In the same vein, why does an armed robbery in many states carry an "enhanced" sentence, or even become a different crime, because a gun was used? Would a crossbow or a big knife have been any different? They're all deadly weapons.
Armed does not equal gun here--a crossbow and a big knife count as 'armed' in probably all jurisdictions, and I've heard at least one has had to specifically say alligators count as 'armed' too. Rocks can and have counted for armed. If you've got a certain level of martial arts training you may count as armed even if wearing absolutely nothing whatsoever, depending on the jurisdiction and its laws on if and under what circumstances a person counts as a deadly weapon.
Those last two words are the key thing: armed robbery means that a deadly weapon was brought to the crime and its use threatened. You're probably okay bringing a very obviously-a-boffer item and threatening to boff them if they don't give you the goods, but I am not a lawyer and moreover I advise against robbing people in any manner under any circumstances, even ones as absurd as those discussed here.
Humans are not treated as in a perpetual state of consent for giving away money, for being taken strange places by strangers, or any of the other sorts of cases where "consent" defenses are common.... except that they generally are treated as being in a perpetual state of consent for sex.
[...]
And this is wrong.
That's because the social assumption currently is that humans are, in fact, in a perpetual state of mindless heat and will be DTF--or have you missed how much trouble it can be for a woman to get their healthcare providers to grasp that they're not sexually active? You're right that it's wrong, but the part that needs addressing is that assumption.
Or have you missed that this assumption is even stronger with men, to the point that getting a female-on-male case to court is a PITA because our culture insists that men always, always want sex and if they can be raped it is only by other men?
That said, a few of these cases probably are best off collapsing on the rape charges given that the nasty truth is sometimes that both sides had defective consent--for example, let's say that I'm underage but I told you I was legal to get you to have sex with me. What you did is statutory rape but what I did was rape by deception, which is a charge some jurisdictions have. Because I'm underage I simply lack the ability to consent, while for the sake of manners I'm going to go with the presumption that you'd not have consented if you knew I was underage. (Please note that your argument covers why it ought to be a charge recognized in all courts: consent gotten by lies isn't accepted in other situations, so why should it be with sex?)
Of course, what would be really interesting is if such a case was simply treated as a mutual rape--so both sides get charged and go to trial, and given the charges involved the minor fact that both consented would be a non-issue. (In fact, I might be better off claiming you didn't consent, so I'm innocent of the specific charge--something people have gotten away with, but best done only when a not guilty verdict will prevent you from being charged with the 'correct' crime.)
What is the log and what is the mote in parent's statements?
Don't lust after other women,
thanks mister christian for deciding that you needed to dispense this advice to those who haven't partaken of your kool-aid
Make it gender-neutral and you'll find it excellent advice for keeping any romantic relationship working: Focus on your partner(s), don't start pre-planning cheating on them, don't make it easy for you to justify to yourself cheating on them, make a point of doing relationship maintenance things like 'having conversations with to your partner(s),' and you're not likely to feel any need to cheat.
If you feel the need to cheat despite all of that, it's probably time to GTFO or at least force counseling if you're for some reason still determined to stay together.
That said: Cheating here is specifically infidelity--open relationships are different, though I'm going to give somebody who says they're in one yet was using Ashley Madison strange looks. (I'd personally go for one of the sites catering to the open relationships and/or polyamory crowd--I'm more likely to find somebody there who'd be fine if my partner wanted to meet them, if nothing else.)
"I am about to be killed, tortured, or exiled," he wrote. "And I did nothing."
No, what you did was expose yourself using social media to an authoritarian, abusive government. Realize that or do not.
Don't worry. If he took realistic achievable steps to protect himself, I'm sure a cacophany of narrow-minded Slashdotters -- with no knowledge of history and no understanding of the kind of people who like to run things -- would howl at him for being a tin-foil hatter.
If he took realistic, achievable steps to protect himself, he'd not have been using Ashley Madison in the first place--having checked into them, I'd have been wary even before the hack because of Ashley Madison's business practices. Them charging money for profile deletion is a red flag.
Seems ridiculously low. They have already been sued for over half a billion CAD. This is likely to end their business. Is that really all they can afford or are willing to pay?
Shows how much they care about their users. Presumably they are hoping to get someone to grass on the cheap, and only ramp it up later if no-one comes forward. Even more alarming, it suggests that they have no idea who it is and their security is so poor they have nothing to go on.
I'd say how much they cared about their users was shown much earlier--or has the claims about them not deleting information they demanded money to delete not been verified yet? If it has, they're probably going to be gotten for fraud.
It's too bad today's news pushes such obvious political agendas. They should be focused on telling the truth as objectively as possible.
There's an unfortunately significant body of research in social psychology that suggests that it might be better, in fact, to encourage them to be open and honest about their political agendas--even if they do try to be objective, as long as we have humans doing the reporting agendas and opinions will inevitably shape things. Ironically, being openly and consciously aware of your biases seems to actually make people better at suppressing them in order to be objective. (I've not seen any proposed mechanism, but offhand I'd say it'd be the obvious one of them being able to self-monitor and correct.)
I'm in California and IMHO the way they are teaching math in elementary school sucks. Working on a computer is a distraction
This is the crux of the problem with education reform. No matter what you do, someone will complain. First, Russotto was complaining that kids can't work ahead. I pointed out that that is wrong, and in many public schools the kids can work ahead at their own pace. Then you complain that that is a bad thing, and the kids should go back to drills with pencil and paper.
For the record, I very much disagree with you. Recent changes in California public schools have been very much for the better. Why should my kid be penalized because your kid is dumb? Your kid should get some remedial help, but that is no reason to hold others back.
Actually, as somebody who's worked with learning math on computers? Proper display support is not common enough, and learning to do the basic stuff on pencil and paper without a calculator & doing so repeatedly can get you to the point where you will be able to do the calculations even while very out of it, which you're best off betting on having to do sometimes.
The other thing? Wolfram Alpha exists, and if your kids are lazy they're using it & if they're not bright enough to get why laziness doesn't pay long-term they're abusing it too. (I've found that for some bits of math, it provides better explanations than textbooks do, and a few I suspect are actually best explained in an animated form, possibly with an audio component--music and music theory might be the most reliable way to make math relevant and certainly the one least likely to be innocently bigoted.)
Honestly, I'd favor a hybrid--drills on any format that lets you easily carry them around to do at your own leisure (cell phone app and paper options should coexist), with computer checking so you can know if you're doing it right but not for grading them. Drills should be seen as a way to get practice and build confidence, and work on good habits as sometimes simply showing your steps can get you farther than merely plugging numbers from the problem into calculator and copying the output. I'm not even going to knock learning formulas--though I certainly would object to not teaching how to solve them for any value you want. If nothing else, it simplifies things. (Plug in values where you have them, solve for what you don't. see if you can determine a value for the remaining unknowns, repeat until at most one unknown remains--yes, defining one in terms of another is allowed for this.)
