Before the Syrian civil war, two pipelines were proposed by Qatar to get gas to Europe. Going through Syria. Now, don't forget, Qatar are (were) major Clinton Foundation donors. Iran, a Russian ally, also proposed a pipeline. It also went through Syria. Guess which one Assad approved?
Oh, for pity's sake!
The Clinton Foundation's relationship with Qatar had NOTHING to do with Assad's decision. Instead, as is the case with Middle Eastern politics in general, Islamic sectarianism was the deciding factor.
Qatar is and, since the expansion of Islam beyond what are now the Saudi cities of Mecca and Medina, has always been ruled and principally inhabited by Sunni muslims. Syria is (and has been, ever since the Assad clan and its associated Ba'ath Party came to power) a Sunni-majority "nation" (if you're unclear why I put that term in quotes, go look up the Balfour Declaration for background on why "national" borders across the Middle East are arbitrary constructs that exist because of British arrogance, rather than naturally-derived nations that emerged from the traditional tribal and sectarian divisions in the region), ruled by an authoritarian, Shia-minority government that exerts control over the Sunni majority via oppression and terror. (In effect, it's a mirror image of the Iraqi power structure under Saddam Hussein, where a Sunni minority ruled a Shia majority via the same strategy.)
The Assad clan chose the Iranian pipeline proposal because it has, ever since Iran's (Shia) Islamic Revolution of 1979, ALWAYS been an Iranian client state (as is the Hezboll'ah quasi-state in the Bekaa Valley region of Lebanon, which both Syria and Iran support with money and arms) and ally. There was never any serious possibility that the Assads would accept the Qatari proposals, because that would have obligated them to Sunni bankers - and, in the Middle East, such obligations always come with unpublicized, but very real political strings.
Not to mention such an arrangement would have publicly humiliated the Iranian mullahs - which would have been unwise for an authoritarian state that depended heavily on arms and oil money from Iran to maintain its control over its own people and its supply pipline to its Hezboll'ah co-clients.
This kind of myopic, USA-centric, profound misunderstanding of Middle Eastern politics, and its concomittant ignorance of how power actually works in the Islamic world is why we had no business whatsoever invading Iraq, why our experiment in enforced regime change in Libya backfired so spectacularly, and why allowing ourselves to be drawn into the developing quagmire in Syria is such a Really Bad Idea. We have NO idea what the fuck we're doing there, and our accumulated previous experience should have (but clearly has not) taught us that thrusting our military dick into the Middle East without a Waterford-clear idea of what we're trying to accomplish, precisely how we propose to accomplish it, exactly who the other players are (and what their respective power bases and goals are), and a precisely-defined exit strategy in hand, is arrogant foolishness of the very highest order.
And it's essentially begging to be taught that lesson yet again, in the most humiliating and expensive way possible...
Half of all people are less intelligent than average. Not only is that racist
Which prompted me to observe:
It's not UnknownSoldier who's being racist here, you nimwit. You are the one who's claiming that non-white people are "less intelligent than average."
UnknownSoldier's disinterest in the opinions of stupid people makes no distinction that I can see regarding race. In my own experience, idiots come in all colors, all sexual persuasions, all ethnicities, all religions. You are the one who is saying, in effect, that prejudice against dimwits is somehow equivalent to being prejudiced against a particular race or group of races.
It's not.
But saying - even by implication - that white people aren't stupid, so not wanting to hear from dumbasses must automagically mean you're prejudiced against black people (or asians, or Hispanics, or American Indians, or anyone other than white folks) IS as blatantly racist as it's possible to be without physically waving a Confederate flag and chanting "You will not replace us!"
That, in turn, motivated DNS-and-BIND to reply:
Any policy which has a disparate impact on marginalized communities is racist. Calling blacks stupid and saying that they hate all stupid people equally is a common tactic used by racists. It needs to be called out wherever it appears.
I don't give a fuck about the "mainstream view" of the Establishment. Likewise, I could not possibly care less about the mainstream view of the anti-Establishment. My interest is in individuals, not affinity groups, clubs, associations, fraternal organizations, religions, "movements" or other granfalloons.
It's a universal ploy on the part of people, like yourself, who clutch at any excuse to exercise their propensity for judgementalism, to label every person with a distaste for conversing with idiots as "racist", so that you can delegitimize their preference not to waste their time and effort throwing intellectual pearls before imbecilic swine - and wrap yourself in the undeserved flag of righteousness in the process.
In my experience, intelligent, thoughtful people understand that time is the most precious commodity any human possesses - more valuable, by far, than wealth, power, fame, or a complete set of new-in-box Star Wars figurines. That's because we each get only so much of it. When that's exhausted, that's it. We cannot buy, borrow, manufacture, or inherit more. So, permitting people who are either inherently incapable of participating in intellectual discourse, or who are actually proud and jealously defensive of their ignorance and ineducablitly, to waste our constantly-dwindling supply of time constitutes for us (because I count myself in that number) an inexcusable squandering of that irreplaceable resource. It's not a badge of tolerance, it's a display of irresponsibility and ingratitude - and it is and should be a mark of shame.
To maintain, as you obviously do, that, because some racists twist that prejudice against wasting time arguing with our intellectual inferiors into a defense of actual bigotry, the rest of us are also somehow bigots, as well, is complete and utter bullshit. More precisely, it's a claim of guilt by INVOLUNTARY association - and I, for one, reject it as absolutely false and defamatory.
I have had sometimes-extensive colloquies with intelligent and insightful persons for whom English is not their first language, and whose grammar, usage, and vocabulary reflect that fact, without being willing
Half of all people are less intelligent than average. You're saying you don't want to read their opinions? Not only is that racist, but it's ugly classism as well. They have just as much a right to representation as anyone.
<facepalm>
I'm accustomed to you spewing stupid, thoughtless, didactic nonsense, but this takes the entire catering truck.
Half of all people are less intelligent than average. Not only is that racist, but...
It's not UnknownSoldier who's being racist here, you nimwit. You are the one who's claiming that non-white people are "less intelligent than average." UnknownSoldier's disinterest in the opinions of stupid people makes no distinction that I can see regarding race. In my own experience, idiots come in all colors, all sexual persuasions, all ethnicities, all religions. You are the one who is saying, in effect, that prejudice against dimwits is somehow equivalent to being prejudiced against a particular race or group of races.
It's not.
But saying - even by implication - that white people aren't stupid, so not wanting to hear from dumbasses must automagically mean you're prejudiced against black people (or asians, or Hispanics, or American Indians, or anyone other than white folks) IS as blatantly racist as it's possible to be without physically waving a Confederate flag and chanting "You will not replace us!"
