Project Veritas just released a new story about how twitter bans people who have opinions they don't like.
Basically, any message deemed "offensive" can be attenuated in various ways, but of course being pro-Trump is claimed to be offensive by some so it becomes politically partisan.
I don't know why any company, or any person, would attempt to limit someone else's expression of ideas. It's very clear that companies who do that hurt their own bottom line, there are numerous examples in the past year. So long as the expression isn't explicitly against the law (notably threats and kiddie porn), why bother?
Any methods to limit offense should apply to the listener, not the speaker. If the company wants to give the listener the ability to mute ideas, phrases, or people they don't like, then that's fine. The speaker can still have their message, and the old saw "but no one's obliged to listen to you" still applies.
Facebook, Google, Twitter... all the big players have an idea of what "incorrect behaviour" is, and want to enforce their vision on everyone.
It's ill-advised, badly implemented, and financially a mistake.
And for the record, Gab.ai is the new twitter that does just that: if you don't like the tone of what people say, you can mute people or words or phrases you don't like.
Why do people even do that? I thought we went over this in grade school: freedom of speech is a right.
Why would anyone expect the cost of natural disasters to do anything but go up? The price of everything is going up, from real estate to building materials to labor. Every time there is damage the cost of repair will be greater, sometimes much greater. Every year is probably going to be the most expensive. To claim (or imply) we had larger disasters than ever before is simply false, we've had bigger hurricanes, and worse wildfires. Especially speaking of wildfires, THAT is due to Californias stupid policy on never doing controlled burns and the sky-high price of real estate there. Wildfires there are nothing but a man-made disaster, probably caused by "Raw Water" freaks smoking pot as they collect.
I also like how they casually imply the year being warm has strong ties to all the disasters - which include things like a freeze.
I'm not quite sure of your premise, one thing about natural disasters is that we get to learn from them.
For example, the Loma Prieta earthquake (California 6.9, 1989), worth $5.6 in damages, caused changes in building codes to make the buildings more tolerant of earthquakes. There have been further earthquakes of roughly the same magnitude, with much less damage. It's not completely comperable, the 1994 Northridge earthquake caused more damage, because earthquakes happen at different places and magnitudes.
The New Orleans Levee breaches that caused all the flooding: OK, we should have seen that coming, but have we fixed the problems there? Would another hurricane cause as much damage?
And there are near disasters that cause us to harden our defenses. The recent Oroville Dam crisis in California is getting fixed to better withstand seasonally unusual conditions, and no one wants to build nuclear reactors after Fukishima.
Historically speaking, I'm not entirely sure that the costs of disasters should keep going up.
Disasters tend to have happened before, and people tend to make plans.
If your party votes no on NN, will you change your vote?
I'm not the person you're baiting, but here's my answer: I will not. [Change my vote]
I'm also 100% a Republican, but there are issues on which the party and I disagree.
That being said, I try to sort the differences by importance to the country, and find other issues are of much greater significance. I believe that immigration is a road to disaster for our country, and needs to be reined in.
National security is also high on my list, although of lesser importance than immigration.
I'm a nerd who wants NN, but I also see the larger picture.
At this point if the executive order provided free high speed internet to all Americans the headline would probably be "Trump signs order making it easier to spy on all Americans".
Damn!
Just checking the early comments, and it's all "he's only rewarding the red states for voting him in", "it's encroachment on public lands - will end with offshore drilling and commercialization of public lands", "write a check to your cronies".
Even though I disliked Obama and [president] Clinton, at least I accepted that they were duly elected, and note that they did some things that were actually good for the country. Notably, Clinton reduced regulations and reduced the deficit (and national debt) for awhile.
Is there *nothing* good that will come from this president?
At least he's no longer literally Hitler. That's progress.
You forgot that people are only anti-federalist when the feds do something they don't like, but all for the Feds to exert their power to prevent states form doing something they don't like.
Is that a problem?
I was under the impression that the governments (both federal and local) should work for the benefit of the people, and that a big problem with governments as they are now is: that they don't.
Why is it bad that the people always favor things that they would like?
