I haven't seen these (my few airplane trips have been relatively normal), but I still love looking out of the window at the world below. Since I'm a bit of a photography nut, I've taken quite a few photos of the Earth below or even the sky above which looks different when you're above the clouds. I don't fly that often, but I'd miss it if airplanes stopped having windows.
Not this specifically, but I had a philosophy teacher in college that liked to teach "the facts" about historical Jesus (as opposed to Biblical Jesus). For example, Historical Jesus advocated for a super-strict definition of sin. If you even thought about doing a sin, Historical Jesus would have said it was the same as committing the sin. (At which point, I'd say you might as well commit any sin that pops in your head.) Biblical Jesus seemed to be about loosening the restrictions that Jews of the time lived by. This was because "Biblical Jesus" was written/rewritten by people hundreds of years after Historical Jesus lived.
It was a very interesting class, but the Christians in the class did NOT like this discussion one bit!
There are times to debate and times not to debate. This is one of those times when debate won't work. In a debate, both sides stand a chance at convincing the other. Sure, that chance might be slim, but it is there. Ham could have convinced Bill Nye that evolution isn't true - though the evidence required would have to have been enormous. Ham outright admitted that no evidence that Bill Nye presented could ever change his mind.
The same is true for the people who deny that the Holocaust happened or that the Moon landing was faked. If you try to debate with them you will lose. Not because they are right and you are wrong, but because they are deep in their own little world and all evidence against their personal theories is instantly dismissed. At best, you'll just waste a few hours of your life. At worst, they'll present "evidence" that sounds solid (yet you know can't be right) that you won't be able to counter right then and there without research. They will take this as "proof" that they win the debate and it could convince people on the fence that you were wrong.
When is the last time that a politician has tried to get history books rewritten to take City on The Edge of Forever into account? When's the last time that a school board voted to allow for the teaching that light speed could be bypassed using dilithium crystals in a warp drive? I doubt even the most hard-core Trek fan has seriously tried doing this. (And even if they did, I doubt they got any traction on it.)
I have no problem with people's religious beliefs. I even have my own religious beliefs. But the second that you try to set policy based solely on your religious beliefs, you are foisting them on other people who might have different religious beliefs (or no religious beliefs at all). This gets even worse when the religious belief-backed policy is favoring religious belief over science and even worse still when it tries to push science out of the science classroom because it challenges someone's religious beliefs.
I recently had an issue with my car's muffler/exhaust assembly. It sounded like I was driving a motorboat down the road. A very loud motorboat. It was quite pricey to fix also. You never appreciate how quiet modern cars are until your muffler goes. (Now imagine an urban area with no mufflers on any of the cars.)
If Ebola broke out in Texas for instance, a state of emergency would be declared then quarantine imposed on anyone within a ten miles of an Ebola victim. The situation would have been resolved within months.
This is why I'm not panicking about an Ebola plague - despite the media's and some politician's attempts to make it seem like Ebola Doomsday is just over the horizon. Ebola isn't an easy disease to catch. It doesn't spread by air (even though the conspiracy theorists would say otherwise). You need direct bodily fluid contact. This is why in the Duncan case his family and friends weren't infected but a couple of health care workers (who were close to him when he was the sickest and thus had the biggest viral load) were.
Worst case scenario is that we will isolate the infected and anyone they came in contact with. The disease would quickly lose its infection vector and die out. However, with only about 9 cases in the US so far, I think we're a long way from needing to take these steps.
They do have governments in that part of the planet?
Nigeria imposed quarantines early and quickly and they have been declared Ebola free.
If you're a copyright holder and have a problem with something you can see embedded on a page, go after the person/site hosting the content.
And if the content was a video that you (the copyright holder) uploaded to YouTube, then simply edit the video and set it to disallow embedding. Your embedding problem will be solved with zero lawyer costs and in less time than it would take to fire off a "Don't Embed Our Content" C&D letter. If the website then rips your video from YouTube and displays it on their website, by all means get the lawyers involved, but a simple embedding issue isn't something you need lawyers to solve.
