There's not much you can do about Jobs, Balmer, or Cook being assholes, but we probably can force Mozilla to kick Eich to the curb.
Using Firefox isn't acting against gay rights. Eich donated to an anti-gay marriage proposal, there's no evidence or even reason to believe that this is going to influence the company and its stance. Google on the other hand actively partakes in aggressive tax evasion and by using their software we are directly supporting that.
As to the logic that what he did was pretty assholish. I don't agree with it but I doubt we'd be supporting a campaign to get an atheist kicked off the board of a company in a highly religious country. There's a reason why it's better if we don't persecute people for holding views we disagree with, which is that it sets a precedent to persecute those whose views we agree with when they are in the minority.
He was explaining what the service was to someone who clearly didn't know, the difference between that and apologising is pretty vast so I'm surprised you couldn't spot the difference. Believe it or not, one doesn't need to defend a service provider in order to wish to help inform people of what the service is.
I wasn't aware MAD doctrine had actually been abandoned and the US was now willing to sell its own territory
Well then I suggest you catch up, or at least think a little more broadly. The point of Nuclear weapons in MAD is to ensure that nobody else uses Nukes against you because it would result in both sides being destroyed. If Russia invaded Alaska (unlikely at best) then America wouldn't retaliate with Nukes because it would be moronic to do so; it would use its conventional military. Even if America couldn't retake Alaska for some reason it wouldn't make sense to use Nukes in response because that would result in vast, or total, annihilation of America as well as Russia. Better to use economic and alternative military options to target Russia until you can force them to back down.
I'm actually quite surprised that eastern European nations, who appear to be both concerned about Russia and frustrated by Europes response, haven't started hinting that they might begin developing nuclear weapons so that they have their own nuclear deterrent now that the west has shown how little a promise means. Putting Europe in that position might force them to be more aggressive in their sanctions against Russia in order to stop it.
I'm really not sure if I'd be more worried to find out that most of the posts like this were cyber-shilling by pro-Russians or just naive/argumentative people who genuinely believe it.
occupied the Crimea after an internationally monitored referendum with a secret ballot
The election was not internationally monitored (look into the group they refer to) and the result is obviously false (the turnout figures and result are absolutely incompatible with prior voting trends in Crimea). I have no issue with the view that Crimea may have voted to join Russia in a truly free and fair referendum, although I am not fully convinced, but that doesn't mean I have to parrot Russian government messages and nor should you.
2001. Is Friends still the most watched show on TV. Is the population of America still 280,000,000 and the approximately 40 million new citizens can be ignored? A 13 year old census is a piss poor source, what is especially amusing is that the same wikipedia page says that demographics in Crimea are shifting from ethnic Russian to Crimean Tatar by 1.5% a year. So if you just blindly follow your 'source' without applying any critical thinking you'd actually conclude that Crimea is 40% ethnic Russian.
You do know it isn't 2001 right? You may as well say America has a Republican president because Bush was President in 2001.
I find it amusing that you demand evidence from the parent poster when your own 'source' gives it
This is particularly apparent in both the Russian and Ukrainian ethnic populations, whose growth rate has been falling at the rate of 0.6% and 0.12% annually respectively. In comparison, the ethnic Crimean Tatar population has been growing at the rate of 0.9% per annum.[13]
Your own wikipedia page from which you've quoted a 13 year old survey shows that there's a yearly 1.5% shift in demographic from ethnic Russian to Crimean Tatar.
Perhaps a point on which we disagree. I think there is a case for arguing that 'punishment' can be ethical and in fact necessary. If someone cannot be punished for stealing then there are a proportion of people who will make a rational decision to steal. Fining someone is after all a punishment, barring someone entry is punishment and treating the person differently in a way they don't like is punishment.
To me, the issue of punishment and ethics is a far murkier one. If the motivation of punishment is a rational response to minimise the amount of crime, is proportionate and is minimised as much as possible that's about the best we can do.
I didn't come up with the title or wording of the summary which I chose to use in my response to it. I'm not disturbed, or surprised, by you lacking the maturity to consider that before putting together misdirected rebuttals.
Nate Silver, stats-steeped liberal darling of the past 6+ years, has the temerity to direct his ruthless, data-driven worldview against a liberal sacred cow.
Firstly, I can't see a rational reason why Nate would be a darling to liberals given that his appeal is trying to stick to verifiable numbers rather than opinion. Perhaps you are confusing liberal appeal with conservative hatred. Someone being right has never been a strong defence for going against the party line for them;)
If anything what surprised me about this article is that some of its methodology seems to directly contradict Nate's usual MO and the section of his book on the subject of disasters.
