Yes, and the Democratic race started with at least 4 other candidates, all of whom were much better than Hillary.
As is usual in our primaries in both parties, one of the worst, if not the very worst, candidate is the one who gets the nomination. It was exactly the same in 2008: there were many better candidates than Obama, in fact probably all of them except for Hillary. Yet Hillary and Obama became the top two, with Obama finally narrowly defeating Hillary (thankfully; Obama sucked but it would have been 100x worse with Hillary).
I have an idea: we need to institute a second primary election, after the first round of primaries is done. This way, everyone gets a chance to change their vote. All the original candidates should be listed on the ballots, and all the states should vote on the same day. It'd be really interesting, at the very least, to see if the results are significantly different. Of course, the thing they really need to do is institute a ranked or approval voting system. For the Democrat primaries, I'd probably vote 1. Bernie, 2. Chafey, 3. Webb 4. O'Malley 5. Hillary. But really, they should just dump the primaries altogether and make a single ranked voting system for the general election, with all the candidates running at once, from all parties. Then I'd be able to rank Carly Fiorina higher than Hillary (though still way down the list, only higher maybe than Cruz and Santorum). Carly helped run two big companies straight into the ground, but she's still a far, far better choice than Hillary.
Yep, back in the old days, our Presidents and other leading politicians (like Ben Franklin) were frequently polymaths. Jefferson was also an inventor, a businessman, and philosopher, for instance.
These days, our politicians are just lawyers who have no other skills or interests whatsoever, and somehow think that qualifies them for leadership positions.
From what I've read about the CCTV cameras in England, the vast majority of them are owned and operated by private businesses. That's not the same. The government doesn't have easy access to that data, and needs to get a proper warrant for it in case they have a valid suspicion that it recorded a crime.
Living creatures do not emit near IR. They emit far IR, because of their heat signature.
Regular cameras cannot see thermal IR; you need a special kind of camera for that, and those things are really expensive. (I think they need to be actively cooled too.) Worse, you can't see much with them, except the actual heat signature. They're really great for spotting a criminal hiding in some bushes, but you'll never be able to identify his face or anything close to the level of detail; all you'll see is some bright colors in a vaguely human shape against a dark background.
Normal cameras (that see in near-IR) can make out a lot of detail, but there has to be near-IR illumination, just like a visible-light camera needs visible-light illumination of some kind (either sunlight or artificial).
Not really, it depends on your context. If you're going by the old "animal - vegetable - mineral" classification scheme, then it's a vegetable, since it's obviously neither a mineral nor an animal.
Furthermore, the term "vegetation" is used to describe any kind of plant life. There's nothing incorrect about calling a corn stalk "vegetation". Therefore, corn has to be a vegetable.
It seems to me that this "grain not vegetable" thing comes from nutritionists or botanists or some culinary group trying to coopt the word "vegetable" and make it a precise scientific term. It's just a synonym for "plant".
From Wikipedia's "vegetable" article: "In everyday usage, a vegetable is any part of a plant that is consumed by humans as food as part of a savory meal. "
and also, more importantly: "The original meaning of the word vegetable, still used in biology, was to describe all types of plant, as in the terms "vegetable kingdom" and "vegetable matter"."
farther down: "The broadest definition is the word's use adjectivally to mean "matter of plant origin" to distinguish it from "animal", meaning "matter of animal origin". More specifically, a vegetable may be defined as "any plant, part of which is used for food","
So basically, the definition of the word varies greatly, depending on who you're talking to. Apparently, botanists and biologists can't even agree on it. For us laypeople who aren't involved in biological sciences, botany, or culinary arts, corn is indeed a vegetable. The US Supreme Court even agreed in one case, where tomatoes were taxed as vegetables even though they're technically a fruit. IMO, if the botanists and others want a term to distinguish some items from fruits, then they need to make up a new term.
I think another important factor is: who owns the cameras?
A few years ago, people were complaining a lot about how you couldn't go anywhere outside in London without being recorded by CCTV cameras. However, the catch was, the vast majority of these cameras were privately-owned by local businesses, like the 24-hour gas station example you mentioned. They weren't government owned or operated.
