I'll patronize you when it is called for. It is called for in this case. 3" of wintry mix is a mild inconvenience, not a shut the whole city down natural disaster. Oh yeah, slush/sleet DOES plow out of the way with no problems. Drive slow is the right response to such conditions. As to the whole needing momentum to go up hill on ice; yeah, not so much. Proper throttle modulation to avoid tire spin works better since you'll be in control. Then again, I drive through worse conditions every year, so I wouldn't know how to handle such things...
You keep saying "drive slow" like there was some other option being taken. Did you miss there part where I described bumper to bumper traffic for hours on end? Excessive speed, sliding, and spinning out weren't exactly problems here. Just masses of people tying up roads that were overloaded with mild slipping issues going uphill from a complete stop every now and then. Most people had the sense to stay off the roads that were completely iced over. (And I think you're nuts if you think you could have driven up them without chains regardless of throttle control.)
Like I said, most people were driving sensibly. (By default, if nothing else.) I only saw maybe 15-20 incidents of people spinning their tires in the whole 13+ hours, and every one of them got it under control after a few seconds without needing a push. Moderating the throttle is not a hard skill to learn, and yesterday was good practice for a lot of Atlantans. I did see one guy fishtail in the opposite lane (while driving one-handed so he could smoke), but that was an outlier.
Driving skill was not the primary issue for why my commute took so long and certainly not excessive speed.
Salt spreaders are an expensive luxury in most cases, if your car isn't prepared for ice you shouldn't be driving. Proper winter tires is better than salt.
No one was expecting the ice, and dropping hundreds of dollars for all new tires twice a year is more appropriately called "an expensive luxury" for people in a city that gets an event like this only twice a decade or so. Snow chains make more sense.
(But if, like me, you only apply them only once every few years, and the ones you have have a non-standard design that was just the last thing in the store before the last big event with some sort of crazy cross chain hook thing that you can't find instructions for after 30 freaking minutes of Googling and seeing example after example of more logical designs, then that means eff all too.)
I know nothing about Atlanta, so I know there could be a genuine reason - just wondering if it was because there are no pavements on the route, because it was too cold, because you just thought walking might be more dangerous than driving, or something else??
Atlanta is a city of cars with massive amounts of suburban sprawl. Sidewalks are missing from many stretches of road that go through residential and other non-commercial areas, and bike lanes are almost non-existent. The terrain is very hilly too.
Plus, very few people were dressed appropriately for being outside in sub-freezing weather for hours at a time. I wasn't, because I was not expecting this. Had I been, it would have taken me a third of the time that it did take me to drive. I kick myself for not bringing appropriate cold weather gear to work (and for not just staying home that day).
If I had any idea what I was going to get into, I might have tried it anyway (which would have been DUMB, because I didn't know how long it took to walk that distance until one of my roommates had to the next day). But I didn't, and at the time I left I had the delusion that I was going to make it home before my driveway iced over. I wasn't worried at all about the drive itself; surely it wouldn't take me more than an hour, right?
I'm sure you personally know quite a lot of people who are living from paycheck to paycheck and/or are living on welfare (which by the way is also only possible because of cheap oil). Those people just didn't exist back then because they could not survive the winters.
You... pretty much don't know anything about the labor conditions surrounding the industrial revolution, do you? Living paycheck to paycheck is an improvement on what people in the 19th century had to deal with. Try being unable to feed your children, even with them working 60+ hrs a week. Consider that they had debtor's prisons back then. You think these people had better finances than people today? We at least have a minimum wage.
Isn't it funny how, when it comes to religion or other parts of life, we have to accept what science tells us no matter how unpleasant the consequences are. It is inviolable and can't be argued with because it is objective truth. Denialists are shamed and labeled as low-IQ morons. But, as soon as race enters the issue, suddenly science cannot be right under any circumstances, and we have to ignore the evidence of our lying eyes. Isn't that strange?
The problem is that science governing differences in races (which is a pretty scientifically shaky categorization scheme to begin with considering the relative genetic diversity within races) has long been tainted with conclusions driving the "research." Frankly, most so-called "science" surrounding race is pretty much the opposite of science. We're not closing our eyes to the truth on it, we're just looking beneath the surface.
It's a lot like what you see when people try to wrap a veneer of science around creationism or against global warming or in favor of the health of smoking or the efficacy of homeopathy. Small sample groups, tests that aren't comprehensive, taking small flaws in the opposition position and building castles in the sky around it (often *decades* after mainstream science has accounted for the issue and moved on), etc.
