Actually, you don't even have to get too clever to save lives. In early 2015, the South Pacific country of Vanuatu was devastated by cyclone Pam, a category 5 storm that severely damaged almost half the country. (Full disclosure: the UNICEF photos are mine.). In spite of some islands being completely denuded of shelter, only 11 people died.
The people of Vanuatu deal with an average of 1.5 cyclones every year, but this was an unique event. There had never been a storm of this intensity measured in the country before, and certainly not one that passed directly on top of more than half the population. 3000 years of dealing with cyclones meant that people knew how to cope, but it was telecommunications that allowed us to warn people in time for them to seek shelter. Ironically, on Tanna (the worst-affected island) the majority of casualties occurred when the wall of a building designated an emergency shelter collapsed.
One national telco saw its entire national network knocked out. But within 10 days, they had better than 90% of it back in operation. I myself saw the CEO manhandling a microwave antenna into the back of a chopper during the height of the relief effort.
So yeah, it's not glorious; it's not clever. Sometimes tech just needs to be available to save lives.
P.S. The owners of a Very Large Internet Company saved a lot of lives in the immediate aftermath of the storm when they sent their superyacht to assist with relief activities. The vessel was small enough to get into the countless tiny passages, and large enough to support a helipad for medevacs. On top of that, the 40,000 litre desalination unit could keep entire villages supplied with water until barges could arrive. They don't want their names to come out because this is one of the few places in the world they can get away and just be people. But thanks guys. You rock.
The Good: if there are known threats that can be filtered, this is the most efficient level on which to do them.
The Bad: this will inevitably be extended to blocking torrent sites, Wikileaks and any web sites I administer.
The Ugly: it will create a false sense of security, "educating" users to be less educated about their machines.
The un-fucking-believably stupid: Ignoring the capacity for police state tactics in surveilling the domestic population, this is the same as tacking a bullseye onto the nation's internet and telling every terrorist, rogue nation and hacktivist:
DO NOT PRESS THIS BUTTON. THIS ONE. RIGHT HERE. IT WOULD BE VERY BAD. SO DON'T PRESS IT.
It shouldn't matter who the DNC leaker was. Blaming "the Ruskies" is just a diversion.
The question here isn't 'who leaked?', so much as 'if it's the Russians, what are they holding back?'
I'm a fan of leakers, but would prefer leaks from people who don't have a horse in the race. The age-old question 'cui bono?' (who benefits?) is a key element to establishing the value and completeness of a leak. I say this, by the way, as a professional journalist who has relied on leaks and whistleblowers for some big stories.
So what if the UBI reaches 100% of the federal tax?
I think the way that $3 trillion figure is formulated is more than a little disingenuous. Surely you don't just give $10,000 to every Tom, Dick and Harriet. Anywhere this has been looked at, it's been implemented as an income subsidy. In other words, you top up everyone's income so that nobody earns less than a given amount. Based on that calculation, and factoring in savings on welfare, food stamps etc., the idea actually looks quite attractive.
It's OpenBTS, not Facebook's new project, that developed incredibly cheap 2.5G GSM service on cheap, software defined radio hardware.
Exactly. This idea has been around for yonks. Probably the most visible in international development circles was the Grameen Foundation's Village Phone project. This included small-scale GSM transmitter/receivers along with phones that would be shared on a commercial pay-as-you-go basis.
I met a few people working on a variation of this in Timor Leste, and tried to get some formal backing and traction for this in some Pacific island countries. The bottom line is that it's a no-go scenario, because you have inordinately high regulatory barriers, and the opposition of local telcos, who don't want anyone else hanging off their infrastructure, no matter how good it is for the bottom line.
That made some sense at the time, but today, why wouldn't you build your wireless network on WiFi instead?
Because at the end of the day, you still need to interact with local telcos. You can shim it any way you want, but if a person can't call or text their cousin in the capital, they're not going to pay to use the service.
But that's not reason to give up hope. You should give up hope because the telcos will never let it happen anyway, and even if they do, they'll find some new way to screw you out of accessing an affordable and open internet.:-)
But a large number of professional programmers didn't learn how to code in a formal school program, either because they're self-taught or because they learned on the job.
Citation please.
In the early days, many people didn't have anyone to learn from. If you weren't enrolled in a University computer science programme, you probably had close to zero access to formal instruction.
