Understood. But when you find you're dealing with people who have no moral or social objections to murder, sometimes you can sway them by suggesting that they think of how others will react to having their friends and relatives killed by remote strangers.
OTOH, some people aren't capable of empathy for others, and your only remaining tool is to convince them that there's an all-seeing alien being ("God") in the sky watching their every move, and they'll be judge by what that invisible watcher sees. And even that doesn't work with some people.
If you read the article now, you'll find that it describes the rel=nofollow attribute as meaning something very different from its literal meaning. Many search sites interpret it as meaning "Don't use this link to influence page rank". But they still follow the link, and index what it points to.
Actually, this change in interpretation happened fairly quickly. When I first read about rel=nofollow, I added it to the links in a lot of my own web pages. The reason is that I was responsible for several web sites that presented the client with a link to a document, plus a list of links that converted the document to a list of different formats. I'd learned that this caused a serious problem: When a search bot ran across such a page, it attempted to extract the document in all of the listed formats. When hit with dozens of such requests per second from all the Internet's search bots, this brought the servers to their knees, and effectively locked out human clients. Producing PDF, PS, and EPS is expensive...
So I added the rel=nofollow links. This worked for a few months. Then, slowly, the search bots returned to following all the links to extract all the documents in all our supported formats. Maybe they weren't using this to affect their page rank (for "pages" that don't actually exist), but it still bogged our servers down with zillions of requests for all our documents in all our formats.
So I started a project to identify all the search bots. When one of them is spotted, its attempts to convert a document to another format is simply dropped, with a brief comment explaining why. This was fast, so it restored our servers to usability by mere humans.
OTOH, google ads fairly quickly terminated our account. We totally failed to get an explanation (or any contact with humans) from them, but we're pretty sure that our transgression was returning different data to googlebots than the data returned to nicer clients that don't bog down our servers. This is strictly forbidden by their EULA, of course. But we can't survive their following all the rel=nofollow links, and forcing our servers to use all the time that it takes to convert all our documents to all our supported formats. Producing PDF, PS, EPS, and now SVG is expensive...
If there's a way to tell all search bots "Don't follow this link; it merely returns the same data in a different format", I'd like to know about it. But I suspect that, if such exists, it will be reinterpreted in the same way that rel=nofollow is reinterpreted.
Interestingly, the media often calls Obama "Mr. Obama" and not "President Obama"
The obvious temptation is to treat this as some sort of reverse racism, showing that they're being respectful of a black man. But I suspect what's at work is different than that.
If you look back at the media's treatment of the last two presidents, you'll find a lot of the media calling them nicknames. "Bill", "Dubya", and so on. This was clearly because they both really pushed the "good-old-boy" image, someone that you'd be comfortable having a beer or three with, so using their first names seems normal. Obama, OTOH, comes across as a quite serious, informed, take-charge sort of guy. He's not a share-a few-beers sort of fellow. So it's natural to use "mister" and his last name. I suspect that it's really nothing deeper than this.
Of course, if you want subtle (or unsubtle) racism about Obama, you can easily find it. You can also easily find Arkansas-hick characterizations of Clinton, and equally insulting disparagement of many other US presidents based on their backgrounds.
I don't give a crap if it was Warren Harding creating the kill order, US presidents do not have the right to order murders. End of story.
Actually, yes, they do. And it's probably not at all the end of the story. Several recent US presidents have ordered such murders, and they've all gotten away with it. Obama is even using it successfully as campaign material. Even the professional comedians have picked up on this, characterizing Obama's campaign approach as "I killed Osama bin Laden", and little else. There isn't the slightest chance that Obama will be charged with any crime for this action. So it's clear that US presidents do have the "right" to order murders.
A couple of centuries ago, one of the many reasons that the US declared independence was to end the right of monarchs to order summary (without trial) punishment, including execution, of people charged with crimes. Supposedly the US Constitution put an end to this, requiring "due process" before punishment. But this is no longer applicable, as the US legal system has clearly reinstated summary execution, when ordered by the president. We just need to also reinstate inheritance of the presidency (by primogeniture?), and we'll be back where we started.
"and Shrub"
isn't the President and doesn't matter, no matter how many times you and the current administration try to pretend otherwise.
Actually, the entire US media does this. It's common in the US to refer to ex-presidents as "president", with no qualifiers. Thus, Bill Clinton is routinely referred to as "president Clinton". Sometimes you hear this preceded by "former" or "ex-", but it's more common to not bother with such qualifiers. The two Bushes often have suffixes like "one" and "two", or "senior and "junior", to distinguish them, but no prefix to indicate that they're no longer president.
