Why does it have to be a net gain? There seems no logical reason that I can fathom that you have to increase dumping toxins of one type in order to decrease dumping other toxins. Decrease them all. How much toxin do you think should be acceptable in the water you drink?
The real question is, how much expense and trouble are we willing to go to to remove these toxins from the water we drink?
For me, the answer depends on how toxic the toxins are. There are "toxins" everywhere in the environment. You're inhaling thousands of "toxins" right now. You aren't dead from them, and won't likely ever even get sick from them, because the concentrations are too low. Some of them come from "dumping", sure, but some are older than humanity, so even if everybody agrees not to pollute anymore, there will still be toxins. And you can't ever get rid of them completely--there'll always be a few molecules of them floating around. And in many cases it might take a trillion dollars, complete buy-in from everyone everywhere, and an bone fide miracle even to halve the concentrations of these substances. So it's essentially impossible. So in those cases it's probably better to spend your money and your political will and your miracles elsewhere, where they can do much more good.
Wow. Looking over the comments on this article, there's apparently something about advanced applied microbiology techniques that really reminds some people how much they hate how other cultures prepare their food slightly differently, wear slightly different clothes, use a different set of arbitrary sounds to communicate their ideas, and have skin that reflects more or less sunlight.
Florida Regulators OK Plan To Increase Toxins In Water
Under the proposal, acceptable levels of toxins will be increased for more than two dozen known carcinogens and decreased for 13 currently regulated chemicals. State officials back the plan because it places new rules on 39 other chemicals that are not currently regulated.
I believe that Florida is our most naturally toxic state, and of course politicians are always terrible. But just based on the brief description in the linked article, I don't think that this particular policy change deserves to be characterized as "Florida officials vote to poison everyone." It sounds like it actually might be a net gain for environmental safety, though of course without exact data on the chemicals involved and their acceptable concentration before and after, it's hard to say.
What I want to know is, when did these officials stop beating their wives?
Netflix is the first media company with the business model of "Give the customers exactly what they want." It is very refreshing.
Agreed. The old broadcast TV networks weren't really even trying. They based their programming decisions on the Nielsen rating, which in turn was based on what a few households living in New York City were more likely to watch. This led to everyone in America having to see way too much of whatever people from New York City liked. Even that data was pretty suspect, because at any given time there were only ever three things to watch anyway. That sample size doesn't exactly lend itself to statistical significance.
Quartz ran an article over the weekend which captures a growing trend among millennials: to have a side job--
Oh, boy, sounds like somebody's written another article that describes twentysomethings doing normal, everyday things as if they were members of a completely alien species having incomprehensible interactions with the fabric of the fifth dimension.
I wonder how out-of-touch and annoying this particular article is going to be? All right, I'm taking a deep breath. How bad could it possibly be? Here we go, let's do this.
Hillary Clinton [has] a tech plan that reads like a Silicon Valley wish list. It calls for:
Oh, I can't wait to hear what it calls for.
connecting every U.S. household to high-speed internet by 2020
Sigh. I usually try to counter the diehard tech pessimists on Slashdot, but in this case I join them in saying: fuck you, political campaign. No chance of this happening, even after they redefine what "high" means, which of course they will: fuck them. Surely nobody is stupid enough to believe this, but fuck them for thinking we are. Fuck them double, and fuck me too, if they turn out to be right about how stupid we are, which they probably will: fuck everything.
reducing regulatory barriers and supporting Net neutrality rules, [which ban internet providers from blocking or slowing content.]
Replacing regulatory barriers, maybe, with new barriers that favor incumbent tech companies and make things even more difficult for new entrants to the marketplace. Actually, it's more likely that they'll just partially replace the old barriers, and even those few of the new regs that were intended to be a sop to the good-intentioned will turn out to have cancerous side-effects, because that's how regulation works.
