I can't see where the article says that these companies are 'guilty' - it only really says they play a disproportionately large role in the production of CO2, which isn't surprising at all; it is what we would expect. It points out where we can most effectively concentrate our efforts, if we want to curb emissions: cut back on the production and use of fossil fuels. Again this is no surprise at all. Alas, neither is the reaction of people like you, who immediately work themselves into a frenzy instead of thinking through implications: we can actually shift away fossil fuels with relative ease, and we are already doing so (which is why things like solar panels and electric cars are growing in popularity). So, calm down, it is going to be OK.
Apart from that, if we are to talk about guilt, I think the producers of fossil fuels and people like you do carry a large part of the responsibility for why we aren't already much further along in replacing fossil fuels with something sustainable. The big oil and coal producers are major funders of obfuscation, producing cherry-picked 'research', funding anti-environmentalist campaigns etc etc, and you just go along with it, although I can't quite figure out what your motivation is. Fear? Spite? Whatever it is, you are part of a dying breed, and that is something the rest of us should be grateful for. If you look closely, you can see that at least some producers of fossil fuels know the time has come to change their face and start pretending that they have all along been in favour of a much greener world, honest.
I wouldn't buy it for any price, really. It isn't the functionality or the hardware, but the fact that you are tied into only ever using Apple's app store etc etc - plus the fact that you have to actually BUY the development tools and learn yet another languages, when the Android comes without the same degree of tie-in, plus you can download the whole development kit for free and it is Java, a language that actually has applications outside the phone. In a way, it isn't the iPhone that I don't want, it is Apple.
A bit like the Pythia at the temple of Apollo, who would generally speak gibberish, that her priests would then interpret. I don't know if it is funny, but perhaps it will be if we live long enough. But we are only about half a year into his precidency, and already Honey Monster is rushing towards a military confrontation with the beached whale in North Korea. I mean, think about that; the Chinese have since the Korea War, kept NK as a buffer between themselves and America's vassal state in the south, and they are increasingly assertive about their territorial aspirations. Will they just sit quietly by while Trump sends troops into NK, provoking them to use whatever nuclear weapons they have and escalating from there? Hardly - I doubt they are all that keen on Kim's perverse regime, but they definitely don't want American expansion in the region, and they do have an alliance with NK, which gives them a legitimate excuse to join the war. North Korea may be easy enough to flatten, but China isn't. The US may have enough weaponry to convert China to a slag heap, but not before they have sent their own missiles on the way - and they do have enough of those, without a doubt.
While I applaud such measures [as a techno-nerd one of the most infuriating aspects of the economy for me is the enforced obsolescence] I cannot help but wonder - since the whole planet agrees on the basic principles of free market capitalism, which inevitably result in forced obsolescence and a race to the bottom ["best product for the most affordable price' is the same as "worst product for the highest possible price"] why do we then spend absolutely enormous amount of time, money and effort to STOP the system going to where it goes naturally based on its premises.
Hear! Hear! This sort of crap has been going on for far too long - there seems to be, maybe not an actual conspiracy, but something that looks a lot like a universal acceptance that this is the way to make business, from the invention of the razor with disposable blades onwards. However, there is also a strong and possibly growing trend the opposite way, of people tinkering and quite often re-discovering the "old ways": learning how to hone and use a straight razor, or learning woodworking without electric tools etc; and in the process discovering how little actual value is added by the supposedly indispensable, modern tools. Linux, FOSS and RaspberryPi are other examples of the same: maybe people are sick of being powerless and dependent on buying shitty products when it is so obvious that they are being defrauded, in effect.
Plus, of course, they do have at leas one more natural resource in abundance: sunshine. They could export electricity, especially when we finally work out how to store excess power efficiently. BTW - it isn't as if the Arabic Peninsula has no other, natural resources, such as minerals, but oil is just very abundant, very easy to extract and in huge demand.
Am I right in reading this as saying that the government of the US wants to know who voted for what? I'm asking because I can't quite believe that I am reading this. Wasn't voting in secret supposed to be one of the cornerstones of democracy? If somebody, in government or elsewhere can subsequentially find out how individuals voted, how can we guarantee that there aren't voters who are being intimidated into voting the "right" way? Because President Trustworthy promises?
Show your face? Courage is signing up on/.? Fuck off, you snobbish cunt.
Snobbish? Oh, you mean, because I use polysyllabic words? That is because of something that happened to me when I was a child: education. And no, it doesn't take a lot of courage to sign up on/. - but apparently more than what some have.
The free market interprets government interference as damage and routes around it.
This is little more than religious dogma. In the real world, businesses accept sensible rules imposed by the government, because they know everybody will have the same standards to follow. In quite a lot of cases such rules are considered as beneficial because they even out the playing field for everybody. When there are no rules, you can't stop cheaters, and cheating by a few earns the whole market a bad reputation, thus hurting everybody's business.
A load of hogwash, I think. Anyway, what can the US do, in real terms? I don't think most European leaders would let America dictate how tax regulations are enforced; expecially since several of them express open contempt for the Donald. You know, if American companies don't want to comply with EU regulations, they can withdraw from that market - nobody's forcing them to stay, as far as I can see. European, Chinese and Indian companies would be happy to see that happen. You have to comply with the rules where you do your business - European companies trading in the US also have to follow US rules - what is so hard to understand about that?
