True. Of course, once people have redefined science as a social construct, "scientific truth" becomes a matter of consensus and agreement, rather than objective truth, evidence, and experimental reproducibility. Most people probably don't adopt the most extreme position of denying all objective reality, but the debate about science in politics clearly has been influenced by these ideas. That's why we hear so much about the supposed "scientific consensus" or why people trot out battling experts.
I confess that I don’t quite understand Dr. Holdren’s particular 1971 vision of global warming — why would nuclear fuels be contributing to it?
In fact, the quote shows Holdren to be a complete idiot: he actually believes that the heat released from nuclear and fossil fuels itself would lead to global warming. But that heat is utterly negligible compared to solar irradiation. Anybody who holds such a belief is evidently completely scientifically illiterate and incompetent.
The idea that government should be based in a significant way on science is a hallmark of progressivism. In politics, science is just used as an excuse by special interest groups to push their agenda; what passes for science is often simply speculation or guesswork couched in scientific terms. Or, as in the case of climate change, a kernel of scientific truth, a lot of speculation, and a complete neglect of economic and moral issues.
That depends on whether those benefits derive from positive/negative rights or positive/negative liberties and what your political persuasion happens to be.
You don't even have to debate whether "trading" is legally different from "sharing". If "trading" takes off, cities like Seattle will simply add it to the list of things you can't do.
What you should do against such corruption and stupidity is vote with your dollars, vote in elections, and if that doesn't help, vote with your feet.
No, it isn't, that's the point. Privacy is about the separation of an act from the public sphere, not how that act is observed. People who want to outlaw the recording of public acts misappropriate the term "privacy" in order to mislead people push through their agenda.
Laws like this are trying to limit certain forms of public photography and public recording; they have nothing to do with privacy. If you want to limit public recording, make an argument for that, don't destroy the meaning of the word "privacy".
Once the line is blurred, things go downhill further. Laws like this don't prohibit government or corporate surveillance cameras, because they are either in public or on land owned by the owner of the camera. Once you change the meaning of "privacy" to include public spaces, you have established the principle that violating people's privacy is OK, and that surveillance can extend to other private areas.
Indeed, it means "private". If you have a threesome, it's private, although you're not alone. In that case, if one of your partners is wearing Google Glass, that's between you three to work out. The case we're talking about here is where strangers record you. Whatever a stranger can see in a generally accessible place is, by definition, not "private".
We already have a similar law in place. It's illegal to videotape you, make pictures of you or record you in any other way unless you give prior consent
Google Glass only records from a first person point of view, and is less sensitive than normal human eyes or ears. So, pretty much by definition, if it can be recorded by Google Glass, it isn't private: the person doing the recording needs to be visibly present to record the information.
What such laws are really primarily aimed at are to protect government officials, politicians, and the rich and famous from having their wrongdoings documented.
Google had a high valuation, but it was much smaller in terms of employees and had few products. Apple was flying high, Jobs was highly respected and had a lot of power because Apple controlled several major platforms that were important to Google's success.
We aren't playing a game of "who is morally superior". We're talking about whether the US has a reasonable national security interest in spying on Germany, and it does, as long as Germany remains a large exporter of advanced weapon systems.
So, let's see: Jobs is behaving like an a**hole, taking revenge on people leaving Apple and preventing them from getting new jobs. To do so, he threatens a smaller startup, which is what Google was at the time. Seems to me the culprit here is Jobs and Apple, and the victims are both his employees and Google.
German companies are some of the biggest arms dealers in the world and have sold arms to regimes that are hostile to the US. Likewise, you'd expect German satellite data providers and German financial service providers to do business with groups that are hostile to the US. And German governments have been trying to make trade deals and agreements that harm the US. The German government itself was monitoring many of its parliamentarians for anti-democratic communist activities, and Germany is a hotbed of Neo-Nazi activities. So, I would very much hope that US intelligence services are keeping a tab on the activities of both German private companies and the German government.
but on the other hand this is a bug affecting critical system functionality which is not visible to the majority of users, and for some reason this is exactly the sort of bug that free software projects have a distressing tendency to ignore
This bug was reported in December 2013 and has been discussed in the bug tracker since, so it isn't being "ignored". However, if people did choose to ignore it, that would be completely OK. Developers fix what interests them, perhaps because they need it themselves or because a friend needs it. Nobody has any obligation to even pay attention to what some outside person wants, disabled or not.