Of course, if you don't expect your kid to get into any particularly math-heavy STEM classes in college, a total lack of practice is not going to hurt too bad, but the more your kid needs math skills the more important practice can be. Paper-and-pencil particularly matters if they get into classes where showing their work is essential to getting credit--I had at least one professor where doing the right things to the wrong numbers only got you dings if and only if you showed your work.
Rote memorization IS what schools are about today. You are not supposed to understand. You are not supposed to deduct it yourself. And sure as fuck you are not supposed to question it.
There is actually a very good reason for this: It's easier to teach. And most importantly, easier to test. It's also much easier for kids who can sponge (soak up the crap - pour out the crap at the test - no need to retain anything, just rinse and repeat for the next subject). Most of all, though, since you don't have to build on any foundation, you can pick up anywhere. And that means that kids who did not understand the foundations are not going to ruin your test score averages.
I guess that's called "no child left behind". Everyone is on the same crappy level that way.
It predates it by a lot, that's how my math textbooks were and I left public school before that hit. I was also an example of somebody who understood math well enough that the textbooks didn't bother me as much as bore the !@#$ out me--I don't think insisting anybody write proofs is good, I actually had an utterly lousy calc class that had you wanting to do proofs completely from memory for every question on the regular quizes. Proofs being shown, however, is actually pretty useful and utterly fascinating to watch--and it helps you understand why you actually need to know this material and how it links together.
Teaching math is hard, and the general view currently is that it's not actually necessary for a teacher to know the subject when teaching K12: they should merely know how to teach. The idea that knowing the material perhaps might make a difference, at least before high school, is somewhat revolutionary.
The other issue here, though, isn't that it's easier to test rote memorization--in fact, the most basic and (arguably) effective test with high validity and test-retest reliability is to simply give the person a task which requires outright the skills you're testing for--but rather that it's easier for the school system to game and keep its own bad behaviors from harming it. The test style I mentioned? It's pretty much the standard one in developmental psychology when studying when certain skills turn up, and it works pretty well. With a computerized test, you can also eliminate the need to have a human watching to see if the task was completed, though it'd still be very much pass/fail because there's really nothing between.
You can teach people to game multiple choice tests, especially ones not designed to show it (this takes skill), and I've taken some standardized tests where I'm not sure how else they expected somebody to pass them--certainly, knowing the subject didn't help one tiny bit, because it wasn't actually testing that. The questions were stuff like "Writer's favorite color," the answers were all fruits-not-sharing-names-with-colors, but that didn't matter because the short bit of writing that the question was allegedly about was about the birds and never mentioned the favorite color. (I got a perfect score on one where all the questions worked this way simply by picking the most PC answer.)
Everyone's after their own interests. Including district level execs who push for higher property taxes because they want a higher salary.
At least with Google, Apple, MS, Facebook and the rest... Their self-interest benefits actual students by way of teaching useful skills.
Right. Like the BASIC programming language that I learned in senior high school is relevant in the job marketplace today. Whatever these students allegedly learn about "computer science" in K-12 will be obsolete before the ink on their "job-ready diploma" from Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, et. al. diploma is dry.
Well, aside from the larger reason that no high school diploma in the US is 'job-ready' because somebody(s) thought the diploma itself and not the skills it used to represent were the reason why people with HS diplomas earned more over a lifetime & now many HS diplomas might as well be from diploma mills...
Some flavor of BASIC is used in teaching the overall processes of 'how to program' so when they go on to learn more useful programming languages the class can go straight to 'how to program in this specific language,' which is very useful for anybody in there for whom this would be a 3rd+ programming language. This is what BASIC was designed for, and is pretty good language for teaching good programming habits and basic skills; it's quick and relatively easy to read, and nobody had to point out to me the sheer utility of reading others' code because some BASIC commands I learned I did from observing others' use of them.
I'm pretty sure that nobody would expect BASIC to be used for coding an OS, and a successful effort to do such would be a dancing bear, but that's not what the purpose of BASIC is anyway. It's a teaching language, and asking more of it would probably hurt its usefulness as such.
Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
We used to have BIOS jumpers. Then system admins wanted to be able to run a BIOS update across whole companies. The BIOS is very rarely comprised compared to the amount of updates it receives, so it was a good trade off.
The better solution might be to minimize BIOS updates as well as some special process involved in activating access to the BIOS--not necessarily resetting jumpers but something that requires an act from a human being.
As in when libertarian want to cut all 'helping the poor' governmental service and let charity do the work, many study found out that at current level, charity does not even do more than 5% of help that government does. I greatly doubt that if you were to get completely tax exempt that you would suddenly increase your charity by 20 times.
How is 'help' defined in these 'many study' you mention? I know a few studies have found that how you help makes a serious difference as well as how close to the problem the choices are made as well--merely throwing money at problems, it turns out, isn't good. Not only that, but culture and social views actually shape if you give and how much: if you view it as a problem for the government to fix, you won't give as much money if any. People also seem to be overall less inclined to pay attention to how well the government actually uses the money it gets, and at least some of the 'charitable' functions it serves are indirect vote-buying.
I've heard that studies have found that some of the biggest improvements in 3rd world countries aren't done at all by charities--they're done by people from those countries going to the 1st world to work, and sending money home to their family, who know precisely what they actually need.
This book actually sounds like a pretty good example, actually, especially if it's not distributed mostly to places where that level of drastic reduction in bacterial load in the water is definitely needed. Slow sand filters won't get used up and will last a hella lot longer, biosand filters are an advancement upon those, and in all cases the 'used up' part is important given that your body is used to whatever the local water's bacterial load is. In fact, this book sounds like more of something for emergencies and Western tourists to use.
It's worth noting that biosand filters have comparable reductions in bacterial levels to the filter paper--keeping them working does require making sure the locals know how to maintain them, but improving the educational levels so they can maintain them on their own and ideally build them from raw materials as well actually would benefit them more long-term than having them depend on handouts from the West. Don't just give people fish, teach them how to fish.
But if you know of any stories like those reported, I want you to escalate to HR. You can also email me directly at jeff@amazon.com. Even if it’s rare or isolated, our tolerance for any such lack of empathy needs to be zero.”
. . . but probably best to do so anonymously, or with someone else's email account. We all know how large companies love whistle blowers.
Sometimes the problem is one of technique: If you blow the whistle by tipping off the right people higher up that Pointy the Middle Manager is doing Illegal Things They Are Liable For, they're likely to be pretty happy with it, especially if you did that with enough time for them to get rid of Pointy instead of as just a token warning before they get the legal papers. (Remember, Pointy probably doesn't do it when they're looking, and the people whose rears Pointy orally services are definitely not the right people to tip off.) This especially applies for when dear old Pointy was close to being fired anyway--they were just waiting for some reason or another.
Management is about as able to know what's going on when and where they can't see as all other humans.
In fact, if management is showing signs of knowing that sort of thing when properly they oughtn't, no matter how benevolent it currently is...leaving might be a Good Idea. Current benevolence is not a guarantee of future benevolence.
