Can't play with kids since they're too old and tired so the kids have to get smarter and play with themselves.
That really is an eye-wateringly daft thing to say. As anybody knows, who'se had the benefit of grandparents taking care of the children, children and grandparents get along extremely well, in general. Part of this is because older people often have more time than the actual parents, but a large part of it is down to the fact that as you get older and more mature, you also tend to become more tolerant, creative and interested. So, where a young father is mostly interested in sex, beer, football and sex, an older father is more likely to have got past the more infantile stage of adulthood and acquired some interests in life - which he can then share with his children.
Do you really imagine that a man of 40 to 50 is 'old and tired'? Well perhaps you will be, if all you do is lie around on a sofa wasting you time. Life starts at 40, as the saying goes, and what it means is, you still have loads of energy, and now you also have experience and purpose. Some things you simply don't know enough about to really do until you are mature.
- like Albert Einstein, von Neumann, Wernher von Braun, Fritz Zwicky and so on. America's scientific leadership was built, by and large, on a lot of foreign experts, who then went on to develop your own, human capital, so it is not necessarily a good idea to keep them out.
I wrote a comment about the state of the standard model of quantum mechanics, and the OP is about the same subject. I can't see how you get from there to talking about climate science, but since you bring it up, I don't think there is any doubt that the climate is changing, that we cause it and that we are able to change our ways as a society; we can probably avoid the worst of the effects, but we do need to act, sooner rather than later. It makes good sense any way, to stop polluting and overconsuming, in so many ways.
Article doesn't explain how the scientists know this is an end to the destruction versus a temporary reprieve? Seems like a stupid title altogether.
That is probably because the scientists don't actually say such a thing at all. I think, if one were to search through to a more trustworthy source, it would say something like 'The coral bleaching event that has unfolded over the last 3 years seems to be less severe this year, and this may be a sign that it is coming to an end, if this trend continues.' - and then a lot of explanations about what observations and expectations they base this on. Science is almost never startling or sensational; and in the very rare cases when it is, it will get ignored for a long time as being speculative. Just the way of the world; so when you see an sensational headline about a scientific discovery on a pop-sci website, it can probably be safely ignored.
I give things until the end of the year, before Brexit collapses and we can hopefully go back to tackling the real issues that affect the UK.
I really hope you are right. I think a lot of people are deeply frustrated with being governed by a group of people, whose only qualification is that they feel entitled to tell others what to do. And it isn't just in government we see this - I think anyone who has had a highly skilled job, like an engineer, software developer, medical doctor etc, recognises this: you are ruled by incompetent managers, who happened to have the right connections and feel they have the right to rule; they boast of their great successes, when they actually just had an easy ride, and then they fail spectacularly and take the company down with them, even though it could have been avoided, had they just been competent.
I don't know if Corbyn's promises can hold - I think it is possible, but it will not be as easy as their manifesto claims. And I know that we can't go on being ruled by incompetent fools, and he at least seems to be genuine. A guy who grows his own vegetables has to have his feet on the ground, I would have thought;-)
Real estate rights are forever, then why not copyright?
Are real estate right forever? And should they be? In both cases I don't think so, and anyway, 'indefinitely' isn't exactly the same as 'forever': it is possible that you can own the exclusive rights to use a piece of land indefinitely, under present law, but no nation lasts forever, and your rights will disappear over time. But I don't even think land ownership should be indefinite; there should be some limitations, so that one family can't sit on large tracts of land to the exclusion of everybody else.
But even if we accept that land ownership should be indefinite, it doesn't follow that intellectual property right should be - there are vast differences: you can't make many copies of a piece of land, but you can copy a piece of data at almost no cost at all. You can make money from a piece of real estate, if you invest a large amount of work and/or money on an ongoing basis, whereas you can monetise your intellectual work with relatively modest investment. Real estate, whether it is land or buildings, has very clear boundaries, whereas intellectual property doesn't. And so on.
I think it is very reasonable that a creative person can make a living from his work, if it is of any perceived value, but just like you would expect a farmer to keep working on his land to produce new crops, you would expect the creative person to keep working to produce new things; after a while, the old works become part of common culture and it is reasonable that they also go into the public domain after a while.
Why do some people always start whining about requests to make things slightly better for anyone who isn't them?
I could propose several explanations, but I don't really want to be unkind. I think in many ways, people are to be pitied, if their lives are so void of meaning that they object to helping others, even when takes nothing away from themselves. I wonder what they would feel about it, if somebody designed a game that was incredibly cool, but which was designed to specifically work for, say, blind people, so that it would be a distinct disadvantage if you are used to rely on sight?
Maybe it's me, people keep saying I'm some kind of "SJW",...
You should feel proud if you stand for social justice. It means you have a conscience, that you care - those are the traits that make us human.
We have known for a long time that the standard model isn't complete, not least since it does not incorporate gravity in any way. I think most physicists are surprised at how QM still seems to hold together - unlike GR, it is a really complicated theory, mathematically; it is all too often not well understood by the experimental physicists, and there are examples of techniques (like quantization) being applied as a set of rules thumb, a bit like 'first we caluculate the Hamiltonian for a classical system, then use the magical quantization rules'. Amazingly, it often works even if it is mathematically incorrect, but it is of course not going to last, I think; there must be cases where the cracks in the reasoning have been plastered over by the statistical noise in the measurements, and once we see clear evidence that the theory doesn't hold, we will have to go back over old data and discover the cracks we didn't spot back then.