Why would anyone want to keep that address anyway? I would think it would cause all sorts of problems with people assuming that it was an unmonitored account. I don't have a lot of sympathy.
No, I don't expect you do. It seems to be a common misconception here that it is somehow 'tough' to be uncaring and express you contempt for the plight of others. The fact that you haven't got the courage to show your face, but post as an AC, suggests that you are not really all that tough.
But back to the question: If you have 20 years' worth of important contacts, who have your email address, then you have plenty of good reasons for not wanting to change that address. Figuring out who has your address and who is important is very hard work, which you would know if you had ever had to do it. and getting everybody to change the contact details they have for you is even worse. Should he have chosen a better name back then? Perhaps - but he didn't and it has worked for 20 years, so what is your point actually? His ISP could let him continue using this address without breaking into a sweat, and it is not actually their business interfering in what kind of imagine their customers want to impress on their contacts - they are in the wrong, simply.
First find out if having childlike sex dolls are a stepping stone to abusing real children, or if they are a good substitute so that less children are abused. Depending on the answer, either allow or ban them.
How would you go about figuring that out? And also, I don't think it addresses the real problem of what to do about pedophilia and the immense harm it causes. The whole issue of sex in relation to children is a highly contentious issue, to the extent that there still are many unanswered questions - and even some un-asked ones too.
Just to get it out of the way, let me clarify my own position: I think it is clear that adults involving children in sex is immensely harmful, and in my opinion pedophiles are dangerous individuals that any society must find a way to deal with. I'm not saying that we have to lock them up, but we do have a serious problem that needs to be solved. I also realise that these are opinions and that I can't claim to know any solutions.
What we do know for a fact is that there are many children that have been severely harmed by sexual abuse, and that there are pedophile predators lurking around on the internet, organising a regular trade in the vilest depravities. Even if we disregard the harm done to their victims (and how can we?), there is a huge cost to society in the form of mental (and sometimes physical) disability, crime, substance abuse etc as a consequence of these crimes.
Amongst the many unanswered questions are for example: Why (or by which mechanism) does sexual abuse of a child harm the child? It may appear to be obvious - it sort of lies in the term 'abuse', but that really is a circular argument: it is called abuse because it is harmful. It is well known, that children do, to some extent, enjoy sexual stimulation as such: some discover masturbation as early as the age of five - so where does the harm come in? Is it because an adult, who should protect the child, violates the fundamental trust a child has? Is it because of the adult's strong need for secrecy and the consequent oppression and use of threats? Something else? I haven't come across any professional discussion of this so far.
Another problem we don't quite understand is: why do some people become pedophile? I don't buy the idea, that this is simply their nature - there is no 'biological' argument for this being the case. Compare with homosexuality: The function of sexual lust is to motivate people to procreate and produce children. Sex partners of the same gender can be seen as a side effect - a convenient way to follow your instinct, when there is no partner of the opposite sex available. It may also have benefits within a group by strengthening ties in for example a group of hunters. Evolution will tend to 'allow' some degree of homosexuality in the species.
No such argument exists for pedophilia: Harming a child goes against our natural instincts - evolution has ensured that parents want to protect their children, and by extension the children of others in their group. A pedophile has to overcome the imperative of this strong, natural instinct, and it is very hard to seriously consider the argument, that having sex with a child is somehow likely to be more convenient than finding an adult partner. And even if you could, it still seems clear that it is un-adaptive in terms of evolution, so natural selection should tend to weed it out.
There is a lot of woolly thinking around what it takes to succeed. The ones that have achieved spectacular success will, not surprisingly, point to things like their amazing talent, high intelligence, incredible determination, ability to focus 100% 24/7 and so on; it is, however, mostly unfounded. There have been studies (this year, but I don't have a link) showing that what actually makes the difference, is mostly luck: you can have all the qualities and talent, but you have to be in the right place at the right time, and that is mostly down to lucky circumstances outside your own control. You may have been born with very high intelligence, but unless you go to a good school, it won't be developed in the best way - you find school far too easy, and become lazy, you find your school mates uninteresting, and become a loner without social skills. Or you may go to university, get top grades, but because you come from a poor background, you don't fit into the social network of those from a richer background, and therefore don't go directly into a top-level job. To succeed in business, you have to not just be talented and intelligent, you also need to have this fundamental feeling of entitlement, that you only get if you grew up as part of the ruling elite.
So, perhaps if you were lucky enough in your life, you find it rewarding to work hard, and therefore always want to work. You probably had the privilege to choose your favourite line of work, you had a safety net in your family, so you could be bold in your ventures, and you could make several attempts, if you failed. And of course, today, with an always-on environment, you can be at work on the beach or anywhere you like, so you can claim to work 20 hours a day, really. Compare this to the more normal situation, where you work because you have to, in any job that might be within your reach, and you get at most one chance to set up a successful business, because if you fail, you will be so broke that you have no second chance. In that situation, why would you work harder than you must? For most of us, if you dig a hole in record time, all you get is a bigger shovel, so you can work harder.
For a country that ostensibly wants to be the preeminent world power, they sure can be dumb. Who would fall for that thing in the first place?