It is *possible* that there are genetic differences between African populations and Eurasian populations that affect general intelligence, but IQ tests are an absolutely terrible way of identifying them if they do exist, and most of the theories explaining them like the "cold weather" theory are heavily wrapped up in notions of racial superiority that have no place in science and are frequently adopted by people who have no interest in any science except that which can be used to justify their own beliefs.
I'm amazed that a politician of all people took the gamble in that direction.
I'm not. You have to understand that Georgia is a very conservative state. People will forgive you for "acts of God" if you didn't "waste" tax dollars (even if you ended up spending more later). People will crucify you for impeding business, running a nanny state, and wasting taxpayer dollars if it turns out *not* to be a disaster.
Oh, and the people hurt worst by it? Probably the most liberal counties in the state, so who gives a flying f--k for electoral purposes? It's not like you're going to win votes by getting rural voters to pay for salt trucks for the city. It's barely even considered part of the state by a lot of people -- just a Yankee colony.
Why? 2-3 inches here and the only things we do different are leave earlier and drive slower. No chains. No pre-salting the roads. Just slow the fuck down until the roads get plowed or melt.
The problem was twofold: every single business and government agency let their people go home at the exact same time (roughly 12:30-1:00 PM). Even in good weather, this would have caused an hours long snarl in the city, but when you have masses of people struck with the sudden realization that if they don't leave now they may not be able to get up/down their driveways, then yeah, you get a complete traffic clusterf--k.
The second problem was that we weren't dealing with whatever dainty light fairy powder you Northerners deal with in which you think a snowplow would help. We were dealing with sleet and slush. "Wintry mix," you hear it called on weather stations. By the time sundown hit, most of the roads were covered in a solid, eighth-inch think sheet of ice except for those parts kept warm and shielded by the constant gridlock over them.
I know, because I was in it for 13 1/2 hours to only go 8.5 miles. There was no "drive slower" option for any of us on my route home, and I never passed a single accident on the way. We moved a car length every 2-3 minutes, and having to restart going uphill after dark meant that some people we sliding, because you need freaking *momentum* to drive uphill on ice. People were running out of gas and having to abandon cars. A lot of people were camping out in cars in parking lots or sheltering at stores that stayed open, like Home Depot.
I have a roommate who had to walk home the next day, and his time revealed that I could have walked home, walked back to work, and walked home again with a half hour break in between each leg and still beaten myself home.
So don't freaking patronize us. There's stuff that could have been done better in terms of planning by the city and in terms of more people keeping an eye on the weather (the midday snow took everyone at our office by surprise), but it wasn't a matter of just driving better. There was literally *nothing* many of us could have done from that angle. 99% of the people I saw drove sensibly. (Well, more like self-entitled jackasses who wouldn't spit on a man if he was on fire because it might make them thirsty, the way they refused let people over or tried to skip ahead using the middle lanes, but generally safely.)
I know/. doesn't carry the newest news, but please.... just because Kentucky is considering it now?
So, if someone else once did something, then it's never newsworthy if anyone else every does it again, even if it affects a completely different group of people?
That pretty much eliminates ALL news. "There is nothing new under the sun," and all.
Pointing out that something the powers that be consider a crime may actually be an act of extra-legal social justice is a perfectly legitamate comment.
How is it social justice to steal someone's Twitter identity just because it happens to be very short and catchy? Did you not read the post I responded to in which the poster blamed Mr. Hiroshima for "swimming with the sharks" just for being "a social media (value = what exactly?)" That's straight up blaming the victim of theft and extortion for nothing more than being popular in a forum the poster doesn't respect.
And your particular phrasing of "having something the criminal wanted" combined with your assumption that the commenter's 'life choices' are the sole cause of his present level of poverty or affluence strongly suggests your a right wing asshat who should be taken out and shot for the good of the nation.
His life choices for being a social media personality where what was being blamed for him being targeted. Poverty or affluence has nothing to do with this. He just was just an early adopter who got lucky that his first name's initial wasn't taken yet. That was why he was targeted. He had something that someone else wanted and wasn't willing to take the legal road or just accept his right to refuse. There is no justification for extortion for here.
Also, I'm solidly a progressive, but your lunatic off-topic strawmanning here is reminding me once against the only thing worse than arguing politics with an idiot is having one publicly take your side.