This discrepancy in the decay of the tau lepton is probably one of these cracks, and I think it is quite exciting, but it isn't quite the sensation the editors want to make of it. I have already read about it several times, even on Scientific American and ScienceDaily, and I have heard it mentioned in recent BBC podcasts; Slashdot's editors would do well to stop reading the big-eyed, gawping articles in glossy magazines like futurism.com, and instead reading the slightly more sober stuff in news closer to the source. You guys should stop perpetuating the ideaa that science is some sort of cool entertainment and scientists are some sort of attention seeking rock-stars.
You sit here telling people to not pass judgement while you, yourself, have judged them to be capable. Curiously, you've judged this and made some assumptions about competency when, frankly, evidence suggests a lack of competency.
Not really - I reserve judgment until I know more, but until then I am willing to give them the benefit of doubt. After all, we give even murderers a chance to defend themselves before judging them. I think I have explained in sufficient detail why I think it is more likely than not, that they have shown reasonable competence, and I won't invest any more effort into the subject. I suspect you won't be convinced by any arguments, and I frankly don't really care.
Any complex construction project needs to take into account a large number of requirements and parameters; some of these may be in conflict with each other, so the engineers have to make compromises based on the best of their knowledge. In some cases the simply have to guess, because they still don't have strong enough data. It is presumptious, to say the least, to pass judgment without knowing more about how they made their design choices.
Pure guesswork, but I can imagine a reason why it would make sense to construct a tunnel that slopes downward: cold air tends to run down a slope, so it would be a way to preserve the low temperatures, something that is significant when your energy supplies have to reach you from rather far away. They will have weighed that up against the risk of the permafrost melting and estimated that the risk was relatively low; the arctic has been warming up a lot faster than even the pessimists though was likely back then.
Sorry, I should have done a better job of explaining my context - I think these particular slurs are English/European. I chose them because they are less well known and I have the impression that many Americans would feel offended if I used the N-word.
Prisons were never set up for rehabilitating prisoners.
And that is deeply shameful. It is only a minority of prisoners that cannot be rehabilitated under any circumstances, but what you are saying here is that prisons are not even trying; the idea never occurred. Punishment without purpose only breaks a person down and makes him (or her) less fit to come back into society.
That's just bone-headed. If you want to manufacture a new energy-efficient whatzit, go right ahead. No one's stopping you.
In the past, before we had standardised units of measure, the size of a foot, for example, would be different from city to city, and the same for everything else, which meant that there would be constant problems with claims about short measure etc. Both traders and customers wanted to have standardised measures, so they could feel confident that they knew what they were buying. Same now - I don't think this is the government telling manufacturers how to produce their goods, it is about defining a standard scale, so everybody knows how different brands compare. This makes it possible to compete on objective value of the goods rather than perhaps lies.
It is both sad and embarrassing to see how all the anti-environmentalists and the arm-chair philosophers join forces (again) to start kicking, when their perceived enemy of the moment is apparently lying down. Maybe you can elaborate on your own expertise in major construction work in the high Arctic? I think it is pretty likely that whoever built this site were qualified for the job, so I will go with their opinion on the matter over yours any time of the day. Permafrost melting isn't exactly a new, surprising phenomenon, and both the Russians, the Norwegians and the Canadians are aware of the issues and will no doubt have taken that into the totality of their considerations.
The world's seed banks are of huge importance. Not only are we losing bio-diversity very fast at the moment, but we are also losing genetic variety in all our food crops, which makes us more vulnerable to emerging plant-diseases, pests etc. As just one example, take the banana: nearly all the bananas we see in supermarkets come from the Cavendish variety, which is now under serious threat from a fungus disease. And calling it a variety is probably a bit of a misnomer - Cavendish bananas don't produce seed (or only very rarely), and all the plants are clones of just 1 original plant, so they are genetically identical. Whatever kills one is likely to kill all. The seed banks are there to preserve the genetic variety of food crops, to protect us against something like this happening to wheat, rice, maize, potatoes etc etc. Even if you are meat eater, you don't want to loose the crops that feed the cattle that feed you.
And we are becoming increasingly aware of the fact that we can ill afford to lose the natural eco-systems, since much or even most of what we grow for crops, depends on them being at least somewhat intact; so the seed vaults' work in preserving wild plant species is also very important. This is definitely not just a bunch of tree-huggers wasting tax-payers' money. If you are looking for waste of tax-payers' money, look no further than to propping up an unnecessary coal industry or giving tax breaks to the wealthy.
How do they count people as "racist" exactly? If I say "he is Japanese" is that counted? Now change Japanese to any Race/Ethnicity/Religion that you like. Is that counted as a "racist"? How about if you search for "Japanese fighter"?
Are you trying to convince us that since it isn't racist to refer to somebody's nationality, it is also not racist to call black people 'Sambo' or to refer to Jews as 'Yids'? And perhaps, if you take the words simply as words, they are only sounds - the racism is in the attitude you have to other people. However, since words only have meaning in a context, and some words have mostly been used to express racist views, theyd are certainly now widely perceived as racist slurs.
I think, from a research point of view, it is perfectly valid to use certain words as a proxy for covert (or overt) racism: If a person doesn't feel wrong, somehow, about using these words, they are probably either out of contact with what the common views are on these words, or they are racist: they feel good about using words that are meant to insult certain groups of people. In this day and age, it seems unlikely that most people wouldn't know that certain words are regarded as racist, and in a statistical study, that is good enough, since the size of the dataset should even out any uncertainties.
