...it's the entire contents of the article, minus the ads and with Slashdot's wrapped around it instead. This is copyright theft, pure and simple, and this summary should be deleted and replaced with a much, MUCH more abbreviated version.
Or... maybe Engadget's article could be deleted and replaced with a much, MUCH more detailed and information-rich version.
Standards when a human is on board are way more stringent than for cargo. They have to meet an overall 1 in 500 probability of failure during ascent
Are you sure? Ars mentions "NASA's mission requirement for a loss-of-crew probability of 1-in-270" -- presumably "mission requirement" covers ascent, orbit and descent.
I scoured the lands of the US for 1.5 years to fill a vacant position and I couldn't find anyone in the US to do it. I work in NIH funded research and needed a programmer at $45k/yr. I was fine with a new college grad, and I still couldn't find anyone. I went to every college in the area and said "If you have taken a programming class, I want you. I'll pay you. I'll train you in the languages we use" and no responses. Why??
We offered $48k/yr for a nanny. We only spent 0.2 years looking and we got a small handful of okay candidates. They didn't need college. If you still can't find anyone the wage you're asking, would you like me to send you along some nanny dropouts as referrals?
Would you want customs agents making their own regulations? How about police departments? Hell no. The laws and regulations ought to come from Congress. Oh - "but Congressmen don't have the time and energy to work on such laws". That's why a lot of the "responsibility" given to the Federal Government should be in the states. Examples include HUD, Education, etc...
In most scientific and technical areas, I'd like to leave regulations to the people who have a good understanding of that area (i.e. scientists and engineers). As for the political leaders at federal or state level, what expertise do they bring to scientific and technical areas? a liberal-arts or law degree? good rhetoric and campaign-funding skills?
Curious how you came up with your figures. And as to countries with "civil unrest and poor-functioning central government", isn't that pretty much the definition of countries with refugees? So, according to your figures (how did you get 98%?), the order focuses the ban on refugees coming from countries with refugees (civil unrest and poor-functioning central government).
As I said, my figures need to be done more carefully. But my methodology for this first pass was:
(1) From wikipedia, get a list of muslim-majority countries in descending order
(2) From wikipedia, get a list of countries with armed conflict (measured in deaths/year 2016). Maybe I should have instead used the Global Peace Index. There were two non-muslim-majority countries which had notable armed conflict, so I added them to the list: Mexico and Nigeria.
(3) I added a bit of general knowledge. To my understanding, Nigeria has solidly functioning civil governance and its conflict is due to tribal conflict over oil proceeds. And I believe Mexico has solidly functioning civil governance apart from the drug war. (That's why maybe the Global Peace Index would have been better and more objective).
(4) For each of the three claims, I went through the country list to determine how many of the countries it correctly predicted whether they'd be subject to the moratorium or not. That's where the 98% number came from.
I would like to redo the numbers with some different methodology. My first question is what percentage of the world's muslims are subject to the immigration moratorium. I suspect that because the hugely populous Muslim countries like Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Turkey, Egypt aren't on the ban, probably it affects only a small percentage. Then I'd want to look at population numbers for the Global Peace Index too.
I'm not sure your point about refugees. There were separate things: (1) 90-day moratorium on immigration from certain countries, (2) 120-day moratorium on refugee admission, (3) indefinite moratorium on refugees from Syria. I've only been considering the first one to see whether it really should be considered anti-Muslim.
In general, I think the executive order signals a terrible shift towards refugee-unfriendliness, and I think this is the bit that we should focus on. When we focus instead on the claim "it's targeted at Muslims", I think that weakens the message.
It's odd, isn't it, that not one of the countries where Trump has business interests made it on to the list, including Saudi Arabia where almost all of the 9/11 hijackers came from?
The narrative you're insinuating doesn't fit the facts. Here they are:
The claim "Trump's immigration moratorium is targeted at majority-Muslim countries" -- this claim is 21% accurate [i.e. basically false].
The claim "Trump's moratorium is targeted at Iran, plus those countries with civil unrest and poor-functioning central government" -- this claim is 98% accurate (only exception is Afghanistan)
Your claim "Trump's moratorium is targeted at majority-Muslim countries save for those where he has business interests" -- this claim is 38% accurate (major exceptions include Pakistan, Bangladesh, Algeria, Morocco, Uzbekistan, Niger, Malaysa).
