The idea of a Libertarian seizing power is kind of funny. The power to set people free. The power to reduce the power of the government. The whole point of the Libertarian philosophy is to reduce the amount of power the government has over the individual: to minimize coercion and tyranny, I wouldn't really want to force people to be free, but I would like to offer freedom to all of those who want it.
What I meant was that special interest groups will always try to achieve their own selfish pragmatic goals at the expense of others. That is quite distinct from utopians or idealists like myself who are trying to achieve a philosophical principle rather than some form of narrow self interest. Actually in terms of self-interest I would probably be better off with a fully socialist government than a Libertarian one.
Good one. You're a member of a group of 100k, tops. In a country of 330 million.
Not saying it would be easy, but it would be funny if the election results could be that badly distorted. No doubt people would suspect foul play. Anyway the plausibility of the results isn't the point. The point was that lots of people would love to change the outcome of our elections including many of our own citizens.
Come back when you understand how a democracy works.
It obviously doesn't work especially when all the choices are horrible and the candidate with fewer votes wins.
Democracy is how grown ups enforce and regulate human rights.
Did you really just use the verbs 'enforce' and 'regulate' with human rights? Seriously? You don't even understand what they are. Google "natural rights' and "john locke" Pathetic that any American should be so ignorant of the principles our country was founded on.
And given your posting, you'd brag about it
Where have I bragged about anything? And anyway what does going to prison have to do with anything? If I could get a Libertarian president elected I might consider prison a small price to pay.
But they'd be merciful in comparison to me. You're not even human to me.
Maybe I'm not human. Maybe I'm a sentient synthetic organism sent here to destroy your planet by getting a Libertarian elected. It would certainly mean armageddon, but maybe that is exactly what your species deserves.
We can never go back to 1776. Ever. Police have fully automatic weapons and tanks now, the Internet will always be here in one form or another, and you can never go back to the one off event of the American revolutionary war.
I was referring to our freshly post war republic-if-you-can-keep-it. Our little noble experiment. The American government of the 18th century. Not sure if a Libertarian president could do very much in resetting the clock, but he might be able to do some cool and interesting things regardless.
If it were up to me though I'd divide up the country into ideological territories so everyone would have a place to call home. A few states for Libertarians if only because that was the principle upon which the entire country was founded in the first place. Wyoming would seem like a good start there. At least one state for the die hard Marxists who don't care how many times the system has proven that it just cannot work. Something for the Greens. And of course the rest could be split up into the Democrats and Republicans who could then maybe even fight wars with each other. How entertaining that would be.
The world is not you
You can't know that.
No republican president has won the popular vote since George HW Bush, in 1992, and that trend shows no sign of slowing down. By 2050, minorities will outnumber whites. Give the US thirty years. It'll turn blue.
Well blue has already turned so red it may as well be purple. In thirty years both parties will be even more similar to each other. So similar in fact that it really will be increasingly difficult to argue that it is a two party system at all.
Good fucking luck getting the latter without some form of the former.
Even if that's true it was certainly not the primary value of our Libertarian Republic. It was just an incidental detail. The real point was Lockean Natural Rights. They wanted people to be left alone to pursue their own goals as long as they didn't violate anyone else's basic human rights. This basic principle has been so twisted that people think the point of our special snowflake of a republic was majority rule.
Democracy was already a thing before gaining independence from England. If that's all our founders cared about America would have been nothing special. But in fact it was a country founded on more profound principles than that: on the philosophy of John Locke and to a lesser extent Rousseau and Voltaire.
The founding fathers were libertarians and terrorists by modern standards and they would go completely insane if they could see how badly we have fucked up their precious Republic. With hindsight they could probably write a constitution that would hold back tyranny for a bit longer, but ultimately people are cunts and will always try to seize power when they can.
You know, if HC had won Trumpists would be all over this and more.
Why would that make a difference? Hillary won the popular vote anyway by a significant margin and so far no one is claiming any votes were changed. Although I'm not sure how they can be so sure that not a single vote was changed. Perhaps they will elaborate.
There are two kinds of people who fall back into "popular vote" mode when referring to the US Presidential elections.
You forgot the third kind who just think the electoral college system is stupid, antiquated, and unjust and think it is silly to call ourselves a democracy when the candidate with the minority of votes wins. It does underscore the pointlessness of voting though. What a waste of time.
I actually didn't care at all who won the last election. The only reason I might start to care is if Trump actually starts doing some crazy stuff he has talked about like banning all muslims from entering the country or building his crazy wall. So far he can't even get his limited travel ban. So I'm not bothered.
Personally though I think the popular vote should matter more than the electoral one. One man one vote I say. If you are going to make some citizens' vote count more at least base it on something meaningful like maybe IQ. Maybe the 'electors' should be required to have a formally tested IQ of at least 150 to qualify. Hell while we are at it maybe we should disqualify anyone with an IQ of less than 150 from voting at all. You'd have to qualify before you were allowed to vote. That would be fun.
