Hard to imagine how a lack of belief in God(s) could cause someone to do anything. A belief that the CIA is monitoring your every move could cause you to take some sort of action. Not believing that the CIA is monitoring your every move would just keep you at the baseline of acting however you were going to act anyway. Most/all of the "violent atheist" examples in history were compelled to violence by some other belief (nationalism of some form typically) and then just happened to also be atheist.
Frankly, I would bet that most cases of "religious violence" are mislabeled as well. Even if people believe loads of religious stuff, at the end of the day most of those people will not go to far off the path what they were going to do anyway. Even if God exists, he is fucking invisible. Much more likely, someone who gets violent is doing it for some political, tribal, resource, or historical reason. Sane people tend to know that you should pretty much treat religion as "pretend time" when there is actually something on the line.
Where do you live where there are "crazy violent Atheists". Most of the atheists that I am aware of would be better described as pacifists (Christopher Hitchens being a notable exception, but I would still not consider him "crazy violent"). Flaming on reddit is entirely different than shooting up an abortion clinic or flying a plane into a building. Atheists tend to not kill over religion, since the entire reason they get frustrated is that religion is stupid.
There's a No True Scotsman in there for sure. Defining Leftists as totalitarian is a major fail here. Conservatives and Leftists have both become totalitarian at many points in history. The Nazis were far right to the core. Puritan communities could hardly be called "leftist", and yet they had a society with strict social control. If you had said "Libertarian" instead of "Conservative", then I would agree with you (and replacing "Leftist" with "Communitarian").
lol. I love that episode, but picking an episode to get someone into Doctor Who that barely has the Doctor in it does seem a bit odd. I would recommend just about any of the newer Matt Smith episodes if campyness was the problem. Better acting, cinematography, writing, etc. I love them all, but I don't really have a problem with the campy stuff.
We're all slashdotters here so we can be candid. The real reason to work from home is so you can read/. all day without your hand on the alt+tab all day. #firstworldproblems
We have the same unofficial policy in the company I work for. I share an office with our network engineer, and we will often have entire conversations over IM. In some ways it is easier to communicate that way, since we can pass links and files back and forth quickly.
Eh, the credit checks are vanishingly rare. The drug test are usually mouth swabs that only detect drugs in the past 24 hours anyway. It seems fair for them to verify that you are not currently on crack at the time of the interview.
... our urban cities are increasingly destroyed by criminal elements.
The actual data disagrees with you here. Violent crime has been falling since the early 90s. Also, those extra 20 rounds would not even be particularly useful in the situation you laid out. No one is going to take out 20 guys with a pistol while being attacked. You could get a couple shots off, at which point they would run or you would be overwhelmed.
My personal (albeit unrealistic) belief is that you should be able to own whatever gun you want... but then we ban ammunition. Nothing allowed but rubber bullets, and we confiscate all the regular ammo. Drink one too many King Cobras and shoot your wife in a drunken rage? You can both laugh it off in the morning!
They both have close to equal incentives to BS. I am not sure how much having data should affect the credibility of either side though. Data can be manipulated in some pretty wacky ways. The only real way to decide either way is to have some back and forth until one side has to start giving ground in the face of evidence, since their explanations have less explanatory power than the other side (or risk looking like a fool). So far both sides have ceded a bit of ground. The reporter admitted that the data showed something different than his memory of the speeds he was driving. He came up with a possible explanation; speedometers not calibrated to tire size. Tesla can either empirically refute this claim (or fail to) quite easily. It is an empirical question with an empirical answer. The reporter has an edge where he claims that the car lost range in the cold. Tesla fails here to provide any evidence to falsify that claim. Now all the stuff about what tech support said or did not say is a bit up in the air. If the calls were recorded, then expect a smackdown from Tesla pretty soon. If not, then we have to assess what the probability of support actually giving the advice is. To me it seems pretty unlikely that someone working at an EV company could have such a poor understanding of their operation (most of the alleged advice could be refuted by common sense and an 8th grade level understanding of Physics), but who knows. All of us here know that tech support can often give astoundingly bad advice and many established companies struggle with the QA of support teams, much less in a small young company like Tesla. TLDR: I generally agree with you that the reporter sounds like a weasle, but we must still reserve final judgement until we have more evidence. Tesla has this guy on the ropes, but there is still a distinct possibility that Tesla could have failed on a couple fronts.
