IMO the biggest take away is to highlight how the bible should only ever be read as a book of fairy tales.
I look at the Bible as an old social science textbook. The "good story" method of conveying information and ideas still remains an extremely effective teaching tool today despite a massive increase in access to the written word and the literacy to comprehend it. For the time period in which it was written, it would have been the most effective way to disseminate information to the general public.
And, again taking into account the primitive time period, the policies and ideas were quite advanced and sound in reasoning. For example, In a time when life expectancy was low and everything from famine to plague to natural disaster had the potential to (and repeatedly did) wipe out a significant percentage of the human population, birth control and homosexuality could have had severe impacts on the existence of mankind. It could also be argued that some of the info is highly advanced scientific knowledge explained in a primitive way for a primitive people. And with just a bit of creative interpretation one can even apply things like the story of creation to today's scientific knowledge. "Let there be light" could be a 2000 year old scientific reference to the Big Bang. The take away should be that the bible should be viewed like any old text book or encyclopedia. Interesting, and containing some persistently good information, but still woefully inaccurate, out of date and increasingly irrelevant to the present.
Nothing makes this clearer than Creationists. If we all didn't have a forgiving blind spot any religion would earn the title of "Cult for insane (but mostly nice) folks" - but creationists are a bridge too far. They're where you have to throw your hands up & admit that religion really is a load of bull & anyone who believes is deluded/insane.
Calling creationists deluded or insane is itself delusional and insane. Science is agnostic, not atheistic. Rejecting the existence of divinity requires the same blind faith as any other religion. Creationists aren't necessarily mentally deficient, they simply hold to different theory of reality. I don't see how their view is any less valid than opposing theories. I myself hold in the theories grounded in the theory that our observable reality is real. But I can't definitively say the universe we observe doesn't exist as part of a computer simulation, a dream or as the equivalent of an ant farm sitting on the desk of some being we can't fathom. I also wouldn't classify anyone who does believe in such things to be insane. So long as they don't use their belief to justify harming people or oppressing the beliefs of others, people should be free to believe in anything they like.
Everyone does SEO. Why should them doing it well enough to reach the top of certain search results be disparaged? Campaigning to suppress, diminish or down rank them in search results because we don't agree with their views makes us no better than them when they try to do it to us.
I think the fear is more that kids will see this stuff while doing research for school (especially in earlier grades where they don't necessarily know better) and take it for granted.
If they're old enough to be given free reign on a computer to do research, they should be old enough to know how to perform basic fact checking. The only kids likely to take that kind of stuff for granted are the ones who are already being dragged to Sunday School by devout parents and have been indoctrinated from birth to believe that if someone can make something fit with scripture in any way, it's fact. And even a lot of those kids learn enough about critical thinking and scientific method to recognise the hypocrisies inherent in organized religion and break that habit by their teens.
I personally indoctrinated my kids on Carlin very early. And funnily, I was actually introduced to Carlin by my childhood Southern Baptist pastor. Although the only thing Southern about the place was that it's membership was mostly dust bowl migrants and their descendants and I don't know how it was affiliated with baptists as we had 2 marriage ceremonies for homosexual couples while I was there way back in the late 80s, something even the state of CA wouldn't recognise at the time and that the SBC still forbids.
Picasso expressed himself with pictures. Shakespeare expressed himself with words. Today's Picassos can use Photoshop and Shakespeares can use a text editor without inhibiting the ability for expression. The medium is secondary.
A few months ago I had to get shoulder surgery and had one arm completely immobilized for 6 weeks. Rather than sit at home doing nothing until I could work again, I took a job doing polls at a local mall. Often, the questions had to do with how people felt about controversial issues such as patent law, gay marriage, medical/recreational marijuana and psychedelics, contraception, etc... And despite being in a solidly Red section of the state, the poll results were almost always solidly liberal by a very large margin. The disheartening part was that, time and time again, when I asked "Are you registered to vote" those who took the more liberal positions on such issues said "No.", often giving me some diatribe about why their vote didn't matter and thus registering and voting was pointless. However, the ones who were in the "people who distribute contraceptives should be subject to the death penalty" camp always answered that they were registered to vote and voted in every election, no matter how minor.
The politicians haven't forgotten who votes for them at all. They just also know that people who strongly dislike them are more likely to not vote than to vote against them because of the mindset that once a person they dislike gets elected or a policy measure they don't like gets passed, there's no point in voting at all ever again.