Similarly, in news stories about Mitt Romney, it's common for writers to call him "governor Romney", although he hasn't been a governor of any state for some years. I'm not sure when this practice started, but it's fairly standard in US news reports now.
This terminology does assume that the audience knows a bit about recent political history, of course, and is sometimes confusing to those who haven't been keeping up with who is in or out of which offices. People have occasionally complained about this, but it doesn't do any good.
As for the current topic, it actually makes a bit of sense. We're talking about the "right" of the current US president (whoever that may be) to order the execution without trial of anyone in the world. Examples of this by the current and/or any previous presidents are all relevant to the discussion. Just stopping the current president from killing people at random without recourse won't stop when Obama leaves office 0.5 or 4.5 years from now, just as the problem didn't end when Bush (either one) left office. If we Want To Do Something About It, we need to deal with the fact that it's a power that any US president currently has.
And that policy of showing up 10 minutes early? If they want the day to start 10 minutes early then they can pay me for that 10 minutes, and at over time rates to boot.
Seriously, the sense of entitlement some companies have is a little annoying.
It's not a sense of entitlement; it's a sense of power over you.
This story just helps get out a bit of advice that's of growing importance: Many employers have figured out how to intercept HTTPS connections and decode their content. If you don't want your employer knowing all your secret information, such as account numbers, login ids, passwords, etc., you should never type any of these things on a work machine. Chances are they've also installed keystroke recording software, ostensibly to monitor your "productivity", but also to give them copies of all your private account information if you ever type it at work. They will eventually use this against you. This is the way that the business world has gone. You should know about it, and be aware of it at all times.
Note also that we've heard from a lot of people here who think this is all right and proper. To them, and to many companies, you have no rights at all during work hours. This is the way things have gone.
That's why God created bananas. So you could practice proper application of a condom. Just ask any American school kid. It's part of their curriculum.
And this is why American bananas are a sterile species that reproduces only asexually. All those condoms make banana sex unproductive, so they've been selected for a means of reproduction that is productive under the conditions imposed on them by their human predators.
Depends on your dialect. My native dialect is one of the many that still preserve the "wh" sound (which has always actually been/hw/ phonetically, but the usual insane English spelling rules apply;-). It's only "woosh" if you speak one of the many dialects that has dropped yet another kind of initial/h/, the one represented in the "wh" digraph.
I'm not aware of any dialects that converted/hw/ into/sw/. But maybe the writer speaks a dialect (idiolect?) that does that. Stranger things have happened in the English language.
If you don't know the difference between an adult and a young child, and how their perception of authority is different, then why are you commenting on this subject?
We're not talking about how adults perceive a recommendation here, so stop pretending we are.
Actually, we are talking about how adults perceive(d) the things in the story. It started with the person who wrote a misleading headline for the story. Then assorted news people and their editors added their own perceptions to the story. Then the broadcasters retold it in their own words. Then the talk-show hosts added their own misperceptions, to give us a story radically different from what actually happened. Then the/. crowd got ahold of the summary and took it in many radically different directions.
But maybe I'm just guessing that all these people in the news-mangling chain are legally adults.;-)
Jeez; how many times did you post this? I counted 33 copies, totalling more than half of the lines showing in my copy of the discussion, and I don't even have it set to show everything.
Flooding a discussion like this with identical copy&paste tirades is usually a good way to find yourself banned by just about any serious discussion site.
So not only can you say nothing about intelligence based on mDNA but mDNA is worthless for anything other than paternity and descendence studies.
Wait -- How can you use mDNA for determining paternity? It's only passed via the maternal line. I seem to have missed something about mitochondrial DNA...
(Actually, I've read claims that the occasional sperm cell contains one or more mitochondria. So it's possible that a tiny amount of our mitochondrial DNA comes from a male ancestor. )
White countries need more diversity. They will be 100% diverse when there are no white people left.
I remember around 1980 reading comments from demographers that their best evidence was that the US had passed a threshold sometime in the previous few years: The majority of Americans now had black-African ancestors. This was, of course, only a rough estimate, since DNA testing was in its infancy then (and might be said to be in its toddler stage now;-). But the evidence since then seems to be consistent with their conclusion.
I've seen claims recently that only about 1/4 of the American population is of pure European descent. Of course, around 3/4 of the population "passes" for white, and most of those don't even know about their non-white ancestors. The population appears to be mostly white because that's the main source of their genes. But to the racists among us, there has to be some worry about the fact that more than half of the white people around them aren't "pure".
