Apparently North Korea makes "vinalon" out of coal and limestone. Kim Il Sung called it "Juche Fiber". According to a defector "Almost no one" wears it. There is some speculation that a vinalon plant in NK is making rocket fuel for its missile program.
Interesting post. I'm a white cracker too and I have no idea who Camilla Cabello is but I love Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and George Clinton. I loathe George Michael but Tchaikovsky is cool in my book.
I've no idea what an "FD" is. I don't really care for Boy George but Snoop is alright. Beethoven is cool and I think I have a Handel CD somewhere.
"the Blues is God's music"
Which God?
I also like Blues for Allah by the Grateful Dead., God (or Allah?) help me.
"It;s cold outside": (there's no kind of atmosphere) - obviously a Red Dwarf reference
"I'm the gypsy, I'm the Acid Queen!" - obviously a Who reference.
Deja Vu - oh my god,you have me listening to David Crosby again -
"I'm a fool for female voices"
So am I Whether it's Donna Gaudhcaux or Grace Slick or Janis Joplin or Trish Murphy I love them.
Of all the places I shop only two stores have not adopted a chip reader. They're both liquor stores if that matters.
I believe they're both of the mindset that swiping a card through their magnetic readers has always worked before so why should they change things?
And perhaps they're wise to do that. There is a 3rd liquor store that I sometimes go to and they have an Apple POS (point of sale) system. It's incredible. I have never seen an Apple POS system other than that place.
I don't know if it's Apple software but it's horrid. Sometimes it just can't process payments - and that's without even using your Apple Pay (I have an Android anyway)...
My credit card number has been stolen a few times - probably from internet purchases. But to their credit (ha - "credit") my Master Visa has never held me responsible for those fraudulent charges,.
So I'm not really all that worried. In most cases they were calling me to ask if I really bought a handbag in Milan for $6000. And when I tell them I didn't they're all like "I didn't think so....we need to issue you a new card."
Okay.
Maybe I shouldn't go to so many liquor stores, but signatures have been a joke for a long time. I just scribble something to make the machine accept my payment. It's not consistent from transaction to transaction.
One time I was in a bad mood and I wrote "Fuck You" as my signature. It accepted that with no problem even though I assure you my name is not "Fuck You".
I didn't care for the song, but I probably wouldn't have cared much for the source material from which the AI learned.
What if anyone could "teach" this AI musician from their own set of music and see what it came up with? This could be really fun actually. What if I fed it a dozen songs from various artists and told it to learn from that? Is a dozen not enough to come up with anything more than a weird mix? Feed it every song in my whole music collectiion.....
Hmmm......I might not like that. Remove the ones I hardly ever listen to. Okay, now turn that one band up - yeah - let them influence you.
What would the AI learn if you only fed it Frank Zappa, King Crimson and David Bowie? It would probably be very different from whatever it would learn from Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and David Crosby. What if you only allowed it to listen to Gregg Allman (just his solo stuff), Mozart and Britney Spears? WTF would it make of that?
I want to see what happens if you only let the AI learn from The Ramones and The Beatles.
I think your own experiences have skewed you perception of the kind of fast food places people see outside of your local city.
Almost every fast food place seems to have a drive-thru in much of the US* - maybe not in NYC but certainly in many parts of the US where land is cheaper.
I couldn't quickly find a percentage of restaurants with drive-thrus but a couple of sources say fast food restaurants get about 60-70% of their sales from drive-thrus.
For every fast food chain, about 60%-70% of the sales they have come from their drive thru services.
Programming Languages for Shooting Yourself in the Foot
C You shoot yourself in the foot.
Algol You shoot yourself in the foot with a musket. The musket is esthetically fascinating, and the wound baffles the adolescent medic in the emergency room.
FORTRAN You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you have no exception-processing ability....
lisp You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds . . .
Assembly You crash the OS and overwrite the root disk. The system administrator arrives and shoots you in the foot. After a moment of contemplation, the administrator shoots himself in the foot and then hops around the room rabidly shooting at everyone in sight.
C++ You accidently create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical care is impossible since you can't tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying, "that's me, over there."
Ada If you are dumb enough to actually use this language, the United States Department of Defense will kidnap you, stand you up in front of a firing squad, and tell the soldiers, "Shoot at his feet."
Modula/2 After realizing that you can't actually accomplish anything in the language, you shoot yourself in the head.
csh, etc. You can't remember the syntax for anything, so you spend five hours reading man pages before giving up. You then shoot the computer and switch to C.
Pascal The compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the foot.
