The best I could do was to enable "display URL on hover" in my favorite browser, and hope that the URLs were at least somewhat self-identifying.
Yikes. I can't imagine a browser being my favorite if it didn't already display the URL on hover, by default.
I'm so glad that they've focused so much attention on Firefox (still my favorite browser by far, though it was painful there for a while). It sounds like the criticisms of this web site are reasonable (I haven't bothered to look), and that's a pity.
But wholesale dismissal of Mozilla--a company which has really picked itself back up and has been doing great things again for the last couple years--based on one crappy web site isn't right (though perhaps understandable if you had poor experiences with some past versions of their browsers), and it seems strange that they would produce something of the sort. https://developer.mozilla.org/ (MDN) is a counter-example of a fantastic web resource that Mozilla provides, which is why you'll often find it at the top of the results when searching for things related to web development.
I'm so glad we have such a good, free (in every sense) browser that isn't backed by a major data-mining company. Thanks, Mozilla!
I'd like to thank Californians for putting up with idiotic toilets that save a few percent off state usage so they can send 90% of their water to water a desert so we can have winter vegetables and "California" as an adjective on many prepared foods, meaning avocado.
Thanks, put-upon Califlushers!
Actually, more than 20% of the water (unless it's changed in the past few years) goes to grow alfalfa to feed cattle, and much of it is now shipped to China. https://www.bloomberg.com/view...
There'd be a lot more water to go around if all they were growing were fruits & veg.
Those idiots couldn't feed themselves if they had to...
I was planning to just look for replies to mod up, but I found no responses to this part of your argument, and, well... I figure it deserves a reply as much as anything else you said (which is to say, it probably doesn't merit a response).
For your edification, here are just a couple of the top google hits for "california america's breadbasket":
More than half the country's vegetables, fruits, and nuts are grown in California.
California has often been referred to as the breadbasket of the world. In fact the California Department of Food and Agriculture notes that California is the world’s fifth largest supplier of food and agriculture commodities. Some of the leading agriculture commodities are dairy, grapes, almonds, walnuts, various varieties of fresh fruit, and vegetables. Over 400 different crops are grown in California. Interestingly, California only possesses 4% of the total U.S. farms, but supplies the nation with the most agriculture products.
Is this a feature that others don't use? Am I unique? What's going on?
Just another anecdotal observation, but I've been using Firefox since it first came out, and wasn't aware it even had an RSS reader. No loss for me, but I also never made a habit of following RSS feeds.
IMHO the best thing about Firefox is it was the browser from Mozilla without all the bloat that made it suck. All I want from my web browser is a web browser (that's fast, easy to use, not from an advertising and/or evil company, and works on Linux).
Nothing wrong with using soy juice on your cereal if you want to but the act of cooking it or drinking it doesn't magically make it into milk.
Heeeeee! "Soy juice". Yeah, that'll go great with your gin.
Say, doesn't "soy juice" mean "I am juice", in Spanish?
But seriously, I don't think "juice" means what you think it does. It's even more inaccurate than calling non-dairy products "milk".
noun: juice
1. the liquid obtained from or present in fruit or vegetables.
You can squeeze soybeans or nuts all you want; you'll get neither juice nor milk. Non-dairy "milks" are generally made of highly processed, ground-up seeds mixed with thickening agents and large volumes of water. It's not even comparable to juice from concentrate, since that starts out as... well, juice. And the resulting liquid is much, much more comparable to milk (in form, appearance, and common uses) than it is to any kind of juice.
This is nothing but marketing bullshit intended to confuse customers into believing they are somehow substitute products when they aren't and do not share the same properties.
Seriously?! You think anyone has ever been fooled into thinking non-dairy milks are actually milk? They'd have to be much stupider even than the average consumer.
Calling them "milks" (always with a modifier to make clear they are not milk, e.g. "soy milk" or "almond milk"--NO ONE calls their non-dairy milk simply "milk") helps people to understand that they are similar, and that they may be useful as a substitute for the thing they are being compared to.
What's far more problematic than non-dairy milk substitutes comparing themselves to dairy milk as an accompaniment to cold cereal or beverages (but never claiming equivalence to milk) is companies such as Nestle which throw massive marketing efforts behind convincing mothers that fake milk (aka a synthetic "formula") is superior to their own, true milk, which as you correctly observe can only come from the mammary gland of a mammal (and ideally one of the same species as the infant that's consuming it).
