He only sounds like that because of Russia's financial crisis. They had to let their translators go and they're using Google Translate to feed him his lines. Note how running this through English->Russian then Russian->English has no effect on its intelligibility; that's because it's already been made into semantic hash by the original mechanical translation:
Listen, having nuclear weapons, my uncle was a great professor, scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Good genes, very good genes, OK, very clever, Wharton financial school, very good, very smart - you know, if you are a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, for example, it's good if I ran. As a liberal democrat , They will say that I am one of the smartest people in any part of the world - it's true! - but when you are a conservative Republican, they try - oh, they make a number - that's why I always start: I went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, made it, built a fortune - you know that I must constantly Give your powers, because we are a little at a disadvantage - but you look at the nuclear case that really bothers me - it would be so simple, and it's not as important as these lives (nuclear powerful, my uncle explained that for I have many, many years ago, power and it was 35 years ago, He is Clarifies the strength of what will happen and he was right - who would have thought?) But when you look at what's going on with the Four prisoners - now there were three and now four - but when there were three and even now, I would say that this is all in the messenger; Guys, and they are guys, because, you know, they do not do it, they did not think that women are smarter now than men, so you know that they will need another 150 years - but the Persians Great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators , So, they, they just killed, they just killed us.
Sure, but you don't set such limits to detect catastrophes. You set such limits to detect unforeseen circumstances that might, perhaps in rare situations, lead to catastrophe.
A worker being exposed to harmful levels of radiation is catastrophic. A worker being exposed to a level of radiation that is medically harmless but which should not have occurred is a situation that requires investigation, because that means something about your assumptions isn't quite right. That doesn't mean you ought to panic; in any sensibly conservative procedure you have to accept that false positive concern is a routine event -- as in your story of the smoke detector.
COBOL remains in use -- it's been estimated that even today on average a typical American interacts at least indirectly with a piece of COBOL software more than a dozen times daily. Over 200 billion lines of code are currently being maintained, and that figure is growing, albeit slowly. It's not hard to find COBOL jobs, if you live in a city which is a major center for some the industries that were early adopters of computers.
I understand this, but this is as it should be, and if people are still driving more gas guzzzlers than is offset by the income, the answer is to raise the tax.
I've been donating to the project for a few years. I hope it is helping the developers focus more time on working on ReactOS and getting the resources they need.
I just want to say, good for you. Too often the only thing people contribute to a project are complaints that it's not going fast enough.
There is a third option between letting people do things which impose a cost on everyone else (e.g. like pollution), and forcing everybody to do the same thing. You can make people who want to do those things pay at least some of those costs.
If you want to drive a 12 MPG Maybach, go ahead, but you then pay a mileage excise tax that goes to offset the costs. It's the same hedonic calculus -- how much do I want to pay for the performance? But with more realistic cost numbers.
What do you do with those taxes? Well you can offset some of the costs of the wars we fight to secure access to Middle Eastern oil -- about 2.5 trillion dollars in the last decades or so. You don't think we'd have fought the wars if there wasn't oil there, do you? Or if oil demand were much lower, for that matter.
Or you could put the money into energy efficiency and pollution control research.
But one of the best ways to use the money is to simply give it back to people who make choices that lower public costs,e.g. people who choose to drive, say, a Chevy Malibu sedan (46 MPG city) owner would get a mileage rebate.
But isn't this meddling with peoples' choice of cars. Yes! We're encouraging people to make choices that cost us less. But we're still giving them a choice. That's more than you get under a system where you're forced to pay the consequences of other peoples' selfish choices.
It's the power of habit and humans amazing power to adapt to whatever is usual to them. If you go outside all the time, the effort and discomfort are scarcely noticeable. If you take a couch potato and drag him on your weekend hike and it'll feel to him like a crime against humanity.
In a scorched earth war you attack the enemy's most valuable assets. This likely isn't going to be shantytowns in South Asia or Africa, it's going to be the greatest concentrations of wealth you can find. This would be bad for North America, Europe, Japan, and coastal China.
H. Beam Piper's future history series posits exactly such a war, which is why in his later stories people with Northern European surnames are a rarity (although somewhat more likely to be a protagonist). It's a small detail, but it makes sense.
