The backlash is coming, just look at the election of Trump which is the result of over-stressing the "minority" dogmas.
No, the election of Trump WAS the backlash: that was frustrated people lashing out against an establishment, that they feel is stacking the deck against them. What is coming - and is already underway - is the realisation that Trump is just as much part of the establishment, and that trying to cure America's ailments by electing him is like overdosing on laxatives to cure diarrhea. And I don't think the people who keep ranting against PC and equal rights for minorities actually are against treating everbody fairly; they just want to feel that they themselves are being given a fair chance too, but their attention is being directed towards things that sound stupid, so they don't realise that it is the rich and powerful who are the real problem.
Or perhaps men and women find different things fulfilling.
That could be the case - however, with attitudes like the ones detailed in the summary, we are not likely to actually know, because at the core of it there is a refusal to engage with problems by those who believe they benefit from the status quo. This isn't just about women or gender issues either, it is the same kind of attitude the underlies all situations where there is an unwillingness to address problems with prejudice and unjust discrimination. The argument always goes like "They are fundamentally different, everbody is happy as it is,..." - but if that was the case, why do these groups of people feel they are not given a chance? To counter your anecdote, here's mine: my daughter's ambition was to be a metal-worker - not sure what the right term is in English, but perhaps 'tool-smith' will do. She learned to weld - top of the class. She is very good with a lathe and all the other things you need; but she had a lot of difficulty getting apprenticed, and when she found an apprenticeship, she was frozen out and bullied until she was kicked out "because she didn't know how to get along with people" by a manager who wouldn't even start to look into matters. I doubt any male would have been able to tolerate what she did, but then I don't think they would have been exposed to this kind of viciousness. Does it sound like just innocent "natural differences between genders" to you? People like you are blind to the very real problems caused by bias, bullying and discrimination in the workplace, because you just close your eyes and that is enough to make you feel comfortable.
Excel is used heavily in scientific analysis of data.
An extraordinary claim like needs a bit more detail - as well as quotations. Spreadsheets are no doubt useful for quick and dirty ad-hoc calculations, and one can imagine a scientist running a limited data set through one, while deciding on which model to build on a massively parallel super computer - which BTW most likely runs Linux - but spreadsheets are meant to be used primarily by managers and their assistants. I think one big limitation with a spreadsheet is that it is two-dimensional and cannot easily be modified to model a larger number of dimensions; it also sort of sits between specialities: it is like a database, with each sheet being a bit like a table, but you would never replace a database with it. You can perform calculations - even quite complicated ones - but you would never use it for serious number crunching; at the end of the day, your calculations are interpreted, not compiled, and you are running on a desktop computer, not TFLOPS hardware, and many real datasets contain billions of rows.
In fact, even cats don't eat meat exclusively, if by meat we mean muscle tissue. Most predators, if I'm not mistaken, will eat the gut and its contents before they eat muscle, thereby benefitting from whatever half-digested plant material the prey has eaten.
This is yet another technology where there is a clear need for strong regulation, IMO. Gene manipulation is a technology that has huge potential implications, both good and bad; it can - and probably will in the future - be used to improve crop yields and add disease resistance, and it is of course already being tried out in gene therapies for a number of serious conditions. We could produce many important chemicals - drugs and other - in a cheap and easy way by modifying a suitable micro organism. But as Monsanto and others have demonstrated, companies and individuals driven by short-sighted greed can potentially cause enormous harm, not the least of which is the damage to public trust in this technology. Maybe this is too radical, but I am probably in favour on a complete ban on the commercial exploitation on gene editing technology until we have a set of strong and clear, global regulations in place; all research into this should be publicly funded and published in open access journals.
The current estimates are that the inland ice will take millennia to melt, so you will have to be patient. Same goes for the arctic tundras - there will be a long time in which underground permafrost is melting, making the ground unstable, swampy etc. I take it you've never actually been to the high arctic? It does in fact get surprisingly warm in many areas during the summer, at which time you will experience the main feature of tundra + warm temperatures: insects in their hundreds of billions, all want to get to know you very intemately. Put in another way: if you walk around with your mouth open, you'll end up putting on weight. I don't know about you, but I would probably not want to live there.
