And to top it all of, Cruz accidentally punches his wife and elbows her while giving a hug onstage.
It's completely accidental, all of us have done the same thing at some point in our lives, and I hate that this is what's going to be all over the news tomorrow.
I'm a big fan of rational political discussion, and this media circus makes me sick.
I've been following Scott Adams' blog, and he has some insightful things to say about Trump and how he manages to win.
Scroll back a few entries in the blog and they're pretty interesting.
With that background, I've just this morning figured out how Trump managed to pull it off: he's been using "sad" as a verbal kill-shot.
Check out any image of Ted Cruz, and the most notable feature is his sloping eyebrows. He's definitely got that "sad puppy-dog" look.
Trump has been using "sad" in his speeches for months, and associating it with all sorts of slightly pejorative things. He's never made it specific that he's doing this as an association to Cruz, and "sad" is not extreme rhetoric so it escapes peoples' notice. (He sometimes calls Ted sad, but I'm talking about all the other "sad"s over the past few months.)
Furthermore, he masks it by giving people a more transparent and direct kill-shot: "lying Ted Cruz". People are distracted by the extreme moniker and reject it, and all the while they don't notice that they are slowly building an association between "sad" and a wide range of slightly bad things.
So when they see Ted on stage or in the media, that association is what they feel.
I think it's a case of priming, and Trump has masterfully arm-wrestled Ted's reputation to the floor without him realizing it.
Pundits are quick to point out that Trump's unfavorability is at 70%, and all polls show that Hillary would beat Trump in an election.
What they *don't* say is that Hillary herself is only 12 points lower (56% unfavorability), and that's bound to change over the next 6 months.
In fact, Hillary's unfavorability seems to be creeping up of late, and Trump's is falling.
As much as I admire the quality and intentions of the iPhone, I don't see it as being that important. People were texting, calling, and (gasp!) yes, even browsing the web before an iPhone ever showed up. The locked-in experience of the time was vastly inferior to what the iPhone brought to the game, which is of course the main reason that it did so well. But, without the iPhone, the smartphone market would still have developed, and people still would be carrying tiny but powerful little computers in their pockets.
Before the iPhone, people were lamenting several things about cell phones:
1) They all had a keypad 0-9 display. You had all sorts of features, but you had to remember which keypad number activated speaker phone, and which number sent to voice mail, and so on.
2) The carriers controlled the software with an iron fist. The industry was lamenting that it was impossible to write any programming for cell phones because you had to go through the carriers, who imposed an onerous process and only allowed applications they *thought* might sell well enough to be worth their effort. (And I remember specifically that Tetris was allowed on phones due to its popularity, and pretty-much nothing else.)
When I heard that Apple was making a cell phone, my immediate thought was "well, they'll never get the carriers to accept it". I was rather *surprised* when Apple managed to get ATT on board as a carrier, and I think a lot of other people were as well.
Then the iPhone came out and it had some features:
1) The icons changed based on circumstance. The "speakerphone" function was an icon that was indicative of its function. You no longer had to remember which number to press. A lot of people don't understand how innovative this was at the time, for phones.
2) You could download apps for all sorts of things, and you could write your own apps. This led to a wide spectrum of useful things, but it included some surprising apps such as one that identified bird species using the camera. Things that the carriers would *never* have thought of as useful or even interesting now suddenly became possible.
3) The thing worked seamlessly. You could be listening to music and when a call came in it paused the music, put it into the background, and allowed you to talk for a bit. When you hung up the music continued from where it had left off.
4) There were a bunch of other innovations too, such as the keypad expanding the key when you touched it when your finger covered the key. That made it *much* easier to use a small-display keypad.
We don't see much to recommend the iPhones nowadays because everyone and their brother is making spartphones (including, for instance Microsoft), but when you compare them to what was available at the time, they really were quite the innovation.
But why couldn't each state just create a single interstate commerce tax rate for this situation? That way the complexity businesses complain about is removed (look a table with only 50 -52 entries), then let a state figure out how to divvy up within itself. Simplifies for business, states get the some/most of the revenue they think/know they are currently denied. Well, sucks for the consumer - but puts the consumer in right legal standing, fulfilling the use tax laws.
Let me put a counterpoint to your argument.
Why can't each state just drop sales tax altogether, and make up the difference by reducing collection costs and raising other taxes?
NH total tax burden, the total amount of all taxes for the average person, is 7.9%. Of the 50 states, we are usually among the 3 lowest by this measure, and occasionally *the* lowest.
New Hampshire has no sales tax and no income tax, and we do just fine with services per-person (state spending per person) higher than California.
South Dakota tax burden is 7.1% (lower than us... this year) which is similar. They could easily dump their sales tax altogether and recover the difference in other taxes.