It was in this vein that I asked the author of an unpublished manuscript I'd been given to review, why is there nobody with a Hispanic surname? He got all huffy about "political correctness", but my problem was that this was a post-apocalyptic story set in Southern California, where already Latinos outnumber Anglos. It was OK by me if he didn't want to write any Latino characters, but it made no sense that the apocalypse would selectively wipe out everyone with a Spanish name. All he needed was to come up with some plausible explanation, like an India/Pakistan style partition.
It worked for him, speaking in a strictly political sense. It actually cost the taxpayers many, many times more what PATCO was asking for.
Ironically PATCO endorsed Reagan in the 1980 election. PATCO was made up mostly of conservative military veterans, so Reagan's team approached them with a deal: Reagan would support their negotiating position if they'd switch their endorsement from the Democrats to him. Once he was safely elected Reagan reneged on the deal, then fired them when they went on strike.
It was a risky move, but the sheer drama of the move thrilled Reagan's non-union supporters. From a financial viewpoint, it cost billions to replace the fired controllers, not to mention the impact on the rest of the economy of the disruption involved.
As for the powerful blow this dealt for the unions, and if you want to see the impact of that, look at the median household income growth since 1980, which is practically nil when adjusted for inflation.
Sure. Look at how Internet service worked on cell phone networks before Apple blew the old system up with the iPhone. Apple didn't do this out of idealism, but because it couldn't differentiate itself in an environment where the carriers controlled the user experience.
In fact in general look at how inferior US cell service is to the rest of the developed world. This was a result of a deliberate calculation by the Reagan administration that a more innovative network would result if carriers were free to choose their own standards. What they did was try to make it as painful as possible to change carriers while nickel-and-diming their subscribers for all they were worth. It was a safe, profitable strategy, like auto companies taking their mediocre old car platforms and putting exciting new bodies on them.
Meanwhile, in Internet services the competition is cutthroat because a level playing field is baked into the very architecture of the system, and innovation has been moving too fast for ISPs and cellular carriers to tie down their customer bases with "exclusive content". But it is coming. I've dealt with these people before and that's their wet dream: a captive customer base.
One of the things I always told my kids growing up is that a piece of the truth is almost useless by itself; you need enough of the whole truth to understand what's going on.
The piece of truth you learn in capitalism Sunday school is that businesses try to maximize profits and that this forces them to innovate. This is true, but it misses the other part of the truth: businesses also try to minimize risk, and this cuts against the innovation impulse.
It's the force of competition that makes businesses take risks and thus innovate, and nowhere is the competition fiercer than in a commodity market. That's why businesses want to differentiate their products, and that's what net discrimination is all about. They want to make it impossible to compare different services by making it impossible or difficult to get content except through certain channels. Expect exclusive deals so you'll find yourself choosing between getting local baseball programming on one provider or the latest Star Trek series on another.
It's all about hanging onto customers, and there's two ways to do that: to make them happy, or make it painful to leave. Of the two, making it painful to leave is less risky.
Just use your common sense. Sure minorities can identify with white male leads. They've been doing it for years. In fact I've been doing it for years and I'm not white. And it goes both ways. How many white kids grew up on Jackie Chan movies?
But common sense should also tell you that there's a big difference between identifying with a protagonist who happens to look like you and never seeing anyone like you in a lead role. You can't logically defend the position that minorities should be satisfied with nothing but white male protagonists but that white males can't put up with anything else. If minority women can identify with a white male character then white men can identify with a minority woman character. In fact, some of my favorite characters are white women, like Granny Weatherwax in the Discworld novels.
Let me be clear: it's perfectly OK by me if a protagonist is a white male. Representation of minorities in non-traditional roles is a praiseworthy thing, but shouldn't be compulsory. The solution to representation isn't to set yourself up as the diversity (or uniformity) police. It's to seek out the kind of stories you want, or better yet, write them.
But even if you do seek out stories with a certain kind of protagonist, don't write off ones that don't fit that narrow profile. That's just narrow-minded. Think of how much you'd miss if you had such a superficial filter. For all you know this black female captain might end up being your favorite. That's not likely, but it's not because she's a black woman, it's because making a character with broad appeal is really, really difficult.