I too have a habit of wanting to take things very literally, and can relate to your having a pet peeve about language.
But the word "milk" and the adjective "milky" have been used to describe so many things that aren't produced by mammals--think coconut milk, milkweed, milk of magnesia, milk thistle, milk paint (yes, usually actually made with dairy milk), milk glass (milky-colored; not glasses for milk),... that I hardly think this is a fight worth fighting.
Unless you're the dairy industry, of course. Then, you have big money to lobby the government to change widely-understood and accepted language in hopes of making dairy substitutes less attractive and marketable to your customers. Especially when you have a government in power that is actually even more friendly to massive, well-established "homeland" industries than those of decades past.
As an Irish person, I just see this as our incompetent government targeting jobs in peat and crippling the economy deliberately in their continuous effort to destroy anything we have left.
I don't agree with modding this -1, Flamebait. This seems like very conservative political viewpoint, likely to be held by many in Ireland's large peat industry (and all those in the economy who depend directly or indirectly on the use of peat as a fuel). The comment doesn't contribute much to the discourse, but I don't think calling it "flamebait" is fair.
But if you'll just look at the comment's subject, "As an Iris peron meh", you'll realize that no "Irish person" would ever write that.
Those aren't typos of an Irish person. They're the typos of bored flunky who pasted prewritten propaganda (with no typos) into a comment box--but was expected to type the subject manually. Neither English nor Irish was this person's first language.
This isn't a cynical Irish person's heartfelt complaint about what they see as a shitty situation. This was someone just trying to stir the pot with a carefully-written message.
Yeah it's pretty disingenuous to suddenly pretend you have moral or ethical qualms. It has to have been clear to _anyone_ in the industry for years how fucked up Facebook is, and how amoral their behavior is. The only difference is now that the general public is getting concerned.
I've been rebuffing recruiters from Facebook (among other corporate assholes) for years. Acting ethically (and insisting on working only for companies which don't offend my moral sensibilities), isn't a new concept to me. It does greatly limit one's employment prospects, but on the other hand I've never had trouble finding a job.
I am very leery of eating popcorn nowadays because it seems to irritate my guts quite a bit. Which is a shame, because I loved popcorn as a child (back before GMO corn existed).
I was concerned about this, too. But thankfully, there aren't any GM varieties of popcorn. Popcorn is a different variety altogether than sweet corn like you eat on the cob, and which has become dominated by the Bt seeds. And you mentioned wheat, but there's no GM wheat, either.
But if you go to the cinema and there's fake buttery topping on the popcorn, my guess is it's made with GM soy oil. And there's surely GM corn syrup in the soda.
Yeah, this particular study seems very laudatory of GMOs. They focus on the beneficial side-effects of Bt corn. Focus is good. But the summary suggests the focus was pretty narrow, only on two species of "bug". specifically corn borers. Pests. Why only focus on pesty bugs? They could have tracked the populations of at least one other species of insect. How about good "bugs"? Bees, for instance. Bees are good.
But it "kills SO many bugs", hooray!
And better yet, its amazing bug-killing field extends well beyond the confines of where it's you've planted it! Your neighbors will thank you for planting this fine Bt corn.
If this study wasn't funded by GM proponents, I'll be a monkey's uncle.
Do they have an "Ethics in Physics" class required for people who might design nuclear weapons?
Or an "Ethics in Chemistry" for those who might design mundane explosives or chemical weapons?
...
Yes, absolutely. Ethics was a requirement for my B.S. in Chemistry, over 20 years ago. I don't know how widespread that requirement was or is, or whether a deeper focus on ethics is required for post-graduate Chemistry studies.
But it should be required for everyone, whether or not they have an interest in science. And it certainly should be a requirement for Chemistry, Physics, (perhaps most of all) Biotech, Computer Science... and in fact all sciences; they all have the potential to discover or invent truly dangerous materials or technologies, and therefore have a much greater moral responsibility than so-called laypeople.
In the end, I chose a different career path (software development) for which I didn't require any further (formal) education. I've found that having a strong sense of ethics and morals greatly restricts my employment opportunities (at least as much as if I'd continued with chemistry). But thankfully I'm not alone in taking responsibility for my actions, and considering the potential ramifications of whatever I may create.
