"Imagine a world in which the book burners had won"
Please. "Horrifying"?
The OP pimps itself breathlessly as "This interactive map of global Internet censorship is the most important thing youâ(TM)ll see today" - yes, it's about as important (and surprising) as the sun coming up in the East.
The facts are that a) the ubiquitous availability of information is a relatively new thing. Public libraries didn't even really exist until the latter 19th/E20th centuries. The internet is less than a generation old. b) governments and power structures have controlled such information throughout the span of human history.
The panicked tone of the article implies that this is worse than ever, which is patently histrionic bullshit. Even in these heavily censored countries, these people have access to information that they NEVER would have had before.
I'm not even 100% convinced that the ideal of universal access to information is an unalloyed good. Certainly, from the POV of a midwestern, middle class educated individual I *assume* that the net result of having more information is beneficial - but I can certainly see that there are negative aspects to "everything open", such as people who clearly don't understand basic science drawing conclusions from unfiltered scientific data. Or statistics? How many people are easily manipulated by presentations of statistics that they don't even understand? Again, my gut tells me that the "net" is a benefit, but I can't say I'm certain.
Again, as a small-l liberal, I believe that information and communication is probably good in the long run; even the small trickles of illumination sneaking into those heavily censored places suggests to me that their ability to keep their people in ignorance will eventually expire. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually.
A glass 95% empty is still a crapton better than no glass at all.
For all the people who believe that this is true, I think we should encourage them.
- Humans haven't evolved to travel faster than walking/riding speed, so they should eschew all forms of mechanical transport >30 mph. - Humans haven't evolved to emotionally cope with communication without being in-person, so they need to give up cell phones - Humans' eyes haven't evolved to cope with electronic text or really any text, so they should never read or go on the internet.
Personally, I agree, this would be a better world if they all did that. I know I'd be happier.
(in short, this is stupid; natural selection works as a RESULT of environmental and species' behavioral changes, not that we have to wait until we evolved to be able to cope with X before we can do it.)
Maybe you missed my point about the earth going through pretty much this same scenario at least a dozen times in the last couple of million years? Human CO2 is dwarfed by natural sources, and the greenhouse effect of WATER VAPOR is massively more than that. What AGW zealots are asserting is that the climate is balanced on some sort of knife-edge of conditions, that the slightest tip by human CO2 emissions will push it into a runaway spiral of effects. We've got historical records of sudden higher CO2 and temps a dozen times; each time, feedback brought the system back to an equilibrium state. Why would we assert that "now" is somehow different from all of those previous examples?
You talked about feedback loops that restore a system to equilibrium (which, indeed, are amply demonstrated in everything from physical to biological systems on Earth), then (somehow) assume this isn't one.
As you mention, nature frequently has feedback loops that offset changing conditions. If the "sweet spot" comfort zone of the natural system on earth were anywhere near as desperately sensitive one as it's currently portrayed, then over the 4+ billion year history of life on earth - and the half dozen cataclysmic extinction events that wipe out 3/4+ of the extant species - the climate would have spun off into one of these feedback loops that are so desperately (hopefully?) projected and we'd have a lifeless Venus or a dessicated Mars. We don't, ergo the system is robust, QED.
To your specific point, we even have several historical examples in the ice records of (geologically) sudden 'pulses' in CO2 and temperature to levels comparable or exceeding today.* In every case the system has then returned to an equilibrium....DOZENS of times over the past couple of million years. The feedback loops you talk about are real; the cataclysmic FUD you're talking about negative feedback is, quite evidently, not. I'll post 4 billion years of actual historical record of far more substantial shocks to the climate of this planet, against 15 years of panicky hypochondriac environmentalists finally devising an issue with some purchase in the public mind.
*some might point out that it happens every 120k years so so, and the last one was about 120k years ago. Yet this specific instance, curiously, is deemed to be "caused by" humans? If I stood on a beach, and knew that the tide came in 10 times before, regularly, and now it is rising for an 11th time, what sort of a moron would I be to assume THIS TIME it's because I'm standing there?