If you can get people there without the proteins in their brain being denatured by radiation, maybe you could keep them that way for extended periods without their brains turning into scrambled eggs.
If you want to know what the Internet would look like, look at how information services were run by cell phone companies before Apple came along with the iPhone and broke the system.
The focus wasn't on investing tons of money to develop innovative new capabilities, the focus was on ways of monetizing what their networks already could do, the way they still do with text messaging. For example I had a phone with a camera, but to get the picture off the camera I had to subscribe to a proprietary "Picture Mail" service that would cost me $5 per month.
They wanted to be in the business of marketing services to customers, because packages of services may not have the same sales volumes, but they're simple and profitable. The carriers dreaded the alternative, which was to be in the commodity bandwidth market. That meant cutthroat competition because people would just pick the cheapest pipe that was big and fast enough for their needs.
Because he can drum up business among people who can pay the entry fee with the chance to buttonhole the president. He probably charges the taxpayer to put up the entourage too.
For star trek, the audience is global, and at the very least both men and women are strongly represented.
But you're assuming people will only identify with characters who superficially resemble them. By that argument, Spock should never have existed as a character, and in fact the network wasn't happy about him because they had exactly those kinds of overly literal assumptions about audience identification.
You always have to disaggregate reactions like this. Sure, the outright sexist/racists will hate the idea, but I think people who don't hole racist/sexist views could also feel that way. I think people underestimate their own capacity as an audience.
People are complex and multifaceted, and so are compellingly written characters. And that's how you enter into an emotional attachment to a character, not just through your superficial resemblance to them. That's how people identify with Spock, who is a member of a species that doesn't even exist. They even feel attachment to the Mars Exploration Rovers. They see themselves in these things, even though we know they aren't alive or even sentient.
It's the storyteller's job to engage this ability people have to identify with characters who are different from them. Often this is pure wish fulfillment, and the characters are stronger and more ruthless than we dare to be. In the case of Star Trek the characters are more resourceful and more principled than we dare to be. Next to that differences in sex and skin tone are nothing.
Except that if you look at humanity as a whole, "white male" is hardly the dominant category. Suppose we have a officer candidate pool of a 100 individuals. What would the demographics be like if that reflected the demographics of the human race as a whole?
You'd have about 15 white male candidates, and 28 Asian female candidates. And yet we have never seen a regular Asian woman character in command; in fact we've never seen any Asian woman in a command track position. They've been present, but entirely in technical support jobs: nurse, communications specialist, botanist.
About 14 candidates are either African or are of African descent, so that means about 7 of our candidates are African women -- assuming 2017 demographics and not accounting for the effect of Africa's greater fertility rate on future demographics. The probability of pairing an Asian woman with an African woman is about 20%, so it's not surprising to see this combination. The probability of a having a Captain/First Officer pairing that consists of a white man paired with another white man is about 2%. And yet we have seen this once in five series so far (TNG), but not the Asian woman/African woman combination which is 10x more likely.
Let's just look at male/female. The probability of a M/M or F/F combination is 25%, and of some M/F mix about 50%. Here's how the captain/first officer pairings have worked out for ST series:
TOS: M/M TNG: M/M DS9: M/F VOY: F/M ENT: M/F
Now thus far we've seen M/M over-represented, but not at a statistically significant rate. The absence of a F/F combination however is significant (p 0.032). Adding an F/F combination makes this combination of outcomes non-significant (e.g. you can't reject the null hypothesis that the assignment of sex to role is unbiased).
And here's the kicker: Michelle freakin' badass Yeoh. If you have trouble picturing her in the captain's chair, you don't know who she is.
I don't see how you get that from a trailer. You have a captain and a first officer who are both women, which would happen 25% of the time if men and women reached that rank equally often. Looking at the cast on IMDB, there are more women than in TOS, but more than half the characters are men.
And looking who they chose... Michelle Yeoh. If you can't see Michelle Yeoh in the captain's chair, you don't know who she is.
