First off, let's be clear. I do know that US Citizens did fall into the hands of countries like Ethiopia while they were fighting for the Islamic Courts regime in Somalia. And there was possibly torture while the FBI (who were observers) took no action. That's deeply troubling, and possibly illegal.
However, I want to make myself clear that just because the FBI can do questionable things, that it is important to understand scale. The SS was a paramilitary (and as the Waffen SS, a military) group that was the political arm of the Nazi Party even more than the government. They engaged in running concentration camps, extermination camps, and carried out efficient mass executions in the field. They were involved in the T4 euthanasia program to kill undesirables, they were wrapped up in the racial and ethnic theories of the Nazis to the point where they were supposed to be the Aryan ideal. They were in charge of the Gestapo and the SD (which were the actual secret police) They also engaged in ritual sought to replace religion with some sort of SS religion of Teutonic mysticism which even Hitler thought was odd.
In short, they were a state within a state, and in charge of every oppressive state agency. And they used that power regularly and efficiently with almost zero check on any of their actions.
Oh yes, and they tortured people. And so has probably a large number of police agencies worldwide. That doesn't make any of them the SS. Comparing the FBI's actions, illegal or undesirable as they might be to that of the SS is to diminish the enormity of what the SS represented to make a contemporary political point via hyperbole. And that, I do not care to accept.
So I don't accept the comparison, but that doesn't mean my rejection of a bad comparison means I support illegal or unethical actions. I oppose inaccuracy.
As much as I agree, you'd be surprised just how clear her background would have been to the people in the South at that time. There would be a lot of cues, and people at that time would err on the side of considering you "colored" if they even suspected it.
Of course, it wouldn't have hurt that she probably conformed with the rules and roles about being African so she didn't do something her own, possibly darker, family members could not have gotten away with.
If there was a law passed that made Latin looking people have to sit at the back of the bus, some of my close relatives would have to go to the back, but no one would question if I sat in the front seat. Nevertheless, you can be sure I wouldn't ditch my family and assume a privilege that they would not have simply because of the accident of my hair and skin coloration and features.
Would you have gone into whatever field you were in if someone kept telling you that they had to be super brave just to deal with trying to get a job like you're looking at?
Sometimes I think these "role-model" stories are written more like cautionary stories that play up the drama of being segregated. Perhaps you don't need the black face of someone who had to struggle through their field to actually do it. Maybe if you told a story of someone who simply enjoyed their work, white or black, you would have a role model and an example that would be encouraging, rather than discouraging.
You know, when I read an article like this, I am more emotionally moved to become a Freedom Rider than I am be to become a physicist.
Of course, it reads like a morality play about the evils of segregation, so instead of inspiration, we keep having to be reminded of how some smart woman who clearly did a lot of important work, got constantly screwed over because she was black and a woman but somehow managed to do work anyway.
If this is the inspiration that women and blacks of today are reading, it's no wonder they're mad and disenchanted. Would I have gotten into IT if everyone told me that I would have to be a brave pioneer to do so? Fuck, no. I got into IT because I liked it, and no one discouraged me through horror stories of what it was like.
For the most part, I agree. And what is more, I think that the only real way to overcome racism or sexism is for someone to sit down and succeed despite disadvantage and then, more importantly, pass on their ethic and their culture of getting shit done to their children and others in their community.
Every person on Earth, Kings, Queens or otherwise, likely has poor or disadvantaged people in their past at some point. There were days where you could capture white people on the Mediterranean and sell them into slavery in North Africa to Muslims as a common practice. Blacks sold other blacks into slavery. Asians certainly had slavery and other practices of servitude.
There is nothing inherently superior, or inferior, or disadvantaged about being white or black. What *can* make you disadvantaged is your culture and how you look at life. If you work hard, you may still get fucked over, that possibility is *always* there. But over time you and your children will succeed because you will do what it takes to succeed and not allow temporary setbacks to stop you. And your children will see that and follow that example and they will be even better at it.
If this woman worked hard, and succeeded, then she increased the chances that both her descendants, women or men, light or dark skinned, will also see that success and follow in her footsteps. But she and people like her, need to stand up for that culture of success and not allow themselves to become rare, and exceptional stories for Black History Month or some feelgood article about their horrid past dealing with segregation.
I'm pretty sure that Blizz knows that the party has to end soon, I doubt this is any particular strategy to keep subscribers.
And I do truly believe that they are just that big of a bunch of assholes that they'd do this to simply make a point.
