No, we know for a fact that the Russians tried to get Trump elected. It's not even in dispute. It's not even really in dispute that his campaign colluded. His son and campaign manager have admitted to meeting with a Russian spy to coordinate the effort. That's a fact too.
The ongoing investigation is all about who can be charged with which crimes.
I'm not sure what you mean. We know, factually, that there was a massive effort by Russian Intelligence to get Trump elected. What's more, by the small margin that Trump won, it's extremely hard to argue that they didn't successfully change the results of the election.
It's no a conspiracy theory any more than it's a conspiracy theory to think that the NSA intercepts emails and text messages, and collects metadata on phone calls. These are facts.
No, that they are such a fringe group with so little support that they aren't a threat. The last count of active members in these groups were a few thousand in the US.
That depends on how you count it. The number of people who literally, publicly, explicitly claim to be Nazis? You might be right that it's in the thousands. But there are a lot of different groups that might use different labels. There are a lot of people who won't admit to being part of extremist groups, so numbers are hard to verify. I've seen estimates around 150,000 who are active members of white supremacy groups. That's not even counting people who have white supremacist leanings, or sympathy for white supremacy groups.
They're responsible for more violent crime and more deaths each year than Antifa Muslim terrorists.
You should refrain from calling black atheists "Nazis".
Oh, yeah, I'm sure you're a black atheist transexual lesbian Muslim. How dare I disagree with you, right? I don't care who you claim to be, and I'm not saying you're necessarily a Nazi yourself. You might be a Russian spy, or just some troll that escaped from 4chan. Whatever it is, your purpose here is clearly to spread misinformation in order to defend Nazis.
Ok, so what's your argument? That NeoNazis and the KKK are so rare as to be virtually non-existant?
You know what? It doesn't matter, because you're just trying to change the subject, because you can't win a straight argument. Antifa is a tiny fringe extremist group that is built behind a good idea: fascism is bad. On the other side, you have a much larger extremist group built around a bad idea: white supremacy and fascism are good.
I don't think we're forced to take sides. We can be opposed to both (I am opposed to both). But it's noteworthy that not only are you picking sides, but you're taking the side of the wannabe Nazis. Hide behind whatever rhetoric you want, but I see you.
Ok, first, I don't know that I care what Marc Thiessen says in an editorial. Second, I have no love for Antifa.
In any case, that does not excuse NeoNazis. Not in the least. Stop trying to excuse Nazis with the idea that some other group is also bad. I don't care. I'll accept that other groups are bad. The NeoNazis should still be condemned. Stop trying to shift blame to excuse NeoNazis.
Sorry, but what kind of bullshit are you spouting?
Are you seriously quibbling over the intersection between German Nazis and American NeoNazis? I don't doubt that there's little overlap in personnel, but that doesn't excuse either group.
Yup. Get rid of Mexicans. They're rapists, according to Trump. That was the basis of his first campaign speech. Mexican Americans born in this country also shouldn't be allowed to be judges, according to Trump.
Also, he supports racial profiling and "stop and frisk" on the basis that black people are likely to be criminals anyway. He has said he supports deporting Muslims, perhaps even if they're citizens.
When asked whether waterboarding was torture, he said it was, but he supported torture, and wants us to do worse than waterboarding. When asked about minimizing civilian casualties when attacking terrorist groups, he went the other way and said he thought we should wipe out the entire families of suspected terrorists.
The guy is a monster. A stupid, pathetic, cowardly, ineffective monster, but a monster no less.
Right, because what bad things have Nazis ever done?</sarcasm>
Normally, I wouldn't think I need a sarcasm tag, but given the nature of some of the discussion here, it seems that I might need to establish that "Nazis weren't on the right side of history." And the cognitive dissonance among Trump supporters must be bonkers. You have propaganda that acknowledges that Nazis were bad and scary, but trying to make it sound like they were liberal and had the same ideology as modern Democrats, and then other propaganda saying that Nazis are totally nice people who aren't dangerous at all. Either one of those viewpoints is completely insane all by itself, but trying to hold both in your mind at the same time... I don't know how you do it.
People can be against fascism and still be assholes.
It's disturbing how, when there are protests between wannabe Nazis and basically anyone else, some people leap to condemn the "anyone else". Whatever ever happened to not being huge fans of the Nazis?