In 2013, Mother Jones Magazine reporter Mac McClelland wrote an investigative piece called "I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave" recounting her experience working as a "picker" in an Amazon warehouse in Ohio. In it, she points out that many of her fellow laborers were getting food stamps (aka "SNAP"), because they could not otherwise feed their families on their take-home pay.
It's worth noting that those workers would qualify for Ohio Medicaid - also at taxpayer expense - in addition to SNAP. And HEAP, and an Ohio utilities payment assistance program called PIPP+, as well...
It hardly matters. Old people will eventually spend all of that money on some other medical condition. Unless you have a cure for old age in general, people will still have to face that after decades, their bodies are getting worn down. That means spending more and more money to keep it afloat or just accepting death.
"It hardly matters" to you - for the moment.
Wait until someone you care about develops Alzheimer's (this, of course, assumes you care about anyone other than yourself), and you have to deal with their progressive mental deterioration on a personal level. I can tell you from my personal experience that watching my mother steadily turn into a frightened, confused, paranoid sketch of herself, conversing with whom eventually became little more than an exercise in listening to a skipping record - constantly getting lost before she reached the end of a sentence, repeating the same "news" several dozen times in a half-hour phone call - was profoundly heart-rending.
To focus exclusively on the financial cost of the disease (and you are completely off-base even there, since Alzheimer's can require up to a decade or so of residential, supervised care before it becomes fatal in and of itself) and completely ignore the human one is profoundly callous, at best.
I'm not going to say, "I hope it happens to someone you love," because I wouldn't wish Alzheimer's on anyone. But I surely am tempted...
en masse onto the net without so much providing its users with a basic netiquette checklist in preparation.
All of the other clowns in the article's car were responsible for creating one variety or another of so-called "social media" - which is a mere subset of the vast collection of resources known as the Internet, rather than being the thing itself. Social media (very much including the zombified remains of Slashdot) has, in fact, evolved into something of a plague. It didn't have to be that way, but the Zuckerbergs of the world chose to focus on monetizing their platforms, rather than managing them for the benefit of their users - so money talked and social responsibility walked, instead.
So, here we are, our privacy compromised beyond recovery, our public forums awash in trolls and manipulators, and our society increasingly polarized and enraged - all in the name of ad revenue.
It's not the Internet that's broken, folks. It's social media. Let's not conflate the two...
It's not weird. It's intentional. The intent is to require broad geographic as well as popular consensus to pass laws that apply to the entire country, thereby protecting minority rights from the tyranny of a 50%+1 majority concentrated in any one place.
You're correct about that being the original intent of the bicameral national legislature of the USA. However, in actual practice, the effect has turned out quite differently.
In large part, that's because the Founders could not possibly have forseen the evolution of California, for example, from a Spanish territory a continent away into the largest constituent state of the Union by population, with the largest economy of all the states (and currently the 10th largest in the world) two centuries after the Constitution was ratified - and still, by law, having no greater power in the Senate than Wyoming, with 1.5% of California's population (as of the 2010 census).
It's a product of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
"Prediction is difficult - particularly about the future."
- Danish proverb, most famously cited by Neils Bohr
No it isn't. If ten people live on a forested mountain, the one hundred people in the town in the next valley should not be able to vote to deforest the mountain.
You're conflating local governance with national governance - purposefully, I suspect.
Give California six senators and it's safe to predict that exactly none of them will vote to deforest Montana.
We are a republic. We are not a democracy. Democracies are stupid.
Given the outcome of the last national election - and the complete disfunction of the USA's national legislature - the available evidence suggests that republics are equally stupid...
Sorry, but wrong. Remember, it's Firesign; the gender of the bird is an important part of the joke. Do a search and you'll find this exact wording supported by Phil Proctor.
Damn.
Rather than searching the Internet, I simply listened carefully to the actual bit from I Think We're All Bozos on this Bus again.
And yes, you are correct, sir. It's "his" not "its".
Amazing how our preconceptions can affect our perceptions. I misheard it in 1971, and I've continued to mishear it ever since.
Until now, that is. Thank you for calling my attention to this misperception.
No album release in the history of commercial music has had a dynamic range in excess of 40 dB, which means that there is no extra quality at all to gain by going from 16 bits to anything else in final reproduction.
Human ears can not hear about 20 kHz (give or take a few kHz), but even more important, no commercial music is ever done with instruments designed to produce sound at above 20 kHz, meaning there is no point what so ever in going above 44 kHz in final reproduction.
...
What you do not hear is any increase in "resolution", because there is no such increase present - and even if there was, you could not hear it, because the CDA is already producing a better reproduction than your ear is capable of resolving.
Mmm... no.
What you are failing to understand about audio resolution is that, while the human ear cannot, by definition, hear ultrasonic frequencies directly, they interact both with other signals in the same ranges and with those well within the range of human hearing to produce complex, lower-order harmonics and transients that humans can very definitely hear.
Just as one example: I own and have for a couple of decades used a Korg Triton digital workstation keyboard. It's a great tool and I love it.
However, the samples it employs are CD-quality (44.1 kbps at 16-bit resolution). Last year, I purchased a Korg Kronos 2 to supplement it. That device employs 48 kbps samples at 24-bit resolution - and the improvement in detail, resolution, and overall quality of the instruments (most of which duplicate those of the 1990's-era Triton) is striking. It's so obvious that even my wife, whose ears are strictly untrained, can immediately identify which keyboard is producing a given sound in a blind A/B listening test. (This is with both devices running through the same sound system, using identical cables and connectors, and volume-matched to eliminate the tendency of untrained human ears to perceive louder sounds as higher quality.)
You're just flat-out wrong.
The 1970's-era CD-DA Red Book audio standard (it was formally published in 1980 - the last year of the 1970's - but had been developed over the course of the preceeding 3 years) was developed as a compromise between competing standards championed and patented by Philips and Sony. It was considered "good enough" for consumer audio - a decision that was made based on a number of different, competing factors (cost of components required to reproduce the signal in a consumer-affordable player being one of the most influential), but the biggest one was the technological limitations of that era's digital audio processing technology. In short, it was as good a standard as the mass market could afford.
With the introduction of DVD audio in 2000, consumers finally got access to audio encoded at rates of up to 192 kbps at 24-bit resolution (that's for stereo - 5.1 surround maxes out at 96 kbps). Put both CD and DVD-A editions of Dark Side Of The Moon on the same sound system and A/B them and even you will be able to hear the difference. 96 kbps kicks the stuffing out of CDA's 44.1 kbps, even to completely untrained ears.