It proposes investments in computer science and engineering education ("engage the private sector and nonprofits to train up to 50,000 computer science teachers in the next decade")
Translation: Schools will be coerced into prioritizing idiotic programming classes that are incompetently taught. And funding will be cut somewhere else, likely in math and science budgets, because hey, this introductory class in the latest illiterate Drag-N-Drop Programming Language means we're covered for STEM now.
expansion of 5G mobile data
I... guess? Wasn't this going to happen anyway?
making inexpensive Wi-Fi available at more airports and train stations
Short of draconian price controls, airports and... seriously, train stations?... will continue charge whatever the market will bear, which is frankly already unbearable, and will likely slowly get worse until the next oil crisis, when it will get worse more quickly.
and attaching a green card to the diplomas of foreign-born students earning STEM degrees.
Aha! Now we see the actual purpose of the bill: more H1Bs. The rest of it is just cover.
one Tesla owner decided to make his own autonomous charging station...that will automatically guide the Model S's charging cable into the waiting receptacle... while it's incredibly slow, it does work.
VOLTRON: [watching at home] No, no, that's good. I like it slow. Oh, yeah, baby. Slower.
Maybe it was meant to say "take knock off indie game"
I wondered whether the game was called "Knock" or something, or if the gameplay somehow involved knocking on a door (possibly after lighting a bag of poop on fire), but your idea makes more sense.
Though calling the game a "knock-off" would seem to undercut the premise of the article, which is that the DMCA is being invoked when it shouldn't. Still, I've heard many times that you can't copyright the mechanics of a game, so maybe it doesn't matter if it's a "knock-off" anyway.
As of 2014, there are 318 million people in the US. I highly doubt that 1/3 of the US population lives in the middle of nowhere. Perhaps 10s of millions, but unlikely 100 million.
You are of course correct. According to Wikipedia, the population of the US is currently 323,341,000, and 81% of them live in cities or suburbs. That works out to 61.4 million people living in rural areas. Rhetorical excesses aside, my point was that that's kind of a lot of people for the monopolists to be willfully depriving of decent internet connectivity.
Not to be a jerk about it but... so what? Why is it that people want to live in the sticks and cry that they don't have everything that places that have more than 10,000 people per square mile have?... Maybe by the time I retire I can actually live someplace with a population density under 20/sqm and get good internet service but I'm not going to fool myself that it makes good business sense to do it today.
People have been saying that for 20 years now. What we've learned in those decades is that it will probably never make more business sense to build infrastructure in the country when you can make more money maintaining and/or rebuilding that infrastructure in a city instead.
The real problem, in my view, is that we only have two or three telecoms companies in the United States. They have no interest in serving the few (hundred million) people who choose to live in the middle of nowhere, so they don't. That would theoretically be okay, because in a free market, some smaller, more local companies would pick up the slack and build out to those underserved area. But the big companies won't let that happen. They bribe state and federal legislators to make laws that make competing with them effectively illegal, even in places where they don't actually compete.
According to the makers of the Opera browser, Microsoft's recent claim that its Windows 10 Edge browser is more power-efficient than Chrome are erroneous. Running its own tests with Opera, Edge and Chrome, the company finds that Opera runs 22% faster (with a battery life of 3hr 55m) than Edge (3hrs 12m).
What a surprising result. It's strange, when I tested the browser I wrote myself, "Pseudonymium", using my own hand-picked test criteria, which I call the "Pseudonymo" benchmark, the results said that my browser was, and I quote "one point nine and one-third percent times more betterer" than all of its competitors.
It's almost like comparison tests administered by the producers of a product versus competing products in the same market segment are inherently untrustworthy.
El Nino has played a significant role in climbing carbon dioxide levels
Wow, just when I thought I had heard global warming blamed on absolutely everything, and absolutely everything blamed on El Nino. But I never even considered blaming El Nino for carbon emissions.
...that the answer to any question posed in a headline is "No".
I'd be all for a single consistent package management system for Linux that everyone could get behind. This isn't that. This is just a third option everyone's going to have to deal with.
In most cases, the process of learning to code goes like this:
1. I got a computer! Cool! Look, I just type in this "program" I got from { a magazine | my brother | the internet | Jim the IT guy } and I can make a blue square dance!
2. Great, now I wonder what else I can make dance. Oh, and what else I can make a blue square do? And what about other colors and shapes?