Farmers have had automated trucks operating on farms for several years now. A farm just down the road from me went fully automated last year. In spring I can sit out on my porch and watch the cultivators and plows tilling soil without a person anywhere nearby. In summer I watch the automated watering arms crawl back and forth across the fields. And in the fall I watch the driverless combines, harvesters, balers and trailers harvesting the crops.
Because only 0.3% of the 60 million downloads were conducted by AT&T, Cablevision, Time Warner Cable, Verizon or Comcast subscribers. The notices weren't trashed by the infringers, they were trashed by ISPs who didn't forward them because they don't participate in CAS or exist outside the reach of CAS and the DMCA and don't forward notices that cite those laws as the legal justification for the notice.
Many of those ISPs probably received and forwarded a separate notice that conforms to format required by their country's copyright enforcement laws. It just wasn't a CAS notice. But media company executives and lawyers won't let silly things like the truth or facts get in the way of a good self-serving narrative.
XX/XY absolutely determines gender in normally developed humans. That genetic defects/mutations/abnormalities such as 46,XY can occur doesn't refute that.
And "identity" isn't meaningless. It's merely subjective whereas chromosome identification is objective. As for which determines what someone IS, that too is subjective.
Thankfully, I nor my parents went to school in Texas. So, in my Biology class we learned that genitalia and identity are both irrelevant and in humans:
XY Chomosomes = Male
XX Chomosomes = Female
Creationists have a stronger leg to stand on than climate change deniers.
Creationism is still a valid theory, it's just one completely bereft of scientific evidence to support it. But if God showed up and started performing Deity-ish things, science would have to accept it as fact. Climate change denialists however are screaming "THERE IS NO GOD!" while He is standing in front of them juggling lightning bolts.
But to get most next-day content on Hulu comes through "TV Anywhere" meaning you need to be paying a cable company and Hulu to get it. If I'm paying the cable company, why bother with Hulu at all?
To be honest, I figured that it/had/ to be a bad ruling and spent a while trying to understand why it was wrong, just because of how they've been lately. Perhaps I'm just paranoid.
Drug dogs just don't have enough lobbyists paying every nephew and 3rd cousin twice removed each justice has to get a "typical" ruling.
Maybe this person is Betty White having a bout of dementia thinking she's really Rose Nylund and that getting enough first posts on Slashdot will get her immortalized as a statue in St. Olaf.....
Give 100 people both the parts to create an Internet and the parts to create a Space Shuttle. Which do you think will happen first, will they send an E-mail or will they go to space?
So, there's a Republican candidate running on a platform of "I vow to say that anything a Democrat says or does is Unamerican, Treasonous, a war on Religion (Christianity of course being the only valid religion) and/or hypocritical. How? Mainly by waiting for them to say how everything I believe in is discriminatory and disgusting then attacking them as hypocrites and liars because they only criticized me for saying I think gay people are subhumans who don't deserve the same rights as people who live by the tenets set forth in a 2000 year old novel, while completely failing to mention some some 3rd world Warlord who kills gay people outright. I will then go on Fox News and tell the world how it's Hillary and Obama's fault that the Warlord hates gays because they failed to go back in time and make Richard Simmons answer a fan letter that was sent by said Warlord to him in 1979; all while Sean Hannity performs analingous on me just off camera." What makes that newsworthy?
If/. plans to report on every bit of stupidity that falls out of political candidates mouths, well... it'll be just like every other "news" site in the U.S.
The U.S. has had hemostatic dressings since at least World War II. Soldiers carried a mix of sulfanilamide, aluminum sulfate and titanium dioxide, the use of which is still taught at the US Army Combat Medic school and the USAF Pararescue School. Although in practice, the military now uses modern Combat Gauzes like Quik Clot, Celox Gauze and ChitoGauze on the battlefield.
Password managers aren't a magic solution either as someone with a camera phone and a good angle or infection by a simple keylogger can negate any security a password manager can provide. Plus, they give attackers a single point of focus to gain access to all your passwords for every website you use (and potentially more if you use form fill in features to store credit card info) in a very handy reference list. Like everything else, they're only a secure as the weakest point in the chain between you and whichever manager you use.
The only real solution for people who value their online identity is to never establish one at all. And even then someone might establish one in your name if they get access to the right records database. All anyone can really do is try to find a solution that is convenient and not stupidly insecure while ensuring they know how to minimize the damage if/when their information is compromised in some way (watch bank and credit card statements, check credit report frequently, etc..).
Of course! I frequently go to Best Buy to shop for things.
Then I buy them online from a retailer that charges at least 30% less (usually Amazon) and doesn't grill me for a half hour when I have to return something their employees broke tossing boxes around.