Well known tyrannical strategy at play: Keep the masses pitted against each other and you can do whatever you wish.
Here, I think you are playing the conspiracy card: "They", that mysterious and shady entity that seems to be so powerful, are manipulating people's minds again. It is simply public opinion: the more or less agreed, average set of what most people feel is right(-sh). Most people simply don't want to be confronted with unpleasant, loud-mouthed and small-minded prejudices all the time; that's the so-called "censorship" that some people keep complaining about. They don't think the issues you go on about are relevant - they see it as SPAM, basically, and just want you to stop, so they can concentrate on the issues that are important to them.
As for who keeps the radicals (what you call 'masses') pitted against each other: it's not my impression that they need any encouragement to do that - most radical groups are spoiling for a fight, and talking about 'masses' is simply wishful thinking on their part, as they are in fact very small minorities.
That, and also: I see no reason why I would want my money transactions to be anonymous, which seems to be the only advantage of this. In fact, I want my payments to be visible, so I can prove that I made a payment, or on rare occasions, can reverse a payment if a service wasn't delivered.
When do we decide that the Islamic religion of the present day is too violent and insist that it reform or be banned?
You mean, let's be "tough on terror" by overreacting and committing unspeakable acts of gross indecency against millions of innocent people, because they happen to have grown up in a culture that you don't understand and don't want to understand? I don't think so. There are variants of Islam that subscribe to a darkened worldview, but there are Christians, even in this day and age, who are no less deluded and aggressive; what you suggest is to fall into the same, demented thinking as them, and initiate a religious war, in essence - so we may have people killed in the millions by war instead of tens to hundreds by rather feeble act of cowardice by terrorists.
What we should do instead, is what intelligent governments are already working on: reaching out to the huge majority of decent, moderate Muslims, and work with them to solve this issue, since it hurts them as badly as it hurts us (or worse, in fact).
The story stays the same - don't fuck over your admins and have proper procedure and backup.
There's a lot of lessons that management somehow never seem able to learn. Like, never have only 1 sysadmin, even if having more seems like overkill. Or, how about nurturing a relationship based on mutual respect and trust? The sysadmin has after all been trusted with one of the most important resource in any company, in most cases: the data. Yet, in a previous job I had an experience that I think is not uncommon: I had been there for over 10 years, I was regularly praised by my colleagues, but I was 'old' (ie >50); so my manager tried several ways to get rid of me - unreasonable demands, vague targets with moving goal-posts, etc, and when that didn't work, I was made "redundant" and asked to train some poor, unexperienced soul. On my last day, I wiped my workstation disk (very easy to do, not easy to recover from: using the 'dd' command to copy from/dev/zero to/dev/sda overwrites the partition table and then everything else, and the system doesn't report an error until it needs to load something that isn't there); nothing criminal in that, but just imagine I had decided to be creative and incorporated some discrete time bombs of that sort months later, when I was well away? It isn't hard to do, and it isn't hard to see how it could be made to look like the new guy had screwed up in a major way. Fortunatey I am both honest and mature enough to not do this kind of shit; but that company could have suffered significant losses if I hadn't been, and I think complacent, idiot managers, who are incapable of inspiring trust and loyalty and treat people like cattle, should be flayed and rolled in salt - after being given a drug to heighten their pain sensitivity, not that I want to sound harsh or anything.
I think Python should be seen as a scripting language: a language whose purpose is to tie together the real applications, rather like bash and ksh. Python has a lot of packages or modules (or whatever they are called), many of which seem well suited for scientific or engineering purposes; it is my impression that most are written in C or C++ for speed. So, you can see the attraction of Python for, say a scientist - there are modules for many specialised, mathematical areas, all of which are very difficult to code from scratch, and although there are similar packages for C, C++ and FORTRAN, they are less easy to just pick up and use.
I think you are less likely to find applications in Python - it is quite possible to do, and I have seen some, but just like you wouldn't normally write applications for general consumption in bash (although you can), Python isn't really the obvious choice either, IMO. Perhaps it is exactly because scripting languages are so good for ad hoc work - you get to expect that everything must be equally easy to achieve, but many things are simply complicated by nature, so the advantages of using Python become less prominent.
As a British citizen, I have to agree with much of what you say, but let me offer a slightly different perspective, perhaps.
I think one of the main problems in British politics over the last several decades has been the way Labour deserted its natural core voters: the working class, in a wider sense - not just the traditional factory workers, but everybody in a simillar position in society; all us that are destined to be employees, basically, rather than business owners. Blair tried to widen the scope, but lost sight of the working class and became enamoured with what one can call 'neo-capitalism' (well, I'm trying to be kind - not sure if he really deserves it); that is not to say that it is impossible for Labour to appeal to those who don't traditionally feel they are 'working class' - I think it is very possible, but you have to persuade people to rethink their position in society and realise that it isn't somehow embarrassing to be working class. Corbyn's jaw-dropping, explosive rise shows us that a lot of people felt that so-called New Labour was a mistake, and that they do in fact want them to remember the old values and bring them in to the modern reality; I think Corbyn at least has the intellectual span to envision this, and if the party can unite behind him, they could pull it off.
