Shill and idiot. You're stove took energy to produce too. And you know what it doesn't produce clean energy. Where as solar does.
Like you, I disagree strongly with the idea that coal is somehow 'cleaner' than solar energy etc, but I don't think it is justified to start calling people idiots for stating their views, even if they appear uninformed. But what I REALLY take issue with is when people are modded 'Troll' simply because they have a different opinion; that is the stupidest way to respond, no better than schoolyard bullying. Insults and bullying can only hurt the viewpoint you appear to be supporting.
The Miller-Urey experiment is farcical handwaving in terms of claiming support for spontaneous generation of complex life.
No, not really; it is a simple demonstration of the fact that some of the molecules used by living organisms can be produced under conditions similar to what science at the time thought Earth might have been like. Since then we have discovered many other environments in which plausible precursors to biological molecules are produced; it all adds up. I recommend the writings of Nick Lane (professor at UCL: http://traditions.cultural-chi...) - he makes a lot of sense, and I am sure he isn't the only one either. Science is getting very close to understanding many if not most of the details in how life probably arose on Earth.
This is not remotely production of life.
Of course it isn't, but it part of a large number of natural processes that converge towards life.
As for the Google situation, legally, it likely depends on how far back the bus driver was when the Google car started around
Speaking of which, an autonomous car would have have an array of sensors monitoring things around the car, and one would expect that the data will have been logged for exactly this sort of eventuality, so it ought to be easy enough to see who was in violation of the rules.
Here's a tip: Go somewhere else, and enjoy some of the truly great things in the world. American is rammed full of breathtakingly beautiful scenery - why go and spend obscene amounts of money on superficial crap like Disney World?
I think, in the background of this article and others like it hovers the assumption that life is a rare, unlikely event. I would argue that the opposite is the case: life is something that must arise in any dynamic system, unless there are specific conditions against it. Since the Miller-Urey experiment in the 50es we have seen a growing body of evidence suggesting that the components of life are generated all the time, everywhere, cosmologically speaking, and that life itself is simply another level of chemical complexity, to put it simply.
I said 'dynamic system' for a reason: dynamic systems are mathematical abstractions of the physical world, and even on that level you can begin to see glimpses of something central for life: spotaneous, localised decreases in entropy. Drawing lines from there to life itself is of course wildly speculative, but I am very much in favour of the idea that the universe is teeming with life; read Stephen Baxter's "exultant (sic)" for some interesting thoughts about this idea (as well as some good SF).
Simply put, Trump is a "demagogue", as were Hitler and Stalin, that doesn't mean he is inherently evil
No-one is inherently evil - if we were to believe the Bible, not even Satan himself was/is inherently evil. Evil is in what you do - in my opinion, when you at some point decide to take a course of action that you know is wrong. I think what we should ask ourselves, before we trust a significant chunk of power into the hands of anybody is not "Is this guy good/evil?", but how likely are they to keep choosing the course of action that they genuinely believe is the best for the nation as a whole? With a guy like Trump, I think the answer is pretty obvious: he has already for a long time demonstrated his commitment to his own, narrow self-interest - I don't get the impression that the question of selflessly caring for the wider interests of the people ever enters his mind. Right now, based on these criteria, I think the best candidate is Bernie Sanders - I may well be wrong, of course, but even the very fact that he calls himself a "socialist" suggests that he quite likely care about the people.
The very term "acceptable ad" sounds a bit underhanded to me; or perhaps it is just that we have already lost all trust in the advertising industry and through them, in the companies that advertising in that way. They should rethink they whole ambition and the strategy that follows from it: the term should be "Wanted Ads": advertising that people actually want - like when you go online and search for "where can I buy X within 10 miles of Y?" That's when you want to find adverts, but only if they are genuinely matches for the parameters given.
Gandhi's struggle would have turned out very, very differently had he been dealing with Hitler or Stalin or Mao instead of the British Empire. His methods only work against an adversary who has at least SOME heart or nobility you can leverage and exploit.
