Lovecraft was writing in the early 1900s. There was a lot of racism among famous writers back then (particularly associated with colonialism). We can't blame them for how the world was when they were alive, and we can't fault them for not posthumously changing their views to meet current norms.
We *can* be upset that Orson Scott Card has been vocally against gay marriage in an age when gay marriage is obviously acceptable to most people. If he wants to take a principled, public stand against gay marriage (and face the consequences of his public statements), then he is free to do so. He's placed himself in the political arena by making public statements about political issues, and it should surprise nobody that such statements upset those who disagree.
Free speech is not free of consequences. If Orson Scott Card wants to shit on gays, he's free to do so; the government will not stop him, but he may find that it limits his popularity.
I hate the self-checkout aisle. I'm competent at scanning groceries, but the moment I do something unexpected in the "bagging area" I have to wait for someone to come fix it. I don't know the code number for my produce, so I have to look it up. I have to key it in on a shitty touchscreen. If I bought beer, someone has to come inspect me. I used a reusable bag, and it confused the machine. The whole process takes 5x as long as it would have with a human being. The checker is faster at scanning, has memorized all the produce codes, has an efficient user interface, can check my ID at will, and generally has the entire process together enough in their brain to make it far more efficient. I don't go to the self-checkout anymore.
Because there are a lot of foreign grad students in the US, it disproportionately harms brown people, which is a bonus for Republicans.
Higher education tends to correlate with liberal attitudes, so it disproportionately harms liberals, which is a bonus for Republicans.
Most grad students don't have a lot of money, so it disproportionately harms the un-wealthy, which is a bonus for Republicans.
It's a tax increase that Republican voters can get behind because they can really stick it to "liberal elites" and make them "pay their fair share." If this part of the tax bill becomes law, it potentially cripples advanced education in the US, but those ivory tower eggheads should just go get an honest man's job, anyway.
It's particularly petty and cruel. And the majority of the cruelty is not toward grad students, it's toward the Republican voters. The politicians are trying to take advantage of the worst aspects of their constituents' natures to get them to support damaging the futures of young people and the entire education system. Because poor people should be jealous of the success of others who are moderately less poor, rather than the rich people who are screwing us all.
Apparently, that was their original goal for the program ("The blue verified badge on Twitter lets people know that an account of public interest is authentic"). But the perception was that verification implied endorsement, and then Twitter started reinforcing that by doing things like revoking Milo Whatshisface's verification because he was being shitty on their service. By doing that, they imply that verification doesn't just mean that an account is authentic--after all, Milo's Twitter account was authentically Milo's.
So they opened Pandora's Box on that one. How can they credibly go back to saying verification means authentic?
They're going to have to eliminate the whole thing and redeploy it with a different name ("identity check" or something). Because if they don't, people are going to start using that status as a political litmus test, which is going to make it even worse.
I never succeeded at training a Pandora station. Mine all inexorably turned into all Beatles all the time. The first time I did one, it turned into a Beatles station within a day. I'm not a big Beatles fan, but I don't mind an occasional track, so I hadn't been downvoting them. For my next try, I mercilessly downvoted Beatles songs whenever they came on. That station turned into solo projects from member of the Beatles, covers of Beatles songs by other artists, Beatles covering the music of other artists, and live performances by the Beatles. I tried several times with different seeds and different approaches to downvoting Beatles music. The last straw was after I had started a new channel, when I had downvoted too many Beatles-related songs in an hour, Pandora punished me with a ukulele medley of What a Wonderful World and Over the Rainbow. That was the end of my time with Pandora.
I see several comments already implying that open licenses specifically for data are unnecessary because we already have free open source licenses for code, but they're not the same.
Most of our open source licenses use copyright law as their foundations. Different legal systems treat the idea of copyrighting facts somewhat differently, but in the US, facts aren't copyrightable. That means that trying to apply a FOSS license to data can be fraught--how can the copyright-based license apply if data aren't copyrightable?.
In the EU, facts aren't copyrightable, but "databases" are--where a "database" is a collection of data that has had value added by efforts to organize the data, for example (they call this "sui generis").
