Uber is very interested in self driving cars. They know what the end game is. Having human drivers is just a stop gap step in getting their foot in the door in the taxi industry. The same way that Netflix used DVD delivery by mail to jump start their online streaming services, Uber is definitely thinking about the next step that they are going to be taking.
Yes, the big question is how Uber will contract the cars from some other group so they won't be responsible if anything happens.
The ewoks aren't "dark" they aren't "serious"... and their presence softens the tone of the movie (especially as Luke was much darker and more serious in this movie and the ewok scenes are spliced with the MUCH darker throne room scenes).
Except when you remember that the main characters were worried because the ewoks were about to cook and eat them. Only Luke levitating C3PO saved them. I'm sure that many a ewok dined on stormtrooper flesh after the victory on Endor.
I have had exactly the opposite experience as this "journalist". Upon re-watching Episode 4 after more than 20 years, I was struck by how superior the set design and and acting was to the prequels.
Yes, but you wouldn't get the click count for an article that said it held up. Internet "journalism" these days means finding something people like, harsh on it, watch your click count go up from outrage. Much easier than providing actual content.
They cut it out in the theatrical release originally. So your claim they couldn't cut the scene is patently false.
I was going to say that he was probably specifically talking about the stepping on the tail part, not the entire scene, but I see that you are an AC, so you already knew that and are just trolling.
"Only imperial storm troopers are so precise"? What sort of transparently false "evidence" was that?
When I heard that I immediately thought "typical bad Lucas dialog". I don't think there's some grand alternate plot happening, I think it's just a really good story that isn't told that well. Imperial stormtroopers, it turns out, aren't that precise at all considering the number of times Luke/Leia/Solo+crew are shot at and not hit.
Well remember that most of the time they were being shot at, they were purposely being herded back to their ship so they could "escape". If Gran Moff Tarkin had the foresight to put a tracker on the Millennium Falcon, don't you think he would have the same to instruct the stormtroopers not to hit the people he wanted to escape?
The idea was to show that religions are ridiculous, not to join the ranks of the bullshit peddlers.
May I put forth the idea that this is a good lesson on what religion really means to humanity as a species. I'm certain that there is an example of the ancient Greeks saying something like "there are no gods", yet such ideas never really stick. Religion isn't generally just some random belief system. It's not even a control system put onto people. Mankind seems to really want an ideology and have it tie into self-identity and community. For most of history religion has been greatly tied into if not synonymous with community and politics, often with governments adopting the religion of the people. In those systems that eschewed religious ideas, they still had an ideology that was enforced on the people and was adopted as a driver of community and politics. Religion will never really go away as people want something like it. It might be replaced with something but will never just disappear.
Not that it will really matter if it ever does disappear. People will still fight over ideologies, nationalities, tribal groups, etc. If nothing else, they'll always be fighting over money and resources and blaming it on something else which can almost always be seen in any supposed bad thing religion causes anyway.
Suppose the caucus did nominate Trump (I don't know how they work.)
Surely in a national election, Trump would have no chance?
The Democrats could nominate Joffrey Baratheon, and win by a landslide.
I think you mean convention. The candidate is nominated at the party convention. The representatives to go to the convention are decided by each state rules that are usually by a primary vote or by caucus which is essentially lots of smaller local votes of those present propagating up the chain of command to decide who goes for the state. At the party convention, those representing each state will show up and vote towards who their state decided upon along with others such as party leaders who get to go because they are party leaders. Who actually ends up voting for whom will mean a lot of haggling and deal trading to see who ends up with the most votes and gets the nomination.
If Trump wins, there will be plenty of people who will vote the party line no matter who is on the ticket. Politics are currently too polarized to really do otherwise as the main differences between the parties are wedge issues capturing single issue voters and the other party is certainly against their issue. Sure, a certain amount of swing voters exist and to a great extent help decide the winner as both parties are evenly split. If one party gets too far behind the other, they merely adopt some policies similar to the other party to syphon away voters. Another thing that really matters is who can get out the vote. Sure, each party might have 50% of the voters no matter what given the chance, but how many will actually get up, go out, and vote? Lackluster candidates and issues means that many swing voters never decide, vote for 3rd parties, or just decide they have more important things to do after work than voting.
