This isn't about pollution. It's about the level of CO2 in the atmosphere - which is the primary acceleration factor for global warming.
The key point is this: human beings are dumping additional CO2 into the atmosphere above and beyond that produced naturally by the environment. This has to have an impact, and reduction of human contributions also has to lower or slow the rate of impact.
You can't escape the laws of physics. We have been accelerating the factor of greenhouse warming since the dawn of the industrial era, and therefore decreasing the time we have available to deal with the effects that are already impacting us. We can argue all day about the primary cause of the warming - increased output of the sun, etc...but you can't argue that what we are doing has no effect.
Some examples of related impacts that are accelerating and affecting human populations today:
The number of severe weather events has increased significantly and steadily year over year since the 1950s.
Water sheds are being impacted all over the world due to loss of glaciers, both in terms of availability of water in the event of drought, and in terms of record levels of melt water flooding - most recently seen in the Oroville California dam overflow and resultant damage to the aging infrastructure, and flooding this year in Peru.
Crops are already being impacted by heat and drought conditions, and some Northern areas are starting to consider using seeds normally reserved for more Southerly climates, while those in the South are looking into modifications to make their plants more hardy in drought stressed conditions.
Permafrost is not only melting more frequently and in larger areas across the world, but is also causing ground subsidence - with massive evidence of this in Siberia.
By doing nothing - we accept that the major human population centers will be faced with existential problems sooner rather than later.
Another point that I don't see mentioned is that the data for the vast majority of social media companies is either on US soil or diversely hosted across multiple sites around the globe. In either case, the UK does not have jurisdiction to force the companies to fork over the data.
Furthermore, for those companies that do have operations or other business activities inside the UK, this might be the impetus to move out. Of course, these UK employees would be redundant (laid off).
The social media companies have been laughing in our faces for too long.
That is clearly a mischaracterization. The social media companies are trying to protect customers from undue searches and seizures of personal data - thereby protecting their revenue streams. I don't expect that to be a laughing matter in the board rooms of these companies.
To expand on what you're saying creimer, here is something to consider: when I was born - somewhere just North of 50 years ago - the concept of the suburbs was a relatively recent thing. Before that time, people either lived in the city - which was an area about 5 or 10 miles in diameter (for large cities at the time), or you were living in the country - the boondocks.
In 1946 there were 300 people living in the countryside that would become the culdesac and ranch house filled abomination of a subdivided township that I grew up in. This place was, and is still, less than 5 miles from the center of a major city on the East coast.
When I arrived in 1968 (at a very young age - but old enough to ride a bike) the place had swollen to 10,000 people and the place was mostly filled with suburban homes and new schools for all the children like myself.
When I left in 1983, there 15,000 people living there and still growing.
Today there are 35,000 people living in this space, and more roads, and multilevel housing units, and crowding than I would have ever imagined as a kid. To me the place is almost indistinguishable from the 'city center' they were designed to avoid. It is just part of a massive megalopolis of urban sprawl stretching from Washington D.C. to New York City and bankrupting people who can barely make enough to live there, much less save and grow. I can't even live there today - even though I make somewhat above the equivalent income of my father in 1980 (when you adjust for inflation over the years e.g. his $35,000 from 1980 = $101,000 in today's dollars).
Ultimately this is a problem that is bigger than just Silicon Valley, and cuts to the core of what society should do to not only manage urban and suburban growth, but also rethink how and where we work and where and how we live. I think it is something people are already starting to address themselves, even as governments pull away. Living smaller is a key component. Do we really need tract homes? Should we be paying banks thousands of our hard earned dollars for a mortgage we can't afford? Why are we commuting when we can effectively work just about anywhere with modern technology today? More importantly why aren't more companies making it easier to do that in an economy that is dominated by software and service companies?
This is what happens when your freshly minted MBAs get to run the shop. They think everyone with the same job title are interchangeable widgets. Newsflash: they're not!