You don't need the translations for the names, you need them for the ballot initiatives. School bonds and the like.
That's actually what I was thinking of when I said 'sections'.
I could figure out the "important" elections like president, governor, federal and state congressional elections even if they were in Spanish, for example, by name recognition. Japanese would be... tougher.;)
In Spanish, it should be concerning if you have to rely upon name recognition to figure out which election is which there. President in Spanish is presidente, governor is gobernador, representative is representante, and senator is senador. Most of this list appears to remain pretty recognizable throughout Europe, and definitely in the five major Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian). Most of that list appears to be understandable even if you move to Russian.
Japanese actually would be among the easier of the more exotic languages, as it regularly uses four script systems--and this would be one of the rare upsides, actually. Name recognition probably will get you through as long as the names are left in romanji (read: the Latin alphabet), and if transliterated it'd be in katakana which is phonetic. (It's relatively easily memorized, however some fonts are easier to distinguish some pairs in such as shi and tsu.) However, other Asian languages might be a problem, as well as Arabic and Russian.
There is also the little phenomenon of people with more than one address voting in multiple precincts, people who blatantly vote at multiple polling stations, and worse.
As sibling said, a state-issued photo ID costs less than two Starbucks frappé drinks.
Oh, and you have to have one anyway to buy liquor, buy cigarettes, take out a loan of any type (including payday loans), write a check, use any state or federal government services (other than voting), get electricity and/or water turned on to your home/apartment/whatever, get married, drive a car...
Let's emphasize here: None of that list can possibly place an obligation upon the state to issue you even the one that skips the 'drive a car' part. One thing the list doesn't mention is that you do need one to do any sort of thing at a bank--not just write a check or get a loan, but to cash a check or open an account. A state-issued photo ID is also one of the things you will need to take with you to the local Social Security office if you need a social security card, which you kind of need for most jobs.
Assuming that somebody's so poor that the cost of 'two Starbucks frappé drinks' actually is going to be a significant financial hit, how do you expect them to be able to afford to do anything to get themselves less poor without a state-issued photo ID?
To emphasize Obfuscant's good reply: the worries about the cost of IDs are also misplaced. A driver's license, specifically, can be expensive, and some people just can't get one due to disability. Requiring a driver's license would indeed be a dirty screw intended to disenfranchise a swath of voters.
But these days every state has a non-driver's photo ID (when I was young we called it a "drinker's license"), which doesn't have anything to do with the ability to drive, and is much cheaper (usually under $10), and generally they're good for longer as well. An ID that costs you about $1/year is not an undue burden.
Nothing's perfect, but it seems a perfectly reasonable compromise to keep the vote honest.
It at least some states which have enacted voter ID laws, a non-driver's license is also free if you're qualified to vote, which means that the only real hardship is going to the DMV to obtain one--and arguably the rulings that say poll taxes are illegal could be leveraged to mean that this is in fact implicit in all such laws.
Given that you need a photo ID to do an amazing lot of things that should but don't mean the government could be obligated to issue you such, I'm actually more suspicious of the people who whine about such--especially since at least at the federal courthouses I live near, you need one simply to get farther inside than the lobby. (You'd think that alone would do it, but no.)
Sort it yourself. Tweak search terms if you need to. A quick skim indicates that quite a few artificial sweeteners have established negative effects on the gut microflora, however, and the few whose abstracts I've skimmed add that it also makes for acidic feces & altered drug metabolism because of altered gene expression.
If you're going to idly drink something, soda is not a good choice, but I've used it on occasion when I want something that raises electrolytes or actually need 'empty' calories...which can easily happen if you're running a caloric debt.
Remember, it's not your caloric intake itself but the ratio of intake-to-burned that's important: You can eat a diet 100% free of 'bad' foods and still be fat, and you can eat a diet with a lot of calorie-rich food...and have problems having enough calories.
Too much stressing about your caloric intake probably is just plain unhealthy, anyway. I've been having to get it through an anorexic's head that the moment they started referencing BMI for calling themselves overweight, I got concerned. (Casual article covering parts of why BMI is a bad measure--basically, it's used because it's popular and easy, not because it's accurate because it's not.)
I don't know how to make this any clearer: My problem was not a lack of backups--it was knowing what I needed to restore from the backups.
Putting all the profiles and customizations into a single location would make restoring from backup onto a fresh install--or even moving to a new computer--relatively trivial. This is what the person I was replying to claimed started being normal in Windows around Win7. I was talking about how I knew from experience that it was not true in practice.
If you were telling us about how Acronis has confirmed tracking of where profiles and customization files get stuck, that might be relevant to this thread. (It also would actually be something I'd want as a feature if it works.)
Wondering why somebody talking about restoring from backups after having to wipe a drive due to having to reinstall the OS doesn't have backups, however, is only relevant if you want to give the impression that your reading comprehension in English is not that good.
Go read two posts up: I, at least, am talking about restoring cautiously from backup. Blind restoring from backup is not bad if you're recovering from a dead hard drive, but not so good when you're having to troubleshoot software.
The reason for the switch to portable editions was for the sheer simplicity of backing them up afterwards--instead of having to attempt to locate where various programs stuck personal settings and profiles were stuck, I could just back up the entire thing, even if that's not my preference. Reinstalling the programs I use is not much of a bother, as I keep copies of the install media even if in the form of burning them to a disk; reconfiguring is.
While in Tokyo I lived mostly about 15 minutes from Shibuya Station, and for a while in Komagome at the top of the Yamanote loop. Once during spring strike I had to walk all the way in (Toranomon). That was definitely a time when I could have used a WalkCar.
I've done a lot of street skating in my time, and I wonder how this device compares? I've never boarded, so I don't know. It would solve the problem of "What do I do with my skates when I enter a building?"
I was lucky and didn't have to deal with any strikes while I was there, but to be honest I think my first thought was along the lines of "So, defictionalization of motorized skateboards?"
I think I was about 15 minutes away from my station at each end, but the station at the 'home' end was pretty well-placed for me to get grocery shopping taken care of on my way home, and on my way out I usually made sure I had time for coffee.
I think one of the major questions here is if it's something you could travel to and from someplace like Japan carrying--the battery might make it impossible to stow in your luggage unless you slip it into your carry-on. (Which simply adds to the reasons why a cart mode might be a very desirable feature, actually; sometimes it just simply is going to be a lot more helpful if it carries your things instead of carrying you.)
Don't get me wrong, Windows is not perfect, not by a long shot. Forced patching is one reason I don't install Win10 - I always wait 6 months before patching to avoid those issues. Linux just needs to do a better job of auto-recovery is all I'm saying.
And I'm saying that my experience is that Windows isn't as easy to do that as you make it sound. If it was, I'd have been merely annoyed by having to reinstall Windows ~3-4 times in a row on the same machine, because I'd have been able to use it without much trouble...until the forced patch hit again.
