If you don't like it, it's easy enough to fix. You can use an editor macro to "compile" your Python-with-braces to Python, and de-compile other peoples' Python to your Python-with-braces. that would correct what you see as "wrong" with the language but maintaining full access to and compatibility with the entire Python software ecosystem.
In my view the braces/whitespace thing simply isn't such a big deal. It's just a lexical convention. It's an interesting gimmick; what C programmer hasn't encountered some brain-dead indentation that obscures the actual structure of the code? But that's easy to fix, you just pretty-print the file. I guess the problem is when pretty-print reveals a really overblown control flow, which making code formatting lexically significant discourages. But in practical terms coders who are so bad as to generate that kind of stuff will find some other way to make your life miserable.
The place she'd have the biggest impact if she won would be Stephen Lynch's 8th, which encompasses the Boston neighborhoods of Southie Roslindale, and Dorchester, the cities of Brockton, Braintree, Norwood, and Quincy. Lynch is an old-time union Democrat. He's also the least liberal congressman from Massachusetts, which in his own analogy is like being the slowest Kenyan in the Boston Marathon. But she'd have almost zero chance of winning the working class voters in this district especially against a longtime incumbent.
In American politics, incumbents are at there most vulnerable in their first re-election campaign. So Wu's best bet would have been to run this year against Katherine Clarke, who has just been re-elected to the relatively new 5th. But that ship has sailed, and now Clarke is fully familiar to her constituents in her sprawling suburban district.
The place where Wu's tech background and politics would be most advantageous would be long-time liberal lion Mike Capuano's 7th district, which includes Cambridge and Somerville. But he's been winning elections in those communities since he was elected Mayor of Somerville in 1990. He also made it past the first re-election benchmark in the new district boundaries this year.
So basically this is like her announcing her candidacy to become a liberal feminist for Emperor of the Moon -- if the incumbent Emperor were a popular liberal feminist. It's not likely to come to anything, and if it did win it wouldn't make much of a difference. She should move to North Carolina and run there.
If we're going to do sci-fi references, why leave out Asimov? Terminator was a throwback to the kind of pulp robot-run-amok stories that Asimov almost single-handedly made obsolete.
I've always thought that one consistent point in Asimov's robot stories that that robots are morally superior to humans -- at least if by "moral" you mean "principled". Ethics are literally baked right into Asimov's robots.
A robotic COO could be programmed to serve shareholder interests in a way a human COO could not be. It could also be programmed to be law abiding to within its ability to interpret what the law requires. Perhaps most importantly, it won't have an inbuilt tendency to rationalization and wishful thinking. Of course you still can't trust the bastards that programmed the thing, but it will serve somebody faithfully, to the best of its abilities.
I think this may not be quite so new as it seems. In a way, attempts to apply cybernetic control principles to management go waay back ("Management by Objectives 1954), even predating cybernetics itself ("Scientific Management" circa 1910).
The thing is the evidence for the effectiveness of these systems have always been mixed. As with every kind of educational reform ever attempted, there were some remarkable success stories but in practice these saddled users with a rigid ideology and time-consuming rituals.
The difference today is that measurement can be done in a much more intrusive way, down to every last second of the day, and that more complex decisions can be taken. So why not replace the manager with an AI, once you have reduced the workers to robots? And I expect some remarkable success stories to emerge from this attempt. Because they always do.
There are actually some people who are either happy or at least nonplussed to be alone.
I think this is true. The trick is really knowing if this is really you.
Let me give an analogy. A few years ago I was driving home from Christmas dinner at my sister's house when suddenly I couldn't unclench my hands from the steering wheel. I went to the emergency room, they did a blood test and my blood sugar was over 600. "You're diabetic," the doctor said, and she gave me a shot of insulin. Suddenly, I felt better than I had in twenty years. The things is, I had been feeling like crap for years, but I didn't know it. I thought I felt normal, but that's because "normal" is how you feel every day.
After that experience I've come to doubt self-reports of well-being. I look at people who sincerely believe they are happy, but they don't look like happy to me. They seem miserable. Resentful. Sour-tempered. On a good day they might manage smug. Now maybe the problem is I don't have access to their rich inner lives, which they must keep bottled up like they're in a thermos. But it's just possible that they're deceived by the extraordinary human capacity to get used to feeling like crap.