The reason NH does so well is that we only have property tax(*). It's one and *only* one tax, so the costs of collecting our taxes are very low. And the taxation is on one big item instead of a zillion niggling little things. Compare with California, which has property tax, sales tax, and income tax. The costs of collection and compliance are much higher.
It costs money to collect taxes. For every parking meter that takes quarters or subway system that takes cards, you need an elaborate infrastructure of meter maids, ticket kiosks, maintenance, bank deposits, and accounting.
Sales tax is much the same. It requires more complicated accounting, compliance verification at the state level, special bank accounts, auditing and so on. Getting rid of a single state government auditor will easily save $100,000 in salary and an equal amount in employee benefits.
Simpler is better - just dump the sales tax and get the money elsewhere.
(*) Not strictly true, since there are fees for government services such as drivers' licenses and corporate taxes, but mostly true for people in most cases.
It sets a bad precedent. And the risk of retaliation is great.
Um... retaliation from whom?
And wasn't the precedent set when we tracked down and killed Saddam Hussein? (And his "most wanted" cronies, conveniently passed out to our soldiers as a deck of playing cards?)
Or how about Manuel Noriega, who was the head of a foreign nation, and we sent in a seal team to capture him, kidnap him, and bring him to the US to stand trial?
Or how about (with help from the UK) overthrowing the democratically elected leader of Iran in order to install the Shah, who was a brutal dictator who tortured people for the next 38 years?
>...and a single drone strike in NK could solve much of the world's conflict.
That might actually and forever solve all of the worlds conflicts. I wonder if starting a war between the US and China really is really such a promising perspective from your mothers basement, Mr. Warrior. If you are old enough I suggest you enlist in the army and fight and fall for some made up convincing reason in some desert instead of starting a career in politics cause further world wars.
I keep thinking how the US will drone strike wedding receptions on flimsy evidence, even assassinating our own citizens and their children for even *meeting* with an alleged terrorist
...and a single drone strike in NK could solve much of the world's conflict.
Take one of the Chinese ambassadors aside, have a quiet word, get a secret "OK" from the leadership, and *BANG!*. No more fear, uncertainty, and doubt in South Korea or Japan.
We could even disavow all knowledge. Classify the relevant documents for 50 years, like we did with Nixon extending the Vietnam war for political gain (by taking actions which were probably treasonous).
*Sigh*.
But we're a step closer to having Bison be our national mammal, and Harriet Tubman will be on the $20.
...but Greenpeace has been repeatedly shown to be a horrible organization of eco-terrorists who often don't understand the science behind the things they protest.
That's a very important distinction to make, it's completely on-point and relevant to the current discussion.
We simply *cannot* judge the validity of the TTIP documents without taking their provenance and history of Greenpeace into account!
Its been well over a decade since those were real problems. That said, I would give you more credibility if you hadn't posted as AC. And FWIW, I've been using Linux as an everyday desktop since 1997. Yes, it actually was a bit harder back then, you had to do some reading and understanding. Nowdays, stick the disc in and reboot.
The OP was about the start menu, so here's a real goddamned problem with linux.
I'm using Linux Mint, which comes with cinnamon.
You can configure the start menu, but it's clunky. To move things around you have to laboriously click on an application, click "copy", go to the destination, and click "paste". One at a time, because doesn't support multiple selections.
Then you have to go *back* to the original location, where you now have *two* copies of the application icon, and make one of them invisible. Not delete it - that will also delete the one you just put in the new location.
About 90 minutes later (*) I had the start menu categories organized in a good way, and made the things I didn't need invisible. Some things you can't make invisible ("universal access"), but I can live with the extra clutter.
The menu system editor lets you make sub-menus. I like to have a small number of choices in each menu (so that I don't have to scan long lists to find the thing I want), so I thought I would group the wine applications (there are 3 of them) into a sub-menu named wine, so that it would only take up 1 line in the menu.
...which doesn't work. All sub-menu items are promoted to the upper-level menu, so this means I can only have a *maximum* of 11 items in any menu before I have to use the slider bar and scan down long lists of items.
A quick google shows that this feature, of not having sub-menus, is by design, it's not going to be fixed, and the system was designed in such a way that the underlying structure format has to be rewritten to support it.
So there's this feature of the menu editor for putting things in sub-menus, but it has no effect?
Gah!
This is reminiscent of the Firefox changes, where people keep saying "Oh, this is much better! DO IT OUR WAY!"
Compare to the WinXP version of menu organizing: the start menu is a directory (on the disk), and sub-menus are sub-directories. Applications are files (links to the executable), which can be moved around trivially en-masse using cut and paste.
I keep hearing linux evangelists saying "everything is a file", but not in this case. Everything is hidden, broken, designed to be used one-and-only way, and obscure.
(I'm aware of the "alacarte" application, which makes it *slightly* easier to manipulate menus, but the end result is the same. It also borked the menu system, so I had to purge and reinstall cinnamon.)