What happens if it gets unusually cold at night and you weren't watching the weather forecast?
IDK, park in your garage? I lived in Milwaukee for 10 years. Park your gas car outside and there will be plenty of mornings that it wont start. Now I live in Charleston. You know how often this would be an issue? Never. I just do not see this being a big deal in most parts of the country where it only gets this cold a few days per year, and its not like it bricks, it just lowers its range. Obviously an EV will not match a gas vehicle on every mark. Neither can a gas vehicle match an EV on every mark. Sometimes you have to optimize for different situations.
Yeah. Major fail. I bet if you walked into the NYT and asked the crossword guy if speeding up and slowing down could extend the range of an electric car, they could tell you the obvious answer, no. This guy is supposed to be an energy expert. No way in hell he could not know the basic challenges to efficiency even if he was a complete and total moron. He would have heard about this stuff all the time. Unbelievable audacity.
alternately slow down and speed up to take advantage of regenerative braking
For a guy who is supposed to be an energy expert he clearly has a pretty poor understanding of thermodynamics. For that matter, anyone reviewing cars for a major publication should have a basic understanding physics, not to mention... you know... cars. The article read like someone reviewing a stick shift car when they had only ever learned automatic. If you are writing car reviews for the NYT I would hope you would be a fucking car junkie who is obsessed with every little detail, but distills the most important stuff down for us casual users. This is like my mom reviewing the new Macbook: "The internet won't close! How do I open Facebook! You mean it doesn't get my email? My old Macbook had email!"
Don't get me wrong, I do still think Elon Musk is a shifty little bastard who could/would lie his way out of anything, but the real story here is that the NYT assigned a completely unqualified journalist to a story and it blew up in their face.
Mom & Pop can be much better employers... or they can be much, much worse. Corporate america tends to be a bit more normalized. I would not be at all surprised that Mom & Pops are significantly more likely to have issues with sexual harassment, withholding pay, poor working conditions, etc. I am sure it happens, but it is hard to imagine any of these things overtly happening in a corporate environment, since this is a function that even the least competent HR department can handle.
Yep we had the same thing with Boeing in my area. We basically gave them a billion dollars and promised our workers would be subservient and love them long time.
This pretty much sums up the number one problem with tech culture in the valley. Companies are optimized to raise money, not make money. Facebook has had years to switch the focus already but still cannot seem to do it. If your typical tech startup had 20 billion in the bank, the founders would say "Look how this will affect our valuation! We'll be able to get to round 98 of seed funding!"
True, but this is the kind of hardware that businesses typically write a blank check for IME. Most banks are used to dropping 200k on an iSeries plus licensing. IBM shops are pretty cost tolerant, almost by definition.
That is correct. I used to write insurance systems. The stuff written in the past 10-15 years is run in real time (almost exclusively.Net of some form). This stuff is the BLL, DAL, and UI layer that handles rating policies, quotes, etc. The "mainframey" stuff then comes into that system and does a lot of the more permanent processing so that the data can be put into the accounting systems. Nobody is running a real time web server on COBOL or driving a GUI app with COBOL. This stuff happens nightly at the highest frequency (I am sure there are SOME exceptions). Most of these systems are doing what you might call "end of month" processing. I have done this work on systems that processed billions of dollars worth of business per year, so I really do know what I am talking about here. My last job like this was actually replacing an RPG system that did just that with a SQL backed.Net web service application that could process policies in real time. In my experience, most RPG/COBOL programmers learned to code before event based programming was even a thing, and since most of them have been pretty siloed for the past 20 years, few have any experience with the real time paradigm at all. Ironically, we see a similar thing happening in the web right now with real time web apps and rich web clients. We all know that not everyone will make the jump, so many people will be left maintaining the more "get updates when you refresh the page" web apps.
We are typically talking about batch financial transactions that get queued up and run on a weekend towards the end of the month in the context of COBOL. Performance is largely moot in this area.