Is Trump that unelectable? We won't really know till it happens. Like I said, that there is a Democrat running against him gives a great deal of motivation to many Republicans to go out and vote. We'd like to think that he's unelectable, but it may turn out that the threat of Hillary's "lawlessness" or Bernnie's "socialism" might scare people to get out and vote or fail to inspire their own people to get out and vote. I find it strange that the Republicans seem to rag on anybody other than old white christian guys so much, but that they haven't taken a different stance seems to indicate that they do not think it is losing them votes yet.
That is still unacceptable behavior. My workplace is in an area where Verizon has refused to upgrade the phone lines and Time Warner doesn't cover large chunks of each block. So most businesses are on crappy 1.0-1.5 Mbps DSL connections, with the fastest possible being just 3 Mbps. Combine that with each business having 3-10 computers and this automatic multi-gigabyte download behavior is completely unacceptable. Especially for the couple businesses who've resorted to cellular LTE Internet with extremely low data caps to try to get decent speed.
And Microsoft will respond the way they always do, "Have your domain admin go into Active Directory and set a group policy to prevent the download and installation of Win10."
I'd find them fairly often. Never had to use them much while I was there but I looked for them as they tended to be cool looking bronze plaques mounted usually around where the train station would dump you out on the street.
Yup. Some years ago, my ex-wife and daughters were LPN and CNA. A couple of them worked in an elder care facility.
Proclamation came down from on high that they will be using a new touchscreen system to log patient interactions.
Said touchscreen was mounted flat to the wall, at a height usable only for someone about 5' 9" or taller. Of COURSE most of these women were not that tall. In addition to the multitude of clicks and verifications to log one scrip or treatment, they literally had to get a stepstool to use the damn thing. Safety? What's that?
As somebody who deployed those touchscreens, the most likely cause was that engineering was given no or the wrong specs for setting them up, followed closely by some 5'10" doctor wanting it mounted so he could easily use it, and thirdly, but not uncommon, nobody ever bothered to ask for them to be lowered. There we no shortage of times when some nurse would talk about the years of agony on such a set up while I was dealing with another issue, and I'd just pull out a hex wrench and lower everything on the Ergotron track 6" right then and there.
Sure. But this was true before electronic records too. If nobody asked these questions when filling out paper forms - then the questions are not needed for the digital version either. It is the patients life either way - and it worked before.
And it works better now. Every department, let alone every hospital, have people whose job is to do nothing but make sure that the process and results are better now than before. There is a lot of money in making things better even without talking about lawsuits. The main thing that nurses, and especially doctors, need to realize, is that they are not the only people who make the hospital work. They may have to open that second window and spend three seconds clicking the right button or filling in a field. They don't like it, but if they don't, that creates hours of work for many other people downstream and probably even for themselves.
Next, what idiot thought it was a good idea to enter codes anyway? The patient takes a HIV test, not "test 129.4". The patient may need "valium", not "drug #132667". And so on. Codes may have their places in the system's internal workings, but no need to expose that to users. They can select "HIV test" from a pulldown menu, or start typing HIV and have autocompletion. And red lines, if they type gibberish.
I'll blame everything on vendors. Multiple vendors combining multiple systems all expected by each hospital to work in completely different workflows. Short description fields, long description fields, systems that require a minimum number of digits combined with ones that have a maximum number, and in workflows driven by some complete other systems that may be based one either long or short description fields, modifiers, hospital policies, etc. Hospital might one one thing, doctors another, and nurses still another, but they are all still constrained by what the vendor application they buy will actually do. Even then, chances are whatever it is they are complaining about can be fixed with purchase of an additional system, upgrade of the current system, which would require new hardware and re-integration with the HIS interfaces. That's probably a three year IT project that'll cost 10 million and only affect their department.