Firstly, she's a she. Secondly, it's not her chosen profession - she was allotted that cabinet role, and could easily be doing education or transport in the next reshuffle. Thirdly, if she thinks banning encryption does anything to stop criminals who, by definition, do things illegally, I'd suggest she's awful at her job.
I agree that she, like so many of Tories, is strangely unsuited for her job - it goes with the class: they feel they are entitled to rule, and they have the sort of skillset that goes with hobnobbing amongst their peer group of upper class people, but are poorly equipped when it comes to understanding the practicalities of the life of normal, skilled workers, who depend for their income on being able to do real work. And she clearly hasn't got much of a clue about IT, the internet, encryption or anything like that.
However, I think you misunderstand the way legislators work; "banning encryption", silly as the notion is, would not be meant to ensure that nobody uses encryption anymore. The purpose with legislation is to give law enforcement and the courts the tools they need - a police officer cannot legally arrest people unless the law says so, and the judge cannot punish a person, unless there is a law that says a crime was committed. So, if a person used encryption, assuming this law was passed, they could be arrested and punished - saying things like "it wouldn't work because criminals don't obey the law" simply misses the point.
The eerie irony of this is that the companies using contractors are often paying a higher hourly rate than they would for a permanent employee at the same time as the contractor himself is paid less than the normal wage. I think what is needed is something like a minimum wage scheme, graded after the profession - something like the average pay for that category minus a small percentage. Yes, I do realise it would put many contracting agencies out of business - that is sort of the point.
Well, to defends Doyle (and Holmes), at that time scientifically based atheism was at best seen as an oddity or excentricity, since everybody "knew" that there was a God and that "there is more than meets the eye". This kind of worldview is still around, but fortunately seems to be on decline (which is one reason why fundamentalists from all religions feel they are under pressure and need to take up arms). We simply cannot judge Sherlock Homes or Doyle on their scientific outlook as compared to modern standars - for the time, he was probably amazingly bold.
The way all appliances seem to be moving towards running Android these days, I will probably be able to pay in the supermatket with my 50" Samsung TV soon.
Dam the EU is so nice. Over time cap / better workers rights and healthcare not tied to jobs.
Somewhat startlingly, these are among the very reasons that some wanted UK to leave EU. They call it "taking back control", but things like this are what has irked a lot of the anti-Europeans in the Conservative party.
Whether it is right to make scientific articles, published by commercial journals, freely available - and on the other hand whether it is right to hamper the freedom of scientific research by making the articles prohibitively expensive - is perhaps open to discussion, although I personally think all scientific research should be freely accessible. But it is clear from the popularity of sites such as this, that there is a huge desire (as well as a need) for open access to research. Unless the commercial scientific journals can somehow address these issues and give people what they want, they won't be sustainable in the long term; and I can't see how they can do that.
I thought "climate change" was supposed to cause worldwide droughts? If you can imagine just any fear you want as being the result of "climate change", then the entire concept becomes meaningless.
The term "climate change" is a kind of short-hand, which refers to the changes that are caused by human activities on top of natural climate variation. The one thing that more than anything else defines man-made climate change is the increased energy retention in the atmosphere, that we can measure as an increase in the average temperature across the whole planet and smoothed out over a relatively long period of time, which is above what we would have expected to find from natural causes. But locally, on a day to day basis, there will be big variations in temperature, and secondarily in air pressure, wind speed, humidity, precipitation etc - the tendency is to make these variations stronger, so droughts may become worse, rainfall may become heavier, storms more violent, heatwaves hotter and more frequent, and yes, you will in places see much more snow and more severe cold snaps.