For my part, a colleague of mine came by my desk, saw me struggling to handle a conditional with a macro, and showed me how to create a control structure in Visual Basic. Spent a few months playing and reading MS' Knowledge Base in text mode through a 9600 baud connection. Then I found Kernihan and Ritchie little book, and suddenly it all made sense.
Fast forward 6 years to the late '90s, and I was writing systems software for NOC services. The dot com boom happened, and Bob, as they say, was my uncle.
This is the capitalist version of "let them eat cake." Because god help them if the proles feel like they deserve some of the money they're making capitalists.
That's truer than you realise. Marie Antoinette reportedly said, 'Qu'ils mangent la brioche.' Translated in the proper context, it meant that because flour supplies were so low, they should use alternate sources, in this case, the highly refined (cake) flour that was being saved off for herself and her family.
This was straight-up socialist redistribution she was calling for.
I think Marie Antoinette would have supported the idea of a guaranteed basic income.
I follow The Economist or, when I have to write for the colonials, Chicago.
The rest are all shite.
The Economist's style guide is a thing of beauty. I have it sitting on my desktop to provide inspiration. But it has to be read with an Oxbridgean accent, and the speaker has to imply with every breath that really you shouldn't be writing at all, but if you absolutely must communicate, then this form is probably the least offensive to others.
Except when it's meant to be. I'd never seen the title 'Mr' used in derision before I picked up that lovely rag.
I saw on the news the other day, that students were saying they had been traumatized by someone writing in chalk "Trump 2016". I mean, I'm no Trump supporter, but seriously, traumatized?
Others have pointed out that the report was utterly false.
Still, look at how well the lie plays among self-righteous bigots with a persecution complex. And yet we still allow Trump and his ilk to spew this shit, because free speech. Astonishing, isn't it, how people will allow people such as yourself to fill yourself with ill-informed tripe, and yet you're the ones who are persecuted?
If you aren't for the latest gay agenda...
Respectfully: What The Fuck is a 'gay agenda'? Equal rights? Enjoying the same rights as everyone else everywhere?
or if you raise the concern that a certain group does seem to have most of the terrorist problem coming from their ranks....
Just say it, for fuck sake: MUSLIMS. You mean those dirty, rag-headed, gutteral, snarly, infidels who chop people's heads off and want to impose Shariah law on you and your loved ones? That's who you mean, right, when you spew mealy-mouthed phrases like 'certain groups'? How fucking precious.
And how fucking wrong. In the United States, Muslims terrorists are notmore numerous than others. Historically, levels of terrorism in the US and Europe are down, not up.
well, you just cannot speak about that without repercussions. It isn't even just being shunned, but you are actively suppressed these days.
Goddamn right, you're being suppressed. If by 'suppressed' you mean 'told to shut your fucking yap until you derive at least the slightest clue about the subject you keep ranting about'.
Look at how many comedians these days, won't do shows on college campuses anymore....
Okay, that one is a fair cop. People on both sides of the political spectrum are way touchier than they've a right to be.
That said, I would treat them to the same derision I'm showing you if they failed to adhere to the facts and basic logic.
Theres major concern that any dissenting speech is being supressed, if it goes even remotely against the new social agenda.
For as long as the 'new social agenda' constitutes actually caring about the truth, and upholding basic human rights and equality under the law... then Fucking A Right, nothing deserves—even remotely—to go against the new social agenda.
... and for as long as the 'new social agenda' is a bunch of gluten-free, artisanal hipster snowflakes busy enabling and affirming themselves while old Brooklyn cries in shame, then they can go get fucked too.
Even what used to be common sense has no place in the public square these days.
Bigotry used to be common sense for far too long and for far too many people. It deserves to die a death, and those people who perpetuate it deserve to be told to shut their cake-holes.
Look, I get how you feel, but dude, seriously, your views are not just wrong, they're hurtful and harmful. Not to people's precious feelings—to their lives. When you oppose the 'latest gay agenda', you're sentencing some very good friends of mine to not being able to hold a loved one's hand in the hospital. You're saying that someone who devoted their life to caring and tending for a home shoul
You refer to him as President Obama the first time and Mr Obama after that, what's the problem?