Slashdot Mirror
He only sounds like that because of Russia's financial crisis. They had to let their translators go and they're using Google Translate to feed him his lines. Note how running this through English->Russian then Russian->English has no effect on its intelligibility; that's because it's already been made into semantic hash by the original mechanical translation:
Listen, having nuclear weapons, my uncle was a great professor, scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Good genes, very good genes, OK, very clever, Wharton financial school, very good, very smart - you know, if you are a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, for example, it's good if I ran. As a liberal democrat , They will say that I am one of the smartest people in any part of the world - it's true! - but when you are a conservative Republican, they try - oh, they make a number - that's why I always start: I went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, made it, built a fortune - you know that I must constantly Give your powers, because we are a little at a disadvantage - but you look at the nuclear case that really bothers me - it would be so simple, and it's not as important as these lives (nuclear powerful, my uncle explained that for I have many, many years ago, power and it was 35 years ago, He is Clarifies the strength of what will happen and he was right - who would have thought?) But when you look at what's going on with the Four prisoners - now there were three and now four - but when there were three and even now, I would say that this is all in the messenger; Guys, and they are guys, because, you know, they do not do it, they did not think that women are smarter now than men, so you know that they will need another 150 years - but the Persians Great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators , So, they, they just killed, they just killed us.
All right. Sit down, Lurlene, this may be rough...The president of the United States IS named Schicklegruber!
Sure, but you don't set such limits to detect catastrophes. You set such limits to detect unforeseen circumstances that might, perhaps in rare situations, lead to catastrophe.
A worker being exposed to harmful levels of radiation is catastrophic. A worker being exposed to a level of radiation that is medically harmless but which should not have occurred is a situation that requires investigation, because that means something about your assumptions isn't quite right. That doesn't mean you ought to panic; in any sensibly conservative procedure you have to accept that false positive concern is a routine event -- as in your story of the smoke detector.
Thank you for your perspective, Ivan.
Of course it can run COBOL.
COBOL remains in use -- it's been estimated that even today on average a typical American interacts at least indirectly with a piece of COBOL software more than a dozen times daily. Over 200 billion lines of code are currently being maintained, and that figure is growing, albeit slowly. It's not hard to find COBOL jobs, if you live in a city which is a major center for some the industries that were early adopters of computers.
I'm all for people driving the cars they want. As long as they pay their own way.
I understand this, but this is as it should be, and if people are still driving more gas guzzzlers than is offset by the income, the answer is to raise the tax.
I've been donating to the project for a few years. I hope it is helping the developers focus more time on working on ReactOS and getting the resources they need.
I just want to say, good for you. Too often the only thing people contribute to a project are complaints that it's not going fast enough.
There is a third option between letting people do things which impose a cost on everyone else (e.g. like pollution), and forcing everybody to do the same thing. You can make people who want to do those things pay at least some of those costs.
If you want to drive a 12 MPG Maybach, go ahead, but you then pay a mileage excise tax that goes to offset the costs. It's the same hedonic calculus -- how much do I want to pay for the performance? But with more realistic cost numbers.
What do you do with those taxes? Well you can offset some of the costs of the wars we fight to secure access to Middle Eastern oil -- about 2.5 trillion dollars in the last decades or so. You don't think we'd have fought the wars if there wasn't oil there, do you? Or if oil demand were much lower, for that matter.
Or you could put the money into energy efficiency and pollution control research.
But one of the best ways to use the money is to simply give it back to people who make choices that lower public costs,e.g. people who choose to drive, say, a Chevy Malibu sedan (46 MPG city) owner would get a mileage rebate.
But isn't this meddling with peoples' choice of cars. Yes! We're encouraging people to make choices that cost us less. But we're still giving them a choice. That's more than you get under a system where you're forced to pay the consequences of other peoples' selfish choices.
Yes. Now imagine Apple owning the link to your home, business, and phone.
It's the power of habit and humans amazing power to adapt to whatever is usual to them. If you go outside all the time, the effort and discomfort are scarcely noticeable. If you take a couch potato and drag him on your weekend hike and it'll feel to him like a crime against humanity.
In a scorched earth war you attack the enemy's most valuable assets. This likely isn't going to be shantytowns in South Asia or Africa, it's going to be the greatest concentrations of wealth you can find. This would be bad for North America, Europe, Japan, and coastal China.
