"These traits no longer increase, despite further continuous nutritional, medical, and scientific progress..."
Perhaps not as much progress has been made as our scientists say then?
It's more a claim that human health has an asymptotic limit that we're approaching.
When it comes to athletics there's basically three ways to beat records, improve the talent pool (more healthy people), improve the training, improve the equipment, and doping.
If Daniel Epstein is to be believed Usain Bolt was only slightly faster than Jesse Owens, which suggests it's almost all equipment and the talent pool, training, and even doping don't make much of a difference for male sprinters.
For longevity most of our improvements have come from nutrition and fixing things that go wrong. But at a certain age we exceed the design specs and a ton of really important things start going wrong at the same time. To really start changing things we'll need to figure out how to replace whole systems, how to replace worn out parts of brains.
Now, I think the study is missing one big thing on the longevity side, obesity. I suspect it's cancelled out a ton of the medical advancements of the past few decades. At some point we're going to solve obesity and at that point we're going to see a big jump in longevity.
So were these iron weapons more ceremonial? Prized because they are rare? Or indicative of regional trade issues?
If they were meteorite iron I'd have to assume they were extremely rare.
Rich people back then would have been a lot like the rich people of today. When you have a bit of money you get the same thing everyone else has, only better. When you have an absurd amount of money you start looking for other ways to show off your wealth, a weapon made from a rock that fell from the friggin' sky is really damn cool.
Who would be stupid enough to do something like this?
Trump can't even keep his mouth shut long enough to save himself from criminal liability or resist to the urge to give Russian government the location of U.S. nuclear submarines.
Any spy who reports directly to trump is a dead man walking.
You're assuming these spies would be spying on governments hostile to the administration.
I think a more likely purpose for these spies is to collect dirt on domestic political actors and to provide back-channels to foreign governments that are secure from monitoring from the US government.
Both of these might put the spies at risk of criminal liability in the US, but the people and institutions they'll piss off are generally not the ones that go around ordering hits.
the tax in question is being paid to Ireland, not the EU. The reason they EU is getting involved is the EU has rules to avoid countries engaging in a race to the bottom to attract major corporations. Ireland violated those rules.
What's to prevent Ireland from "hiring" Google to perform some token service for them and then handing all of the tax money back?
Two things, first, the company in this story was Apple.
Second is the same set of underlying rules, according to this:
The commission says that lower tax bills create illegal "state aid", giving firms advantages over rivals.
So if the violation isn't taxes in specific, but rather the practice of giving big companies sweetheart deals, then handing the money back to Google would be an even more obvious violation.
Apple doesn't owe any taxes in Ireland, as defined by the laws of Ireland.
Incorrect, the laws of Ireland recognize the treaties that make Ireland part of the EU. And the language of those treaties recognizes the authority of the EC on this issue.
If Ireland wants to change its laws to allow it to charge Apple no tax it can follow Britain's example and do so.
The EU, a soon-to-be irrelevant third party, saw a bucket of cash it wanted and is somehow coercing both parties to get an unjustified payout.
Also incorrect, the tax in question is being paid to Ireland, not the EU. The reason they EU is getting involved is the EU has rules to avoid countries engaging in a race to the bottom to attract major corporations. Ireland violated those rules.
No, they doubled the standard deduction and eliminated all personal deductions. A family with two adults and two children will have a smaller standard deduction ($24K) than they have now. And if they have more kids they lose big time.
Or if you're over 65 and get two deductions per person and the standard deduction now, even a couple loses.
It hardly seems fair to argue the details of the tax bill when the legislators themselves don't fully understand what they voted for.
1) What was this premium service? Did it have a good selection of content? A nice interface? Did it let people binge-watch a series?
2) If I was getting a premium service for free for 45 days I might binge watch some things or watch some movies, but I wouldn't use it to watch a regular series since I'd lose it after a few episodes.
3) Habits are hard to break. I'd expect the torrenting to decrease more over time as they grew more familiar with the subscription service and developed new viewing habits.
He not only admitted he downloaded the files, he said he was PROUD that he had downloaded the files as they furthered the investigation into malware.
