However, the world has... cheap and fast global communications,...
That's IMHO the important bit. People inherently need the world around them to be Just. A little understood implication of that is that the better and quicker we are able to communicate with the rest of the world, the more injustice gets exposed. Injustice is like a fungus: too much sunlight and it burns away.
Its pretty easy to find places where this is clearly not true (eg: Syria). But those are localized places and times. That's like finding a place where entropy seems to be decreasing; you can do that, but that only means elsewhere it increased more. Human society seems to follow Theodore Parker's principle: The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
This seems like a good place and time for my favorite Christmas song, written by Longfellow after he'd lost his entire family (wife included) during the Civil War:
I heard the bells on Christmas day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men.
I thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along th'unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.
And in despair I bowed my head:
"There is no peace on earth," I said,
"For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men."
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth he sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail,
With peace on earth, good will to men."
Till, ringing, singing, on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime, a chant sublime,
Of peace on earth, good will to men!
I honestly don't see your clarification as any better. If people are encouraged to hand those cards out sort of as a perk for knowing someone who works there, what exactly is that saying about your company's Tier 1 service? If not having to go through that layer is a special favor, then clearly even the company is acknowledging that it is an unpleasant experience for the poor sucke--er--customers stuck using it.
...and a bit later there was this bit, which is probably appropo for those of us jumping in 5 days later:
I thought I’d pretty much finished with this thread, but I really feel I have to make one more comment before I sign off.
A ridiculous number of people have gotten caught up in the whole “he used a minus sign instead of an ascii hyphen! The bastard” controversy that has followed this thread around and has spilled over into any number of internet message boards. First of all, let me be clear. The issue was not with my use of a minus sign. The issue Amazon had was that someone had complained about hyphenation. Second, I have since gone back and checked the original file on the Kindle text-to-speech app and it renders fine. No issues. Third – to those people who love to nit pick and find a tiny issue then blow it up out of all proportion – that was not what the blog post was about. The blog post was a rant that I never expected more than a hundred or so people to see about how Amazon took a book down on the basis of a single complaint. But really, you people need to get a fucking life. More important things have happened over the last week. Go get upset over the nutter who killed those people in that Australian cafe. Get angry at the continuing erosion of your civil rights. In the grand scheme of things, minus over hyphen is probably not worth that much of your time. Have a very happy Christmas. Graeme
It's an unrelated issue, though. If the goal is to improve crime statistics, then you go with the data you have. This is not exactly the same as lowering the actual rate of crime. Separate problem, separate solution.
GIGO. There's not much point in making a modern optimized statistical science of acting on bad data.
If he's a boy, there's a good chance that's true. However, if your child is a girl, I can pretty much guarantee she's encountered sexism before age 7. I remember my oldest daughter coming up against it at age 4, and being really frustrated about it. And that's just the first time I (a relatively clueless dad) noticed it.
Is the problem here that we need to isolate little boys from the knowledge of their own privilege?
In the united states how ever, the lack of women in STEM jobs and the lack of men in Nursing is seen not as a result of hard wired biological differences. But some kind of 'oppression'
There was a time in the early 20th century when "computer" was a job description, and most of the holders of those jobs were women. Math was viewed as a female activity, which their brains were better wired for than men's. Interestingly, at the same time a lot of the best basketball players were Jewish, and there were all sorts of explanations for why Jews were better than everyone else at basketball that look horribly racist today (eg: the game supposedly relied on "being sneaky").
So basically what you are asking me to accept is that these racists had the right idea about genetic predispositions being something we can infer just by looking at activities that groups of people engage in, but since their societies weren't perfect like ours is today, that logic didn't work like it does today. Do I have that about right?
Its perfectly reasonable to say that their sister gets to do something they don't because otherwise she wouldn't bother doing it or anything else like it at all, because everyone seems to (wrongly) think that stuff is only for boys. (Yes, I have daughters and a son as well). I have a daughter who has totally bought into that "math is for boys" thing society has pushed on her, and IMHO nothing short of tactical nukes is out of bounds in attacking that.
Tell you what, when we have a situation where there are more girls than boys in IT, then we can start worrying about correcting anti-boy discrimination. Until then, yes it may exist, but it is clearly not our biggest problem
This sounds like one of those great ideas often had by people who have spent no time on Twitter at all. People on Twitter seem to be quite happy to shout to the world opinions most of us thought went extinct decades, or even centuries ago. If you don't mind occasionally creating a new burner account, there are no filters, and pretty much anything goes.
So they are essentially going about this entirely backwards. If they really want to shame people, they should go through the drunk's Twitter feeds and send copies of some of their more offensive stuff to places people care more about. For instance, send it to their parents, or post it on their cars. Bring their crap into meatspace.
