But... what if there is some unflattering FACT about a group that offends and insults most members of that group? Conversely, there may be flattering fact about a group that most members of the group find flattering.
I'd be interested in examples of what you mean here.
I'll just remark that (a) offensive speech is, absent libel or incitement, perfectly legal in the US, but people don't have to listen to you or let you use their property as a forum for that speech; and (b) it's also quite possible to lie using facts by quoting them out of context. In fact that's how the most skillful liars work. But lying is generally protected speech unless it's libel or fraud, so you're safe there.
I'm not sure you actually know what a dilemma is. I'm not saying you HAVE to choose between posting your views to Facebook OR Stormfront; I'm saying you can express opinions on Stormfront (and other websites) that would be prohibited by Facebook's "Community Standards" [note 1], and that the existence of sites like Stormfront is due to US constitutional protections for unpopular speech.
What this means is that Facebook's Community Standards aren't a civil liberties issue, not even in a "positive liberty" sense.
NOTE 1: Here is the relevant section of Facebook's "Community Standards"
Hate Speech
Facebook removes hate speech, which includes content that directly attacks people based on their: race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, sex, gender or gender identity, or serious disabilities or diseases.
So you see that it happens that speech which is prohibited in Germany by law happens also to be prohibited on US Facebook by Facebook policy.
Here is what the American Bar Association says about "hate speech"; it's worth repeating:
Hate speech is speech that offends, threatens, or insults groups, based on race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, disability, or other traits. Should hate speech be discouraged? The answer is easy—of course! However, developing such policies runs the risk of limiting an individual’s ability to exercise free speech. When a conflict arises about which is more important—protecting community interests or safeguarding the rights of the individual—a balance must be found that protects the civil rights of all without limiting the civil liberties of the speaker.
Now in the US hate speech is usually protected under the First Amendment. The exceptions are when the speaker is intentionally inciting imminent lawless action, or uttering fighting words. Fighting words are at present is something of a Constitutional moving target.
Hate speech can also be an aggravating factor in an ordinary crime. Think about the difference between burning a barrel of leaves on a neighbor's property, and burning a cross (if that neighbor is black). Physically these acts are not so different, but the nature of the crimes are very different. The intent of the cross burning is to frighten the neighbor, perhaps to force him to move away; it is in effect a crime against liberty.
Of course I'm talking about the US, and this situation is in Germany for historical and constitutional reasons takes a stronger stance against hate speech. There it is called Voksverhetzung; there's a definition of Voksverthetzung in the Wikipedia article if you're interested in specifics. Clearly it's illegal to say many things in Germany that would be protected speech in the US (e.g. merely advocating violence against Jews as opposed to inciting it). But even in the US what Zuckerberg is doing would be perfectly legal; Facebook is a private vendor who sets its terms of service and if you don't like it, well, you can always post your updates over on Stormfront (which operates in the US because it's protected -- their server is in Texas apparently).
Zuckerberg can define "hate speech" any way he wants and enforce it in his TOS, as long as the stockholders don't rise up in revolt.
No, it's not fructose reduction, although that's a very good thing. I saw this effect myself, and I've never had a sweet tooth and never consumed much stuff with fructose in it. Even so, as soon as I'd lost a few percent of my body weight my A1C (a diabetes marker that integrates your blood glucose level over the past month or two) dropped to the normal range.
Now I don't know whether it was the lost weight per se or something about the process of losing weight that did this. In my case I ended up losing 30% of my body weight in six months.
If anyone's interested in how I did that, I simply did three things: (1) logged all the calories I ate (there are smartphone apps that make this easy) and (2) timed my meals so I limited the rate of calorie consumption to 25 calories/minute; (3) limited my calorie intake so I was in slight deficit most days. Actually (3) sounds hard, but actually it was the easiest part once I stopped wolfing down my food. I used to get stuffed before I was satisfied; now I'm satisfied before I'm stuffed, simple as that. I generally don't have to watch my daily calorie intake total because it tends to fall into the right range on its own.
I'd say slow eating is the most important part. Once you start eating slower you just eat fewer calories before your full, and enjoy them more. I'll never eat on the run again; I'd rather fast. You also start to make different food choices when you go slower. A flour tortilla has almost 500 calories. A half dozen of them have the energy to keep an active adult man on his feet for a day. But for me it means 20 minutes of watching the clock; it's not that I'll never eat a flour tortilla again, but I pause these days before I select a calorie dense food.
You can make the Big Mac the poster boy for bad food, but it's just a drop in an ocean of food that's bad -- at least bad to eat on a consistent basis.
The choice isn't Big Mac or not Big Mac; it's whether you prepare your own food or eat convenience food. The one thing that most clearly correlates with the rise of obesity in the west is the drop in the time people spend preparing their own food. It's not just that you get control over what goes into your food, people tend to make different choices when they cook for themselves. Harry Balzer, a food industry marketing consultant, suggests eating whatever you want -- if you want to have apple pie, cookies and ice cream for dinner, go ahead. Just make them all yourself; it's a practical certainty that you won't eat that way very often.