Of course, the private servers may well cause a problem for their relaunch of "Classic World of Warcraft: New Game+" or some other strategy that I am not familiar with.
Which really wouldn't make too much sense. Most of the subscribers of WoW have been there for years. They already played vanilla in many cases. There may be new people who just wanted to experience WoW as it used to be, but if they have the client, they bought the game or got the client somewhere. And they will probably want to move on to new content when they are done with vanilla. There's only so many Molten Core runs you can make, after all.
I'd think this would attract (a) people who did have a subscription in the past but wanted to play vanilla again, (b) people who never played WoW and wanted in for free or (c) someone who is just friends with (a) or (b) and wouldn't be playing WoW by themselves.
In the case of (a), Blizzard already has their money, they really haven't lost anything except perhaps a few more bucks stringing along a junkie who longs for the days of the Barrens chat and the Scarlet Monastery.
For (b), these are people who might actually sign up for a WoW subscription as soon as they play Vanilla and are done with it and want more content. Now, I haven't played in years, but is my assumption Outland and Northrend are probably a ghost town right now. Nevertheless, I can't believe these reverse engineered servers would actually have such a high pop that it would be much different in terms of play. And they would eventually hit Level 95,000,000 or whatever the level cap is now.
And for (c), they were never getting their money without their friend anyway so what's the deal?
It seems odd for them to consider this an actual threat to their subscriber base. It may well be that they are telling the truth and they're doing this simply because it is theirs and they are just that big of a set of dicks.
If you walked up to someone in the US, and instead said that "all intensive purposes" phrase in a sentence, no one is going to correct you or have trouble understanding the meaning behind it.
True, but that's mostly because I don't relish the opportunity to tell someone to their face, that they are spewing gibberish , unless they're fully indecipherable and I can't avoid it.
It's a little different in the US, although perhaps not too much.
Either way, now these guys are going from poorly paid to "not paid". There's more of a safety net in Europe, but I don't think more people who have been made structurally unemployed is going to be good for Europe.
Not that this is a reason to halt progress on this front, but I hope someone has thought about this....
The SA was never a national police force or even a governmental body. The SA was only ever the paramilitary branch of the Nazi party. Full stop. Powerful, yes. Numerous, yes. Violent, most definitely. Police? No. They were brawlers, thugs, and bodyguards. They engaged in illegal intimidation and street fights with equally violent German Communists. They executed progroms on Jews. In short, they were a uniformed gang. They were... the original Skinheads, only with less anarchy and more uniforms. And probably more hair.
Indeed, when Ernst Rohm (chief of the SA) started making noises about having the SA become the basis of the German Army is when Hitler was pressured by the powerful professional military to put Rohm down and drastically curtail the SA's influence. This was the "Night of the Long Knives" for those who care to look it up.
Now, the SS became something like a national police force after Goering turned over his control of the Prussian State Police to Himmler and the Kriminalpolizei was unified under him as Chief of the German Police and they were all given SS ranks, Or perhaps it is more realistic to say that the Police became a little more like the SS, since they simply kept on the existing cops on for the most part.
But to call the FBI an analogue to the SS is like saying that the RCMP is also like the SS. They might be national and uniformed, but it is their mode of operation which distinguishes them from other police forces, not the fact that they happened to be a national police force. The FBI isn't running concentration camps or acting as a political police force. It's like saying that anyone with a remotely authoritarian streak is automatically Hitler. There's a reason there's only been one Hitler and he's pretty much the modern equivalent of Satan. You would need to do a lot to best (or worst) his actual deeds.
I actually agree with you 100% and think that self-driving trucks and autos will make the roads safer, even if they don't make accidents impossible.
When I see this, however, I do wonder what they are thinking about the truck drivers that they are eagerly working at putting out of work. CDL driving isn't a job that I want to do myself, but it is relatively well paying and supports a number of working people who are not exactly STEM material. I hope someone has some idea on that front, or you'll find that you're working on creating even more Donald Trump-type voters.
I've been using Linux since the late 90's and in no way have I found a Linux desktop to be user-friendly in the manner in which I believe that is actually being discussed.
Yes, it can be relatively user friendly to people who have specific needs that don't require much exploration aside from the immediate browsing or mail or word processing features. That's why everyone seems to have the anecdote that they got it working for their 99 year old great-grandmother.
Realistically, though, the desktop and UX as a whole has always been a bastard child subordinated to other interests and even outright turf wars. It seems to be able to get to the point where it is skin-deep usable, and then the usability curve suddenly drops off like a cliff if you are not a power user and want to do something slightly odd.
