Try the Waze app. It's a working crowd sourced navigation tool. It actively routes around or at least notifies you of slowdowns ahead, as well as other traffic hazards and police locations.
Where I live (Finland), the cops aren't generally considered to be enemies so I don't want to participate in any application that warns people about their location...
The OP lives in USA which is - last time I checked - a representative democracy. It might be imperfect one (=difficult to break the two-party system) but it's still a democracy... which means that The Government is just the set of institutions that The Population has built. Saying that you aren't part of the government in such a state is saying that you can't influence the decision making process, which probably means that you are too young to vote.
It doesn't help if you say "I'm a LIBERTARIAN. I want the fed abolished...". Even ignoring all arguments about how you can't exclude yourself from a group just because you don't believe in everything it has democratically decided... This is FBI we are talking about. Even the most idealistic libertarians would say "The government has only one job: Keep us safe from the bad guys" (i.e. power to use violence is the only true natural monopoly) so this is perhaps the one institution that libertarians would retain.
The parent a few level up said that they can get away with incompetence because they work for the government and thus implied that government accepts incompetence and private sector doesn't. The GP answered "There are just as incompetent people on private sector". Now you're derailing it with "Sure, but it doesn't matter, because it's the private sector".
Sure, I (think I) understand the point: If someone wastes their own money, it's less important than if they waste taxpayer money. However, when someone says that "Government accepts competence, private sector doesn't" they're more or less implying "If we let private sector take care of things, they'll be done better than when we let the government take care of them". When someone refutes by saying that private sector is just as competent, they're implying that transferring stuff to private sector might not do any good because there are always incompetent people, no matter what the organization is.
After that, saying what you just said seems to be completely irrelevant.
It's possible to use the client for data storage but sign and/or encrypt all the data so that you know the client hasn't modified it.
This approach has actually been gaining momentum lately. For example, everyone knows that cookies shouldn't be used for storing important data (such as whether the client has logged in to a web service and what his user id is) so the traditional method is to store session data on the server and just store the session id in the cookie. However, play! (a framework that finally makes java web development tolerable) aims for more stateless architecture and stores all the session data on the client and just uses digital signature to make sure that the data client sends to server hasn't been tampered with.
We bring personal devices to the company network, install screensavers and cool programs from the internet and write our passwords down to post-its on our screen because it's convenient! Don't tell us "You're doing it wrong" when it's YOUR responsibility to come up with good designs that accommodate to our every desire while keeping us perfectly safe!
I know I have, as a part of my (software) engineering degree, studied more physics than the average person and I might have better intuition about what stuff should look like... but that flight seem in no way, shape or form realistic or natural. The push from the wings hardly correlates with his flight path, etc...
I'm not expert but from my understanding (which seems to be supported by Wikipedia) he truly was more or less liberal/libertarian in early 1900s and became more conservative by 1920s. Quoting wikipedia on his early political career
Churchill stood again for the seat of Oldham at the 1900 general election. After winning the seat, he went on a speaking tour throughout Britain and the United States, raising £10,000 for himself (about £800,000 today). In Parliament, he became associated with a faction of the Conservative Party led by Lord Hugh Cecil; the Hughligans. During his first parliamentary session, he opposed the government's military expenditure and Joseph Chamberlain's proposal of extensive tariffs, which were intended to protect Britain's economic dominance. His own constituency effectively deselected him, although he continued to sit for Oldham until the next general election. After the Whitsun recess in 1904 he crossed the floor to sit as a member of the Liberal Party. As a Liberal, he continued to campaign for free trade. When the Liberals took office with Henry Campbell-Bannerman as prime minister, in December 1905, Churchill became Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies dealing mainly with South Africa after the Boer War.
So he was briefly associated with the Conservative Party but he opposed military spending, wanted lower tariffs, campaigned for free trade and switched to liberal party. Twenty years later (1924) he rejoined the conservatives.