In this case I gather it's been three months so it's appropriate to be asking questions.
Bug fixes often take 1-2 years even for high priority bugs. To expect a bug fix after three months is totally unreasonable. I run distros that are several years out of date because newer distros have broken things that I depend on. And for the accessibility bug, there are numerous simple workarounds that anybody with half a brain can figure out.
The submitter was behaving like a total prick when he asked "Should disabled users stick with outdated, vulnerable, and unsupported Linux distros or should we move to OS-X / Windows?"
I disagree. Workers councils and unions give workers a voice in a company that they usually would not have
Yes, German workers are "consulted", in accordance with the German view of what the corporate and social hierarchy should be. They are not treated as equal providers of a valuable good and service. And as your comments show, you firmly believe in this world view.
And with the rise of globalization, a company is free to just move to other countries. That is why we have import tax and trade agreements.
Yes, one of the reasons Germany is doing so well in terms of exports: it is screwing over its workers, and German obedience and submission of authority has German workers comply. The Prussian anti-socialist strategy of providing token participation in order to keep the workers at bay obviously is still working well more than a century later.
People like you are being the jerks here, because you think that you are entitled to better support from well-meaning and hard working FOSS volunteers who clearly are making an effort than you are from companies you pay a shitload of money to.
What's so outrageous about dotacohen's and your attitude is not that you want the bug to be fixed, it's that you are being abusive even though the bug was just reported a few months ago and people are obviously looking into it.
when people who claim to be conservatives are front and center in efforts to invade people's privacy or their lives in general.
It's equally hypocritical when self-proclaimed conservatives or liberals do it, because it runs counter to both conservative and liberal ideology.
Whether this situation, the banning of books at libraries, abortion or anything other matter involving one's personal freedoms, conservatives seem to go out of their way to be hypocrites when talking about freedom.
Democrats have been quite eagerly engaging in book banning and limiting free speech. Much of the spying and intrusion into personal freedoms has come from Democrats, including jerks like Nancy Pelosi. And to anti-abortion politicians, abortion is about protecting the freedom of the unborn child; I happen to disagree with that view, but their position isn't hypocritical.
Sort of like when businesses decry government regulation or intrusion into their practices then turn around and come to the taxpayer asking for money.
Unlike politicians or philosophers, it's not the purpose of businesses to articulate a consistent ideology. In fact, a business should aim to argue for minimizing regulation and maximizing taxpayer support. It is the job of our politicians to deny the latter. Sadly, they often fail.
The bug was reported in December 2013, and expecting a three month turnaround from a free project for bug fixes is a bit much. There are plenty of older distros that are still supported and work, so the sky isn't falling. And, believe me, recent Linux distros break plenty of people's user interfaces in plenty of ways that are just as inconvenient as not having sticky key work may be to you. In addition, if you really care, you can write a user-mode program to give you the same functionality.
So, my suggestion is: just switch to Windows or OS/X. I'm sure those commercial systems will give you bug fixes with three months turnaround. You deserve the kind of service and support that Microsoft and Apple give you!
Workers councils treat workers as junior partners in a relationship with the company; it establishes a social hierarchy and is intended to reduce conflict. It's a typically German approach towards maintaining social order and power hierarchies. Workers councils really started in 19th century in an effort to prevent socialist ideas and self-determination from taking a hold in Germany. In the end, the arrangement just screws over workers.
But the employees can also write their opinions about the new CEO and write about their concerns that somebody, in their opinion, is a bad choice for representing their company.
That's what "voicing their opinions" means.
PS: I'm from Europe and maybe we differ from the social customs, but in Europe the employees have a voice in their companies, too. It's not like (maybe, I have the impression) in the USA where only the shareholders or the owners have any say in a company.
Oh, it's very much a cultural difference. Germany has a system in which employees "have a voice"; it's not representative of Europe as a whole and rather linked to Germany's fascist and totalitarian history. VW tried to introduce such a system in one of its US plants and the workers rejected it because they recognized that rather than giving them more control, it reduced their power.