I think this is a useful distinction. If a crime is committed and it's likely a private camera recorded it, then the government can get a legal warrant and gain access to that recording, and use it for evidence. But without a proper warrant, they can't just comb through the footage at will on a "fishing expedition", looking for something to use against someone. With government-owned cameras everywhere, they can.
As you said, widespread usage of government cameras without a warrant is ripe for abuse. Private camera owners don't have the same motivations, and likely only use them just in case they themselves are the victim of a crime and need evidence.
Forums would be useless with video clip posts. Just look at a typical forum thread: it can have several hundred posts. It'd take you hours and hours to watch them all, but in text form you can skim through them in minutes.
TFA does make a nice point about how well our human brains work with text, especially considering that text is not a natural thing that we were evolved to read. We can process textual information absurdly quickly.
Cat pictures are great, but Reddit is probably the best place for those. You're not limited to what your dumb family members post there, you can find a subreddit that's nothing but cat pictures and see all the best cat pictures the world has to offer. Facebook is a terrible place for that kind of thing, or anything at all really. It's nothing more than a site for narcissists to post pictures trying to prove to all their friends and family what wonderful lives they lead.
F35 200 million a pop can do an awful lot with that money
It'll cost far, far, far more than the entire cost of the F-35 program to build smartphones in America. And who's going to do it anyway? Are you proposing that the US government become a smartphone manufacturer? Or should they just give the money to some company to do it? When was the last time that turned out well? They give huge amounts of money to defense contractors and don't get a whole lot for it.
Scrap the whole thing and you could build a whole series of industrial plants to make anything you want but hey
If you really think that, you are woefully ignorant of how industry and the economy works. How old are you, 14?
There's no "largescale acts" in there anywhere, just a few nutjobs here and there killing a small number of people. There's absolutely nothing there that compares with ISIS or anything else going on in the middle east.
This is all wrong. Fictional text (books) and video (movies) are two totally different media, each with their strengths and weaknesses. You can't hear music in a book, for instance, but movies are full of them. Movies are a very different art form from books, though some movies are indeed based on books or attempted adaptations of them. Movies absolutely do have their place, as do books and mini-series/TV shows.
Text is not "better" than video, nor the reverse, just like airplanes are not "better" than bicycles or cars. An airplane isn't very useful in taking you from your house to the grocery store down the street.
However, there is a real trend, as seen with this idiotic Facebook exec, to push more and more video on the internet for no good reason. Video has its place to be sure: if you want to show someone how to play a song on a guitar, or how to take apart something on their car, a video can do that in a much more easily understood format than text with diagrams, or worse, text alone. However, if you just want to catch up with the daily news, video is generally a terrible format: you can read (and skim) far faster than you can watch some idiot talk in front of a camera. And that's what these idiots are trying to push: they want us to stop reading text-based news sources, and instead watch videos of talking heads, probably because they can insert unskippable ads into the stream.
However, you're wrong about this executive not being fit for his position. Facebook is fundamentally a shitty advertising company, so it does make sense that they'd push more video like this, so they can make more money from advertising.
No, there's some really useful ones there. They're of the "how-to" variety however: it's faster and easier to make a cellphone video showing how to, for instance, disassemble some part on your car, than to write up a lengthy explanation complete with diagrams, and it's frequently more useful for the viewer as well since a video showing how someone does something can be easier to understand and apply to a physical object than to read an explanation with diagrams. This doesn't require professional production at all.
But yeah, videos of some dude sitting at home yapping about some topic are useless. Learn to type! Same goes for mainstream news organizations, which with their talking heads are really no better than the moronic YouTube guy. If your opinion or news piece is important and worth spending my time on, you'll write it (exception for news reports showing recorded video of the news item itself).
You can get new OEM Samsung batteries for the S4 on Ebay for $10.
The S6 is crap: the battery is not user-replaceable, there's no SD slot, and it's not waterproof like the S5. It's a step down in every single way from its predecessor. (No, the S4 isn't waterproof either; that's the big feature the S5 has over it.)
Because the S6 and S7 are crap. Of course, he'll probably keep his S5 as long as he can, but eventually he's going to want to get something newer, and unless Samsung goes back to making great phones like the S4 and S5, it'll have to be something non-Samsung.
I will say, it is possible Samsung may go back: the S7 is an improvement over the S6 as they brought back the SD slot and (I think) water resistance, but it still has the stupid sealed-in battery so it's a no-go.