In my case, nobody would suspect that I'm not pure white, probably entirely norther-European. But in fact our family records show that my father's father's mother was an Ojibwa (aka Chippewa). I don't consider this terribly significant, because I've never faced discrimination on that basis. It's also not very special, since current estimates are that 20-25% of the US population has "Native-American" (the current euphemism since there are now so many folks from India in the country;-) ancestry. I've found that when I mention this, the person I'm talking to often tells me which of their ancestors was in which tribe. So I can easily believe that 20-25% estimate.
Anyway, it does appear that the folks who want to keep America pure white have already lost the battle. It's only a matter of a few more generations until it evens out, and the majority doesn't even look white.
I'm a Canadian. By your definition that makes me an American.
Nah; you're a North-American.;-)
The simplest way to explain why "American" refers to a citizen of just the one country is to consider the question "What's the only country in the world with 'America' in its name?" The English term "American" is an adjective that refers to that one country. That's why English-speaking people everywhere use "American" to refer to citizens of that country. Similarly, they use "Canadian" to refer to anything related to the country with the string "Canada" in its name.
Granted, it is confusing to have "America" also used in the names of a couple of continents. But we should be smart enough to handle that issue. This problem doesn't exist with, e.g., "Africa". It is used in the names of several countries, so when you want to talk about citizens of one of those countries, you usually wouldn't say "African"; you'd include another part of the country's name.
There have been a few attempts to coin names based on the "US" abbreviation, but that sorta flopped. Part of the problem is that there are a lot of other countries whose names (in translation) include "United States of". So "citizen of the United States" is technically ambiguous, and refers to different countries when you translate it into various other languages.
But no other country uses the character string "America" in its name, so it can be safely and unambiguously used (in any language) to refer to a citizen of just the one country.
The quotes aren't examples of racism; they're example of xenophobia. Racism means fear or hatred of others based on race. But the targets of these quotes included people who were genetically close relatives of the Jews of the time, so they're not actually based on race. The term Goyim referred to everyone outside the Jewish social group, which is what xenophobia deals with.
Actually, "goyim" is often translated as "nations", which is a closer English match for the meaning. It has been common (for Jews and non-Jews) to view the Jews as a "national" group, which is the basis of considering them disloyal outsiders. The parent's quotes are simply the same thing seen from the Jewish side. The same attitudes are easily found about other religious groups, e.g., Catholics and Muslims.
Of course, it has become common for people to use "racism" to mean "saying something I don't like about someone I do like". But this sorta cheapens the term. It's a more useful term if it's used in its basic meaning of classifying people by superficial racial characteristics. The English language also has useful words for social divisions based on other criteria.
Any man who refers to himself as something else and then an American is not an American at all.
Not sure I understand this. I recall once referring to myself first as "your typical American mongrel", and then explaining that I was a French-Scottish-Irish-Dutch-Danish-Italian-Ojibwa-American. Did the second description cancel out the first? Or should it just be considered a sort of mocking of the usual "X-American" usage?
It also occurs to me to wonder how many other countries use this sort of phrasing. I know I've seen similar descriptions for Mexicans and Brazilians, both of which have a history of mixed immigration similar to the US, but I have no idea if it's common in those countries.
It might be especially useful if the error reply were of the form "450 Blocked by $Censor", where $Censor is the name of the entity (governmental or corporate or whatever) that has imposed the blocking. It should give enough information that the client can identify the agency or person(s) responsible for the blocking.
We are probably going to have to start to manipulate the climate. When that happens there are going to be major disasters (entire countries turned into deserts; millions of people starved; flooding etc).
There's also the problem of legal liability. Lots of people have pointed out that, if a corporation with deep pockets does something and someone suffers, there's a lawsuit; if nobody does anything and someone suffers, it's an Act of God (who can't be sued in this world). This is a problem, for example, with some medicines. They typically have unpleasant side effects for some patients, and these victims often sue. But if you don't sell treat them or sell them anything, you can't be sued. There have been claims that this is what has caused the exit of many companies from the production of vaccines. The same legal process would apply to climate control. If you try to control bad weather, and it happens anyway, you may be liable for the damage, but if you do nothing, you're not responsible.
The more slowly and more in control we do it the more chance there will be to limit that; the more it's limited the more chance there is to actually succeed.
I'd guess that most engineers would agree. But they'd all be willing to help do pilot studies. This is assuming that they can get liability coverage. Or if it can be done by the government, which is a lot harder to sue for damages.
Also, I doubt that anyone would claim that we fully understand the climate or the fine details of how we're affecting it. This would further encourage a go-slow policy.
