No, it wouldn't: 1. Those involved in the negotiations have stated that the Obama administration got the plan it wanted.
2. My congressman at the time, Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), threatened to vote against Obamacare unless there was the option to choose the US Government as your health insurance provider. Obama took him on Air Force One and personally lobbied him about it: I have no idea what happened on that plane, but I do know that Kucinich changed his vote as a result of that ride.
3. Look at the plan that Hillary Clinton put together back in 1993: It also included private insurance companies as a key part of the system.
4. There were some Democrats who supported single payer systems. They were basically laughed out of the room in presidential primaries, congressional committees, etc.
The thing is, all of those seem kinda true, but fall apart when you examine them closely:
1. George Soros doesn't attempt to hide what he does with his money. David and Charles Koch do.
2. I don't think you know what "kleptocratic" and "fascist" really mean:
- In a kleptocracy, the primary purpose of government is personally enriching the officials in it. The US doesn't really operate that way: The politicians get paid well and get paid off, but they aren't really getting all that rich themselves (by the standards of rich people), they're more carrying water for billionaires like Soros, Koch, and Koch, which makes the US more of a plutocracy than a kleptocracy. By contrast, a kleptocrat like Jean-Claude Duvalier snagged something like $500 million, making (for example) Bill Clinton's $80 million in book sales and speaking fees look like peanuts by comparison.
- If the US were really full-blown fascist, you'd see a much larger percentage of economic activity geared towards funding a war of conquest somewhere, mass executions of citizens without trial, open and legalized discrimination in the streets, and people shipped off to labor camps based solely on their parentage. We've had some of that at various points in our history, but there's a lot of steps between modern American and Mussolini's Italy that simply aren't happening right now.
3. The ones really losing are not the middle class, they're the people in those ghettos already who have no good way out. You mention Detroit: As bad as it would be if you were used to living in a nice suburb and then ended up in something kind of like Detroit, how much worse would it suck if you were born and raised in Detroit and never acquired the net worth or job skills to be able to viably move somewhere else. Another factor in all this, that I'm not positive the upper class really understands: If the middle class goes completely under, it takes the upper class with them, because the upper class's investment income depends ultimately on the consumer spending of everyone else.
It should be pointed out that Occupy's story was different than the Tea Party's.
The Tea Party tapped real anger and real opinions of a lot of Americans, but did everything in its power to try to take that anger and turn it into simply easy votes for the Republican Party candidates. What's gotten the Republican Party into trouble lately is that they forgot that when you have organized passionate people, they do what they want to do rather than what you want them to do. The other factor is that movement conservatism (basically a system of a few billionaires hiring a cadre of political lackeys to work at their think tanks, media organizations, and Congress) has abandoned moderate conservatism in favor of the Tea Party because the Tea Party will lower their taxes more, which is their only real political goal.
The Occupy movement's story, on the other hand, never really had the support of the Democratic Party apparatus, in large part because the Democratic Party leaders support Wall St even though their rank-and-file membership does not. The FBI coordinated (illegal) police attacks on protests around the country, and no level of government or either major political party has raised any kind of stink about the obvious and documented cases of unjustified police violence against citizens (e.g. Anthony Bologna pepper-spraying people who had broken no law and had not resisted police in any way).
It depends on where the ambassador is. The US ambassador to Denmark, for instance, is basically a plum political appointment for a major supporter who likes the idea of living in Denmark, knows how to speak Danish, and has some friends or family in Copenhagen already. But the US ambassador to Russia is a senior career member of the US Foreign Service, because they want someone in Moscow who is less likely to screw things up than the political payback guy would.
So, for example, the current US ambassador to Germany is John Emerson, who has no foreign policy experience before his appointment and got his appointment by helping Bill Clinton and Barack Obama's campaign in California. By contrast, J Christopher Stevens, the ambassador to Libya killed in the Benghazi attack, had about 20 years of diplomatic service in the Middle East, serving in Israel, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and several Middle East-related posts back in Washington DC.
Here's what I think: If you know what you're doing, doing things the right way takes no longer than doing things the wrong way when you start. Example
So the end result is that it's a lot cheaper to do things the right way, because you start off almost as fast, and end up not having to slow down to deal with the headaches that exist as the thing gets larger.
