So well researched and reasoned that the authors of the two papers he relies on the most have publicly stated that he didn't understand them, and that his conclusions are wrong.
Really? As far as I know they distanced themselves from Damore (nobody likes to be lynched in a witch hunt) and not from what he wrote. The article "The Google Memo: Four Scientists Respond" features the comments of four scientists (including scientists cited by Damore) about the Google Memo. Here are some excerpts:
"The author of the Google essay on issues related to diversity gets nearly all of the science and its implications exactly right. " L. Jussim
"A Google employee recently shared a memo that referenced some of my scholarly research on psychological sex differences[...]. Alongside other evidence, the employee argued, in part, that this research indicates affirmative action policies based on biological sex are misguided. Maybe, maybe not. " D. Schmitt
"[...]this memo unleashed a firestorm of negative commentary, most of which ignored the memo’s evidence-based arguments. Among commentators who claim the memo’s empirical facts are wrong, I haven’t read a single one who understand sexual selection theory, animal behavior, and sex differences research." G. Milller
"As a woman who’s worked in academia and within STEM, I didn’t find the memo offensive or sexist in the least. I found it to be a well thought out document, asking for greater tolerance for differences in opinion, and treating people as individuals instead of based on group membership." D. Soh
It is interesting to note that while Schmitt (who is extensively cited in Damore's memo) seems a bit critical of Damore, he basically confirms what Damore says: he keeps saying that treating sexes as dichotomous is wrong, which is exactly what Damore said. In fact Schmitt writes: "treating people as dichotomous sexes is exactly what many affirmative action policies do" (that is what Damore was rebutting).
Many tried to misrepresent the Google Memo, including Wired, where you can read things like:
“It is unclear to me that this sex difference would play a role in success within the Google workplace (in particular, not being able to handle stresses of leadership in the workplace. That’s a huge stretch to me),” writes Schmitt. So, yes, that’s the researcher Damore cites disagreeing with Damore.
That seems a rebuttal of Damore's claim, by the same author he cited. Except for the fact that Damore never said something like: "women can't handle the stresses of leadership in the workplace". Nor he implied that. When you resort to straw man arguments, you probably lack a strong point.
Well, not really. Spectre is a problem only for applications that run trusted code alongside untrusted code (i.e. interpreters, JIT vm), that is a small subset of all software. Why do you want to tamper all your software, then?
It is totally the other way around. Meltdown has no fix: you have to entirely skip the hardware feature via software and take the performance hit.
Spectre is already patched on some ARM processors (note that many ARM processors are not affected by Spectre), while AMD says that it should be patched in the software affected. Since Spectre only refers to leakages of memory in the same process, it is only a problem for JIT and VM stuff (e.g. browsers and their Javascript, wait for a browser update in the next few days).
Meltdown is the real problem here and that affects only all Intel CPUs since 1995 (except for Itanium and pre-2013 Atom) and one [sic!] ARM chip (I think Cortex-A75).
Spectre is linked to two vulnerabilities: the first one is difficult to exploit and solvable via software, the second one is very difficult to exploit. Spectre allows to read memory from the same process, so it is an issue only for JIT and VM code. Meltdown allows to read memory everywhere.
Of course. However the problem was that the Shah alienated the liberals, the leftists and all the secular forces. So when the Islamic extremists (who are not a minority, but are the most part of the lower classes still today) tried to topple him, none tried to defend the Shah: the Shah was overturned by the extremists and the liberals. Then the extremists took over, because they were the strongest party by far.
As a side note, the average government of the Italian Republic lasted less than a year too (and the Kingdom of Italy wasn't better, if you don't count Mussolini) for much of its history. Turkey is not much better either.
Leave them alone . . . . Iran was once a democracy until they elected the "wrong" leader and America and Britain fixed it by putting in the Shah. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Unfortunately your history is a bit off. The Shah was in power before the Prime Minister's coup, and was in power after the British & American counter-coup. You may note this section of the Wikipedia article:
Execution of Operation Ajax
The official pretext for the start of the coup was Mossadegh's decree to dissolve Parliament, giving himself and his cabinet complete power to rule, while effectively stripping the Shah of his powers.[10][11][12] It resulted in him being accused of giving himself "total and dictatorial powers."