The files then somehow made their way to the KGB.
Since then he's said that there was a trojan on the PC he got the files from (but the trojan infection wasn't their fault because the PC user had turned off Kapersky for awhile which they also knew) so Russian hackers must've gotten the information that way
Now he's saying it's a giant conspiracy?
He doesn't have to actively work with the Russian government - they could easily have moles in his organization pulling the data out.
Note, if intelligence agencies in the US government decided that Kaspersky was collaborating with the Russian government, then an orchestrated campaign to destroy the company's reputation (and get it off the computers of the US government and its employee) is precisely the response I'd expect.
What percentage of those 12 million people go bankrupt when it turns out their city will be uninhabitable in 30 years?
Don't know. What percentage of them are dumb enough to continue to live in a city that they KNOW will be uninhabitable in 30 years?
It doesn't matter.
Right now, the value of each of those properties is $X, in 30 years the value of those properties will be $0. At some point someone or a series of someones is going to lose $X.
Was anyone killed or injured during these robberies? The fact they were armed with guns doesn't mean they intended to use those guns, it certainly introduces a lot more risk that such a thing could happen, but not 116 years worth.
More over, is someone who commits eight armed robberies eight times as bad as someone who commits one? Or four times as bad as someone who commits two? If not, then why do the sentences occur concurrently?
I draw a distinction between someone who is a one-time armed robber vs someone who is a repeated armed robber, but I don't think there's a big difference between someone who has performed three and eight.
Remember that most crimes are committed by young males and recidivism rates tend to be low, even if you put him away for 10 years he's probably not re-offending once he gets out.
All this could play out in a mere 20 to 50 years -- much too quickly for humanity to adapt.
Humanity can adapt to changes on a far more rapid timescale than this. We don't have to hang around until we evolve gills we just move to higher ground and rebuild. This will involve social and economic upheaval and a reduction in the standard of living on a short timescale but that does not mean we cannot adapt to the change.
What's the value of a modern metropolis, hundreds of billions? trillions? What percentage of those 12 million people go bankrupt when it turns out their city will be uninhabitable in 30 years?
And you're not just talking about population relocation. At the same time this is going on storms have higher intensities, changing rainfall patterns cause harvests to drop, and countries start squabbling about how to use geo-engineering to improve their situation.
North American and Europe can probably manage, though the debate over who pays for that vanished wealth is going to be ugly. But China, India, and Pakistan? These are three really big Nuclear armed nations who will experience a lot of climate change and have a lot of very poor people with limited resources to handle a big relocation or food shortage.
The world is barely stable now, just 3 years ago people were worried that a major war was going to erupt because Putin decided to take a chunk of Ukraine. There's a reason climate change is freaking out the world's militaries, all these different stressors will not be handled by noble philosopher kings, there could be some very ugly conflicts in our future.
Statements such as "If sea levels rise by six feet, "around 12 million people in the United States would be displaced, and the world's most vulnerable megacities, like Shanghai, Mumbai, and Ho Chi Minh City, could be wiped off the map." are massive exaggerations. If this was even on the same side of the planet as reality those some places would be screwed every high tide.
Some years back I heard about a study where they asked very young children to describe the shape of the earth. Some thought sphere, some thought flat, others thought dome, and others just couldn't come up with a coherent answer.
I spent a while reading your comment and trying to figure out how you thought tides and construction worked. My conclusion was that I don't think you have a coherent answer.
"Can you expound on 'Thanksgiving is white privilege'", or does the student just repeat tired-old-arguments--or simply responds with profanity when challenged? Or violence? Universities are supposed to make you reason about your views, not just repeat talking points.
I have no idea what the student understood though I have no doubt he was simply repeating talking points. As far as I'm concerned the only way to be under 25 and right on a complex subject is by having the dumb luck to choose the right set of talking points. It's only later that those talking points turn into wisdom and nuanced views.
Oh, as for native americans...what they should be thinking is "I no longer have to worry about the tribe next door putting me through torture rituals if I get captured". Eastern tribes tended to be pretty violent; though not as bad as the meso-american ones. The "European Tribes" simply won the latest war and imposed a peace. People tend to be people, regardless of skin color...
