Indeed. As it happens, I believe that (at least in America) the far right is much, much, much more dangerous than the far left, but that doesn't mean these pathetic hypocritical leftist witch hunts put a smile on my face. I mean, this is so stupid. We KNOW that the American leftists are not sufficiency energized by this tactic, hence why there was dip in the turnout of Ds last year, leading to Hillary's loss. Over a year later, and it's nothing but more self-sabotage, more of the War on Humor, etc.
And yeah, the hypocrisy does really hurt. It bolsters the right wing media and disillusions the pro-rational, pro-truth left. (That's not even the same as "moderate". I don't believe in moderation for moderation's sake, just sanity for sanity's sake and truth for truth's sake.)
Show of hands: are there any leftists in the audience who don't know, or still refuse to admit, that Black Lives Matter was/is a centrally planned movement run by a organization that openly quotes and openly idolizes the fugitive "domestic terrorist" and cop killer, Assata Shakur? Because it was, and they do. For a very long time, they had an attributed quote from her at the top of their website and you could find dozens of videos of BLM protesters chanting that same quote in unison at their rallies and protests. And the other major populist leftist movement of the past few years, that Women's March thing? Also centrally organized, and they openly celebrated Assata Shakur's birthday.
The people on the left don't know this or want to hear any of this; they don't want think about it. But guess what? The right wing knows about it and they are using it (plus the War on Humor, plus a few of the actual lies printed by the "MSM", plus a thousand other groanworthy missteps by leftists who foolishly think they can beat the far right at its own game) to win over the hearts and minds of a new generation.
I have zero fear of the "far left" directly doing massive damage to America; our left-wing politicians are way too moderate-ized (and also too unpopular) for that to ever happen. But these jokers are ruining it for everyone else, all the millions of us who despite what the Republicans stand for right now. They're ruining it for everyone, because they actually think that they can out-stupid and out-demagogue the right wing in America. And you can't; you just CAN'T god damn it.
A left wing pro-PC / witch hunt mentality led directly to Trump and six months before that, it led directly to Brexit. How many clusterfucks is it going to take for people to wake up and realize that this has been a FAILED strategy and move on?
The American right is much, much worse about ignorance (and valuing non-ignorance) than the left. This is very old news. And yeah, there's a ton of hard data supporting it.
But leftists really need to understand that "better than the Republicans" simply isn't good enough. If the average Democrat utters unique 3 political lies per week and the Republicans utters 30... that's not enough to translate into a political advantage! Those three lies are not only more than enough material for Fox News and talk radio to have a field day to embolden their base, but they're also enough to disillusion the centrists, fence-sitters, and "politics are just too depressing" folks.
You have to try to set the bar higher. Relative honesty isn't good enough; relative sanity isn't good enough.
Example? Well, just yesterday I replied to drinkypoo who more or less was denying that Obama had ever "took the side of black people before facts came out". And he did, of course. He didn't do it remotely to the degree that Fox News says he did; he's an infinitely more insightful and reasonable person than the current POTUS, etc. etc., but that isn't good enough.
Ring wingers never want give up on nonsense like Benghazi or the birth certificate thing or WMDs or a 9/11 connection in the Iraq War. And leftists don't want to give up their own deceitful shibboleths like the shooting Treyvon Martin, or that Trump supposedly "confessed to sexual assault on tape" (and of course he didn't even come close to it. His entire cringey macho thesis was that women "let you" touch them, with no hint whatsoever that he was using some sort of coercion), or that conservative Islam is somehow much less dangerous than conservative Christianity.
Some people misinterpret this all as saying that left should be more passive... no, nothing could be further from the truth. The American left is anemic as hell, woefully centrist and compromise-ready also unwilling to fight important nuts-and-bolts battles like the electoral college and campaign finance reform. The left NEEDS to be bold and stubborn, but it can take the high road while it does so. It can't sling mud the way the Republicans do and get away with it. It can't beat the right at its own game. It just makes people shrug and give up.
Which is exactly what happened last year. The numbers don't lie. It wasn't a spike in the pro-Trump right, it was the anemic response of the anti-Trump vote that allowed the unthinkable to happen. This really shouldn't be a controversial thing to say any more, and yet somehow it is.
If the market really had demonstrated that a large number of people really wanted to swap out their CPUs (assuming they had any idea what they were) or add RAM (What? A truck?) or any of the other geeky things that tickle you, we'd see them.
"If people really wanted to have cameras in their phones, we'd have seen them by now"--ColdWetDog in 2001.
It wouldn't be quite *that* popular but I'm almost positive PC gamers alone could make it profitable.
I know there's more of you than of us. I clearly acknowledged that.
And yet, there are more Americans that dislike sushi than like it. But for some *curious* reason, there are still tons of Japanese restaurants around.
It's just that simple. If the market really had demonstrated that a large number of people really wanted to swap out their CPUs (assuming they had any idea what they were) or add RAM (What? A truck?) or any of the other geeky things that tickle you, we'd see them.
The GPU and battery are the major ones, of course.
You are hiding in an incredibly small niche.
1. Have you SEEN some of the niche-y shit that's succeeded on Kickstarter?
2. Better yet: have you SEEN the kinds of crap keyboard enthusiasts get up to at places like Geekhack, Deskthority and Massdrop? Ludicrous custom keycaps, recreating 30 year old buckle spring keyboards, modding Cherry MX switches by hand and then reselling them, successfully lobbying Cherry and Gateron to produce new switch types, people paying $700 for vintage beam spring keyboards or the fabled ALPS blues...
3. People who LAN party but can't afford a DTR laptop is not *that* small of a niche. (Not that I LAN any more; I just want a more powerful and more capable machine that I can easily move around and customize.) Let me tell you, it's a major pain in the ass to have to wrestle an ATX tower, LCD, keyboard and mass of cables into a trunk. And then if someone trips over a cord or you have a tiny flicker of a brownout, you're reset. (Unless you brought along a 10 pound UPS with you as well.)
What I'm describing could be done with off the shelf parts. It should be considerably easier for someone who had the right connections to put together than a palm-sized device. There is also precedence for it; a very long time ago (before my time), there used to be something called a "luggable" in the days before laptops were practical. And people bought them.
Are you poor? Maybe I didn't make it clear enough: I'm poor. Poor geeks do actually exist and we do appreciate things being less-disposable. There are probably more of us than there are of you, though I grant you not all of us would be willing to put up with a DTR lapzilla like I'm envisioning.
