And the real kicker here is that police who are doing their jobs correctly have it very much in their interest to have all encounters they have with the public filmed. Why? Because then there's no dispute as to what happened.
So that leaves 2 major reasons why cops don't want to be filmed: 1. Juries are more likely to believe cops than civilians, so any disputes as to what happened during a police-citizen encounter favor the police by a wide margin. 2. Bad cops obviously don't want to get caught, and good cops often choose to cover up for bad cops. Why, I'm not sure - any good cops want to weigh in on that problem?
The good news is that any ordinary citizen can help solve the first problem, by taking your turn in jury duty and not automatically assuming the police are telling the truth.
TFA states "Due to security and privacy concerns, we anonymize their names and label them as Carrier A and Carrier B."
I'm guessing that's in fact BS, and the real reason they don't tell you which carrier is which is to protect themselves from massive lawsuits, or possibly because Microsoft Research can't offend the carriers because their corporate overlords want to have deals to sell Windows-based smartphones to them.
Astronomers believe they caught the supernova within hours of its explosion, a rare feat made possible with a specialized survey telescope and state-of-the-art computational tools
An amazingly rare feat, as not only did they catch the supernova right away, they somehow violated the universal speed limit of c in order to do so. Someone call the physics police on "chill" or Soulskill or whoever made that summary.
The DOJ has shown itself to be completely unwilling to prosecute bankers or their regulators.
Not only that, but the DoJ has also taken steps to punish other government officials, notably New York AG Eric Schneiderman, for looking for ways to prosecute under their own authority. They've made it clear that the only penalty the Obama administration will accept for the banks is a fine of somewhere around $60 billion, which will look like a big number to satisfy the public but is peanuts compared to what those banks earned with their illegal practices.
That is more true than many would like to think. There are 2 ways this can happen: 1. For poor kids, a good-hearted but misguided social worker may try to give them a diagnosis so they have a better chance of passing in school. 2. For rich kids, parents will try to give them a diagnosis in order to give them a leg up on exams, get them into and through good schools, and so forth.
What the diagnosis is changes: 15 years ago, the kids were all getting diagnosed with ADHD. About 7 years ago, it became autism or Asperger's. While the circumstances and genetics of kids change, I find it hard to believe that all of a sudden the causes of ADHD gave way to the causes of autism.
Don't know, don't care. Perhaps the parents should have thought about possible costs before procreating?
So now you have a mass of uncared-for, uneducated, unemployable poor kids sitting around with basically nothing to do but join up with criminal gangs. Of course, you can respond to that problem with increased policing, but that means that you're now paying more than you saved in education for police, judges, and juvenile detention.
And that's ignoring the philosophical problem of how much children should be penalized for the sins and stupidity of their parents.
Oh, you don't have to go back 500 years to get their ideal society. You only really need to go back to the 1890's or so, when Robber Barons ran everything, corruption in politics was rampant, and a few very large banking organizations (most notably J.P. Morgan's) were able to violate laws with impunity. Both Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt did a lot to put a stop to it, and there were also lots of socialists and anarchists such as Emma Goldman, Upton Sinclair, and later Eugene Debs running around arguing that if workers didn't get a government more responsive to them, they should all stop working and see how the fat cats liked that.
A few of the other big issues with the US system: * The US system has a summer vacation, while most other school systems do not. The effect of this policy, a legacy of the 19th century when kids had to go work the family farm in the summer, is that not only do students lose about 2-3 months in the summer, they also lose 2-3 months in the fall reviewing all the stuff they covered in the previous year that they've forgotten over the break. * A particular style of conservative Protestantism actively discourages the proper study of many subjects. In the really extreme cases, they'll go after math departments for teaching that pi != 3, but more commonly go after history books that acknowledge that the world existed before God created it c 4000 BC (and none of that "BCE / CE" business either, it's "BC" and "AD"), biology books that teach that life as we know it was the result of natural processes, and any efforts by humanities teachers to incorporate art and culture that has viewpoints that don't match up exactly with their worldview. * A lot of politicians want to go to a system in which only private schools exist and education is limited to those who's parents can afford to pay. A good way to make their political case is to ensure that the public schools suck. Or as the joke sometimes goes, Republicans argue that government doesn't work, and once elected to office do their best to prove their point.
You're absolutely right that with US schools, there is no silver bullet.
No, the real story here is that Bruce Schneier went back in time and encoded the secrets to human happiness on this obscure species genetic code using advanced steganography. The effects of beer are proof of his contribution.
That's the whole point: GP is arguing that this sort of practice is in fact quite normal, and that Microsoft will probably not stop just because of the bad press.