The article itself states clearly that they have no idea how long these seeps have in fact been going on - while other seeps have been researched specifically for that and found NO BASIS for believing they're getting worse. So to automagically jump to the conclusion (which the article desperately tries to - "it's hard to prove they're the result of climate change" - as if that was the end goal of all research, right?) suggest at least faulty science, if not downright mendacity. Want a feedback loop? How about this - the seeps are extremely sensitive to ocean temp and pressure. The article suggests that a warming ocean might(hopefully, again) be the cause. But if the planet is warming, and seas are rising, this is going to put those seeps under deeper water, which is in fact more likely to slow them down. And if they've been bubbling away forever (ie contributing steadily and unaccounted-for levels of methane to the atmosphere), this could be the mechanism that then reverses warming.
Because fearmongering about dirty, nasty predatory men is a lot more politically palatable than talking to young women about making bad choices and the consequences thereof. That's "substantiating the patriarchy".
The public narrative is about "victimization" not about "stupidity and carelessness".
Don't get me wrong, a man who takes advantage of a girl who's drunk is just as much a scumbag shit as someone who takes advantage of a girl who's been drugged.
But... I know that if I left my car running with the keys in it, even if the guy that (almost inevitably) would steal it should & would be prosecuted, simultaneously the insurance company isn't going to replace my car because of my own stupid choices.
Agreed. I can't mod this + enough. There seems to be a sort of collective dismissal of the power of government in hacker circles, as if the fact that some faceless bureaucrat in a lowly department failing to deploy a firewall to protect trivial information, or the FBI wasting billion$ on a worthless systems upgrade, were representative of the technological competency of the whole of the US gov't.
I doubt that's the case.
What people fail to understand is that the government is *huge* and as easy as it is to find laughable examples of waste, abuse, and outright incompetence, that's only one end of the bell curve.
The OTHER end has incredibly competent people, giant fat gobs of money, and a wealth of resources that beggar the imagination (ie if they need something and cannot ask for or buy it, they can resort to overt legalities like subpoenas, or not-so-legal methods like property condemnation, deportation, or IRS audits) to compel behavior in pursuit of their goals. Further, the great bulk of the US populace (ie not the very vocal 0.01% on internet chat boards) is IN FAVOR OF LAW AND ORDER, full stop, and will cheerfully volunteer cooperation to "the authorities" however they can. The US federal gov't has tremendous credibility with most of the population.
My point is enthusiastically reiterating the OP: it's one thing to hack some nerd-gamer servers, but when you attack the infrastructure of the US (and make no mistake, that's what this was) you will come to the attention of the 'sharp, pointy' end of the bellcurve.
"Mental hurdle aside, the reality is that anyone who plays games, regardless of the platform, is a gamer."
Maybe a teenage boy wrote this summary, because this sort of sophomoric pedantry would be part for the course for a teenager.
Yes, according to the literal meaning of the words, a "gamer" is someone who has ever played a game. In the vernacular, however, the commonly-accepted meaning is substantially narrower than that, implying someone who is an habitual player of video games, in this context, themselves being more involved than minsweeper, solitaire, or yes, kandy krush.
I am a bibliophile, and much prefer to read a book to my kindle. Nonetheless, I travel a lot and a kindle is inarguably an advantage for me. I found the kindle was terribly distracting for at least the first month, until I settled down and didn't have to think at all about using it. So I would like to see this test done with experienced users.
See, I'm reasonably mature, and if someone says something that I don't like, I can choose to ignore them or, if I feel like it, engage.
It's as simple as clicking away (or even just closing my eyes).
Of course, this post might be labeled as a 'troll' because I'm deliberately being condescending, but that's a stylistic choice to convey that I believe someone, anyone, who claims to have been hooked by a troll 'against their will' needs to fucking grow up.
You don't really seem to 'get' the value of emails. The point is that they can be processed whenever. To delete them is stupid. Essentially, by negating the time-independent aspect of email, you're reducing it to little more than a phone call in terms of utility.
I'm not sure if you noticed, but the rest of the world doesn't conform to your standards of vacation, and there are even alternate TIMEZONES in this world, so it's entirely reasonable that someone might send an email while you're not there.