Damn it all, does the world *really* need more pocket-sized computers? I'm still waiting for modular, user-upgradeable large DTR laptop to appear. I'm so sick of having to upgrade entire machines, or use a desktop if I want to game (since I certainly can't afford a gaming DTR.)
I understand that most people these days desire sleek, disposable ultrabook crap with soldiered CPUs and GPUs and disposable proprietary batteries, but surely I'm not the only one who'd love to seesomething like this? Doesn't anyone do LAN parties any more? It could use miniITX; hell, the thing could be half a foot think and use a standard ATX power supply and weigh 17 pounds for all I care, just as long as it has an integrated screen, cheap commodity battery (for UPS purposes only, not for sustained use) and keyboard (pref with user-swappable mechanical switches) and can be carried in a bag with one hand...
Wish we had some sort of site to vote for crowdfunded things that no one has even proposed yet, just to demonstrate the interest.
I'm sorry, I just recalled that Treyvon did indeed have a one small scratch on him. A small scratch on his finger, as I recall. Not other bruisers or anything. The autopsy report is freely available online if you don't believe me. A LOT of left-wingers assume I'm lying, because no one in their favorite echo chamber ever told them that the innocent, passive Treyvon story was wrong
Yes, the left is also addicted to echo chambers and fake news. The greatest tragedy with Trump is the "we're not as bad as...!" effect. The right might be an order of magnitude worse, but the left is still bad enough to alienate much of the passionate and the swing voters. Leftists will hear me say something like this, talk about facts that have been freely available for YEARS, and they either just call me a liar or they insist that Martin must have swung first and missed, then Treyvon righteously counterattacked. On the basis of WHAT evidence do you say that's definitely what happened? It's pure conjecture. It's reasonable doubt by any sane measure, and given what we do know (including the lack of injuries and the fact that Treyvon's girlfriend saying that he was suspicious about "this cracker" that was following him), I'd say it's more likely than not that Treyvon threw the first punch. Which would put him in the wrong. Regardless of how rude (or racist) it is to follow someone and confront them, you don't get to punch them or smash their heads into the concrete in retaliation. In America, that sort of thing will get you shot. And afterwards the shooter will be *rightly* exonerated, even if he is bit of a macho prick himself.
Admit it, just fucking admit it. And admit that Obama was in fact a little too quick to fall down on the side of a black person on at least one occasion. Just admit it, then rightfully scoff at the idea that he was some massive serial racebaiter and pivot the conversation back to the important stuff, back to the present. Millions of Americans are desperately eager to follow a "side" that isn't full of shit, that knows when to admit they are wrong. Or at least I know I am.
As I recall, he came close to it with Treyvon Martin, by commenting that "he could have been his son", which is a pretty dang sympathetic thing to being saying, as well one with overtly racial overtones. Of course, it later came out that the picture the media was like 5 years out of date, and instead of a small smiling 12 year old, the Treyvon who got shot was a huge nearly-18 year old who--like George Zimmerman--had some known macho tendencies. And it also came out that multiple witnesses saw Treyvon in a dominant position on top of Martin throwing "MMA-style" punches at him and bashing his head into the concrete. It also came out that the 911 call had been edited by journalists to make it seem more like Zimmerman was being racist. Annnnnnd... it came out that Treyvon didn't have a single scratch on him while Zimmerman had a broken nose and lacerations to the back of his head.
So yeah, I think Obama definitely jumped the gun there, was quick to jump on the "fucking racists shooting black kids" bandwagon. I've a lot more sympathy for the situation with the black professor who was arrested in his own house. I personally think Obama initially made the right call there, coming down initially on the side of the black guy, but he later walked back and invited both the black guy and the cop to the white house for beer and Kumbaya. So, basically by his own admission, Obama acknowledged he jumped the gun in that case as well by preemptively supporting only the black guy (though I happen to disagree with his later walking-back.)
These incidents and more like them were, of course, massively blown out of proportion by the racebaiting right, but in this they were greatly assisted by the racebaiting left who refused to behave sensibly, like abandon the narrative of Treyvon as innocent victim even after the mountains of evidence had come out.
I'm not sure I follow your analogy. You don't seem to be properly differentiating copyleft open source (GPL) from permissive open source (BSD / Apache / MIT / public domain), which was a central point of my post.
Let's see if we can clarify this a bit more: what happens if proprietary source code is discovered in another project, be it OSS or proprietary code from another company?
Now, why isn't "toxic" a perfectly apt response to the "GPL is viral" claims? Unauthorized use of proprietary code, such as that found in RemixOS,would result in a cease and desist and all efforts on the derivative being wasted. That's a reasonable analogy of "toxic".
This is true even within projects like OS X, where components like (for example) Rosetta are apparently unilaterally terminated by Apple even though demand for them still exists. In the OSS world, such a project might (if it didn't have a major sponsor) have spotty support and be stuck in alpha status or suffer progressive bit rot that is only partially addressed by some ad-hoc backporting attempts or myriad other issues... but popular, important compatibility-enhancing software layers like that almost never simply die completely overnight.
This is the toxicity of proprietary software at work. You can rattle off a long list of advantages for OS X or Windows; I'm not saying those advantages don't exist. Of course open source has major issues. And of course having more money than God helps companies like MSFT and AAPL sidestep a lot of those issues.
But in regards to this specific issue, this much-maligned "viral" aspect of copyleft licenses (GPL)... it is not being fairly compared to what the analogous proprietary situation looks like. If proprietary code infects your project, your project dies unless it can be excised entirely. And if a proprietary project like RemixOS dies on its own, usually nobody from the outside can resuscitate it.
Question: if the GPL "viral" or "cancerous", what do you call this, this son-of-Apache closed source freeware license that Jibe used for Remix OS ?
Because if the GPL really is those things, then non-OSS freeware must be "toxic" (and by extension, "permissive" licensed software is "permissive" only of various forms of toxicity.) I briefly played around with RemixOS because it would be handy to have it available, preferably running in a VM, as a handy to use Android-only applications. Spent a couple hours tinkering with it, trying to get it to work properly. And then I noticed it wasn't open source.
Not a nutter against all forms of closed source software, but when it comes to OSes and staple workhorse applications, life is just too damn short to waste it on non-OSS.