There is an experiment that I think most will have seen in school at some point, which explains a lot about this: You take a large glass tank with water, place a Bunsen burner under it, and drop a crystal of some water soluble colour over the flame; what you see is the colour rising up, then curling back down - ie turbulence. If you measure the temperature in different places, you will probably get high readings in the column over the flame, but low readings in an area around the flame, where colder water is being sucked in - and high readings near the top edges as well; this also happens to our atmosphere: the flame is hot near equator, the air rises and blows up to the polar regions, where it is sucked down, because cold air is suck in near the ground at the equator. One of the major differences is that the atmosphere is a very thin layer: 10 miles deep, spread oout over a circumference of 25000 miles, which would correspond to the glass tank in your school laboratory being 10 cm high and 250 m wide, which means that any turbulence becomes much more localised, which translates into the much more chaotic system that is our weather.
First, thank you for your well reasoned response - there are too few people on/. who even try.
But the most likely scenario is that if we double the lifespan of humans, we'll be spending a lot of time at the elderly end of our life phase.
I think you are too pessimistic. If we compare with some of the few large animals that live longer than us, I think what we see is that they have a longer "middle-age", so they live as healthy adults for a long time. In nature you don't survive long if you are frail and decrepit. And I agree with your sentiment - I don't think anybody would want to endure many decades of doddering senility, but from what I read, there is a lot of research into things like organ replacement (by growing new organs from a person's own stemcells), and they are making progress across the board - things like cartilage to repair worn out joints, new hearts, kidneys, livers, panreases etc - even lung tissue. It is early days still, but the challenges seem to be surmountable, so I am optimistic. The bigger challenge is probably going to be to master our health on a more holistic level, eg. understanding the details in how our immune system work and is regulated, and how we can fine tune it and stop it from occasionally attacking legitimate body cells.
But, given the population and the cost of geriatric medicine to the economy, is extending human life that much of a good idea?
The point is not to extend the time you hang around being in poor health, but to give people a longer, healthy (and productive) life. There are reasons to believe that one of the key reasons for our species' success was the fact that we started having grandparents about 30K years ago: https://www.theguardian.com/sc... - grandparents not only give those of childbearing age more freedom to gather food etc, they were probably crucial in establishing bonds with other tribes, thus providing an important precondition for a larger society and eventually civilisation. Now-a-days, I think living healthy lives for longer has obvious bebefits - caring for a frail, elderly population is expensive for any society, but taking the frailty out of the equation not only means a great cost saving, it also adds years in which people contribute to society.
What do you mean? A president who every morning at 3AM blurts out un-thought-through policy statements on Twitter, that he hasn't discussed with his advisors or even informed his staff about - are you saying there something wrong with that?/s
Modern sensibilities? By not giving in to people with a mental disorder and not allowing them to enter the army, have their operations paid for by tax money instead of trying to fix their brain issue?
Ah, yes, well, since you bring it up, how about the Commander in Chief, who is clearly severaly disturbed himself? If we are supposed to let him "lead" us, surely we can be more tolerant of people with significantly smaller problems too?
You explanation is too simplistic - political conflicts are never that straight forward. There is always culpability on both sides, and no one participant in a conflict ever tell an unbiased story; and when you pick a side, you are a participant, even if it is only in an infinitesimally small way - it certainly skews your opinions.
They have been Muslims for centuries and before the formation of the PRC were semi autonomous.
That is probably not entirely true - or not as simple as you put it; check Wikipedia for an outline of their history.
However they are seen as a threat as they are not part of the Han ethnic group that the current chinese government comes from.
Much of the conflict between the Uyghurs and the Chinese state goes back at least to the Qing Dynasty, so the modern PRC inherited an age-old conflict - I think it is disingenious to try to paint it as simply a about racism. I don't recognise any of the sources quoted in the OP, so how can I know that they are depicting the situation truthfully? What, if anything, do the Chinese state media have to say? When you don't have access to known, trustworthy sources, you have to weigh up what all sides say and try to balance your opinion that way; at least if you want to actually know the truth and aren't just looking to feed your grudges.
