PLOS One can put its amateur entomologists up against the mass of data accumulated when we thought that the Soviets were going to head into the Fulda Gap with nerve gases softening up the way. Let's see how it stacks up.
I'm going to go with "this is bullshit" for $100. No decline in insects anywhere I have spent much time.
To his credit, MLK rejected the Soviet funds and refused to work with them, but others in the black activist (ok, terrorist...we're talking the Black Panthers here) were all too willing to take the funds and materiel.
The Soviets had the view that the Achilles heel of the US was black vs white enmity, and have funded it carefully for many years now.
Mitrokhin, "Secret History of the KGB". Great story how he got out of Russia and how he compiled the archive while working at the KGB.
You're avoiding the reality that the unions were a short term cudgel until progressive-era laws were put into place to prevent the abuses you refer to. Once political power was in the hands of a Teddy Roosevelt, let's say, or his nephew, things changed rapidly. In the Gilded Age, sure, a union was your best bet, but that hasn't been for almost 100 years now. In the meantime, unions do kill businesses and they restrain trade, to the detriment of workers who would otherwise be productive, but have to take employment at below the maximal wage that would be available had not everything but the service jobs fled overseas.
As for steel - it should be clear enough that if the steel workers unions were interested in the well being of their workers, they'd figure out a way to cooperate with the management to maximize employment for the longest period possible. That isn't what happened, in practice. Basically, management would keep fighting with the unions until they took a decision to close a plant, which tended to end the labor difficulties in one fell swoop. The decision was often driven by such factors. I don't blame the workers, but I do blame the false idea that collective bargaining is necessarily good for workers. That's just bogus.
The truth is that the Big Three automakers were (and are) unable to respond to competitive stresses caused by places with lower wages being able to export into the US market. The lame management was a given - though there were only three things the management could do:
1) Cut costs sufficiently to compete - I rate this as nigh-impossible as a practical matter, as things like transport, raw materials, and infrastructure cost more here, too, and the automakers couldn't remake the whole economy all on their own. That said, this is where unions hurt the most.
Unions are rather shortsighted beasts and they cause more harm to manufacturing workers in the long run than they help. If you take a year-long or five year view, they are great. Look over a career's length, and the evidence is equivocal. Over 100 years, the union will kill any manufacturing business dead. The objective of the union is to maximize return for the union members and to control/limit access to the labor market in that industry in the interest of maintaining scarcity toward maximizing union member return. This is rarely congruent with the interests of the manufacturer, most obviously in times of competitive stress. Unions are great at getting workers stuff when the going is good, but when it is rough, they are unwilling to give anything back. Unions most typically force the manufacturer to reach the edge of bankruptcy and total dissolution before the union is willing to negotiate in good faith and with urgency, and by then it is much too late.
You need only look at what happened to US Steel, if the automakers aren't convincing enough.
2) Diversify - which was done, but was insufficent to stop the bleeding. Think, say, investments in Mazda by Ford, or in Isuzu/Suzuki by GM (Geo line).
3) Push their political masters to restrict trade to protect their market. This is what was ultimately done. You didn't think all those foreign car makers built plants in the US for their health, did you? They were compelled to. All that free trade talk is bullshit once your ox starts getting gored.
So, those who blame the unions and blame the management have lots of details to pick from to support their view. My view is that we should just accept that free trade is a phantom and stop pretending that we don't have a corporatist, protectionist regime. It's the only way the old-fashioned US economy works on a macroscopic level. Even the internet companies are starting to feel the pinch and are going to become part of this old school economy before long.
Why is so much of politics today pretending we don't believe in what we actually do believe in?
This is a bad idea and the convenience factor makes it worse. We'll have people whining on video in a few years about having their lives ruined by these things, and wanting the government to save them from their own stupidity. Conjure up your own scenario, it's easy to do - these things own your life once you give them credentials and such.
What is this American bias against believing that our own government is in the propaganda business the same way every other country is engaged in the propaganda business? Our government lies freely to serve its own aims and always has - and believe me on this, I work for it!
Probably the same way nearly all Americans think the US is based on classically liberal principles like those old Saturday morning civics cartoons rather than being a corporatist fascist state, as it has been at least since the 1930s. Cognitive dissonance is a powerful thing.