Nope. It has nothing to do with "not liking" him. It's about things that he's said and done. Maybe you should start paying more attention to the news. You've missed a crazy couple of years.
No, they're not communists, at least not generally. At this point, it seems to me like they're the status quo party-- or at least, the pre-Trump "status quo" before he started wrecking things and trying to turn us into an authoritarian dictatorship.
We desperately need a new voting system in primaries and all elections that will allow for other parties to compete...
I don't disagree. The problem is, any change to fix things will require changing laws, which has to be passed by Congress, which is filled with the two parties in power. So basically the political parties need to choose to make themselves less powerful, which they're not going to do.
It is pretty well known that the "left" rarely argues in favor of limited government, they tend to want more and more government. More laws, more regulations, more taxes, more government spending, more government ownership of infrastructure, services, land, resources, etc, more forced "redistribution of wealth", more Federal instead of State control.
Maybe there are some people on the left who think that way, but that's largely a straw man from Republican propagandists. There are a lot of people that you'd probably call "Liberals" who certainly want limits placed on government, it's just that they want different limits placed in different places. They're less concerned about the government providing you with healthcare, and more concerned about the NSA reading your emails. It's not completely unreasonable.
Just to say it: I'm not a Democrat. I'm actually pretty conservative, but I increasingly have to argue in defense of "liberals" because Republicans have lost their goddamn minds. At this point, the Democratic party is the conservative party, and the Republican party has embraced radical and reckless policies. They seem content to burn the house down with themselves in it, just so long as Democrats get burned too.
No, Nazis were not leftists, but nevertheless, it is not accurate nor useful to call Republicans Nazis.
There are real issues out there in the world. Distracting from them by name calling is not helpful
Republicans are not Nazis, but there is reason for concern.
There are still some conservative Republicans, but true conservatives are becoming rare. The Republican party is becoming dominated by radicals. The party has become increasingly nationalistic and authoritarian. It has become increasingly tolerant of public support of white supremacy.
We haven't hit the point of invading neighboring countries or committing genocide, but Trump has been clear: He wants to overturn the rule of law. He wants to round up ethnic minorities and get rid of them. He's advocated murdering religious minorities. He's talked about wanting to do away with elections and be President for life.
No, he's not joking, and neither are his followers. Authoritarianism is a slippery slope. We're not on that slope yet, but we're disturbingly close, and Trump keeps shoving us closer. If Trump fires Mueller and gets away with it, that's the tipping point. That makes him above the law. That's when he stops being a president and becomes a dictator.
If you think that it can't happen, you're not paying attention.
Almost all the time there will not be any useful alternatives to get to your destination.
That's not really true. There are some instances where there isn't any viable alternative. It's not that unusual that there's an alternate subway or bus route that will take you to the same approximate location. If a train is going to take long enough, sometimes it even makes more sense to walk than to wait.
Well it's also handling the input from the controller, I think.
Yes, it's true that the game isn't actually running on the Nintendo hardware, but it's also not as though he's just bypassing the internal hardware to output to the display capabilities. From what I can understand, the Nintendo thinks it's playing a game, but he's screwing with the output from the game cartridge to make it display things that a Nintendo shouldn't be capable of.
It's sort of like a good magic trick. Yes, it's a trick, but the way he's pulling the trick off is interesting and impressive in its own right.
Seems to assume all Twitter users are U.S. citizens.
Well first, this case was brought by citizens (as far as I know). The way court cases work is they usually don't decide on a completely broad and all-encompassing question. I haven't read the whole decision yet, but it probably doesn't universally bar Trump from blocking anyone under any circumstances. It probably specifies that Trump can't block Twitter users from his feed in the particular way that he blocked those people.
However, it's worth noting that the Bill of Rights does not guarantee rights to US citizens. That may surprise people, but go back and read them. The First Amendment does not grant the freedom of speech to citizens, but rather prohibits the government from infringing on people's freedom of speech. It actually doesn't say anything about citizens or non-citizens, just people. So yes, people who are US citizens are also protected by the First Amendment.
That not allowing someone to talk to you is a violation of their right to free speech.
There's an important distinction here in that, I'm pretty sure Trump can block people from sending him private messages on a platform like Twitter, or even "block" them in the sense of making it so he doesn't see another user's public posts. However, blocking users from reading his feed is a different thing. Because he uses his Twitter account for official purposes, blocking people means limiting their access to public governmental communications. Worse, if he blocks them from replying to his tweets, then he's denying them access to the public platform that is "responses to Trump's twitter feed".
