Snowden actually revealed nothing publicly. All those documents were entrusted to journalists. It's the WaPo, the Guardian, the NYT and so forth that decide which ones to publish and when, not him.
"A failing road car stops on the road. Not always ideal, but generally a controllable event"
Far from ideal, quite often fatal. A failing car on a crowded interstate can result in an accident involving many vehicles with lots of casualties, and this happens shockingly often.
"A failing flying car drops out of the sky."
Unlikely. You have redundant systems, if your main control system fails the backup kicks in, you have 8 engines and still have limited flight abilities even if over half of them fail simultaneously, and even if absolutely everything else fails there is a parachute big enough to bring the entire car down relatively gently.
"Therefore it has to be orders of magnitude more reliable than your typical car."
Things like light-sport and ultralight aviation met a lot of resistance and took years to be accepted, but they work just fine. Yes, they are dangerous but lots of things are dangerous and we cope nonetheless. Driving a car is incredibly dangerous, the roads are overcrowded, and people are dying every day from that already.
But it's a politically safe choice to do nothing about it, because people are used to it. Whereas it's politically risky to allow people to choose another route, even if it's clearly safer, because undoubtedly there will be some accidents either way, and if you made a change that allowed a new type of accident you would be in the news and people would blame you, while you are unlikely to be blamed for all the accidents you could have prevented but did not if you simply preserve the status quo.
1. Flying cars exist, and have for decades. Look up Moller. They have a really good product already engineered, they just need to pay off the FAA before they can start selling. So I would back their project rather than this one.
2. Adding a third dimension actually expands the driving space dramatically, alleviating congestion and making collisions less likely since there is so much more space to use. Certainly there would be safety issues but there is no reason to think they would be more severe than the issues with groundbound automobiles. Are you in favor of banning them too?
"Road side illumination should be generally restricted to built up areas"
Very true.
But the article is set in Holland. There is absolutely nowhere in Holland that is not a built up area, and it's been that way for centuries, possibly millenia. So it makes sense they have a lot of street lights. They have relatively little crime and if glowing markings on the road can be made to work reliably in that climate (which I suspect may take some time) it might actually make things safer. Street lights can blind but a soft red glow off the road would not.
I wasnt there and and I dont believe you were either. Standard sources seem to disagree with you a bit. The Tatars were more widespread before the Communist terror, but Crimea was still significantly ethnically Russian long before that.
And I have no need to apologize for Putin. He's a brutal criminal. But he's a brutal criminal that at least seems to have a good idea of his own nations interests and pursues that and for the most part avoids working directly counter to it. It would be nice if our own 'leaders' could do that as well.
I far prefer an online shop. The difference between 'it's on the shelf there' and 'we can order it quickly enough to deliver it to you on time' is not something I care about. Wide selection is. Supposedly I am their target demographic.
Unfortunately Amazon as a company is pure evil, and every penny given to them is potentially a penny in the fund for lawyers to subvert our system. I never gave them a penny and, barring rather unlikely and shocking events, I never will be.
I believe if you can find a copy of 'the Illuminati Papers' that would be the most prominent point. IIRC he actually made the assertion repeatedly, in several books, but always referring back to that.
That's what you get when you let the government get involved.
We should have never created NASA to start with, we'd be at least 50 years ahead with a real (commercial) moonbase by now if we'd just let idiot millionaires shoot for the moon in peace.
""Having established its presence in the Crimean Peninsula"
Like this was recent.
Crimea has been Russian since 1783.
For my fellow Murricans, that was 7 years after our Declaration of Independence, 4 years before our Constitutional Convention, and 17 years before we moved the Federal Capital from Philadelphia to Washington.
While I have seen a bit of press on the systemd issue, I do not feel like I understand it well enough to comment without an 'I may not have a clue here' caveat.
But yeah, if you are replacing a simple robust and proven system with a complex new system, you damn well better have a MUCH better case than 'it boots faster' or your reception is going to be my boot up your arse.