You don't have to believe the notion that social connection leads to greater levels of human health and happiness -- although it seems at least plausible given that this is true for practically every other primate species. And even in you believe it is true for most people, that doesn't necessarily mean that applies to you. Maybe you're a special case.
But it seems to me rational to approach life as an experiment. You might think you are as happy as happy can be, but why take it for granted this is your best version of "normal"? And of course experiments force you to sharpen a lot of fuzzy concepts, like "social connection" or "isolation". I am an introvert. It doesn't mean I'm shy, or socially awkward, or misanthropic. It doesn't mean I don't need social connections. It just means I need different things from those connections than an extrovert would.
You're just free associating important-sounding words.
I expect the irony escapes you there, but no. I am arguing that time and economics matter. I suppose if you insist on ignoring time and money as part of your calculations there's nothing anyone can do to stop you, butin he real world cost constraints limit what can actually get done, and there is such a thing as doing something so slowly it makes no practical difference.
I don't particularly favor burning wood, simply because if we are going to go the biomass route we should choose plants that fix carbon more quickly. Grasses can be harvested annually, making them more attractive from a carbon standpoint than most trees, although some trees can be harvested as frequently as every three years. Naturally burning trees that take a century or more to grow to maturity isn't much better than burning coal -- because the timescale is longer than the expected lifetime of a CO2 molecule in the atmosphere.
But even with grass economic considerations are important. In theory corn-derived ethanol could be carbon neutral, but it's not, because of the fossil fuels used to cultivate the corn (a grass by the way), process it, and transport the ethanol. In fact if you add the carbon impact of all that up we're actually better off burning natural gas. But the limitation is economic. It is physically possible to produce carbon-neutral corn ethanol, it's just too expensive at present.
If I burn X amount of coal or gasoline, leading to one metric ton of CO2 entering the atmosphere, and then plant enough trees to recapture one metric ton of CO2... that is no less carbon neutral than the above.
Sure, if you did plant enough trees. But in fact globally forest extent is shrinking and nobody is talking about offsetting coal with re-forestation. That's because coal wouldn't be economically competitive if you had to pay for the cost of offsetting the pollution it emits. It's barely hanging on as is.
You can argue for anything if you imagined that we did things that (a) we aren't doing and (b) we aren't doing because they aren't economically practical.
Timescales don't matter.
Economists and financial analysts would beg to differ. So would chemists, physicists, ecologists and evolutionary biologists. Time is literally the most important factor there is in just about every calculation we make. There's a big difference between a 4% ROI in a month and a 4% ROI in a decade. There's a big difference between a 4 degree warming in a century and a 4 degree warming in ten thousand years.
It used to be believed that gas equilibrium with the oceans would prevent any increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration. That's why the anthropogenic greenhouse effect, which was proposed in the 1890s, wasn't believed by most scientists prior to the International Geophysical Year in 1958. In that year the oceanographer Roger Revelle demonstrated that the rate at which the oceans could absorb CO2 was physically limited. In other words the timescale of natural carbon sequestration was too long to prevent an increase in atmospheric CO2.
Wood burning is not clean because it emits particulates. From a carbon standpoint it depends on what you are burning and especially what you replace it with.
If you burn bamboo from a bamboo plantation the carbon you emit will be offset within a year or two by carbon fixed in newly grown bamboo. If you burn giant sequoias and turn the grove you harvested them from into a parking lot, then that's a lot like burning coal.
You're misssing the point in a spectacular way. We don't care about where the CO2 comes from, but we *do* about the net impact of the system on the concentration of CO2 over the course of our lifetimes.
Biofuels create a closed fuel cycle in which CO2 is continually sequestered and released in balance on a biological timescale. Fossil fuels form a system in which the CO2 is balanced on a geological timescale.
Yes, it is true that in a hundred million years switching from fossil fuels to biodiesel won't make any difference. But it will in the course of our lifetime and the lifetimes of our children.
I think we can safely ignore carbon that was sequestered before Class Mammalia emerged in the fossil record when we're discussing the impact of environmental conditions on H. sapiens.
Well, it's not like they built a hundred thousand km of roads with these things, this is just one kilometer. That suggests the "people in high places" might be smarter than you think they are. They clearly don't expect this to be a practical project. The primary product here is knowledge, not electricity.
France is an advanced industrialized economy without much in the way of natural energy resources -- unlike the United States which is the third largest oil producing country in the world and the largest producer of natural gas. It gets 75% of its power with nuclear reactors; but it only produces three tons of uranium a year while consuming twelve. So while they don't have acute economic vulnerability to disruption in their energy supplies, it's still valuable to them to develop options.