The "pretext" has the "unfortunate" quality of being true and understated in Wikipedia. The Prime Minister overthrew the Iranian democratic government, and effectively the Shah who then fled the country. The Prime Minister took the power of ruling by decree, in other words a dictator. After a quick look it appears that the Wikipedia article fails to mention that there was a fraudulent election staged to justify all of this. The Time magazine article that I saw on it mentioned that Iran's Prime Minister received a higher percentage vote than either Hitler or Stalin received in their elections. I wonder what the Farsi word for chutzpah is? Anyway, the counter-coup restore the Shah to power, it wasn't what put him in power to begin with.
Almost true, that is completely false. From the same wikipedia article:
the Shah began to take an increasingly active role in politics. He quickly organized the Iran Constituent Assembly to amend the constitution to increase his powers. He established the Senate of Iran which had been a part of the Constitution of 1906 but had never been convened. The Shah had the right to appoint half the senators and he chose men sympathetic to his aims. Mossadegh thought this increase in the Shah's political power was not democratic; he believed that the Shah should "reign, but not rule" in a manner similar to Europe's constitutional monarchies. Led by Mossadegh, political parties and opponents of the Shah's policies banded together to form a coalition known as the National Front. Oil nationalization was a major policy goal for the party.
By 1951, the National Front had won majority seats for the popularly elected Majlis (Parliament of Iran).
Basically the Shah created an upper house of the Parliament that was completely loyal to him, then a lot of people in Iran got upset for this fact and finally they elected Mossadegh who opposed that novelty. That's also why he was thinking of dissolving the Parliament: the unelected Shah controlled the upper house through unlected members. That was not very democratic to the eyes of Mossadegh and many Iranians alike. The real problem, though, was the oil nationalization part. That got the US and UK to act: you can butcher your people all you want (like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain do), but don't touch our precious! End of story.
Then again, the majority of the people in Iran, like in every Middle East country, is made up of islamist blockheads, so, even if the ayatollah gets deposed, the end result would not be better (and probably much worse). But that's not what matters to the U.S.
You are aware that the idea of a "banana equivalent dose" has been thouroughly debunked, right? The net increase of radioactivity exposure from eating a banana is: zero
"The Potassium-40 in bananas is a particularly poor model isotope to use, Meggitt says, because the potassium content of our bodies seems to be under homeostatic control. When you eat a banana, your body's level of Potassium-40 doesn't increase. You just get rid of some excess Potassium-40. The net dose of a banana is zero."
What? Are you serious? The shockingly diminutive numbers of the alleged Russian campaign on Twitter & Facebook (they spent tens of thousands of dollars over a year! tens of thousands, I tell you!!11!!) were the artificially inflated result of a computer-assisted, paranoid review. I mean, they included among the suspected Russian trolls even those that have a cyrillic character in their username or that logged even once from Russia. Well that last one makes sense: I'm sure that Hillary Clinton logged from Russia more than once.
Jokes aside, to hijack the Brexit referendum, Russia allegedly spent up to 1$. Maybe Russians have loads of internet trolls, but Brexit, the Donald, racists, social warriors, divisions, the internet craziness are not their fault: they were all home-produced.
That is a fundamental problem and I don't think it changes much if you rein in social media.
In my opinion there is a problem with social media. In real life, it is difficult to find a place (workplace, schoolroom, bus stop) where everybody thinks the same: you have to compare your ideas. In social media you can easily choose to talk only to similarly minded people and so you lose the ability to confront different ideas. All these snowflakes are children born from the marriage between political correctness and social media.
You seem Russian as those are Russian type explanations.
Ad hominem argument since the first line? Ok...
I have known for a very long time that Ukraine allowing Russians to keep ships there was a really bad idea, but government after government foolishly believed that they could pacify Mother Russia by doing so and she wouldn't attack them.
The "bad idea" is the fact that Ukraine's governments were/are among the worst, most corrupted governments in the former Soviet Republics and they got worse at managing their dilapidated economy "revolution" after "revolution" (that is coups by some lobby of oligarchs). Russia kept their economy on life support in exchange of blind allegiance. They switched allegiance and so Russia pulled the plug on the life support, while nor the EU, nor the USA are fool enough to dump money in the Ukrainian economy. That's your "bad idea".
