So as a customer I either have to pay for nebulous software that will be of no use to me (ie, won't run under my operating system) or else I have to pay a $20 tax to a nebulous "fight against human trafficking".
I don't mind paying a tax or levy or whatever the correct term is, if I felt I could trust that it would be spent intelligently on a useful purpose. Personally, I detest pornography, not because of it's supposedly sexual content, but because it is so mind-numbingly unintelligent; but I can't see that it is my business to stop others from wasting their money on it. And filtering is at best inefficient and clumsy; you either end up running into road-blocks on things that shouldn't be filtered, or you keep running into crap that you really don't want to spend bandwidth on. I already have AdBlock and other things, and it seems to filter out all kinds of porn, including the kind called advertising; nothing more is needed.
If they can show me that the money is well spent, I would be willing to pay $100 every time I bought a new PC, why not? But I want to see the accounts every year.
Well, not quite - the number show that she does have a fair bit of support, and it would be a bit rich to suggest that all 52% or so) of Americans are simply blind idiots; there's going to be quite a lot of people who actually like her, warts and all.
Yet the media will spin like a top to call trump the next hitler and announce the apocalypse because he was elected. Dems lost because hillary sucks, period!
Trump is not a patch on Hitler, thankfully. He is a fascist, no doubt, and I feel pretty certain that his presidency is going to be mostly a miserable failure, unless he learns real quick, because he simply doesn't have what it takes. I have been trying to see him as either a leader or a manager, and I just can't spot it. A good manager is somebody who is good at administrating and sorting out the paperwork, so to speak - he is likely to seem a bit grey, because he lacks charisma (which tends to make you less efficient as a manager); Trump has loads of charisma, but I don't much evidence of management skills.
So is he a good leader? A good leader needs more than charisma: he needs to be a good strategist, and he has to be able to see himself as the servant of his followers, in a sense, rather than "The King"; he needs a good deal of humility, and I don't see those qualities in Trump, either. And for both a manager and a leader, it is necessary to understand your own limitations and accept that there are things you just don't know enough about; you have to be able to select the right advicers, and I think a wise president will understand that he needs intelligent, well-educated people with a proven track record in critical thinking, who do not necessarily agree with him, because when you hold great power, you need somebody who can sometimes hold you in check with their insight.
I would not be at all surprised if Trump, after a few, initial wins, begins to lose the plot; he may keep blurting out insults against China or his allies in Europe, Canada or Australia, and he will end up either to have to backtrack in a humiliating way (which will anger many of his current, most fervent supporters), or he will persist in being stupid and harm the US' standing internationally (which will lose him the support of the middle ground). Either way, if he really is as narcissistic as he has appeared until now, he won't be able to handle being incresingly unpopular; and I dread to think what he will do in that situation. Or he may start alienating the best minds in the country by doing all the wrong things to the scientific community, because he simply hasn't got a clue about what science is and how the scientific community works. The best scientists can find good work anywhere in the world; if the US becomes unattractive, then China, Europe and Australia are more than happy to receive them - China has a very active policy of attracting scientists from overseas, for example, and it is very successful. America only became the world leader in science, because it has been very attractive to do science there; Trump might well hand that position over to China by being too stupid.
A fat lot that will help, when the problem is that delivry firms dump the packet outside and drive off. A more sensible approach would be to have safe delivery spots - or more, since I already see them here and there: something like a wall of steel lockers, where the delivery is deposited. The recipient will then get a code to unlock it sent to his mobile.
Or legislation: the seller should be liable for the loss of the goods, unless they can show a receipt with a signature and a photo of who signed. Something like that. It shouldn't be up to the consumer to solve the problem, because they are the ones least able to fix it.
Thank you for your enlightened and helpful comments, mr Coward.
Millions of weather stations?
- or to take in a bit of context: "... perhaps millions of weather stations..." - this word, "perhaps" tells the enlightened reader that I am making a guess, but I think it is likely to be reasonable. A weather station is basically just a small, white painted box about 2 m above the ground and containing a few, simple instruments, like a thermometer and a barometer. They have been standardised and in use for more than a century, and they are surprisingly common, so I wouldn't think putting their number in the millions is to high.
You are not allowed to have or post an opinion on this topic until you learn something about it.
Ah, that would be this "Freedom of Speech" that people like you go on about? I live in an evil, communist country (UK) where we are not familiar with this concept; I mistakenly thought that it meant that I could talk freely about thing I think are right. Where did I go wrong? Was it that I don't include enough childish insults or simple minded, sweeping statement?
You are making pro AGW people look like completely ignorant dipshits and wasting precious bits on the internet better used for piano playing cat videos on YouTube than your ignorant nonsense.
AGW can mean "Anthropogenic Global Warming" or "Anti-Global Warming"; having read this last bit, I can't figure out whether you mean one or the other. But thank you for the tip - next time I will include a cat video and play piano.