And I have to hand to to them: they still see knowledge as something worth pursuing. Here in the US we're so focused on the short-term (and indeed the past) that there isn't a lot of support for public research -- the incoming administration's budget director has even proposed getting out of research funding altogether.
Sure. But you're still bound by the rules of that market. UK companies would still be subject to Brussels, however UK/EU relations would take on a distinctly bilateral flavor instead of the old multi-lateral flavor of the old Common Market days. This would put the UK at more of a disadvantage relative to the rest of Europe when it comes to bargaining power, both in comparison to its pre-Brexit position in the EU and it's pre-EU position in the Common Market.
Really the only way for the UK to obtain a more favorable position would be if the entire EU collapses. Which the rest of Europe is keenly aware of. That's why the rest of Europe isn't going to cut Britain any slack on Brexit. If other EU members see that Britain negotiated itself a more favorable position by exiting the EU, then other nations will follow. So there are three possible outcomes:
(1) Britain manages to negotiate a symbolic exit with little de facto impact. (2) Britain is treated like any other foreign country in the European Market. (3) The EU collapses and the former members try to salvage something by reviving the old Common Market system.
The only outcome that is potentially economically favorable to Britain is (3). The country that gains the most from Brexit is Russia.
Because they only want to sort of leave the EU. They're looking for some kind of intermediate state where they have the same access to European markets European companies do. Realistically that means British companies will have to abide by most if not all EU regulations and human rights restrictions.
Brexit would be quite simple if what the UK really wanted is complete independence. Both sides would set up the border crossings and customs stations that started closing down in 60s, and negotiate access to each others markets on a case by case basis. This would be a perfect example. The EU is not going to allow spying on its citizens by a foreign power (the UK), so if the UK wants to sell financial services in the EU it'll just have to agree to be bound by EU human rights rules.
US ICBMs are solid fuel rockets. This is so they can be launched quickly before an attack by an adversary can take them out.
That said the primary design goal for this particular rocket is low cost. One of these particular rockets costs only $38 million. Many launch systems aimed at putting about 1000 kg into orbit are solid fuel because it's relatively cheap to build and operate a solid-propellant rocket and you don't need to squeeze every last bit of specific impulse out of the rocket to launch a modest payload. .
But you don't have an expectation of privacy when a third party is concerned. This is why there has to be statutory limitations on the ability of law enforcement to compel the disclosure of phone company records.
The mistaken notion that you have an expectation of privacy using social media is especially pernicious. Hasn't it even occurred to you to wonder why Facebook and Twitter don't charge you to use their services? Because the user isn't the customer; he's the product.
It's always amazes me that people can have such an utter ignorance of the basic principles governing the society they live in. What matters is your understanding of the consequences of your action when you choose to perform that action. The very same act with the very same consequences can perfectly innocent or a capital offense, depending on what you know.
For example Alice offers Bob a candybar. Bob checks the ingredients and believing the candy bar to be safe eats it. He dies: the ingredients fail to include the nut oil used. Fascinated, Alice finds out that Carlos also has a deadly peanut allergy, and offers him an identical candy bar. Carlos also dies.
Both these events are identical in every single respect right down to the consequence. You could observe each of these events right from the moment Alice purchased the candybar right to through to the fatal consequences, and you would not see a single difference in detail. Yet one is an unfortunate mishap, the other is a murder. The only difference is what Alice knows.
Increasing shareholder value, the motherhood of corporate boards everywhere.
Presumably they've done the actuarial calculations on the cost of payouts to cyclists, pedestrians and driver killed, injured or maimed by their technology and decided they can afford it.
As a boomer I've met both Holocaust survivors (the grandparents of friends) and Germans who weren't Nazis, but supported the regime as patriotic citizens. I've even seen sat at the dinner table with Jews and Germans who lived through the era as they discussed their families' experiences. There was no agenda other than to make sense of an almost unimaginable catastrophe.
And what you don't understand, because you've probably never paid attention to the testimony, much less witnessed it, is how personal that catastrophe was. The Holocaust wasn't some political abstraction, it was having everything your family worked for and stood for stolen; it was having your parents and siblings ripped away; it was experiencing personal suffering, deprivation, and exploitation.
At the hands of smug, self-righteous bureaucrats who had the gall to write "Arbeit Macht Frei" over the gates of the labor camps.