It is called being willing to take a risk; a lot of the things we now consider obvious parts of everyday life, will have been considered frivolous, hare-brained schemes initially. Computers, for example: didn't the CEO of Digital once, famously, say that he could see the need for perhaps 2 or 3 computers to be built, globally? The very idea that they would be owned by everyone and used mostly for idle play would have been ridiculed. America became the world leader, at least for a while, by being willing to take a risk and invest in things that might fail.
That said, though, this particular project does seem like one that could never work - at least in its naive form. Having a cars, bicycles or pedestrians moving freely under a moving bus on stilts doesn't strike me as a good idea; it would require immense self-control and presence of mind from all road-users, qualities you don't find in abundance on the roads. But it might be feasible to have a train system in two layers, with the top and bottom moving independently. Doing it as trains on stilts might even be cheaper than building trainlines in layers tha traditional way.
A local sheriff told the New York Times, "I really have no idea what they were thinking. I just don't understand the younger generation on trying to get their 15 minutes of fame."
When you grow up with guns all over the place and the attitude that owning them is somehow cool and an obvious, God-given right, and no compulsory education in responsible gun ownership and -handling, is it any surprise that children (including teenagers) become complacent? When I was that age, I too thought it would be exciting to have guns and make explosives and other spectacular stuff - it simply didn't quite occur to me how badly things can go wrong. In this case it did, and now there is a young girl, not just mourning the loss of her boyfriend, but also looking at the prospect of having to live with the fact that she killed him, as well as potentially serving jail time. However, as sad as that is, what really sickens me is seeing the heart- and mindless, callous idiots in the comments laughing and mocking the poor girl. She is probably not the sharpest thinker, all considered, but judging from the comments flowing through here like effluent, neither are you guys, so one day you may well be standing in some situation, where you just did something deeply stupid - and life changing. Look forward to it, and enjoy the laughter.
There has been a lot of that going around, lately. Mathematics is actually pretty careful to remember its heroes, male and female, but Ada Lovelace is not among them. Other women are. This is a rather strong indicator of what is going on here.
It is true that there are a few, famous female mathematicians (Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...), but off the top of my head, I could only name two: Emmy Noether and Sofia Kovalevskaya. The main reason for that is no doubt the fact that women were simply not allowed to study at university until an embarrassingly late date - Emmy Noether was only just allowed into Erlangen (in 1903, I believe) as one of only two women out of about 1000 students. And amazing as it may seem, there are still academic institutions where you meet a bias against women scientists, although things have improved.
So, I think, rather than the world of mathematics celebrating female mathematicians exactly as much as the males, there is still a legacy of reluctance, so that we only really hear about the ones that are so undeniably outstanding, that we have to accept them. Fortunately the world of academia has been improving a lot, but we aren't quite there yet.
one is racist (ALL whites) and one is talking about "radical" islam, meaning the people we are actually at war with, ISIS and other groups
That depends a lot on what you consider a "race". It is well known to anybody with insight into the scientific consensus, that the concept of race is completely arbitrary, since it has very little basis in biology or genetics, but is used to discriminate against groups of people based on superficial criteria. This is also evidenced by the curious fact that in the past, race has been determined not just by skin colour, but things like the shape of the head, the height of the person, colour of the eyes or similar features; if you read older literature from the age of European imperialism, you will see lots of references to "the German/French/Latin/British/... race" - not to mention "the Jewish race"; this is closely related to the concept from about the same time, of 'breed': the working class were of a different breed from the aristocracy, who were bred for ruling over them - clearly, it was unthinkable that one could become the other.
So, race has nothing to do with biology and everything to do with finding an excuse for bias, bigotry and prejudice; now-a-days race is out of favour, as an excuse, so we talk about "ethnicity" "culture" or "religion" instead, but we mean the same thing: "They" are fundamentally different from "Us". It is still the same, old, vicious racism, though. Thus, when somebody talks about "radicalized Muslims" and "radical Islam" in this way, the emphasis is on Muslims and Islam, not the fact that they are vicious, fanatical murderers - so the bias is clearly against all Muslims, only he wraps it up in what he hopes is plausible deniability.
Man, I'm all for helping people, but it's getting fucking ridiculous....what's next, suing magazines for not being in braille too for blind folks? Suing Apple for iPods that deaf people can't use?
Whether disabled people in America should receive help or not is up to the conscience of the American people, I suppose, but there are obvious differences between being able to use a magazine or an iPod, and being able to use what is in most places considered essential, public services, such as taxis. And yes, taxis are regarded as delivering "essential, public service" in many if not most cities in the world. As far as I know, in most of UK, taxies are allowed to use the designated bus-lanes, whereas other drivers are fined for doing so - so, taxis have a somewhat privileged status. They are also, very often, used as a kind of "almost ambulance" by local authorities, to transport the sick and disabled, who don't require a full ambulance. I don't think it is unreasonable to expect a registered taxi company to be able to fulfill that part of their obligations, by having facilities for transporting disabled people.
But are they effective? I suppose it depends on what the aim is - the way I read it, the study shows that they are only effective if he wants to sow discord and create division - his supporters become a bit more sycophantic, the rest of us are sickened even more. But didn't he talk about uniting all Americans and making America great again? Division only diminishes the nation.