The reality of software and services is sales runs are cyclical. When employees are widgets (like factory workers) the company hires them when the sales get hot, and they lay off when the sales go cold. However, with software and services you have other options that can smooth out those cyclical ebbing and flowing by making architectural decisions up front. By making decisions, like allowing on line automated upgrades, payments, and the like you can avoid the jarring changes to personnel - while allowing for real structural growth for long term hires instead.
You are absolutely right. United we stand; divided we fall. You don't have to play their game - particularly in today's world with all the opportunities the Internet provides you can find customers and/or patrons for your unique skills.
If you want to be successful at getting your foot in the door of a traditional company - try talking about your desire to find a job with your friends and family. With luck and the right contacts you can get in by someone inside vouching for you.
The very first adult job I acquired out of high school was working in a lamp store (lamp repairs and lamp creation from parts, heavy lifting and unboxing and boxing for delivery, lamp installation for display in store, sales and register, and cleanup). I got the job through my girlfriend at the time, who's parent's CPA worked for the owner who just so happened to be opening a new store. I got the job the day of the interview because they all vouched for me.
My current job (career - 20+ years on the job) was through a college friend who already worked at the company. I had the right skill set they needed, at the right time - they were scaling their operations, and he vouched for me - which gave me added points over my competition. This all through a short conversation I had with him about my need to find a job (the student loans and credit cards were maxed out and I was worried about how to make the next month's payments).
In some ways, I think if you are open to it and can communicate with others, the universe will provide. And don't get me wrong, there were times when I had to take the burger flipping type jobs in a pinch - but I always saw those things as stepping stones to something better. It's all about your attitude regardless of the slings and arrows of misfortune thrown your way.
If Google buys your company - take a cash buy-out. Once Google owns your technology - they are going to do with it what they want to anyway. No use you hanging around for that.
Do not stay on-board because you have better things to do - like start your next business, retire to a sailboat in the Caribbean, or pursue other interests (do you like to write? Write a book and put it up on Kindle.) People put so many limits on themselves; they really need to expand their comfort zone.
As for Age Discrimination: that is real and should be dealt with if found in a company. Hypocritical for a company that supposedly supports diversity. Everyone should be interested in combating this because we are all going to get old one day, assuming we don't die first.
From the article: "...the chips are biologically safe..."
I guess it all depends on your definition of 'biologically safe.' I bet it wouldn't be very safe if the chip were to get an overloaded electromagnetic pulse at its operating frequency. Gives DOS attack a new meaning.
On a positive note, it might get hot enough to cauterize the area around it thus preventing infection.
...individuals are ultimately responsible for their own actions....
You hit the nail on the head there - people should be judged on their actions (or to steal better words from MLK, "the content of their character"), rather than the color of their skin, or their affiliations.
This is a key point in the political context: think about it, if we all walked in lock step with the party line at the exclusion of all other ideas (for those of us who associate with a political party) there would be no opportunity for change, negotiation, or reconciliation for the population at large. Diversity is critical to the functioning of our American government, regardless of your political bent.
In the 1900s (and earlier) people came here to work hard and succeed. While that still exists in many cases, in others we have people looking for handouts or looking to do harm because of their hatred for the US. Immigration isn't a simple topic and today's world doesn't make it simpler, not for the US anymore than for Europe.
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian-born American anarchists who were convicted of murdering a guard and a paymaster during the April 15, 1920 armed robbery of the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company in South Braintree, Massachusetts, United States. They were executed in the electric chair seven years later at Charlestown State Prison. Both men adhered to an anarchist movement that advocated relentless warfare against what they perceived as a violent and oppressive government.
The Wall Street bombing occurred at 12:01 pm on September 16, 1920, in the Financial District of Manhattan, New York City. The blast killed 30 people immediately, and another eight died later of wounds sustained in the blast. There were 143 seriously injured, and the total number of injured was in the hundreds.[1]:160–61
The bombing was never solved, although investigators and historians believe the Wall Street bombing was carried out by Galleanists (Italian anarchists), a group responsible for a series of bombings the previous year. The attack was related to postwar social unrest, labor struggles, and anti-capitalist agitation in the United States.