What you say about him reforming liberal party to become less libertarian... you might be correct (I don't have that through knowledge) but if that's so, I'd guess that would have happened around 1920 or so, when he was himself growing more cynical.
If you're not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you're not a conservative at forty you have no brain.
When Churchill said the above, he very much meant liberal as in libertarian. The point was that when you're young and idealist, you think that free economy/people/etc. lead to the best results... and after you've seen a bit more of the world (and grown a bit more cynical), you end up thinking that regulations and the like have their place.
So... while the term "liberal" appears to be synonymous to cultural liberalism to those who reside in the USA, it can mean either cultural or economic liberalism or any combination of those here in Europe. It all depends on what kind of rhetoric the party wants to use... For example, here in Finland we have a Libertarianist party (which doesn't have much support) under the name of "Liberals".
I've lived all my life in apartment buildings (Second and fifth floor, not counting the ground floor) and were an earthquake to occur, I'm not at all certain that it's preferable over small-ish caves containing a couple of rooms... Naturally, that's not that important if they aren't in area prone to earthquakes.
Hell, I'd love to live in a cave like that, provided that it'd have electricity and all.
OS/2 has gone away; Linux hasn't. But, even today, Windows 7 is no particular match for Linux. Does Windows run on Z-series mainframes? Sparc? Anything other than x86? Big-endian? Embedded? With how much compatibility?
The discussion is about desktops so pretty much none of that is relevant... Or maybe there is relevance that you didn't elaborate enough and I'm just not getting? I don't think that anyone here denies that Linux is superior to Windows in that kind of specialized systems but that's just not important in this context.
It's important that we have a free (both meanings of the word) alternative for an operating system for those who want it. However, as long as the existence of that alternative is relatively safe it just comes down to competition. You need to invest something (money, time, etc.) to a system and you gain something from it (be it the knowledge that your system is "free", more stability or the UI and applications you prefer) and if most people say that they'd rather go with Windows... why is that "wrong"?
I guess you can make the point "They might not say that if they KNEW more about Linux" but at that point you are no longer asking "How to increase Linux market share" but rather "How to educate people about Linux so we get more competition" which should be approached with an entirely different mindset. I find it difficult to even think "We should boycott MS because it's EVIL"... Maybe it still is so, but there are so many even more horrible corporations around that I feel a bit apathetic about that.
Summa summarum... If you know that someone would benefit from Linux, it should be easy to sell. If you don't know, why should you even try to?
Maybe the conservative party is behind this, maybe not... but does it really matter?
Let's go with the assumption that someone high up in the party organization is to blame. How many people knew about this tactic being employed? Three? Five? Seven? How many people are employed by the party? Three hundred? Five hundred? Seven hundred? How many people voted for them? Twenty million? (I really have no idea, actually. But the point is, we're talking about many, many orders of magnitude in difference here)
So, if we find out that a handful of corrupted people employed a dirty tactic, what should follow? Sure, let's convict those guys but after that... Should everyone stop voting for the party they felt to represent them the best, because of a couple of bad apples? As disgusting as this tactic was, I have hard time seeing how "Yes" would be a reasonable response. If the answer is "No", we end up saying "It doesn't matter whether the conservative party is responsible or not".
Maybe we get some public discourse about what kind of data you should be allowed to keep in a database but... meh.
Thanks for the quick reply. You make it sound very noble especially the foreign corporation bit. Your argument is: ignore everything everywhere when it benefits the citizens? Please, I'm not a defender of corporations, but surely you must see that this is a slippery slope?
You might be saying "If we do stuff like this, we hamper R&D in the long run... so this is a bad idea" but that (whether I agree with it or not) wouldn't be discussing long-term benefits vs. short-term benefits and doesn't seem to be what you're getting at. It'd be about tuning the algorithm and have nothing to do with slippery slopes.