The Tories gambled and lost; they misread the situation, but I am not convinced that this is Theresa May's fault - she is in many ways one of the few good Conservatives, and I like her, but she is surrounded by the old-style 'nasty tories', as she once called them; the kind satirised in 'The New Statesman' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Statesman). The Tories, under David Cameron tried to re-invent themselves as 'nice, and in favour of social justice, but I think it never rang true, and you kept seeing the jeering, private-school raised bully through the varnish on a regular basis. They will form the next government, I'm sure, and they deserve it; if anybody deserves struggling with the mess of Brexit and the inevitable failures that will come off it, it is the Tories.
So here we are - fatefully moving towards Brexit, as if it was just unavoidable now; a very British kind of fatalism, I think. The truth is, of course, that we can halt this process at any time; we may have to eat humble pie and come back hat in hand, but of course we can. Just turn the idea around: if the remain side had won by such a slim majority, we would immediately have had the leavers shouting about how unfair it all was, and they would have been campaigning on and on now; so why should we just accept what is increasingly looking like a very bad idea with a heavy sigh? That simply does not make sense.
I have little doubt that we will come back - but next time, I hope the EU is a more ambitious union, not just a glorified market place with a few extra curls, but a full political union - a federal state or something like that.
It is much easier to state what I don't like, which is most, modern 'soft documentaries' that are almost homeopathic when it comes to facts and understanding, and invariably comes with poor narration, constant soundtrack of muzak and 'artistic' cutting. But there are a few people that have done good documentaries for BBC: Dr Lucy Worsley, who makes slightly crazy (in a good way) historical documentaries, and Francesco da Mosco with his journeys through Italy are just very, very pleasant and relaxing to watch. There are others, of course - history and archaeology are subjects that seem to attract good documentaries atm; nature and hard science programmes are unfortunately a very mixed bag with too much big-eyed gawping and too little real communication of understanding.
Trump withdrew from the Paris accord, and Covfefe was the more searched term than Paris Climate Agreement.
Really? However, it was front page news everywhere I looked, as were (and still are) the many, critical comments from state and industry leaders globally. China, among others, greeted it with something like "Really?!" and a big grin on their faces, because they are trying to become the world leaders in renewable energy and green technology, and the US has just abdicated from even trying.
Your side thinks he sabotages his schemes by these tweets.
The rest of us know (and Trump himself knows) that the tweets are meaningless and valueless in and of themselves, but they distract the MSM from what is really going on, and in a way that makes the left look like gibbering imbeciles.
He's been doing this since about *a year* prior to the election, and your side hasn't caught on even yet!
'Our side' being something like >90% of the world population, I take it? A lot of people voted for Trump in anger over what is clearly an increasingly unfair and unbalanced system; they don't like him, and they know he is a useless clown, but they want change. Same in UK with Brexit and paradoxically, with Jeremy Corbyn. People are tired of the same, old, hollow lies about how capitalism has to favour the rich only. With Trump and Brexit they are going to be deeply disappointed, no doubt, whereas with Corbyn, who knows? It remains to be seen, but at least he isn't such a glaringly obvious idiot, far removed from reality, as Trump.
Some people seem to be able to keep up an illusion about their glorious leader, no matter what the evidence tells them - are you sure you're not one of them? Trump is not the solution to what is wrong with America and the world; how could a billionaire and the spoiled child of a rich father sort of the wrongs that he himself and his class of people are the results of? That's like treating starvation with fasting - or perhaps more accurately, curing obesity by overeating.
This is as crazy as having closed source software determine guilt
Or indeed using software at all, when it comes to doling out justice. The law is imperfect - one might almost say by design - and is only ever meant to be a guideline or framework for the judge, who is there to add some human insight and understanding. I think it is a very disturbing idea, using computers to "calculate" justice; before we know it, we will have courts run by call centers.
"We cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed," May said.
This is of course true - but this is at best only treating the symptoms and leaving the disease to fester. Introducing restrictions is what we do, when we don't know what else to do; we can give morphine to cancer patients, but any doctor would much rather be able to cure the cancer. There is a point, when only treating the symptoms becomes a sign of incompetence; I think we already know at least some of the cure that is needed to get rid of terrorism: address inequality, both at home and abroad. Of course, that may require us to be painfully honest about our own role in creating the inequalities in the first place.
As I read the election polls and the comments on BBC, we are heading towards a hung parliament, which in my view is possibly the best scenario in many ways - exactly because it isn't "Strong and Stable (TM)". Governments shouldn't be based on overwhelming majorities - it makes them far too cocky; a minority goverment is forced to seek compromises, and will therefore be more balanced. I don't think Theresa May is a bad prime minister - she seems like a decent and well-intentioned person who genuinely wants to give better conditions to the worst off; the problem is, there are still so many of the old, nasty tories about, and she is not going to have things her way, even if they wind by a landslide. They say some of the right things, but what do they actually mean? They says "the party for working people" - what they mean is "people who are in work", not those that have got kicked out of their job and can't find a new one because their skills and age are against them. It should probably be seen in the same context as another of their favourite phrases: "aspirational". I think anyone who has seen the tv series "Keeping up appearances" knows how "aspirational" tends to look, and I don't think real, working class people see themselves in that light.
Ms May made a tactical mistake in calling an election now - people are sick of elections by now, they are not so much pro-conservative as simply resigned to Labour's internal struggles, and worst of all: it has made Labour bury their strife, at least for now, and they are coming out with a set of surprisingly appealing policies. In a way I hope they don't quite make it to government; the Tories deserve being saddled with the mess they have unleashed with Brexit. No government is going to come out of that unscathed, and I'd rather that it were the Tories who suffer - it only seems fair.