Microsoft failing to secure its operating systems is a painful story that has taken over 25 years to unwind, exacerbated by that internet thing.
Your biggest threat is a social attack on your credentials, which your AV does nothing for. Your next biggest threat is a zero day, which is not something your AV will stop. The next threat on the list is user error, mostly running things you shouldn't on your computer. The purpose of AV is orthogonal to this problem, and the signature-based stuff mostly won't help.
Since AV doesn't stop the most significant threats, it hardly has a purpose. Back in the DOS days, I could make a good argument for it, but today? Nah. You might as well assume compromise, use a password manager and change them frequently.
True, they can sit on their cash for aeons, but Apple as a tastemaker has literally already died. The last vestiges of the reality distortion field let up, and now it's back to early 90's Apple, the company that couldn't do anything right.
The retarded leftists on this site all are convinced they can bend reality with willpower alone. Some of them will never figure out that they are wrong.
I don't think people want Hulu. Having a promo price isn't going to change that. It's a service without much of a premise, and doesn't have any other business to bundle its service with to get subscribers, either. Netflix got where it was by mailing DVDs. What did Hulu ever do that people found even marginally interesting?
It'll go in phases. Someone will eventually fill the need. They'll pretend the loss of profits is something else until someone achieves the magic formula.
Not going to buy a new set because Apple - or Google wants me to. Fuck them. I'd sooner switch cell phones. Eventually, the manufacturers will get the message.
The idiot Hal Smith, former NSA employee, apparently put stuff that shouldn't have been seen outside a SCIF on his home system. His content was exfiltrated, presumably by Russians. But now it's the vector of the exfiltration's fault that classified material was stolen.
News flash: the system was broken the moment the stuff saw a computer outside of an airgapped network. For that matter, Mr. Smith put himself in criminal jeopardy at that moment.
If the guy had been using Avast or Bitdefender, would that have made you feel better? Do you really think the Russians couldn't penetrate the firms providing those products? Think again.
While we're at it, do you really think that the Russians are the only people soaking up data from the US like a sponge? Why so much focus on their activities? You'd think people had a political axe to grind, almost...
Somehow, I made it out of my parents' basement over the past 48 1/2 years. In the process, I got a clearance and roll with more background checking and additional ID than most people will ever have. None of that makes me feel even slightly safe, because I know it's all bullshit, really. It doesn't protect against espionage, identity theft or anything else, really. Moreover, the aggregation of key information into a single database is what enabled the OPM breach that gave it all away to (presumably) the Chinese. So some guy in China now knows everything about me, including my personal contacts and whatever data the USG gleaned during my background investigation.
I subjected myself to this, and I really only have myself to blame for being captured in the OPM hack. People shouldn't be forcibly subjected to this for zero gain in any critical way. And the data won't remain secure. That much is obvious, now. Governments cannot secure electronic data.
There's lots wrong with the system, but an ID card with crypto isn't going to fix anything, just make things worse.
It's painfully obvious why a national id is a bad thing. There are people on both left and right who think it is a bad idea.
Another document you have to carry - "papers, please" Instantly used for voting and other government services to filter those who can get them. That's racist! YA form of ID to renew Simple way to make noncompulsory things compulsory - census responses, selective service, jury duty
Just another step toward totalitarianism and the utter devaluation of human liberty. Fuck that. No one wants your efficiency, or your supposed protection from cybercriminals. This reminds me of the old email idea response sheet.
Do you somehow think Mussolini was the only guy in the early 1900s who was influenced by Nietzsche? Soviet communism drew quite a bit from that font as well. As such, Nietzsche being a litmus test for "fascism" or "right-wing-ism" is a nonsequitur.
Fascism is utterly leftist. It eschews liberal values and reactionary values - often using the same verbiage as communists or progressives might. Fascism believes in socialism in the terms that Marx pioneered. However, Fascism believes in a national socialism - a socialism confined to a single country, just as Bolshevism eventually settled on a somewhat similar formula in the Soviet Union until the Second World War. As such, measures practiced by communists are virtually identical to fascist measures, including police states, collectivization of industry and agriculture, belief in group rights over individual rights, et al ad nauseam.
But really, can you seriously sit there with a straight face and call a political system that expropriates property for the people 'Volk', hollows out or topples monarchies, and guarantees jobs for the public, along with all the socialist medical and retirement benefits you might care to mention, a 'right wing phenomenon'?
