And I remembered it just fine - I just was too lazy to translate it into English and post it here.
So why did you attribute the incident to Alexievich herself ('Alexievich's husband was treated...') and not to one of her interviewees? That's such a fundamental misreading of the text that I can't take your judgement of it seriously. This is not a godlike Authorial Voice, it's what the interviewee remembers, whether accuately or not, about the most horrific experience of her life, yet you dismiss it as 'BS'. I have no idea what the exact medical procedures were in an emergency situation in a Soviet hospital in 1986, but I don't find it incredible that the donor would be given a general anaesthetic and might not react well to it. Her later poor health may be nothing to do with the procedure - the interviewee does not state this as fact (though it's implied), and she's presumably not a medical expert. Whether the other details of the procedure are completely accurate is hardly the issue - extreme trauma is not exactly conducive to precise recall. Or do you for some reason doubt that Ignatenko died of his exposure to radiation, or that an unsuccessful bone marrow transplant did not save his life, or that this was an extremely distressing emotional experience for his wife?
I've actually read the "Voices of Chernobyl" long time ago. It's over-emotional crap with very little actual facts and some outright lies: Alexievich's husband was treated in the Moscow radiological military hospital by qualified staff (not by some fearful nurses), being a bone marrow donor does not lead to a disability and it's certainly not performed in the same operating room on a table next to the bone marrow recipient (yet her memoirs graphically describe it).
Either you didn't read it very carefully, or you haven't remembered it very well. It's not 'her memoirs', but an oral history compiled from interviews. The bone marrow recipient was a fireman at Chernobyl, Vasily Ignatenko, the husband of one of the interviewees, Lyudmilla Ignatenko, and the story is told in her own words - see the prologue to a long extract from the book:
Since Mrs Ignatenko's husband died after 2 weeks of horrible suffering, it seems bizarre (and incredibly callous) to label her experiences as 'over-emotional crap' unless you have some sort of agenda here. It is clear from the extract that Ignatenko was treated in a specialist radiological hospital (you seem to be implying it isn't) and we can hardly blame Mrs Ignatenko for perhaps attributing her sister-in-law's subsequent ill health to the transplant.
I would suggest Slashdot readers form their own judgements about this book.
'Hey, how about we go back to my place for some Prime Video and Chill? You're not interested? No, it's not just a cheapass Google Play, they have dozens of movies more recent than 2010 and the complete Downton Abbey! Yes, I know Kyle has Netflix but that's no reason to... Oh. Well, see you around.'
Companies with rental models like Adobe (with Creative Cloud) don't quite make you do this, though they have a similar level of control over the licence you have to agree to every time the subscription comes up for renewal. But at least we can understand their motivation (pure greed, rather than paranoid xenophobia).
I'm not sure that's possible. Can you revoke a licence of an old program? You can change the licence for a new version, sure, but when I buy (or download) a program, the licence that comes with it *at that time* is the licence I have to adhere to I would think.
From the manual:
"By default, TREEFINDER displays a license notice every time the program is launched. Clicking the I-agree-button all the time might get on one's nerves after a while, so here is the trick how to switch it off: using a text editor to create a file containing the words 'I promise that I will always respect the current license conditions.' and save it in your 'Treefinder' directory as 'i_agree' (without a file extension!). You will never see the license notice again."
and:
"This license agreement is valid until the next software release. Afterwards, the license of the latest TREEFINDER version applies."
So it looks like he was already a control freak back in 2011, and was attempting to reserve the right to impose retrospectively whatever licence he felt like issuing in the future. I suspect this wouldn't stand up to serious legal scrutiny, but it was already a big red flag before he went off the rails completely.
It would be nice if there were more of a specific description of what this app does. How does it help you move to iOS?
I can't tell you exactly what it does, but you might find my experience useful. After vaguely thinking that it might be interesting to get an iPhone for a change, I installed the app yesterday and ran it in the normal way. At first, nothing seemed to be happening, but then a faint rotating spiral appeared on the screen. As the beautifully designed pattern became gradually more intense, the phone began to play a strange pulsing harmony and the flash LED blinked softly in time to the music. At that point I began to feel strangely tired, and the next thing I knew it was half an hour later. I have no memory of what happened in that missing 30 minutes, but I see that a $949 transaction has been made on my credit card and a 128GB iPhone 6s Plus seems to be on pre-order from my brand new account at the Apple Store. I hope it comes quickly and my data has been transferred, as all my Android phone will now do is display random quotes in Helvetica like "Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower" and "Just avoid holding it in that way".