OTOH, arguing that we shouldn't start pushing the climate around until we know what we're doing is specious. We've been doing that for thousands of years, on a small scale, when we didn't know what we were doing. We've been doing it much more strongly for the last couple of centuries, and we now do somewhat understand what we've been doing. Economic forces guarantee that we won't stop pushing the climate around. There are over 7 billion of us now, and those people have to eat. So the question really is whether we will move into controlling our climate-pushing activities, or continue to push the climate in an uncontrolled fashion.
And how is declaring "engineering solutions will be found" not just simply passing the buck to the future?
Well, of course, it has to be in the future, because we've so resolutely refused to solve the problems in the past.;-)
But various others have pointed out that the "engineering solutions" may not be very far in the future, if we want to implement them. One of the consequences of the accumulated evidence that the recent climate changes are primarily due to human activity is that we know that we're capable of pushing the world' climate around, and we know how we've been doing it. So from an engineering viewpoint, pushing it in a different direction (e.g., stability or slower change) is within our capabilities. Granted, the "Further Research is Needed" mantra applies, but we know enough to take effective action now if we want to.
The major questions aren't scientific or technical; they're economic, political and religious. That is, it doesn't do much good to convince the engineers that there's a problem that they can fix. They already know about it (and are looking for funding;-). We also have to get the go-ahead from the leaders of our governments and major corporations.
The outlook isn't necessarily good. We do have documentation about various major disasters throughout human history, including many that were caused by humans who understood that they were causing a disaster. History says that humans often don't act on such knowledge, even when their society is collapsing around them.
We saw a good small-scale example of this back in 2005. Before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the US Government ran a simulation study of such events. Google "Hurricane Pam" to read all about it. Katrina was pretty similar to Pam. The US Army Corps of Engineers produced a thorough report on the physical infrastructure of the Mississippi Delta, which listed all the places where the levees would later break during Katrina, plus estimates of the maintenance required to fix the problems. Congress turned down the applications for funding. Everyone involved knew that it was just a matter of time until the disaster hit, but the government didn't fund the maintenance, and the disaster followed the engineers' prediction practically to the letter.
This is a local example of the sort of disasters that our political systems have historically perpetrated with full knowledge beforehand. It looks like the climate-change story is a repeat performance. Some of the scientists involved decided to try to publicise it a couple of decades back, on the grounds that it was a growing problem that we could probably fix if we want to. But history says that we probably won't do anything about it, although we know how to.
(If you want a bigger example, look up the history of ozone depletion. That's actually a fairly good example of partial success. The depletion is known to be almost entirely due to chemical compounds added to the atmosphere by human activity. Our dumping of those compounds has been radically decreased, and the depletion has nearly leveled off, though it hasn't been reversed. But it is an interesting example of human governments cooperating on a global level to deal with a global problem. So there's some hope. We don't always fail when facing such large-scale problems.;-)
... "purpose" is definitely part of genetically engineered organisms, since their DNA has been directly altered by knowing, thinking humans, and not evolution.
Indeed. And I've known a few biologists who like to "tweak" their colleagues by pointing this out. Also, there are certain kinds of animal behavior for which "purpose" or "intent" by the animal itself is widely considered a correct term. Consider a hungry predator stalking prey. It clearly is doing this "in order to" get a meal. Now, you can make the obvious charge that, scientifically, we really should object and say that we need good evidence that the critter really has such thought processes. But with some of the larger predators, problem-solving skills have been demonstrated. It's then easy to argue that, with these intelligent predators, simple mental connections such as "I'm hungry... Edible animal over there... Stalk... Catch... Eat" should be the default assumption. This may be a very simple example of "purpose", but it really should qualify. These animals have (simple) minds. The stalking behavior is done with intent to catch prey, which in turn is done to get food.
The problem seen in intro bio classes (and political discussions of evolution) is that people tend to infer purpose where there is no visible evidence. Sunflowers don't turn their leaves and flowers toward the sun with the purpose of maximizing solar input. They don't have minds at all, as far as we can tell. They do that because their genes produce chemical processes that result in that behavior. This developed because their ancestors with cells that behaved that way produced more seeds than relatives with poorer turning mechanisms.
Slashdot Mirror
Understood. But when you find you're dealing with people who have no moral or social objections to murder, sometimes you can sway them by suggesting that they think of how others will react to having their friends and relatives killed by remote strangers.
OTOH, some people aren't capable of empathy for others, and your only remaining tool is to convince them that there's an all-seeing alien being ("God") in the sky watching their every move, and they'll be judge by what that invisible watcher sees. And even that doesn't work with some people.