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Frankly, I would bet that most cases of "religious violence" are mislabeled as well. Even if people believe loads of religious stuff, at the end of the day most of those people will not go to far off the path what they were going to do anyway. Even if God exists, he is fucking invisible. Much more likely, someone who gets violent is doing it for some political, tribal, resource, or historical reason. Sane people tend to know that you should pretty much treat religion as "pretend time" when there is actually something on the line.
Idk if being anti-fascist is such a bad thing... Are people out there really arguing for pro-fascist forms of government
Where do you live where there are "crazy violent Atheists". Most of the atheists that I am aware of would be better described as pacifists (Christopher Hitchens being a notable exception, but I would still not consider him "crazy violent"). Flaming on reddit is entirely different than shooting up an abortion clinic or flying a plane into a building. Atheists tend to not kill over religion, since the entire reason they get frustrated is that religion is stupid.
There's a No True Scotsman in there for sure. Defining Leftists as totalitarian is a major fail here. Conservatives and Leftists have both become totalitarian at many points in history. The Nazis were far right to the core. Puritan communities could hardly be called "leftist", and yet they had a society with strict social control. If you had said "Libertarian" instead of "Conservative", then I would agree with you (and replacing "Leftist" with "Communitarian").
Why would anyone reward the creator of all Daleks, the most evil race in the universe?!
lol. I love that episode, but picking an episode to get someone into Doctor Who that barely has the Doctor in it does seem a bit odd. I would recommend just about any of the newer Matt Smith episodes if campyness was the problem. Better acting, cinematography, writing, etc. I love them all, but I don't really have a problem with the campy stuff.
I think you might be an extrovert by definition. You find it relaxing to be in a chatty crowd? Most introverts can do it, but it takes real effort.
We're all slashdotters here so we can be candid. The real reason to work from home is so you can read /. all day without your hand on the alt+tab all day. #firstworldproblems
We have the same unofficial policy in the company I work for. I share an office with our network engineer, and we will often have entire conversations over IM. In some ways it is easier to communicate that way, since we can pass links and files back and forth quickly.
You must have sent your kids to Milford, where children are neither seen nor heard: http://arresteddevelopment.wikia.com/wiki/Milford_School
Eh, the credit checks are vanishingly rare. The drug test are usually mouth swabs that only detect drugs in the past 24 hours anyway. It seems fair for them to verify that you are not currently on crack at the time of the interview.
... our urban cities are increasingly destroyed by criminal elements.
The actual data disagrees with you here. Violent crime has been falling since the early 90s. Also, those extra 20 rounds would not even be particularly useful in the situation you laid out. No one is going to take out 20 guys with a pistol while being attacked. You could get a couple shots off, at which point they would run or you would be overwhelmed.
My personal (albeit unrealistic) belief is that you should be able to own whatever gun you want... but then we ban ammunition. Nothing allowed but rubber bullets, and we confiscate all the regular ammo. Drink one too many King Cobras and shoot your wife in a drunken rage? You can both laugh it off in the morning!
C on Rails has been a long time coming.
They both have close to equal incentives to BS. I am not sure how much having data should affect the credibility of either side though. Data can be manipulated in some pretty wacky ways. The only real way to decide either way is to have some back and forth until one side has to start giving ground in the face of evidence, since their explanations have less explanatory power than the other side (or risk looking like a fool). So far both sides have ceded a bit of ground. The reporter admitted that the data showed something different than his memory of the speeds he was driving. He came up with a possible explanation; speedometers not calibrated to tire size. Tesla can either empirically refute this claim (or fail to) quite easily. It is an empirical question with an empirical answer. The reporter has an edge where he claims that the car lost range in the cold. Tesla fails here to provide any evidence to falsify that claim. Now all the stuff about what tech support said or did not say is a bit up in the air. If the calls were recorded, then expect a smackdown from Tesla pretty soon. If not, then we have to assess what the probability of support actually giving the advice is. To me it seems pretty unlikely that someone working at an EV company could have such a poor understanding of their operation (most of the alleged advice could be refuted by common sense and an 8th grade level understanding of Physics), but who knows. All of us here know that tech support can often give astoundingly bad advice and many established companies struggle with the QA of support teams, much less in a small young company like Tesla. TLDR: I generally agree with you that the reporter sounds like a weasle, but we must still reserve final judgement until we have more evidence. Tesla has this guy on the ropes, but there is still a distinct possibility that Tesla could have failed on a couple fronts.