Please...what a load of bullshit has been foisted on the public for 70 years in the name of propagandistic differentiation between the Nazi enemy and Soviet 'ally'. The communists and fellow travelers dominating the media and academia have been perfectly happy to continue this lie to the benefit of their preferred political system. Otherwise, we'd have to brand all forms of left-wing totalitarianism - Communism, Fascism and Progressivism - murderous evils, as they are.
Bresenham's algorithm is not an anti-aliasing method. It's simply a path approximator for line segments. If you want anti-aliasing, you're going to have to use Wu.
I shouldn't even respond but it's true. You have no fucking idea what you are talking about. Steam trains aren't rockets. Rockets aren't safe and will never be.
Failure mode. If the Concorde had a catastrophic failure, true, it was likely that all aboard were toast, but engine failures, loss of fuel, etc were all theoretically survivable without losing the entire craft. Any suborbital spacecraft has some pretty shitty options in terms of failure.
The reliability of spacecraft over time doesn't warm the heart about avoiding that fatal loss of life event where people are then unwilling to use the craft. Before someone brings up the Soyuz program... it was/is less reliable than the Shuttle, which itself was demonstrated unreliable over time.
Bottom line: being atop a huge stack of combustible materials where over 90% of the mass is volatile fuel is not a safe thing and cannot be made safe, by any reasonable standard. I might ride it because I am ok with chopper flights in war zones and the like, and haven't minded much being shot at in the past. But will my mother? Would I consider it reasonable to bring a child on such a craft? My wife? No.
As a side note, the Concordes also pushed the envelope in terms of takeoff speed because of design decisions, and this is what caused the only fatal crash of the airplane, essentially.
There is no way that this craft could be made safe enough for people to trust it. First accident, and no one wants to use it anymore.
There is also no way the launch cost and infrastructure required could be made affordable for city to city travel. Even a Concorde turned out to be unaffordable over the long term, and that was quite a bit simpler than this scheme.
Slashdot Mirror
PLOS One can put its amateur entomologists up against the mass of data accumulated when we thought that the Soviets were going to head into the Fulda Gap with nerve gases softening up the way. Let's see how it stacks up.
I'm going to go with "this is bullshit" for $100. No decline in insects anywhere I have spent much time.
To his credit, MLK rejected the Soviet funds and refused to work with them, but others in the black activist (ok, terrorist...we're talking the Black Panthers here) were all too willing to take the funds and materiel.
The Soviets had the view that the Achilles heel of the US was black vs white enmity, and have funded it carefully for many years now.
Mitrokhin, "Secret History of the KGB". Great story how he got out of Russia and how he compiled the archive while working at the KGB.
You're avoiding the reality that the unions were a short term cudgel until progressive-era laws were put into place to prevent the abuses you refer to. Once political power was in the hands of a Teddy Roosevelt, let's say, or his nephew, things changed rapidly. In the Gilded Age, sure, a union was your best bet, but that hasn't been for almost 100 years now. In the meantime, unions do kill businesses and they restrain trade, to the detriment of workers who would otherwise be productive, but have to take employment at below the maximal wage that would be available had not everything but the service jobs fled overseas.
As for steel - it should be clear enough that if the steel workers unions were interested in the well being of their workers, they'd figure out a way to cooperate with the management to maximize employment for the longest period possible. That isn't what happened, in practice. Basically, management would keep fighting with the unions until they took a decision to close a plant, which tended to end the labor difficulties in one fell swoop. The decision was often driven by such factors. I don't blame the workers, but I do blame the false idea that collective bargaining is necessarily good for workers. That's just bogus.
The truth is that the Big Three automakers were (and are) unable to respond to competitive stresses caused by places with lower wages being able to export into the US market. The lame management was a given - though there were only three things the management could do:
1) Cut costs sufficiently to compete - I rate this as nigh-impossible as a practical matter, as things like transport, raw materials, and infrastructure cost more here, too, and the automakers couldn't remake the whole economy all on their own. That said, this is where unions hurt the most.