That's standard editorial practice. The Economist style guide says that you provide the title once, and then it's Ms/r/rs So-and-so for the rest of the piece. In my newspaper, that's the way it works as well.
I know that last sentence was purely gratuitous. I just get a kick of out of saying, 'in my newspaper....':-)
But you have to admit, politically speaking, your country is a fucking laughing stock right now isn't it?
Tough call, actually. We just put over half the government into jail for criminal bribery. Seriously. 14 out of 27 MPs were convicted. On the one hand. Bribery is so common and politicians are so shameless that they collectively walked right into a conviction. On the other hand, we actually showed that crimes among the ruling class have consequences.
The last time the politicians compromised, the American people got the Iraq war. I prefer gridlock over compromise.
Un. Fucking. Believable.
I don't really care if I get modded down so far I can't edit my hosts file for moo-ing.
This is the most vacuous piece of reasoning I have ever in my life come across, but tragically, that's probably because I live in Saneland, which is the geographical area NOT occupied by the contiguous United States. It's just so wrong in so many ways there quite literally is no way to respond respectfully to it, unless it were uttered by a bespectacled, slightly sociopathic eleven year-old. In which case I would tell him to stop talking until he's finished his homework.
I despair of you, you know that? I am saddened by what your country—and you—have been reduced to. And I grew up with the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, with the Nixon resignation and Reagan's arms for hostages constitutional fuckuppery. I breakfasted under a Doomsday clock that was just two minutes to midnight.
But nothing compares to the pass you have brought your nation—and, God help us, this planet—to now.
Mod me down; label me a troll. But I used to be your neighbour. I used to be your friend.
Slashdot is wondering what happened to their old tech/geek audience, while allowing the radical liberal activists and brainwashed "global warming" propagandists to take over the site - the same way Digg was destroyed.
If the new owners want to see a future for slashdot, the first thing to do is kick out these idiot Global Warming activists.
You know what? I'm a radicalised global warming (no scare quotes) activist. You know why? Because I live in a perfect island paradise in the South Pacific.
Only these days, it ain't so perfect. First, we got hit with the most powerful cyclone in the history of this region. Then we got 8 months of extreme drought thanks to the most powerful El Niño event in recorded history.
Neither cyclones nor the ENSO cycle are abnormal here. We are situated just south enough of the equator that we get an average of about 1.5 cyclones in our territorial waters every year. And ENSO has pretty much defined our climatic cycles since before humans ever inhabited here.
But the severity of these events, and the abnormality of weather events in recent years, is indisputably increasing. This year alone, we've seen record high regional temperatures, cyclones crossing the equator—an hitherto unknown event—and just this week, we saw a weak hurricane reverse its path, redouble its strength to Category 3/4, and now we're waiting for it to make landfall in a country that is about 1000 miles from where the storm's typical path would be. We've also seen cyclonic storms forming outside of the tropical belt, and... well, the list goes on.
Have I been brainwashed? Yes. Brainwashed by the evidence. You can cite all the skepticist bullshit you like, because I'm watching my climate change right in front of my eyes. And yes, I know the difference between weather and climate. I also know that virtually all of the climate prediction models call for increasingly wide fluctuations in weather behaviour, and that fits pretty much perfectly with the evidence in front of me.
So respectfully: If I and my ilk have ruined Slashdot for you, then good. Feel free to fuck off out of here and leave the conversation to rational adults.
Obama should word with rankng Senate members of both parties and nominate a politically-centrist judge whose judicial qualifications are impeccable.
Or they could just select a racist, sexist, blatantly partisan, third-rate juridical bombast whose greatest claim to fame is having written some of the most laughable Supreme Court arguments in recent memory.
This. There are several missing important moderations. "You must be new here" should be one of them. Along with "+1 Troll" (or "+1 look at that") a positive mod for things which are sufficiently bad to be worth reading.
The simplest way to get this is to separate the qualitative from the quantitative i.e. have one drop-down with the score (+ or -) and one with the qualifier. More or less the way metamod works now, but with all the options all the time.
No, it's fucking not. I live in a Least Developed Country and spent a decade assisting it in making region-leading progress in technology. Last year, the UN gave our country an award for its advances. Our Universal Access Policy dictates that 98% of the population will have access to 21/12Mbps bandwidth by the beginning of 2018.