Imagine if we abolished copyright tomorrow and Walmart could stock Walmart-brand DVDs of all TV shows/movies. Plus, a Walmart streaming service where all of your favorite shows/movies could be viewed for half the monthly price of Netflix. Of course, none of the money would go to the people who actually made the shows. Just to Walmart. And it would be priced intentionally low so that it would make financial sense for people to buy them from Walmart and not from anyone else. (Just like how Walmart does to other stores when they open up.)
Just because every Tom, Dick, and Harry *can* distribute his film on the Internet doesn't mean he can beat the big companies. They still have huge divisions dedicated to marketing films - i.e. convincing people that THIS is the film they should spend their time watching, not that other film. Without copyright, those big companies could grab any promising film that Tom, Dick, or Harry makes and distribute it on their own without giving Tom, Dick, or Harry anything.
If anything, the reasons for copyright are more alive than ever. It's the copyright term length that's messed up - not the existence of copyright itself. 14 years + a one-time 14 year renewal would be more than enough for anyone to make whatever profit there is to be made off of a work. Sure, there will be the odd work that still makes profits 30 years later (e.g. Star Wars, Mickey Mouse), but that's the exception, not the rule. Right now, we're setting copyright terms based on profitability of a minority of works, locking all the others up until all of the other ones stop making money. How many works from 1986 (28 years ago) could be freed up for new creations if copyright were brought back to its original limits?
The push for standardized tests has one goal: Prove students are failing.
If you can show students are failing, then you can blame teachers for the failure. If you can do this, then corporations can rush in to "save" them with new course materials (bought with millions in taxpayer money, of course). Even better, the corporations (e.g. Pearson) run the standardized tests, grade them, and aren't held accountable for the test quality or grading accuracy. So Pearson can make the tests show that kids are failing which leads to more Pearson sales to "help our kids succeed."
It gets even worse when my state's governor (Cuomo) talks about enacting the "death penalty" on public schools that don't hit marks he sets for the standardized tests. Meaning, he'll close these schools down and replace them with charter schools - business run schools that are exempt from most testing and can choose which kids to accept and which they will reject.
With two kids in public schools struggling under EngageNY, my wife and I are right in the thick of this. We're part of a growing group of parents who refuse to allow their kids to take these high-stakes tests, despite FUD and push-back from people who want more testing.
Really? Because it doesn't seem to be part of New York's EngageNY enacting of Common Core. EngageNY is a set of scripts for the teachers to read to the students. The students are expected to answer the questions in EXACTLY the way that EngageNY says they will answer them. If they get the right answer by taking a different path, they are marked as wrong.
This doesn't even get into the high stakes testing that is being pushed as needed to prove that our students are learning (really being used to "prove" that the students are failing and that the teachers need more corporate/government oversight). This winds up shifting class focus from learning your lessons to preparing for the tests.
Think of it this way then: Duncan was in the hospital for ten days. How many nurses and doctors looked after him during this time? How many family and friends and random strangers was he around before he went into the hospital? Out of all of these people, only two people contracted Ebola and that's because they were healthcare workers exposed to more of his secretions (and thus had a higher risk).
Except that's what doctors and other healthcare workers do every day. They put their lives in danger by treating people with diseases that, if they aren't careful, they could catch. Firefighters also knowingly risk their lives to save people. They will go running into a burning building just to try to pull someone out.
Risking your life to try to save someone else - when you are a trained professional - isn't idiot-territory. These aren't random people jumping into a raging river to save a drowning victim who wind up also drowning. These are people who take all available precautions, realize there is still a danger, and still try to save lives. These people are heroes.
Now if some news reports are right and the doctor interacted with people after showing symptoms, I'd agree that THAT was an idiot move.
There's no rational reason to restrict it to just terrorism offences
And that right there is another argument against holding relatives accountable for the actions their family members take. Let's say today it is only applied to terrorism. A couple years down the road, someone shoots up a bunch of people and kills himself. There's a big push for his family to be held accountable (perhaps they are part of an unfavorably viewed minority) and they are. The next crime is less heinous but now there's a precedent of using this for less and less severe crimes. Eventually, any crime committed by one person can get their entire family in trouble if the prosecutor decides to apply it. (In other words, if the person isn't part of the "popular majority.")
