Well TFS says Latino Americans are earning more than their parents. Of course they mostly worked really shit jobs (and some newer immigrants from Central and South America still do) so that their children could work slightly less shit jobs. My ancestors were immigrants so I can't really fault them any more for wanting a better life or to get out of their own country, but I'm not going to pretend that the rampant illegal immigration is a good thing for the U.S. as it hurts unskilled labor the most and they've been suffering the more for longer than anyone else.
The problem is that Europe recovered from WWII and became their own economic powerhouse and the U.S. helped rebuild Japan and prop up Korea, in part because we saw what being harsh dicks to a country did to Germany after WWI and it turns out those countries had a lot of really smart people that could work just as hard or even harder than Americans. The idea of a single income household with a stay-at-home mom was a bubble just waiting to burst.
Economic osmosis always meant the U.S. was going to be knocked down a few pegs. The country could have done a better job investing in the future, but instead it bought cars with fins with fuel efficiency that could better be measured in gallons per mile. This just exacerbated today's problems, but in a lot of ways we're repeating the same mistakes in different ways.
I don't think college got any better or worse, it is primary and secondary education that seem far worse. At some point it became less and less acceptable to tell anyone they sucked or needed to get their shit together because it wouldn't fly. I think there are a larger number (there were always people like this, just fewer of them) of young people today who are completely incapable of coping with failure because they've never been challenged or had to face adversity. The system just rolled over for them and let them through no matter how poorly they did.
It's not just idiots (but there are still plenty of those) either, but also smart kids who just can't handle a challenge because everything got so dumbed down they've never had to rise above a really low bar. Eventually they hit college or the real world and suddenly find life turned up side down. Big fish in little ponds being suddenly lost in an ocean and there's no ribbon for trying your best if your best isn't good enough. Because it became unacceptable to hold anyone back, everyone ended up being held back.
Big education gets paid either way, so its surprising that they care as much as they do, but I suspect some of that comes down to enough people who want to be good educators working around the system. Some professors don't care much about that, but they might do some cutting edge research and cultivate the next generation of research professors so I suppose there's value there. Regardless, it's a mess in that some fields are so competitive in terms of available jobs that it makes little sense for some more expensive universities to have those programs because unless those students are already wealthy they shouldn't expect to be able to pay off the cost of their education for decades with current job prospects in those fields.
I don't think college is primarily to blame, and to some degree it's always been more of what you make of it than anything else, but I suspect they're starting to eat the shit sandwich that's been pushed through the education system and are probably passing the buck a little themselves. It probably varies by university and program though as colleges were always a bit of chaotic fiefdom and tenured faculty could always tell idiotic administrators to go piss up a rope when necessary. Maybe degrees did get watered down, but it probably isn't anywhere as much as people would like to think. Maybe you just work a company that can only attract C-level college talent and all the highly motivated 4.0 students aren't bothering to apply or interview there.
The flip side of automation and improvements in manufacturing and technology is that goods and services become less expensive because costly human labor is no longer required. It may be that as time goes on it becomes possible for society to support a larger and larger percentage of the population that doesn't do anything or is incapable of contributing any value simply because the cost to so is being driven downward by the same forces that are removing people from the labor pool.
It's probably preferable to just pay these people to stay home and not bother the rest of society instead of having to pay people to deal with the results of criminal behavior because there's little sense in paying just as much money to solve a problem using one approach that involves creating a bunch of jobs to do busy work that wouldn't be necessary under a completely different approach.
The only real issue is asking the people who fall into the group of inability to add value not to reproduce or to only reproduce below replacement rate. It's basic human nature to want to pass on one's genes, no matter how useless or detrimental society might view them. Would someone be content to live knowing that or could they be persuaded not to have children or have fewer? I question whether it would work since there are so many religious people who think they need to be fruitful and multiply.
The presence or absence of the Y chromosome (or specifically one very small part of it, the SRY gene) determines biological sex. Gender (the perception of which sex the self should be) is heavily correlated with biological sex, but it appears as though it can deviate from the typical pattern as a result of events during fetal development. Most of the gender-related stuff you see on places like tumblr these days is pure bullshit that has no scientific basis, but transgenderism is something that has been studied and scientists may have identified parts of the brain that are responsible for gender.
Is it really worth it to pay $10 extra and several days wait for 36 shots, just to that broadcast to others that I still use film?