You might be focusing on the "the citizens" bit, meaning that you're essentially saying "We're all human, so a state putting its own citizens ahead those who live elsewhere doesn't act in an ethical fashion". I might actually agree with that to some extent but I got the feeling that this isn't the point you're trying to make. Besides, it's hard to say "It's a slippery slope" when essentially every state in the world already does that more than what's involved in this specific story.
My best guess at the moment is that your worldview simply differs from mine (Perhaps more weight on individual liberties for their own sake and less weight on maximizing happiness) but feel free to elaborate.:)
fremium model prey's on the inability of many people to not only add the micro transactions together
#idonthavefactstobackthisup, but when fremium games generate more profit, it's not because the same people end up paying more. It's because more people end up paying a bit. So, instead of me having to make large-ish (let's say 50 euros) investment on a game and hope that it's good, I can get a game for free or for a nominal fee (a couple of euros), play a while and if I like the game, occasionally buy something nice.
There are many advantages here: I get to personalize my games (if I visit a friend with same games that I have and try some of them out, I'll have a whole another experience!), I don't ever waste money on stuff I end up not liking, the publisher gets constant feedback on what kind of content the gamers are into and can provide new stuff based on that and most importantly... the very low cost of initial investment is wonderful. I have a large-ish group of friends and friend-of-friends that like to play together and not nearly everyone in the group is in a relatively well-paying job like the one I have. Yet, because of the this model, we can get into a new game every other week or so.
So... yeah. I really love the microtransaction model though I'm pretty confident that I can perform simple addition.
There used to be a site called QuickSilverScreen. It was essentially a lot of links to videos uploaded to Megavideo and the like (you were able to browse by category, by show, by season, etc...). When it began attracting attention, it switched TLDs. I'm not sure whether it was originally.com or.net or what but it switched to.im and continued for a while like nothing would've happened. Eventually it was shut down and I'm not sure what kind of threats/laws were used for that but I'm pretty certain that attacking the domains had essentially no effect at all.
I need to buy a few new domains soon and.com seemed like the obvious choice, but perhaps I'll go with.fi instead.
Why haven't I ever seen a study done on this? Oh, probably because there's a whole market (and political party) around guilting certain consumers into buying these products.
The short answer is that you've not paid much attention. Maybe your prejudices cause you to avoid environmentalist media and thus contribute to you now knowing what they're actually all about? Besides, it seems like you're referring to Democrats (or Greens, if you're outside USA) but the "buy a new car - now environmentally friendly!" is consumerism and benefits car manufacturers... thus your finger might be pointing too far left.
Anyways, the recycling-vs-new is pretty well-researched topic. What's the carbon footprint of... a new car? is what I first came up when googling (first try of keywords: "a new car environment", it was 4th result or so) but you can find plenty of more, if you're actually interested. And as you can see, that link is to a very mainstream site, so it's not like "the green journalists" would somehow be keeping this stuff off the news.
I'll end with two pieces of trivia: 1) Buying a cloth bag is more environmentally friendly than buying a plastic one only if you intend to use it well more than 100 times. 2) Talking about carbon footprint of having pets is pretty much the easiest way to create ****storms among the environmentalists.
actually yea, i saw this video on youtube with a masked guy asking to download hoic and or loic for an attack on facebook (what they would want to achieve with that is a bit unclear... blacking out facebook for a few hours has like zero consequence or political impact imo) sounded a bit like testosterone headbutting contest... so i download it and scanned them both, avira gave nothing but housecall found malware in one of them... so that's what i posted in a reply to the video...
i dont know who would be so smart as to just download something from anyone with a mask thats available anywhere and install it without scanning but apparently some people did... stupid?
It's a piece of software intended to be used for DDOSing (even if participating is voluntary)... Did you really expect it not to register as malware if it's "legit"? I fail to see the point of scanning it in the first place.