H. Beam Piper's future history series posits exactly such a war, which is why in his later stories people with Northern European surnames are a rarity (although somewhat more likely to be a protagonist). It's a small detail, but it makes sense.
It was in this vein that I asked the author of an unpublished manuscript I'd been given to review, why is there nobody with a Hispanic surname? He got all huffy about "political correctness", but my problem was that this was a post-apocalyptic story set in Southern California, where already Latinos outnumber Anglos. It was OK by me if he didn't want to write any Latino characters, but it made no sense that the apocalypse would selectively wipe out everyone with a Spanish name. All he needed was to come up with some plausible explanation, like an India/Pakistan style partition.
It worked for him, speaking in a strictly political sense. It actually cost the taxpayers many, many times more what PATCO was asking for.
Ironically PATCO endorsed Reagan in the 1980 election. PATCO was made up mostly of conservative military veterans, so Reagan's team approached them with a deal: Reagan would support their negotiating position if they'd switch their endorsement from the Democrats to him. Once he was safely elected Reagan reneged on the deal, then fired them when they went on strike.
It was a risky move, but the sheer drama of the move thrilled Reagan's non-union supporters. From a financial viewpoint, it cost billions to replace the fired controllers, not to mention the impact on the rest of the economy of the disruption involved.
As for the powerful blow this dealt for the unions, and if you want to see the impact of that, look at the median household income growth since 1980, which is practically nil when adjusted for inflation.
Sure. Look at how Internet service worked on cell phone networks before Apple blew the old system up with the iPhone. Apple didn't do this out of idealism, but because it couldn't differentiate itself in an environment where the carriers controlled the user experience.
In fact in general look at how inferior US cell service is to the rest of the developed world. This was a result of a deliberate calculation by the Reagan administration that a more innovative network would result if carriers were free to choose their own standards. What they did was try to make it as painful as possible to change carriers while nickel-and-diming their subscribers for all they were worth. It was a safe, profitable strategy, like auto companies taking their mediocre old car platforms and putting exciting new bodies on them.
Meanwhile, in Internet services the competition is cutthroat because a level playing field is baked into the very architecture of the system, and innovation has been moving too fast for ISPs and cellular carriers to tie down their customer bases with "exclusive content". But it is coming. I've dealt with these people before and that's their wet dream: a captive customer base.
One of the things I always told my kids growing up is that a piece of the truth is almost useless by itself; you need enough of the whole truth to understand what's going on.
The piece of truth you learn in capitalism Sunday school is that businesses try to maximize profits and that this forces them to innovate. This is true, but it misses the other part of the truth: businesses also try to minimize risk, and this cuts against the innovation impulse.
It's the force of competition that makes businesses take risks and thus innovate, and nowhere is the competition fiercer than in a commodity market. That's why businesses want to differentiate their products, and that's what net discrimination is all about. They want to make it impossible to compare different services by making it impossible or difficult to get content except through certain channels. Expect exclusive deals so you'll find yourself choosing between getting local baseball programming on one provider or the latest Star Trek series on another.
It's all about hanging onto customers, and there's two ways to do that: to make them happy, or make it painful to leave. Of the two, making it painful to leave is less risky.
Just use your common sense. Sure minorities can identify with white male leads. They've been doing it for years. In fact I've been doing it for years and I'm not white. And it goes both ways. How many white kids grew up on Jackie Chan movies?
But common sense should also tell you that there's a big difference between identifying with a protagonist who happens to look like you and never seeing anyone like you in a lead role. You can't logically defend the position that minorities should be satisfied with nothing but white male protagonists but that white males can't put up with anything else. If minority women can identify with a white male character then white men can identify with a minority woman character. In fact, some of my favorite characters are white women, like Granny Weatherwax in the Discworld novels.
Let me be clear: it's perfectly OK by me if a protagonist is a white male. Representation of minorities in non-traditional roles is a praiseworthy thing, but shouldn't be compulsory. The solution to representation isn't to set yourself up as the diversity (or uniformity) police. It's to seek out the kind of stories you want, or better yet, write them.
But even if you do seek out stories with a certain kind of protagonist, don't write off ones that don't fit that narrow profile. That's just narrow-minded. Think of how much you'd miss if you had such a superficial filter. For all you know this black female captain might end up being your favorite. That's not likely, but it's not because she's a black woman, it's because making a character with broad appeal is really, really difficult.