How do you deal with jurisdictional incompatibilities? Good open data licenses spell out the solutions to these conflicts. I see nothing about them in the CDLA. That alone would make me extremely hesitant to try to use it on any data product I publish.
The CDLA is also not an attempt to fix issues with other licenses – in fact we didn’t start with any other license as the model or base but rather went through a requirements gathering process to understand the use cases under which people were struggling with sharing data
This is a really strange statement to me. They apparently didn't attempt to address any problem with any existing license, but went ahead and rolled their own license without any consideration for the development that others have gone through for open data license agreements. Troubling, because the groups (particularly Creative Commons) that have put a lot of work into open data licenses have been through the growing pains already, and it seems foolish to ignore that.
In my town, Walmart drove a lot of the local shops out of business years before Amazon got big. Other shops have closed as they became obsolete... the last travel agency in town just closed last year. But there are still plenty of locally owned businesses, especially those that provide services. Restaurants, bars, cafes; salons and spas; gyms and theaters, etc.. Independents can still survive, but it makes sense to run a business that doesn't directly compete with Amazon or Walmart.
I visited some relatives who have Comcast Xfinity a while back. It wasn't working right, which meant we had to keep resetting the cable box. That thing takes longer to boot up than my desktop PC. It took *minutes* after we turned it on to be able to watch TV. And then, the interface lag between pushing a button on the remote and seeing the results on the screen is so long, it made me think I hadn't successfully pushed the button. I realize there's some delay there for decoding the digital stream, but I still can't help but recall when I was younger, changing channels was pretty much instantaneous. It was a much better user experience.
Yeah, a relative of mine had a Dell laptop where eventually one of the keys would require a very hard press to work at all, and when it did it would often produce two of whatever character (I think it was 'h'). We bought a new keyboard on Amazon for roughly $25 and it took maybe 45 minutes to install. It took longer than I expected because we had to pry a bunch of plastics apart.
On an earlier Dell that I'd had, removing the keyboard was a matter of unscrewing all of the screws marked 'K' on the bottom of the laptop, then pulling up the keyboard and undoing the ribbon cable. Replacing that one was a matter of 5 or 10 minutes.
It's all a lot easier if you don't insist on the laptop having no visible fasteners.
I bought a 360 well after launch, but before the ads got too obnoxious. Then the Xbox updated and we got video ads with sound. That evening, I reconfigured its DNS to a custom server that I set up to sabotage all requests for the MS ad servers. I was pretty happy with that. There were still some ads, but they were static and easy to ignore. If I couldn't have gotten rid of the video ads, I might well have gotten rid of mine, too.
Anyway, I've never upgraded to the new generation, and the 360 has been in a box in the closet since I moved a year and a half ago. I've been thinking of buying a PS4 (pretty much to play The Last of Us and FFXII Zodiac). Maybe they'll get cheap for xmas...
With an optical telescope, you just point it at the thing in the sky you want to watch. With a radio telescope, you get a much bigger collector than an optical lens, and you also point it in the sky at the thing you want to watch. I'm not quite sure how you know exactly what you're looking at with a radio telescope, particularly if the thing you're observing is not visible optically, but I can make a guess.
But my question is, this neutron star collision was detected by the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave interferometers, which don't even point at anything. Do they find the location of the source of the wave by comparing its arrival at different sites, then somehow computing a physical location that must be the origin? Wouldn't you need several of these devices to pinpoint that source accurately? Finally, how do they know that the g wave they observed corresponds with neutron stars colliding, and not any of a variety of other kinds of events?
Slashdot has a contingent of users (particularly ACs, but others as well) who will take any opportunity to bitch about Elon Musk and everything he does. You can see it in the comments to this story, where people are making Tesla's setbacks out to be massive failures, or suggesting that the entire company is some kind of grand con job to absorb government money. They seem immune to arguments that Tesla has ultimately delivered what it promised, or that SpaceX has been quite successful with its launches and landings.
This story is comment-bait, I think, to stir up these pointless arguments in an effort to drive ad impressions. The summary is misleading and needlessly disparaging. Though the story is only two hours old, the comment count is already near the median number for every older story still on the front page. That counts as a win for the operators of the site, who are motivated in part by generating site traffic.