When people make the majority of their own food, they settle into a predictable pattern for most of their cooking: they buy good ingredients and prepare them simply. Even if you tried to eat that way out of restaurants, eventually you'd slip into bad eating patterns because there's nothing but mindfulness and willpower keeping you from doing that -- and those are in limited supply for all of us. Take french fries; there's nothing wrong with an occasional meal of fries, but limiting them to a reasonable fraction of your diet takes attention when they're on offer every day. But if you made your own french fries, that's a self limiting process. It's not even all that hard to do, but contemplating the modest effort involved makes you pause to think about whether you really want fries tonight. When the waiter asks "do you want fries with that?" you tend to say yes if you might want fries.
I love going out to restaurants, even chain restaurants. I don't think we should villainize the Big Mac; there's nothing wrong with it, so long as it doesn't become your go-to food. But it's so easy for foods you shouldn't be living on to become your staple when you order them at the drive-through or buy them premade at the supermarket and throw it into the microwave.
So let me get this straight - the initial readings were well below any dangerous threshold, now the readings have increased and are now 80% higher than the initial readings, and are now 0.1% of the dangerous threshold... That's the alarming problem?
Imagine you had a bag full of balls and they're all supposed to be white. You want to check whether there are any black ones, but you don't want to go through every ball in the bag; so you randomly sample the bag until you've reached whatever confidence interval you wanted. That's pretty much how all environmental monitoring schemes work. You can't measure the entire volume of space around something like this, so you sample discrete points in space, which is just like drawing balls from the bag.
Now imagine the balls aren't black and white, but continuously distributed over range of shades from white to black. Gray balls are not a problem in themselves, but if you come up with more gray balls in your sample than you expected it suggests that the distribution of shades might be different than you expected. This in turn suggests there may be some black balls in the bag. It's not proof either way; perhaps you were just unlucky in your sample. So what you don't do is dismiss the gray balls you've found, saying "gray balls aren't a problem." What you do is take more samples to see if you're looking at a statistical fluke or an unexpected change in the distribution of ball colors.
Your argument is that we haven't seen definitive proof of a problem in any individual sample, so there must be no problem. The problem with that logic is that if it were correct you could eliminate problems by simply not looking so hard for them. If you cut the number of test wells by 90%, your chance of seeing a sample which was dangerously contaminated would drop dramatically.
Yes, an individual sample may prove you have a problem. But that requires some luck in your sampling choice. So what you want to do is look at the distribution of samples, which is a much more sensitive (a.k.a. more economical) way of looking at the data. In particular looking for unexplained change in data is much more efficient than increasing the number of sample points to get the same sensitivity; it means you spend the money to do more samples only when there's some evidence something unexpected is going on.
The word people are using is "alarming"; not "catastrophe" or "disaster". That's because the facts warrant alarm (n. a sudden fear or distressing suspense caused by an awareness of danger; apprehension; fright.), but not panic. There is at yet no data which shows an imminent serious threat to human or environmental health, but the alarming thing is that the tritium levels found in the groundwater shouldn't be that high. If they are that high then something is not working the way it's supposed to be working, and we don't know why.
That's a very reasonable grounds for apprehension, and the appropriate response is an investigation, which we all hope turns up some minor and readily corrected problem. Otherwise there'd be no point checking the groundwater for tritium in the first place.
If you don't like TFA you can simply google "indian point tritium groundwater" and pick up a more trusted news source. Most of the major news sources are taking the position I just outlined: no need for panic, but this needs a good looking-into.
The listener is the only one responsible, for believing false statements and acting in bad faith. The speaker didn't force him. It is a personal choice that no one else should be held to account.
Deception is a kind of force. That's the whole point of deception is to force the listener to do your bidding by subverting his knowledge of the truth.
Yes, I know I'm in a tiny minority, but it does not invalidate what I say.
Yes, but if you disagree with virtually everyone you should at least consider the possibility that you're wrong. You aren't necessarily wrong, but you probably are.
I'm not talking about compelling people to believe or respond in any way. I'm talking about holding people responsible for the consequences of the responses they choose to make. I don't care if you believe that Bernie Sanders drinks the blood of Christian babies. If you sincerely believe that, and spread it around, well it's unfortunate that you're such a deranged person. But if you start that rumor knowing it's false, you should face consequences.
This is not some kind of new-fangled theory. It's been part of US law since before the Revolution; it goes back in common law for over 500 years. Every free society in the world has some legal prohibition on defamation.
As to the idea that words have no power you don't give them, that's naive in the extreme. I'm not talking about hurt feelings, I'm talking about damaged reputations and that is very powerful no matter how you feel about it. People absolutely depend upon their reputations to conduct business. To deliberately and unjustly take someone's reputation away is no different from torching a tractor on a farm or a lithography machine at a semiconductor plant.
The difference is that politicians in the past would stretch, spin, and skew the truth, but tried to stop short of outright breaking it.
No, that's not the difference at all. The difference is that the Internet allows us to step into a comforting echo chamber where things that would upset us are safely excluded; only the things we want to believe can get in. Back in the day if a politician were caught in a lie it would be damaging, so you avoided lies where you'd get caught. But today getting caught doesn't matter; the truth doesn't matter; what matters is which way reaction is breaking and you shape that with new information -- or misinformation, either works equally well so long as what you said a few days ago is old news. If your a politician old news can't penetrate the bubble you keep your followers in.