Unix % ls foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o % rm *.o rm:.o: No such file or directory % ls %
Of course racism is still protected under the First Amendment
No, it isn't. The First Amendment prohibits Congress from restricting speech, but it does not affect private companies or individuals from censoring how they see fit within their own domains.
I didn't mean to suggest otherwise and I fully support the right of anyone running a website or a hosting service to censor their own personal or corporate "domains".
What I meant was that even if you could identify racists the government really couldn't do much about it. I suppose they could put them on a list. That's kind of disturbing, but the government does maintain lots of databases about potential or suspected criminals already, just not always based on their internet posts alone.
So racism is not a crime but the First Amendment also allows websites to refuse to host content they find objectionable.
I, for one, am betting on AI being the best hope. Let AI watch conversations on games (where it is a private affair, mind you, not a constitutional issue), and start cracking down on overly-aggressive players before they can turn into hazards.
The moment something crosses the line of legality, the game platform should have all the logs and records needed to make an easy case for prosecution,
That's a scary idea. I'm not even a gamer but I could see how this could go wrong. I'm fighting some anonymous guy over the internet and am trash-talking and they're trash-talking right back. We keep pushing the rhetoric further and further. At what point do the authorities step in?
I imagine most trash-talk on the internet is simply talk. You could probably develop an AI which identified potential criminals based on their internet speech but it would just be potential criminals. Most of those people turn out to be all talk.
And why limit it to games? Forums like slashdot and twitter and facebook and the comment sections on the likes of the Washington Post could all be subject to looking for potential criminals. How do we tweak the algorithms? The comment sections on some places are cesspools of racism and hatred.
Of course racism is still protected under the First Amendment so this AI would have to distinguish between those who simply hate and those who would commit violence due to their hatred - that might be tricky.
From a legal standpoint they almost certainly did not. From a moral standpoint it's definitely arguable that they did.
I've made bad decisions in my life and lived with the regret, but none of those decisions has ever resulted in anyone losing their life especially not an innocent person's life. I don't believe the cop who killed an innocent man wanted to take a life that day but I would have a hard time living with myself if I had been the one to kill that guy.
Even if no charges were ever brought against me (and they almost certainly wouldn't be) I would feel guilty for the rest of my life. I would relive that moment and ask myself why I felt I had to shoot a man who I would later learn was unarmed.
It's not a simple case of murder because it's definitely not that but it is an example of how law enforcement in the US is unjust and harms the innocent.
“Replicants are like any other machine - they're either a benefit or a hazard. If they're a benefit, it's not my problem” - Deckard
I for one eagerly await the day when people like "Tyler Barris" can be replaced by replicants even if they do eventually develop their own emotional responses."hate, love, fear, anger, envy". Or is there a difference at all? More human than human. Sigh......
I can't relate to this guy at all.
If it's okay to "retire" replicants, should it not also be okay to "retire" sociopaths like Tyler Barris? And who am I to call him a sociopath? What if we deployed Blade Runner units to destroy all the replicants - or just anyone we deemed to have developed their own emotional responses?
Okay, I'm talking crazy now but sometimes we just have to pick up the pieces and prosecute them after they commit a crime and we can catch them.
Look, we're not living in some hippy commune and I don't believe they were either. How the hell do they figure out that this girl's name was "Sunrise" when the anthropologist quoted in the article says we didn't even know this culture existed?
And yet so quickly we understand their language and the names they gave their children?
How did they figure out her name or her first cousin's name? How do they know they were cousins? Were there written records to go by? Or perhaps these were just names given affectionately by the archaeologists digging up their bones - who never meant to suggest that those were their actual names, but just chose them out of a need to identify them other than by whatever reference number anthropologists use.
Does anyone actually think her name was "Lucy"? I do have to admit "Lucy" is much more appealing than "AL 288-1". It's easier to remember too. I just don't believe that was her real name.
We're talking about people who are paying their bills who may be violating copyright.
Cutting off someone's heat or AC could in extreme cases lead to death and in lesser cases could actually lead to property damage. I do worry that my pipes might freeze every time the temperature dips below zero (Fahrenheit).
Fortunately I can pay my bills so I'm not too familiar with the process but I do know that my local utility just can't shut you off for missing one or even 2 bills (maybe after three). I'm not going to test the system but I am blessed in many ways and can pay the bills. What if I couldn't? Would homelessness be the next logical step?
At least where I live they're not going to make you freeze to death even if you don't pay your bill on time. So what if I pirated the last season of Breaking Bad? (that was in fact the last thing I torrented).
Walter White wants his paycheck and if you don't come up with the money you're gonna freeze to death!!