Slashdot Mirror
Can't play with kids since they're too old and tired so the kids have to get smarter and play with themselves.
That really is an eye-wateringly daft thing to say. As anybody knows, who'se had the benefit of grandparents taking care of the children, children and grandparents get along extremely well, in general. Part of this is because older people often have more time than the actual parents, but a large part of it is down to the fact that as you get older and more mature, you also tend to become more tolerant, creative and interested. So, where a young father is mostly interested in sex, beer, football and sex, an older father is more likely to have got past the more infantile stage of adulthood and acquired some interests in life - which he can then share with his children.
Do you really imagine that a man of 40 to 50 is 'old and tired'? Well perhaps you will be, if all you do is lie around on a sofa wasting you time. Life starts at 40, as the saying goes, and what it means is, you still have loads of energy, and now you also have experience and purpose. Some things you simply don't know enough about to really do until you are mature.
Stop bringing in foreign experts
- like Albert Einstein, von Neumann, Wernher von Braun, Fritz Zwicky and so on. America's scientific leadership was built, by and large, on a lot of foreign experts, who then went on to develop your own, human capital, so it is not necessarily a good idea to keep them out.
I wrote a comment about the state of the standard model of quantum mechanics, and the OP is about the same subject. I can't see how you get from there to talking about climate science, but since you bring it up, I don't think there is any doubt that the climate is changing, that we cause it and that we are able to change our ways as a society; we can probably avoid the worst of the effects, but we do need to act, sooner rather than later. It makes good sense any way, to stop polluting and overconsuming, in so many ways.
Article doesn't explain how the scientists know this is an end to the destruction versus a temporary reprieve? Seems like a stupid title altogether.
That is probably because the scientists don't actually say such a thing at all. I think, if one were to search through to a more trustworthy source, it would say something like 'The coral bleaching event that has unfolded over the last 3 years seems to be less severe this year, and this may be a sign that it is coming to an end, if this trend continues.' - and then a lot of explanations about what observations and expectations they base this on. Science is almost never startling or sensational; and in the very rare cases when it is, it will get ignored for a long time as being speculative. Just the way of the world; so when you see an sensational headline about a scientific discovery on a pop-sci website, it can probably be safely ignored.
I give things until the end of the year, before Brexit collapses and we can hopefully go back to tackling the real issues that affect the UK.
I really hope you are right. I think a lot of people are deeply frustrated with being governed by a group of people, whose only qualification is that they feel entitled to tell others what to do. And it isn't just in government we see this - I think anyone who has had a highly skilled job, like an engineer, software developer, medical doctor etc, recognises this: you are ruled by incompetent managers, who happened to have the right connections and feel they have the right to rule; they boast of their great successes, when they actually just had an easy ride, and then they fail spectacularly and take the company down with them, even though it could have been avoided, had they just been competent.
I don't know if Corbyn's promises can hold - I think it is possible, but it will not be as easy as their manifesto claims. And I know that we can't go on being ruled by incompetent fools, and he at least seems to be genuine. A guy who grows his own vegetables has to have his feet on the ground, I would have thought ;-)
Real estate rights are forever, then why not copyright?
Are real estate right forever? And should they be? In both cases I don't think so, and anyway, 'indefinitely' isn't exactly the same as 'forever': it is possible that you can own the exclusive rights to use a piece of land indefinitely, under present law, but no nation lasts forever, and your rights will disappear over time. But I don't even think land ownership should be indefinite; there should be some limitations, so that one family can't sit on large tracts of land to the exclusion of everybody else.
But even if we accept that land ownership should be indefinite, it doesn't follow that intellectual property right should be - there are vast differences: you can't make many copies of a piece of land, but you can copy a piece of data at almost no cost at all. You can make money from a piece of real estate, if you invest a large amount of work and/or money on an ongoing basis, whereas you can monetise your intellectual work with relatively modest investment. Real estate, whether it is land or buildings, has very clear boundaries, whereas intellectual property doesn't. And so on.
I think it is very reasonable that a creative person can make a living from his work, if it is of any perceived value, but just like you would expect a farmer to keep working on his land to produce new crops, you would expect the creative person to keep working to produce new things; after a while, the old works become part of common culture and it is reasonable that they also go into the public domain after a while.
Why do some people always start whining about requests to make things slightly better for anyone who isn't them?
I could propose several explanations, but I don't really want to be unkind. I think in many ways, people are to be pitied, if their lives are so void of meaning that they object to helping others, even when takes nothing away from themselves. I wonder what they would feel about it, if somebody designed a game that was incredibly cool, but which was designed to specifically work for, say, blind people, so that it would be a distinct disadvantage if you are used to rely on sight?
Maybe it's me, people keep saying I'm some kind of "SJW", ...
You should feel proud if you stand for social justice. It means you have a conscience, that you care - those are the traits that make us human.
We have known for a long time that the standard model isn't complete, not least since it does not incorporate gravity in any way. I think most physicists are surprised at how QM still seems to hold together - unlike GR, it is a really complicated theory, mathematically; it is all too often not well understood by the experimental physicists, and there are examples of techniques (like quantization) being applied as a set of rules thumb, a bit like 'first we caluculate the Hamiltonian for a classical system, then use the magical quantization rules'. Amazingly, it often works even if it is mathematically incorrect, but it is of course not going to last, I think; there must be cases where the cracks in the reasoning have been plastered over by the statistical noise in the measurements, and once we see clear evidence that the theory doesn't hold, we will have to go back over old data and discover the cracks we didn't spot back then.