... and others:
The Los Angeles Times bombing was the purposeful dynamiting of the Los Angeles Times building in Los Angeles, California, on October 1, 1910 by a union member belonging to the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers. The explosion started a fire which killed 21 newspaper employees and injured 100 more. It was termed the "crime of the century" by the Times.
Brothers John J. ("J.J.") and James B. ("J.B.") McNamara were arrested in April 1911 for the bombing. Their trial became a cause célèbre for the American labor movement. J.B. admitted to setting the explosive, and was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. J.J. was sentenced to 15 years in prison for bombing a local iron manufacturing plant, and returned to the Iron Workers union as an organizer.
No they weren't -- the reason we have all of these European ethnic groups associated with a 'white' race is to dissociate themselves with their immigrant status and heritage - precisely because they were being discriminated against.
The bigger irony to this story, is these same people who have immigrant backgrounds (and that would be all European Americans) turn around and discriminate against new immigrants.
...Now it seems that everyone must not only tell you where they stand on issues, but they have to tell you why you're wrong for not taking the same stance. Day after day with the smug condescending memes, fake news pieces from whacked out websites, pointless hoaxes that Snopes debunked years ago ad nausem. After a while it just gets on your nerves and you either join them, drop out, or go insane....
What you are describing is really the propaganda battle in a cultural war that the Liberals didn't know existed before Trump was elected into office, and the mainstream Conservatives, while aware, didn't realize how hard it would turn on them and bite them in the butt. This war has been going on a long time: e.g. Powell Memorandum in 1971, and if you count the white nationalism/supremacy part of this - it goes back to colonial times and the advent of slavery. Trump spoke to these people and his win has emboldened them even more than before. They have mastered the tools of social media, and will try to destroy you if you do not align with their world view.
Back in the day we were used to time-shifting our collection of information, and the viewing of information. This was accomplished on BBSs - such as FIDONET - by up and down loading content for later viewing with offline viewers. You would just set up some automation to run during off times (while you were asleep for example). Back in those days -- even as slow as things were, your time didn't seem to be wasted as much as today.
I don't have a bad connection - I stream videos no problem - so I can only assume the problem is the advertising cruft layered on top. As a result, I'm in the early stages of putting together a web crawler of my own...basically I go to the same sites day after day -- so most of what I read comes from the same sources - so why not crawl those sites and draw down what I want to read at my leisure? I can also automagically separate the multimedia from the text, and deal with that as I want to - rather than how a standard browser decides to do for you.
Website owners and ad people have gotten lazy - and disrespectful of users; time to claim back our time.
I think the real issue here is 'access to' versus 'elimination'.
If you are your own boss, or you are a hobbyist, then this question is irrelevant. You can and should have access to every capability - it is up to you to manage based upon your own capabilities.
In a business with a gaggle of programmers that is evolving over time, it is a different story. In that situation, you have developers of all different skill levels potentially, coming into and leaving the business if you are growing, and you have to take into consideration the risks associated with allowing poor code to impact your paying customers. In that case, I think it would make sense to create access limits for different programmers based upon their skill levels and areas of responsibility. You could also cross train and provide options for people without this access to prove they can be trusted to get higher level access to more of the 'shoot yourself in the foot' tools/constructs - which would expand your cadre without risking your business in the process.
It's not a simple as that. If you are on a team of developers who are building applications on top of clearly defined APIs, all the heavy lifting from a systems perspective should already be done for you. This is to ensure the company doesn't end up with 15 different versions of the same code in each release that needs to be maintained in the future. I think mostly it comes down to the bottom line: a business doesn't want to spend money on building the same library over and over again.