Of COURSE company A is going to push their format which is incompatible with any other because then they lock in their customers, giving them no choice but to pay them ridiculous amounts of money in the future.
As somebody that deals with this everyday, I think you ascribe too much thinking and forethought to thew said companies. Most of them never even developed the software in question. They bought it when they bought some other smaller company that came up with a better product. They had the better product because they put the effort into making it have features that the current competition didn't have. Those features many times require format differences that didn't even exist in the other systems. Trust me, the big vendors can't even get their own systems to play nice together because they were all from other places. To say that format incompatibilities are a conspiracy to keep from operating with other vendors is just wishful thinking.
Japanese addresses are so generally screwy that it is normal behavior to draw maps when giving directions.
Yes, I've heard that map programs for finding addresses are the first thing that Japanese install on their phones. Outside of every train station and otherwise scattered around are maps of the neighborhood that show blocks and buildings with their numbers. See, everything is divided up by Prefecture, City, Neighborhood, Block, Building (floor, office) and numbered in no particular standard order for streets that are certainly not even laid out in a grid pattern. There's no way to find an address without a map in in someplace like Tokyo as sometimes the building isn't even marked with their number (because they expect you to be following a map). Much worse than London and their need for AtoZ.
There are millions of unwanted pets sitting in shelters. Before you worry about making your poodle live for 300 years, maybe go down there and adopt a couple.
Meh. It's just a way to do animal testing for human medicine without raising too many red flags. The first generation of poodle to live to a century or two will be owned by some research lab and probably not allowed to breed much.
There is no "natural order". Animals are our distant cousins, evolved to fit other niches than us, not some creation we have been designated to "rule over".
I would say that is debatable with domesticated species.
You can use more than just a hammer. How about an acetylene torch? Bolt Cutters? Hydrofluoric acid? Typical "if all you have is a hammer" tunnel vision. I expect more from you, Slashdot!
True, but with this method, or lock picking, I can gain access to whatever it is that is locked up, remove what I want, and then replace the lock with no visible evidence of entrance. The noise is minimal, the technique and tools pretty trivial, so that at any opportunity, someone who wanted to could gain entrance and leave without leaving obvious clues. If you had a job box, tool shed, or building locked up with one of these, they could easily gain entrance, and remove something, possibly leaving the owner no idea it had been stolen. Locks still there, key still works, perhaps they'll think they put it someplace else and spend days if not weeks looking for it before realizing it's actually missing. Even then they might not be sure it was stolen. If there was more items that could be taken in one trip, they could even come back later.
That being said, unless you're investigated by spooks, any old lock will probably work. Most doors won't stand up to a couple of solid kicks if a credit card won't work, and the best NYC bike messenger lock would last about as long to power tools or a farm jack.
The Pilgrims who sailed on the Mayflower didn't expect to ever return to Europe. And half of them died in the first couple of years, in the horrible wilderness called "Massachusetts".
Everybody who goes to Mars will die. (Some quickly, some slowly, some from old age.... maybe even some who come back to Earth.) EVERYBODY dies. Many pioneers died along the Oregon Trail, or heading to California. Exploration isn't safe, but staying home in bed doesn't protect you from dying.
Ya, but Pilgrims and the sailors of earlier ventures were a cheap and expendable resource. The people we send to Mars will represent millions in training cost each and billions in lost research for any that die. They will all come back, baring accident, as we will be able to go to Mars and come back long before we will ever be able to build a sustainable outpost on Mars, let alone a colony. The first people to Mars will be the equivalent of Columbus or Lewis and Clark, not Oregon Trail settlers.
Newspeak is just a way of lying. The Soviets, Nazis and other fascists mastered this, and it worked pretty well for them. The American political right has adopted this lesson of history, so vividly described by Orwell.