This discrepancy in the decay of the tau lepton is probably one of these cracks, and I think it is quite exciting, but it isn't quite the sensation the editors want to make of it. I have already read about it several times, even on Scientific American and ScienceDaily, and I have heard it mentioned in recent BBC podcasts; Slashdot's editors would do well to stop reading the big-eyed, gawping articles in glossy magazines like futurism.com, and instead reading the slightly more sober stuff in news closer to the source. You guys should stop perpetuating the ideaa that science is some sort of cool entertainment and scientists are some sort of attention seeking rock-stars.
You sit here telling people to not pass judgement while you, yourself, have judged them to be capable. Curiously, you've judged this and made some assumptions about competency when, frankly, evidence suggests a lack of competency.
Not really - I reserve judgment until I know more, but until then I am willing to give them the benefit of doubt. After all, we give even murderers a chance to defend themselves before judging them. I think I have explained in sufficient detail why I think it is more likely than not, that they have shown reasonable competence, and I won't invest any more effort into the subject. I suspect you won't be convinced by any arguments, and I frankly don't really care.
Any complex construction project needs to take into account a large number of requirements and parameters; some of these may be in conflict with each other, so the engineers have to make compromises based on the best of their knowledge. In some cases the simply have to guess, because they still don't have strong enough data. It is presumptious, to say the least, to pass judgment without knowing more about how they made their design choices.
Pure guesswork, but I can imagine a reason why it would make sense to construct a tunnel that slopes downward: cold air tends to run down a slope, so it would be a way to preserve the low temperatures, something that is significant when your energy supplies have to reach you from rather far away. They will have weighed that up against the risk of the permafrost melting and estimated that the risk was relatively low; the arctic has been warming up a lot faster than even the pessimists though was likely back then.
Sorry, I should have done a better job of explaining my context - I think these particular slurs are English/European. I chose them because they are less well known and I have the impression that many Americans would feel offended if I used the N-word.
Prisons were never set up for rehabilitating prisoners.
And that is deeply shameful. It is only a minority of prisoners that cannot be rehabilitated under any circumstances, but what you are saying here is that prisons are not even trying; the idea never occurred. Punishment without purpose only breaks a person down and makes him (or her) less fit to come back into society.
That's just bone-headed. If you want to manufacture a new energy-efficient whatzit, go right ahead. No one's stopping you.
In the past, before we had standardised units of measure, the size of a foot, for example, would be different from city to city, and the same for everything else, which meant that there would be constant problems with claims about short measure etc. Both traders and customers wanted to have standardised measures, so they could feel confident that they knew what they were buying. Same now - I don't think this is the government telling manufacturers how to produce their goods, it is about defining a standard scale, so everybody knows how different brands compare. This makes it possible to compete on objective value of the goods rather than perhaps lies.
It is both sad and embarrassing to see how all the anti-environmentalists and the arm-chair philosophers join forces (again) to start kicking, when their perceived enemy of the moment is apparently lying down. Maybe you can elaborate on your own expertise in major construction work in the high Arctic? I think it is pretty likely that whoever built this site were qualified for the job, so I will go with their opinion on the matter over yours any time of the day. Permafrost melting isn't exactly a new, surprising phenomenon, and both the Russians, the Norwegians and the Canadians are aware of the issues and will no doubt have taken that into the totality of their considerations.
The world's seed banks are of huge importance. Not only are we losing bio-diversity very fast at the moment, but we are also losing genetic variety in all our food crops, which makes us more vulnerable to emerging plant-diseases, pests etc. As just one example, take the banana: nearly all the bananas we see in supermarkets come from the Cavendish variety, which is now under serious threat from a fungus disease. And calling it a variety is probably a bit of a misnomer - Cavendish bananas don't produce seed (or only very rarely), and all the plants are clones of just 1 original plant, so they are genetically identical. Whatever kills one is likely to kill all. The seed banks are there to preserve the genetic variety of food crops, to protect us against something like this happening to wheat, rice, maize, potatoes etc etc. Even if you are meat eater, you don't want to loose the crops that feed the cattle that feed you.
And we are becoming increasingly aware of the fact that we can ill afford to lose the natural eco-systems, since much or even most of what we grow for crops, depends on them being at least somewhat intact; so the seed vaults' work in preserving wild plant species is also very important. This is definitely not just a bunch of tree-huggers wasting tax-payers' money. If you are looking for waste of tax-payers' money, look no further than to propping up an unnecessary coal industry or giving tax breaks to the wealthy.
How do they count people as "racist" exactly? If I say "he is Japanese" is that counted? Now change Japanese to any Race/Ethnicity/Religion that you like. Is that counted as a "racist"? How about if you search for "Japanese fighter"?
Are you trying to convince us that since it isn't racist to refer to somebody's nationality, it is also not racist to call black people 'Sambo' or to refer to Jews as 'Yids'? And perhaps, if you take the words simply as words, they are only sounds - the racism is in the attitude you have to other people. However, since words only have meaning in a context, and some words have mostly been used to express racist views, theyd are certainly now widely perceived as racist slurs.
I think, from a research point of view, it is perfectly valid to use certain words as a proxy for covert (or overt) racism: If a person doesn't feel wrong, somehow, about using these words, they are probably either out of contact with what the common views are on these words, or they are racist: they feel good about using words that are meant to insult certain groups of people. In this day and age, it seems unlikely that most people wouldn't know that certain words are regarded as racist, and in a statistical study, that is good enough, since the size of the dataset should even out any uncertainties.