There are instances when low level systems programming is needed, and whoever is assigned that task should have the freedom to do what is needed to ensure the systems provided can perform at the desired level and provided whatever is necessary for security and so on. There is nothing canned that can do that, so you better have your best developers on that given the potential impacts to your customers and therefore to your bottom line.
If you work for yourself - then do what you want since you're calling the shots.
Policy choice is relative to your business risk/exposure. Ultimately whatever you choose to do with your own programming (if you work for yourself or you're just a hobbyist) will be proved out by your clients/users when they use (break) your software and systems. On the other hand, if you work for someone else as an employee, then you are bound to follow their rules, regardless of your views. You can try to change it, or you can find another job elsewhere.
It's not simply a matter of these things being beyond anyone's ability, but it is also true that there are different levels of skills and experience that exist in a business environment. A good choice would be to partner your systems developer with your brightest applications developer to cross pollinate. Unfortunately, my experience also suggests that many companies don't do a good job of mentoring and growing talent within the company. People get assigned to silos and languish unless explicitly transfered to the group with a different focus. It really comes down to the philosophy of your employer.
At first, when I read the title I thought to myself, "how arrogant." What about people who are primarily verbal - and don't do math, or don't care to do math?
Are they not equally fulfilled in their lives? How rich - a scientist who makes sweeping generalizations in a scientific journal.
If he had prefaced it with, "I have observed in some people that...blah blah blah," then yeah, that would be defensible.
Imagine if you will, a haystack. That haystack represents all the 'information' flowing from various 'news' sources on the Internet. Inside of that haystack are needles - that represent stories about the Trump administration: several gold needles - real news stories, several silver needles - bona fide comedic satire, and rusty needles which appear to be real news stories - but are fake...click bait and possible propaganda.
People are so overloaded with the cruft coming inbound from so many sources, some of this being retweeted or relinked stories (facebook) - they are losing track of what is real and what is not. It becomes even more difficult when news outlets that are ostensibly real, end up addressing the fake stories as well - either through mistakes and presenting as real news, or to debunk. Ultimately it is a news blitz caused by the confluence of a number of things: Trump's propensity to tweet and countertweet, his administration's rate of deployment of changes, confusion about sharing information from the administration (mixed messages), overlayed with all the satire and click bait.
Clearly indicating what is and is not satire will go a long way to avoiding satire bubbling up through multiple layers as true news stories.
Pac Man was the second video game I played, the first being Pong. It was the first console video game I played outside of the home. A friend of mine came to me and said, "I gotta show you something that's going to blow your mind." So off we rode on our bikes to the local Target store. They had two arcade machines: Pac Man, and Asteroids. Thus began 30+ years, many thousands of hours, and thousands of dollars invested in video games. Galaxian still haunts my memories...
That description would cover every state from Texas east to the Atlantic Ocean, and North to the Virgina - with a few Midwest states thrown in for good measure.
Because this information is being used as a witch hunt to identify low level employees for removal. These low level employees may not have been the decision maker when it came to selection of who would go or not, and as a result, the questions in the questionaire may incorrectly represent actual responsibility or functionality of the employee beyond that single question. Additionally, you can't arbitrarily remove government employees from their jobs without a substantive reason - as opposed to an ideological one (last time I can think of was the air traffic controller's strike during Reagan years - which directly impacted public safety)
As a result, the responsible leadership is saying "this is my responsibility; we can get into details at my level." This is the right thing to do, and also serves the people at the same time.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't about pollution. It's about the level of CO2 in the atmosphere - which is the primary acceleration factor for global warming.
The key point is this: human beings are dumping additional CO2 into the atmosphere above and beyond that produced naturally by the environment. This has to have an impact, and reduction of human contributions also has to lower or slow the rate of impact.
You can't escape the laws of physics. We have been accelerating the factor of greenhouse warming since the dawn of the industrial era, and therefore decreasing the time we have available to deal with the effects that are already impacting us. We can argue all day about the primary cause of the warming - increased output of the sun, etc...but you can't argue that what we are doing has no effect.