On an interesting side-note: Gandhi did have some interaction with Hitler - apparently he wrote at least once to Hitler, starting "My dear friend..." or something to that effect. I'm not implying that Gandhi was a fascist or would have condoned the Holocaust, though - in India, probably due to ignorance of European history, I think you can still find comic books that portray Hitler and the Nazis as great people. The Nazi tosh about 'Aryans' and 'lesser races' has some resonance with Indian culture; hence the caste system.
As for speculation about what Stalin or Mao would have done - who knows? There is no doubt the they made some momentuously bad decisions in their time, but no real person is exclusively evil, whatever that word means. Stalin I know too little about, but if you study modern, Chinese history, I think you will find that one of the main reasons that Mao and the Communists won, and the Guomindang didn't, was that the Communists did "live off the land" the way Goumindang did: the Communists didn't simply take food and resources from the peasant, and they offered genuine help where they, eg. medical help. The reason it went so badly wrong after the revolution, in my view, has more to do with the fact that a gret revolutionary leader is rarely a great civil administrator. The ideal leader of a revolution is charismatic, has a simple purpose and is ruthless enough to carry out his plans, whereas civil adminstration is all about grey, pragmatic compromise, feeling your way along and making the best of things. It would probably have been better in many ways if he had left power of his own volition after the revolution, because he was in many ways an appalling leader in peacetime, but nobody can take away the fact that he was a amazingly good revolutionary leader.
As for the British being so bloody noble - read about the Opium wars, and while you're at it, study the history of the British Empire and the industrial revolution, especially from the perspective of the poor. India won her independence for two reasons: a) Britain was weakened by ongoing events in Europe in throughout much of the earliy part of the 20th century (hint: WWI and WWII), and b) nobody can rule for very long over a people who constantly don't want you as a ruler. The constant disruptions of civil society will inevitably lead to substantial losses that drain the strength of the rulers until it falls apart. I suspect that Britain was more than happy to be rid of her colonies in the end.
I am against a technology company being compelled to undermine encryption technology so that the law enforcement can go with their usual scope creep from "just for terrorists", to "just for really bad criminals", to "well, maybe tax evasion", to "ok, how about copyright infringement", and finally "because you aren't allowed to keep secrets from us".
I am a lot less worried about government getting their hands on my data than private companies doing the same. Companies are only accountable to their owners, the shareholders, and we have seen often enough how little they care about things like privacy, ethics and even legality, as long as there's a profit to be made. Democratic governments are, at least in principle, accountable to the people. I am sure the huge distrust Americans have in their governments has a lot to do with big business having been able to engineer it that way, because if people started believing that they could get a good government, perhaps the government would start changing things in a way that would take power away from those businesses.
I will never again eat at Burger King in large part because of their tax inversion
Oddly enough, I stopped eating there because of intestinal inversion.
Another odd fact: Your mouth and your anus are directly connected by a rather short tube. Eating at places like Burger King and MacDonalds brings that fact into renewed focus, I think.
Alas, if you want to stay current/work in the IT industry, you better get familiar with Windows 10. This is the next major version, so it is the target platform to develop for.
I use Debian myself for my main usage, but keep a Windows laptop for testing/learning on what real-world uses. Windows 7 was excellent and the "upgrade" to 10 was a sad day indeed. But one has to stay current in the industry trends:-(
I have been a developer for something like 3 decades. I have worked in MVS, MS DOS, Windows (since 2.11), OS/2, all the UNIXes and Linux. I have not used Windows professionally since before 2000, and I have plenty of work. Admittedly, I work more on the backend, but when I need to do GUI, I more and more use Java. Not because it is wonderful, but because it is adequate and very portable. I don't think anybody really needs to live with Windows.
What hardware are they focusing on? Vax11? IBM 360?
Shooting from the hip, but to me a mainframe is not the same as "a huge computer"; I know some people think it is. Mainframes tend to be engineered for reliability more than anything else, as well as for fast i/o; they are usually rather specialised computers in many ways. The OS often seems a bit simplified compared to Linux, Windows or OS/X.
It also often surprises people that many of the hot, new features we are still getting used to started their lives in mainframes: virtual machines is one that springs to mind - IBM released the first version of the VM operating system in 1972, 44 years ago.