Your reason stated for Saakhasvili's invasion is correct, but note that you are forgetting to mention that Russian troops went there to "help" (wink wink) during a previous ethnic clash over a decade earlier and never left.
They never left because they had an international mandate to stay there. Georgians were not happy with that mandate, but neither were South Ossetians, who claimed it was too pro-Georgia.
Then we have the usual "Don't single out Russia. Everybody else is doing it and doing it more!" argument. You lose on that one.
What does that even mean? What's your point, perhaps: love me, I'm a liberal? I never absolved Russia of lying: I am just saying that someone else is both a liar and a hypocrite. Counter that if you can articulate something more than "you lose, I win because Russia".
Same situation. Saakashvili, then president of Georgia, tried to deflect the attention from his own failures as a politician by militarily occupying South Ossetia, which was an autonomous region of Georgia under the control of a peace keeping force monitored by the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe). Again, Russia exploited the situation "helping" South Ossetia, but you can say that Saakashvili had it coming.
Then we have proof that Russia has created Facebook groups creating dueling protests to reinforce Americans divides and stresses, there is a problem with racism in the US, so they bring up fake news or exaggerated news to play on these feelings of uncomfortable and turn it to fear.
Don't be naive, not just Russia. What about Saudi Arabia? Qatar? Israel? Corporations? The American government? They are all investing in the fake news business, and they are all, singularly, investing much more than Russia. The sum of their investments dwarfs the Russian investments. If you somewhat fear Russian fake news, you should accordingly be scared to death by your establishment fake news.
If you ask me which rock is more like Earth, for anything other than mass and density I'll choose Mars.
Other than mass, density (which is also related to the composition of the planet) and distance from sun, that is everything. Saying that Mars is more like Earth than Venus is like saying that a chimpanzee is more similar to George Clooney than an amputee, because both the chimpanzee and George Clooney have two legs and two arms. In fact, like a chimpanzee could never be a human being (like George Clooney), Mars could never be a life supporting (that is Earth-like) planet because it is too small (hence no atmosphere, no magnetic field etc.), while maybe Venus could have been an Earth double, if only it had been a bit further from the sun. The fact that Venus is clearly not a double of planet Earth, despite being so similar from a geological and astronomical point of view, is interesting for those who want to know why the Earth is the Earth and not another sterile rock. The reasons why Mars is a sterile rock are well known.
Yes and it was a well known fact decades ago. This water-on-Mars affair was the usual publicity stunt to get more funds from the government with pseudo-science (because real science makes the headlines rarely). It is a fact that Venus is the more earth-like planet inside the solar system (and probably even beyond the solar system), however since studying Venus is too costly and complicated we got this Martian frenzy.
"We arent allowed to question why someone votes a particular way" - Yes, we are. That doesn't touch the question of allowing known-and-provably-fraudulent news stories from propaganda sources.
That works both ways, mind you. If the problem is "fraudolent stories", then none is safe and you could bet that the "fraudolent stories" and "propaganda" from non-Russian sources literally obliterated that from Russia. If the problem, instead, is "fraudolent stories allegedly from Russia", be assured, that was not a serious problem: our social/mainstream media overlords already took care of that, preemptively censoring all that bad bad stuff to great extent and then some.
"It sucks that some use this to subvert some people's vote" = You are now apologizing for that directly. I reject that we have to allow fraudulent activity because "My interpretation of freedum sez"
Don't be too intransigent, it usually backfires. Look at all those progressive liberal men who chastised every alleged sexual harasser out there: it is their turn now.
You should know how it ended for Robespierre.
It is not the best thing since the bible, it is not novel, it is not an entertaining read. However since it is the argument of the discussion, one shoul read it before posting his/her insights.
Me too. I actually like Perl, I find its regular expression stuff quite powerful for scripting. Javascript and PHP are worse in my opinion, they have more or less the same problems as Perl, without any real strong point. However, if there is one language I hate, that is VBScript: terribly confusing, painfully slow and cumbersome for many simple tasks (like regular expressions), yet it is pushed down your throat by Excel lovers office managers.