More important than idiot ethicists standing in the way is the "more than a decade" for approval in the west. As opposed to what? Hundreds of thousands dying each year for lack of organs?
Hundreds of thousands dying from poorly made organs. Possibly in very bad ways and after spending hundreds of thousands or millions for them and being given false hope.
The FDA doesn't exist just to dangle perfect cures above people's heads and cackle as they die frustrated. It exists to keep bad products that can kill people who are relying on them to save them from reaching the market. The FDA has guidelines for allowing some experimental treatments when there are no alternatives, but when there are, it's best to use what we currently know is safe.
70 years ago, before the FDA was given the power to evaluate the safety of drugs and medical devices, we had radium "tonics" and antibiotic syrups made with antifreeze. 50 years ago, companies could give doctors "trial samples" of drugs not yet approved for sale -- until thalidomide caused thousands of babies to be born with birth defects. The FDA could have stopped that had it had the power back then -- the drug was on hold due to concerns about thyroid toxicity.
The FDA is not the enemy. If you had to die, would you rather it be through someone being too careful or would you rather it be because someone wasn't careful enough and profited from it?
And then, what would a twice removed or twice updated human being life's be worth? Will we treat them with the same respect and rights as a First born?
Considering that this technology would most likely come first to the extremely wealthy, I expect that the answers will swiftly either become (a) "yes" or (b) "no, and it sucks to be a meatbag commoners."
Once it becomes cheap and easy for people to manufacture their own goods why the fuck would they buy expensive crap from big names.
Why do people buy an MP3 collection when they could just hum their favorite songs all day?
For a long time, the commercial produced version will probably simply be better. And when there becomes a way of getting the same for free (i.e. piracy), then the laws will simply be cranked up to try and prevent it, just like we did in the wake of early file-sharing networks.
For instance an average European has an average IQ of 105 compared to 70 in Africa. Though, the higher IQ is likely due to divergent racial evolution that occured well after the insertion of neanderthal genes...
Or it could be a matter of education, relative stress in childhood, and diet. Or it could be a matter of a cultural upbringing that doesn't value and train people in the types of reasoning favored by IQ tests. I'd like to see a test cataloging our relative abilities to navigate vast terrain, to remember and recite oral histories, to perform pattern recognition based on ability to identify wild plants, or just a simple ability to navigate complex social situations, for example. Or it could be a function of languages, since we already know that languages can affect things like the ability to recognize and categorize colors.
Have you ever read letters from American Civil War soldiers to their families back home? We're not talking a college education demographic by a long shot, but the eloquence and care of language in these letters is often breathtaking. Are we "dumber" than them as a populace for not being able to write like an average farm boy could 150 years ago? Or are we just trained for different uses of our brains.
IQ is a crappy measure of genetic superiority, because it fails to account for environment & upbringing, and it's heavily biased towards one particular culture's most valued intelligence traits.
If he wasn't a social media (value = what exactly?) then this would never have happened anyway.
And if she wasn't wearing those clothes, she wouldn't have gotten raped. Clearly, she was asking for it.
Blaming the victim for having something a criminal wanted is about the closest thing you can get in terms of being human scum to being the criminal himself. You should be ashamed of yourself, but you're probably way to smug about how your life choices wouldn't have led to you having anything this guy wanted. Like that somehow makes you superior.
"8. The refusal to take close up photos from various angles, the refusal to take microscopic images of the specimen, the refusal to release high resolution photos, is inexplicable, recklessly negligent, and bizarre. Any intelligent adult, adolescent, child, chimpanzee, monkey, dog, or rodent with even a modicum of curiosity, would approach, investigate and closely examine a bowl-shaped structure which appears just a few feet in front of them when 12 days earlier they hadn't noticed it. But not NASA and its rover team who have refused to take even a single close up photo."
His claim for standing to sue is pretty funny too. It boils down to, "I did a bunch of impressive neuroscience work in the late 70s & early 80s, vanished for 20 years, and then reappeared two decades later in full Linus Pauling crank mode churning out books on astrobiology and 'proving' that the evolution of DNA predates Earth by 6 billion years, that upper atmosphere plasma are actually extremophiles, and that otherwise I'm super interested in Mars."
"Oh, and I'm a taxpayer and really interested in this rock, therefore I deserved to have control over what NASA does in regards to it since they're too boneheaded to see how important it is."
Here's one of his other books. The reviews give you an idea of how far this man has fallen as a scientist.