And if you're one of those types that likes a CMS, try Mezzanine and tell me if it's still hard to get something other than PHP up and running.
Actually, it's more that PHP makes it easy to suck at those things. For example, mysql_query(), with no parameterization support, is something that should never have existed, and for a long time was the only way to do mysql queries.
If you read the paper, you'll discover that about 50% of the projects examined use PHP, so the 80% number is disproportionately high.
Re:I can predict the future
on
PHP.net Compromised
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I can predict there will be a lot of posts by developers of other languages laughing at PHP while ignoring their own languages massive security failures in the often not so distant past.
You know, I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one.
I'm not saying that other languages are perfect, far from it. But the PHP world, by and large, is inhabited by people who don't really understand security. I've worked in it for a long time, and in every single application and library written in PHP that I encounter, I find results that show signs of knowing of, for instance, the existance of concepts called "SQL injection" and "XSS attack" but no understanding of what those things actually mean beyond taking some boilerplate kinda-solution in most but not all relevant locations.
By contrast, the libraries that Java and Python and Ruby provide, both out of the box and in third-party packages, tend to have been designed to make those kinds of attacks difficult to open yourself up to. The documentation for those packages emphasizes the security risks and concerns, the developer communities do everything they can to reduce those risks, and the result is that there are fewer minefields.
And that is why, in this paper, a whopping 80% of SQL injection and a disproportionately high number of XSS vulnerabilities are from projects that were written in PHP. It's possible to do the right thing in that language, but the evidence is fairly strong that developers focused primarily on PHP don't.
When doing that, you typically don't put your arms up continuously. For example, when I'm putting up sheet rock, sometimes I'm cutting things into shape, sometimes I'm moving a section over to the wall, sometimes I'm taking measurements, and sometimes I'm reaching up to put in screws. When I'm painting, sometimes I'm reaching up to roll paint on the surface, but sometimes I'm reaching down to put paint on the roller. When I've done building projects, a lot of the time was spent working at the much more convenient sawhorse level, or assembling pieces on the floor, rather than trying to do all the carpentry vertically. I've never encountered someone, including professionals in building trades, who holds their arms up continuously for extended periods, because that simply drains strength from your arms.
A buddy of mine who was a top-notch bricklayer was sometimes putting down a course or mortering, but a lot of the time was reaching down to pick up bricks.
Apparently in the future everyone will have tremendous upper body strength.
Yup, it's the gorilla arm problem all over again: Try waving your hand in front of your face for about 10 minutes and see how you feel after a while.
An interesting experiment to demonstrate what an actual comfortable interface would look like: (1) Drop your arms to your sides. (2) Bend the arms at the elbow to bring them up to desk height, keeping everything else relaxed as possible. (3) Wiggle your fingers. That's where the thing you interact with should be: If you're like most people, your fingers will be more-or-less positioned to grasp an invisible object about the size of a volleyball in between your hands, interacting with the vertical surfaces. The reasons keyboards aren't actually made like that have to do with (A) the inability in that position to see what you're doing, (B) the impossibility of the right hand help the left hand or vice versa, and (C) it was easier to build mechanical typewriters the way modern keyboards are laid out, with all the key hits coming from more-or-less the same angle. But it's useful for showing what does and doesn't feel natural.
Hey, I've got an idea: How about we make all Muslims wear a religious symbol on their clothing at all times, so they can receive all the special treatment they deserve? How about shipping them all off to some special camp to keep them from hurting anyone else. And if they don't make it back home, that would really solve the problem once and for all, right? Perhaps we could find some useful work for them to be doing while they're being kept there, making army uniforms or something. It might seem morally repugnant to imprison or kill people because of their religion, but in these trying times we have to do distasteful things to prevent our great nation from being overrun by those people who hurt us so badly.
And for those too dense to realize what I'm referring to, replace "Muslims" with "Jews" and tell me if you're still comfortable with that policy. I realize the Godwin risk I'm taking here, but the comparison seems too apt to ignore.
Fucking seriously let's save all that tax money and the tax money being wasted now, and just racially profile. What's the fucking problem?
There are 3 major problems: 1. Approximately 99.99999% of brown people are not terrorists. Why is it OK to give them the same treatment you find unacceptable when directed at you?