Frankly they all suck, and so holding one higher--or lower as the case may be--is vapid at best. Drop the slanted political "news" and get back to what we come to Slash Dot for.
Speaking of vapid... the idea that all the candidates are equivalent is the most empty and baseless statement I've heard in a long time. Or do you really think there's no difference between Trump and Kasich, or Sanders for that matter? Yes, there's always dreck, but this year's primaries offers more substantive and stark choices than any primary since I began voting in 1980.
Opinions aren't actionable, but of course speech is and should be actionable. Or are you saying that defamation should be legal? In our system the bar for proving defamation is pretty high, particularly against a public figure.
The kind of defamation that you can prove against someone like Jacobus is scurrilous in the extreme; it doesn't contribute in any constructive way to the public debate, because it has to be a deliberate and malicious falsehood.
No, I think the situation is the same on both sides in the US, and it's probably going to be true of any two party system. The people who think the most about politics are the least satisfied with their party, but consider it the lesser of two evils.
The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.
Which of course doesn't apply here. Twitter isn't a democracy, it's a kakocracy.
I can imagine some consequences, the biggest of which is that there'll be more leaks -- of the Bradley Manning type of the Edward Snowden type, as well as leaks to friendly and not-so-friendly intelligence services.
Which doesn't mean it's not a good idea. Or that if it's a good idea it can't be a bad idea at the same time. Every tough decision has both desirable and undesirable consequences, the problem is that people aren't comfortable with that. In fact they shouldn't be. But they like to wrap themselves in a comforting blanket of confirmation bias so they act as if ideas are either entirely bad with no good consequences or entirely good with no bad ones.
I don't fetishize the US Constitution; a lot of it (like the electoral college) is pretty half-assed. It's not surprising, because they didn't have a lot of models of a formal republican constitution to build upon. But the one thing about it that's really brilliant about the US Constitution is the notion of checks and balances. The powers you give the government are always dangerous, so you encumber their use by harnessing the natural instinct of institutions to guard their prerogatives. That's genius.
I agree to stipulate this can be used for important and legitimate purposes, obviously it can. But if the government wants to do this I want to hear about the checks and balances.
In this case "no vision for putting a manned mission on Mars in the foreseeable future."
I know "politics" is a dirty word for most nerds, but if you want to spend the hundred billion taxpayer dollars that the optimists think it'll take to mount a manned Mars mission you should at least do them the courtesy of convincing them it's a the best use of their space science money.
"I want to go to Mars at any cost," isn't a vision. Taking a few half-assed first steps toward Mars in the hope that future admistrators will be forced to go down that path because that's all he's got after you've starved Earth and planetary sciences programs into insignificance -- well that's not much of a plan in my book.
If you did a serious analysis of what went wrong with US security in the run up to 9/11, one of the many things that might have stopped it was if the CIA had told the FBI that known Al Qaeda operatives were in the US. In fact the CIA knew that the perpetrators of the USS Cole bombing had met with two if the 9/11 bombers, but lied to the FBI when the FBI team investigating the Cole asked about it.
Why did they lie? Two reasons. The first was that the CIA has a different organizational mission; they wanted to penetrate Al Qaeda, and having Al Qaeda operating in the US would be convenient. The second was institutional rivalry that rose the point of personal hatred. One CIA administrator actually testified that the one good thing that happened on the 9/11 was that the two towers fell on John O'Neill, the FBI administrator in charge of the Cole bombing. It's shocking that a US intelligence officer could feel that way, but even more shocking that he'd admit it publicly.
Clearly US intelligence was horribly dysfunctional and misguided in the run up to 9/11, so what did we do about it? We promoted the CIA people who were responsible for stonewalling the FBI out of harm's way. Then we fought a war against a country which had nothing to do with 9/11 and which resulted in 4400 US troops being killed, and civilians killed and wounded beyond anyone's ability to count.
Getting the US security apparatus working together would have been a much smarter response than invading Iraq, but even though it's the right thing to do people are also right to be concerned. Any power the government has to do legitimate things can also be used to do illegitimate things; that's the point we have to start with. Otherwise we're stuck with a false dichotomy: should we be safe or should we be free. If we argue in those terms we'll be neither. We should be arguing in terms of oversight and auditing that will place potentially career-ending if not prison-serving consequences on misuse of data.
If we treat them as powerful, attacking them will also gain credibility. Beheading videos may be great to recruit supporters, but they're also a great way of getting the West to accept military force used against them.
ISIS actually doesn't understand that. Middle Eastern cultures tend to assume that if they threaten the West and the West doesn't attack them, it's because of weakness, not because of scruples.
Well, possibly. It's a bit simplistic to talk about "Middle Eastern cultures" as if they're one thing, and assume that determines the opinions of everyone in the Middle East as if they were cultural robots. People in the Middle East don't think uniformly about the West any more than people in the West agree about the Middle East. Some of them know a great deal about us. Dr. Khansari, the Iranian foreign minister, has spent more of his life in the US than in Iran, from the time he was a teenager. I suspect he understands us rather well.