When everyone can be a photographer, some people need to find a way to set themselves apart. To show everyone that they're serious, or talk about how the physical process preserves blah blah blah. For some people it's about being quaint or nostalgic more than the finished product, maybe out of some desire to feel as though they've accomplished something and not necessarily a narcissistic desire for attention. I wonder if in another decade or so more people will be into pottery and making their own bowls and mugs just so they can feel like they don't have to rely on the 3D printer to do it all for them.
It stands to reason since the countries that put words like "democratic" or "people's republic" in the names of their countries tend to be authoritarian dictatorships that we shouldn't simply trust that a country with the word "socialist" in it is some kind of utopia for workers. However, the authoritarian aspect of a country should be removed from their economic policies. The Nazis were far from socialist and their economic policy something that changed though out their reign. Early on their 25-point plan contained a lot of points that have more in common with communist or socialist positions such as nationalizing industries, more equitable sharing of profits for workers, and the like. It also contained a lot of aspects of nationalism (e.g. a German people, limiting immigration, etc.) which is why it had the name National Socialism in the first place.
However, once they were in power there wasn't a clear push in either direction. The Nazis privatized some parts of the existing government while at the same time nationalizing companies, particularly those that would be used to fuel their war machine. They also outright took over the labor unions to the extent that they were controlled by the party and essentially made them functionally useless. There wasn't a clear cut push for outright government (or worker) control of industry nor was there a hand's off free market approach.
Trying to lump Nazi Germany into one basket (left) or the other (right) ignores a lot of the fine detail. In some regards they leaned left, and in others right. On the whole they probably came closer to the center than most people would care or like to admit and I think it had less to do with any sense of economic ideology and more with doing whatever was most effective in terms of building their army or supporting the war effort.
I've had moments where I've thought "No way, that can't be that person's real name and occupation!" -- and then gone to LinkedIn or similar and found out that yes, that history teacher, dental hygienist or business owner really does correspond to the profile. It's (in my opinion) a sad commentary on how un-civil we are to each other.
People like that have always existed, you just didn't know any of them or ever spend much time around them because you probably didn't frequent the same places and meat space only exposes you to so many people in situations where you can hear those kinds of opinions, but the internet is hardly responsible for any of this. If they weren't posting it to some website, they'd be in a local bar saying the same shit, only to a smaller audience. Trust me, I've seen people make those same kind of rants live and in person. As a quick aside, another alternative is that you perhaps don't recognize some of these rants because you happen to agree with them and don't mentally place them into the same category. Mostly another side effect of the fact that the company we keep tends to be of a similar mind to our own selves.
The only thing the internet did was give everyone a platform to reach everyone else and the tools to find those kind of things which enrage us, which seems to be like some kind of god-damned magnet to the average human. I'm remind of a scene from the Howard Stern movie where he finds out that the people who say they hate him spend more time listening to his radio show than the people who like the show. There's another old saying about how some people aren't really happy unless they've got something to be angry about and the internet is a perfect machine for feeding the perpetual rage hungry that these people tend to have. Look at any news source that is heavily targeted towards conservatives or liberals or even any other political ideology. They contain very few stories about what their side or group is doing right, but a large amount of stories that will make their readers angry. Kind of weird that at the fringes there are people who define themselves less in terms of what they are and more so in terms of their opposition of some other group, or more accurately their flawed perception of it.
The 99% who follow the elite 1% who champion the narcissistic fuck out of social media platforms are depressed as shit thinking about how droll their lives are.
But does knowing that make some of us feel better about our own lot in life (sure we might have problems, but we're not sad moppets like those people in TFA) in turn? And what further effects might that happiness of ours have on others, such as perhaps making some of them happy that there is still happiness (albeit at someone else's misery over someone else's happiness) to be found in this world.
I'm not sure how deep the recursion goes, but it might be a net positive.
I'd say that ideally you would make an AI that can start to reason about reliability and the like, but it seems like every time Microsoft, Google, or some other company puts one out on the internet, it gets bombarded by trolls from 4chan that try to turn it into something that might even make Hitler blush.
Also, it's probably because there are hundreds (thousands?) of people crammed into an area and trying to use service that wasn't developed to deal with that kind of capacity on a regular basis. If you've ever driven though parts of the mid-west there's a lot of areas with bad or no coverage depending on where you're at. If they're at the edge of a tower, its going to eat through more battery life.
I also bet it's partially due to a bit of hysteria. People have their battery drain faster than usual, apps crash, etc. all the time, but don't think too much of it. All it takes is one rumor and suddenly people are paying a lot more attention to the meaningless coincidences and trying to find something to attribute them to even if there isn't one.