Being handed a box with the contents of your office by security along with a document from the legal department that detail which clause(s) of your contract have been breached so they can avoid having to pay you for the remainder of the contract term and void any golden handshake provisions in the contract is how people with contracts get fired. Not having your contract renewed is akin to being given a gold watch and cake.
I prefer simple, personal methods easy for humans to remember but difficult for machines to guess. Things like passages out of a favorite book, modified versions of song lyrics, etc. For example, take the first half of a chorus from one song and a the last half of a verse from another by a different artist of a different genre and combine them and you have a multiple word pass phrase that's easy to remember . Even if the attacker knows to use song lyrics, with so many songs out there and ways to vary how you use their lyrics, it'd still be very difficult to break by machine.
Apparently, he didn't get sacked. They're just not renewing his contract. Which means he gets to sit on his ass and get paid by the BBC while fielding offers from pretty much every other media company in the world until his contract expires while the guy he punched no longer gets to work for one of the most prestigious show brands in the world.
So, the guy he punched will likely end up on some doomed BBC 2 reality show, The BBC loses a 28 year old brand and a show that brought in over $50 million/year while Clarkson (and potentially May and Hammond) get to find someone willing to pay for the talents honed at the BBC without (apparently) being subject to the no-compete clause and the anger of Top Gear fans that quitting would have subjected them to.
And prosecution? It's England, not the U.S. It was a simple assault by a drunk old man at a pub with with the victim saying publicly that he sustained only minor injury. If Britain imposed prison time for that they'd have more people in jail than the US does every time the World Cup came round. At most he'll get a £500 fine and have to get some counseling.
He never went on a Michael Richards-esque racist rant or anything. He's a comic in the vein of Lenny Bruce, George Carlin and Richard Pryor. Most people get it. Some don't and some just like to get offended because it allows them to express hate toward others in a way that's not only currently socially acceptable, but often encouraged. Being offended gives them a power over others that they could never have if their brand of self righteous hate wasn't as accepted now as racist hate was in the past. That sort of person is absolutely giddy when someone like Jeremy Clarkson get ordered to the back of the bus.
But inevitably, he doesn't go quietly and meekly to the back, he gets off the bus and drives beside it in a Veyron, revving the engine to redline and laughing at the people offended by the noise.
He signed it, but the Clinton administration wrote it. It was held up by Republicans until G.W.B. got into office. The Politics of No Child Left Behind
Much of the state is rural areas with rural students whose ambitions didn't go beyond spending their lives working the family farm just like their daddy and grandaddy; many of whom were traditionally "home schooled" until Arkansas introduced much more stringent requirements on home schooling in the late 90s. The old joke that when it's 12:30 in Little Rock, 15 minutes outside the city it's 1950, isn't really much of a joke as it's not far from fact. That's what drags down the statistics. But those statistics are actually great for the state as the money that keeps coming in to "fix" the "broken" education system (thanks to Arkansas native Bill Clinton's "No Child Left Behind" act, funny how that works out huh?) doesn't go to a town in Monroe Country whose high school graduating class is 12 and has an annual budget of 3 paperclips and a mule. It goes to the schools in the growing business hub cities that were already fairly good so overall, the schools in such cities are now well above average, but with districts carefully designed to include enough rural and impoverished kids to keep the test score averages and graduation rates from looking too good.
This is just another of the measures Arkansas is trying to entice more tech companies to move to Arkansas. It's a dirt cheap place to do business and a dirt cheap place to live (I bought a new, high end 3200 square foot home in 2010 for under $300k) with plenty of undeveloped areas to grow out. They've been working to build out tech infrastructure in Little Rock and between Bentonville (Walmart HQ) to Fort Smith (a manufacturing and shipping hub) for most of the past decade. Now, they're trying to develop the workforce to further support it. And, as you mentioned, Arkansas would absolutely love to attract businesses who sell coding crap or do any other kind of tech stuff. They've been grooming the state for such businesses for years. Get the people selling coding crap here and the people who make coding crap will follow.
That may be true. However, self driving cars are an entirely different matter. While they are really cool, do you really want to be in one hurling down the highway at 85MPH (I'm in Utah) and trusting that the automated systems are going to know the difference between a coyote or a tumbleweed?
Today? No. In 20 years? Almost certainly as by then they should be perfected enough that they'll be a lot safer than sharing the road with vehicles operated manually by a 19 year old who thinks they're such a fantastic driver that they can safely fly down the highway at 120MPH. When I was a tow truck driver just out of HS I watched the CHP spray what was left of such drivers off the road at least once a week.
