However, it is interesting that they came up with someone who committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest. Twice. With two separate guns.
That's nutty enough to inspire a boatload of conspiracy theories all by itself - forget any connection to political powers.
And there was a guy who committed suicide by cutting his arms 11 times, his neck twice and shooting himself in the head in such a way that no gun was found.
Or the suicide by gunshot to the back of the head.
Or the chick who packed her luggage and arranged it in the living room before committing suicide by gunshot.
Another guy who committed suicide with two guns? Wait... What?
Somebody spent a lot of time trolling the papers for weird suicide stories. How the heck do you even find a single "suicide by two guns" story? That can't be true... can it? Not the Clinton part.... just the "suicide by two guns" part. Most of these stories have to be covered in goofy sauce that doesn't hold up to scrutiny, right?
So a quick trip to Wikipedia.... and multiple gunshot suicide is actually a thing. And not just "guy rigged up two guns", but actual "dude took 3 shots in the chest to kill himself" multiple gunshot suicide. from the wiki:
One particular case has been documented from Australia. In February 1995, a man committed suicide on parkland in Canberra. He took a pump action shotgun and shot himself in the chest. The load passed through the chest without hitting a rib, and went out the other side. He then walked fifteen meters, pulled out a pistol and shot himself in the head. After reloading the shotgun, he leaned the shotgun against his throat, and shot his throat and part of his jaw. He then reloaded a final time, walked 200 meters to a hill, sat down on the slope, held the gun against his chest with his hands and operated the trigger with his toes. This shot entered the thoracic cavity and demolished the heart, killing him.[5][6]
It is actually better if it is directly billed, because then people have an understanding of what their services cost. When it all comes out of your check in a lump sum, or all gets rolled into your mortgage payment, it is hard to understand when things have gone sideways. You have to pay either way.
We would probably have a lot less waste in government if every item were billed separately.
My city services are billed en mas, but they are broken out by line items. So I get to say things like "holy crap, why is our water bill $190?" and take action to mitigate that price.
I can't do the same thing on a lot of other services from the county, because they are all rolled up into a single millage rate. It would be nice if I could see an itemized bill - $800 for police, $37 for social services, $18 for traffic lights... whatever.
My county breaks out school services as a separate millage rate on our property taxes, so we know where that money is going. They still manage to spend an exorbitant amount on fancy administration buildings and not enough on maintenance, but at least we have an exact number for what it is costing us.
I think you missed the salient points in the article.
These are city fire fighters. Paid for by city taxes. The county does not maintain a fire department. So the city provides fire services to county residents for a fee. The home in question was located in the county, outside the city limits.
The city has no power or authority to levy taxes on county residents. The county could do this, but elected not to.
The alternative here is not for the city firefighters to put out fires in the county without being paid. That is not sustainable. The alternative is for the city to end the service being rendered to the county residents and allow them to form their own fire department. Allowing county residents to "opt in" to city fire protection is a pretty good alternative.
That's what I was thinking. Why would a judge rebuke anyone for this? This is pretty much the entirety of investigative work. Not just private investigators either. Police will lie to get the information they are looking for, whether in promising to go to bat with the D.A. or in claiming to be a prostitute during a sting operation.
I must be missing something, because that's the norm in investigative work. Skip tracers routinely use "social engineering" to track down debtors. You don't call up mom and say "Hi, this is detective Wilson from the NYPD. Your son is wanted as a suspect for armed robbery. Please let me know where we can pick him up." At least, not if you want to actually catch your guy.
Pbbbbt..... A couple of two-term governors that cut taxes and turned budget deficits into surpluses? These idiots who want to get the government out of your bedroom? Who want to end foreign wars?
Who the hell would moderate my comment as "Troll"? The original post seemed to be making the point that Trump is the only alternative to Hillary. I pointed out that is not the case.
Nobody who isn't a troll, and probably mentally unstable, even knows who Gary Johnson is.
Just because he cut taxes and left office with a surplus is no reason to suspect he can manage a budget. Just because he was actually for equal rights for LGBTQI folk long before Obama and Hillary decided to quit being opposed to marriage equality, that's no reason to suspect that he is in favor of equal rights. Just because he was re-elected in a landslide in a democrat-dominated state is no reason to suspect that he can actually win an election. Just because he was a vocal opponent of war..... I mean, c'mon! The guy is a libertarian!
He's against pot prohibition! That proves that he's a nutter. And the fact that you know his name proves that you are a nutter.
Heck, you might as well have mentioned Jill Stein. No sane person has ever heard of the Green Party either.
100 million? I would have guessed a much bigger number. I guess it is just because I have kids right in their target demographic. There are loads of youtube channels with millions of subscribers that feature guys playing minecraft and narrating as they play the game. Seriously, these minecraft youtube shows have much bigger audiences than MSNBC - yet you've heard of the people on MSNBC.