I get that the government can spy on people and there is documented evidence of various agencies having and using the equipment and technology to do so, but that doesn't mean its always doing so or is in this particular case. I had assumed that the protesters were mostly hippies and the like that the government wouldn't give two shits about, but I suppose if there are some ELF-types at the protest their might be more cause for concern or the possibility where a warrant to do so could be granted and things are being done above board legally.
Presumably you get the benefit of being at work and not missing 20 weeks of project work and product development. If you can't use this to impress upon your managers or bosses that you're worth more or use your extra time to become more vital to the company and get promotions than either you don't actually provide any additional benefit over someone who was taking leave or the management isn't capable of realizing what their employees are worth and you're stuck with some arbitrary system for advancement that may have little to do with your abilities, in which case you should probably change jobs as soon as possible.
Perhaps in America, but this is Japan we're talking about. Their criminal enterprise is mostly related to vice crimes (gambling, prostitution, etc.) and would probably find preying on the elderly to be shameful. Their cultural differences and very homogeneous population means that certain types of crimes are among the lowest in the world in Japan. At the same time it also leads to disproportionate amounts (relative to other first-world countries) of other types of crime like human trafficking.
This really isn't the same as investing and building renewable energy infrastructure means that you don't need to get your power from some other source that creates more pollution. While I agree that the idea of carbon offsets is pretty pointless, this isn't the same. I suppose you could argue that if someone else just buys the coal power that Apple stops using, it didn't really change anything, which is certainly a possibility, but still better than just building more coal plants.
Part of the issue is that the U.S. has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world. If it were lowered, companies would probably be more willing to bring back money or not try to store it overseas because there would be no financial advantage towards doing so. Even the Nordic countries that are often regarded as having the best social safety nets (or even outright referred to as being socialist, albeit by silly people who don't know what socialism is) have lower corporate tax rates that are more in line with the rest of the world.
We probably wouldn't be having this conversation if the U.S. had similar rates to the rest of the world.
I don't use a case on my phone, but if I did it would probably be to make it slightly thicker. I see a lot of people with cracked screens, but I buy my phones unlocked so I pay the full price which makes me a bit more careful with them so I'm not too worried about any drops.
However, it's easily possible to make a thin phone thicker with a case. However a thick phone cannot be made any thinner in such a fashion and I do remember back to when phones were much thicker and the only reason they weren't a burden was because they didn't have 5" screens. Try having a phone as thick as a Nokia 3310 be any wider or taller than it was and still be pocket friendly.
I think the real reason the phones keep getting thinner is that the components keep getting smaller and while a larger battery could be added, this would add to the weight of the device, which is what I think manufacturers really want to minimize.
That it was filled with large quantities of what amounts to tinder didn't help matters, but it's not much different than the infamous club fire from over a decade ago when the Great White were playing that killed 100 people because it was over capacity and didn't follow the fire code. Maybe people are more prone to laugh at it happening to hipsters instead of hard rock fans because of generational reasons, but this could have happened to almost anyone playing in an unsafe venue.
The asshole that broke into my car a few years ago seemed to do reasonably well with a simple fist-sized rock. I wouldn't want to try punching through a window, but I'm reasonably sure that I could kick through one if my life depended on it. The police and rescue use tools to minimize harm to themselves and others, not because it's impossible to accomplish without the use of said tool.
You can be charged with breaking and entering a property even if the door is unlocked so this is no different in that he unlawfully accessed a system that he no longer had a right to access. It doesn't matter if he or an ex has a valid key or not if they are no longer welcome on the property. In this case, termination of employment makes that pretty damned clear. It doesn't matter if the ISP was incredibly stupid and negligent in their own actions by not revoking the former employee's access credentials.
If you want to argue whether or not this is "hacking" or not, it's probably not what a computer literate person would consider hacking, but it probably fits in the overly general and vague use of the word by the media and non-technical individuals. The former are going to agree with you that it isn't (though probably not for the reasons you've used) and the latter don't care so the argument is rather pointless.
Its all now just lazy he-said she-said bullshit where the only filter is the bias of the Journalists and Publications.
If the last decade has shown us anything, it's that this is what people actually want to consume. Even prior to the rise of new media, most papers or news networks had some form of political slant. All we're seeing now is a magnification of this. Most people only want something that conforms to their existing beliefs, not an objective account. Knowing that we've gone from the media producing slanted views of stories towards opinion pieces about events and are now heading towards fabrications or opinionated hyperbole to the point of absurdity.