If a child and a dog run out into the street at the same time from opposite sides, do you trust the car to make the right decision as to which it will run over?
I'd expect we'll have systems that identify any warm blooded creature entering the roadway and instantly apply braking and take evasive maneuvers that human reaction times couldn't possibly compete with and that they'd be more reliable and consistent than human drivers have ever been and they'll be able to communicate what they're seeing and doing with other vehicles nearby so they can measures to ensure they react appropriately as well.
How would you like to be legally responsible for your self driving car if it runs over a child?
You probably wouldn't be liable in such a case. The car maker would be. Just as they are now if a flaw in the car causes an accident. But with an automated car there'd be no way for the car manufacturer to claim it was the driver's fault so it'd take a lot less litigation to assign such liability.
What about black ice?
Machines are already better at identifying black ice than humans via the use of things like thermal imaging and reflective laser analysis. And if you see a patch of black ice, there's no guarantee the guy behind you will see it. But if automated cars became the norm, once one car (or a satellite or drone) sees a patch of black ice, every other car in the area can be notified to avoid it and they could even automatically dispatch an automated service vehicle to remove it.
What if a person is in the road and the car has a choice of running over the person or crashing and possibly killing you.
Why wouldn't the car see the person and stop while sending a signal to all the cars behind it to do the same and avoid a pile up? A car will never be too busy changing the radio station or messing with their phone or driving drunk or fatigued or subject to panic so, even when someone does foolishly run out in the road, the number of times where the option will be "Run over the person or crash into something" will be far rarer than it is today with human drivers.
Do you trust the car to make the right decision?
My car can already parallel park a lot better than I can. And there's already systems for planes that allow them to safely fly and land in conditions it'd be nearly impossible for a human to safely do so. And humans aren't known for making good decisions, especially when they're required to make them quickly. So yeah, once the technology matures to the same point as automated parallel parking, automated cruise control and Automatic braking have, I'd trust it to drive.
>As much as I like software (and writing it), there are IMHO too many judgement calls for a computer and in many situations too many for a lot of (supposedly sane) people.
As much as I like humans, and as much fun it is creating more of them, there are IMHO too many physical and mental limitations for even a supposedly sane human to do as quickly and accurately and make judgements based upon the available data as a well programmed machine can.
In the US, the biggest reason that I've heard from people as to why "they don't want their vote to be counted" is because registered voter pools are what's used in most jurisdictions as the jury duty pool. If they don't register to vote, they won't ever get summoned for jury duty. And there's a lot of incentive to avoid being summoned, at least in my jurisdiction. Here, when you get a summons you have to call the day before your summons date to make sure you'll still be required to appear and if not, your summons date will just be pushed back a week or two rather than be rescinded. That often happens several times before you actually get ordered to appear but, not knowing if that'll be the case each time and most employers requiring at least a week's notice for time off, that means someone being called in might miss numerous days of work even if they aren't ever selected to sit on a jury. And of course, since so many people stay out of the voter pool, being called for jury duty isn't a rare event. Last year, half my 15 paid vacation days were used to get paid for days I had to request off due to jury duty summons. Not a big deal for me as I don't use vacation days anyway (my employer allows us to cash in unused days at the end of the year) but for non-salary people that don't give paid vacation days, that can be untenable and you have to actually be told to appear before you can get a hardship exemption (which they rarely approve). Worse, being an at-will work state, being called for jury duty can even cost people their jobs entirely if their employer is particularly sleazy as it's impossible to prove they fired someone for not getting out of jury duty when, as long as they don't try to challenge granting them unemployment benefits, no one will ever even question it and even of they are questioned they can just say "That's not why I fired them. I just didn't like their personality." and that's the end of it.
Mandatory voting is a stupid idea as Americans don't like mandatory *anything*. It's a great way to ensure Grumpy Cat is voted in as our next President. To increase voter turnout they need to remove any perceived penalty like allowing voter registration pools to be used for anything other than voting that discourage people from registering to vote and they need to make voting more convenient. Use driver's license registrations or taxpayer information for jury recruitment. And put voting booths at places like Walmart, Costco, indoor malls or stadiums and such that are made to comfortably accommodate large numbers of people rather than putting them in some tiny classroom at a local elementry school with 3 parking spots within a half mile of the place where people will have to stand in line outside in the November cold for a couple hours before they can vote. But, none of that is in the best interests of politicians as they rely on the old, wealthy and zealous to keep them in office as normal people wouldn't vote for many of the nutjobs that currently hold office across the US.
Slashdot Mirror
IMO the biggest take away is to highlight how the bible should only ever be read as a book of fairy tales.