If you read the article now, you'll find that it describes the rel=nofollow attribute as meaning something very different from its literal meaning. Many search sites interpret it as meaning "Don't use this link to influence page rank". But they still follow the link, and index what it points to.
Actually, this change in interpretation happened fairly quickly. When I first read about rel=nofollow, I added it to the links in a lot of my own web pages. The reason is that I was responsible for several web sites that presented the client with a link to a document, plus a list of links that converted the document to a list of different formats. I'd learned that this caused a serious problem: When a search bot ran across such a page, it attempted to extract the document in all of the listed formats. When hit with dozens of such requests per second from all the Internet's search bots, this brought the servers to their knees, and effectively locked out human clients. Producing PDF, PS, and EPS is expensive ...
So I added the rel=nofollow links. This worked for a few months. Then, slowly, the search bots returned to following all the links to extract all the documents in all our supported formats. Maybe they weren't using this to affect their page rank (for "pages" that don't actually exist), but it still bogged our servers down with zillions of requests for all our documents in all our formats.
So I started a project to identify all the search bots. When one of them is spotted, its attempts to convert a document to another format is simply dropped, with a brief comment explaining why. This was fast, so it restored our servers to usability by mere humans.
OTOH, google ads fairly quickly terminated our account. We totally failed to get an explanation (or any contact with humans) from them, but we're pretty sure that our transgression was returning different data to googlebots than the data returned to nicer clients that don't bog down our servers. This is strictly forbidden by their EULA, of course. But we can't survive their following all the rel=nofollow links, and forcing our servers to use all the time that it takes to convert all our documents to all our supported formats. Producing PDF, PS, EPS, and now SVG is expensive ...
If there's a way to tell all search bots "Don't follow this link; it merely returns the same data in a different format", I'd like to know about it. But I suspect that, if such exists, it will be reinterpreted in the same way that rel=nofollow is reinterpreted.
Interestingly, the media often calls Obama "Mr. Obama" and not "President Obama"
The obvious temptation is to treat this as some sort of reverse racism, showing that they're being respectful of a black man. But I suspect what's at work is different than that.
If you look back at the media's treatment of the last two presidents, you'll find a lot of the media calling them nicknames. "Bill", "Dubya", and so on. This was clearly because they both really pushed the "good-old-boy" image, someone that you'd be comfortable having a beer or three with, so using their first names seems normal. Obama, OTOH, comes across as a quite serious, informed, take-charge sort of guy. He's not a share-a few-beers sort of fellow. So it's natural to use "mister" and his last name. I suspect that it's really nothing deeper than this.
Of course, if you want subtle (or unsubtle) racism about Obama, you can easily find it. You can also easily find Arkansas-hick characterizations of Clinton, and equally insulting disparagement of many other US presidents based on their backgrounds.
I don't give a crap if it was Warren Harding creating the kill order, US presidents do not have the right to order murders. End of story.
Actually, yes, they do. And it's probably not at all the end of the story. Several recent US presidents have ordered such murders, and they've all gotten away with it. Obama is even using it successfully as campaign material. Even the professional comedians have picked up on this, characterizing Obama's campaign approach as "I killed Osama bin Laden", and little else. There isn't the slightest chance that Obama will be charged with any crime for this action. So it's clear that US presidents do have the "right" to order murders.
A couple of centuries ago, one of the many reasons that the US declared independence was to end the right of monarchs to order summary (without trial) punishment, including execution, of people charged with crimes. Supposedly the US Constitution put an end to this, requiring "due process" before punishment. But this is no longer applicable, as the US legal system has clearly reinstated summary execution, when ordered by the president. We just need to also reinstate inheritance of the presidency (by primogeniture?), and we'll be back where we started.
"and Shrub" isn't the President and doesn't matter, no matter how many times you and the current administration try to pretend otherwise.
Actually, the entire US media does this. It's common in the US to refer to ex-presidents as "president", with no qualifiers. Thus, Bill Clinton is routinely referred to as "president Clinton". Sometimes you hear this preceded by "former" or "ex-", but it's more common to not bother with such qualifiers. The two Bushes often have suffixes like "one" and "two", or "senior and "junior", to distinguish them, but no prefix to indicate that they're no longer president.
Similarly, in news stories about Mitt Romney, it's common for writers to call him "governor Romney", although he hasn't been a governor of any state for some years. I'm not sure when this practice started, but it's fairly standard in US news reports now.
This terminology does assume that the audience knows a bit about recent political history, of course, and is sometimes confusing to those who haven't been keeping up with who is in or out of which offices. People have occasionally complained about this, but it doesn't do any good.