If most consumers don't care about much beyond whether a news story supports their beliefs, it's far easier just to invent something that does that than it is to take a real story and add spin or to try to produce an objective and neutral report. To some extent we've always had this, and one needs look no farther than the tabloids in most grocery stores to see that this is not a new phenomena, but has always been around. The difference is that people haven't adopted to tabloids being available in web form. To the untrained eye they look essentially the same as any other news website, whereas most people wouldn't make the same mistake with a traditional paper and a tabloid.
With traditional media, the barrier to entry was high enough that it wasn't easy for huge number of tabloids to survive at one time. There was a physical cost to printing and you likely needed an advertising department on its own which adds further cost. The internet has removed most of those problems. Almost anyone can set up a website now and there are plenty of frameworks that make it easy for even unexperienced individuals to have something that looks reasonably professional, third party ad networks make it trivial to add to your site and no needed to have someone handling the customers, and social media has made it incredibly easy to have your site brought to a wide audience almost overnight due to network effects and ease of sharing that weren't present before. The great democratizer of the internet has made it possible for the everyman to have a printing press and the same reach as a big corporation. Unfortunately most people are idiots. This result doesn't seem terribly surprising in retrospect.
Everyone likes to trot out that example, but if you replace it with a guy flashing lots of money in a shady bar and getting held up in the parking lot, people tend not to feel anywhere near as much remorse. I can say with certainly that no one deserves to be robbed or hurt, but we don't live in a perfect world and if you don't take chances to minimize bad things happening to you, you're an idiot. Sure you don't deserve to have bad things happen to you, but they're going to happen with far greater frequency than they do to someone who isn't an idiot.
I'm pretty sure you lock your doors at night and never leave your keys in your car. I'll also bet you'd never tell your a female relation or friend that it would be a really bad idea to walk through Riyahd in a mini skirt. She should be perfectly free to do so, but that's practically a death sentence and we both know it.
I have no idea if Spore got better or not, but from what I played of it before it crashed and then EAs shit DRM and customer service rendering the game further unplayable felt more like just average. I wouldn't be surprise if they put out some extra content and tightened up the game to where it might be something more than a 5/10 experience, and that's even accounting for the inflated game rating scale where anything below 80% isn't generally considered to be good.
I haven't played No Man's Sky, but I had a pretty good feeling that it couldn't live up to the hype. I rode that train with Spore and realized quickly it couldn't hope to live up to what I had imagined, as upon further reflection that would have meant making some really advanced AI among other things or required far more computational power than my PC could hope to muster. I probably should have known better any way since I remember the same thing happening some years before that when the first Fable was announced with similar promises of an incredibly organic and adaptable world.
Or consumers to do some research or wait for reviews. This game reminded me of another game from several years ago that was met with similar criticisms. Anyone remember Spore, which also had the same procedural generation and infinite possibilities?
Exact same hype train and same result. On a side note I still haven't bought another EA game due to getting fucked by EA's DRM and their refusal to do anything about it.
I don't think that's something really that unique to Republicans (also for what it's worth red/blue only became associated with Republicans/Democrats in the 2000 election and previously the Republicans used blue in their party's branding, but that's besides the point) as there are plenty of places that have been Democrat strongholds for decades that are in just as bad of shape (do neither sides economic policies work?). The real crux of the problem is that when any one party maintains control to that degree or has no real challengers, they have no incentive to do better. We look at something like the Comcast or other cable monopolies and see how shit the service is so why do we expect something different from political parties?
The stupidest part about it is that the first past the post voting system all but ensures that we see this outcome. I don't mean to say Democrats and Republicans exactly as you see them today, but two parties that are becoming increasingly polarized as there's no real room for anything in the middle. We've seen it historically in that the United States has always had two dominant parties with any third party being little more than a flash in the pan or one that eventually cannibalized an existing party and took it over. Were this to happen frequently enough, the system would be better, but the existing parties have been around far too long and with the exception of the crossover during the civil right's movement haven't changed much at all.
We need a system where it's possible to have more than two parties because it will allow people to find something that's a better fit. If you want both the right to own a gun and to have an abortion, there's really no viable party for you, but with a system that isn't first-past-the-post, it becomes possible for those more nuanced parties to exist, which means the existing parties lose their monopoly status and have to be more responsible to the voters instead of to a small number of moneyed interests.
