminate them, we simply out-competed the old drugs in the market by replacing them with better, cheaper safer drugs?
I think legalizing marijuana is part of this, because it actually has a lot of the qualities of a better drug -- once you're stoned, it's less useful to smoke more pot while you're stoned and at a certain point more pot doesn't really make you more high. It has an extremely low overdose potential, is non-addictive and doesn't produce much in the way of chronic health problems (smoking aside).
There's a reason we don't treat alcoholics with whiskey.
I suspect it's not a very good reason or a reason whose motivation is derived from Calvinistic moral calculus.
My friend's step mother is an alcoholic and has been through a half-dozen treatment programs, most of them in-patient programs and still hasn't stopped drinking.
What if we just acknowledged that alcoholics drink, and instead of trying to foist abstinence we instead eliminated the shame associated with "failing" to become a teetotaler and instead put some effort into just getting their drinking down to less-destructive levels?
There were at least two NYTimes articles about this kind of thing in the past year, including a Dutch program that gave chronic alcoholics jobs *and* beer, providing them with structure that got them into a productive life cycle but acknowledged that they could drink, too? From the looks of it, it appeared to be fairly successful. The key things seem to be getting into life patterns that provide meaning and teaching them to drink at levels that are much less destructive. Eliminating the shame associated with drinking seems to be important to this.
From everything I've read, psychiatrists consider buprenorphine an extremely good treatment for opioid addiction. If getting opioid addicts on a stable maintenance dose and back into constructive life habits works for them, why couldn't something similar work for alcoholics?
The relentless focus on total abstinence seems bizarre in comparison to, say, people with depression whom we *encourage* to take maintenance doses of anti-depressants without relentless shaming of those who can't "just get better" and stop taking them.
It would not surprise me at all if we ever found out that some people are biologically susceptible to alcoholism or opioid addiction due to brain chemistry imbalances, just as some people are prone to depression for the same reasons.
...maybe with some dose of self-buoyancy, too.
It's obviously way more complicated than the armchair designer can imagine, but I wonder if:
1) The black box could be made to be ejected in the case of an airplane crash
2) Made buoyant somehow so that it will float once ejected
3) Configured with a GPS receiver and logger so that when it was found, even if it had drifted many miles from the crash site, it would give a pretty good idea of where it crashed
(1) is probably a tougher condition than it sounds to define. The last thing you want is DL123 ejecting a fucking 10 pound black box randomly over a populated area. Maybe some kind of multiple-monitoring setup in the black box of airplane systems combined with a 30 minute delay and cockpit warning of pending ejection so it can be aborted before it ends up embedded in someone's attic. Of course there's no guarantee the section housing it will be oriented in a way that allows for ejection -- it may get stuck or eject into the seabed.
(2) This seems like it shouldn't be that hard, maybe like a self-inflating lifejacket.
(3) This seems also less than hard if you can get the thing to ejected and floated to the surface.
I'm sure they've also grown up in an environment where every fucking thing has a password and many things have grown more hostile to crappy passwords or not allowing saved passwords.
Yet at the same time, there's this constant sense that those passwords don't matter, as some other vulnerability in a browser, an operating system or some other link in the chain has rendered those passwords essentially useless. And Snowden, too.
So maybe they've just gotten to the point where they see through it as some kind of TSA-like security theater, where you enter 37 passwords every time you turn around, yet none of it fucking matters because your credit card number still gets stolen.
It's almost like they're kind of right, but for the wrong reasons.
His search history is now Serious Legal Stuff, baseball and some cat videos.
One argument that I've heard - and I have to admit that there may be some merit to it - is that women had very few career choices at the time. Since teaching was almost exclusively a woman's job, it represented pretty much the top position that a woman in the workforce could attain. As a result, you had the best and brightest working women doing the teaching. Now, they are doctors and lawyers. I don't know if I buy it and I've never seen data to support or refute the notion.
An interesting idea, but you have to figure that the best educated and most well off women of the era were married and not working at all. I would still imagine there was a cream of the crop filtering process anyway for the remaining population of unmarried educated women in the workforce to end up in education, at least in less industrialized areas where there wasn't clerical work.
What will that really get them? Most any place with enough infrastructure and rule of law to run a datacenter at that scale is also vulnerable to the NSA indirectly through the local security services, outright black ops or vulnerable to the kind diplomatic pressure that would give the NSA carte blanche.
Fucking Switzerland caved on bank secrecy -- and that was SWITZERLAND and BANK SECRECY. The rest of Western Europe lacks neither the stated neutrality nor the tradition to stop them.
I gots to keep up with the leet vaperz on the intertubz.
I got me a 20kWh unregulated battery, a .1 ohm coil made from kanthal I bought direct from de China mail order place and some 3.6% nic juice I brewed from botanicals at the local hippie shop.
Best part is, if my car dies I can get so cranked on nicotine I can push it the last 10 miles or my mod can jump start it.
I think the "as long as it takes" concept makes sense for higher education, but its complicated by social development issues in lower grades. A 15 year old in 8th grade is a whole bunch of challenges for everyone, as is a 20 year old in 12th grade.
And the only standard you can really apply is a "minimum standards" -- you can't produce top 20% outcomes for every student, and many of them will never achieve it even if you keep them in high school until they're 25. So all you'd end up doing is exiting smarter students early, dumbing down the process for everyone else.
Maybe this is a good idea, but my guess is that the top 5% actually end up raising up the entire top 20% just by being there, and that they force the curriculum and teachers to aim slightly higher than the bare minimum.
I think throwing shit at the wall is largely a byproduct of the teacher education system. I think there was a time where "teacher's colleges" focused on pedagogy. Now it's all caught up in postmodern systemic analysis. In order to gain the essential M.Ed. necessary for the union contract guaranteed raise for just having an M.Ed., education departments have had to churn out masses of Education PhDs to bulk up the faculty.
These PhDs need to write a dissertation on a unique topic, which ends up being some new theme and variation on whatever the latest system is.So you end up with an education process that churns out teachers over-educated in systems and under-educated in concrete pedagogy, plus an entire Greek Chorus of academics deeply invested in systemic thinking.
We've been teaching people to read and write en masse for a couple of hundred years now, is it *that* hard? Based on the historical essays written by elementary school students 75-100 years ago that turn up in the paper every so often, I'm guessing we were doing a fine job of it back then -- and that was probably with worse raw material than we have now, more immigrants, more illiterate or uneducated parents, and at least as much poverty as now (certainly more material deprivation).