I had nowhere near the same problems with the Linux boxes I've run, though I'm probably going to try to stay away from systemd until/unless it settles down to doing its job and only its job.
Mr. Blart has a different use case. He gets on a Segway at the beginning of his shift, and never has occasion to step off except to pause at the food court for more cheese and nachos. Having him use the Segway for these activities protects the mall customers from unsightly waddling.
At the same time, I have seen precisely one Segway in use in the wild, other than for tours, since the day it was introduced. It was about five years ago on the Las Vegas Strip. The Japanese invention strikes me as being a lot more useful.
I've seen one less than a year ago, being used by a cop (actual cop, not mall cop) who was doing a 'foot' patrol at an open-air mall. On the other hand, I was in a city where I've seen cops using such a wide variety of vehicles that I'd not bat an eye at moped cops or unicycle cops.
From what I could tell, it was because it was actually pretty efficient given the area the cop was being expected to cover--it was too large for it to be reasonable to do it entirely on foot, and the traffic was such that on foot would work better than attempting a patrol car, and the reason they had a cop there was because that mall had that lovely combination of a lot of intersections & pedestrian crossings that assumed drivers coming up on the non-blind direction were paying attention and a lot of drivers who, well, weren't.
That said, having lived in Tokyo, yeah, this looks a lot more useful overall--though I'd have used something like this more for when I was having to switch between the lines run by Tokyo Metro and JR East, since that tended to involve the occasional mad dash, as they counted as interchanges what in reality meant going from one station to another (such as between Meiji-Jingmae and Harajuku stations, or Shibuya and Edisu stations) in order to actually make the transfer. The Lawson was only a short half-block away.
I never advocated exchanging liberty for - not even safety, just convenience. I just pointed out that a large number of people either do not agree with Franklin, or do not see it that way.
Benjamin Franklin was a very intelligent man, but that doesn't make everything he said immediate, objective truth. Simply quoting him doesn't really add all that much to the discussion.
Most people don't know the trade they're actually making, if the reaction to the NSA spying program going public is any indicator, and I'd actually be somewhat okay with trading privacy for a service if and only if I am able to do proper informed consent: let people knowingly decide what privacy they're fine with giving up for what services. I suspect a significant number of people on/. certainly would be fine with trading some privacy for a service as long as the transparency and consent were properly done.
The thing is, the failure of transparency here suggests that the privacy violations are such that Microsoft believes that a large number of people would be not okay with the trade.
I've had to do several reinstalls of Windows 7 on a computer that got caught by a bad update and had its boot sequence repeatedly hosed until I was able to ensure that the update didn't get installed yet again. (I haven't checked to see if MS ever did get around to actually removing the update, given that they ended up basically advising people to remove it because it was a ticking time bomb.) It's not just a drag and drop in and out of that folder--I ended up having to back up several to come close to having it all done, and with a few I just gave up and switched to the portable edition because it was less trouble on reinstalling it.
I'm not installing Win10 for reasons that really have more to do with the fact that it's barely been a year since MS inflicted bad patches on me, and I really don't feel like trusting them yet to have properly vetted them before shoving them out. If they want me to be okay with forced updates, having it so that bad updates can be automatically 'recalled' instead of forcing people to manually go in and pry them out would be a good start.
Two docs by two different people to be dead. Seems simple enough by someone in the know.
In terms of life, all I can think of is the scenes from The Shawshank Redemption. Randall Stevens was created through the mail, but one needs a birth cert, a social security number, a bank account, a driver's license. As far as I can tell, that's the minimum to live a real life here in the US. How can one hack all of the above today? A DL in NJ required "six points of ID" presented in person. So... How can one hack a new life after hacking the death of an old one?
A driver's license functions as legal photo ID in the US--the DMV will issue for people who can't drive for various reasons what's basically a non-driver's license, sometimes listed on the signs as such. It takes the same pieces of ID to obtain (the first) one, however, and the birth certificate and social security number in my experience are required (first time only)...and the Feds won't issue you a social security card without a valid photo ID. If you can get an official copy of your birth certificate without a valid photo ID may vary by state, but at least in the state I was born in...because my original one was lost, I had to go with the fiction that my mom (who, as my parent, is on the short list of people who they will give an official copy to) wanted it.
Oh, and yeah, a driver's license or non-driver's license is pretty much essential to getting any other form of what will count as valid photo ID once you're an adult. It might be possibly to parlay a minor's passport or the ilk into a (non-)driver's license, but I wouldn't want to have to test that.
As for the historical records--those don't always get looked at too closely. The bulk of mine from before I was around 16 got misplaced in what is politely described as a very inept paper-to-electronic records transfer effort by the country; of the ones that are known to have survived, it was because somebody else was maintaining them. This is apparently a common enough issue that nobody's batted an eye, since I've also done nothing that'd have my background investigated much.
Because a vegan diet that is actually complete is unquestionably harder and more expensive than a non-vegan one.
I'm not a vegan (or a vegetarian), but that's total nonsense. Just because some people make it "harder" (whatever that means) or more expensive doesn't mean it inherently is. Back up you claim. WHY is a vegan diet intrinsically "harder" and more expensive?
As a vegetarian: Because some nutrients simply can't be gotten from plants, and your body can't make 'em. Vegetarians usually get this gap filled via dairy, but vegans usually need nutritional yeast or the like to fill these gaps. A few are mixed bags--you can theoretically get your entire required amounts from plants, but the bioavailability is lousy enough that the sheer volume required is an impracticality. (Some are also weird in that if you're veg* your body is actually going to process it a lot more efficiently, so exactly how much you need to be getting from your diet daily is different.)
More importantly, the availability of some of the supplements you might need--especially if you're insisting they be vegan and/or have one of the stricter definitions of vegan--can be pretty lousy, and force you to go to stores like Whole Foods (AKA Whole Paycheck).
Rice and beans make a cheap, complete protein. There are all sorts of vegetable oils for fats (no need for extra virgin olive oil), or eat some peanuts (or real nuts if you want to splurge). You get your carbs from grain/bread/etc. If you can't stand veggies for vitamins, then pop a vitamin pill.
Those are some basics; fill in the blanks on your own.
Bioavailability order is: made by your body (perfect bioavailability), comes from food (good to lousy), vitamin pill (usually lousy). And on the last, it can be a pain if you need it I helped my Mom go searching for the correct type of iron supplement when she needed to raise her iron quickly after cancer surgery--there is a form with excellent bioavailability, but the only way to get it was to have a pharmacist order it specially for us, and it had to be picked up from the pharmacy.
That said, it sounds like Soylent is aiming for going nonGMO gluten-free organic [add more buzzwords here] vegan, so yeah, it'll be more expensive because you will be avoiding some of the cheap, common sources of nutrients and what would actually be the ideal solution of an edible algae that does it all 'in house' and possibly could be even grown as a stage in water processing. (Short term, this would be incredibly expensive, but once you've made the algae all you need to do is keep some alive somewhere so you can seed and reseed tanks as needed, making it incredibly cheap.)