Do you actually know any of the history of how first contact went for Native Americans? They're estimated to have lost 80-90% population through disease, starvation, and deliberate killing. Not to mention having their land taken and losing a lot of their culture due to forced assimilation. And you think they're better off today? Substance abuse, poverty, mass unemployment, etc. There's a reason why those communities suffer horrid suicide rates, they do not experience the same country you experience.
If you were to give me the choice between living as a European nobleman in 1400 and a poor Caucasian in Europe or N.A. in 2017 I'd choose 2017 in a heartbeat.
If the choice were an average North American Aboriginal in 1400 and living as an average North American Aboriginal in 2017 I'm honestly not sure which way I'd go.
North American Aboriginals would have been far better off if the Americans had not been colonized by Europeans.
So he builds a rocket expected to reach 1,500 feet.... When there is an 11,500 foot mountain 50 miles from Amboy with a trail right to the tippy top.and a 360 degree view of the horizon - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Call me crazy but I really don't think this has anything to do with 'flat earth', science or rockets. He got his picture in the paper. End of story.
Or if he didn't want to make the drive he could have taken a ride in a hot air balloon:
HOW HIGH DO BALLOONS GO?
Flights in hot air balloons have been recorded at over 50,000 feet. However, the sport of ballooning is most enjoyable when flying 1,200 to 3,000 feet. Or just above the treetops. When balloons fly over populated areas, they maintain an altitude of at least 1,000 feet.
This has nothing to do with proving a flat earth, it's entirely about the publicity and the fact he wanted to make a rocket.
First of all, I just have to say: First world problems on this one...
Second of all, people have to realize that critic reviews have, almost since the time of Shakespeare, been overly critical of media that is primarily audience targeted and for lack of a better term fun to experience. Critics want edgy, ground breaking artistic media because for the most part they watch way too many movies and are burnt out and cynical. The rest of us who watch maybe 25 movies a year are for the most part just looking for a good time. The best barometer I have found to figure out if I will enjoy a movie or not is the Amazon reviews score and reading the top positive and top negative. There is always the risk of a spoiler, but it is a far better barometer because normal people are giving their impressions. As traditional media and newspapers die, so too should the movie critic industry. It is an antiquated system that is neither useful nor necessary in the modern era.
Critics offer two services, one they offer intelligent analysis of art and contribute to the public conversation around art, second, they help people decide what art to seek out.
Roger Ebert was a great example of the first one, he could identity themes and influences a viewer with less experience would miss, and his analysis could add some layers and really enhance the enjoyment of a movie.
But as for the second part, a good reviewer can also let you understand what kind of film a movie is and how it succeeds on that measure. For instance, 300 got huge audience ratings, but I didn't like it, I just got bored. If I'd read a good review previously it might have told me it was an awesome film, but not a film I'd personally enjoy.
People seem so damned intolerant of anything anymore. You have people who, if you don't agree with everything they espouse, no matter how unrealistic it may be, you are labeled a hater, a bigot, stupid, intolerant, whatever. Frankly, I'm sick of it.
Just two days ago, my wife and I were over at her mother's for Thanksgiving, and my wife's brother, the youngest in the family and still in university, trotted out this "Thanksgiving is white privilege bullshit". Universities... supposedly places where differing thoughts and opinions can swirl around, have become bastions of intolerance for any differing opinion or belief.
"Thanksgiving is white privilege bullshit" sounds exactly like an opinion that might pop out from a place where differing thoughts and opinions can swirl around. You can't really learn anything if you only hear things you agree with, I'd actually be kind of curious to hear why he thought "Thanksgiving is white privilege".
You also need to distinguish criticism from discussion, if you make a dumb argument I'm going to push back. I'll agree there's some points of views that you rarely hear expressed on campus, that's because they're really hard to defend.
I agree that there's a problem with conservative speakers being protested on campuses, which is related though really a different discussion. But "Thanksgiving is white privilege" does make me wonder what Native Americans think about Thanksgiving.
Interviews are expensive, you don't want to waste them interviewing poor candidates.