Actually you still need the system administrators as well. Developers might think they are competent to administer the systems and that is fine for dev but they aren't up to engineering stable production environments. The problem with "devops" is that far too many people think developers handling ops is a sane choice when proper use of these systems is for real ops engineers to employ some dev tools.
It's worse than that, actually. I have worked in the IT industry for too many decades, and for that entire time, programmers on the one side and system administrators on the the other have complained of the utter incompetence of each other - with a good deal of justification, I might add (I have worked on both sides, so I do have some background). Developers too often don't understand that programs have to be supportable: it must be easy and convenient for the support staff to troubleshoot and configure, because they very often don't have the time needed to dig deep into problems. And sysadmin too often have no clue about what goes on inside a process, how the OS loads and executes code, not to mention how the whole develop and release process works - sysadmins have little knowledge of (and respect for) what developers need, in order to do their job. Devops is suppsed to be a group of people, who understand both sides well, but in reality they are merely 2nd level supporters, who can sort of stumble through a bit a script writing, if they must.
The fundamental problem is one of proper management - managers in general don't understand what skilled, technical employees do, so they mistake script writing skills for development skills, and because of the promises of the cloud, they imagine you don't need real sysadmins either, since it is all automated and the cloud provider will have the necessary sysadmins - "problem solved". In the all too rare cases where the managers actually understand things and respect their staff, they will work to get developers and sysadmins to communicate at floor level and learn from each other; developers can in fact be allowed to perform some sysadmin under supervision from the real sysadmins, and sysadmins can learn about what developers actually do and why they have their specific needs. And that is when real devops happens.
I really can't stand this "OMG, I don't think we should do a scientific experiment, because waaa!" bullshit.
Conducting scientific experiments is not in itself a bad thing, if we are willing to accept the outcome of the experiments, and if we are willing to accept that scientific experiments are not simply a proof of concept thing, by which I mean that one or a few experiemnts are not enough to give us confidence that we know eough about the benefits as well as the costs. Also, if we are to accept the scientific validity of climate modification, aren't also to accept the same for (other) climate science: the science that tells us things we don't want to hear? It is the same scientific method and the same climate models that go into both.
We have in a sense been running a gigantic experiemnt in climate modification for at least a couple of centuries, since the industrial revolution, and so far the results aren ot that positive, so I think it is wise to hold back on further experiments, at least until we know what the hell we are doing. And the easiest way to address global warming is already known: cut CO2 emissions right down and start producing carbon sinks on a larger scale.
... using your home AC doesn't force you to just keep using your AC for the rest of the day. You only keep going if you judge the effect to be beneficial. And if even critics are saying that the effect will be so beneficial that we won't want to stop - and somehow that's the problem! - I have to wonder how they feel about farming, or clothing, or pretty much every other good idea we've invented and kept around.
I think you know this simply isn't true. To use your example, people don't just use air conditioning to cool down a bit when the heat is worst - they keep it on constantly, even to such an extent that in some places people put on a jacket when they go inside. The reality is that air conditioning isolates you from the real environment and makes you dependent on spending ever more energy on keeping cool. It also makes you blind to alternative, less energy wasting ways of dealing with a hot climate and ends up being an impediment to making real improvements. There are many ways of living in a hot climate, some of them thousands of years old - can you list, say, 10 of them, off the top of your head? Why keep on living like fools, wasting resources on things we don't actually need? It's unintelligent - and worse: it's unimaginative.
... they were not the least bit ashamed of that either.
Sometimes I get the impression that Americans are proud of being ignorant - or at least pretend to be proud of it (and I say this without malice). I wonder if it is because of the general mistrust in anything to do with government and 'city slickers' that seems to have been a feature of much of American culture - the sort of sentiment that seems to be crystallised in Sam Cooke's song, "Don't Know Much About History". Bookish knowledge and education is something that can feel as if it is dictated by some authority (which it is, in a sense), and it also tends to make students strive to leave the ways of their parents behind, which looks and feels a bit like 'class treason'.
Yeah, this matches my own experience. However, what I think would be much more interesting is if I could choose which ringtone the recipient would hear when I call. Oh, the possibilities.... Just imagine calling that manager you can't stand in the middle of a presentation from the mobile of another person you don't like. Some might call it childish, but I like to think of it as youthful.
Maybe he doesn't know what a trillion is? This isn't the first time he reminds me of George W Bush (to whom he doesn't compare favourably):
An aide walks into the oval office. George W. Bush is currently president, and the Iraq war is dragging out into a long and grueling occupation. The aide presents the numbers from yesterday to the President.
"Mr. President, yesterday the US coalition forces killed a confirmed 36 insurgents."
The President nodded his head patriotically.
"There were some losses on our end, however." The aide continued. "We lost a US hummer with four soldiers in it to an IED outside of Tikrit, and 2 Brazilian soldiers were killed in a crossfire in Baghdad."
The president nodded solemnly with the news of the hummer, but his face was ashen by the end of the sentence, and he buried his face in his hands. The aide looked startled, "Sir, what's the matter."
With scared eyes, President Bush looked up and mumbled "How many is a brazilian?"
Slashdot Mirror
...Pornhub Vice President Corey Price ...