Unions are rather shortsighted beasts and they cause more harm to manufacturing workers in the long run than they help. If you take a year-long or five year view, they are great. Look over a career's length, and the evidence is equivocal. Over 100 years, the union will kill any manufacturing business dead. The objective of the union is to maximize return for the union members and to control/limit access to the labor market in that industry in the interest of maintaining scarcity toward maximizing union member return. This is rarely congruent with the interests of the manufacturer, most obviously in times of competitive stress. Unions are great at getting workers stuff when the going is good, but when it is rough, they are unwilling to give anything back. Unions most typically force the manufacturer to reach the edge of bankruptcy and total dissolution before the union is willing to negotiate in good faith and with urgency, and by then it is much too late.
You need only look at what happened to US Steel, if the automakers aren't convincing enough.
2) Diversify - which was done, but was insufficent to stop the bleeding. Think, say, investments in Mazda by Ford, or in Isuzu/Suzuki by GM (Geo line).
3) Push their political masters to restrict trade to protect their market. This is what was ultimately done. You didn't think all those foreign car makers built plants in the US for their health, did you? They were compelled to. All that free trade talk is bullshit once your ox starts getting gored.
So, those who blame the unions and blame the management have lots of details to pick from to support their view. My view is that we should just accept that free trade is a phantom and stop pretending that we don't have a corporatist, protectionist regime. It's the only way the old-fashioned US economy works on a macroscopic level. Even the internet companies are starting to feel the pinch and are going to become part of this old school economy before long.
Why is so much of politics today pretending we don't believe in what we actually do believe in?
And it can not be. It just is.
This is a bad idea and the convenience factor makes it worse. We'll have people whining on video in a few years about having their lives ruined by these things, and wanting the government to save them from their own stupidity. Conjure up your own scenario, it's easy to do - these things own your life once you give them credentials and such.
What is this American bias against believing that our own government is in the propaganda business the same way every other country is engaged in the propaganda business? Our government lies freely to serve its own aims and always has - and believe me on this, I work for it!
Probably the same way nearly all Americans think the US is based on classically liberal principles like those old Saturday morning civics cartoons rather than being a corporatist fascist state, as it has been at least since the 1930s. Cognitive dissonance is a powerful thing.
Microsoft failing to secure its operating systems is a painful story that has taken over 25 years to unwind, exacerbated by that internet thing.
Your biggest threat is a social attack on your credentials, which your AV does nothing for. Your next biggest threat is a zero day, which is not something your AV will stop. The next threat on the list is user error, mostly running things you shouldn't on your computer. The purpose of AV is orthogonal to this problem, and the signature-based stuff mostly won't help.
Since AV doesn't stop the most significant threats, it hardly has a purpose. Back in the DOS days, I could make a good argument for it, but today? Nah. You might as well assume compromise, use a password manager and change them frequently.
You might want to check your facts.
True, they can sit on their cash for aeons, but Apple as a tastemaker has literally already died. The last vestiges of the reality distortion field let up, and now it's back to early 90's Apple, the company that couldn't do anything right.
No amount of virtue signaling is going to save them from that.
The retarded leftists on this site all are convinced they can bend reality with willpower alone. Some of them will never figure out that they are wrong.
I don't think people want Hulu. Having a promo price isn't going to change that. It's a service without much of a premise, and doesn't have any other business to bundle its service with to get subscribers, either. Netflix got where it was by mailing DVDs. What did Hulu ever do that people found even marginally interesting?
For the endless "BSD is dying" replies of the past.
It'll go in phases. Someone will eventually fill the need. They'll pretend the loss of profits is something else until someone achieves the magic formula.
Not going to buy a new set because Apple - or Google wants me to. Fuck them. I'd sooner switch cell phones. Eventually, the manufacturers will get the message.
The idiot Hal Smith, former NSA employee, apparently put stuff that shouldn't have been seen outside a SCIF on his home system. His content was exfiltrated, presumably by Russians. But now it's the vector of the exfiltration's fault that classified material was stolen.
News flash: the system was broken the moment the stuff saw a computer outside of an airgapped network. For that matter, Mr. Smith put himself in criminal jeopardy at that moment.
If the guy had been using Avast or Bitdefender, would that have made you feel better? Do you really think the Russians couldn't penetrate the firms providing those products? Think again.
While we're at it, do you really think that the Russians are the only people soaking up data from the US like a sponge? Why so much focus on their activities? You'd think people had a political axe to grind, almost...