As far as I know, the only mainframe architecture still in production is the IBM z Series, which traditionally runs MVS and/or VM. Or DOS (but not the DOS we all know and loathe). There is a mature linux, popularly called zLinux, which is very good, although I felt vaguely disappointed that it is so similar to Linux on all other hardware (that is of course one of the great strengths of Linux, though). There is also an emulator for the zSeries architecture called Hercules, and you can get several distributions of linux to install on it (no license required).
..."destroying the relationship" between advertisers and consumers,...
It actually said that - I had to read it again just to make sure. I'm afraid that horse bolted long ago, shortly after people realised that you can hardly move on the internet for insultingly stupid, wheedling, lying scumbags trying to take money off you for worthless crap. As soon as the first email was sent, we had SPAM; as soon as the first website came online, we had to fight our way through more advertising. Every time a new technology was intrduced, it turned out that the main, or even othe only, purpose was advertising and, more recently, collecting data about us. The relationsship between advertisers and consumers has only ever been the relationship between predator/parasite and prey; if we can destroy that relationship for ever, then the sooner the better. The real victims are not advertisers, but the consumers, who have to keep vigilant to fight off advertising and other scams, and the real businesses out there, who can't reach their customers, because the advertisers have so massively failed to keep their "business" clean.
The entire thing is a joke. The phone is made in China in the same factories and suppliers as other phones. The difference is that their suppliers say "sure, we only use tungsten from Colorado, not from the Congo". And the hipsters fly home happy.
Perhaps - it seems likely that there is a hefty dollop of cynically targeting an audience to whom these issues matter, quite possibly the same people who buy "health food" and follow fad diets. However, it is clear that these issues are increasingly important for people's choices, and if this trend steers business towards sourcing their materials and their production methods more ethically and sustainably, then I am all for it, because it may have the effect of inspiring the less ethical producers to do better.
What I don't understand is this oppressive bitterness which insists that anything and anybody must be equally bitter and cynical. Misery loves company, it seems; but people are not idiotic tree-huggers and hipsters just because they think nature is worth protecting, or because they are able to see a wider connection. Your attitude reminds me of an old Beatles song: "Mean Mr Mustard" (Oops, sorry, my idiotic, tree-hugging, bleeding heart socialist hipster background shines through)
This isn't a new 'problem', as the government would have us believe. There is no sudden urgency, save that on the part of the FBI.
True - but it is still a problem, one way or the other, and we clearly haven't been able to solve it yet. And we never will, unless we are willing to give a little on all sides.
... an actual warrant, and that how the Fourth Amendment...
We keep getting into these discussions about encryption, privacy and so on, and that is right and good, but I feel we are just walking in circles. I think, when we are down to quoting constitution and sacred principles of human rights, and it still doesn't settle the discussion, we are not going to get there, unless we are willing to think out of the box. IOW, think about how we can find compromises.
The thing is that both sides have very good, valid points. The right to privacy and freedom from surveillance are not something to be easily dismissed, and I think even those in favour of more surveillance apprecite that; but in an age where criminals and terrorists are benefitting enormously from encryption and electronic communication, how do we ensure that the police and security services are able to carry out their legitimate tasks of stopping terrorists and catching criminals? It is all very well to criticise "the evil government" for wanting to snoop on us, but I don't see anybody come up with anything better. If people who understand technology can't think up a way to solve this problem, how can we expect politicians and business leaders to figure it out? Instead of always just shooting down anything that comes along, let's try to contribute with something positive.
If I may intercede here - shouldn't we, in the interest of public decency in publishing, stop calling people 'dicks' and instead refer to them as, well, how about 'dickerels'? Hmm, or perhaps 'Richards'?
Is it too much to ask Google to simply come out in favor of privacy of its users?
Don't you think that queston is a bit naive, all considered? Google, as all companies, can only be assumed to be working in the interests of their owners, and even that is an ideal case, as we know from the all to common examples of CEOs lining their own pockets to the loss of their shareholders. Google is not you friend - they don't care about protecting your privacy or freedom, they collect people's data for their own profit; if they are unwilling to share this information, it is because they consider the data an important part of their business model. If sharing the data at some point turns out to be profitable, that is what will happen.
the hospital has paid a 40-bitcoin ransom (about $17,000)
That's about 340 tablets of hospital aspirin or 680 hospital bandaids for those counting at home.