I look forward to the first time a Daimler exec sends an email to someone out of the office for something important to be done when they get back from vacation.
The key takeaway from the report is that nobody will be personally held to blame for the incompetence (at best; corruption and nepotism at worst) of the process and end result.
Second, I keep hearing this "there's no genetic basis!" bullshit as if it's a fact. Are you asserting that there is no genetic basis for epicanthic folds or for melanin levels in the skin? Are you seriously saying that these characteristics are not heritable?
Because if they're heritable, there's a genetic basis for it, and (generally) vice versa.
Now, the problem with race is as much one of definition as of identification. The human 'race' isn't like a bunch of different color legos - discrete and identifiably different. It's more like a river flowing into a fen - due to geography and history, there's a diffusion of the 'theoretical root human' into a myriad of generally-observable channels, but even THEN none of them were ever really discrete, and mixing is continual at the margins.
NEVERTHELESS, to therefore deny that there are what are generally recognized as ethnicities because of this pedantic insistence on focusing on boundary-cases is silly.
It's honestly not a bad idea, except for the 'problem of the mandarins'.
Because our society is exceptionally complex, even the role of 'managing the managers' assigned to execute tasks/policy is a major challenge, and no single person can be expected to have enough expertise to do everything.
So politicians rely on mandarins - unelected, professional bureaucrats that ostensibly just know how to push the levers and pull the strings to execute the mechanisms of government.
When a freshman politician arrives, these mandarins wield a great deal of power, as this politician is pretty much at their mercy. If there's nothing BUT 'freshmen' politicians, these bureaucrats essentially run the government. A long-service, professional politician at least has a chance of intuiting when policy is being deliberately interfered with.
Is that 'ability' to babysit the mandarins worth the permanent old boy network of back-scratching career politicos? That's really the question, isn't it?
Hell, geneticists won't even accept that a FLOOD of hormones throughout our development from blastocyst onward that spur dimorphism, change the development of significant parts of the human anatomy, the voice, musculature, hell even the very skeletal structure itself has *any* impact on mental abilities, strengths, weaknesses etc in any way.
If they won't admit something so fundamental because it's taboo, how could they possibly admit that ethnicities have different strengths and weaknesses?
This merely pushes engagement ranges out once again. WWI riflemen were trained to shoot at hundreds of yards, in fact the sight-system on the old WWI bolt-action rifles is often stepped out to crazy ranges like 1200 yards. (Not that they'd actually hit anything.) It's only with the advent of general-issue personal weapons with rapid fire capability that aimed-fire ranges have shrunk in the modern era. (Some would say that they shrunk to what typical engagement ranges were ANYWAY.)
Now, the conventional wisdom of shooting from 500 yards instead of 100 yards is shooter safety, as it gives the advantage to the shooter - the reply-fire (even if it's of large volume) is likely to be reflexive, hasty and (normally) unlikely to hit anything 500y away.
This is no longer necessarily true. Counter-sniper systems are getting better every day - more sophisticated, quicker, and more accurate - meaning.50 cal or heavier suppressive fire can land on the shooter's position as quickly as 0.75 seconds from registering the incoming shot.
What this means only is that infantry combat is truly entering the computer age.
Human reflexes have been recognized to be largely too slow to perform any but the grossest weapons-release functions for air and (some) naval combat, this now means that even for infantry combat we're going to have automated rifles firing on targets, and automated systems firing back - both quicker, and better than people could do it.
The existing canal has been widened, and there are alternative plans for the next step of increase, but nobody has moved forward because the economics just don't make sense.
Further, despite the breathless headline, this is likely to be about as realistic as cold fusion. There are HUGE engineering problems with the plan for the Nicaragua canal, not to mention massive ecological ones. The Chinese group allegedly signing up for this has NO history in mega-engineering projects, and is apparently little more than a boutique venture-cap agency. Finally, there's no REASON for the canal - US East Coast ports are nowhere near being able to handle such ships as would require that scale of canal....which is expected by actual experts in the field to cost north of $100 bn, not the $40bn mentioned.
There is, quite literally nothing of substance to this plan, nor even any plans of substance expected. Sure, if China just wants to buy a canal, they have the cash. Then again, unless they care to ignore the international community, there are a host of other decade+ hurdles that would need to be crossed for it not to be an environmental catastrophe.