And someone is always fucking with it. Gnome 2 not good enough for you? Well, let's just fuck it up with Gnome 3. Let's all hate on Unity, now. Et cetera.
Don't get me wrong, not a Metro fan, but as much as the 8.1 Start menu and all of that is kind of annoying, once I got used to it, it was basically Windows 7 only better or worse in a few small ways. It's still basically Windows.
That's why for as long as I remember, my Linux development environment has been a VM running on Windows, which is what I actually use when I want a Desktop. My current VM is actually an Ubuntu 15.10 with Gnome 3. I kind of like it for some specific things. I know, however, that as soon as I want to get the least bit clever with it, I'm going to be opening a Terminal session to try to get it to do what I want. And I have the skills and experience to do it, but after going-on 20 years of this crap, I can't be arsed to do so anymore.
I just don't understand why someone can't just take what is, by all accounts, a superior kernel, on top of superior userland, and not take the lessons of Windows and MacOS and actually make a superior desktop UX out of it. Sadly, I suspect that there may be some things that a dictator is going to get done a lot more easily than a community, and user experience is one of them.
Hey! He was totally going to do it, but the Republican's made him keep it open. Or something.
As if they could prevent him from taking an executive action on detainees on a military base on foreign soil who are there quite simply because they were captured by the US military of which he is Commander-in-Chief of and they aren't US citizens and have few well defined rights under US law or the Geneva Conventions.
It's not as if he would ever threaten to use executive action to do anything that Congress didn't like. Right?
Here's the thing. Profiling and other methods that we decry the use of would probably go a long way towards cutting down on crime, including terrorism. The real problem is not that they are ineffective, but that they either harm or otherwise inconvenience completely innocent people because they would err on the side of assuming that your membership in a particular group (voluntary or involuntary) makes you inherently worth investigating. Much of what you are joking about in terms of AI and insta-justice is fictional, but the mindset behind it is not.
More realistically, if you really did forbid the entrance of Muslims and deport all of the existing Muslims in the country, you'd definitely make some dent in home grown terrorism, and you'd also drive the remaining ones underground, where communication is more difficult to coordinate except between more dedicated groups which law enforcement is better equipped to handle. There would be no more people who are radicalized by that radical preacher who was brought into your local mosque to teach publicly. The Internet would still be a problem, but you're going to be less likely to be swayed by a radical Muslim terrorist social media presence if you are not actually a believing Muslim to begin with.
Of course, you'd displace ten thousand or more innocent people for every single Muslim-type terrorist you managed to rid the country of and create an absolute human rights shitstorm. That's why it generally wouldn't work in a country that pretends to care about human rights and justice. But, nobody should confused into thinking it would be ineffective, and for that reason we should understand that being safer isn't necessarily our first priority.
We *are* safer when everyone thinks the same and looks the same. And that's why safety cannot be the point.
The government, at any time, has a huge treasure trove of secrets and information at its disposal. That's bothersome, but the reality is that half the time, they can't even coordinate with each other enough to make any use out of it at all, good or bad. What tends to matter is who in the government has the data and how it can affect you.
Having huge amounts of information on file with the government is absolutely guaranteed if we maintain our trajectory of having the government have to take care of everything for us. We can outlaw all the small airplanes all we want, and we'll still have a huge amount of information on us in government databases just due to the services we're required to use.
Just consider this, aside from any issue with the ACA you might have on principle, *everyone* is now required to file with the government whether they have a health care plan that meets certain requirements or pay a penalty. I don't recall that in the past the government was actually aware of what insurance I used, particularly since I have not had to make use of Medicare or any government program. Now, that information is in a database at the IRS. I'm honestly less concerned with some airplane than I am with the ACA requirement because the plane will probably never take note of a single thing I do, and even then the use of that data in court is sketchy, but the ACA ensures that I must provide limited, but detailed information to be stored legally in a database, which will certainly be used to enforce a law on me.
If the people are being overhead from the other end of the block because someone has unobtrusively trained a shotgun microphone on them, that's exceeding reasonable expectations because people who go around with live shotgun mikes are not the norm and because individuals are being spied on. That's about the same degree as aerial surveillance with an unmuted plane.
Perhaps, but I think it is entirely legal to do so. The question is what the data is being put to use for and whether they should be collecting it.