There are good reasons for refusing such treatments: they may very well leave you with serious brain damage, i.e., a "zombie". Even for resuscitation after regular heart attack, brain damage is so common that some people would rather be dead than take the risk. I probably would rather die than take the risk, but unfortunately there is no way to get paramedics to honor such a request reliably.
Slashdot Mirror
True. Of course, once people have redefined science as a social construct, "scientific truth" becomes a matter of consensus and agreement, rather than objective truth, evidence, and experimental reproducibility. Most people probably don't adopt the most extreme position of denying all objective reality, but the debate about science in politics clearly has been influenced by these ideas. That's why we hear so much about the supposed "scientific consensus" or why people trot out battling experts.
From the article:
In fact, the quote shows Holdren to be a complete idiot: he actually believes that the heat released from nuclear and fossil fuels itself would lead to global warming. But that heat is utterly negligible compared to solar irradiation. Anybody who holds such a belief is evidently completely scientifically illiterate and incompetent.
The idea that government should be based in a significant way on science is a hallmark of progressivism. In politics, science is just used as an excuse by special interest groups to push their agenda; what passes for science is often simply speculation or guesswork couched in scientific terms. Or, as in the case of climate change, a kernel of scientific truth, a lot of speculation, and a complete neglect of economic and moral issues.
That depends on whether those benefits derive from positive/negative rights or positive/negative liberties and what your political persuasion happens to be.
You don't even have to debate whether "trading" is legally different from "sharing". If "trading" takes off, cities like Seattle will simply add it to the list of things you can't do.
What you should do against such corruption and stupidity is vote with your dollars, vote in elections, and if that doesn't help, vote with your feet.
No, it isn't, that's the point. Privacy is about the separation of an act from the public sphere, not how that act is observed. People who want to outlaw the recording of public acts misappropriate the term "privacy" in order to mislead people push through their agenda.
Laws like this are trying to limit certain forms of public photography and public recording; they have nothing to do with privacy. If you want to limit public recording, make an argument for that, don't destroy the meaning of the word "privacy".
Once the line is blurred, things go downhill further. Laws like this don't prohibit government or corporate surveillance cameras, because they are either in public or on land owned by the owner of the camera. Once you change the meaning of "privacy" to include public spaces, you have established the principle that violating people's privacy is OK, and that surveillance can extend to other private areas.
Indeed, it means "private". If you have a threesome, it's private, although you're not alone. In that case, if one of your partners is wearing Google Glass, that's between you three to work out. The case we're talking about here is where strangers record you. Whatever a stranger can see in a generally accessible place is, by definition, not "private".
And you live where? North Korea?
Google Glass only records from a first person point of view, and is less sensitive than normal human eyes or ears. So, pretty much by definition, if it can be recorded by Google Glass, it isn't private: the person doing the recording needs to be visibly present to record the information.
What such laws are really primarily aimed at are to protect government officials, politicians, and the rich and famous from having their wrongdoings documented.
So you're saying that the Google manager were obsequious and accommodating because... why exactly?
Google had a high valuation, but it was much smaller in terms of employees and had few products. Apple was flying high, Jobs was highly respected and had a lot of power because Apple controlled several major platforms that were important to Google's success.
We aren't playing a game of "who is morally superior". We're talking about whether the US has a reasonable national security interest in spying on Germany, and it does, as long as Germany remains a large exporter of advanced weapon systems.
So, let's see: Jobs is behaving like an a**hole, taking revenge on people leaving Apple and preventing them from getting new jobs. To do so, he threatens a smaller startup, which is what Google was at the time. Seems to me the culprit here is Jobs and Apple, and the victims are both his employees and Google.
German companies are some of the biggest arms dealers in the world and have sold arms to regimes that are hostile to the US. Likewise, you'd expect German satellite data providers and German financial service providers to do business with groups that are hostile to the US. And German governments have been trying to make trade deals and agreements that harm the US. The German government itself was monitoring many of its parliamentarians for anti-democratic communist activities, and Germany is a hotbed of Neo-Nazi activities. So, I would very much hope that US intelligence services are keeping a tab on the activities of both German private companies and the German government.