And on the flip side for ordinary Germans it was going along because patriotic gullibility was easy. Hoping for the best was a the path of least resistance. It was also a path to a national catastrophe:
Great Carthage drove three wars. After the first one it was still powerful. After the second one it was still inhabitable. After the third one it was no longer possible to find her. -- Bertolt Brecht
What we are losing is the personal memory of the banality of evil, of how ordinary people can enable and empower the depraved. We flatter ourselves we are better than those Germans who maybe didn't vote for the Nazis, but allowed themselves to be swept up by the vicious, inane bigotries of Nazi propaganda. We assume that we are smarter. Or at the very least nicer people.
We're not. We're not better, and I can tell you from personal experience we aren't nicer or smarter than the Germans who let the Nazis shove their nation's hand into the meat grinder of WW2. The people who went along were pleasant, cultured, educated people who read the papers and loved their families and were good to their neighbors, but in the end let the hope that Nazis weren't really that bad turn them into suckers.
A search result is not supposed to represent a "reflection of the web". It is supposed to provide the searcher with the information he needs. And if he want a reflection of the state of the web, he can just ask for that.
If someone searches "How do I get rid of a wart?" presumably he wants reliable medical information. "What are some folk cures for warts?" probably means he's OK with, possibly even is looking for bullshit folk magic.
What is on the web is overwhelmingly bullshit, so much so that this may be the very central struggle of this present generation: to preserve critical thought, even rationality itself against a growing belief that every belief is equally valid.
So when someone queries, "Did the Holocaust happen?" they should get back the most reliable information sources. If they want to know what's going on in the mental cesspools of the Internet, let them search for "Holocaust denialism".
Er, that's a broken way of looking at it. If she ONLY got votes in three precinct in California, she wouldn't have won the popular vote. But in fact she got votes in every part of the country, which add up to a substantial (2.8 million) margin of popular vote victory.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it's up to them, isn't it? The point is when you run you're offering people an alternative.
If you don't like it, it's easy enough to fix. You can use an editor macro to "compile" your Python-with-braces to Python, and de-compile other peoples' Python to your Python-with-braces. that would correct what you see as "wrong" with the language but maintaining full access to and compatibility with the entire Python software ecosystem.
In my view the braces/whitespace thing simply isn't such a big deal. It's just a lexical convention. It's an interesting gimmick; what C programmer hasn't encountered some brain-dead indentation that obscures the actual structure of the code? But that's easy to fix, you just pretty-print the file. I guess the problem is when pretty-print reveals a really overblown control flow, which making code formatting lexically significant discourages. But in practical terms coders who are so bad as to generate that kind of stuff will find some other way to make your life miserable.
Exactly who does she intend to take down?
The place she'd have the biggest impact if she won would be Stephen Lynch's 8th, which encompasses the Boston neighborhoods of Southie Roslindale, and Dorchester, the cities of Brockton, Braintree, Norwood, and Quincy. Lynch is an old-time union Democrat. He's also the least liberal congressman from Massachusetts, which in his own analogy is like being the slowest Kenyan in the Boston Marathon. But she'd have almost zero chance of winning the working class voters in this district especially against a longtime incumbent.
In American politics, incumbents are at there most vulnerable in their first re-election campaign. So Wu's best bet would have been to run this year against Katherine Clarke, who has just been re-elected to the relatively new 5th. But that ship has sailed, and now Clarke is fully familiar to her constituents in her sprawling suburban district.
The place where Wu's tech background and politics would be most advantageous would be long-time liberal lion Mike Capuano's 7th district, which includes Cambridge and Somerville. But he's been winning elections in those communities since he was elected Mayor of Somerville in 1990. He also made it past the first re-election benchmark in the new district boundaries this year.
So basically this is like her announcing her candidacy to become a liberal feminist for Emperor of the Moon -- if the incumbent Emperor were a popular liberal feminist. It's not likely to come to anything, and if it did win it wouldn't make much of a difference. She should move to North Carolina and run there.
If we're going to do sci-fi references, why leave out Asimov? Terminator was a throwback to the kind of pulp robot-run-amok stories that Asimov almost single-handedly made obsolete.
I've always thought that one consistent point in Asimov's robot stories that that robots are morally superior to humans -- at least if by "moral" you mean "principled". Ethics are literally baked right into Asimov's robots.