In this sense, I think it is entirely legal to do what they are doing. To me that means that there needs to be a law that controls that more closely. And I'd prefer a law. I tire of having the judiciary actually doing the legislation in the country. Whether or not it is the right thing to do, I think this country needs to re-engage in actually following the legislative process rather than waiting for someone to hire a lawyer to fix things in the courts so that we don't actually have to elect people who will take this shit seriously.
Depends on what you consider a "script", I suppose. You can write pretty complicated stuff in things that are called "scripting languages" like perl and there is some (broken) OO in perl5. Ruby is basically a scripting language and OO is pretty much built-in so that everything is an object.
Now, if you mean a minimalist scripting language like bash, then yeah, probably little need for OO since constructing a whole object to merely send myself an listing of my mail queue at 2am every night via cron is probably overkill.
Of course, I have worked for some companies that fell absolutely in love with absurdly long shell scripts, so perhaps it enables those sorts of goofballs who really want to cling to the 1970s.
There are practical advantages to owning a home. But, yes, the government can take it away from you if you don't pay on it.
On the other hand, there was never a time that a government or stronger person couldn't take away from you what you "owned" so you're pretty much no worse off than before, and considerably better in most respects.
Yes, tax is sort of like "rent" but it is truly its own thing. A property tax could theoretically be repealed and then your ownership would remain intact and you wouldn't owe anyone for your paid off property. It's just that no one is going to actually repeal property tax because it is a fairly equitable (and convenient) way of taxing people.
Many companies can zombie along for fairly long periods because they had considerable amount of startup hype and the investment money that goes with it.
It is also possible that they do have a reasonably decent revenue stream from current operations which may not put them in the black, but gives them a considerable amount of remaining runway before they would have to close down, or more likely, be bought out.
I am not a fan of Twitter, but it seems to have invaded the consciousness of news sites and such as a PR vehicle for companies and celebrities. That alone does give it a certain inherent value, even if that value is a lot less than what you might be able to build a successful independent company around.
You're totally right. However, I will point out, the dictionary does change based on current usage, it does not represent usage from the past.
We're constantly promoting slang and different usages to accepted dictionary forms.
Also, dictionary writers are no less capable of acting out of their own opinions about language than anyone else, although they tend to wait for some evidence of adoption before simply ratifying the change.
Sometimes it is useful to look at the dated etymologies of the words in the unabridged versions to see when they came into vogue. Obviously, in the 1890's we all know that the word "gay" was in common use and was primarily defined by being merry. In the 1930's it was used in a more general sense of being sexually promiscuous (a reason that it became associated with homosexuality given the beliefs of those times). Now, those usages are considered to be less primary than it simply being used as a synonym of "homosexual".
Words change meanings based on politics so it is wrong to simply point at a dictionary. However, it is important to remember that sometimes those meanings have changed to suit a particular political or social design.
From the Dictionary.com definition of gender, where they take pains to explain the currently popular definition of gender as being cultural or behavioral they show the following root:
1300-50; Middle English gendren, genderen Middle French gendrer Latin generre to beget, derivative of genus gender1, genus
Begetting does not imply someone who is culturally "gendered" differently than their anatomy. There is little begetting going on in the case of active transsexuals today (without external assistance) and there was certainly a lot less in the past (putting aside those who fulfilled their anatomical roles with distaste or out of obligation).
In short, we've changed the definition, and we're quite literally in semantics now. You can argue that the change is useful and more descriptive, and it does certainly provide a language to describe current thoughts in regard to separated "gender" from anatomy, but someone who wants to make the basic argument that this was just developed recently, and that the word has been re-defined, has a point.
What is wrong with this discussion is that we're trying to define a word meaning as a gold standard of what is correct about the theories behind the new usage. It is an appeal to authority and in both cases, is entirely missing the point.
At least some of the delegates feel bound to vote for who their populations voted for, which is the candidate who sent them there. A brokered convention is certainly a distinct possibility, but I don't know how far they can go and retain credibility. Generally, despite the possibility of back door stuff, most political types know that they need to at least give lip service to their constituencies. I doubt that many of them are relishing the opportunity to vote against Trump on a later ballot.
As I said, they would need everyone else in agreement to not nominate Trump. I've pointed out in the past that the votes are there to keep Trump out, but I really think they needed to move before the convention to prevent complete havoc. Now it's going to be WWIII to keep Trump from being the nominee.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, let's be clear. I do know that US Citizens did fall into the hands of countries like Ethiopia while they were fighting for the Islamic Courts regime in Somalia. And there was possibly torture while the FBI (who were observers) took no action. That's deeply troubling, and possibly illegal.