Did the average human 100,000 years ago breastfeed until 12 years old, or until 6 months old. I doubt that we have any idea.
Hunter-gatherer populations are a good proximate for human behavior that long ago. It varies by culture, but the average seems to be 3-5 years of age. Inuit are kind of an outlier at 7 years of age, but it makes sense given their environment. That's also about the same age at which most non-agricultural societies considered it safe to raise another child. Infanticide is common as a means of birth control until that age.
It is interesting though that we didn't evolve a means of controlling fertility until children are old enough to be semi self-sufficient (or dead of unfortunate events) the way, for example, lions do.
Humans, like most mammals, can universally digest lactose in childhood. Also, like most mammals, the gene for producing lactase largely shuts down in adulthood, since in nature, it's largely unneeded and a waste of energy resources. People descended from milk-drinking cultures (mostly Europeans) have variations of a gene that prevent lactase production from turning off in adulthood.
Of course, this has little to nothing to do with breasts, since humans are the only primates that have visible breasts when not nursing their newborn young, and even then they are much, much smaller than in humans. It's most likely they exist purely for sexual signalling (like a peacock's tail), since their size is mostly irrelevant to their function in child-rearing.
Other than just pure momentum, I just don't see anything FB unique that can't be duplicated by G+ or someone else. Their backend software is pretty cool, but that isn't exactly something the users see or care about.
There's nothing that Wal-mart sells that can't be bought elsewhere. But like Facebook, the reason it dominates is because it does all of that in one place, has a good back end (understatement for Wal-mart), has a well-established customer base that is content to stick with what they know despite what all the "cool" kids think, and leverages its size and reach well to keep its advantages intact.
How does that compare to slurping some soylent ? The table conversation ? The joy of eating ? I simply don't get it, what the fun of soylent could be. Must be me.
That sounds delicious and either time-consuming or expensive (possibly both). Soylent is neither time-consuming nor expensive, and many of us simply don't have time to cook or money to eat out, much less time to socialize over every single meal, including breakfast and lunch.
I enjoy food when I get the chance to enjoy it. Most meals, though, are exercises in getting sufficient nutrition to live within my budget without making me late to work or making me have to stay longer. I plan to use Soylent to replace non-dinner meals, so that I can spend more of my life on things I enjoy. Heck, if Soylent frees up enough time, I may actually get a chance to cook *more* in the evenings instead of just shoveling down pre-processed crap because I'm busy.
Also, there's the nutrition angle. Soylent may not be as good as a whole, prepared meal, but it's a hell of a lot better than what I eat for breakfast (nothing most days) and lunch (whatever restaurants I can get in and out of in under 15 minutes).
Everything in Soylent is GRAS (generally recognized as safe). The ingredient list is easy to find online, and all the company is really doing is paying someone to mix ingredients ordered from other suppliers which are already approved as safe in food. They aren't doing anything in house themselves beyond testing the recipe.
What exactly do you expect the FDA to find which would merit additional scrutiny beyond that which is already present at all their suppliers and at their mixer & packer?
It's the reason why the internet has been such a double-edge sword for politics. Rather than a world-wide network enabling us to reach and appreciate a far wider range of topics and beliefs, we've instead been largely enabled to find the most comfortable echo chamber to reinforce all of our crazy without having to listen to neighbors who might not agree with our increasingly detached beliefs.
Not that that's always a bad thing, if you're a persecuted minority, for example. But I think the edge facing us does more cutting than the other side of the sword most of the time. Just look at how partisan things have gotten.
You got 15 years experiene writing C code, good luck finding a "whiz kid" who can do it better than someone who's been doing it for that long.
You said it yourself, C isn't going away anytime soon. Stick to it as your bread and butter.
I agree with this sentiment wholeheartedly, and I want to flip your question around back at you:
How the hell do I get into embedded programming? I've got 7 years of C & C++ UNIX workstation & server programming on my resume, so I keep getting resumes tossed my way asking about embedded jobs with decent pay, but I'm not actually qualified for any of them. (Typical lazy recruiter BS.)
I am interested though because I enjoyed low-level programming when I did it in college, so let me know how to get into the position you are trying to leave. I could use the cash.
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I'll patronize you when it is called for. It is called for in this case. 3" of wintry mix is a mild inconvenience, not a shut the whole city down natural disaster. Oh yeah, slush/sleet DOES plow out of the way with no problems. Drive slow is the right response to such conditions. As to the whole needing momentum to go up hill on ice; yeah, not so much. Proper throttle modulation to avoid tire spin works better since you'll be in control. Then again, I drive through worse conditions every year, so I wouldn't know how to handle such things...