Anyways... "Anonymous" is a banner like "Feminism". Anyone can label themselves as such if they feel like it. So different kinds of people apply the term to themselves that the term itself is essentially meaningless. Interesting thing isn't what Anon stands for but rather the fact that so many people (from gamers to script kiddies to half-competent security guys) want to be part of that social movement. Medium is the message, etc.
There are a couple of common reasons for people to convert to Christianity from atheism. Prison, serious illness and a sweet, really religious wife-candidate. I think these account for about 90% of the cases. #idonthavefactstobackthisup
One could make an argument that modern China is something akin to a technocracy. I'm relatively certain that most of the high-ranking officials and politicians (if you want to call them that) have science or engineering background. This is one of the first articles that came up when I googled "China technocracy", I'm sure you can find something with less provocative headline, if you want to. Made in China: The Revenge of the Nerds
These techno-intellectuals' were once themselves targeted by the Gang of Four and zealous Red Guards because of their suspect class backgrounds, allegedly elitist attitudes, and affiliations with the "capitalist roaders," Liu Shaoqi and Deng himself. But now they hold sway in the Politburo, the Central Committee, the National People's Congress, and even provincial, municipal, and county governments.
I understand that he had been burgled many times before (losing a total of about 10 000 dollars) and that he had all the right to be frustrated about police inaction... That said, he had no reason to believe he was under any threat when he fired his shotgun at the backs of two people who were trying to flee through the window, killing one and injuring the other. The court thought that he was clearly using inappropriate force and he spent 3 years in jail after which he was let free because he behaved well.
Call me crazy freedom-hating left-wing nutjob if you want to, but I don't think that anyone has the right to execute people without a trial if it's not in self-defense... especially when it comes to crimes that don't carry a death penalty in the first place.
When companies can decide to track and analyze your behavior in any way they want to, reasonably accurately predict things such as pregnancies, marriages, divorces, etc., and use it to their advantage, intentionally disguising all this from you... it's borderline absurd to say "people should just keep their secrets secret".
It's true that it's arguable whether this sort of behavior should be regulated (It's not "evil" that they just look what you've bought and try to predict your interests based on that) and if we decide to regulate it, we'll face a lot of problems... But it's quite odd to say that there shouldn't be a lot of public discourse around this subject (It's relevant to a lot of people and we already have some laws about ethical advertising and for a good reason) and just silly to say that people should take personal responsibility about how data miners figure out things they've never told anyone.
I obviously don't know what I'm talking about so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong... but I seriously doubt it would take that long.
I'd guess that a lot of that "6 months" involves testing. In other words, if there is a very quickly spreading pandemic that kills over half the people it infects, we could probably say "Let's just pray that there aren't too horrible side effects for most people. Start mass producing the prototype!" Also, in such a case we could probably say "There is a risk of billions of deaths... We want every damn factory to produce the vaccine, ignore all the patents, let's sort the licensing fees when humanity has been saved" which would probably speed up the production a bit.
tl;dr: It'd probably be less than 6 months if we're willing to inject anything and everything that slows down the disease and it's suddenly the #1 priority of mankind.
I keep hearing that American beer is too light and I have no reason to doubt that but let me assure you that Nordic beer is also crap. The local term is "Poronkusi", which translates to something like "Reindeer piss". (Of course, some microbreweries are exception but I'd guess that there are quite decent microbreweries in USA too).
Darwinism certainly isn't science. Darwin was one fella, whose theories very significantly influenced a scientific discipline known as Biology. I think that the term "Darwinism" is used widely in only two instances: 1) In natural language, when people refer to something/someone stupid that will probably disappear soon due to obvious reasons (see Darwin Awards). 2) By religious people who call evolution theory Darwinism in order to make it appear somehow separate from biology (They know how stupid it'd sound to say "The prevailing theories in Biology are bogus, thus the discipline of Biology is pretty much bogus" so they instead say "Darwinism is jut replacing JESUS with this DARWIN prophet. We can totally refute that without refuting biology!").