As for the current topic, it actually makes a bit of sense. We're talking about the "right" of the current US president (whoever that may be) to order the execution without trial of anyone in the world. Examples of this by the current and/or any previous presidents are all relevant to the discussion. Just stopping the current president from killing people at random without recourse won't stop when Obama leaves office 0.5 or 4.5 years from now, just as the problem didn't end when Bush (either one) left office. If we Want To Do Something About It, we need to deal with the fact that it's a power that any US president currently has.
So why the hell did Shrub invade Iraq?
In my personal opinion? Because he thought he could get away with it.
And he was right, wasn't he?
A Do Not Kill list only needs one entry: American citizen.
We've had clues that this has indeed been US policy for some time. If they're not American citizens, they can be killed with impunity.
That is what you meant, right? ;-)
The main problem with this policy is that other nations are likely to respond with a similar policy, but with the proper name changed.
Or employers should be following the Electronic Data Rights and Privacy Acts, which prohibit them from viewing or using such information?
Good luck trying to collect the evidence against them from the company's private network.
Shwuck off.
Hey, you speak Yiddish!
And that policy of showing up 10 minutes early? If they want the day to start 10 minutes early then they can pay me for that 10 minutes, and at over time rates to boot. Seriously, the sense of entitlement some companies have is a little annoying.
It's not a sense of entitlement; it's a sense of power over you.
This story just helps get out a bit of advice that's of growing importance: Many employers have figured out how to intercept HTTPS connections and decode their content. If you don't want your employer knowing all your secret information, such as account numbers, login ids, passwords, etc., you should never type any of these things on a work machine. Chances are they've also installed keystroke recording software, ostensibly to monitor your "productivity", but also to give them copies of all your private account information if you ever type it at work. They will eventually use this against you. This is the way that the business world has gone. You should know about it, and be aware of it at all times.
Note also that we've heard from a lot of people here who think this is all right and proper. To them, and to many companies, you have no rights at all during work hours. This is the way things have gone.
That's why God created bananas. So you could practice proper application of a condom. Just ask any American school kid. It's part of their curriculum.
And this is why American bananas are a sterile species that reproduces only asexually. All those condoms make banana sex unproductive, so they've been selected for a means of reproduction that is productive under the conditions imposed on them by their human predators.
Except the appropriate onomatopoeia is woosh.
Depends on your dialect. My native dialect is one of the many that still preserve the "wh" sound (which has always actually been /hw/ phonetically, but the usual insane English spelling rules apply ;-). It's only "woosh" if you speak one of the many dialects that has dropped yet another kind of initial /h/, the one represented in the "wh" digraph.
I'm not aware of any dialects that converted /hw/ into /sw/. But maybe the writer speaks a dialect (idiolect?) that does that. Stranger things have happened in the English language.
If you don't know the difference between an adult and a young child, and how their perception of authority is different, then why are you commenting on this subject? We're not talking about how adults perceive a recommendation here, so stop pretending we are.
Actually, we are talking about how adults perceive(d) the things in the story. It started with the person who wrote a misleading headline for the story. Then assorted news people and their editors added their own perceptions to the story. Then the broadcasters retold it in their own words. Then the talk-show hosts added their own misperceptions, to give us a story radically different from what actually happened. Then the /. crowd got ahold of the summary and took it in many radically different directions.
But maybe I'm just guessing that all these people in the news-mangling chain are legally adults. ;-)
Jeez; how many times did you post this? I counted 33 copies, totalling more than half of the lines showing in my copy of the discussion, and I don't even have it set to show everything.
Flooding a discussion like this with identical copy&paste tirades is usually a good way to find yourself banned by just about any serious discussion site.
So not only can you say nothing about intelligence based on mDNA but mDNA is worthless for anything other than paternity and descendence studies.
Wait -- How can you use mDNA for determining paternity? It's only passed via the maternal line. I seem to have missed something about mitochondrial DNA ...
(Actually, I've read claims that the occasional sperm cell contains one or more mitochondria. So it's possible that a tiny amount of our mitochondrial DNA comes from a male ancestor. )
White countries need more diversity. They will be 100% diverse when there are no white people left.
I remember around 1980 reading comments from demographers that their best evidence was that the US had passed a threshold sometime in the previous few years: The majority of Americans now had black-African ancestors. This was, of course, only a rough estimate, since DNA testing was in its infancy then (and might be said to be in its toddler stage now ;-). But the evidence since then seems to be consistent with their conclusion.
I've seen claims recently that only about 1/4 of the American population is of pure European descent. Of course, around 3/4 of the population "passes" for white, and most of those don't even know about their non-white ancestors. The population appears to be mostly white because that's the main source of their genes. But to the racists among us, there has to be some worry about the fact that more than half of the white people around them aren't "pure".