I am sorry, but climatologists are claiming that modern structures and forecasting should reduce costs. Why? For example, the more modern structure of automobiles intentionally increases the cost of fixing an automobile involved in a crash.
Because in the case of a car crash the small cost of fixing a car is preferably to loss of life or permanent injury. Technology and policy changes have meant that these more important things have been targeted and vastly reduced. In the case of weather events the most important costs are loss of life and economic damage so it makes sense that measures would have been taken to reduce these where possible. If anything your car analogy shows the exact logic that would lead people to conclude that not expecting damage from weather events to fall is irrational.
To give a very short analogy of why the article is flawed, if it was about roads and whether they are more dangerous today or not, then it would take no notice of whether cars themselves are safer. It would be saying in 1950 1/100000 miles driver someone died, in 2010 1/300000 miles someone died therefore the roads today are safer than the roads in 1950 (all numbers made up).
Car technology has moved on, meaning that even if roads have no more safety measures then less people should die. Our flood defences, planning and response abilities and knowledge of handling risk have also moved on hugely and thus the expectation should be that if weather events remained constant then the damage should be vastly decreased.
What I found frustrating about this article is that Nate Silver nicely covered the difficulty of looking at extreme weather events in any short (less than thousands of years) timescales: If mega-storms happen on average every 20 years then it wouldn't be unusual to have a 20 year period that includes two followed by another 20 year period with none, a 10% increase in the chance of mega-storms over that period would be impossible to spot because it's simply too small a period to see that trend.
Technology has gotten far better allowing us to predict risks and mitigate them more effectively. We're richer which allows us to spend more on protection. Our emergency services have extensive procedures to relocating people in risk areas etc. I would be very surprised to find that we haven't got an order of magnitude or more better at handling extreme weather events compared to just 70 years ago. It seems odd to start from the premise that our ability to handle disasters hasn't improved during the entire time, especially as it doesn't appear to be the kind of view Nate would propose.
Some crimes are so bad they require a really long period of punishment,
Am I the only the person a little disturbed that we've got scholars focused on the future of punishment coming up with shit like this? We already have ways we could make imprisonment worse, we could torture prisoners incessantly throughout their incarceration but don't because we're trying to show more humanity and restraint than those we lock up... Are they seriously dumb enough to think someone who commits a horrible crime with a 30 year sentence was going to reconsider if they could get an imaginary 60 years or 600 years? Does anyone think that injecting someone with a drug to make them feel like they are somewhere unpleasent for drastically longer is somehow not torture when injecting them with a drug that would cause them pain for a short period of time is?
I expect this kind of primal bollocks to be popular with the population at large but I'd, perhaps naively, thought that people who were informed and trying to put together a rational case would know better.
Again, if we had just stuck with pesticides, the resistance problem would not be as severe. We are now down one pesticide. We lost ground.
Thanks for the response. If rootworm becomes entirely resistant to BT then the need for BT resistant corn vanishes, so why would farmers keep paying a premium for it? Why would a GM producer intentionally allow their product to become redundant?
The Klien ones look more like the Fluke ones than the Sparkfun one does.
The orange ones? I think you need to get your vision testing. You're one of god knows how many people on here suggesting that all multimeters sold at look exactly like Fluke's without ever giving a specific example and invariably being quickly countered by someone who has passable vision who points out that no, actually, they don't.
Not bloody likely, no one buying a multimeter will say "Hey, look! A Fluke multimeter for only $30!"
Probably true, but then it's not like expecting them to not blatantly rip off the style and colouring of a fluke device is an unreasonable burden and let's face it any system of protecting trademarks that tries to decide whether confusion is likely based on pricing discrepancy is going to be a nightmare.
I can't see what the actual issue with the situation put forwards by the article is. Farmers have been able to use considerably less pesticide for a decade, the effectiveness of that solution is falling so they'll have to go back to using pesticide. How is that worse than just having used pesticide throughout the whole period and have the rootworm build up a better resistance to that instead?
If God didn't hate Fags, he wouldn't have Created Evolution to weed them out of the gene pool.
So you're suggesting he's incompetent and homophobic and that this somehow was the motivation for him 'designing' evolution? Yeah, that sounds persuasive...