Slashdot Mirror
Try the Waze app. It's a working crowd sourced navigation tool. It actively routes around or at least notifies you of slowdowns ahead, as well as other traffic hazards and police locations.
Where I live (Finland), the cops aren't generally considered to be enemies so I don't want to participate in any application that warns people about their location...
The OP lives in USA which is - last time I checked - a representative democracy. It might be imperfect one (=difficult to break the two-party system) but it's still a democracy... which means that The Government is just the set of institutions that The Population has built. Saying that you aren't part of the government in such a state is saying that you can't influence the decision making process, which probably means that you are too young to vote.
It doesn't help if you say "I'm a LIBERTARIAN. I want the fed abolished...". Even ignoring all arguments about how you can't exclude yourself from a group just because you don't believe in everything it has democratically decided... This is FBI we are talking about. Even the most idealistic libertarians would say "The government has only one job: Keep us safe from the bad guys" (i.e. power to use violence is the only true natural monopoly) so this is perhaps the one institution that libertarians would retain.
You will be one day, so I recommend staying up to date on all the important issues.
The parent a few level up said that they can get away with incompetence because they work for the government and thus implied that government accepts incompetence and private sector doesn't. The GP answered "There are just as incompetent people on private sector". Now you're derailing it with "Sure, but it doesn't matter, because it's the private sector".
Sure, I (think I) understand the point: If someone wastes their own money, it's less important than if they waste taxpayer money. However, when someone says that "Government accepts competence, private sector doesn't" they're more or less implying "If we let private sector take care of things, they'll be done better than when we let the government take care of them". When someone refutes by saying that private sector is just as competent, they're implying that transferring stuff to private sector might not do any good because there are always incompetent people, no matter what the organization is.
After that, saying what you just said seems to be completely irrelevant.
It's possible to use the client for data storage but sign and/or encrypt all the data so that you know the client hasn't modified it.
This approach has actually been gaining momentum lately. For example, everyone knows that cookies shouldn't be used for storing important data (such as whether the client has logged in to a web service and what his user id is) so the traditional method is to store session data on the server and just store the session id in the cookie. However, play! (a framework that finally makes java web development tolerable) aims for more stateless architecture and stores all the session data on the client and just uses digital signature to make sure that the data client sends to server hasn't been tampered with.
We bring personal devices to the company network, install screensavers and cool programs from the internet and write our passwords down to post-its on our screen because it's convenient! Don't tell us "You're doing it wrong" when it's YOUR responsibility to come up with good designs that accommodate to our every desire while keeping us perfectly safe!
Just look at the damn video.
I know I have, as a part of my (software) engineering degree, studied more physics than the average person and I might have better intuition about what stuff should look like... but that flight seem in no way, shape or form realistic or natural. The push from the wings hardly correlates with his flight path, etc...
I'm not expert but from my understanding (which seems to be supported by Wikipedia) he truly was more or less liberal/libertarian in early 1900s and became more conservative by 1920s. Quoting wikipedia on his early political career
Churchill stood again for the seat of Oldham at the 1900 general election. After winning the seat, he went on a speaking tour throughout Britain and the United States, raising £10,000 for himself (about £800,000 today). In Parliament, he became associated with a faction of the Conservative Party led by Lord Hugh Cecil; the Hughligans. During his first parliamentary session, he opposed the government's military expenditure and Joseph Chamberlain's proposal of extensive tariffs, which were intended to protect Britain's economic dominance. His own constituency effectively deselected him, although he continued to sit for Oldham until the next general election. After the Whitsun recess in 1904 he crossed the floor to sit as a member of the Liberal Party. As a Liberal, he continued to campaign for free trade. When the Liberals took office with Henry Campbell-Bannerman as prime minister, in December 1905, Churchill became Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies dealing mainly with South Africa after the Boer War.
So he was briefly associated with the Conservative Party but he opposed military spending, wanted lower tariffs, campaigned for free trade and switched to liberal party. Twenty years later (1924) he rejoined the conservatives.