Every elementary school kid knows minecraft. They have it on their Xbox, mom's phone, tablet... boys and girls pretty well equally. They love minecraft. And the biggest youtube minecraft channel is from Europe, so it has to be big over there too. I guess they haven't hit big in Asia yet. I suppose that's a good thing for Mojang... It has been a big deal for long enough that I assumed it was ready to jump the shark.
One of the big things we worked on to make disparate parts work together was facilitating communication. We encouraged senior guys to coach-up more junior guys - offering suggestions and such - but we also encouraged just general communication. So if they felt like having chat sessions about last night's episode and wasting a couple of minutes, nobody said anything. This helps turn "a bunch of guys" into a team.
The team part is important when the crap hits the fan. There's always a deadline, or a critical bug, or something that can put stress on the team and lead to finger pointing. But with team cohesion you have a better chance of everyone pulling together and fixing the problem. We rarely had bugs go unstomped for more than a couple of hours because junior guys felt comfortable asking for help and senior guys didn't feel it was necessary to kick someone who was struggling.
Of course the other big part of the formula is hiring the right sort of people. Hire a jackass and he's gonna be a jackass in the middle of your team.
I think the "opiod deaths" number also includes "people who died and we detected opiates in their system". So you die of a heart attack and you are taking Vicodin, you died an opiod related death, even though the direct cause was a heart attack and there may not even be a true link to the drug.
So unless the cause of death is "got shot by crazy stalker", if you are on drugs when you die, the chances are that the death will be scored as drug-related.
I know this is true for marijuana use. If you die in a car accident and they detect canaboid metabolites in your blood, they'll rule it a marijuana-related traffic death. Even if you also happened to be drunk at three times the legal limit, and the pot levels are too low to have caused driving impairment. So the numbers are somewhat inflated.
I've never done any sort of illicit drug, and I stand behind your take. I too will do any damn drug I want. (in my case that happens to be none, but still)
This part of the drug argument should be simple for all to comprehend. What you chose to do with your own body, mind and life is up to no one but you. And any prick who wants to pick up a gun and point it at you "for your own good" can go rot in a special place in hell. Whether that gun is intended to keep you safe from addiction, or keep you out of hell for loving the wrong person, or any of the other myriad things that nannies want to prevent consenting adults from doing with each other.
I don't personally do any of these things, and that answer would be the same the day after they are all legalized, but that doesn't mean that I can't comprehend the evil that is inherent in using force to make people live according to your personal moral code.
This doesn't address intent or the existence of any such plot, but it does suggest that the take that this is all ridiculous and can have no impact is not correct.
There seems to be more going on than google's first blush take. (this ends up being long as I try search terms, but stick with me, it might go somewhere)
There are several terms from the 90's about the Clintons that should be of relevance to people wanting to research that period.
Rose Law Billing records. Vince Foster. Or how about a generic politician term: Corruption.
Searches for "Hillary Clinton billing records" autosuggest on bing after you get to "bill", but on Google the autocomplete not only doesn't suggest that, it goes blank after you type "billi"
Same for Vince Foster. "Vin" gets the suggestion on bing. But you get to "Vinc" on Google and suggest goes blank.
Corruption: Just type the "C" on bing and "Corruption", "Crimes" and "Cattle Futures" come up. On google you have to go all the way to "Corr" to get the suggestion of "corruption reddit". Something that doesn't appear on Bing at all.
For Trump - on Bing type in "Donald Trump R" and get the number one suggestion, "racist". On Google you have to go to "Rac" to get a list of Donald Trump racist suggestions.
Trump on Bing - Bankruptcy comes up after "B", on google it comes up after "Bancr"
Trump and Lie - Bing suggests after li, Google gives two related suggestions after "Lie" Since those are generic politician terms, let's check Hillary. Bing suggests after the "L". Google gives a suggestion to a youtube video "lies for 13 minutes" after the word "lie".
Some of this could be some algorithm to fight googlebombing. But it sure seems targeted to whitewash Hillary Clinton's background - Vince Foster and the Rose Law Billing Records were pretty big news stories back in the 90's. The Vince Foster stuff is probably full of really nutty conspiracy theorists, but the Billing Records was not really in the realm of the tinfoil hat crowd. And it would be odd for this to be algorithmically removed at this late date - there would be a decade of relevant web articles before the art of googlebombing became a thing.
To bolster this supposition, I tried Bush and w, looking for war crimes. After "W" Bing suggested "Worst President Ever". Hey, that was the original google-bomb! So I tried it on Google. Totally suppressed. You go to "worst pr" and google suggest goes dark.