(Yes, there are corner cases like slavery and discrimination, but these only get changed when a majority wants them to change. We only gave women the vote in 1920 when a majority thought it was appropriate. Net Neutrality is not one of those corner cases.)
there is no potential profit and no one is willing to pay for development, trials, and certification
If time and resources were infinite this wouldn't be an issue. Neither are, hence no matter how noble it would be to "fix" certain things, hard choices occasionally need to be made. Do you spend tens of millions researching a drug that will benefit, say, 500 people or that same money on a drug that will benefit 50 million people?
There are many problems with this view, but I'll focus on the most obvious one.
There is no way for a patient to "exit" this system in order to take control of their situation. They cannot go to the doctor and sign a waiver saying they know the risks but want to do it anyway - that's illegal.
They are condemned to a lifetime of no hope and no recourse. It would be simple and inexpensive to give them a legal way out of the medical system we have now, so that they could at least try things on their own under the supervision of a real doctor.
There's also the humanitarian angle - we're actually *not* researching drugs that benefit 50 million people medically, we're researching boner drugs and hair-growth drugs, and drugs that mask symptoms long-term but don't actually cure anything. Because *those* drugs can affect 50 million people for profit, while curing actual diseases doesn't.
We have readers who are experts on economics, law, medicine, and game theory(*). What's the solution to this?
There are rare diseases that affect only a handful of people in the US, and there are tons of medical procedures and devices which could be used but aren't.
Two anecdotes: a) I talked to a doctor at Berman-Gund (Boston) who claims to have a cure for a rare inherited disease that affects only 450 people in the US, but has given up because it's too expensive to develop(**). b) My dentist (heavily involved in research at Tufts) mentioned that there's lots of new diagnostic methods available, but insurance companies won't allow them because they're afraid they will turn up undiscovered conditions that are expensive to treat. Essentially, it's cheaper (in the actuarial sense) to let things go until they are untreatable so that the patient dies quickly.
A) What are the characteristics of a system that fixes these problems, and
B) How do we get from where we are to that system?
(*) For a situation with an incentive for better health. (**) Meaning: With only 450 potential patients, there is no potential profit and no one is willing to pay for development, trials, and certification
No Bitcoin is a failure, with a bottlenecked architecture that prevents liquidity, high transaction fees far in excess of bank wiring fee, high percentage of use for black market begging for government intervention, and extreme volatility making it useless as store of value
Your claim reads "Bitcoin is a failure", but your explanation is roughly "Bitcoin has problems".
Bitcoin is in widespread use, people are looking into fixing the problems, and... what's your definition of a failure?
People want to destroy their bodies then run to the doctor looking for magic. Then they complain it costs money and doesn't fix the root issue and sue the doctors if they don't like the results
What about people who *don't* want to destroy their bodies?
What about people who try to take care of their bodies: aren't obese, exercise, and don't do drugs, smoke, or drink to excess?
There's an *awful lot* of these people. I don't think the "destroy their bodies" crowd is quite as big as your implication "all people".
And yes, I would like my doctor to fix the issue, which is what I expect from *any* expert I hire to fix a problem, and if they charge me lots of money and it doesn't fix the root issue then yes, I want to sue them.
(Let me take a moment to say how entirely offensive I find your post. All the way from the smarmy holier-than-thou attitude, to the emotional straw man argument.)
I went to the auto shop this month, and they told me "you need new bearings, that's not something we can do, check with your dealership". I went to the dealership and they said "yes, we can fix that, it'll cost *this much*." They know how to do it, how much it'll cost, and there's strong protections in my state if they screw it up or charge too much or don't fix the problem.
Go to the doctor and it's "try this and see if it helps". They get all pissy if you go online to get informed about your symptoms, they prescribe to mask symptoms and not fix problems, and there's no real recourse if it doesn't work. "...and if it doesn't work come back and we'll try something else".
"Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit."
"Love and tensor algebra? Have you taken leave of your senses?" Trurl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming:
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane, Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn, Their indices bedecked from one to n, Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone, And every vector dreams of matrices. Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze: It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Riemann, Hilbert, or in Banach space Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways. Our asymptotes no longer out of phase, We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I'll grant thee random access to my heart, Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love; And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove, And in our bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel, Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler, Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers, Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain? Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes, A root or two, a torus and a node: The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine! The product of our scalars is defined! Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye, I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh. Bernoulli would have been content to die, Had he but known such a2 cos 2 phi
The stories should reflect society as it is today. White men controlling everything is so 1950's.