3. Okay, over a two-month period I wrote this thirty-page program that does something I like. I'm going to show it to { the computer club | my brother | the guys in the forum | | my coworkers } and they're going to be so impressed.
4. They weren't impressed. They just { laughed | grimaced | insulted me in the most graphic terms imaginable | asked me how my real job was going }.
5a. I quit, forever! Fuck you nerds! [QUIT.]
OR:
5b. Maybe I can { read a book | beg my brother | look at a website | study Jim's code } to see how I can get better.
6. Okay, it's been another two months, but I know a lot better now, and it's definitely way better this time. In fact, it's as good as it can possibly be. I'm confident that now when I show { whoever }, they're really finally gonna be impressed.
Currently, according to the terms of service, parody accounts are acceptable as long as it’s clear that the account is intended to parody a person rather than attempt to trick Twitter users into believing it’s actually them.
Putin's a genius. There's nothing DarthPutinKGB could say that's so outlandishly evil that the real Putin wouldn't say it, or actually do it. So there's no way to satisfy the Twitter terms of service, so the account has to be removed.
... everyone dies eventually, and we are maybe just witnessing the "older generation who was the first to benefit from those progresses" starting to die.
But the death rate within each age group went up. Ageing population was already corrected for.
I admit I find this tricky to conceptualize, but does that matter? Isn't a decrease in the death rate of any decade-of-life cohort necessarily followed by an increase in the death rate of the next decade-of-life cohort ten years later?
Elon Musk wants us to build human colonies on Mars. Jeff Bezos has a slightly more measured take.
I don't think the author of the article understands what "measured" means....
So no, I don't think Bezos did a whole lot of "measurement" before opining on things.
Measured:
4. deliberate and restrained; careful: measured language; measured terms.
Good catch. While we're at it, nuts don't go with screws. Those are bolts. Jeez, people. It's almost like you're playing with words sometimes. It's just not respectful.
So you're right, maybe not the best pun. But what I was getting at is that the reporter seems to think that colonizing Mars is less practical than doing all our manufacturing in space. I kind of disagree.
Elon Musk wants us to build human colonies on Mars. Jeff Bezos has a slightly more measured take.
I don't think the author of the article understands what "measured" means.
People criticize the colonization of Mars as unrealistic, but most of those plans involve making things destined for Martian consumption on Mars itself and using martian materials. Say what you will about Mars, but it's a whole planet. There's always building materials within easy reach, if you're not too picky about their specific composition
But as others have noted, Bezos's plan pretty much presupposes that every raw material that goes into every orbital factory has had a rocket strapped to it at some point, to bring it either from the surface of the Earth or from somewhere else in the solar system. That's got to be a hell of a freight charge.
So no, I don't think Bezos did a whole lot of "measurement" before opining on things. It's called talking out of your ass. I do it, you do it, everybody does it. The right thing to do is just to ignore it, even when a billionaire does it.
That does seem low. Only 488 million?? In a country with eighty billion social posts a year?
I would have guessed a much higher number.
If your numbers are correct, that means that only about 0.61% of posts, about 1 in every 165, are government astroturfers. That really does seem low. I almost feel like those may be better odds than you get on Slashdot.
Still, I mean, most social media posts nowadays are just pictures of food. That throws off the statistics, because the Chinese government probably doesn't feel the need to fake many of those. North Korea is another story. I heard that 19 out of the 26 posts on North Korean social media last year were pictures of food faked by the government..
Slashdot Mirror
Why does it have to be a net gain? There seems no logical reason that I can fathom that you have to increase dumping toxins of one type in order to decrease dumping other toxins. Decrease them all. How much toxin do you think should be acceptable in the water you drink?
The real question is, how much expense and trouble are we willing to go to to remove these toxins from the water we drink?
