Putin has invented a new military strategy: Implausible denyability.
Basically this. I feel like it's basically meant to help supporters when defending their positions. Putin's supporters basically claim a) Russia isn't really doing anything in Ukraine, b) even if they are it's justified since the West started it.
Instead of jumping right to "b" opponents need to get past "a" and actually get the Putin supporter to admit Russia is even involved. It just puts another layer of BS that needs to be dispelled before you can debate Russia's actions directly.
My understanding is that Linus is still very much the head of the Linux kernel as a project, so what happens to the project management after he's gone? Greg Kroah-Hartman might be a great right hand man but I don't know if he has the political standing or history to step in as the benevolent dictator of a project critical to multiple multi-billion dollar companies.
Do they put in place a Debian-like foundation, or something like Eclipse.org where it's essentially directed by the major distributions.
Maybe there's a succession plan in place already but this strikes me as a major question that needs to be addressed.
Re:Excellent. Now how about High Fructose Corn Syr
on
FDA Bans Trans Fat
·
· Score: 1
One could argue HFCS is worse than transfat and it is used everywhere. Come on, get on a roll, FDA!
One could, but one could also argue that HFCS isn't any different than regular sugar, the difference with Trans Fat is there's a scientific consensus around one view.
The FDA shouldn't be banning things just because a few researchers and journalists have started thinking it's bad, if they'd have banned butter a long time ago and we'd all be eating margarine.
Somewhat unusually for a new app, the bulk of it is built in the venerable C++ language, because the main guys on the team were big C++ fans who found a way to justify their preference.
Not saying it was the wrong choice, particularly for the team in question, but I'm betting if you hand the project to another team you come up with a different language.
Also interesting is it sounds like they're using an automatic code generator to translate some of the stuff from C++ to Java to run on android, maybe it will work seamlessly but that extra layer always makes me nervous.
"If 13% of iOS device users in the world paid $9.99-per-month for Apple Music, it would generate more cash each year than the entire recorded music biz manages right now."
I sure as hell don't purchase $120 in music per year, even when the CD was king I doubt many ever did.
So why do they suddenly expect us all to start spending as much on music as the most vociferous consumers?
$3-5 monthly, $36-60 per year, that's a price point where subscription services start making sense to me.
While there might be a problem with fraud in Uber use in China, is it any worse than in any other country? There is an implicit racism in all these stories that hit the media decrying 'Chinese Fraud and Duplicity'. I am sure there is plenty, as totalitarian governments have been shown to increase dishonesty in their populations, but is it really worse than any other developing country or country lacking a government?
Granted, the story will 'sell more papers' than a similar story about Uber being defrauded by teenage stoners from Kansas. China is a competing economic power with the US and EU, and as a result it seems to being demonized because Chinese people didn't have the common sense to be born with white skin. This constant barrage of stories about 'Chinese' dishonesty paints an image of them as being inscrutable and untrustworthy as a race.
Think of it as a Prisoners Dilemma applied to a market economy. The Prisoners Dilemma generally means people cooperate within their group (optimal with repeated interactions) but defect with outsiders (optimal for 1-off interactions).
The West has had market economies for a very long time, we've figured that cooperating even with strangers is the best strategy at a cultural level so as a culture we've put in a lot of effort into telling people they should conduct business honestly even with strangers and not defect.
In China this kind of economy is a lot newer so people are following the default rule, cooperate in your group and defect outside. They'll change over eventually but I think it is a true phenomena that the Chinese won't feel the same pressure to cooperate with strangers.
He observed something that some of us have actually seen but not spoken about. Men and women are different. Who knew?
To suggest splitting them in a lab is ridiculous but that doesn't eliminate the fact that his observations/statements are reality in all work environments where both genders reside.
Should he really be stoned to death for speaking of this? Is it because he talked about women in the work place because I noticed him mentioning both genders? If he's not allowed to speak about gender differences then all hope is lost for the feminist case. After all don't they just want to be seen as another worker in the work place?
More to the point do the comments represent his views in a meaningful way or are they just the result of some random speculation he had during the talk and decided to blurt out?
If he's made this his thing then sure, talk about it, but in general my issue with articles like is is that people say some random thing, it goes viral, and suddenly that is how they're defined to the world.
How many things do you say in a day? How many of those things, if they went viral, would accurately represent your views?
...cruelty is OK so long as it's an old tradition!