That's not how I parsed his post. It's OK for the CIA to stockpile zero days[1]. It's ok for them to use them against hostile foreign powers. It's not ok for them to use them against reporters or political activists, especially American citizens on American soil. It's not ok for them to spy on everyone who owns a certain exploitable device.
This is an area that demands nuance. Simply saying "durrr, we shouldn't be doing any of these things, against anyone, ever!" is masochism. It's the sort of masochism that often leads to the country drifting towards the right, because centrists are by and large not interested in pursuing an anti-American agenda that demands we self-flagellate and remove ourself as a global power to remove even the *possibility* that said power could be abused.
Fight abuse. Don't fight tools. I'm someone who believes James Clapper should have been not merely fired but imprisoned for perjury, but that doesn't mean I'd support the wholesale destruction of our ability to use tradecraft in targeted ways.
1. This is a somewhat debatable point, but as long as they aren't actively weakening the code base this seems reasonable enough. This about more than merely being able to eavesdrop on Russian spies or destroy Iranian centrifuges; it's also about being able to monitor what other spy agencies are doing or attempt to do and it's about the confidence those spy agencies could have in their ability to do things undetected. If the CIA were required to openly disclose any zero day that it knew about (and if this were actually enforced), that would mean that if their Russian or Chinese counterparts ever stumbled on a new zero day, they would instantly know that the CIA was ignorant of this vulnerability. Thus, such a policy would put us as a significant disadvantage in not just intelligence, but also counterintelligence.
I plugged a laptop into a DVI port on our TV, got a wireless $10 mini-keyboard with integrated touchpad off of eBay, cranked up the icon and font sizes a bit I plugged a laptop into a DVI port on our TV, got a wireless $10 mini-keyboard with integrated touchpad off of eBay, cranked up the icon and font sizes a bit and it's worked out surprisingly well. It's much quicker to use than the 'smart' Bluray player we were previously using, and it can do a lot more... and it's running Qubes OS. Ain't no drive-by hacker getting in there.
For the slightly less tenacious people who just want something approaching regular desktop Linux level security and a simpler interface, there's Myth TV. Which has been out for fifteen years. And there's also Kodi, which even non-technical people have heard of and apparently love.
Addressing just the geeks in the audience: I don't understand the appeal of Roku and smart TVs the like, I really don't. They're slow. The remote-based UI is cumbersome as hell. They're vulnerable. They're un-upgradable. And for the most part they're no cheaper than an old laptop off of Craigslist that has HDMI or DVI out. I sort of suspect that most people simply have a strong psychological need to separate their leisure from their work, and it's primarily for that reason that they prefer a completely different device with a different UI.
Because racism is being made more socially acceptable in certain subgroups
This is true, but only because of what that poster was saying: people are saying "yeah, I guess I'm racist now. Whatever" and thus the taboo is weakened in "certain subgroups", and it's due primarily to the broad over-application of the term. I've termed this phenomenon the ongoing catastrophic failure of Operation Conflation: Progressives trying to fight back against a rise in visible racism by inflating the definition of the term is having the opposite effect as intended by weakening the taboo against real racism, yet the more this tactic backfires the harder they push.
It used to be people would make racist jokes or comments and no one would call it racist because their friends had similar views, and even if they were offended it's extremely awkward to call someone racist to their face.
It used to be that there were terms like "insensitive" or "crude" used to describe people who used words and ideas in blunt, offensive or stereotype-reinforcing ways without their usage actually supporting racism/sexism/antisemitism/etc. This middle ground has mostly disappeared. Nazi and Holocaust jokes, once thought to be merely distasteful, are now called antisemitic even if the evidence strongly indicates otherwise.
Any reference whatsoever to an ethnic custom or stereotype is now deemed racist. I've listened as perfectly intelligent-sounding people tried to explain that the sound of a gong playing when a Chinese character walks on-screen is blatantly racist. Because... what now? What's the implicit logic behind that analysis; what's the implied (and supposedly racist) meaning? That Chinese people have no sense of musicality? That they have an irresistible racial impulse to play gongs? That the peace and quiet of wholesome white neighborhoods is being disrupted by the raucous 3 a.m. gong-playing of inferior barbarians? It's an extremely stupid thing to utterly equate cultural observation/parody and actual racism, but this is not a fringe interpretation of the concept. Give it another decade, and I wouldn't be surprised if people are arguing it's racist to ever show a Mexican eating a taco.
The same exact thing is happening with sexism. Jerry Seinfeld's daughter called her mother sexist for suggesting that in a couple years, she'll probably want to hang around boys more often. Not, "you're definitely going to do this" or "I insist that you do this", just that this seemed like a probable course of events. And after Jerry mentioned this in an interview (the context being how the youth of today doesn't understand what actual prejudice is), I saw dozens of progressive-types defending his daughter's characterization of her mother's words. And not a month ago, I had an exchange on Slashdot where I basically said "She [some woman complaining about sexism] sounds like a cunt. Ok, now, *that was a joke* and the *only* reason why I make this joke was to ask whether you think that this self-conscious usage is sexist." And the person said yes, I was sexist for using the word. This is the world we live in now. Four-year-old level tattletale-ing has replaced all reflection and nuance. It doesn't matter at all that I'm a gender egalitarian.
but I think "racist" still means that you believe a race is inferior
We're going to see "(archaic)" next to this definition in the dictionary if things continue as they have been.
it's in public. u don't have any expectation of privacy
Historically true, but if we're headed for a world where everything we do and everything we say in public (at least outside and within the city limits) is on file for all time on a server somewhere that's been pre-analyzed and indexed using using facial recognition and voice recognition... we might want to consider revising that rule of thumb a bit.
I can't help it if the journalists in this country are dead set on proving Trump right. He should be the one person it should be possible to oppose by sticking to talking about normal, sensible truth but when faced with such a jackass the media can't help but lie and blither a stream of irrelevances. It's been very illuminating.
That doesn't mean they lie more than he does (of course not), but they are a much deeper and more durable fixture of American (and world) culture than the shit talking 70 year old buffoon in the White House.
To make a men's jacked a woman's jacket, the zipper zips from the left side. To tell a men's shirt from a woman's shirt, the button's are on the left side as opposed to men's shirts have buttons on the right side.
Super wooooooooooooooosh. I even mentioned that *exact* button thing.