If you're looking for really high end people most of them have a degree already. So the degree requirement just gets rid of extraneous candidates.
If you're looking for lower to mid-range people requiring a degree filters out some qualified applicants, but there should be plenty left.
That's not to say companies are hitting the right balance, our most talented hire by far had a degree is a field completely unrelated to software dev, (though he came with a boatload of experience). And certainly, if you find an awesome candidate and HR pushes back because they're missing a checkbox then HR needs to be fixed.
In general the DC movies are dark and serious while the MCU movies are fun and lighthearted.
The DC approach works really well with a character who is dark and serious like Batman, if usually fails with anything else.
As for the allegation in the story, that WB screwed with the timing to shield the movies opening, it's probably a coincidence, but it is plausible even as a one-off scheme since it could mean the difference of millions of dollars.
Realistically WB only has two reasons to be interested in Rotten Tomatoes, either they want some additional insight into what audiences and critics like, or they want to influence the media coverage of their movies.
The best chance Linux has of taking of is when support for Windows 7 ends in 2020. Under this plan they could end up switching to Windows 10 just as Linux begins to gain ground.
I for one won't be using Windows 10 and slowly transitioning my PCs to Linux Mint, and I think a significant number of computer enthusiasts will do the same. I'm finding Linux Mint to be very usable and to meet most of my needs. I may need to keep one Windows PC around for a while longer, but hopefully I'll find a way to get rid of that.
I think this was the plan in 2003.
Realistically Linux has been my desktop since 2001, and in the last 10 years the only things that have a major impact on my day-to-day experience are the support for Netflix and Steam.
Maybe a few more home enthusiasts will start jumping on board (Netflix and Steam are huge for the home experience), but considering that Apple has largely been expunged from the corporate environment I don't see how Linux is suddenly going to break in.
The future of corporate is Windows desktops. Maybe the desktop can be dislodged by phones, tablets, dumb net terminals, or some future tech, but no one is kicking them off the desktop.
It's just an arms race, the moment you block BitTorrent someone makes a new protocol. You block that protocol too and they make a 3rd protocol that disguises itself as normal traffic.
Soon Comcast is gives up entirely, or gets in an arms race with the protocol authors trying to detect P2P traffic with legitimate traffic getting caught in the crossfire.
Justin Trudeau should also worry about the general breakdown of the U.S. government in many other areas.
True, but the US is a very large market in the shared resource of the Internet. The fall of net neutrality will negatively affect the quality of the Internet for everyone.
The problem is really that organizations like EFF and OpenMedia should not be providing form letters to send in the first place. They should give the person an address to send their remarks to, but absolutely *NONE* of the content of the email should be provided or else they are just setting up a situation where this kind of thing is going to happen.
I've seen this kind of thing happen before, where a federal organization accepts public comments on an issue, and a well-meaning person or organization that wants people to send letters about the matter decides to supply an example of what such a letter should look like. Laziness on the part of the end-user kicks in and everybody just copies and pastes the darn thing, maybe changing only about 10% of it, and causing the organization to ignore all of them.
So did the EFF and OpenMedia make an obvious rookie screw up, or were they following the existing standard whereby form letters were considered?
That's literally the f'ing point of the article! They data mined the responses, and determined that 1/3rd of them were a form letter, and a good chunk were opinion and not an actual defensible argument. I know we can't be bothered to even comprehend the summary, but come on!
I think you missed the point of my comment.
I'm not claiming they looked over the responses, determined that the vast majority didn't fit their criteria for consideration, and then threw them out.
I'm claiming they wanted to kill net neutrality, so they reviewed the responses with the aim of justifying that conclusion, and then chose to interpret and apply their standards in a way that would ignore the overwhelming public support for net neutrality shown in the comments.
Slashdot Mirror
"Starbucks employed 8 percent more people in the U.S. in 2016 than it did in 2015, the year it launched the app..."
Employees per store is the only valid statistic to support their contention. Otherwise, it's factoring in new employees in new stores.
Unless the app made Starbucks more profitable and led to more stores being opened.