2. A terrorist organization trying to beat a racial profile will simply recruit white-looking terrorists. Some of the most dangerous and prolific terrorists in recent decades have been white guys: Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Lighter-skinned Arabs, such as hijacker Mohammed Atta, could probably pass for white.
3. Treating citizens differently solely because of their race was made unconstitutional in 1868, and actually enforced as unconstitutional starting in 1954. To implement a similar policy, you'd need to amend the constitution first.
I love this idea. Does anybody know whether it's been tried?
Sticking cars on trains is already happening. Some examples: - Amtrak auto-train can take you from Washington D.C. to Orlando with your car on the train. - Euro-Tunnel is the easiest way to get you and your car from the UK to France.
My personal suggestion for an ambitious transportation goal: Have auto-trains parallel to / in the median of 2-digit interstates, with stations every 50-100 miles and near major cities. Sure, that would be a big undertaking, but there would be significant benefits too: reduced wear on rural interstates, fewer accidents, fewer miles driven, a much-improved passenger rail system, less stress for passengers, etc. And for a really ambitious engineering project, see if we could invent a way to do the loading and unloading of cars on a train that's still moving, so that trains could provide service to, say, Syracuse NY without significantly slowing down the people trying to get from Buffalo to Albany.
That doesn't make any sense: 1. Any expert in a field is going to have opinions on the issues relevant to the field that you can't possibly hope to verify. e.g. hands up, everyone who has both the direct knowledge and expertise to definitively know the Higgs boson is real.
2. If Bruce Schneier is an NSA asset, then why would he say and do things to reduce the power of the NSA?
3. If Bruce Schneier is biased against the NSA, why would that necessarily make the bad things he says about the NSA untrue?
That's why ad hominems are not considered valid arguments in serious debate. You're supposed to attack the argument, not the person making it.
Are you suggesting I should show my 5 year old son a beheading video?
No, I'm suggesting that your 5-year-old seeing it, probably by accident, will almost definitely not encourage him to behead someone (or himself). I'm not a father, but I've taken care of lots of kids before, and one of the things I've learned to do is not shelter kids too much, because kids who are overly sheltered have a harder time dealing with the bad stuff in life once they're 25.
I'm against all censorship. Period. Including of things that are horrific.
It's not like you can really shield people completely from the horrific violence of the world. In some places, the kids not only see it, but they're forced to be a part of it as child soldiers. In other places, kids aren't supposed to see it, but are encouraged to enjoy a fantasy version of that horrific violence so that they'll grow up into 18-year-olds who want to join the military service and kill people. In lots of places, even the kids who aren't supposed to go into the service (typically because their parents are rich enough) get exposed to horrific violence via something called "evening news". At best, you can try to create a fantasy bubble in which the bad stuff only happens in places very far away from where you are - this usually involves willfully ignoring the assaults, murders, robberies, rapes, car crashes, etc that are probably happening fairly close to you right now.
Also, the reaction of children to real violence is the same as adults: horror. They might enjoy a good scare in October at a haunted house or a murder mystery story, but the real thing leaves kids (and lots of adults) crying, screaming in fear, defacating, vomiting, etc. If you want a sure way to get kids to not want to behead themselves or anyone else, showing them a real beheading is a pretty good way of doing it.
Well, that wouldn't really be his choice, now would it?
My suspicion on the answer to this question, for people, depends entirely on what the actions being judged are. For example, "Your Honor, my client cannot be held responsible for his crimes, because he has no free will." "Why of course, honey, I picked out those flowers especially because I thought you might like them."
On the one hand, Ubuntu has seriously improved desktop Linux, particularly in hardware auto-detection and driver support.
On the other hand, you've shown on several occasions that your goal with Ubuntu is to take the effort of thousands of volunteer developers and sell it and the Ubuntu install base for personal profit. That turns those same formerly motivated volunteers into chumps who worked for you for free, and nobody likes being a chump.
And then there's the UI thing, but Ubuntu is hardly the only one making mistakes there (see Gnome 3). The fundamental issue is that a significant portion of UI designers think that making tablets and desktops and phones should all have basically identical interfaces. There's a clear reason why that's a bad idea: Different kinds of input methods demand different kinds of interactions. For example, on a touchscreen the easiest place to interact with is the center of the screen, whereas with a mouse the easiest place to interact with is actually the corners, which means you want to put your icons and menus and such in different places.