(*) After finding this out, I originally thought I'd edit the config files manually and move things around using the editor. Editing is easy, but finding out which files to edit is highly non-trivial. I found three (yes, three) separate places that *seemed* to list the top-level categories of my start menu, but test edits (change "graphics" to "grophics" and check for changes) had no effect. Also, there are a bewildering number of possible files to edit, in several locations. Some are in $HOME/.config, some are $HOME/.local, and some are in/etc/xdg.
Is this newsworthy? Are these apps somehow more interesting or important than all the other apps that leak info?
This doesn't tell us *anything* about Cruz or Kasich. Even the Kasich spokesman saying that experts "don't know what they're talking about" isn't particularly interesting, it tells us nothing about Cruz or Kasich, and shouldn't be paraded around as yet another reason that this-or-that campaign is defective.
I don't know why these specific apps are called out, except that they somehow relate to the candidates.
Would someone like to report what those candidates political stand for?
Taking advice from Greece on societal economics probably isn't that smartest choice. Seems like this guy wants to double down on the already failed bet.
I'm all for doing something about Climate change, but can we fix our country first?
The US labor participation rate has fallen off the cliff. Our population is increasingly divided into the rich and the homeless.
The suicide rate is highest it's been in 3 decades. Looking at the commentary to that article, lots and lots of smart, highly trained workers are out of work and terrified.
Even among those who *have* jobs, the jobs now are part-time, menial and boring. A greeter at WalMart 20 hours a week won't keep you from poverty. Articles entitled "<such-and-so> corporation fires entire department, hires H1B workers, and makes employees train their replacements" come up about once a month now.
The lead politician on the R side has a 70% disapproval rating, but D side leader is only 12 points lower (and might be indicted for several felonies).
We spend twice as much as our revenue. We spend it on endless wars over pointless goals. We torture foreigners and assassinate our own citizens. We've turned our "land of the free" into Stazi-Lite with no one to reign the abuses of law enforcement, spy agencies, or even elected officials.
We are not safe in our homes.
All recent news indicates that the US is dying as a nation. It's headed for a crash-and-burn not seen since Roman times.
I'm all for trash talking the Republicans for ignoring climate change and all that, but we have much bigger fish to fry.
I really, *really* don't care about every niggling little political issue in an election with one binary choice.
I make my choice based on the biggest issue, and vote for the person I think will best address it.
Given that SSRIs are known to sometimes (for reasons unknown) cause suicidal ideation where there was none before, and the way we tend to hand those out like candy, I would say those are far more likely than the opiates to be causing a rise in suicide.
I'm currently exploring the theory that a) there are 4 forms of depression, each caused by low levels of one category of neurotransmitter, and b) the first form is caused by low serotonin.
My working theory is that SSRI's sometimes fail because either a) the depression is due to a different transmitter, and/or b) SSRI's won't help if you have little or no serotonin to begin with.
This could be why SSRI's sometimes increase the chances of suicide. The cure would be for the patient to make more serotonin, not to interfere with its proper workings.
Another form of depression is from low dopamine. The two types are similar, but can be distinguished. Serotonin is the "happy" transmitter, and low levels are associated with dark moods and suicide, while dopamine is the "reward" transmitter, so low levels are associated with tiredness, low energy, and the feeling that tasks are pointless.
I suspect that a survey or questionnaire could be used to identify the particular type of depression a person has, and given the results lead to a specific treatment of one of the transmitters.
I'm still researching, but this one proposed mechanism seems to explain a lot of things in the literature. Most notably, that depression appears to be a resource depletion disease.
Looking at all the seasoned, unemployable old folks on this thread gets me wondering...
Why don't we all get together and form a company?
We've got lots of time, modern resources allow us to telecommute and collaborate. Running a business isn't that hard(*).
Lots and lots of people have ideas for companies. (Heck, I have a dozen ideas for products each year, I know lots of people who do, and I know where to go looking for product ideas.)
Why don't we put our heads together and do something productive with our time?
(*) Tedious, yes. Boring, definitely. But not especially hard.
I wasn't trying to be mean, or to get you riled up.
Economics really is a religion of sorts, a series of overlapping schools of thought and rationalized theories.
People who give sermons about this economist or that making future predictions usually don't add anything to the discussion.
I see problems, failed predictions, bad statistics, and lack of fundamentals in pretty-much every economic theory I come across.
Question: According to Irwin Schiff, what is the best value for inflation?
I don't mean "a little is good, a lot is bad, and negative is very bad", I mean what numeric value is the best value to have in our economy?
If the answer is "it depends", then what's the formula? What are the dependencies?
That's a fundamental, basic premise of economics. All throughout Schiff's writings, he talks about inflation: how the government uses it, how the fed controls it, and how it affects our lives.
But he never sets down in clear text: this is the value it *should* be.
Why is that?
BTW, Schiff is that guy who claimed that there was no law requiring people to pay income taxes.