Electors who voted for Trump did so because they were selected by their States to cast their votes for Trump.
I'm just familiar with the basic idea of the electoral college. I don't really know the details. My understanding was that the electors are generally supposed to vote along with the popular vote in their jurisdiction, but that they don't have to. You are saying 'the state' tells the electors who to vote for? If that's the case then the elector system is even more pointless than I thought. So who exactly is it that tells the electors who to vote for?
You didn't get the memo. There is no vote fraud. Nothing to see here, move along.
How can we be sure of that? I wasn't aware that it was so definitive. In fact I'm still waiting for the evidence of the tampering to actually be presented. Of course if votes had been changed I wouldn't necessarily expect our intelligence services to tell us that. Because reasons.
The seat was going to be empty anyway, and the theater owner wouldn't had made money on it if you didn't freeload. So what's the harm in watching for free?
Yeah I don't see the harm in that scenario. But of course the cinema does have the right to kick you out if they catch you.
So I'm just curious if you also consider Hillary Clinton to be a racist anti-Muslim? Or is it just Trump?
Those aren't very compelling examples. Neither was at all directly related to religion. Hillary is probably as islamophobic as most Americans are, but not as much as Trump. Trump advocated blocking all Muslims from entering the US during his campaign. I guess it could be worse. He could have advocated putting the ones already in the US into camps or deporting them, but it's a pretty extreme measure that is presumably based on some pretty extreme view along the lines of Muslim = Terrorist.
the six countries on the travel ban were Sudan, Libya, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, and Syria. All of them have either extremely poor security situations with rampant domestic terrorism and active insurgencies, or in Iran's case an extremely antagonistic relationship with the US government and Israel (which has major lobbying power in the US).
Blocking entire countries because of a tiny tiny tiny minority of people living there is in itself tribalist and the sort of simplistic over-generalized thinking that racism is all about. The sheer magnitude of innocent people caught in that ginormous net is extremely unjust by any measure. That some Americans are terrified of a tiny minority of people from those countries wearing towels on their heads does not make it any more rational or just.
Is Trump the man really a racist and islamophobe as he is painted by the left? I don't really know because I don't personally know the guy, but some of the things he has said have justifiably scared people about what he might be capable of. When it comes to that he at least gives me pause. His policies certainly do tend at least toward xenophobia and isolationism. The actual 6 country version of the travel ban is just a small taste of what he might be capable of. After all he did originally advocate blocking everyone who believes in a particular religion from entering the country.
What some people find confusing I think is that while terrorists are usually Muslims or at least Arabs, Muslims are not usually terrorists and actually neither are Arabs. Actual terrorists are almost as rare as aliens. They may as well not exist at all and we should really treat them as if they don't because attention is what they are looking for. All of this fear just encourages them and shows them what cowards we really are.
Didn't Trump actually lose the election in terms of the popular vote? To you foreigners who blame us for voting Trump in we didn't really. The electors did. Not us. We voted in our own version of Theresa May.
If the Russians or someone pretending to be them (maybe it was Aaron Swartz and a team of his undead minions) managed to succeed in altering the results of the election what does this imply about Hillary winning the popular vote by a significant margin but losing in electoral votes? Is it possible that the hackers actually wanted to try to make sure that the unusually extreme Trump would lose? After all most hackers with the skill to pull off something like this are very unlikely to be Trump supporters.
It is unusual for the popular vote to be so much higher than the electoral vote. I mean maybe some electors were bribed to vote Trump, but otoh maybe the popular vote was just the only vote that was hackable. It would be ironic if it turns out that an investigation uncovers that votes were actually hacked in the other direction. That would seem to then imply that it wasn't Russians after all, but rather someone framing them. North Korea maybe?
If I were investigating the first thing I would do is look into the finances of the electors who voted for trump even though the popular vote was against him. The second thing I would do would be to try to figure out how many popular votes were changed and which direction they were changed in. Maybe Trump lost popular votes because some Libertarian hacker altered them to vote for the Libertarian candidate (yay!).
So you think we should just ignore all of the massive amount of evidence from a dizzying array of sources
Seriously? What evidence? They haven't shown us any yet. They are just making claims and they don't have a lot of credibility. We're supposed to take them, of all people, on faith? Known liars?
But even if they do have absolute proof that they are willing to show us that the Russian government really did hack our election computers so what? It's not an act of war. No one was hurt by it. It's not a big deal. It just means we have to improve the security of our electronic voting system or fix whatever they showed to be vulnerable.
The one response to this that should not be on the table is saber rattling and unfortunately that is exactly the response I am seeing from a lot of angry Dems at the moment. At least online. I don't want to go back to a cold war with Russia and I don't see how any sane person would. North Korea has fucking concentration camps, is working on nuclear ICBMs and has openly threatened to attack us and we haven't gone to war with them over it. In comparison this is nothing. We should just thank them for helping us improve our weak computer security and leave it at that. What else can we do anyway?