The stories should maximize profit.
Tangentially, if the stories are riveting and artistically interesting or win awards for things (such as artwork or plot or character development), that will cause greater sales and thus greater profits.
Female Thor and black female Iron Man - those were seemingly *not* chosen to maximize profit.
...and now people are noting that profits due to those choices are down.
I asked my dentist (who's heavily involved in medical/dental research at Tufts) about health research, and he noted that health care has a lot of diagnostic techniques that can't be used.
He explained that the insurance companies are afraid the new diagnostics will turn up problems in people that otherwise wouldn't be found until they're too late to fix and that, actuarially speaking, it's cheaper to let the problems go on and let the patient die. Also, it's possible the patient would die from random chance before the condition is found.
I have no idea if this is correct, but I can remember lots of "promising new" techniques and devices here on slashdot and other places over the years - yet the last new device that we actually got is the MRI.
(And for the longest time your insurance company wouldn't pay for an MRI - even though it was in widespread use - because it was deemed "experimental".)
The term of choice used to be "racist", but that's been so overused in the past year and a half that they have to switch to using another word.
I've been following the zeitgeist of this. Until around December of last year, people would flee from the word, conceding the argument to whoever first uses the word to describe the other side. Then in December people started ignoring the word a little, then Jan/Feb people were like "meh" about it, and around March people started (note: started, not widely) embracing the word.
Then "OK, I'm racist" started popping up, but it wasn't really attached to the *person*, it was attached to the position. One could say "OK, I'm racist" for posting an opinion about strong immigration control. Or "OK, I'm racist" for posting an opinion about limiting visas or voter ID.
Through the summer, "racist" started to be applied to just about everything. Tigers are racist. Perfectionism is a form of racism. Two white parents having a white child is racist. I'm not making that last one up, it's "[...] one of the most powerful forces supporting white supremacy" - don't you know?
Now racist has completely lost its meaning. No one online seems to pay any attention to it at all.
Sexual assault is pretty big right now, but it's fading fast. It was a flash in the pan with people like Harvey Weinstein, but quickly got more ridiculous. You can tell it's on it's way out because Fart rape is a thing.
(Side note: "Trump is literally Hitler" is pretty-much dead, the last nail in that coffin was recognizing Jerusalem as the capitol of Israel.)
So now they need a new word, and it's probably going to be nazis for awhile. Expect this to go on for a couple of months and get progressively more ridiculous, probably though the primaries of next year.
Then Ramadan comes up (May 15 to June15), many terrorist actions will make the news cycle(*), and it's likely that "Islamaphobe" will be the word of the day.
It's basically the fashion industry for words.
(*) Just extrapolating from past years, such as last year viz. London. OK, I'm racist.
In the US, real money is defined as gold or silver, as is similar in the Constitutions of several states and the Bretton Woods Agreement.
Historians, economists, and traders use the term 'fiat' all the time, but this may be the first time any of them were accused of being 'leet' rather than 'nerds'.
Why do you have a burr up your ass about a particular economic term?
In addition, he's attacking the author (he sounds pretentious!) and not the substance of the article, or even the reliability of the information given.
All this means is that, in 5000 years, historians will get a dangerously stilted view of what was posted on twitter - if Trumps tweets are archived, but not the tweets that debunks his claims, then his claims will stand unopposed for future historians to debate about.
How do you mean, exactly?
I'm wondering what danger there could be (5000 years from now), and if we should take steps to avoid it.
Then again, it might be more important to some people to scare the public with scary factoids than to provide education. That's my observation at least.
Spot on!
Reading the line "tens of thousands of them are soaring through space and slamming into Earth's atmosphere from all directions" my first reaction was:
Divide "tens of thousands" by the surface area of the atmosphere.
My next thought was to divide my own profile surface area (maybe 1 square meter?) by the surface area of the Earth's atmosphere (500 trillion, or thereabouts) and multiply that by "tens of thousands" to come up with the probability of getting hit by a cosmic ray.