It figures a company that deals in porn would have a president of vice.
I can't see where the article says that these companies are 'guilty' - it only really says they play a disproportionately large role in the production of CO2, which isn't surprising at all; it is what we would expect. It points out where we can most effectively concentrate our efforts, if we want to curb emissions: cut back on the production and use of fossil fuels. Again this is no surprise at all. Alas, neither is the reaction of people like you, who immediately work themselves into a frenzy instead of thinking through implications: we can actually shift away fossil fuels with relative ease, and we are already doing so (which is why things like solar panels and electric cars are growing in popularity). So, calm down, it is going to be OK.
Apart from that, if we are to talk about guilt, I think the producers of fossil fuels and people like you do carry a large part of the responsibility for why we aren't already much further along in replacing fossil fuels with something sustainable. The big oil and coal producers are major funders of obfuscation, producing cherry-picked 'research', funding anti-environmentalist campaigns etc etc, and you just go along with it, although I can't quite figure out what your motivation is. Fear? Spite? Whatever it is, you are part of a dying breed, and that is something the rest of us should be grateful for. If you look closely, you can see that at least some producers of fossil fuels know the time has come to change their face and start pretending that they have all along been in favour of a much greener world, honest.
I wouldn't buy it for any price, really. It isn't the functionality or the hardware, but the fact that you are tied into only ever using Apple's app store etc etc - plus the fact that you have to actually BUY the development tools and learn yet another languages, when the Android comes without the same degree of tie-in, plus you can download the whole development kit for free and it is Java, a language that actually has applications outside the phone. In a way, it isn't the iPhone that I don't want, it is Apple.
A bit like the Pythia at the temple of Apollo, who would generally speak gibberish, that her priests would then interpret. I don't know if it is funny, but perhaps it will be if we live long enough. But we are only about half a year into his precidency, and already Honey Monster is rushing towards a military confrontation with the beached whale in North Korea. I mean, think about that; the Chinese have since the Korea War, kept NK as a buffer between themselves and America's vassal state in the south, and they are increasingly assertive about their territorial aspirations. Will they just sit quietly by while Trump sends troops into NK, provoking them to use whatever nuclear weapons they have and escalating from there? Hardly - I doubt they are all that keen on Kim's perverse regime, but they definitely don't want American expansion in the region, and they do have an alliance with NK, which gives them a legitimate excuse to join the war. North Korea may be easy enough to flatten, but China isn't. The US may have enough weaponry to convert China to a slag heap, but not before they have sent their own missiles on the way - and they do have enough of those, without a doubt.
While I applaud such measures [as a techno-nerd one of the most infuriating aspects of the economy for me is the enforced obsolescence] I cannot help but wonder - since the whole planet agrees on the basic principles of free market capitalism, which inevitably result in forced obsolescence and a race to the bottom ["best product for the most affordable price' is the same as "worst product for the highest possible price"] why do we then spend absolutely enormous amount of time, money and effort to STOP the system going to where it goes naturally based on its premises.
Hear! Hear! This sort of crap has been going on for far too long - there seems to be, maybe not an actual conspiracy, but something that looks a lot like a universal acceptance that this is the way to make business, from the invention of the razor with disposable blades onwards. However, there is also a strong and possibly growing trend the opposite way, of people tinkering and quite often re-discovering the "old ways": learning how to hone and use a straight razor, or learning woodworking without electric tools etc; and in the process discovering how little actual value is added by the supposedly indispensable, modern tools. Linux, FOSS and RaspberryPi are other examples of the same: maybe people are sick of being powerless and dependent on buying shitty products when it is so obvious that they are being defrauded, in effect.
Plus, of course, they do have at leas one more natural resource in abundance: sunshine. They could export electricity, especially when we finally work out how to store excess power efficiently. BTW - it isn't as if the Arabic Peninsula has no other, natural resources, such as minerals, but oil is just very abundant, very easy to extract and in huge demand.
Am I right in reading this as saying that the government of the US wants to know who voted for what? I'm asking because I can't quite believe that I am reading this. Wasn't voting in secret supposed to be one of the cornerstones of democracy? If somebody, in government or elsewhere can subsequentially find out how individuals voted, how can we guarantee that there aren't voters who are being intimidated into voting the "right" way? Because President Trustworthy promises?
Show your face? Courage is signing up on /.? Fuck off, you snobbish cunt.
Snobbish? Oh, you mean, because I use polysyllabic words? That is because of something that happened to me when I was a child: education. And no, it doesn't take a lot of courage to sign up on /. - but apparently more than what some have.
The free market interprets government interference as damage and routes around it.
This is little more than religious dogma. In the real world, businesses accept sensible rules imposed by the government, because they know everybody will have the same standards to follow. In quite a lot of cases such rules are considered as beneficial because they even out the playing field for everybody. When there are no rules, you can't stop cheaters, and cheating by a few earns the whole market a bad reputation, thus hurting everybody's business.
A load of hogwash, I think. Anyway, what can the US do, in real terms? I don't think most European leaders would let America dictate how tax regulations are enforced; expecially since several of them express open contempt for the Donald. You know, if American companies don't want to comply with EU regulations, they can withdraw from that market - nobody's forcing them to stay, as far as I can see. European, Chinese and Indian companies would be happy to see that happen. You have to comply with the rules where you do your business - European companies trading in the US also have to follow US rules - what is so hard to understand about that?