If you don't think fake news changed the outcome of the election, it's because you're inside the bubble.
The outcome of the election was the result of two opposing forces: the repulsion for Trump that made a lot of people vote Hillary, even if they didn't like her, and the repulsion for Hillary that made a lot of people not vote her, even if they do not like Trump. Eventually the second force prevailed, and that was thanks to all the media that endorsed Hillary: the media fanfare made alot of people think that Hillary's victory was obvious and so they voted libertarian or something else and that was fatal in swing states.
Not to mention that many of those users saw those posts after the election. Not to mention that Russia-linked does not automatically mean false (if a post is "Russia-linked", whatever that means, and true, where's the problem?).
Well, 300 years ago Europe was in the middle of the Little Ice Age. It'd be interesting to know if the Sphinx snow patch melted sometimes during the warmer period before the Little Ice Age, but we do not know, since data is missing.
Your belief system seems to recognize climate data going back only a few decades, perhaps a century.
Climate data goes further back obviously, but the problem is that data varies a lot in consistency, accuracy, frequency, space span. It is like sea serpents, old data, and giant oarfishes, modern data, or krakens, old data, and giant squids, modern data: yes, you have data going back for centuries, but that data is really sketchy and totally useless if you want to infer species distribution, behavioural differences etc. through time.
Slashdot Mirror
That is not a rebuttal of Damore's claims, even if it is ambiguously worded to seem like one.
So well researched and reasoned that the authors of the two papers he relies on the most have publicly stated that he didn't understand them, and that his conclusions are wrong.
Really? As far as I know they distanced themselves from Damore (nobody likes to be lynched in a witch hunt) and not from what he wrote. The article "The Google Memo: Four Scientists Respond" features the comments of four scientists (including scientists cited by Damore) about the Google Memo. Here are some excerpts:
"The author of the Google essay on issues related to diversity gets nearly all of the science and its implications exactly right. "
L. Jussim
"A Google employee recently shared a memo that referenced some of my scholarly research on psychological sex differences[...]. Alongside other evidence, the employee argued, in part, that this research indicates affirmative action policies based on biological sex are misguided. Maybe, maybe not. "
D. Schmitt
"[...]this memo unleashed a firestorm of negative commentary, most of which ignored the memo’s evidence-based arguments. Among commentators who claim the memo’s empirical facts are wrong, I haven’t read a single one who understand sexual selection theory, animal behavior, and sex differences research."
G. Milller
"As a woman who’s worked in academia and within STEM, I didn’t find the memo offensive or sexist in the least. I found it to be a well thought out document, asking for greater tolerance for differences in opinion, and treating people as individuals instead of based on group membership."
D. Soh
It is interesting to note that while Schmitt (who is extensively cited in Damore's memo) seems a bit critical of Damore, he basically confirms what Damore says: he keeps saying that treating sexes as dichotomous is wrong, which is exactly what Damore said. In fact Schmitt writes: "treating people as dichotomous sexes is exactly what many affirmative action policies do" (that is what Damore was rebutting).
Many tried to misrepresent the Google Memo, including Wired, where you can read things like:
“It is unclear to me that this sex difference would play a role in success within the Google workplace (in particular, not being able to handle stresses of leadership in the workplace. That’s a huge stretch to me),” writes Schmitt. So, yes, that’s the researcher Damore cites disagreeing with Damore.
That seems a rebuttal of Damore's claim, by the same author he cited. Except for the fact that Damore never said something like: "women can't handle the stresses of leadership in the workplace". Nor he implied that. When you resort to straw man arguments, you probably lack a strong point.
Well, not really. Spectre is a problem only for applications that run trusted code alongside untrusted code (i.e. interpreters, JIT vm), that is a small subset of all software. Why do you want to tamper all your software, then?
It is totally the other way around. Meltdown has no fix: you have to entirely skip the hardware feature via software and take the performance hit.