As for our scruples about attacking people, people in the Middle East can be forgiven if they don't believe the West has any, because some of us don't. It depends on politics -- who has the upper hand at the moment, the people with scruples or the people without?
I think the same applies in the Middle East. Again we tend to think of people in the Middle East as cultural robots, but they've got politics too. Just as you can be pretty sure (in most election years anyway) that the Republican presidential nominee will veer to left in the general election and the Democrat will veer to the right, people in the Middle East posture according to political expediency too. Yes a beheading may bring the wrath of the West down on your country sooner or later, but they may also help you gain power over your rivals right now. That kind of cynically calculated political self-interest should be very recognizable to us because it happens everywhere.
What I'm saying is that it's not necessarily all about us, even when people like ISIS claim it is, because they're liars.
Well, the planet doesn't need more humans, but each generation of humans needs the next generation of humans to take care of it in their senescence. Not that there's likely to be a shortage of new humans in any case.
On the flip side curing infertility isn't going to make any measurable or perceptible difference in population growth. For that there are two extremely powerful and effective cures: (1) raising the level of economic security so people don't try to procreate their way to a secure old age and (2) raising the status of women to the point where they have other things to do beside take care of children (important as that may be). If overpopulation bothers you, that's where your attention should go.
So you may as well cure infertility. Yes, there's a cost to overpopulation, but there's a benefit to having a next generation too; but neither is going to be impacted by helping a handful of people obtain the benefits of having children.
Well, it sounds like you have bigger problems with that former boss, but permission to distribute is permission to distribute. At most he can do is demand you stop, depending on the license.
In fact with many licenses all you need to do is get permission to install a binary. That triggers the source code redistribution provisions.
Well, a lot of the language we're using to talk about this is unsatisfyingly vague. What does it mean that "the Earth should not exist"? And especially "strictly speaking"; people misuse that phrase the way they misuse "literally" -- i.e. to mean exactly the opposite of what it actually does.
If the model strictly speaking precludes the existence of the Earth, then the model was constructed wrongly. But what if the model simply predicts that the most likely number of Earth-like planets is zero? That would not, strictly speaking, preclude the Earth existing. Presumably the next most likely number of Earths would be one, followed by two etc.
In any case I have some experience with models of complex systems about which data is somewhat spotty -- in my case zoonotic diseases, which depend on all kinds of things which we don't have very good data about. So we run them with suppositions, which we dignify by calling "parameters". The thing about such models is that they're mainly useful in generating research questions than making predictions. We might not know exactly how quickly a virus amplifies inside a disease vector like a mosquito; if the model suggests that human transmissions go up rapidly with shorter amplification times, then that becomes a research priority. It can't tell you that if zika virus establishes itself in Miami this year that we'll get 22 cases.
It seems to me that we're at an analogous place with models of exosolar planets. We've only been detecting them for a few years, so while it's a reasonable starting point to assume that they're representative of planets in the universe as a whole, that isn't necessarily true. Indeed it's possible we'll never be able to observe a representative sample of planets.
is that they're very, very media savvy. They understand the value of PR, and are not above saying things they don't have any real plans to do just for the publicity effect. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure they'd be happy to lop off a few CEO heads (especially the Jew), but I'm guessing their primary aim is to keep us talking about them.
And you know, we do have to talk about them, because that's the way our society operates and they know it. But we don't necessarily have to give their chest-thumping any credence. I think that's the primary thing they want; if we treat them as powerful then they will gain credibility and that will attract adherents. So let's review; the guys they're threatening are famous, high profile billionaires. They're already attractive targets for domestic terrorists and criminals; they're not soft targets for any screwball ISIS might inspire to martyrdom.
ISIS also can get other things from from making largely empty threats. They can get whip up American anti-Muslim sentiment, which serves ISIS's purposes very well. The droves of Muslims eager to get away from ISIS's control undermines the legitimacy ISIS's claim to having established a new caliphate, so they are very quick to publicize the fact that anyone trying to leave is going to get kicked by Hungarian cameramen.
If you don't want to be an unwitting ISIS stooge, take a deep breath and put them in perspective. Sure, they're a bunch of dangerous fanatics, but they're 6000 miles away. And yes, they're bound to have a few homicidal crackpot adherents here in the USA, but those crackpots are just a drop in our big bucket of homegrown homicidal crackpots, and we hardly give our native nutcases any attention at all. We're already taking our homegrown fanatics and mass killers in stride, so it's just a marginal effort to worry about ISIS.
That's ISIS in a nutshell for us: they're a marginal concern. Not to say ISIS doesn't have a place on the list of the things we need to be concerned with, but it hardly deserves to be the center of our foreign policy, much less the center of our national policy.
The government can bypass the OS entirely and clone the memory, at which point they have a lot of stuff encrypted in AES-256 with not a clue about the password.
That is simply not true. Apple's own documentation states the password is stored in flash.