So this puts all atheists in a bad light, right? Because you know, all atheists are alike. (beware of sarcasm)
I've encountered many atheists who claim that all 1.2 billion Muslims in the world are bad based on the actions of a few thousand terrorists. The argument isn't "all atheists are bad", but "some atheists are bad, ergo atheism doesn't automatically lead to good behavior", as some who oppose religion believe.
What about those religions that aren't like Scientologists? For example, would the world really be a worse place off without Quakers or Jains or other strictly non-violent religions? How about those evil Unitarian Universalists, who basically have built their religion around "We may disagree about invisible beings in the sky, but that doesn't mean we should hate each other"? How about the deeply religious people who more-or-less invented philosophy, mathematics, physics, chemistry, genetics, astronomy, and a few other sciences - should we get rid of them too?
And atheists aren't immune from being the bad guy either: Communist atheists killed off a lot of people for being religious.
How about this for some morality: Killing people, except in defense of self or someone else, is wrong (and worshiping a different invisible guy or the same invisible guy differently isn't a very good reason). Torturing people is wrong. Raping people is wrong. Hurting people, except in defense of self or someone else, is wrong. Stealing (however done) is wrong, but less wrong than hurting, raping, torturing, or murdering. Groups that break those rules are bad, groups that don't are at worst harmless.
Re:Yeah, but it does depend on the area of science
on
How Science Goes Wrong
·
· Score: 1
In other words, those in charge do everything in their power to ensure a profitable result.
I know I chose my undergraduate institution based on the size of the administration...
Actually, some people do. For example, those who want individualized attention from the Dean of Students office, tutoring centers, counselors and psychologists on staff, etc. There are also those who look heavily at alumni giving, and the fact is that schools that have a lot of that tend to also have an army of fundraisers hitting up alumni on a regular basis (also, they need to have rich alumni).
Slashdot Mirror
No, it wouldn't:
1. Those involved in the negotiations have stated that the Obama administration got the plan it wanted.
2. My congressman at the time, Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), threatened to vote against Obamacare unless there was the option to choose the US Government as your health insurance provider. Obama took him on Air Force One and personally lobbied him about it: I have no idea what happened on that plane, but I do know that Kucinich changed his vote as a result of that ride.
3. Look at the plan that Hillary Clinton put together back in 1993: It also included private insurance companies as a key part of the system.
4. There were some Democrats who supported single payer systems. They were basically laughed out of the room in presidential primaries, congressional committees, etc.
The thing is, all of those seem kinda true, but fall apart when you examine them closely:
1. George Soros doesn't attempt to hide what he does with his money. David and Charles Koch do.
2. I don't think you know what "kleptocratic" and "fascist" really mean:
- In a kleptocracy, the primary purpose of government is personally enriching the officials in it. The US doesn't really operate that way: The politicians get paid well and get paid off, but they aren't really getting all that rich themselves (by the standards of rich people), they're more carrying water for billionaires like Soros, Koch, and Koch, which makes the US more of a plutocracy than a kleptocracy. By contrast, a kleptocrat like Jean-Claude Duvalier snagged something like $500 million, making (for example) Bill Clinton's $80 million in book sales and speaking fees look like peanuts by comparison.
- If the US were really full-blown fascist, you'd see a much larger percentage of economic activity geared towards funding a war of conquest somewhere, mass executions of citizens without trial, open and legalized discrimination in the streets, and people shipped off to labor camps based solely on their parentage. We've had some of that at various points in our history, but there's a lot of steps between modern American and Mussolini's Italy that simply aren't happening right now.
3. The ones really losing are not the middle class, they're the people in those ghettos already who have no good way out. You mention Detroit: As bad as it would be if you were used to living in a nice suburb and then ended up in something kind of like Detroit, how much worse would it suck if you were born and raised in Detroit and never acquired the net worth or job skills to be able to viably move somewhere else. Another factor in all this, that I'm not positive the upper class really understands: If the middle class goes completely under, it takes the upper class with them, because the upper class's investment income depends ultimately on the consumer spending of everyone else.
It should be pointed out that Occupy's story was different than the Tea Party's.