A robotic COO could be programmed to serve shareholder interests in a way a human COO could not be. It could also be programmed to be law abiding to within its ability to interpret what the law requires. Perhaps most importantly, it won't have an inbuilt tendency to rationalization and wishful thinking. Of course you still can't trust the bastards that programmed the thing, but it will serve somebody faithfully, to the best of its abilities.
I think this may not be quite so new as it seems. In a way, attempts to apply cybernetic control principles to management go waay back ("Management by Objectives 1954), even predating cybernetics itself ("Scientific Management" circa 1910).
The thing is the evidence for the effectiveness of these systems have always been mixed. As with every kind of educational reform ever attempted, there were some remarkable success stories but in practice these saddled users with a rigid ideology and time-consuming rituals.
The difference today is that measurement can be done in a much more intrusive way, down to every last second of the day, and that more complex decisions can be taken. So why not replace the manager with an AI, once you have reduced the workers to robots? And I expect some remarkable success stories to emerge from this attempt. Because they always do.
You have no understanding of the dynamic nature of the atmosphere. Equillibria do not function instantaneously.
Until you understand more physics (and economics) there really isn't any point in arguing with you.
There are actually some people who are either happy or at least nonplussed to be alone.
I think this is true. The trick is really knowing if this is really you.
Let me give an analogy. A few years ago I was driving home from Christmas dinner at my sister's house when suddenly I couldn't unclench my hands from the steering wheel. I went to the emergency room, they did a blood test and my blood sugar was over 600. "You're diabetic," the doctor said, and she gave me a shot of insulin. Suddenly, I felt better than I had in twenty years. The things is, I had been feeling like crap for years, but I didn't know it. I thought I felt normal, but that's because "normal" is how you feel every day.
After that experience I've come to doubt self-reports of well-being. I look at people who sincerely believe they are happy, but they don't look like happy to me. They seem miserable. Resentful. Sour-tempered. On a good day they might manage smug. Now maybe the problem is I don't have access to their rich inner lives, which they must keep bottled up like they're in a thermos. But it's just possible that they're deceived by the extraordinary human capacity to get used to feeling like crap.
You don't have to believe the notion that social connection leads to greater levels of human health and happiness -- although it seems at least plausible given that this is true for practically every other primate species. And even in you believe it is true for most people, that doesn't necessarily mean that applies to you. Maybe you're a special case.
But it seems to me rational to approach life as an experiment. You might think you are as happy as happy can be, but why take it for granted this is your best version of "normal"? And of course experiments force you to sharpen a lot of fuzzy concepts, like "social connection" or "isolation". I am an introvert. It doesn't mean I'm shy, or socially awkward, or misanthropic. It doesn't mean I don't need social connections. It just means I need different things from those connections than an extrovert would.
You're just free associating important-sounding words.
I expect the irony escapes you there, but no. I am arguing that time and economics matter. I suppose if you insist on ignoring time and money as part of your calculations there's nothing anyone can do to stop you, butin he real world cost constraints limit what can actually get done, and there is such a thing as doing something so slowly it makes no practical difference.
I don't particularly favor burning wood, simply because if we are going to go the biomass route we should choose plants that fix carbon more quickly. Grasses can be harvested annually, making them more attractive from a carbon standpoint than most trees, although some trees can be harvested as frequently as every three years. Naturally burning trees that take a century or more to grow to maturity isn't much better than burning coal -- because the timescale is longer than the expected lifetime of a CO2 molecule in the atmosphere.
But even with grass economic considerations are important. In theory corn-derived ethanol could be carbon neutral, but it's not, because of the fossil fuels used to cultivate the corn (a grass by the way), process it, and transport the ethanol. In fact if you add the carbon impact of all that up we're actually better off burning natural gas. But the limitation is economic. It is physically possible to produce carbon-neutral corn ethanol, it's just too expensive at present.
No. Just because I don't want a trade war with China doesn't mean I want them hacking our institutions. China is not our friend. Nor is Russia.
If I burn X amount of coal or gasoline, leading to one metric ton of CO2 entering the atmosphere, and then plant enough trees to recapture one metric ton of CO2... that is no less carbon neutral than the above.
Sure, if you did plant enough trees. But in fact globally forest extent is shrinking and nobody is talking about offsetting coal with re-forestation. That's because coal wouldn't be economically competitive if you had to pay for the cost of offsetting the pollution it emits. It's barely hanging on as is.