What you're saying seems to imply a really interesting price structure: 340 Aspirin tablets for $17000? Or are we talking about a seriouosly hefty kind of portable computing device called 'Aspirin'?
It's a little disingenuous to blame Germany for it, because Polish mobs were killing the survivors from Auschwitz.
I agree, to some extent. I think your wording highlights a fundamental problem in this kind of debate: people talk about "The Germans", "The Poles" or, indeed, "The Jews", as if they were a uniform mass, all equally responsible for whatever we want to blame them for. The reality is always much more complex than that - responsibility is always personal, individual, and I don't think anybody seriously questions the fact that most Germans were not in favour of the systematic mass extinction campaigns carried out by the Nazis. However, the same applies everywhere - talking about 'Polish Death Camps' may be meant as a shorthand for 'Nazi Death Camps in Poland', but I can easily understand why Polish people feel it is needlessly hurtful.
...all kids end up with distorted ideas of what sex love and relationships are all about, and porn is not to blame...
Why don't you tell us more about what, in your opinion, sex, love and relationships are all about? I think we would all be interested to know. And have the courage to use your real name.
That Lady Gaga tribute to Bowie was absolutely awful.
Well, David Bowie was unique. It wasn't just his style or persona, but his virtuosity; I remember watching him on Top of the Pops, him and his band playing together like a well oiled, classical orchestra of virtuosos, completely without all the electronic aids used by modern stage artists - no miming to a playback tape, no automatic correction of pitch or rhythm, but performed to absolute perfection. Anybody will sound like a fork grating over a dinner plate compared to that.
Slashdot Mirror
Shill and idiot. You're stove took energy to produce too. And you know what it doesn't produce clean energy. Where as solar does.
Like you, I disagree strongly with the idea that coal is somehow 'cleaner' than solar energy etc, but I don't think it is justified to start calling people idiots for stating their views, even if they appear uninformed. But what I REALLY take issue with is when people are modded 'Troll' simply because they have a different opinion; that is the stupidest way to respond, no better than schoolyard bullying. Insults and bullying can only hurt the viewpoint you appear to be supporting.
(professor at UCL: http://traditions.cultural-chi...
Oops - mega-oops, in fact. This was supposed to be a link to wikipedia. Hopefully people can find their way there on their own :-)
The Miller-Urey experiment is farcical handwaving in terms of claiming support for spontaneous generation of complex life.
No, not really; it is a simple demonstration of the fact that some of the molecules used by living organisms can be produced under conditions similar to what science at the time thought Earth might have been like. Since then we have discovered many other environments in which plausible precursors to biological molecules are produced; it all adds up. I recommend the writings of Nick Lane (professor at UCL: http://traditions.cultural-chi...) - he makes a lot of sense, and I am sure he isn't the only one either. Science is getting very close to understanding many if not most of the details in how life probably arose on Earth.
This is not remotely production of life.
Of course it isn't, but it part of a large number of natural processes that converge towards life.
As for the Google situation, legally, it likely depends on how far back the bus driver was when the Google car started around
Speaking of which, an autonomous car would have have an array of sensors monitoring things around the car, and one would expect that the data will have been logged for exactly this sort of eventuality, so it ought to be easy enough to see who was in violation of the rules.
Here's a tip: Go somewhere else, and enjoy some of the truly great things in the world. American is rammed full of breathtakingly beautiful scenery - why go and spend obscene amounts of money on superficial crap like Disney World?
I think, in the background of this article and others like it hovers the assumption that life is a rare, unlikely event. I would argue that the opposite is the case: life is something that must arise in any dynamic system, unless there are specific conditions against it. Since the Miller-Urey experiment in the 50es we have seen a growing body of evidence suggesting that the components of life are generated all the time, everywhere, cosmologically speaking, and that life itself is simply another level of chemical complexity, to put it simply.