The exact same thing could be said about Japan in the period between WW1 and WW2, about Germany pre-WW2 and it wasn't true then. If you allow the precedent to be set that if you're big enough then military force is the easiest way to get what you want then it encourages it. If we can't discourage Russia from annexing Crimea then why should China be discouraged from annexing Taiwan? Why would Japan feel confident in maintaining a small military and no nukes if American promises mean so little? Will NK become more confident about annexing the South?
Even ignoring American's own self-interest they leaned heavily on Ukraine to give up its Nuclear weapons by promising it, Russia etc would respect its territory. If it allows Russia to annex it without even attempting to do something about it then it makes the word of American diplomats even less meaningful and pushes anyone who had been relying on American support to protect them instead of nuclear weapons to get them.
America does need to get over the notion of being the worlds police, and we might actually be seeing it do exactly that here. It has resisted calls to escalate the military stand off in Ukraine and has encouraged the Ukraine to show restraint. It is one of many countries that are using moderate economic measures to discourage behaviour that needs to be discouraged. I can only hope that this is a sign of maturity and not cowardice...
Oh, for fucks sake now even statistical analysis articles have to come with these retarded click grabber buzzfeed style headlines. Next election we'll have a series of "You won't believe... what a Republican said", "Amazing facts that'll blow your mind about... the democratic party", "4 secrets that... Libertarians don't want you to know":(
Exactly. It's a bad decision but ultimately if they are offering backers the choice of their money back (through an easy process) then it isn't like anyone who cares about having a downloadable copy is out of pocket. Plenty of Kickstarters fail to deliver at all, to deliver on time or to deliver exactly what they said they would; that's an inherent issue when backing something so early in the process and backers usually expect a considerable discount in return.
You could have saved a lot of space by leaving out the puerile insults. Slashdot's moderation system is a long way from perfect but what exactly do you think they should do to 'fix' it. Stop users moderating and have all comments equal, allowing the spamming of views? Have one person or a small group decide which posts are good or bad?
Based on this post it seems likely to me that you can't express a point effectively and rather than resolve that you've decided it must be the fault of other people that you get down-modded.
If history is anything to go by Putin is going to keep doing land grabs until someone with a good arsenal of nukes agrees to play the brinksmanship game with him.
It's far too early to say but I'm hopeful that this isn't the only solution. The risk with brinkmanship is that it only takes a tiny mistake to turn into a global catastrophe. What we might be seeing at the moment is a credible attempt to move beyond hard power politics by the west and if it works it could set a far better precedent for diplomacy throughout the century which will become especially important as new global powers become more influential. Personally I think doing something like what you proposed, upping the military rhetoric would likely have little impact at all and would put Putin in a position where he couldn't pull back without losing face and control.
By offering more content that I want to watch... pretty much the only measure of better that I'm interested in. Literally the only people I've ever had recommend Prime to me point out that you can buy stuff through it. It seems like an odd point because I'm happy with Netflix and I don't need to buy more stuff to make up for a subscription service that I don't find satisfactory.
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Using Firefox isn't acting against gay rights. Eich donated to an anti-gay marriage proposal, there's no evidence or even reason to believe that this is going to influence the company and its stance. Google on the other hand actively partakes in aggressive tax evasion and by using their software we are directly supporting that.
As to the logic that what he did was pretty assholish. I don't agree with it but I doubt we'd be supporting a campaign to get an atheist kicked off the board of a company in a highly religious country. There's a reason why it's better if we don't persecute people for holding views we disagree with, which is that it sets a precedent to persecute those whose views we agree with when they are in the minority.
He was explaining what the service was to someone who clearly didn't know, the difference between that and apologising is pretty vast so I'm surprised you couldn't spot the difference. Believe it or not, one doesn't need to defend a service provider in order to wish to help inform people of what the service is.
Well then I suggest you catch up, or at least think a little more broadly. The point of Nuclear weapons in MAD is to ensure that nobody else uses Nukes against you because it would result in both sides being destroyed. If Russia invaded Alaska (unlikely at best) then America wouldn't retaliate with Nukes because it would be moronic to do so; it would use its conventional military. Even if America couldn't retake Alaska for some reason it wouldn't make sense to use Nukes in response because that would result in vast, or total, annihilation of America as well as Russia. Better to use economic and alternative military options to target Russia until you can force them to back down.
I'm actually quite surprised that eastern European nations, who appear to be both concerned about Russia and frustrated by Europes response, haven't started hinting that they might begin developing nuclear weapons so that they have their own nuclear deterrent now that the west has shown how little a promise means. Putting Europe in that position might force them to be more aggressive in their sanctions against Russia in order to stop it.