Wrong. The collapse of the American economy was predicted a very long time ago for the exact reasons that make the basis for your societal and economic ideology.
Just to be clear, at the same time there were people predicting a new era of wealth and happiness.
Economics is like that - you can always find someone who correctly predicted something (after the fact).
Most of history was a worst time to be alive than right now, for the average person at least. It just somehow always seems to be fashionable to claim that "things were always better in the good ole days". It's just stupid cliche' bullshit from entitled brats.
One form of depression comes from low serotonin.
The metabolic pathway goes: 5-HTP->Tryptophan->Serotonin
Note that corn-fed stock (chickens, turkey, and such) is lower in tryptophan than free-range stock
Perhaps our modern diet is lower in tryptophan that our bodies are evolved for?
Serotonin (and all other neurotransmitters) are sent from one neuron to another, and then reclaimed. The reclamation process isn't 100% effective, some small amount is lost in the process, but the end result is that the brain doesn't make Serotonin very fast. It doesn't need to, because it expects to lose only a little during reclamation.
(This is the mechanism of SSRI antidepresants: they interfere with the "reuptake" process.)
If you have a job or environment that requires creativity, you may be exercising your Serotonin pathways a lot, leading to low serotonin. This is why the stereotype of "artist" includes dark, moody, and prone to suicide.
Maybe the rise in suicide is due to our fast-paced life that demands more creativity from many workers (such as programmers), while at the same time presenting us with lower Serotonin precursors such as Tryptophan.
Just a thought, probably isn't be true.
It's almost certainly due to the financial downturn and rise of prescription opiates.
That $10 switch seems alot of like some cost reduction yahoo is calling the shots and does not want to pay for the needed costs to due it right.
I dunno... reading through the hacking team break-in (by which I mean, reading the hacker's first-person description, it's unclear to me how *anyone* could be considered responsible for these sorts of things.
The hacked system should encrypt passwords, use a salt, have offsite backups that are regularly tested... all that "of course" stuff applies.
But I'm not at all sure how having a modem or router hacked could be the responsibility of the system.
The hacking-team narrative suggests that the person who did it replaced the [router?] firmware with a custom one with his own backdoor. A single 0day exploit on an internet-facing appliance.
Did someone intentionally weaken the PRNG in your Intel CPU at the mask level? Did someone replace the firmware on your hard drive? Is your BIOS compromised?
I read where someone put malware into the firmware of an intelligent *battery*.
Welcome to the future: everything has firmware, and all firmware can be reflashed by the factory.
(The update service installed when you install our product will automatically upgrade the system as needed. Just download and execute! This fixes the rendering issue in the Tagalog language pack, it's a *must have* upgrade!)
I'm not sure how anyone can guarantee their systems are secure any more.
Characters in the anime/manga "Ghost in the Shell" had external memories where they could store things to augment their own memories. You could talk with someone using term "tapetum lucidum", your external memory would kick in and you would instantly recognize what the speaker meant. (The reflective tissue behind the retinas of some mammals, the thing that makes predator eyes reflect light at night.)
I've come to realize that I use Google in exactly this way - as an external memory. I *knew* about the tapetum lucidum, didn't quite know how to spell it, and relied on google to give me the correct spelling and verify that I had the right concept.
Google is an adjunct to my computer science knowledge as well. I use Perl a lot, and... what was the built-in function that deletes a file? Oh yeah - it's "unlink". How do I fix this error message? Stack exchange suggests these two lines.
And so on.
If you have a penchant for correct information it's even more interesting. Google allows you to drill down to find the actual source of something that is being reported on, and there are any number of sites that will attempt to sort out the truth of something. Did someone strap a JATO to a car and go 300mph in Arizona? (Snopes.com) Is Ted Cruz ineligible for president because he was born in Canada? (Politifact.com) Did Archimedes destroy an army of ships using focused mirrors? (Mythbusters)
All this information at our fingertips, and the "truthiness" is slowly being squeezed out like the damp from a sponge.
We already have external memories... it's just not efficiently integrated.
Slashdot Mirror
And to top it all of, Cruz accidentally punches his wife and elbows her while giving a hug onstage.
It's completely accidental, all of us have done the same thing at some point in our lives, and I hate that this is what's going to be all over the news tomorrow.
I'm a big fan of rational political discussion, and this media circus makes me sick.
What an awesome post!
I've already posted in this thread, but if I had the mod points you would get them!
Man, I *totally* can't type numbers tonight!
The 56 <-> 70 numbers were correctly entered. The difference between them is 14 points!
Clinton is 16 points lower, not 12 points as typoed.
The most recent unfavorability ratings are:
Trump's unfavorability has dropped to 65%.
Hillary's rating has been mostly steady at 55%.
So this month there is only 10 points difference.
I've been following Scott Adams' blog, and he has some insightful things to say about Trump and how he manages to win.