So that would suggest that this phenomenon is the result of the anti-googlebomb tech, whatever that is. With Eric Schmidt having set up "The Groundwork" to handle tech issues - perhaps this is a service they offer. Using knowledge of Google's procedures and tech, they could be providing SEO services to wipe out things that campaigns don't want seen.
This is basically my take. Remember all those folks who kept denigrating any argument against privacy intrusions as a "slippery slope fallacy?" Well, welcome to the bottom of the slippery slope. We've seen some similar rumblings in the US from time to time. Oddly, in the political arena there seems to be a large coalition that believes that all speech should be verifiable as to authorship - an area where anonymous speech has a long and important tradition. Actually, political speech is really the main reason that free speech has to be included in national founding documents.
Even more oddly, the same folks who beat the drums for this ID requirement seem to find the notion of proving your identity in order to vote an abomination.
I really can't figure out what people are thinking these days on this topic. All I know is that even a whiff of this sort of thing prior to the 1990's would have gotten you drummed off the stage. The image of "show me your papers" or a national ID card was the symbol of everything that was wrong about Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. I guess we've forgotten what that was like.
Slashdot proves that an online community can form with ID's completely independent of real world identity and still provide all of the credibility checks that real-world communities provide. I'm not sure why anyone would entertain these ideas.
See what happens if I open a place where I serve food and claim not to be a restaurant. I should be able to sell food for a much lower price,
This actually exists, hopefully minus the green meat. They are called food trucks, and it is a big issue in the same circles that Uber is a big issue. Brick and mortar restaurants don't like them because they steal their lucrative lunch crowds and don't have the fixed overhead of a restaurant. So cities try to regulate them out of business.... and eventually they figure out a way to make sure the government wets their beak enough and suddenly they find a way to allow food trucks.
That was my thought as well. Really nice electron micrographs of your new meta-material lens... but no images produced by the lens. Presumably because it isn't ready to actually produce a useable image yet. Because if you had a lens capable of producing better images than the best microscope lenses, you'd take a picture with the best oil immersion lens you can find and then take the same image with your lens. A nice side by side comparison where we'd all go, "Wow, that is better!!"
So we are at the "look at this new technology I've developed" stage. Which is really cool, but not worthy of the hype-filled headlines or rampant speculation about space telescopes in the comments.
Weren't they huge in the ATM industry? I think they had a big presence in the POS market as well. A lot of that gear was still running many, many years down the road.
Back in 1991 or '92 I went to an Amiga user's group meeting and saw a similar demo of a 3D rendered cube with video running on the surfaces (same video on all sides). This was at a time when windows 3.11 could render a 3D shape.... eventually. And this cube could just be spun at will with a mouse. While playing video.
The place came unglued with applause. Lots of the users were in the TV industry using video toaster to render titles and such for local programming, so this was huge for them.
OS/2 Warp was well ahead of its time.... but never complete. Amiga was even further ahead of its time - it is hard to remember how amazing it was to be able to format a floppy and do anything else at the same time. Heck, I used to format one floppy while copying data to another one, all while editing a document. Neither windows nor Mac could come close to accomplishing that at the time.
When OS/2 came along I ran a shared 486/33 with 4 modems. Each was attached to a separate DOS session so collaborators could remotely connect to a Paradox database. Paradox ran faster in an OS/2 DOS box while being shared than it did in native DOS on the same box. Really amazing stuff at the time.
It is too bad that they didn't fulfill their promise. But we have a few really good desktop operating systems to chose from now, so I suppose it is academic.
The last statement in the summary is completely uncalled for. The ad hominem attack does nothing to defend NASA's methodology. It only serves to try to discredit the criticism. That's the biggest thing I have a problem with. If you're convinced the methodology is correct and that the concerns are unfounded, that's enough to fend off the criticism. That the critic was once an executive at Microsoft is totally irrelevant.
That's what I was coming to post. The personal vitriol was weird - particularly in public statements. That kind of talk is usually reserved for serial offenders - people like Peter Duesberg (AIDS denial) or Andrew Wakefield (anti-vaxxer) who ignore all data and plow ahead with dangerous opinions, tarnishing the academy and harming people in the process. And even then that sort of talk is reserved until much back and forth in the professional arena.
That reminds me of the good old days when Uber claimed to be a "ridesharing" service, something you would use when you want to cut back on the costs of traveling alone.
I think this was real. The first time I remember hearing about Uber was in stories about commuters in places like San Francisco where they have big tolls to cross the bridge. I remember one story - NPR I think - where the driver picked up 3 separate riders on the way to work. They all met him at more central locations, not at their home. They specifically mentioned the toll to get across the bridge being split because they weren't taking 4 cars. I think they were pitching in like 5 bucks each for the ride.