I said 'dynamic system' for a reason: dynamic systems are mathematical abstractions of the physical world, and even on that level you can begin to see glimpses of something central for life: spotaneous, localised decreases in entropy. Drawing lines from there to life itself is of course wildly speculative, but I am very much in favour of the idea that the universe is teeming with life; read Stephen Baxter's "exultant (sic)" for some interesting thoughts about this idea (as well as some good SF).
Simply put, Trump is a "demagogue", as were Hitler and Stalin, that doesn't mean he is inherently evil
No-one is inherently evil - if we were to believe the Bible, not even Satan himself was/is inherently evil. Evil is in what you do - in my opinion, when you at some point decide to take a course of action that you know is wrong. I think what we should ask ourselves, before we trust a significant chunk of power into the hands of anybody is not "Is this guy good/evil?", but how likely are they to keep choosing the course of action that they genuinely believe is the best for the nation as a whole? With a guy like Trump, I think the answer is pretty obvious: he has already for a long time demonstrated his commitment to his own, narrow self-interest - I don't get the impression that the question of selflessly caring for the wider interests of the people ever enters his mind. Right now, based on these criteria, I think the best candidate is Bernie Sanders - I may well be wrong, of course, but even the very fact that he calls himself a "socialist" suggests that he quite likely care about the people.
Well, I knew that the Chinese have some exotic things on the menu, but this one is a bit novel, all the same.
I thought it was this one:
http://politicalhumor.about.co...
The very term "acceptable ad" sounds a bit underhanded to me; or perhaps it is just that we have already lost all trust in the advertising industry and through them, in the companies that advertising in that way. They should rethink they whole ambition and the strategy that follows from it: the term should be "Wanted Ads": advertising that people actually want - like when you go online and search for "where can I buy X within 10 miles of Y?" That's when you want to find adverts, but only if they are genuinely matches for the parameters given.
Gandhi's struggle would have turned out very, very differently had he been dealing with Hitler or Stalin or Mao instead of the British Empire. His methods only work against an adversary who has at least SOME heart or nobility you can leverage and exploit.
On an interesting side-note: Gandhi did have some interaction with Hitler - apparently he wrote at least once to Hitler, starting "My dear friend ..." or something to that effect. I'm not implying that Gandhi was a fascist or would have condoned the Holocaust, though - in India, probably due to ignorance of European history, I think you can still find comic books that portray Hitler and the Nazis as great people. The Nazi tosh about 'Aryans' and 'lesser races' has some resonance with Indian culture; hence the caste system.
As for speculation about what Stalin or Mao would have done - who knows? There is no doubt the they made some momentuously bad decisions in their time, but no real person is exclusively evil, whatever that word means. Stalin I know too little about, but if you study modern, Chinese history, I think you will find that one of the main reasons that Mao and the Communists won, and the Guomindang didn't, was that the Communists did "live off the land" the way Goumindang did: the Communists didn't simply take food and resources from the peasant, and they offered genuine help where they, eg. medical help. The reason it went so badly wrong after the revolution, in my view, has more to do with the fact that a gret revolutionary leader is rarely a great civil administrator. The ideal leader of a revolution is charismatic, has a simple purpose and is ruthless enough to carry out his plans, whereas civil adminstration is all about grey, pragmatic compromise, feeling your way along and making the best of things. It would probably have been better in many ways if he had left power of his own volition after the revolution, because he was in many ways an appalling leader in peacetime, but nobody can take away the fact that he was a amazingly good revolutionary leader.
As for the British being so bloody noble - read about the Opium wars, and while you're at it, study the history of the British Empire and the industrial revolution, especially from the perspective of the poor. India won her independence for two reasons: a) Britain was weakened by ongoing events in Europe in throughout much of the earliy part of the 20th century (hint: WWI and WWII), and b) nobody can rule for very long over a people who constantly don't want you as a ruler. The constant disruptions of civil society will inevitably lead to substantial losses that drain the strength of the rulers until it falls apart. I suspect that Britain was more than happy to be rid of her colonies in the end.