No, Newspeak was not meant to be lying. Newspeak as described by Orwell was to replace the lying by limiting the language so that the concepts they had to lie about no longer existed. Propaganda is lying and what fascists master. Newspeak was the next step in no longer having to lie because lying takes too much effort. Saying War is Peace isn't Newspeak. Newspeak would be first replacing Peace with Duty. Eliminating the word Peace and its meaning from the vocabulary all together. Eventually, they would remove War also as it would be implied in the only meaning of Duty there was. The purpose of Newspeak was not to conflate the meanings of words, but to eliminate unwanted meaning by eliminating the words to narrow the language to allow only the desired mode of thinking.
Contrast that with the 70s, 80s and 90s where apart from an oil scare and a dip when manufacturing moved overseas things were mostly on the up and up.
You've got some serious selection bias going on. 70's - massive racial unrest over injustice, much worse than today, 80's drugs and gang related crime - much worse than it is today, 90's - just the beginning of the downward trend of the bad things that we're seeing even less of now. Since the 80's the average percentage of the household budget spent on food has gone from 17% to 11%. In the 50's it was 30% and in 1900 it was 45%.
Build a thousand SMRs and get oil down to $21 a barrel. The Sultans and power that be in the middle east will go broke. They will be back to throwing rocks at each other. Stop letting them out, make them deal with their own population explosion.
The world would be so much more peaceful.
Not really. Lots of reactors would drive coal out of business, maybe. Oil is used for transportation and manufacturing things like plastic and asphalt. Less than 1% of the US power grid is supplied by oil. Even if we developed electric vehicles and switched over the sweet crude from the middle east would still be valuable for making plastics and other uses.
I have never heard of protesters forming into opposing mobs and attacking eachother being a common problem. I think what you are thinking of is sporting events.
True, this is Europe. From my experience, European protests are usually broken up into three marches. One of the marches is left wing and one is for the right wing so they can both have their say and not deal with each other. The third one is for those that just want to engage in street fights with the police.
Slashdot Mirror
Uber is very interested in self driving cars. They know what the end game is. Having human drivers is just a stop gap step in getting their foot in the door in the taxi industry. The same way that Netflix used DVD delivery by mail to jump start their online streaming services, Uber is definitely thinking about the next step that they are going to be taking.
Yes, the big question is how Uber will contract the cars from some other group so they won't be responsible if anything happens.
The ewoks aren't "dark" they aren't "serious"... and their presence softens the tone of the movie (especially as Luke was much darker and more serious in this movie and the ewok scenes are spliced with the MUCH darker throne room scenes).
Except when you remember that the main characters were worried because the ewoks were about to cook and eat them. Only Luke levitating C3PO saved them. I'm sure that many a ewok dined on stormtrooper flesh after the victory on Endor.
I have had exactly the opposite experience as this "journalist". Upon re-watching Episode 4 after more than 20 years, I was struck by how superior the set design and and acting was to the prequels.
Yes, but you wouldn't get the click count for an article that said it held up. Internet "journalism" these days means finding something people like, harsh on it, watch your click count go up from outrage. Much easier than providing actual content.
They cut it out in the theatrical release originally. So your claim they couldn't cut the scene is patently false.
I was going to say that he was probably specifically talking about the stepping on the tail part, not the entire scene, but I see that you are an AC, so you already knew that and are just trolling.
When I heard that I immediately thought "typical bad Lucas dialog". I don't think there's some grand alternate plot happening, I think it's just a really good story that isn't told that well. Imperial stormtroopers, it turns out, aren't that precise at all considering the number of times Luke/Leia/Solo+crew are shot at and not hit.
Well remember that most of the time they were being shot at, they were purposely being herded back to their ship so they could "escape". If Gran Moff Tarkin had the foresight to put a tracker on the Millennium Falcon, don't you think he would have the same to instruct the stormtroopers not to hit the people he wanted to escape?
The idea was to show that religions are ridiculous, not to join the ranks of the bullshit peddlers.
May I put forth the idea that this is a good lesson on what religion really means to humanity as a species. I'm certain that there is an example of the ancient Greeks saying something like "there are no gods", yet such ideas never really stick. Religion isn't generally just some random belief system. It's not even a control system put onto people. Mankind seems to really want an ideology and have it tie into self-identity and community. For most of history religion has been greatly tied into if not synonymous with community and politics, often with governments adopting the religion of the people. In those systems that eschewed religious ideas, they still had an ideology that was enforced on the people and was adopted as a driver of community and politics. Religion will never really go away as people want something like it. It might be replaced with something but will never just disappear.