Unfortunately for audiophiles, by that time, consumers of digital audio had already become accustomed to crappy 128 kbps MP3 rips, and DVD-A died a slow-ish death in the commercial marketplace. By 2007 it was officially declared extinct, when new releases in the format stopped altogether.
Which is why we're currently stuck with 40-year-old digital audio technology - and also why Neil Young's ultra-high-quality Pono digital audio format is doomed...
TFS says they can still be played on old turntables. It seems that what they are doing is taking the digital audio, computing the shape of the groove and passing that on to a numerically controlled laser cutter. The end result is a record track much the same as (and compatible with) older LPs. But they have removed the limitations of the analog master cutting techniques.
It's important to keep in mind that professional digital audio recording is done at frequency sampling rates as high as 320kbps sampling rates at 32-bit resolution (although 192 kbps at 24-bit resolution is more common). In the process of mastering for CD, the final mix is down-sampled to 44.1 kbps at 16-bit resolution (the CDA standard). So the source material is of FAR higher audio quality than the end product that consumers hear.
Rhino Records has issued a stream of premium-quality LPs for the audiophile market that are pressed using 180-gram, very high-grade vinyl discs. These extra-thick records, made of nearly bubble-free vinyl, sound very different than the old-school LPs I bought in my youth. At first play, they are nearly as noiseless as CDs, they're highly warp-resistant, and they're mastered at higher SPLs than the original vinyl releases. On an audiophile-grade sound system, they make the CD versions sound as sonically-impoverished as they actually are.
It's not just the much-vaunted analog "warmth" of the vinyl sound (in reality, that's a product of the distortion characteristics of the vinyl/needle/cartridge/preamp signal chain), either. They offer measurably-better resolution than CDA, and the product of that higher resolution is a richness and detail to the sound they produce of which CD audio simply is incapable.
If you play them on a laser turntable, and keep them properly stored to minimize their exposure to dust, they'll retain that pristine, first-play sound indefinitely. This new vinyl format, then, holds the potential to make future such premium LP releases sound even better than the current audiophile versions.
I'm interested in hearing whether the real-world improvement matches the hype. And I'm willing to withhold judgement on it until I get a chance to do so...
corporate intrusions on individual privacy are, in the age of AI, potentially an even greater threat to civil liberties
Prompting an Anonymous Coward to contradict me, thusly:
Not possible. Only government can actually threaten you with anything. Corporations either provide a service...or don't. They cannot prosecute you, they cannot send cops to your home to no-knock raid you in the middle of the night, they cannot shoot you for "fearing for my(their) life". Only government can do all of those things.
Any corporation on the planet can collect literally every bit of information about me that they want, they still won't be a bigger threat to my liberty than the cops munching donuts in the police station down the street from my house.
I'll break my rule of not responding to ACs this one time, as a public service.
You fail to grasp the threat.
First, as we have seen again and again, corporate online databases are not secure. FB allowed Cambridge Analytica to collect tens of millions of its users' information, Equifax permitted black hats to siphon off essentially their entire credit database, including more than enough information on ALL of its users to easily allow anyone willing to pay for that information to steal the identities of most of the adults in the USA, the Impact Team did the same thing to Ashley Madison, obtaining blackmail material on its entire user base. The list goes on and on and ON.
Second, National Security Letters, FISA warrants, and other deliberately-secret means of prying information on an unlimited number of users out of social media and other online sites - very much including information that would be excluded from traditional search warrants - mean any data collected by AI-driven data miners is freely available to the government you insist is the only credible threat to individual liberty. If social media sites have your data, the FBI can get it - and, if it can, it will.
How your fact-free, unsupported opinion on this topic achieved plus ANYTHING "Informative" is beyond me...
Prompting mvdwege to explain:
Because it is the kind of fact-free libertard ranting "Tuh Govemment is bad!1!!1!" that appeals to the basement dwelling nerds that resent living under their parents' authority but are too much of a failure to make it out on their own.
And lots of these losers read Slashdot and ipso facto have mod points.
You are, of course, correct, sir.
(I'm certain you were aware that I knew that to begin with, but - taking your.sig into account - posted your explanation anyway, for the edification and amusement of the/. masses. And to bait the bears, obviously... )
First of all, Markey and Blumenthal's constituents neither know nor care about privacy considerations on the Web. Like most Americans (and Brits, and Aussies, and the bulk of Internet users everywhere), they haven't bothered to inform themselves about it, nor do they want to, because it's too confusing and "technical" for them to grasp.
Prompting Dragonslicer to observe:
I agree with most of your post, but I somewhat disagree with this part. Markey represents Massachusetts, and there is a pretty large number of intelligent, technically-knowledgeable people there.
Obviously including you. (I say "obviously" because you used the appropriate state-of-being verb construction to agree in number with the subject of your final clause. Most people would've used the incorrect "are.")
The thing is, Markey also represents all the Southies, and other high-school dropouts, near-dropouts, and people who barely managed to obtain their GEDs in Massachusetts. And, Harvard, Yale, and other such institutions notwithstanding, they outnumber you, especially when you consider retirees, most of whom are barely computer literate, much less knowledgeable about the privacy considerations of their online presence.
I'm not disparaging those folks. I'm just stating a fact: most people, regardless of the state in which they reside, don't know jack shit about online privacy. Nor do they particularly care. It's something of a "where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise" situation, and still more of a "What? Me worry?" one.
Americans, on the whole, are some of the world's most proudly ignorant, incurious people on the planet. You pretty much have to go all the way to Australia to find a bigger bunch of knobs. I mean, we let ourselves be bamboozled into electing an obvious con man as president, after all. (I say "we" here in the collective sense. I certainly didn't vote for that oafish narcissist.) Not wanting to deal with complex, subtle, and more than a little obscure topics is baked into our DNA. In fact, our countrymen, by and large, will resist being educated on such subjects with determined ferocity and unwavering resentment.
I blame TV for that. Most Americans were reared on it from infancy - and it has trained them to expect any problem, however recondite, to be wrapped up with a neat bow on it inside of a single hour (two at the most), including commercial breaks. It requires no imagination on their part, no broad or deep education, no grasp of subtlety or nuance - not even mere literacy, for the most part. And our public educational system, with its bizzare, cultish devotion to whole-word reading, and the more recent advent of "teaching the test" (thanks to W's "no test left behind" initiative), is pratically designed to churn out reading-averse, uncritical drones by the millions.
Because they don't care. This is just a song-and-dance to their constituents to look like give a shit.
No. No, it's not.