I'm not sure what ignorant nonsense you are referring to. Scientific recsearch generates enormous amounts of data, far more than the effluent from Facebook or Twitter, if that is your idea of "Big Data". The only part of my original post that isn't based on concrete knowledge is the bit about the weather stations. You clearly didn't bother to check for yourself - if you had, you would have been able to provide a better estimate than I did.
Exactly - people in generl have little idea just how much we are talking about. All scientific activity produces mountains of data - it isn't just the LHC at CERN (which produces 100s of GB per second) - even a small study of sea-birds, with the use of small strap-on cameras and similar, can produce TBs in a relatively short span of time. For climate data, it has to be enormous amounts of data too: several daily observations from perhaps millions of weather stations, plus satelite data, radar observations, etc, not to mention results produced by runs of simulations over and over with tiny variations in the start parameters.
But people are always like that - there's an anecdote from the beginning of the mainframe - possibly apocryphal: It used to be that you could order a printout of the source code (in assembler, of course) of the OS of your IBM system, and in one place they decided that this would be instructive and might be useful; so they put in the order. After a week or two, a lorry turned up with 25 tons of print-out. IOW, think before you ask for all the data.
So what does that have to do with establishing causation? The prevalence of autism is also correlated with dietary sugar intake and BMI too. That doesn't mean they are related. The only way to establish causation is to test the hypothesis, not test the correlation.
When you know that you have a strong correlation, you certainly have a reason to start looking more closely, for one thing. And when you also have several, good ideas that there may be plausible ways in which one could cause the other, then that is where you start looking; this isn't sophisticated and difficult to follow, it is simple, common sense that most people use every day.
What you are saying, essentially, is that you don't want to find out. Compare that to the attitude you guys had against Clinton: guilty on suspicion, and guilty even after being exonerated several times. I think I can spot an imbalance here. I wasn't much infatuated with her, but I do have a bias towards simple fairness and honesty, even if it applies to somebody I don't like.
This issue is important, not because it might say that Trump shouldn't be president (there are already substantial reason for that IMO), but because of the enormous security implications if it turns out that any foreign power has manipulated the elections of the US - or for that matter of any, European democracy. If we can't trust the fundamental election process, what can we trust? It is critically important to ensure that our elections are trustworthy; one might argue that we should have looked much more closely at that issue decades ago, because it has long been clear that the power structures in many socalled democracies are in fact rotten to the core.
... imagine how much worse it would get if they never died and could continue to amass wealth and power indefinitely.
Fortunately, the same law applies. There is always a limit to growth, and if history shows us anything, it is that the limit is quite often a lot closer than we like to imagine.
Whether autism is "primarily genetic" is still a matter of a lot of debate, not least because we don't really understand enough about genes in general to determine whether things are due to variations in DNA or due to epigenetics - ie the interface between environment and DNA. It is not at all implausible that differences in the availability of vitamin D can have a profound impact on the expression of genes, IMO. Also, it has to be added that no study is suggesting that autism is caused exclusively by any one factor; only that lack of vitamin D seems to one of the contributing factors.
It is right and good that we are skeptical about scientific results - the scientific method is nothing less than skepticism honed to a razor-sharp edge - but there is a difference between skepticism, intelligently applied, and mere contraryness. This is something we all have to keep in mind, always.
Where is the news? This seems to just confirm previous data, which is important to researchers, but not that interesting to the public.
Well, this is how science works. Overall, it is extremely rare to make astounding, new discoveries; most scientific research is about confirming what we already know or improving our observations - even the Higgs boson was just a confirmation of what we already knew, really. It is easy to get the idea that all science is making sensational finds, if you only read the popular science stuff, and it gives you the completely wrong picture. Important science is mostly routine. It has to be - the scientific method dictates that you must keep testing, because the only certainty you can achieve lies in falsifying predictions. That is why there still are people who keep finding new ways of testing that gravity still works as predicted; next time it might not - that is of course taking it to the extreme, but it is scientifically very valid to keep asking the question.
The vitamin-D hypothesis has been around for years. It would be interesting if a causal link, or treatment, could be demonstrated, e.g. a randomised placebo controlled trial of supplements during pregnancy. But there seems to be none of that yet.
I think you are getting things mixed up a bit. Randomised trials are meant specifically for testing the efficacy of new medicines. The method would work for vitamin D, of course, but it would be ethically unsound to deliberately expose groups of people to the well-documented risks that this deficiency would cause, and it would be extremely difficult to control the parameters, I think; you get vitamin D from many sources, such as exposure to sunlight, and you would have to keep large groups of pregnant women confined indoors for 9 months, and so on. Can't be done practically.
But it isn't really necessary. Firstly, I think we have confirmed that the correlation is real, not spurious, so presumably we now have a confirmed pattern of vitamin D deficiency correlating to a certain increase in the risk of developing autism. Secondly, other research seems to point to plausible mechanisms - we know something about what goes on in an autistic brain, and we know that vitamin D probably plays an important role in the development of certain features that appear to be important in connection with autism.
But you are right, this is not a surprising, new discovery; we are simply inching closer to understanding how autism develops.