Let's say Putin says, "Yeah we messed with your insecure election computers. It was fun! What are you gonna do about it?" Well what would you have us do about it? Ask them nicely to stop? Go to war? How are you going to stop them? For that matter how will you stop anyone else from doing the same thing? Maybe some kid in Sri Lanka or Argentina will be the next one to break in and have some fun. That's why computer security is a thing. Are we going to declare war against every country that breaks into our computers?
Take this shit seriously, you twats. Things like this can topple nations.
Most of the time it doesn't matter who gets elected. If I thought the election of one parties candidate over the other would somehow overthrow the government I'd definitely be in favor of that though. That would be awesome. Some chance at real change finally.
It's not the Russians you should worry about anyway. It's Libertarians like me. I don't give a fuck about democracy, but I do care about human rights a lot. If I could hack into the voting system and get a (sane/moderate) Libertarian elected would I do it? Fuck yes. Welcome back to 1776, motherfuckers.
Hell who wouldn't try to influence an election to get a shot at seeing their own particular utopian views put to the test? Socialist party? The Green Party? You really think it's just the Russians who care which candidate gets elected here? A more useful question would be who wouldn't want to hack the election results if they could? Hell the Green Party might could justify almost any action based on their belief that they would truly be saving the world from armageddon if they were in power.
It could even be argued that an easily hackable election system could be a good thing. A chance for real change. Maybe even for the better. The majority is usually wrong about most things because most people are very stupid, particularly in the US. So how about giving some minority views a chance?
Totally agree. The only difference here is that Trump isn't a normal politician and may have some racist or at least anti-Muslim views and some more extreme ideas than usual. So far nothing has come of it and the rest of the system (house, senate, judicial) is all regular politicians. So it may end up like Obama wanting to close Gitmo but not being able to (assuming you believe he wanted to). Luckily a president is not quite a dictator. Not yet at least.
Note how the travel ban went nowhere and so far I haven't read about any Muslim internment camps or mass deportation of Muslim Americans. If Trump seriously tries to do any of that stuff then I'll start to seriously worry, but for now he's all bark and no bite. At least so far. It's kind of entertaining to see how the Dems are reacting. I've never seen this kind of rage or bile before. Not even the most Hilary hating conservative was ever this enraged. Nothing like hatred to unite people, eh?
In some ways the other side of the pond worries me more. Trump isn't advocating the end of encryption, human rights (except for Muslims of course), and uh the internet while she's at it. Hopefully the political system over there can prevent her from actually doing any of that extreme stuff. There's a lot of dangerous anti-Muslim talk over there too, but May is not nearly as much an islamophobe or xenophobe as Trump. Unfortunately they both tend to go in for overly simple solutions to complex problems, but then so do most politicians. The Philippines with their president's policy of Murder All Drug Dealers (and users) as a way to solve the drug problem there is my favorite illustration of this.
Sounds like it's time for better security in the computerized part of the voting system. Even if the Russian government, as opposed to just individual hackers who might even be spoofing a Russian government IP address for reasons, really is behind this so what? It's not any kind of real attack. If you are advocating that we try to hack their own insecure internet-facing computer systems go for it. Would love to see someone other than Putin or a Putin clone get elected next time. I'm not even convinced this sort of thing should be a crime at all. More like relatively harmless play. Or we could move toward nuclear war with Russia if you want. Up to you.
I personally kind of like the Russkies. I have no problem with them. I think we should stick with staying on friendly and good diplomatic terms with them. I lived through the 80s and I find being friends with them a lot better than Duck and Cover drills. OTOH we all know how cool nuclear war would be. It would truly be 'interesting times'. Plus a lot of Beautiful People would die or at least suffer a reduced quality of life. So I'm cool with either option, but for most people I think the first option would be preferable.
I guess we do live in interesting times in a way. Democrats have become so much like Republicans now that they have become war mongers as long as it suits their agenda in other ways. Although I must admit I don't see how getting on a more cold war like footing with Russia again is going to hurt their arch-enemy Trump. Because Democratic presidents were known for chewing gum and kicking ass but running out of gum? I'm not seeing it. I'm just glad Trump himself is not taking the bait and transforming into Dr. Strangelove.
I can remember back in the 80s when most Democrats were supporters of the ACLU and even human rights. It used to be that Republicans wanted financial freedom (even for poor people in many cases) but government control of our personal lives and Democrats wanted personal freedoms (pro ACLU, pro drug etc) put wanted more government control of the economy (Robin Hood economics). Now both parties want government control of everything just in somewhat different ways, but this pro war stance on the part of the Democrats is something new.
But saber rattling over this is just dumb. You want to investigate Trump for being overly friendly with the Russians (not really a crime imo but whatever) fine, but escalating this into any sort of real conflict just because you want to demonize the Russians because Trump gets along with Putin is harmful to world peace and not really going to accomplish anything you want anyway.