First of all, Markey and Blumenthal's constituents neither know nor care about privacy considerations on the Web. Like most Americans (and Brits, and Aussies, and the bulk of Internet users everywhere), they haven't bothered to inform themselves about it, nor do they want to, because it's too confusing and "technical" for them to grasp. Secondly, there really hasn't been any groundswell of demand for such protections. Most of the outrage has been generated by journalists - some of whom actually do know a little bit about the implications of data breaches.
More to the point, both Markey and Blumenthal are among the most tech-savvy legislators in Congress. They've both been opponents of restrictions on encryption and the efforts of law enforcement to get Congress to mandate back doors for their convenience. They're both suspicious of stingray cell phone data collection. They genuinely give a damn about their constituents' rights online and off - not because that plays well with voters, but because it's a subject that goes to the heart of Constitutional protections against unjustified government intrusion on individual liberty.
Oh, and because corporate intrusions on individual privacy are, in the age of AI, potentially an even greater threat to civil liberties, as evidenced by Cambridge Analytica's conveyance of FB users' private information to the ethical black hole that now occupies the Oval Office.
How your fact-free, unsupported opinion on this topic achieved plus ANYTHING "Informative" is beyond me...
How can legislators not see that this is worthless? We will have a pop up on every website/app demanding CONSENT and if we click NO the website/app won't let us have access. Congratulations on passing a law to add another pop up to all websites and apps.
From TFS:
Edge providers would not be allowed to impose "take-it-or-leave-it" offers that require customers to consent in order to use the service.
If you're going to opine about something, you might want to try knowing what the fuck you're talking about...
I'm a little suspicious of the claim that this is being "interpreted in a new way", and it generally sounds like the reporter is more interested in manufacturing controversy for a catchy story than actually figuring out what is going on. The NOAA release says that SpaceX has a license already, so that's not "new". I'm wondering if, in a previous launch, they violated some "conditions" that nobody on either side wants to talk about specifically. Another option would be that there was something special about this launch that fell on the wrong side of the "conditions" of SpaceX's license. But the reporter apparently couldn't be bothered to actually report the story, they just made up something vague and inflammatory that isn't even consistent with their own primary sources.
Brzzt.
The NOAA statement you link to is virtually content-free. That's a fact.
The only thing that seems to have changed is the addition of payload cameras for the Falcon Heavy test launch to showcase Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster and its spacesuited dummy driver, with the Earth as its background. That video has gone pandemic, and, in the process, has immensely boosted both SpaceX's and Elon Musk's own credibility and reputation around the globe, without in any way endangering the USA's national security.
Were I conspiracy-inclined, I'd point to the fact that Musk's resignation from Trump's Economic Advisory Council started a stampede for the exits by other members of that body that resulted in it being disbanded - after having met a grand total of one time - and that sequence of events put a major dent in POTUS 45's claim to have "all the best people" advising him.
Then I'd note that among Donald Trump's signal personality traits is holding very public grudges (and prosecuting them in ludicrously petty ways) over insignificant perceived slights. I'd probably also mention that NOAA, counter-intuitively, is an agency of the Commerce Department - and that Wilbur Ross, the current Secretary of that department, has demonstrated himself to be among the very most shameless presidential sycophants in a Cabinet stuffed to bursting with unabashed toadies and lickspittles.
But I'm not much into conspiracy-mongering, so I'll just add my voice to those who have characterized this bit of bureaucratic thuggery as standard-issue government overreach, tip my hat to the Streisand Effect, and say, "Let's see what happens next time, shall we... ?"
Antivirus vendors' products are injecting their own code "into parts of the kernel" that Microsoft was trying to patch? And Microsoft allows this?
No third-party software should ever be allowed to patch an OS kernel - any OS kernel. Ever.
(Yes, yes, I know. Kernel patching has been SOP for all kinds of Windows software for decades now. But, c'mon - Windows 10 was supposed to have been designed from the ground up to be secure. Permitting the OS kernel to be patched by third parties, even with user permission required, is a fundamental security design flaw that no OS architect should allow...
My wife and I were lucky enough to get tickets to see Dr. Stephen Hawking "speak" at the Berkeley Community Theatre. They were free, if I recall correctly, but demand for them was understandably high, since he had recently released his best-selling book A Brief History of Time, which was still on the NYT bestseller list at the time.
Great book, btw, if a tiny bit dated now. I recommend the illustrated, updated and revised edition to everyone with an interest in the work to which Hawking devoted his life.
Hawking was in town to present a series of lectures on cosmology and the physics of black holes at the University of California, and he graciously agreed to also appear at the BCT for a much more general presentation to a capacity crowd of almost 3,500.
ALS had, of course, long since claimed Hawking's ability to speak for himself - as well as almost all of his motor control - so, even then, the voice we heard was that of his voice synthesizer. Nonetheless, his personality came through in full force: by turns funny, professorial, wondering, and confiding. It was, no doubt, a canned presentation, but the man himself controlled the pace at which it unfolded - and his timing was absolutely masterful. He had the crowd hanging on his every word, and he received a standing ovation that lasted for a good five minutes or more at the end of his performance.
We'd had to park several blocks away, so, because of downtown Berkeley's proliferation of one-way streets, we found ourselves on Shattuck Avenue, headed the opposite direction from home, and looking for a chance to get turned around, when we passed the intersection of Shattuck and Allston Way. And there, on the corner, sitting all alone in his wheelchair, obviously waiting for suitably-equipped transport to arrive and whisk him away to his hotel, was Dr. Stephen Hawking, Lucasion Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, eminent physicist, bestselling author, and pop-culture superstar.
To this day, I still wish that we'd stopped, and offered to keep him company while he waited - but, sadly, we did not...
Slashdot Mirror
DNS-and-BIND blithered:
Before the Syrian civil war, two pipelines were proposed by Qatar to get gas to Europe. Going through Syria. Now, don't forget, Qatar are (were) major Clinton Foundation donors. Iran, a Russian ally, also proposed a pipeline. It also went through Syria. Guess which one Assad approved?
Oh, for pity's sake!
The Clinton Foundation's relationship with Qatar had NOTHING to do with Assad's decision. Instead, as is the case with Middle Eastern politics in general, Islamic sectarianism was the deciding factor.
Qatar is and, since the expansion of Islam beyond what are now the Saudi cities of Mecca and Medina, has always been ruled and principally inhabited by Sunni muslims. Syria is (and has been, ever since the Assad clan and its associated Ba'ath Party came to power) a Sunni-majority "nation" (if you're unclear why I put that term in quotes, go look up the Balfour Declaration for background on why "national" borders across the Middle East are arbitrary constructs that exist because of British arrogance, rather than naturally-derived nations that emerged from the traditional tribal and sectarian divisions in the region), ruled by an authoritarian, Shia-minority government that exerts control over the Sunni majority via oppression and terror. (In effect, it's a mirror image of the Iraqi power structure under Saddam Hussein, where a Sunni minority ruled a Shia majority via the same strategy.)