It *would * be amusing to see how the US Navy would literally shit themselves to have a massive Pacific/Atlantic canal controlled politically by China.
Nonsense, an editorial screed by the New Yorker is meaningless. And if you want to bring context into it, you'll lose even harder.
Firstly, judicial review wasn't even a principle until Marbury v Madison in 1803. So we're talking about the 19th century only.
In cases in the 19th Century, the Supreme Court ruled pretty much only that the Second Amendment does not bar state regulation of firearms. (For example, in United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542, 553 (1875), the Court stated that the Second Amendment âoehas no other effect than to restrict the powers of the national government,â and in Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252, 265 (1886), the Court reiterated that the Second Amendment âoeis a limitation only upon the power of Congress and the National government, and not upon that of the States.â )
Although most of the rights in the Bill of Rights have been selectively incorporated into the rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment and thus cannot be impaired by state governments, the Second Amendment has never been so incorporated.
It's only since 1939 United States v Miller, that federal court decisions considering the Second Amendment have largely interpreted it as preserving the authority of the states to maintain militias - not the '150 year history' stated in the deliberately-misleading text of the quoted article.
In fact, it's ONLY in the latter 20th Century that we've even HAD this debate, as all constitutional commentary and understanding previous to that was universal in its understanding of the 2nd Amendment as an individual right, *not* dependent on being in a militia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Of course, you further disregard that according to the US code, all males from 17-44 *are* by default in the militia. (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/311)
Yes, the action of these worms kept oxygen levels at "just the right level" for animals and other species to evolve...but isn't it simpler to expect that (lacking these worms, and with I suppose the much-higher oxygen levels) some other feedback mechanism would have eventually kicked in and THEN life would have evolved around that norm instead?
Obviously, with a sample size of precisely one, it's hard to say.
The US Constitution is only about 4 pages, 4400 words (and the bulk of that is structural & procedural minutiae about the US government). The role of the USSC is simply resolving if a law does or does not conform to the US Constitution.
Given those relatively limited boundaries, it shouldn't be that complex of an issue to predict algorithmically the results of a given judicial ruling, one would think. (The devil's in the details about parsing meaning and context.)
Of course, I believe phrases like "the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" are indisputably clear, and I'm astonished that people can find convoluted ways to try to tear it apart syntactically.and semantically.
Not to trivialize the little buggers' reflexes, but this can't have been entirely unpredicted? Human quick-fire nerve channels transmit signals at 100m/s, so, considering it's nearly 1m from my fingertip to my brain, that's 20 milliseconds right there from finger to brain back to finger for the reaction. That same distance in a fly is what, perhaps 0.2mm? That means his signal-time is 0.004 milliseconds unless I've misplaced a 0 in there somewhere. Not to mention, I'd expect that there's something to be said for the efficiency of function in the CPU, as it were. A brain evolved for perhaps 8 'tasks' in total (walk, fly, seek food, eat, seek mate, reproduce, recognize danger, flee danger?) would likely be intrinsically quicker-processing at any of those tasks than one that is (one hopes) substantially more complex?
That quote is nonsensical. "Solar power is the winner!"....at being environmentally friendly, not cheap or efficient. "Solar power provides up to 20 years of power for a single carbon investment" what an absurd metric? So if I built a power plant, and "in one investment" dumped 50 years worth of coal piles around it, it would be better than solar, by this measure? "(a feat which) cannot be duplicated by any other commonly used type of energy production"....other than wind. You might want to check what the phrase 'cannot be duplicated by any other' means.
Slashdot Mirror
"Imagine a world in which the book burners had won"
Please. "Horrifying"?
The OP pimps itself breathlessly as "This interactive map of global Internet censorship is the most important thing youâ(TM)ll see today" - yes, it's about as important (and surprising) as the sun coming up in the East.
The facts are that
a) the ubiquitous availability of information is a relatively new thing. Public libraries didn't even really exist until the latter 19th/E20th centuries. The internet is less than a generation old.
b) governments and power structures have controlled such information throughout the span of human history.