No, we have no possible argument about whether Comcast as an ISP is a monopoly of any kind. If you actually look at the situation, you'll find 8 different ISPs [highspeedinternet.com] that serve Fort Collins.
And if you actually lived in Fort Collins you'd know your choices are limited to Comcast or CenturyLink so bravo - you're right. It's a duopoly, not a monopoly.
I've contacted some of those other companies. They just said they can't or won't serve any of the addresses in FoCo where I've ever lived.
I look forward to the day when my internet is run the way my electric utility is run - efficiently and reasonably priced just the way Fort Collins Utilities is run.
Actually, I do know one person whose ISP is one of those other companies, but he can't get Comcast. They have all staked out their territories and agreed not to encroach on each other's turf.
To draw a closer analogy you would have to say Putin called up Hillary and advised her on how to run her campaign, but that's not what people suspect.
The theory is that Russia (at Putin's direction) flooded social media with divisive political rhetoric. To what end? Perhaps political revenge? Bill Clinton did support Yeltsin in '96. Putin has been accused of much worse than unleashing an army of Facebook trolls.
I can't say what Putin thinks, but I suspect anything that weakens NATO and the US is a win for him. A divided USA is a good result for him. We're so busy bickering about whether or not to move our embassy to Jerusalem that we're missing out on the big picture - and also abandoning any hope of a real peace.
I wish people would stop trying to justify Trump's policies by saying it was either him or Hillary. That may have been a valid argument before the election, but now that Trump is President he needs to stop campaigning against her.
Trump needs to man up! He can't just rely on "at least I'm not Hillary".
I usually try to avoid politics on/, because it would destroy all my karma, but this error message - especially with the bit about Obama golfing almost seems like it's not so much "throwing shade" on his administration but rather mocking Trump's since we're all aware of how hypocritical Trump has been about golfing.
If there's one stone Trump shouldn't throw in his glass house it's accusing Obama of golfing too much - but he's been doing that so long it's an unquestioned meme for his supporters.
Does Trump even play golf at all? Well he sure tries hard to hide it when he does. He's even hiring trucks to block photographer's views of Mar-a-Lago's golf course.
I remember when Trump and others criticized Obama and Bush for playing too much golf. "Now watch this drive!" Trump was one of those who criticized Obama at least. Trump claimed he would work so hard he would never have time to golf, didn't he? And now the only thing he does more often than golf is tweet or watch TV.
That error message reminds me of a former co-worker who named a couple of servers "ecoli" and "salmonella" when we worked for a beef company. Upper level management was not pleased when word got around. They didn't fire him for that though and I suspect they actually laughed about it privately.
The sysadmin who named those servers thought it was funny and so did I because in a meat producing company that large, recalls for ecoli and salmonella are common. Most consumers never even hear about them. In his defense, those were not public servers.
If only senses of humor grew as prolifically as such bacteria.
Let's suppose another nation was having an election and there was a choice of an incumbent who was US friendly but the challenger promised to nationalize all the foreign industry that had invested in their country and built plants.
Should the President of the US not even talk to the current President of that country and offer him or her some words of wisdom.
This is entirely different from launching a propaganda campaign to influence the electorate.
And if Netanyahu wants to openly praise Trump or offer him advice on his campaign for reelection that's perfectly okay. And if some other world leader wants to openly criticize him I'm okay with that too.
Has the whole world gone insane?
Presidents shouldn't talk to each other or voice their opinions openly for fear of being accused of meddling in other country's political affairs? Are you insane? You may not agree with everything the President says or who he says it to, but that doesn't mean he can't say those things.
Bill Clinton was President of the United States in 1996. Boris Yeltsin was President of Russia in 1996.
Both were running for reelection.
Should our president not be allowed to talk to presidents of other countries who are running for reelection? Should certain topics have been forbidden?
Maybe Russians could be upset about this but Clinton was acting in what he believed the interests of the United States were at the time.
I don't remember that bug but I do remember management making us test everything extensively when DST was changed in the US to a different schedule. And they were right to make us test it too, but everything worked - except for the 3rd party software that was used for timeclocks which fortunately wasn't my problem.
Somehow telling hourly workers in the fall that they would get repaid for that extra hour when we "sprung forward" in the spring wasn't acceptable. Imagine that.
But when I think about all the time and effort that goes into implementing and testing DST schemes as well as time zones I can't help but imagine it is a huge drain on the world's economy (not to mention the health effects).
Even when I lived in Arizona I wasn't immune to this nonsense. The mantra was that if people on the East Coast were at their desks by 8 AM (eastern time) I either had to be at the office by 6 AM or 5 AM depending on whether DST was in effect or not.