I didn't actually realize it was that bad, from one of the articles:
Mary Scollay, an associate veterinarian at Gulfstream Park Racing & Casino and at Calder Race Course, both in south Florida, who coordinates the on-track project, reported at the March 17 Welfare and Safety of the Racehorse Summit that dirt tracks such as Churchill Downs had seen 2.03 fatal injuries per 1,000 starts compared with 1.47 per 1,000 on synthetic tracks. Scollay cautions that the number reflects less than a year's worth of data so it should not be taken as definitive.
So with every race the horse has a 0.5% chance of dying, that's a horrifically high probability.
the advantage of metric is that it is a global standard and the units are all divisible by ten.
That's it.
Third... and this can't be stressed enough... I feel like the metric advocates really don't get this... Americans don't care about joining a global standard. At all. Not even a little.
Actually that is a big advantage. It means a ridiculous amount of resources being spent supporting and converting between two measurement systems. Industrial scenarios might be a legitimate worry but for everyday usage people would be just as happy with it within a year.
I'm curious to see if any economists have done an analysis on how long it would take for a conversion to pay off.
Even in Metric countries like Canada, many people still use imperial units for a lot of things. Go to the lumber store and you can get a 2x4, and they are sold in 6, 8, 10, and 12 foot lengths. Plywood is sold in 4x4 foot sheets.
That's due to matching industry standards, I'm not sure how that stuff gets switched over.
Just about everybody I know refers to their weight in pounds and their height in feet and inches. Almost nobody can tell you the metric equivalent without a calculator. We order a pint of beer at the pub, and most people still refer to a block of butter as a "pound of butter". . British people still use "stone" to express their body weight, and they are supposed to be metric as well.
You can standardize all you want, and print whatever you want on the packaging, but people are still going to use whatever they are used to. You could have the US go metric tomorrow, but people will still use Imperial measurements for another century
I don't know about Britain but for Canada I think it's due to sports. That's one place we're regularly exposed to height and weight measurements and virtually all the major sports here are big in the US, and the size of the US media market means we're going to be flooded with whatever measurements they use to measure athletes.
But if you start talking about smaller items like things from the grocery store I think we're a lot more comfortable thinking in grams.
The fact they were working at CMU suggests they were already paying them market value.
The fact they aren't working there anymore suggest they weren't.
Depends on your definition of market value. If they went to multiple companies I'd say CMU was paying below, but the fact they all went to Uber suggests that Uber paid well above market value to make sure they accepted the offers.
What I think actually happened is that Uber treated the Robotics Engineering Center as a startup with a set of internal working relationships and expertise that they wanted. Since they couldn't actually buy the Center they just hired away all the researchers.
So the employees rather than shareholders, managers or the CEO got a fat paycheck for being good at their jobs. That's communism!
I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad thing but it's different from how we usually evaluate market value for employees.
How loathsome that CMU will have to pay their researchers MARKET VALUE to keep them!
The fact they were working at CMU suggests they were already paying them market value.
What I think actually happened is that Uber treated the Robotics Engineering Center as a startup with a set of internal working relationships and expertise that they wanted. Since they couldn't actually buy the Center they just hired away all the researchers.
you are aware that affordability is sort of a huge part of mass market appeal, right? When I go out shopping for a new car, Tesla is not on the radar as it doesn't appeal to me because it costs way too much. Similar to how Ferrari doesn't really appeal to me, awesome products, but way too expensive.
Partially.
Tesla costs too much because the tech is new and somewhat experimental, but if rich people keep buying them the tech will mature and costs will come down until it's mass market.
Ferrari is different in that it's a luxury brand, so it will always be good quality but more expensive. I'm sure it drives technology forward as well, particularly is design and manufacturing, but maybe not to the extent of a Tesla.
I don't agree at all. Until one of his products becomes a mass market conusmer item and not a niche play, then I'll come to your opinion. But so far none of his products have shown any mass market appeal and can't even compete in their niche without government subsidies.
So it goes for virtually any new product.
That's one thing the rich are actually good for, buying the sometimes dubious new inventions and supporting product development until things are mature enough for mass market.
I thought that Putin most likely would not waste money on such nonsense, but I did find the comments humorous.
But now I am starting to think that these... "people" aren't just utterly delusional Internet users from Russia, but actual, paid-for, managed and directed sockpuppets.