The panicked tone of the article implies that this is worse than ever, which is patently histrionic bullshit. Even in these heavily censored countries, these people have access to information that they NEVER would have had before.
I'm not even 100% convinced that the ideal of universal access to information is an unalloyed good. Certainly, from the POV of a midwestern, middle class educated individual I *assume* that the net result of having more information is beneficial - but I can certainly see that there are negative aspects to "everything open", such as people who clearly don't understand basic science drawing conclusions from unfiltered scientific data. Or statistics? How many people are easily manipulated by presentations of statistics that they don't even understand? Again, my gut tells me that the "net" is a benefit, but I can't say I'm certain.
Again, as a small-l liberal, I believe that information and communication is probably good in the long run; even the small trickles of illumination sneaking into those heavily censored places suggests to me that their ability to keep their people in ignorance will eventually expire. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually.
A glass 95% empty is still a crapton better than no glass at all.
For all the people who believe that this is true, I think we should encourage them.
- Humans haven't evolved to travel faster than walking/riding speed, so they should eschew all forms of mechanical transport >30 mph.
- Humans haven't evolved to emotionally cope with communication without being in-person, so they need to give up cell phones
- Humans' eyes haven't evolved to cope with electronic text or really any text, so they should never read or go on the internet.
Personally, I agree, this would be a better world if they all did that. I know I'd be happier.
(in short, this is stupid; natural selection works as a RESULT of environmental and species' behavioral changes, not that we have to wait until we evolved to be able to cope with X before we can do it.)
(looks at the last 13 years of US conduct in the "war" on terror)
You think jurisdiction - or lack thereof - makes *any* substantial difference?
Seriously?
Maybe you missed my point about the earth going through pretty much this same scenario at least a dozen times in the last couple of million years?
Human CO2 is dwarfed by natural sources, and the greenhouse effect of WATER VAPOR is massively more than that. What AGW zealots are asserting is that the climate is balanced on some sort of knife-edge of conditions, that the slightest tip by human CO2 emissions will push it into a runaway spiral of effects.
We've got historical records of sudden higher CO2 and temps a dozen times; each time, feedback brought the system back to an equilibrium state. Why would we assert that "now" is somehow different from all of those previous examples?
You had it, and then you lost it.
You talked about feedback loops that restore a system to equilibrium (which, indeed, are amply demonstrated in everything from physical to biological systems on Earth), then (somehow) assume this isn't one.
As you mention, nature frequently has feedback loops that offset changing conditions. If the "sweet spot" comfort zone of the natural system on earth were anywhere near as desperately sensitive one as it's currently portrayed, then over the 4+ billion year history of life on earth - and the half dozen cataclysmic extinction events that wipe out 3/4+ of the extant species - the climate would have spun off into one of these feedback loops that are so desperately (hopefully?) projected and we'd have a lifeless Venus or a dessicated Mars. We don't, ergo the system is robust, QED.
To your specific point, we even have several historical examples in the ice records of (geologically) sudden 'pulses' in CO2 and temperature to levels comparable or exceeding today.* In every case the system has then returned to an equilibrium....DOZENS of times over the past couple of million years. The feedback loops you talk about are real; the cataclysmic FUD you're talking about negative feedback is, quite evidently, not. I'll post 4 billion years of actual historical record of far more substantial shocks to the climate of this planet, against 15 years of panicky hypochondriac environmentalists finally devising an issue with some purchase in the public mind.
*some might point out that it happens every 120k years so so, and the last one was about 120k years ago. Yet this specific instance, curiously, is deemed to be "caused by" humans? If I stood on a beach, and knew that the tide came in 10 times before, regularly, and now it is rising for an 11th time, what sort of a moron would I be to assume THIS TIME it's because I'm standing there?
The article itself states clearly that they have no idea how long these seeps have in fact been going on - while other seeps have been researched specifically for that and found NO BASIS for believing they're getting worse. So to automagically jump to the conclusion (which the article desperately tries to - "it's hard to prove they're the result of climate change" - as if that was the end goal of all research, right?) suggest at least faulty science, if not downright mendacity.