Spectre is already patched on some ARM processors (note that many ARM processors are not affected by Spectre), while AMD says that it should be patched in the software affected. Since Spectre only refers to leakages of memory in the same process, it is only a problem for JIT and VM stuff (e.g. browsers and their Javascript, wait for a browser update in the next few days).
Meltdown is the real problem here and that affects only all Intel CPUs since 1995 (except for Itanium and pre-2013 Atom) and one [sic!] ARM chip (I think Cortex-A75).
Spectre is linked to two vulnerabilities: the first one is difficult to exploit and solvable via software, the second one is very difficult to exploit. Spectre allows to read memory from the same process, so it is an issue only for JIT and VM code. Meltdown allows to read memory everywhere.
Of course. However the problem was that the Shah alienated the liberals, the leftists and all the secular forces. So when the Islamic extremists (who are not a minority, but are the most part of the lower classes still today) tried to topple him, none tried to defend the Shah: the Shah was overturned by the extremists and the liberals. Then the extremists took over, because they were the strongest party by far.
As a side note, the average government of the Italian Republic lasted less than a year too (and the Kingdom of Italy wasn't better, if you don't count Mussolini) for much of its history. Turkey is not much better either.
Leave them alone . . . . Iran was once a democracy until they elected the "wrong" leader and America and Britain fixed it by putting in the Shah. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Unfortunately your history is a bit off. The Shah was in power before the Prime Minister's coup, and was in power after the British & American counter-coup. You may note this section of the Wikipedia article:
Execution of Operation Ajax The official pretext for the start of the coup was Mossadegh's decree to dissolve Parliament, giving himself and his cabinet complete power to rule, while effectively stripping the Shah of his powers.[10][11][12] It resulted in him being accused of giving himself "total and dictatorial powers."
The "pretext" has the "unfortunate" quality of being true and understated in Wikipedia. The Prime Minister overthrew the Iranian democratic government, and effectively the Shah who then fled the country. The Prime Minister took the power of ruling by decree, in other words a dictator. After a quick look it appears that the Wikipedia article fails to mention that there was a fraudulent election staged to justify all of this. The Time magazine article that I saw on it mentioned that Iran's Prime Minister received a higher percentage vote than either Hitler or Stalin received in their elections. I wonder what the Farsi word for chutzpah is? Anyway, the counter-coup restore the Shah to power, it wasn't what put him in power to begin with.
Almost true, that is completely false. From the same wikipedia article:
the Shah began to take an increasingly active role in politics. He quickly organized the Iran Constituent Assembly to amend the constitution to increase his powers. He established the Senate of Iran which had been a part of the Constitution of 1906 but had never been convened. The Shah had the right to appoint half the senators and he chose men sympathetic to his aims. Mossadegh thought this increase in the Shah's political power was not democratic; he believed that the Shah should "reign, but not rule" in a manner similar to Europe's constitutional monarchies. Led by Mossadegh, political parties and opponents of the Shah's policies banded together to form a coalition known as the National Front. Oil nationalization was a major policy goal for the party.
By 1951, the National Front had won majority seats for the popularly elected Majlis (Parliament of Iran).
Basically the Shah created an upper house of the Parliament that was completely loyal to him, then a lot of people in Iran got upset for this fact and finally they elected Mossadegh who opposed that novelty. That's also why he was thinking of dissolving the Parliament: the unelected Shah controlled the upper house through unlected members. That was not very democratic to the eyes of Mossadegh and many Iranians alike.
The real problem, though, was the oil nationalization part. That got the US and UK to act: you can butcher your people all you want (like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain do), but don't touch our precious! End of story.
Then again, the majority of the people in Iran, like in every Middle East country, is made up of islamist blockheads, so, even if the ayatollah gets deposed, the end result would not be better (and probably much worse). But that's not what matters to the U.S.
You are aware that the idea of a "banana equivalent dose" has been thouroughly debunked, right? The net increase of radioactivity exposure from eating a banana is: zero
"The Potassium-40 in bananas is a particularly poor model isotope to use, Meggitt says, because the potassium content of our bodies seems to be under homeostatic control. When you eat a banana, your body's level of Potassium-40 doesn't increase. You just get rid of some excess Potassium-40. The net dose of a banana is zero."