Trump is president. I don't like it either but it doesn't really matter that much who is president. It's mostly business as usual no matter who is living in that big white building. So calm the fuck down people and wipe that drool and spittle from your rabid mouths. This could even be something positive if it helps to make our electronic voting systems more secure or if it starts to get people thinking about how stupid and antiquated our electoral college system is. Democracy is mostly about a wolf and some sheep deciding what's for dinner anyway. It's really individual/human rights that distinguishes us from totalitarian dictatorships. Or really the rights that the government doesn't have. Voting is mostly bread and circus to keep the common people believing they can make a difference.
Or a waterblock and radiator or a phase change block connecting to an air conditioning system. It is possible to go fanless if your radiator or heat sink is big enough, but it will always be more effective with fans.
An investigation should not be necessary if they have evidence. They should just present the evidence if there is any. The purpose of an investigation is to gather evidence. They claim they already have it but not only won't show it to us, but won't even give us a hint at what it might be. That's just pathetic.
Factors like how well trained individuals are can play a major role.
What about intelligence? Does that play any role? Is a programmer with an IQ of 78 but with more training more valuable than a programmer with an IQ of 150 but with less training?
Do more intelligent programmers make fewer careless errors? Not sure about that. But they would seem to have greater potential to write elegant and beautiful programs that I could be proud of having paid for. What I would want is clever programmers who can build beautiful and efficient machines.
Interesting. This happened only about a year after I took my first formal programming course at university. So my first formally taught programming experience was with a language that refused to compile if you accidentally typed a space at the end of a line. I found the constant bugs due to this so annoying that I dropped the course in the first couple of weeks even though programming is one of my favorite activities in the world. To this day I have never touched Fortran again.
Luckily the C/C++ era was fast approaching and I loved and continue to love that language for its efficiency and concise logical structure. It just makes sense for me and feels right. For me the choice of language is mostly about personal preference. More a matter of taste than anything. Although for performance critical tasks I would hope any competent programmer would drop into C/C++ or even ASM for critical inner loops.
There are a couple of language types I'd really like to see though. One would be a compiled-programs-as-objects language that is 'object-oriented' but with objects that can run and be useful on their own and not only as a component of another program. Another would be a language that is more friendly to code self-modification at runtime to better implement genetic algorithms.
Real intelligence cannot be measured in flops. The number of synapse operations per second may not matter. We don't know what does matter except probably the overall number of neural connections among lots of other factors that we are currently unaware of due to our simplified model of the brain. The new hardware is good because it scales up the number of synapses, but a TPU is not a brain and that is the problem.
Currently the only intelligent device we know of is a brain. We should be trying to understand its working principles and emulating it as closely as possible. Of course we are doing both of those things probably as best we can. It's more a question of which path is the most optimal for quick results. Take your pick, but I'd place my bets on harnessing the power of existing massive neural machines that operate in ways we don't even yet understand. It's like trying to build faster computers like we are now in very slow increments versus trying to figure out how to use an alien supercomputer which we have no real understanding of. I think the latter has greater potential for interesting results.
Announced what? I don't believe anything they say without evidence. I don't think presenting their evidence is an unreasonable request and until they do...well I am certainly not going to take anything those liars say on faith. They aren't just liars. They are evil liars.
There's a reason why hard evidence will not be in the public domain - it's a matter of national intelligence.
So you expect the rest of us to take their claims on blind faith? Because they've proven so honest and trustworthy in the past? Yes our intelligence agencies have never lied. Of course we can trust them! Fuck your blind faith. No evidence or it never happened. Period. That's what is right and just.
Countries like the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, much of the EU, and many others, have generally been strong supporters of freedom, democracy, and human rights. Together, they are powerful to defend those values.
Wait, what? When? In this century? That hasn't been true for a long time.
There is no reason to 'push back' against Russia. Whatever they did there is no evidence and even if they really did say buy some electoral votes or something you know what? It doesn't matter. Use that knowledge to improve the system so it isn't so vulnerable to corrupt electors. Although the electoral system does seem inherently vulnerable to bribery it has always been that way. Maybe it's time to dump it, but our insecure outdated election system is no reason to go to war with Russia, something that is always a bad idea. This isn't even worth saber rattling about. It's nothing. Not a big deal. Even if it's true and so far there is zero evidence that it is. At best some Russian hackers hacked some emails and set some information free. If certain people were not tech illiterate their emails would have been strongly encrypted and not stored for any length of time, especially not in an insecure location. But I'm happy with email leaks because it gets the information out there. I'd be just as happy to see Trump's emails. The more information the world has about our leaders the better.
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The idea of a Libertarian seizing power is kind of funny. The power to set people free. The power to reduce the power of the government. The whole point of the Libertarian philosophy is to reduce the amount of power the government has over the individual: to minimize coercion and tyranny, I wouldn't really want to force people to be free, but I would like to offer freedom to all of those who want it.