I find it refreshing and frankly way overdue that these schools have realized the need for having their students formally consider the ethical ramifications of so-called AI. I hope the need becomes universally recognized.
I clicked the link in TFS but after the page loaded it had a lot of blank space and just didn't look right. So I glanced at the URL, saw "www.seattlepi.com/seattlenews/amp/..." and realized I'd been had.
C'mon Slashdot, why can't you filter links to catch AMP URLs, then find and offer us a direct, un-"enhanced" link to the article?
For the "whoosher" who modded "-1: Offtopic"; I'm sorry I didn't include tags. I'll admit my attempt at humor was a bit subtle, and bound to be lost on the hasty reader. It was in response to the idiot AC's statement:
Before we start comparing Word and LibreOffice, remember Wordpad vs Abiword.
Just read that one sentence over and over a few times, and I think you'll get my point. I wasn't actually expressing any opinion about citrus or any fruit. I love grapefruits, tangerines, pears, apples and LibreOffice.
For starters, let's keep it simple and try comparing Wordpad and Abiword.
Wordpad loads in the blink of an eye. It handles enormous files flawlessly, and I have never seen it crash.
Abiword takes an annoying pause before it can do anything. Not only will it choke on large files, but it won't even run on many popular distros - if it runs at all.
Last night we tried for hours to install the latest version on my son's Debian based Raspberry Pi 3. It comes up with a flashing window. Not only is it useless, but it's even hard to close!
Maybe Microsoft doesn't make it easy to copy Word, but how do you explain the lack of a competitor to Wordpad. Before we start comparing Word and LibreOffice, remember Wordpad vs Abiword. This comparison illustrates what has always been wrong with the Linux desktop.
I feel sorry for any kid that only has a Linux machine for his schoolwork,
For starters, let's try comparing Tangerines and Grapefruit.
Most Tangerines are incredibly easy to peel. I've been able to eat half a dozen Tangerines in one sitting, and never even got juice in my eye.
Grapefruit take forever to peel. Not only does they end up choking me with that less-tasty white stuff all over the juicy parts, but most people don't like them as much - if they'll eat them at all.
Last night my kid and I tried for hours to peel half a dozen Grapefruit, and we ended up with juice everywhere and he kept squirting me right in the eye. He even swears it wasn't on purpose.
Maybe nature doesn't make it easy to turn Grapefruit into Tangerines, but how do you explain the lack of a reasonable competitor to Tangerines? Before we start comparing Pears to Apples, remember Tangerines vs Grapefruit. This comparison illustrates what has always been wrong with Fruit.
I feel sorry for any kid that only gets Grapefruit in his school lunchbox.
Wow. It would sure suck if you had this disability and had to take tests such as these:
According to China Youth Daily, students at the Sichuan Vocational College of Culture and Communication were handed papers with photos of seven people during their exams, and asked to select their teacher and write their name underneath.
Those who were able to identify their teacher did not get any extra marks, but students were severely penalised if they answered incorrectly, having 41 points deducted from their final score. China Daily says that the identity test accounted for 30% of their overall grade.
You are missing a big piece -- the horrible ineffectiveness of Internet ads. So what if 700,000 people were exposed. I am exposed to several thousand Internet ads a day. I remember none of them. They are just clutter that I ignore. You probably need to expose me to an ad 5,000 times before I will notice it. I may have been exposed to the Twitter and Facebook ads, who cares, I never noticed them.
That's some excellent reasoning if we're talking about ads, but it seems to me that you're responding here to something else that failed to fully engage your attention (TFS)--even though it provoked you to write a reply. This isn't about "Internet ads" that people were merely "exposed" to. The fact that someone actually followed a troll account, or liked or reposted a "tweet" proves that they were actually engaged and inspired to take action based on its content.
"Consistent with our commitment to transparency, we are emailing notifications to 677,775 people in the United States who followed one of these accounts or retweeted or liked a Tweet from these accounts during the election period"
TFS doesn't offer a breakdown of the numbers for each of these actions, but for the sake of argument let's say that each person who liked, followed, or "retweeted" a troll post has, on average, 10 followers on Twitter who are actually active users. I'm not a Twitterer but from what I know, that number seems conservative (no pun intended); clearly some of these people would have had thousands or tens of thousands of followers. Each of these followers would have been exposed to every like and retweet, and curiosity must have driven at least some of them to check out the content of the new account their "friend" (for lack of a better word--maybe "followee"?) decided to follow. Even if they didn't otherwise interact with it.