(source: https://boingboing.net/2010/08... )
I don't know if the famous "banana equivalent dose" is correct, however it is obviously not zero. Unless you pee while eating bananas, of course.
That's what N N Thaleb calls skin in the game: https://medium.com/incerto/on-... .
What? Are you serious? The shockingly diminutive numbers of the alleged Russian campaign on Twitter & Facebook (they spent tens of thousands of dollars over a year! tens of thousands, I tell you!!11!!) were the artificially inflated result of a computer-assisted, paranoid review. I mean, they included among the suspected Russian trolls even those that have a cyrillic character in their username or that logged even once from Russia. Well that last one makes sense: I'm sure that Hillary Clinton logged from Russia more than once.
Jokes aside, to hijack the Brexit referendum, Russia allegedly spent up to 1$. Maybe Russians have loads of internet trolls, but Brexit, the Donald, racists, social warriors, divisions, the internet craziness are not their fault: they were all home-produced.
That is a fundamental problem and I don't think it changes much if you rein in social media.
In my opinion there is a problem with social media. In real life, it is difficult to find a place (workplace, schoolroom, bus stop) where everybody thinks the same: you have to compare your ideas. In social media you can easily choose to talk only to similarly minded people and so you lose the ability to confront different ideas. All these snowflakes are children born from the marriage between political correctness and social media.
RTFA. The whole point of this exploit is that is undetectable by anti virus software or any other application.
You seem Russian as those are Russian type explanations.
Ad hominem argument since the first line? Ok...
I have known for a very long time that Ukraine allowing Russians to keep ships there was a really bad idea, but government after government foolishly believed that they could pacify Mother Russia by doing so and she wouldn't attack them.
The "bad idea" is the fact that Ukraine's governments were/are among the worst, most corrupted governments in the former Soviet Republics and they got worse at managing their dilapidated economy "revolution" after "revolution" (that is coups by some lobby of oligarchs). Russia kept their economy on life support in exchange of blind allegiance. They switched allegiance and so Russia pulled the plug on the life support, while nor the EU, nor the USA are fool enough to dump money in the Ukrainian economy. That's your "bad idea".
Your reason stated for Saakhasvili's invasion is correct, but note that you are forgetting to mention that Russian troops went there to "help" (wink wink) during a previous ethnic clash over a decade earlier and never left.
They never left because they had an international mandate to stay there. Georgians were not happy with that mandate, but neither were South Ossetians, who claimed it was too pro-Georgia.
Then we have the usual "Don't single out Russia. Everybody else is doing it and doing it more!" argument. You lose on that one.
What does that even mean? What's your point, perhaps: love me, I'm a liberal? I never absolved Russia of lying: I am just saying that someone else is both a liar and a hypocrite. Counter that if you can articulate something more than "you lose, I win because Russia".
Being the timely "annexation" of Crimea when Ukraine was in discussion of joining the EU
Uff, the annexation of Crimea by Russia was made possible by many stupid decisions of the "revolutionary" parliament of Ukraine, that passed a bill to remove the Russian language (and other minority languages) from the list of the official regional languages, while there are regions of Ukraine where a large part (or even the majority) of the population identify themselves as Russian (or some other minority). That was one of the reason of the counter-revolution in Ukraine, that was then exploited by Russia.
the invasion of Georgia
Same situation. Saakashvili, then president of Georgia, tried to deflect the attention from his own failures as a politician by militarily occupying South Ossetia, which was an autonomous region of Georgia under the control of a peace keeping force monitored by the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe). Again, Russia exploited the situation "helping" South Ossetia, but you can say that Saakashvili had it coming.
Then we have proof that Russia has created Facebook groups creating dueling protests to reinforce Americans divides and stresses, there is a problem with racism in the US, so they bring up fake news or exaggerated news to play on these feelings of uncomfortable and turn it to fear.
Don't be naive, not just Russia. What about Saudi Arabia? Qatar? Israel? Corporations? The American government? They are all investing in the fake news business, and they are all, singularly, investing much more than Russia. The sum of their investments dwarfs the Russian investments. If you somewhat fear Russian fake news, you should accordingly be scared to death by your establishment fake news.