Slashdot Mirror
But... what if there is some unflattering FACT about a group that offends and insults most members of that group? Conversely, there may be flattering fact about a group that most members of the group find flattering.
I'd be interested in examples of what you mean here.
I'll just remark that (a) offensive speech is, absent libel or incitement, perfectly legal in the US, but people don't have to listen to you or let you use their property as a forum for that speech; and (b) it's also quite possible to lie using facts by quoting them out of context. In fact that's how the most skillful liars work. But lying is generally protected speech unless it's libel or fraud, so you're safe there.
I'm not sure you actually know what a dilemma is. I'm not saying you HAVE to choose between posting your views to Facebook OR Stormfront; I'm saying you can express opinions on Stormfront (and other websites) that would be prohibited by Facebook's "Community Standards" [note 1], and that the existence of sites like Stormfront is due to US constitutional protections for unpopular speech.
What this means is that Facebook's Community Standards aren't a civil liberties issue, not even in a "positive liberty" sense.
NOTE 1: Here is the relevant section of Facebook's "Community Standards"
So you see that it happens that speech which is prohibited in Germany by law happens also to be prohibited on US Facebook by Facebook policy.
Here is what the American Bar Association says about "hate speech"; it's worth repeating:
Hate speech is speech that offends, threatens, or insults groups, based on race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, disability, or other traits. Should hate speech be discouraged? The answer is easy—of course! However, developing such policies runs the risk of limiting an individual’s ability to exercise free speech. When a conflict arises about which is more important—protecting community interests or safeguarding the rights of the individual—a balance must be found that protects the civil rights of all without limiting the civil liberties of the speaker.
Now in the US hate speech is usually protected under the First Amendment. The exceptions are when the speaker is intentionally inciting imminent lawless action, or uttering fighting words. Fighting words are at present is something of a Constitutional moving target.
Hate speech can also be an aggravating factor in an ordinary crime. Think about the difference between burning a barrel of leaves on a neighbor's property, and burning a cross (if that neighbor is black). Physically these acts are not so different, but the nature of the crimes are very different. The intent of the cross burning is to frighten the neighbor, perhaps to force him to move away; it is in effect a crime against liberty.
Of course I'm talking about the US, and this situation is in Germany for historical and constitutional reasons takes a stronger stance against hate speech. There it is called Voksverhetzung; there's a definition of Voksverthetzung in the Wikipedia article if you're interested in specifics. Clearly it's illegal to say many things in Germany that would be protected speech in the US (e.g. merely advocating violence against Jews as opposed to inciting it). But even in the US what Zuckerberg is doing would be perfectly legal; Facebook is a private vendor who sets its terms of service and if you don't like it, well, you can always post your updates over on Stormfront (which operates in the US because it's protected -- their server is in Texas apparently).
Zuckerberg can define "hate speech" any way he wants and enforce it in his TOS, as long as the stockholders don't rise up in revolt.
No, it's not fructose reduction, although that's a very good thing. I saw this effect myself, and I've never had a sweet tooth and never consumed much stuff with fructose in it. Even so, as soon as I'd lost a few percent of my body weight my A1C (a diabetes marker that integrates your blood glucose level over the past month or two) dropped to the normal range.
Now I don't know whether it was the lost weight per se or something about the process of losing weight that did this. In my case I ended up losing 30% of my body weight in six months.
If anyone's interested in how I did that, I simply did three things: (1) logged all the calories I ate (there are smartphone apps that make this easy) and (2) timed my meals so I limited the rate of calorie consumption to 25 calories/minute; (3) limited my calorie intake so I was in slight deficit most days. Actually (3) sounds hard, but actually it was the easiest part once I stopped wolfing down my food. I used to get stuffed before I was satisfied; now I'm satisfied before I'm stuffed, simple as that. I generally don't have to watch my daily calorie intake total because it tends to fall into the right range on its own.
I'd say slow eating is the most important part. Once you start eating slower you just eat fewer calories before your full, and enjoy them more. I'll never eat on the run again; I'd rather fast. You also start to make different food choices when you go slower. A flour tortilla has almost 500 calories. A half dozen of them have the energy to keep an active adult man on his feet for a day. But for me it means 20 minutes of watching the clock; it's not that I'll never eat a flour tortilla again, but I pause these days before I select a calorie dense food.
You can make the Big Mac the poster boy for bad food, but it's just a drop in an ocean of food that's bad -- at least bad to eat on a consistent basis.
The choice isn't Big Mac or not Big Mac; it's whether you prepare your own food or eat convenience food. The one thing that most clearly correlates with the rise of obesity in the west is the drop in the time people spend preparing their own food. It's not just that you get control over what goes into your food, people tend to make different choices when they cook for themselves. Harry Balzer, a food industry marketing consultant, suggests eating whatever you want -- if you want to have apple pie, cookies and ice cream for dinner, go ahead. Just make them all yourself; it's a practical certainty that you won't eat that way very often.