You mean I have to get up an hour earlier because THEY changed THEIR clocks? Goddammit.
TBH, I'm not even sure if DST is during the summer or the winter. Others have suggested it before and I know it sounds radical but I'd be in favor of everyone adopting UTC or Coordinated Universal Time as well as adopting 24 hour clocks. For me, sunrise would be at 14:27 today. I can live with that. Everyone in the whole world could at least agree on the time!
The sun rising at 14:27 is no more strange a concept than the fact that Australia and other countries in the Southern Hemisphere are going to celebrate Christmas in the middle of summer.
--
A couple of years ago I was frustrated because I was doing a phone interview for a position in Central Time being handled by a recruiter in Eastern Time while I live in Mountain Time.
It's like they had no concept of time zones.
"Your interview is at 1 PM."
"Okay, is that my time, your time or the interviewer's time?"
He seemed annoyed that I asked. Shouldn't it have been obvious? I'm curious what time zone others would guess was right if faced with that.
This has not been my experience with Walmart which seems to vary widely by location from all the stories I've heard.
I do try to avoid it before midnight but even when I've gone during the day it doesn't take significantly longer (if at all) than other stores.
I usually shop between midnight and about 5 AM. It's just less crowded.
The only problem I've run into while trying to check out is that they do software updates at about 4 AM. Not every night of course but when they do update their registers the whole system is down for about 45 minutes (based on the 2 times I've had it happen when I was there). A cashier told me it can take 15 minutes to an hour.
So there I am with all my groceries wondering if I should wait or just abandon them. I've waited both times.
It made me curious about their POS system. Back in the early '90s I was a developer for one but that was a much simpler and smaller retailer with different needs than Walmart. I still wonder why it takes that long or why they don't have any way to process customers while they're updating.
They somehow manage to do end-of-day processes at midnight without shutting down all the registers.
That was something my POS was not capable of but none of those stores were 24 hour operations either.
When the Walmart near me first installed self-checkout the scales were terribly sensitive and for the first month or two I had to call an employee over at least once to override it. Even something as simple as moving an item from one bag to another would cause a problem.
They improved them and now I hardly ever have that problem.
I've never had to go from a self-checkout to an employee assisted checkout though.
I scan and bag my groceries faster than they do anyway. It makes sense when you consider that I really just want to get out of the store as fast as I can but they're stuck there for the duration of their shift. I'm not saying they're slackers but they have no incentive to do it fast.
The one drawback I see for me is that I pay more attention to what's being scanned and what the price is when someone else scans the items. At a self-checkout if something rings up the wrong price I'm probably not going to notice unless it's off by a large amount.
I just got a Mi Band 2 and the heart rate measurements are kind of crazy at times. In the space of about 15 minutes just sitting here my heart rate has gone from 116 to 41. If I believed it was accurate I'd probably make an appointment with a doctor. That said it's often close enough for my own amusement and curiosity.
It tracks sleep reasonably well although there is a lag from me going to sleep and it realizing I'm asleep - maybe a half-hour or so.
I don't take the steps as 100% accurate either but it does give me an idea of how much I've walked.
After about 9 days the battery is still at 25% and that's with it supposedly measuring heart rate every 2 minutes during sleep.
Every time I've looked at other devices I was turned off by price or daily charging or bad reviews but I figured $35 wasn't too much even if I hated it. And surprisingly to me it doesn't bother me to wear it. I haven't worn a watch since the '90s (Timex DataLink).
If this thing were accurate and had better software it would be great.
When a site such as MSN carries a news story - the whole text from perhaps the AP under an MSN link are they not paying for it at all? IS there some sort of revenue sharing from whatever ads are served up?
I would think just copying their entire articles without permission would clearly violate copyright and would have been shut down long ago if that were the case.
OTOH, if they're just linking to stories with only a sentence or two in a preview that seems like fair use to my untrained layman's eye. And besides, how else would some podunk newspaper halfway across the country get any hits if Google didn't find them for me?
Slashdot Mirror
Shouldn't there be an option for Cowboy Neal in all the polls?
Apparently North Korea makes "vinalon" out of coal and limestone. Kim Il Sung called it "Juche Fiber". According to a defector "Almost no one" wears it. There is some speculation that a vinalon plant in NK is making rocket fuel for its missile program.
Special Report: The fabulous story of North Korea's fabric made of stone
Interesting post. I'm a white cracker too and I have no idea who Camilla Cabello is but I love Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and George Clinton. I loathe George Michael but Tchaikovsky is cool in my book.
I've no idea what an "FD" is. I don't really care for Boy George but Snoop is alright. Beethoven is cool and I think I have a Handel CD somewhere.