Even if they can't steal your bike, can they steal your $300 lock?! Also, don't most cyclists have another rather obvious means of blowing (alcohol-free) air into a tube..?
From the moment you check in, it's clear that hub is a little bit different. Lengthy queues at reception are replaced by kiosks (pictured above) that allow you to check in using your smartphone, with key cards for your room set up in seconds right in front of you.
The last time I stayed in a hotel (in Stockholm) I checked in online from the airport and my phone was the room key.
I think the author, using the "offensive-computing" nick, knew very well that this would trigger a discussion and that's probably the reason this project was created in the first place.
Yes, mod this up as the most insightful contribution to the thread so far. Although the author is careful to use other example in the readme, the code and example application are (provocatively) written to discriminate against everyone except the usual racist definition of 'white Europeans'. The 'European' group of reference populations defined by 23andme would normally include Ashkenazi Jews:
Unfortunately, Google tries to think for you all the time, and usually make a bad job of it. You can't possibly be searching for [thing you typed], you must mean [thing with a similar name that's much more popular on social media this week]. You don't want established information about [thing you typed], you want 3 search pages of the same [parroted news story vaguely related to thing from this morning]. You don't want [famous torrent site], you want [misleadingly named malware domain because we've nuked the actual site for some mysterious reason of our own]. Once upon a time, Google was used by people who were happy to think for themselves. Now it targets the mass market, and has algorithms designed to second guess poorly constructed searches at the expense of dumbing down the experience for the minority of users who can put together a precise set of search terms. It feels like a blunt instrument now - finding anything obscure always seems to need multiple quoted strings (like AltaVista back in the day) and Verbatim mode.
The 1980's attempt was like an anemic version of an Apple II or Commodore Amiga.
The BBC Micro was 1/4 of the price of the Apple II and pre-dated the Amiga by several years, so that's hardly a fair comparison.
The current [proposed] system is so watered down that any student will be bored within 1-2 years.
You really don't think that something that can engage a school kid for a year or two isn't worthwhile?
Given that the BBC is part of the UK gov't, perhaps they rejected the Pi because they couldn't convince the foundation that adding the anti-terrorist/surveillance tech [that Cameron has been yakking about] was a good idea. Or, that the Pi was "too powerful" for school children and could be used by terrorists... Just sayin'...
I heard it was because the Pi generates a signal that blocks the Reptilian mind control devices implanted in every Freeview tuner...
Seriously slashdot? What is this crap? They are slowly fucking up the front page design, one annoying step after another.
Inspired by the stealth design of the F-35 ('Operation Boiled Frog'), the Lockheed-Dice production team are hoping to fly under the radar by sneakily changing the front page one element at a time, so that in 6 months time the site will look exactly like Beta. However, as in the case of the F-35, the final product will be superficially flashy, but less functional than the previous design.
I'm an atheist, but I agree with the pope about what's in there. No need to dismiss his opinions because he doesn't talk about contraceptives or whatever, this is not what it is all about.
Lawrence Krauss isn't just an atheist, but a self-described 'anti-theist' who can't resist taking a crack at the Pope even when (or perhaps especially when) he's doing something positive like this. Which is rather a shame, as this is something people of good will ought to make common cause about.
No, but welcome to Adobe, Mr Wrangler! As your first task, it will be your responsibility to ensure that our award-winning Acrobat Reader and Flash products retain their legendary online security reputations.
Plenty of good books (Ursula Le Guin, Neil Gaiman, China Mieville, Terry Pratchett, David Mitchell, Susanna Clarke, Joe Haldeman...) over the last decade on that list. What do you think is 'worth reading'?
Their winning design combined a WAM arm (complete with a suction cup for lifting objects) and an XR4000 mobile base into a single unit
The chief designer, a Dr Davros of Skaro, CA, welcomed his 'supreme victory' in the competition, but questioned Amazon's decision not to proceed with the immediate replacement of their entire human workforce with his creation: 'Do you believe that I would let a lifetime's work be ended by the will of spineless fools like you? You have won nothing. I allowed this charade to be played out for one reason only. To find those men who were truly loyal to me and to discover those who would betray me! WE... I WILL GO ON!' Amazon officials, earlier invited to a demonstration of the improved 'Mark III Travel Machine', could not be reached for comment.