You have it wrong, as nobody wins in a race to the bottom, that's the point of the expression.
The expression is a complicated one with a long and varied history. Describing it as "everyone loses" really missed the point. The expression is more about the process involved more than the end result.
It can be like a game of chicken. Somebody does indeed win if the other one swerves before hitting bottom, or otherwise can't continue the race, or if one party is more bottom-tolerant than the other. In this context, the American right is more tolerant of and proficient with lies and nonsense than the American left. The latter will fall to shambles long before the former does, but that doesn't mean they aren't in a race right now.
A lot of industries had a race to the bottom with Chinese competitors. Guess what? China won, because their "bottom" is lower than that found in first world nations. And it's a real victory we're talking about here; they're raking in the billions.
Major sample bias issues if those are only military personnel they're examining. Feel free to dig through it and come up with the % difference in that ratio if you wish, though. (Not the % difference in arm length, but % difference in the arm length / torso lngth ratio.) Also, you need to include the standard deviation for both sexes so we know roughly how many males will be inconvenienced compared to the females, and for that number you might need some sort of joint distribution (which may or may not be possible to construct with the data given.)
I think males typically have bigger chest circumferences and longer torsos, so it's not at all clear which way that would swing. Breast size is a huge variable there. She said that they took their measurements, so if the jackets were being custom tailored or at least had more than a one dimensional S/M/L/XL sizing system, this is all moot regardless.
Yes, it is quite easy to notice you are usually quite irate and dyspeptic.
I.e. I am neither delusional nor apathetic. Nor moronic. Yup, no arguments there. If you're not depressed or pissed off, there is something wrong with you.
A lot of conjecture here that goes against my anecdotal observations. The waist size difference is a bit silly, this being 2017 (what with the obesity epidemic obliterating causing far greater variation than gender.) Any gendered studies of arm length to torso length ratios? And that's all assuming it's a S/M/L situation; the "taking our measurements" bit implies higher end jackets that were going to be custom tailored, making all of this moot.
No, they weren't offered men's jackets. They were told that they were not getting them at the last minute, after the order had been placed.
Well, that's obviously malevolent bullshit if true.
This is a race to the bottom the left cannot win. The right is used to and will tolerate an astonishing quantity of lies and bullshit. The left, as we've already seen, will become demoralized when faced with a candidate who is only a blandly, typically-horrible politician.
The Times has already reached "bad enough" in my estimation, along with every other news publication I've ever looked at in any detail. And unlike the millions of evangelicals who watch Fox News and reluctantly voted for Trump, I don't grade on a curve.
The mainstream media needs to aggressively, forcefully hold Trump to account. Given the amount of material they have to work with, this should be an easy task. Unfortunately, they have conclusively demonstrated that they cannot separate out lies from truth, much less the absurdly sensationalist and irrelevant from the reasonable and important. They've fallen prey to the greatest troll[1] the world has ever seen and it will destroy them in the end, once the lurid headlines lose their charm.
And history will record the moment of their downfall, of course, as the moment they tried kill two birds with one stone with their "fake news" non-story[2], too busy drinking their own kool-aid to realize that mainstream news has always been a pretty damn sketchy enterprise, even during its supposed golden eras.
1. Albeit probably one who is operating mostly on a subconscious level.
2. Fabricated news websites and chain emails and conspiracy theories obviously exist, but they've been around for a long time and are more of a symptom than a disease in their own right.
Yup. And that's just the tip of the clusterfuck iceberg. Anyone who is interested should read Feynman's appendix in its entirity, which he insisted should be added to the Roger's Commission report on threat of having his name removed from the whole thing.
He believed that NASA's delusional bureaucracy was ultimately to blame and it needed to be torn down entirely and rebuilt. The other members of the commission disagreed, which is pretty much why two decades later the crew of the Columbia died. Sadly, a narrative of organizational incompetence is extremely hard to keep alive in the mainstream media, so in the minds of most people they're still just random tragedies... an unavoidable price of space flight.
Two other things worth noting about Feynman's assessment: he was strongly impressed by the software systems of the Shuttle, considering it to be much more robust than the hardware (not the sort of thing one often hears these days), and the coda to his appendix is, of course, a timeless one worth quoting:
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
Except my point was that your estimation of "The Producers" lacks much in the way of validity.
If you thought that sucking Hollywood genitalia was a sound way to demonstrate validity of assessment, you thought wrong. Beyond all of the obvious problems attendant with asserting that mainstream tastes are the only "valid" ones, it's worth noting how historical works routinely get a pass for being different or trailblazing instead of being good works that actually stand the test of time. Edit the play out of The Producers (which is what, less than 10 minutes of screen time?), show it to people who've never seen it before and it would get abysmal reviews. It's a one-trick pony movie. It just happens to be a good trick.
It really comes across as irate.
No moreso than usual. Several of Mel Brooks' works are fairly overrated, having a couple hilarious scenes padded out with an hour of filler. And some of his later movies are underrated despite having better pacing and consistency. And I'm sure I'd find plenty to dislike in many of PDP's vids.
we women needed to find jackets that were the same price as the bulk-order price of the men's jackets.
That sounds an awful lot like the women were able to get a "men's jacket" if they wanted to.
we can't say what differentiated them,
Built-in beard trimmer and cock ring? Transparent torso to show off chest hairs? Built-in testosterone replacement therapy patches sewn into the shoulders? "Female Body Inspector" emblazoned on it in large orange letters above an Uber logo? What are *you* imagining?
It's basically breaking a promise, and then after being called on it
Oh yeah, the biggest problem with cutthroat white collar jobs is they 'lied' about their custom jacket being available with a pretty princess trim. This point (along with some others) drastically detracts from the rest of her claims by making her seem like an out of touch whiner. Highly competitive Dilbert-esque environments like she's describing are hell are on Earth, a neverending stream of politicking and lies. Not making a female only version of their swag is an utterly absurd complaint.
I've worked in jobs that had uniforms and guess what, there was no female-specific version. The hats and pants and such appear roughly masculine, because when it comes to clothing 'masculine' tends towards neutrality (i.e. mostly sans decoration) and being utilitarian.
making people take a lesser choice
Which is you asserting that non-stereotypically feminine clothing is lesser. Ignoring the question of whether or not that's a slight against male fashion, I've personally known probably a dozen females who would disagree with you.
And apparently doing the work themselves.