Source: here from Wikipedia is the list of majority-Muslim countries in descending order of population, plus those (according to Wikipedia) with severe civil unrest, and those subject to the moratorium. I'm measuring accuracy by country count. I should really come up with a more sophisticated measure of accuracy, but can't be bothered...
Indonesia [trump business interests] Pakistan Nigeria [not majority-muslim, has civil unrest but well-functioning government] Bangladesh Mexico [not majority-muslim, but has civil unrest due to drug war but otherwise well-functioning government] Iran [30day ban] Turkey [trump business interests] Egypt [trump business interests] Algeria Sudan [30day ban, civil unrest] Morocco Iraq [30day ban, severe civil unrest] Afghanistan [severe civil unrest] Uzbekistan Saudi Arabia [trump business interests] Yemen [30day ban, civil unrest] Syria [30day ban, severe civil unrest] Niger Malaysia Mali Senegal Burkina Faso Tunisia Somalia [30day ban, civil unrest] Kazakhstan Azerbaijan [trump business interests] Guinea Chad Tajikistan Jordan Libya [30day ban, civil unrest] Kyrgyzstan Turkmenistan Mauritania Siera Leone United Arab Emirates [trump business interest] Kuwait Oman Lebanon Gambia Kosovo Qatar [trump business interests] Bahrain Comoros Western Sahara Maldives Mayotte Cocos (Keeling) Islands
You'll see that "has trump business interests" is a poor predictor of whether a majority-muslim country escaped the moratorium. It has no false positives, but loads of false negatives.
The Washington Post has an article showing the list of Muslim countries whose people are banned from entering the U.S. The common trait is they have no Trump business ties. Welcome to Fascism in the old sense of the word.
That's technically true but still dishonest reporting by the Washington Post.
The claim "Trump's immigration moratorium is targeted at majority-Muslim countries" -- this claim is 21% accurate [i.e. basically false].
The claim "Trump's moratorium is targeted at Iran, plus those countries with civil unrest and poor-functioning central government" -- this claim is 98% accurate (only exception is Afghanistan)
The claim "Trump's moratorium is targeted at majority-Muslim countries save for those where he has business interests" -- this claim is 38% accurate (major exceptions include Pakistan, Bangladesh, Algeria, Morocco, Uzbekistan, Niger, Malaysa).
There are the news reports that Trump's 90-day immigration moratorium is aimed at majority-Muslim countries excepting those where he has/had business interests. And also calling it a "Muslim ban". But those narratives don't fit the facts. Here's the list of majority-Muslim countries in descending order of population, plus those with severe civil unrest, and those subject to the moratorium. I'm measuring accuracy by country count. I should really come up with a more sophisticated measure of accuracy, but can't be bothered...
Indonesia [trump business interests] Pakistan Nigeria [not majority-muslim, has civil unrest but well-functioning government] Bangladesh Mexico [not majority-muslim, but has civil unrest due to drug war but otherwise well-functioning government] Iran [30day ban] Turkey [trump business interests] Egypt [trump business interests] Algeria Sudan [30day ban, civil unrest] Morocco Iraq [30day ban, severe civil unrest] Afghanistan [severe civil unrest] Uzbekistan Saudi Arabia [trump business interests] Yemen [30day ban, civil unrest] Syria [30day ban, severe civil unrest] Niger Malaysia Mali Senegal Burkina Faso Tunisia Somalia [30day ban, civil unrest] Kazakhstan Azerbaijan [trump business interests] Guinea Chad Tajikistan Jordan Libya [30day ban, civil unrest] Kyrgyzstan Turkmenistan Mauritania Siera Leone United Arab Emirates [trump business interest] Kuwait Oman Lebanon Gambia Kosovo Qatar [trump business interests] Bahrain Comoros Western Sahara Maldives Mayotte Cocos (Keeling) Islands
Note: I'm not a Trump supporter. I've written to my representative and senators to add my voice against him, and I marched with my family last Saturday. On the other hand, I think the media have been FAILING us liberals by giving incomplete or misleading journalism -- articles that are designed to inflame our passions and attract our clicks, but without having the solid factual basis needed for us to engage with our republican friends.
While I'm sorry for what happened to your niece, you're not winning this argument any better than known_coward_69. Can either of your provide statistics for how high the risk is of SIDS?
In the 1980s, in the UK and US, about 1 live birth in 500 ended in SIDS. Today, thanks to better knowledge and education on the topic, that number is down to about 1 in 5000.