Some examples of related impacts that are accelerating and affecting human populations today:
The number of severe weather events has increased significantly and steadily year over year since the 1950s.
Sea level rise is real, and related subsidence of coastal areas is also real (e.g. Miami Florida, and Norfolk Virginia sea level impacts). Indications are this increase in speed of sea level rise is related to the thinning and breakup of the floating ice in Antarctica that serves to slow the march of land based glaciers into the Southern Ocean. Glaciers there are recorded as dropping 4 meters per year. And, Larsen B is getting ready to break off and form the largest iceberg in recorded history sometime very soon (June/July). A similar speedup of glacial movement and subsidence is also being measured in Greenland as well as other ice sheets around the world.
Water sheds are being impacted all over the world due to loss of glaciers, both in terms of availability of water in the event of drought, and in terms of record levels of melt water flooding - most recently seen in the Oroville California dam overflow and resultant damage to the aging infrastructure, and flooding this year in Peru.
Crops are already being impacted by heat and drought conditions, and some Northern areas are starting to consider using seeds normally reserved for more Southerly climates, while those in the South are looking into modifications to make their plants more hardy in drought stressed conditions.
Permafrost is not only melting more frequently and in larger areas across the world, but is also causing ground subsidence - with massive evidence of this in Siberia.
By doing nothing - we accept that the major human population centers will be faced with existential problems sooner rather than later.
They are looking at this cumulatively, not current levels.
Another point that I don't see mentioned is that the data for the vast majority of social media companies is either on US soil or diversely hosted across multiple sites around the globe. In either case, the UK does not have jurisdiction to force the companies to fork over the data.
Furthermore, for those companies that do have operations or other business activities inside the UK, this might be the impetus to move out. Of course, these UK employees would be redundant (laid off).
The social media companies have been laughing in our faces for too long.
That is clearly a mischaracterization. The social media companies are trying to protect customers from undue searches and seizures of personal data - thereby protecting their revenue streams. I don't expect that to be a laughing matter in the board rooms of these companies.
To expand on what you're saying creimer, here is something to consider: when I was born - somewhere just North of 50 years ago - the concept of the suburbs was a relatively recent thing. Before that time, people either lived in the city - which was an area about 5 or 10 miles in diameter (for large cities at the time), or you were living in the country - the boondocks.
In 1946 there were 300 people living in the countryside that would become the culdesac and ranch house filled abomination of a subdivided township that I grew up in. This place was, and is still, less than 5 miles from the center of a major city on the East coast.
When I arrived in 1968 (at a very young age - but old enough to ride a bike) the place had swollen to 10,000 people and the place was mostly filled with suburban homes and new schools for all the children like myself.
When I left in 1983, there 15,000 people living there and still growing.
Today there are 35,000 people living in this space, and more roads, and multilevel housing units, and crowding than I would have ever imagined as a kid. To me the place is almost indistinguishable from the 'city center' they were designed to avoid. It is just part of a massive megalopolis of urban sprawl stretching from Washington D.C. to New York City and bankrupting people who can barely make enough to live there, much less save and grow. I can't even live there today - even though I make somewhat above the equivalent income of my father in 1980 (when you adjust for inflation over the years e.g. his $35,000 from 1980 = $101,000 in today's dollars).
Ultimately this is a problem that is bigger than just Silicon Valley, and cuts to the core of what society should do to not only manage urban and suburban growth, but also rethink how and where we work and where and how we live. I think it is something people are already starting to address themselves, even as governments pull away. Living smaller is a key component. Do we really need tract homes? Should we be paying banks thousands of our hard earned dollars for a mortgage we can't afford? Why are we commuting when we can effectively work just about anywhere with modern technology today? More importantly why aren't more companies making it easier to do that in an economy that is dominated by software and service companies?
Yes I'm using RSS - I aggregate my feeds via netvibes.com .