Why would an autonomous car bother to try to pass another vehicle that was going ~3 mph slower than the limit? Why not just hang out behind it? It's unlikely to make any significant difference in how long it takes to get where it's going. Plus, it can realize somewhat better fuel economy from the decrease in drag that goes along with drafting behind the truck (assuming it can maintain an appropriate distance due to its sensor and control systems).
I agree. I went into it not knowing much about it--I avoided press and reviews beforehand. I also didn't expect much. I was quite doubtful that they'd be able to do it right. But, having seen it, I liked everything about it. It was great. It makes some of the other sequels that have come out (Star Trek comes to mind) look like something that you might accidentally step in on the street.
Having read this review, I'm not even really sure what the guy is complaining about. It seems like he's been wanting to write an article about how bad franchises and sequels are, and Blade Runner represented an opportunity to do that. The problem is, Blade Runner is actually a good movie.
I see a lot of comments here suggesting that these anti-net neutrality posts may not have been a bot campaign but some kind of canned message opposite to the EFF campaign. I happened to be submitting a comment on the FCC site while the bot campaign was running, and you could refresh the site and see each time-stamped comment as it came in. The bot comments were all identical text, which could be expected even it it weren't a bot, but the obvious thing that tipped me off while looking at it was that the comments were coming into the site in alphabetical order of lastname, firstname. Ultimately, there were millions of them, and they all came in perfect alphabetical order. I thought it was such an obvious ploy that they would pause the comment period and clear out the phony comments, but I guess since the comments were what they wanted, it's better for them just to leave them and count them as real votes.
I worked at a place where we had a lot of disk (~2TB) with data that were accessible to the public. We also had a web site in place where users could upload new data, which would then be vetted by staff and then published to the public. This was all okay.
The bad part starts when we hired a new guy who, among other duties, wound up redoing the upload interface. So he redesigns and implements the system. I wasn't part of that process, and I wasn't paying any attention to how he was doing it. Later on, he quit, and his codebase was passed to me to maintain. That's when I started looking at the code and discovered that he had implemented a server-side API for uploading data that required no credentials whatsoever--he had set up a password authentication on the web front-end, but the API itself was open to the world. Oh, and the new API also stored uploaded data directly in the publicly accessible disk space. Any rando on the Internet who discovered this API would be able to upload hundreds of GB of whatever porn and warez they wanted, and just pass the URLs out freely. This code had been running in production for months.
Luckily, apparently nobody noticed. I audited the file system and its contents were exactly the files we expected to be there, and with the correct hashes. But it all made me wish we had a better review process, if this was the kind of coder they were going to hire.
How do you say it? Pop-bang-underscore-OS? Pop-not-underbar-OS? Or is the punctuation silent? And if it's silent, then why is it there? What function does it serve? Usually, silent letters are vestigial traces of linguistic evolution, but there's obviously no historic origin of this form. When silicon valley companies spell something stupidly, it's so they can trademark it, so maybe that's the reason? Anyway, ugh. Although their desktop environment looks kinda cool.
I guess this goes along with the madness that is college students' belief that disagreement is innately hurtful and may even extend to the level of hate speech or threats. Young people seem to be taught that conflict is necessarily aggressive and wrong, and if someone else's opinions conflict with theirs, then those people are also aggressive and wrong (and their own side is blameless and innocent). And, apparently having lost the capacity for friendly competition, all that's left is ugly, go-for-the-jugular, all-out destruction of the other side. We see the same thing in our government, where compromise is now a craven weakness.
The word "fundamental," to start. Apple did not change the fundamental shape of the iPhone. If they made it, I dunno, round or toroidal, that would be a change to the fundamental shape. As it is, they changed it from a rectangle to a rectangle with some of its screen blocked by other hardware. Apparently, they faced the choice of whether to have a little patch of screen to the right and left of that bar, or just to make the screen start below it. I don't think either choice they could have made in that situation could be described as "courageous."
The problem is that young people from Western countries are now unable to cope with "bad" words which might hurt their precious little feelings.