Why would anyone want to keep that address anyway? I would think it would cause all sorts of problems with people assuming that it was an unmonitored account. I don't have a lot of sympathy.
No, I don't expect you do. It seems to be a common misconception here that it is somehow 'tough' to be uncaring and express you contempt for the plight of others. The fact that you haven't got the courage to show your face, but post as an AC, suggests that you are not really all that tough.
But back to the question: If you have 20 years' worth of important contacts, who have your email address, then you have plenty of good reasons for not wanting to change that address. Figuring out who has your address and who is important is very hard work, which you would know if you had ever had to do it. and getting everybody to change the contact details they have for you is even worse. Should he have chosen a better name back then? Perhaps - but he didn't and it has worked for 20 years, so what is your point actually? His ISP could let him continue using this address without breaking into a sweat, and it is not actually their business interfering in what kind of imagine their customers want to impress on their contacts - they are in the wrong, simply.
First find out if having childlike sex dolls are a stepping stone to abusing real children, or if they are a good substitute so that less children are abused. Depending on the answer, either allow or ban them.
How would you go about figuring that out? And also, I don't think it addresses the real problem of what to do about pedophilia and the immense harm it causes. The whole issue of sex in relation to children is a highly contentious issue, to the extent that there still are many unanswered questions - and even some un-asked ones too.
Just to get it out of the way, let me clarify my own position: I think it is clear that adults involving children in sex is immensely harmful, and in my opinion pedophiles are dangerous individuals that any society must find a way to deal with. I'm not saying that we have to lock them up, but we do have a serious problem that needs to be solved. I also realise that these are opinions and that I can't claim to know any solutions.
What we do know for a fact is that there are many children that have been severely harmed by sexual abuse, and that there are pedophile predators lurking around on the internet, organising a regular trade in the vilest depravities. Even if we disregard the harm done to their victims (and how can we?), there is a huge cost to society in the form of mental (and sometimes physical) disability, crime, substance abuse etc as a consequence of these crimes.
Amongst the many unanswered questions are for example: Why (or by which mechanism) does sexual abuse of a child harm the child? It may appear to be obvious - it sort of lies in the term 'abuse', but that really is a circular argument: it is called abuse because it is harmful. It is well known, that children do, to some extent, enjoy sexual stimulation as such: some discover masturbation as early as the age of five - so where does the harm come in? Is it because an adult, who should protect the child, violates the fundamental trust a child has? Is it because of the adult's strong need for secrecy and the consequent oppression and use of threats? Something else? I haven't come across any professional discussion of this so far.
Another problem we don't quite understand is: why do some people become pedophile? I don't buy the idea, that this is simply their nature - there is no 'biological' argument for this being the case. Compare with homosexuality: The function of sexual lust is to motivate people to procreate and produce children. Sex partners of the same gender can be seen as a side effect - a convenient way to follow your instinct, when there is no partner of the opposite sex available. It may also have benefits within a group by strengthening ties in for example a group of hunters. Evolution will tend to 'allow' some degree of homosexuality in the species.
No such argument exists for pedophilia: Harming a child goes against our natural instincts - evolution has ensured that parents want to protect their children, and by extension the children of others in their group. A pedophile has to overcome the imperative of this strong, natural instinct, and it is very hard to seriously consider the argument, that having sex with a child is somehow likely to be more convenient than finding an adult partner. And even if you could, it still seems clear that it is un-adaptive in terms of evolution, so natural selection should tend to weed it out.
There is a lot of woolly thinking around what it takes to succeed. The ones that have achieved spectacular success will, not surprisingly, point to things like their amazing talent, high intelligence, incredible determination, ability to focus 100% 24/7 and so on; it is, however, mostly unfounded. There have been studies (this year, but I don't have a link) showing that what actually makes the difference, is mostly luck: you can have all the qualities and talent, but you have to be in the right place at the right time, and that is mostly down to lucky circumstances outside your own control. You may have been born with very high intelligence, but unless you go to a good school, it won't be developed in the best way - you find school far too easy, and become lazy, you find your school mates uninteresting, and become a loner without social skills. Or you may go to university, get top grades, but because you come from a poor background, you don't fit into the social network of those from a richer background, and therefore don't go directly into a top-level job. To succeed in business, you have to not just be talented and intelligent, you also need to have this fundamental feeling of entitlement, that you only get if you grew up as part of the ruling elite.
So, perhaps if you were lucky enough in your life, you find it rewarding to work hard, and therefore always want to work. You probably had the privilege to choose your favourite line of work, you had a safety net in your family, so you could be bold in your ventures, and you could make several attempts, if you failed. And of course, today, with an always-on environment, you can be at work on the beach or anywhere you like, so you can claim to work 20 hours a day, really. Compare this to the more normal situation, where you work because you have to, in any job that might be within your reach, and you get at most one chance to set up a successful business, because if you fail, you will be so broke that you have no second chance. In that situation, why would you work harder than you must? For most of us, if you dig a hole in record time, all you get is a bigger shovel, so you can work harder.
For a country that ostensibly wants to be the preeminent world power, they sure can be dumb. Who would fall for that thing in the first place?