If anything thinks a "make the families accountable law" would only ever be applied to acts of terrorism, they obviously haven't been paying attention for the last thirty or so years.
So the Terminators won't actually look like Arnold, but will appear as good looking women. "Run, everyone! Run! Hey, stop gawking at them! They aren't women! RUN!!!!" *entire group gunned down while they stare at the Terminators*
Dress shirts come with collar size measurement. If you're buying t-shirts or non-dress long sleeve shirts, though, you need to content with Small-Medium-Large-XL. I can be a medium from some places (where mediums run large), a large in other places, and XL from some places that run their sizes on the smaller side. Clothes are one of the few items I mostly refuse to buy online (with the occasional TeeFury shirt as the exception) because of this sizing issue.
There are two types of trolls. One type (let's call this the Classic Troll) gets their jollies by upsetting people. So if you respond to the troll's inflammatory remarks, they like it and will keep it up. If you ignore the Classic Troll, they will slink away to try to rile someone else up.
The second type (Targeted Troll) doesn't care about upsetting people as much as they care about targeting a specific person or group. If you're part of the group they are targeting and they latch on to you, they may or may not let go if you ignore them. If you're the specific person they are targeting, then they WON'T stop merely because they are ignored. They will keep ramping up the remarks until a response is obtained.
The big problem with Targeted Trolls is that they don't tend to be solitary creatures like the Classic Troll. While they will act alone, they can also get together with other Targeted Trolls to harass the person/people who have entered their cross-hairs. This amplifies the harassment and can make it impossible for them to be ignored. (For example, if one of them tracks down the victim's home address and posts it with a threatening message.)
If it's to hide from us that divine influence, then how can it be obvious to them?
Partly for the same reason that Moon landing conspiracy theorists claim the existence of a vast conspiracy that is both competent enough to hide the truth from the general public/media/competing nations/etc but yet incompetent enough to make easily spotted basic mistakes. They want to feel special and how they do this is by a) setting up a very powerful, secretive individual/organization and then b) being one of only a few people able to see past said individual's/organization's smoke screen. This elevates them (in their mind) over the rabble that fall for the ruse and makes them special.
This is also a reason why all evidence against the existence of their conspiracy or organization or individual is immediately discounted. If they were to accept the truth, they would have to also accept that they aren't more special than anyone else and, in fact, might be less special than most people for having believed something so ridiculous. Therefore, they keep on believing and claim that the mountain of evidence to the contrary was placed there by "the conspiracy/individual" to deceive those less special than they arel.
I have met young Earth creationists. At one time, I belonged to an Orthodox temple (I was living with my parents back then and membership was free because my parents were members). The rabbi would give speeches often decrying how scientists kept changing their minds about how the world worked but the bible was constant in its message. (I won't get into all the ways this sentence is wrong. That's a whole other post.) He was of the mindset that the world was formed around 6,000 - 10,000 years ago (I don't think he ever gave an exact figure but definitely believed it was around that long) and that any evidence to the contrary was just foolish scientists getting it wrong.
I didn't argue with him at the time. It would have been a losing proposition anyway. There's no way I could have changed his viewpoint. My eyes did plenty of rolling during my time there, though.
I wonder how Isaac Asimov would have regarded social media. His essay had the statement "For every new good idea you have, there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones, which you naturally do not care to display." In social media, people will post hundreds of statements of varying quality. Most will be ignored (or read and instantly forgotten in the flood of content). A few will rise to the top (being retweeted, reposted, shared, etc). I know using social media (and the Internet in general) has made me less reluctant to share my ideas. The ridicule of expressing something stupid is lessened if the person mocking you for said stupid idea is just a screen name versus a flesh and blood person in front of you. On the flip side, losing the "quality filter" and making sharing ideas easier might mean that you quickly express a mediocre idea instead of spending more time on it and honing it into a great idea.
Slashdot Mirror
There have been much fewer gremlin incidents since the airlines stopped serving meals on flights - especially when flying after midnight.