The Assad clan chose the Iranian pipeline proposal because it has, ever since Iran's (Shia) Islamic Revolution of 1979, ALWAYS been an Iranian client state (as is the Hezboll'ah quasi-state in the Bekaa Valley region of Lebanon, which both Syria and Iran support with money and arms) and ally. There was never any serious possibility that the Assads would accept the Qatari proposals, because that would have obligated them to Sunni bankers - and, in the Middle East, such obligations always come with unpublicized, but very real political strings.
Not to mention such an arrangement would have publicly humiliated the Iranian mullahs - which would have been unwise for an authoritarian state that depended heavily on arms and oil money from Iran to maintain its control over its own people and its supply pipline to its Hezboll'ah co-clients.
This kind of myopic, USA-centric, profound misunderstanding of Middle Eastern politics, and its concomittant ignorance of how power actually works in the Islamic world is why we had no business whatsoever invading Iraq, why our experiment in enforced regime change in Libya backfired so spectacularly, and why allowing ourselves to be drawn into the developing quagmire in Syria is such a Really Bad Idea. We have NO idea what the fuck we're doing there, and our accumulated previous experience should have (but clearly has not) taught us that thrusting our military dick into the Middle East without a Waterford-clear idea of what we're trying to accomplish, precisely how we propose to accomplish it, exactly who the other players are (and what their respective power bases and goals are), and a precisely-defined exit strategy in hand, is arrogant foolishness of the very highest order.
And it's essentially begging to be taught that lesson yet again, in the most humiliating and expensive way possible ...
DNS-and-BIND stated:
Half of all people are less intelligent than average. Not only is that racist
Which prompted me to observe:
It's not UnknownSoldier who's being racist here, you nimwit. You are the one who's claiming that non-white people are "less intelligent than average."
UnknownSoldier's disinterest in the opinions of stupid people makes no distinction that I can see regarding race. In my own experience, idiots come in all colors, all sexual persuasions, all ethnicities, all religions. You are the one who is saying, in effect, that prejudice against dimwits is somehow equivalent to being prejudiced against a particular race or group of races.
It's not.
But saying - even by implication - that white people aren't stupid, so not wanting to hear from dumbasses must automagically mean you're prejudiced against black people (or asians, or Hispanics, or American Indians, or anyone other than white folks) IS as blatantly racist as it's possible to be without physically waving a Confederate flag and chanting "You will not replace us!"
That, in turn, motivated DNS-and-BIND to reply:
Any policy which has a disparate impact on marginalized communities is racist. Calling blacks stupid and saying that they hate all stupid people equally is a common tactic used by racists. It needs to be called out wherever it appears.
How would it be bad to replace white people with brown immigrants? The whites are racist as hell. "Look, to be totally honest, if things are so bad as you say with the white working class, don't you want to get new Americans in?" This is a pretty mainstream view among Establishment types and their allies. You don't agree?
I don't give a fuck about the "mainstream view" of the Establishment. Likewise, I could not possibly care less about the mainstream view of the anti-Establishment. My interest is in individuals, not affinity groups, clubs, associations, fraternal organizations, religions, "movements" or other granfalloons.
It's a universal ploy on the part of people, like yourself, who clutch at any excuse to exercise their propensity for judgementalism, to label every person with a distaste for conversing with idiots as "racist", so that you can delegitimize their preference not to waste their time and effort throwing intellectual pearls before imbecilic swine - and wrap yourself in the undeserved flag of righteousness in the process.
In my experience, intelligent, thoughtful people understand that time is the most precious commodity any human possesses - more valuable, by far, than wealth, power, fame, or a complete set of new-in-box Star Wars figurines. That's because we each get only so much of it. When that's exhausted, that's it. We cannot buy, borrow, manufacture, or inherit more. So, permitting people who are either inherently incapable of participating in intellectual discourse, or who are actually proud and jealously defensive of their ignorance and ineducablitly, to waste our constantly-dwindling supply of time constitutes for us (because I count myself in that number) an inexcusable squandering of that irreplaceable resource. It's not a badge of tolerance, it's a display of irresponsibility and ingratitude - and it is and should be a mark of shame.
To maintain, as you obviously do, that, because some racists twist that prejudice against wasting time arguing with our intellectual inferiors into a defense of actual bigotry, the rest of us are also somehow bigots, as well, is complete and utter bullshit. More precisely, it's a claim of guilt by INVOLUNTARY association - and I, for one, reject it as absolutely false and defamatory.
I have had sometimes-extensive colloquies with intelligent and insightful persons for whom English is not their first language, and whose grammar, usage, and vocabulary reflect that fact, without being willing
DNS-and-BIND blurted:
Half of all people are less intelligent than average. You're saying you don't want to read their opinions? Not only is that racist, but it's ugly classism as well. They have just as much a right to representation as anyone.
<facepalm>
I'm accustomed to you spewing stupid, thoughtless, didactic nonsense, but this takes the entire catering truck.
Half of all people are less intelligent than average. Not only is that racist, but ...
It's not UnknownSoldier who's being racist here, you nimwit. You are the one who's claiming that non-white people are "less intelligent than average." UnknownSoldier's disinterest in the opinions of stupid people makes no distinction that I can see regarding race. In my own experience, idiots come in all colors, all sexual persuasions, all ethnicities, all religions. You are the one who is saying, in effect, that prejudice against dimwits is somehow equivalent to being prejudiced against a particular race or group of races.
It's not.
But saying - even by implication - that white people aren't stupid, so not wanting to hear from dumbasses must automagically mean you're prejudiced against black people (or asians, or Hispanics, or American Indians, or anyone other than white folks) IS as blatantly racist as it's possible to be without physically waving a Confederate flag and chanting "You will not replace us!"
Please, just STFU and go the fuck away ...
In 2013, Mother Jones Magazine reporter Mac McClelland wrote an investigative piece called "I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave" recounting her experience working as a "picker" in an Amazon warehouse in Ohio. In it, she points out that many of her fellow laborers were getting food stamps (aka "SNAP"), because they could not otherwise feed their families on their take-home pay.
It's worth noting that those workers would qualify for Ohio Medicaid - also at taxpayer expense - in addition to SNAP. And HEAP, and an Ohio utilities payment assistance program called PIPP+, as well ...
alvinrod shrugged dismissively:
It hardly matters. Old people will eventually spend all of that money on some other medical condition. Unless you have a cure for old age in general, people will still have to face that after decades, their bodies are getting worn down. That means spending more and more money to keep it afloat or just accepting death.