That's certainly a viewpoint - but why? Isn't solving a problem like our dependency on fossil fuels important enough that we should be pragmatic about it? As Terry Pratchett once said (different context, though): "I'd gnaw the arse of a dead mole, if I thought it would help".
The linked article (by assuming that it is accurate, because many people here are saying that it is very misleading) talks about various issues which are certainly top-secret like names/addresses of people in witness protection/considered by police as classified or detailed information about military vehicles.
I think you are using the term 'top-secret' in a different meaning than mine (which is not to imply that mine is right) - top-secret is usually reserved for state secrets, not for information like this, however important it may be for the individuals. Information about individuals under witness protection doesn't have the potential to compromise the security of the state, normally.
In any case, mailing a whole database is quite straightforward...
The point I was trying to get across was that almost any database you can think of is likely to be big - several GB, certainly if it contains large numbers of images. Mailing a whole database of that size is not something you would do by mistake - you would have plenty of opportunity to stop it, since the sending would take a while, I'd think. Plus, of course, almost any mail server sets a fairly low limit on the size of attachments.
... people who are taking time off, or have given up looking for work, or work at home to look after their family, don't count as part of the workforce
This is quoted from the article itself, which by the way is full of accusations of lying and senationalism. The way I read it, the statisticians don't include people who, for some reason choose not to pursue employment - how is that supposed to be wrong? Am I excluded from, say, football, because I choose not to watch it? This is just sensationalism.
One of the multiple questions coming to my mind after reading all this is: why are so different types of top-level secret information of a country being stored in the same database?
I'd say that chances are that they were not considered top-secret. Data that allows you to identify a person and find their address etc are generally not, even if it important to to the individual that the data are kept secret. Top-secret normally means that secrecy is important for the security of the nation.
Another question worht asking is: how can you fit an entire database into an email? If it contains photos of several million people, it is going to be large. It doesn't sound plausible to me.
Injecting something under the skin seems a lot less temporary than a henna-type tattoo that you could (eventually) wash off.
I'm not all that worried about that aspect of it - we have been chipmarking pets and other animals for a long time, and we know it is very safe. It has a lot of advantages in terms of identification (although it is also potentially something that can be forged). Applications like finance and healthcare spring to mind, as well as personalising your mobile and other gadgets so they only work if the right person hold them. There's two questions, though: would people in general want ot be easily identifiable? And in order to really benefit from this sort of thing, we need a central register of all participants - who should manage this register?
As a practical example, take Denmark, where they have had such a system for a very long time (not the implant, the register): the CPR (Central Person Register). The upside is that it is very easy for any doctor or hospital to find your complete health record, and the social services have access to the same system, so they can, in principle, provide the best possible help to each individual (although in practice it rarely work that well, not least because social services are always over-committed and under-funded). There are downsides as well: it is extremely easy for any creditor to find you, which means that creditors can be - and invariably are - very heavy-handed, because they don't feel they need to be nice. If debtors can disappear out of sight, the creditors will be more motivated to try to keep them on their side.
I think when "thousands" is being bandied around, it probably just means "I think it is a lot". I am sure there has been at least some research into this, and in my view it is definitely something worth taking into account when planning where to place windfarms, so we don't place them exactly where loads of vulnerable, migratory birds have their customary flight path - this is what makes this idea so attractive, because it makes it possible to choose sites with much more flexibility.
I suspect the issue with birds may seem like a very small problem to most people - after all, we see them swarming in by the 10- to 100 thousands in many cases, but the fact of the matter is that in many cases that may represent most or even all of the world's population of some migratory species. And it is worth protecting them - not simply for romantic reasons, either, I think. We have already in the past eradicated species from certain environments with unforeseen consequences - like getting rid of a top predator and then finding that you are overrun by a species you didn't know was their main prey, which now turns out to be a far bigger problem. At the very least we should learn enough to not do something stupid based on a lazy lack of interest.
Slashdot Mirror
The backlash is coming, just look at the election of Trump which is the result of over-stressing the "minority" dogmas.