You keep saying "drive slow" like there was some other option being taken. Did you miss there part where I described bumper to bumper traffic for hours on end? Excessive speed, sliding, and spinning out weren't exactly problems here. Just masses of people tying up roads that were overloaded with mild slipping issues going uphill from a complete stop every now and then. Most people had the sense to stay off the roads that were completely iced over. (And I think you're nuts if you think you could have driven up them without chains regardless of throttle control.)
Like I said, most people were driving sensibly. (By default, if nothing else.) I only saw maybe 15-20 incidents of people spinning their tires in the whole 13+ hours, and every one of them got it under control after a few seconds without needing a push. Moderating the throttle is not a hard skill to learn, and yesterday was good practice for a lot of Atlantans. I did see one guy fishtail in the opposite lane (while driving one-handed so he could smoke), but that was an outlier.
Driving skill was not the primary issue for why my commute took so long and certainly not excessive speed.
Salt spreaders are an expensive luxury in most cases, if your car isn't prepared for ice you shouldn't be driving. Proper winter tires is better than salt.
No one was expecting the ice, and dropping hundreds of dollars for all new tires twice a year is more appropriately called "an expensive luxury" for people in a city that gets an event like this only twice a decade or so. Snow chains make more sense.
(But if, like me, you only apply them only once every few years, and the ones you have have a non-standard design that was just the last thing in the store before the last big event with some sort of crazy cross chain hook thing that you can't find instructions for after 30 freaking minutes of Googling and seeing example after example of more logical designs, then that means eff all too.)
(Yeah, the replacements are already on order.)
I know nothing about Atlanta, so I know there could be a genuine reason - just wondering if it was because there are no pavements on the route, because it was too cold, because you just thought walking might be more dangerous than driving, or something else??
Atlanta is a city of cars with massive amounts of suburban sprawl. Sidewalks are missing from many stretches of road that go through residential and other non-commercial areas, and bike lanes are almost non-existent. The terrain is very hilly too.
Plus, very few people were dressed appropriately for being outside in sub-freezing weather for hours at a time. I wasn't, because I was not expecting this. Had I been, it would have taken me a third of the time that it did take me to drive. I kick myself for not bringing appropriate cold weather gear to work (and for not just staying home that day).
If I had any idea what I was going to get into, I might have tried it anyway (which would have been DUMB, because I didn't know how long it took to walk that distance until one of my roommates had to the next day). But I didn't, and at the time I left I had the delusion that I was going to make it home before my driveway iced over. I wasn't worried at all about the drive itself; surely it wouldn't take me more than an hour, right?
I was so, so naive.
I'm sure you personally know quite a lot of people who are living from paycheck to paycheck and/or are living on welfare (which by the way is also only possible because of cheap oil). Those people just didn't exist back then because they could not survive the winters.
You... pretty much don't know anything about the labor conditions surrounding the industrial revolution, do you? Living paycheck to paycheck is an improvement on what people in the 19th century had to deal with. Try being unable to feed your children, even with them working 60+ hrs a week. Consider that they had debtor's prisons back then. You think these people had better finances than people today? We at least have a minimum wage.
Also, you might want to read up on the effects of poverty and deprivation on decision making. In many cases, it's poverty that causes lower intelligence, not purely vice versa.
Isn't it funny how, when it comes to religion or other parts of life, we have to accept what science tells us no matter how unpleasant the consequences are. It is inviolable and can't be argued with because it is objective truth. Denialists are shamed and labeled as low-IQ morons. But, as soon as race enters the issue, suddenly science cannot be right under any circumstances, and we have to ignore the evidence of our lying eyes. Isn't that strange?
The problem is that science governing differences in races (which is a pretty scientifically shaky categorization scheme to begin with considering the relative genetic diversity within races) has long been tainted with conclusions driving the "research." Frankly, most so-called "science" surrounding race is pretty much the opposite of science. We're not closing our eyes to the truth on it, we're just looking beneath the surface.
It's a lot like what you see when people try to wrap a veneer of science around creationism or against global warming or in favor of the health of smoking or the efficacy of homeopathy. Small sample groups, tests that aren't comprehensive, taking small flaws in the opposition position and building castles in the sky around it (often *decades* after mainstream science has accounted for the issue and moved on), etc.