(that news story alone doesn't directly provide the numbers I cited. I also looked up other data sources e.g. for the number of live births in the UK, and I relied upon my memory that US and UK were broadly similar in this respect).
When your power grid management interfaces are directly connected to the Internet you must suffer. There's no excuse for that.
There are plenty good reasons. You're being extreme.
The grid management has to be connected to *some* network. That's so you can monitor the health of the grid from a central location, and coordinate a distributed response to events. (Heck, it's also useful if you can connect to control it even when weather conditions make it too hazardous to travel on-site).
[1] You could do that with suitable VPNing over the public internet. That way you benefit from its extensive reach, its cheap price, its resilience, the rapid repair time that ISPs offer. All you need to build is a network connection from each of your grid nodes to the nearest internet.
[2] Or you could do it with dedicated leased lines that aren't part of the internet. You'll pay a heck of a lot more, and loads of grid nodes won't have convenient connection.
[3] Or you could put up your own network. (You're a power-grid so you're used to putting up networks!) But this isn't your core competence, will suffer from longer outages, and will be most expensive.
Bear in mind that every subcontractor who prepares a bid using the public internet will produce a *LOWER* bid with *INCREASED* functionality. The only way that a higher-priced bid will ever win is if they someone demonstrate that the downside costs (in terms of expected cost of future hacks) will be significantly larger than the higher upfront bid. And any such attempted demonstration would be instantly met by the answer "why not use just a secure VPN to get best robustness at the cheapest price?"
So I think that infrastructure like this *can* and *should* be connected to the internet.
It boggles my mind why people are more prepared to keep paying for bandwidth and the associated problems such as connection dependencies, interstitial ads and increased battery usage, rather than just using local memory to store music.
I have 20k+ songs in my personal library, collected according to my interests and tastes since the 1990s. But I still end up getting a better selection/mix when I stream music from Songza. Why?... I suspect it's because putting together a good music selection really is a skilled career path, but not my career path, so it makes sense to outsource it.
(This is for home listening on powered devices, so your problems like bandwidth/ads/battery don't apply).
Real life is offensive... Ever walk down the street in the city and a bum comes up to you begging?... Ever been on a farm and smell the pigs or the cow manure?
You sound like someone who's easily offended. My three year old daughter is less squeamish.
I'm actually trying to think of the use-case for SMS in Skype. As opposed to using the normal instant messaging feature I mean. You want to SMS someone that doesn't have their phone number linked to Skype, but not using your phone? Am I missing something?
I think you must be missing something:) Loads of people don't use skype at all, or do use it but aren't currently on a skype-active device. But most of them carry an SMS-capable device at all times. While you're at your desk, you want some way to message these people.
Could you use a different messaging service like Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp or whatever? Maybe, if you already know they have that app installed on their phone and it's set up for notifications. But SMS is guaranteed to always work.
Accurately pointing out violent, criminal illegal immigrants is not xenophobia.
Accurately pointing out violent, criminal illegal immigrants when you omit the statistical context about violent, criminals who aren't illegal immigrants *IS* xenophobia. Literally. It is fear+distrust aimed specifically at foreigners.
If I had to guess, I'd assume that UK kids are probably somewhat better off in terms of "book material" than their forebears, though independent assessments of reasoning skills (i.e., non-curricular tests similar to IQ tests), etc. seem to show mild declines.
I thought that IQ tests showed marked improvements in abstract/conceptual reasoning skills, and moderate increase in vocabulary skills (4 point increase in vocab skills amongst schoolchildren from 1953 to 2006). http://www.apa.org/monitor/201... http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...
I never trust Malcom Gladwell, but he's quoted in that second article saying the exact opposite of OP: "And, if we go back even farther, the Flynn effect puts the average IQs of the schoolchildren of 1900 at around 70, which is to suggest, bizarrely, that a century ago the United States was populated largely by people who today would be considered mentally retarded."
For example, Scott Adams being shadow banned from twitter for having insightful views on the election.
We never actually saw evidence that Scott was shadowbanned. He said that some of his readers had claimed that his stories weren't on their twitter feeds. He issued a challenge to the CEO of Twitter to respond within three days. No response was reported, and Scott didn't explain the resolution. I personally continued to see Scott's tweets on my twitter feed just fine throughout that time.
I think a more likely explanation is that Scott was never shadowbanned, and that some of his followers didn't notice a tweet from him or it got buried under a load of other things. It matched their cognitive bias about twitter following a shadowban agenda against right wing folks, and it matched Scott's cognitive bias about him being important, and so he went ahead and "asked the question" (i.e. "I'm not saying I've been shadowbanned, I'm just asking the question"). And that naturally laid the cognitive bias for it to evolve into a statement of fact.