"the Blues is God's music"
Which God?
I also like Blues for Allah by the Grateful Dead., God (or Allah?) help me.
"It;s cold outside": (there's no kind of atmosphere) - obviously a Red Dwarf reference
"I'm the gypsy, I'm the Acid Queen!" - obviously a Who reference.
Deja Vu - oh my god,you have me listening to David Crosby again -
"I'm a fool for female voices"
So am I Whether it's Donna Gaudhcaux or Grace Slick or Janis Joplin or Trish Murphy I love them.
Of all the places I shop only two stores have not adopted a chip reader. They're both liquor stores if that matters.
I believe they're both of the mindset that swiping a card through their magnetic readers has always worked before so why should they change things?
And perhaps they're wise to do that. There is a 3rd liquor store that I sometimes go to and they have an Apple POS (point of sale) system. It's incredible. I have never seen an Apple POS system other than that place.
I don't know if it's Apple software but it's horrid. Sometimes it just can't process payments - and that's without even using your Apple Pay (I have an Android anyway)...
My credit card number has been stolen a few times - probably from internet purchases. But to their credit (ha - "credit") my Master Visa has never held me responsible for those fraudulent charges,.
So I'm not really all that worried. In most cases they were calling me to ask if I really bought a handbag in Milan for $6000. And when I tell them I didn't they're all like "I didn't think so....we need to issue you a new card."
Okay.
Maybe I shouldn't go to so many liquor stores, but signatures have been a joke for a long time. I just scribble something to make the machine accept my payment. It's not consistent from transaction to transaction.
One time I was in a bad mood and I wrote "Fuck You" as my signature. It accepted that with no problem even though I assure you my name is not "Fuck You".
I didn't care for the song, but I probably wouldn't have cared much for the source material from which the AI learned.
What if anyone could "teach" this AI musician from their own set of music and see what it came up with? This could be really fun actually. What if I fed it a dozen songs from various artists and told it to learn from that? Is a dozen not enough to come up with anything more than a weird mix? Feed it every song in my whole music collectiion.....
Hmmm......I might not like that. Remove the ones I hardly ever listen to. Okay, now turn that one band up - yeah - let them influence you.
What would the AI learn if you only fed it Frank Zappa, King Crimson and David Bowie? It would probably be very different from whatever it would learn from Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and David Crosby. What if you only allowed it to listen to Gregg Allman (just his solo stuff), Mozart and Britney Spears? WTF would it make of that?
I want to see what happens if you only let the AI learn from The Ramones and The Beatles.
That was a name given to the body by the present-day occupants
No shit.
That was my point.
I think your own experiences have skewed you perception of the kind of fast food places people see outside of your local city.
Almost every fast food place seems to have a drive-thru in much of the US* - maybe not in NYC but certainly in many parts of the US where land is cheaper.
I couldn't quickly find a percentage of restaurants with drive-thrus but a couple of sources say fast food restaurants get about 60-70% of their sales from drive-thrus.
For every fast food chain, about 60%-70% of the sales they have come from their drive thru services.
https://www.fastfoodmenuprices...
Approximately 70 percent of McDonald's’ U.S. sales now come from drive-thru windows.
http://news.mcdonalds.com/Corp...
That would be quite a feat if they managed to get 70% of sales from drive-thrus when only 1% even have drive-thrus.
* I suspect this may be part of the difference here. I imagine Europe has fewer drive-thrus but also probably fewer fast food places in general.
This is an abbreviated version. The whole thing can be found here:
http://www.menlo.com/folks/ada...
Programming Languages for Shooting Yourself in the Foot
C
You shoot yourself in the foot.
Algol
You shoot yourself in the foot with a musket. The musket is esthetically fascinating, and the wound baffles the adolescent medic in the emergency room.
FORTRAN ...
You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you have no exception-processing ability.
lisp
You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds . . .
Assembly
You crash the OS and overwrite the root disk. The system administrator arrives and shoots you in the foot. After a moment of contemplation, the administrator shoots himself in the foot and then hops around the room rabidly shooting at everyone in sight.
C++
You accidently create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical care is impossible since you can't tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying, "that's me, over there."
Ada
If you are dumb enough to actually use this language, the United States Department of Defense will kidnap you, stand you up in front of a firing squad, and tell the soldiers, "Shoot at his feet."
Modula/2
After realizing that you can't actually accomplish anything in the language, you shoot yourself in the head.
csh, etc.
You can't remember the syntax for anything, so you spend five hours reading man pages before giving up. You then shoot the computer and switch to C.
Pascal
The compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the foot.