Slashdot Mirror
Well TFS says Latino Americans are earning more than their parents. Of course they mostly worked really shit jobs (and some newer immigrants from Central and South America still do) so that their children could work slightly less shit jobs. My ancestors were immigrants so I can't really fault them any more for wanting a better life or to get out of their own country, but I'm not going to pretend that the rampant illegal immigration is a good thing for the U.S. as it hurts unskilled labor the most and they've been suffering the more for longer than anyone else.
The problem is that Europe recovered from WWII and became their own economic powerhouse and the U.S. helped rebuild Japan and prop up Korea, in part because we saw what being harsh dicks to a country did to Germany after WWI and it turns out those countries had a lot of really smart people that could work just as hard or even harder than Americans. The idea of a single income household with a stay-at-home mom was a bubble just waiting to burst.
Economic osmosis always meant the U.S. was going to be knocked down a few pegs. The country could have done a better job investing in the future, but instead it bought cars with fins with fuel efficiency that could better be measured in gallons per mile. This just exacerbated today's problems, but in a lot of ways we're repeating the same mistakes in different ways.
I don't think college got any better or worse, it is primary and secondary education that seem far worse. At some point it became less and less acceptable to tell anyone they sucked or needed to get their shit together because it wouldn't fly. I think there are a larger number (there were always people like this, just fewer of them) of young people today who are completely incapable of coping with failure because they've never been challenged or had to face adversity. The system just rolled over for them and let them through no matter how poorly they did.
It's not just idiots (but there are still plenty of those) either, but also smart kids who just can't handle a challenge because everything got so dumbed down they've never had to rise above a really low bar. Eventually they hit college or the real world and suddenly find life turned up side down. Big fish in little ponds being suddenly lost in an ocean and there's no ribbon for trying your best if your best isn't good enough. Because it became unacceptable to hold anyone back, everyone ended up being held back.
Big education gets paid either way, so its surprising that they care as much as they do, but I suspect some of that comes down to enough people who want to be good educators working around the system. Some professors don't care much about that, but they might do some cutting edge research and cultivate the next generation of research professors so I suppose there's value there. Regardless, it's a mess in that some fields are so competitive in terms of available jobs that it makes little sense for some more expensive universities to have those programs because unless those students are already wealthy they shouldn't expect to be able to pay off the cost of their education for decades with current job prospects in those fields.
I don't think college is primarily to blame, and to some degree it's always been more of what you make of it than anything else, but I suspect they're starting to eat the shit sandwich that's been pushed through the education system and are probably passing the buck a little themselves. It probably varies by university and program though as colleges were always a bit of chaotic fiefdom and tenured faculty could always tell idiotic administrators to go piss up a rope when necessary. Maybe degrees did get watered down, but it probably isn't anywhere as much as people would like to think. Maybe you just work a company that can only attract C-level college talent and all the highly motivated 4.0 students aren't bothering to apply or interview there.
The flip side of automation and improvements in manufacturing and technology is that goods and services become less expensive because costly human labor is no longer required. It may be that as time goes on it becomes possible for society to support a larger and larger percentage of the population that doesn't do anything or is incapable of contributing any value simply because the cost to so is being driven downward by the same forces that are removing people from the labor pool.
It's probably preferable to just pay these people to stay home and not bother the rest of society instead of having to pay people to deal with the results of criminal behavior because there's little sense in paying just as much money to solve a problem using one approach that involves creating a bunch of jobs to do busy work that wouldn't be necessary under a completely different approach.
The only real issue is asking the people who fall into the group of inability to add value not to reproduce or to only reproduce below replacement rate. It's basic human nature to want to pass on one's genes, no matter how useless or detrimental society might view them. Would someone be content to live knowing that or could they be persuaded not to have children or have fewer? I question whether it would work since there are so many religious people who think they need to be fruitful and multiply.
The presence or absence of the Y chromosome (or specifically one very small part of it, the SRY gene) determines biological sex. Gender (the perception of which sex the self should be) is heavily correlated with biological sex, but it appears as though it can deviate from the typical pattern as a result of events during fetal development. Most of the gender-related stuff you see on places like tumblr these days is pure bullshit that has no scientific basis, but transgenderism is something that has been studied and scientists may have identified parts of the brain that are responsible for gender.
Is it really worth it to pay $10 extra and several days wait for 36 shots, just to that broadcast to others that I still use film?
When everyone can be a photographer, some people need to find a way to set themselves apart. To show everyone that they're serious, or talk about how the physical process preserves blah blah blah. For some people it's about being quaint or nostalgic more than the finished product, maybe out of some desire to feel as though they've accomplished something and not necessarily a narcissistic desire for attention. I wonder if in another decade or so more people will be into pottery and making their own bowls and mugs just so they can feel like they don't have to rely on the 3D printer to do it all for them.