Google should downlist American media too, because they also "inject themselves into US politics".
But Google already did that!!!! Alternet, Counterpunch, Democracy Now and many other independent media outlet were heavily downlisted.
If you ask me which rock is more like Earth, for anything other than mass and density I'll choose Mars.
Other than mass, density (which is also related to the composition of the planet) and distance from sun, that is everything. Saying that Mars is more like Earth than Venus is like saying that a chimpanzee is more similar to George Clooney than an amputee, because both the chimpanzee and George Clooney have two legs and two arms. In fact, like a chimpanzee could never be a human being (like George Clooney), Mars could never be a life supporting (that is Earth-like) planet because it is too small (hence no atmosphere, no magnetic field etc.), while maybe Venus could have been an Earth double, if only it had been a bit further from the sun. The fact that Venus is clearly not a double of planet Earth, despite being so similar from a geological and astronomical point of view, is interesting for those who want to know why the Earth is the Earth and not another sterile rock. The reasons why Mars is a sterile rock are well known.
Yes and it was a well known fact decades ago. This water-on-Mars affair was the usual publicity stunt to get more funds from the government with pseudo-science (because real science makes the headlines rarely). It is a fact that Venus is the more earth-like planet inside the solar system (and probably even beyond the solar system), however since studying Venus is too costly and complicated we got this Martian frenzy.
"We arent allowed to question why someone votes a particular way" - Yes, we are. That doesn't touch the question of allowing known-and-provably-fraudulent news stories from propaganda sources.
That works both ways, mind you. If the problem is "fraudolent stories", then none is safe and you could bet that the "fraudolent stories" and "propaganda" from non-Russian sources literally obliterated that from Russia. If the problem, instead, is "fraudolent stories allegedly from Russia", be assured, that was not a serious problem: our social/mainstream media overlords already took care of that, preemptively censoring all that bad bad stuff to great extent and then some.
"It sucks that some use this to subvert some people's vote" = You are now apologizing for that directly. I reject that we have to allow fraudulent activity because "My interpretation of freedum sez"
Don't be too intransigent, it usually backfires. Look at all those progressive liberal men who chastised every alleged sexual harasser out there: it is their turn now. You should know how it ended for Robespierre.
Fossil fuels are only cheaper if you keep the waste products off the books.
The same is true for PV and wind farms too. Really, this very story is about the cost of the PV industry waste.
It is not the best thing since the bible, it is not novel, it is not an entertaining read. However since it is the argument of the discussion, one shoul read it before posting his/her insights.
Me too. I actually like Perl, I find its regular expression stuff quite powerful for scripting. Javascript and PHP are worse in my opinion, they have more or less the same problems as Perl, without any real strong point. However, if there is one language I hate, that is VBScript: terribly confusing, painfully slow and cumbersome for many simple tasks (like regular expressions), yet it is pushed down your throat by Excel lovers office managers.
If you don't think fake news changed the outcome of the election, it's because you're inside the bubble.
The outcome of the election was the result of two opposing forces: the repulsion for Trump that made a lot of people vote Hillary, even if they didn't like her, and the repulsion for Hillary that made a lot of people not vote her, even if they do not like Trump. Eventually the second force prevailed, and that was thanks to all the media that endorsed Hillary: the media fanfare made alot of people think that Hillary's victory was obvious and so they voted libertarian or something else and that was fatal in swing states.
Not to mention that many of those users saw those posts after the election.
Not to mention that Russia-linked does not automatically mean false (if a post is "Russia-linked", whatever that means, and true, where's the problem?).
Well, 300 years ago Europe was in the middle of the Little Ice Age. It'd be interesting to know if the Sphinx snow patch melted sometimes during the warmer period before the Little Ice Age, but we do not know, since data is missing.
Your belief system seems to recognize climate data going back only a few decades, perhaps a century.
Climate data goes further back obviously, but the problem is that data varies a lot in consistency, accuracy, frequency, space span.
It is like sea serpents, old data, and giant oarfishes, modern data, or krakens, old data, and giant squids, modern data: yes, you have data going back for centuries, but that data is really sketchy and totally useless if you want to infer species distribution, behavioural differences etc. through time.