"It hardly matters" to you - for the moment.
Wait until someone you care about develops Alzheimer's (this, of course, assumes you care about anyone other than yourself), and you have to deal with their progressive mental deterioration on a personal level. I can tell you from my personal experience that watching my mother steadily turn into a frightened, confused, paranoid sketch of herself, conversing with whom eventually became little more than an exercise in listening to a skipping record - constantly getting lost before she reached the end of a sentence, repeating the same "news" several dozen times in a half-hour phone call - was profoundly heart-rending.
To focus exclusively on the financial cost of the disease (and you are completely off-base even there, since Alzheimer's can require up to a decade or so of residential, supervised care before it becomes fatal in and of itself) and completely ignore the human one is profoundly callous, at best.
I'm not going to say, "I hope it happens to someone you love," because I wouldn't wish Alzheimer's on anyone. But I surely am tempted ...
All of the other clowns in the article's car were responsible for creating one variety or another of so-called "social media" - which is a mere subset of the vast collection of resources known as the Internet, rather than being the thing itself. Social media (very much including the zombified remains of Slashdot) has, in fact, evolved into something of a plague. It didn't have to be that way, but the Zuckerbergs of the world chose to focus on monetizing their platforms, rather than managing them for the benefit of their users - so money talked and social responsibility walked, instead.
So, here we are, our privacy compromised beyond recovery, our public forums awash in trolls and manipulators, and our society increasingly polarized and enraged - all in the name of ad revenue.
It's not the Internet that's broken, folks. It's social media. Let's not conflate the two ...
RightwingNutjob pointed out:
It's not weird. It's intentional. The intent is to require broad geographic as well as popular consensus to pass laws that apply to the entire country, thereby protecting minority rights from the tyranny of a 50%+1 majority concentrated in any one place.
You're correct about that being the original intent of the bicameral national legislature of the USA. However, in actual practice, the effect has turned out quite differently.
In large part, that's because the Founders could not possibly have forseen the evolution of California, for example, from a Spanish territory a continent away into the largest constituent state of the Union by population, with the largest economy of all the states (and currently the 10th largest in the world) two centuries after the Constitution was ratified - and still, by law, having no greater power in the Senate than Wyoming, with 1.5% of California's population (as of the 2010 census).
It's a product of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
"Prediction is difficult - particularly about the future."
- Danish proverb, most famously cited by Neils Bohr
reanjr snarled:
No it isn't. If ten people live on a forested mountain, the one hundred people in the town in the next valley should not be able to vote to deforest the mountain.
You're conflating local governance with national governance - purposefully, I suspect.
Give California six senators and it's safe to predict that exactly none of them will vote to deforest Montana.
We are a republic. We are not a democracy. Democracies are stupid.
Given the outcome of the last national election - and the complete disfunction of the USA's national legislature - the available evidence suggests that republics are equally stupid ...
swell remonstrated:
Sorry, but wrong. Remember, it's Firesign; the gender of the bird is an important part of the joke. Do a search and you'll find this exact wording supported by Phil Proctor.
Damn.
Rather than searching the Internet, I simply listened carefully to the actual bit from I Think We're All Bozos on this Bus again.
And yes, you are correct, sir. It's "his" not "its".
Amazing how our preconceptions can affect our perceptions. I misheard it in 1971, and I've continued to mishear it ever since.
Until now, that is. Thank you for calling my attention to this misperception.
Carry on ...
swell misquoted:
"Why does the porridge-bird lay his eggs in the air?"
Very unsatisfactory reply. Maybe you'll have better luck.
Well, as a Firesign Theatre fan of close to five decades, this is not the droid you're looking for.
First of all, the actual question was, "Why does the porridge bird lay its egg in the air?" (Emphasis mine.)
Secondly (and rather critically), any male bird that lays eggs anywhere is a bird I'd like to see ...
BadDreamer in part proclaimed:
No album release in the history of commercial music has had a dynamic range in excess of 40 dB, which means that there is no extra quality at all to gain by going from 16 bits to anything else in final reproduction.
Human ears can not hear about 20 kHz (give or take a few kHz), but even more important, no commercial music is ever done with instruments designed to produce sound at above 20 kHz, meaning there is no point what so ever in going above 44 kHz in final reproduction.
...
What you do not hear is any increase in "resolution", because there is no such increase present - and even if there was, you could not hear it, because the CDA is already producing a better reproduction than your ear is capable of resolving.
Mmm ... no.
What you are failing to understand about audio resolution is that, while the human ear cannot, by definition, hear ultrasonic frequencies directly, they interact both with other signals in the same ranges and with those well within the range of human hearing to produce complex, lower-order harmonics and transients that humans can very definitely hear.
Just as one example: I own and have for a couple of decades used a Korg Triton digital workstation keyboard. It's a great tool and I love it.
(Here's an example of a recording I made with it where, aside from my voice, and my acoustic and electric guitars, every sound is a product of the Triton.)
However, the samples it employs are CD-quality (44.1 kbps at 16-bit resolution). Last year, I purchased a Korg Kronos 2 to supplement it. That device employs 48 kbps samples at 24-bit resolution - and the improvement in detail, resolution, and overall quality of the instruments (most of which duplicate those of the 1990's-era Triton) is striking. It's so obvious that even my wife, whose ears are strictly untrained, can immediately identify which keyboard is producing a given sound in a blind A/B listening test. (This is with both devices running through the same sound system, using identical cables and connectors, and volume-matched to eliminate the tendency of untrained human ears to perceive louder sounds as higher quality.)
You're just flat-out wrong.
The 1970's-era CD-DA Red Book audio standard (it was formally published in 1980 - the last year of the 1970's - but had been developed over the course of the preceeding 3 years) was developed as a compromise between competing standards championed and patented by Philips and Sony. It was considered "good enough" for consumer audio - a decision that was made based on a number of different, competing factors (cost of components required to reproduce the signal in a consumer-affordable player being one of the most influential), but the biggest one was the technological limitations of that era's digital audio processing technology. In short, it was as good a standard as the mass market could afford.
With the introduction of DVD audio in 2000, consumers finally got access to audio encoded at rates of up to 192 kbps at 24-bit resolution (that's for stereo - 5.1 surround maxes out at 96 kbps). Put both CD and DVD-A editions of Dark Side Of The Moon on the same sound system and A/B them and even you will be able to hear the difference. 96 kbps kicks the stuffing out of CDA's 44.1 kbps, even to completely untrained ears.
Unfortunately for audiophiles, by that time, consumers of digital audio had already become accustomed to crappy 128 kbps MP3 rips, and DVD-A died a slow-ish death in the commercial marketplace. By 2007 it was officially declared extinct, when new releases in the format stopped altogether.