The per-person money limits being removed helps the Republicans far more than the Democrats. Yes, the Dems are still playing the game, because if they don't they will lose every election. But if you are looking for the party that has the most to gain by finding a way around the CU decision, the Democrats are your party.
The Republicans could put a Ham Sandwhich against Hillary and win.
Not real sure where you are getting this. Any data I can find shows it exactly wrong. Right now, polling is showing Hillary beating any Republican put up against her. The one that does best is Romney, and the one they tried that does worst in Rand Paul. Its been this way for months, if not years.
I'd be happy if we could get a GOP w/o the religion, that along with getting rid of the Citizen's United decision, and the money out of the political mess that is both parties.
As far as I know, the American police used to use a lot more blunt force -- flashlights, billy clubs, night sticks, beavertail saps, sap gloves -- to subdue people.
Not sure when and where this was. When I was a kid it was perfectly acceptable for a cop to shoot you dead if you were running away and suspected of a felony. Of course once you are dead everybody only has the cop's word that you were suspected of a felony. So as a white kid, I had "the talk" about never ever running from a cop. (Non-white kids of course had to balance the danger of running with the danger of not running).
What happened here is that a prosecutor covered his ass by handing the whole thing over to a grand jury when it would normally have never progressed that far.
This prosecutor basically acted as the accused's defense attorney during the grand jury. For example, he had the accused testify at length in his own behalf, and dumped all available info and testimony on the jury. Both of these are highly irregular in a murder investigation, and acted to the accused benifit. Even worse, if you dive into the actual transcripts, you'll see that he treated the accused ridiculously well on the stand. At one point, the accused even had to bring up a weak spot in his own testimony himself (he wanted it addressed, and it was clear the "prosecutor" was never going to do it).
Then the prosecutor, after finding out the results in the morning, waited until after dark to announce them. In the announcement, he proceeded to blame everybody but the cops for the whole situation. So essentially he personally whitewashed the whole case away, waited until there was no time to cool off before nightfall, and then taunted everybody who was already upset.
Lots of things are still unclear here, but one thing is crystal clear. The prosecutor in this case did everything in his power to cause a riot.
There is a grand jury who disagrees with the version of events that you have imagined.
Deciding what happened is not a grand jury's job. They are supposed to see if there's enough evidence that there's a reasonable suspicion that a crime may have been committed. Actual trials are for looking hard at all the evidence and seeing what happened. When there's conflicting testimony (like there was here), grand juries are supposed to send the case to a trial with a real jury.
If a prosecutor wants a trial, getting it through a grand jury is hardly even a speed bump. What happened here is that the prosecutor did not want a trail, and moved heaven and earth to stop it at the grand jury stage.
An interesting correlation here is that French people don't work nearly as many hours as US people do. For example, according to the OECD numbers (which include part-time workers), US workers average about 34.5 hours a week, while French workers average about 26.8. Their typical work week is 30 hours, not 40.
Perhaps the issue here is that French readers still have energy left after work to engage in higher civic pursuits. Meanwhile US readers when they finally get a few moments free are too brain-dead from all the work to be up for anything more challenging that laughing at cats playing piano.
Perhaps when none of the major browsers use it as the default search engine, people will start to get the idea out of their stupid heads that forcing a search engine to remove results is not the same thing as taking something off the internet. In short, Google != "The Internet".
Then perhaps we won't see more idiotic decisions like this one.
Actually, if I had mod points, I'd mod parent down for providing this link. Normally its kind fun to read lots of bad reviews, but these just made me nauseous. Unless you are on a diet (or better yet, bulimic), don't click that link.
Very interesting. This is though the exact kind of thing I was talking about. Siberia might look like the perfect place to introduce mammoths, but Australia looked like the perfect place to introduce rabbits too. Related elephants are actually incredibly destructive creatures. Scale that up to mammoths, and we really have no clue what will happen.
Additionally, I suspect they will have to substantially upgrade their fencing if they hope to keep mammoths in.:-)
Well I truly didn't understand then. If the point wasn't to bring back the species, what would the point of the cloning and extinct creature be? Why bother doing it?
Slashdot Mirror
Quantum mechanics does let you slightly violate relativity, sending very short messages back from the future.
Yup. No longer than 140 characters.
However, the world has ... cheap and fast global communications, ...
That's IMHO the important bit. People inherently need the world around them to be Just. A little understood implication of that is that the better and quicker we are able to communicate with the rest of the world, the more injustice gets exposed. Injustice is like a fungus: too much sunlight and it burns away.