If they wanted to be treated special instead of being treated like members of the human race who also had torsos, heads, two arms, and a need to stay warm in the winter, then yes they had to do the work themselves. It's a pity you have such a big problem with egalitarianism.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. As it happens, I believe that (at least in America) the far right is much, much, much more dangerous than the far left, but that doesn't mean these pathetic hypocritical leftist witch hunts put a smile on my face. I mean, this is so stupid. We KNOW that the American leftists are not sufficiency energized by this tactic, hence why there was dip in the turnout of Ds last year, leading to Hillary's loss. Over a year later, and it's nothing but more self-sabotage, more of the War on Humor, etc.
And yeah, the hypocrisy does really hurt. It bolsters the right wing media and disillusions the pro-rational, pro-truth left. (That's not even the same as "moderate". I don't believe in moderation for moderation's sake, just sanity for sanity's sake and truth for truth's sake.)
Show of hands: are there any leftists in the audience who don't know, or still refuse to admit, that Black Lives Matter was/is a centrally planned movement run by a organization that openly quotes and openly idolizes the fugitive "domestic terrorist" and cop killer, Assata Shakur? Because it was, and they do. For a very long time, they had an attributed quote from her at the top of their website and you could find dozens of videos of BLM protesters chanting that same quote in unison at their rallies and protests. And the other major populist leftist movement of the past few years, that Women's March thing? Also centrally organized, and they openly celebrated Assata Shakur's birthday.
The people on the left don't know this or want to hear any of this; they don't want think about it. But guess what? The right wing knows about it and they are using it (plus the War on Humor, plus a few of the actual lies printed by the "MSM", plus a thousand other groanworthy missteps by leftists who foolishly think they can beat the far right at its own game) to win over the hearts and minds of a new generation.
I have zero fear of the "far left" directly doing massive damage to America; our left-wing politicians are way too moderate-ized (and also too unpopular) for that to ever happen. But these jokers are ruining it for everyone else, all the millions of us who despite what the Republicans stand for right now. They're ruining it for everyone, because they actually think that they can out-stupid and out-demagogue the right wing in America. And you can't; you just CAN'T god damn it.
A left wing pro-PC / witch hunt mentality led directly to Trump and six months before that, it led directly to Brexit. How many clusterfucks is it going to take for people to wake up and realize that this has been a FAILED strategy and move on?
The American right is much, much worse about ignorance (and valuing non-ignorance) than the left. This is very old news. And yeah, there's a ton of hard data supporting it.
But leftists really need to understand that "better than the Republicans" simply isn't good enough. If the average Democrat utters unique 3 political lies per week and the Republicans utters 30... that's not enough to translate into a political advantage! Those three lies are not only more than enough material for Fox News and talk radio to have a field day to embolden their base, but they're also enough to disillusion the centrists, fence-sitters, and "politics are just too depressing" folks.
You have to try to set the bar higher. Relative honesty isn't good enough; relative sanity isn't good enough.
Example? Well, just yesterday I replied to drinkypoo who more or less was denying that Obama had ever "took the side of black people before facts came out". And he did, of course. He didn't do it remotely to the degree that Fox News says he did; he's an infinitely more insightful and reasonable person than the current POTUS, etc. etc., but that isn't good enough.
Ring wingers never want give up on nonsense like Benghazi or the birth certificate thing or WMDs or a 9/11 connection in the Iraq War. And leftists don't want to give up their own deceitful shibboleths like the shooting Treyvon Martin, or that Trump supposedly "confessed to sexual assault on tape" (and of course he didn't even come close to it. His entire cringey macho thesis was that women "let you" touch them, with no hint whatsoever that he was using some sort of coercion), or that conservative Islam is somehow much less dangerous than conservative Christianity.
Some people misinterpret this all as saying that left should be more passive... no, nothing could be further from the truth. The American left is anemic as hell, woefully centrist and compromise-ready also unwilling to fight important nuts-and-bolts battles like the electoral college and campaign finance reform. The left NEEDS to be bold and stubborn, but it can take the high road while it does so. It can't sling mud the way the Republicans do and get away with it. It can't beat the right at its own game. It just makes people shrug and give up.
Which is exactly what happened last year. The numbers don't lie. It wasn't a spike in the pro-Trump right, it was the anemic response of the anti-Trump vote that allowed the unthinkable to happen. This really shouldn't be a controversial thing to say any more, and yet somehow it is.
If the market really had demonstrated that a large number of people really wanted to swap out their CPUs (assuming they had any idea what they were) or add RAM (What? A truck?) or any of the other geeky things that tickle you, we'd see them.
"If people really wanted to have cameras in their phones, we'd have seen them by now"--ColdWetDog in 2001.
It wouldn't be quite *that* popular but I'm almost positive PC gamers alone could make it profitable.
It's just that simple. If the market really had demonstrated that a large number of people really wanted to swap out their CPUs (assuming they had any idea what they were) or add RAM (What? A truck?) or any of the other geeky things that tickle you, we'd see them.
The GPU and battery are the major ones, of course.
You are hiding in an incredibly small niche.
1. Have you SEEN some of the niche-y shit that's succeeded on Kickstarter?
2. Better yet: have you SEEN the kinds of crap keyboard enthusiasts get up to at places like Geekhack, Deskthority and Massdrop? Ludicrous custom keycaps, recreating 30 year old buckle spring keyboards, modding Cherry MX switches by hand and then reselling them, successfully lobbying Cherry and Gateron to produce new switch types, people paying $700 for vintage beam spring keyboards or the fabled ALPS blues...
3. People who LAN party but can't afford a DTR laptop is not *that* small of a niche. (Not that I LAN any more; I just want a more powerful and more capable machine that I can easily move around and customize.) Let me tell you, it's a major pain in the ass to have to wrestle an ATX tower, LCD, keyboard and mass of cables into a trunk. And then if someone trips over a cord or you have a tiny flicker of a brownout, you're reset. (Unless you brought along a 10 pound UPS with you as well.)
What I'm describing could be done with off the shelf parts. It should be considerably easier for someone who had the right connections to put together than a palm-sized device. There is also precedence for it; a very long time ago (before my time), there used to be something called a "luggable" in the days before laptops were practical. And people bought them.