However, I want to make myself clear that just because the FBI can do questionable things, that it is important to understand scale. The SS was a paramilitary (and as the Waffen SS, a military) group that was the political arm of the Nazi Party even more than the government. They engaged in running concentration camps, extermination camps, and carried out efficient mass executions in the field. They were involved in the T4 euthanasia program to kill undesirables, they were wrapped up in the racial and ethnic theories of the Nazis to the point where they were supposed to be the Aryan ideal. They were in charge of the Gestapo and the SD (which were the actual secret police) They also engaged in ritual sought to replace religion with some sort of SS religion of Teutonic mysticism which even Hitler thought was odd.
In short, they were a state within a state, and in charge of every oppressive state agency. And they used that power regularly and efficiently with almost zero check on any of their actions.
Oh yes, and they tortured people. And so has probably a large number of police agencies worldwide. That doesn't make any of them the SS. Comparing the FBI's actions, illegal or undesirable as they might be to that of the SS is to diminish the enormity of what the SS represented to make a contemporary political point via hyperbole. And that, I do not care to accept.
So I don't accept the comparison, but that doesn't mean my rejection of a bad comparison means I support illegal or unethical actions. I oppose inaccuracy.
As much as I agree, you'd be surprised just how clear her background would have been to the people in the South at that time. There would be a lot of cues, and people at that time would err on the side of considering you "colored" if they even suspected it.
Of course, it wouldn't have hurt that she probably conformed with the rules and roles about being African so she didn't do something her own, possibly darker, family members could not have gotten away with.
If there was a law passed that made Latin looking people have to sit at the back of the bus, some of my close relatives would have to go to the back, but no one would question if I sat in the front seat. Nevertheless, you can be sure I wouldn't ditch my family and assume a privilege that they would not have simply because of the accident of my hair and skin coloration and features.
Would you have gone into whatever field you were in if someone kept telling you that they had to be super brave just to deal with trying to get a job like you're looking at?
Sometimes I think these "role-model" stories are written more like cautionary stories that play up the drama of being segregated. Perhaps you don't need the black face of someone who had to struggle through their field to actually do it. Maybe if you told a story of someone who simply enjoyed their work, white or black, you would have a role model and an example that would be encouraging, rather than discouraging.
You know, when I read an article like this, I am more emotionally moved to become a Freedom Rider than I am be to become a physicist.
It is supposed to be inspirational.
Of course, it reads like a morality play about the evils of segregation, so instead of inspiration, we keep having to be reminded of how some smart woman who clearly did a lot of important work, got constantly screwed over because she was black and a woman but somehow managed to do work anyway.
If this is the inspiration that women and blacks of today are reading, it's no wonder they're mad and disenchanted. Would I have gotten into IT if everyone told me that I would have to be a brave pioneer to do so? Fuck, no. I got into IT because I liked it, and no one discouraged me through horror stories of what it was like.
For the most part, I agree. And what is more, I think that the only real way to overcome racism or sexism is for someone to sit down and succeed despite disadvantage and then, more importantly, pass on their ethic and their culture of getting shit done to their children and others in their community.
Every person on Earth, Kings, Queens or otherwise, likely has poor or disadvantaged people in their past at some point. There were days where you could capture white people on the Mediterranean and sell them into slavery in North Africa to Muslims as a common practice. Blacks sold other blacks into slavery. Asians certainly had slavery and other practices of servitude.
There is nothing inherently superior, or inferior, or disadvantaged about being white or black. What *can* make you disadvantaged is your culture and how you look at life. If you work hard, you may still get fucked over, that possibility is *always* there. But over time you and your children will succeed because you will do what it takes to succeed and not allow temporary setbacks to stop you. And your children will see that and follow that example and they will be even better at it.
If this woman worked hard, and succeeded, then she increased the chances that both her descendants, women or men, light or dark skinned, will also see that success and follow in her footsteps. But she and people like her, need to stand up for that culture of success and not allow themselves to become rare, and exceptional stories for Black History Month or some feelgood article about their horrid past dealing with segregation.
I'm pretty sure that Blizz knows that the party has to end soon, I doubt this is any particular strategy to keep subscribers.
And I do truly believe that they are just that big of a bunch of assholes that they'd do this to simply make a point.
Of course, the private servers may well cause a problem for their relaunch of "Classic World of Warcraft: New Game+" or some other strategy that I am not familiar with.
Which really wouldn't make too much sense. Most of the subscribers of WoW have been there for years. They already played vanilla in many cases. There may be new people who just wanted to experience WoW as it used to be, but if they have the client, they bought the game or got the client somewhere. And they will probably want to move on to new content when they are done with vanilla. There's only so many Molten Core runs you can make, after all.