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In the same vein, why does an armed robbery in many states carry an "enhanced" sentence, or even become a different crime, because a gun was used? Would a crossbow or a big knife have been any different? They're all deadly weapons.
Armed does not equal gun here--a crossbow and a big knife count as 'armed' in probably all jurisdictions, and I've heard at least one has had to specifically say alligators count as 'armed' too. Rocks can and have counted for armed. If you've got a certain level of martial arts training you may count as armed even if wearing absolutely nothing whatsoever, depending on the jurisdiction and its laws on if and under what circumstances a person counts as a deadly weapon.
Those last two words are the key thing: armed robbery means that a deadly weapon was brought to the crime and its use threatened. You're probably okay bringing a very obviously-a-boffer item and threatening to boff them if they don't give you the goods, but I am not a lawyer and moreover I advise against robbing people in any manner under any circumstances, even ones as absurd as those discussed here.
Humans are not treated as in a perpetual state of consent for giving away money, for being taken strange places by strangers, or any of the other sorts of cases where "consent" defenses are common.... except that they generally are treated as being in a perpetual state of consent for sex.
[...]
And this is wrong.
That's because the social assumption currently is that humans are, in fact, in a perpetual state of mindless heat and will be DTF--or have you missed how much trouble it can be for a woman to get their healthcare providers to grasp that they're not sexually active? You're right that it's wrong, but the part that needs addressing is that assumption.
Or have you missed that this assumption is even stronger with men, to the point that getting a female-on-male case to court is a PITA because our culture insists that men always, always want sex and if they can be raped it is only by other men?
That said, a few of these cases probably are best off collapsing on the rape charges given that the nasty truth is sometimes that both sides had defective consent--for example, let's say that I'm underage but I told you I was legal to get you to have sex with me. What you did is statutory rape but what I did was rape by deception, which is a charge some jurisdictions have. Because I'm underage I simply lack the ability to consent, while for the sake of manners I'm going to go with the presumption that you'd not have consented if you knew I was underage. (Please note that your argument covers why it ought to be a charge recognized in all courts: consent gotten by lies isn't accepted in other situations, so why should it be with sex?)
Of course, what would be really interesting is if such a case was simply treated as a mutual rape--so both sides get charged and go to trial, and given the charges involved the minor fact that both consented would be a non-issue. (In fact, I might be better off claiming you didn't consent, so I'm innocent of the specific charge--something people have gotten away with, but best done only when a not guilty verdict will prevent you from being charged with the 'correct' crime.)
What is the log and what is the mote in parent's statements?
Don't lust after other women,
thanks mister christian for deciding that you needed to dispense this advice to those who haven't partaken of your kool-aid
Make it gender-neutral and you'll find it excellent advice for keeping any romantic relationship working: Focus on your partner(s), don't start pre-planning cheating on them, don't make it easy for you to justify to yourself cheating on them, make a point of doing relationship maintenance things like 'having conversations with to your partner(s),' and you're not likely to feel any need to cheat.
If you feel the need to cheat despite all of that, it's probably time to GTFO or at least force counseling if you're for some reason still determined to stay together.
That said: Cheating here is specifically infidelity--open relationships are different, though I'm going to give somebody who says they're in one yet was using Ashley Madison strange looks. (I'd personally go for one of the sites catering to the open relationships and/or polyamory crowd--I'm more likely to find somebody there who'd be fine if my partner wanted to meet them, if nothing else.)
"I am about to be killed, tortured, or exiled," he wrote. "And I did nothing."
No, what you did was expose yourself using social media to an authoritarian, abusive government. Realize that or do not.
Don't worry. If he took realistic achievable steps to protect himself, I'm sure a cacophany of narrow-minded Slashdotters -- with no knowledge of history and no understanding of the kind of people who like to run things -- would howl at him for being a tin-foil hatter.
If he took realistic, achievable steps to protect himself, he'd not have been using Ashley Madison in the first place--having checked into them, I'd have been wary even before the hack because of Ashley Madison's business practices. Them charging money for profile deletion is a red flag.
Seems ridiculously low. They have already been sued for over half a billion CAD. This is likely to end their business. Is that really all they can afford or are willing to pay?
Shows how much they care about their users. Presumably they are hoping to get someone to grass on the cheap, and only ramp it up later if no-one comes forward. Even more alarming, it suggests that they have no idea who it is and their security is so poor they have nothing to go on.
I'd say how much they cared about their users was shown much earlier--or has the claims about them not deleting information they demanded money to delete not been verified yet? If it has, they're probably going to be gotten for fraud.
It's too bad today's news pushes such obvious political agendas. They should be focused on telling the truth as objectively as possible.
There's an unfortunately significant body of research in social psychology that suggests that it might be better, in fact, to encourage them to be open and honest about their political agendas--even if they do try to be objective, as long as we have humans doing the reporting agendas and opinions will inevitably shape things. Ironically, being openly and consciously aware of your biases seems to actually make people better at suppressing them in order to be objective. (I've not seen any proposed mechanism, but offhand I'd say it'd be the obvious one of them being able to self-monitor and correct.)
I'm in California and IMHO the way they are teaching math in elementary school sucks. Working on a computer is a distraction
This is the crux of the problem with education reform. No matter what you do, someone will complain. First, Russotto was complaining that kids can't work ahead. I pointed out that that is wrong, and in many public schools the kids can work ahead at their own pace. Then you complain that that is a bad thing, and the kids should go back to drills with pencil and paper.
For the record, I very much disagree with you. Recent changes in California public schools have been very much for the better. Why should my kid be penalized because your kid is dumb? Your kid should get some remedial help, but that is no reason to hold others back.
Actually, as somebody who's worked with learning math on computers? Proper display support is not common enough, and learning to do the basic stuff on pencil and paper without a calculator & doing so repeatedly can get you to the point where you will be able to do the calculations even while very out of it, which you're best off betting on having to do sometimes.
The other thing? Wolfram Alpha exists, and if your kids are lazy they're using it & if they're not bright enough to get why laziness doesn't pay long-term they're abusing it too. (I've found that for some bits of math, it provides better explanations than textbooks do, and a few I suspect are actually best explained in an animated form, possibly with an audio component--music and music theory might be the most reliable way to make math relevant and certainly the one least likely to be innocently bigoted.)
Honestly, I'd favor a hybrid--drills on any format that lets you easily carry them around to do at your own leisure (cell phone app and paper options should coexist), with computer checking so you can know if you're doing it right but not for grading them. Drills should be seen as a way to get practice and build confidence, and work on good habits as sometimes simply showing your steps can get you farther than merely plugging numbers from the problem into calculator and copying the output. I'm not even going to knock learning formulas--though I certainly would object to not teaching how to solve them for any value you want. If nothing else, it simplifies things. (Plug in values where you have them, solve for what you don't. see if you can determine a value for the remaining unknowns, repeat until at most one unknown remains--yes, defining one in terms of another is allowed for this.)