"He stepped out of the way to let a dark-suited sarariman by, spotting the Mitsubishi-Genentech logo tattooed across the back of the man's right hand. Was it authentic? If that's for real, he thought, he's in for trouble. If it wasn't, served him right. M-G employees above a certain level were implanted with advanced microprocessors that monitored mutagen levels in the bloodstream. Gear like that would get you rolled in Night City, rolled straight into a black clinic."
So if this is the case, my initial question stands; What was he trying to show? That scientific journals will publish bad science (IMHO it's not their job to check the results and conclusion of studies, that is up to the scientific community)?
Any reputable journal will use a peer review process that will at least provide some level of filtering for this sort of thing, effectively the first step in assessment by the community. Junk journals hardly even bother pretending to do this, and are fair game for sting operations. However, I think that issuing press releases to the mainstream media is more questionable. How many of these newspapers will even bother printing followup articles explaining the sting? A fair proportion of their readers will probably never find out that the claims had no real basis, and will add the chocolate nonsense to their mental store of other dubious 'facts' that get reported in these papers (especially in the 'nutrition' section!).
I don't think it's an arbitrary cut (at least not until you get to, say, Wagner, where selections really do tend to look like 'bleeding chunks'). In earlier operas, there's usually a pretty clear distinction between recitative and aria, not that much different to the songs in a musical today (or even the singles from a 'concept album'). Of course you can argue that composers with a bit of business sense had an eye on the technology of the time - popular arias were sold individually as sheet music, and later as records - I've seen the 78 described (in the LP era) as 'still the ideal medium for a Puccini-length aria'. Puccini died in 1924, and many of his arias were the early hits of the gramophone. Short-form music has always been popular, though. How many popular folk songs go on for more than 5 minutes? In church music, the choir may tackle longer form works, but the hymns the congregation sings generally aren't much longer than a pop single.
Slashdot Mirror
And I remembered it just fine - I just was too lazy to translate it into English and post it here.
So why did you attribute the incident to Alexievich herself ('Alexievich's husband was treated...') and not to one of her interviewees? That's such a fundamental misreading of the text that I can't take your judgement of it seriously. This is not a godlike Authorial Voice, it's what the interviewee remembers, whether accuately or not, about the most horrific experience of her life, yet you dismiss it as 'BS'. I have no idea what the exact medical procedures were in an emergency situation in a Soviet hospital in 1986, but I don't find it incredible that the donor would be given a general anaesthetic and might not react well to it. Her later poor health may be nothing to do with the procedure - the interviewee does not state this as fact (though it's implied), and she's presumably not a medical expert. Whether the other details of the procedure are completely accurate is hardly the issue - extreme trauma is not exactly conducive to precise recall. Or do you for some reason doubt that Ignatenko died of his exposure to radiation, or that an unsuccessful bone marrow transplant did not save his life, or that this was an extremely distressing emotional experience for his wife?
I've actually read the "Voices of Chernobyl" long time ago. It's over-emotional crap with very little actual facts and some outright lies: Alexievich's husband was treated in the Moscow radiological military hospital by qualified staff (not by some fearful nurses), being a bone marrow donor does not lead to a disability and it's certainly not performed in the same operating room on a table next to the bone marrow recipient (yet her memoirs graphically describe it).
Either you didn't read it very carefully, or you haven't remembered it very well. It's not 'her memoirs', but an oral history compiled from interviews. The bone marrow recipient was a fireman at Chernobyl, Vasily Ignatenko, the husband of one of the interviewees, Lyudmilla Ignatenko, and the story is told in her own words - see the prologue to a long extract from the book:
http://www.alexievich.info/kni...
Since Mrs Ignatenko's husband died after 2 weeks of horrible suffering, it seems bizarre (and incredibly callous) to label her experiences as 'over-emotional crap' unless you have some sort of agenda here. It is clear from the extract that Ignatenko was treated in a specialist radiological hospital (you seem to be implying it isn't) and we can hardly blame Mrs Ignatenko for perhaps attributing her sister-in-law's subsequent ill health to the transplant.
I would suggest Slashdot readers form their own judgements about this book.
1. Harvard doesn't necessarily mean genuinely smart, believe me I have first-hand experience.
Maybe. Nobody has ever managed to work out what they are actually saying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
'Hey, how about we go back to my place for some Prime Video and Chill? You're not interested? No, it's not just a cheapass Google Play, they have dozens of movies more recent than 2010 and the complete Downton Abbey! Yes, I know Kyle has Netflix but that's no reason to... Oh. Well, see you around.'