It is *possible* that there are genetic differences between African populations and Eurasian populations that affect general intelligence, but IQ tests are an absolutely terrible way of identifying them if they do exist, and most of the theories explaining them like the "cold weather" theory are heavily wrapped up in notions of racial superiority that have no place in science and are frequently adopted by people who have no interest in any science except that which can be used to justify their own beliefs.
I'm amazed that a politician of all people took the gamble in that direction.
I'm not. You have to understand that Georgia is a very conservative state. People will forgive you for "acts of God" if you didn't "waste" tax dollars (even if you ended up spending more later). People will crucify you for impeding business, running a nanny state, and wasting taxpayer dollars if it turns out *not* to be a disaster.
Oh, and the people hurt worst by it? Probably the most liberal counties in the state, so who gives a flying f--k for electoral purposes? It's not like you're going to win votes by getting rural voters to pay for salt trucks for the city. It's barely even considered part of the state by a lot of people -- just a Yankee colony.
Why? 2-3 inches here and the only things we do different are leave earlier and drive slower. No chains. No pre-salting the roads. Just slow the fuck down until the roads get plowed or melt.
The problem was twofold: every single business and government agency let their people go home at the exact same time (roughly 12:30-1:00 PM). Even in good weather, this would have caused an hours long snarl in the city, but when you have masses of people struck with the sudden realization that if they don't leave now they may not be able to get up/down their driveways, then yeah, you get a complete traffic clusterf--k.
The second problem was that we weren't dealing with whatever dainty light fairy powder you Northerners deal with in which you think a snowplow would help. We were dealing with sleet and slush. "Wintry mix," you hear it called on weather stations. By the time sundown hit, most of the roads were covered in a solid, eighth-inch think sheet of ice except for those parts kept warm and shielded by the constant gridlock over them.
I know, because I was in it for 13 1/2 hours to only go 8.5 miles. There was no "drive slower" option for any of us on my route home, and I never passed a single accident on the way. We moved a car length every 2-3 minutes, and having to restart going uphill after dark meant that some people we sliding, because you need freaking *momentum* to drive uphill on ice. People were running out of gas and having to abandon cars. A lot of people were camping out in cars in parking lots or sheltering at stores that stayed open, like Home Depot.
I have a roommate who had to walk home the next day, and his time revealed that I could have walked home, walked back to work, and walked home again with a half hour break in between each leg and still beaten myself home.
So don't freaking patronize us. There's stuff that could have been done better in terms of planning by the city and in terms of more people keeping an eye on the weather (the midday snow took everyone at our office by surprise), but it wasn't a matter of just driving better. There was literally *nothing* many of us could have done from that angle. 99% of the people I saw drove sensibly. (Well, more like self-entitled jackasses who wouldn't spit on a man if he was on fire because it might make them thirsty, the way they refused let people over or tried to skip ahead using the middle lanes, but generally safely.)
I know /. doesn't carry the newest news, but please.... just because Kentucky is considering it now?
So, if someone else once did something, then it's never newsworthy if anyone else every does it again, even if it affects a completely different group of people?
That pretty much eliminates ALL news. "There is nothing new under the sun," and all.
Pointing out that something the powers that be consider a crime may actually be an act of extra-legal social justice is a perfectly legitamate comment.
How is it social justice to steal someone's Twitter identity just because it happens to be very short and catchy? Did you not read the post I responded to in which the poster blamed Mr. Hiroshima for "swimming with the sharks" just for being "a social media (value = what exactly?)" That's straight up blaming the victim of theft and extortion for nothing more than being popular in a forum the poster doesn't respect.
And your particular phrasing of "having something the criminal wanted" combined with your assumption that the commenter's 'life choices' are the sole cause of his present level of poverty or affluence strongly suggests your a right wing asshat who should be taken out and shot for the good of the nation.
His life choices for being a social media personality where what was being blamed for him being targeted. Poverty or affluence has nothing to do with this. He just was just an early adopter who got lucky that his first name's initial wasn't taken yet. That was why he was targeted. He had something that someone else wanted and wasn't willing to take the legal road or just accept his right to refuse. There is no justification for extortion for here.
Also, I'm solidly a progressive, but your lunatic off-topic strawmanning here is reminding me once against the only thing worse than arguing politics with an idiot is having one publicly take your side.
More important than idiot ethicists standing in the way is the "more than a decade" for approval in the west. As opposed to what? Hundreds of thousands dying each year for lack of organs?