Want a feedback loop? How about this - the seeps are extremely sensitive to ocean temp and pressure. The article suggests that a warming ocean might(hopefully, again) be the cause. But if the planet is warming, and seas are rising, this is going to put those seeps under deeper water, which is in fact more likely to slow them down. And if they've been bubbling away forever (ie contributing steadily and unaccounted-for levels of methane to the atmosphere), this could be the mechanism that then reverses warming.
Because fearmongering about dirty, nasty predatory men is a lot more politically palatable than talking to young women about making bad choices and the consequences thereof. That's "substantiating the patriarchy".
The public narrative is about "victimization" not about "stupidity and carelessness".
Don't get me wrong, a man who takes advantage of a girl who's drunk is just as much a scumbag shit as someone who takes advantage of a girl who's been drugged.
But... I know that if I left my car running with the keys in it, even if the guy that (almost inevitably) would steal it should & would be prosecuted, simultaneously the insurance company isn't going to replace my car because of my own stupid choices.
Just sayin'.
Agreed.
I can't mod this + enough.
There seems to be a sort of collective dismissal of the power of government in hacker circles, as if the fact that some faceless bureaucrat in a lowly department failing to deploy a firewall to protect trivial information, or the FBI wasting billion$ on a worthless systems upgrade, were representative of the technological competency of the whole of the US gov't.
I doubt that's the case.
What people fail to understand is that the government is *huge* and as easy as it is to find laughable examples of waste, abuse, and outright incompetence, that's only one end of the bell curve.
The OTHER end has incredibly competent people, giant fat gobs of money, and a wealth of resources that beggar the imagination (ie if they need something and cannot ask for or buy it, they can resort to overt legalities like subpoenas, or not-so-legal methods like property condemnation, deportation, or IRS audits) to compel behavior in pursuit of their goals. Further, the great bulk of the US populace (ie not the very vocal 0.01% on internet chat boards) is IN FAVOR OF LAW AND ORDER, full stop, and will cheerfully volunteer cooperation to "the authorities" however they can. The US federal gov't has tremendous credibility with most of the population.
My point is enthusiastically reiterating the OP: it's one thing to hack some nerd-gamer servers, but when you attack the infrastructure of the US (and make no mistake, that's what this was) you will come to the attention of the 'sharp, pointy' end of the bellcurve.
Good luck with that.
"Mental hurdle aside, the reality is that anyone who plays games, regardless of the platform, is a gamer."
Maybe a teenage boy wrote this summary, because this sort of sophomoric pedantry would be part for the course for a teenager.
Yes, according to the literal meaning of the words, a "gamer" is someone who has ever played a game. In the vernacular, however, the commonly-accepted meaning is substantially narrower than that, implying someone who is an habitual player of video games, in this context, themselves being more involved than minsweeper, solitaire, or yes, kandy krush.
Lesson 1: if the company executives are bigger news than the company and more importantly, its products, then you're doing something seriously wrong.
I am a bibliophile, and much prefer to read a book to my kindle.
Nonetheless, I travel a lot and a kindle is inarguably an advantage for me.
I found the kindle was terribly distracting for at least the first month, until I settled down and didn't have to think at all about using it. So I would like to see this test done with experienced users.
No, I wouldn't pay a single penny.
See, I'm reasonably mature, and if someone says something that I don't like, I can choose to ignore them or, if I feel like it, engage.
It's as simple as clicking away (or even just closing my eyes).
Of course, this post might be labeled as a 'troll' because I'm deliberately being condescending, but that's a stylistic choice to convey that I believe someone, anyone, who claims to have been hooked by a troll 'against their will' needs to fucking grow up.
Dear Daimler,
You don't really seem to 'get' the value of emails. The point is that they can be processed whenever. To delete them is stupid. Essentially, by negating the time-independent aspect of email, you're reducing it to little more than a phone call in terms of utility.
I'm not sure if you noticed, but the rest of the world doesn't conform to your standards of vacation, and there are even alternate TIMEZONES in this world, so it's entirely reasonable that someone might send an email while you're not there.
I look forward to the first time a Daimler exec sends an email to someone out of the office for something important to be done when they get back from vacation.