Companies with rental models like Adobe (with Creative Cloud) don't quite make you do this, though they have a similar level of control over the licence you have to agree to every time the subscription comes up for renewal. But at least we can understand their motivation (pure greed, rather than paranoid xenophobia).
I'm not sure that's possible. Can you revoke a licence of an old program? You can change the licence for a new version, sure, but when I buy (or download) a program, the licence that comes with it *at that time* is the licence I have to adhere to I would think.
From the manual:
"By default, TREEFINDER displays a license notice every time the program is launched.
Clicking the I-agree-button all the time might get on one's nerves after a while, so here is the
trick how to switch it off: using a text editor to create a file containing the words 'I promise
that I will always respect the current license conditions.' and save it in your 'Treefinder'
directory as 'i_agree' (without a file extension!). You will never see the license notice again."
and:
"This license agreement is valid until the next software release. Afterwards, the license of the
latest TREEFINDER version applies."
So it looks like he was already a control freak back in 2011, and was attempting to reserve the right to impose retrospectively whatever licence he felt like issuing in the future. I suspect this wouldn't stand up to serious legal scrutiny, but it was already a big red flag before he went off the rails completely.
And I suppose "Superman" is just a slightly larger human being.
https://xkcd.com/1394/
They have so much money they could probably have Martin Shkreli murdered and get away with it.
No need to spend it. A Kickstarter for this job would probably be funded in 5 minutes at the moment.
It would be nice if there were more of a specific description of what this app does. How does it help you move to iOS?
I can't tell you exactly what it does, but you might find my experience useful. After vaguely thinking that it might be interesting to get an iPhone for a change, I installed the app yesterday and ran it in the normal way. At first, nothing seemed to be happening, but then a faint rotating spiral appeared on the screen. As the beautifully designed pattern became gradually more intense, the phone began to play a strange pulsing harmony and the flash LED blinked softly in time to the music. At that point I began to feel strangely tired, and the next thing I knew it was half an hour later. I have no memory of what happened in that missing 30 minutes, but I see that a $949 transaction has been made on my credit card and a 128GB iPhone 6s Plus seems to be on pre-order from my brand new account at the Apple Store. I hope it comes quickly and my data has been transferred, as all my Android phone will now do is display random quotes in Helvetica like "Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower" and "Just avoid holding it in that way".
Even if they can't steal your bike, can they steal your $300 lock?! Also, don't most cyclists have another rather obvious means of blowing (alcohol-free) air into a tube..?
From the moment you check in, it's clear that hub is a little bit different. Lengthy queues at reception are replaced by kiosks (pictured above) that allow you to check in using your smartphone, with key cards for your room set up in seconds right in front of you.
The last time I stayed in a hotel (in Stockholm) I checked in online from the airport and my phone was the room key.
Order everything from one account, then strip the DRM from your books and read them on the Android app of your choice without signing on to anything?
I think the author, using the "offensive-computing" nick, knew very well that this would trigger a discussion and that's probably the reason this project was created in the first place.
Yes, mod this up as the most insightful contribution to the thread so far. Although the author is careful to use other example in the readme, the code and example application are (provocatively) written to discriminate against everyone except the usual racist definition of 'white Europeans'. The 'European' group of reference populations defined by 23andme would normally include Ashkenazi Jews:
https://customercare.23andme.c...
but this group is explicitly excluded by offensive-computing:
https://github.com/offapi/rbac...
Google won't think for you.
Unfortunately, Google tries to think for you all the time, and usually make a bad job of it. You can't possibly be searching for [thing you typed], you must mean [thing with a similar name that's much more popular on social media this week]. You don't want established information about [thing you typed], you want 3 search pages of the same [parroted news story vaguely related to thing from this morning]. You don't want [famous torrent site], you want [misleadingly named malware domain because we've nuked the actual site for some mysterious reason of our own]. Once upon a time, Google was used by people who were happy to think for themselves. Now it targets the mass market, and has algorithms designed to second guess poorly constructed searches at the expense of dumbing down the experience for the minority of users who can put together a precise set of search terms. It feels like a blunt instrument now - finding anything obscure always seems to need multiple quoted strings (like AltaVista back in the day) and Verbatim mode.
Presumably the same "area 51" nutters?
Worse than that. A few hundred of the more extreme 'truthers' even deny that Pluto is a planet.
The 1980's attempt was like an anemic version of an Apple II or Commodore Amiga.
The BBC Micro was 1/4 of the price of the Apple II and pre-dated the Amiga by several years, so that's hardly a fair comparison.