Hundreds of thousands dying from poorly made organs. Possibly in very bad ways and after spending hundreds of thousands or millions for them and being given false hope.
The FDA doesn't exist just to dangle perfect cures above people's heads and cackle as they die frustrated. It exists to keep bad products that can kill people who are relying on them to save them from reaching the market. The FDA has guidelines for allowing some experimental treatments when there are no alternatives, but when there are, it's best to use what we currently know is safe.
70 years ago, before the FDA was given the power to evaluate the safety of drugs and medical devices, we had radium "tonics" and antibiotic syrups made with antifreeze. 50 years ago, companies could give doctors "trial samples" of drugs not yet approved for sale -- until thalidomide caused thousands of babies to be born with birth defects. The FDA could have stopped that had it had the power back then -- the drug was on hold due to concerns about thyroid toxicity.
The FDA is not the enemy. If you had to die, would you rather it be through someone being too careful or would you rather it be because someone wasn't careful enough and profited from it?
And then, what would a twice removed or twice updated human being life's be worth? Will we treat them with the same respect and rights as a First born?
Considering that this technology would most likely come first to the extremely wealthy, I expect that the answers will swiftly either become (a) "yes" or (b) "no, and it sucks to be a meatbag commoners."
Admit it, the first thing we're all going to print is bacon.
Fixed that for you.
Once it becomes cheap and easy for people to manufacture their own goods why the fuck would they buy expensive crap from big names.
Why do people buy an MP3 collection when they could just hum their favorite songs all day?
For a long time, the commercial produced version will probably simply be better. And when there becomes a way of getting the same for free (i.e. piracy), then the laws will simply be cranked up to try and prevent it, just like we did in the wake of early file-sharing networks.
For instance an average European has an average IQ of 105 compared to 70 in Africa. Though, the higher IQ is likely due to divergent racial evolution that occured well after the insertion of neanderthal genes...
Or it could be a matter of education, relative stress in childhood, and diet. Or it could be a matter of a cultural upbringing that doesn't value and train people in the types of reasoning favored by IQ tests. I'd like to see a test cataloging our relative abilities to navigate vast terrain, to remember and recite oral histories, to perform pattern recognition based on ability to identify wild plants, or just a simple ability to navigate complex social situations, for example. Or it could be a function of languages, since we already know that languages can affect things like the ability to recognize and categorize colors.
Have you ever read letters from American Civil War soldiers to their families back home? We're not talking a college education demographic by a long shot, but the eloquence and care of language in these letters is often breathtaking. Are we "dumber" than them as a populace for not being able to write like an average farm boy could 150 years ago? Or are we just trained for different uses of our brains.
IQ is a crappy measure of genetic superiority, because it fails to account for environment & upbringing, and it's heavily biased towards one particular culture's most valued intelligence traits.
If he wasn't a social media (value = what exactly?) then this would never have happened anyway.
And if she wasn't wearing those clothes, she wouldn't have gotten raped. Clearly, she was asking for it.
Blaming the victim for having something a criminal wanted is about the closest thing you can get in terms of being human scum to being the criminal himself. You should be ashamed of yourself, but you're probably way to smug about how your life choices wouldn't have led to you having anything this guy wanted. Like that somehow makes you superior.
"8. The refusal to take close up photos from various angles, the refusal to take microscopic images of the specimen, the refusal to release high resolution photos, is inexplicable, recklessly negligent, and bizarre. Any intelligent adult, adolescent, child, chimpanzee, monkey, dog, or rodent with even a modicum of curiosity, would approach, investigate and closely examine a bowl-shaped structure which appears just a few feet in front of them when 12 days earlier they hadn't noticed it. But not NASA and its rover team who have refused to take even a single close up photo."
His claim for standing to sue is pretty funny too. It boils down to, "I did a bunch of impressive neuroscience work in the late 70s & early 80s, vanished for 20 years, and then reappeared two decades later in full Linus Pauling crank mode churning out books on astrobiology and 'proving' that the evolution of DNA predates Earth by 6 billion years, that upper atmosphere plasma are actually extremophiles, and that otherwise I'm super interested in Mars."
"Oh, and I'm a taxpayer and really interested in this rock, therefore I deserved to have control over what NASA does in regards to it since they're too boneheaded to see how important it is."
Here's one of his other books. The reviews give you an idea of how far this man has fallen as a scientist.
Did the average human 100,000 years ago breastfeed until 12 years old, or until 6 months old. I doubt that we have any idea.