I'd think this would attract (a) people who did have a subscription in the past but wanted to play vanilla again, (b) people who never played WoW and wanted in for free or (c) someone who is just friends with (a) or (b) and wouldn't be playing WoW by themselves.
In the case of (a), Blizzard already has their money, they really haven't lost anything except perhaps a few more bucks stringing along a junkie who longs for the days of the Barrens chat and the Scarlet Monastery.
For (b), these are people who might actually sign up for a WoW subscription as soon as they play Vanilla and are done with it and want more content. Now, I haven't played in years, but is my assumption Outland and Northrend are probably a ghost town right now. Nevertheless, I can't believe these reverse engineered servers would actually have such a high pop that it would be much different in terms of play. And they would eventually hit Level 95,000,000 or whatever the level cap is now.
And for (c), they were never getting their money without their friend anyway so what's the deal?
It seems odd for them to consider this an actual threat to their subscriber base. It may well be that they are telling the truth and they're doing this simply because it is theirs and they are just that big of a set of dicks.
Yeah, that's true. In the 18th Century, they didn't have cars, iPhones, or nuclear weapons. I feel better already.
If you walked up to someone in the US, and instead said that "all intensive purposes" phrase in a sentence, no one is going to correct you or have trouble understanding the meaning behind it.
True, but that's mostly because I don't relish the opportunity to tell someone to their face, that they are spewing gibberish , unless they're fully indecipherable and I can't avoid it.
Now we just have to wait 30 more years for millennials to get into positions where they can do something about it.
At which time they will act like people who are 30 years older than they are now.
Young people like to get behind causes to save the world, but burn out after a few decades of reality. News at 11.
It's a little different in the US, although perhaps not too much.
Either way, now these guys are going from poorly paid to "not paid". There's more of a safety net in Europe, but I don't think more people who have been made structurally unemployed is going to be good for Europe.
Not that this is a reason to halt progress on this front, but I hope someone has thought about this....
The SA was never a national police force or even a governmental body. The SA was only ever the paramilitary branch of the Nazi party. Full stop. Powerful, yes. Numerous, yes. Violent, most definitely. Police? No. They were brawlers, thugs, and bodyguards. They engaged in illegal intimidation and street fights with equally violent German Communists. They executed progroms on Jews. In short, they were a uniformed gang. They were... the original Skinheads, only with less anarchy and more uniforms. And probably more hair.
Indeed, when Ernst Rohm (chief of the SA) started making noises about having the SA become the basis of the German Army is when Hitler was pressured by the powerful professional military to put Rohm down and drastically curtail the SA's influence. This was the "Night of the Long Knives" for those who care to look it up.
Now, the SS became something like a national police force after Goering turned over his control of the Prussian State Police to Himmler and the Kriminalpolizei was unified under him as Chief of the German Police and they were all given SS ranks, Or perhaps it is more realistic to say that the Police became a little more like the SS, since they simply kept on the existing cops on for the most part.
But to call the FBI an analogue to the SS is like saying that the RCMP is also like the SS. They might be national and uniformed, but it is their mode of operation which distinguishes them from other police forces, not the fact that they happened to be a national police force. The FBI isn't running concentration camps or acting as a political police force. It's like saying that anyone with a remotely authoritarian streak is automatically Hitler. There's a reason there's only been one Hitler and he's pretty much the modern equivalent of Satan. You would need to do a lot to best (or worst) his actual deeds.
I actually agree with you 100% and think that self-driving trucks and autos will make the roads safer, even if they don't make accidents impossible.
When I see this, however, I do wonder what they are thinking about the truck drivers that they are eagerly working at putting out of work. CDL driving isn't a job that I want to do myself, but it is relatively well paying and supports a number of working people who are not exactly STEM material. I hope someone has some idea on that front, or you'll find that you're working on creating even more Donald Trump-type voters.
For some value of "user-friendliness", I guess.
I've been using Linux since the late 90's and in no way have I found a Linux desktop to be user-friendly in the manner in which I believe that is actually being discussed.
Yes, it can be relatively user friendly to people who have specific needs that don't require much exploration aside from the immediate browsing or mail or word processing features. That's why everyone seems to have the anecdote that they got it working for their 99 year old great-grandmother.