Now, take the original 677,775 people who engaged with a troll post, add their 6,777,750 followers, and you've got 7,455,525 twitter fiends who actually read--weren't just exposed to--the propaganda. Divide that by the 139 million voters quoted by the GP, and you've got over 5% of the electorate who read the propaganda. That is no longer an insignificant number; it's over 7 million voters! If they were just "Internet ads", then over 7 million appearances of the propaganda posts would indeed be irrelevant; as you sagely point out (though I doubt you typify the average Internet user), only a small fraction of those would have been seen, no less read. But if you're at all active on social media, I'll bet you do actually read some of what your "friends" post.
That's the whole point of the problem, here. These are not "ads" in the traditional sense. The original troll posts were effectively ads, but here we've got Twitter saying almost 700 thousand people engaged with them, then effectively endorsed them by promoting them to their followers. I'd say that's a big difference!
Then add me on FB and I promise to post pics of kittens and what I've just had for dinner.
As a "foodie" with foodie friends, I actually miss the days when people would share the interesting meals they'd made. Far better than selfies and endless reposts of non-original crap. At least it was personal and creative.
This proposed change actually has me intrigued. I'm very doubtful it will actually improve things, since the suggestion is that they'll reduce commercial advertising, which is how they make money. But maybe I'll check out Facebook again in a few months.
And thanks for the offer, but even if I made a practice of adding strangers to my FB network, I'm doubt I'd be able to find the right Anonymous Coward. And besides, I'm really more of a dog person. Cats are boring.
Every is seeing too much of bold fonts? Did someone forget a closing bold tag in some style sheet?
Yeah, the entire article section had been enclosed within <strong> tags for some reason. I edited the source in Firefox and changed "<strong>" to the meaningless "<string>", just to make it bearable to read the page.
But thankfully, a few page refreshes afterwards, and they'd already fixed it. Maybe someone had thought <strong> would somehow toughen their security.
Anyway, c'mon guys... stop editing the live site!;)
I ask because in my [limited] professional life, I know of exactly zero entities using this software.
Am I missing out on anything? Can someone more knowledgeable advise me of why I should use Thunderbird over Outlook or GMail?
In addition to using it to access my principal email ISP via IMAP/SMTP, I use Thunderbird to manage my gmail accounts (likewise, via IMAP/SMTP). I use the Lightning add-on to manage the Google calendars people add me to. Just because other people choose to use gmail doesn't mean I should be forced to. At least, that's how I feel about it.
In the past I've used Thunderbird (again with the help of Lightning, plus another add-on) to manage email and calendars on corporate Exchange servers. Don't even get me started on Outlook. From my experience it was always an awful beast since the very beginning, not that I keep a close on eye on it anymore.
So what's it going to be? Outlook? Gmail? Huh?! For every new job or new client, am I supposed to switch to a different email and calendaring UI? No thanks! If I already have one tool that's appropriate for the job at hand, why would I want to invest time in another? It's not like I engage in email and the scheduling of meetings as hobbies! They're tiresome parts of my job for which I simply need reliable tool(s). No garage is going to force a mechanic to use the "house" spanners and sockets. I don't think any homebuilder is going to force carpenters to use the corporate framing hammers.
Thunderbird is a great tool that only ever grows dull in the sense that it's boring--because it works and stays out of the way.
So thanks, Thunderbird! A faithful and constant part of my toolkit for over a decade. Thanks to you, I've gotten my work done with fewer needless distractions. And thanks to you, I haven't had to use those other "free" sets of tools that aren't truly free in the ways most important to me.
Well, those are some reasons I use Thunderbird.
They would be perfectly good reasons to use a different free and open email & calendaring client, if there's another you prefer... or can even find. Anyway, I'm sure some people can think of reasons they don't like Thunderbird. But it's familiar, works almost perfectly, and keeps my email and calendar separate from my web browser, which helps me stay organized.
Now that they're reviving the bird, I sure hope Lightning gets updated to work with the new add-on system, and some bug fixes as well. Given the miracles they've just performed in reviving Firefox, I'm more excited than worried.