Somehow, I made it out of my parents' basement over the past 48 1/2 years. In the process, I got a clearance and roll with more background checking and additional ID than most people will ever have. None of that makes me feel even slightly safe, because I know it's all bullshit, really. It doesn't protect against espionage, identity theft or anything else, really. Moreover, the aggregation of key information into a single database is what enabled the OPM breach that gave it all away to (presumably) the Chinese. So some guy in China now knows everything about me, including my personal contacts and whatever data the USG gleaned during my background investigation.
I subjected myself to this, and I really only have myself to blame for being captured in the OPM hack. People shouldn't be forcibly subjected to this for zero gain in any critical way. And the data won't remain secure. That much is obvious, now. Governments cannot secure electronic data.
There's lots wrong with the system, but an ID card with crypto isn't going to fix anything, just make things worse.
It's painfully obvious why a national id is a bad thing. There are people on both left and right who think it is a bad idea.
Another document you have to carry - "papers, please"
Instantly used for voting and other government services to filter those who can get them. That's racist!
YA form of ID to renew
Simple way to make noncompulsory things compulsory - census responses, selective service, jury duty
Just another step toward totalitarianism and the utter devaluation of human liberty. Fuck that. No one wants your efficiency, or your supposed protection from cybercriminals. This reminds me of the old email idea response sheet.
Wouldn't the quantization of spacetime qualify as a fundamental resolution limit, in and of itself?
Do you somehow think Mussolini was the only guy in the early 1900s who was influenced by Nietzsche? Soviet communism drew quite a bit from that font as well. As such, Nietzsche being a litmus test for "fascism" or "right-wing-ism" is a nonsequitur.
Fascism is utterly leftist. It eschews liberal values and reactionary values - often using the same verbiage as communists or progressives might. Fascism believes in socialism in the terms that Marx pioneered. However, Fascism believes in a national socialism - a socialism confined to a single country, just as Bolshevism eventually settled on a somewhat similar formula in the Soviet Union until the Second World War. As such, measures practiced by communists are virtually identical to fascist measures, including police states, collectivization of industry and agriculture, belief in group rights over individual rights, et al ad nauseam.
But really, can you seriously sit there with a straight face and call a political system that expropriates property for the people 'Volk', hollows out or topples monarchies, and guarantees jobs for the public, along with all the socialist medical and retirement benefits you might care to mention, a 'right wing phenomenon'?
Please...what a load of bullshit has been foisted on the public for 70 years in the name of propagandistic differentiation between the Nazi enemy and Soviet 'ally'. The communists and fellow travelers dominating the media and academia have been perfectly happy to continue this lie to the benefit of their preferred political system. Otherwise, we'd have to brand all forms of left-wing totalitarianism - Communism, Fascism and Progressivism - murderous evils, as they are.
Bresenham's algorithm is not an anti-aliasing method. It's simply a path approximator for line segments. If you want anti-aliasing, you're going to have to use Wu.
I agree with the broad brush of your post.
I shouldn't even respond but it's true. You have no fucking idea what you are talking about. Steam trains aren't rockets. Rockets aren't safe and will never be.
Failure mode. If the Concorde had a catastrophic failure, true, it was likely that all aboard were toast, but engine failures, loss of fuel, etc were all theoretically survivable without losing the entire craft. Any suborbital spacecraft has some pretty shitty options in terms of failure.
The reliability of spacecraft over time doesn't warm the heart about avoiding that fatal loss of life event where people are then unwilling to use the craft. Before someone brings up the Soyuz program... it was/is less reliable than the Shuttle, which itself was demonstrated unreliable over time.
Bottom line: being atop a huge stack of combustible materials where over 90% of the mass is volatile fuel is not a safe thing and cannot be made safe, by any reasonable standard. I might ride it because I am ok with chopper flights in war zones and the like, and haven't minded much being shot at in the past. But will my mother? Would I consider it reasonable to bring a child on such a craft? My wife? No.
As a side note, the Concordes also pushed the envelope in terms of takeoff speed because of design decisions, and this is what caused the only fatal crash of the airplane, essentially.
There is no way that this craft could be made safe enough for people to trust it. First accident, and no one wants to use it anymore.
There is also no way the launch cost and infrastructure required could be made affordable for city to city travel. Even a Concorde turned out to be unaffordable over the long term, and that was quite a bit simpler than this scheme.