And though the First Amendment does not in any way guarantee people access to a public platform, it does prohibit the government from barring people access to a public platform. Trump is a governmental official, and therefore cannot infringe on free speech.
And that digital forums are 'public', despite plenty of homeless and impoverished citizens lacking access to them.
For the purposes of First Amendment protection, yes, public digital forums are generally going to be considered "public". However, as I pointed out, the First Amendment only protects you from the government. The government is generally going to be prohibited from preventing you from accessing online digital forums. So I think it raises the question, is the government preventing homeless people from accessing these digital forums?
Looking at it simply and directly, the answer is "no". Economic factors are creating roadblocks to them gaining access.
However, I think you could make a more complex argument that the government has some obligation (moral if not legal) to enable people to access the Internet, on First Amendment grounds. The Internet is becoming the dominant form of telecommunications infrastructure. If you don't have Internet access, then you can't engage in the public political debate, at least not on equal footing with anyone who has the Internet. You can't post your own thoughts, but you also don't have access to what other people are saying. And though the government isn't actively prohibiting access to the Internet, the Internet did grow out of a government program, which makes them partially responsible for its effects, and the government is also partially responsible for the economic factors that prevent people from having access.
I'm ambivalent, personally. On the one hand, I agree with you. These things are treated a little too much like they're disposable. I'm also not sure that the games are being heavily limited by the hardware these days. A lot of times, a new generation console comes out, and the same basic games get a fancy graphics overhaul, but they play the same way, and they're not particularly more fun.
On the other hand, that's in terms of tossing what you currently have and replacing it. It is a bit annoying, just as a concept, that if you go to buy a brand new console, you're basically buying computer hardware from 7 years ago. That whole thins is made less annoying by the fact that Microsoft and Sony have released interim updates that bump the hardware specs a bit.
But that action of bumping the hardware specs raises a question for me: Why can't that just be what these companies do? Why does there need to be a Playstations 5 that's going to break compatibility? Can they just bump the specs again, and make a super-fast Playstation 4 that will run games with even better graphics?
The whole thing with console versions seems like an antiquated model. Why not release a new Playstation model every year, or every 2 years, that just bumps the specs and introduces new features? It creates a bit of a moving target, but Sony could also make rules to mitigate those problems. They could require that developers include graphics presets that make the game playable on the previous [however many] models of Playstations, so that new games weren't constantly forcing you to upgrade. They could also maintain backward compatibility, so that buying a new Playstation doesn't cut you off from playing older games.
After all, I can install Steam on my Windows PC and play games from 20 years ago. Why can't they make it so my Playstation 4 can play Playstation 3 games?
That doesn't solve the problem, because it just creates a deeply cynical electorate who doesn't believe any facts.
Because what if Candidate A really was speaking at a satanist convention, and just got caught, and then covers his tracks by making a fake video of Candidate B saying exactly the same speech? Now everyone thinks both were fakes, even though one side is telling the truth, and people elect a satanist who disparages the flag, mom, and apple pie.
The truth is, we're already there. We don't need convincing fakes to convince people. We don't even need a plausible lie to convince people. Apparently you can make patently false outrageous nonsensical claims, and tens of millions of people will buy into it without a second thought.
I'm still very skeptical that they can handle anything but the most trivial of driving situations.
I think that's seems like an appropriate response. It's an unproven technology. People should be skeptical that the current form of that technology will work without problems. We shouldn't "have faith" in self-driving cars. We should be able to understand how the technology works, measure the failure rate empirically, and come to a reasoned view on what real-world applications the technology is safe for.
The technology will improve and become more adept, and I expect that it'll eventually be safer than human drivers in most situations. Hopefully it'll be able to identify the situations it can't handle safely.
You have a president who colluded with the Russian Intelligence to get himself elected, and since has used the office in blatantly illegal ways to enrich himself. He's showed distain for all ethical rules and social mores. He's taken it on himself to dismantle our institutions, and fill the government with unethical stupid people who are blindly loyal to him. As law enforcement investigates his crimes, he's been disrupting the investigation and undermining law enforcement in general, while preparing to fire any law enforcement personnel involved in the investigation. Oh, and he's been talking about installing himself as dictator for life.