Not all Mormons. Just the polygynous ones. I'm not interested in digging deeper right now, but this seems like a reasonable place to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that Flexagon was dismissing Mozilla because of this. That was in response to other comments, elsewhere!
Yikes. I can't imagine a browser being my favorite if it didn't already display the URL on hover, by default.
I'm so glad that they've focused so much attention on Firefox (still my favorite browser by far, though it was painful there for a while). It sounds like the criticisms of this web site are reasonable (I haven't bothered to look), and that's a pity.
But wholesale dismissal of Mozilla--a company which has really picked itself back up and has been doing great things again for the last couple years--based on one crappy web site isn't right (though perhaps understandable if you had poor experiences with some past versions of their browsers), and it seems strange that they would produce something of the sort. https://developer.mozilla.org/ (MDN) is a counter-example of a fantastic web resource that Mozilla provides, which is why you'll often find it at the top of the results when searching for things related to web development.
I'm so glad we have such a good, free (in every sense) browser that isn't backed by a major data-mining company. Thanks, Mozilla!
I'd like to thank Californians for putting up with idiotic toilets that save a few percent off state usage so they can send 90% of their water to water a desert so we can have winter vegetables and "California" as an adjective on many prepared foods, meaning avocado.
Thanks, put-upon Califlushers!
Actually, more than 20% of the water (unless it's changed in the past few years) goes to grow alfalfa to feed cattle, and much of it is now shipped to China.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view...
There'd be a lot more water to go around if all they were growing were fruits & veg.
Those idiots couldn't feed themselves if they had to...
I was planning to just look for replies to mod up, but I found no responses to this part of your argument, and, well... I figure it deserves a reply as much as anything else you said (which is to say, it probably doesn't merit a response).
For your edification, here are just a couple of the top google hits for "california america's breadbasket":
source: https://naturalresources.house...
source: http://eb5northerncalifornia.c...
Yup, I'm pretty sure it's you who's the idiot who couldn't feed themselves... if it weren't for California.
> Nonsense. ACA banned catastrophic health insurance/health saving accounts.
Not even remotely true. I still have my HSA.
Just another anecdotal observation, but I've been using Firefox since it first came out, and wasn't aware it even had an RSS reader. No loss for me, but I also never made a habit of following RSS feeds.
IMHO the best thing about Firefox is it was the browser from Mozilla without all the bloat that made it suck. All I want from my web browser is a web browser (that's fast, easy to use, not from an advertising and/or evil company, and works on Linux).
Nothing wrong with using soy juice on your cereal if you want to but the act of cooking it or drinking it doesn't magically make it into milk.
Heeeeee! "Soy juice". Yeah, that'll go great with your gin.
Say, doesn't "soy juice" mean "I am juice", in Spanish?
But seriously, I don't think "juice" means what you think it does. It's even more inaccurate than calling non-dairy products "milk".
noun: juice
1. the liquid obtained from or present in fruit or vegetables.
You can squeeze soybeans or nuts all you want; you'll get neither juice nor milk. Non-dairy "milks" are generally made of highly processed, ground-up seeds mixed with thickening agents and large volumes of water. It's not even comparable to juice from concentrate, since that starts out as... well, juice. And the resulting liquid is much, much more comparable to milk (in form, appearance, and common uses) than it is to any kind of juice.
This is nothing but marketing bullshit intended to confuse customers into believing they are somehow substitute products when they aren't and do not share the same properties.
Seriously?! You think anyone has ever been fooled into thinking non-dairy milks are actually milk? They'd have to be much stupider even than the average consumer.
Calling them "milks" (always with a modifier to make clear they are not milk, e.g. "soy milk" or "almond milk"--NO ONE calls their non-dairy milk simply "milk") helps people to understand that they are similar, and that they may be useful as a substitute for the thing they are being compared to.
What's far more problematic than non-dairy milk substitutes comparing themselves to dairy milk as an accompaniment to cold cereal or beverages (but never claiming equivalence to milk) is companies such as Nestle which throw massive marketing efforts behind convincing mothers that fake milk (aka a synthetic "formula") is superior to their own, true milk, which as you correctly observe can only come from the mammary gland of a mammal (and ideally one of the same species as the infant that's consuming it).