There's a bunch of eastern European nations that have joined NATO since the wall fell.
Anyone can join NATO, even a Moon colony if we were to establish one and make it an independent nation. The other NATO members would probably have to agree to it, of course, but just because the name reflects the origins of the organization doesn't mean they have to limit membership to nations in the north Atlantic. It probably would make sense to change the name, however, if they let Pacific Rim nations join, but there is a lot of historical inertia to the "NATO" name.
This is dumb. America simply does not have the technology or capability of manufacturing a smartphone. There is no supply chain present that you'd need to get the parts here, there's no LCD manufacturers here in the US that could make the kind of screens found on even a 3-year-old S4, it's simply impossible. And if you're stupid enough to point to Apple as "American", the iPhone is made in China, by contract manufacturers.
It's not just that the US doesn't make any, as you say yourself, it's that it's not even possible for the US to make any, not without investing many billions of dollars in building factories to build the components necessary, and building up the IP and technical institutional knowledge necessary. Other nations have invested in this stuff; we have not. You can't just decide on a whim to start doing this stuff; it's like Zimbabwe suddenly deciding they want to build Mars rovers and space stations and reusable rockets to launch them, or Vietnam suddenly deciding they're going to build world-class automobiles (and not just a final-assembly factory, but all the components too).
But yeah, I'm one of those people who'd like to see Hillary in jail. If they can throw Rove in there with her, so much the better. Toss Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld in while you're at it.
I agree with the other responder: you're spouting a load of crap.
I've bought 3 Samsung S4s in the past year on the used market, all with OEM batteries. None of the batteries are "dying", though a couple have noticeably lost capacity (but still not that bad). That's on a 3-year-old phone; it's normal for lithium batteries to have noticeable capacity loss after 3 years of constant use. On your shitty Apple, this would require paying $$$ for an Apple tech to replace the battery, or just buy a new phone for $$$$. On these S4s, it's no problem: I just buy a new OEM battery and pop it in and the phone is good as new, so I only have to spend about $120 for a great phone by not buying something that's brand new. Phones haven't noticeably improved in the last 3 years anyway, just like computers haven't improved noticeably in the last 6 or more.
The warranty thing may have been a valid concern a few years ago, but this is 2016. The S4 was released in 2013. They're up to the S7 now; any S4 you buy now is used (I know--I've bought 3 of them in the last year, but all used of course), and is long out of warranty.
As an American, I have lots of complaints about Christians, but to equate the two religions is pure lunacy. Christians haven't committed largescale acts of religious violence for a very long time. The Crusades were a millenia ago. People haven't been burned at the stake by Christians for centuries. The Salem Witch trials were in the late 1600s. By contrast, Islamic nations are horribly violent places right now. If you don't believe me, take a plane to Turkey, cross over into Syria, and go spend some time in Al-Raqqah. ISIL controls a huge amount of territory, has tens of thousands of fighters and probably millions of citizens, and executes people brutally on a daily basis. And that's just the worst of the lot. Saudi Arabia, our wonderful ally, has all kinds of misogynistic laws and executes people in medieval fashion too. Qatar, another strong US ally, just released a Dutch woman from jail where she was held for 3 months because she was raped, and was pushed to marry her rapist so they could both leave jail early (!). UAE does that kind of stuff all the time. The Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan had popular support (and still does in places) and they also commit countless acts of brutality. Islamic countries have been full of violence for ages, especially for anyone who left the religion or violated some other backwards religious law.
Christians have their issues still (like the WBC), but this is a serious case of false equivalence here.
You don't have to look at any holy book passages to see how totally different Islamic and Western nations are.
Yeah, that's a good question. I really don't know, but you're probably right: if you don't mind being spied on by the TV maker (which is why it needs to be connected to the internet ultimately, for the phone-home "feature"), but don't mess around with any of the other "smart" features, and especially if you're behind any typical NAT router, I don't see how you'd get infected with anything unless the TV maker's own service gets compromised.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and the Democratic race started with at least 4 other candidates, all of whom were much better than Hillary.
As is usual in our primaries in both parties, one of the worst, if not the very worst, candidate is the one who gets the nomination. It was exactly the same in 2008: there were many better candidates than Obama, in fact probably all of them except for Hillary. Yet Hillary and Obama became the top two, with Obama finally narrowly defeating Hillary (thankfully; Obama sucked but it would have been 100x worse with Hillary).