There is little doubt that modern technology can achieve incredible results and we can reproduce sounds and images almost better than the original; but why go to such lengths, when there is so little content that is worth reproducing to any high standard? I remember back in the 70es, there was a similar craze for the most crystal clear sound and so on - and a few people would have a special listening room, with one chair in the optimal position etc etc, and maybe for that rare breed it was worth it all. But for everybody else, what is the relevance? Who has the time, even, to sit and concentrate on the sublime?
It's like the nonsense about food - sorry, 'cuisine' - and foodies; they'll go on about the most exquisite ingredients, the most luxurious this and that, but when you get down to it, it's just grub that you're going to wrap your face around, and while most people can tell the difference between cheap crap and good quality food, very few can tell whether it is the very bestest in the world or merely good.
It basically extends U.S. corporate hegemony to China's doorstep. And before you go all "but but corporations are greedy!" you want American corporations to do well more than you want a Chinese state-sponsored company to do well.
Which is one of the reasons why China are very active in the South China Sea and establishing themselves there: they are more or less hemmed in by American interests - a long tail of islands stretching from Japan down to Taiwan, then from Taiwan to the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia. To the Chinese it is like a long string of Cubas, which is just one island that the US used to feel assertive about.
That apart, I'm not sure what you are saying here - are you saying that it is better if American greed is successful rather than a Chinese state-owned company? I'm not sure I agree - as I understand it, in an American company, you can basically be fired on a whim with no notice period (this is from my American friends), whereas in a Chinese state-owned company, a worker is nearly impossible to fire for any reason, which is why these companies have traditionally had a reputation for inefficiency. I think it would be nice if the Chinese model was more successful than the American one, for obvious reasons.
Ah, the new and exciting world of post-truth, where all you need is an opinion and an inflated ego. It worked for Trump, so it must work for everybody else.
It is obvious why they do this: They want the TPP to work, and they are sending a political signal, not least to Trump. but also to other, interested parties in the region. Basically, what they say is: "We want closer cooperation - ideally with the US, but we might get this to work without." I haven't studied the details (or even the headlines, tbh) of the TPP, but given the internet, easy travel, trans-national corporations etc, globalisation is a fact, and if the US want to isolate themselves, the rest of the world will go on without. You may point to Brexit, but the take-away point here is that UK is in no way talking about isolationism - quite the opposite, in fact: they want to become more international than they felt they were able to in EU (I don't agree with Brexit, but that's beside the point). Globalisation will happen with you or to you; I think it is better to take active part in the processes and see if you can influence them in your favour. By refusing to be part of it and sulking in a corner, all you achieve is to be left out of influence.
The popular vote is actually not even an official thing at all. It's a media invention. The states vote. They vote with electors. How they apportion their electors is up to them.
I think you are talking about two different things: The popular vote is a real, measurable thing, the electoral college is just one way of organising the counting of the popular vote - others may exist that are as good or better. It is a discussion worth having, since many democracies have a system much closer to proportional representation, especially in this situation where the popular vote points at the candidate that didn't win according to the electoral college.
One has to admire your bravery and honesty in revealing your true name in this forum, mr Coward; I personally prefer to hide behind a pseudonym, because I am scared that anybody finds out.
So, as you say, your guy seems to have it all his way; of course that also means that later, when his policies turn out to be major disasters, you can't hide behind "Oh, but the senate/house/... opposed us all the way, so of course it didn't work out." And unless he turns out to be a truly astoundingly brilliant leader, he will face growing, popular opposition - starting from 50%, in fact - and popular opposition is not as easily controlled as the senate and the house.
Here is what I think is likely to happen: He'll start out in typical, bumbling style, maybe initially he will have the support of the Republicans, but fairly soon the deep resentment that was all too visible during the primaries, will come to the surface again, and they will start opposing him in growing numbers. The popular opposition will spread from the current 50% to something much higher, because a lot of the people who voted for him don't like him much, and a lot of the angry people who voted for him, did so because they hope against hope that he will make things better - when he fails, as he must, they will turn against him with fury. And then come the midterm elections, where he loses the senate and the house.
Meanwhile, the Democrats will have 4 years in relative peace, where they have the chance to do some serious rethinking of their whole setup, and can work on reconnecting with the voters. They won't be in power anywhere, and will therefore not get their name attached to unpopular policies that come out of government, but they will still be under pressure from their electorate to improve their ways, so it is conceivable that they will actually do so.
So, all in all, it will be worth watching, certainly. Where the whining will come from, though - we'll see, won't we?
Whether this survey actually shows what they think it does, is perhaps not clear, but humans and in fact all animals have evolved to deal with information overload; we don't really take in all the sensory stimuli that hit us all the time - we have found ways to cut down on things and focus on what is important. The challenge with the internet lies in finding the right filtering method, so we get the things that are actually important, rather than the things we would like to see. In all honesty, it is probably something all of us need to work more on all the time; but some seem to choose not to.
As soon as you get into registered lists, issuing stickers or permits, etc. it gets so expensive that you don't want to do it.