Not that it will really matter if it ever does disappear. People will still fight over ideologies, nationalities, tribal groups, etc. If nothing else, they'll always be fighting over money and resources and blaming it on something else which can almost always be seen in any supposed bad thing religion causes anyway.
Nope, a whole bunch of them were founded on the guiding principle that a fool and his money are soon parted.
You mean like the guy selling all those FSM car plates?
Suppose the caucus did nominate Trump (I don't know how they work.) Surely in a national election, Trump would have no chance? The Democrats could nominate Joffrey Baratheon, and win by a landslide.
I think you mean convention. The candidate is nominated at the party convention. The representatives to go to the convention are decided by each state rules that are usually by a primary vote or by caucus which is essentially lots of smaller local votes of those present propagating up the chain of command to decide who goes for the state. At the party convention, those representing each state will show up and vote towards who their state decided upon along with others such as party leaders who get to go because they are party leaders. Who actually ends up voting for whom will mean a lot of haggling and deal trading to see who ends up with the most votes and gets the nomination.
If Trump wins, there will be plenty of people who will vote the party line no matter who is on the ticket. Politics are currently too polarized to really do otherwise as the main differences between the parties are wedge issues capturing single issue voters and the other party is certainly against their issue. Sure, a certain amount of swing voters exist and to a great extent help decide the winner as both parties are evenly split. If one party gets too far behind the other, they merely adopt some policies similar to the other party to syphon away voters. Another thing that really matters is who can get out the vote. Sure, each party might have 50% of the voters no matter what given the chance, but how many will actually get up, go out, and vote? Lackluster candidates and issues means that many swing voters never decide, vote for 3rd parties, or just decide they have more important things to do after work than voting.
Is Trump that unelectable? We won't really know till it happens. Like I said, that there is a Democrat running against him gives a great deal of motivation to many Republicans to go out and vote. We'd like to think that he's unelectable, but it may turn out that the threat of Hillary's "lawlessness" or Bernnie's "socialism" might scare people to get out and vote or fail to inspire their own people to get out and vote. I find it strange that the Republicans seem to rag on anybody other than old white christian guys so much, but that they haven't taken a different stance seems to indicate that they do not think it is losing them votes yet.
That is still unacceptable behavior. My workplace is in an area where Verizon has refused to upgrade the phone lines and Time Warner doesn't cover large chunks of each block. So most businesses are on crappy 1.0-1.5 Mbps DSL connections, with the fastest possible being just 3 Mbps. Combine that with each business having 3-10 computers and this automatic multi-gigabyte download behavior is completely unacceptable. Especially for the couple businesses who've resorted to cellular LTE Internet with extremely low data caps to try to get decent speed.
And Microsoft will respond the way they always do, "Have your domain admin go into Active Directory and set a group policy to prevent the download and installation of Win10."
I'd find them fairly often. Never had to use them much while I was there but I looked for them as they tended to be cool looking bronze plaques mounted usually around where the train station would dump you out on the street.
Yup. Some years ago, my ex-wife and daughters were LPN and CNA. A couple of them worked in an elder care facility. Proclamation came down from on high that they will be using a new touchscreen system to log patient interactions. Said touchscreen was mounted flat to the wall, at a height usable only for someone about 5' 9" or taller. Of COURSE most of these women were not that tall. In addition to the multitude of clicks and verifications to log one scrip or treatment, they literally had to get a stepstool to use the damn thing. Safety? What's that?
As somebody who deployed those touchscreens, the most likely cause was that engineering was given no or the wrong specs for setting them up, followed closely by some 5'10" doctor wanting it mounted so he could easily use it, and thirdly, but not uncommon, nobody ever bothered to ask for them to be lowered. There we no shortage of times when some nurse would talk about the years of agony on such a set up while I was dealing with another issue, and I'd just pull out a hex wrench and lower everything on the Ergotron track 6" right then and there.