Scroll back a few entries in the blog and they're pretty interesting.
With that background, I've just this morning figured out how Trump managed to pull it off: he's been using "sad" as a verbal kill-shot.
Check out any image of Ted Cruz, and the most notable feature is his sloping eyebrows. He's definitely got that "sad puppy-dog" look.
Trump has been using "sad" in his speeches for months, and associating it with all sorts of slightly pejorative things. He's never made it specific that he's doing this as an association to Cruz, and "sad" is not extreme rhetoric so it escapes peoples' notice. (He sometimes calls Ted sad, but I'm talking about all the other "sad"s over the past few months.)
Furthermore, he masks it by giving people a more transparent and direct kill-shot: "lying Ted Cruz". People are distracted by the extreme moniker and reject it, and all the while they don't notice that they are slowly building an association between "sad" and a wide range of slightly bad things.
So when they see Ted on stage or in the media, that association is what they feel.
I think it's a case of priming, and Trump has masterfully arm-wrestled Ted's reputation to the floor without him realizing it.
Pundits are quick to point out that Trump's unfavorability is at 70%, and all polls show that Hillary would beat Trump in an election.
What they *don't* say is that Hillary herself is only 12 points lower (56% unfavorability), and that's bound to change over the next 6 months.
In fact, Hillary's unfavorability seems to be creeping up of late, and Trump's is falling.
It's starting to look like he might win.
And that he's winning on purpose.
Who'd of think it?
As much as I admire the quality and intentions of the iPhone, I don't see it as being that important. People were texting, calling, and (gasp!) yes, even browsing the web before an iPhone ever showed up. The locked-in experience of the time was vastly inferior to what the iPhone brought to the game, which is of course the main reason that it did so well. But, without the iPhone, the smartphone market would still have developed, and people still would be carrying tiny but powerful little computers in their pockets.
Before the iPhone, people were lamenting several things about cell phones:
1) They all had a keypad 0-9 display. You had all sorts of features, but you had to remember which keypad number activated speaker phone, and which number sent to voice mail, and so on.
2) The carriers controlled the software with an iron fist. The industry was lamenting that it was impossible to write any programming for cell phones because you had to go through the carriers, who imposed an onerous process and only allowed applications they *thought* might sell well enough to be worth their effort. (And I remember specifically that Tetris was allowed on phones due to its popularity, and pretty-much nothing else.)
When I heard that Apple was making a cell phone, my immediate thought was "well, they'll never get the carriers to accept it". I was rather *surprised* when Apple managed to get ATT on board as a carrier, and I think a lot of other people were as well.
Then the iPhone came out and it had some features:
1) The icons changed based on circumstance. The "speakerphone" function was an icon that was indicative of its function. You no longer had to remember which number to press. A lot of people don't understand how innovative this was at the time, for phones.
2) You could download apps for all sorts of things, and you could write your own apps. This led to a wide spectrum of useful things, but it included some surprising apps such as one that identified bird species using the camera. Things that the carriers would *never* have thought of as useful or even interesting now suddenly became possible.
3) The thing worked seamlessly. You could be listening to music and when a call came in it paused the music, put it into the background, and allowed you to talk for a bit. When you hung up the music continued from where it had left off.
4) There were a bunch of other innovations too, such as the keypad expanding the key when you touched it when your finger covered the key. That made it *much* easier to use a small-display keypad.
We don't see much to recommend the iPhones nowadays because everyone and their brother is making spartphones (including, for instance Microsoft), but when you compare them to what was available at the time, they really were quite the innovation.
But why couldn't each state just create a single interstate commerce tax rate for this situation?
That way the complexity businesses complain about is removed (look a table with only 50 -52 entries), then let a state figure out how to divvy up within itself.
Simplifies for business, states get the some/most of the revenue they think/know they are currently denied.
Well, sucks for the consumer - but puts the consumer in right legal standing, fulfilling the use tax laws.
Let me put a counterpoint to your argument.
Why can't each state just drop sales tax altogether, and make up the difference by reducing collection costs and raising other taxes?
NH total tax burden, the total amount of all taxes for the average person, is 7.9%. Of the 50 states, we are usually among the 3 lowest by this measure, and occasionally *the* lowest.
New Hampshire has no sales tax and no income tax, and we do just fine with services per-person (state spending per person) higher than California.
South Dakota tax burden is 7.1% (lower than us... this year) which is similar. They could easily dump their sales tax altogether and recover the difference in other taxes.
The reason NH does so well is that we only have property tax(*). It's one and *only* one tax, so the costs of collecting our taxes are very low. And the taxation is on one big item instead of a zillion niggling little things. Compare with California, which has property tax, sales tax, and income tax. The costs of collection and compliance are much higher.
It costs money to collect taxes. For every parking meter that takes quarters or subway system that takes cards, you need an elaborate infrastructure of meter maids, ticket kiosks, maintenance, bank deposits, and accounting.