I have an idea: we need to institute a second primary election, after the first round of primaries is done. This way, everyone gets a chance to change their vote. All the original candidates should be listed on the ballots, and all the states should vote on the same day. It'd be really interesting, at the very least, to see if the results are significantly different. Of course, the thing they really need to do is institute a ranked or approval voting system. For the Democrat primaries, I'd probably vote 1. Bernie, 2. Chafey, 3. Webb 4. O'Malley 5. Hillary. But really, they should just dump the primaries altogether and make a single ranked voting system for the general election, with all the candidates running at once, from all parties. Then I'd be able to rank Carly Fiorina higher than Hillary (though still way down the list, only higher maybe than Cruz and Santorum). Carly helped run two big companies straight into the ground, but she's still a far, far better choice than Hillary.
Yep, back in the old days, our Presidents and other leading politicians (like Ben Franklin) were frequently polymaths. Jefferson was also an inventor, a businessman, and philosopher, for instance.
These days, our politicians are just lawyers who have no other skills or interests whatsoever, and somehow think that qualifies them for leadership positions.
From what I've read about the CCTV cameras in England, the vast majority of them are owned and operated by private businesses. That's not the same. The government doesn't have easy access to that data, and needs to get a proper warrant for it in case they have a valid suspicion that it recorded a crime.
Nope.
Living creatures do not emit near IR. They emit far IR, because of their heat signature.
Regular cameras cannot see thermal IR; you need a special kind of camera for that, and those things are really expensive. (I think they need to be actively cooled too.) Worse, you can't see much with them, except the actual heat signature. They're really great for spotting a criminal hiding in some bushes, but you'll never be able to identify his face or anything close to the level of detail; all you'll see is some bright colors in a vaguely human shape against a dark background.
Normal cameras (that see in near-IR) can make out a lot of detail, but there has to be near-IR illumination, just like a visible-light camera needs visible-light illumination of some kind (either sunlight or artificial).
Nitpick: corn is a grain, not a vegetable.
Not really, it depends on your context. If you're going by the old "animal - vegetable - mineral" classification scheme, then it's a vegetable, since it's obviously neither a mineral nor an animal.
Furthermore, the term "vegetation" is used to describe any kind of plant life. There's nothing incorrect about calling a corn stalk "vegetation". Therefore, corn has to be a vegetable.
It seems to me that this "grain not vegetable" thing comes from nutritionists or botanists or some culinary group trying to coopt the word "vegetable" and make it a precise scientific term. It's just a synonym for "plant".
From Wikipedia's "vegetable" article:
"In everyday usage, a vegetable is any part of a plant that is consumed by humans as food as part of a savory meal. "
and also, more importantly:
"The original meaning of the word vegetable, still used in biology, was to describe all types of plant, as in the terms "vegetable kingdom" and "vegetable matter"."
farther down:
"The broadest definition is the word's use adjectivally to mean "matter of plant origin" to distinguish it from "animal", meaning "matter of animal origin". More specifically, a vegetable may be defined as "any plant, part of which is used for food","
So basically, the definition of the word varies greatly, depending on who you're talking to. Apparently, botanists and biologists can't even agree on it. For us laypeople who aren't involved in biological sciences, botany, or culinary arts, corn is indeed a vegetable. The US Supreme Court even agreed in one case, where tomatoes were taxed as vegetables even though they're technically a fruit. IMO, if the botanists and others want a term to distinguish some items from fruits, then they need to make up a new term.
I think another important factor is: who owns the cameras?
A few years ago, people were complaining a lot about how you couldn't go anywhere outside in London without being recorded by CCTV cameras. However, the catch was, the vast majority of these cameras were privately-owned by local businesses, like the 24-hour gas station example you mentioned. They weren't government owned or operated.
I think this is a useful distinction. If a crime is committed and it's likely a private camera recorded it, then the government can get a legal warrant and gain access to that recording, and use it for evidence. But without a proper warrant, they can't just comb through the footage at will on a "fishing expedition", looking for something to use against someone. With government-owned cameras everywhere, they can.
As you said, widespread usage of government cameras without a warrant is ripe for abuse. Private camera owners don't have the same motivations, and likely only use them just in case they themselves are the victim of a crime and need evidence.