Sure. But this was true before electronic records too. If nobody asked these questions when filling out paper forms - then the questions are not needed for the digital version either. It is the patients life either way - and it worked before.
And it works better now. Every department, let alone every hospital, have people whose job is to do nothing but make sure that the process and results are better now than before. There is a lot of money in making things better even without talking about lawsuits. The main thing that nurses, and especially doctors, need to realize, is that they are not the only people who make the hospital work. They may have to open that second window and spend three seconds clicking the right button or filling in a field. They don't like it, but if they don't, that creates hours of work for many other people downstream and probably even for themselves.
Next, what idiot thought it was a good idea to enter codes anyway? The patient takes a HIV test, not "test 129.4". The patient may need "valium", not "drug #132667". And so on. Codes may have their places in the system's internal workings, but no need to expose that to users. They can select "HIV test" from a pulldown menu, or start typing HIV and have autocompletion. And red lines, if they type gibberish.
I'll blame everything on vendors. Multiple vendors combining multiple systems all expected by each hospital to work in completely different workflows. Short description fields, long description fields, systems that require a minimum number of digits combined with ones that have a maximum number, and in workflows driven by some complete other systems that may be based one either long or short description fields, modifiers, hospital policies, etc. Hospital might one one thing, doctors another, and nurses still another, but they are all still constrained by what the vendor application they buy will actually do. Even then, chances are whatever it is they are complaining about can be fixed with purchase of an additional system, upgrade of the current system, which would require new hardware and re-integration with the HIS interfaces. That's probably a three year IT project that'll cost 10 million and only affect their department.
Of COURSE company A is going to push their format which is incompatible with any other because then they lock in their customers, giving them no choice but to pay them ridiculous amounts of money in the future.
As somebody that deals with this everyday, I think you ascribe too much thinking and forethought to thew said companies. Most of them never even developed the software in question. They bought it when they bought some other smaller company that came up with a better product. They had the better product because they put the effort into making it have features that the current competition didn't have. Those features many times require format differences that didn't even exist in the other systems. Trust me, the big vendors can't even get their own systems to play nice together because they were all from other places. To say that format incompatibilities are a conspiracy to keep from operating with other vendors is just wishful thinking.
Japanese addresses are so generally screwy that it is normal behavior to draw maps when giving directions.
Yes, I've heard that map programs for finding addresses are the first thing that Japanese install on their phones. Outside of every train station and otherwise scattered around are maps of the neighborhood that show blocks and buildings with their numbers. See, everything is divided up by Prefecture, City, Neighborhood, Block, Building (floor, office) and numbered in no particular standard order for streets that are certainly not even laid out in a grid pattern. There's no way to find an address without a map in in someplace like Tokyo as sometimes the building isn't even marked with their number (because they expect you to be following a map). Much worse than London and their need for AtoZ.
There are millions of unwanted pets sitting in shelters. Before you worry about making your poodle live for 300 years, maybe go down there and adopt a couple.
Meh. It's just a way to do animal testing for human medicine without raising too many red flags. The first generation of poodle to live to a century or two will be owned by some research lab and probably not allowed to breed much.
There is no "natural order". Animals are our distant cousins, evolved to fit other niches than us, not some creation we have been designated to "rule over".
I would say that is debatable with domesticated species.
Only a bankster is stupid enough not to spend a ratio of 3:111 to protect their business.
The problem with paying blackmail is that it doesn't ever stop.
It does and it works if it delays the blackmailer long enough for that payer's investigators to discover who did it and send in a hit squad.
"The pod has been pressurized to minimize the G forces effects on a passenger."
Really? How is that little trick performed?
Simple: they depolarize the tachyon flow to the defector dish. It's almost like you've never even seen an episode.
They could just reverse the neutron flow.
You can use more than just a hammer. How about an acetylene torch? Bolt Cutters? Hydrofluoric acid? Typical "if all you have is a hammer" tunnel vision. I expect more from you, Slashdot!