These things are possible when a country actually bucks the lobbyists and industry reps and sets some real goals.
So unless you have some actual real-world insight into this, perhaps you could quit reiterating the same tired point that's just been debunked. 'Is so!' isn't much of an argument, you know.
This is not about free internet for anyone. This is about affordable access to the internet—all of it. Even poor people have money, and they value the internet and the ability to communicate widely. They will pay for the service if it's only offered fairly and affordably.
You say, 'companies don't want to do X' as if that were sufficient reason not to do X. But a country allows a telco a partial monopoly in exchange for a contribution to the public welfare. That includes providing affordable fucking internet to the people of the country.
It astonishes me how people buy the telco line without even questioning it for one second. If you had read the article I linked to, you'd know that telco revenues doubled in the last ten years in the developing world, but services have not grown nearly fast enough to keep up with the developed world. Contrast that with the developed world, where revenues are pretty much flat, but bandwidth use and residential broadband penetration are flying off the top of the X axis on the chart.
Do not try to tell me that telcos can't turn a profit making affordable internet available to most of the developed world. I know that's false, because I'm watching it happen here.
Although it can probably never be proven, occam's razor indicates that money changed hands. It's a more logical conclusion than this level of incompetence amongst the necessary number of employees.
If past experience is any indication, then yes, telcos are perfectly content to engage in the dodgiest of dodgy practices if it means making a buck or two.
Slashdot Mirror
Check out the Hackaday prize, over at Hackaday.io.
Actually, you don't even have to get too clever to save lives. In early 2015, the South Pacific country of Vanuatu was devastated by cyclone Pam, a category 5 storm that severely damaged almost half the country. (Full disclosure: the UNICEF photos are mine.). In spite of some islands being completely denuded of shelter, only 11 people died.
The people of Vanuatu deal with an average of 1.5 cyclones every year, but this was an unique event. There had never been a storm of this intensity measured in the country before, and certainly not one that passed directly on top of more than half the population. 3000 years of dealing with cyclones meant that people knew how to cope, but it was telecommunications that allowed us to warn people in time for them to seek shelter. Ironically, on Tanna (the worst-affected island) the majority of casualties occurred when the wall of a building designated an emergency shelter collapsed.
One national telco saw its entire national network knocked out. But within 10 days, they had better than 90% of it back in operation. I myself saw the CEO manhandling a microwave antenna into the back of a chopper during the height of the relief effort.
So yeah, it's not glorious; it's not clever. Sometimes tech just needs to be available to save lives.
P.S. The owners of a Very Large Internet Company saved a lot of lives in the immediate aftermath of the storm when they sent their superyacht to assist with relief activities. The vessel was small enough to get into the countless tiny passages, and large enough to support a helipad for medevacs. On top of that, the 40,000 litre desalination unit could keep entire villages supplied with water until barges could arrive. They don't want their names to come out because this is one of the few places in the world they can get away and just be people. But thanks guys. You rock.
The Good: if there are known threats that can be filtered, this is the most efficient level on which to do them.
The Bad: this will inevitably be extended to blocking torrent sites, Wikileaks and any web sites I administer.
The Ugly: it will create a false sense of security, "educating" users to be less educated about their machines.
The un-fucking-believably stupid: Ignoring the capacity for police state tactics in surveilling the domestic population, this is the same as tacking a bullseye onto the nation's internet and telling every terrorist, rogue nation and hacktivist:
DO NOT PRESS THIS BUTTON. THIS ONE. RIGHT HERE. IT WOULD BE VERY BAD. SO DON'T PRESS IT.
It shouldn't matter who the DNC leaker was. Blaming "the Ruskies" is just a diversion.
The question here isn't 'who leaked?', so much as 'if it's the Russians, what are they holding back?'
I'm a fan of leakers, but would prefer leaks from people who don't have a horse in the race. The age-old question 'cui bono?' (who benefits?) is a key element to establishing the value and completeness of a leak. I say this, by the way, as a professional journalist who has relied on leaks and whistleblowers for some big stories.
Javascript, the worst possible programming idea that seems to unfortunately work.
Son, you only say that because you've never poked the Cold Fusion bear. In earlier versions, it didn't even have subroutines.
So what if the UBI reaches 100% of the federal tax?