You can argue for anything if you imagined that we did things that (a) we aren't doing and (b) we aren't doing because they aren't economically practical.
Timescales don't matter.
Economists and financial analysts would beg to differ. So would chemists, physicists, ecologists and evolutionary biologists. Time is literally the most important factor there is in just about every calculation we make. There's a big difference between a 4% ROI in a month and a 4% ROI in a decade. There's a big difference between a 4 degree warming in a century and a 4 degree warming in ten thousand years.
It used to be believed that gas equilibrium with the oceans would prevent any increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration. That's why the anthropogenic greenhouse effect, which was proposed in the 1890s, wasn't believed by most scientists prior to the International Geophysical Year in 1958. In that year the oceanographer Roger Revelle demonstrated that the rate at which the oceans could absorb CO2 was physically limited. In other words the timescale of natural carbon sequestration was too long to prevent an increase in atmospheric CO2.
Wood burning is not clean because it emits particulates. From a carbon standpoint it depends on what you are burning and especially what you replace it with.
If you burn bamboo from a bamboo plantation the carbon you emit will be offset within a year or two by carbon fixed in newly grown bamboo. If you burn giant sequoias and turn the grove you harvested them from into a parking lot, then that's a lot like burning coal.
You're misssing the point in a spectacular way. We don't care about where the CO2 comes from, but we *do* about the net impact of the system on the concentration of CO2 over the course of our lifetimes.
Biofuels create a closed fuel cycle in which CO2 is continually sequestered and released in balance on a biological timescale. Fossil fuels form a system in which the CO2 is balanced on a geological timescale.
Yes, it is true that in a hundred million years switching from fossil fuels to biodiesel won't make any difference. But it will in the course of our lifetime and the lifetimes of our children.
I think we can safely ignore carbon that was sequestered before Class Mammalia emerged in the fossil record when we're discussing the impact of environmental conditions on H. sapiens.
Well, it's not like they built a hundred thousand km of roads with these things, this is just one kilometer. That suggests the "people in high places" might be smarter than you think they are. They clearly don't expect this to be a practical project. The primary product here is knowledge, not electricity.
France is an advanced industrialized economy without much in the way of natural energy resources -- unlike the United States which is the third largest oil producing country in the world and the largest producer of natural gas. It gets 75% of its power with nuclear reactors; but it only produces three tons of uranium a year while consuming twelve. So while they don't have acute economic vulnerability to disruption in their energy supplies, it's still valuable to them to develop options.
And I have to hand to to them: they still see knowledge as something worth pursuing. Here in the US we're so focused on the short-term (and indeed the past) that there isn't a lot of support for public research -- the incoming administration's budget director has even proposed getting out of research funding altogether.
Sure. But you're still bound by the rules of that market. UK companies would still be subject to Brussels, however UK/EU relations would take on a distinctly bilateral flavor instead of the old multi-lateral flavor of the old Common Market days. This would put the UK at more of a disadvantage relative to the rest of Europe when it comes to bargaining power, both in comparison to its pre-Brexit position in the EU and it's pre-EU position in the Common Market.
Really the only way for the UK to obtain a more favorable position would be if the entire EU collapses. Which the rest of Europe is keenly aware of. That's why the rest of Europe isn't going to cut Britain any slack on Brexit. If other EU members see that Britain negotiated itself a more favorable position by exiting the EU, then other nations will follow. So there are three possible outcomes:
(1) Britain manages to negotiate a symbolic exit with little de facto impact.
(2) Britain is treated like any other foreign country in the European Market.
(3) The EU collapses and the former members try to salvage something by reviving the old Common Market system.
The only outcome that is potentially economically favorable to Britain is (3). The country that gains the most from Brexit is Russia.
Because they only want to sort of leave the EU. They're looking for some kind of intermediate state where they have the same access to European markets European companies do. Realistically that means British companies will have to abide by most if not all EU regulations and human rights restrictions.
Brexit would be quite simple if what the UK really wanted is complete independence. Both sides would set up the border crossings and customs stations that started closing down in 60s, and negotiate access to each others markets on a case by case basis. This would be a perfect example. The EU is not going to allow spying on its citizens by a foreign power (the UK), so if the UK wants to sell financial services in the EU it'll just have to agree to be bound by EU human rights rules.
US ICBMs are solid fuel rockets. This is so they can be launched quickly before an attack by an adversary can take them out.