No, the election of Trump WAS the backlash: that was frustrated people lashing out against an establishment, that they feel is stacking the deck against them. What is coming - and is already underway - is the realisation that Trump is just as much part of the establishment, and that trying to cure America's ailments by electing him is like overdosing on laxatives to cure diarrhea. And I don't think the people who keep ranting against PC and equal rights for minorities actually are against treating everbody fairly; they just want to feel that they themselves are being given a fair chance too, but their attention is being directed towards things that sound stupid, so they don't realise that it is the rich and powerful who are the real problem.
Or perhaps men and women find different things fulfilling.
That could be the case - however, with attitudes like the ones detailed in the summary, we are not likely to actually know, because at the core of it there is a refusal to engage with problems by those who believe they benefit from the status quo. This isn't just about women or gender issues either, it is the same kind of attitude the underlies all situations where there is an unwillingness to address problems with prejudice and unjust discrimination. The argument always goes like "They are fundamentally different, everbody is happy as it is, ..." - but if that was the case, why do these groups of people feel they are not given a chance? To counter your anecdote, here's mine: my daughter's ambition was to be a metal-worker - not sure what the right term is in English, but perhaps 'tool-smith' will do. She learned to weld - top of the class. She is very good with a lathe and all the other things you need; but she had a lot of difficulty getting apprenticed, and when she found an apprenticeship, she was frozen out and bullied until she was kicked out "because she didn't know how to get along with people" by a manager who wouldn't even start to look into matters. I doubt any male would have been able to tolerate what she did, but then I don't think they would have been exposed to this kind of viciousness. Does it sound like just innocent "natural differences between genders" to you? People like you are blind to the very real problems caused by bias, bullying and discrimination in the workplace, because you just close your eyes and that is enough to make you feel comfortable.
Excel is used heavily in scientific analysis of data.
An extraordinary claim like needs a bit more detail - as well as quotations. Spreadsheets are no doubt useful for quick and dirty ad-hoc calculations, and one can imagine a scientist running a limited data set through one, while deciding on which model to build on a massively parallel super computer - which BTW most likely runs Linux - but spreadsheets are meant to be used primarily by managers and their assistants. I think one big limitation with a spreadsheet is that it is two-dimensional and cannot easily be modified to model a larger number of dimensions; it also sort of sits between specialities: it is like a database, with each sheet being a bit like a table, but you would never replace a database with it. You can perform calculations - even quite complicated ones - but you would never use it for serious number crunching; at the end of the day, your calculations are interpreted, not compiled, and you are running on a desktop computer, not TFLOPS hardware, and many real datasets contain billions of rows.
In fact, even cats don't eat meat exclusively, if by meat we mean muscle tissue. Most predators, if I'm not mistaken, will eat the gut and its contents before they eat muscle, thereby benefitting from whatever half-digested plant material the prey has eaten.
Mechanically recovered head meat, the kind of stuff that only KFC would try to feed you out of one of their buckets.
Well, they do say as much in their current advert here in UK: "The Chicken, the WHOLE chicken, and nothing but the chicken".
This is yet another technology where there is a clear need for strong regulation, IMO. Gene manipulation is a technology that has huge potential implications, both good and bad; it can - and probably will in the future - be used to improve crop yields and add disease resistance, and it is of course already being tried out in gene therapies for a number of serious conditions. We could produce many important chemicals - drugs and other - in a cheap and easy way by modifying a suitable micro organism. But as Monsanto and others have demonstrated, companies and individuals driven by short-sighted greed can potentially cause enormous harm, not the least of which is the damage to public trust in this technology. Maybe this is too radical, but I am probably in favour on a complete ban on the commercial exploitation on gene editing technology until we have a set of strong and clear, global regulations in place; all research into this should be publicly funded and published in open access journals.