What I meant was that special interest groups will always try to achieve their own selfish pragmatic goals at the expense of others. That is quite distinct from utopians or idealists like myself who are trying to achieve a philosophical principle rather than some form of narrow self interest. Actually in terms of self-interest I would probably be better off with a fully socialist government than a Libertarian one.
Humans get human rights regardless of where they were born. Even a sentient non-human would get them.
Good one. You're a member of a group of 100k, tops. In a country of 330 million.
Not saying it would be easy, but it would be funny if the election results could be that badly distorted. No doubt people would suspect foul play. Anyway the plausibility of the results isn't the point. The point was that lots of people would love to change the outcome of our elections including many of our own citizens.
Come back when you understand how a democracy works.
It obviously doesn't work especially when all the choices are horrible and the candidate with fewer votes wins.
Democracy is how grown ups enforce and regulate human rights.
Did you really just use the verbs 'enforce' and 'regulate' with human rights? Seriously? You don't even understand what they are. Google "natural rights' and "john locke" Pathetic that any American should be so ignorant of the principles our country was founded on.
And given your posting, you'd brag about it
Where have I bragged about anything? And anyway what does going to prison have to do with anything? If I could get a Libertarian president elected I might consider prison a small price to pay.
But they'd be merciful in comparison to me. You're not even human to me.
Maybe I'm not human. Maybe I'm a sentient synthetic organism sent here to destroy your planet by getting a Libertarian elected. It would certainly mean armageddon, but maybe that is exactly what your species deserves.
We can never go back to 1776. Ever. Police have fully automatic weapons and tanks now, the Internet will always be here in one form or another, and you can never go back to the one off event of the American revolutionary war.
I was referring to our freshly post war republic-if-you-can-keep-it. Our little noble experiment. The American government of the 18th century. Not sure if a Libertarian president could do very much in resetting the clock, but he might be able to do some cool and interesting things regardless.
If it were up to me though I'd divide up the country into ideological territories so everyone would have a place to call home. A few states for Libertarians if only because that was the principle upon which the entire country was founded in the first place. Wyoming would seem like a good start there. At least one state for the die hard Marxists who don't care how many times the system has proven that it just cannot work. Something for the Greens. And of course the rest could be split up into the Democrats and Republicans who could then maybe even fight wars with each other. How entertaining that would be.
The world is not you
You can't know that.
No republican president has won the popular vote since George HW Bush, in 1992, and that trend shows no sign of slowing down. By 2050, minorities will outnumber whites. Give the US thirty years. It'll turn blue.
Well blue has already turned so red it may as well be purple. In thirty years both parties will be even more similar to each other. So similar in fact that it really will be increasingly difficult to argue that it is a two party system at all.
Good fucking luck getting the latter without some form of the former.
Even if that's true it was certainly not the primary value of our Libertarian Republic. It was just an incidental detail. The real point was Lockean Natural Rights. They wanted people to be left alone to pursue their own goals as long as they didn't violate anyone else's basic human rights. This basic principle has been so twisted that people think the point of our special snowflake of a republic was majority rule.
Democracy was already a thing before gaining independence from England. If that's all our founders cared about America would have been nothing special. But in fact it was a country founded on more profound principles than that: on the philosophy of John Locke and to a lesser extent Rousseau and Voltaire.
The founding fathers were libertarians and terrorists by modern standards and they would go completely insane if they could see how badly we have fucked up their precious Republic. With hindsight they could probably write a constitution that would hold back tyranny for a bit longer, but ultimately people are cunts and will always try to seize power when they can.
You know, if HC had won Trumpists would be all over this and more.
Why would that make a difference? Hillary won the popular vote anyway by a significant margin and so far no one is claiming any votes were changed. Although I'm not sure how they can be so sure that not a single vote was changed. Perhaps they will elaborate.
There are two kinds of people who fall back into "popular vote" mode when referring to the US Presidential elections.
You forgot the third kind who just think the electoral college system is stupid, antiquated, and unjust and think it is silly to call ourselves a democracy when the candidate with the minority of votes wins. It does underscore the pointlessness of voting though. What a waste of time.
I actually didn't care at all who won the last election. The only reason I might start to care is if Trump actually starts doing some crazy stuff he has talked about like banning all muslims from entering the country or building his crazy wall. So far he can't even get his limited travel ban. So I'm not bothered.
Personally though I think the popular vote should matter more than the electoral one. One man one vote I say. If you are going to make some citizens' vote count more at least base it on something meaningful like maybe IQ. Maybe the 'electors' should be required to have a formally tested IQ of at least 150 to qualify. Hell while we are at it maybe we should disqualify anyone with an IQ of less than 150 from voting at all. You'd have to qualify before you were allowed to vote. That would be fun.
Electors who voted for Trump did so because they were selected by their States to cast their votes for Trump.