When people make the majority of their own food, they settle into a predictable pattern for most of their cooking: they buy good ingredients and prepare them simply. Even if you tried to eat that way out of restaurants, eventually you'd slip into bad eating patterns because there's nothing but mindfulness and willpower keeping you from doing that -- and those are in limited supply for all of us. Take french fries; there's nothing wrong with an occasional meal of fries, but limiting them to a reasonable fraction of your diet takes attention when they're on offer every day. But if you made your own french fries, that's a self limiting process. It's not even all that hard to do, but contemplating the modest effort involved makes you pause to think about whether you really want fries tonight. When the waiter asks "do you want fries with that?" you tend to say yes if you might want fries.
I love going out to restaurants, even chain restaurants. I don't think we should villainize the Big Mac; there's nothing wrong with it, so long as it doesn't become your go-to food. But it's so easy for foods you shouldn't be living on to become your staple when you order them at the drive-through or buy them premade at the supermarket and throw it into the microwave.
So let me get this straight - the initial readings were well below any dangerous threshold, now the readings have increased and are now 80% higher than the initial readings, and are now 0.1% of the dangerous threshold... That's the alarming problem?
Imagine you had a bag full of balls and they're all supposed to be white. You want to check whether there are any black ones, but you don't want to go through every ball in the bag; so you randomly sample the bag until you've reached whatever confidence interval you wanted. That's pretty much how all environmental monitoring schemes work. You can't measure the entire volume of space around something like this, so you sample discrete points in space, which is just like drawing balls from the bag.
Now imagine the balls aren't black and white, but continuously distributed over range of shades from white to black. Gray balls are not a problem in themselves, but if you come up with more gray balls in your sample than you expected it suggests that the distribution of shades might be different than you expected. This in turn suggests there may be some black balls in the bag. It's not proof either way; perhaps you were just unlucky in your sample. So what you don't do is dismiss the gray balls you've found, saying "gray balls aren't a problem." What you do is take more samples to see if you're looking at a statistical fluke or an unexpected change in the distribution of ball colors.
Your argument is that we haven't seen definitive proof of a problem in any individual sample, so there must be no problem. The problem with that logic is that if it were correct you could eliminate problems by simply not looking so hard for them. If you cut the number of test wells by 90%, your chance of seeing a sample which was dangerously contaminated would drop dramatically.
Yes, an individual sample may prove you have a problem. But that requires some luck in your sampling choice. So what you want to do is look at the distribution of samples, which is a much more sensitive (a.k.a. more economical) way of looking at the data. In particular looking for unexplained change in data is much more efficient than increasing the number of sample points to get the same sensitivity; it means you spend the money to do more samples only when there's some evidence something unexpected is going on.
The word people are using is "alarming"; not "catastrophe" or "disaster". That's because the facts warrant alarm (n. a sudden fear or distressing suspense caused by an awareness of danger; apprehension; fright.), but not panic. There is at yet no data which shows an imminent serious threat to human or environmental health, but the alarming thing is that the tritium levels found in the groundwater shouldn't be that high. If they are that high then something is not working the way it's supposed to be working, and we don't know why.
That's a very reasonable grounds for apprehension, and the appropriate response is an investigation, which we all hope turns up some minor and readily corrected problem. Otherwise there'd be no point checking the groundwater for tritium in the first place.
If you don't like TFA you can simply google "indian point tritium groundwater" and pick up a more trusted news source. Most of the major news sources are taking the position I just outlined: no need for panic, but this needs a good looking-into.
The listener is the only one responsible, for believing false statements and acting in bad faith. The speaker didn't force him. It is a personal choice that no one else should be held to account.
Deception is a kind of force. That's the whole point of deception is to force the listener to do your bidding by subverting his knowledge of the truth.
Yes, I know I'm in a tiny minority, but it does not invalidate what I say.
Yes, but if you disagree with virtually everyone you should at least consider the possibility that you're wrong. You aren't necessarily wrong, but you probably are.
I'm not talking about compelling people to believe or respond in any way. I'm talking about holding people responsible for the consequences of the responses they choose to make. I don't care if you believe that Bernie Sanders drinks the blood of Christian babies. If you sincerely believe that, and spread it around, well it's unfortunate that you're such a deranged person. But if you start that rumor knowing it's false, you should face consequences.
This is not some kind of new-fangled theory. It's been part of US law since before the Revolution; it goes back in common law for over 500 years. Every free society in the world has some legal prohibition on defamation.
As to the idea that words have no power you don't give them, that's naive in the extreme. I'm not talking about hurt feelings, I'm talking about damaged reputations and that is very powerful no matter how you feel about it. People absolutely depend upon their reputations to conduct business. To deliberately and unjustly take someone's reputation away is no different from torching a tractor on a farm or a lithography machine at a semiconductor plant.
The difference is that politicians in the past would stretch, spin, and skew the truth, but tried to stop short of outright breaking it.
No, that's not the difference at all. The difference is that the Internet allows us to step into a comforting echo chamber where things that would upset us are safely excluded; only the things we want to believe can get in. Back in the day if a politician were caught in a lie it would be damaging, so you avoided lies where you'd get caught. But today getting caught doesn't matter; the truth doesn't matter; what matters is which way reaction is breaking and you shape that with new information -- or misinformation, either works equally well so long as what you said a few days ago is old news. If your a politician old news can't penetrate the bubble you keep your followers in.