Are you poor? Maybe I didn't make it clear enough: I'm poor. Poor geeks do actually exist and we do appreciate things being less-disposable. There are probably more of us than there are of you, though I grant you not all of us would be willing to put up with a DTR lapzilla like I'm envisioning.
Damn it all, does the world *really* need more pocket-sized computers? I'm still waiting for modular, user-upgradeable large DTR laptop to appear. I'm so sick of having to upgrade entire machines, or use a desktop if I want to game (since I certainly can't afford a gaming DTR.)
I understand that most people these days desire sleek, disposable ultrabook crap with soldiered CPUs and GPUs and disposable proprietary batteries, but surely I'm not the only one who'd love to seesomething like this? Doesn't anyone do LAN parties any more? It could use miniITX; hell, the thing could be half a foot think and use a standard ATX power supply and weigh 17 pounds for all I care, just as long as it has an integrated screen, cheap commodity battery (for UPS purposes only, not for sustained use) and keyboard (pref with user-swappable mechanical switches) and can be carried in a bag with one hand...
Wish we had some sort of site to vote for crowdfunded things that no one has even proposed yet, just to demonstrate the interest.
I'm sorry, I just recalled that Treyvon did indeed have a one small scratch on him. A small scratch on his finger, as I recall. Not other bruisers or anything. The autopsy report is freely available online if you don't believe me. A LOT of left-wingers assume I'm lying, because no one in their favorite echo chamber ever told them that the innocent, passive Treyvon story was wrong
Yes, the left is also addicted to echo chambers and fake news. The greatest tragedy with Trump is the "we're not as bad as...!" effect. The right might be an order of magnitude worse, but the left is still bad enough to alienate much of the passionate and the swing voters. Leftists will hear me say something like this, talk about facts that have been freely available for YEARS, and they either just call me a liar or they insist that Martin must have swung first and missed, then Treyvon righteously counterattacked. On the basis of WHAT evidence do you say that's definitely what happened? It's pure conjecture. It's reasonable doubt by any sane measure, and given what we do know (including the lack of injuries and the fact that Treyvon's girlfriend saying that he was suspicious about "this cracker" that was following him), I'd say it's more likely than not that Treyvon threw the first punch. Which would put him in the wrong. Regardless of how rude (or racist) it is to follow someone and confront them, you don't get to punch them or smash their heads into the concrete in retaliation. In America, that sort of thing will get you shot. And afterwards the shooter will be *rightly* exonerated, even if he is bit of a macho prick himself.
Admit it, just fucking admit it. And admit that Obama was in fact a little too quick to fall down on the side of a black person on at least one occasion. Just admit it, then rightfully scoff at the idea that he was some massive serial racebaiter and pivot the conversation back to the important stuff, back to the present. Millions of Americans are desperately eager to follow a "side" that isn't full of shit, that knows when to admit they are wrong. Or at least I know I am.
As I recall, he came close to it with Treyvon Martin, by commenting that "he could have been his son", which is a pretty dang sympathetic thing to being saying, as well one with overtly racial overtones. Of course, it later came out that the picture the media was like 5 years out of date, and instead of a small smiling 12 year old, the Treyvon who got shot was a huge nearly-18 year old who--like George Zimmerman--had some known macho tendencies. And it also came out that multiple witnesses saw Treyvon in a dominant position on top of Martin throwing "MMA-style" punches at him and bashing his head into the concrete. It also came out that the 911 call had been edited by journalists to make it seem more like Zimmerman was being racist. Annnnnnd... it came out that Treyvon didn't have a single scratch on him while Zimmerman had a broken nose and lacerations to the back of his head.
So yeah, I think Obama definitely jumped the gun there, was quick to jump on the "fucking racists shooting black kids" bandwagon. I've a lot more sympathy for the situation with the black professor who was arrested in his own house. I personally think Obama initially made the right call there, coming down initially on the side of the black guy, but he later walked back and invited both the black guy and the cop to the white house for beer and Kumbaya. So, basically by his own admission, Obama acknowledged he jumped the gun in that case as well by preemptively supporting only the black guy (though I happen to disagree with his later walking-back.)
These incidents and more like them were, of course, massively blown out of proportion by the racebaiting right, but in this they were greatly assisted by the racebaiting left who refused to behave sensibly, like abandon the narrative of Treyvon as innocent victim even after the mountains of evidence had come out.
I'm not sure I follow your analogy. You don't seem to be properly differentiating copyleft open source (GPL) from permissive open source (BSD / Apache / MIT / public domain), which was a central point of my post.
Let's see if we can clarify this a bit more: what happens if proprietary source code is discovered in another project, be it OSS or proprietary code from another company?
Now, why isn't "toxic" a perfectly apt response to the "GPL is viral" claims? Unauthorized use of proprietary code, such as that found in RemixOS,would result in a cease and desist and all efforts on the derivative being wasted. That's a reasonable analogy of "toxic".
This is true even within projects like OS X, where components like (for example) Rosetta are apparently unilaterally terminated by Apple even though demand for them still exists. In the OSS world, such a project might (if it didn't have a major sponsor) have spotty support and be stuck in alpha status or suffer progressive bit rot that is only partially addressed by some ad-hoc backporting attempts or myriad other issues... but popular, important compatibility-enhancing software layers like that almost never simply die completely overnight. This is the toxicity of proprietary software at work. You can rattle off a long list of advantages for OS X or Windows; I'm not saying those advantages don't exist. Of course open source has major issues. And of course having more money than God helps companies like MSFT and AAPL sidestep a lot of those issues.
But in regards to this specific issue, this much-maligned "viral" aspect of copyleft licenses (GPL)... it is not being fairly compared to what the analogous proprietary situation looks like. If proprietary code infects your project, your project dies unless it can be excised entirely. And if a proprietary project like RemixOS dies on its own, usually nobody from the outside can resuscitate it.
Question: if the GPL "viral" or "cancerous", what do you call this, this son-of-Apache closed source freeware license that Jibe used for Remix OS ?
Because if the GPL really is those things, then non-OSS freeware must be "toxic" (and by extension, "permissive" licensed software is "permissive" only of various forms of toxicity.) I briefly played around with RemixOS because it would be handy to have it available, preferably running in a VM, as a handy to use Android-only applications. Spent a couple hours tinkering with it, trying to get it to work properly. And then I noticed it wasn't open source.
Dropped it like it was radioactive and never looked back.