I haven't seen these (my few airplane trips have been relatively normal), but I still love looking out of the window at the world below. Since I'm a bit of a photography nut, I've taken quite a few photos of the Earth below or even the sky above which looks different when you're above the clouds. I don't fly that often, but I'd miss it if airplanes stopped having windows.
That one doesn't count as self-driving car because it needed a train to push it!
Not this specifically, but I had a philosophy teacher in college that liked to teach "the facts" about historical Jesus (as opposed to Biblical Jesus). For example, Historical Jesus advocated for a super-strict definition of sin. If you even thought about doing a sin, Historical Jesus would have said it was the same as committing the sin. (At which point, I'd say you might as well commit any sin that pops in your head.) Biblical Jesus seemed to be about loosening the restrictions that Jews of the time lived by. This was because "Biblical Jesus" was written/rewritten by people hundreds of years after Historical Jesus lived.
It was a very interesting class, but the Christians in the class did NOT like this discussion one bit!
There are times to debate and times not to debate. This is one of those times when debate won't work. In a debate, both sides stand a chance at convincing the other. Sure, that chance might be slim, but it is there. Ham could have convinced Bill Nye that evolution isn't true - though the evidence required would have to have been enormous. Ham outright admitted that no evidence that Bill Nye presented could ever change his mind.
The same is true for the people who deny that the Holocaust happened or that the Moon landing was faked. If you try to debate with them you will lose. Not because they are right and you are wrong, but because they are deep in their own little world and all evidence against their personal theories is instantly dismissed. At best, you'll just waste a few hours of your life. At worst, they'll present "evidence" that sounds solid (yet you know can't be right) that you won't be able to counter right then and there without research. They will take this as "proof" that they win the debate and it could convince people on the fence that you were wrong.
When is the last time that a politician has tried to get history books rewritten to take City on The Edge of Forever into account? When's the last time that a school board voted to allow for the teaching that light speed could be bypassed using dilithium crystals in a warp drive? I doubt even the most hard-core Trek fan has seriously tried doing this. (And even if they did, I doubt they got any traction on it.)
I have no problem with people's religious beliefs. I even have my own religious beliefs. But the second that you try to set policy based solely on your religious beliefs, you are foisting them on other people who might have different religious beliefs (or no religious beliefs at all). This gets even worse when the religious belief-backed policy is favoring religious belief over science and even worse still when it tries to push science out of the science classroom because it challenges someone's religious beliefs.
Unless the self-driving car is a Delorean. Then the first self-driving car will hit the road in 1955.
I recently had an issue with my car's muffler/exhaust assembly. It sounded like I was driving a motorboat down the road. A very loud motorboat. It was quite pricey to fix also. You never appreciate how quiet modern cars are until your muffler goes. (Now imagine an urban area with no mufflers on any of the cars.)
This is why I'm not panicking about an Ebola plague - despite the media's and some politician's attempts to make it seem like Ebola Doomsday is just over the horizon. Ebola isn't an easy disease to catch. It doesn't spread by air (even though the conspiracy theorists would say otherwise). You need direct bodily fluid contact. This is why in the Duncan case his family and friends weren't infected but a couple of health care workers (who were close to him when he was the sickest and thus had the biggest viral load) were.
Worst case scenario is that we will isolate the infected and anyone they came in contact with. The disease would quickly lose its infection vector and die out. However, with only about 9 cases in the US so far, I think we're a long way from needing to take these steps.
Nigeria imposed quarantines early and quickly and they have been declared Ebola free.
And if the content was a video that you (the copyright holder) uploaded to YouTube, then simply edit the video and set it to disallow embedding. Your embedding problem will be solved with zero lawyer costs and in less time than it would take to fire off a "Don't Embed Our Content" C&D letter. If the website then rips your video from YouTube and displays it on their website, by all means get the lawyers involved, but a simple embedding issue isn't something you need lawyers to solve.
Nope. You're not being detained. You are free to go. Your money on the other hand...