Hunter-gatherer populations are a good proximate for human behavior that long ago. It varies by culture, but the average seems to be 3-5 years of age. Inuit are kind of an outlier at 7 years of age, but it makes sense given their environment. That's also about the same age at which most non-agricultural societies considered it safe to raise another child. Infanticide is common as a means of birth control until that age.
It is interesting though that we didn't evolve a means of controlling fertility until children are old enough to be semi self-sufficient (or dead of unfortunate events) the way, for example, lions do.
Humans, like most mammals, can universally digest lactose in childhood. Also, like most mammals, the gene for producing lactase largely shuts down in adulthood, since in nature, it's largely unneeded and a waste of energy resources. People descended from milk-drinking cultures (mostly Europeans) have variations of a gene that prevent lactase production from turning off in adulthood.
Of course, this has little to nothing to do with breasts, since humans are the only primates that have visible breasts when not nursing their newborn young, and even then they are much, much smaller than in humans. It's most likely they exist purely for sexual signalling (like a peacock's tail), since their size is mostly irrelevant to their function in child-rearing.
Either you fail at fractions, or I should either envy your longevity or pity your unimaginable gastric issues. Maybe both.
Other than just pure momentum, I just don't see anything FB unique that can't be duplicated by G+ or someone else. Their backend software is pretty cool, but that isn't exactly something the users see or care about.
There's nothing that Wal-mart sells that can't be bought elsewhere. But like Facebook, the reason it dominates is because it does all of that in one place, has a good back end (understatement for Wal-mart), has a well-established customer base that is content to stick with what they know despite what all the "cool" kids think, and leverages its size and reach well to keep its advantages intact.
How does that compare to slurping some soylent ? The table conversation ? The joy of eating ? I simply don't get it, what the fun of soylent could be. Must be me.
That sounds delicious and either time-consuming or expensive (possibly both). Soylent is neither time-consuming nor expensive, and many of us simply don't have time to cook or money to eat out, much less time to socialize over every single meal, including breakfast and lunch.
I enjoy food when I get the chance to enjoy it. Most meals, though, are exercises in getting sufficient nutrition to live within my budget without making me late to work or making me have to stay longer. I plan to use Soylent to replace non-dinner meals, so that I can spend more of my life on things I enjoy. Heck, if Soylent frees up enough time, I may actually get a chance to cook *more* in the evenings instead of just shoveling down pre-processed crap because I'm busy.
Also, there's the nutrition angle. Soylent may not be as good as a whole, prepared meal, but it's a hell of a lot better than what I eat for breakfast (nothing most days) and lunch (whatever restaurants I can get in and out of in under 15 minutes).
Everything in Soylent is GRAS (generally recognized as safe). The ingredient list is easy to find online, and all the company is really doing is paying someone to mix ingredients ordered from other suppliers which are already approved as safe in food. They aren't doing anything in house themselves beyond testing the recipe.
What exactly do you expect the FDA to find which would merit additional scrutiny beyond that which is already present at all their suppliers and at their mixer & packer?
"Slashdot used to combine editor quality control and insight with crowd-sourced harvesting to cover the 'News for Nerds' space."
No it didn't. My sig for years was a protest at the idea of paying for Slashdot when the editors couldn't go a month without a dupe.
It's the reason why the internet has been such a double-edge sword for politics. Rather than a world-wide network enabling us to reach and appreciate a far wider range of topics and beliefs, we've instead been largely enabled to find the most comfortable echo chamber to reinforce all of our crazy without having to listen to neighbors who might not agree with our increasingly detached beliefs.
Not that that's always a bad thing, if you're a persecuted minority, for example. But I think the edge facing us does more cutting than the other side of the sword most of the time. Just look at how partisan things have gotten.
You got 15 years experiene writing C code, good luck finding a "whiz kid" who can do it better than someone who's been doing it for that long.
You said it yourself, C isn't going away anytime soon. Stick to it as your bread and butter.
I agree with this sentiment wholeheartedly, and I want to flip your question around back at you:
How the hell do I get into embedded programming? I've got 7 years of C & C++ UNIX workstation & server programming on my resume, so I keep getting resumes tossed my way asking about embedded jobs with decent pay, but I'm not actually qualified for any of them. (Typical lazy recruiter BS.)
I am interested though because I enjoyed low-level programming when I did it in college, so let me know how to get into the position you are trying to leave. I could use the cash.