I too have a habit of wanting to take things very literally, and can relate to your having a pet peeve about language.
But the word "milk" and the adjective "milky" have been used to describe so many things that aren't produced by mammals--think coconut milk, milkweed, milk of magnesia, milk thistle, milk paint (yes, usually actually made with dairy milk), milk glass (milky-colored; not glasses for milk), ... that I hardly think this is a fight worth fighting.
Unless you're the dairy industry, of course. Then, you have big money to lobby the government to change widely-understood and accepted language in hopes of making dairy substitutes less attractive and marketable to your customers. Especially when you have a government in power that is actually even more friendly to massive, well-established "homeland" industries than those of decades past.
As an Irish person, I just see this as our incompetent government targeting jobs in peat and crippling the economy deliberately in their continuous effort to destroy anything we have left.
I don't agree with modding this -1, Flamebait. This seems like very conservative political viewpoint, likely to be held by many in Ireland's large peat industry (and all those in the economy who depend directly or indirectly on the use of peat as a fuel). The comment doesn't contribute much to the discourse, but I don't think calling it "flamebait" is fair.
But if you'll just look at the comment's subject, "As an Iris peron meh", you'll realize that no "Irish person" would ever write that.
Those aren't typos of an Irish person. They're the typos of bored flunky who pasted prewritten propaganda (with no typos) into a comment box--but was expected to type the subject manually. Neither English nor Irish was this person's first language.
This isn't a cynical Irish person's heartfelt complaint about what they see as a shitty situation. This was someone just trying to stir the pot with a carefully-written message.
We really need a -1, Troll Farm mod.
Dang. I sure hope no one figures out how to implement such comment deployments here at slashdot!
The dems did the same thing to Bush allowing Obama to appoint many judges. Why should I care now that the shoe is on the other foot?
Legitimate citation, please.
An electrochemical process? Thank goodness we have unlimited supplies of CO2-free electricity available.
In the future, we do (because we must).
Yeah it's pretty disingenuous to suddenly pretend you have moral or ethical qualms. It has to have been clear to _anyone_ in the industry for years how fucked up Facebook is, and how amoral their behavior is. The only difference is now that the general public is getting concerned.
I've been rebuffing recruiters from Facebook (among other corporate assholes) for years. Acting ethically (and insisting on working only for companies which don't offend my moral sensibilities), isn't a new concept to me. It does greatly limit one's employment prospects, but on the other hand I've never had trouble finding a job.
Modded me Flamebait, really? So much for a rational discussion. I see the GM trolls are hard at work today.
I am very leery of eating popcorn nowadays because it seems to irritate my guts quite a bit. Which is a shame, because I loved popcorn as a child (back before GMO corn existed).
I was concerned about this, too. But thankfully, there aren't any GM varieties of popcorn. Popcorn is a different variety altogether than sweet corn like you eat on the cob, and which has become dominated by the Bt seeds. And you mentioned wheat, but there's no GM wheat, either.
But if you go to the cinema and there's fake buttery topping on the popcorn, my guess is it's made with GM soy oil. And there's surely GM corn syrup in the soda.
Yeah, this particular study seems very laudatory of GMOs. They focus on the beneficial side-effects of Bt corn. Focus is good. But the summary suggests the focus was pretty narrow, only on two species of "bug". specifically corn borers. Pests. Why only focus on pesty bugs? They could have tracked the populations of at least one other species of insect. How about good "bugs"? Bees, for instance. Bees are good.
But it "kills SO many bugs", hooray!
And better yet, its amazing bug-killing field extends well beyond the confines of where it's you've planted it! Your neighbors will thank you for planting this fine Bt corn.
If this study wasn't funded by GM proponents, I'll be a monkey's uncle.
Do they have an "Ethics in Physics" class required for people who might design nuclear weapons?
Or an "Ethics in Chemistry" for those who might design mundane explosives or chemical weapons?
...
Yes, absolutely. Ethics was a requirement for my B.S. in Chemistry, over 20 years ago. I don't know how widespread that requirement was or is, or whether a deeper focus on ethics is required for post-graduate Chemistry studies.
But it should be required for everyone, whether or not they have an interest in science. And it certainly should be a requirement for Chemistry, Physics, (perhaps most of all) Biotech, Computer Science... and in fact all sciences; they all have the potential to discover or invent truly dangerous materials or technologies, and therefore have a much greater moral responsibility than so-called laypeople.