The Tea Party tapped real anger and real opinions of a lot of Americans, but did everything in its power to try to take that anger and turn it into simply easy votes for the Republican Party candidates. What's gotten the Republican Party into trouble lately is that they forgot that when you have organized passionate people, they do what they want to do rather than what you want them to do. The other factor is that movement conservatism (basically a system of a few billionaires hiring a cadre of political lackeys to work at their think tanks, media organizations, and Congress) has abandoned moderate conservatism in favor of the Tea Party because the Tea Party will lower their taxes more, which is their only real political goal.
The Occupy movement's story, on the other hand, never really had the support of the Democratic Party apparatus, in large part because the Democratic Party leaders support Wall St even though their rank-and-file membership does not. The FBI coordinated (illegal) police attacks on protests around the country, and no level of government or either major political party has raised any kind of stink about the obvious and documented cases of unjustified police violence against citizens (e.g. Anthony Bologna pepper-spraying people who had broken no law and had not resisted police in any way).
It depends on where the ambassador is. The US ambassador to Denmark, for instance, is basically a plum political appointment for a major supporter who likes the idea of living in Denmark, knows how to speak Danish, and has some friends or family in Copenhagen already. But the US ambassador to Russia is a senior career member of the US Foreign Service, because they want someone in Moscow who is less likely to screw things up than the political payback guy would.
So, for example, the current US ambassador to Germany is John Emerson, who has no foreign policy experience before his appointment and got his appointment by helping Bill Clinton and Barack Obama's campaign in California. By contrast, J Christopher Stevens, the ambassador to Libya killed in the Benghazi attack, had about 20 years of diplomatic service in the Middle East, serving in Israel, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and several Middle East-related posts back in Washington DC.
Here's what I think: If you know what you're doing, doing things the right way takes no longer than doing things the wrong way when you start.
Example
So the end result is that it's a lot cheaper to do things the right way, because you start off almost as fast, and end up not having to slow down to deal with the headaches that exist as the thing gets larger.
And if you're one of those types that likes a CMS, try Mezzanine and tell me if it's still hard to get something other than PHP up and running.
Actually, it's more that PHP makes it easy to suck at those things. For example, mysql_query(), with no parameterization support, is something that should never have existed, and for a long time was the only way to do mysql queries.
If you read the paper, you'll discover that about 50% of the projects examined use PHP, so the 80% number is disproportionately high.
I can predict there will be a lot of posts by developers of other languages laughing at PHP while ignoring their own languages massive security failures in the often not so distant past.
You know, I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one.
I'm not saying that other languages are perfect, far from it. But the PHP world, by and large, is inhabited by people who don't really understand security. I've worked in it for a long time, and in every single application and library written in PHP that I encounter, I find results that show signs of knowing of, for instance, the existance of concepts called "SQL injection" and "XSS attack" but no understanding of what those things actually mean beyond taking some boilerplate kinda-solution in most but not all relevant locations.
By contrast, the libraries that Java and Python and Ruby provide, both out of the box and in third-party packages, tend to have been designed to make those kinds of attacks difficult to open yourself up to. The documentation for those packages emphasizes the security risks and concerns, the developer communities do everything they can to reduce those risks, and the result is that there are fewer minefields.
And that is why, in this paper, a whopping 80% of SQL injection and a disproportionately high number of XSS vulnerabilities are from projects that were written in PHP. It's possible to do the right thing in that language, but the evidence is fairly strong that developers focused primarily on PHP don't.
When doing that, you typically don't put your arms up continuously. For example, when I'm putting up sheet rock, sometimes I'm cutting things into shape, sometimes I'm moving a section over to the wall, sometimes I'm taking measurements, and sometimes I'm reaching up to put in screws. When I'm painting, sometimes I'm reaching up to roll paint on the surface, but sometimes I'm reaching down to put paint on the roller. When I've done building projects, a lot of the time was spent working at the much more convenient sawhorse level, or assembling pieces on the floor, rather than trying to do all the carpentry vertically. I've never encountered someone, including professionals in building trades, who holds their arms up continuously for extended periods, because that simply drains strength from your arms.
A buddy of mine who was a top-notch bricklayer was sometimes putting down a course or mortering, but a lot of the time was reaching down to pick up bricks.
Apparently in the future everyone will have tremendous upper body strength.
Yup, it's the gorilla arm problem all over again: Try waving your hand in front of your face for about 10 minutes and see how you feel after a while.