I look at the Bible as an old social science textbook. The "good story" method of conveying information and ideas still remains an extremely effective teaching tool today despite a massive increase in access to the written word and the literacy to comprehend it. For the time period in which it was written, it would have been the most effective way to disseminate information to the general public.
And, again taking into account the primitive time period, the policies and ideas were quite advanced and sound in reasoning. For example, In a time when life expectancy was low and everything from famine to plague to natural disaster had the potential to (and repeatedly did) wipe out a significant percentage of the human population, birth control and homosexuality could have had severe impacts on the existence of mankind. It could also be argued that some of the info is highly advanced scientific knowledge explained in a primitive way for a primitive people. And with just a bit of creative interpretation one can even apply things like the story of creation to today's scientific knowledge. "Let there be light" could be a 2000 year old scientific reference to the Big Bang.
The take away should be that the bible should be viewed like any old text book or encyclopedia. Interesting, and containing some persistently good information, but still woefully inaccurate, out of date and increasingly irrelevant to the present.
Nothing makes this clearer than Creationists. If we all didn't have a forgiving blind spot any religion would earn the title of "Cult for insane (but mostly nice) folks" - but creationists are a bridge too far. They're where you have to throw your hands up & admit that religion really is a load of bull & anyone who believes is deluded/insane.
Calling creationists deluded or insane is itself delusional and insane. Science is agnostic, not atheistic. Rejecting the existence of divinity requires the same blind faith as any other religion. Creationists aren't necessarily mentally deficient, they simply hold to different theory of reality.
I don't see how their view is any less valid than opposing theories. I myself hold in the theories grounded in the theory that our observable reality is real. But I can't definitively say the universe we observe doesn't exist as part of a computer simulation, a dream or as the equivalent of an ant farm sitting on the desk of some being we can't fathom. I also wouldn't classify anyone who does believe in such things to be insane. So long as they don't use their belief to justify harming people or oppressing the beliefs of others, people should be free to believe in anything they like.
Everyone does SEO. Why should them doing it well enough to reach the top of certain search results be disparaged? Campaigning to suppress, diminish or down rank them in search results because we don't agree with their views makes us no better than them when they try to do it to us.
I think the fear is more that kids will see this stuff while doing research for school (especially in earlier grades where they don't necessarily know better) and take it for granted.
If they're old enough to be given free reign on a computer to do research, they should be old enough to know how to perform basic fact checking.
The only kids likely to take that kind of stuff for granted are the ones who are already being dragged to Sunday School by devout parents and have been indoctrinated from birth to believe that if someone can make something fit with scripture in any way, it's fact. And even a lot of those kids learn enough about critical thinking and scientific method to recognise the hypocrisies inherent in organized religion and break that habit by their teens.
I personally indoctrinated my kids on Carlin very early. And funnily, I was actually introduced to Carlin by my childhood Southern Baptist pastor. Although the only thing Southern about the place was that it's membership was mostly dust bowl migrants and their descendants and I don't know how it was affiliated with baptists as we had 2 marriage ceremonies for homosexual couples while I was there way back in the late 80s, something even the state of CA wouldn't recognise at the time and that the SBC still forbids.
Picasso expressed himself with pictures. Shakespeare expressed himself with words. Today's Picassos can use Photoshop and Shakespeares can use a text editor without inhibiting the ability for expression. The medium is secondary.
...and make decisions with their wallet...
Keep getting reelected.
A few months ago I had to get shoulder surgery and had one arm completely immobilized for 6 weeks. Rather than sit at home doing nothing until I could work again, I took a job doing polls at a local mall. Often, the questions had to do with how people felt about controversial issues such as patent law, gay marriage, medical/recreational marijuana and psychedelics, contraception, etc... And despite being in a solidly Red section of the state, the poll results were almost always solidly liberal by a very large margin.
The disheartening part was that, time and time again, when I asked "Are you registered to vote" those who took the more liberal positions on such issues said "No.", often giving me some diatribe about why their vote didn't matter and thus registering and voting was pointless. However, the ones who were in the "people who distribute contraceptives should be subject to the death penalty" camp always answered that they were registered to vote and voted in every election, no matter how minor.
The politicians haven't forgotten who votes for them at all. They just also know that people who strongly dislike them are more likely to not vote than to vote against them because of the mindset that once a person they dislike gets elected or a policy measure they don't like gets passed, there's no point in voting at all ever again.