...shadowbanned for having insightful views on the election.
That's a pretty dishonest misrepresentation. Scott says he was probably shadowbanned because he asked people to tweet him examples of Clinton supporters being violent. (Indeed Scott has had insightful views on the election both before his alleged shadowbanning, and after, so I don't know how anyone could think he was banned because he had those views.)
Our school system is really only designed to enable rote memorization:... Memorize your multiplication tables.
I don't think that's true. Twenty years ago kids were taught to do long multiplication, long division etc. as a straightforward set of rote instructions that they had to memorize and apply blindly.
More recently as part of "new maths" they're told to solve these problems differently -- with techniques that are no longer the rote application of instructions, but instead require creativity and understanding of what the numbers represent. http://www.nbcwashington.com/n...
I'm in two minds about this. As a computer scientist, I loved that kids were learning ALGORITHMs, and they're missing out on that now. But as someone who cares about maths, I'm happy that they're understanding numbers better. (even if it leaves their less mentally agile parents dismayed, like in the above link).
In the literal sense, they are retarded compared to children of similar age 40 years ago. Their grammar and word usage is worse, their punctuation is worse. Their grasp of mathematics is worse. Their knowledge of history is worse. Their cognizance of current events is worse.
Citation needed. I think you're wrong. Here are charts of A-level performance (national exams taken in the UK at the end of 12th grade) which have shown steady and significant improvements since the 1960s. (Source = http://www.buckingham.ac.uk/wp..., and a further report of data since 1990 = http://www.bstubbs.co.uk/a-lev...)
I picked A-levels because they've been the same kind of exam for a long time (as opposed to say the 10th grade O-levels which were changed out for GCSEs).
On the subject of maths, my understanding is that calculus used to be a college course, but now it's taught to loads of high school students. Here's another graph showing increased earlier uptake of calculus: http://www.maa.org/the-changin...
Madam Curie won two nobel prizes, one in chemistry (1911), one in physics.(1903). She didn't need "women's privilege" to do it. She did it the old fashioned way, she earned it. All women's privilege does in any area is debase it. But if the Dutch wish to debase their science for reasons of gender pandering and political correctness, that is their right. Too bad. They can kiss goodbye to respect for Dutch scientific achievement.
You're doing it wrong. Science is when you respect it for its theories, their significance, their correctness. If your respect is being swayed by anything else then you're doing politics not science.
As far as I am concerned the only thing that is important was were the e-mails faked. If the were not than all said nation state really did was give us a better informed public.
"Heed not the words of the devil even though he speak the truth." (I remember that saying from a book long ago, but haven't been able to find an online source).
If the public gets well systematically over-informed about the bad points of "X", but not so about the good points of "X" nor the bad points of "Y", then they've been left in a worse position to decide between "X" and "Y".
I'm not saying that happened in this case. I think the email leaks from the DNC were fine. I just don't think it's a generally good principle.
You can spend vast amounts of money to sway someone and fail (see: Hillary) which is why real election tampering creates the votes it needs.
You can spend much smaller amounts of money to sway someone and succeed (see: Trump) which is why election tampering can be done much more efficiently than through voter ID avenues.
I think that when it tries anything other than its primary mandate (being a forum for the world leader... not nations... leaders) to voice their collective opinion on the state of the world's affairs, it does not succeed. UN has never managed to stop a war. UN has never managed to resolve a humanitarian crises.
The UN is the collective will of the world's nations.
Why should anyone care what a political organization have to say about any particular scientific question?
Most political organizations throughout history have felt it necessary to foster scientific discovery and invention, and to create self-regulating bodies to further the same.
the only real difference is that espionage tends to run at a loss, while advertising is economically self sustaining.
I'm not sure what calculation that would be. Advertising costs money, is paid for out of revenue, which is paid for by passing the cost to customers. Espionage costs money, is paid for out of government funds, which is paid by passing the cost to tax-payers.
Slashdot Mirror
...it's the entire contents of the article, minus the ads and with Slashdot's wrapped around it instead. This is copyright theft, pure and simple, and this summary should be deleted and replaced with a much, MUCH more abbreviated version.
Or... maybe Engadget's article could be deleted and replaced with a much, MUCH more detailed and information-rich version.
