Oh, that's not true. I'm sure they're everywhere. The question is whether *this* guy is an actual flat-Earther, or just a smart promoter.
Steam rockets go back quite a ways in daredevil history, back to Evel Knievel's 1972 attempt to jump the Snake River Canyon in a rocket engineer designed by a team of rocket and aerospace engineers. His attempt failed because of a premature parachute deployment. The jump was successfully completed in 2016 using a replica which reached altitudes of 2000 feet and a speed of 400mph, setting a steam rocket distance record of 4756 feet.
That was a daring and dangerous stunt stunt, and the Evel Knievel angle guaranteed a lot of public attention. But let's say you're going to break that record, in reality the altitudes and distances are paltry compared to what you can reach in an airplane. Or even driving over a mountain pass. So how do you attract money and eyeballs? A good cock and bull story, one that lazy and ignorant media will be sure to swallow.
Firing absolutely has to be on the decision tree somewhere, but not near the root of the tree for all the reasons you say. Firing is not a quick fix, except insofar as shielding other people responsible for a problem.
Given that the people who worked with the button-pusher had doubts about his ability to perform, and that this isn't the first time that employee has failed to distinguish between real and drill emergencies, there's obviously a lot more wrong with the way the agency handles performance issues, as well as with the way this particular drill was conducted. If that's not corrected, it could leave employees gun-shy in a real crisis.
Agreed on the thinness of evidence, but also remember this was 1971, before personal computers or even the first public key cipher. Assuming for sake of argument the people behind this latest "solution" to the mystery are correct, then the text would have been ciphered by hand using some rudimentary shared-secret cipher. An expert wouldn't need much text to recover the key -- and in fact this might have been necessary if the sender had no secure channel to transmit the key over.
The problem with "solving" the D.B. Cooper mystery is the double-edged role of imagination in understanding the world. You need imagination to connect sparse evidence into some kind of coherent picture, but that emotionally convincing "aha" feeling you get when you manage to do that drops you right down into confirmation bias territory. That's how conspiracy theories get started.
Making Cooper out to be an ex-spook with CIA paramilitary experience connects a some of dots in an emotionally convincing way: Cooper's ability to manipulate others, his ability to make a convincing bomb and use a parachute. But it leaves others unconnected, like the titanium particles found on his tie. But that's real life, isn't it? Sometimes dots don't have any connection to the picture (e.g. contamination of the evidence after it is collected).
The letters aren't a slam-dunk even if the decryption is valid. They could be a prank. They could be a spook taking advantage of the highly publicized event for his own purposes. What's more there is nothing really to connect this Rackstraw person to the letters, and the known details of his career don't really match up (which of course they wouldn't).
In the end this is Yet Another D.B. Cooper Theory: a few very suggestive connections topped with a mountain of conjecture. Particularly suspect is tying it down to a specific person. That's a major leap of faith.
No danger there. The mosquito species that commonly bite humans are the ones that are adapted to living in proximity of humans. What is habitat destruction for other species is habitat creation for them.
For example Culex pipiens is so well adapted to coexiting with humans its common name is "house mosquito". Clearly it didn't evolve to live around humans. In its natural habitat it laid its eggs in mucky forest puddles and fed on birds. Wipe out the forest and replace it with a suburban subdivision and you actually increase its egg laying habitat: ditches, poorly draining gutters, catch basins and so on. Populations have developed a taste for human blood too -- evolution in action -- and because it still bites birds is a perfect vector for many viral disease that cross from avian to human populations.
Something like this always happens when there is widespread habitat disruption: most species populations are harmed but a small number of them hit the jackpot: what biologists call "weedy species". Mice, voles and pikas are all very similar small woodland creatures, but its ability to adapt to human activities transforms the mouse in some situation into a nightmarish plague.
People have been asking for an outline view in libreoffice writer for well over a decade. The answer is always, "We have the navigator window," which misses the point -- it's a user interface request, providing an alternate means to do a similar thing doesn't really address it. Outline view provides more of a direct manipulation experience.
It's easy enough to see the background of the people who work for Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood by going to the website and reading the staff biographies.