Of course, if you don't expect your kid to get into any particularly math-heavy STEM classes in college, a total lack of practice is not going to hurt too bad, but the more your kid needs math skills the more important practice can be. Paper-and-pencil particularly matters if they get into classes where showing their work is essential to getting credit--I had at least one professor where doing the right things to the wrong numbers only got you dings if and only if you showed your work.
Rote memorization IS what schools are about today. You are not supposed to understand. You are not supposed to deduct it yourself. And sure as fuck you are not supposed to question it.
There is actually a very good reason for this: It's easier to teach. And most importantly, easier to test. It's also much easier for kids who can sponge (soak up the crap - pour out the crap at the test - no need to retain anything, just rinse and repeat for the next subject). Most of all, though, since you don't have to build on any foundation, you can pick up anywhere. And that means that kids who did not understand the foundations are not going to ruin your test score averages.
I guess that's called "no child left behind". Everyone is on the same crappy level that way.
It predates it by a lot, that's how my math textbooks were and I left public school before that hit. I was also an example of somebody who understood math well enough that the textbooks didn't bother me as much as bore the !@#$ out me--I don't think insisting anybody write proofs is good, I actually had an utterly lousy calc class that had you wanting to do proofs completely from memory for every question on the regular quizes. Proofs being shown, however, is actually pretty useful and utterly fascinating to watch--and it helps you understand why you actually need to know this material and how it links together.
Teaching math is hard, and the general view currently is that it's not actually necessary for a teacher to know the subject when teaching K12: they should merely know how to teach. The idea that knowing the material perhaps might make a difference, at least before high school, is somewhat revolutionary.
The other issue here, though, isn't that it's easier to test rote memorization--in fact, the most basic and (arguably) effective test with high validity and test-retest reliability is to simply give the person a task which requires outright the skills you're testing for--but rather that it's easier for the school system to game and keep its own bad behaviors from harming it. The test style I mentioned? It's pretty much the standard one in developmental psychology when studying when certain skills turn up, and it works pretty well. With a computerized test, you can also eliminate the need to have a human watching to see if the task was completed, though it'd still be very much pass/fail because there's really nothing between.
You can teach people to game multiple choice tests, especially ones not designed to show it (this takes skill), and I've taken some standardized tests where I'm not sure how else they expected somebody to pass them--certainly, knowing the subject didn't help one tiny bit, because it wasn't actually testing that. The questions were stuff like "Writer's favorite color," the answers were all fruits-not-sharing-names-with-colors, but that didn't matter because the short bit of writing that the question was allegedly about was about the birds and never mentioned the favorite color. (I got a perfect score on one where all the questions worked this way simply by picking the most PC answer.)
Everyone's after their own interests. Including district level execs who push for higher property taxes because they want a higher salary.
At least with Google, Apple, MS, Facebook and the rest... Their self-interest benefits actual students by way of teaching useful skills.
Right. Like the BASIC programming language that I learned in senior high school is relevant in the job marketplace today. Whatever these students allegedly learn about "computer science" in K-12 will be obsolete before the ink on their "job-ready diploma" from Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, et. al. diploma is dry.
Well, aside from the larger reason that no high school diploma in the US is 'job-ready' because somebody(s) thought the diploma itself and not the skills it used to represent were the reason why people with HS diplomas earned more over a lifetime & now many HS diplomas might as well be from diploma mills...
Some flavor of BASIC is used in teaching the overall processes of 'how to program' so when they go on to learn more useful programming languages the class can go straight to 'how to program in this specific language,' which is very useful for anybody in there for whom this would be a 3rd+ programming language. This is what BASIC was designed for, and is pretty good language for teaching good programming habits and basic skills; it's quick and relatively easy to read, and nobody had to point out to me the sheer utility of reading others' code because some BASIC commands I learned I did from observing others' use of them.
I'm pretty sure that nobody would expect BASIC to be used for coding an OS, and a successful effort to do such would be a dancing bear, but that's not what the purpose of BASIC is anyway. It's a teaching language, and asking more of it would probably hurt its usefulness as such.
Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
We used to have BIOS jumpers. Then system admins wanted to be able to run a BIOS update across whole companies. The BIOS is very rarely comprised compared to the amount of updates it receives, so it was a good trade off.
The better solution might be to minimize BIOS updates as well as some special process involved in activating access to the BIOS--not necessarily resetting jumpers but something that requires an act from a human being.
As in when libertarian want to cut all 'helping the poor' governmental service and let charity do the work, many study found out that at current level, charity does not even do more than 5% of help that government does. I greatly doubt that if you were to get completely tax exempt that you would suddenly increase your charity by 20 times.
How is 'help' defined in these 'many study' you mention? I know a few studies have found that how you help makes a serious difference as well as how close to the problem the choices are made as well--merely throwing money at problems, it turns out, isn't good. Not only that, but culture and social views actually shape if you give and how much: if you view it as a problem for the government to fix, you won't give as much money if any. People also seem to be overall less inclined to pay attention to how well the government actually uses the money it gets, and at least some of the 'charitable' functions it serves are indirect vote-buying.
I've heard that studies have found that some of the biggest improvements in 3rd world countries aren't done at all by charities--they're done by people from those countries going to the 1st world to work, and sending money home to their family, who know precisely what they actually need.
This book actually sounds like a pretty good example, actually, especially if it's not distributed mostly to places where that level of drastic reduction in bacterial load in the water is definitely needed. Slow sand filters won't get used up and will last a hella lot longer, biosand filters are an advancement upon those, and in all cases the 'used up' part is important given that your body is used to whatever the local water's bacterial load is. In fact, this book sounds like more of something for emergencies and Western tourists to use.
It's worth noting that biosand filters have comparable reductions in bacterial levels to the filter paper--keeping them working does require making sure the locals know how to maintain them, but improving the educational levels so they can maintain them on their own and ideally build them from raw materials as well actually would benefit them more long-term than having them depend on handouts from the West. Don't just give people fish, teach them how to fish.
Bezos says
But if you know of any stories like those reported, I want you to escalate to HR. You can also email me directly at jeff@amazon.com. Even if it’s rare or isolated, our tolerance for any such lack of empathy needs to be zero.”
. . . but probably best to do so anonymously, or with someone else's email account. We all know how large companies love whistle blowers.
Sometimes the problem is one of technique: If you blow the whistle by tipping off the right people higher up that Pointy the Middle Manager is doing Illegal Things They Are Liable For, they're likely to be pretty happy with it, especially if you did that with enough time for them to get rid of Pointy instead of as just a token warning before they get the legal papers. (Remember, Pointy probably doesn't do it when they're looking, and the people whose rears Pointy orally services are definitely not the right people to tip off.) This especially applies for when dear old Pointy was close to being fired anyway--they were just waiting for some reason or another.
Management is about as able to know what's going on when and where they can't see as all other humans.
In fact, if management is showing signs of knowing that sort of thing when properly they oughtn't, no matter how benevolent it currently is...leaving might be a Good Idea. Current benevolence is not a guarantee of future benevolence.