If it didn't exist - would have to invent something like it to avoid the drudgery of sifting and sorting for viable news and information.
This is what happens when your freshly minted MBAs get to run the shop. They think everyone with the same job title are interchangeable widgets. Newsflash: they're not!
The reality of software and services is sales runs are cyclical. When employees are widgets (like factory workers) the company hires them when the sales get hot, and they lay off when the sales go cold. However, with software and services you have other options that can smooth out those cyclical ebbing and flowing by making architectural decisions up front. By making decisions, like allowing on line automated upgrades, payments, and the like you can avoid the jarring changes to personnel - while allowing for real structural growth for long term hires instead.
You are absolutely right. United we stand; divided we fall. You don't have to play their game - particularly in today's world with all the opportunities the Internet provides you can find customers and/or patrons for your unique skills.
If you want to be successful at getting your foot in the door of a traditional company - try talking about your desire to find a job with your friends and family. With luck and the right contacts you can get in by someone inside vouching for you.
The very first adult job I acquired out of high school was working in a lamp store (lamp repairs and lamp creation from parts, heavy lifting and unboxing and boxing for delivery, lamp installation for display in store, sales and register, and cleanup). I got the job through my girlfriend at the time, who's parent's CPA worked for the owner who just so happened to be opening a new store. I got the job the day of the interview because they all vouched for me.
My current job (career - 20+ years on the job) was through a college friend who already worked at the company. I had the right skill set they needed, at the right time - they were scaling their operations, and he vouched for me - which gave me added points over my competition. This all through a short conversation I had with him about my need to find a job (the student loans and credit cards were maxed out and I was worried about how to make the next month's payments).
In some ways, I think if you are open to it and can communicate with others, the universe will provide. And don't get me wrong, there were times when I had to take the burger flipping type jobs in a pinch - but I always saw those things as stepping stones to something better. It's all about your attitude regardless of the slings and arrows of misfortune thrown your way.
Google discriminated based on Age, they violated the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967
Age is never a metric to justify laying off anyone.
If Google buys your company - take a cash buy-out. Once Google owns your technology - they are going to do with it what they want to anyway. No use you hanging around for that.
Do not stay on-board because you have better things to do - like start your next business, retire to a sailboat in the Caribbean, or pursue other interests (do you like to write? Write a book and put it up on Kindle.) People put so many limits on themselves; they really need to expand their comfort zone.
As for Age Discrimination: that is real and should be dealt with if found in a company. Hypocritical for a company that supposedly supports diversity. Everyone should be interested in combating this because we are all going to get old one day, assuming we don't die first.
I guess it all depends on your definition of 'biologically safe.' I bet it wouldn't be very safe if the chip were to get an overloaded electromagnetic pulse at its operating frequency. Gives DOS attack a new meaning.
On a positive note, it might get hot enough to cauterize the area around it thus preventing infection.
...individuals are ultimately responsible for their own actions....
You hit the nail on the head there - people should be judged on their actions (or to steal better words from MLK, "the content of their character"), rather than the color of their skin, or their affiliations.
This is a key point in the political context: think about it, if we all walked in lock step with the party line at the exclusion of all other ideas (for those of us who associate with a political party) there would be no opportunity for change, negotiation, or reconciliation for the population at large. Diversity is critical to the functioning of our American government, regardless of your political bent.
In the 1900s (and earlier) people came here to work hard and succeed. While that still exists in many cases, in others we have people looking for handouts or looking to do harm because of their hatred for the US. Immigration isn't a simple topic and today's world doesn't make it simpler, not for the US anymore than for Europe.
I call BS on that. Have you ever heard of the "Sacco and Vanzetti" case?
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian-born American anarchists who were convicted of murdering a guard and a paymaster during the April 15, 1920 armed robbery of the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company in South Braintree, Massachusetts, United States. They were executed in the electric chair seven years later at Charlestown State Prison. Both men adhered to an anarchist movement that advocated relentless warfare against what they perceived as a violent and oppressive government.