The election was not internationally monitored (look into the group they refer to) and the result is obviously false (the turnout figures and result are absolutely incompatible with prior voting trends in Crimea). I have no issue with the view that Crimea may have voted to join Russia in a truly free and fair referendum, although I am not fully convinced, but that doesn't mean I have to parrot Russian government messages and nor should you.
2001. Is Friends still the most watched show on TV. Is the population of America still 280,000,000 and the approximately 40 million new citizens can be ignored? A 13 year old census is a piss poor source, what is especially amusing is that the same wikipedia page says that demographics in Crimea are shifting from ethnic Russian to Crimean Tatar by 1.5% a year. So if you just blindly follow your 'source' without applying any critical thinking you'd actually conclude that Crimea is 40% ethnic Russian.
I find it amusing that you demand evidence from the parent poster when your own 'source' gives it This is particularly apparent in both the Russian and Ukrainian ethnic populations, whose growth rate has been falling at the rate of 0.6% and 0.12% annually respectively. In comparison, the ethnic Crimean Tatar population has been growing at the rate of 0.9% per annum.[13]
Your own wikipedia page from which you've quoted a 13 year old survey shows that there's a yearly 1.5% shift in demographic from ethnic Russian to Crimean Tatar.
Perhaps a point on which we disagree. I think there is a case for arguing that 'punishment' can be ethical and in fact necessary. If someone cannot be punished for stealing then there are a proportion of people who will make a rational decision to steal. Fining someone is after all a punishment, barring someone entry is punishment and treating the person differently in a way they don't like is punishment.
To me, the issue of punishment and ethics is a far murkier one. If the motivation of punishment is a rational response to minimise the amount of crime, is proportionate and is minimised as much as possible that's about the best we can do.
I didn't come up with the title or wording of the summary which I chose to use in my response to it. I'm not disturbed, or surprised, by you lacking the maturity to consider that before putting together misdirected rebuttals.
You can start a discussion without suggesting torturing people.
Firstly, I can't see a rational reason why Nate would be a darling to liberals given that his appeal is trying to stick to verifiable numbers rather than opinion. Perhaps you are confusing liberal appeal with conservative hatred. Someone being right has never been a strong defence for going against the party line for them ;)
If anything what surprised me about this article is that some of its methodology seems to directly contradict Nate's usual MO and the section of his book on the subject of disasters.
Because in the case of a car crash the small cost of fixing a car is preferably to loss of life or permanent injury. Technology and policy changes have meant that these more important things have been targeted and vastly reduced. In the case of weather events the most important costs are loss of life and economic damage so it makes sense that measures would have been taken to reduce these where possible. If anything your car analogy shows the exact logic that would lead people to conclude that not expecting damage from weather events to fall is irrational.
To give a very short analogy of why the article is flawed, if it was about roads and whether they are more dangerous today or not, then it would take no notice of whether cars themselves are safer. It would be saying in 1950 1/100000 miles driver someone died, in 2010 1/300000 miles someone died therefore the roads today are safer than the roads in 1950 (all numbers made up).
Car technology has moved on, meaning that even if roads have no more safety measures then less people should die. Our flood defences, planning and response abilities and knowledge of handling risk have also moved on hugely and thus the expectation should be that if weather events remained constant then the damage should be vastly decreased.
What I found frustrating about this article is that Nate Silver nicely covered the difficulty of looking at extreme weather events in any short (less than thousands of years) timescales: If mega-storms happen on average every 20 years then it wouldn't be unusual to have a 20 year period that includes two followed by another 20 year period with none, a 10% increase in the chance of mega-storms over that period would be impossible to spot because it's simply too small a period to see that trend.
Technology has gotten far better allowing us to predict risks and mitigate them more effectively. We're richer which allows us to spend more on protection. Our emergency services have extensive procedures to relocating people in risk areas etc. I would be very surprised to find that we haven't got an order of magnitude or more better at handling extreme weather events compared to just 70 years ago. It seems odd to start from the premise that our ability to handle disasters hasn't improved during the entire time, especially as it doesn't appear to be the kind of view Nate would propose.