Well known tyrannical strategy at play: Keep the masses pitted against each other and you can do whatever you wish.
Here, I think you are playing the conspiracy card: "They", that mysterious and shady entity that seems to be so powerful, are manipulating people's minds again. It is simply public opinion: the more or less agreed, average set of what most people feel is right(-sh). Most people simply don't want to be confronted with unpleasant, loud-mouthed and small-minded prejudices all the time; that's the so-called "censorship" that some people keep complaining about. They don't think the issues you go on about are relevant - they see it as SPAM, basically, and just want you to stop, so they can concentrate on the issues that are important to them.
As for who keeps the radicals (what you call 'masses') pitted against each other: it's not my impression that they need any encouragement to do that - most radical groups are spoiling for a fight, and talking about 'masses' is simply wishful thinking on their part, as they are in fact very small minorities.
That, and also: I see no reason why I would want my money transactions to be anonymous, which seems to be the only advantage of this. In fact, I want my payments to be visible, so I can prove that I made a payment, or on rare occasions, can reverse a payment if a service wasn't delivered.
When do we decide that the Islamic religion of the present day is too violent and insist that it reform or be banned?
You mean, let's be "tough on terror" by overreacting and committing unspeakable acts of gross indecency against millions of innocent people, because they happen to have grown up in a culture that you don't understand and don't want to understand? I don't think so. There are variants of Islam that subscribe to a darkened worldview, but there are Christians, even in this day and age, who are no less deluded and aggressive; what you suggest is to fall into the same, demented thinking as them, and initiate a religious war, in essence - so we may have people killed in the millions by war instead of tens to hundreds by rather feeble act of cowardice by terrorists.
What we should do instead, is what intelligent governments are already working on: reaching out to the huge majority of decent, moderate Muslims, and work with them to solve this issue, since it hurts them as badly as it hurts us (or worse, in fact).
The story stays the same - don't fuck over your admins and have proper procedure and backup.
There's a lot of lessons that management somehow never seem able to learn. Like, never have only 1 sysadmin, even if having more seems like overkill. Or, how about nurturing a relationship based on mutual respect and trust? The sysadmin has after all been trusted with one of the most important resource in any company, in most cases: the data. Yet, in a previous job I had an experience that I think is not uncommon: I had been there for over 10 years, I was regularly praised by my colleagues, but I was 'old' (ie >50); so my manager tried several ways to get rid of me - unreasonable demands, vague targets with moving goal-posts, etc, and when that didn't work, I was made "redundant" and asked to train some poor, unexperienced soul. On my last day, I wiped my workstation disk (very easy to do, not easy to recover from: using the 'dd' command to copy from /dev/zero to /dev/sda overwrites the partition table and then everything else, and the system doesn't report an error until it needs to load something that isn't there); nothing criminal in that, but just imagine I had decided to be creative and incorporated some discrete time bombs of that sort months later, when I was well away? It isn't hard to do, and it isn't hard to see how it could be made to look like the new guy had screwed up in a major way. Fortunatey I am both honest and mature enough to not do this kind of shit; but that company could have suffered significant losses if I hadn't been, and I think complacent, idiot managers, who are incapable of inspiring trust and loyalty and treat people like cattle, should be flayed and rolled in salt - after being given a drug to heighten their pain sensitivity, not that I want to sound harsh or anything.
I think Python should be seen as a scripting language: a language whose purpose is to tie together the real applications, rather like bash and ksh. Python has a lot of packages or modules (or whatever they are called), many of which seem well suited for scientific or engineering purposes; it is my impression that most are written in C or C++ for speed. So, you can see the attraction of Python for, say a scientist - there are modules for many specialised, mathematical areas, all of which are very difficult to code from scratch, and although there are similar packages for C, C++ and FORTRAN, they are less easy to just pick up and use.
I think you are less likely to find applications in Python - it is quite possible to do, and I have seen some, but just like you wouldn't normally write applications for general consumption in bash (although you can), Python isn't really the obvious choice either, IMO. Perhaps it is exactly because scripting languages are so good for ad hoc work - you get to expect that everything must be equally easy to achieve, but many things are simply complicated by nature, so the advantages of using Python become less prominent.
As a British citizen, I have to agree with much of what you say, but let me offer a slightly different perspective, perhaps.
I think one of the main problems in British politics over the last several decades has been the way Labour deserted its natural core voters: the working class, in a wider sense - not just the traditional factory workers, but everybody in a simillar position in society; all us that are destined to be employees, basically, rather than business owners. Blair tried to widen the scope, but lost sight of the working class and became enamoured with what one can call 'neo-capitalism' (well, I'm trying to be kind - not sure if he really deserves it); that is not to say that it is impossible for Labour to appeal to those who don't traditionally feel they are 'working class' - I think it is very possible, but you have to persuade people to rethink their position in society and realise that it isn't somehow embarrassing to be working class. Corbyn's jaw-dropping, explosive rise shows us that a lot of people felt that so-called New Labour was a mistake, and that they do in fact want them to remember the old values and bring them in to the modern reality; I think Corbyn at least has the intellectual span to envision this, and if the party can unite behind him, they could pull it off.