For me, the answer depends on how toxic the toxins are. There are "toxins" everywhere in the environment. You're inhaling thousands of "toxins" right now. You aren't dead from them, and won't likely ever even get sick from them, because the concentrations are too low. Some of them come from "dumping", sure, but some are older than humanity, so even if everybody agrees not to pollute anymore, there will still be toxins. And you can't ever get rid of them completely--there'll always be a few molecules of them floating around. And in many cases it might take a trillion dollars, complete buy-in from everyone everywhere, and an bone fide miracle even to halve the concentrations of these substances. So it's essentially impossible. So in those cases it's probably better to spend your money and your political will and your miracles elsewhere, where they can do much more good.
It's not a perfect world. Sorry.
Wow. Looking over the comments on this article, there's apparently something about advanced applied microbiology techniques that really reminds some people how much they hate how other cultures prepare their food slightly differently, wear slightly different clothes, use a different set of arbitrary sounds to communicate their ideas, and have skin that reflects more or less sunlight.
Florida Regulators OK Plan To Increase Toxins In Water
Under the proposal, acceptable levels of toxins will be increased for more than two dozen known carcinogens and decreased for 13 currently regulated chemicals. State officials back the plan because it places new rules on 39 other chemicals that are not currently regulated.
I believe that Florida is our most naturally toxic state, and of course politicians are always terrible. But just based on the brief description in the linked article, I don't think that this particular policy change deserves to be characterized as "Florida officials vote to poison everyone." It sounds like it actually might be a net gain for environmental safety, though of course without exact data on the chemicals involved and their acceptable concentration before and after, it's hard to say.
What I want to know is, when did these officials stop beating their wives?
Netflix is the first media company with the business model of "Give the customers exactly what they want." It is very refreshing.
Agreed. The old broadcast TV networks weren't really even trying. They based their programming decisions on the Nielsen rating, which in turn was based on what a few households living in New York City were more likely to watch. This led to everyone in America having to see way too much of whatever people from New York City liked. Even that data was pretty suspect, because at any given time there were only ever three things to watch anyway. That sample size doesn't exactly lend itself to statistical significance.
Twitter was inspired by the realization that nobody has any good ideas, so we might as well get all the bad ideas out of the way faster.
Quartz ran an article over the weekend which captures a growing trend among millennials: to have a side job--
Oh, boy, sounds like somebody's written another article that describes twentysomethings doing normal, everyday things as if they were members of a completely alien species having incomprehensible interactions with the fabric of the fifth dimension.
I wonder how out-of-touch and annoying this particular article is going to be? All right, I'm taking a deep breath. How bad could it possibly be? Here we go, let's do this.
--or as many of them call it, the "side-hustle."
Oh, God, my eyes! I wasn't ready!
Hillary Clinton [has] a tech plan that reads like a Silicon Valley wish list. It calls for:
Oh, I can't wait to hear what it calls for.
connecting every U.S. household to high-speed internet by 2020
Sigh. I usually try to counter the diehard tech pessimists on Slashdot, but in this case I join them in saying: fuck you, political campaign. No chance of this happening, even after they redefine what "high" means, which of course they will: fuck them. Surely nobody is stupid enough to believe this, but fuck them for thinking we are. Fuck them double, and fuck me too, if they turn out to be right about how stupid we are, which they probably will: fuck everything.
reducing regulatory barriers and supporting Net neutrality rules, [which ban internet providers from blocking or slowing content.]
Replacing regulatory barriers, maybe, with new barriers that favor incumbent tech companies and make things even more difficult for new entrants to the marketplace. Actually, it's more likely that they'll just partially replace the old barriers, and even those few of the new regs that were intended to be a sop to the good-intentioned will turn out to have cancerous side-effects, because that's how regulation works.
It proposes investments in computer science and engineering education ("engage the private sector and nonprofits to train up to 50,000 computer science teachers in the next decade")
Translation: Schools will be coerced into prioritizing idiotic programming classes that are incompetently taught. And funding will be cut somewhere else, likely in math and science budgets, because hey, this introductory class in the latest illiterate Drag-N-Drop Programming Language means we're covered for STEM now.
expansion of 5G mobile data
I... guess? Wasn't this going to happen anyway?
making inexpensive Wi-Fi available at more airports and train stations
Short of draconian price controls, airports and... seriously, train stations?... will continue charge whatever the market will bear, which is frankly already unbearable, and will likely slowly get worse until the next oil crisis, when it will get worse more quickly.
and attaching a green card to the diplomas of foreign-born students earning STEM degrees.