You don't need the translations for the names, you need them for the ballot initiatives. School bonds and the like.
That's actually what I was thinking of when I said 'sections'.
I could figure out the "important" elections like president, governor, federal and state congressional elections even if they were in Spanish, for example, by name recognition. Japanese would be... tougher. ;)
In Spanish, it should be concerning if you have to rely upon name recognition to figure out which election is which there. President in Spanish is presidente, governor is gobernador, representative is representante, and senator is senador. Most of this list appears to remain pretty recognizable throughout Europe, and definitely in the five major Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian). Most of that list appears to be understandable even if you move to Russian.
Japanese actually would be among the easier of the more exotic languages, as it regularly uses four script systems--and this would be one of the rare upsides, actually. Name recognition probably will get you through as long as the names are left in romanji (read: the Latin alphabet), and if transliterated it'd be in katakana which is phonetic. (It's relatively easily memorized, however some fonts are easier to distinguish some pairs in such as shi and tsu.) However, other Asian languages might be a problem, as well as Arabic and Russian.
There is also the little phenomenon of people with more than one address voting in multiple precincts, people who blatantly vote at multiple polling stations, and worse.
As sibling said, a state-issued photo ID costs less than two Starbucks frappé drinks.
Oh, and you have to have one anyway to buy liquor, buy cigarettes, take out a loan of any type (including payday loans), write a check, use any state or federal government services (other than voting), get electricity and/or water turned on to your home/apartment/whatever, get married, drive a car...
Let's emphasize here: None of that list can possibly place an obligation upon the state to issue you even the one that skips the 'drive a car' part. One thing the list doesn't mention is that you do need one to do any sort of thing at a bank--not just write a check or get a loan, but to cash a check or open an account. A state-issued photo ID is also one of the things you will need to take with you to the local Social Security office if you need a social security card, which you kind of need for most jobs.
Assuming that somebody's so poor that the cost of 'two Starbucks frappé drinks' actually is going to be a significant financial hit, how do you expect them to be able to afford to do anything to get themselves less poor without a state-issued photo ID?
To emphasize Obfuscant's good reply: the worries about the cost of IDs are also misplaced. A driver's license, specifically, can be expensive, and some people just can't get one due to disability. Requiring a driver's license would indeed be a dirty screw intended to disenfranchise a swath of voters.
But these days every state has a non-driver's photo ID (when I was young we called it a "drinker's license"), which doesn't have anything to do with the ability to drive, and is much cheaper (usually under $10), and generally they're good for longer as well. An ID that costs you about $1/year is not an undue burden.
Nothing's perfect, but it seems a perfectly reasonable compromise to keep the vote honest.
It at least some states which have enacted voter ID laws, a non-driver's license is also free if you're qualified to vote, which means that the only real hardship is going to the DMV to obtain one--and arguably the rulings that say poll taxes are illegal could be leveraged to mean that this is in fact implicit in all such laws.
Given that you need a photo ID to do an amazing lot of things that should but don't mean the government could be obligated to issue you such, I'm actually more suspicious of the people who whine about such--especially since at least at the federal courthouses I live near, you need one simply to get farther inside than the lobby. (You'd think that alone would do it, but no.)
Sort it yourself. Tweak search terms if you need to. A quick skim indicates that quite a few artificial sweeteners have established negative effects on the gut microflora, however, and the few whose abstracts I've skimmed add that it also makes for acidic feces & altered drug metabolism because of altered gene expression.
If you're going to idly drink something, soda is not a good choice, but I've used it on occasion when I want something that raises electrolytes or actually need 'empty' calories...which can easily happen if you're running a caloric debt.
Remember, it's not your caloric intake itself but the ratio of intake-to-burned that's important: You can eat a diet 100% free of 'bad' foods and still be fat, and you can eat a diet with a lot of calorie-rich food...and have problems having enough calories.
Too much stressing about your caloric intake probably is just plain unhealthy, anyway. I've been having to get it through an anorexic's head that the moment they started referencing BMI for calling themselves overweight, I got concerned. (Casual article covering parts of why BMI is a bad measure--basically, it's used because it's popular and easy, not because it's accurate because it's not.)
I don't know how to make this any clearer: My problem was not a lack of backups--it was knowing what I needed to restore from the backups.
Putting all the profiles and customizations into a single location would make restoring from backup onto a fresh install--or even moving to a new computer--relatively trivial. This is what the person I was replying to claimed started being normal in Windows around Win7. I was talking about how I knew from experience that it was not true in practice.
If you were telling us about how Acronis has confirmed tracking of where profiles and customization files get stuck, that might be relevant to this thread. (It also would actually be something I'd want as a feature if it works.)
Wondering why somebody talking about restoring from backups after having to wipe a drive due to having to reinstall the OS doesn't have backups, however, is only relevant if you want to give the impression that your reading comprehension in English is not that good.
Go read two posts up: I, at least, am talking about restoring cautiously from backup. Blind restoring from backup is not bad if you're recovering from a dead hard drive, but not so good when you're having to troubleshoot software.
The reason for the switch to portable editions was for the sheer simplicity of backing them up afterwards--instead of having to attempt to locate where various programs stuck personal settings and profiles were stuck, I could just back up the entire thing, even if that's not my preference. Reinstalling the programs I use is not much of a bother, as I keep copies of the install media even if in the form of burning them to a disk; reconfiguring is.
While in Tokyo I lived mostly about 15 minutes from Shibuya Station, and for a while in Komagome at the top of the Yamanote loop. Once during spring strike I had to walk all the way in (Toranomon). That was definitely a time when I could have used a WalkCar.
I've done a lot of street skating in my time, and I wonder how this device compares? I've never boarded, so I don't know. It would solve the problem of "What do I do with my skates when I enter a building?"
I was lucky and didn't have to deal with any strikes while I was there, but to be honest I think my first thought was along the lines of "So, defictionalization of motorized skateboards?"
I think I was about 15 minutes away from my station at each end, but the station at the 'home' end was pretty well-placed for me to get grocery shopping taken care of on my way home, and on my way out I usually made sure I had time for coffee.
I think one of the major questions here is if it's something you could travel to and from someplace like Japan carrying--the battery might make it impossible to stow in your luggage unless you slip it into your carry-on. (Which simply adds to the reasons why a cart mode might be a very desirable feature, actually; sometimes it just simply is going to be a lot more helpful if it carries your things instead of carrying you.)
Don't get me wrong, Windows is not perfect, not by a long shot. Forced patching is one reason I don't install Win10 - I always wait 6 months before patching to avoid those issues. Linux just needs to do a better job of auto-recovery is all I'm saying.
And I'm saying that my experience is that Windows isn't as easy to do that as you make it sound. If it was, I'd have been merely annoyed by having to reinstall Windows ~3-4 times in a row on the same machine, because I'd have been able to use it without much trouble...until the forced patch hit again.