Of course you'd need to compensate for job losses from competing stores.
But at the same time you might try to capture secondary benefits from the whole coffee-ordering transaction being made more efficient.
Things get complicated quickly.
"These traits no longer increase, despite further continuous nutritional, medical, and scientific progress ..."
Perhaps not as much progress has been made as our scientists say then?
It's more a claim that human health has an asymptotic limit that we're approaching.
When it comes to athletics there's basically three ways to beat records, improve the talent pool (more healthy people), improve the training, improve the equipment, and doping.
If Daniel Epstein is to be believed Usain Bolt was only slightly faster than Jesse Owens, which suggests it's almost all equipment and the talent pool, training, and even doping don't make much of a difference for male sprinters.
For any sport there's an optimal physique, and outside of fundamentally changing human biology you can't really do much better.
For longevity most of our improvements have come from nutrition and fixing things that go wrong. But at a certain age we exceed the design specs and a ton of really important things start going wrong at the same time. To really start changing things we'll need to figure out how to replace whole systems, how to replace worn out parts of brains.
Now, I think the study is missing one big thing on the longevity side, obesity. I suspect it's cancelled out a ton of the medical advancements of the past few decades. At some point we're going to solve obesity and at that point we're going to see a big jump in longevity.
So were these iron weapons more ceremonial? Prized because they are rare? Or indicative of regional trade issues?
If they were meteorite iron I'd have to assume they were extremely rare.
Rich people back then would have been a lot like the rich people of today. When you have a bit of money you get the same thing everyone else has, only better. When you have an absurd amount of money you start looking for other ways to show off your wealth, a weapon made from a rock that fell from the friggin' sky is really damn cool.
Who would be stupid enough to do something like this?
Trump can't even keep his mouth shut long enough to save himself from criminal liability or resist to the urge to give Russian government the location of U.S. nuclear submarines.
Any spy who reports directly to trump is a dead man walking.
You're assuming these spies would be spying on governments hostile to the administration.
I think a more likely purpose for these spies is to collect dirt on domestic political actors and to provide back-channels to foreign governments that are secure from monitoring from the US government.
Both of these might put the spies at risk of criminal liability in the US, but the people and institutions they'll piss off are generally not the ones that go around ordering hits.
the tax in question is being paid to Ireland, not the EU. The reason they EU is getting involved is the EU has rules to avoid countries engaging in a race to the bottom to attract major corporations. Ireland violated those rules.
What's to prevent Ireland from "hiring" Google to perform some token service for them and then handing all of the tax money back?
Two things, first, the company in this story was Apple.
Second is the same set of underlying rules, according to this:
The commission says that lower tax bills create illegal "state aid", giving firms advantages over rivals.
So if the violation isn't taxes in specific, but rather the practice of giving big companies sweetheart deals, then handing the money back to Google would be an even more obvious violation.
Apple doesn't owe any taxes in Ireland, as defined by the laws of Ireland.
Incorrect, the laws of Ireland recognize the treaties that make Ireland part of the EU. And the language of those treaties recognizes the authority of the EC on this issue.
If Ireland wants to change its laws to allow it to charge Apple no tax it can follow Britain's example and do so.
The EU, a soon-to-be irrelevant third party, saw a bucket of cash it wanted and is somehow coercing both parties to get an unjustified payout.
Also incorrect, the tax in question is being paid to Ireland, not the EU. The reason they EU is getting involved is the EU has rules to avoid countries engaging in a race to the bottom to attract major corporations. Ireland violated those rules.
No, they doubled the standard deduction and eliminated all personal deductions. A family with two adults and two children will have a smaller standard deduction ($24K) than they have now. And if they have more kids they lose big time.
Or if you're over 65 and get two deductions per person and the standard deduction now, even a couple loses.
It hardly seems fair to argue the details of the tax bill when the legislators themselves don't fully understand what they voted for.
1) What was this premium service? Did it have a good selection of content? A nice interface? Did it let people binge-watch a series?
2) If I was getting a premium service for free for 45 days I might binge watch some things or watch some movies, but I wouldn't use it to watch a regular series since I'd lose it after a few episodes.