Realistically, though, the desktop and UX as a whole has always been a bastard child subordinated to other interests and even outright turf wars. It seems to be able to get to the point where it is skin-deep usable, and then the usability curve suddenly drops off like a cliff if you are not a power user and want to do something slightly odd.
And someone is always fucking with it. Gnome 2 not good enough for you? Well, let's just fuck it up with Gnome 3. Let's all hate on Unity, now. Et cetera.
Don't get me wrong, not a Metro fan, but as much as the 8.1 Start menu and all of that is kind of annoying, once I got used to it, it was basically Windows 7 only better or worse in a few small ways. It's still basically Windows.
That's why for as long as I remember, my Linux development environment has been a VM running on Windows, which is what I actually use when I want a Desktop. My current VM is actually an Ubuntu 15.10 with Gnome 3. I kind of like it for some specific things. I know, however, that as soon as I want to get the least bit clever with it, I'm going to be opening a Terminal session to try to get it to do what I want. And I have the skills and experience to do it, but after going-on 20 years of this crap, I can't be arsed to do so anymore.
I just don't understand why someone can't just take what is, by all accounts, a superior kernel, on top of superior userland, and not take the lessons of Windows and MacOS and actually make a superior desktop UX out of it. Sadly, I suspect that there may be some things that a dictator is going to get done a lot more easily than a community, and user experience is one of them.
Hey! He was totally going to do it, but the Republican's made him keep it open. Or something.
As if they could prevent him from taking an executive action on detainees on a military base on foreign soil who are there quite simply because they were captured by the US military of which he is Commander-in-Chief of and they aren't US citizens and have few well defined rights under US law or the Geneva Conventions.
It's not as if he would ever threaten to use executive action to do anything that Congress didn't like. Right?
Here's the thing. Profiling and other methods that we decry the use of would probably go a long way towards cutting down on crime, including terrorism. The real problem is not that they are ineffective, but that they either harm or otherwise inconvenience completely innocent people because they would err on the side of assuming that your membership in a particular group (voluntary or involuntary) makes you inherently worth investigating. Much of what you are joking about in terms of AI and insta-justice is fictional, but the mindset behind it is not.
More realistically, if you really did forbid the entrance of Muslims and deport all of the existing Muslims in the country, you'd definitely make some dent in home grown terrorism, and you'd also drive the remaining ones underground, where communication is more difficult to coordinate except between more dedicated groups which law enforcement is better equipped to handle. There would be no more people who are radicalized by that radical preacher who was brought into your local mosque to teach publicly. The Internet would still be a problem, but you're going to be less likely to be swayed by a radical Muslim terrorist social media presence if you are not actually a believing Muslim to begin with.
Of course, you'd displace ten thousand or more innocent people for every single Muslim-type terrorist you managed to rid the country of and create an absolute human rights shitstorm. That's why it generally wouldn't work in a country that pretends to care about human rights and justice. But, nobody should confused into thinking it would be ineffective, and for that reason we should understand that being safer isn't necessarily our first priority.
We *are* safer when everyone thinks the same and looks the same. And that's why safety cannot be the point.
The government, at any time, has a huge treasure trove of secrets and information at its disposal. That's bothersome, but the reality is that half the time, they can't even coordinate with each other enough to make any use out of it at all, good or bad. What tends to matter is who in the government has the data and how it can affect you.
Having huge amounts of information on file with the government is absolutely guaranteed if we maintain our trajectory of having the government have to take care of everything for us. We can outlaw all the small airplanes all we want, and we'll still have a huge amount of information on us in government databases just due to the services we're required to use.
Just consider this, aside from any issue with the ACA you might have on principle, *everyone* is now required to file with the government whether they have a health care plan that meets certain requirements or pay a penalty. I don't recall that in the past the government was actually aware of what insurance I used, particularly since I have not had to make use of Medicare or any government program. Now, that information is in a database at the IRS. I'm honestly less concerned with some airplane than I am with the ACA requirement because the plane will probably never take note of a single thing I do, and even then the use of that data in court is sketchy, but the ACA ensures that I must provide limited, but detailed information to be stored legally in a database, which will certainly be used to enforce a law on me.
If the people are being overhead from the other end of the block because someone has unobtrusively trained a shotgun microphone on them, that's exceeding reasonable expectations because people who go around with live shotgun mikes are not the norm and because individuals are being spied on. That's about the same degree as aerial surveillance with an unmuted plane.
Perhaps, but I think it is entirely legal to do so. The question is what the data is being put to use for and whether they should be collecting it.