Then I realized that the OP stated "at any given moment", and realized that you can't multiply by the number of "moments" in a flight.
if the party in power changes. And yes, this is a partisan issue.[...] Gun Control and Abortion are both powerful wedge issues that drive people to the polls. I don't see NN being one of those. Maybe if we could get this framed as a small business concern we'd have a chance, but I've yet to see anyone even mention that angle.
Then why don't you add "right to own firearms" and "abortion is regulated at the state level" to your party's platform?
Not every position your party takes needs to be the opposite from the other side.
The US used to (still does, I bet) tap Russian cables. Turnabout is fair play?
Read "Blind Man's Bluff" for stories of us playing all sorts of crazy sub games against the Russians.
Kinda feels like we've got a new Cold War, don't it? Only now it's an Information / Data / Commerce thing, not a Nukes thing.
A more concerning question is: Have they installed cable severing devices that can be remotely triggered? I suppose a remotely-triggered bomb would be easy enough, but it might be something more sophisticated, such as a method to turn off a repeater and then turn it back on again later.
If we ever get into a war with a country that has submarines (or Disney, for that matter), expect intercontinental internet and phone service to be gone for the duration.
This would be a crippling economic tactic, so long as the US would suffer more than the country at war. For most countries it would be a net win for them.
I can't think of any realistic way to protect this asset, either.
Maybe satellite internet (per previous Slashdot article) isn't such a bad idea?
It's truly weird how over a year after President Trump won the election, and nearly a year since he assumed power, the left is still oblivious as to why they lost the election.
It's not weird at all.
They need to justify ever more mechanisms for throttling molding the information that people see. Even though the mainstream media gave her a lopsided boost, even though the DNC sacrificed their down-ballot elections to get her elected *and* cheated in the run up to the election, even though Facebook and Twitter and Google were banning people, deleting accounts, and reading peoples' documents, despite an army of "correct the record" trolls... despite all that, she still lost.
They're putting in place the very mechanisms that will give them more control over the future narrative.
Their propaganda machine wasn't powerful enough, they're fixing it so that it'll be more powerful next time.
The FCC's Enforcement Bureau found that Sinclair aired stories paid for by the Huntsman Cancer Foundation without disclosing that they were paid programming. The programming was made to look like independent news coverage.
This is a blow against "fake" news.
On a related note, Facebook is dumping it's fake news flagging system (the "disputed" flag), because studies show that flagging something as fake makes people more likely to share it!
(Snicker.... snort... chuckle... BWA HA HA HAH HAH!)
For those of you who are interested in actual news, Breitbart had an article about the so-called "ban".
I've found that Breitbart, with a conservative slant, is more accurate and has better overall journalism. They provide links and are very cautious about unnamed single-person sources like the one cited in the WaPo article. (Makes perfect sense: they have a lot to lose, and if they made a mistake they'd never hear the end of it.)
Just recently Trump's lawyer complained that the E-mails were "unlawfully" obtained.
That was a direct quote, the actual word used. Watching the news cycle on this was hilarious:
E-mails were "illegally" obtained (ABC News) E-mails were "improperly" obtained (NBC News) Trump criticizes how Mueller obtained transition emails (WaPo) Trump Allies Flip Out After Mueller Lands Tens Of Thousands Of [EMails] (HuffPo) Image of Cooperation Between White House and Mueller Starts to Fracture (NY Times) Are Trump's Lawyers Attempting to Discredit Mueller? (nymag.com)
Everyone falling over themselves trying to make the actual quote softer and less significant.
Anyone still wonder why no one trusts the mainstream news?
Trump's approval rating is in the gutter and he's taking the GOP with it.
Was just looking at some comments the other day saying, in effect, the following:
Economy is going great, ISIS is defeated, stock market is soaring, China is finally dealing with North Korea, and jobs are coming back. Not bad for "worst president in history"
Don't discount the fuckton of people who are enjoying the positive changes that have happened since he was elected. Those polls are just the bitter people who still dislike Trump for no reason.
Slashdot Mirror
Project Veritas just released a new story about how twitter bans people who have opinions they don't like.
Basically, any message deemed "offensive" can be attenuated in various ways, but of course being pro-Trump is claimed to be offensive by some so it becomes politically partisan.