It stands to reason since the countries that put words like "democratic" or "people's republic" in the names of their countries tend to be authoritarian dictatorships that we shouldn't simply trust that a country with the word "socialist" in it is some kind of utopia for workers. However, the authoritarian aspect of a country should be removed from their economic policies. The Nazis were far from socialist and their economic policy something that changed though out their reign. Early on their 25-point plan contained a lot of points that have more in common with communist or socialist positions such as nationalizing industries, more equitable sharing of profits for workers, and the like. It also contained a lot of aspects of nationalism (e.g. a German people, limiting immigration, etc.) which is why it had the name National Socialism in the first place.
However, once they were in power there wasn't a clear push in either direction. The Nazis privatized some parts of the existing government while at the same time nationalizing companies, particularly those that would be used to fuel their war machine. They also outright took over the labor unions to the extent that they were controlled by the party and essentially made them functionally useless. There wasn't a clear cut push for outright government (or worker) control of industry nor was there a hand's off free market approach.
Trying to lump Nazi Germany into one basket (left) or the other (right) ignores a lot of the fine detail. In some regards they leaned left, and in others right. On the whole they probably came closer to the center than most people would care or like to admit and I think it had less to do with any sense of economic ideology and more with doing whatever was most effective in terms of building their army or supporting the war effort.
I've had moments where I've thought "No way, that can't be that person's real name and occupation!" -- and then gone to LinkedIn or similar and found out that yes, that history teacher, dental hygienist or business owner really does correspond to the profile. It's (in my opinion) a sad commentary on how un-civil we are to each other.
People like that have always existed, you just didn't know any of them or ever spend much time around them because you probably didn't frequent the same places and meat space only exposes you to so many people in situations where you can hear those kinds of opinions, but the internet is hardly responsible for any of this. If they weren't posting it to some website, they'd be in a local bar saying the same shit, only to a smaller audience. Trust me, I've seen people make those same kind of rants live and in person. As a quick aside, another alternative is that you perhaps don't recognize some of these rants because you happen to agree with them and don't mentally place them into the same category. Mostly another side effect of the fact that the company we keep tends to be of a similar mind to our own selves.
The only thing the internet did was give everyone a platform to reach everyone else and the tools to find those kind of things which enrage us, which seems to be like some kind of god-damned magnet to the average human. I'm remind of a scene from the Howard Stern movie where he finds out that the people who say they hate him spend more time listening to his radio show than the people who like the show. There's another old saying about how some people aren't really happy unless they've got something to be angry about and the internet is a perfect machine for feeding the perpetual rage hungry that these people tend to have. Look at any news source that is heavily targeted towards conservatives or liberals or even any other political ideology. They contain very few stories about what their side or group is doing right, but a large amount of stories that will make their readers angry. Kind of weird that at the fringes there are people who define themselves less in terms of what they are and more so in terms of their opposition of some other group, or more accurately their flawed perception of it.
The 99% who follow the elite 1% who champion the narcissistic fuck out of social media platforms are depressed as shit thinking about how droll their lives are.
But does knowing that make some of us feel better about our own lot in life (sure we might have problems, but we're not sad moppets like those people in TFA) in turn? And what further effects might that happiness of ours have on others, such as perhaps making some of them happy that there is still happiness (albeit at someone else's misery over someone else's happiness) to be found in this world.
I'm not sure how deep the recursion goes, but it might be a net positive.
I'd say that ideally you would make an AI that can start to reason about reliability and the like, but it seems like every time Microsoft, Google, or some other company puts one out on the internet, it gets bombarded by trolls from 4chan that try to turn it into something that might even make Hitler blush.
Also, it's probably because there are hundreds (thousands?) of people crammed into an area and trying to use service that wasn't developed to deal with that kind of capacity on a regular basis. If you've ever driven though parts of the mid-west there's a lot of areas with bad or no coverage depending on where you're at. If they're at the edge of a tower, its going to eat through more battery life.
I also bet it's partially due to a bit of hysteria. People have their battery drain faster than usual, apps crash, etc. all the time, but don't think too much of it. All it takes is one rumor and suddenly people are paying a lot more attention to the meaningless coincidences and trying to find something to attribute them to even if there isn't one.