An interesting experiment to demonstrate what an actual comfortable interface would look like: (1) Drop your arms to your sides. (2) Bend the arms at the elbow to bring them up to desk height, keeping everything else relaxed as possible. (3) Wiggle your fingers. That's where the thing you interact with should be: If you're like most people, your fingers will be more-or-less positioned to grasp an invisible object about the size of a volleyball in between your hands, interacting with the vertical surfaces. The reasons keyboards aren't actually made like that have to do with (A) the inability in that position to see what you're doing, (B) the impossibility of the right hand help the left hand or vice versa, and (C) it was easier to build mechanical typewriters the way modern keyboards are laid out, with all the key hits coming from more-or-less the same angle. But it's useful for showing what does and doesn't feel natural.
What should be profiled is an Islamic background.
Hey, I've got an idea: How about we make all Muslims wear a religious symbol on their clothing at all times, so they can receive all the special treatment they deserve? How about shipping them all off to some special camp to keep them from hurting anyone else. And if they don't make it back home, that would really solve the problem once and for all, right? Perhaps we could find some useful work for them to be doing while they're being kept there, making army uniforms or something. It might seem morally repugnant to imprison or kill people because of their religion, but in these trying times we have to do distasteful things to prevent our great nation from being overrun by those people who hurt us so badly.
And for those too dense to realize what I'm referring to, replace "Muslims" with "Jews" and tell me if you're still comfortable with that policy. I realize the Godwin risk I'm taking here, but the comparison seems too apt to ignore.
Fucking seriously let's save all that tax money and the tax money being wasted now, and just racially profile. What's the fucking problem?
There are 3 major problems:
1. Approximately 99.99999% of brown people are not terrorists. Why is it OK to give them the same treatment you find unacceptable when directed at you?
2. A terrorist organization trying to beat a racial profile will simply recruit white-looking terrorists. Some of the most dangerous and prolific terrorists in recent decades have been white guys: Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Lighter-skinned Arabs, such as hijacker Mohammed Atta, could probably pass for white.
3. Treating citizens differently solely because of their race was made unconstitutional in 1868, and actually enforced as unconstitutional starting in 1954. To implement a similar policy, you'd need to amend the constitution first.
I love this idea. Does anybody know whether it's been tried?
Sticking cars on trains is already happening. Some examples:
- Amtrak auto-train can take you from Washington D.C. to Orlando with your car on the train.
- Euro-Tunnel is the easiest way to get you and your car from the UK to France.
My personal suggestion for an ambitious transportation goal: Have auto-trains parallel to / in the median of 2-digit interstates, with stations every 50-100 miles and near major cities. Sure, that would be a big undertaking, but there would be significant benefits too: reduced wear on rural interstates, fewer accidents, fewer miles driven, a much-improved passenger rail system, less stress for passengers, etc. And for a really ambitious engineering project, see if we could invent a way to do the loading and unloading of cars on a train that's still moving, so that trains could provide service to, say, Syracuse NY without significantly slowing down the people trying to get from Buffalo to Albany.
That doesn't make any sense:
1. Any expert in a field is going to have opinions on the issues relevant to the field that you can't possibly hope to verify. e.g. hands up, everyone who has both the direct knowledge and expertise to definitively know the Higgs boson is real.
2. If Bruce Schneier is an NSA asset, then why would he say and do things to reduce the power of the NSA?
3. If Bruce Schneier is biased against the NSA, why would that necessarily make the bad things he says about the NSA untrue?
That's why ad hominems are not considered valid arguments in serious debate. You're supposed to attack the argument, not the person making it.
Are you suggesting I should show my 5 year old son a beheading video?
No, I'm suggesting that your 5-year-old seeing it, probably by accident, will almost definitely not encourage him to behead someone (or himself). I'm not a father, but I've taken care of lots of kids before, and one of the things I've learned to do is not shelter kids too much, because kids who are overly sheltered have a harder time dealing with the bad stuff in life once they're 25.
I'm against all censorship. Period. Including of things that are horrific.