Not necessarily - ANPR is a new word I've started seeing on signs in and around London: Automatic Number Plate Recognition. It is used for many things: police cars can identify the owner of a car in front of them and see if they paid road tax, have a valid insurance etc, Transport for London can see who enters the Congestion Charge Zone, and there is this new thing called Average Speed Check - and so on. If it works for these purposes, how hard would it be to use it to check whether people are allowed to use their cars on certain days? Very easy, is the answer, in terms of technology. The hard bit is the legislation and deciding on how to administrate and implement it; because you don't want to cobble a system together and then have to change it over and over, or go through Parliament several times.
Personally, I think we should be quite heavihanded about this - require that a family can only buy a car if they can prove they have a secure, legal place to park it (that would sort a lot of the problems in Beijing, where they tend to park in several layers - illegally - every night). Or require that people can justify a real need to own a car, like being unable to use public transport for serious, medical reasons. And then provide good, public transport and good facilities for bicycles; if you have less than 5 - 10 miles to work, then a bike is perfectly suited, and you shouldn't need a car.
I'm a big fan of China in many respects, and I think their central government very often get things right - more so than many in the West. But as many sincere fans, I am not just uncritically accepting everything they do as right. In this case I reserve judgement; many things depend on how this is implemented and how it is used.
In my view, it was always obvious that something like this must turn up at some point. The unregulated internet was a lot of fun in the early years, certainly, but it is no longer all that much fun - there are too many things going on that are anything but fun, quite frankly, with scams, false news, rumour mills, organised crime, bullying, people trafficking etc, and the genuinely good things are sometimes drowning in the effluence. So it has to come to an end in some way or other - things like censorship, lack of anonymity and social credit scores are attempts at hammering out some sort of "law in the Wild West" of the internet. I'm not sure they are all good, but eventually we will settle one something that most people will find acceptable, and which will be reasonably effective.
At then end of the day, the internet is a public space, ultimately paid for by "society": the physical infrastructure etc maybe be owned by companies of various sorts, but at the end of the day, their customers pay for it and it trickles down to us (that is the only part of "trickle down economics" that actually works: all expenses are ultimately paid by those at the bottom of the pyramid game). But that being the case, the rules have to be set in such a way that they are acceptable to most people, and most people prefer there to be limits for what you are allowed to do and say.
Really, people need to chill out. When absolutely everything gets you offended, really your offendedness is meaningless.
Yeah, sure, but to be fair, I think the "offence" this time was over the inclusion of a rather non-descript magazine, whose main selling point was the vaguely pornographic pictures, to an audience, whose main interest is somewhat removed from idle chit-chat. Playboy's core customers have always been the stupid rich, who think Las Vegas is an exciting holiday destination, that middle-aged men in glittery suits singing Sinatra songs are the height of cool, and who think that smoking cigars is sophisticated. We'll look at nude photos any ime of the day, but Playboy is or management types in suits. If they wanted to please a crowd of nerds, it might have worked better to include a graphical novel (or whatever the better class of cartoons are called) or a reprint of some of the more interesting comics from a byegone age. My favourites are the early editions of "The Broons" which are written in a very crinkly sort of Scots English.
It is really bizarre, the way fact checking and standing up to liars, fear mongers, hate speech has been twisted around so that it is now called "propaganda" and "censorship". I suppose we are fortunate in some ways - at least Trump's nasal whine doesn't evoke quite the same passion as Hitler, and I don't think they have a master manipulator like Goebbels yet. And unlike in Germany in the thirties, companies are not flocking to him as one; and we now have the internet, so perhaps there is hope that he won't get it all his way. But it is going to be grim for a while.
How about you.....improve the lives for angry young men to combat the radicalisation epidemic?
Indeed. The problem, in practical terms, is that once we have let things slip as far as we have, where we have "angry young men", it becomes very hard, because they will now try their worst to stop you from actually improving things. Like now Daesh and other terrorist organisations are active, they profit from the ineqalities in our society, so they don't want us to fix it; that is one of the major factors in why they direct their attacks against innocent people.
Because Bitcoin is not a currency according to previous legal rulings and the IRS seems to be treating it however would advantage them in any given instance
Tax, as far as I know, should be paid on any transaction that results in somebody receiving something of real value. I don't know if bitcoin falls into that category, but in most countries, if you receive payment in kind, you still have to pay tax of the value, which seems perfectly reasonable to me. So whichever way you turn it, it is reasonably that the revenue services know; bitcoin doesn't need to be "currency" or legal tender, it doesn't even have to be inherently valuable (if that even has any meaning) it only needs to have a trade value.
...anyone that actually likes chocolate likes a good dark chocolate that is already not as sweet
Funny enough - I like chocolate to be either quite light milk chocolate or very dark, 90%. I find the 60% - 85% ones too sweet in combination with the bitterness.
Slashdot Mirror
So as a customer I either have to pay for nebulous software that will be of no use to me (ie, won't run under my operating system) or else I have to pay a $20 tax to a nebulous "fight against human trafficking".