I'd say calling your group "Heart of Texas", or "United Muslims of America" is representing yourself as American. SO is calling your group "Being Patriotic" and using crossed American flags as your emblem. Calling yourself "Donald Trump America" is pretending to be American.
We have been investigating this for many months, and for a while we had found no evidence of fake accounts linked to Russia running ads. When we recently uncovered this activity, we provided that information to the special counsel.
This is not very well written, so I've italicized the relevant bits. They didn't find any of this while it was going on, but later were able to identify the fake accounts.
I'm saying that a substantial fraction of opioid deaths could be stopped by monitoring situations like the one we're discussing, where a ridiculous number of doses are shipped to a couple tiny pharmacies. One pharmacy got nine million doses of Oxycontin in just two years.
It's easy to check if that's even possibly reasonable. If that same pharmacy also got 150 million doses of statin (a class of blood pressure medication taken by 60% of Americans) then it's just a popular pharmacy. But if its ordering more Oxycontin than statin, it's a virtual certainty that nearly all of those nine million doses went to junkies.
And if that's the case, simply auditing pharmacies with unusual volumes of opioid orders would take a huge chunk out of the black market trade. Show me something that simple which would save cancer or alcohol patients and I'm all ears.
In this case Wikipedia's editor misinerpreted this sentence in the source materials:
Compared with placebo, cannabinoids were associated with a greater average number of patients showing a complete nausea and vomiting response
That sentence sounds like pot is causing nausea and vomiting, but in fact it's talking about treating nausea and vomiting with pot so a "complete response" is a total reduction in those symptoms.
I don't think it was infighting, I think it was complacency and misreading the data.
Clinton's campaign acted all along as if they could leave it to Trump lose the election, and the polls seemed to be bearing that out. However polling figures aren't as reliable as the "margin of error" figures suggest, because that margin only represents random sampling errors. It does not account for systematic sampling errors.
Every poll is adjusted by some kind of likely voter turnout model, and in state after state anomalously high rural turnout knocked those models into a cocked hat. The thing is there were warning signs of this from Clinton's own campaigns in those states, which Clinton chose to ignore because the numbers were telling her what she expected to hear.
That's always a danger when you manage by numbers. Numeric and anecdotal data both have their place, mostly to raise healthy doubts about the other.
Oh puh-lease. These accounts and ads got canned because they violated Facebook's TOS, which forbid pretending impersonating other people or deceptively misidentifying yourself.
The Russians were free to say whatever they wanted to say about American politics, as long as they didn't pretend to be Americans.
TL;DR: The Internet Research Agency is a St. Petersburg based company which has among its customers the government of Russia. The company specializes in astroturfing -- not just in the US but in Russia as well. In Eastern Europe they're focused on Ukraine but in the US they post on both sides of issues (e.g. posting as socially conservative groups or as radical LGBT groups) in order to stir up division, e.g. posing as American Muslims or gays or as American evangelical Christians.
I'll make a deal here. I'll admit I'm the nimrod here and you are not if you can show me a single instance of a written government or military procedure which says "this is not a drill" means "Time critical" as you claim.
What decades of experience has taught the people who do this for real (and aren't just nimrods pontificating about what "common sense" tells them how it ought to be done, on slashdot) is that plain language is much better than codes or secret decoder rings.
I don't dispute this, but this is exactly what you are recommending -- in fact it's worse than secret decoder ring BS because it contradicts what the language plainly says.
When the trope got started in the 50s, a lot of people had experience about US ships in WW2. It's not hard to find recordings of things like general quarters from actual where the phrases "This IS a drill" and "This is NOT a drill" are used, or in which neither phrase is used. Apparently the practice varies from ship to ship and situation to situation.
The most famous use of the phrase is from the Pearl Harbor attack, in which radiomen were instructed to say "AIR RAID PEARL HARBOR. THIS IS NO DRILL.” Some present remember hearing it as "THIS IS NO FUCKING DRILL," which would be a good way of removing any doubt.
Here's the thing: if you want people to understand "this is NOT a drill" to mean, not what the words plainly say, but to mean "this is time critical", you have to (a) have a policy that states this and (b) train people on that meaning.