I think it's a bit of both.
There are wildly delusional advocates for almost any position, I don't see why Russian foreign policy would be any different. Especially when you consider that Russia does have some legitimate grievances against the West (I get why people wanted the NATO expansion, but expanding an anti-Russia alliance into the former USSR was more than a bit provocative).
At the end of the day Russians are just like anyone else, and they'll be willing to swallow a boat-load of BS so they can cheer for Russia. Some of them will go online and undergo crazy rationalizations on comment boards to convince people why Russia is in the right. They're largely following the same pool of newspapers, blogs, and pundits, so they'll all repeat the same arguments and crazy theories.
I have no idea how to differentiate these people from the actual trolls.
Sure, it's HBO, and sure they have some stellar in-house programming; but it's one channel. People who are dumping their $60/month (and up!) cable TV plans aren't likely to pay $15 for one channel. Heck, Netflix is under $10. Even the old baboons that run Hulu don't try to charge that much for Plus...
If you're on Comcast's lowest tier TV-included package - "Internet Plus" - HBO is a free add-on. Right now we're paying ~ $70/month total for internet plus Cable TV (The TV channels include HD and are basically a throw-in, it's how Comcast tries to hide how many of its customers don't want cable TV anymore). I can't imagine paying $15 for any single channel.
Maybe, though I'm guessing a lot of people only watch shows from 3-4 channels on a regular basis and watch only a very small amount of programming for the rest. HBO is a very exclusive channel, but even if you did that for all those 3-4 channels you'd pay $45-$60 for almost all the programming you get currently, but commercial free and on-demand with a back catalog.
There are exactly 0 valid reasons why gay couples shouldn't be allowed to get married, that's it, zero reasons, as in absolutely none.
I happened to be in Ireland the day before the vote and asked several of the No campaigners why they thought gay marriage should be banned. They ranged from adoption scenarios that already existed, a weird insistence that equality meant two things were IDENTICAL making gay marriage a contradiction, and the innovative approach of comparing gay marriage to global warming (because even though no one has had any problems so far that doesn't mean things won't go bad in the future for unknown reasons).
In short every argument was absolutely terrible and I had an absolute blast listening to them.
The article labels them "anti-terrorism experts" but the mere fact that they even considered this long enough for there to have been a written record belies that title and proves instead that they are "anti-terrorism idiots".
They were idiots if they acted on those suspicions and started spying on Comic Con or individual geeks, but to have never researched them at all would have been stupider by far.
Geeks are a major cultural force and a lot of those shows have their own utopian ideology mixed in, the 20th century is basically a story of different ideologies fighting it out, Democracy, Communism, Fascism, etc. Almost certainly nothing sinister would ever emerge from Trekkies, but when you have a national law enforcement agency those threats that almost certainly won't happen can be worth checking out.
I think an unbiased system would be female skewed since mothers tend to be more dedicated than fathers but I don't know if the system is in fact unbiased.
You talk about an unbiased system while in the same breath making an incredibly biased statement. Interesting.
So sex differences only exist when they benefit men?
That mothers would be more invested in their offspring is easily predicted by that fact that they have a massive biological investments in their offspring that men lack, it's one of those things that I'll simply cite as obvious.
But the strength difference between men and women is pretty drastic
And irrelevant. Abuse isn't about who's stronger, it's about....abusing your partner. You could be a 400 lbs benchpressing linebacker, but it's not going to protect you from being hit with a frying pan while you're sleeping. There's also the heavy societal condition that men should never hit women, even if it's in self-defense.
Unless you bring a weapon into the equation strength becomes relevant because it creates a power imbalance. I don't deny that female physical abuse exists, it might even be at similar levels to male abuse, but I'm very skeptical that it's as harmful.
Men's rights and white power groups and other groups that "fight" for the rights of an already empowered majority exist only because they choose to ignore history.
There are no such thing as "group" rights. If a man is denied custody of his children during a divorce procedure, that isn't some how okay because his grandmother was denied a job.
I think an unbiased system would be female skewed since mothers tend to be more dedicated than fathers but I don't know if the system is in fact unbiased. (And yes, I'm sure there exists seemingly unjust anecdotes on both sides).