Not a nutter against all forms of closed source software, but when it comes to OSes and staple workhorse applications, life is just too damn short to waste it on non-OSS.
That's not how I parsed his post. It's OK for the CIA to stockpile zero days[1]. It's ok for them to use them against hostile foreign powers. It's not ok for them to use them against reporters or political activists, especially American citizens on American soil. It's not ok for them to spy on everyone who owns a certain exploitable device.
This is an area that demands nuance. Simply saying "durrr, we shouldn't be doing any of these things, against anyone, ever!" is masochism. It's the sort of masochism that often leads to the country drifting towards the right, because centrists are by and large not interested in pursuing an anti-American agenda that demands we self-flagellate and remove ourself as a global power to remove even the *possibility* that said power could be abused.
Fight abuse. Don't fight tools. I'm someone who believes James Clapper should have been not merely fired but imprisoned for perjury, but that doesn't mean I'd support the wholesale destruction of our ability to use tradecraft in targeted ways.
1. This is a somewhat debatable point, but as long as they aren't actively weakening the code base this seems reasonable enough. This about more than merely being able to eavesdrop on Russian spies or destroy Iranian centrifuges; it's also about being able to monitor what other spy agencies are doing or attempt to do and it's about the confidence those spy agencies could have in their ability to do things undetected. If the CIA were required to openly disclose any zero day that it knew about (and if this were actually enforced), that would mean that if their Russian or Chinese counterparts ever stumbled on a new zero day, they would instantly know that the CIA was ignorant of this vulnerability. Thus, such a policy would put us as a significant disadvantage in not just intelligence, but also counterintelligence.
Too much Netflix, not enough chill?
I plugged a laptop into a DVI port on our TV, got a wireless $10 mini-keyboard with integrated touchpad off of eBay, cranked up the icon and font sizes a bit I plugged a laptop into a DVI port on our TV, got a wireless $10 mini-keyboard with integrated touchpad off of eBay, cranked up the icon and font sizes a bit and it's worked out surprisingly well. It's much quicker to use than the 'smart' Bluray player we were previously using, and it can do a lot more... and it's running Qubes OS. Ain't no drive-by hacker getting in there.
For the slightly less tenacious people who just want something approaching regular desktop Linux level security and a simpler interface, there's Myth TV. Which has been out for fifteen years. And there's also Kodi, which even non-technical people have heard of and apparently love.
Addressing just the geeks in the audience: I don't understand the appeal of Roku and smart TVs the like, I really don't. They're slow. The remote-based UI is cumbersome as hell. They're vulnerable. They're un-upgradable. And for the most part they're no cheaper than an old laptop off of Craigslist that has HDMI or DVI out. I sort of suspect that most people simply have a strong psychological need to separate their leisure from their work, and it's primarily for that reason that they prefer a completely different device with a different UI.
Because racism is being made more socially acceptable in certain subgroups
This is true, but only because of what that poster was saying: people are saying "yeah, I guess I'm racist now. Whatever" and thus the taboo is weakened in "certain subgroups", and it's due primarily to the broad over-application of the term. I've termed this phenomenon the ongoing catastrophic failure of Operation Conflation: Progressives trying to fight back against a rise in visible racism by inflating the definition of the term is having the opposite effect as intended by weakening the taboo against real racism, yet the more this tactic backfires the harder they push.
It used to be people would make racist jokes or comments and no one would call it racist because their friends had similar views, and even if they were offended it's extremely awkward to call someone racist to their face.
It used to be that there were terms like "insensitive" or "crude" used to describe people who used words and ideas in blunt, offensive or stereotype-reinforcing ways without their usage actually supporting racism/sexism/antisemitism/etc. This middle ground has mostly disappeared. Nazi and Holocaust jokes, once thought to be merely distasteful, are now called antisemitic even if the evidence strongly indicates otherwise.
Any reference whatsoever to an ethnic custom or stereotype is now deemed racist. I've listened as perfectly intelligent-sounding people tried to explain that the sound of a gong playing when a Chinese character walks on-screen is blatantly racist. Because... what now? What's the implicit logic behind that analysis; what's the implied (and supposedly racist) meaning? That Chinese people have no sense of musicality? That they have an irresistible racial impulse to play gongs? That the peace and quiet of wholesome white neighborhoods is being disrupted by the raucous 3 a.m. gong-playing of inferior barbarians? It's an extremely stupid thing to utterly equate cultural observation/parody and actual racism, but this is not a fringe interpretation of the concept. Give it another decade, and I wouldn't be surprised if people are arguing it's racist to ever show a Mexican eating a taco.
(And not only that: it will be racist cultural appropriation / fetishization to show a non-Latino enjoying a taco.)
The same exact thing is happening with sexism. Jerry Seinfeld's daughter called her mother sexist for suggesting that in a couple years, she'll probably want to hang around boys more often. Not, "you're definitely going to do this" or "I insist that you do this", just that this seemed like a probable course of events. And after Jerry mentioned this in an interview (the context being how the youth of today doesn't understand what actual prejudice is), I saw dozens of progressive-types defending his daughter's characterization of her mother's words. And not a month ago, I had an exchange on Slashdot where I basically said "She [some woman complaining about sexism] sounds like a cunt. Ok, now, *that was a joke* and the *only* reason why I make this joke was to ask whether you think that this self-conscious usage is sexist." And the person said yes, I was sexist for using the word. This is the world we live in now. Four-year-old level tattletale-ing has replaced all reflection and nuance. It doesn't matter at all that I'm a gender egalitarian.
but I think "racist" still means that you believe a race is inferior
We're going to see "(archaic)" next to this definition in the dictionary if things continue as they have been.
it's in public. u don't have any expectation of privacy
Historically true, but if we're headed for a world where everything we do and everything we say in public (at least outside and within the city limits) is on file for all time on a server somewhere that's been pre-analyzed and indexed using using facial recognition and voice recognition... we might want to consider revising that rule of thumb a bit.
I can't help it if the journalists in this country are dead set on proving Trump right. He should be the one person it should be possible to oppose by sticking to talking about normal, sensible truth but when faced with such a jackass the media can't help but lie and blither a stream of irrelevances. It's been very illuminating.
That doesn't mean they lie more than he does (of course not), but they are a much deeper and more durable fixture of American (and world) culture than the shit talking 70 year old buffoon in the White House.
I take it you have never lived with a woman.