It's not that lots of meaningless sex is bad for you, it's that it makes an excellent distraction from thinking too carefully about the bigger picture. Oh, and also, most of the sex that's portrayed as cool tends to be of the stupid and risky variety - it's not like you have characters sitting down in films and TV shows saying "Ok, we need to make sure that nobody's going to get pregnant or end up HIV positive from this."
Add to that that basically every religion in that area had its own creation myth
Actually, not just in that area. Almost every single religious belief system ever known to exist has at some point developed a creation myth. They vary a lot in their focus and meaning, but some interesting commonalities include a conflict between a mighty god of some kind and an opposing force with us humans caught in the middle. For instance, the Acheans had pretty well settled on Zeus defeating Kronos, and early Indian writings focus on Indra defeating Vrtra. But you're absolutely right that Genesis has a lot of parallels with the Zoroastrianism found in much of the Middle East at the time.
That means you have to target the 2 things that can be changed: 1. The "uncool" part of it - many cultures worldwide have made educational success totally cool. The trouble is that many powerful factions within the US want the masses to be stupid, because stupid people are easier to control, and as such teach kids that the most cool things they can possibly do are (a) smash their heads into other children over an oblate spheroid, (b) go to some faraway land and kill people, (c) ingest mind-numbing chemical substances, (d) have lots of totally meaningless sex, and (e) for a select few, compete with their peers to please authority figures. It's no accident that (a) and (b) encourage boys in particular to become good soldiers, (c) and (d) serve as excellent distractions (read Brave New World), and (e) teaches the middle-class kids in particular to be running over each other trying to please the upper crust.
2. The "not all that interesting" part is typically a lack of creativity on the part of how we teach kids. I've taught kids who you wouldn't think were at all interested in math a bit of trigonometry and similar triangles. Not by sitting them down in front of a chalkboard, but by giving them the problem of building a set of porch steps and working with them on figuring out how to cut the boards so that the steps would be level and a reasonable angle to climb. That way of teaching, though, is typically more expensive than just lining them up in a classroom, drugging them with Ritalin and the like, and saying "learn it or else".
It's one thing to say to the press "We're likely to do X". It's another thing entirely to say privately "We're definitely going to do X, no question about it." In the first case, everybody knows at the same time, and it's a statement of likelihood, not fact. In the second case, insiders have information that is different from the world at large that gives them an unfair advantage in the markets. By comparison, imagine what would have happened if S&P had been screaming to the press that they'd be downgrading, but telling their buddies that they weren't actually going to do it and were just blowing smoke.
Your 95% guesstimate is probably quite incorrect, given that at least 30% of households currently don't have a computer of any kind. Now, schools in relatively wealthy suburbs are more likely to have a high Facebook participation rate, but a teacher at a public school isn't supposed to be expecting that a student necessarily has access to those tools because of the financial burden of getting and keeping Internet access.
During the Roman Empire, why were Germans still barbarians?
That's actually not that hard to answer, but the answer is completely different from what you might think. The Roman definition of "barbarian" was largely "people we haven't conquered or bought off yet", so (for example) the Gauls prior to Julius Caesar's butt-kicking campaign were barbarians but became integrated with Roman society within a century. The Germans remained "barbarians" because they'd kicked the butts of the Romans when they tried to move in at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.
By far the most significant technological difference between the Germans and Romans were that the Romans had written language and the Germans didn't. One indication of their general technical parity that is that once the Germans had a good reason to move (namely, the Huns attacking from the east), they were able to manage quite well against the Romans.
In other words, the third-party library playground is larger and moving faster than the standard library. I'd expect that in any code base, because the standard library out of necessity has to be more concerned with backwards compatibility so that the next language upgrade doesn't break existing code. For instance, strcpy is still supported in C, even though it's widely regarded as very unsafe.
But you'll notice that the Python standard library slowly adds in third-party modules that are widely used and are best-in-class, and slowly kicks out older modules that suck. For instance, the string module has very little left in it that's not deprecated.
What color most professional athletes are varies wildly across different sports in the US - baseball is majority white with a large Hispanic minority, football and basketball are both majority black with large white contingents, soccer is mostly white but with significant black and Hispanic minorities (source), and less popular but still significant sports like auto racing, hockey, tennis and golf are almost exclusively white.
Most of the evidence out there suggests that athletic ability is not heavily tied to race at all. If you look at the racial makeup of a professional sport, it's typically not much different from the racial makeup of the college, high school, or casual players of that sport. That tells you that the racial breakdown of the pros has a lot more to do with who chooses to play a particular sport and spend the thousands of hours it takes to get really good at it.
Slashdot Mirror
And the real kicker here is that police who are doing their jobs correctly have it very much in their interest to have all encounters they have with the public filmed. Why? Because then there's no dispute as to what happened.
So that leaves 2 major reasons why cops don't want to be filmed:
1. Juries are more likely to believe cops than civilians, so any disputes as to what happened during a police-citizen encounter favor the police by a wide margin.