The Uber part was helping match riders with drivers. It was more of competition for the bus than for cabs. They mentioned that the bus would take about 2 hours, where a direct commute was more like 30-45 minutes. So the driver saves like 30 bucks a day, gets some company on the ride and the riders avoid about $20-25 in expenses (paying 10 for the privilege) while getting some company for the ride and avoiding an extra couple hours on a bus every day. Win-win.
There also was a big bit about the etiquette of ride-sharing.... when to talk, when not to talk. What you can and cannot talk about. The stories at that time were definitely about regular folks commuting to work and sharing rides.
I suppose what happened is that once the infrastructure was in place, people living in locations that were ripe for black market cab operations figured out that they could use this service to make a few bucks filling the unmet need for cabs. Even before Uber there were big markets for black market cabs in places like New York City. Heck, New York is so over-regulated that they even have black market bus lines.
Nobody who lives in Africa would call the peoples of Africa "one race". They can easily identify the different peoples by their appearance.
Just as you might not be able to tell the difference between Korean, Lao, Japanese, Mongol, etc., the people who live there can easily spot the differences. I don't think anyone would argue that the Aboriginal people of Australia are simply a social construct. They split off from the rest of humanity as much as 75,000 years ago. That's a reasonably long time for a population to be isolated in evolutionary terms.
And if you get small leaks in your high-pressure pipeline that only has gas flowing down it and not a heavy rail car, you still have a functional pipeline. If you develop small leaks on a hyperloop tube, you loose your vacuum and the high speeds are kaput. Not catastrophic, but potentially very expensive from an ongoing maintenance point of view. Or an initial cost point of view, depending on how robust you build.
You guys are all funny and stuff... but let's take a moment away from the snark about a donut-head reality-TV dip-weasle who isn't in charge of anything and recall that this is a story about our actual government running around stomping on your liberties and the constitution right now. Not in some Trump-ruled dystopian future, but in the Patriot Act present. So if we want to spew some snark toward the top of the executive branch, let's look to the guy who is actually in charge.
Very few people in government seem to have any interest in protecting your right to privacy online, or your freedom of speech. Getting deflected into a Team Red vs. Team Blue side-show does nothing to help rein in our leadership. It only provides a distraction while they continue to chisel away at your freedom.
Some of you jokesters are old enough to be able to recognize just how dystopian the present is. You don't even have to go all the way back to black-and-white TV to find an era when "show me your papers" was a popular meme for showing a horrible totalitarian regime. The idea of a government that is always watching its citizens was the cardboard-cutout villain in every action movie and TV show.
And here we are, less than half a lifetime later with a national government that will send agents to initiate a secret investigation about some loudmouth troll on the internet - threatening anyone who even mentions the fact that the government is snooping around with jail time. Holy crap, have we lost our way.
You guys are smart enough and well-informed enough that you should be leading the cries of "to the woodchippers!" instead of laying it off on some doofus who is not only not in power, but is never going to get elected to anything.
I'm old enough and I remember. There were congressional hearings. There was huge pressure to pass new laws to regulate speech in the music industry. Rap was becoming popular and crossing over and suburban moms were agitated. Two Live Crew were so horny. They became the sort of lightning rod for the whole thing.
Then Dee Snyder of Twisted Sister and Frank Zappa made impassioned pleas on behalf of artistic freedom before the committees that helped to turn the tide. But the beast still wanted a skin. So the music industry adapted to the pressure by creating a voluntary labeling system. That was enough to diffuse the situation and allow the world to keep on spinning. There for a while there was a lot of hand wringing over stores carrying CDs/Albums that were labeled - but then there were acts that seemed to be seeking out the label on purpose to gin up sales. Eventually everyone lost interest and moved on.
But there was a real danger that "The Man" would step in and try to adjudicate music content. It kind of recapitulated the arc of the Film industry before it, with the MPAA eventually adopting a voluntary ratings system to allow congress a fig leaf so they would go away and leave them alone. That system is actually mildly useful, although a real rating system run by independent third parties would probably be better. The music one still has little benefit as far as I can see.
So if "no laws were passed" counts as "not a crusade" then OK, I suppose. But it was enough pressure brought by enough people to get their elected representatives to move toward obviously unconstitutional censorship laws with enough momentum that the recording industry created their own system in hopes of heading off a federally mandated system of labeling or censorship.
Which should serve as a cautionary tale for all those who think "that couldn't happen" with their government. There are plenty of examples of stupid to go around. People can get ginned up about just about anything. So the world needs firebrand watchdogs to stand in the breach against government overreach. Folks like Ralph Nader who have fought both industry and government. Or Harvey Silvergate of FIRE. Or Ron Paul. Or Al Goldstein of Screw Magazine. You know..... Nutballs.