I had nowhere near the same problems with the Linux boxes I've run, though I'm probably going to try to stay away from systemd until/unless it settles down to doing its job and only its job.
Mr. Blart has a different use case. He gets on a Segway at the beginning of his shift, and never has occasion to step off except to pause at the food court for more cheese and nachos. Having him use the Segway for these activities protects the mall customers from unsightly waddling.
At the same time, I have seen precisely one Segway in use in the wild, other than for tours, since the day it was introduced. It was about five years ago on the Las Vegas Strip. The Japanese invention strikes me as being a lot more useful.
I've seen one less than a year ago, being used by a cop (actual cop, not mall cop) who was doing a 'foot' patrol at an open-air mall. On the other hand, I was in a city where I've seen cops using such a wide variety of vehicles that I'd not bat an eye at moped cops or unicycle cops.
From what I could tell, it was because it was actually pretty efficient given the area the cop was being expected to cover--it was too large for it to be reasonable to do it entirely on foot, and the traffic was such that on foot would work better than attempting a patrol car, and the reason they had a cop there was because that mall had that lovely combination of a lot of intersections & pedestrian crossings that assumed drivers coming up on the non-blind direction were paying attention and a lot of drivers who, well, weren't.
That said, having lived in Tokyo, yeah, this looks a lot more useful overall--though I'd have used something like this more for when I was having to switch between the lines run by Tokyo Metro and JR East, since that tended to involve the occasional mad dash, as they counted as interchanges what in reality meant going from one station to another (such as between Meiji-Jingmae and Harajuku stations, or Shibuya and Edisu stations) in order to actually make the transfer. The Lawson was only a short half-block away.
I never advocated exchanging liberty for - not even safety, just convenience. I just pointed out that a large number of people either do not agree with Franklin, or do not see it that way.
Benjamin Franklin was a very intelligent man, but that doesn't make everything he said immediate, objective truth. Simply quoting him doesn't really add all that much to the discussion.
Most people don't know the trade they're actually making, if the reaction to the NSA spying program going public is any indicator, and I'd actually be somewhat okay with trading privacy for a service if and only if I am able to do proper informed consent: let people knowingly decide what privacy they're fine with giving up for what services. I suspect a significant number of people on /. certainly would be fine with trading some privacy for a service as long as the transparency and consent were properly done.
The thing is, the failure of transparency here suggests that the privacy violations are such that Microsoft believes that a large number of people would be not okay with the trade.
I've had to do several reinstalls of Windows 7 on a computer that got caught by a bad update and had its boot sequence repeatedly hosed until I was able to ensure that the update didn't get installed yet again. (I haven't checked to see if MS ever did get around to actually removing the update, given that they ended up basically advising people to remove it because it was a ticking time bomb.) It's not just a drag and drop in and out of that folder--I ended up having to back up several to come close to having it all done, and with a few I just gave up and switched to the portable edition because it was less trouble on reinstalling it.
I'm not installing Win10 for reasons that really have more to do with the fact that it's barely been a year since MS inflicted bad patches on me, and I really don't feel like trusting them yet to have properly vetted them before shoving them out. If they want me to be okay with forced updates, having it so that bad updates can be automatically 'recalled' instead of forcing people to manually go in and pry them out would be a good start.
Two docs by two different people to be dead. Seems simple enough by someone in the know. In terms of life, all I can think of is the scenes from The Shawshank Redemption. Randall Stevens was created through the mail, but one needs a birth cert, a social security number, a bank account, a driver's license. As far as I can tell, that's the minimum to live a real life here in the US. How can one hack all of the above today? A DL in NJ required "six points of ID" presented in person. So... How can one hack a new life after hacking the death of an old one?
A driver's license functions as legal photo ID in the US--the DMV will issue for people who can't drive for various reasons what's basically a non-driver's license, sometimes listed on the signs as such. It takes the same pieces of ID to obtain (the first) one, however, and the birth certificate and social security number in my experience are required (first time only)...and the Feds won't issue you a social security card without a valid photo ID. If you can get an official copy of your birth certificate without a valid photo ID may vary by state, but at least in the state I was born in...because my original one was lost, I had to go with the fiction that my mom (who, as my parent, is on the short list of people who they will give an official copy to) wanted it.
Oh, and yeah, a driver's license or non-driver's license is pretty much essential to getting any other form of what will count as valid photo ID once you're an adult. It might be possibly to parlay a minor's passport or the ilk into a (non-)driver's license, but I wouldn't want to have to test that.
As for the historical records--those don't always get looked at too closely. The bulk of mine from before I was around 16 got misplaced in what is politely described as a very inept paper-to-electronic records transfer effort by the country; of the ones that are known to have survived, it was because somebody else was maintaining them. This is apparently a common enough issue that nobody's batted an eye, since I've also done nothing that'd have my background investigated much.
Because a vegan diet that is actually complete is unquestionably harder and more expensive than a non-vegan one.
I'm not a vegan (or a vegetarian), but that's total nonsense. Just because some people make it "harder" (whatever that means) or more expensive doesn't mean it inherently is. Back up you claim. WHY is a vegan diet intrinsically "harder" and more expensive?
As a vegetarian: Because some nutrients simply can't be gotten from plants, and your body can't make 'em. Vegetarians usually get this gap filled via dairy, but vegans usually need nutritional yeast or the like to fill these gaps. A few are mixed bags--you can theoretically get your entire required amounts from plants, but the bioavailability is lousy enough that the sheer volume required is an impracticality. (Some are also weird in that if you're veg* your body is actually going to process it a lot more efficiently, so exactly how much you need to be getting from your diet daily is different.)
More importantly, the availability of some of the supplements you might need--especially if you're insisting they be vegan and/or have one of the stricter definitions of vegan--can be pretty lousy, and force you to go to stores like Whole Foods (AKA Whole Paycheck).
Rice and beans make a cheap, complete protein. There are all sorts of vegetable oils for fats (no need for extra virgin olive oil), or eat some peanuts (or real nuts if you want to splurge). You get your carbs from grain/bread/etc. If you can't stand veggies for vitamins, then pop a vitamin pill.
Those are some basics; fill in the blanks on your own.
Bioavailability order is: made by your body (perfect bioavailability), comes from food (good to lousy), vitamin pill (usually lousy). And on the last, it can be a pain if you need it I helped my Mom go searching for the correct type of iron supplement when she needed to raise her iron quickly after cancer surgery--there is a form with excellent bioavailability, but the only way to get it was to have a pharmacist order it specially for us, and it had to be picked up from the pharmacy.
That said, it sounds like Soylent is aiming for going nonGMO gluten-free organic [add more buzzwords here] vegan, so yeah, it'll be more expensive because you will be avoiding some of the cheap, common sources of nutrients and what would actually be the ideal solution of an edible algae that does it all 'in house' and possibly could be even grown as a stage in water processing. (Short term, this would be incredibly expensive, but once you've made the algae all you need to do is keep some alive somewhere so you can seed and reseed tanks as needed, making it incredibly cheap.)