I don't know why any company, or any person, would attempt to limit someone else's expression of ideas. It's very clear that companies who do that hurt their own bottom line, there are numerous examples in the past year. So long as the expression isn't explicitly against the law (notably threats and kiddie porn), why bother?
Any methods to limit offense should apply to the listener, not the speaker. If the company wants to give the listener the ability to mute ideas, phrases, or people they don't like, then that's fine. The speaker can still have their message, and the old saw "but no one's obliged to listen to you" still applies.
Facebook, Google, Twitter... all the big players have an idea of what "incorrect behaviour" is, and want to enforce their vision on everyone.
It's ill-advised, badly implemented, and financially a mistake.
And for the record, Gab.ai is the new twitter that does just that: if you don't like the tone of what people say, you can mute people or words or phrases you don't like.
Why do people even do that? I thought we went over this in grade school: freedom of speech is a right.
Why would anyone expect the cost of natural disasters to do anything but go up? The price of everything is going up, from real estate to building materials to labor. Every time there is damage the cost of repair will be greater, sometimes much greater. Every year is probably going to be the most expensive. To claim (or imply) we had larger disasters than ever before is simply false, we've had bigger hurricanes, and worse wildfires. Especially speaking of wildfires, THAT is due to Californias stupid policy on never doing controlled burns and the sky-high price of real estate there. Wildfires there are nothing but a man-made disaster, probably caused by "Raw Water" freaks smoking pot as they collect.
I also like how they casually imply the year being warm has strong ties to all the disasters - which include things like a freeze.
I'm not quite sure of your premise, one thing about natural disasters is that we get to learn from them.
For example, the Loma Prieta earthquake (California 6.9, 1989), worth $5.6 in damages, caused changes in building codes to make the buildings more tolerant of earthquakes. There have been further earthquakes of roughly the same magnitude, with much less damage. It's not completely comperable, the 1994 Northridge earthquake caused more damage, because earthquakes happen at different places and magnitudes.
The New Orleans Levee breaches that caused all the flooding: OK, we should have seen that coming, but have we fixed the problems there? Would another hurricane cause as much damage?
And there are near disasters that cause us to harden our defenses. The recent Oroville Dam crisis in California is getting fixed to better withstand seasonally unusual conditions, and no one wants to build nuclear reactors after Fukishima.
Historically speaking, I'm not entirely sure that the costs of disasters should keep going up.
Disasters tend to have happened before, and people tend to make plans.
Remember when Cons complained about "ruling through executive orders"?
Yeah - that was awesome!
(Remember when you said it was OK to do that?)
I am for rational NN. And i am 100% Republican.
If your party votes no on NN, will you change your vote?
I'm not the person you're baiting, but here's my answer: I will not. [Change my vote]
I'm also 100% a Republican, but there are issues on which the party and I disagree.
That being said, I try to sort the differences by importance to the country, and find other issues are of much greater significance. I believe that immigration is a road to disaster for our country, and needs to be reined in.
National security is also high on my list, although of lesser importance than immigration.
I'm a nerd who wants NN, but I also see the larger picture.
Ask me again if DACA amnesty ever happens.
You can't tell by some of the comments.
At this point if the executive order provided free high speed internet to all Americans the headline would probably be
"Trump signs order making it easier to spy on all Americans".
Damn!
Just checking the early comments, and it's all "he's only rewarding the red states for voting him in", "it's encroachment on public lands - will end with offshore drilling and commercialization of public lands", "write a check to your cronies".
They left out "he's only doing it to watch liberal heads explode".
Even though I disliked Obama and [president] Clinton, at least I accepted that they were duly elected, and note that they did some things that were actually good for the country. Notably, Clinton reduced regulations and reduced the deficit (and national debt) for awhile.
Is there *nothing* good that will come from this president?
At least he's no longer literally Hitler. That's progress.
You forgot that people are only anti-federalist when the feds do something they don't like, but all for the Feds to exert their power to prevent states form doing something they don't like.
Is that a problem?
I was under the impression that the governments (both federal and local) should work for the benefit of the people, and that a big problem with governments as they are now is: that they don't.
Why is it bad that the people always favor things that they would like?