It's not just that people are unable to cope. It's also their apparent inability to disengage from a conversation they find hurtful or upsetting. If a person gets into a flame war and just keeps going, maybe they should just... stop? I dunno, maybe that's a coping mechanism in itself. If a Facebook chat made me want to actually hang myself, I'd probably stop using Facebook. But a lot of people, especially young people, don't seem to have that.
Younger people interact more online than in person today, even when they're sitting in the same room with each other. They still have the same peer pressures to conform and belong, and on various web sites and apps they can get a quantified measure of how well they do so. They go on sites like Reddit and post stuff, much of it not original thought but memes (not just of the graphical variety, but also textual memes like Slashdot's old Natalie Portman/hot grits bit), and they are desperate for people to upvote so they feel like they're part of the club. They may delete a post if it's not popular enough. And, of course, some young people's cliques have always rewarded them for being cruel to people, so that continues.
It's not just younger people. Middle-aged people do it, too, going on Facebook with "1 like=1 prayer" and posts that virtue signal to whatever group they belong. But it's all just people speaking into the echo chamber they've chosen and hoping they've posted at the right moment for their groupthink to be validated by repetition and points from the rest.
With various points systems, we've gamified social status, and people are biologically wired to like to win games. Even on Slashdot, many years ago, we had visible numeric karma scores, and people got into stupid e-penis contests to see who could get a higher number. It wasn't so much fun when karma turned into classified ranges, and people stopped. We're not at the point depicted in that episode of Black Mirror yet, but we can see the seeds of it.
It's a social problem, partly caused by the fact that we have this new technology for social interaction without many generations of behavioral norms, partly caused by the fact that anonymity and distance seems to encourage people to be shittier and more confrontational to each other. Likely with many other causes. But the solution almost certainly isn't a technological or legal one.
I was considering photographing the eclipse because I thought the process could be fun and interesting to learn about and do. I didn't expect my photos to be any better than a professional's--in fact, I expected them to be worse. I wound up not doing it because the company I ordered the solar filter from ran out before they fulfilled my order.
I understand that the whole thing is just advertisement for MS Office certification, but I'm still curious what kind of things a person has to do to win the competition. All these articles about the stupid thing, and none of them has managed to provide an example of a task that a person might be expected to perform.
Slashdot Mirror
Was there supposed to be a deeper meaning hidden in your non sequitur? Did you forget some of the words? Yahtzee, chucklehead.
Lovecraft was writing in the early 1900s. There was a lot of racism among famous writers back then (particularly associated with colonialism). We can't blame them for how the world was when they were alive, and we can't fault them for not posthumously changing their views to meet current norms.
We *can* be upset that Orson Scott Card has been vocally against gay marriage in an age when gay marriage is obviously acceptable to most people. If he wants to take a principled, public stand against gay marriage (and face the consequences of his public statements), then he is free to do so. He's placed himself in the political arena by making public statements about political issues, and it should surprise nobody that such statements upset those who disagree.
Free speech is not free of consequences. If Orson Scott Card wants to shit on gays, he's free to do so; the government will not stop him, but he may find that it limits his popularity.
I hate the self-checkout aisle. I'm competent at scanning groceries, but the moment I do something unexpected in the "bagging area" I have to wait for someone to come fix it. I don't know the code number for my produce, so I have to look it up. I have to key it in on a shitty touchscreen. If I bought beer, someone has to come inspect me. I used a reusable bag, and it confused the machine. The whole process takes 5x as long as it would have with a human being. The checker is faster at scanning, has memorized all the produce codes, has an efficient user interface, can check my ID at will, and generally has the entire process together enough in their brain to make it far more efficient. I don't go to the self-checkout anymore.
It's a tax increase that Republican voters can get behind because they can really stick it to "liberal elites" and make them "pay their fair share." If this part of the tax bill becomes law, it potentially cripples advanced education in the US, but those ivory tower eggheads should just go get an honest man's job, anyway.
It's particularly petty and cruel. And the majority of the cruelty is not toward grad students, it's toward the Republican voters. The politicians are trying to take advantage of the worst aspects of their constituents' natures to get them to support damaging the futures of young people and the entire education system. Because poor people should be jealous of the success of others who are moderately less poor, rather than the rich people who are screwing us all.