Whining about a movie is silly, but MRAs have some valid points about discrimination against men in family law. For instance, most domestic violence laws are written as if men are the sole abusers, when most DV is actually perpetrated by women. In California, the police can only arrest the "dominant" (physically stronger) partner, regardless of who was the initiator or the aggressor. So a woman can attack her husband, and he goes to jail.
Disclaimer: I haven't seen the movie.
Is that an actual policy or are you making a generalization.
Certainly DV by women exists, perhaps it's even the case that incidents the could be classified as DV are more commonly done by women.
But the strength difference between men and women is pretty drastic, I have little doubt that the most severe abuse is overwhelmingly committed by men.
If you consider for a split moment that he is not a human but a vicious predator animal, you might be able to draw your conclusions differently. Humans are not known for intentionally putting backbacks with explosives next to preschool kids so as to kill them.
You're kind of proving my point.
To justify killing him you're literally dehumanizing him. I think that's an extremely dangerous road to go down, to justify treatment of others by denying their humanity. He might be a fundamentally evil person, taking pleasure in the death and pain of others. He might be a good, though horribly deluded person, convincing himself he would do the most good by committing a terrible act. But either way he's a human.
Accept that by executing him you're executing a person.
I'm not sure how to feel, and I'm not sure how to feel about that.
On the one hand, I'm no fan of the death penalty, because I've read about far too many cases where such a sentence was handed down and the accused turned out to be innocent. On the other hand, in this particular case, part of me wants to say "let him die, and if you can't figure it out, I'll drive up and do the deed." I don't know any of the victims. I wasn't on the jury. I don't know all of the facts. I presume him to be guilty (why?) and assuming he's guilty I want him executed (why?). It's not very often that I find myself contradicting my own strongly held principles.
I'm still not comfortable with the principal that the state should be killing people through the judicial system, I don't like the idea that society gets into the habit of having these discussions of whether someone deserves death.
Just say that killing someone with the objective of killing them (as opposed to winning a war or saving a hostage) is never acceptable. I think it's a lot healthier and what's the downside? I understand why the friends and families of victims might want vengeance, but I'm not sure that should be a goal of the judicial system. And is it such a big deal if a handful of people who deserve death end up with life in prison instead? If you're going to screw up it's better to do so on the side of mercy.
Slashdot Mirror
Putin has invented a new military strategy: Implausible denyability.
Basically this. I feel like it's basically meant to help supporters when defending their positions. Putin's supporters basically claim a) Russia isn't really doing anything in Ukraine, b) even if they are it's justified since the West started it.
Instead of jumping right to "b" opponents need to get past "a" and actually get the Putin supporter to admit Russia is even involved. It just puts another layer of BS that needs to be dispelled before you can debate Russia's actions directly.
I have it at on good information that it stopped being cool at user ID 535826.
My first thought is this looks like it's going to be one of those threads where people with progressively lower UIDs start posting.
My second thought is how sad it is that I'm able to participate with a UID over 500k
My understanding is that Linus is still very much the head of the Linux kernel as a project, so what happens to the project management after he's gone? Greg Kroah-Hartman might be a great right hand man but I don't know if he has the political standing or history to step in as the benevolent dictator of a project critical to multiple multi-billion dollar companies.
Do they put in place a Debian-like foundation, or something like Eclipse.org where it's essentially directed by the major distributions.
Maybe there's a succession plan in place already but this strikes me as a major question that needs to be addressed.
One could argue HFCS is worse than transfat and it is used everywhere. Come on, get on a roll, FDA!
One could, but one could also argue that HFCS isn't any different than regular sugar, the difference with Trans Fat is there's a scientific consensus around one view.
The FDA shouldn't be banning things just because a few researchers and journalists have started thinking it's bad, if they'd have banned butter a long time ago and we'd all be eating margarine.
Somewhat unusually for a new app, the bulk of it is built in the venerable C++ language, because the main guys on the team were big C++ fans who found a way to justify their preference.
Not saying it was the wrong choice, particularly for the team in question, but I'm betting if you hand the project to another team you come up with a different language.
Also interesting is it sounds like they're using an automatic code generator to translate some of the stuff from C++ to Java to run on android, maybe it will work seamlessly but that extra layer always makes me nervous.
"If 13% of iOS device users in the world paid $9.99-per-month for Apple Music, it would generate more cash each year than the entire recorded music biz manages right now."
I sure as hell don't purchase $120 in music per year, even when the CD was king I doubt many ever did.