(Yes, there are corner cases like slavery and discrimination, but these only get changed when a majority wants them to change. We only gave women the vote in 1920 when a majority thought it was appropriate. Net Neutrality is not one of those corner cases.)
there is no potential profit and no one is willing to pay for development, trials, and certification
If time and resources were infinite this wouldn't be an issue. Neither are, hence no matter how noble it would be to "fix" certain things, hard choices occasionally need to be made. Do you spend tens of millions researching a drug that will benefit, say, 500 people or that same money on a drug that will benefit 50 million people?
There are many problems with this view, but I'll focus on the most obvious one.
There is no way for a patient to "exit" this system in order to take control of their situation. They cannot go to the doctor and sign a waiver saying they know the risks but want to do it anyway - that's illegal.
They are condemned to a lifetime of no hope and no recourse. It would be simple and inexpensive to give them a legal way out of the medical system we have now, so that they could at least try things on their own under the supervision of a real doctor.
There's also the humanitarian angle - we're actually *not* researching drugs that benefit 50 million people medically, we're researching boner drugs and hair-growth drugs, and drugs that mask symptoms long-term but don't actually cure anything. Because *those* drugs can affect 50 million people for profit, while curing actual diseases doesn't.
If you have a strong immune system, you should never need antibiotics.
Apropos of nothing, where can I get one of those?
So how do we fix this?
We have readers who are experts on economics, law, medicine, and game theory(*). What's the solution to this?
There are rare diseases that affect only a handful of people in the US, and there are tons of medical procedures and devices which could be used but aren't.
Two anecdotes: a) I talked to a doctor at Berman-Gund (Boston) who claims to have a cure for a rare inherited disease that affects only 450 people in the US, but has given up because it's too expensive to develop(**). b) My dentist (heavily involved in research at Tufts) mentioned that there's lots of new diagnostic methods available, but insurance companies won't allow them because they're afraid they will turn up undiscovered conditions that are expensive to treat. Essentially, it's cheaper (in the actuarial sense) to let things go until they are untreatable so that the patient dies quickly.
A) What are the characteristics of a system that fixes these problems, and
B) How do we get from where we are to that system?
(*) For a situation with an incentive for better health.
(**) Meaning: With only 450 potential patients, there is no potential profit and no one is willing to pay for development, trials, and certification
No Bitcoin is a failure, with a bottlenecked architecture that prevents liquidity, high transaction fees far in excess of bank wiring fee, high percentage of use for black market begging for government intervention, and extreme volatility making it useless as store of value
Your claim reads "Bitcoin is a failure", but your explanation is roughly "Bitcoin has problems".
Bitcoin is in widespread use, people are looking into fixing the problems, and... what's your definition of a failure?
Is Twitter a failure in your book?
People want to destroy their bodies then run to the doctor looking for magic. Then they complain it costs money and doesn't fix the root issue and sue the doctors if they don't like the results
What about people who *don't* want to destroy their bodies?
What about people who try to take care of their bodies: aren't obese, exercise, and don't do drugs, smoke, or drink to excess?
There's an *awful lot* of these people. I don't think the "destroy their bodies" crowd is quite as big as your implication "all people".
And yes, I would like my doctor to fix the issue, which is what I expect from *any* expert I hire to fix a problem, and if they charge me lots of money and it doesn't fix the root issue then yes, I want to sue them.
(Let me take a moment to say how entirely offensive I find your post. All the way from the smarmy holier-than-thou attitude, to the emotional straw man argument.)
I went to the auto shop this month, and they told me "you need new bearings, that's not something we can do, check with your dealership". I went to the dealership and they said "yes, we can fix that, it'll cost *this much*." They know how to do it, how much it'll cost, and there's strong protections in my state if they screw it up or charge too much or don't fix the problem.
Go to the doctor and it's "try this and see if it helps". They get all pissy if you go online to get informed about your symptoms, they prescribe to mask symptoms and not fix problems, and there's no real recourse if it doesn't work. "...and if it doesn't work come back and we'll try something else".
"Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit."
"Love and tensor algebra? Have you taken leave of your senses?" Trurl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming:
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Riemann, Hilbert, or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a2 cos 2 phi
(From "Cyberiad", by Stanislaw Lem)
The stories should reflect society as it is today. White men controlling everything is so 1950's.