In fact there apparently was no such training, so there was apparently no such policy.
In any case if the word count is more paramount than clarity here, you could use an arbitrary phrase like "code black" and train people on what that means.
Let's imagine we weren't arguing this in hindsight. Instead, let's imagine we've just received contradictory information: this is a drill, this is NOT a drill. On what basis should we decide how to act?
If you say, "choose which option is mostly likely to be true," then the result is you treat this as a drill spuriously identified as a real situation.
If you say, "choose the action which results in the least potential harm," the course of action isn't altogether clear. A false alarm causes emotional distress, and resulting panic can result in real injuries and death. On the other hand it is physically possible for a real attack to occur, in fact that is the whole reason you're holding drills. Treating a real attack as a drill could result in thousands of unnecessary deaths.
Now I've heard some argue that there is actually nothing anyone can do to help people survive a nuclear attack. I don't believe that's true, but let's suppose it is. Then the rational course of action is not to prepare for a nuclear attack at all. The benefit you gain from holding drills is zero, and the potential harm created by the drills themselves is greater than zero.
How can that phrase emphasize that it's a real emergency if it's also used in drills? And if you want to emphasize that time is critical, why not say that?
The solution seems simple to me: use the phrase "this IS a drill" in drills, and "this is NOT a drill" in real emergencies.
Possibly because there are over 17 million cars sold annually in the US.
Imagine you're a the manufactuerer who has the first real-world ready autonomous car system. You could spin it off and sell it to other manufacturers, allowing the ones in third place and lower to leapfrog your nearest competitor. This could eventually put your stockholders in the position of receiving a royalty on most cars being made whether they're from your company or not.
Slashdot Mirror
The Flat Earth Society publishes a membership register. You can check for yourself: there are members from Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
Oh, that's not true. I'm sure they're everywhere. The question is whether *this* guy is an actual flat-Earther, or just a smart promoter.
Steam rockets go back quite a ways in daredevil history, back to Evel Knievel's 1972 attempt to jump the Snake River Canyon in a rocket engineer designed by a team of rocket and aerospace engineers. His attempt failed because of a premature parachute deployment. The jump was successfully completed in 2016 using a replica which reached altitudes of 2000 feet and a speed of 400mph, setting a steam rocket distance record of 4756 feet.
That was a daring and dangerous stunt stunt, and the Evel Knievel angle guaranteed a lot of public attention. But let's say you're going to break that record, in reality the altitudes and distances are paltry compared to what you can reach in an airplane. Or even driving over a mountain pass. So how do you attract money and eyeballs? A good cock and bull story, one that lazy and ignorant media will be sure to swallow.
Firing absolutely has to be on the decision tree somewhere, but not near the root of the tree for all the reasons you say. Firing is not a quick fix, except insofar as shielding other people responsible for a problem.
Given that the people who worked with the button-pusher had doubts about his ability to perform, and that this isn't the first time that employee has failed to distinguish between real and drill emergencies, there's obviously a lot more wrong with the way the agency handles performance issues, as well as with the way this particular drill was conducted. If that's not corrected, it could leave employees gun-shy in a real crisis.
It's stupid and random. If they have an algorithm doing this the programmer is a moron
All he has to do is write his algorithm so that it has no false positives. Any idiot can see that would solve the problem.
If people are doing it, they are morons.
Not necessarily. It's the people who hired them that are morons. You should hire people who don't make mistakes.
Agreed on the thinness of evidence, but also remember this was 1971, before personal computers or even the first public key cipher. Assuming for sake of argument the people behind this latest "solution" to the mystery are correct, then the text would have been ciphered by hand using some rudimentary shared-secret cipher. An expert wouldn't need much text to recover the key -- and in fact this might have been necessary if the sender had no secure channel to transmit the key over.
The problem with "solving" the D.B. Cooper mystery is the double-edged role of imagination in understanding the world. You need imagination to connect sparse evidence into some kind of coherent picture, but that emotionally convincing "aha" feeling you get when you manage to do that drops you right down into confirmation bias territory. That's how conspiracy theories get started.