And you're surprised that he's tweeting from an insecure phone? You're worried about that?
Let's keep our eye on the ball here. If you quibble over trivial things, it reenforces the idea that his opponents simply "don't like him" for personal reasons. It's not personal. He's a criminal. He needs to go to jail.
I'm sure there are poorly designed or executed studies that come to incorrect conclusions. I'm sure there are occasional scientists that fudge their results and hype their conclusions for recognition. I know that there's some straight-up unscientific "studies" that are just misleading propaganda.
I would just argue that we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. We shouldn't dismiss science wholesale, nor should we ignore warnings of potential environmental disasters, just because some people are sensationalizing things.
Most of this stuff global destruction environmental science PR is pretty contrived anyway... Once you get to "we are all going to die!" there simply isn't much more you can use that's worse...
Yeah, there's some truth to this, but I don't think you can lay it all at any one group's feet. Some scientist does a study on earthquakes, and finds that the worst case scenario of one model is that the world will have a short period of high seismic activity sometime in the next 100 years. When he publishes his study, he makes a special note of that result just to make it a little more sensationalistic. Then some reporter becomes aware of the study, and writes a news story about how the world is definitely going to be overrun with earthquakes for the next 100 years. That story gets onto news aggregation sites (like this one), and people don't even read the article, and then you have a bunch of people arguing about the ironclad proof that the world will explode within the next 10 years.
The science of the original study may have been solid. It may even be that the conclusions and predictions of the study were pretty good. Or not. We'll probably never find out, since the world won't explode in 10 years, and then everyone will say that the study was bunk.
Yeah, whenever people talk about Azimov's laws of robotics as though they're the go-to rules for making AI safe, I always ask, "Have you ever read any of those stories?"
The stories are generally about how those laws fail to prevent AI from running amok, so it's pretty clear that Azimov himself didn't think the rules were good enough. In fact, I think the stories are pointing out the insufficiency of logical rules, and point out the value of things like instincts, emotions, and moral sensibility.
Slashdot Mirror
No, we know for a fact that the Russians tried to get Trump elected. It's not even in dispute. It's not even really in dispute that his campaign colluded. His son and campaign manager have admitted to meeting with a Russian spy to coordinate the effort. That's a fact too.
The ongoing investigation is all about who can be charged with which crimes.
"The Russians Dit It" is a good example.
I'm not sure what you mean. We know, factually, that there was a massive effort by Russian Intelligence to get Trump elected. What's more, by the small margin that Trump won, it's extremely hard to argue that they didn't successfully change the results of the election.
It's no a conspiracy theory any more than it's a conspiracy theory to think that the NSA intercepts emails and text messages, and collects metadata on phone calls. These are facts.
No, that they are such a fringe group with so little support that they aren't a threat. The last count of active members in these groups were a few thousand in the US.
That depends on how you count it. The number of people who literally, publicly, explicitly claim to be Nazis? You might be right that it's in the thousands. But there are a lot of different groups that might use different labels. There are a lot of people who won't admit to being part of extremist groups, so numbers are hard to verify. I've seen estimates around 150,000 who are active members of white supremacy groups. That's not even counting people who have white supremacist leanings, or sympathy for white supremacy groups.
They're responsible for more violent crime and more deaths each year than Antifa Muslim terrorists.
You should refrain from calling black atheists "Nazis".
Oh, yeah, I'm sure you're a black atheist transexual lesbian Muslim. How dare I disagree with you, right? I don't care who you claim to be, and I'm not saying you're necessarily a Nazi yourself. You might be a Russian spy, or just some troll that escaped from 4chan. Whatever it is, your purpose here is clearly to spread misinformation in order to defend Nazis.
Ok, so what's your argument? That NeoNazis and the KKK are so rare as to be virtually non-existant?
You know what? It doesn't matter, because you're just trying to change the subject, because you can't win a straight argument. Antifa is a tiny fringe extremist group that is built behind a good idea: fascism is bad. On the other side, you have a much larger extremist group built around a bad idea: white supremacy and fascism are good.
I don't think we're forced to take sides. We can be opposed to both (I am opposed to both). But it's noteworthy that not only are you picking sides, but you're taking the side of the wannabe Nazis. Hide behind whatever rhetoric you want, but I see you.