I am against a technology company being compelled to undermine encryption technology so that the law enforcement can go with their usual scope creep from "just for terrorists", to "just for really bad criminals", to "well, maybe tax evasion", to "ok, how about copyright infringement", and finally "because you aren't allowed to keep secrets from us".
I am a lot less worried about government getting their hands on my data than private companies doing the same. Companies are only accountable to their owners, the shareholders, and we have seen often enough how little they care about things like privacy, ethics and even legality, as long as there's a profit to be made. Democratic governments are, at least in principle, accountable to the people. I am sure the huge distrust Americans have in their governments has a lot to do with big business having been able to engineer it that way, because if people started believing that they could get a good government, perhaps the government would start changing things in a way that would take power away from those businesses.
I will never again eat at Burger King in large part because of their tax inversion
Oddly enough, I stopped eating there because of intestinal inversion.
Another odd fact: Your mouth and your anus are directly connected by a rather short tube. Eating at places like Burger King and MacDonalds brings that fact into renewed focus, I think.
Alas, if you want to stay current/work in the IT industry, you better get familiar with Windows 10. This is the next major version, so it is the target platform to develop for.
I use Debian myself for my main usage, but keep a Windows laptop for testing/learning on what real-world uses. Windows 7 was excellent and the "upgrade" to 10 was a sad day indeed. But one has to stay current in the industry trends :-(
I have been a developer for something like 3 decades. I have worked in MVS, MS DOS, Windows (since 2.11), OS/2, all the UNIXes and Linux. I have not used Windows professionally since before 2000, and I have plenty of work. Admittedly, I work more on the backend, but when I need to do GUI, I more and more use Java. Not because it is wonderful, but because it is adequate and very portable. I don't think anybody really needs to live with Windows.
What hardware are they focusing on? Vax11? IBM 360?
Shooting from the hip, but to me a mainframe is not the same as "a huge computer"; I know some people think it is. Mainframes tend to be engineered for reliability more than anything else, as well as for fast i/o; they are usually rather specialised computers in many ways. The OS often seems a bit simplified compared to Linux, Windows or OS/X.
It also often surprises people that many of the hot, new features we are still getting used to started their lives in mainframes: virtual machines is one that springs to mind - IBM released the first version of the VM operating system in 1972, 44 years ago.
As far as I know, the only mainframe architecture still in production is the IBM z Series, which traditionally runs MVS and/or VM. Or DOS (but not the DOS we all know and loathe). There is a mature linux, popularly called zLinux, which is very good, although I felt vaguely disappointed that it is so similar to Linux on all other hardware (that is of course one of the great strengths of Linux, though). There is also an emulator for the zSeries architecture called Hercules, and you can get several distributions of linux to install on it (no license required).
..."destroying the relationship" between advertisers and consumers,...
It actually said that - I had to read it again just to make sure. I'm afraid that horse bolted long ago, shortly after people realised that you can hardly move on the internet for insultingly stupid, wheedling, lying scumbags trying to take money off you for worthless crap. As soon as the first email was sent, we had SPAM; as soon as the first website came online, we had to fight our way through more advertising. Every time a new technology was intrduced, it turned out that the main, or even othe only, purpose was advertising and, more recently, collecting data about us. The relationsship between advertisers and consumers has only ever been the relationship between predator/parasite and prey; if we can destroy that relationship for ever, then the sooner the better. The real victims are not advertisers, but the consumers, who have to keep vigilant to fight off advertising and other scams, and the real businesses out there, who can't reach their customers, because the advertisers have so massively failed to keep their "business" clean.
The entire thing is a joke. The phone is made in China in the same factories and suppliers as other phones. The difference is that their suppliers say "sure, we only use tungsten from Colorado, not from the Congo". And the hipsters fly home happy.
Perhaps - it seems likely that there is a hefty dollop of cynically targeting an audience to whom these issues matter, quite possibly the same people who buy "health food" and follow fad diets. However, it is clear that these issues are increasingly important for people's choices, and if this trend steers business towards sourcing their materials and their production methods more ethically and sustainably, then I am all for it, because it may have the effect of inspiring the less ethical producers to do better.