Unix .o .o: No such file or directory
% ls
foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o
% rm *
rm:
% ls
%
Of course racism is still protected under the First Amendment
No, it isn't. The First Amendment prohibits Congress from restricting speech, but it does not affect private companies or individuals from censoring how they see fit within their own domains.
I didn't mean to suggest otherwise and I fully support the right of anyone running a website or a hosting service to censor their own personal or corporate "domains".
What I meant was that even if you could identify racists the government really couldn't do much about it. I suppose they could put them on a list. That's kind of disturbing, but the government does maintain lots of databases about potential or suspected criminals already, just not always based on their internet posts alone.
So racism is not a crime but the First Amendment also allows websites to refuse to host content they find objectionable.
I, for one, am betting on AI being the best hope. Let AI watch conversations on games (where it is a private affair, mind you, not a constitutional issue), and start cracking down on overly-aggressive players before they can turn into hazards.
The moment something crosses the line of legality, the game platform should have all the logs and records needed to make an easy case for prosecution,
That's a scary idea. I'm not even a gamer but I could see how this could go wrong. I'm fighting some anonymous guy over the internet and am trash-talking and they're trash-talking right back. We keep pushing the rhetoric further and further. At what point do the authorities step in?
I imagine most trash-talk on the internet is simply talk. You could probably develop an AI which identified potential criminals based on their internet speech but it would just be potential criminals. Most of those people turn out to be all talk.
And why limit it to games? Forums like slashdot and twitter and facebook and the comment sections on the likes of the Washington Post could all be subject to looking for potential criminals. How do we tweak the algorithms? The comment sections on some places are cesspools of racism and hatred.
Of course racism is still protected under the First Amendment so this AI would have to distinguish between those who simply hate and those who would commit violence due to their hatred - that might be tricky.
The SWAT team didn't murder anybody.
From a legal standpoint they almost certainly did not. From a moral standpoint it's definitely arguable that they did.
I've made bad decisions in my life and lived with the regret, but none of those decisions has ever resulted in anyone losing their life especially not an innocent person's life. I don't believe the cop who killed an innocent man wanted to take a life that day but I would have a hard time living with myself if I had been the one to kill that guy.
Even if no charges were ever brought against me (and they almost certainly wouldn't be) I would feel guilty for the rest of my life. I would relive that moment and ask myself why I felt I had to shoot a man who I would later learn was unarmed.
It's not a simple case of murder because it's definitely not that but it is an example of how law enforcement in the US is unjust and harms the innocent.
“Replicants are like any other machine - they're either a benefit or a hazard. If they're a benefit, it's not my problem” - Deckard
I for one eagerly await the day when people like "Tyler Barris" can be replaced by replicants even if they do eventually develop their own emotional responses."hate, love, fear, anger, envy". Or is there a difference at all? More human than human. Sigh......
I can't relate to this guy at all.
If it's okay to "retire" replicants, should it not also be okay to "retire" sociopaths like Tyler Barris? And who am I to call him a sociopath? What if we deployed Blade Runner units to destroy all the replicants - or just anyone we deemed to have developed their own emotional responses?
Okay, I'm talking crazy now but sometimes we just have to pick up the pieces and prosecute them after they commit a crime and we can catch them.
Look, we're not living in some hippy commune and I don't believe they were either. How the hell do they figure out that this girl's name was "Sunrise" when the anthropologist quoted in the article says we didn't even know this culture existed?
And yet so quickly we understand their language and the names they gave their children?
How did they figure out her name or her first cousin's name? How do they know they were cousins? Were there written records to go by? Or perhaps these were just names given affectionately by the archaeologists digging up their bones - who never meant to suggest that those were their actual names, but just chose them out of a need to identify them other than by whatever reference number anthropologists use.
We've all heard of Lucy", right?
Does anyone actually think her name was "Lucy"? I do have to admit "Lucy" is much more appealing than "AL 288-1". It's easier to remember too. I just don't believe that was her real name.
We're talking about people who are paying their bills who may be violating copyright.
Cutting off someone's heat or AC could in extreme cases lead to death and in lesser cases could actually lead to property damage. I do worry that my pipes might freeze every time the temperature dips below zero (Fahrenheit).
Fortunately I can pay my bills so I'm not too familiar with the process but I do know that my local utility just can't shut you off for missing one or even 2 bills (maybe after three). I'm not going to test the system but I am blessed in many ways and can pay the bills. What if I couldn't? Would homelessness be the next logical step?
At least where I live they're not going to make you freeze to death even if you don't pay your bill on time. So what if I pirated the last season of Breaking Bad? (that was in fact the last thing I torrented).