I'm just familiar with the basic idea of the electoral college. I don't really know the details. My understanding was that the electors are generally supposed to vote along with the popular vote in their jurisdiction, but that they don't have to. You are saying 'the state' tells the electors who to vote for? If that's the case then the elector system is even more pointless than I thought. So who exactly is it that tells the electors who to vote for?
You didn't get the memo. There is no vote fraud. Nothing to see here, move along.
How can we be sure of that? I wasn't aware that it was so definitive. In fact I'm still waiting for the evidence of the tampering to actually be presented. Of course if votes had been changed I wouldn't necessarily expect our intelligence services to tell us that. Because reasons.
The seat was going to be empty anyway, and the theater owner wouldn't had made money on it if you didn't freeload. So what's the harm in watching for free?
Yeah I don't see the harm in that scenario. But of course the cinema does have the right to kick you out if they catch you.
So I'm just curious if you also consider Hillary Clinton to be a racist anti-Muslim? Or is it just Trump?
Those aren't very compelling examples. Neither was at all directly related to religion. Hillary is probably as islamophobic as most Americans are, but not as much as Trump. Trump advocated blocking all Muslims from entering the US during his campaign. I guess it could be worse. He could have advocated putting the ones already in the US into camps or deporting them, but it's a pretty extreme measure that is presumably based on some pretty extreme view along the lines of Muslim = Terrorist.
the six countries on the travel ban were Sudan, Libya, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, and Syria. All of them have either extremely poor security situations with rampant domestic terrorism and active insurgencies, or in Iran's case an extremely antagonistic relationship with the US government and Israel (which has major lobbying power in the US).
Blocking entire countries because of a tiny tiny tiny minority of people living there is in itself tribalist and the sort of simplistic over-generalized thinking that racism is all about. The sheer magnitude of innocent people caught in that ginormous net is extremely unjust by any measure. That some Americans are terrified of a tiny minority of people from those countries wearing towels on their heads does not make it any more rational or just.
Is Trump the man really a racist and islamophobe as he is painted by the left? I don't really know because I don't personally know the guy, but some of the things he has said have justifiably scared people about what he might be capable of. When it comes to that he at least gives me pause. His policies certainly do tend at least toward xenophobia and isolationism. The actual 6 country version of the travel ban is just a small taste of what he might be capable of. After all he did originally advocate blocking everyone who believes in a particular religion from entering the country.
What some people find confusing I think is that while terrorists are usually Muslims or at least Arabs, Muslims are not usually terrorists and actually neither are Arabs. Actual terrorists are almost as rare as aliens. They may as well not exist at all and we should really treat them as if they don't because attention is what they are looking for. All of this fear just encourages them and shows them what cowards we really are.
Didn't Trump actually lose the election in terms of the popular vote? To you foreigners who blame us for voting Trump in we didn't really. The electors did. Not us. We voted in our own version of Theresa May.
If the Russians or someone pretending to be them (maybe it was Aaron Swartz and a team of his undead minions) managed to succeed in altering the results of the election what does this imply about Hillary winning the popular vote by a significant margin but losing in electoral votes? Is it possible that the hackers actually wanted to try to make sure that the unusually extreme Trump would lose? After all most hackers with the skill to pull off something like this are very unlikely to be Trump supporters.
It is unusual for the popular vote to be so much higher than the electoral vote. I mean maybe some electors were bribed to vote Trump, but otoh maybe the popular vote was just the only vote that was hackable. It would be ironic if it turns out that an investigation uncovers that votes were actually hacked in the other direction. That would seem to then imply that it wasn't Russians after all, but rather someone framing them. North Korea maybe?
If I were investigating the first thing I would do is look into the finances of the electors who voted for trump even though the popular vote was against him. The second thing I would do would be to try to figure out how many popular votes were changed and which direction they were changed in. Maybe Trump lost popular votes because some Libertarian hacker altered them to vote for the Libertarian candidate (yay!).
So you think we should just ignore all of the massive amount of evidence from a dizzying array of sources
Seriously? What evidence? They haven't shown us any yet. They are just making claims and they don't have a lot of credibility. We're supposed to take them, of all people, on faith? Known liars?
But even if they do have absolute proof that they are willing to show us that the Russian government really did hack our election computers so what? It's not an act of war. No one was hurt by it. It's not a big deal. It just means we have to improve the security of our electronic voting system or fix whatever they showed to be vulnerable.
The one response to this that should not be on the table is saber rattling and unfortunately that is exactly the response I am seeing from a lot of angry Dems at the moment. At least online. I don't want to go back to a cold war with Russia and I don't see how any sane person would. North Korea has fucking concentration camps, is working on nuclear ICBMs and has openly threatened to attack us and we haven't gone to war with them over it. In comparison this is nothing. We should just thank them for helping us improve our weak computer security and leave it at that. What else can we do anyway?