It is called being willing to take a risk; a lot of the things we now consider obvious parts of everyday life, will have been considered frivolous, hare-brained schemes initially. Computers, for example: didn't the CEO of Digital once, famously, say that he could see the need for perhaps 2 or 3 computers to be built, globally? The very idea that they would be owned by everyone and used mostly for idle play would have been ridiculed. America became the world leader, at least for a while, by being willing to take a risk and invest in things that might fail.
That said, though, this particular project does seem like one that could never work - at least in its naive form. Having a cars, bicycles or pedestrians moving freely under a moving bus on stilts doesn't strike me as a good idea; it would require immense self-control and presence of mind from all road-users, qualities you don't find in abundance on the roads. But it might be feasible to have a train system in two layers, with the top and bottom moving independently. Doing it as trains on stilts might even be cheaper than building trainlines in layers tha traditional way.
You weren't surprised by the reaction were you?
No, but I would have liked to be.
A local sheriff told the New York Times, "I really have no idea what they were thinking. I just don't understand the younger generation on trying to get their 15 minutes of fame."
When you grow up with guns all over the place and the attitude that owning them is somehow cool and an obvious, God-given right, and no compulsory education in responsible gun ownership and -handling, is it any surprise that children (including teenagers) become complacent? When I was that age, I too thought it would be exciting to have guns and make explosives and other spectacular stuff - it simply didn't quite occur to me how badly things can go wrong. In this case it did, and now there is a young girl, not just mourning the loss of her boyfriend, but also looking at the prospect of having to live with the fact that she killed him, as well as potentially serving jail time. However, as sad as that is, what really sickens me is seeing the heart- and mindless, callous idiots in the comments laughing and mocking the poor girl. She is probably not the sharpest thinker, all considered, but judging from the comments flowing through here like effluent, neither are you guys, so one day you may well be standing in some situation, where you just did something deeply stupid - and life changing. Look forward to it, and enjoy the laughter.
There has been a lot of that going around, lately. Mathematics is actually pretty careful to remember its heroes, male and female, but Ada Lovelace is not among them. Other women are. This is a rather strong indicator of what is going on here.
It is true that there are a few, famous female mathematicians (Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...), but off the top of my head, I could only name two: Emmy Noether and Sofia Kovalevskaya. The main reason for that is no doubt the fact that women were simply not allowed to study at university until an embarrassingly late date - Emmy Noether was only just allowed into Erlangen (in 1903, I believe) as one of only two women out of about 1000 students. And amazing as it may seem, there are still academic institutions where you meet a bias against women scientists, although things have improved.
So, I think, rather than the world of mathematics celebrating female mathematicians exactly as much as the males, there is still a legacy of reluctance, so that we only really hear about the ones that are so undeniably outstanding, that we have to accept them. Fortunately the world of academia has been improving a lot, but we aren't quite there yet.
one is racist (ALL whites) and one is talking about "radical" islam, meaning the people we are actually at war with, ISIS and other groups
That depends a lot on what you consider a "race". It is well known to anybody with insight into the scientific consensus, that the concept of race is completely arbitrary, since it has very little basis in biology or genetics, but is used to discriminate against groups of people based on superficial criteria. This is also evidenced by the curious fact that in the past, race has been determined not just by skin colour, but things like the shape of the head, the height of the person, colour of the eyes or similar features; if you read older literature from the age of European imperialism, you will see lots of references to "the German/French/Latin/British/... race" - not to mention "the Jewish race"; this is closely related to the concept from about the same time, of 'breed': the working class were of a different breed from the aristocracy, who were bred for ruling over them - clearly, it was unthinkable that one could become the other.
So, race has nothing to do with biology and everything to do with finding an excuse for bias, bigotry and prejudice; now-a-days race is out of favour, as an excuse, so we talk about "ethnicity" "culture" or "religion" instead, but we mean the same thing: "They" are fundamentally different from "Us". It is still the same, old, vicious racism, though. Thus, when somebody talks about "radicalized Muslims" and "radical Islam" in this way, the emphasis is on Muslims and Islam, not the fact that they are vicious, fanatical murderers - so the bias is clearly against all Muslims, only he wraps it up in what he hopes is plausible deniability.
Man, I'm all for helping people, but it's getting fucking ridiculous....what's next, suing magazines for not being in braille too for blind folks? Suing Apple for iPods that deaf people can't use?
Whether disabled people in America should receive help or not is up to the conscience of the American people, I suppose, but there are obvious differences between being able to use a magazine or an iPod, and being able to use what is in most places considered essential, public services, such as taxis. And yes, taxis are regarded as delivering "essential, public service" in many if not most cities in the world. As far as I know, in most of UK, taxies are allowed to use the designated bus-lanes, whereas other drivers are fined for doing so - so, taxis have a somewhat privileged status. They are also, very often, used as a kind of "almost ambulance" by local authorities, to transport the sick and disabled, who don't require a full ambulance. I don't think it is unreasonable to expect a registered taxi company to be able to fulfill that part of their obligations, by having facilities for transporting disabled people.
But are they effective? I suppose it depends on what the aim is - the way I read it, the study shows that they are only effective if he wants to sow discord and create division - his supporters become a bit more sycophantic, the rest of us are sickened even more. But didn't he talk about uniting all Americans and making America great again? Division only diminishes the nation.