I don't mind paying a tax or levy or whatever the correct term is, if I felt I could trust that it would be spent intelligently on a useful purpose. Personally, I detest pornography, not because of it's supposedly sexual content, but because it is so mind-numbingly unintelligent; but I can't see that it is my business to stop others from wasting their money on it. And filtering is at best inefficient and clumsy; you either end up running into road-blocks on things that shouldn't be filtered, or you keep running into crap that you really don't want to spend bandwidth on. I already have AdBlock and other things, and it seems to filter out all kinds of porn, including the kind called advertising; nothing more is needed.
If they can show me that the money is well spent, I would be willing to pay $100 every time I bought a new PC, why not? But I want to see the accounts every year.
America hates Hillary Clinton
Well, not quite - the number show that she does have a fair bit of support, and it would be a bit rich to suggest that all 52% or so) of Americans are simply blind idiots; there's going to be quite a lot of people who actually like her, warts and all.
Yet the media will spin like a top to call trump the next hitler and announce the apocalypse because he was elected. Dems lost because hillary sucks, period!
Trump is not a patch on Hitler, thankfully. He is a fascist, no doubt, and I feel pretty certain that his presidency is going to be mostly a miserable failure, unless he learns real quick, because he simply doesn't have what it takes. I have been trying to see him as either a leader or a manager, and I just can't spot it. A good manager is somebody who is good at administrating and sorting out the paperwork, so to speak - he is likely to seem a bit grey, because he lacks charisma (which tends to make you less efficient as a manager); Trump has loads of charisma, but I don't much evidence of management skills.
So is he a good leader? A good leader needs more than charisma: he needs to be a good strategist, and he has to be able to see himself as the servant of his followers, in a sense, rather than "The King"; he needs a good deal of humility, and I don't see those qualities in Trump, either. And for both a manager and a leader, it is necessary to understand your own limitations and accept that there are things you just don't know enough about; you have to be able to select the right advicers, and I think a wise president will understand that he needs intelligent, well-educated people with a proven track record in critical thinking, who do not necessarily agree with him, because when you hold great power, you need somebody who can sometimes hold you in check with their insight.
I would not be at all surprised if Trump, after a few, initial wins, begins to lose the plot; he may keep blurting out insults against China or his allies in Europe, Canada or Australia, and he will end up either to have to backtrack in a humiliating way (which will anger many of his current, most fervent supporters), or he will persist in being stupid and harm the US' standing internationally (which will lose him the support of the middle ground). Either way, if he really is as narcissistic as he has appeared until now, he won't be able to handle being incresingly unpopular; and I dread to think what he will do in that situation. Or he may start alienating the best minds in the country by doing all the wrong things to the scientific community, because he simply hasn't got a clue about what science is and how the scientific community works. The best scientists can find good work anywhere in the world; if the US becomes unattractive, then China, Europe and Australia are more than happy to receive them - China has a very active policy of attracting scientists from overseas, for example, and it is very successful. America only became the world leader in science, because it has been very attractive to do science there; Trump might well hand that position over to China by being too stupid.
A fat lot that will help, when the problem is that delivry firms dump the packet outside and drive off. A more sensible approach would be to have safe delivery spots - or more, since I already see them here and there: something like a wall of steel lockers, where the delivery is deposited. The recipient will then get a code to unlock it sent to his mobile.
Or legislation: the seller should be liable for the loss of the goods, unless they can show a receipt with a signature and a photo of who signed. Something like that. It shouldn't be up to the consumer to solve the problem, because they are the ones least able to fix it.
Thank you for your enlightened and helpful comments, mr Coward.
Millions of weather stations?
- or to take in a bit of context: "... perhaps millions of weather stations..." - this word, "perhaps" tells the enlightened reader that I am making a guess, but I think it is likely to be reasonable. A weather station is basically just a small, white painted box about 2 m above the ground and containing a few, simple instruments, like a thermometer and a barometer. They have been standardised and in use for more than a century, and they are surprisingly common, so I wouldn't think putting their number in the millions is to high.
You are not allowed to have or post an opinion on this topic until you learn something about it.
Ah, that would be this "Freedom of Speech" that people like you go on about? I live in an evil, communist country (UK) where we are not familiar with this concept; I mistakenly thought that it meant that I could talk freely about thing I think are right. Where did I go wrong? Was it that I don't include enough childish insults or simple minded, sweeping statement?
You are making pro AGW people look like completely ignorant dipshits and wasting precious bits on the internet better used for piano playing cat videos on YouTube than your ignorant nonsense.
AGW can mean "Anthropogenic Global Warming" or "Anti-Global Warming"; having read this last bit, I can't figure out whether you mean one or the other. But thank you for the tip - next time I will include a cat video and play piano.