The stories should maximize profit.
Tangentially, if the stories are riveting and artistically interesting or win awards for things (such as artwork or plot or character development), that will cause greater sales and thus greater profits.
Female Thor and black female Iron Man - those were seemingly *not* chosen to maximize profit.
This comes as a surprise?
I asked my dentist (who's heavily involved in medical/dental research at Tufts) about health research, and he noted that health care has a lot of diagnostic techniques that can't be used.
He explained that the insurance companies are afraid the new diagnostics will turn up problems in people that otherwise wouldn't be found until they're too late to fix and that, actuarially speaking, it's cheaper to let the problems go on and let the patient die. Also, it's possible the patient would die from random chance before the condition is found.
I have no idea if this is correct, but I can remember lots of "promising new" techniques and devices here on slashdot and other places over the years - yet the last new device that we actually got is the MRI.
(And for the longest time your insurance company wouldn't pay for an MRI - even though it was in widespread use - because it was deemed "experimental".)
The term of choice used to be "racist", but that's been so overused in the past year and a half that they have to switch to using another word.
I've been following the zeitgeist of this. Until around December of last year, people would flee from the word, conceding the argument to whoever first uses the word to describe the other side. Then in December people started ignoring the word a little, then Jan/Feb people were like "meh" about it, and around March people started (note: started, not widely) embracing the word.
Then "OK, I'm racist" started popping up, but it wasn't really attached to the *person*, it was attached to the position. One could say "OK, I'm racist" for posting an opinion about strong immigration control. Or "OK, I'm racist" for posting an opinion about limiting visas or voter ID.
Through the summer, "racist" started to be applied to just about everything. Tigers are racist. Perfectionism is a form of racism. Two white parents having a white child is racist. I'm not making that last one up, it's "[...] one of the most powerful forces supporting white supremacy" - don't you know?
Now racist has completely lost its meaning. No one online seems to pay any attention to it at all.
Sexual assault is pretty big right now, but it's fading fast. It was a flash in the pan with people like Harvey Weinstein, but quickly got more ridiculous. You can tell it's on it's way out because Fart rape is a thing.
(Side note: "Trump is literally Hitler" is pretty-much dead, the last nail in that coffin was recognizing Jerusalem as the capitol of Israel.)
So now they need a new word, and it's probably going to be nazis for awhile. Expect this to go on for a couple of months and get progressively more ridiculous, probably though the primaries of next year.
Then Ramadan comes up (May 15 to June15), many terrorist actions will make the news cycle(*), and it's likely that "Islamaphobe" will be the word of the day.
It's basically the fashion industry for words.
(*) Just extrapolating from past years, such as last year viz. London. OK, I'm racist.
In the US, real money is defined as gold or silver, as is similar in the Constitutions of several states and the Bretton Woods Agreement.
Historians, economists, and traders use the term 'fiat' all the time, but this may be the first time any of them were accused of being 'leet' rather than 'nerds'.
Why do you have a burr up your ass about a particular economic term?
In addition, he's attacking the author (he sounds pretentious!) and not the substance of the article, or even the reliability of the information given.
All this means is that, in 5000 years, historians will get a dangerously stilted view of what was posted on twitter - if Trumps tweets are archived, but not the tweets that debunks his claims, then his claims will stand unopposed for future historians to debate about.
How do you mean, exactly?
I'm wondering what danger there could be (5000 years from now), and if we should take steps to avoid it.
Shannon's paper "Prediction Entropy of Printed English" tries to measure the amount of information per character in English.
He found that English is about 1 bit per character, and so compressed text can be expected to take up about that much room.
The paper is a pretty interesting read if you have read his 1948 paper that defines entropy (also a good read).
He came up with some interesting experimental methods to measure entropy in English.
Then again, it might be more important to some people to scare the public with scary factoids than to provide education. That's my observation at least.
Spot on!
Reading the line "tens of thousands of them are soaring through space and slamming into Earth's atmosphere from all directions" my first reaction was:
Divide "tens of thousands" by the surface area of the atmosphere.