If you can get people there without the proteins in their brain being denatured by radiation, maybe you could keep them that way for extended periods without their brains turning into scrambled eggs.
If you want to know what the Internet would look like, look at how information services were run by cell phone companies before Apple came along with the iPhone and broke the system.
The focus wasn't on investing tons of money to develop innovative new capabilities, the focus was on ways of monetizing what their networks already could do, the way they still do with text messaging. For example I had a phone with a camera, but to get the picture off the camera I had to subscribe to a proprietary "Picture Mail" service that would cost me $5 per month.
They wanted to be in the business of marketing services to customers, because packages of services may not have the same sales volumes, but they're simple and profitable. The carriers dreaded the alternative, which was to be in the commodity bandwidth market. That meant cutthroat competition because people would just pick the cheapest pipe that was big and fast enough for their needs.
Because he can drum up business among people who can pay the entry fee with the chance to buttonhole the president. He probably charges the taxpayer to put up the entourage too.
For star trek, the audience is global, and at the very least both men and women are strongly represented.
But you're assuming people will only identify with characters who superficially resemble them. By that argument, Spock should never have existed as a character, and in fact the network wasn't happy about him because they had exactly those kinds of overly literal assumptions about audience identification.
You always have to disaggregate reactions like this. Sure, the outright sexist/racists will hate the idea, but I think people who don't hole racist/sexist views could also feel that way. I think people underestimate their own capacity as an audience.
People are complex and multifaceted, and so are compellingly written characters. And that's how you enter into an emotional attachment to a character, not just through your superficial resemblance to them. That's how people identify with Spock, who is a member of a species that doesn't even exist. They even feel attachment to the Mars Exploration Rovers. They see themselves in these things, even though we know they aren't alive or even sentient.
It's the storyteller's job to engage this ability people have to identify with characters who are different from them. Often this is pure wish fulfillment, and the characters are stronger and more ruthless than we dare to be. In the case of Star Trek the characters are more resourceful and more principled than we dare to be. Next to that differences in sex and skin tone are nothing.
Except that if you look at humanity as a whole, "white male" is hardly the dominant category. Suppose we have a officer candidate pool of a 100 individuals. What would the demographics be like if that reflected the demographics of the human race as a whole?
You'd have about 15 white male candidates, and 28 Asian female candidates. And yet we have never seen a regular Asian woman character in command; in fact we've never seen any Asian woman in a command track position. They've been present, but entirely in technical support jobs: nurse, communications specialist, botanist.
About 14 candidates are either African or are of African descent, so that means about 7 of our candidates are African women -- assuming 2017 demographics and not accounting for the effect of Africa's greater fertility rate on future demographics. The probability of pairing an Asian woman with an African woman is about 20%, so it's not surprising to see this combination. The probability of a having a Captain/First Officer pairing that consists of a white man paired with another white man is about 2%. And yet we have seen this once in five series so far (TNG), but not the Asian woman/African woman combination which is 10x more likely.
Let's just look at male/female. The probability of a M/M or F/F combination is 25%, and of some M/F mix about 50%. Here's how the captain/first officer pairings have worked out for ST series:
TOS: M/M
TNG: M/M
DS9: M/F
VOY: F/M
ENT: M/F
Now thus far we've seen M/M over-represented, but not at a statistically significant rate. The absence of a F/F combination however is significant (p 0.032). Adding an F/F combination makes this combination of outcomes non-significant (e.g. you can't reject the null hypothesis that the assignment of sex to role is unbiased).
And here's the kicker: Michelle freakin' badass Yeoh. If you have trouble picturing her in the captain's chair, you don't know who she is.
So, your objective standard is your feeling?
TOS felt inclusive to people who'd been excluded.
Exactly what are you numerical requirements for you not feel excluded?
I don't see how you get that from a trailer. You have a captain and a first officer who are both women, which would happen 25% of the time if men and women reached that rank equally often. Looking at the cast on IMDB, there are more women than in TOS, but more than half the characters are men.
And looking who they chose... Michelle Yeoh. If you can't see Michelle Yeoh in the captain's chair, you don't know who she is.