Without Luther Campbell, Dee Snyder et. al. and a capitulation by the industry to form a voluntary rating system, we definitely would have had a federal law mandating such - and probably more. So I wouldn't minimize the moment. It was a pretty big deal, even though it really doesn't directly affect very many people.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it is nutty tinfoil hat stuff.
However, it is interesting that they came up with someone who committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest. Twice. With two separate guns.
That's nutty enough to inspire a boatload of conspiracy theories all by itself - forget any connection to political powers.
And there was a guy who committed suicide by cutting his arms 11 times, his neck twice and shooting himself in the head in such a way that no gun was found.
Or the suicide by gunshot to the back of the head.
Or the chick who packed her luggage and arranged it in the living room before committing suicide by gunshot.
Another guy who committed suicide with two guns? Wait... What?
Somebody spent a lot of time trolling the papers for weird suicide stories. How the heck do you even find a single "suicide by two guns" story? That can't be true... can it? Not the Clinton part.... just the "suicide by two guns" part. Most of these stories have to be covered in goofy sauce that doesn't hold up to scrutiny, right?
So a quick trip to Wikipedia.... and multiple gunshot suicide is actually a thing. And not just "guy rigged up two guns", but actual "dude took 3 shots in the chest to kill himself" multiple gunshot suicide. from the wiki:
Now that's determination.
It is actually better if it is directly billed, because then people have an understanding of what their services cost. When it all comes out of your check in a lump sum, or all gets rolled into your mortgage payment, it is hard to understand when things have gone sideways. You have to pay either way.
We would probably have a lot less waste in government if every item were billed separately.
My city services are billed en mas, but they are broken out by line items. So I get to say things like "holy crap, why is our water bill $190?" and take action to mitigate that price.
I can't do the same thing on a lot of other services from the county, because they are all rolled up into a single millage rate. It would be nice if I could see an itemized bill - $800 for police, $37 for social services, $18 for traffic lights... whatever.
My county breaks out school services as a separate millage rate on our property taxes, so we know where that money is going. They still manage to spend an exorbitant amount on fancy administration buildings and not enough on maintenance, but at least we have an exact number for what it is costing us.
I think you missed the salient points in the article.
These are city fire fighters. Paid for by city taxes. The county does not maintain a fire department. So the city provides fire services to county residents for a fee. The home in question was located in the county, outside the city limits.
The city has no power or authority to levy taxes on county residents. The county could do this, but elected not to.
The alternative here is not for the city firefighters to put out fires in the county without being paid. That is not sustainable. The alternative is for the city to end the service being rendered to the county residents and allow them to form their own fire department. Allowing county residents to "opt in" to city fire protection is a pretty good alternative.
That's what I was thinking. Why would a judge rebuke anyone for this? This is pretty much the entirety of investigative work. Not just private investigators either. Police will lie to get the information they are looking for, whether in promising to go to bat with the D.A. or in claiming to be a prostitute during a sting operation.
I must be missing something, because that's the norm in investigative work. Skip tracers routinely use "social engineering" to track down debtors. You don't call up mom and say "Hi, this is detective Wilson from the NYPD. Your son is wanted as a suspect for armed robbery. Please let me know where we can pick him up." At least, not if you want to actually catch your guy.
You mean this guy?
Pbbbbt..... A couple of two-term governors that cut taxes and turned budget deficits into surpluses? These idiots who want to get the government out of your bedroom? Who want to end foreign wars?
Please.....
Who the hell would moderate my comment as "Troll"? The original post seemed to be making the point that Trump is the only alternative to Hillary. I pointed out that is not the case.
Nobody who isn't a troll, and probably mentally unstable, even knows who Gary Johnson is.
Just because he cut taxes and left office with a surplus is no reason to suspect he can manage a budget. Just because he was actually for equal rights for LGBTQI folk long before Obama and Hillary decided to quit being opposed to marriage equality, that's no reason to suspect that he is in favor of equal rights. Just because he was re-elected in a landslide in a democrat-dominated state is no reason to suspect that he can actually win an election. Just because he was a vocal opponent of war..... I mean, c'mon! The guy is a libertarian!
He's against pot prohibition! That proves that he's a nutter. And the fact that you know his name proves that you are a nutter.
Heck, you might as well have mentioned Jill Stein. No sane person has ever heard of the Green Party either.
They call it NCR paper. It even comes pre-collated so you don't have to put each color in separate trays.
100 million? I would have guessed a much bigger number. I guess it is just because I have kids right in their target demographic. There are loads of youtube channels with millions of subscribers that feature guys playing minecraft and narrating as they play the game. Seriously, these minecraft youtube shows have much bigger audiences than MSNBC - yet you've heard of the people on MSNBC.