Farmers have had automated trucks operating on farms for several years now. A farm just down the road from me went fully automated last year. In spring I can sit out on my porch and watch the cultivators and plows tilling soil without a person anywhere nearby. In summer I watch the automated watering arms crawl back and forth across the fields. And in the fall I watch the driverless combines, harvesters, balers and trailers harvesting the crops.
Because only 0.3% of the 60 million downloads were conducted by AT&T, Cablevision, Time Warner Cable, Verizon or Comcast subscribers. The notices weren't trashed by the infringers, they were trashed by ISPs who didn't forward them because they don't participate in CAS or exist outside the reach of CAS and the DMCA and don't forward notices that cite those laws as the legal justification for the notice.
Many of those ISPs probably received and forwarded a separate notice that conforms to format required by their country's copyright enforcement laws. It just wasn't a CAS notice.
But media company executives and lawyers won't let silly things like the truth or facts get in the way of a good self-serving narrative.
XX/XY absolutely determines gender in normally developed humans. That genetic defects/mutations/abnormalities such as 46,XY can occur doesn't refute that.
And "identity" isn't meaningless. It's merely subjective whereas chromosome identification is objective. As for which determines what someone IS, that too is subjective.
Thankfully, I nor my parents went to school in Texas. So, in my Biology class we learned that genitalia and identity are both irrelevant and in humans:
XY Chomosomes = Male
XX Chomosomes = Female
Creationists have a stronger leg to stand on than climate change deniers.
Creationism is still a valid theory, it's just one completely bereft of scientific evidence to support it. But if God showed up and started performing Deity-ish things, science would have to accept it as fact.
Climate change denialists however are screaming "THERE IS NO GOD!" while He is standing in front of them juggling lightning bolts.
But to get most next-day content on Hulu comes through "TV Anywhere" meaning you need to be paying a cable company and Hulu to get it. If I'm paying the cable company, why bother with Hulu at all?
To be honest, I figured that it /had/ to be a bad ruling and spent a while trying to understand why it was wrong, just because of how they've been lately. Perhaps I'm just paranoid.
Drug dogs just don't have enough lobbyists paying every nephew and 3rd cousin twice removed each justice has to get a "typical" ruling.
Maybe this person is Betty White having a bout of dementia thinking she's really Rose Nylund and that getting enough first posts on Slashdot will get her immortalized as a statue in St. Olaf.....
Give 100 people both the parts to create an Internet and the parts to create a Space Shuttle. Which do you think will happen first, will they send an E-mail or will they go to space?
So, there's a Republican candidate running on a platform of "I vow to say that anything a Democrat says or does is Unamerican, Treasonous, a war on Religion (Christianity of course being the only valid religion) and/or hypocritical. How? Mainly by waiting for them to say how everything I believe in is discriminatory and disgusting then attacking them as hypocrites and liars because they only criticized me for saying I think gay people are subhumans who don't deserve the same rights as people who live by the tenets set forth in a 2000 year old novel, while completely failing to mention some some 3rd world Warlord who kills gay people outright. I will then go on Fox News and tell the world how it's Hillary and Obama's fault that the Warlord hates gays because they failed to go back in time and make Richard Simmons answer a fan letter that was sent by said Warlord to him in 1979; all while Sean Hannity performs analingous on me just off camera."
/. plans to report on every bit of stupidity that falls out of political candidates mouths, well... it'll be just like every other "news" site in the U.S.
What makes that newsworthy?
If
The U.S. has had hemostatic dressings since at least World War II. Soldiers carried a mix of sulfanilamide, aluminum sulfate and titanium dioxide, the use of which is still taught at the US Army Combat Medic school and the USAF Pararescue School. Although in practice, the military now uses modern Combat Gauzes like Quik Clot, Celox Gauze and ChitoGauze on the battlefield.
Password managers aren't a magic solution either as someone with a camera phone and a good angle or infection by a simple keylogger can negate any security a password manager can provide. Plus, they give attackers a single point of focus to gain access to all your passwords for every website you use (and potentially more if you use form fill in features to store credit card info) in a very handy reference list. Like everything else, they're only a secure as the weakest point in the chain between you and whichever manager you use.
The only real solution for people who value their online identity is to never establish one at all. And even then someone might establish one in your name if they get access to the right records database. All anyone can really do is try to find a solution that is convenient and not stupidly insecure while ensuring they know how to minimize the damage if/when their information is compromised in some way (watch bank and credit card statements, check credit report frequently, etc..).
Of course! I frequently go to Best Buy to shop for things.
Then I buy them online from a retailer that charges at least 30% less (usually Amazon) and doesn't grill me for a half hour when I have to return something their employees broke tossing boxes around.