Aha! Now we see the actual purpose of the bill: more H1Bs. The rest of it is just cover.
one Tesla owner decided to make his own autonomous charging station...that will automatically guide the Model S's charging cable into the waiting receptacle... while it's incredibly slow, it does work.
VOLTRON: [watching at home] No, no, that's good. I like it slow. Oh, yeah, baby. Slower.
Maybe it was meant to say "take knock off indie game"
I wondered whether the game was called "Knock" or something, or if the gameplay somehow involved knocking on a door (possibly after lighting a bag of poop on fire), but your idea makes more sense.
Though calling the game a "knock-off" would seem to undercut the premise of the article, which is that the DMCA is being invoked when it shouldn't. Still, I've heard many times that you can't copyright the mechanics of a game, so maybe it doesn't matter if it's a "knock-off" anyway.
As of 2014, there are 318 million people in the US. I highly doubt that 1/3 of the US population lives in the middle of nowhere. Perhaps 10s of millions, but unlikely 100 million.
You are of course correct. According to Wikipedia, the population of the US is currently 323,341,000, and 81% of them live in cities or suburbs. That works out to 61.4 million people living in rural areas. Rhetorical excesses aside, my point was that that's kind of a lot of people for the monopolists to be willfully depriving of decent internet connectivity.
Federal Court: The Fourth Amendment Does Not Protect Your Home Computer
Federal Court: We Can't Read Good and Can't Do Other Stuff Good Too.
You don't understand what evolution is. There is nothing evolutionary in Apple's changes.
Well struck, brother. Chastise the infidel. For it sayeth in the Book of Jobs, there is no such thing as evolution. It's all Genius Design.
Not to be a jerk about it but... so what? Why is it that people want to live in the sticks and cry that they don't have everything that places that have more than 10,000 people per square mile have?... Maybe by the time I retire I can actually live someplace with a population density under 20/sqm and get good internet service but I'm not going to fool myself that it makes good business sense to do it today.
People have been saying that for 20 years now. What we've learned in those decades is that it will probably never make more business sense to build infrastructure in the country when you can make more money maintaining and/or rebuilding that infrastructure in a city instead.
The real problem, in my view, is that we only have two or three telecoms companies in the United States. They have no interest in serving the few (hundred million) people who choose to live in the middle of nowhere, so they don't. That would theoretically be okay, because in a free market, some smaller, more local companies would pick up the slack and build out to those underserved area. But the big companies won't let that happen. They bribe state and federal legislators to make laws that make competing with them effectively illegal, even in places where they don't actually compete.
What he said, only substitute "Fortran" for "C and C++" and "C" for "Rust".
Or "C" for "C and C++" and "C++" for "Rust".
Or "$CommandName" for "C and C++" and "$CommandName_safe" for "Rust".
Or "Rust" for "C and C++" and "IronOxide2019" for "Rust".
Repeat as needed.
According to the makers of the Opera browser, Microsoft's recent claim that its Windows 10 Edge browser is more power-efficient than Chrome are erroneous. Running its own tests with Opera, Edge and Chrome, the company finds that Opera runs 22% faster (with a battery life of 3hr 55m) than Edge (3hrs 12m).
What a surprising result. It's strange, when I tested the browser I wrote myself, "Pseudonymium", using my own hand-picked test criteria, which I call the "Pseudonymo" benchmark, the results said that my browser was, and I quote "one point nine and one-third percent times more betterer" than all of its competitors.
It's almost like comparison tests administered by the producers of a product versus competing products in the same market segment are inherently untrustworthy.
"If you didn't want to buy my antidote, you shouldn't have let me sneak up behind you, clonk you on the head, and inject you with poison."
El Nino has played a significant role in climbing carbon dioxide levels
Wow, just when I thought I had heard global warming blamed on absolutely everything, and absolutely everything blamed on El Nino. But I never even considered blaming El Nino for carbon emissions.