Standards when a human is on board are way more stringent than for cargo. They have to meet an overall 1 in 500 probability of failure during ascent
Are you sure? Ars mentions "NASA's mission requirement for a loss-of-crew probability of 1-in-270" -- presumably "mission requirement" covers ascent, orbit and descent.
https://arstechnica.com/scienc...
I scoured the lands of the US for 1.5 years to fill a vacant position and I couldn't find anyone in the US to do it. I work in NIH funded research and needed a programmer at $45k/yr. I was fine with a new college grad, and I still couldn't find anyone. I went to every college in the area and said "If you have taken a programming class, I want you. I'll pay you. I'll train you in the languages we use" and no responses. Why??
We offered $48k/yr for a nanny. We only spent 0.2 years looking and we got a small handful of okay candidates. They didn't need college. If you still can't find anyone the wage you're asking, would you like me to send you along some nanny dropouts as referrals?
Would you want customs agents making their own regulations? How about police departments? Hell no. The laws and regulations ought to come from Congress. Oh - "but Congressmen don't have the time and energy to work on such laws". That's why a lot of the "responsibility" given to the Federal Government should be in the states. Examples include HUD, Education, etc...
In most scientific and technical areas, I'd like to leave regulations to the people who have a good understanding of that area (i.e. scientists and engineers). As for the political leaders at federal or state level, what expertise do they bring to scientific and technical areas? a liberal-arts or law degree? good rhetoric and campaign-funding skills?
I think that free market is incompatible with addiction - pretty much by definition.
Curious how you came up with your figures. And as to countries with "civil unrest and poor-functioning central government", isn't that pretty much the definition of countries with refugees? So, according to your figures (how did you get 98%?), the order focuses the ban on refugees coming from countries with refugees (civil unrest and poor-functioning central government).
As I said, my figures need to be done more carefully. But my methodology for this first pass was:
(1) From wikipedia, get a list of muslim-majority countries in descending order
(2) From wikipedia, get a list of countries with armed conflict (measured in deaths/year 2016). Maybe I should have instead used the Global Peace Index. There were two non-muslim-majority countries which had notable armed conflict, so I added them to the list: Mexico and Nigeria.
(3) I added a bit of general knowledge. To my understanding, Nigeria has solidly functioning civil governance and its conflict is due to tribal conflict over oil proceeds. And I believe Mexico has solidly functioning civil governance apart from the drug war. (That's why maybe the Global Peace Index would have been better and more objective).
(4) For each of the three claims, I went through the country list to determine how many of the countries it correctly predicted whether they'd be subject to the moratorium or not. That's where the 98% number came from.
I would like to redo the numbers with some different methodology. My first question is what percentage of the world's muslims are subject to the immigration moratorium. I suspect that because the hugely populous Muslim countries like Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Turkey, Egypt aren't on the ban, probably it affects only a small percentage. Then I'd want to look at population numbers for the Global Peace Index too.
I'm not sure your point about refugees. There were separate things: (1) 90-day moratorium on immigration from certain countries, (2) 120-day moratorium on refugee admission, (3) indefinite moratorium on refugees from Syria. I've only been considering the first one to see whether it really should be considered anti-Muslim.
In general, I think the executive order signals a terrible shift towards refugee-unfriendliness, and I think this is the bit that we should focus on. When we focus instead on the claim "it's targeted at Muslims", I think that weakens the message.
It's odd, isn't it, that not one of the countries where Trump has business interests made it on to the list, including Saudi Arabia where almost all of the 9/11 hijackers came from?
The narrative you're insinuating doesn't fit the facts. Here they are:
The claim "Trump's immigration moratorium is targeted at majority-Muslim countries" -- this claim is 21% accurate [i.e. basically false].
The claim "Trump's moratorium is targeted at Iran, plus those countries with civil unrest and poor-functioning central government" -- this claim is 98% accurate (only exception is Afghanistan)
Your claim "Trump's moratorium is targeted at majority-Muslim countries save for those where he has business interests" -- this claim is 38% accurate (major exceptions include Pakistan, Bangladesh, Algeria, Morocco, Uzbekistan, Niger, Malaysa).
Source: here from Wikipedia is the list of majority-Muslim countries in descending order of population, plus those (according to Wikipedia) with severe civil unrest, and those subject to the moratorium. I'm measuring accuracy by country count. I should really come up with a more sophisticated measure of accuracy, but can't be bothered...