Being handed a box with the contents of your office by security along with a document from the legal department that detail which clause(s) of your contract have been breached so they can avoid having to pay you for the remainder of the contract term and void any golden handshake provisions in the contract is how people with contracts get fired.
Not having your contract renewed is akin to being given a gold watch and cake.
I prefer simple, personal methods easy for humans to remember but difficult for machines to guess. Things like passages out of a favorite book, modified versions of song lyrics, etc.
For example, take the first half of a chorus from one song and a the last half of a verse from another by a different artist of a different genre and combine them and you have a multiple word pass phrase that's easy to remember . Even if the attacker knows to use song lyrics, with so many songs out there and ways to vary how you use their lyrics, it'd still be very difficult to break by machine.
Apparently, he didn't get sacked. They're just not renewing his contract. Which means he gets to sit on his ass and get paid by the BBC while fielding offers from pretty much every other media company in the world until his contract expires while the guy he punched no longer gets to work for one of the most prestigious show brands in the world.
So, the guy he punched will likely end up on some doomed BBC 2 reality show, The BBC loses a 28 year old brand and a show that brought in over $50 million/year while Clarkson (and potentially May and Hammond) get to find someone willing to pay for the talents honed at the BBC without (apparently) being subject to the no-compete clause and the anger of Top Gear fans that quitting would have subjected them to.
And prosecution? It's England, not the U.S. It was a simple assault by a drunk old man at a pub with with the victim saying publicly that he sustained only minor injury. If Britain imposed prison time for that they'd have more people in jail than the US does every time the World Cup came round. At most he'll get a £500 fine and have to get some counseling.
He never went on a Michael Richards-esque racist rant or anything. He's a comic in the vein of Lenny Bruce, George Carlin and Richard Pryor. Most people get it. Some don't and some just like to get offended because it allows them to express hate toward others in a way that's not only currently socially acceptable, but often encouraged.
Being offended gives them a power over others that they could never have if their brand of self righteous hate wasn't as accepted now as racist hate was in the past. That sort of person is absolutely giddy when someone like Jeremy Clarkson get ordered to the back of the bus.
But inevitably, he doesn't go quietly and meekly to the back, he gets off the bus and drives beside it in a Veyron, revving the engine to redline and laughing at the people offended by the noise.
He signed it, but the Clinton administration wrote it. It was held up by Republicans until G.W.B. got into office. The Politics of No Child Left Behind
Much of the state is rural areas with rural students whose ambitions didn't go beyond spending their lives working the family farm just like their daddy and grandaddy; many of whom were traditionally "home schooled" until Arkansas introduced much more stringent requirements on home schooling in the late 90s. The old joke that when it's 12:30 in Little Rock, 15 minutes outside the city it's 1950, isn't really much of a joke as it's not far from fact. That's what drags down the statistics. But those statistics are actually great for the state as the money that keeps coming in to "fix" the "broken" education system (thanks to Arkansas native Bill Clinton's "No Child Left Behind" act, funny how that works out huh?) doesn't go to a town in Monroe Country whose high school graduating class is 12 and has an annual budget of 3 paperclips and a mule. It goes to the schools in the growing business hub cities that were already fairly good so overall, the schools in such cities are now well above average, but with districts carefully designed to include enough rural and impoverished kids to keep the test score averages and graduation rates from looking too good.
This is just another of the measures Arkansas is trying to entice more tech companies to move to Arkansas. It's a dirt cheap place to do business and a dirt cheap place to live (I bought a new, high end 3200 square foot home in 2010 for under $300k) with plenty of undeveloped areas to grow out. They've been working to build out tech infrastructure in Little Rock and between Bentonville (Walmart HQ) to Fort Smith (a manufacturing and shipping hub) for most of the past decade. Now, they're trying to develop the workforce to further support it. And, as you mentioned, Arkansas would absolutely love to attract businesses who sell coding crap or do any other kind of tech stuff. They've been grooming the state for such businesses for years. Get the people selling coding crap here and the people who make coding crap will follow.
That may be true. However, self driving cars are an entirely different matter. While they are really cool, do you really want to be in one hurling down the highway at 85MPH (I'm in Utah) and trusting that the automated systems are going to know the difference between a coyote or a tumbleweed?
Today? No. In 20 years? Almost certainly as by then they should be perfected enough that they'll be a lot safer than sharing the road with vehicles operated manually by a 19 year old who thinks they're such a fantastic driver that they can safely fly down the highway at 120MPH. When I was a tow truck driver just out of HS I watched the CHP spray what was left of such drivers off the road at least once a week.