There's no going back, now.
Apparently, that was their original goal for the program ("The blue verified badge on Twitter lets people know that an account of public interest is authentic"). But the perception was that verification implied endorsement, and then Twitter started reinforcing that by doing things like revoking Milo Whatshisface's verification because he was being shitty on their service. By doing that, they imply that verification doesn't just mean that an account is authentic--after all, Milo's Twitter account was authentically Milo's.
So they opened Pandora's Box on that one. How can they credibly go back to saying verification means authentic? They're going to have to eliminate the whole thing and redeploy it with a different name ("identity check" or something). Because if they don't, people are going to start using that status as a political litmus test, which is going to make it even worse.
I never succeeded at training a Pandora station. Mine all inexorably turned into all Beatles all the time. The first time I did one, it turned into a Beatles station within a day. I'm not a big Beatles fan, but I don't mind an occasional track, so I hadn't been downvoting them. For my next try, I mercilessly downvoted Beatles songs whenever they came on. That station turned into solo projects from member of the Beatles, covers of Beatles songs by other artists, Beatles covering the music of other artists, and live performances by the Beatles. I tried several times with different seeds and different approaches to downvoting Beatles music. The last straw was after I had started a new channel, when I had downvoted too many Beatles-related songs in an hour, Pandora punished me with a ukulele medley of What a Wonderful World and Over the Rainbow. That was the end of my time with Pandora.
I see several comments already implying that open licenses specifically for data are unnecessary because we already have free open source licenses for code, but they're not the same.
Most of our open source licenses use copyright law as their foundations. Different legal systems treat the idea of copyrighting facts somewhat differently, but in the US, facts aren't copyrightable. That means that trying to apply a FOSS license to data can be fraught--how can the copyright-based license apply if data aren't copyrightable?.
In the EU, facts aren't copyrightable, but "databases" are--where a "database" is a collection of data that has had value added by efforts to organize the data, for example (they call this "sui generis").
How do you deal with jurisdictional incompatibilities? Good open data licenses spell out the solutions to these conflicts. I see nothing about them in the CDLA. That alone would make me extremely hesitant to try to use it on any data product I publish.
From their FAQ:
This is a really strange statement to me. They apparently didn't attempt to address any problem with any existing license, but went ahead and rolled their own license without any consideration for the development that others have gone through for open data license agreements. Troubling, because the groups (particularly Creative Commons) that have put a lot of work into open data licenses have been through the growing pains already, and it seems foolish to ignore that.
In my town, Walmart drove a lot of the local shops out of business years before Amazon got big. Other shops have closed as they became obsolete... the last travel agency in town just closed last year. But there are still plenty of locally owned businesses, especially those that provide services. Restaurants, bars, cafes; salons and spas; gyms and theaters, etc.. Independents can still survive, but it makes sense to run a business that doesn't directly compete with Amazon or Walmart.
I visited some relatives who have Comcast Xfinity a while back. It wasn't working right, which meant we had to keep resetting the cable box. That thing takes longer to boot up than my desktop PC. It took *minutes* after we turned it on to be able to watch TV. And then, the interface lag between pushing a button on the remote and seeing the results on the screen is so long, it made me think I hadn't successfully pushed the button. I realize there's some delay there for decoding the digital stream, but I still can't help but recall when I was younger, changing channels was pretty much instantaneous. It was a much better user experience.
Yeah, a relative of mine had a Dell laptop where eventually one of the keys would require a very hard press to work at all, and when it did it would often produce two of whatever character (I think it was 'h'). We bought a new keyboard on Amazon for roughly $25 and it took maybe 45 minutes to install. It took longer than I expected because we had to pry a bunch of plastics apart.
On an earlier Dell that I'd had, removing the keyboard was a matter of unscrewing all of the screws marked 'K' on the bottom of the laptop, then pulling up the keyboard and undoing the ribbon cable. Replacing that one was a matter of 5 or 10 minutes.
It's all a lot easier if you don't insist on the laptop having no visible fasteners.