Walter White wants his paycheck and if you don't come up with the money you're gonna freeze to death!!
No, we have no possible argument about whether Comcast as an ISP is a monopoly of any kind. If you actually look at the situation, you'll find 8 different ISPs [highspeedinternet.com] that serve Fort Collins.
And if you actually lived in Fort Collins you'd know your choices are limited to Comcast or CenturyLink so bravo - you're right. It's a duopoly, not a monopoly.
I've contacted some of those other companies. They just said they can't or won't serve any of the addresses in FoCo where I've ever lived.
I look forward to the day when my internet is run the way my electric utility is run - efficiently and reasonably priced just the way Fort Collins Utilities is run.
Actually, I do know one person whose ISP is one of those other companies, but he can't get Comcast. They have all staked out their territories and agreed not to encroach on each other's turf.
To draw a closer analogy you would have to say Putin called up Hillary and advised her on how to run her campaign, but that's not what people suspect.
The theory is that Russia (at Putin's direction) flooded social media with divisive political rhetoric. To what end? Perhaps political revenge? Bill Clinton did support Yeltsin in '96. Putin has been accused of much worse than unleashing an army of Facebook trolls.
I can't say what Putin thinks, but I suspect anything that weakens NATO and the US is a win for him. A divided USA is a good result for him. We're so busy bickering about whether or not to move our embassy to Jerusalem that we're missing out on the big picture - and also abandoning any hope of a real peace.
I wish people would stop trying to justify Trump's policies by saying it was either him or Hillary. That may have been a valid argument before the election, but now that Trump is President he needs to stop campaigning against her.
Trump needs to man up! He can't just rely on "at least I'm not Hillary".
I usually try to avoid politics on /, because it would destroy all my karma, but this error message - especially with the bit about Obama golfing almost seems like it's not so much "throwing shade" on his administration but rather mocking Trump's since we're all aware of how hypocritical Trump has been about golfing.
If there's one stone Trump shouldn't throw in his glass house it's accusing Obama of golfing too much - but he's been doing that so long it's an unquestioned meme for his supporters.
Does Trump even play golf at all? Well he sure tries hard to hide it when he does. He's even hiring trucks to block photographer's views of Mar-a-Lago's golf course.
I remember when Trump and others criticized Obama and Bush for playing too much golf. "Now watch this drive!" Trump was one of those who criticized Obama at least. Trump claimed he would work so hard he would never have time to golf, didn't he? And now the only thing he does more often than golf is tweet or watch TV.
That error message reminds me of a former co-worker who named a couple of servers "ecoli" and "salmonella" when we worked for a beef company. Upper level management was not pleased when word got around. They didn't fire him for that though and I suspect they actually laughed about it privately.
The sysadmin who named those servers thought it was funny and so did I because in a meat producing company that large, recalls for ecoli and salmonella are common. Most consumers never even hear about them. In his defense, those were not public servers.
If only senses of humor grew as prolifically as such bacteria.
Yes,
Let's suppose another nation was having an election and there was a choice of an incumbent who was US friendly but the challenger promised to nationalize all the foreign industry that had invested in their country and built plants.
Should the President of the US not even talk to the current President of that country and offer him or her some words of wisdom.
This is entirely different from launching a propaganda campaign to influence the electorate.
And if Netanyahu wants to openly praise Trump or offer him advice on his campaign for reelection that's perfectly okay. And if some other world leader wants to openly criticize him I'm okay with that too.
Has the whole world gone insane?
Presidents shouldn't talk to each other or voice their opinions openly for fear of being accused of meddling in other country's political affairs? Are you insane? You may not agree with everything the President says or who he says it to, but that doesn't mean he can't say those things.
Bill Clinton was President of the United States in 1996.
Boris Yeltsin was President of Russia in 1996.
Both were running for reelection.
Should our president not be allowed to talk to presidents of other countries who are running for reelection? Should certain topics have been forbidden?
Maybe Russians could be upset about this but Clinton was acting in what he believed the interests of the United States were at the time.
I'm not seeing any scandal there.
you of course realize that every western country BUT the US has voter ID laws.
Are you sure?
http://www.politifact.com/texa...
According to that article the UK does not require an ID (except Northern Ireland). Nor does Denmark, Australia or New Zealand.
Some other western countries only require an ID when someone's identity is in doubt.
Canada accepts multiple non-photo IDs such as a prescription label or a library card.
Other western countries do require a photo ID but make them easy to get and in some cases even require that people have an ID.