Its pretty easy to find places where this is clearly not true (eg: Syria). But those are localized places and times. That's like finding a place where entropy seems to be decreasing; you can do that, but that only means elsewhere it increased more. Human society seems to follow Theodore Parker's principle: The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
This seems like a good place and time for my favorite Christmas song, written by Longfellow after he'd lost his entire family (wife included) during the Civil War:
I heard the bells on Christmas day Their old familiar carols play, And wild and sweet the words repeat Of peace on earth, good will to men.
I thought how, as the day had come, The belfries of all Christendom Had rolled along th'unbroken song Of peace on earth, good will to men.
And in despair I bowed my head: "There is no peace on earth," I said, "For hate is strong and mocks the song Of peace on earth, good will to men."
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep: "God is not dead, nor doth he sleep; The wrong shall fail, the right prevail, With peace on earth, good will to men."
Till, ringing, singing, on its way, The world revolved from night to day, A voice, a chime, a chant sublime, Of peace on earth, good will to men!
I honestly don't see your clarification as any better. If people are encouraged to hand those cards out sort of as a perk for knowing someone who works there, what exactly is that saying about your company's Tier 1 service? If not having to go through that layer is a special favor, then clearly even the company is acknowledging that it is an unpleasant experience for the poor sucke--er--customers stuck using it.
Perhaps those are the people who control the project's ELF executable files?
I thought I’d pretty much finished with this thread, but I really feel I have to make one more comment before I sign off.
A ridiculous number of people have gotten caught up in the whole “he used a minus sign instead of an ascii hyphen! The bastard” controversy that has followed this thread around and has spilled over into any number of internet message boards. First of all, let me be clear. The issue was not with my use of a minus sign. The issue Amazon had was that someone had complained about hyphenation. Second, I have since gone back and checked the original file on the Kindle text-to-speech app and it renders fine. No issues. Third – to those people who love to nit pick and find a tiny issue then blow it up out of all proportion – that was not what the blog post was about. The blog post was a rant that I never expected more than a hundred or so people to see about how Amazon took a book down on the basis of a single complaint. But really, you people need to get a fucking life. More important things have happened over the last week. Go get upset over the nutter who killed those people in that Australian cafe. Get angry at the continuing erosion of your civil rights. In the grand scheme of things, minus over hyphen is probably not worth that much of your time. Have a very happy Christmas. Graeme
It's an unrelated issue, though. If the goal is to improve crime statistics, then you go with the data you have. This is not exactly the same as lowering the actual rate of crime. Separate problem, separate solution.
GIGO. There's not much point in making a modern optimized statistical science of acting on bad data.
Pluto is not anthropomorphized. He's antropomorphic Mickey's dog.
Caninopomorphized then?
If he's a boy, there's a good chance that's true. However, if your child is a girl, I can pretty much guarantee she's encountered sexism before age 7. I remember my oldest daughter coming up against it at age 4, and being really frustrated about it. And that's just the first time I (a relatively clueless dad) noticed it.
Is the problem here that we need to isolate little boys from the knowledge of their own privilege?
In the united states how ever, the lack of women in STEM jobs and the lack of men in Nursing is seen not as a result of hard wired biological differences. But some kind of 'oppression'
There was a time in the early 20th century when "computer" was a job description, and most of the holders of those jobs were women. Math was viewed as a female activity, which their brains were better wired for than men's. Interestingly, at the same time a lot of the best basketball players were Jewish, and there were all sorts of explanations for why Jews were better than everyone else at basketball that look horribly racist today (eg: the game supposedly relied on "being sneaky").
So basically what you are asking me to accept is that these racists had the right idea about genetic predispositions being something we can infer just by looking at activities that groups of people engage in, but since their societies weren't perfect like ours is today, that logic didn't work like it does today. Do I have that about right?
Its perfectly reasonable to say that their sister gets to do something they don't because otherwise she wouldn't bother doing it or anything else like it at all, because everyone seems to (wrongly) think that stuff is only for boys. (Yes, I have daughters and a son as well). I have a daughter who has totally bought into that "math is for boys" thing society has pushed on her, and IMHO nothing short of tactical nukes is out of bounds in attacking that.
Tell you what, when we have a situation where there are more girls than boys in IT, then we can start worrying about correcting anti-boy discrimination. Until then, yes it may exist, but it is clearly not our biggest problem
This sounds like one of those great ideas often had by people who have spent no time on Twitter at all. People on Twitter seem to be quite happy to shout to the world opinions most of us thought went extinct decades, or even centuries ago. If you don't mind occasionally creating a new burner account, there are no filters, and pretty much anything goes.