I'm not sure what ignorant nonsense you are referring to. Scientific recsearch generates enormous amounts of data, far more than the effluent from Facebook or Twitter, if that is your idea of "Big Data". The only part of my original post that isn't based on concrete knowledge is the bit about the weather stations. You clearly didn't bother to check for yourself - if you had, you would have been able to provide a better estimate than I did.
there's tons of raw data out there
Exactly - people in generl have little idea just how much we are talking about. All scientific activity produces mountains of data - it isn't just the LHC at CERN (which produces 100s of GB per second) - even a small study of sea-birds, with the use of small strap-on cameras and similar, can produce TBs in a relatively short span of time. For climate data, it has to be enormous amounts of data too: several daily observations from perhaps millions of weather stations, plus satelite data, radar observations, etc, not to mention results produced by runs of simulations over and over with tiny variations in the start parameters.
But people are always like that - there's an anecdote from the beginning of the mainframe - possibly apocryphal: It used to be that you could order a printout of the source code (in assembler, of course) of the OS of your IBM system, and in one place they decided that this would be instructive and might be useful; so they put in the order. After a week or two, a lorry turned up with 25 tons of print-out. IOW, think before you ask for all the data.
So what does that have to do with establishing causation? The prevalence of autism is also correlated with dietary sugar intake and BMI too. That doesn't mean they are related. The only way to establish causation is to test the hypothesis, not test the correlation.
When you know that you have a strong correlation, you certainly have a reason to start looking more closely, for one thing. And when you also have several, good ideas that there may be plausible ways in which one could cause the other, then that is where you start looking; this isn't sophisticated and difficult to follow, it is simple, common sense that most people use every day.
... nothing of substance here.
What you are saying, essentially, is that you don't want to find out. Compare that to the attitude you guys had against Clinton: guilty on suspicion, and guilty even after being exonerated several times. I think I can spot an imbalance here. I wasn't much infatuated with her, but I do have a bias towards simple fairness and honesty, even if it applies to somebody I don't like.
This issue is important, not because it might say that Trump shouldn't be president (there are already substantial reason for that IMO), but because of the enormous security implications if it turns out that any foreign power has manipulated the elections of the US - or for that matter of any, European democracy. If we can't trust the fundamental election process, what can we trust? It is critically important to ensure that our elections are trustworthy; one might argue that we should have looked much more closely at that issue decades ago, because it has long been clear that the power structures in many socalled democracies are in fact rotten to the core.
... imagine how much worse it would get if they never died and could continue to amass wealth and power indefinitely.
Fortunately, the same law applies. There is always a limit to growth, and if history shows us anything, it is that the limit is quite often a lot closer than we like to imagine.
Whether autism is "primarily genetic" is still a matter of a lot of debate, not least because we don't really understand enough about genes in general to determine whether things are due to variations in DNA or due to epigenetics - ie the interface between environment and DNA. It is not at all implausible that differences in the availability of vitamin D can have a profound impact on the expression of genes, IMO. Also, it has to be added that no study is suggesting that autism is caused exclusively by any one factor; only that lack of vitamin D seems to one of the contributing factors.
It is right and good that we are skeptical about scientific results - the scientific method is nothing less than skepticism honed to a razor-sharp edge - but there is a difference between skepticism, intelligently applied, and mere contraryness. This is something we all have to keep in mind, always.
Where is the news?
This seems to just confirm previous data, which is important to researchers, but not that interesting to the public.
Well, this is how science works. Overall, it is extremely rare to make astounding, new discoveries; most scientific research is about confirming what we already know or improving our observations - even the Higgs boson was just a confirmation of what we already knew, really. It is easy to get the idea that all science is making sensational finds, if you only read the popular science stuff, and it gives you the completely wrong picture. Important science is mostly routine. It has to be - the scientific method dictates that you must keep testing, because the only certainty you can achieve lies in falsifying predictions. That is why there still are people who keep finding new ways of testing that gravity still works as predicted; next time it might not - that is of course taking it to the extreme, but it is scientifically very valid to keep asking the question.
The vitamin-D hypothesis has been around for years. It would be interesting if a causal link, or treatment, could be demonstrated, e.g. a randomised placebo controlled trial of supplements during pregnancy. But there seems to be none of that yet.
I think you are getting things mixed up a bit. Randomised trials are meant specifically for testing the efficacy of new medicines. The method would work for vitamin D, of course, but it would be ethically unsound to deliberately expose groups of people to the well-documented risks that this deficiency would cause, and it would be extremely difficult to control the parameters, I think; you get vitamin D from many sources, such as exposure to sunlight, and you would have to keep large groups of pregnant women confined indoors for 9 months, and so on. Can't be done practically.
But it isn't really necessary. Firstly, I think we have confirmed that the correlation is real, not spurious, so presumably we now have a confirmed pattern of vitamin D deficiency correlating to a certain increase in the risk of developing autism. Secondly, other research seems to point to plausible mechanisms - we know something about what goes on in an autistic brain, and we know that vitamin D probably plays an important role in the development of certain features that appear to be important in connection with autism.
But you are right, this is not a surprising, new discovery; we are simply inching closer to understanding how autism develops.