This is exactly my sentiment. I really look forward to Facebook going out of business and Zuckerberg becoming a has-been.
Forums would be useless with video clip posts. Just look at a typical forum thread: it can have several hundred posts. It'd take you hours and hours to watch them all, but in text form you can skim through them in minutes.
TFA does make a nice point about how well our human brains work with text, especially considering that text is not a natural thing that we were evolved to read. We can process textual information absurdly quickly.
Cat pictures are great, but Reddit is probably the best place for those. You're not limited to what your dumb family members post there, you can find a subreddit that's nothing but cat pictures and see all the best cat pictures the world has to offer. Facebook is a terrible place for that kind of thing, or anything at all really. It's nothing more than a site for narcissists to post pictures trying to prove to all their friends and family what wonderful lives they lead.
Don't tell Facebook this; I really want to see them push this all-video strategy, and ASAP too.
Hopefully it'll finally get everyone to abandon that POS site, turning it into the next MySpace.
F35 200 million a pop can do an awful lot with that money
It'll cost far, far, far more than the entire cost of the F-35 program to build smartphones in America. And who's going to do it anyway? Are you proposing that the US government become a smartphone manufacturer? Or should they just give the money to some company to do it? When was the last time that turned out well? They give huge amounts of money to defense contractors and don't get a whole lot for it.
Scrap the whole thing and you could build a whole series of industrial plants to make anything you want but hey
If you really think that, you are woefully ignorant of how industry and the economy works. How old are you, 14?
There's no "largescale acts" in there anywhere, just a few nutjobs here and there killing a small number of people. There's absolutely nothing there that compares with ISIS or anything else going on in the middle east.
This is all wrong. Fictional text (books) and video (movies) are two totally different media, each with their strengths and weaknesses. You can't hear music in a book, for instance, but movies are full of them. Movies are a very different art form from books, though some movies are indeed based on books or attempted adaptations of them. Movies absolutely do have their place, as do books and mini-series/TV shows.
Text is not "better" than video, nor the reverse, just like airplanes are not "better" than bicycles or cars. An airplane isn't very useful in taking you from your house to the grocery store down the street.
However, there is a real trend, as seen with this idiotic Facebook exec, to push more and more video on the internet for no good reason. Video has its place to be sure: if you want to show someone how to play a song on a guitar, or how to take apart something on their car, a video can do that in a much more easily understood format than text with diagrams, or worse, text alone. However, if you just want to catch up with the daily news, video is generally a terrible format: you can read (and skim) far faster than you can watch some idiot talk in front of a camera. And that's what these idiots are trying to push: they want us to stop reading text-based news sources, and instead watch videos of talking heads, probably because they can insert unskippable ads into the stream.
However, you're wrong about this executive not being fit for his position. Facebook is fundamentally a shitty advertising company, so it does make sense that they'd push more video like this, so they can make more money from advertising.
No, there's some really useful ones there. They're of the "how-to" variety however: it's faster and easier to make a cellphone video showing how to, for instance, disassemble some part on your car, than to write up a lengthy explanation complete with diagrams, and it's frequently more useful for the viewer as well since a video showing how someone does something can be easier to understand and apply to a physical object than to read an explanation with diagrams. This doesn't require professional production at all.
But yeah, videos of some dude sitting at home yapping about some topic are useless. Learn to type! Same goes for mainstream news organizations, which with their talking heads are really no better than the moronic YouTube guy. If your opinion or news piece is important and worth spending my time on, you'll write it (exception for news reports showing recorded video of the news item itself).
Exactly. Hell, let's make it 10x the employee's last salary.
If employers can't afford that, no problem: they don't have to use non-competes.
I think they need to go further and make it so you get the 50% pay even if you quit the job.
If the company doesn't like that, no one's forcing them to require non-competes.
You can get new OEM Samsung batteries for the S4 on Ebay for $10.
The S6 is crap: the battery is not user-replaceable, there's no SD slot, and it's not waterproof like the S5. It's a step down in every single way from its predecessor. (No, the S4 isn't waterproof either; that's the big feature the S5 has over it.)
