Surprised no one mentioned this yet. Why people think the Air Force guy is crazy is beyond me. Of course autonomous systems that kill are a threat to humanity.
I suppose I can't assure that the counterfactual wouldn't have been true. But I have my doubts. The Soviets were really good about maintaining internal control and I don't think information dissemination would have done all that much. The Voice of America was pounding them with broadcasts for 40+ years with little effect.
The Soviet Union ultimately fell to a popular uprising, inasmuch as the hardliners lost their nerve during the 1991 coup. Were you around for this, with Yeltsin on top of a tank? Maybe not...here's a BBC link. This was all like it was yesterday to me, but it is 25 years ago now. Enough time for someone to grow up to adulthood without knowing about it.
As for what happened before, Gorbachev's 'glasnost' and 'perestroika' policies were essentially driven by a reformist Communist agenda. He believed that by changing the way the state ran, the economic system could be preserved. He was wrong. The hardliners in the 1991 coup wanted to restore the full Soviet package of repression and isolation, but realized they lacked sufficient support to make it happen.
After the coup, the constituent states of the Soviet Union all opted out by the end of 1991, and it passed into history. Anyway, I don't see how you don't call this a popular uprising. Gorby was trying to avoid a civil war by reforming, but in the end the people basically kicked him out of his job and went their own way.
The Chinese were a lot smarter about this - junk the socialist economic system and keep the authoritarianism. It's a lot more functional, though they're running into a brick wall now with that.
They do, but the Soviets used to register and control typewriters. And for all the samizdat activity in the old S.U., what ultimately undid them were blue jeans. Or more precisely, lack of consumer goods. So you can be way too paranoid, y'know?
Do you really believe that online activity had anything to do with that?
It's a convenient belief structure, but the issues that caused the uprisings were going to come to fruition even if Vint Cerf had concluded that packet based communication had no future.
In addition, I get the impression that Android = "cheap" is pretty well ingrained into at least the US market. All the junkiest phones advertise running Android nowadays. Avoiding the term is probably a net benefit for vendors intending to charge a premium.
The Soviet Union was every inch a real threat, as it had a real nuclear arsenal. The residual weapons in Russia's hands still make it the largest in the world in terms of warheads. It also had, by far, the largest credible conventional army in the world for 46 years after the end of WWII, with a history of regular use (1956, 1968, 1979/80), and battlefield success. The Soviets were involved in every brushfire war happening in Africa and Asia, and even a few involvements in the Americas - Cuba and Nicaragua come to mind. The Soviets were interested in dominating the world, though in a less revolutionary way than in the days of the original Comintern. Dozens of nations around the world had Marxist regimes sustained by Soviet aid, and growing that sphere of influence to isolate and Finlandize the West - and specifically the United States - was the Soviet plan.
In summary, shove your revisionist crap up your ass. I lived in fear of those warheads ending society as I knew it for my first 20 years. The fact that the Soviets only got nuclear weapons through the actions of Communist spies and fellow travelers associated with the Manhattan Project...well, explains why I hate leftists gratuitously.
Did panspermia get ruled out while I wasn't watching?
If that ends up being the reason life arose here, then we actually don't know that much about the chemistry that begat life. I have seen lots of ideas about how we might end up with amino acids but not a lot about how that would turn into a cell.
That said, the commentary is a little speculative. With a sample size of one, the conclusions we can draw about life across the universe are very limited.
If I had a Spotify account, i'd be closing it right now. I have done so with every firm that forces a mandatory password change, from banks to message boards. My logic is that their security sucks and forcing a pw change just lengthens my misery working with them.
And it was open like that because it was directly competing with CP/M systems which generally were same/same - source of the BIOS readily available and easily dumpable from the system's ROM.
Precisely. It's like the idiot light on your car for gas/overheating/whatever. If you failed to note the problem, it might warn you. Find a lightweight program and suck it up. I ran without AV from the late 80s to about 2011, and then I gave in based on the more subtle threats that were becoming common. Just not running scripts and untrusted attachments wasn't feeling entirely safe in an age of hidden filesystems that could get past air gaps.
For the record, i'd never gotten anything I knew about and no AV was ever able to find malware on my personal systems. No guarantees, but it was a pretty good record.