There is little doubt that modern technology can achieve incredible results and we can reproduce sounds and images almost better than the original; but why go to such lengths, when there is so little content that is worth reproducing to any high standard? I remember back in the 70es, there was a similar craze for the most crystal clear sound and so on - and a few people would have a special listening room, with one chair in the optimal position etc etc, and maybe for that rare breed it was worth it all. But for everybody else, what is the relevance? Who has the time, even, to sit and concentrate on the sublime?
It's like the nonsense about food - sorry, 'cuisine' - and foodies; they'll go on about the most exquisite ingredients, the most luxurious this and that, but when you get down to it, it's just grub that you're going to wrap your face around, and while most people can tell the difference between cheap crap and good quality food, very few can tell whether it is the very bestest in the world or merely good.
OK, rant's over, you can breathe again.
It basically extends U.S. corporate hegemony to China's doorstep. And before you go all "but but corporations are greedy!" you want American corporations to do well more than you want a Chinese state-sponsored company to do well.
Which is one of the reasons why China are very active in the South China Sea and establishing themselves there: they are more or less hemmed in by American interests - a long tail of islands stretching from Japan down to Taiwan, then from Taiwan to the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia. To the Chinese it is like a long string of Cubas, which is just one island that the US used to feel assertive about.
That apart, I'm not sure what you are saying here - are you saying that it is better if American greed is successful rather than a Chinese state-owned company? I'm not sure I agree - as I understand it, in an American company, you can basically be fired on a whim with no notice period (this is from my American friends), whereas in a Chinese state-owned company, a worker is nearly impossible to fire for any reason, which is why these companies have traditionally had a reputation for inefficiency. I think it would be nice if the Chinese model was more successful than the American one, for obvious reasons.
Ah, the new and exciting world of post-truth, where all you need is an opinion and an inflated ego. It worked for Trump, so it must work for everybody else.
It is obvious why they do this: They want the TPP to work, and they are sending a political signal, not least to Trump. but also to other, interested parties in the region. Basically, what they say is: "We want closer cooperation - ideally with the US, but we might get this to work without." I haven't studied the details (or even the headlines, tbh) of the TPP, but given the internet, easy travel, trans-national corporations etc, globalisation is a fact, and if the US want to isolate themselves, the rest of the world will go on without. You may point to Brexit, but the take-away point here is that UK is in no way talking about isolationism - quite the opposite, in fact: they want to become more international than they felt they were able to in EU (I don't agree with Brexit, but that's beside the point). Globalisation will happen with you or to you; I think it is better to take active part in the processes and see if you can influence them in your favour. By refusing to be part of it and sulking in a corner, all you achieve is to be left out of influence.
This is unbelievable for an ousted president.
Yes, we definitely don't want to know who was behind this; anything but the truth.
The popular vote is actually not even an official thing at all. It's a media invention. The states vote. They vote with electors. How they apportion their electors is up to them.
I think you are talking about two different things: The popular vote is a real, measurable thing, the electoral college is just one way of organising the counting of the popular vote - others may exist that are as good or better. It is a discussion worth having, since many democracies have a system much closer to proportional representation, especially in this situation where the popular vote points at the candidate that didn't win according to the electoral college.
One has to admire your bravery and honesty in revealing your true name in this forum, mr Coward; I personally prefer to hide behind a pseudonym, because I am scared that anybody finds out.
So, as you say, your guy seems to have it all his way; of course that also means that later, when his policies turn out to be major disasters, you can't hide behind "Oh, but the senate/house/... opposed us all the way, so of course it didn't work out." And unless he turns out to be a truly astoundingly brilliant leader, he will face growing, popular opposition - starting from 50%, in fact - and popular opposition is not as easily controlled as the senate and the house.
Here is what I think is likely to happen: He'll start out in typical, bumbling style, maybe initially he will have the support of the Republicans, but fairly soon the deep resentment that was all too visible during the primaries, will come to the surface again, and they will start opposing him in growing numbers. The popular opposition will spread from the current 50% to something much higher, because a lot of the people who voted for him don't like him much, and a lot of the angry people who voted for him, did so because they hope against hope that he will make things better - when he fails, as he must, they will turn against him with fury. And then come the midterm elections, where he loses the senate and the house.
Meanwhile, the Democrats will have 4 years in relative peace, where they have the chance to do some serious rethinking of their whole setup, and can work on reconnecting with the voters. They won't be in power anywhere, and will therefore not get their name attached to unpopular policies that come out of government, but they will still be under pressure from their electorate to improve their ways, so it is conceivable that they will actually do so.
So, all in all, it will be worth watching, certainly. Where the whining will come from, though - we'll see, won't we?
Whether this survey actually shows what they think it does, is perhaps not clear, but humans and in fact all animals have evolved to deal with information overload; we don't really take in all the sensory stimuli that hit us all the time - we have found ways to cut down on things and focus on what is important. The challenge with the internet lies in finding the right filtering method, so we get the things that are actually important, rather than the things we would like to see. In all honesty, it is probably something all of us need to work more on all the time; but some seem to choose not to.