So why do they suddenly expect us all to start spending as much on music as the most vociferous consumers?
$3-5 monthly, $36-60 per year, that's a price point where subscription services start making sense to me.
While there might be a problem with fraud in Uber use in China, is it any worse than in any other country? There is an implicit racism in all these stories that hit the media decrying 'Chinese Fraud and Duplicity'. I am sure there is plenty, as totalitarian governments have been shown to increase dishonesty in their populations, but is it really worse than any other developing country or country lacking a government?
Granted, the story will 'sell more papers' than a similar story about Uber being defrauded by teenage stoners from Kansas. China is a competing economic power with the US and EU, and as a result it seems to being demonized because Chinese people didn't have the common sense to be born with white skin. This constant barrage of stories about 'Chinese' dishonesty paints an image of them as being inscrutable and untrustworthy as a race.
Think of it as a Prisoners Dilemma applied to a market economy. The Prisoners Dilemma generally means people cooperate within their group (optimal with repeated interactions) but defect with outsiders (optimal for 1-off interactions).
The West has had market economies for a very long time, we've figured that cooperating even with strangers is the best strategy at a cultural level so as a culture we've put in a lot of effort into telling people they should conduct business honestly even with strangers and not defect.
In China this kind of economy is a lot newer so people are following the default rule, cooperate in your group and defect outside. They'll change over eventually but I think it is a true phenomena that the Chinese won't feel the same pressure to cooperate with strangers.
He observed something that some of us have actually seen but not spoken about. Men and women are different. Who knew?
To suggest splitting them in a lab is ridiculous but that doesn't eliminate the fact that his observations/statements are reality in all work environments where both genders reside.
Should he really be stoned to death for speaking of this? Is it because he talked about women in the work place because I noticed him mentioning both genders? If he's not allowed to speak about gender differences then all hope is lost for the feminist case. After all don't they just want to be seen as another worker in the work place?
More to the point do the comments represent his views in a meaningful way or are they just the result of some random speculation he had during the talk and decided to blurt out?
If he's made this his thing then sure, talk about it, but in general my issue with articles like is is that people say some random thing, it goes viral, and suddenly that is how they're defined to the world.
How many things do you say in a day? How many of those things, if they went viral, would accurately represent your views?
Math fail.
True, I think I got 1/2 in my head at some point.
0.2% is still pretty brutal though.
...cruelty is OK so long as it's an old tradition!
I didn't actually realize it was that bad, from one of the articles:
Mary Scollay, an associate veterinarian at Gulfstream Park Racing & Casino and at Calder Race Course, both in south Florida, who coordinates the on-track project, reported at the March 17 Welfare and Safety of the Racehorse Summit that dirt tracks such as Churchill Downs had seen 2.03 fatal injuries per 1,000 starts compared with 1.47 per 1,000 on synthetic tracks. Scollay cautions that the number reflects less than a year's worth of data so it should not be taken as definitive.
So with every race the horse has a 0.5% chance of dying, that's a horrifically high probability.
All measurements systems are arbitrary.
the advantage of metric is that it is a global standard and the units are all divisible by ten.
That's it.
Third... and this can't be stressed enough... I feel like the metric advocates really don't get this... Americans don't care about joining a global standard. At all. Not even a little.
Actually that is a big advantage. It means a ridiculous amount of resources being spent supporting and converting between two measurement systems. Industrial scenarios might be a legitimate worry but for everyday usage people would be just as happy with it within a year.
I'm curious to see if any economists have done an analysis on how long it would take for a conversion to pay off.
Even in Metric countries like Canada, many people still use imperial units for a lot of things. Go to the lumber store and you can get a 2x4, and they are sold in 6, 8, 10, and 12 foot lengths. Plywood is sold in 4x4 foot sheets.
That's due to matching industry standards, I'm not sure how that stuff gets switched over.
Just about everybody I know refers to their weight in pounds and their height in feet and inches. Almost nobody can tell you the metric equivalent without a calculator. We order a pint of beer at the pub, and most people still refer to a block of butter as a "pound of butter". . British people still use "stone" to express their body weight, and they are supposed to be metric as well.
You can standardize all you want, and print whatever you want on the packaging, but people are still going to use whatever they are used to. You could have the US go metric tomorrow, but people will still use Imperial measurements for another century
I don't know about Britain but for Canada I think it's due to sports. That's one place we're regularly exposed to height and weight measurements and virtually all the major sports here are big in the US, and the size of the US media market means we're going to be flooded with whatever measurements they use to measure athletes.