Let's say Putin says, "Yeah we messed with your insecure election computers. It was fun! What are you gonna do about it?" Well what would you have us do about it? Ask them nicely to stop? Go to war? How are you going to stop them? For that matter how will you stop anyone else from doing the same thing? Maybe some kid in Sri Lanka or Argentina will be the next one to break in and have some fun. That's why computer security is a thing. Are we going to declare war against every country that breaks into our computers?
Take this shit seriously, you twats. Things like this can topple nations.
Most of the time it doesn't matter who gets elected. If I thought the election of one parties candidate over the other would somehow overthrow the government I'd definitely be in favor of that though. That would be awesome. Some chance at real change finally.
It's not the Russians you should worry about anyway. It's Libertarians like me. I don't give a fuck about democracy, but I do care about human rights a lot. If I could hack into the voting system and get a (sane/moderate) Libertarian elected would I do it? Fuck yes. Welcome back to 1776, motherfuckers.
Hell who wouldn't try to influence an election to get a shot at seeing their own particular utopian views put to the test? Socialist party? The Green Party? You really think it's just the Russians who care which candidate gets elected here? A more useful question would be who wouldn't want to hack the election results if they could? Hell the Green Party might could justify almost any action based on their belief that they would truly be saving the world from armageddon if they were in power.
It could even be argued that an easily hackable election system could be a good thing. A chance for real change. Maybe even for the better. The majority is usually wrong about most things because most people are very stupid, particularly in the US. So how about giving some minority views a chance?
Totally agree. The only difference here is that Trump isn't a normal politician and may have some racist or at least anti-Muslim views and some more extreme ideas than usual. So far nothing has come of it and the rest of the system (house, senate, judicial) is all regular politicians. So it may end up like Obama wanting to close Gitmo but not being able to (assuming you believe he wanted to). Luckily a president is not quite a dictator. Not yet at least.
Note how the travel ban went nowhere and so far I haven't read about any Muslim internment camps or mass deportation of Muslim Americans. If Trump seriously tries to do any of that stuff then I'll start to seriously worry, but for now he's all bark and no bite. At least so far. It's kind of entertaining to see how the Dems are reacting. I've never seen this kind of rage or bile before. Not even the most Hilary hating conservative was ever this enraged. Nothing like hatred to unite people, eh?
In some ways the other side of the pond worries me more. Trump isn't advocating the end of encryption, human rights (except for Muslims of course), and uh the internet while she's at it. Hopefully the political system over there can prevent her from actually doing any of that extreme stuff. There's a lot of dangerous anti-Muslim talk over there too, but May is not nearly as much an islamophobe or xenophobe as Trump. Unfortunately they both tend to go in for overly simple solutions to complex problems, but then so do most politicians. The Philippines with their president's policy of Murder All Drug Dealers (and users) as a way to solve the drug problem there is my favorite illustration of this.
Sounds like it's time for better security in the computerized part of the voting system. Even if the Russian government, as opposed to just individual hackers who might even be spoofing a Russian government IP address for reasons, really is behind this so what? It's not any kind of real attack. If you are advocating that we try to hack their own insecure internet-facing computer systems go for it. Would love to see someone other than Putin or a Putin clone get elected next time. I'm not even convinced this sort of thing should be a crime at all. More like relatively harmless play. Or we could move toward nuclear war with Russia if you want. Up to you.
I personally kind of like the Russkies. I have no problem with them. I think we should stick with staying on friendly and good diplomatic terms with them. I lived through the 80s and I find being friends with them a lot better than Duck and Cover drills. OTOH we all know how cool nuclear war would be. It would truly be 'interesting times'. Plus a lot of Beautiful People would die or at least suffer a reduced quality of life. So I'm cool with either option, but for most people I think the first option would be preferable.
I guess we do live in interesting times in a way. Democrats have become so much like Republicans now that they have become war mongers as long as it suits their agenda in other ways. Although I must admit I don't see how getting on a more cold war like footing with Russia again is going to hurt their arch-enemy Trump. Because Democratic presidents were known for chewing gum and kicking ass but running out of gum? I'm not seeing it. I'm just glad Trump himself is not taking the bait and transforming into Dr. Strangelove.
I can remember back in the 80s when most Democrats were supporters of the ACLU and even human rights. It used to be that Republicans wanted financial freedom (even for poor people in many cases) but government control of our personal lives and Democrats wanted personal freedoms (pro ACLU, pro drug etc) put wanted more government control of the economy (Robin Hood economics). Now both parties want government control of everything just in somewhat different ways, but this pro war stance on the part of the Democrats is something new.
But saber rattling over this is just dumb. You want to investigate Trump for being overly friendly with the Russians (not really a crime imo but whatever) fine, but escalating this into any sort of real conflict just because you want to demonize the Russians because Trump gets along with Putin is harmful to world peace and not really going to accomplish anything you want anyway.