Sales tax is much the same. It requires more complicated accounting, compliance verification at the state level, special bank accounts, auditing and so on. Getting rid of a single state government auditor will easily save $100,000 in salary and an equal amount in employee benefits.
Simpler is better - just dump the sales tax and get the money elsewhere.
(*) Not strictly true, since there are fees for government services such as drivers' licenses and corporate taxes, but mostly true for people in most cases.
It sets a bad precedent. And the risk of retaliation is great.
Um... retaliation from whom?
And wasn't the precedent set when we tracked down and killed Saddam Hussein? (And his "most wanted" cronies, conveniently passed out to our soldiers as a deck of playing cards?)
Or how about Manuel Noriega, who was the head of a foreign nation, and we sent in a seal team to capture him, kidnap him, and bring him to the US to stand trial?
Or how about (with help from the UK) overthrowing the democratically elected leader of Iran in order to install the Shah, who was a brutal dictator who tortured people for the next 38 years?
Or overthrowing the democratically-elected leader of Guatemala?
And that's only in the last 50-ish years, and ones that I can remember on the spot.
Bad precedent?
The US does whatever the hell it wants, and doesn't care overly much about world opinion.
> ...and a single drone strike in NK could solve much of the world's conflict.
That might actually and forever solve all of the worlds conflicts.
I wonder if starting a war between the US and China really is really such a promising perspective from your mothers basement, Mr. Warrior.
If you are old enough I suggest you enlist in the army and fight and fall for some made up convincing reason in some desert instead of starting a career in politics cause further world wars.
Woot! I got one!
I keep thinking how the US will drone strike wedding receptions on flimsy evidence, even assassinating our own citizens and their children for even *meeting* with an alleged terrorist
Take one of the Chinese ambassadors aside, have a quiet word, get a secret "OK" from the leadership, and *BANG!*. No more fear, uncertainty, and doubt in South Korea or Japan.
We could even disavow all knowledge. Classify the relevant documents for 50 years, like we did with Nixon extending the Vietnam war for political gain (by taking actions which were probably treasonous).
*Sigh*.
But we're a step closer to having Bison be our national mammal, and Harriet Tubman will be on the $20.
USA, the leader of the free world.
...but Greenpeace has been repeatedly shown to be a horrible organization of eco-terrorists who often don't understand the science behind the things they protest.
That's a very important distinction to make, it's completely on-point and relevant to the current discussion.
We simply *cannot* judge the validity of the TTIP documents without taking their provenance and history of Greenpeace into account!
Amiright?
Its been well over a decade since those were real problems. That said, I would give you more credibility if you hadn't posted as AC. And FWIW, I've been using Linux as an everyday desktop since 1997. Yes, it actually was a bit harder back then, you had to do some reading and understanding. Nowdays, stick the disc in and reboot.
The OP was about the start menu, so here's a real goddamned problem with linux.
I'm using Linux Mint, which comes with cinnamon.
You can configure the start menu, but it's clunky. To move things around you have to laboriously click on an application, click "copy", go to the destination, and click "paste". One at a time, because doesn't support multiple selections.
Then you have to go *back* to the original location, where you now have *two* copies of the application icon, and make one of them invisible. Not delete it - that will also delete the one you just put in the new location.
About 90 minutes later (*) I had the start menu categories organized in a good way, and made the things I didn't need invisible. Some things you can't make invisible ("universal access"), but I can live with the extra clutter.
The menu system editor lets you make sub-menus. I like to have a small number of choices in each menu (so that I don't have to scan long lists to find the thing I want), so I thought I would group the wine applications (there are 3 of them) into a sub-menu named wine, so that it would only take up 1 line in the menu.
A quick google shows that this feature, of not having sub-menus, is by design, it's not going to be fixed, and the system was designed in such a way that the underlying structure format has to be rewritten to support it.
So there's this feature of the menu editor for putting things in sub-menus, but it has no effect?
Gah!
This is reminiscent of the Firefox changes, where people keep saying "Oh, this is much better! DO IT OUR WAY!"
Compare to the WinXP version of menu organizing: the start menu is a directory (on the disk), and sub-menus are sub-directories. Applications are files (links to the executable), which can be moved around trivially en-masse using cut and paste.
I keep hearing linux evangelists saying "everything is a file", but not in this case. Everything is hidden, broken, designed to be used one-and-only way, and obscure.
(I'm aware of the "alacarte" application, which makes it *slightly* easier to manipulate menus, but the end result is the same. It also borked the menu system, so I had to purge and reinstall cinnamon.)
(*) After finding this out, I originally thought I'd edit the config files manually and move things around using the editor. Editing is easy, but finding out which files to edit is highly non-trivial. I found three (yes, three) separate places that *seemed* to list the top-level categories of my start menu, but test edits (change "graphics" to "grophics" and check for changes) had no effect. Also, there are a bewildering number of possible files to edit, in several locations. Some are in $HOME/.config, some are $HOME/.local, and some are in /etc/xdg.