To make a men's jacked a woman's jacket, the zipper zips from the left side. To tell a men's shirt from a woman's shirt, the button's are on the left side as opposed to men's shirts have buttons on the right side.
Super wooooooooooooooosh. I even mentioned that *exact* button thing.
You have it wrong, as nobody wins in a race to the bottom, that's the point of the expression.
The expression is a complicated one with a long and varied history. Describing it as "everyone loses" really missed the point. The expression is more about the process involved more than the end result.
It can be like a game of chicken. Somebody does indeed win if the other one swerves before hitting bottom, or otherwise can't continue the race, or if one party is more bottom-tolerant than the other. In this context, the American right is more tolerant of and proficient with lies and nonsense than the American left. The latter will fall to shambles long before the former does, but that doesn't mean they aren't in a race right now.
A lot of industries had a race to the bottom with Chinese competitors. Guess what? China won, because their "bottom" is lower than that found in first world nations. And it's a real victory we're talking about here; they're raking in the billions.
You lose on such a victory, as it is destructive.
No, you're thinking of pyrrhic victory.
Major sample bias issues if those are only military personnel they're examining. Feel free to dig through it and come up with the % difference in that ratio if you wish, though. (Not the % difference in arm length, but % difference in the arm length / torso lngth ratio.) Also, you need to include the standard deviation for both sexes so we know roughly how many males will be inconvenienced compared to the females, and for that number you might need some sort of joint distribution (which may or may not be possible to construct with the data given.)
More chest room would be my guess.
I think males typically have bigger chest circumferences and longer torsos, so it's not at all clear which way that would swing. Breast size is a huge variable there. She said that they took their measurements, so if the jackets were being custom tailored or at least had more than a one dimensional S/M/L/XL sizing system, this is all moot regardless.
Yes, it is quite easy to notice you are usually quite irate and dyspeptic.
I.e. I am neither delusional nor apathetic. Nor moronic. Yup, no arguments there. If you're not depressed or pissed off, there is something wrong with you.
No, they weren't offered men's jackets. They were told that they were not getting them at the last minute, after the order had been placed.
Well, that's obviously malevolent bullshit if true.
This is a race to the bottom the left cannot win. The right is used to and will tolerate an astonishing quantity of lies and bullshit. The left, as we've already seen, will become demoralized when faced with a candidate who is only a blandly, typically-horrible politician.
The Times has already reached "bad enough" in my estimation, along with every other news publication I've ever looked at in any detail. And unlike the millions of evangelicals who watch Fox News and reluctantly voted for Trump, I don't grade on a curve.
The mainstream media needs to aggressively, forcefully hold Trump to account. Given the amount of material they have to work with, this should be an easy task. Unfortunately, they have conclusively demonstrated that they cannot separate out lies from truth, much less the absurdly sensationalist and irrelevant from the reasonable and important. They've fallen prey to the greatest troll[1] the world has ever seen and it will destroy them in the end, once the lurid headlines lose their charm.
And history will record the moment of their downfall, of course, as the moment they tried kill two birds with one stone with their "fake news" non-story[2], too busy drinking their own kool-aid to realize that mainstream news has always been a pretty damn sketchy enterprise, even during its supposed golden eras.
1. Albeit probably one who is operating mostly on a subconscious level.
2. Fabricated news websites and chain emails and conspiracy theories obviously exist, but they've been around for a long time and are more of a symptom than a disease in their own right.
He believed that NASA's delusional bureaucracy was ultimately to blame and it needed to be torn down entirely and rebuilt. The other members of the commission disagreed, which is pretty much why two decades later the crew of the Columbia died. Sadly, a narrative of organizational incompetence is extremely hard to keep alive in the mainstream media, so in the minds of most people they're still just random tragedies... an unavoidable price of space flight.
Two other things worth noting about Feynman's assessment: he was strongly impressed by the software systems of the Shuttle, considering it to be much more robust than the hardware (not the sort of thing one often hears these days), and the coda to his appendix is, of course, a timeless one worth quoting:
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
Except my point was that your estimation of "The Producers" lacks much in the way of validity.
If you thought that sucking Hollywood genitalia was a sound way to demonstrate validity of assessment, you thought wrong. Beyond all of the obvious problems attendant with asserting that mainstream tastes are the only "valid" ones, it's worth noting how historical works routinely get a pass for being different or trailblazing instead of being good works that actually stand the test of time. Edit the play out of The Producers (which is what, less than 10 minutes of screen time?), show it to people who've never seen it before and it would get abysmal reviews. It's a one-trick pony movie. It just happens to be a good trick.
It really comes across as irate.
No moreso than usual. Several of Mel Brooks' works are fairly overrated, having a couple hilarious scenes padded out with an hour of filler. And some of his later movies are underrated despite having better pacing and consistency. And I'm sure I'd find plenty to dislike in many of PDP's vids.
we women needed to find jackets that were the same price as the bulk-order price of the men's jackets.
That sounds an awful lot like the women were able to get a "men's jacket" if they wanted to.
we can't say what differentiated them,
Built-in beard trimmer and cock ring? Transparent torso to show off chest hairs? Built-in testosterone replacement therapy patches sewn into the shoulders? "Female Body Inspector" emblazoned on it in large orange letters above an Uber logo? What are *you* imagining?
It's basically breaking a promise, and then after being called on it
Oh yeah, the biggest problem with cutthroat white collar jobs is they 'lied' about their custom jacket being available with a pretty princess trim. This point (along with some others) drastically detracts from the rest of her claims by making her seem like an out of touch whiner. Highly competitive Dilbert-esque environments like she's describing are hell are on Earth, a neverending stream of politicking and lies. Not making a female only version of their swag is an utterly absurd complaint.
I've worked in jobs that had uniforms and guess what, there was no female-specific version. The hats and pants and such appear roughly masculine, because when it comes to clothing 'masculine' tends towards neutrality (i.e. mostly sans decoration) and being utilitarian.
making people take a lesser choice
Which is you asserting that non-stereotypically feminine clothing is lesser. Ignoring the question of whether or not that's a slight against male fashion, I've personally known probably a dozen females who would disagree with you.
And apparently doing the work themselves.
If they wanted to be treated special instead of being treated like members of the human race who also had torsos, heads, two arms, and a need to stay warm in the winter, then yes they had to do the work themselves. It's a pity you have such a big problem with egalitarianism.