That said the primary design goal for this particular rocket is low cost. One of these particular rockets costs only $38 million. Many launch systems aimed at putting about 1000 kg into orbit are solid fuel because it's relatively cheap to build and operate a solid-propellant rocket and you don't need to squeeze every last bit of specific impulse out of the rocket to launch a modest payload.
.
But you don't have an expectation of privacy when a third party is concerned. This is why there has to be statutory limitations on the ability of law enforcement to compel the disclosure of phone company records.
The mistaken notion that you have an expectation of privacy using social media is especially pernicious. Hasn't it even occurred to you to wonder why Facebook and Twitter don't charge you to use their services? Because the user isn't the customer; he's the product.
It's always amazes me that people can have such an utter ignorance of the basic principles governing the society they live in. What matters is your understanding of the consequences of your action when you choose to perform that action. The very same act with the very same consequences can perfectly innocent or a capital offense, depending on what you know.
For example Alice offers Bob a candybar. Bob checks the ingredients and believing the candy bar to be safe eats it. He dies: the ingredients fail to include the nut oil used. Fascinated, Alice finds out that Carlos also has a deadly peanut allergy, and offers him an identical candy bar. Carlos also dies.
Both these events are identical in every single respect right down to the consequence. You could observe each of these events right from the moment Alice purchased the candybar right to through to the fatal consequences, and you would not see a single difference in detail. Yet one is an unfortunate mishap, the other is a murder. The only difference is what Alice knows.
And arrest the engineers and managers of the company and charge them under the RICO statute.
Increasing shareholder value, the motherhood of corporate boards everywhere.
Presumably they've done the actuarial calculations on the cost of payouts to cyclists, pedestrians and driver killed, injured or maimed by their technology and decided they can afford it.
As a boomer I've met both Holocaust survivors (the grandparents of friends) and Germans who weren't Nazis, but supported the regime as patriotic citizens. I've even seen sat at the dinner table with Jews and Germans who lived through the era as they discussed their families' experiences. There was no agenda other than to make sense of an almost unimaginable catastrophe.
And what you don't understand, because you've probably never paid attention to the testimony, much less witnessed it, is how personal that catastrophe was. The Holocaust wasn't some political abstraction, it was having everything your family worked for and stood for stolen; it was having your parents and siblings ripped away; it was experiencing personal suffering, deprivation, and exploitation.
At the hands of smug, self-righteous bureaucrats who had the gall to write "Arbeit Macht Frei" over the gates of the labor camps.
And on the flip side for ordinary Germans it was going along because patriotic gullibility was easy. Hoping for the best was a the path of least resistance. It was also a path to a national catastrophe:
Great Carthage drove three wars. After the first one it was still powerful. After the second one it was still inhabitable. After the third one it was no longer possible to find her. -- Bertolt Brecht
What we are losing is the personal memory of the banality of evil, of how ordinary people can enable and empower the depraved. We flatter ourselves we are better than those Germans who maybe didn't vote for the Nazis, but allowed themselves to be swept up by the vicious, inane bigotries of Nazi propaganda. We assume that we are smarter. Or at the very least nicer people.
We're not. We're not better, and I can tell you from personal experience we aren't nicer or smarter than the Germans who let the Nazis shove their nation's hand into the meat grinder of WW2. The people who went along were pleasant, cultured, educated people who read the papers and loved their families and were good to their neighbors, but in the end let the hope that Nazis weren't really that bad turn them into suckers.
We aren't better or wiser than them. But what we should be is forewarned. And there people who'd prefer we weren't.
A search result is not supposed to represent a "reflection of the web". It is supposed to provide the searcher with the information he needs. And if he want a reflection of the state of the web, he can just ask for that.
If someone searches "How do I get rid of a wart?" presumably he wants reliable medical information. "What are some folk cures for warts?" probably means he's OK with, possibly even is looking for bullshit folk magic.
What is on the web is overwhelmingly bullshit, so much so that this may be the very central struggle of this present generation: to preserve critical thought, even rationality itself against a growing belief that every belief is equally valid.
So when someone queries, "Did the Holocaust happen?" they should get back the most reliable information sources. If they want to know what's going on in the mental cesspools of the Internet, let them search for "Holocaust denialism".
How can the Republic function when so many people have their vote diluted?
Er, that's a broken way of looking at it. If she ONLY got votes in three precinct in California, she wouldn't have won the popular vote. But in fact she got votes in every part of the country, which add up to a substantial (2.8 million) margin of popular vote victory.