Ok, first, I don't know that I care what Marc Thiessen says in an editorial. Second, I have no love for Antifa.
In any case, that does not excuse NeoNazis. Not in the least. Stop trying to excuse Nazis with the idea that some other group is also bad. I don't care. I'll accept that other groups are bad. The NeoNazis should still be condemned. Stop trying to shift blame to excuse NeoNazis.
Sorry, but what kind of bullshit are you spouting?
Are you seriously quibbling over the intersection between German Nazis and American NeoNazis? I don't doubt that there's little overlap in personnel, but that doesn't excuse either group.
Yup. Get rid of Mexicans. They're rapists, according to Trump. That was the basis of his first campaign speech. Mexican Americans born in this country also shouldn't be allowed to be judges, according to Trump.
Also, he supports racial profiling and "stop and frisk" on the basis that black people are likely to be criminals anyway. He has said he supports deporting Muslims, perhaps even if they're citizens.
When asked whether waterboarding was torture, he said it was, but he supported torture, and wants us to do worse than waterboarding. When asked about minimizing civilian casualties when attacking terrorist groups, he went the other way and said he thought we should wipe out the entire families of suspected terrorists.
The guy is a monster. A stupid, pathetic, cowardly, ineffective monster, but a monster no less.
Right, because what bad things have Nazis ever done?</sarcasm>
Normally, I wouldn't think I need a sarcasm tag, but given the nature of some of the discussion here, it seems that I might need to establish that "Nazis weren't on the right side of history." And the cognitive dissonance among Trump supporters must be bonkers. You have propaganda that acknowledges that Nazis were bad and scary, but trying to make it sound like they were liberal and had the same ideology as modern Democrats, and then other propaganda saying that Nazis are totally nice people who aren't dangerous at all. Either one of those viewpoints is completely insane all by itself, but trying to hold both in your mind at the same time... I don't know how you do it.
People can be against fascism and still be assholes.
It's disturbing how, when there are protests between wannabe Nazis and basically anyone else, some people leap to condemn the "anyone else". Whatever ever happened to not being huge fans of the Nazis?
Nope. It has nothing to do with "not liking" him. It's about things that he's said and done. Maybe you should start paying more attention to the news. You've missed a crazy couple of years.
No, they're not communists, at least not generally. At this point, it seems to me like they're the status quo party-- or at least, the pre-Trump "status quo" before he started wrecking things and trying to turn us into an authoritarian dictatorship.
We desperately need a new voting system in primaries and all elections that will allow for other parties to compete...
I don't disagree. The problem is, any change to fix things will require changing laws, which has to be passed by Congress, which is filled with the two parties in power. So basically the political parties need to choose to make themselves less powerful, which they're not going to do.
It is pretty well known that the "left" rarely argues in favor of limited government, they tend to want more and more government. More laws, more regulations, more taxes, more government spending, more government ownership of infrastructure, services, land, resources, etc, more forced "redistribution of wealth", more Federal instead of State control.
Maybe there are some people on the left who think that way, but that's largely a straw man from Republican propagandists. There are a lot of people that you'd probably call "Liberals" who certainly want limits placed on government, it's just that they want different limits placed in different places. They're less concerned about the government providing you with healthcare, and more concerned about the NSA reading your emails. It's not completely unreasonable.
Just to say it: I'm not a Democrat. I'm actually pretty conservative, but I increasingly have to argue in defense of "liberals" because Republicans have lost their goddamn minds. At this point, the Democratic party is the conservative party, and the Republican party has embraced radical and reckless policies. They seem content to burn the house down with themselves in it, just so long as Democrats get burned too.
No, Nazis were not leftists, but nevertheless, it is not accurate nor useful to call Republicans Nazis. There are real issues out there in the world. Distracting from them by name calling is not helpful
Republicans are not Nazis, but there is reason for concern.
There are still some conservative Republicans, but true conservatives are becoming rare. The Republican party is becoming dominated by radicals. The party has become increasingly nationalistic and authoritarian. It has become increasingly tolerant of public support of white supremacy.
We haven't hit the point of invading neighboring countries or committing genocide, but Trump has been clear: He wants to overturn the rule of law. He wants to round up ethnic minorities and get rid of them. He's advocated murdering religious minorities. He's talked about wanting to do away with elections and be President for life.