I get that the government can spy on people and there is documented evidence of various agencies having and using the equipment and technology to do so, but that doesn't mean its always doing so or is in this particular case. I had assumed that the protesters were mostly hippies and the like that the government wouldn't give two shits about, but I suppose if there are some ELF-types at the protest their might be more cause for concern or the possibility where a warrant to do so could be granted and things are being done above board legally.
Presumably you get the benefit of being at work and not missing 20 weeks of project work and product development. If you can't use this to impress upon your managers or bosses that you're worth more or use your extra time to become more vital to the company and get promotions than either you don't actually provide any additional benefit over someone who was taking leave or the management isn't capable of realizing what their employees are worth and you're stuck with some arbitrary system for advancement that may have little to do with your abilities, in which case you should probably change jobs as soon as possible.
Perhaps in America, but this is Japan we're talking about. Their criminal enterprise is mostly related to vice crimes (gambling, prostitution, etc.) and would probably find preying on the elderly to be shameful. Their cultural differences and very homogeneous population means that certain types of crimes are among the lowest in the world in Japan. At the same time it also leads to disproportionate amounts (relative to other first-world countries) of other types of crime like human trafficking.
This really isn't the same as investing and building renewable energy infrastructure means that you don't need to get your power from some other source that creates more pollution. While I agree that the idea of carbon offsets is pretty pointless, this isn't the same. I suppose you could argue that if someone else just buys the coal power that Apple stops using, it didn't really change anything, which is certainly a possibility, but still better than just building more coal plants.
Part of the issue is that the U.S. has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world. If it were lowered, companies would probably be more willing to bring back money or not try to store it overseas because there would be no financial advantage towards doing so. Even the Nordic countries that are often regarded as having the best social safety nets (or even outright referred to as being socialist, albeit by silly people who don't know what socialism is) have lower corporate tax rates that are more in line with the rest of the world.
We probably wouldn't be having this conversation if the U.S. had similar rates to the rest of the world.
I don't use a case on my phone, but if I did it would probably be to make it slightly thicker. I see a lot of people with cracked screens, but I buy my phones unlocked so I pay the full price which makes me a bit more careful with them so I'm not too worried about any drops.
However, it's easily possible to make a thin phone thicker with a case. However a thick phone cannot be made any thinner in such a fashion and I do remember back to when phones were much thicker and the only reason they weren't a burden was because they didn't have 5" screens. Try having a phone as thick as a Nokia 3310 be any wider or taller than it was and still be pocket friendly.
I think the real reason the phones keep getting thinner is that the components keep getting smaller and while a larger battery could be added, this would add to the weight of the device, which is what I think manufacturers really want to minimize.
That it was filled with large quantities of what amounts to tinder didn't help matters, but it's not much different than the infamous club fire from over a decade ago when the Great White were playing that killed 100 people because it was over capacity and didn't follow the fire code. Maybe people are more prone to laugh at it happening to hipsters instead of hard rock fans because of generational reasons, but this could have happened to almost anyone playing in an unsafe venue.
The asshole that broke into my car a few years ago seemed to do reasonably well with a simple fist-sized rock. I wouldn't want to try punching through a window, but I'm reasonably sure that I could kick through one if my life depended on it. The police and rescue use tools to minimize harm to themselves and others, not because it's impossible to accomplish without the use of said tool.
You can be charged with breaking and entering a property even if the door is unlocked so this is no different in that he unlawfully accessed a system that he no longer had a right to access. It doesn't matter if he or an ex has a valid key or not if they are no longer welcome on the property. In this case, termination of employment makes that pretty damned clear. It doesn't matter if the ISP was incredibly stupid and negligent in their own actions by not revoking the former employee's access credentials.
If you want to argue whether or not this is "hacking" or not, it's probably not what a computer literate person would consider hacking, but it probably fits in the overly general and vague use of the word by the media and non-technical individuals. The former are going to agree with you that it isn't (though probably not for the reasons you've used) and the latter don't care so the argument is rather pointless.
Its all now just lazy he-said she-said bullshit where the only filter is the bias of the Journalists and Publications.
If the last decade has shown us anything, it's that this is what people actually want to consume. Even prior to the rise of new media, most papers or news networks had some form of political slant. All we're seeing now is a magnification of this. Most people only want something that conforms to their existing beliefs, not an objective account. Knowing that we've gone from the media producing slanted views of stories towards opinion pieces about events and are now heading towards fabrications or opinionated hyperbole to the point of absurdity.