I bought a 360 well after launch, but before the ads got too obnoxious. Then the Xbox updated and we got video ads with sound. That evening, I reconfigured its DNS to a custom server that I set up to sabotage all requests for the MS ad servers. I was pretty happy with that. There were still some ads, but they were static and easy to ignore. If I couldn't have gotten rid of the video ads, I might well have gotten rid of mine, too.
Anyway, I've never upgraded to the new generation, and the 360 has been in a box in the closet since I moved a year and a half ago. I've been thinking of buying a PS4 (pretty much to play The Last of Us and FFXII Zodiac). Maybe they'll get cheap for xmas...
With an optical telescope, you just point it at the thing in the sky you want to watch. With a radio telescope, you get a much bigger collector than an optical lens, and you also point it in the sky at the thing you want to watch. I'm not quite sure how you know exactly what you're looking at with a radio telescope, particularly if the thing you're observing is not visible optically, but I can make a guess.
But my question is, this neutron star collision was detected by the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave interferometers, which don't even point at anything. Do they find the location of the source of the wave by comparing its arrival at different sites, then somehow computing a physical location that must be the origin? Wouldn't you need several of these devices to pinpoint that source accurately? Finally, how do they know that the g wave they observed corresponds with neutron stars colliding, and not any of a variety of other kinds of events?
Slashdot has a contingent of users (particularly ACs, but others as well) who will take any opportunity to bitch about Elon Musk and everything he does. You can see it in the comments to this story, where people are making Tesla's setbacks out to be massive failures, or suggesting that the entire company is some kind of grand con job to absorb government money. They seem immune to arguments that Tesla has ultimately delivered what it promised, or that SpaceX has been quite successful with its launches and landings.
This story is comment-bait, I think, to stir up these pointless arguments in an effort to drive ad impressions. The summary is misleading and needlessly disparaging. Though the story is only two hours old, the comment count is already near the median number for every older story still on the front page. That counts as a win for the operators of the site, who are motivated in part by generating site traffic.
Why would an autonomous car bother to try to pass another vehicle that was going ~3 mph slower than the limit? Why not just hang out behind it? It's unlikely to make any significant difference in how long it takes to get where it's going. Plus, it can realize somewhat better fuel economy from the decrease in drag that goes along with drafting behind the truck (assuming it can maintain an appropriate distance due to its sensor and control systems).
I agree. I went into it not knowing much about it--I avoided press and reviews beforehand. I also didn't expect much. I was quite doubtful that they'd be able to do it right. But, having seen it, I liked everything about it. It was great. It makes some of the other sequels that have come out (Star Trek comes to mind) look like something that you might accidentally step in on the street.
Having read this review, I'm not even really sure what the guy is complaining about. It seems like he's been wanting to write an article about how bad franchises and sequels are, and Blade Runner represented an opportunity to do that. The problem is, Blade Runner is actually a good movie.
I see a lot of comments here suggesting that these anti-net neutrality posts may not have been a bot campaign but some kind of canned message opposite to the EFF campaign. I happened to be submitting a comment on the FCC site while the bot campaign was running, and you could refresh the site and see each time-stamped comment as it came in. The bot comments were all identical text, which could be expected even it it weren't a bot, but the obvious thing that tipped me off while looking at it was that the comments were coming into the site in alphabetical order of lastname, firstname. Ultimately, there were millions of them, and they all came in perfect alphabetical order. I thought it was such an obvious ploy that they would pause the comment period and clear out the phony comments, but I guess since the comments were what they wanted, it's better for them just to leave them and count them as real votes.
I worked at a place where we had a lot of disk (~2TB) with data that were accessible to the public. We also had a web site in place where users could upload new data, which would then be vetted by staff and then published to the public. This was all okay.
The bad part starts when we hired a new guy who, among other duties, wound up redoing the upload interface. So he redesigns and implements the system. I wasn't part of that process, and I wasn't paying any attention to how he was doing it. Later on, he quit, and his codebase was passed to me to maintain. That's when I started looking at the code and discovered that he had implemented a server-side API for uploading data that required no credentials whatsoever--he had set up a password authentication on the web front-end, but the API itself was open to the world. Oh, and the new API also stored uploaded data directly in the publicly accessible disk space. Any rando on the Internet who discovered this API would be able to upload hundreds of GB of whatever porn and warez they wanted, and just pass the URLs out freely. This code had been running in production for months.