You're technically correct but I got a full bird colonel Army doctor to say I could deploy. It got up that high. The G6 of the unit in question wanted me to deploy _really_ bad and pushed it to that extent.
I've been injecting insulin and other drugs for 16 years now. No fuckups. No reactions. Nothing, and i'm no one special in this regard. It sounds like epinephrine is less stable than insulin in storage, but I could work with that - I used to carry my drugs in a sealed metal thermos on travel. Deployed to Iraq and back that way in 07-08.
I am concerned about the lubrication and circuit boards (electrolytic caps, mostly) associated with hard disks over long term storage. I have found a high failure rate on my own old hard drives - old MFM drives were kind of crappily engineered, however, so the fact that an ST-251 drive from 1990 doesn't work today shouldn't necessarily be indicative of the lifespan of say, a WD Black 1TB manufactured in 2010.
In my world, we rely on practical tests of functionality *with the actual users* rather than theoretical measures of effectiveness. It seems the CDC agrees with me on this one.
As to one of your other points:
"The bottom line is that a single act of intercourse between a young couple has on average a one in 20 chance of pregnancy – this assumes the opportunity presented itself on a random day, as these things tend do when you are young."
So the answer is based on how often you fuck. The CDC numbers do not map precisely to data of this sort, however.
Last point: "measuring the effectiveness of encouraging people not to fuck" sounds like the craptastic questionnaire-based research I saw at (not to pick on them) the Lehigh psych department in the early 2000s. People lie, and they can't simulate the paths not taken effectively. There would literally be no way to know if someone decided to not have sexual intercourse based on an abstinence campaign.
Besides, my kind of abstinence campaign would be "Blowjobs for Everyone" or "Real lovers wank each other".
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Surprised no one mentioned this yet. Why people think the Air Force guy is crazy is beyond me. Of course autonomous systems that kill are a threat to humanity.
You'd think a porn sniffing dog might detect the faint scent of jizz on the usb sticks. Would probably start hitting on the cop's crotch and hand.
I suppose I can't assure that the counterfactual wouldn't have been true. But I have my doubts. The Soviets were really good about maintaining internal control and I don't think information dissemination would have done all that much. The Voice of America was pounding them with broadcasts for 40+ years with little effect.
The Soviet Union ultimately fell to a popular uprising, inasmuch as the hardliners lost their nerve during the 1991 coup. Were you around for this, with Yeltsin on top of a tank? Maybe not...here's a BBC link. This was all like it was yesterday to me, but it is 25 years ago now. Enough time for someone to grow up to adulthood without knowing about it.
As for what happened before, Gorbachev's 'glasnost' and 'perestroika' policies were essentially driven by a reformist Communist agenda. He believed that by changing the way the state ran, the economic system could be preserved. He was wrong. The hardliners in the 1991 coup wanted to restore the full Soviet package of repression and isolation, but realized they lacked sufficient support to make it happen.
After the coup, the constituent states of the Soviet Union all opted out by the end of 1991, and it passed into history. Anyway, I don't see how you don't call this a popular uprising. Gorby was trying to avoid a civil war by reforming, but in the end the people basically kicked him out of his job and went their own way.
The Chinese were a lot smarter about this - junk the socialist economic system and keep the authoritarianism. It's a lot more functional, though they're running into a brick wall now with that.
They do, but the Soviets used to register and control typewriters. And for all the samizdat activity in the old S.U., what ultimately undid them were blue jeans. Or more precisely, lack of consumer goods. So you can be way too paranoid, y'know?
Do you really believe that online activity had anything to do with that?
It's a convenient belief structure, but the issues that caused the uprisings were going to come to fruition even if Vint Cerf had concluded that packet based communication had no future.
Tempests in teapots. I'm sure people online like to think collective opinion matters here, but it doesn't, really.
So your argument is that the US should have just rolled over and let the Soviets take over the world? Got it.
Leftist tripe.
Very logical thought process.
In addition, I get the impression that Android = "cheap" is pretty well ingrained into at least the US market. All the junkiest phones advertise running Android nowadays. Avoiding the term is probably a net benefit for vendors intending to charge a premium.