True, but with this method, or lock picking, I can gain access to whatever it is that is locked up, remove what I want, and then replace the lock with no visible evidence of entrance. The noise is minimal, the technique and tools pretty trivial, so that at any opportunity, someone who wanted to could gain entrance and leave without leaving obvious clues. If you had a job box, tool shed, or building locked up with one of these, they could easily gain entrance, and remove something, possibly leaving the owner no idea it had been stolen. Locks still there, key still works, perhaps they'll think they put it someplace else and spend days if not weeks looking for it before realizing it's actually missing. Even then they might not be sure it was stolen. If there was more items that could be taken in one trip, they could even come back later.
That being said, unless you're investigated by spooks, any old lock will probably work. Most doors won't stand up to a couple of solid kicks if a credit card won't work, and the best NYC bike messenger lock would last about as long to power tools or a farm jack.
The Pilgrims who sailed on the Mayflower didn't expect to ever return to Europe. And half of them died in the first couple of years, in the horrible wilderness called "Massachusetts".
Everybody who goes to Mars will die. (Some quickly, some slowly, some from old age.... maybe even some who come back to Earth.) EVERYBODY dies. Many pioneers died along the Oregon Trail, or heading to California. Exploration isn't safe, but staying home in bed doesn't protect you from dying.
Ya, but Pilgrims and the sailors of earlier ventures were a cheap and expendable resource. The people we send to Mars will represent millions in training cost each and billions in lost research for any that die. They will all come back, baring accident, as we will be able to go to Mars and come back long before we will ever be able to build a sustainable outpost on Mars, let alone a colony. The first people to Mars will be the equivalent of Columbus or Lewis and Clark, not Oregon Trail settlers.
Newspeak is just a way of lying. The Soviets, Nazis and other fascists mastered this, and it worked pretty well for them. The American political right has adopted this lesson of history, so vividly described by Orwell.
No, Newspeak was not meant to be lying. Newspeak as described by Orwell was to replace the lying by limiting the language so that the concepts they had to lie about no longer existed. Propaganda is lying and what fascists master. Newspeak was the next step in no longer having to lie because lying takes too much effort. Saying War is Peace isn't Newspeak. Newspeak would be first replacing Peace with Duty. Eliminating the word Peace and its meaning from the vocabulary all together. Eventually, they would remove War also as it would be implied in the only meaning of Duty there was. The purpose of Newspeak was not to conflate the meanings of words, but to eliminate unwanted meaning by eliminating the words to narrow the language to allow only the desired mode of thinking.
Contrast that with the 70s, 80s and 90s where apart from an oil scare and a dip when manufacturing moved overseas things were mostly on the up and up.
You've got some serious selection bias going on. 70's - massive racial unrest over injustice, much worse than today, 80's drugs and gang related crime - much worse than it is today, 90's - just the beginning of the downward trend of the bad things that we're seeing even less of now. Since the 80's the average percentage of the household budget spent on food has gone from 17% to 11%. In the 50's it was 30% and in 1900 it was 45%.
Build a thousand SMRs and get oil down to $21 a barrel. The Sultans and power that be in the middle east will go broke. They will be back to throwing rocks at each other. Stop letting them out, make them deal with their own population explosion. The world would be so much more peaceful.
Not really. Lots of reactors would drive coal out of business, maybe. Oil is used for transportation and manufacturing things like plastic and asphalt. Less than 1% of the US power grid is supplied by oil. Even if we developed electric vehicles and switched over the sweet crude from the middle east would still be valuable for making plastics and other uses.
I have never heard of protesters forming into opposing mobs and attacking eachother being a common problem. I think what you are thinking of is sporting events.
True, this is Europe. From my experience, European protests are usually broken up into three marches. One of the marches is left wing and one is for the right wing so they can both have their say and not deal with each other. The third one is for those that just want to engage in street fights with the police.
Are programmers more likely to be terrorists?
No, because they're not engineers.
*ducks and runs*