As soon as you get into registered lists, issuing stickers or permits, etc. it gets so expensive that you don't want to do it.
Not necessarily - ANPR is a new word I've started seeing on signs in and around London: Automatic Number Plate Recognition. It is used for many things: police cars can identify the owner of a car in front of them and see if they paid road tax, have a valid insurance etc, Transport for London can see who enters the Congestion Charge Zone, and there is this new thing called Average Speed Check - and so on. If it works for these purposes, how hard would it be to use it to check whether people are allowed to use their cars on certain days? Very easy, is the answer, in terms of technology. The hard bit is the legislation and deciding on how to administrate and implement it; because you don't want to cobble a system together and then have to change it over and over, or go through Parliament several times.
Personally, I think we should be quite heavihanded about this - require that a family can only buy a car if they can prove they have a secure, legal place to park it (that would sort a lot of the problems in Beijing, where they tend to park in several layers - illegally - every night). Or require that people can justify a real need to own a car, like being unable to use public transport for serious, medical reasons. And then provide good, public transport and good facilities for bicycles; if you have less than 5 - 10 miles to work, then a bike is perfectly suited, and you shouldn't need a car.
I envision the headlines:
"Stephen Hawking working on brown holes"
I'm a big fan of China in many respects, and I think their central government very often get things right - more so than many in the West. But as many sincere fans, I am not just uncritically accepting everything they do as right. In this case I reserve judgement; many things depend on how this is implemented and how it is used.
In my view, it was always obvious that something like this must turn up at some point. The unregulated internet was a lot of fun in the early years, certainly, but it is no longer all that much fun - there are too many things going on that are anything but fun, quite frankly, with scams, false news, rumour mills, organised crime, bullying, people trafficking etc, and the genuinely good things are sometimes drowning in the effluence. So it has to come to an end in some way or other - things like censorship, lack of anonymity and social credit scores are attempts at hammering out some sort of "law in the Wild West" of the internet. I'm not sure they are all good, but eventually we will settle one something that most people will find acceptable, and which will be reasonably effective.
At then end of the day, the internet is a public space, ultimately paid for by "society": the physical infrastructure etc maybe be owned by companies of various sorts, but at the end of the day, their customers pay for it and it trickles down to us (that is the only part of "trickle down economics" that actually works: all expenses are ultimately paid by those at the bottom of the pyramid game). But that being the case, the rules have to be set in such a way that they are acceptable to most people, and most people prefer there to be limits for what you are allowed to do and say.
Really, people need to chill out. When absolutely everything gets you offended, really your offendedness is meaningless.
Yeah, sure, but to be fair, I think the "offence" this time was over the inclusion of a rather non-descript magazine, whose main selling point was the vaguely pornographic pictures, to an audience, whose main interest is somewhat removed from idle chit-chat. Playboy's core customers have always been the stupid rich, who think Las Vegas is an exciting holiday destination, that middle-aged men in glittery suits singing Sinatra songs are the height of cool, and who think that smoking cigars is sophisticated. We'll look at nude photos any ime of the day, but Playboy is or management types in suits. If they wanted to please a crowd of nerds, it might have worked better to include a graphical novel (or whatever the better class of cartoons are called) or a reprint of some of the more interesting comics from a byegone age. My favourites are the early editions of "The Broons" which are written in a very crinkly sort of Scots English.
It is really bizarre, the way fact checking and standing up to liars, fear mongers, hate speech has been twisted around so that it is now called "propaganda" and "censorship". I suppose we are fortunate in some ways - at least Trump's nasal whine doesn't evoke quite the same passion as Hitler, and I don't think they have a master manipulator like Goebbels yet. And unlike in Germany in the thirties, companies are not flocking to him as one; and we now have the internet, so perhaps there is hope that he won't get it all his way. But it is going to be grim for a while.
How about you.....improve the lives for angry young men to combat the radicalisation epidemic?
Indeed. The problem, in practical terms, is that once we have let things slip as far as we have, where we have "angry young men", it becomes very hard, because they will now try their worst to stop you from actually improving things. Like now Daesh and other terrorist organisations are active, they profit from the ineqalities in our society, so they don't want us to fix it; that is one of the major factors in why they direct their attacks against innocent people.
Because Bitcoin is not a currency according to previous legal rulings and the IRS seems to be treating it however would advantage them in any given instance
Tax, as far as I know, should be paid on any transaction that results in somebody receiving something of real value. I don't know if bitcoin falls into that category, but in most countries, if you receive payment in kind, you still have to pay tax of the value, which seems perfectly reasonable to me. So whichever way you turn it, it is reasonably that the revenue services know; bitcoin doesn't need to be "currency" or legal tender, it doesn't even have to be inherently valuable (if that even has any meaning) it only needs to have a trade value.
...anyone that actually likes chocolate likes a good dark chocolate that is already not as sweet
Funny enough - I like chocolate to be either quite light milk chocolate or very dark, 90%. I find the 60% - 85% ones too sweet in combination with the bitterness.