Imagine if we abolished copyright tomorrow and Walmart could stock Walmart-brand DVDs of all TV shows/movies. Plus, a Walmart streaming service where all of your favorite shows/movies could be viewed for half the monthly price of Netflix. Of course, none of the money would go to the people who actually made the shows. Just to Walmart. And it would be priced intentionally low so that it would make financial sense for people to buy them from Walmart and not from anyone else. (Just like how Walmart does to other stores when they open up.)
Just because every Tom, Dick, and Harry *can* distribute his film on the Internet doesn't mean he can beat the big companies. They still have huge divisions dedicated to marketing films - i.e. convincing people that THIS is the film they should spend their time watching, not that other film. Without copyright, those big companies could grab any promising film that Tom, Dick, or Harry makes and distribute it on their own without giving Tom, Dick, or Harry anything.
If anything, the reasons for copyright are more alive than ever. It's the copyright term length that's messed up - not the existence of copyright itself. 14 years + a one-time 14 year renewal would be more than enough for anyone to make whatever profit there is to be made off of a work. Sure, there will be the odd work that still makes profits 30 years later (e.g. Star Wars, Mickey Mouse), but that's the exception, not the rule. Right now, we're setting copyright terms based on profitability of a minority of works, locking all the others up until all of the other ones stop making money. How many works from 1986 (28 years ago) could be freed up for new creations if copyright were brought back to its original limits?
The push for standardized tests has one goal: Prove students are failing.
If you can show students are failing, then you can blame teachers for the failure. If you can do this, then corporations can rush in to "save" them with new course materials (bought with millions in taxpayer money, of course). Even better, the corporations (e.g. Pearson) run the standardized tests, grade them, and aren't held accountable for the test quality or grading accuracy. So Pearson can make the tests show that kids are failing which leads to more Pearson sales to "help our kids succeed."
It gets even worse when my state's governor (Cuomo) talks about enacting the "death penalty" on public schools that don't hit marks he sets for the standardized tests. Meaning, he'll close these schools down and replace them with charter schools - business run schools that are exempt from most testing and can choose which kids to accept and which they will reject.
With two kids in public schools struggling under EngageNY, my wife and I are right in the thick of this. We're part of a growing group of parents who refuse to allow their kids to take these high-stakes tests, despite FUD and push-back from people who want more testing.
Really? Because it doesn't seem to be part of New York's EngageNY enacting of Common Core. EngageNY is a set of scripts for the teachers to read to the students. The students are expected to answer the questions in EXACTLY the way that EngageNY says they will answer them. If they get the right answer by taking a different path, they are marked as wrong.
This doesn't even get into the high stakes testing that is being pushed as needed to prove that our students are learning (really being used to "prove" that the students are failing and that the teachers need more corporate/government oversight). This winds up shifting class focus from learning your lessons to preparing for the tests.
By that reasoning, I should listen to everything Dr. Oz says because he's a fully licensed and trained medical doctor (cardiologist), right?
Or maybe being in one medical field doesn't make you an expert in all medical fields?
(Even more so if you have a political agenda to advance and thus reason to ignore evidence that doesn't agree with your views.)
Think of it this way then: Duncan was in the hospital for ten days. How many nurses and doctors looked after him during this time? How many family and friends and random strangers was he around before he went into the hospital? Out of all of these people, only two people contracted Ebola and that's because they were healthcare workers exposed to more of his secretions (and thus had a higher risk).
Except that's what doctors and other healthcare workers do every day. They put their lives in danger by treating people with diseases that, if they aren't careful, they could catch. Firefighters also knowingly risk their lives to save people. They will go running into a burning building just to try to pull someone out.
Risking your life to try to save someone else - when you are a trained professional - isn't idiot-territory. These aren't random people jumping into a raging river to save a drowning victim who wind up also drowning. These are people who take all available precautions, realize there is still a danger, and still try to save lives. These people are heroes.
Now if some news reports are right and the doctor interacted with people after showing symptoms, I'd agree that THAT was an idiot move.