Or, the Wall Street Bombing of 1020?
The Wall Street bombing occurred at 12:01 pm on September 16, 1920, in the Financial District of Manhattan, New York City. The blast killed 30 people immediately, and another eight died later of wounds sustained in the blast. There were 143 seriously injured, and the total number of injured was in the hundreds.[1]:160–61 The bombing was never solved, although investigators and historians believe the Wall Street bombing was carried out by Galleanists (Italian anarchists), a group responsible for a series of bombings the previous year. The attack was related to postwar social unrest, labor struggles, and anti-capitalist agitation in the United States.
The Los Angeles Times bombing was the purposeful dynamiting of the Los Angeles Times building in Los Angeles, California, on October 1, 1910 by a union member belonging to the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers. The explosion started a fire which killed 21 newspaper employees and injured 100 more. It was termed the "crime of the century" by the Times. Brothers John J. ("J.J.") and James B. ("J.B.") McNamara were arrested in April 1911 for the bombing. Their trial became a cause célèbre for the American labor movement. J.B. admitted to setting the explosive, and was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. J.J. was sentenced to 15 years in prison for bombing a local iron manufacturing plant, and returned to the Iron Workers union as an organizer.
Ya cause in the 1900's they were treated fairly
No they weren't -- the reason we have all of these European ethnic groups associated with a 'white' race is to dissociate themselves with their immigrant status and heritage - precisely because they were being discriminated against.
The bigger irony to this story, is these same people who have immigrant backgrounds (and that would be all European Americans) turn around and discriminate against new immigrants.
...Now it seems that everyone must not only tell you where they stand on issues, but they have to tell you why you're wrong for not taking the same stance. Day after day with the smug condescending memes, fake news pieces from whacked out websites, pointless hoaxes that Snopes debunked years ago ad nausem. After a while it just gets on your nerves and you either join them, drop out, or go insane. ...
What you are describing is really the propaganda battle in a cultural war that the Liberals didn't know existed before Trump was elected into office, and the mainstream Conservatives, while aware, didn't realize how hard it would turn on them and bite them in the butt. This war has been going on a long time: e.g. Powell Memorandum in 1971, and if you count the white nationalism/supremacy part of this - it goes back to colonial times and the advent of slavery. Trump spoke to these people and his win has emboldened them even more than before. They have mastered the tools of social media, and will try to destroy you if you do not align with their world view.
Back in the day we were used to time-shifting our collection of information, and the viewing of information. This was accomplished on BBSs - such as FIDONET - by up and down loading content for later viewing with offline viewers. You would just set up some automation to run during off times (while you were asleep for example). Back in those days -- even as slow as things were, your time didn't seem to be wasted as much as today.
I don't have a bad connection - I stream videos no problem - so I can only assume the problem is the advertising cruft layered on top. As a result, I'm in the early stages of putting together a web crawler of my own...basically I go to the same sites day after day -- so most of what I read comes from the same sources - so why not crawl those sites and draw down what I want to read at my leisure? I can also automagically separate the multimedia from the text, and deal with that as I want to - rather than how a standard browser decides to do for you.
Website owners and ad people have gotten lazy - and disrespectful of users; time to claim back our time.
I think the real issue here is 'access to' versus 'elimination'.
If you are your own boss, or you are a hobbyist, then this question is irrelevant. You can and should have access to every capability - it is up to you to manage based upon your own capabilities.
In a business with a gaggle of programmers that is evolving over time, it is a different story. In that situation, you have developers of all different skill levels potentially, coming into and leaving the business if you are growing, and you have to take into consideration the risks associated with allowing poor code to impact your paying customers. In that case, I think it would make sense to create access limits for different programmers based upon their skill levels and areas of responsibility. You could also cross train and provide options for people without this access to prove they can be trusted to get higher level access to more of the 'shoot yourself in the foot' tools/constructs - which would expand your cadre without risking your business in the process.