Because the S6 and S7 are crap. Of course, he'll probably keep his S5 as long as he can, but eventually he's going to want to get something newer, and unless Samsung goes back to making great phones like the S4 and S5, it'll have to be something non-Samsung.
I will say, it is possible Samsung may go back: the S7 is an improvement over the S6 as they brought back the SD slot and (I think) water resistance, but it still has the stupid sealed-in battery so it's a no-go.
There's a bunch of eastern European nations that have joined NATO since the wall fell.
Anyone can join NATO, even a Moon colony if we were to establish one and make it an independent nation. The other NATO members would probably have to agree to it, of course, but just because the name reflects the origins of the organization doesn't mean they have to limit membership to nations in the north Atlantic. It probably would make sense to change the name, however, if they let Pacific Rim nations join, but there is a lot of historical inertia to the "NATO" name.
This is dumb. America simply does not have the technology or capability of manufacturing a smartphone. There is no supply chain present that you'd need to get the parts here, there's no LCD manufacturers here in the US that could make the kind of screens found on even a 3-year-old S4, it's simply impossible. And if you're stupid enough to point to Apple as "American", the iPhone is made in China, by contract manufacturers.
It's not just that the US doesn't make any, as you say yourself, it's that it's not even possible for the US to make any, not without investing many billions of dollars in building factories to build the components necessary, and building up the IP and technical institutional knowledge necessary. Other nations have invested in this stuff; we have not. You can't just decide on a whim to start doing this stuff; it's like Zimbabwe suddenly deciding they want to build Mars rovers and space stations and reusable rockets to launch them, or Vietnam suddenly deciding they're going to build world-class automobiles (and not just a final-assembly factory, but all the components too).
For which one?
But yeah, I'm one of those people who'd like to see Hillary in jail. If they can throw Rove in there with her, so much the better. Toss Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld in while you're at it.
I agree with the other responder: you're spouting a load of crap.
I've bought 3 Samsung S4s in the past year on the used market, all with OEM batteries. None of the batteries are "dying", though a couple have noticeably lost capacity (but still not that bad). That's on a 3-year-old phone; it's normal for lithium batteries to have noticeable capacity loss after 3 years of constant use. On your shitty Apple, this would require paying $$$ for an Apple tech to replace the battery, or just buy a new phone for $$$$. On these S4s, it's no problem: I just buy a new OEM battery and pop it in and the phone is good as new, so I only have to spend about $120 for a great phone by not buying something that's brand new. Phones haven't noticeably improved in the last 3 years anyway, just like computers haven't improved noticeably in the last 6 or more.
The warranty thing may have been a valid concern a few years ago, but this is 2016. The S4 was released in 2013. They're up to the S7 now; any S4 you buy now is used (I know--I've bought 3 of them in the last year, but all used of course), and is long out of warranty.
Oh please.
As an American, I have lots of complaints about Christians, but to equate the two religions is pure lunacy. Christians haven't committed largescale acts of religious violence for a very long time. The Crusades were a millenia ago. People haven't been burned at the stake by Christians for centuries. The Salem Witch trials were in the late 1600s. By contrast, Islamic nations are horribly violent places right now. If you don't believe me, take a plane to Turkey, cross over into Syria, and go spend some time in Al-Raqqah. ISIL controls a huge amount of territory, has tens of thousands of fighters and probably millions of citizens, and executes people brutally on a daily basis. And that's just the worst of the lot. Saudi Arabia, our wonderful ally, has all kinds of misogynistic laws and executes people in medieval fashion too. Qatar, another strong US ally, just released a Dutch woman from jail where she was held for 3 months because she was raped, and was pushed to marry her rapist so they could both leave jail early (!). UAE does that kind of stuff all the time. The Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan had popular support (and still does in places) and they also commit countless acts of brutality. Islamic countries have been full of violence for ages, especially for anyone who left the religion or violated some other backwards religious law.
Christians have their issues still (like the WBC), but this is a serious case of false equivalence here.
You don't have to look at any holy book passages to see how totally different Islamic and Western nations are.
Yeah, that's a good question. I really don't know, but you're probably right: if you don't mind being spied on by the TV maker (which is why it needs to be connected to the internet ultimately, for the phone-home "feature"), but don't mess around with any of the other "smart" features, and especially if you're behind any typical NAT router, I don't see how you'd get infected with anything unless the TV maker's own service gets compromised.