Every elementary school kid knows minecraft. They have it on their Xbox, mom's phone, tablet... boys and girls pretty well equally. They love minecraft. And the biggest youtube minecraft channel is from Europe, so it has to be big over there too. I guess they haven't hit big in Asia yet. I suppose that's a good thing for Mojang... It has been a big deal for long enough that I assumed it was ready to jump the shark.
This matches my experience.
One of the big things we worked on to make disparate parts work together was facilitating communication. We encouraged senior guys to coach-up more junior guys - offering suggestions and such - but we also encouraged just general communication. So if they felt like having chat sessions about last night's episode and wasting a couple of minutes, nobody said anything. This helps turn "a bunch of guys" into a team.
The team part is important when the crap hits the fan. There's always a deadline, or a critical bug, or something that can put stress on the team and lead to finger pointing. But with team cohesion you have a better chance of everyone pulling together and fixing the problem. We rarely had bugs go unstomped for more than a couple of hours because junior guys felt comfortable asking for help and senior guys didn't feel it was necessary to kick someone who was struggling.
Of course the other big part of the formula is hiring the right sort of people. Hire a jackass and he's gonna be a jackass in the middle of your team.
It seems that pretty much everyone saw through this idiotic ruse. My faith in the Slashdot crowd is temporarily restored. Well done.
Oh, and I've set up a mechanical A.I. that induces the startle response, entirely constructed of an envelope, bobby pin, a steel washer and a rubber band. Let the ethics discussion commence!
I think the "opiod deaths" number also includes "people who died and we detected opiates in their system". So you die of a heart attack and you are taking Vicodin, you died an opiod related death, even though the direct cause was a heart attack and there may not even be a true link to the drug.
So unless the cause of death is "got shot by crazy stalker", if you are on drugs when you die, the chances are that the death will be scored as drug-related.
I know this is true for marijuana use. If you die in a car accident and they detect canaboid metabolites in your blood, they'll rule it a marijuana-related traffic death. Even if you also happened to be drunk at three times the legal limit, and the pot levels are too low to have caused driving impairment. So the numbers are somewhat inflated.
I will do any damn drug I want..
I've never done any sort of illicit drug, and I stand behind your take. I too will do any damn drug I want. (in my case that happens to be none, but still)
This part of the drug argument should be simple for all to comprehend. What you chose to do with your own body, mind and life is up to no one but you. And any prick who wants to pick up a gun and point it at you "for your own good" can go rot in a special place in hell. Whether that gun is intended to keep you safe from addiction, or keep you out of hell for loving the wrong person, or any of the other myriad things that nannies want to prevent consenting adults from doing with each other.
I don't personally do any of these things, and that answer would be the same the day after they are all legalized, but that doesn't mean that I can't comprehend the evil that is inherent in using force to make people live according to your personal moral code.
There was actually a study published in PNAS about search engine manipulation being able to change election outcomes. They tested subtle manipulations in the results order, but presumably changing suggestions would have similar effects.
This doesn't address intent or the existence of any such plot, but it does suggest that the take that this is all ridiculous and can have no impact is not correct.
There seems to be more going on than google's first blush take. (this ends up being long as I try search terms, but stick with me, it might go somewhere)
There are several terms from the 90's about the Clintons that should be of relevance to people wanting to research that period.
Rose Law Billing records. Vince Foster. Or how about a generic politician term: Corruption.
Searches for "Hillary Clinton billing records" autosuggest on bing after you get to "bill", but on Google the autocomplete not only doesn't suggest that, it goes blank after you type "billi"
Same for Vince Foster. "Vin" gets the suggestion on bing. But you get to "Vinc" on Google and suggest goes blank.
Corruption: Just type the "C" on bing and "Corruption", "Crimes" and "Cattle Futures" come up. On google you have to go all the way to "Corr" to get the suggestion of "corruption reddit". Something that doesn't appear on Bing at all.
For Trump - on Bing type in "Donald Trump R" and get the number one suggestion, "racist". On Google you have to go to "Rac" to get a list of Donald Trump racist suggestions.
Trump on Bing - Bankruptcy comes up after "B", on google it comes up after "Bancr"
Trump and Lie - Bing suggests after li, Google gives two related suggestions after "Lie" Since those are generic politician terms, let's check Hillary. Bing suggests after the "L". Google gives a suggestion to a youtube video "lies for 13 minutes" after the word "lie".
Some of this could be some algorithm to fight googlebombing. But it sure seems targeted to whitewash Hillary Clinton's background - Vince Foster and the Rose Law Billing Records were pretty big news stories back in the 90's. The Vince Foster stuff is probably full of really nutty conspiracy theorists, but the Billing Records was not really in the realm of the tinfoil hat crowd. And it would be odd for this to be algorithmically removed at this late date - there would be a decade of relevant web articles before the art of googlebombing became a thing.