If a child and a dog run out into the street at the same time from opposite sides, do you trust the car to make the right decision as to which it will run over?
I'd expect we'll have systems that identify any warm blooded creature entering the roadway and instantly apply braking and take evasive maneuvers that human reaction times couldn't possibly compete with and that they'd be more reliable and consistent than human drivers have ever been and they'll be able to communicate what they're seeing and doing with other vehicles nearby so they can measures to ensure they react appropriately as well.
How would you like to be legally responsible for your self driving car if it runs over a child?
You probably wouldn't be liable in such a case. The car maker would be. Just as they are now if a flaw in the car causes an accident. But with an automated car there'd be no way for the car manufacturer to claim it was the driver's fault so it'd take a lot less litigation to assign such liability.
What about black ice?
Machines are already better at identifying black ice than humans via the use of things like thermal imaging and reflective laser analysis. And if you see a patch of black ice, there's no guarantee the guy behind you will see it. But if automated cars became the norm, once one car (or a satellite or drone) sees a patch of black ice, every other car in the area can be notified to avoid it and they could even automatically dispatch an automated service vehicle to remove it.
What if a person is in the road and the car has a choice of running over the person or crashing and possibly killing you.
Why wouldn't the car see the person and stop while sending a signal to all the cars behind it to do the same and avoid a pile up? A car will never be too busy changing the radio station or messing with their phone or driving drunk or fatigued or subject to panic so, even when someone does foolishly run out in the road, the number of times where the option will be "Run over the person or crash into something" will be far rarer than it is today with human drivers.
Do you trust the car to make the right decision?
My car can already parallel park a lot better than I can. And there's already systems for planes that allow them to safely fly and land in conditions it'd be nearly impossible for a human to safely do so. And humans aren't known for making good decisions, especially when they're required to make them quickly. So yeah, once the technology matures to the same point as automated parallel parking, automated cruise control and Automatic braking have, I'd trust it to drive.
>As much as I like software (and writing it), there are IMHO too many judgement calls for a computer and in many situations too many for a lot of (supposedly sane) people.
As much as I like humans, and as much fun it is creating more of them, there are IMHO too many physical and mental limitations for even a supposedly sane human to do as quickly and accurately and make judgements based upon the available data as a well programmed machine can.
The only way I can see s
In the US, the biggest reason that I've heard from people as to why "they don't want their vote to be counted" is because registered voter pools are what's used in most jurisdictions as the jury duty pool. If they don't register to vote, they won't ever get summoned for jury duty. And there's a lot of incentive to avoid being summoned, at least in my jurisdiction.
Here, when you get a summons you have to call the day before your summons date to make sure you'll still be required to appear and if not, your summons date will just be pushed back a week or two rather than be rescinded. That often happens several times before you actually get ordered to appear but, not knowing if that'll be the case each time and most employers requiring at least a week's notice for time off, that means someone being called in might miss numerous days of work even if they aren't ever selected to sit on a jury. And of course, since so many people stay out of the voter pool, being called for jury duty isn't a rare event. Last year, half my 15 paid vacation days were used to get paid for days I had to request off due to jury duty summons. Not a big deal for me as I don't use vacation days anyway (my employer allows us to cash in unused days at the end of the year) but for non-salary people that don't give paid vacation days, that can be untenable and you have to actually be told to appear before you can get a hardship exemption (which they rarely approve). Worse, being an at-will work state, being called for jury duty can even cost people their jobs entirely if their employer is particularly sleazy as it's impossible to prove they fired someone for not getting out of jury duty when, as long as they don't try to challenge granting them unemployment benefits, no one will ever even question it and even of they are questioned they can just say "That's not why I fired them. I just didn't like their personality." and that's the end of it.
Mandatory voting is a stupid idea as Americans don't like mandatory *anything*. It's a great way to ensure Grumpy Cat is voted in as our next President. To increase voter turnout they need to remove any perceived penalty like allowing voter registration pools to be used for anything other than voting that discourage people from registering to vote and they need to make voting more convenient. Use driver's license registrations or taxpayer information for jury recruitment. And put voting booths at places like Walmart, Costco, indoor malls or stadiums and such that are made to comfortably accommodate large numbers of people rather than putting them in some tiny classroom at a local elementry school with 3 parking spots within a half mile of the place where people will have to stand in line outside in the November cold for a couple hours before they can vote. But, none of that is in the best interests of politicians as they rely on the old, wealthy and zealous to keep them in office as normal people wouldn't vote for many of the nutjobs that currently hold office across the US.