Making Cooper out to be an ex-spook with CIA paramilitary experience connects a some of dots in an emotionally convincing way: Cooper's ability to manipulate others, his ability to make a convincing bomb and use a parachute. But it leaves others unconnected, like the titanium particles found on his tie. But that's real life, isn't it? Sometimes dots don't have any connection to the picture (e.g. contamination of the evidence after it is collected).
The letters aren't a slam-dunk even if the decryption is valid. They could be a prank. They could be a spook taking advantage of the highly publicized event for his own purposes. What's more there is nothing really to connect this Rackstraw person to the letters, and the known details of his career don't really match up (which of course they wouldn't).
In the end this is Yet Another D.B. Cooper Theory: a few very suggestive connections topped with a mountain of conjecture. Particularly suspect is tying it down to a specific person. That's a major leap of faith.
No danger there. The mosquito species that commonly bite humans are the ones that are adapted to living in proximity of humans. What is habitat destruction for other species is habitat creation for them.
For example Culex pipiens is so well adapted to coexiting with humans its common name is "house mosquito". Clearly it didn't evolve to live around humans. In its natural habitat it laid its eggs in mucky forest puddles and fed on birds. Wipe out the forest and replace it with a suburban subdivision and you actually increase its egg laying habitat: ditches, poorly draining gutters, catch basins and so on. Populations have developed a taste for human blood too -- evolution in action -- and because it still bites birds is a perfect vector for many viral disease that cross from avian to human populations.
Something like this always happens when there is widespread habitat disruption: most species populations are harmed but a small number of them hit the jackpot: what biologists call "weedy species". Mice, voles and pikas are all very similar small woodland creatures, but its ability to adapt to human activities transforms the mouse in some situation into a nightmarish plague.
People have been asking for an outline view in libreoffice writer for well over a decade. The answer is always, "We have the navigator window," which misses the point -- it's a user interface request, providing an alternate means to do a similar thing doesn't really address it. Outline view provides more of a direct manipulation experience.
It's easy enough to see the background of the people who work for Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood by going to the website and reading the staff biographies.
Senator Burr has released the some of the specific ads identified by Facebook as Russian in origin. The House Democrats have also released a wider sample of ads flagged by Facebook as Russian fakes.
I'd say calling your group "Heart of Texas", or "United Muslims of America" is representing yourself as American. SO is calling your group "Being Patriotic" and using crossed American flags as your emblem. Calling yourself "Donald Trump America" is pretending to be American.
Where did FB say they were pretending to be Americans?
here, to wit:
This is not very well written, so I've italicized the relevant bits. They didn't find any of this while it was going on, but later were able to identify the fake accounts.
What other topics can get "canned"?
I just got through saying they got canned for misrepresenting their identity, not the topic.
I'm saying that a substantial fraction of opioid deaths could be stopped by monitoring situations like the one we're discussing, where a ridiculous number of doses are shipped to a couple tiny pharmacies. One pharmacy got nine million doses of Oxycontin in just two years.
It's easy to check if that's even possibly reasonable. If that same pharmacy also got 150 million doses of statin (a class of blood pressure medication taken by 60% of Americans) then it's just a popular pharmacy. But if its ordering more Oxycontin than statin, it's a virtual certainty that nearly all of those nine million doses went to junkies.
And if that's the case, simply auditing pharmacies with unusual volumes of opioid orders would take a huge chunk out of the black market trade. Show me something that simple which would save cancer or alcohol patients and I'm all ears.
In this case Wikipedia's editor misinerpreted this sentence in the source materials:
Compared with placebo, cannabinoids were associated with a greater average number of patients showing a complete nausea and vomiting response
That sentence sounds like pot is causing nausea and vomiting, but in fact it's talking about treating nausea and vomiting with pot so a "complete response" is a total reduction in those symptoms.
I don't think it was infighting, I think it was complacency and misreading the data.
Clinton's campaign acted all along as if they could leave it to Trump lose the election, and the polls seemed to be bearing that out. However polling figures aren't as reliable as the "margin of error" figures suggest, because that margin only represents random sampling errors. It does not account for systematic sampling errors.