The current estimates are that the inland ice will take millennia to melt, so you will have to be patient. Same goes for the arctic tundras - there will be a long time in which underground permafrost is melting, making the ground unstable, swampy etc. I take it you've never actually been to the high arctic? It does in fact get surprisingly warm in many areas during the summer, at which time you will experience the main feature of tundra + warm temperatures: insects in their hundreds of billions, all want to get to know you very intemately. Put in another way: if you walk around with your mouth open, you'll end up putting on weight. I don't know about you, but I would probably not want to live there.
Firstly, she's a she. Secondly, it's not her chosen profession - she was allotted that cabinet role, and could easily be doing education or transport in the next reshuffle. Thirdly, if she thinks banning encryption does anything to stop criminals who, by definition, do things illegally, I'd suggest she's awful at her job.
I agree that she, like so many of Tories, is strangely unsuited for her job - it goes with the class: they feel they are entitled to rule, and they have the sort of skillset that goes with hobnobbing amongst their peer group of upper class people, but are poorly equipped when it comes to understanding the practicalities of the life of normal, skilled workers, who depend for their income on being able to do real work. And she clearly hasn't got much of a clue about IT, the internet, encryption or anything like that.
However, I think you misunderstand the way legislators work; "banning encryption", silly as the notion is, would not be meant to ensure that nobody uses encryption anymore. The purpose with legislation is to give law enforcement and the courts the tools they need - a police officer cannot legally arrest people unless the law says so, and the judge cannot punish a person, unless there is a law that says a crime was committed. So, if a person used encryption, assuming this law was passed, they could be arrested and punished - saying things like "it wouldn't work because criminals don't obey the law" simply misses the point.
The eerie irony of this is that the companies using contractors are often paying a higher hourly rate than they would for a permanent employee at the same time as the contractor himself is paid less than the normal wage. I think what is needed is something like a minimum wage scheme, graded after the profession - something like the average pay for that category minus a small percentage. Yes, I do realise it would put many contracting agencies out of business - that is sort of the point.
Well, to defends Doyle (and Holmes), at that time scientifically based atheism was at best seen as an oddity or excentricity, since everybody "knew" that there was a God and that "there is more than meets the eye". This kind of worldview is still around, but fortunately seems to be on decline (which is one reason why fundamentalists from all religions feel they are under pressure and need to take up arms). We simply cannot judge Sherlock Homes or Doyle on their scientific outlook as compared to modern standars - for the time, he was probably amazingly bold.
The way all appliances seem to be moving towards running Android these days, I will probably be able to pay in the supermatket with my 50" Samsung TV soon.
Dam the EU is so nice. Over time cap / better workers rights and healthcare not tied to jobs.
Somewhat startlingly, these are among the very reasons that some wanted UK to leave EU. They call it "taking back control", but things like this are what has irked a lot of the anti-Europeans in the Conservative party.
Whether it is right to make scientific articles, published by commercial journals, freely available - and on the other hand whether it is right to hamper the freedom of scientific research by making the articles prohibitively expensive - is perhaps open to discussion, although I personally think all scientific research should be freely accessible. But it is clear from the popularity of sites such as this, that there is a huge desire (as well as a need) for open access to research. Unless the commercial scientific journals can somehow address these issues and give people what they want, they won't be sustainable in the long term; and I can't see how they can do that.
I thought "climate change" was supposed to cause worldwide droughts? If you can imagine just any fear you want as being the result of "climate change", then the entire concept becomes meaningless.
The term "climate change" is a kind of short-hand, which refers to the changes that are caused by human activities on top of natural climate variation. The one thing that more than anything else defines man-made climate change is the increased energy retention in the atmosphere, that we can measure as an increase in the average temperature across the whole planet and smoothed out over a relatively long period of time, which is above what we would have expected to find from natural causes. But locally, on a day to day basis, there will be big variations in temperature, and secondarily in air pressure, wind speed, humidity, precipitation etc - the tendency is to make these variations stronger, so droughts may become worse, rainfall may become heavier, storms more violent, heatwaves hotter and more frequent, and yes, you will in places see much more snow and more severe cold snaps.