The Soviet Union was every inch a real threat, as it had a real nuclear arsenal. The residual weapons in Russia's hands still make it the largest in the world in terms of warheads. It also had, by far, the largest credible conventional army in the world for 46 years after the end of WWII, with a history of regular use (1956, 1968, 1979/80), and battlefield success. The Soviets were involved in every brushfire war happening in Africa and Asia, and even a few involvements in the Americas - Cuba and Nicaragua come to mind. The Soviets were interested in dominating the world, though in a less revolutionary way than in the days of the original Comintern. Dozens of nations around the world had Marxist regimes sustained by Soviet aid, and growing that sphere of influence to isolate and Finlandize the West - and specifically the United States - was the Soviet plan.
In summary, shove your revisionist crap up your ass. I lived in fear of those warheads ending society as I knew it for my first 20 years. The fact that the Soviets only got nuclear weapons through the actions of Communist spies and fellow travelers associated with the Manhattan Project...well, explains why I hate leftists gratuitously.
Did panspermia get ruled out while I wasn't watching?
If that ends up being the reason life arose here, then we actually don't know that much about the chemistry that begat life. I have seen lots of ideas about how we might end up with amino acids but not a lot about how that would turn into a cell.
I do believe this a serious article.
That said, the commentary is a little speculative. With a sample size of one, the conclusions we can draw about life across the universe are very limited.
Oh, those two leftist assholes...wouldn't know the truth if it bit them.
I wonder if they are tracking this. I think they need to be reminded of this - all three of them.
Agreed, this is just dumb.
If I had a Spotify account, i'd be closing it right now. I have done so with every firm that forces a mandatory password change, from banks to message boards. My logic is that their security sucks and forcing a pw change just lengthens my misery working with them.
The guns did nothing. The people fucked around and killed themselves. Stop equating a terrorist group with an inanimate object.
He's adding in all accidental gun deaths and suicides, which are overwhelmingly done using guns because it's fast and (presumed) less painful.
In other words, a typical lying leftist scumbag.
And it was open like that because it was directly competing with CP/M systems which generally were same/same - source of the BIOS readily available and easily dumpable from the system's ROM.
Precisely. It's like the idiot light on your car for gas/overheating/whatever. If you failed to note the problem, it might warn you. Find a lightweight program and suck it up. I ran without AV from the late 80s to about 2011, and then I gave in based on the more subtle threats that were becoming common. Just not running scripts and untrusted attachments wasn't feeling entirely safe in an age of hidden filesystems that could get past air gaps.
For the record, i'd never gotten anything I knew about and no AV was ever able to find malware on my personal systems. No guarantees, but it was a pretty good record.
You're technically correct but I got a full bird colonel Army doctor to say I could deploy. It got up that high. The G6 of the unit in question wanted me to deploy _really_ bad and pushed it to that extent.
A free market cannot exist,because freedom only protects the criminal. Coercion is what protects the virtuous.
People herded into Gulags and concetration camps would beg to differ.
I've been injecting insulin and other drugs for 16 years now. No fuckups. No reactions. Nothing, and i'm no one special in this regard. It sounds like epinephrine is less stable than insulin in storage, but I could work with that - I used to carry my drugs in a sealed metal thermos on travel. Deployed to Iraq and back that way in 07-08.
n/t
I am concerned about the lubrication and circuit boards (electrolytic caps, mostly) associated with hard disks over long term storage. I have found a high failure rate on my own old hard drives - old MFM drives were kind of crappily engineered, however, so the fact that an ST-251 drive from 1990 doesn't work today shouldn't necessarily be indicative of the lifespan of say, a WD Black 1TB manufactured in 2010.
In my world, we rely on practical tests of functionality *with the actual users* rather than theoretical measures of effectiveness. It seems the CDC agrees with me on this one.
As to one of your other points:
"The bottom line is that a single act of intercourse between a young couple has on average a one in 20 chance of pregnancy – this assumes the opportunity presented itself on a random day, as these things tend do when you are young."
Source
So the answer is based on how often you fuck. The CDC numbers do not map precisely to data of this sort, however.
Last point: "measuring the effectiveness of encouraging people not to fuck" sounds like the craptastic questionnaire-based research I saw at (not to pick on them) the Lehigh psych department in the early 2000s. People lie, and they can't simulate the paths not taken effectively. There would literally be no way to know if someone decided to not have sexual intercourse based on an abstinence campaign.
Besides, my kind of abstinence campaign would be "Blowjobs for Everyone" or "Real lovers wank each other".