So they are essentially going about this entirely backwards. If they really want to shame people, they should go through the drunk's Twitter feeds and send copies of some of their more offensive stuff to places people care more about. For instance, send it to their parents, or post it on their cars. Bring their crap into meatspace.
The per-person money limits being removed helps the Republicans far more than the Democrats. Yes, the Dems are still playing the game, because if they don't they will lose every election. But if you are looking for the party that has the most to gain by finding a way around the CU decision, the Democrats are your party.
The Republicans could put a Ham Sandwhich against Hillary and win.
Not real sure where you are getting this. Any data I can find shows it exactly wrong. Right now, polling is showing Hillary beating any Republican put up against her. The one that does best is Romney, and the one they tried that does worst in Rand Paul. Its been this way for months, if not years.
I'd be happy if we could get a GOP w/o the religion, that along with getting rid of the Citizen's United decision, and the money out of the political mess that is both parties.
You have that now. They are called "Democrats".
As far as I know, the American police used to use a lot more blunt force -- flashlights, billy clubs, night sticks, beavertail saps, sap gloves -- to subdue people.
Not sure when and where this was. When I was a kid it was perfectly acceptable for a cop to shoot you dead if you were running away and suspected of a felony. Of course once you are dead everybody only has the cop's word that you were suspected of a felony. So as a white kid, I had "the talk" about never ever running from a cop. (Non-white kids of course had to balance the danger of running with the danger of not running).
What happened here is that a prosecutor covered his ass by handing the whole thing over to a grand jury when it would normally have never progressed that far.
Its considerably more nefarious than that. There's an old saying among lawyers that a Grand Jury will indict a ham sandwich if the prosecutor wants it to.
This prosecutor basically acted as the accused's defense attorney during the grand jury. For example, he had the accused testify at length in his own behalf, and dumped all available info and testimony on the jury. Both of these are highly irregular in a murder investigation, and acted to the accused benifit. Even worse, if you dive into the actual transcripts, you'll see that he treated the accused ridiculously well on the stand. At one point, the accused even had to bring up a weak spot in his own testimony himself (he wanted it addressed, and it was clear the "prosecutor" was never going to do it).
Then the prosecutor, after finding out the results in the morning, waited until after dark to announce them. In the announcement, he proceeded to blame everybody but the cops for the whole situation. So essentially he personally whitewashed the whole case away, waited until there was no time to cool off before nightfall, and then taunted everybody who was already upset.
Lots of things are still unclear here, but one thing is crystal clear. The prosecutor in this case did everything in his power to cause a riot.
There is a grand jury who disagrees with the version of events that you have imagined.
Deciding what happened is not a grand jury's job. They are supposed to see if there's enough evidence that there's a reasonable suspicion that a crime may have been committed. Actual trials are for looking hard at all the evidence and seeing what happened. When there's conflicting testimony (like there was here), grand juries are supposed to send the case to a trial with a real jury.
If a prosecutor wants a trial, getting it through a grand jury is hardly even a speed bump. What happened here is that the prosecutor did not want a trail, and moved heaven and earth to stop it at the grand jury stage.
An interesting correlation here is that French people don't work nearly as many hours as US people do. For example, according to the OECD numbers (which include part-time workers), US workers average about 34.5 hours a week, while French workers average about 26.8. Their typical work week is 30 hours, not 40.
Perhaps the issue here is that French readers still have energy left after work to engage in higher civic pursuits. Meanwhile US readers when they finally get a few moments free are too brain-dead from all the work to be up for anything more challenging that laughing at cats playing piano.
This Barbie actually does sound like some computer "engineers" I've known.
Do the typical kid mods of ripping all the hair off and smashing the doll down a bit, and it could be "Computer Engineer Wally", from Dilbert.
Beats me. I get my free stuff for free.
Perhaps when none of the major browsers use it as the default search engine, people will start to get the idea out of their stupid heads that forcing a search engine to remove results is not the same thing as taking something off the internet. In short, Google != "The Internet".
Then perhaps we won't see more idiotic decisions like this one.
Actually, if I had mod points, I'd mod parent down for providing this link. Normally its kind fun to read lots of bad reviews, but these just made me nauseous. Unless you are on a diet (or better yet, bulimic), don't click that link.
Very interesting. This is though the exact kind of thing I was talking about. Siberia might look like the perfect place to introduce mammoths, but Australia looked like the perfect place to introduce rabbits too. Related elephants are actually incredibly destructive creatures. Scale that up to mammoths, and we really have no clue what will happen.
Additionally, I suspect they will have to substantially upgrade their fencing if they hope to keep mammoths in. :-)
Well I truly didn't understand then. If the point wasn't to bring back the species, what would the point of the cloning and extinct creature be? Why bother doing it?