What I don't understand is this oppressive bitterness which insists that anything and anybody must be equally bitter and cynical. Misery loves company, it seems; but people are not idiotic tree-huggers and hipsters just because they think nature is worth protecting, or because they are able to see a wider connection. Your attitude reminds me of an old Beatles song: "Mean Mr Mustard" (Oops, sorry, my idiotic, tree-hugging, bleeding heart socialist hipster background shines through)
This isn't a new 'problem', as the government would have us believe. There is no sudden urgency, save that on the part of the FBI.
True - but it is still a problem, one way or the other, and we clearly haven't been able to solve it yet. And we never will, unless we are willing to give a little on all sides.
... an actual warrant, and that how the Fourth Amendment ...
We keep getting into these discussions about encryption, privacy and so on, and that is right and good, but I feel we are just walking in circles. I think, when we are down to quoting constitution and sacred principles of human rights, and it still doesn't settle the discussion, we are not going to get there, unless we are willing to think out of the box. IOW, think about how we can find compromises.
The thing is that both sides have very good, valid points. The right to privacy and freedom from surveillance are not something to be easily dismissed, and I think even those in favour of more surveillance apprecite that; but in an age where criminals and terrorists are benefitting enormously from encryption and electronic communication, how do we ensure that the police and security services are able to carry out their legitimate tasks of stopping terrorists and catching criminals? It is all very well to criticise "the evil government" for wanting to snoop on us, but I don't see anybody come up with anything better. If people who understand technology can't think up a way to solve this problem, how can we expect politicians and business leaders to figure it out? Instead of always just shooting down anything that comes along, let's try to contribute with something positive.
...Apple are being a bunch of dicks about...
If I may intercede here - shouldn't we, in the interest of public decency in publishing, stop calling people 'dicks' and instead refer to them as, well, how about 'dickerels'? Hmm, or perhaps 'Richards'?
Is it too much to ask Google to simply come out in favor of privacy of its users?
Don't you think that queston is a bit naive, all considered? Google, as all companies, can only be assumed to be working in the interests of their owners, and even that is an ideal case, as we know from the all to common examples of CEOs lining their own pockets to the loss of their shareholders. Google is not you friend - they don't care about protecting your privacy or freedom, they collect people's data for their own profit; if they are unwilling to share this information, it is because they consider the data an important part of their business model. If sharing the data at some point turns out to be profitable, that is what will happen.
the hospital has paid a 40-bitcoin ransom (about $17,000)
That's about 340 tablets of hospital aspirin or 680 hospital bandaids for those counting at home.
What you're saying seems to imply a really interesting price structure: 340 Aspirin tablets for $17000? Or are we talking about a seriouosly hefty kind of portable computing device called 'Aspirin'?
It's a little disingenuous to blame Germany for it, because Polish mobs were killing the survivors from Auschwitz.
I agree, to some extent. I think your wording highlights a fundamental problem in this kind of debate: people talk about "The Germans", "The Poles" or, indeed, "The Jews", as if they were a uniform mass, all equally responsible for whatever we want to blame them for. The reality is always much more complex than that - responsibility is always personal, individual, and I don't think anybody seriously questions the fact that most Germans were not in favour of the systematic mass extinction campaigns carried out by the Nazis. However, the same applies everywhere - talking about 'Polish Death Camps' may be meant as a shorthand for 'Nazi Death Camps in Poland', but I can easily understand why Polish people feel it is needlessly hurtful.
...all kids end up with distorted ideas of what sex love and relationships are all about, and porn is not to blame...
Why don't you tell us more about what, in your opinion, sex, love and relationships are all about? I think we would all be interested to know. And have the courage to use your real name.
That Lady Gaga tribute to Bowie was absolutely awful.
Well, David Bowie was unique. It wasn't just his style or persona, but his virtuosity; I remember watching him on Top of the Pops, him and his band playing together like a well oiled, classical orchestra of virtuosos, completely without all the electronic aids used by modern stage artists - no miming to a playback tape, no automatic correction of pitch or rhythm, but performed to absolute perfection. Anybody will sound like a fork grating over a dinner plate compared to that.