What if you get hit by a bus?
It's not a simple as that. If you are on a team of developers who are building applications on top of clearly defined APIs, all the heavy lifting from a systems perspective should already be done for you. This is to ensure the company doesn't end up with 15 different versions of the same code in each release that needs to be maintained in the future. I think mostly it comes down to the bottom line: a business doesn't want to spend money on building the same library over and over again.
There are instances when low level systems programming is needed, and whoever is assigned that task should have the freedom to do what is needed to ensure the systems provided can perform at the desired level and provided whatever is necessary for security and so on. There is nothing canned that can do that, so you better have your best developers on that given the potential impacts to your customers and therefore to your bottom line.
If you work for yourself - then do what you want since you're calling the shots.
Policy choice is relative to your business risk/exposure. Ultimately whatever you choose to do with your own programming (if you work for yourself or you're just a hobbyist) will be proved out by your clients/users when they use (break) your software and systems. On the other hand, if you work for someone else as an employee, then you are bound to follow their rules, regardless of your views. You can try to change it, or you can find another job elsewhere.
It's not simply a matter of these things being beyond anyone's ability, but it is also true that there are different levels of skills and experience that exist in a business environment. A good choice would be to partner your systems developer with your brightest applications developer to cross pollinate. Unfortunately, my experience also suggests that many companies don't do a good job of mentoring and growing talent within the company. People get assigned to silos and languish unless explicitly transfered to the group with a different focus. It really comes down to the philosophy of your employer.
At first, when I read the title I thought to myself, "how arrogant." What about people who are primarily verbal - and don't do math, or don't care to do math? Are they not equally fulfilled in their lives? How rich - a scientist who makes sweeping generalizations in a scientific journal.
If he had prefaced it with, "I have observed in some people that...blah blah blah," then yeah, that would be defensible.
Kellyanne said she meant to say Bowling Green Tourists .
Imagine if you will, a haystack. That haystack represents all the 'information' flowing from various 'news' sources on the Internet. Inside of that haystack are needles - that represent stories about the Trump administration: several gold needles - real news stories, several silver needles - bona fide comedic satire, and rusty needles which appear to be real news stories - but are fake...click bait and possible propaganda.
People are so overloaded with the cruft coming inbound from so many sources, some of this being retweeted or relinked stories (facebook) - they are losing track of what is real and what is not. It becomes even more difficult when news outlets that are ostensibly real, end up addressing the fake stories as well - either through mistakes and presenting as real news, or to debunk. Ultimately it is a news blitz caused by the confluence of a number of things: Trump's propensity to tweet and countertweet, his administration's rate of deployment of changes, confusion about sharing information from the administration (mixed messages), overlayed with all the satire and click bait.
Clearly indicating what is and is not satire will go a long way to avoiding satire bubbling up through multiple layers as true news stories.
Pac Man was the second video game I played, the first being Pong. It was the first console video game I played outside of the home. A friend of mine came to me and said, "I gotta show you something that's going to blow your mind." So off we rode on our bikes to the local Target store. They had two arcade machines: Pac Man, and Asteroids. Thus began 30+ years, many thousands of hours, and thousands of dollars invested in video games.
Galaxian still haunts my memories...
RIP Masaya Nakamura
That description would cover every state from Texas east to the Atlantic Ocean, and North to the Virgina - with a few Midwest states thrown in for good measure.
Because this information is being used as a witch hunt to identify low level employees for removal. These low level employees may not have been the decision maker when it came to selection of who would go or not, and as a result, the questions in the questionaire may incorrectly represent actual responsibility or functionality of the employee beyond that single question. Additionally, you can't arbitrarily remove government employees from their jobs without a substantive reason - as opposed to an ideological one (last time I can think of was the air traffic controller's strike during Reagan years - which directly impacted public safety)
As a result, the responsible leadership is saying "this is my responsibility; we can get into details at my level." This is the right thing to do, and also serves the people at the same time.