...that the answer to any question posed in a headline is "No".
I'd be all for a single consistent package management system for Linux that everyone could get behind. This isn't that. This is just a third option everyone's going to have to deal with.
In most cases, the process of learning to code goes like this:
1. I got a computer! Cool! Look, I just type in this "program" I got from { a magazine | my brother | the internet | Jim the IT guy } and I can make a blue square dance!
2. Great, now I wonder what else I can make dance. Oh, and what else I can make a blue square do? And what about other colors and shapes?
3. Okay, over a two-month period I wrote this thirty-page program that does something I like. I'm going to show it to { the computer club | my brother | the guys in the forum | | my coworkers } and they're going to be so impressed.
4. They weren't impressed. They just { laughed | grimaced | insulted me in the most graphic terms imaginable | asked me how my real job was going }.
5a. I quit, forever! Fuck you nerds! [QUIT.]
OR:
5b. Maybe I can { read a book | beg my brother | look at a website | study Jim's code } to see how I can get better.
6. Okay, it's been another two months, but I know a lot better now, and it's definitely way better this time. In fact, it's as good as it can possibly be. I'm confident that now when I show { whoever }, they're really finally gonna be impressed.
7. [Return to step 4. Repeat forever.]
Currently, according to the terms of service, parody accounts are acceptable as long as it’s clear that the account is intended to parody a person rather than attempt to trick Twitter users into believing it’s actually them.
Putin's a genius. There's nothing DarthPutinKGB could say that's so outlandishly evil that the real Putin wouldn't say it, or actually do it. So there's no way to satisfy the Twitter terms of service, so the account has to be removed.
But the death rate within each age group went up. Ageing population was already corrected for.
I admit I find this tricky to conceptualize, but does that matter? Isn't a decrease in the death rate of any decade-of-life cohort necessarily followed by an increase in the death rate of the next decade-of-life cohort ten years later?
It's called talking out of your ass. I do it, you do it, everybody does it.
I don't do it, and none of my friends do. Anyone that does discovers they don't stay my friend.
Man, I wish we'd known each other in college. You must've been a blast to hang out with.
Elon Musk wants us to build human colonies on Mars. Jeff Bezos has a slightly more measured take.
I don't think the author of the article understands what "measured" means.... So no, I don't think Bezos did a whole lot of "measurement" before opining on things.
Measured:
4. deliberate and restrained; careful: measured language; measured terms.
Good catch. While we're at it, nuts don't go with screws. Those are bolts. Jeez, people. It's almost like you're playing with words sometimes. It's just not respectful.
So you're right, maybe not the best pun. But what I was getting at is that the reporter seems to think that colonizing Mars is less practical than doing all our manufacturing in space. I kind of disagree.
Elon Musk wants us to build human colonies on Mars. Jeff Bezos has a slightly more measured take.
I don't think the author of the article understands what "measured" means.
People criticize the colonization of Mars as unrealistic, but most of those plans involve making things destined for Martian consumption on Mars itself and using martian materials. Say what you will about Mars, but it's a whole planet. There's always building materials within easy reach, if you're not too picky about their specific composition
But as others have noted, Bezos's plan pretty much presupposes that every raw material that goes into every orbital factory has had a rocket strapped to it at some point, to bring it either from the surface of the Earth or from somewhere else in the solar system. That's got to be a hell of a freight charge.
So no, I don't think Bezos did a whole lot of "measurement" before opining on things. It's called talking out of your ass. I do it, you do it, everybody does it. The right thing to do is just to ignore it, even when a billionaire does it.
That does seem low. Only 488 million?? In a country with eighty billion social posts a year? I would have guessed a much higher number.
If your numbers are correct, that means that only about 0.61% of posts, about 1 in every 165, are government astroturfers. That really does seem low. I almost feel like those may be better odds than you get on Slashdot.
Still, I mean, most social media posts nowadays are just pictures of food. That throws off the statistics, because the Chinese government probably doesn't feel the need to fake many of those. North Korea is another story. I heard that 19 out of the 26 posts on North Korean social media last year were pictures of food faked by the government..