I think the way that $3 trillion figure is formulated is more than a little disingenuous. Surely you don't just give $10,000 to every Tom, Dick and Harriet. Anywhere this has been looked at, it's been implemented as an income subsidy. In other words, you top up everyone's income so that nobody earns less than a given amount. Based on that calculation, and factoring in savings on welfare, food stamps etc., the idea actually looks quite attractive.
It's OpenBTS, not Facebook's new project, that developed incredibly cheap 2.5G GSM service on cheap, software defined radio hardware.
Exactly. This idea has been around for yonks. Probably the most visible in international development circles was the Grameen Foundation's Village Phone project. This included small-scale GSM transmitter/receivers along with phones that would be shared on a commercial pay-as-you-go basis.
I met a few people working on a variation of this in Timor Leste, and tried to get some formal backing and traction for this in some Pacific island countries. The bottom line is that it's a no-go scenario, because you have inordinately high regulatory barriers, and the opposition of local telcos, who don't want anyone else hanging off their infrastructure, no matter how good it is for the bottom line.
That made some sense at the time, but today, why wouldn't you build your wireless network on WiFi instead?
Because at the end of the day, you still need to interact with local telcos. You can shim it any way you want, but if a person can't call or text their cousin in the capital, they're not going to pay to use the service.
But that's not reason to give up hope. You should give up hope because the telcos will never let it happen anyway, and even if they do, they'll find some new way to screw you out of accessing an affordable and open internet. :-)
Brewster Kahle said that sentence at a conference also attended by TBL. And the quote doesn't even appear in the article that the phrase is linked to.
The actual quote is in the New York Time article:
“Edward Snowden showed we’ve inadvertently built the world’s largest surveillance network with the web,” said Mr. Kahle
Congratulations on failing journalism 101. But then, this being Slashdot and all: Congratulations! You're an editor!!
But a large number of professional programmers didn't learn how to code in a formal school program, either because they're self-taught or because they learned on the job. Citation please.
In the early days, many people didn't have anyone to learn from. If you weren't enrolled in a University computer science programme, you probably had close to zero access to formal instruction.
For my part, a colleague of mine came by my desk, saw me struggling to handle a conditional with a macro, and showed me how to create a control structure in Visual Basic. Spent a few months playing and reading MS' Knowledge Base in text mode through a 9600 baud connection. Then I found Kernihan and Ritchie little book, and suddenly it all made sense.
Fast forward 6 years to the late '90s, and I was writing systems software for NOC services. The dot com boom happened, and Bob, as they say, was my uncle.
This is the capitalist version of "let them eat cake." Because god help them if the proles feel like they deserve some of the money they're making capitalists.
That's truer than you realise. Marie Antoinette reportedly said, 'Qu'ils mangent la brioche.' Translated in the proper context, it meant that because flour supplies were so low, they should use alternate sources, in this case, the highly refined (cake) flour that was being saved off for herself and her family.
This was straight-up socialist redistribution she was calling for.
I think Marie Antoinette would have supported the idea of a guaranteed basic income.
What's next..? We're building a wall around Earth to keep illegal aliens out...?
Overkill. We'll just pen them inside their compound when they land.
(P.S. Don't smoke the hair. It'll kill ya.)
I follow The Economist or, when I have to write for the colonials, Chicago.
The rest are all shite.
The Economist's style guide is a thing of beauty. I have it sitting on my desktop to provide inspiration. But it has to be read with an Oxbridgean accent, and the speaker has to imply with every breath that really you shouldn't be writing at all, but if you absolutely must communicate, then this form is probably the least offensive to others.
Except when it's meant to be. I'd never seen the title 'Mr' used in derision before I picked up that lovely rag.
I saw on the news the other day, that students were saying they had been traumatized by someone writing in chalk "Trump 2016". I mean, I'm no Trump supporter, but seriously, traumatized?
Others have pointed out that the report was utterly false.
Still, look at how well the lie plays among self-righteous bigots with a persecution complex. And yet we still allow Trump and his ilk to spew this shit, because free speech. Astonishing, isn't it, how people will allow people such as yourself to fill yourself with ill-informed tripe, and yet you're the ones who are persecuted?
If you aren't for the latest gay agenda...
Respectfully: What The Fuck is a 'gay agenda'? Equal rights? Enjoying the same rights as everyone else everywhere?
or if you raise the concern that a certain group does seem to have most of the terrorist problem coming from their ranks....