3) Habits are hard to break. I'd expect the torrenting to decrease more over time as they grew more familiar with the subscription service and developed new viewing habits.
He not only admitted he downloaded the files, he said he was PROUD that he had downloaded the files as they furthered the investigation into malware.
The files then somehow made their way to the KGB.
Since then he's said that there was a trojan on the PC he got the files from (but the trojan infection wasn't their fault because the PC user had turned off Kapersky for awhile which they also knew) so Russian hackers must've gotten the information that way
Now he's saying it's a giant conspiracy?
He doesn't have to actively work with the Russian government - they could easily have moles in his organization pulling the data out.
Note, if intelligence agencies in the US government decided that Kaspersky was collaborating with the Russian government, then an orchestrated campaign to destroy the company's reputation (and get it off the computers of the US government and its employee) is precisely the response I'd expect.
Don't know. What percentage of them are dumb enough to continue to live in a city that they KNOW will be uninhabitable in 30 years?
It doesn't matter.
Right now, the value of each of those properties is $X, in 30 years the value of those properties will be $0. At some point someone or a series of someones is going to lose $X.
Was anyone killed or injured during these robberies? The fact they were armed with guns doesn't mean they intended to use those guns, it certainly introduces a lot more risk that such a thing could happen, but not 116 years worth.
More over, is someone who commits eight armed robberies eight times as bad as someone who commits one? Or four times as bad as someone who commits two? If not, then why do the sentences occur concurrently?
I draw a distinction between someone who is a one-time armed robber vs someone who is a repeated armed robber, but I don't think there's a big difference between someone who has performed three and eight.
Remember that most crimes are committed by young males and recidivism rates tend to be low, even if you put him away for 10 years he's probably not re-offending once he gets out.
Armed robbery is bad, and multiple armed robberies is worse, but 116 years seems like overkill.
I know it's not the point of the article... but I feel like the sentencing algorithms have some bugs.
All this could play out in a mere 20 to 50 years -- much too quickly for humanity to adapt.
Humanity can adapt to changes on a far more rapid timescale than this. We don't have to hang around until we evolve gills we just move to higher ground and rebuild. This will involve social and economic upheaval and a reduction in the standard of living on a short timescale but that does not mean we cannot adapt to the change.
What's the value of a modern metropolis, hundreds of billions? trillions? What percentage of those 12 million people go bankrupt when it turns out their city will be uninhabitable in 30 years?
And you're not just talking about population relocation. At the same time this is going on storms have higher intensities, changing rainfall patterns cause harvests to drop, and countries start squabbling about how to use geo-engineering to improve their situation.
North American and Europe can probably manage, though the debate over who pays for that vanished wealth is going to be ugly. But China, India, and Pakistan? These are three really big Nuclear armed nations who will experience a lot of climate change and have a lot of very poor people with limited resources to handle a big relocation or food shortage.
The world is barely stable now, just 3 years ago people were worried that a major war was going to erupt because Putin decided to take a chunk of Ukraine. There's a reason climate change is freaking out the world's militaries, all these different stressors will not be handled by noble philosopher kings, there could be some very ugly conflicts in our future.
Statements such as "If sea levels rise by six feet, "around 12 million people in the United States would be displaced, and the world's most vulnerable megacities, like Shanghai, Mumbai, and Ho Chi Minh City, could be wiped off the map." are massive exaggerations. If this was even on the same side of the planet as reality those some places would be screwed every high tide.
Some years back I heard about a study where they asked very young children to describe the shape of the earth. Some thought sphere, some thought flat, others thought dome, and others just couldn't come up with a coherent answer.
I spent a while reading your comment and trying to figure out how you thought tides and construction worked. My conclusion was that I don't think you have a coherent answer.
"Can you expound on 'Thanksgiving is white privilege'", or does the student just repeat tired-old-arguments--or simply responds with profanity when challenged? Or violence? Universities are supposed to make you reason about your views, not just repeat talking points.
I have no idea what the student understood though I have no doubt he was simply repeating talking points. As far as I'm concerned the only way to be under 25 and right on a complex subject is by having the dumb luck to choose the right set of talking points. It's only later that those talking points turn into wisdom and nuanced views.