What you say about him reforming liberal party to become less libertarian... you might be correct (I don't have that through knowledge) but if that's so, I'd guess that would have happened around 1920 or so, when he was himself growing more cynical.
If you're not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you're not a conservative at forty you have no brain.
When Churchill said the above, he very much meant liberal as in libertarian. The point was that when you're young and idealist, you think that free economy/people/etc. lead to the best results... and after you've seen a bit more of the world (and grown a bit more cynical), you end up thinking that regulations and the like have their place.
So... while the term "liberal" appears to be synonymous to cultural liberalism to those who reside in the USA, it can mean either cultural or economic liberalism or any combination of those here in Europe. It all depends on what kind of rhetoric the party wants to use... For example, here in Finland we have a Libertarianist party (which doesn't have much support) under the name of "Liberals".
I've lived all my life in apartment buildings (Second and fifth floor, not counting the ground floor) and were an earthquake to occur, I'm not at all certain that it's preferable over small-ish caves containing a couple of rooms... Naturally, that's not that important if they aren't in area prone to earthquakes.
Hell, I'd love to live in a cave like that, provided that it'd have electricity and all.
OS/2 has gone away; Linux hasn't. But, even today, Windows 7 is no particular match for Linux. Does Windows run on Z-series mainframes? Sparc? Anything other than x86? Big-endian? Embedded? With how much compatibility?
The discussion is about desktops so pretty much none of that is relevant... Or maybe there is relevance that you didn't elaborate enough and I'm just not getting? I don't think that anyone here denies that Linux is superior to Windows in that kind of specialized systems but that's just not important in this context.
It's important that we have a free (both meanings of the word) alternative for an operating system for those who want it. However, as long as the existence of that alternative is relatively safe it just comes down to competition. You need to invest something (money, time, etc.) to a system and you gain something from it (be it the knowledge that your system is "free", more stability or the UI and applications you prefer) and if most people say that they'd rather go with Windows... why is that "wrong"?
I guess you can make the point "They might not say that if they KNEW more about Linux" but at that point you are no longer asking "How to increase Linux market share" but rather "How to educate people about Linux so we get more competition" which should be approached with an entirely different mindset. I find it difficult to even think "We should boycott MS because it's EVIL"... Maybe it still is so, but there are so many even more horrible corporations around that I feel a bit apathetic about that.
Summa summarum... If you know that someone would benefit from Linux, it should be easy to sell. If you don't know, why should you even try to?
Maybe the conservative party is behind this, maybe not... but does it really matter?
Let's go with the assumption that someone high up in the party organization is to blame. How many people knew about this tactic being employed? Three? Five? Seven? How many people are employed by the party? Three hundred? Five hundred? Seven hundred? How many people voted for them? Twenty million? (I really have no idea, actually. But the point is, we're talking about many, many orders of magnitude in difference here)
So, if we find out that a handful of corrupted people employed a dirty tactic, what should follow? Sure, let's convict those guys but after that... Should everyone stop voting for the party they felt to represent them the best, because of a couple of bad apples? As disgusting as this tactic was, I have hard time seeing how "Yes" would be a reasonable response. If the answer is "No", we end up saying "It doesn't matter whether the conservative party is responsible or not".
Maybe we get some public discourse about what kind of data you should be allowed to keep in a database but... meh.
Thanks for the quick reply. You make it sound very noble especially the foreign corporation bit. Your argument is: ignore everything everywhere when it benefits the citizens? Please, I'm not a defender of corporations, but surely you must see that this is a slippery slope?
You might be saying "If we do stuff like this, we hamper R&D in the long run... so this is a bad idea" but that (whether I agree with it or not) wouldn't be discussing long-term benefits vs. short-term benefits and doesn't seem to be what you're getting at. It'd be about tuning the algorithm and have nothing to do with slippery slopes.