Just say it, for fuck sake: MUSLIMS. You mean those dirty, rag-headed, gutteral, snarly, infidels who chop people's heads off and want to impose Shariah law on you and your loved ones? That's who you mean, right, when you spew mealy-mouthed phrases like 'certain groups'? How fucking precious.
And how fucking wrong. In the United States, Muslims terrorists are not more numerous than others. Historically, levels of terrorism in the US and Europe are down, not up.
well, you just cannot speak about that without repercussions. It isn't even just being shunned, but you are actively suppressed these days.
Goddamn right, you're being suppressed. If by 'suppressed' you mean 'told to shut your fucking yap until you derive at least the slightest clue about the subject you keep ranting about'.
Look at how many comedians these days, won't do shows on college campuses anymore....
Okay, that one is a fair cop. People on both sides of the political spectrum are way touchier than they've a right to be.
That said, I would treat them to the same derision I'm showing you if they failed to adhere to the facts and basic logic.
Theres major concern that any dissenting speech is being supressed, if it goes even remotely against the new social agenda.
For as long as the 'new social agenda' constitutes actually caring about the truth, and upholding basic human rights and equality under the law... then Fucking A Right, nothing deserves—even remotely—to go against the new social agenda.
... and for as long as the 'new social agenda' is a bunch of gluten-free, artisanal hipster snowflakes busy enabling and affirming themselves while old Brooklyn cries in shame, then they can go get fucked too.
Even what used to be common sense has no place in the public square these days.
Bigotry used to be common sense for far too long and for far too many people. It deserves to die a death, and those people who perpetuate it deserve to be told to shut their cake-holes.
Look, I get how you feel, but dude, seriously, your views are not just wrong, they're hurtful and harmful. Not to people's precious feelings—to their lives. When you oppose the 'latest gay agenda', you're sentencing some very good friends of mine to not being able to hold a loved one's hand in the hospital. You're saying that someone who devoted their life to caring and tending for a home shoul
There are no alternative explanations to "shall not be infringed".
Actually, it was just an imprecation against putting tassels on your musket sling.
Says the person named "Anonymous Coward".
Noel's son, presumably. Posting incognito.
You refer to him as President Obama the first time and Mr Obama after that, what's the problem?
That's standard editorial practice. The Economist style guide says that you provide the title once, and then it's Ms/r/rs So-and-so for the rest of the piece. In my newspaper, that's the way it works as well.
I know that last sentence was purely gratuitous. I just get a kick of out of saying, 'in my newspaper....' :-)
But you have to admit, politically speaking, your country is a fucking laughing stock right now isn't it?
Tough call, actually. We just put over half the government into jail for criminal bribery. Seriously. 14 out of 27 MPs were convicted. On the one hand. Bribery is so common and politicians are so shameless that they collectively walked right into a conviction. On the other hand, we actually showed that crimes among the ruling class have consequences.
The last time the politicians compromised, the American people got the Iraq war. I prefer gridlock over compromise.
Un. Fucking. Believable.
I don't really care if I get modded down so far I can't edit my hosts file for moo-ing.
This is the most vacuous piece of reasoning I have ever in my life come across, but tragically, that's probably because I live in Saneland, which is the geographical area NOT occupied by the contiguous United States. It's just so wrong in so many ways there quite literally is no way to respond respectfully to it, unless it were uttered by a bespectacled, slightly sociopathic eleven year-old. In which case I would tell him to stop talking until he's finished his homework.
I despair of you, you know that? I am saddened by what your country—and you—have been reduced to. And I grew up with the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, with the Nixon resignation and Reagan's arms for hostages constitutional fuckuppery. I breakfasted under a Doomsday clock that was just two minutes to midnight.
But nothing compares to the pass you have brought your nation—and, God help us, this planet—to now.
Mod me down; label me a troll. But I used to be your neighbour. I used to be your friend.
Slashdot is wondering what happened to their old tech/geek audience, while allowing the radical liberal activists and brainwashed "global warming" propagandists to take over the site - the same way Digg was destroyed.
If the new owners want to see a future for slashdot, the first thing to do is kick out these idiot Global Warming activists.