And that right there is another argument against holding relatives accountable for the actions their family members take. Let's say today it is only applied to terrorism. A couple years down the road, someone shoots up a bunch of people and kills himself. There's a big push for his family to be held accountable (perhaps they are part of an unfavorably viewed minority) and they are. The next crime is less heinous but now there's a precedent of using this for less and less severe crimes. Eventually, any crime committed by one person can get their entire family in trouble if the prosecutor decides to apply it. (In other words, if the person isn't part of the "popular majority.")
If anything thinks a "make the families accountable law" would only ever be applied to acts of terrorism, they obviously haven't been paying attention for the last thirty or so years.
So the Terminators won't actually look like Arnold, but will appear as good looking women. "Run, everyone! Run! Hey, stop gawking at them! They aren't women! RUN!!!!" *entire group gunned down while they stare at the Terminators*
Dress shirts come with collar size measurement. If you're buying t-shirts or non-dress long sleeve shirts, though, you need to content with Small-Medium-Large-XL. I can be a medium from some places (where mediums run large), a large in other places, and XL from some places that run their sizes on the smaller side. Clothes are one of the few items I mostly refuse to buy online (with the occasional TeeFury shirt as the exception) because of this sizing issue.
There are two types of trolls. One type (let's call this the Classic Troll) gets their jollies by upsetting people. So if you respond to the troll's inflammatory remarks, they like it and will keep it up. If you ignore the Classic Troll, they will slink away to try to rile someone else up.
The second type (Targeted Troll) doesn't care about upsetting people as much as they care about targeting a specific person or group. If you're part of the group they are targeting and they latch on to you, they may or may not let go if you ignore them. If you're the specific person they are targeting, then they WON'T stop merely because they are ignored. They will keep ramping up the remarks until a response is obtained.
The big problem with Targeted Trolls is that they don't tend to be solitary creatures like the Classic Troll. While they will act alone, they can also get together with other Targeted Trolls to harass the person/people who have entered their cross-hairs. This amplifies the harassment and can make it impossible for them to be ignored. (For example, if one of them tracks down the victim's home address and posts it with a threatening message.)
Partly for the same reason that Moon landing conspiracy theorists claim the existence of a vast conspiracy that is both competent enough to hide the truth from the general public/media/competing nations/etc but yet incompetent enough to make easily spotted basic mistakes. They want to feel special and how they do this is by a) setting up a very powerful, secretive individual/organization and then b) being one of only a few people able to see past said individual's/organization's smoke screen. This elevates them (in their mind) over the rabble that fall for the ruse and makes them special.
This is also a reason why all evidence against the existence of their conspiracy or organization or individual is immediately discounted. If they were to accept the truth, they would have to also accept that they aren't more special than anyone else and, in fact, might be less special than most people for having believed something so ridiculous. Therefore, they keep on believing and claim that the mountain of evidence to the contrary was placed there by "the conspiracy/individual" to deceive those less special than they arel.
I have met young Earth creationists. At one time, I belonged to an Orthodox temple (I was living with my parents back then and membership was free because my parents were members). The rabbi would give speeches often decrying how scientists kept changing their minds about how the world worked but the bible was constant in its message. (I won't get into all the ways this sentence is wrong. That's a whole other post.) He was of the mindset that the world was formed around 6,000 - 10,000 years ago (I don't think he ever gave an exact figure but definitely believed it was around that long) and that any evidence to the contrary was just foolish scientists getting it wrong.
I didn't argue with him at the time. It would have been a losing proposition anyway. There's no way I could have changed his viewpoint. My eyes did plenty of rolling during my time there, though.
I wonder how Isaac Asimov would have regarded social media. His essay had the statement "For every new good idea you have, there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones, which you naturally do not care to display." In social media, people will post hundreds of statements of varying quality. Most will be ignored (or read and instantly forgotten in the flood of content). A few will rise to the top (being retweeted, reposted, shared, etc). I know using social media (and the Internet in general) has made me less reluctant to share my ideas. The ridicule of expressing something stupid is lessened if the person mocking you for said stupid idea is just a screen name versus a flesh and blood person in front of you. On the flip side, losing the "quality filter" and making sharing ideas easier might mean that you quickly express a mediocre idea instead of spending more time on it and honing it into a great idea.
Yes, but this essay was just found and published now - 22 years after his death.