Oh, as for native americans...what they should be thinking is "I no longer have to worry about the tribe next door putting me through torture rituals if I get captured". Eastern tribes tended to be pretty violent; though not as bad as the meso-american ones. The "European Tribes" simply won the latest war and imposed a peace. People tend to be people, regardless of skin color...
Do you actually know any of the history of how first contact went for Native Americans? They're estimated to have lost 80-90% population through disease, starvation, and deliberate killing. Not to mention having their land taken and losing a lot of their culture due to forced assimilation. And you think they're better off today? Substance abuse, poverty, mass unemployment, etc. There's a reason why those communities suffer horrid suicide rates, they do not experience the same country you experience.
If you were to give me the choice between living as a European nobleman in 1400 and a poor Caucasian in Europe or N.A. in 2017 I'd choose 2017 in a heartbeat.
If the choice were an average North American Aboriginal in 1400 and living as an average North American Aboriginal in 2017 I'm honestly not sure which way I'd go.
North American Aboriginals would have been far better off if the Americans had not been colonized by Europeans.
So he builds a rocket expected to reach 1,500 feet.... When there is an 11,500 foot mountain 50 miles from Amboy with a trail right to the tippy top.and a 360 degree view of the horizon - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Call me crazy but I really don't think this has anything to do with 'flat earth', science or rockets. He got his picture in the paper. End of story.
Or if he didn't want to make the drive he could have taken a ride in a hot air balloon:
HOW HIGH DO BALLOONS GO?
Flights in hot air balloons have been recorded at over 50,000 feet. However, the sport of ballooning is most enjoyable when flying 1,200 to 3,000 feet. Or just above the treetops. When balloons fly over populated areas, they maintain an altitude of at least 1,000 feet.
This has nothing to do with proving a flat earth, it's entirely about the publicity and the fact he wanted to make a rocket.
First of all, I just have to say: First world problems on this one...
Second of all, people have to realize that critic reviews have, almost since the time of Shakespeare, been overly critical of media that is primarily audience targeted and for lack of a better term fun to experience. Critics want edgy, ground breaking artistic media because for the most part they watch way too many movies and are burnt out and cynical. The rest of us who watch maybe 25 movies a year are for the most part just looking for a good time. The best barometer I have found to figure out if I will enjoy a movie or not is the Amazon reviews score and reading the top positive and top negative. There is always the risk of a spoiler, but it is a far better barometer because normal people are giving their impressions. As traditional media and newspapers die, so too should the movie critic industry. It is an antiquated system that is neither useful nor necessary in the modern era.
Critics offer two services, one they offer intelligent analysis of art and contribute to the public conversation around art, second, they help people decide what art to seek out.
Roger Ebert was a great example of the first one, he could identity themes and influences a viewer with less experience would miss, and his analysis could add some layers and really enhance the enjoyment of a movie.
But as for the second part, a good reviewer can also let you understand what kind of film a movie is and how it succeeds on that measure. For instance, 300 got huge audience ratings, but I didn't like it, I just got bored. If I'd read a good review previously it might have told me it was an awesome film, but not a film I'd personally enjoy.
People seem so damned intolerant of anything anymore. You have people who, if you don't agree with everything they espouse, no matter how unrealistic it may be, you are labeled a hater, a bigot, stupid, intolerant, whatever. Frankly, I'm sick of it.
Just two days ago, my wife and I were over at her mother's for Thanksgiving, and my wife's brother, the youngest in the family and still in university, trotted out this "Thanksgiving is white privilege bullshit". Universities... supposedly places where differing thoughts and opinions can swirl around, have become bastions of intolerance for any differing opinion or belief.
"Thanksgiving is white privilege bullshit" sounds exactly like an opinion that might pop out from a place where differing thoughts and opinions can swirl around. You can't really learn anything if you only hear things you agree with, I'd actually be kind of curious to hear why he thought "Thanksgiving is white privilege".