Luckily, apparently nobody noticed. I audited the file system and its contents were exactly the files we expected to be there, and with the correct hashes. But it all made me wish we had a better review process, if this was the kind of coder they were going to hire.
How do you say it? Pop-bang-underscore-OS? Pop-not-underbar-OS? Or is the punctuation silent? And if it's silent, then why is it there? What function does it serve? Usually, silent letters are vestigial traces of linguistic evolution, but there's obviously no historic origin of this form. When silicon valley companies spell something stupidly, it's so they can trademark it, so maybe that's the reason? Anyway, ugh. Although their desktop environment looks kinda cool.
I guess this goes along with the madness that is college students' belief that disagreement is innately hurtful and may even extend to the level of hate speech or threats. Young people seem to be taught that conflict is necessarily aggressive and wrong, and if someone else's opinions conflict with theirs, then those people are also aggressive and wrong (and their own side is blameless and innocent). And, apparently having lost the capacity for friendly competition, all that's left is ugly, go-for-the-jugular, all-out destruction of the other side. We see the same thing in our government, where compromise is now a craven weakness.
The word "fundamental," to start. Apple did not change the fundamental shape of the iPhone. If they made it, I dunno, round or toroidal, that would be a change to the fundamental shape. As it is, they changed it from a rectangle to a rectangle with some of its screen blocked by other hardware. Apparently, they faced the choice of whether to have a little patch of screen to the right and left of that bar, or just to make the screen start below it. I don't think either choice they could have made in that situation could be described as "courageous."
It's not just that people are unable to cope. It's also their apparent inability to disengage from a conversation they find hurtful or upsetting. If a person gets into a flame war and just keeps going, maybe they should just... stop? I dunno, maybe that's a coping mechanism in itself. If a Facebook chat made me want to actually hang myself, I'd probably stop using Facebook. But a lot of people, especially young people, don't seem to have that.
Younger people interact more online than in person today, even when they're sitting in the same room with each other. They still have the same peer pressures to conform and belong, and on various web sites and apps they can get a quantified measure of how well they do so. They go on sites like Reddit and post stuff, much of it not original thought but memes (not just of the graphical variety, but also textual memes like Slashdot's old Natalie Portman/hot grits bit), and they are desperate for people to upvote so they feel like they're part of the club. They may delete a post if it's not popular enough. And, of course, some young people's cliques have always rewarded them for being cruel to people, so that continues.
It's not just younger people. Middle-aged people do it, too, going on Facebook with "1 like=1 prayer" and posts that virtue signal to whatever group they belong. But it's all just people speaking into the echo chamber they've chosen and hoping they've posted at the right moment for their groupthink to be validated by repetition and points from the rest.
With various points systems, we've gamified social status, and people are biologically wired to like to win games. Even on Slashdot, many years ago, we had visible numeric karma scores, and people got into stupid e-penis contests to see who could get a higher number. It wasn't so much fun when karma turned into classified ranges, and people stopped. We're not at the point depicted in that episode of Black Mirror yet, but we can see the seeds of it.
It's a social problem, partly caused by the fact that we have this new technology for social interaction without many generations of behavioral norms, partly caused by the fact that anonymity and distance seems to encourage people to be shittier and more confrontational to each other. Likely with many other causes. But the solution almost certainly isn't a technological or legal one.
They cancelled it when they couldn't fulfill it. I'm still thinking about ordering one, but I thought I'd wait a while for restocking to happen.
I was considering photographing the eclipse because I thought the process could be fun and interesting to learn about and do. I didn't expect my photos to be any better than a professional's--in fact, I expected them to be worse. I wound up not doing it because the company I ordered the solar filter from ran out before they fulfilled my order.
I understand that the whole thing is just advertisement for MS Office certification, but I'm still curious what kind of things a person has to do to win the competition. All these articles about the stupid thing, and none of them has managed to provide an example of a task that a person might be expected to perform.