The current [proposed] system is so watered down that any student will be bored within 1-2 years.
You really don't think that something that can engage a school kid for a year or two isn't worthwhile?
Given that the BBC is part of the UK gov't, perhaps they rejected the Pi because they couldn't convince the foundation that adding the anti-terrorist/surveillance tech [that Cameron has been yakking about] was a good idea. Or, that the Pi was "too powerful" for school children and could be used by terrorists ... Just sayin' ...
I heard it was because the Pi generates a signal that blocks the Reptilian mind control devices implanted in every Freeview tuner...
Seriously slashdot? What is this crap?
They are slowly fucking up the front page design, one annoying step after another.
Inspired by the stealth design of the F-35 ('Operation Boiled Frog'), the Lockheed-Dice production team are hoping to fly under the radar by sneakily changing the front page one element at a time, so that in 6 months time the site will look exactly like Beta. However, as in the case of the F-35, the final product will be superficially flashy, but less functional than the previous design.
I'm an atheist, but I agree with the pope about what's in there. No need to dismiss his opinions because he doesn't talk about contraceptives or whatever, this is not what it is all about.
Lawrence Krauss isn't just an atheist, but a self-described 'anti-theist' who can't resist taking a crack at the Pope even when (or perhaps especially when) he's doing something positive like this. Which is rather a shame, as this is something people of good will ought to make common cause about.
No, but welcome to Adobe, Mr Wrangler! As your first task, it will be your responsibility to ensure that our award-winning Acrobat Reader and Flash products retain their legendary online security reputations.
Plenty of good books (Ursula Le Guin, Neil Gaiman, China Mieville, Terry Pratchett, David Mitchell, Susanna Clarke, Joe Haldeman...) over the last decade on that list. What do you think is 'worth reading'?
Their winning design combined a WAM arm (complete with a suction cup for lifting objects) and an XR4000 mobile base into a single unit
The chief designer, a Dr Davros of Skaro, CA, welcomed his 'supreme victory' in the competition, but questioned Amazon's decision not to proceed with the immediate replacement of their entire human workforce with his creation: 'Do you believe that I would let a lifetime's work be ended by the will of spineless fools like you? You have won nothing. I allowed this charade to be played out for one reason only. To find those men who were truly loyal to me and to discover those who would betray me! WE... I WILL GO ON!' Amazon officials, earlier invited to a demonstration of the improved 'Mark III Travel Machine', could not be reached for comment.
I'm waiting for Mona Lisa-style 'derms.
I was thinking of this bit from Neuromancer:
"He stepped out of the way to let a dark-suited sarariman by, spotting the Mitsubishi-Genentech logo tattooed across the back of the man's right hand. Was it authentic? If that's for real, he thought, he's in for trouble. If it wasn't, served him right. M-G employees above a certain level were implanted with advanced microprocessors that monitored mutagen levels in the bloodstream. Gear like that would get you rolled in Night City, rolled straight into a black clinic."
There's nothing special about our universe
Not easily impressed, are you?
So if this is the case, my initial question stands; What was he trying to show? That scientific journals will publish bad science (IMHO it's not their job to check the results and conclusion of studies, that is up to the scientific community)?
Any reputable journal will use a peer review process that will at least provide some level of filtering for this sort of thing, effectively the first step in assessment by the community. Junk journals hardly even bother pretending to do this, and are fair game for sting operations. However, I think that issuing press releases to the mainstream media is more questionable. How many of these newspapers will even bother printing followup articles explaining the sting? A fair proportion of their readers will probably never find out that the claims had no real basis, and will add the chocolate nonsense to their mental store of other dubious 'facts' that get reported in these papers (especially in the 'nutrition' section!).
I don't think it's an arbitrary cut (at least not until you get to, say, Wagner, where selections really do tend to look like 'bleeding chunks'). In earlier operas, there's usually a pretty clear distinction between recitative and aria, not that much different to the songs in a musical today (or even the singles from a 'concept album'). Of course you can argue that composers with a bit of business sense had an eye on the technology of the time - popular arias were sold individually as sheet music, and later as records - I've seen the 78 described (in the LP era) as 'still the ideal medium for a Puccini-length aria'. Puccini died in 1924, and many of his arias were the early hits of the gramophone. Short-form music has always been popular, though. How many popular folk songs go on for more than 5 minutes? In church music, the choir may tackle longer form works, but the hymns the congregation sings generally aren't much longer than a pop single.