No, he's not joking, and neither are his followers. Authoritarianism is a slippery slope. We're not on that slope yet, but we're disturbingly close, and Trump keeps shoving us closer. If Trump fires Mueller and gets away with it, that's the tipping point. That makes him above the law. That's when he stops being a president and becomes a dictator.
If you think that it can't happen, you're not paying attention.
Almost all the time there will not be any useful alternatives to get to your destination.
That's not really true. There are some instances where there isn't any viable alternative. It's not that unusual that there's an alternate subway or bus route that will take you to the same approximate location. If a train is going to take long enough, sometimes it even makes more sense to walk than to wait.
Only the LTSB enterprise version is usable, and even that gets annoying.
Also, Microsoft basically says that they don't support LTSB for desktop use, which is itself annoying.
Well it's also handling the input from the controller, I think.
Yes, it's true that the game isn't actually running on the Nintendo hardware, but it's also not as though he's just bypassing the internal hardware to output to the display capabilities. From what I can understand, the Nintendo thinks it's playing a game, but he's screwing with the output from the game cartridge to make it display things that a Nintendo shouldn't be capable of.
It's sort of like a good magic trick. Yes, it's a trick, but the way he's pulling the trick off is interesting and impressive in its own right.
Seems to assume all Twitter users are U.S. citizens.
Well first, this case was brought by citizens (as far as I know). The way court cases work is they usually don't decide on a completely broad and all-encompassing question. I haven't read the whole decision yet, but it probably doesn't universally bar Trump from blocking anyone under any circumstances. It probably specifies that Trump can't block Twitter users from his feed in the particular way that he blocked those people.
However, it's worth noting that the Bill of Rights does not guarantee rights to US citizens. That may surprise people, but go back and read them. The First Amendment does not grant the freedom of speech to citizens, but rather prohibits the government from infringing on people's freedom of speech. It actually doesn't say anything about citizens or non-citizens, just people. So yes, people who are US citizens are also protected by the First Amendment.
That not allowing someone to talk to you is a violation of their right to free speech.
There's an important distinction here in that, I'm pretty sure Trump can block people from sending him private messages on a platform like Twitter, or even "block" them in the sense of making it so he doesn't see another user's public posts. However, blocking users from reading his feed is a different thing. Because he uses his Twitter account for official purposes, blocking people means limiting their access to public governmental communications. Worse, if he blocks them from replying to his tweets, then he's denying them access to the public platform that is "responses to Trump's twitter feed".
And though the First Amendment does not in any way guarantee people access to a public platform, it does prohibit the government from barring people access to a public platform. Trump is a governmental official, and therefore cannot infringe on free speech.
And that digital forums are 'public', despite plenty of homeless and impoverished citizens lacking access to them.
For the purposes of First Amendment protection, yes, public digital forums are generally going to be considered "public". However, as I pointed out, the First Amendment only protects you from the government. The government is generally going to be prohibited from preventing you from accessing online digital forums. So I think it raises the question, is the government preventing homeless people from accessing these digital forums?
Looking at it simply and directly, the answer is "no". Economic factors are creating roadblocks to them gaining access.
However, I think you could make a more complex argument that the government has some obligation (moral if not legal) to enable people to access the Internet, on First Amendment grounds. The Internet is becoming the dominant form of telecommunications infrastructure. If you don't have Internet access, then you can't engage in the public political debate, at least not on equal footing with anyone who has the Internet. You can't post your own thoughts, but you also don't have access to what other people are saying. And though the government isn't actively prohibiting access to the Internet, the Internet did grow out of a government program, which makes them partially responsible for its effects, and the government is also partially responsible for the economic factors that prevent people from having access.
I'm ambivalent, personally. On the one hand, I agree with you. These things are treated a little too much like they're disposable. I'm also not sure that the games are being heavily limited by the hardware these days. A lot of times, a new generation console comes out, and the same basic games get a fancy graphics overhaul, but they play the same way, and they're not particularly more fun.
On the other hand, that's in terms of tossing what you currently have and replacing it. It is a bit annoying, just as a concept, that if you go to buy a brand new console, you're basically buying computer hardware from 7 years ago. That whole thins is made less annoying by the fact that Microsoft and Sony have released interim updates that bump the hardware specs a bit.