Dumb fucks.
The key takeaway from the report is that nobody will be personally held to blame for the incompetence (at best; corruption and nepotism at worst) of the process and end result.
No punishments or consequences, all around!
First, where'd I use the word "race"?
Second, I keep hearing this "there's no genetic basis!" bullshit as if it's a fact. Are you asserting that there is no genetic basis for epicanthic folds or for melanin levels in the skin? Are you seriously saying that these characteristics are not heritable?
Because if they're heritable, there's a genetic basis for it, and (generally) vice versa.
Now, the problem with race is as much one of definition as of identification.
The human 'race' isn't like a bunch of different color legos - discrete and identifiably different. It's more like a river flowing into a fen - due to geography and history, there's a diffusion of the 'theoretical root human' into a myriad of generally-observable channels, but even THEN none of them were ever really discrete, and mixing is continual at the margins.
NEVERTHELESS, to therefore deny that there are what are generally recognized as ethnicities because of this pedantic insistence on focusing on boundary-cases is silly.
It's honestly not a bad idea, except for the 'problem of the mandarins'.
Because our society is exceptionally complex, even the role of 'managing the managers' assigned to execute tasks/policy is a major challenge, and no single person can be expected to have enough expertise to do everything.
So politicians rely on mandarins - unelected, professional bureaucrats that ostensibly just know how to push the levers and pull the strings to execute the mechanisms of government.
When a freshman politician arrives, these mandarins wield a great deal of power, as this politician is pretty much at their mercy. If there's nothing BUT 'freshmen' politicians, these bureaucrats essentially run the government. A long-service, professional politician at least has a chance of intuiting when policy is being deliberately interfered with.
Is that 'ability' to babysit the mandarins worth the permanent old boy network of back-scratching career politicos? That's really the question, isn't it?
If you don't like it, perhaps you should get your news from some other site that communicates with whatever measure you find more comforting?
Hell, geneticists won't even accept that a FLOOD of hormones throughout our development from blastocyst onward that spur dimorphism, change the development of significant parts of the human anatomy, the voice, musculature, hell even the very skeletal structure itself has *any* impact on mental abilities, strengths, weaknesses etc in any way.
If they won't admit something so fundamental because it's taboo, how could they possibly admit that ethnicities have different strengths and weaknesses?
This merely pushes engagement ranges out once again. WWI riflemen were trained to shoot at hundreds of yards, in fact the sight-system on the old WWI bolt-action rifles is often stepped out to crazy ranges like 1200 yards. (Not that they'd actually hit anything.) It's only with the advent of general-issue personal weapons with rapid fire capability that aimed-fire ranges have shrunk in the modern era. (Some would say that they shrunk to what typical engagement ranges were ANYWAY.)
Now, the conventional wisdom of shooting from 500 yards instead of 100 yards is shooter safety, as it gives the advantage to the shooter - the reply-fire (even if it's of large volume) is likely to be reflexive, hasty and (normally) unlikely to hit anything 500y away.
This is no longer necessarily true. Counter-sniper systems are getting better every day - more sophisticated, quicker, and more accurate - meaning .50 cal or heavier suppressive fire can land on the shooter's position as quickly as 0.75 seconds from registering the incoming shot.
What this means only is that infantry combat is truly entering the computer age.
Human reflexes have been recognized to be largely too slow to perform any but the grossest weapons-release functions for air and (some) naval combat, this now means that even for infantry combat we're going to have automated rifles firing on targets, and automated systems firing back - both quicker, and better than people could do it.
The existing canal has been widened, and there are alternative plans for the next step of increase, but nobody has moved forward because the economics just don't make sense.
Further, despite the breathless headline, this is likely to be about as realistic as cold fusion. There are HUGE engineering problems with the plan for the Nicaragua canal, not to mention massive ecological ones. The Chinese group allegedly signing up for this has NO history in mega-engineering projects, and is apparently little more than a boutique venture-cap agency. Finally, there's no REASON for the canal - US East Coast ports are nowhere near being able to handle such ships as would require that scale of canal....which is expected by actual experts in the field to cost north of $100 bn, not the $40bn mentioned.