In this sense, I think it is entirely legal to do what they are doing. To me that means that there needs to be a law that controls that more closely. And I'd prefer a law. I tire of having the judiciary actually doing the legislation in the country. Whether or not it is the right thing to do, I think this country needs to re-engage in actually following the legislative process rather than waiting for someone to hire a lawyer to fix things in the courts so that we don't actually have to elect people who will take this shit seriously.
The FBI really is the new SA/SS
Proving only that you have no idea what the SA or the SS actually were.
Depends on what you consider a "script", I suppose. You can write pretty complicated stuff in things that are called "scripting languages" like perl and there is some (broken) OO in perl5. Ruby is basically a scripting language and OO is pretty much built-in so that everything is an object.
Now, if you mean a minimalist scripting language like bash, then yeah, probably little need for OO since constructing a whole object to merely send myself an listing of my mail queue at 2am every night via cron is probably overkill.
Of course, I have worked for some companies that fell absolutely in love with absurdly long shell scripts, so perhaps it enables those sorts of goofballs who really want to cling to the 1970s.
There are practical advantages to owning a home. But, yes, the government can take it away from you if you don't pay on it.
On the other hand, there was never a time that a government or stronger person couldn't take away from you what you "owned" so you're pretty much no worse off than before, and considerably better in most respects.
Yes, tax is sort of like "rent" but it is truly its own thing. A property tax could theoretically be repealed and then your ownership would remain intact and you wouldn't owe anyone for your paid off property. It's just that no one is going to actually repeal property tax because it is a fairly equitable (and convenient) way of taxing people.
Yes, they've changed their mission statement from,
"Don't be evil" to "See no evil, hear no evil."
Many companies can zombie along for fairly long periods because they had considerable amount of startup hype and the investment money that goes with it.
It is also possible that they do have a reasonably decent revenue stream from current operations which may not put them in the black, but gives them a considerable amount of remaining runway before they would have to close down, or more likely, be bought out.
I am not a fan of Twitter, but it seems to have invaded the consciousness of news sites and such as a PR vehicle for companies and celebrities. That alone does give it a certain inherent value, even if that value is a lot less than what you might be able to build a successful independent company around.
You're totally right. However, I will point out, the dictionary does change based on current usage, it does not represent usage from the past.
We're constantly promoting slang and different usages to accepted dictionary forms.
Also, dictionary writers are no less capable of acting out of their own opinions about language than anyone else, although they tend to wait for some evidence of adoption before simply ratifying the change.
Sometimes it is useful to look at the dated etymologies of the words in the unabridged versions to see when they came into vogue. Obviously, in the 1890's we all know that the word "gay" was in common use and was primarily defined by being merry. In the 1930's it was used in a more general sense of being sexually promiscuous (a reason that it became associated with homosexuality given the beliefs of those times). Now, those usages are considered to be less primary than it simply being used as a synonym of "homosexual".
Words change meanings based on politics so it is wrong to simply point at a dictionary. However, it is important to remember that sometimes those meanings have changed to suit a particular political or social design.
From the Dictionary.com definition of gender, where they take pains to explain the currently popular definition of gender as being cultural or behavioral they show the following root:
1300-50; Middle English gendren, genderen Middle French gendrer Latin generre to beget, derivative of genus gender1, genus
Begetting does not imply someone who is culturally "gendered" differently than their anatomy. There is little begetting going on in the case of active transsexuals today (without external assistance) and there was certainly a lot less in the past (putting aside those who fulfilled their anatomical roles with distaste or out of obligation).
In short, we've changed the definition, and we're quite literally in semantics now. You can argue that the change is useful and more descriptive, and it does certainly provide a language to describe current thoughts in regard to separated "gender" from anatomy, but someone who wants to make the basic argument that this was just developed recently, and that the word has been re-defined, has a point.
What is wrong with this discussion is that we're trying to define a word meaning as a gold standard of what is correct about the theories behind the new usage. It is an appeal to authority and in both cases, is entirely missing the point.
At least some of the delegates feel bound to vote for who their populations voted for, which is the candidate who sent them there. A brokered convention is certainly a distinct possibility, but I don't know how far they can go and retain credibility. Generally, despite the possibility of back door stuff, most political types know that they need to at least give lip service to their constituencies. I doubt that many of them are relishing the opportunity to vote against Trump on a later ballot.
As I said, they would need everyone else in agreement to not nominate Trump. I've pointed out in the past that the votes are there to keep Trump out, but I really think they needed to move before the convention to prevent complete havoc. Now it's going to be WWIII to keep Trump from being the nominee.