My next thought was to divide my own profile surface area (maybe 1 square meter?) by the surface area of the Earth's atmosphere (500 trillion, or thereabouts) and multiply that by "tens of thousands" to come up with the probability of getting hit by a cosmic ray.
Then I realized that the OP stated "at any given moment", and realized that you can't multiply by the number of "moments" in a flight.
The article is complete emotional bullshit.
if the party in power changes. And yes, this is a partisan issue.[...] Gun Control and Abortion are both powerful wedge issues that drive people to the polls. I don't see NN being one of those. Maybe if we could get this framed as a small business concern we'd have a chance, but I've yet to see anyone even mention that angle.
Then why don't you add "right to own firearms" and "abortion is regulated at the state level" to your party's platform?
Not every position your party takes needs to be the opposite from the other side.
The US used to (still does, I bet) tap Russian cables. Turnabout is fair play?
Read "Blind Man's Bluff" for stories of us playing all sorts of crazy sub games against the Russians.
Kinda feels like we've got a new Cold War, don't it? Only now it's an Information / Data / Commerce thing, not a Nukes thing.
A more concerning question is: Have they installed cable severing devices that can be remotely triggered? I suppose a remotely-triggered bomb would be easy enough, but it might be something more sophisticated, such as a method to turn off a repeater and then turn it back on again later.
If we ever get into a war with a country that has submarines (or Disney, for that matter), expect intercontinental internet and phone service to be gone for the duration.
This would be a crippling economic tactic, so long as the US would suffer more than the country at war. For most countries it would be a net win for them.
I can't think of any realistic way to protect this asset, either.
Maybe satellite internet (per previous Slashdot article) isn't such a bad idea?
It's truly weird how over a year after President Trump won the election, and nearly a year since he assumed power, the left is still oblivious as to why they lost the election.
It's not weird at all.
They need to justify ever more mechanisms for throttling molding the information that people see. Even though the mainstream media gave her a lopsided boost, even though the DNC sacrificed their down-ballot elections to get her elected *and* cheated in the run up to the election, even though Facebook and Twitter and Google were banning people, deleting accounts, and reading peoples' documents, despite an army of "correct the record" trolls... despite all that, she still lost.
They're putting in place the very mechanisms that will give them more control over the future narrative.
Their propaganda machine wasn't powerful enough, they're fixing it so that it'll be more powerful next time.
From the linked article:
The FCC's Enforcement Bureau found that Sinclair aired stories paid for by the Huntsman Cancer Foundation without disclosing that they were paid programming. The programming was made to look like independent news coverage.
This is a blow against "fake" news.
On a related note, Facebook is dumping it's fake news flagging system (the "disputed" flag), because studies show that flagging something as fake makes people more likely to share it!
(Snicker.... snort... chuckle... BWA HA HA HAH HAH!)
For those of you who are interested in actual news, Breitbart had an article about the so-called "ban".
I've found that Breitbart, with a conservative slant, is more accurate and has better overall journalism. They provide links and are very cautious about unnamed single-person sources like the one cited in the WaPo article. (Makes perfect sense: they have a lot to lose, and if they made a mistake they'd never hear the end of it.)
Just recently Trump's lawyer complained that the E-mails were "unlawfully" obtained.
That was a direct quote, the actual word used. Watching the news cycle on this was hilarious:
E-mails were "illegally" obtained (ABC News)
E-mails were "improperly" obtained (NBC News)
Trump criticizes how Mueller obtained transition emails (WaPo)
Trump Allies Flip Out After Mueller Lands Tens Of Thousands Of [EMails] (HuffPo)
Image of Cooperation Between White House and Mueller Starts to Fracture (NY Times)
Are Trump's Lawyers Attempting to Discredit Mueller? (nymag.com)
Everyone falling over themselves trying to make the actual quote softer and less significant.
Anyone still wonder why no one trusts the mainstream news?
Trump's approval rating is in the gutter and he's taking the GOP with it.
Was just looking at some comments the other day saying, in effect, the following:
Economy is going great, ISIS is defeated, stock market is soaring, China is finally dealing with North Korea, and jobs are coming back. Not bad for "worst president in history"
Don't discount the fuckton of people who are enjoying the positive changes that have happened since he was elected. Those polls are just the bitter people who still dislike Trump for no reason.