An app could leak your private information.
Is this newsworthy? Are these apps somehow more interesting or important than all the other apps that leak info?
This doesn't tell us *anything* about Cruz or Kasich. Even the Kasich spokesman saying that experts "don't know what they're talking about" isn't particularly interesting, it tells us nothing about Cruz or Kasich, and shouldn't be paraded around as yet another reason that this-or-that campaign is defective.
I don't know why these specific apps are called out, except that they somehow relate to the candidates.
Would someone like to report what those candidates political stand for?
That would be interesting.
In which alternative universe is taking economic advice from Greek government officials a good idea? And how do we visit it?
What does that have to do with the correctness of his position?
Taking advice from Greece on societal economics probably isn't that smartest choice. Seems like this guy wants to double down on the already failed bet.
So are you saying he's wrong?
The Democrats aren't fielding any competitive candidates, which makes a President Trump win even more inevitable.
Just to be clear, the Republicans aren't fielding competitive candidates either.
I'm all for doing something about Climate change, but can we fix our country first?
The US labor participation rate has fallen off the cliff. Our population is increasingly divided into the rich and the homeless.
The suicide rate is highest it's been in 3 decades. Looking at the commentary to that article, lots and lots of smart, highly trained workers are out of work and terrified.
Even among those who *have* jobs, the jobs now are part-time, menial and boring. A greeter at WalMart 20 hours a week won't keep you from poverty. Articles entitled "<such-and-so> corporation fires entire department, hires H1B workers, and makes employees train their replacements" come up about once a month now.
The lead politician on the R side has a 70% disapproval rating, but D side leader is only 12 points lower (and might be indicted for several felonies).
We spend twice as much as our revenue. We spend it on endless wars over pointless goals. We torture foreigners and assassinate our own citizens. We've turned our "land of the free" into Stazi-Lite with no one to reign the abuses of law enforcement, spy agencies, or even elected officials.
We are not safe in our homes.
All recent news indicates that the US is dying as a nation. It's headed for a crash-and-burn not seen since Roman times.
I'm all for trash talking the Republicans for ignoring climate change and all that, but we have much bigger fish to fry.
I really, *really* don't care about every niggling little political issue in an election with one binary choice.
I make my choice based on the biggest issue, and vote for the person I think will best address it.
Ignore the small problems, and the distant ones.
We have more immediate concerns.
Given that SSRIs are known to sometimes (for reasons unknown) cause suicidal ideation where there was none before, and the way we tend to hand those out like candy, I would say those are far more likely than the opiates to be causing a rise in suicide.
I'm currently exploring the theory that a) there are 4 forms of depression, each caused by low levels of one category of neurotransmitter, and b) the first form is caused by low serotonin.
My working theory is that SSRI's sometimes fail because either a) the depression is due to a different transmitter, and/or b) SSRI's won't help if you have little or no serotonin to begin with.
This could be why SSRI's sometimes increase the chances of suicide. The cure would be for the patient to make more serotonin, not to interfere with its proper workings.
Another form of depression is from low dopamine. The two types are similar, but can be distinguished. Serotonin is the "happy" transmitter, and low levels are associated with dark moods and suicide, while dopamine is the "reward" transmitter, so low levels are associated with tiredness, low energy, and the feeling that tasks are pointless.
I suspect that a survey or questionnaire could be used to identify the particular type of depression a person has, and given the results lead to a specific treatment of one of the transmitters.
I'm still researching, but this one proposed mechanism seems to explain a lot of things in the literature. Most notably, that depression appears to be a resource depletion disease.
Looking at all the seasoned, unemployable old folks on this thread gets me wondering...
Why don't we all get together and form a company?
We've got lots of time, modern resources allow us to telecommute and collaborate. Running a business isn't that hard(*).
Lots and lots of people have ideas for companies. (Heck, I have a dozen ideas for products each year, I know lots of people who do, and I know where to go looking for product ideas.)
Why don't we put our heads together and do something productive with our time?
(*) Tedious, yes. Boring, definitely. But not especially hard.
I wasn't trying to be mean, or to get you riled up.
Economics really is a religion of sorts, a series of overlapping schools of thought and rationalized theories.
People who give sermons about this economist or that making future predictions usually don't add anything to the discussion.
I see problems, failed predictions, bad statistics, and lack of fundamentals in pretty-much every economic theory I come across.
Question: According to Irwin Schiff, what is the best value for inflation?
I don't mean "a little is good, a lot is bad, and negative is very bad", I mean what numeric value is the best value to have in our economy?
If the answer is "it depends", then what's the formula? What are the dependencies?
That's a fundamental, basic premise of economics. All throughout Schiff's writings, he talks about inflation: how the government uses it, how the fed controls it, and how it affects our lives.