You also need to distinguish criticism from discussion, if you make a dumb argument I'm going to push back. I'll agree there's some points of views that you rarely hear expressed on campus, that's because they're really hard to defend.
I agree that there's a problem with conservative speakers being protested on campuses, which is related though really a different discussion. But "Thanksgiving is white privilege" does make me wonder what Native Americans think about Thanksgiving.
Interviews are expensive, you don't want to waste them interviewing poor candidates.
If you're looking for really high end people most of them have a degree already. So the degree requirement just gets rid of extraneous candidates.
If you're looking for lower to mid-range people requiring a degree filters out some qualified applicants, but there should be plenty left.
That's not to say companies are hitting the right balance, our most talented hire by far had a degree is a field completely unrelated to software dev, (though he came with a boatload of experience). And certainly, if you find an awesome candidate and HR pushes back because they're missing a checkbox then HR needs to be fixed.
In general the DC movies are dark and serious while the MCU movies are fun and lighthearted.
The DC approach works really well with a character who is dark and serious like Batman, if usually fails with anything else.
As for the allegation in the story, that WB screwed with the timing to shield the movies opening, it's probably a coincidence, but it is plausible even as a one-off scheme since it could mean the difference of millions of dollars.
Realistically WB only has two reasons to be interested in Rotten Tomatoes, either they want some additional insight into what audiences and critics like, or they want to influence the media coverage of their movies.
The best chance Linux has of taking of is when support for Windows 7 ends in 2020. Under this plan they could end up switching to Windows 10 just as Linux begins to gain ground.
I for one won't be using Windows 10 and slowly transitioning my PCs to Linux Mint, and I think a significant number of computer enthusiasts will do the same. I'm finding Linux Mint to be very usable and to meet most of my needs. I may need to keep one Windows PC around for a while longer, but hopefully I'll find a way to get rid of that.
I think this was the plan in 2003.
Realistically Linux has been my desktop since 2001, and in the last 10 years the only things that have a major impact on my day-to-day experience are the support for Netflix and Steam.
Maybe a few more home enthusiasts will start jumping on board (Netflix and Steam are huge for the home experience), but considering that Apple has largely been expunged from the corporate environment I don't see how Linux is suddenly going to break in.
The future of corporate is Windows desktops. Maybe the desktop can be dislodged by phones, tablets, dumb net terminals, or some future tech, but no one is kicking them off the desktop.
It's just an arms race, the moment you block BitTorrent someone makes a new protocol. You block that protocol too and they make a 3rd protocol that disguises itself as normal traffic.
Soon Comcast is gives up entirely, or gets in an arms race with the protocol authors trying to detect P2P traffic with legitimate traffic getting caught in the crossfire.
Justin Trudeau should also worry about the general breakdown of the U.S. government in many other areas.
True, but the US is a very large market in the shared resource of the Internet. The fall of net neutrality will negatively affect the quality of the Internet for everyone.
The problem is really that organizations like EFF and OpenMedia should not be providing form letters to send in the first place. They should give the person an address to send their remarks to, but absolutely *NONE* of the content of the email should be provided or else they are just setting up a situation where this kind of thing is going to happen.
I've seen this kind of thing happen before, where a federal organization accepts public comments on an issue, and a well-meaning person or organization that wants people to send letters about the matter decides to supply an example of what such a letter should look like. Laziness on the part of the end-user kicks in and everybody just copies and pastes the darn thing, maybe changing only about 10% of it, and causing the organization to ignore all of them.
So did the EFF and OpenMedia make an obvious rookie screw up, or were they following the existing standard whereby form letters were considered?
That's literally the f'ing point of the article! They data mined the responses, and determined that 1/3rd of them were a form letter, and a good chunk were opinion and not an actual defensible argument. I know we can't be bothered to even comprehend the summary, but come on!
I think you missed the point of my comment.
I'm not claiming they looked over the responses, determined that the vast majority didn't fit their criteria for consideration, and then threw them out.
I'm claiming they wanted to kill net neutrality, so they reviewed the responses with the aim of justifying that conclusion, and then chose to interpret and apply their standards in a way that would ignore the overwhelming public support for net neutrality shown in the comments.