Which is why we're currently stuck with 40-year-old digital audio technology - and also why Neil Young's ultra-high-quality Pono digital audio format is doomed ...
PPH theorized:
TFS says they can still be played on old turntables. It seems that what they are doing is taking the digital audio, computing the shape of the groove and passing that on to a numerically controlled laser cutter. The end result is a record track much the same as (and compatible with) older LPs. But they have removed the limitations of the analog master cutting techniques.
It's important to keep in mind that professional digital audio recording is done at frequency sampling rates as high as 320kbps sampling rates at 32-bit resolution (although 192 kbps at 24-bit resolution is more common). In the process of mastering for CD, the final mix is down-sampled to 44.1 kbps at 16-bit resolution (the CDA standard). So the source material is of FAR higher audio quality than the end product that consumers hear.
Rhino Records has issued a stream of premium-quality LPs for the audiophile market that are pressed using 180-gram, very high-grade vinyl discs. These extra-thick records, made of nearly bubble-free vinyl, sound very different than the old-school LPs I bought in my youth. At first play, they are nearly as noiseless as CDs, they're highly warp-resistant, and they're mastered at higher SPLs than the original vinyl releases. On an audiophile-grade sound system, they make the CD versions sound as sonically-impoverished as they actually are.
It's not just the much-vaunted analog "warmth" of the vinyl sound (in reality, that's a product of the distortion characteristics of the vinyl/needle/cartridge/preamp signal chain), either. They offer measurably-better resolution than CDA, and the product of that higher resolution is a richness and detail to the sound they produce of which CD audio simply is incapable.
If you play them on a laser turntable, and keep them properly stored to minimize their exposure to dust, they'll retain that pristine, first-play sound indefinitely. This new vinyl format, then, holds the potential to make future such premium LP releases sound even better than the current audiophile versions.
I'm interested in hearing whether the real-world improvement matches the hype. And I'm willing to withhold judgement on it until I get a chance to do so ...
strstr blurted:
https://www.obamasweapon.com/
Mod -1 Troll, please ...
I stated:
corporate intrusions on individual privacy are, in the age of AI, potentially an even greater threat to civil liberties
Prompting an Anonymous Coward to contradict me, thusly:
Not possible. Only government can actually threaten you with anything. Corporations either provide a service...or don't. They cannot prosecute you, they cannot send cops to your home to no-knock raid you in the middle of the night, they cannot shoot you for "fearing for my(their) life". Only government can do all of those things.
Any corporation on the planet can collect literally every bit of information about me that they want, they still won't be a bigger threat to my liberty than the cops munching donuts in the police station down the street from my house.
I'll break my rule of not responding to ACs this one time, as a public service.
You fail to grasp the threat.
First, as we have seen again and again, corporate online databases are not secure. FB allowed Cambridge Analytica to collect tens of millions of its users' information, Equifax permitted black hats to siphon off essentially their entire credit database, including more than enough information on ALL of its users to easily allow anyone willing to pay for that information to steal the identities of most of the adults in the USA, the Impact Team did the same thing to Ashley Madison, obtaining blackmail material on its entire user base. The list goes on and on and ON.
Second, National Security Letters, FISA warrants, and other deliberately-secret means of prying information on an unlimited number of users out of social media and other online sites - very much including information that would be excluded from traditional search warrants - mean any data collected by AI-driven data miners is freely available to the government you insist is the only credible threat to individual liberty. If social media sites have your data, the FBI can get it - and, if it can, it will.
Because "terrorists" ...
I confessed:
Prompting mvdwege to explain:
Because it is the kind of fact-free libertard ranting "Tuh Govemment is bad!1!!1!" that appeals to the basement dwelling nerds that resent living under their parents' authority but are too much of a failure to make it out on their own.
And lots of these losers read Slashdot and ipso facto have mod points.
You are, of course, correct, sir.
(I'm certain you were aware that I knew that to begin with, but - taking your .sig into account - posted your explanation anyway, for the edification and amusement of the /. masses. And to bait the bears, obviously ... )
I asserted:
First of all, Markey and Blumenthal's constituents neither know nor care about privacy considerations on the Web. Like most Americans (and Brits, and Aussies, and the bulk of Internet users everywhere), they haven't bothered to inform themselves about it, nor do they want to, because it's too confusing and "technical" for them to grasp.
Prompting Dragonslicer to observe:
I agree with most of your post, but I somewhat disagree with this part. Markey represents Massachusetts, and there is a pretty large number of intelligent, technically-knowledgeable people there.
Obviously including you. (I say "obviously" because you used the appropriate state-of-being verb construction to agree in number with the subject of your final clause. Most people would've used the incorrect "are.")
The thing is, Markey also represents all the Southies, and other high-school dropouts, near-dropouts, and people who barely managed to obtain their GEDs in Massachusetts. And, Harvard, Yale, and other such institutions notwithstanding, they outnumber you, especially when you consider retirees, most of whom are barely computer literate, much less knowledgeable about the privacy considerations of their online presence.
I'm not disparaging those folks. I'm just stating a fact: most people, regardless of the state in which they reside, don't know jack shit about online privacy. Nor do they particularly care. It's something of a "where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise" situation, and still more of a "What? Me worry?" one.
Americans, on the whole, are some of the world's most proudly ignorant, incurious people on the planet. You pretty much have to go all the way to Australia to find a bigger bunch of knobs. I mean, we let ourselves be bamboozled into electing an obvious con man as president, after all. (I say "we" here in the collective sense. I certainly didn't vote for that oafish narcissist.) Not wanting to deal with complex, subtle, and more than a little obscure topics is baked into our DNA. In fact, our countrymen, by and large, will resist being educated on such subjects with determined ferocity and unwavering resentment.
I blame TV for that. Most Americans were reared on it from infancy - and it has trained them to expect any problem, however recondite, to be wrapped up with a neat bow on it inside of a single hour (two at the most), including commercial breaks. It requires no imagination on their part, no broad or deep education, no grasp of subtlety or nuance - not even mere literacy, for the most part. And our public educational system, with its bizzare, cultish devotion to whole-word reading, and the more recent advent of "teaching the test" (thanks to W's "no test left behind" initiative), is pratically designed to churn out reading-averse, uncritical drones by the millions.
They make great consumers, though ...
freeze128 wondered:
I have had lots of hot peppers, but they have NEVER caused me blisters. Is this just a metaphor?
You may have had lots of jalapenos, but Carolina Reapers are a completely different level of hot. Like 900 times hotter than jalapenos.