In short,we live in the golden age of bullshit.
Frankly they all suck, and so holding one higher--or lower as the case may be--is vapid at best. Drop the slanted political "news" and get back to what we come to Slash Dot for.
Speaking of vapid... the idea that all the candidates are equivalent is the most empty and baseless statement I've heard in a long time. Or do you really think there's no difference between Trump and Kasich, or Sanders for that matter? Yes, there's always dreck, but this year's primaries offers more substantive and stark choices than any primary since I began voting in 1980.
No, if he wins the election it doesn't change the nature of Twitter one bit. It's not like winning rewrites reality and turns falsehood into truth.
Opinions aren't actionable, but of course speech is and should be actionable. Or are you saying that defamation should be legal? In our system the bar for proving defamation is pretty high, particularly against a public figure.
The kind of defamation that you can prove against someone like Jacobus is scurrilous in the extreme; it doesn't contribute in any constructive way to the public debate, because it has to be a deliberate and malicious falsehood.
No, I think the situation is the same on both sides in the US, and it's probably going to be true of any two party system. The people who think the most about politics are the least satisfied with their party, but consider it the lesser of two evils.
The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.
Which of course doesn't apply here. Twitter isn't a democracy, it's a kakocracy.
I can imagine some consequences, the biggest of which is that there'll be more leaks -- of the Bradley Manning type of the Edward Snowden type, as well as leaks to friendly and not-so-friendly intelligence services.
Which doesn't mean it's not a good idea. Or that if it's a good idea it can't be a bad idea at the same time. Every tough decision has both desirable and undesirable consequences, the problem is that people aren't comfortable with that. In fact they shouldn't be. But they like to wrap themselves in a comforting blanket of confirmation bias so they act as if ideas are either entirely bad with no good consequences or entirely good with no bad ones.
I don't fetishize the US Constitution; a lot of it (like the electoral college) is pretty half-assed. It's not surprising, because they didn't have a lot of models of a formal republican constitution to build upon. But the one thing about it that's really brilliant about the US Constitution is the notion of checks and balances. The powers you give the government are always dangerous, so you encumber their use by harnessing the natural instinct of institutions to guard their prerogatives. That's genius.
I agree to stipulate this can be used for important and legitimate purposes, obviously it can. But if the government wants to do this I want to hear about the checks and balances.
In this case "no vision for putting a manned mission on Mars in the foreseeable future."
I know "politics" is a dirty word for most nerds, but if you want to spend the hundred billion taxpayer dollars that the optimists think it'll take to mount a manned Mars mission you should at least do them the courtesy of convincing them it's a the best use of their space science money.
"I want to go to Mars at any cost," isn't a vision. Taking a few half-assed first steps toward Mars in the hope that future admistrators will be forced to go down that path because that's all he's got after you've starved Earth and planetary sciences programs into insignificance -- well that's not much of a plan in my book.
Well, the devil is in the details, as they say.
If you did a serious analysis of what went wrong with US security in the run up to 9/11, one of the many things that might have stopped it was if the CIA had told the FBI that known Al Qaeda operatives were in the US. In fact the CIA knew that the perpetrators of the USS Cole bombing had met with two if the 9/11 bombers, but lied to the FBI when the FBI team investigating the Cole asked about it.
Why did they lie? Two reasons. The first was that the CIA has a different organizational mission; they wanted to penetrate Al Qaeda, and having Al Qaeda operating in the US would be convenient. The second was institutional rivalry that rose the point of personal hatred. One CIA administrator actually testified that the one good thing that happened on the 9/11 was that the two towers fell on John O'Neill, the FBI administrator in charge of the Cole bombing. It's shocking that a US intelligence officer could feel that way, but even more shocking that he'd admit it publicly.
Clearly US intelligence was horribly dysfunctional and misguided in the run up to 9/11, so what did we do about it? We promoted the CIA people who were responsible for stonewalling the FBI out of harm's way. Then we fought a war against a country which had nothing to do with 9/11 and which resulted in 4400 US troops being killed, and civilians killed and wounded beyond anyone's ability to count.
Getting the US security apparatus working together would have been a much smarter response than invading Iraq, but even though it's the right thing to do people are also right to be concerned. Any power the government has to do legitimate things can also be used to do illegitimate things; that's the point we have to start with. Otherwise we're stuck with a false dichotomy: should we be safe or should we be free. If we argue in those terms we'll be neither. We should be arguing in terms of oversight and auditing that will place potentially career-ending if not prison-serving consequences on misuse of data.
If we treat them as powerful, attacking them will also gain credibility. Beheading videos may be great to recruit supporters, but they're also a great way of getting the West to accept military force used against them.
ISIS actually doesn't understand that. Middle Eastern cultures tend to assume that if they threaten the West and the West doesn't attack them, it's because of weakness, not because of scruples.
Well, possibly. It's a bit simplistic to talk about "Middle Eastern cultures" as if they're one thing, and assume that determines the opinions of everyone in the Middle East as if they were cultural robots. People in the Middle East don't think uniformly about the West any more than people in the West agree about the Middle East. Some of them know a great deal about us. Dr. Khansari, the Iranian foreign minister, has spent more of his life in the US than in Iran, from the time he was a teenager. I suspect he understands us rather well.