Every poll is adjusted by some kind of likely voter turnout model, and in state after state anomalously high rural turnout knocked those models into a cocked hat. The thing is there were warning signs of this from Clinton's own campaigns in those states, which Clinton chose to ignore because the numbers were telling her what she expected to hear.
That's always a danger when you manage by numbers. Numeric and anecdotal data both have their place, mostly to raise healthy doubts about the other.
Oh puh-lease. These accounts and ads got canned because they violated Facebook's TOS, which forbid pretending impersonating other people or deceptively misidentifying yourself.
The Russians were free to say whatever they wanted to say about American politics, as long as they didn't pretend to be Americans.
come from an outfit called "The Internet Research Agency", which you can read about on Wikipedia.
TL;DR: The Internet Research Agency is a St. Petersburg based company which has among its customers the government of Russia. The company specializes in astroturfing -- not just in the US but in Russia as well. In Eastern Europe they're focused on Ukraine but in the US they post on both sides of issues (e.g. posting as socially conservative groups or as radical LGBT groups) in order to stir up division, e.g. posing as American Muslims or gays or as American evangelical Christians.
Yes, and a half million people will die from cancer.
The issues isn't deaths, the issue is preventable deaths.
I'll make a deal here. I'll admit I'm the nimrod here and you are not if you can show me a single instance of a written government or military procedure which says "this is not a drill" means "Time critical" as you claim.
What decades of experience has taught the people who do this for real (and aren't just nimrods pontificating about what "common sense" tells them how it ought to be done, on slashdot) is that plain language is much better than codes or secret decoder rings.
I don't dispute this, but this is exactly what you are recommending -- in fact it's worse than secret decoder ring BS because it contradicts what the language plainly says.
When the trope got started in the 50s, a lot of people had experience about US ships in WW2. It's not hard to find recordings of things like general quarters from actual where the phrases "This IS a drill" and "This is NOT a drill" are used, or in which neither phrase is used. Apparently the practice varies from ship to ship and situation to situation.
The most famous use of the phrase is from the Pearl Harbor attack, in which radiomen were instructed to say "AIR RAID PEARL HARBOR. THIS IS NO DRILL.” Some present remember hearing it as "THIS IS NO FUCKING DRILL," which would be a good way of removing any doubt.
Here's the thing: if you want people to understand "this is NOT a drill" to mean, not what the words plainly say, but to mean "this is time critical", you have to (a) have a policy that states this and (b) train people on that meaning.
In fact there apparently was no such training, so there was apparently no such policy.
In any case if the word count is more paramount than clarity here, you could use an arbitrary phrase like "code black" and train people on what that means.
Let's imagine we weren't arguing this in hindsight. Instead, let's imagine we've just received contradictory information: this is a drill, this is NOT a drill. On what basis should we decide how to act?
If you say, "choose which option is mostly likely to be true," then the result is you treat this as a drill spuriously identified as a real situation.
If you say, "choose the action which results in the least potential harm," the course of action isn't altogether clear. A false alarm causes emotional distress, and resulting panic can result in real injuries and death. On the other hand it is physically possible for a real attack to occur, in fact that is the whole reason you're holding drills. Treating a real attack as a drill could result in thousands of unnecessary deaths.
Now I've heard some argue that there is actually nothing anyone can do to help people survive a nuclear attack. I don't believe that's true, but let's suppose it is. Then the rational course of action is not to prepare for a nuclear attack at all. The benefit you gain from holding drills is zero, and the potential harm created by the drills themselves is greater than zero.
How can that phrase emphasize that it's a real emergency if it's also used in drills? And if you want to emphasize that time is critical, why not say that?
The solution seems simple to me: use the phrase "this IS a drill" in drills, and "this is NOT a drill" in real emergencies.
Possibly because there are over 17 million cars sold annually in the US.
Imagine you're a the manufactuerer who has the first real-world ready autonomous car system. You could spin it off and sell it to other manufacturers, allowing the ones in third place and lower to leapfrog your nearest competitor. This could eventually put your stockholders in the position of receiving a royalty on most cars being made whether they're from your company or not.
Too bad pot's not a hallucinogen. I wouldn't mind being able to buy it in the corner shop, but I guess I'll have to make do with smack.