And, yes, people who are particularly sensitive to capsacin can and do develop contact dermatitis from eating Carolina Reapers ...
pak9rabid snorted:
Because they don't care. This is just a song-and-dance to their constituents to look like give a shit.
No. No, it's not.
First of all, Markey and Blumenthal's constituents neither know nor care about privacy considerations on the Web. Like most Americans (and Brits, and Aussies, and the bulk of Internet users everywhere), they haven't bothered to inform themselves about it, nor do they want to, because it's too confusing and "technical" for them to grasp. Secondly, there really hasn't been any groundswell of demand for such protections. Most of the outrage has been generated by journalists - some of whom actually do know a little bit about the implications of data breaches.
More to the point, both Markey and Blumenthal are among the most tech-savvy legislators in Congress. They've both been opponents of restrictions on encryption and the efforts of law enforcement to get Congress to mandate back doors for their convenience. They're both suspicious of stingray cell phone data collection. They genuinely give a damn about their constituents' rights online and off - not because that plays well with voters, but because it's a subject that goes to the heart of Constitutional protections against unjustified government intrusion on individual liberty.
Oh, and because corporate intrusions on individual privacy are, in the age of AI, potentially an even greater threat to civil liberties, as evidenced by Cambridge Analytica's conveyance of FB users' private information to the ethical black hole that now occupies the Oval Office.
How your fact-free, unsupported opinion on this topic achieved plus ANYTHING "Informative" is beyond me ...
iamhassi blathered:
How can legislators not see that this is worthless? We will have a pop up on every website/app demanding CONSENT and if we click NO the website/app won't let us have access. Congratulations on passing a law to add another pop up to all websites and apps.
From TFS:
Edge providers would not be allowed to impose "take-it-or-leave-it" offers that require customers to consent in order to use the service.
If you're going to opine about something, you might want to try knowing what the fuck you're talking about ...
AvitarX reminisced:
I'm pretty sure I saw a video of a Google car out on its own.
Beginning on April 2nd of this year, California's DMV has issued licenses to 50 autonomous vehicle makers allowing them to operate without a human driver aboard ...
Bodhammer remonstrated:
According to Google and Facebook, privacy is outdated. Get with the pogrom.
Mod parent +1 Funny, please ...
https://slashdot.org/~Xylantiel confessed:
I'm a little suspicious of the claim that this is being "interpreted in a new way", and it generally sounds like the reporter is more interested in manufacturing controversy for a catchy story than actually figuring out what is going on. The NOAA release says that SpaceX has a license already, so that's not "new". I'm wondering if, in a previous launch, they violated some "conditions" that nobody on either side wants to talk about specifically. Another option would be that there was something special about this launch that fell on the wrong side of the "conditions" of SpaceX's license. But the reporter apparently couldn't be bothered to actually report the story, they just made up something vague and inflammatory that isn't even consistent with their own primary sources.
Brzzt.
The NOAA statement you link to is virtually content-free. That's a fact.
The only thing that seems to have changed is the addition of payload cameras for the Falcon Heavy test launch to showcase Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster and its spacesuited dummy driver, with the Earth as its background. That video has gone pandemic, and, in the process, has immensely boosted both SpaceX's and Elon Musk's own credibility and reputation around the globe, without in any way endangering the USA's national security.
Were I conspiracy-inclined, I'd point to the fact that Musk's resignation from Trump's Economic Advisory Council started a stampede for the exits by other members of that body that resulted in it being disbanded - after having met a grand total of one time - and that sequence of events put a major dent in POTUS 45's claim to have "all the best people" advising him.
Then I'd note that among Donald Trump's signal personality traits is holding very public grudges (and prosecuting them in ludicrously petty ways) over insignificant perceived slights. I'd probably also mention that NOAA, counter-intuitively, is an agency of the Commerce Department - and that Wilbur Ross, the current Secretary of that department, has demonstrated himself to be among the very most shameless presidential sycophants in a Cabinet stuffed to bursting with unabashed toadies and lickspittles.
But I'm not much into conspiracy-mongering, so I'll just add my voice to those who have characterized this bit of bureaucratic thuggery as standard-issue government overreach, tip my hat to the Streisand Effect, and say, "Let's see what happens next time, shall we ... ?"
Antivirus vendors' products are injecting their own code "into parts of the kernel" that Microsoft was trying to patch? And Microsoft allows this?
No third-party software should ever be allowed to patch an OS kernel - any OS kernel. Ever.
(Yes, yes, I know. Kernel patching has been SOP for all kinds of Windows software for decades now. But, c'mon - Windows 10 was supposed to have been designed from the ground up to be secure. Permitting the OS kernel to be patched by third parties, even with user permission required, is a fundamental security design flaw that no OS architect should allow ...
My wife and I were lucky enough to get tickets to see Dr. Stephen Hawking "speak" at the Berkeley Community Theatre. They were free, if I recall correctly, but demand for them was understandably high, since he had recently released his best-selling book A Brief History of Time, which was still on the NYT bestseller list at the time.
Great book, btw, if a tiny bit dated now. I recommend the illustrated, updated and revised edition to everyone with an interest in the work to which Hawking devoted his life.
Hawking was in town to present a series of lectures on cosmology and the physics of black holes at the University of California, and he graciously agreed to also appear at the BCT for a much more general presentation to a capacity crowd of almost 3,500.
ALS had, of course, long since claimed Hawking's ability to speak for himself - as well as almost all of his motor control - so, even then, the voice we heard was that of his voice synthesizer. Nonetheless, his personality came through in full force: by turns funny, professorial, wondering, and confiding. It was, no doubt, a canned presentation, but the man himself controlled the pace at which it unfolded - and his timing was absolutely masterful. He had the crowd hanging on his every word, and he received a standing ovation that lasted for a good five minutes or more at the end of his performance.
We'd had to park several blocks away, so, because of downtown Berkeley's proliferation of one-way streets, we found ourselves on Shattuck Avenue, headed the opposite direction from home, and looking for a chance to get turned around, when we passed the intersection of Shattuck and Allston Way. And there, on the corner, sitting all alone in his wheelchair, obviously waiting for suitably-equipped transport to arrive and whisk him away to his hotel, was Dr. Stephen Hawking, Lucasion Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, eminent physicist, bestselling author, and pop-culture superstar.
To this day, I still wish that we'd stopped, and offered to keep him company while he waited - but, sadly, we did not ...
Oswald McWeany remonstrated thusly:
He should be censored... All that talk about naked singularities. In my Christian country singularities are always suitably clothed.
Why, exactly, is this modded Troll?
It's clearly a joke - and a funny one, at that.
Someone with points, please mod it accordingly ...