Indonesia [trump business interests]
Pakistan
Nigeria [not majority-muslim, has civil unrest but well-functioning government]
Bangladesh
Mexico [not majority-muslim, but has civil unrest due to drug war but otherwise well-functioning government]
Iran [30day ban]
Turkey [trump business interests]
Egypt [trump business interests]
Algeria
Sudan [30day ban, civil unrest]
Morocco
Iraq [30day ban, severe civil unrest]
Afghanistan [severe civil unrest]
Uzbekistan
Saudi Arabia [trump business interests]
Yemen [30day ban, civil unrest]
Syria [30day ban, severe civil unrest]
Niger
Malaysia
Mali
Senegal
Burkina Faso
Tunisia
Somalia [30day ban, civil unrest]
Kazakhstan
Azerbaijan [trump business interests]
Guinea
Chad
Tajikistan
Jordan
Libya [30day ban, civil unrest]
Kyrgyzstan
Turkmenistan
Mauritania
Siera Leone
United Arab Emirates [trump business interest]
Kuwait
Oman
Lebanon
Gambia
Kosovo
Qatar [trump business interests]
Bahrain
Comoros
Western Sahara
Maldives
Mayotte
Cocos (Keeling) Islands
You'll see that "has trump business interests" is a poor predictor of whether a majority-muslim country escaped the moratorium. It has no false positives, but loads of false negatives.
The Washington Post has an article showing the list of Muslim countries whose people are banned from entering the U.S. The common trait is they have no Trump business ties. Welcome to Fascism in the old sense of the word.
That's technically true but still dishonest reporting by the Washington Post.
The claim "Trump's immigration moratorium is targeted at majority-Muslim countries" -- this claim is 21% accurate [i.e. basically false].
The claim "Trump's moratorium is targeted at Iran, plus those countries with civil unrest and poor-functioning central government" -- this claim is 98% accurate (only exception is Afghanistan)
The claim "Trump's moratorium is targeted at majority-Muslim countries save for those where he has business interests" -- this claim is 38% accurate (major exceptions include Pakistan, Bangladesh, Algeria, Morocco, Uzbekistan, Niger, Malaysa).
There are the news reports that Trump's 90-day immigration moratorium is aimed at majority-Muslim countries excepting those where he has/had business interests. And also calling it a "Muslim ban". But those narratives don't fit the facts. Here's the list of majority-Muslim countries in descending order of population, plus those with severe civil unrest, and those subject to the moratorium. I'm measuring accuracy by country count. I should really come up with a more sophisticated measure of accuracy, but can't be bothered...
Indonesia [trump business interests]
Pakistan
Nigeria [not majority-muslim, has civil unrest but well-functioning government]
Bangladesh
Mexico [not majority-muslim, but has civil unrest due to drug war but otherwise well-functioning government]
Iran [30day ban]
Turkey [trump business interests]
Egypt [trump business interests]
Algeria
Sudan [30day ban, civil unrest]
Morocco
Iraq [30day ban, severe civil unrest]
Afghanistan [severe civil unrest]
Uzbekistan
Saudi Arabia [trump business interests]
Yemen [30day ban, civil unrest]
Syria [30day ban, severe civil unrest]
Niger
Malaysia
Mali
Senegal
Burkina Faso
Tunisia
Somalia [30day ban, civil unrest]
Kazakhstan
Azerbaijan [trump business interests]
Guinea
Chad
Tajikistan
Jordan
Libya [30day ban, civil unrest]
Kyrgyzstan
Turkmenistan
Mauritania
Siera Leone
United Arab Emirates [trump business interest]
Kuwait
Oman
Lebanon
Gambia
Kosovo
Qatar [trump business interests]
Bahrain
Comoros
Western Sahara
Maldives
Mayotte
Cocos (Keeling) Islands
Note: I'm not a Trump supporter. I've written to my representative and senators to add my voice against him, and I marched with my family last Saturday. On the other hand, I think the media have been FAILING us liberals by giving incomplete or misleading journalism -- articles that are designed to inflame our passions and attract our clicks, but without having the solid factual basis needed for us to engage with our republican friends.
While I'm sorry for what happened to your niece, you're not winning this argument any better than known_coward_69. Can either of your provide statistics for how high the risk is of SIDS?
In the 1980s, in the UK and US, about 1 live birth in 500 ended in SIDS.
Today, thanks to better knowledge and education on the topic, that number is down to about 1 in 5000.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-eng...