Am I the only the person a little disturbed that we've got scholars focused on the future of punishment coming up with shit like this? We already have ways we could make imprisonment worse, we could torture prisoners incessantly throughout their incarceration but don't because we're trying to show more humanity and restraint than those we lock up... Are they seriously dumb enough to think someone who commits a horrible crime with a 30 year sentence was going to reconsider if they could get an imaginary 60 years or 600 years? Does anyone think that injecting someone with a drug to make them feel like they are somewhere unpleasent for drastically longer is somehow not torture when injecting them with a drug that would cause them pain for a short period of time is?
I expect this kind of primal bollocks to be popular with the population at large but I'd, perhaps naively, thought that people who were informed and trying to put together a rational case would know better.
Thanks for the response. If rootworm becomes entirely resistant to BT then the need for BT resistant corn vanishes, so why would farmers keep paying a premium for it? Why would a GM producer intentionally allow their product to become redundant?
The orange ones? I think you need to get your vision testing. You're one of god knows how many people on here suggesting that all multimeters sold at look exactly like Fluke's without ever giving a specific example and invariably being quickly countered by someone who has passable vision who points out that no, actually, they don't.
Probably true, but then it's not like expecting them to not blatantly rip off the style and colouring of a fluke device is an unreasonable burden and let's face it any system of protecting trademarks that tries to decide whether confusion is likely based on pricing discrepancy is going to be a nightmare.
I can't see what the actual issue with the situation put forwards by the article is. Farmers have been able to use considerably less pesticide for a decade, the effectiveness of that solution is falling so they'll have to go back to using pesticide. How is that worse than just having used pesticide throughout the whole period and have the rootworm build up a better resistance to that instead?
So you're suggesting he's incompetent and homophobic and that this somehow was the motivation for him 'designing' evolution? Yeah, that sounds persuasive...
The exact same thing could be said about Japan in the period between WW1 and WW2, about Germany pre-WW2 and it wasn't true then. If you allow the precedent to be set that if you're big enough then military force is the easiest way to get what you want then it encourages it. If we can't discourage Russia from annexing Crimea then why should China be discouraged from annexing Taiwan? Why would Japan feel confident in maintaining a small military and no nukes if American promises mean so little? Will NK become more confident about annexing the South?
Even ignoring American's own self-interest they leaned heavily on Ukraine to give up its Nuclear weapons by promising it, Russia etc would respect its territory. If it allows Russia to annex it without even attempting to do something about it then it makes the word of American diplomats even less meaningful and pushes anyone who had been relying on American support to protect them instead of nuclear weapons to get them.
America does need to get over the notion of being the worlds police, and we might actually be seeing it do exactly that here. It has resisted calls to escalate the military stand off in Ukraine and has encouraged the Ukraine to show restraint. It is one of many countries that are using moderate economic measures to discourage behaviour that needs to be discouraged. I can only hope that this is a sign of maturity and not cowardice...
Oh, for fucks sake now even statistical analysis articles have to come with these retarded click grabber buzzfeed style headlines. Next election we'll have a series of "You won't believe... what a Republican said", "Amazing facts that'll blow your mind about... the democratic party", "4 secrets that... Libertarians don't want you to know" :(
Exactly. It's a bad decision but ultimately if they are offering backers the choice of their money back (through an easy process) then it isn't like anyone who cares about having a downloadable copy is out of pocket. Plenty of Kickstarters fail to deliver at all, to deliver on time or to deliver exactly what they said they would; that's an inherent issue when backing something so early in the process and backers usually expect a considerable discount in return.
You could have saved a lot of space by leaving out the puerile insults. Slashdot's moderation system is a long way from perfect but what exactly do you think they should do to 'fix' it. Stop users moderating and have all comments equal, allowing the spamming of views? Have one person or a small group decide which posts are good or bad?
Based on this post it seems likely to me that you can't express a point effectively and rather than resolve that you've decided it must be the fault of other people that you get down-modded.
It's far too early to say but I'm hopeful that this isn't the only solution. The risk with brinkmanship is that it only takes a tiny mistake to turn into a global catastrophe. What we might be seeing at the moment is a credible attempt to move beyond hard power politics by the west and if it works it could set a far better precedent for diplomacy throughout the century which will become especially important as new global powers become more influential. Personally I think doing something like what you proposed, upping the military rhetoric would likely have little impact at all and would put Putin in a position where he couldn't pull back without losing face and control.
By offering more content that I want to watch... pretty much the only measure of better that I'm interested in. Literally the only people I've ever had recommend Prime to me point out that you can buy stuff through it. It seems like an odd point because I'm happy with Netflix and I don't need to buy more stuff to make up for a subscription service that I don't find satisfactory.