As for our scruples about attacking people, people in the Middle East can be forgiven if they don't believe the West has any, because some of us don't. It depends on politics -- who has the upper hand at the moment, the people with scruples or the people without?
I think the same applies in the Middle East. Again we tend to think of people in the Middle East as cultural robots, but they've got politics too. Just as you can be pretty sure (in most election years anyway) that the Republican presidential nominee will veer to left in the general election and the Democrat will veer to the right, people in the Middle East posture according to political expediency too. Yes a beheading may bring the wrath of the West down on your country sooner or later, but they may also help you gain power over your rivals right now. That kind of cynically calculated political self-interest should be very recognizable to us because it happens everywhere.
What I'm saying is that it's not necessarily all about us, even when people like ISIS claim it is, because they're liars.
Nobody knows whether it's possible.
Well, the planet doesn't need more humans, but each generation of humans needs the next generation of humans to take care of it in their senescence. Not that there's likely to be a shortage of new humans in any case.
On the flip side curing infertility isn't going to make any measurable or perceptible difference in population growth. For that there are two extremely powerful and effective cures: (1) raising the level of economic security so people don't try to procreate their way to a secure old age and (2) raising the status of women to the point where they have other things to do beside take care of children (important as that may be). If overpopulation bothers you, that's where your attention should go.
So you may as well cure infertility. Yes, there's a cost to overpopulation, but there's a benefit to having a next generation too; but neither is going to be impacted by helping a handful of people obtain the benefits of having children.
Well, it sounds like you have bigger problems with that former boss, but permission to distribute is permission to distribute. At most he can do is demand you stop, depending on the license.
In fact with many licenses all you need to do is get permission to install a binary. That triggers the source code redistribution provisions.
Well, a lot of the language we're using to talk about this is unsatisfyingly vague. What does it mean that "the Earth should not exist"? And especially "strictly speaking"; people misuse that phrase the way they misuse "literally" -- i.e. to mean exactly the opposite of what it actually does.
If the model strictly speaking precludes the existence of the Earth, then the model was constructed wrongly. But what if the model simply predicts that the most likely number of Earth-like planets is zero? That would not, strictly speaking, preclude the Earth existing. Presumably the next most likely number of Earths would be one, followed by two etc.
In any case I have some experience with models of complex systems about which data is somewhat spotty -- in my case zoonotic diseases, which depend on all kinds of things which we don't have very good data about. So we run them with suppositions, which we dignify by calling "parameters". The thing about such models is that they're mainly useful in generating research questions than making predictions. We might not know exactly how quickly a virus amplifies inside a disease vector like a mosquito; if the model suggests that human transmissions go up rapidly with shorter amplification times, then that becomes a research priority. It can't tell you that if zika virus establishes itself in Miami this year that we'll get 22 cases.
It seems to me that we're at an analogous place with models of exosolar planets. We've only been detecting them for a few years, so while it's a reasonable starting point to assume that they're representative of planets in the universe as a whole, that isn't necessarily true. Indeed it's possible we'll never be able to observe a representative sample of planets.
is that they're very, very media savvy. They understand the value of PR, and are not above saying things they don't have any real plans to do just for the publicity effect. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure they'd be happy to lop off a few CEO heads (especially the Jew), but I'm guessing their primary aim is to keep us talking about them.
And you know, we do have to talk about them, because that's the way our society operates and they know it. But we don't necessarily have to give their chest-thumping any credence. I think that's the primary thing they want; if we treat them as powerful then they will gain credibility and that will attract adherents. So let's review; the guys they're threatening are famous, high profile billionaires. They're already attractive targets for domestic terrorists and criminals; they're not soft targets for any screwball ISIS might inspire to martyrdom.
ISIS also can get other things from from making largely empty threats. They can get whip up American anti-Muslim sentiment, which serves ISIS's purposes very well. The droves of Muslims eager to get away from ISIS's control undermines the legitimacy ISIS's claim to having established a new caliphate, so they are very quick to publicize the fact that anyone trying to leave is going to get kicked by Hungarian cameramen.
If you don't want to be an unwitting ISIS stooge, take a deep breath and put them in perspective. Sure, they're a bunch of dangerous fanatics, but they're 6000 miles away. And yes, they're bound to have a few homicidal crackpot adherents here in the USA, but those crackpots are just a drop in our big bucket of homegrown homicidal crackpots, and we hardly give our native nutcases any attention at all. We're already taking our homegrown fanatics and mass killers in stride, so it's just a marginal effort to worry about ISIS.
That's ISIS in a nutshell for us: they're a marginal concern. Not to say ISIS doesn't have a place on the list of the things we need to be concerned with, but it hardly deserves to be the center of our foreign policy, much less the center of our national policy.
The government can bypass the OS entirely and clone the memory, at which point they have a lot of stuff encrypted in AES-256 with not a clue about the password.
That is simply not true. Apple's own documentation states the password is stored in flash.