You might be focusing on the "the citizens" bit, meaning that you're essentially saying "We're all human, so a state putting its own citizens ahead those who live elsewhere doesn't act in an ethical fashion". I might actually agree with that to some extent but I got the feeling that this isn't the point you're trying to make. Besides, it's hard to say "It's a slippery slope" when essentially every state in the world already does that more than what's involved in this specific story.
My best guess at the moment is that your worldview simply differs from mine (Perhaps more weight on individual liberties for their own sake and less weight on maximizing happiness) but feel free to elaborate. :)
fremium model prey's on the inability of many people to not only add the micro transactions together
#idonthavefactstobackthisup, but when fremium games generate more profit, it's not because the same people end up paying more. It's because more people end up paying a bit. So, instead of me having to make large-ish (let's say 50 euros) investment on a game and hope that it's good, I can get a game for free or for a nominal fee (a couple of euros), play a while and if I like the game, occasionally buy something nice.
There are many advantages here: I get to personalize my games (if I visit a friend with same games that I have and try some of them out, I'll have a whole another experience!), I don't ever waste money on stuff I end up not liking, the publisher gets constant feedback on what kind of content the gamers are into and can provide new stuff based on that and most importantly... the very low cost of initial investment is wonderful. I have a large-ish group of friends and friend-of-friends that like to play together and not nearly everyone in the group is in a relatively well-paying job like the one I have. Yet, because of the this model, we can get into a new game every other week or so.
So... yeah. I really love the microtransaction model though I'm pretty confident that I can perform simple addition.
There used to be a site called QuickSilverScreen. It was essentially a lot of links to videos uploaded to Megavideo and the like (you were able to browse by category, by show, by season, etc...). When it began attracting attention, it switched TLDs. I'm not sure whether it was originally .com or .net or what but it switched to .im and continued for a while like nothing would've happened. Eventually it was shut down and I'm not sure what kind of threats/laws were used for that but I'm pretty certain that attacking the domains had essentially no effect at all.
I need to buy a few new domains soon and .com seemed like the obvious choice, but perhaps I'll go with .fi instead.
Why haven't I ever seen a study done on this? Oh, probably because there's a whole market (and political party) around guilting certain consumers into buying these products.
The short answer is that you've not paid much attention. Maybe your prejudices cause you to avoid environmentalist media and thus contribute to you now knowing what they're actually all about? Besides, it seems like you're referring to Democrats (or Greens, if you're outside USA) but the "buy a new car - now environmentally friendly!" is consumerism and benefits car manufacturers... thus your finger might be pointing too far left.
Anyways, the recycling-vs-new is pretty well-researched topic. What's the carbon footprint of ... a new car? is what I first came up when googling (first try of keywords: "a new car environment", it was 4th result or so) but you can find plenty of more, if you're actually interested. And as you can see, that link is to a very mainstream site, so it's not like "the green journalists" would somehow be keeping this stuff off the news.
I'll end with two pieces of trivia:
1) Buying a cloth bag is more environmentally friendly than buying a plastic one only if you intend to use it well more than 100 times.
2) Talking about carbon footprint of having pets is pretty much the easiest way to create ****storms among the environmentalists.
actually yea, i saw this video on youtube with a masked guy asking to download hoic and or loic for an attack on facebook (what they would want to achieve with that is a bit unclear ... blacking out facebook for a few hours has like zero consequence or political impact imo) sounded a bit like testosterone headbutting contest ... so i download it and scanned them both, avira gave nothing but housecall found malware in one of them ... so that's what i posted in a reply to the video ...
i dont know who would be so smart as to just download something from anyone with a mask thats available anywhere and install it without scanning but apparently some people did ... stupid?
It's a piece of software intended to be used for DDOSing (even if participating is voluntary)... Did you really expect it not to register as malware if it's "legit"? I fail to see the point of scanning it in the first place.