In my case, nobody would suspect that I'm not pure white, probably entirely norther-European. But in fact our family records show that my father's father's mother was an Ojibwa (aka Chippewa). I don't consider this terribly significant, because I've never faced discrimination on that basis. It's also not very special, since current estimates are that 20-25% of the US population has "Native-American" (the current euphemism since there are now so many folks from India in the country ;-) ancestry. I've found that when I mention this, the person I'm talking to often tells me which of their ancestors was in which tribe. So I can easily believe that 20-25% estimate.
Anyway, it does appear that the folks who want to keep America pure white have already lost the battle. It's only a matter of a few more generations until it evens out, and the majority doesn't even look white.
I'm a Canadian. By your definition that makes me an American.
Nah; you're a North-American. ;-)
The simplest way to explain why "American" refers to a citizen of just the one country is to consider the question "What's the only country in the world with 'America' in its name?" The English term "American" is an adjective that refers to that one country. That's why English-speaking people everywhere use "American" to refer to citizens of that country. Similarly, they use "Canadian" to refer to anything related to the country with the string "Canada" in its name.
Granted, it is confusing to have "America" also used in the names of a couple of continents. But we should be smart enough to handle that issue. This problem doesn't exist with, e.g., "Africa". It is used in the names of several countries, so when you want to talk about citizens of one of those countries, you usually wouldn't say "African"; you'd include another part of the country's name.
There have been a few attempts to coin names based on the "US" abbreviation, but that sorta flopped. Part of the problem is that there are a lot of other countries whose names (in translation) include "United States of". So "citizen of the United States" is technically ambiguous, and refers to different countries when you translate it into various other languages.
But no other country uses the character string "America" in its name, so it can be safely and unambiguously used (in any language) to refer to a citizen of just the one country.
Time to be picky, picky, picky ...
The quotes aren't examples of racism; they're example of xenophobia. Racism means fear or hatred of others based on race. But the targets of these quotes included people who were genetically close relatives of the Jews of the time, so they're not actually based on race. The term Goyim referred to everyone outside the Jewish social group, which is what xenophobia deals with.
Actually, "goyim" is often translated as "nations", which is a closer English match for the meaning. It has been common (for Jews and non-Jews) to view the Jews as a "national" group, which is the basis of considering them disloyal outsiders. The parent's quotes are simply the same thing seen from the Jewish side. The same attitudes are easily found about other religious groups, e.g., Catholics and Muslims.
Of course, it has become common for people to use "racism" to mean "saying something I don't like about someone I do like". But this sorta cheapens the term. It's a more useful term if it's used in its basic meaning of classifying people by superficial racial characteristics. The English language also has useful words for social divisions based on other criteria.
Any man who refers to himself as something else and then an American is not an American at all.
Not sure I understand this. I recall once referring to myself first as "your typical American mongrel", and then explaining that I was a French-Scottish-Irish-Dutch-Danish-Italian-Ojibwa-American. Did the second description cancel out the first? Or should it just be considered a sort of mocking of the usual "X-American" usage?
It also occurs to me to wonder how many other countries use this sort of phrasing. I know I've seen similar descriptions for Mexicans and Brazilians, both of which have a history of mixed immigration similar to the US, but I have no idea if it's common in those countries.
It might be especially useful if the error reply were of the form "450 Blocked by $Censor", where $Censor is the name of the entity (governmental or corporate or whatever) that has imposed the blocking. It should give enough information that the client can identify the agency or person(s) responsible for the blocking.
We are probably going to have to start to manipulate the climate. When that happens there are going to be major disasters (entire countries turned into deserts; millions of people starved; flooding etc).
There's also the problem of legal liability. Lots of people have pointed out that, if a corporation with deep pockets does something and someone suffers, there's a lawsuit; if nobody does anything and someone suffers, it's an Act of God (who can't be sued in this world). This is a problem, for example, with some medicines. They typically have unpleasant side effects for some patients, and these victims often sue. But if you don't sell treat them or sell them anything, you can't be sued. There have been claims that this is what has caused the exit of many companies from the production of vaccines. The same legal process would apply to climate control. If you try to control bad weather, and it happens anyway, you may be liable for the damage, but if you do nothing, you're not responsible.
The more slowly and more in control we do it the more chance there will be to limit that; the more it's limited the more chance there is to actually succeed.
I'd guess that most engineers would agree. But they'd all be willing to help do pilot studies. This is assuming that they can get liability coverage. Or if it can be done by the government, which is a lot harder to sue for damages.