The Tories gambled and lost; they misread the situation, but I am not convinced that this is Theresa May's fault - she is in many ways one of the few good Conservatives, and I like her, but she is surrounded by the old-style 'nasty tories', as she once called them; the kind satirised in 'The New Statesman' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Statesman). The Tories, under David Cameron tried to re-invent themselves as 'nice, and in favour of social justice, but I think it never rang true, and you kept seeing the jeering, private-school raised bully through the varnish on a regular basis. They will form the next government, I'm sure, and they deserve it; if anybody deserves struggling with the mess of Brexit and the inevitable failures that will come off it, it is the Tories.
So here we are - fatefully moving towards Brexit, as if it was just unavoidable now; a very British kind of fatalism, I think. The truth is, of course, that we can halt this process at any time; we may have to eat humble pie and come back hat in hand, but of course we can. Just turn the idea around: if the remain side had won by such a slim majority, we would immediately have had the leavers shouting about how unfair it all was, and they would have been campaigning on and on now; so why should we just accept what is increasingly looking like a very bad idea with a heavy sigh? That simply does not make sense.
I have little doubt that we will come back - but next time, I hope the EU is a more ambitious union, not just a glorified market place with a few extra curls, but a full political union - a federal state or something like that.
It is much easier to state what I don't like, which is most, modern 'soft documentaries' that are almost homeopathic when it comes to facts and understanding, and invariably comes with poor narration, constant soundtrack of muzak and 'artistic' cutting. But there are a few people that have done good documentaries for BBC: Dr Lucy Worsley, who makes slightly crazy (in a good way) historical documentaries, and Francesco da Mosco with his journeys through Italy are just very, very pleasant and relaxing to watch. There are others, of course - history and archaeology are subjects that seem to attract good documentaries atm; nature and hard science programmes are unfortunately a very mixed bag with too much big-eyed gawping and too little real communication of understanding.
Trump withdrew from the Paris accord, and Covfefe was the more searched term than Paris Climate Agreement.
Really? However, it was front page news everywhere I looked, as were (and still are) the many, critical comments from state and industry leaders globally. China, among others, greeted it with something like "Really?!" and a big grin on their faces, because they are trying to become the world leaders in renewable energy and green technology, and the US has just abdicated from even trying.
Your side thinks he sabotages his schemes by these tweets.
The rest of us know (and Trump himself knows) that the tweets are meaningless and valueless in and of themselves, but they distract the MSM from what is really going on, and in a way that makes the left look like gibbering imbeciles.
He's been doing this since about *a year* prior to the election, and your side hasn't caught on even yet!
'Our side' being something like >90% of the world population, I take it? A lot of people voted for Trump in anger over what is clearly an increasingly unfair and unbalanced system; they don't like him, and they know he is a useless clown, but they want change. Same in UK with Brexit and paradoxically, with Jeremy Corbyn. People are tired of the same, old, hollow lies about how capitalism has to favour the rich only. With Trump and Brexit they are going to be deeply disappointed, no doubt, whereas with Corbyn, who knows? It remains to be seen, but at least he isn't such a glaringly obvious idiot, far removed from reality, as Trump.
Some people seem to be able to keep up an illusion about their glorious leader, no matter what the evidence tells them - are you sure you're not one of them? Trump is not the solution to what is wrong with America and the world; how could a billionaire and the spoiled child of a rich father sort of the wrongs that he himself and his class of people are the results of? That's like treating starvation with fasting - or perhaps more accurately, curing obesity by overeating.
This is as crazy as having closed source software determine guilt
Or indeed using software at all, when it comes to doling out justice. The law is imperfect - one might almost say by design - and is only ever meant to be a guideline or framework for the judge, who is there to add some human insight and understanding. I think it is a very disturbing idea, using computers to "calculate" justice; before we know it, we will have courts run by call centers.
"We cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed," May said.
This is of course true - but this is at best only treating the symptoms and leaving the disease to fester. Introducing restrictions is what we do, when we don't know what else to do; we can give morphine to cancer patients, but any doctor would much rather be able to cure the cancer. There is a point, when only treating the symptoms becomes a sign of incompetence; I think we already know at least some of the cure that is needed to get rid of terrorism: address inequality, both at home and abroad. Of course, that may require us to be painfully honest about our own role in creating the inequalities in the first place.
As I read the election polls and the comments on BBC, we are heading towards a hung parliament, which in my view is possibly the best scenario in many ways - exactly because it isn't "Strong and Stable (TM)". Governments shouldn't be based on overwhelming majorities - it makes them far too cocky; a minority goverment is forced to seek compromises, and will therefore be more balanced. I don't think Theresa May is a bad prime minister - she seems like a decent and well-intentioned person who genuinely wants to give better conditions to the worst off; the problem is, there are still so many of the old, nasty tories about, and she is not going to have things her way, even if they wind by a landslide. They say some of the right things, but what do they actually mean? They says "the party for working people" - what they mean is "people who are in work", not those that have got kicked out of their job and can't find a new one because their skills and age are against them. It should probably be seen in the same context as another of their favourite phrases: "aspirational". I think anyone who has seen the tv series "Keeping up appearances" knows how "aspirational" tends to look, and I don't think real, working class people see themselves in that light.
Ms May made a tactical mistake in calling an election now - people are sick of elections by now, they are not so much pro-conservative as simply resigned to Labour's internal struggles, and worst of all: it has made Labour bury their strife, at least for now, and they are coming out with a set of surprisingly appealing policies. In a way I hope they don't quite make it to government; the Tories deserve being saddled with the mess they have unleashed with Brexit. No government is going to come out of that unscathed, and I'd rather that it were the Tories who suffer - it only seems fair.