(that news story alone doesn't directly provide the numbers I cited. I also looked up other data sources e.g. for the number of live births in the UK, and I relied upon my memory that US and UK were broadly similar in this respect).
When your power grid management interfaces are directly connected to the Internet you must suffer. There's no excuse for that.
There are plenty good reasons. You're being extreme.
The grid management has to be connected to *some* network. That's so you can monitor the health of the grid from a central location, and coordinate a distributed response to events. (Heck, it's also useful if you can connect to control it even when weather conditions make it too hazardous to travel on-site).
[1] You could do that with suitable VPNing over the public internet. That way you benefit from its extensive reach, its cheap price, its resilience, the rapid repair time that ISPs offer. All you need to build is a network connection from each of your grid nodes to the nearest internet.
[2] Or you could do it with dedicated leased lines that aren't part of the internet. You'll pay a heck of a lot more, and loads of grid nodes won't have convenient connection.
[3] Or you could put up your own network. (You're a power-grid so you're used to putting up networks!) But this isn't your core competence, will suffer from longer outages, and will be most expensive.
Bear in mind that every subcontractor who prepares a bid using the public internet will produce a *LOWER* bid with *INCREASED* functionality. The only way that a higher-priced bid will ever win is if they someone demonstrate that the downside costs (in terms of expected cost of future hacks) will be significantly larger than the higher upfront bid. And any such attempted demonstration would be instantly met by the answer "why not use just a secure VPN to get best robustness at the cheapest price?"
So I think that infrastructure like this *can* and *should* be connected to the internet.
It boggles my mind why people are more prepared to keep paying for bandwidth and the associated problems such as connection dependencies, interstitial ads and increased battery usage, rather than just using local memory to store music.
I have 20k+ songs in my personal library, collected according to my interests and tastes since the 1990s. But I still end up getting a better selection/mix when I stream music from Songza. Why? ... I suspect it's because putting together a good music selection really is a skilled career path, but not my career path, so it makes sense to outsource it.
(This is for home listening on powered devices, so your problems like bandwidth/ads/battery don't apply).
> "you tell me the metric, I'll tell you how to game it"
Metric: increased sales revenue (without changing the pricing structure)
Is there any way to game that?
Real life is offensive... Ever walk down the street in the city and a bum comes up to you begging? ... Ever been on a farm and smell the pigs or the cow manure?
You sound like someone who's easily offended. My three year old daughter is less squeamish.
I'm actually trying to think of the use-case for SMS in Skype. As opposed to using the normal instant messaging feature I mean. You want to SMS someone that doesn't have their phone number linked to Skype, but not using your phone? Am I missing something?
I think you must be missing something :) Loads of people don't use skype at all, or do use it but aren't currently on a skype-active device. But most of them carry an SMS-capable device at all times. While you're at your desk, you want some way to message these people.
Could you use a different messaging service like Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp or whatever? Maybe, if you already know they have that app installed on their phone and it's set up for notifications. But SMS is guaranteed to always work.
Accurately pointing out violent, criminal illegal immigrants is not xenophobia.
Accurately pointing out violent, criminal illegal immigrants when you omit the statistical context about violent, criminals who aren't illegal immigrants *IS* xenophobia. Literally. It is fear+distrust aimed specifically at foreigners.
If I had to guess, I'd assume that UK kids are probably somewhat better off in terms of "book material" than their forebears, though independent assessments of reasoning skills (i.e., non-curricular tests similar to IQ tests), etc. seem to show mild declines.
I thought that IQ tests showed marked improvements in abstract/conceptual reasoning skills, and moderate increase in vocabulary skills (4 point increase in vocab skills amongst schoolchildren from 1953 to 2006).
http://www.apa.org/monitor/201...
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...
I never trust Malcom Gladwell, but he's quoted in that second article saying the exact opposite of OP: "And, if we go back even farther, the Flynn effect puts the average IQs of the schoolchildren of 1900 at around 70, which is to suggest, bizarrely, that a century ago the United States was populated largely by people who today would be considered mentally retarded."
For example, Scott Adams being shadow banned from twitter for having insightful views on the election.
We never actually saw evidence that Scott was shadowbanned. He said that some of his readers had claimed that his stories weren't on their twitter feeds. He issued a challenge to the CEO of Twitter to respond within three days. No response was reported, and Scott didn't explain the resolution. I personally continued to see Scott's tweets on my twitter feed just fine throughout that time.