This bug was reported in December 2013 and has been discussed in the bug tracker since, so it isn't being "ignored". However, if people did choose to ignore it, that would be completely OK. Developers fix what interests them, perhaps because they need it themselves or because a friend needs it. Nobody has any obligation to even pay attention to what some outside person wants, disabled or not.
Bug fixes often take 1-2 years even for high priority bugs. To expect a bug fix after three months is totally unreasonable. I run distros that are several years out of date because newer distros have broken things that I depend on. And for the accessibility bug, there are numerous simple workarounds that anybody with half a brain can figure out.
The submitter was behaving like a total prick when he asked "Should disabled users stick with outdated, vulnerable, and unsupported Linux distros or should we move to OS-X / Windows?"
Yes, German workers are "consulted", in accordance with the German view of what the corporate and social hierarchy should be. They are not treated as equal providers of a valuable good and service. And as your comments show, you firmly believe in this world view.
Yes, one of the reasons Germany is doing so well in terms of exports: it is screwing over its workers, and German obedience and submission of authority has German workers comply. The Prussian anti-socialist strategy of providing token participation in order to keep the workers at bay obviously is still working well more than a century later.
If you think that you are going to get this kind of bug fixed faster by Microsoft or Apple than by FOSS developers, you're a fool.
But as I was saying, if you really do think that, you should switch.
People like you are being the jerks here, because you think that you are entitled to better support from well-meaning and hard working FOSS volunteers who clearly are making an effort than you are from companies you pay a shitload of money to.
What's so outrageous about dotacohen's and your attitude is not that you want the bug to be fixed, it's that you are being abusive even though the bug was just reported a few months ago and people are obviously looking into it.
Just like the Soviet Union: voice a liberal, free market opinion and people suggest you should be locked up in a mental institution.
You know it first hand.
It's equally hypocritical when self-proclaimed conservatives or liberals do it, because it runs counter to both conservative and liberal ideology.
Democrats have been quite eagerly engaging in book banning and limiting free speech. Much of the spying and intrusion into personal freedoms has come from Democrats, including jerks like Nancy Pelosi. And to anti-abortion politicians, abortion is about protecting the freedom of the unborn child; I happen to disagree with that view, but their position isn't hypocritical.
Unlike politicians or philosophers, it's not the purpose of businesses to articulate a consistent ideology. In fact, a business should aim to argue for minimizing regulation and maximizing taxpayer support. It is the job of our politicians to deny the latter. Sadly, they often fail.
The bug was reported in December 2013, and expecting a three month turnaround from a free project for bug fixes is a bit much. There are plenty of older distros that are still supported and work, so the sky isn't falling. And, believe me, recent Linux distros break plenty of people's user interfaces in plenty of ways that are just as inconvenient as not having sticky key work may be to you. In addition, if you really care, you can write a user-mode program to give you the same functionality.
So, my suggestion is: just switch to Windows or OS/X. I'm sure those commercial systems will give you bug fixes with three months turnaround. You deserve the kind of service and support that Microsoft and Apple give you!
Workers councils treat workers as junior partners in a relationship with the company; it establishes a social hierarchy and is intended to reduce conflict. It's a typically German approach towards maintaining social order and power hierarchies. Workers councils really started in 19th century in an effort to prevent socialist ideas and self-determination from taking a hold in Germany. In the end, the arrangement just screws over workers.
That's what "voicing their opinions" means.
Oh, it's very much a cultural difference. Germany has a system in which employees "have a voice"; it's not representative of Europe as a whole and rather linked to Germany's fascist and totalitarian history. VW tried to introduce such a system in one of its US plants and the workers rejected it because they recognized that rather than giving them more control, it reduced their power.
There are good reasons for refusing such treatments: they may very well leave you with serious brain damage, i.e., a "zombie". Even for resuscitation after regular heart attack, brain damage is so common that some people would rather be dead than take the risk. I probably would rather die than take the risk, but unfortunately there is no way to get paramedics to honor such a request reliably.
You don't have to replace "every milliliter of blood". The primary purpose of infusing cold saline solution is to cool the body rapidly.