But if you start talking about smaller items like things from the grocery store I think we're a lot more comfortable thinking in grams.
The fact they aren't working there anymore suggest they weren't.
Depends on your definition of market value. If they went to multiple companies I'd say CMU was paying below, but the fact they all went to Uber suggests that Uber paid well above market value to make sure they accepted the offers.
So the employees rather than shareholders, managers or the CEO got a fat paycheck for being good at their jobs. That's communism!
I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad thing but it's different from how we usually evaluate market value for employees.
How loathsome that CMU will have to pay their researchers MARKET VALUE to keep them!
The fact they were working at CMU suggests they were already paying them market value.
What I think actually happened is that Uber treated the Robotics Engineering Center as a startup with a set of internal working relationships and expertise that they wanted. Since they couldn't actually buy the Center they just hired away all the researchers.
you are aware that affordability is sort of a huge part of mass market appeal, right? When I go out shopping for a new car, Tesla is not on the radar as it doesn't appeal to me because it costs way too much. Similar to how Ferrari doesn't really appeal to me, awesome products, but way too expensive.
Partially.
Tesla costs too much because the tech is new and somewhat experimental, but if rich people keep buying them the tech will mature and costs will come down until it's mass market.
Ferrari is different in that it's a luxury brand, so it will always be good quality but more expensive. I'm sure it drives technology forward as well, particularly is design and manufacturing, but maybe not to the extent of a Tesla.
I don't agree at all. Until one of his products becomes a mass market conusmer item and not a niche play, then I'll come to your opinion. But so far none of his products have shown any mass market appeal and can't even compete in their niche without government subsidies.
So it goes for virtually any new product.
That's one thing the rich are actually good for, buying the sometimes dubious new inventions and supporting product development until things are mature enough for mass market.
I thought that Putin most likely would not waste money on such nonsense, but I did find the comments humorous.
But now I am starting to think that these... "people" aren't just utterly delusional Internet users from Russia, but actual, paid-for, managed and directed sockpuppets.
I think it's a bit of both.
There are wildly delusional advocates for almost any position, I don't see why Russian foreign policy would be any different. Especially when you consider that Russia does have some legitimate grievances against the West (I get why people wanted the NATO expansion, but expanding an anti-Russia alliance into the former USSR was more than a bit provocative).
At the end of the day Russians are just like anyone else, and they'll be willing to swallow a boat-load of BS so they can cheer for Russia. Some of them will go online and undergo crazy rationalizations on comment boards to convince people why Russia is in the right. They're largely following the same pool of newspapers, blogs, and pundits, so they'll all repeat the same arguments and crazy theories.
I have no idea how to differentiate these people from the actual trolls.
Sure, it's HBO, and sure they have some stellar in-house programming; but it's one channel. People who are dumping their $60/month (and up!) cable TV plans aren't likely to pay $15 for one channel. Heck, Netflix is under $10. Even the old baboons that run Hulu don't try to charge that much for Plus...
If you're on Comcast's lowest tier TV-included package - "Internet Plus" - HBO is a free add-on. Right now we're paying ~ $70/month total for internet plus Cable TV (The TV channels include HD and are basically a throw-in, it's how Comcast tries to hide how many of its customers don't want cable TV anymore). I can't imagine paying $15 for any single channel.
Maybe, though I'm guessing a lot of people only watch shows from 3-4 channels on a regular basis and watch only a very small amount of programming for the rest. HBO is a very exclusive channel, but even if you did that for all those 3-4 channels you'd pay $45-$60 for almost all the programming you get currently, but commercial free and on-demand with a back catalog.
There are exactly 0 valid reasons why gay couples shouldn't be allowed to get married, that's it, zero reasons, as in absolutely none.
I happened to be in Ireland the day before the vote and asked several of the No campaigners why they thought gay marriage should be banned. They ranged from adoption scenarios that already existed, a weird insistence that equality meant two things were IDENTICAL making gay marriage a contradiction, and the innovative approach of comparing gay marriage to global warming (because even though no one has had any problems so far that doesn't mean things won't go bad in the future for unknown reasons).
In short every argument was absolutely terrible and I had an absolute blast listening to them.