There is an experiment that I think most will have seen in school at some point, which explains a lot about this: You take a large glass tank with water, place a Bunsen burner under it, and drop a crystal of some water soluble colour over the flame; what you see is the colour rising up, then curling back down - ie turbulence. If you measure the temperature in different places, you will probably get high readings in the column over the flame, but low readings in an area around the flame, where colder water is being sucked in - and high readings near the top edges as well; this also happens to our atmosphere: the flame is hot near equator, the air rises and blows up to the polar regions, where it is sucked down, because cold air is suck in near the ground at the equator. One of the major differences is that the atmosphere is a very thin layer: 10 miles deep, spread oout over a circumference of 25000 miles, which would correspond to the glass tank in your school laboratory being 10 cm high and 250 m wide, which means that any turbulence becomes much more localised, which translates into the much more chaotic system that is our weather.
First, thank you for your well reasoned response - there are too few people on /. who even try.
But the most likely scenario is that if we double the lifespan of humans, we'll be spending a lot of time at the elderly end of our life phase.
I think you are too pessimistic. If we compare with some of the few large animals that live longer than us, I think what we see is that they have a longer "middle-age", so they live as healthy adults for a long time. In nature you don't survive long if you are frail and decrepit. And I agree with your sentiment - I don't think anybody would want to endure many decades of doddering senility, but from what I read, there is a lot of research into things like organ replacement (by growing new organs from a person's own stemcells), and they are making progress across the board - things like cartilage to repair worn out joints, new hearts, kidneys, livers, panreases etc - even lung tissue. It is early days still, but the challenges seem to be surmountable, so I am optimistic. The bigger challenge is probably going to be to master our health on a more holistic level, eg. understanding the details in how our immune system work and is regulated, and how we can fine tune it and stop it from occasionally attacking legitimate body cells.
But, given the population and the cost of geriatric medicine to the economy, is extending human life that much of a good idea?
The point is not to extend the time you hang around being in poor health, but to give people a longer, healthy (and productive) life. There are reasons to believe that one of the key reasons for our species' success was the fact that we started having grandparents about 30K years ago: https://www.theguardian.com/sc... - grandparents not only give those of childbearing age more freedom to gather food etc, they were probably crucial in establishing bonds with other tribes, thus providing an important precondition for a larger society and eventually civilisation. Now-a-days, I think living healthy lives for longer has obvious bebefits - caring for a frail, elderly population is expensive for any society, but taking the frailty out of the equation not only means a great cost saving, it also adds years in which people contribute to society.
Are we sure he's sane?
What do you mean? A president who every morning at 3AM blurts out un-thought-through policy statements on Twitter, that he hasn't discussed with his advisors or even informed his staff about - are you saying there something wrong with that? /s
Modern sensibilities? By not giving in to people with a mental disorder and not allowing them to enter the army, have their operations paid for by tax money instead of trying to fix their brain issue?
Ah, yes, well, since you bring it up, how about the Commander in Chief, who is clearly severaly disturbed himself? If we are supposed to let him "lead" us, surely we can be more tolerant of people with significantly smaller problems too?
You explanation is too simplistic - political conflicts are never that straight forward. There is always culpability on both sides, and no one participant in a conflict ever tell an unbiased story; and when you pick a side, you are a participant, even if it is only in an infinitesimally small way - it certainly skews your opinions.
They have been Muslims for centuries and before the formation of the PRC were semi autonomous.
That is probably not entirely true - or not as simple as you put it; check Wikipedia for an outline of their history.
However they are seen as a threat as they are not part of the Han ethnic group that the current chinese government comes from.
Much of the conflict between the Uyghurs and the Chinese state goes back at least to the Qing Dynasty, so the modern PRC inherited an age-old conflict - I think it is disingenious to try to paint it as simply a about racism. I don't recognise any of the sources quoted in the OP, so how can I know that they are depicting the situation truthfully? What, if anything, do the Chinese state media have to say? When you don't have access to known, trustworthy sources, you have to weigh up what all sides say and try to balance your opinion that way; at least if you want to actually know the truth and aren't just looking to feed your grudges.