Also, I doubt that anyone would claim that we fully understand the climate or the fine details of how we're affecting it. This would further encourage a go-slow policy.
OTOH, arguing that we shouldn't start pushing the climate around until we know what we're doing is specious. We've been doing that for thousands of years, on a small scale, when we didn't know what we were doing. We've been doing it much more strongly for the last couple of centuries, and we now do somewhat understand what we've been doing. Economic forces guarantee that we won't stop pushing the climate around. There are over 7 billion of us now, and those people have to eat. So the question really is whether we will move into controlling our climate-pushing activities, or continue to push the climate in an uncontrolled fashion.
And how is declaring "engineering solutions will be found" not just simply passing the buck to the future?
Well, of course, it has to be in the future, because we've so resolutely refused to solve the problems in the past. ;-)
But various others have pointed out that the "engineering solutions" may not be very far in the future, if we want to implement them. One of the consequences of the accumulated evidence that the recent climate changes are primarily due to human activity is that we know that we're capable of pushing the world' climate around, and we know how we've been doing it. So from an engineering viewpoint, pushing it in a different direction (e.g., stability or slower change) is within our capabilities. Granted, the "Further Research is Needed" mantra applies, but we know enough to take effective action now if we want to.
The major questions aren't scientific or technical; they're economic, political and religious. That is, it doesn't do much good to convince the engineers that there's a problem that they can fix. They already know about it (and are looking for funding ;-). We also have to get the go-ahead from the leaders of our governments and major corporations.
The outlook isn't necessarily good. We do have documentation about various major disasters throughout human history, including many that were caused by humans who understood that they were causing a disaster. History says that humans often don't act on such knowledge, even when their society is collapsing around them.
We saw a good small-scale example of this back in 2005. Before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the US Government ran a simulation study of such events. Google "Hurricane Pam" to read all about it. Katrina was pretty similar to Pam. The US Army Corps of Engineers produced a thorough report on the physical infrastructure of the Mississippi Delta, which listed all the places where the levees would later break during Katrina, plus estimates of the maintenance required to fix the problems. Congress turned down the applications for funding. Everyone involved knew that it was just a matter of time until the disaster hit, but the government didn't fund the maintenance, and the disaster followed the engineers' prediction practically to the letter.
This is a local example of the sort of disasters that our political systems have historically perpetrated with full knowledge beforehand. It looks like the climate-change story is a repeat performance. Some of the scientists involved decided to try to publicise it a couple of decades back, on the grounds that it was a growing problem that we could probably fix if we want to. But history says that we probably won't do anything about it, although we know how to.
(If you want a bigger example, look up the history of ozone depletion. That's actually a fairly good example of partial success. The depletion is known to be almost entirely due to chemical compounds added to the atmosphere by human activity. Our dumping of those compounds has been radically decreased, and the depletion has nearly leveled off, though it hasn't been reversed. But it is an interesting example of human governments cooperating on a global level to deal with a global problem. So there's some hope. We don't always fail when facing such large-scale problems. ;-)
Whatever happens, it will become history, and you can't change history.
Sure you can; textbook writers change history with every edition.
Well, I think the word that applies is "tacky", not "wrong". ;-)
It's a value judgement, not a legal judgement.
... "purpose" is definitely part of genetically engineered organisms, since their DNA has been directly altered by knowing, thinking humans, and not evolution.
Indeed. And I've known a few biologists who like to "tweak" their colleagues by pointing this out. Also, there are certain kinds of animal behavior for which "purpose" or "intent" by the animal itself is widely considered a correct term. Consider a hungry predator stalking prey. It clearly is doing this "in order to" get a meal. Now, you can make the obvious charge that, scientifically, we really should object and say that we need good evidence that the critter really has such thought processes. But with some of the larger predators, problem-solving skills have been demonstrated. It's then easy to argue that, with these intelligent predators, simple mental connections such as "I'm hungry ... Edible animal over there ... Stalk ... Catch ... Eat" should be the default assumption. This may be a very simple example of "purpose", but it really should qualify. These animals have (simple) minds. The stalking behavior is done with intent to catch prey, which in turn is done to get food.
The problem seen in intro bio classes (and political discussions of evolution) is that people tend to infer purpose where there is no visible evidence. Sunflowers don't turn their leaves and flowers toward the sun with the purpose of maximizing solar input. They don't have minds at all, as far as we can tell. They do that because their genes produce chemical processes that result in that behavior. This developed because their ancestors with cells that behaved that way produced more seeds than relatives with poorer turning mechanisms.