To bolster this supposition, I tried Bush and w, looking for war crimes. After "W" Bing suggested "Worst President Ever". Hey, that was the original google-bomb! So I tried it on Google. Totally suppressed. You go to "worst pr" and google suggest goes dark.
So that would suggest that this phenomenon is the result of the anti-googlebomb tech, whatever that is. With Eric Schmidt having set up "The Groundwork" to handle tech issues - perhaps this is a service they offer. Using knowledge of Google's procedures and tech, they could be providing SEO services to wipe out things that campaigns don't want seen.
This is basically my take. Remember all those folks who kept denigrating any argument against privacy intrusions as a "slippery slope fallacy?" Well, welcome to the bottom of the slippery slope. We've seen some similar rumblings in the US from time to time. Oddly, in the political arena there seems to be a large coalition that believes that all speech should be verifiable as to authorship - an area where anonymous speech has a long and important tradition. Actually, political speech is really the main reason that free speech has to be included in national founding documents.
Even more oddly, the same folks who beat the drums for this ID requirement seem to find the notion of proving your identity in order to vote an abomination.
I really can't figure out what people are thinking these days on this topic. All I know is that even a whiff of this sort of thing prior to the 1990's would have gotten you drummed off the stage. The image of "show me your papers" or a national ID card was the symbol of everything that was wrong about Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. I guess we've forgotten what that was like.
Slashdot proves that an online community can form with ID's completely independent of real world identity and still provide all of the credibility checks that real-world communities provide. I'm not sure why anyone would entertain these ideas.
This actually exists, hopefully minus the green meat. They are called food trucks, and it is a big issue in the same circles that Uber is a big issue. Brick and mortar restaurants don't like them because they steal their lucrative lunch crowds and don't have the fixed overhead of a restaurant. So cities try to regulate them out of business .... and eventually they figure out a way to make sure the government wets their beak enough and suddenly they find a way to allow food trucks.
That was my thought as well. Really nice electron micrographs of your new meta-material lens... but no images produced by the lens. Presumably because it isn't ready to actually produce a useable image yet. Because if you had a lens capable of producing better images than the best microscope lenses, you'd take a picture with the best oil immersion lens you can find and then take the same image with your lens. A nice side by side comparison where we'd all go, "Wow, that is better!!"
So we are at the "look at this new technology I've developed" stage. Which is really cool, but not worthy of the hype-filled headlines or rampant speculation about space telescopes in the comments.
Weren't they huge in the ATM industry? I think they had a big presence in the POS market as well. A lot of that gear was still running many, many years down the road.
I remember that demo.... it was amazing.
Back in 1991 or '92 I went to an Amiga user's group meeting and saw a similar demo of a 3D rendered cube with video running on the surfaces (same video on all sides). This was at a time when windows 3.11 could render a 3D shape.... eventually. And this cube could just be spun at will with a mouse. While playing video.
The place came unglued with applause. Lots of the users were in the TV industry using video toaster to render titles and such for local programming, so this was huge for them.
OS/2 Warp was well ahead of its time.... but never complete. Amiga was even further ahead of its time - it is hard to remember how amazing it was to be able to format a floppy and do anything else at the same time. Heck, I used to format one floppy while copying data to another one, all while editing a document. Neither windows nor Mac could come close to accomplishing that at the time.
When OS/2 came along I ran a shared 486/33 with 4 modems. Each was attached to a separate DOS session so collaborators could remotely connect to a Paradox database. Paradox ran faster in an OS/2 DOS box while being shared than it did in native DOS on the same box. Really amazing stuff at the time.
It is too bad that they didn't fulfill their promise. But we have a few really good desktop operating systems to chose from now, so I suppose it is academic.
That's what I was coming to post. The personal vitriol was weird - particularly in public statements. That kind of talk is usually reserved for serial offenders - people like Peter Duesberg (AIDS denial) or Andrew Wakefield (anti-vaxxer) who ignore all data and plow ahead with dangerous opinions, tarnishing the academy and harming people in the process. And even then that sort of talk is reserved until much back and forth in the professional arena.
That reminds me of the good old days when Uber claimed to be a "ridesharing" service, something you would use when you want to cut back on the costs of traveling alone.
I think this was real. The first time I remember hearing about Uber was in stories about commuters in places like San Francisco where they have big tolls to cross the bridge. I remember one story - NPR I think - where the driver picked up 3 separate riders on the way to work. They all met him at more central locations, not at their home. They specifically mentioned the toll to get across the bridge being split because they weren't taking 4 cars. I think they were pitching in like 5 bucks each for the ride.
The Uber part was helping match riders with drivers. It was more of competition for the bus than for cabs. They mentioned that the bus would take about 2 hours, where a direct commute was more like 30-45 minutes. So the driver saves like 30 bucks a day, gets some company on the ride and the riders avoid about $20-25 in expenses (paying 10 for the privilege) while getting some company for the ride and avoiding an extra couple hours on a bus every day. Win-win.