I think a more likely explanation is that Scott was never shadowbanned, and that some of his followers didn't notice a tweet from him or it got buried under a load of other things. It matched their cognitive bias about twitter following a shadowban agenda against right wing folks, and it matched Scott's cognitive bias about him being important, and so he went ahead and "asked the question" (i.e. "I'm not saying I've been shadowbanned, I'm just asking the question"). And that naturally laid the cognitive bias for it to evolve into a statement of fact.
...shadowbanned for having insightful views on the election.
That's a pretty dishonest misrepresentation. Scott says he was probably shadowbanned because he asked people to tweet him examples of Clinton supporters being violent. (Indeed Scott has had insightful views on the election both before his alleged shadowbanning, and after, so I don't know how anyone could think he was banned because he had those views.)
Our school system is really only designed to enable rote memorization: ... Memorize your multiplication tables.
I don't think that's true. Twenty years ago kids were taught to do long multiplication, long division etc. as a straightforward set of rote instructions that they had to memorize and apply blindly.
More recently as part of "new maths" they're told to solve these problems differently -- with techniques that are no longer the rote application of instructions, but instead require creativity and understanding of what the numbers represent. http://www.nbcwashington.com/n...
I'm in two minds about this. As a computer scientist, I loved that kids were learning ALGORITHMs, and they're missing out on that now. But as someone who cares about maths, I'm happy that they're understanding numbers better. (even if it leaves their less mentally agile parents dismayed, like in the above link).
In the literal sense, they are retarded compared to children of similar age 40 years ago. Their grammar and word usage is worse, their punctuation is worse. Their grasp of mathematics is worse. Their knowledge of history is worse. Their cognizance of current events is worse.
Citation needed. I think you're wrong. Here are charts of A-level performance (national exams taken in the UK at the end of 12th grade) which have shown steady and significant improvements since the 1960s. (Source = http://www.buckingham.ac.uk/wp..., and a further report of data since 1990 = http://www.bstubbs.co.uk/a-lev...)
http://i.imgur.com/RWdWAjx.png
http://i.imgur.com/gJZ5rbb.png
I picked A-levels because they've been the same kind of exam for a long time (as opposed to say the 10th grade O-levels which were changed out for GCSEs).
On the subject of maths, my understanding is that calculus used to be a college course, but now it's taught to loads of high school students. Here's another graph showing increased earlier uptake of calculus:
http://www.maa.org/the-changin...
Madam Curie won two nobel prizes, one in chemistry (1911), one in physics.(1903). She didn't need "women's privilege" to do it. She did it the old fashioned way, she earned it. All women's privilege does in any area is debase it. But if the Dutch wish to debase their science for reasons of gender pandering and political correctness, that is their right. Too bad. They can kiss goodbye to respect for Dutch scientific achievement.
You're doing it wrong. Science is when you respect it for its theories, their significance, their correctness. If your respect is being swayed by anything else then you're doing politics not science.
As far as I am concerned the only thing that is important was were the e-mails faked. If the were not than all said nation state really did was give us a better informed public.
"Heed not the words of the devil even though he speak the truth." (I remember that saying from a book long ago, but haven't been able to find an online source).
If the public gets well systematically over-informed about the bad points of "X", but not so about the good points of "X" nor the bad points of "Y", then they've been left in a worse position to decide between "X" and "Y".
I'm not saying that happened in this case. I think the email leaks from the DNC were fine. I just don't think it's a generally good principle.
You can spend vast amounts of money to sway someone and fail (see: Hillary) which is why real election tampering creates the votes it needs.
You can spend much smaller amounts of money to sway someone and succeed (see: Trump) which is why election tampering can be done much more efficiently than through voter ID avenues.
I think that when it tries anything other than its primary mandate (being a forum for the world leader... not nations... leaders) to voice their collective opinion on the state of the world's affairs, it does not succeed. UN has never managed to stop a war. UN has never managed to resolve a humanitarian crises.
Wait, what??!? The UN eradicated polio.
UN is a political organization.
The UN is the collective will of the world's nations.
Why should anyone care what a political organization have to say about any particular scientific question?
Most political organizations throughout history have felt it necessary to foster scientific discovery and invention, and to create self-regulating bodies to further the same.
the only real difference is that espionage tends to run at a loss, while advertising is economically self sustaining.
I'm not sure what calculation that would be. Advertising costs money, is paid for out of revenue, which is paid for by passing the cost to customers. Espionage costs money, is paid for out of government funds, which is paid by passing the cost to tax-payers.