I don't remember that bug but I do remember management making us test everything extensively when DST was changed in the US to a different schedule. And they were right to make us test it too, but everything worked - except for the 3rd party software that was used for timeclocks which fortunately wasn't my problem.
Somehow telling hourly workers in the fall that they would get repaid for that extra hour when we "sprung forward" in the spring wasn't acceptable. Imagine that.
But when I think about all the time and effort that goes into implementing and testing DST schemes as well as time zones I can't help but imagine it is a huge drain on the world's economy (not to mention the health effects).
Even when I lived in Arizona I wasn't immune to this nonsense. The mantra was that if people on the East Coast were at their desks by 8 AM (eastern time) I either had to be at the office by 6 AM or 5 AM depending on whether DST was in effect or not.
You mean I have to get up an hour earlier because THEY changed THEIR clocks? Goddammit.
TBH, I'm not even sure if DST is during the summer or the winter. Others have suggested it before and I know it sounds radical but I'd be in favor of everyone adopting UTC or Coordinated Universal Time as well as adopting 24 hour clocks. For me, sunrise would be at 14:27 today. I can live with that. Everyone in the whole world could at least agree on the time!
The sun rising at 14:27 is no more strange a concept than the fact that Australia and other countries in the Southern Hemisphere are going to celebrate Christmas in the middle of summer.
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A couple of years ago I was frustrated because I was doing a phone interview for a position in Central Time being handled by a recruiter in Eastern Time while I live in Mountain Time.
It's like they had no concept of time zones.
"Your interview is at 1 PM."
"Okay, is that my time, your time or the interviewer's time?"
He seemed annoyed that I asked. Shouldn't it have been obvious? I'm curious what time zone others would guess was right if faced with that.
This has not been my experience with Walmart which seems to vary widely by location from all the stories I've heard.
I do try to avoid it before midnight but even when I've gone during the day it doesn't take significantly longer (if at all) than other stores.
I usually shop between midnight and about 5 AM. It's just less crowded.
The only problem I've run into while trying to check out is that they do software updates at about 4 AM. Not every night of course but when they do update their registers the whole system is down for about 45 minutes (based on the 2 times I've had it happen when I was there). A cashier told me it can take 15 minutes to an hour.
So there I am with all my groceries wondering if I should wait or just abandon them. I've waited both times.
It made me curious about their POS system. Back in the early '90s I was a developer for one but that was a much simpler and smaller retailer with different needs than Walmart. I still wonder why it takes that long or why they don't have any way to process customers while they're updating.
They somehow manage to do end-of-day processes at midnight without shutting down all the registers.
That was something my POS was not capable of but none of those stores were 24 hour operations either.
When the Walmart near me first installed self-checkout the scales were terribly sensitive and for the first month or two I had to call an employee over at least once to override it. Even something as simple as moving an item from one bag to another would cause a problem.
They improved them and now I hardly ever have that problem.
I've never had to go from a self-checkout to an employee assisted checkout though.
I scan and bag my groceries faster than they do anyway. It makes sense when you consider that I really just want to get out of the store as fast as I can but they're stuck there for the duration of their shift. I'm not saying they're slackers but they have no incentive to do it fast.
The one drawback I see for me is that I pay more attention to what's being scanned and what the price is when someone else scans the items. At a self-checkout if something rings up the wrong price I'm probably not going to notice unless it's off by a large amount.
I just got a Mi Band 2 and the heart rate measurements are kind of crazy at times. In the space of about 15 minutes just sitting here my heart rate has gone from 116 to 41. If I believed it was accurate I'd probably make an appointment with a doctor. That said it's often close enough for my own amusement and curiosity.
It tracks sleep reasonably well although there is a lag from me going to sleep and it realizing I'm asleep - maybe a half-hour or so.
I don't take the steps as 100% accurate either but it does give me an idea of how much I've walked.
After about 9 days the battery is still at 25% and that's with it supposedly measuring heart rate every 2 minutes during sleep.
Every time I've looked at other devices I was turned off by price or daily charging or bad reviews but I figured $35 wasn't too much even if I hated it. And surprisingly to me it doesn't bother me to wear it. I haven't worn a watch since the '90s (Timex DataLink).
If this thing were accurate and had better software it would be great.
When a site such as MSN carries a news story - the whole text from perhaps the AP under an MSN link are they not paying for it at all? IS there some sort of revenue sharing from whatever ads are served up?
I would think just copying their entire articles without permission would clearly violate copyright and would have been shut down long ago if that were the case.
OTOH, if they're just linking to stories with only a sentence or two in a preview that seems like fair use to my untrained layman's eye. And besides, how else would some podunk newspaper halfway across the country get any hits if Google didn't find them for me?