There also was a big bit about the etiquette of ride-sharing.... when to talk, when not to talk. What you can and cannot talk about. The stories at that time were definitely about regular folks commuting to work and sharing rides.
I suppose what happened is that once the infrastructure was in place, people living in locations that were ripe for black market cab operations figured out that they could use this service to make a few bucks filling the unmet need for cabs. Even before Uber there were big markets for black market cabs in places like New York City. Heck, New York is so over-regulated that they even have black market bus lines.
Nobody who lives in Africa would call the peoples of Africa "one race". They can easily identify the different peoples by their appearance.
Just as you might not be able to tell the difference between Korean, Lao, Japanese, Mongol, etc., the people who live there can easily spot the differences. I don't think anyone would argue that the Aboriginal people of Australia are simply a social construct. They split off from the rest of humanity as much as 75,000 years ago. That's a reasonably long time for a population to be isolated in evolutionary terms.
And if you get small leaks in your high-pressure pipeline that only has gas flowing down it and not a heavy rail car, you still have a functional pipeline. If you develop small leaks on a hyperloop tube, you loose your vacuum and the high speeds are kaput. Not catastrophic, but potentially very expensive from an ongoing maintenance point of view. Or an initial cost point of view, depending on how robust you build.
You guys are all funny and stuff... but let's take a moment away from the snark about a donut-head reality-TV dip-weasle who isn't in charge of anything and recall that this is a story about our actual government running around stomping on your liberties and the constitution right now. Not in some Trump-ruled dystopian future, but in the Patriot Act present. So if we want to spew some snark toward the top of the executive branch, let's look to the guy who is actually in charge.
Very few people in government seem to have any interest in protecting your right to privacy online, or your freedom of speech. Getting deflected into a Team Red vs. Team Blue side-show does nothing to help rein in our leadership. It only provides a distraction while they continue to chisel away at your freedom.
Some of you jokesters are old enough to be able to recognize just how dystopian the present is. You don't even have to go all the way back to black-and-white TV to find an era when "show me your papers" was a popular meme for showing a horrible totalitarian regime. The idea of a government that is always watching its citizens was the cardboard-cutout villain in every action movie and TV show.
And here we are, less than half a lifetime later with a national government that will send agents to initiate a secret investigation about some loudmouth troll on the internet - threatening anyone who even mentions the fact that the government is snooping around with jail time. Holy crap, have we lost our way.
You guys are smart enough and well-informed enough that you should be leading the cries of "to the woodchippers!" instead of laying it off on some doofus who is not only not in power, but is never going to get elected to anything.
I'm old enough and I remember. There were congressional hearings. There was huge pressure to pass new laws to regulate speech in the music industry. Rap was becoming popular and crossing over and suburban moms were agitated. Two Live Crew were so horny. They became the sort of lightning rod for the whole thing.
Then Dee Snyder of Twisted Sister and Frank Zappa made impassioned pleas on behalf of artistic freedom before the committees that helped to turn the tide. But the beast still wanted a skin. So the music industry adapted to the pressure by creating a voluntary labeling system. That was enough to diffuse the situation and allow the world to keep on spinning. There for a while there was a lot of hand wringing over stores carrying CDs/Albums that were labeled - but then there were acts that seemed to be seeking out the label on purpose to gin up sales. Eventually everyone lost interest and moved on.
But there was a real danger that "The Man" would step in and try to adjudicate music content. It kind of recapitulated the arc of the Film industry before it, with the MPAA eventually adopting a voluntary ratings system to allow congress a fig leaf so they would go away and leave them alone. That system is actually mildly useful, although a real rating system run by independent third parties would probably be better. The music one still has little benefit as far as I can see.
So if "no laws were passed" counts as "not a crusade" then OK, I suppose. But it was enough pressure brought by enough people to get their elected representatives to move toward obviously unconstitutional censorship laws with enough momentum that the recording industry created their own system in hopes of heading off a federally mandated system of labeling or censorship.
Which should serve as a cautionary tale for all those who think "that couldn't happen" with their government. There are plenty of examples of stupid to go around. People can get ginned up about just about anything. So the world needs firebrand watchdogs to stand in the breach against government overreach. Folks like Ralph Nader who have fought both industry and government. Or Harvey Silvergate of FIRE. Or Ron Paul. Or Al Goldstein of Screw Magazine. You know..... Nutballs.
Without Luther Campbell, Dee Snyder et. al. and a capitulation by the industry to form a voluntary rating system, we definitely would have had a federal law mandating such - and probably more. So I wouldn't minimize the moment. It was a pretty big deal, even though it really doesn't directly affect very many people.