In the end, I chose a different career path (software development) for which I didn't require any further (formal) education. I've found that having a strong sense of ethics and morals greatly restricts my employment opportunities (at least as much as if I'd continued with chemistry). But thankfully I'm not alone in taking responsibility for my actions, and considering the potential ramifications of whatever I may create.
I find it refreshing and frankly way overdue that these schools have realized the need for having their students formally consider the ethical ramifications of so-called AI. I hope the need becomes universally recognized.
I clicked the link in TFS but after the page loaded it had a lot of blank space and just didn't look right. So I glanced at the URL, saw "www.seattlepi.com/seattlenews/amp/..." and realized I'd been had.
C'mon Slashdot, why can't you filter links to catch AMP URLs, then find and offer us a direct, un-"enhanced" link to the article?
Here it is:
http://www.seattlepi.com/seatt...
For the "whoosher" who modded "-1: Offtopic"; I'm sorry I didn't include tags. I'll admit my attempt at humor was a bit subtle, and bound to be lost on the hasty reader. It was in response to the idiot AC's statement:
Just read that one sentence over and over a few times, and I think you'll get my point. I wasn't actually expressing any opinion about citrus or any fruit. I love grapefruits, tangerines, pears, apples and LibreOffice.
For starters, let's keep it simple and try comparing Wordpad and Abiword.
Wordpad loads in the blink of an eye. It handles enormous files flawlessly, and I have never seen it crash.
Abiword takes an annoying pause before it can do anything. Not only will it choke on large files, but it won't even run on many popular distros - if it runs at all.
Last night we tried for hours to install the latest version on my son's Debian based Raspberry Pi 3. It comes up with a flashing window. Not only is it useless, but it's even hard to close!
Maybe Microsoft doesn't make it easy to copy Word, but how do you explain the lack of a competitor to Wordpad. Before we start comparing Word and LibreOffice, remember Wordpad vs Abiword. This comparison illustrates what has always been wrong with the Linux desktop.
I feel sorry for any kid that only has a Linux machine for his schoolwork,
For starters, let's try comparing Tangerines and Grapefruit.
Most Tangerines are incredibly easy to peel. I've been able to eat half a dozen Tangerines in one sitting, and never even got juice in my eye.
Grapefruit take forever to peel. Not only does they end up choking me with that less-tasty white stuff all over the juicy parts, but most people don't like them as much - if they'll eat them at all.
Last night my kid and I tried for hours to peel half a dozen Grapefruit, and we ended up with juice everywhere and he kept squirting me right in the eye. He even swears it wasn't on purpose.
Maybe nature doesn't make it easy to turn Grapefruit into Tangerines, but how do you explain the lack of a reasonable competitor to Tangerines? Before we start comparing Pears to Apples, remember Tangerines vs Grapefruit. This comparison illustrates what has always been wrong with Fruit.
I feel sorry for any kid that only gets Grapefruit in his school lunchbox.
Wow. It would sure suck if you had this disability and had to take tests such as these:
Source:
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-...
You are missing a big piece -- the horrible ineffectiveness of Internet ads. So what if 700,000 people were exposed. I am exposed to several thousand Internet ads a day. I remember none of them. They are just clutter that I ignore. You probably need to expose me to an ad 5,000 times before I will notice it. I may have been exposed to the Twitter and Facebook ads, who cares, I never noticed them.
That's some excellent reasoning if we're talking about ads, but it seems to me that you're responding here to something else that failed to fully engage your attention (TFS)--even though it provoked you to write a reply. This isn't about "Internet ads" that people were merely "exposed" to. The fact that someone actually followed a troll account, or liked or reposted a "tweet" proves that they were actually engaged and inspired to take action based on its content.
TFS doesn't offer a breakdown of the numbers for each of these actions, but for the sake of argument let's say that each person who liked, followed, or "retweeted" a troll post has, on average, 10 followers on Twitter who are actually active users. I'm not a Twitterer but from what I know, that number seems conservative (no pun intended); clearly some of these people would have had thousands or tens of thousands of followers. Each of these followers would have been exposed to every like and retweet, and curiosity must have driven at least some of them to check out the content of the new account their "friend" (for lack of a better word--maybe "followee"?) decided to follow. Even if they didn't otherwise interact with it.