There is, quite literally nothing of substance to this plan, nor even any plans of substance expected. Sure, if China just wants to buy a canal, they have the cash. Then again, unless they care to ignore the international community, there are a host of other decade+ hurdles that would need to be crossed for it not to be an environmental catastrophe.
Let's look at an INDUSTRY trade publication, instead of a "rah rah China" periodical:
http://www.joc.com/maritime-ne...
It *would * be amusing to see how the US Navy would literally shit themselves to have a massive Pacific/Atlantic canal controlled politically by China.
Nonsense, an editorial screed by the New Yorker is meaningless. And if you want to bring context into it, you'll lose even harder.
Firstly, judicial review wasn't even a principle until Marbury v Madison in 1803. So we're talking about the 19th century only.
In cases in the 19th Century, the Supreme Court ruled pretty much only that the Second Amendment does not bar state regulation of firearms. (For example, in United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542, 553 (1875), the Court stated that the Second Amendment âoehas no other effect than to restrict the powers of the national government,â and in Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252, 265 (1886), the Court reiterated that the Second Amendment âoeis a limitation only upon the power of Congress and the National government, and not upon that of the States.â )
Although most of the rights in the Bill of Rights have been selectively incorporated into the rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment and thus cannot be impaired by state governments, the Second Amendment has never been so incorporated.
It's only since 1939 United States v Miller, that federal court decisions considering the Second Amendment have largely interpreted it as preserving the authority of the states to maintain militias - not the '150 year history' stated in the deliberately-misleading text of the quoted article.
(much of the above is clipped verbatim from http://www.loc.gov/law/help/se...)
In fact, it's ONLY in the latter 20th Century that we've even HAD this debate, as all constitutional commentary and understanding previous to that was universal in its understanding of the 2nd Amendment as an individual right, *not* dependent on being in a militia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Of course, you further disregard that according to the US code, all males from 17-44 *are* by default in the militia. (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/311)
Isn't this just the anthropic principle at work?
Yes, the action of these worms kept oxygen levels at "just the right level" for animals and other species to evolve...but isn't it simpler to expect that (lacking these worms, and with I suppose the much-higher oxygen levels) some other feedback mechanism would have eventually kicked in and THEN life would have evolved around that norm instead?
Obviously, with a sample size of precisely one, it's hard to say.
The US Constitution is only about 4 pages, 4400 words (and the bulk of that is structural & procedural minutiae about the US government).
The role of the USSC is simply resolving if a law does or does not conform to the US Constitution.
Given those relatively limited boundaries, it shouldn't be that complex of an issue to predict algorithmically the results of a given judicial ruling, one would think. (The devil's in the details about parsing meaning and context.)
Of course, I believe phrases like "the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" are indisputably clear, and I'm astonished that people can find convoluted ways to try to tear it apart syntactically.and semantically.
Not to trivialize the little buggers' reflexes, but this can't have been entirely unpredicted?
Human quick-fire nerve channels transmit signals at 100m/s, so, considering it's nearly 1m from my fingertip to my brain, that's 20 milliseconds right there from finger to brain back to finger for the reaction. That same distance in a fly is what, perhaps 0.2mm? That means his signal-time is 0.004 milliseconds unless I've misplaced a 0 in there somewhere.
Not to mention, I'd expect that there's something to be said for the efficiency of function in the CPU, as it were. A brain evolved for perhaps 8 'tasks' in total (walk, fly, seek food, eat, seek mate, reproduce, recognize danger, flee danger?) would likely be intrinsically quicker-processing at any of those tasks than one that is (one hopes) substantially more complex?
"...you'll get more or less the same results..."
You won't be $60,000/year poorer, however.
That quote is nonsensical.
"Solar power is the winner!"....at being environmentally friendly, not cheap or efficient.
"Solar power provides up to 20 years of power for a single carbon investment" what an absurd metric? So if I built a power plant, and "in one investment" dumped 50 years worth of coal piles around it, it would be better than solar, by this measure?
"(a feat which) cannot be duplicated by any other commonly used type of energy production"....other than wind. You might want to check what the phrase 'cannot be duplicated by any other' means.