2. Bad cops obviously don't want to get caught, and good cops often choose to cover up for bad cops. Why, I'm not sure - any good cops want to weigh in on that problem?
The good news is that any ordinary citizen can help solve the first problem, by taking your turn in jury duty and not automatically assuming the police are telling the truth.
TFA states "Due to security and privacy concerns, we anonymize their names and label them as Carrier A and Carrier B."
I'm guessing that's in fact BS, and the real reason they don't tell you which carrier is which is to protect themselves from massive lawsuits, or possibly because Microsoft Research can't offend the carriers because their corporate overlords want to have deals to sell Windows-based smartphones to them.
Astronomers believe they caught the supernova within hours of its explosion, a rare feat made possible with a specialized survey telescope and state-of-the-art computational tools
An amazingly rare feat, as not only did they catch the supernova right away, they somehow violated the universal speed limit of c in order to do so. Someone call the physics police on "chill" or Soulskill or whoever made that summary.
Arizona seems to be pretty safe from natural disasters.
What about wildfires?
Isn't it funny how all the cloud spin states that there'd never be a problem with spinning clouds?
Yeah, this is exactly what happens if you don't make the proper offerings to Poseidon. Well, except possibly the tornado part.
How about "the science is settled among nearly everyone not paid to come up with the answer that AGW isn't happening"?
The DOJ has shown itself to be completely unwilling to prosecute bankers or their regulators.
Not only that, but the DoJ has also taken steps to punish other government officials, notably New York AG Eric Schneiderman, for looking for ways to prosecute under their own authority. They've made it clear that the only penalty the Obama administration will accept for the banks is a fine of somewhere around $60 billion, which will look like a big number to satisfy the public but is peanuts compared to what those banks earned with their illegal practices.
That is more true than many would like to think. There are 2 ways this can happen:
1. For poor kids, a good-hearted but misguided social worker may try to give them a diagnosis so they have a better chance of passing in school.
2. For rich kids, parents will try to give them a diagnosis in order to give them a leg up on exams, get them into and through good schools, and so forth.
What the diagnosis is changes: 15 years ago, the kids were all getting diagnosed with ADHD. About 7 years ago, it became autism or Asperger's. While the circumstances and genetics of kids change, I find it hard to believe that all of a sudden the causes of ADHD gave way to the causes of autism.
He's wearing a "Knuth is my Homeboy" shirt, does that qualify him?
Don't know, don't care. Perhaps the parents should have thought about possible costs before procreating?
So now you have a mass of uncared-for, uneducated, unemployable poor kids sitting around with basically nothing to do but join up with criminal gangs. Of course, you can respond to that problem with increased policing, but that means that you're now paying more than you saved in education for police, judges, and juvenile detention.
And that's ignoring the philosophical problem of how much children should be penalized for the sins and stupidity of their parents.
Oh, you don't have to go back 500 years to get their ideal society. You only really need to go back to the 1890's or so, when Robber Barons ran everything, corruption in politics was rampant, and a few very large banking organizations (most notably J.P. Morgan's) were able to violate laws with impunity. Both Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt did a lot to put a stop to it, and there were also lots of socialists and anarchists such as Emma Goldman, Upton Sinclair, and later Eugene Debs running around arguing that if workers didn't get a government more responsive to them, they should all stop working and see how the fat cats liked that.
A few of the other big issues with the US system:
* The US system has a summer vacation, while most other school systems do not. The effect of this policy, a legacy of the 19th century when kids had to go work the family farm in the summer, is that not only do students lose about 2-3 months in the summer, they also lose 2-3 months in the fall reviewing all the stuff they covered in the previous year that they've forgotten over the break.
* A particular style of conservative Protestantism actively discourages the proper study of many subjects. In the really extreme cases, they'll go after math departments for teaching that pi != 3, but more commonly go after history books that acknowledge that the world existed before God created it c 4000 BC (and none of that "BCE / CE" business either, it's "BC" and "AD"), biology books that teach that life as we know it was the result of natural processes, and any efforts by humanities teachers to incorporate art and culture that has viewpoints that don't match up exactly with their worldview.
* A lot of politicians want to go to a system in which only private schools exist and education is limited to those who's parents can afford to pay. A good way to make their political case is to ensure that the public schools suck. Or as the joke sometimes goes, Republicans argue that government doesn't work, and once elected to office do their best to prove their point.
You're absolutely right that with US schools, there is no silver bullet.
No, the real story here is that Bruce Schneier went back in time and encoded the secrets to human happiness on this obscure species genetic code using advanced steganography. The effects of beer are proof of his contribution.
Besides, if the Earth is completely uninhabitable, Google can just retreat to their moon base.