But he never sets down in clear text: this is the value it *should* be.
Why is that?
BTW, Schiff is that guy who claimed that there was no law requiring people to pay income taxes.
How'd that work out for him?
Wrong. The collapse of the American economy was predicted a very long time ago for the exact reasons that make the basis for your societal and economic ideology.
Just to be clear, at the same time there were people predicting a new era of wealth and happiness.
Economics is like that - you can always find someone who correctly predicted something (after the fact).
Most of history was a worst time to be alive than right now, for the average person at least. It just somehow always seems to be fashionable to claim that "things were always better in the good ole days". It's just stupid cliche' bullshit from entitled brats.
One form of depression comes from low serotonin.
The metabolic pathway goes: 5-HTP->Tryptophan->Serotonin
Note that corn-fed stock (chickens, turkey, and such) is lower in tryptophan than free-range stock
Perhaps our modern diet is lower in tryptophan that our bodies are evolved for?
Serotonin (and all other neurotransmitters) are sent from one neuron to another, and then reclaimed. The reclamation process isn't 100% effective, some small amount is lost in the process, but the end result is that the brain doesn't make Serotonin very fast. It doesn't need to, because it expects to lose only a little during reclamation.
(This is the mechanism of SSRI antidepresants: they interfere with the "reuptake" process.)
If you have a job or environment that requires creativity, you may be exercising your Serotonin pathways a lot, leading to low serotonin. This is why the stereotype of "artist" includes dark, moody, and prone to suicide.
Maybe the rise in suicide is due to our fast-paced life that demands more creativity from many workers (such as programmers), while at the same time presenting us with lower Serotonin precursors such as Tryptophan.
Just a thought, probably isn't be true.
It's almost certainly due to the financial downturn and rise of prescription opiates.
Make the 81M come of the VP's bonus.
That $10 switch seems alot of like some cost reduction yahoo is calling the shots and does not want to pay for the needed costs to due it right.
I dunno... reading through the hacking team break-in (by which I mean, reading the hacker's first-person description, it's unclear to me how *anyone* could be considered responsible for these sorts of things.
The hacked system should encrypt passwords, use a salt, have offsite backups that are regularly tested... all that "of course" stuff applies.
But I'm not at all sure how having a modem or router hacked could be the responsibility of the system.
How can you tell? Is there an exploit for your high-end Juniper firewall?
The hacking-team narrative suggests that the person who did it replaced the [router?] firmware with a custom one with his own backdoor. A single 0day exploit on an internet-facing appliance.
Did someone intentionally weaken the PRNG in your Intel CPU at the mask level? Did someone replace the firmware on your hard drive? Is your BIOS compromised?
I read where someone put malware into the firmware of an intelligent *battery*.
Welcome to the future: everything has firmware, and all firmware can be reflashed by the factory.
(The update service installed when you install our product will automatically upgrade the system as needed. Just download and execute! This fixes the rendering issue in the Tagalog language pack, it's a *must have* upgrade!)
I'm not sure how anyone can guarantee their systems are secure any more.
If the State department can't secure their computers, what hope is there for regular mortals?
Why am I so confused about this story?
Did they build a Lithium battery, or a gold battery?
Is it holding charge or chemical energy? (If it holds charge, is it a supercapacitor?)
The article linked in the OP isn't very clear either. They made a battery, not with an anode and a cathode, but with *two* cathodes.
Okay, the article states "this isn't a true battery". And it's just a wire loop embedded in PMMA.
WTF? Can I get those 10 minutes of my life back?
Characters in the anime/manga "Ghost in the Shell" had external memories where they could store things to augment their own memories. You could talk with someone using term "tapetum lucidum", your external memory would kick in and you would instantly recognize what the speaker meant. (The reflective tissue behind the retinas of some mammals, the thing that makes predator eyes reflect light at night.)
I've come to realize that I use Google in exactly this way - as an external memory. I *knew* about the tapetum lucidum, didn't quite know how to spell it, and relied on google to give me the correct spelling and verify that I had the right concept.
Google is an adjunct to my computer science knowledge as well. I use Perl a lot, and... what was the built-in function that deletes a file? Oh yeah - it's "unlink". How do I fix this error message? Stack exchange suggests these two lines.
And so on.
If you have a penchant for correct information it's even more interesting. Google allows you to drill down to find the actual source of something that is being reported on, and there are any number of sites that will attempt to sort out the truth of something. Did someone strap a JATO to a car and go 300mph in Arizona? (Snopes.com) Is Ted Cruz ineligible for president because he was born in Canada? (Politifact.com) Did Archimedes destroy an army of ships using focused mirrors? (Mythbusters)
All this information at our fingertips, and the "truthiness" is slowly being squeezed out like the damp from a sponge.
We already have external memories... it's just not efficiently integrated.