But that action of bumping the hardware specs raises a question for me: Why can't that just be what these companies do? Why does there need to be a Playstations 5 that's going to break compatibility? Can they just bump the specs again, and make a super-fast Playstation 4 that will run games with even better graphics?
The whole thing with console versions seems like an antiquated model. Why not release a new Playstation model every year, or every 2 years, that just bumps the specs and introduces new features? It creates a bit of a moving target, but Sony could also make rules to mitigate those problems. They could require that developers include graphics presets that make the game playable on the previous [however many] models of Playstations, so that new games weren't constantly forcing you to upgrade. They could also maintain backward compatibility, so that buying a new Playstation doesn't cut you off from playing older games.
After all, I can install Steam on my Windows PC and play games from 20 years ago. Why can't they make it so my Playstation 4 can play Playstation 3 games?
That doesn't solve the problem, because it just creates a deeply cynical electorate who doesn't believe any facts.
Because what if Candidate A really was speaking at a satanist convention, and just got caught, and then covers his tracks by making a fake video of Candidate B saying exactly the same speech? Now everyone thinks both were fakes, even though one side is telling the truth, and people elect a satanist who disparages the flag, mom, and apple pie.
The truth is, we're already there. We don't need convincing fakes to convince people. We don't even need a plausible lie to convince people. Apparently you can make patently false outrageous nonsensical claims, and tens of millions of people will buy into it without a second thought.
I'm still very skeptical that they can handle anything but the most trivial of driving situations.
I think that's seems like an appropriate response. It's an unproven technology. People should be skeptical that the current form of that technology will work without problems. We shouldn't "have faith" in self-driving cars. We should be able to understand how the technology works, measure the failure rate empirically, and come to a reasoned view on what real-world applications the technology is safe for.
The technology will improve and become more adept, and I expect that it'll eventually be safer than human drivers in most situations. Hopefully it'll be able to identify the situations it can't handle safely.
You have a president who colluded with the Russian Intelligence to get himself elected, and since has used the office in blatantly illegal ways to enrich himself. He's showed distain for all ethical rules and social mores. He's taken it on himself to dismantle our institutions, and fill the government with unethical stupid people who are blindly loyal to him. As law enforcement investigates his crimes, he's been disrupting the investigation and undermining law enforcement in general, while preparing to fire any law enforcement personnel involved in the investigation. Oh, and he's been talking about installing himself as dictator for life.
And you're surprised that he's tweeting from an insecure phone? You're worried about that?
Let's keep our eye on the ball here. If you quibble over trivial things, it reenforces the idea that his opponents simply "don't like him" for personal reasons. It's not personal. He's a criminal. He needs to go to jail.
I'm sure there are poorly designed or executed studies that come to incorrect conclusions. I'm sure there are occasional scientists that fudge their results and hype their conclusions for recognition. I know that there's some straight-up unscientific "studies" that are just misleading propaganda.
I would just argue that we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. We shouldn't dismiss science wholesale, nor should we ignore warnings of potential environmental disasters, just because some people are sensationalizing things.
Most of this stuff global destruction environmental science PR is pretty contrived anyway... Once you get to "we are all going to die!" there simply isn't much more you can use that's worse...
Yeah, there's some truth to this, but I don't think you can lay it all at any one group's feet. Some scientist does a study on earthquakes, and finds that the worst case scenario of one model is that the world will have a short period of high seismic activity sometime in the next 100 years. When he publishes his study, he makes a special note of that result just to make it a little more sensationalistic. Then some reporter becomes aware of the study, and writes a news story about how the world is definitely going to be overrun with earthquakes for the next 100 years. That story gets onto news aggregation sites (like this one), and people don't even read the article, and then you have a bunch of people arguing about the ironclad proof that the world will explode within the next 10 years.
The science of the original study may have been solid. It may even be that the conclusions and predictions of the study were pretty good. Or not. We'll probably never find out, since the world won't explode in 10 years, and then everyone will say that the study was bunk.
Yeah, whenever people talk about Azimov's laws of robotics as though they're the go-to rules for making AI safe, I always ask, "Have you ever read any of those stories?"
The stories are generally about how those laws fail to prevent AI from running amok, so it's pretty clear that Azimov himself didn't think the rules were good enough. In fact, I think the stories are pointing out the insufficiency of logical rules, and point out the value of things like instincts, emotions, and moral sensibility.