If most consumers don't care about much beyond whether a news story supports their beliefs, it's far easier just to invent something that does that than it is to take a real story and add spin or to try to produce an objective and neutral report. To some extent we've always had this, and one needs look no farther than the tabloids in most grocery stores to see that this is not a new phenomena, but has always been around. The difference is that people haven't adopted to tabloids being available in web form. To the untrained eye they look essentially the same as any other news website, whereas most people wouldn't make the same mistake with a traditional paper and a tabloid.
With traditional media, the barrier to entry was high enough that it wasn't easy for huge number of tabloids to survive at one time. There was a physical cost to printing and you likely needed an advertising department on its own which adds further cost. The internet has removed most of those problems. Almost anyone can set up a website now and there are plenty of frameworks that make it easy for even unexperienced individuals to have something that looks reasonably professional, third party ad networks make it trivial to add to your site and no needed to have someone handling the customers, and social media has made it incredibly easy to have your site brought to a wide audience almost overnight due to network effects and ease of sharing that weren't present before. The great democratizer of the internet has made it possible for the everyman to have a printing press and the same reach as a big corporation. Unfortunately most people are idiots. This result doesn't seem terribly surprising in retrospect.
Yes
The countries where you can't deal directly in USD have exchanges that will gladly trade it for the local currency at reasonable rates.
If you had to pick a single currency if you were going on the run or needed to move around a lot, I can't think of anything better than USD.
Everyone likes to trot out that example, but if you replace it with a guy flashing lots of money in a shady bar and getting held up in the parking lot, people tend not to feel anywhere near as much remorse. I can say with certainly that no one deserves to be robbed or hurt, but we don't live in a perfect world and if you don't take chances to minimize bad things happening to you, you're an idiot. Sure you don't deserve to have bad things happen to you, but they're going to happen with far greater frequency than they do to someone who isn't an idiot.
I'm pretty sure you lock your doors at night and never leave your keys in your car. I'll also bet you'd never tell your a female relation or friend that it would be a really bad idea to walk through Riyahd in a mini skirt. She should be perfectly free to do so, but that's practically a death sentence and we both know it.
I have no idea if Spore got better or not, but from what I played of it before it crashed and then EAs shit DRM and customer service rendering the game further unplayable felt more like just average. I wouldn't be surprise if they put out some extra content and tightened up the game to where it might be something more than a 5/10 experience, and that's even accounting for the inflated game rating scale where anything below 80% isn't generally considered to be good.
I haven't played No Man's Sky, but I had a pretty good feeling that it couldn't live up to the hype. I rode that train with Spore and realized quickly it couldn't hope to live up to what I had imagined, as upon further reflection that would have meant making some really advanced AI among other things or required far more computational power than my PC could hope to muster. I probably should have known better any way since I remember the same thing happening some years before that when the first Fable was announced with similar promises of an incredibly organic and adaptable world.
Or consumers to do some research or wait for reviews. This game reminded me of another game from several years ago that was met with similar criticisms. Anyone remember Spore, which also had the same procedural generation and infinite possibilities?
Exact same hype train and same result. On a side note I still haven't bought another EA game due to getting fucked by EA's DRM and their refusal to do anything about it.
I don't think that's something really that unique to Republicans (also for what it's worth red/blue only became associated with Republicans/Democrats in the 2000 election and previously the Republicans used blue in their party's branding, but that's besides the point) as there are plenty of places that have been Democrat strongholds for decades that are in just as bad of shape (do neither sides economic policies work?). The real crux of the problem is that when any one party maintains control to that degree or has no real challengers, they have no incentive to do better. We look at something like the Comcast or other cable monopolies and see how shit the service is so why do we expect something different from political parties?
The stupidest part about it is that the first past the post voting system all but ensures that we see this outcome. I don't mean to say Democrats and Republicans exactly as you see them today, but two parties that are becoming increasingly polarized as there's no real room for anything in the middle. We've seen it historically in that the United States has always had two dominant parties with any third party being little more than a flash in the pan or one that eventually cannibalized an existing party and took it over. Were this to happen frequently enough, the system would be better, but the existing parties have been around far too long and with the exception of the crossover during the civil right's movement haven't changed much at all.
We need a system where it's possible to have more than two parties because it will allow people to find something that's a better fit. If you want both the right to own a gun and to have an abortion, there's really no viable party for you, but with a system that isn't first-past-the-post, it becomes possible for those more nuanced parties to exist, which means the existing parties lose their monopoly status and have to be more responsible to the voters instead of to a small number of moneyed interests.