Anyways... "Anonymous" is a banner like "Feminism". Anyone can label themselves as such if they feel like it. So different kinds of people apply the term to themselves that the term itself is essentially meaningless. Interesting thing isn't what Anon stands for but rather the fact that so many people (from gamers to script kiddies to half-competent security guys) want to be part of that social movement. Medium is the message, etc.
There are a couple of common reasons for people to convert to Christianity from atheism. Prison, serious illness and a sweet, really religious wife-candidate. I think these account for about 90% of the cases. #idonthavefactstobackthisup
One could make an argument that modern China is something akin to a technocracy. I'm relatively certain that most of the high-ranking officials and politicians (if you want to call them that) have science or engineering background. This is one of the first articles that came up when I googled "China technocracy", I'm sure you can find something with less provocative headline, if you want to. Made in China: The Revenge of the Nerds
I understand that he had been burgled many times before (losing a total of about 10 000 dollars) and that he had all the right to be frustrated about police inaction... That said, he had no reason to believe he was under any threat when he fired his shotgun at the backs of two people who were trying to flee through the window, killing one and injuring the other. The court thought that he was clearly using inappropriate force and he spent 3 years in jail after which he was let free because he behaved well.
Call me crazy freedom-hating left-wing nutjob if you want to, but I don't think that anyone has the right to execute people without a trial if it's not in self-defense... especially when it comes to crimes that don't carry a death penalty in the first place.
The era of massive data mining is beginning. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/ And that's just your groceries, not your online behavior, which likely contains a lot more hidden clues.
When companies can decide to track and analyze your behavior in any way they want to, reasonably accurately predict things such as pregnancies, marriages, divorces, etc., and use it to their advantage, intentionally disguising all this from you... it's borderline absurd to say "people should just keep their secrets secret".
It's true that it's arguable whether this sort of behavior should be regulated (It's not "evil" that they just look what you've bought and try to predict your interests based on that) and if we decide to regulate it, we'll face a lot of problems... But it's quite odd to say that there shouldn't be a lot of public discourse around this subject (It's relevant to a lot of people and we already have some laws about ethical advertising and for a good reason) and just silly to say that people should take personal responsibility about how data miners figure out things they've never told anyone.
I obviously don't know what I'm talking about so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong... but I seriously doubt it would take that long.
I'd guess that a lot of that "6 months" involves testing. In other words, if there is a very quickly spreading pandemic that kills over half the people it infects, we could probably say "Let's just pray that there aren't too horrible side effects for most people. Start mass producing the prototype!" Also, in such a case we could probably say "There is a risk of billions of deaths... We want every damn factory to produce the vaccine, ignore all the patents, let's sort the licensing fees when humanity has been saved" which would probably speed up the production a bit.
tl;dr: It'd probably be less than 6 months if we're willing to inject anything and everything that slows down the disease and it's suddenly the #1 priority of mankind.
I don't know where the GP is from but I could make a wild guess that it's one of the Nordic countries (Finland, Sweden, etc.) because of this list of countries by coffee consumption per capita.
I keep hearing that American beer is too light and I have no reason to doubt that but let me assure you that Nordic beer is also crap. The local term is "Poronkusi", which translates to something like "Reindeer piss". (Of course, some microbreweries are exception but I'd guess that there are quite decent microbreweries in USA too).
Darwinism certainly isn't science. Darwin was one fella, whose theories very significantly influenced a scientific discipline known as Biology. I think that the term "Darwinism" is used widely in only two instances: 1) In natural language, when people refer to something/someone stupid that will probably disappear soon due to obvious reasons (see Darwin Awards). 2) By religious people who call evolution theory Darwinism in order to make it appear somehow separate from biology (They know how stupid it'd sound to say "The prevailing theories in Biology are bogus, thus the discipline of Biology is pretty much bogus" so they instead say "Darwinism is jut replacing JESUS with this DARWIN prophet. We can totally refute that without refuting biology!").