The article labels them "anti-terrorism experts" but the mere fact that they even considered this long enough for there to have been a written record belies that title and proves instead that they are "anti-terrorism idiots".
They were idiots if they acted on those suspicions and started spying on Comic Con or individual geeks, but to have never researched them at all would have been stupider by far.
Geeks are a major cultural force and a lot of those shows have their own utopian ideology mixed in, the 20th century is basically a story of different ideologies fighting it out, Democracy, Communism, Fascism, etc. Almost certainly nothing sinister would ever emerge from Trekkies, but when you have a national law enforcement agency those threats that almost certainly won't happen can be worth checking out.
You talk about an unbiased system while in the same breath making an incredibly biased statement. Interesting.
So sex differences only exist when they benefit men?
That mothers would be more invested in their offspring is easily predicted by that fact that they have a massive biological investments in their offspring that men lack, it's one of those things that I'll simply cite as obvious.
And irrelevant. Abuse isn't about who's stronger, it's about....abusing your partner. You could be a 400 lbs benchpressing linebacker, but it's not going to protect you from being hit with a frying pan while you're sleeping. There's also the heavy societal condition that men should never hit women, even if it's in self-defense.
Unless you bring a weapon into the equation strength becomes relevant because it creates a power imbalance. I don't deny that female physical abuse exists, it might even be at similar levels to male abuse, but I'm very skeptical that it's as harmful.
Men's rights and white power groups and other groups that "fight" for the rights of an already empowered majority exist only because they choose to ignore history.
There are no such thing as "group" rights. If a man is denied custody of his children during a divorce procedure, that isn't some how okay because his grandmother was denied a job.
I think an unbiased system would be female skewed since mothers tend to be more dedicated than fathers but I don't know if the system is in fact unbiased. (And yes, I'm sure there exists seemingly unjust anecdotes on both sides).
Whining about a movie is silly, but MRAs have some valid points about discrimination against men in family law. For instance, most domestic violence laws are written as if men are the sole abusers, when most DV is actually perpetrated by women. In California, the police can only arrest the "dominant" (physically stronger) partner, regardless of who was the initiator or the aggressor. So a woman can attack her husband, and he goes to jail.
Disclaimer: I haven't seen the movie.
Is that an actual policy or are you making a generalization.
Certainly DV by women exists, perhaps it's even the case that incidents the could be classified as DV are more commonly done by women.
But the strength difference between men and women is pretty drastic, I have little doubt that the most severe abuse is overwhelmingly committed by men.
If you consider for a split moment that he is not a human but a vicious predator animal, you might be able to draw your conclusions differently. Humans are not known for intentionally putting backbacks with explosives next to preschool kids so as to kill them.
You're kind of proving my point.
To justify killing him you're literally dehumanizing him. I think that's an extremely dangerous road to go down, to justify treatment of others by denying their humanity. He might be a fundamentally evil person, taking pleasure in the death and pain of others. He might be a good, though horribly deluded person, convincing himself he would do the most good by committing a terrible act. But either way he's a human.
Accept that by executing him you're executing a person.
I'm not sure how to feel, and I'm not sure how to feel about that.
On the one hand, I'm no fan of the death penalty, because I've read about far too many cases where such a sentence was handed down and the accused turned out to be innocent.
On the other hand, in this particular case, part of me wants to say "let him die, and if you can't figure it out, I'll drive up and do the deed." I don't know any of the victims. I wasn't on the jury. I don't know all of the facts. I presume him to be guilty (why?) and assuming he's guilty I want him executed (why?). It's not very often that I find myself contradicting my own strongly held principles.
I'm still not comfortable with the principal that the state should be killing people through the judicial system, I don't like the idea that society gets into the habit of having these discussions of whether someone deserves death.
Just say that killing someone with the objective of killing them (as opposed to winning a war or saving a hostage) is never acceptable. I think it's a lot healthier and what's the downside? I understand why the friends and families of victims might want vengeance, but I'm not sure that should be a goal of the judicial system. And is it such a big deal if a handful of people who deserve death end up with life in prison instead? If you're going to screw up it's better to do so on the side of mercy.
http://www.menuetos.net/m64l.t...
I might play with it, but if I can't use it for work, play is all it'll be.
I wonder what commercial uses they're thinking of.
Presumably they're thinking of some super-low footprint embedded devices, but still this seems like a lot more of a fun project than a viable product.