It's not like you can really shield people completely from the horrific violence of the world. In some places, the kids not only see it, but they're forced to be a part of it as child soldiers. In other places, kids aren't supposed to see it, but are encouraged to enjoy a fantasy version of that horrific violence so that they'll grow up into 18-year-olds who want to join the military service and kill people. In lots of places, even the kids who aren't supposed to go into the service (typically because their parents are rich enough) get exposed to horrific violence via something called "evening news". At best, you can try to create a fantasy bubble in which the bad stuff only happens in places very far away from where you are - this usually involves willfully ignoring the assaults, murders, robberies, rapes, car crashes, etc that are probably happening fairly close to you right now.
Also, the reaction of children to real violence is the same as adults: horror. They might enjoy a good scare in October at a haunted house or a murder mystery story, but the real thing leaves kids (and lots of adults) crying, screaming in fear, defacating, vomiting, etc. If you want a sure way to get kids to not want to behead themselves or anyone else, showing them a real beheading is a pretty good way of doing it.
Well, that wouldn't really be his choice, now would it?
My suspicion on the answer to this question, for people, depends entirely on what the actions being judged are. For example, "Your Honor, my client cannot be held responsible for his crimes, because he has no free will." "Why of course, honey, I picked out those flowers especially because I thought you might like them."
Be careful when discussing this topic, because you may be booked for arguing with the referee
On the one hand, Ubuntu has seriously improved desktop Linux, particularly in hardware auto-detection and driver support.
On the other hand, you've shown on several occasions that your goal with Ubuntu is to take the effort of thousands of volunteer developers and sell it and the Ubuntu install base for personal profit. That turns those same formerly motivated volunteers into chumps who worked for you for free, and nobody likes being a chump.
And then there's the UI thing, but Ubuntu is hardly the only one making mistakes there (see Gnome 3). The fundamental issue is that a significant portion of UI designers think that making tablets and desktops and phones should all have basically identical interfaces. There's a clear reason why that's a bad idea: Different kinds of input methods demand different kinds of interactions. For example, on a touchscreen the easiest place to interact with is the center of the screen, whereas with a mouse the easiest place to interact with is actually the corners, which means you want to put your icons and menus and such in different places.
So this puts all atheists in a bad light, right? Because you know, all atheists are alike. (beware of sarcasm)
I've encountered many atheists who claim that all 1.2 billion Muslims in the world are bad based on the actions of a few thousand terrorists. The argument isn't "all atheists are bad", but "some atheists are bad, ergo atheism doesn't automatically lead to good behavior", as some who oppose religion believe.
What about those religions that aren't like Scientologists? For example, would the world really be a worse place off without Quakers or Jains or other strictly non-violent religions? How about those evil Unitarian Universalists, who basically have built their religion around "We may disagree about invisible beings in the sky, but that doesn't mean we should hate each other"? How about the deeply religious people who more-or-less invented philosophy, mathematics, physics, chemistry, genetics, astronomy, and a few other sciences - should we get rid of them too?
And atheists aren't immune from being the bad guy either: Communist atheists killed off a lot of people for being religious.
How about this for some morality: Killing people, except in defense of self or someone else, is wrong (and worshiping a different invisible guy or the same invisible guy differently isn't a very good reason). Torturing people is wrong. Raping people is wrong. Hurting people, except in defense of self or someone else, is wrong. Stealing (however done) is wrong, but less wrong than hurting, raping, torturing, or murdering. Groups that break those rules are bad, groups that don't are at worst harmless.
In other words, those in charge do everything in their power to ensure a profitable result.
Exactly how democracy does work.
I don't know, but I think that was when they invented this joke:
"My great-granddad has no nose."
"How does he smell?"
"Awful"
I know I chose my undergraduate institution based on the size of the administration...
Actually, some people do. For example, those who want individualized attention from the Dean of Students office, tutoring centers, counselors and psychologists on staff, etc. There are also those who look heavily at alumni giving, and the fact is that schools that have a lot of that tend to also have an army of fundraisers hitting up alumni on a regular basis (also, they need to have rich alumni).
There are so many to choose from.
In this case, the proposer seems to be under the impression that a desktop, laptop, or tablet is more likely to be compromised than a smartphone.
If you ask just about any competent doctor, they'll tell you that MMR vaccine is making everyone healthier.
That is an invalid argument. It is the Emperor's New Clothes argument.
Out of curiosity, if you don't accept a doctor's opinion regarding a medical decision, who's advice do you consider authoritative?