He unplugged the car because Tesla told him that the car would reach his destination.
Assuming they actually told him that. That sounds pretty unlikely. If they did, then hey, they were both morons.
What happens if it gets unusually cold at night and you weren't watching the weather forecast?
IDK, park in your garage? I lived in Milwaukee for 10 years. Park your gas car outside and there will be plenty of mornings that it wont start. Now I live in Charleston. You know how often this would be an issue? Never. I just do not see this being a big deal in most parts of the country where it only gets this cold a few days per year, and its not like it bricks, it just lowers its range. Obviously an EV will not match a gas vehicle on every mark. Neither can a gas vehicle match an EV on every mark. Sometimes you have to optimize for different situations.
Yeah. Major fail. I bet if you walked into the NYT and asked the crossword guy if speeding up and slowing down could extend the range of an electric car, they could tell you the obvious answer, no. This guy is supposed to be an energy expert. No way in hell he could not know the basic challenges to efficiency even if he was a complete and total moron. He would have heard about this stuff all the time. Unbelievable audacity.
alternately slow down and speed up to take advantage of regenerative braking
For a guy who is supposed to be an energy expert he clearly has a pretty poor understanding of thermodynamics. For that matter, anyone reviewing cars for a major publication should have a basic understanding physics, not to mention... you know... cars. The article read like someone reviewing a stick shift car when they had only ever learned automatic. If you are writing car reviews for the NYT I would hope you would be a fucking car junkie who is obsessed with every little detail, but distills the most important stuff down for us casual users. This is like my mom reviewing the new Macbook: "The internet won't close! How do I open Facebook! You mean it doesn't get my email? My old Macbook had email!"
Don't get me wrong, I do still think Elon Musk is a shifty little bastard who could/would lie his way out of anything, but the real story here is that the NYT assigned a completely unqualified journalist to a story and it blew up in their face.
Mom & Pop can be much better employers... or they can be much, much worse. Corporate america tends to be a bit more normalized. I would not be at all surprised that Mom & Pops are significantly more likely to have issues with sexual harassment, withholding pay, poor working conditions, etc. I am sure it happens, but it is hard to imagine any of these things overtly happening in a corporate environment, since this is a function that even the least competent HR department can handle.
Yep we had the same thing with Boeing in my area. We basically gave them a billion dollars and promised our workers would be subservient and love them long time.
This pretty much sums up the number one problem with tech culture in the valley. Companies are optimized to raise money, not make money. Facebook has had years to switch the focus already but still cannot seem to do it. If your typical tech startup had 20 billion in the bank, the founders would say "Look how this will affect our valuation! We'll be able to get to round 98 of seed funding!"
True, but this is the kind of hardware that businesses typically write a blank check for IME. Most banks are used to dropping 200k on an iSeries plus licensing. IBM shops are pretty cost tolerant, almost by definition.
That is correct. I used to write insurance systems. The stuff written in the past 10-15 years is run in real time (almost exclusively .Net of some form). This stuff is the BLL, DAL, and UI layer that handles rating policies, quotes, etc. The "mainframey" stuff then comes into that system and does a lot of the more permanent processing so that the data can be put into the accounting systems. Nobody is running a real time web server on COBOL or driving a GUI app with COBOL. This stuff happens nightly at the highest frequency (I am sure there are SOME exceptions). Most of these systems are doing what you might call "end of month" processing. I have done this work on systems that processed billions of dollars worth of business per year, so I really do know what I am talking about here. My last job like this was actually replacing an RPG system that did just that with a SQL backed .Net web service application that could process policies in real time. In my experience, most RPG/COBOL programmers learned to code before event based programming was even a thing, and since most of them have been pretty siloed for the past 20 years, few have any experience with the real time paradigm at all. Ironically, we see a similar thing happening in the web right now with real time web apps and rich web clients. We all know that not everyone will make the jump, so many people will be left maintaining the more "get updates when you refresh the page" web apps.
We are typically talking about batch financial transactions that get queued up and run on a weekend towards the end of the month in the context of COBOL. Performance is largely moot in this area.