May Silicon Valley burn in hell.
That's certainly a viewpoint - but why? Isn't solving a problem like our dependency on fossil fuels important enough that we should be pragmatic about it? As Terry Pratchett once said (different context, though): "I'd gnaw the arse of a dead mole, if I thought it would help".
The linked article (by assuming that it is accurate, because many people here are saying that it is very misleading) talks about various issues which are certainly top-secret like names/addresses of people in witness protection/considered by police as classified or detailed information about military vehicles.
I think you are using the term 'top-secret' in a different meaning than mine (which is not to imply that mine is right) - top-secret is usually reserved for state secrets, not for information like this, however important it may be for the individuals. Information about individuals under witness protection doesn't have the potential to compromise the security of the state, normally.
In any case, mailing a whole database is quite straightforward...
The point I was trying to get across was that almost any database you can think of is likely to be big - several GB, certainly if it contains large numbers of images. Mailing a whole database of that size is not something you would do by mistake - you would have plenty of opportunity to stop it, since the sending would take a while, I'd think. Plus, of course, almost any mail server sets a fairly low limit on the size of attachments.
... people who are taking time off, or have given up looking for work, or work at home to look after their family, don't count as part of the workforce
This is quoted from the article itself, which by the way is full of accusations of lying and senationalism. The way I read it, the statisticians don't include people who, for some reason choose not to pursue employment - how is that supposed to be wrong? Am I excluded from, say, football, because I choose not to watch it? This is just sensationalism.
One of the multiple questions coming to my mind after reading all this is: why are so different types of top-level secret information of a country being stored in the same database?
I'd say that chances are that they were not considered top-secret. Data that allows you to identify a person and find their address etc are generally not, even if it important to to the individual that the data are kept secret. Top-secret normally means that secrecy is important for the security of the nation.
Another question worht asking is: how can you fit an entire database into an email? If it contains photos of several million people, it is going to be large. It doesn't sound plausible to me.
Injecting something under the skin seems a lot less temporary than a henna-type tattoo that you could (eventually) wash off.
I'm not all that worried about that aspect of it - we have been chipmarking pets and other animals for a long time, and we know it is very safe. It has a lot of advantages in terms of identification (although it is also potentially something that can be forged). Applications like finance and healthcare spring to mind, as well as personalising your mobile and other gadgets so they only work if the right person hold them. There's two questions, though: would people in general want ot be easily identifiable? And in order to really benefit from this sort of thing, we need a central register of all participants - who should manage this register?
As a practical example, take Denmark, where they have had such a system for a very long time (not the implant, the register): the CPR (Central Person Register). The upside is that it is very easy for any doctor or hospital to find your complete health record, and the social services have access to the same system, so they can, in principle, provide the best possible help to each individual (although in practice it rarely work that well, not least because social services are always over-committed and under-funded). There are downsides as well: it is extremely easy for any creditor to find you, which means that creditors can be - and invariably are - very heavy-handed, because they don't feel they need to be nice. If debtors can disappear out of sight, the creditors will be more motivated to try to keep them on their side.
I think when "thousands" is being bandied around, it probably just means "I think it is a lot". I am sure there has been at least some research into this, and in my view it is definitely something worth taking into account when planning where to place windfarms, so we don't place them exactly where loads of vulnerable, migratory birds have their customary flight path - this is what makes this idea so attractive, because it makes it possible to choose sites with much more flexibility.
I suspect the issue with birds may seem like a very small problem to most people - after all, we see them swarming in by the 10- to 100 thousands in many cases, but the fact of the matter is that in many cases that may represent most or even all of the world's population of some migratory species. And it is worth protecting them - not simply for romantic reasons, either, I think. We have already in the past eradicated species from certain environments with unforeseen consequences - like getting rid of a top predator and then finding that you are overrun by a species you didn't know was their main prey, which now turns out to be a far bigger problem. At the very least we should learn enough to not do something stupid based on a lazy lack of interest.