That's the whole point: GP is arguing that this sort of practice is in fact quite normal, and that Microsoft will probably not stop just because of the bad press.
It's not that lots of meaningless sex is bad for you, it's that it makes an excellent distraction from thinking too carefully about the bigger picture. Oh, and also, most of the sex that's portrayed as cool tends to be of the stupid and risky variety - it's not like you have characters sitting down in films and TV shows saying "Ok, we need to make sure that nobody's going to get pregnant or end up HIV positive from this."
Actually, to create a truly great dancing robot, you need to get one of the new-fangled model of the ABB, the ABBA.
Add to that that basically every religion in that area had its own creation myth
Actually, not just in that area. Almost every single religious belief system ever known to exist has at some point developed a creation myth. They vary a lot in their focus and meaning, but some interesting commonalities include a conflict between a mighty god of some kind and an opposing force with us humans caught in the middle. For instance, the Acheans had pretty well settled on Zeus defeating Kronos, and early Indian writings focus on Indra defeating Vrtra. But you're absolutely right that Genesis has a lot of parallels with the Zoroastrianism found in much of the Middle East at the time.
That means you have to target the 2 things that can be changed:
1. The "uncool" part of it - many cultures worldwide have made educational success totally cool. The trouble is that many powerful factions within the US want the masses to be stupid, because stupid people are easier to control, and as such teach kids that the most cool things they can possibly do are (a) smash their heads into other children over an oblate spheroid, (b) go to some faraway land and kill people, (c) ingest mind-numbing chemical substances, (d) have lots of totally meaningless sex, and (e) for a select few, compete with their peers to please authority figures. It's no accident that (a) and (b) encourage boys in particular to become good soldiers, (c) and (d) serve as excellent distractions (read Brave New World), and (e) teaches the middle-class kids in particular to be running over each other trying to please the upper crust.
2. The "not all that interesting" part is typically a lack of creativity on the part of how we teach kids. I've taught kids who you wouldn't think were at all interested in math a bit of trigonometry and similar triangles. Not by sitting them down in front of a chalkboard, but by giving them the problem of building a set of porch steps and working with them on figuring out how to cut the boards so that the steps would be level and a reasonable angle to climb. That way of teaching, though, is typically more expensive than just lining them up in a classroom, drugging them with Ritalin and the like, and saying "learn it or else".
It's one thing to say to the press "We're likely to do X". It's another thing entirely to say privately "We're definitely going to do X, no question about it." In the first case, everybody knows at the same time, and it's a statement of likelihood, not fact. In the second case, insiders have information that is different from the world at large that gives them an unfair advantage in the markets. By comparison, imagine what would have happened if S&P had been screaming to the press that they'd be downgrading, but telling their buddies that they weren't actually going to do it and were just blowing smoke.
Your 95% guesstimate is probably quite incorrect, given that at least 30% of households currently don't have a computer of any kind. Now, schools in relatively wealthy suburbs are more likely to have a high Facebook participation rate, but a teacher at a public school isn't supposed to be expecting that a student necessarily has access to those tools because of the financial burden of getting and keeping Internet access.
During the Roman Empire, why were Germans still barbarians?
That's actually not that hard to answer, but the answer is completely different from what you might think. The Roman definition of "barbarian" was largely "people we haven't conquered or bought off yet", so (for example) the Gauls prior to Julius Caesar's butt-kicking campaign were barbarians but became integrated with Roman society within a century. The Germans remained "barbarians" because they'd kicked the butts of the Romans when they tried to move in at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.
By far the most significant technological difference between the Germans and Romans were that the Romans had written language and the Germans didn't. One indication of their general technical parity that is that once the Germans had a good reason to move (namely, the Huns attacking from the east), they were able to manage quite well against the Romans.
In other words, the third-party library playground is larger and moving faster than the standard library. I'd expect that in any code base, because the standard library out of necessity has to be more concerned with backwards compatibility so that the next language upgrade doesn't break existing code. For instance, strcpy is still supported in C, even though it's widely regarded as very unsafe.
But you'll notice that the Python standard library slowly adds in third-party modules that are widely used and are best-in-class, and slowly kicks out older modules that suck. For instance, the string module has very little left in it that's not deprecated.
What color most professional athletes are varies wildly across different sports in the US - baseball is majority white with a large Hispanic minority, football and basketball are both majority black with large white contingents, soccer is mostly white but with significant black and Hispanic minorities (source), and less popular but still significant sports like auto racing, hockey, tennis and golf are almost exclusively white.
Most of the evidence out there suggests that athletic ability is not heavily tied to race at all. If you look at the racial makeup of a professional sport, it's typically not much different from the racial makeup of the college, high school, or casual players of that sport. That tells you that the racial breakdown of the pros has a lot more to do with who chooses to play a particular sport and spend the thousands of hours it takes to get really good at it.