You know what? I'm a radicalised global warming (no scare quotes) activist. You know why? Because I live in a perfect island paradise in the South Pacific.
Only these days, it ain't so perfect. First, we got hit with the most powerful cyclone in the history of this region. Then we got 8 months of extreme drought thanks to the most powerful El Niño event in recorded history.
Neither cyclones nor the ENSO cycle are abnormal here. We are situated just south enough of the equator that we get an average of about 1.5 cyclones in our territorial waters every year. And ENSO has pretty much defined our climatic cycles since before humans ever inhabited here.
But the severity of these events, and the abnormality of weather events in recent years, is indisputably increasing. This year alone, we've seen record high regional temperatures, cyclones crossing the equator—an hitherto unknown event—and just this week, we saw a weak hurricane reverse its path, redouble its strength to Category 3/4, and now we're waiting for it to make landfall in a country that is about 1000 miles from where the storm's typical path would be. We've also seen cyclonic storms forming outside of the tropical belt, and... well, the list goes on.
Have I been brainwashed? Yes. Brainwashed by the evidence. You can cite all the skepticist bullshit you like, because I'm watching my climate change right in front of my eyes. And yes, I know the difference between weather and climate. I also know that virtually all of the climate prediction models call for increasingly wide fluctuations in weather behaviour, and that fits pretty much perfectly with the evidence in front of me.
So respectfully: If I and my ilk have ruined Slashdot for you, then good. Feel free to fuck off out of here and leave the conversation to rational adults.
Obama should word with rankng Senate members of both parties and nominate a politically-centrist judge whose judicial qualifications are impeccable.
Or they could just select a racist, sexist, blatantly partisan, third-rate juridical bombast whose greatest claim to fame is having written some of the most laughable Supreme Court arguments in recent memory.
'Cause we're short one now on the bench.
Sarcasm is based on auditory and visual cues of the person.
Sure it is.
You must be new here.
This. There are several missing important moderations. "You must be new here" should be one of them. Along with "+1 Troll" (or "+1 look at that") a positive mod for things which are sufficiently bad to be worth reading.
The simplest way to get this is to separate the qualitative from the quantitative i.e. have one drop-down with the score (+ or -) and one with the qualifier. More or less the way metamod works now, but with all the options all the time.
My pop's favorite movie was "Logan's Run" - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt00...
I know I speak for everyone here in the Slashdot family when I say, "Sorry to hear that."
:-)
I for one welcome our new BIZX overlords! Wait, WTF is a BIZX anyhow?
It's what you IZX after I make you eat my SHIZX, BIZX.
Fo-SHIZX my DIZX, BIZX.
Easy - because the alternative IS nothing.
No, it's fucking not. I live in a Least Developed Country and spent a decade assisting it in making region-leading progress in technology. Last year, the UN gave our country an award for its advances. Our Universal Access Policy dictates that 98% of the population will have access to 21/12Mbps bandwidth by the beginning of 2018.
These things are possible when a country actually bucks the lobbyists and industry reps and sets some real goals.
So unless you have some actual real-world insight into this, perhaps you could quit reiterating the same tired point that's just been debunked. 'Is so!' isn't much of an argument, you know.
This is not about free internet for anyone. This is about affordable access to the internet—all of it. Even poor people have money, and they value the internet and the ability to communicate widely. They will pay for the service if it's only offered fairly and affordably.
You say, 'companies don't want to do X' as if that were sufficient reason not to do X. But a country allows a telco a partial monopoly in exchange for a contribution to the public welfare. That includes providing affordable fucking internet to the people of the country.
It astonishes me how people buy the telco line without even questioning it for one second. If you had read the article I linked to, you'd know that telco revenues doubled in the last ten years in the developing world, but services have not grown nearly fast enough to keep up with the developed world. Contrast that with the developed world, where revenues are pretty much flat, but bandwidth use and residential broadband penetration are flying off the top of the X axis on the chart.
Do not try to tell me that telcos can't turn a profit making affordable internet available to most of the developed world. I know that's false, because I'm watching it happen here.
HTH HAND
Although it can probably never be proven, occam's razor indicates that money changed hands. It's a more logical conclusion than this level of incompetence amongst the necessary number of employees.
If past experience is any indication, then yes, telcos are perfectly content to engage in the dodgiest of dodgy practices if it means making a buck or two.