Trump is president. I don't like it either but it doesn't really matter that much who is president. It's mostly business as usual no matter who is living in that big white building. So calm the fuck down people and wipe that drool and spittle from your rabid mouths. This could even be something positive if it helps to make our electronic voting systems more secure or if it starts to get people thinking about how stupid and antiquated our electoral college system is. Democracy is mostly about a wolf and some sheep deciding what's for dinner anyway. It's really individual/human rights that distinguishes us from totalitarian dictatorships. Or really the rights that the government doesn't have. Voting is mostly bread and circus to keep the common people believing they can make a difference.
People who think allowing these networks to be accessed from the internet at large are stupid.
Actually that is probably the point of this malware. To demonstrate how stupid it is. And yes it is stupid as well as arrogant.
By the way, you'll still need a fan on the CPU.
Or a waterblock and radiator or a phase change block connecting to an air conditioning system. It is possible to go fanless if your radiator or heat sink is big enough, but it will always be more effective with fans.
An investigation should not be necessary if they have evidence. They should just present the evidence if there is any. The purpose of an investigation is to gather evidence. They claim they already have it but not only won't show it to us, but won't even give us a hint at what it might be. That's just pathetic.
Factors like how well trained individuals are can play a major role.
What about intelligence? Does that play any role? Is a programmer with an IQ of 78 but with more training more valuable than a programmer with an IQ of 150 but with less training?
Do more intelligent programmers make fewer careless errors? Not sure about that. But they would seem to have greater potential to write elegant and beautiful programs that I could be proud of having paid for. What I would want is clever programmers who can build beautiful and efficient machines.
F90 discarded white space significance in 1990.
Interesting. This happened only about a year after I took my first formal programming course at university. So my first formally taught programming experience was with a language that refused to compile if you accidentally typed a space at the end of a line. I found the constant bugs due to this so annoying that I dropped the course in the first couple of weeks even though programming is one of my favorite activities in the world. To this day I have never touched Fortran again.
Luckily the C/C++ era was fast approaching and I loved and continue to love that language for its efficiency and concise logical structure. It just makes sense for me and feels right. For me the choice of language is mostly about personal preference. More a matter of taste than anything. Although for performance critical tasks I would hope any competent programmer would drop into C/C++ or even ASM for critical inner loops.
There are a couple of language types I'd really like to see though. One would be a compiled-programs-as-objects language that is 'object-oriented' but with objects that can run and be useful on their own and not only as a component of another program. Another would be a language that is more friendly to code self-modification at runtime to better implement genetic algorithms.
Real intelligence cannot be measured in flops. The number of synapse operations per second may not matter. We don't know what does matter except probably the overall number of neural connections among lots of other factors that we are currently unaware of due to our simplified model of the brain. The new hardware is good because it scales up the number of synapses, but a TPU is not a brain and that is the problem.
Currently the only intelligent device we know of is a brain. We should be trying to understand its working principles and emulating it as closely as possible. Of course we are doing both of those things probably as best we can. It's more a question of which path is the most optimal for quick results. Take your pick, but I'd place my bets on harnessing the power of existing massive neural machines that operate in ways we don't even yet understand. It's like trying to build faster computers like we are now in very slow increments versus trying to figure out how to use an alien supercomputer which we have no real understanding of. I think the latter has greater potential for interesting results.
Where is this detail of which you speak?
Announced what? I don't believe anything they say without evidence. I don't think presenting their evidence is an unreasonable request and until they do...well I am certainly not going to take anything those liars say on faith. They aren't just liars. They are evil liars.
There's a reason why hard evidence will not be in the public domain - it's a matter of national intelligence.
So you expect the rest of us to take their claims on blind faith? Because they've proven so honest and trustworthy in the past? Yes our intelligence agencies have never lied. Of course we can trust them! Fuck your blind faith. No evidence or it never happened. Period. That's what is right and just.
Countries like the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, much of the EU, and many others, have generally been strong supporters of freedom, democracy, and human rights. Together, they are powerful to defend those values.
Wait, what? When? In this century? That hasn't been true for a long time.
There is no reason to 'push back' against Russia. Whatever they did there is no evidence and even if they really did say buy some electoral votes or something you know what? It doesn't matter. Use that knowledge to improve the system so it isn't so vulnerable to corrupt electors. Although the electoral system does seem inherently vulnerable to bribery it has always been that way. Maybe it's time to dump it, but our insecure outdated election system is no reason to go to war with Russia, something that is always a bad idea. This isn't even worth saber rattling about. It's nothing. Not a big deal. Even if it's true and so far there is zero evidence that it is. At best some Russian hackers hacked some emails and set some information free. If certain people were not tech illiterate their emails would have been strongly encrypted and not stored for any length of time, especially not in an insecure location. But I'm happy with email leaks because it gets the information out there. I'd be just as happy to see Trump's emails. The more information the world has about our leaders the better.
There has been no declassified evidence officially made public. Big difference. And that is the way it should happen.
Glad one of you war mongers at least admitted it. No evidence. No crime. Period. You expect popular support without evidence? Forget it.