Now, take the original 677,775 people who engaged with a troll post, add their 6,777,750 followers, and you've got 7,455,525 twitter fiends who actually read--weren't just exposed to--the propaganda. Divide that by the 139 million voters quoted by the GP, and you've got over 5% of the electorate who read the propaganda. That is no longer an insignificant number; it's over 7 million voters! If they were just "Internet ads", then over 7 million appearances of the propaganda posts would indeed be irrelevant; as you sagely point out (though I doubt you typify the average Internet user), only a small fraction of those would have been seen, no less read. But if you're at all active on social media, I'll bet you do actually read some of what your "friends" post.
That's the whole point of the problem, here. These are not "ads" in the traditional sense. The original troll posts were effectively ads, but here we've got Twitter saying almost 700 thousand people engaged with them, then effectively endorsed them by promoting them to their followers. I'd say that's a big difference!
Then add me on FB and I promise to post pics of kittens and what I've just had for dinner.
As a "foodie" with foodie friends, I actually miss the days when people would share the interesting meals they'd made. Far better than selfies and endless reposts of non-original crap. At least it was personal and creative.
This proposed change actually has me intrigued. I'm very doubtful it will actually improve things, since the suggestion is that they'll reduce commercial advertising, which is how they make money. But maybe I'll check out Facebook again in a few months.
And thanks for the offer, but even if I made a practice of adding strangers to my FB network, I'm doubt I'd be able to find the right Anonymous Coward. And besides, I'm really more of a dog person. Cats are boring.
Every is seeing too much of bold fonts? Did someone forget a closing bold tag in some style sheet?
Yeah, the entire article section had been enclosed within <strong> tags for some reason. I edited the source in Firefox and changed "<strong>" to the meaningless "<string>", just to make it bearable to read the page.
But thankfully, a few page refreshes afterwards, and they'd already fixed it. Maybe someone had thought <strong> would somehow toughen their security.
Anyway, c'mon guys... stop editing the live site! ;)
I ask because in my [limited] professional life, I know of exactly zero entities using this software.
Am I missing out on anything? Can someone more knowledgeable advise me of why I should use Thunderbird over Outlook or GMail?
In addition to using it to access my principal email ISP via IMAP/SMTP, I use Thunderbird to manage my gmail accounts (likewise, via IMAP/SMTP). I use the Lightning add-on to manage the Google calendars people add me to. Just because other people choose to use gmail doesn't mean I should be forced to. At least, that's how I feel about it.
In the past I've used Thunderbird (again with the help of Lightning, plus another add-on) to manage email and calendars on corporate Exchange servers. Don't even get me started on Outlook. From my experience it was always an awful beast since the very beginning, not that I keep a close on eye on it anymore.
So what's it going to be? Outlook? Gmail? Huh?! For every new job or new client, am I supposed to switch to a different email and calendaring UI? No thanks! If I already have one tool that's appropriate for the job at hand, why would I want to invest time in another? It's not like I engage in email and the scheduling of meetings as hobbies! They're tiresome parts of my job for which I simply need reliable tool(s). No garage is going to force a mechanic to use the "house" spanners and sockets. I don't think any homebuilder is going to force carpenters to use the corporate framing hammers.
Thunderbird is a great tool that only ever grows dull in the sense that it's boring--because it works and stays out of the way.
So thanks, Thunderbird! A faithful and constant part of my toolkit for over a decade. Thanks to you, I've gotten my work done with fewer needless distractions. And thanks to you, I haven't had to use those other "free" sets of tools that aren't truly free in the ways most important to me.
Well, those are some reasons I use Thunderbird.
They would be perfectly good reasons to use a different free and open email & calendaring client, if there's another you prefer... or can even find. Anyway, I'm sure some people can think of reasons they don't like Thunderbird. But it's familiar, works almost perfectly, and keeps my email and calendar separate from my web browser, which helps me stay organized.
Now that they're reviving the bird, I sure hope Lightning gets updated to work with the new add-on system, and some bug fixes as well. Given the miracles they've just performed in reviving Firefox, I'm more excited than worried.
Not all Mormons. Just the polygynous ones. I'm not interested in digging deeper right now, but this seems like a reasonable place to start:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...