Actually you still need the system administrators as well. Developers might think they are competent to administer the systems and that is fine for dev but they aren't up to engineering stable production environments. The problem with "devops" is that far too many people think developers handling ops is a sane choice when proper use of these systems is for real ops engineers to employ some dev tools.
It's worse than that, actually. I have worked in the IT industry for too many decades, and for that entire time, programmers on the one side and system administrators on the the other have complained of the utter incompetence of each other - with a good deal of justification, I might add (I have worked on both sides, so I do have some background). Developers too often don't understand that programs have to be supportable: it must be easy and convenient for the support staff to troubleshoot and configure, because they very often don't have the time needed to dig deep into problems. And sysadmin too often have no clue about what goes on inside a process, how the OS loads and executes code, not to mention how the whole develop and release process works - sysadmins have little knowledge of (and respect for) what developers need, in order to do their job. Devops is suppsed to be a group of people, who understand both sides well, but in reality they are merely 2nd level supporters, who can sort of stumble through a bit a script writing, if they must.
The fundamental problem is one of proper management - managers in general don't understand what skilled, technical employees do, so they mistake script writing skills for development skills, and because of the promises of the cloud, they imagine you don't need real sysadmins either, since it is all automated and the cloud provider will have the necessary sysadmins - "problem solved". In the all too rare cases where the managers actually understand things and respect their staff, they will work to get developers and sysadmins to communicate at floor level and learn from each other; developers can in fact be allowed to perform some sysadmin under supervision from the real sysadmins, and sysadmins can learn about what developers actually do and why they have their specific needs. And that is when real devops happens.
I really can't stand this "OMG, I don't think we should do a scientific experiment, because waaa!" bullshit.
Conducting scientific experiments is not in itself a bad thing, if we are willing to accept the outcome of the experiments, and if we are willing to accept that scientific experiments are not simply a proof of concept thing, by which I mean that one or a few experiemnts are not enough to give us confidence that we know eough about the benefits as well as the costs. Also, if we are to accept the scientific validity of climate modification, aren't also to accept the same for (other) climate science: the science that tells us things we don't want to hear? It is the same scientific method and the same climate models that go into both.
We have in a sense been running a gigantic experiemnt in climate modification for at least a couple of centuries, since the industrial revolution, and so far the results aren ot that positive, so I think it is wise to hold back on further experiments, at least until we know what the hell we are doing. And the easiest way to address global warming is already known: cut CO2 emissions right down and start producing carbon sinks on a larger scale.
... using your home AC doesn't force you to just keep using your AC for the rest of the day. You only keep going if you judge the effect to be beneficial. And if even critics are saying that the effect will be so beneficial that we won't want to stop - and somehow that's the problem! - I have to wonder how they feel about farming, or clothing, or pretty much every other good idea we've invented and kept around.
I think you know this simply isn't true. To use your example, people don't just use air conditioning to cool down a bit when the heat is worst - they keep it on constantly, even to such an extent that in some places people put on a jacket when they go inside. The reality is that air conditioning isolates you from the real environment and makes you dependent on spending ever more energy on keeping cool. It also makes you blind to alternative, less energy wasting ways of dealing with a hot climate and ends up being an impediment to making real improvements. There are many ways of living in a hot climate, some of them thousands of years old - can you list, say, 10 of them, off the top of your head? Why keep on living like fools, wasting resources on things we don't actually need? It's unintelligent - and worse: it's unimaginative.
... they were not the least bit ashamed of that either.
Sometimes I get the impression that Americans are proud of being ignorant - or at least pretend to be proud of it (and I say this without malice). I wonder if it is because of the general mistrust in anything to do with government and 'city slickers' that seems to have been a feature of much of American culture - the sort of sentiment that seems to be crystallised in Sam Cooke's song, "Don't Know Much About History". Bookish knowledge and education is something that can feel as if it is dictated by some authority (which it is, in a sense), and it also tends to make students strive to leave the ways of their parents behind, which looks and feels a bit like 'class treason'.
Yeah, this matches my own experience. However, what I think would be much more interesting is if I could choose which ringtone the recipient would hear when I call. Oh, the possibilities.... Just imagine calling that manager you can't stand in the middle of a presentation from the mobile of another person you don't like. Some might call it childish, but I like to think of it as youthful.
Maybe he doesn't know what a trillion is? This isn't the first time he reminds me of George W Bush (to whom he doesn't compare favourably):
An aide walks into the oval office. George W. Bush is currently president, and the Iraq war is dragging out into a long and grueling occupation. The aide presents the numbers from yesterday to the President.
"Mr. President, yesterday the US coalition forces killed a confirmed 36 insurgents."
The President nodded his head patriotically.
"There were some losses on our end, however." The aide continued. "We lost a US hummer with four soldiers in it to an IED outside of Tikrit, and 2 Brazilian soldiers were killed in a crossfire in Baghdad."
The president nodded solemnly with the news of the hummer, but his face was ashen by the end of the sentence, and he buried his face in his hands. The aide looked startled, "Sir, what's the matter."
With scared eyes, President Bush looked up and mumbled "How many is a brazilian?"