Boots faster? How often do you boot? FFS.
You could reduce my boot time to nothing and if you introduce a minor regression in the process it's not worth it.
I believe ALL the BSDs still use BSD init, though I dont keep up with them and could be mistaken. Slackware stuck to BSD init when other distros went to SysV, although Patrick wound up as I mentioned modifying it a little for compatibility with upstreams that ASSume SysV.
"That is why I use a window manager as GUI (fvwm2 in my case), not something that thinks it is an essential part of the OS and has any business doing a lot of things that have no place in a GUI."
I quit using GNOME when it quit being willing to work with my choice of window manager (and they broke a few other things at the same time.)
"Same, incidentally, with systemd: Its job (should it ever be able to do it properly) is to start services that configure themselves in whatever way they see fit. Instead it takes over everything it can get its hands on and tries to be some kind of "meta-kernel"."
I dont pretend to be conversant with all the relevant issues but that is my impression of systemd too. An overly large and complicated replacement for a simple system that has always worked perfectly in my experience.
Well, actually, a replacement for a replacement for the system I am perfectly happy with. I never adopted SysV init either (except via the futzing that Patrick did to accommodate packages that think they require it.)
It's not change=good versus change=bad. Everyone is ok with change. The question is what type of changes and why?
Gnome has a history of changing for the worst, and for the worst reasons.
Not just Gnome, they are a leading case but the affliction they suffer from appears to be very widespread in the computing industry. We have a glut of 'designer' prima donnas that all want to 'change' and 'innovate' for no reason other than so they can feel trendy, and this is a predictable result.
Change comes in so many different forms. "I changed this line to fix this bug" is one kind of change. "I changed the master control loop slightly to add a hook for new functions I wrote" is another. "I broke everything completely so we can all have a lot of fun rewriting everything from scratch, and let's make it totally different just to be fresh!" Is a third.
It's not that there is something inherently evil about the third type of change, even. No, it's perfectly acceptable, fine, good, laudable - in the right situation.
But gnome has earned a reputation for excessive and inappropriate changes.
The basic mental malfunction that leads from Gnome3 from Gnome2 is the same as the one that lead from Gnome1 to 2. I guess not as many people used unix key-bindings and window manager choice as some of the things they have broken more recently, but I did and the project has been dead to me ever since they made it clear they broke those things on purpose and would stick by that decision.
"should her life be ruined over the fact that she made some mistakes while in government?"
A question that could be asked of any war-criminal.
Most of her colleagues have received promotions and honors for their failures, so I can see how this might seem unfair from her point of view.
But let's quit thinking about fair for her for just a moment and think about fair to her victims. US soldiers and foreign civilians, dead, maimed brutalized, thousands and thousands of them. Think about it from their point of view for a moment instead of hers. Think about it from the point of view of the relatives of her victims.
And then think about DB customers. Paying customers, mind you, not eyeballs at facebook or google but real live paying customers. They deserve a little respect too. Not a huge amount, perhaps, but at bare minimum keeping the likes of Condy Rice outside the walls is called for. Hiring her, and saying they were proud of it?
No one with two working brain cells could possibly trust them after that. DB is dead.
Eich is a rather different situation. Eich's 'crime' was political speech protected by the first amendment - not a crime at all, however wrong-headed, and with no connection to his work. Condy's situation is different on every count.
"They are showing that according to the type of random fluctations that happen on a short timescale, the warming apparently observed recently is not consistent with being simply random short term fluctuations."
Excellent. A much more sophisticated attempt than the summary would lead one to believe, you must have read TFA.
But tell me this, how do you know the last 500 years is an accurate proxy for the last 500m years? Oh, you dont. In fact if you would go ask a paleoclimatologist dont be surprised if he actually laughs at the suggestion immediately. Every reconstruction I have seen indicated that the last 10k years have been an unusually placid and temperate time and Earths climate has often been much more chaotic in the past.
The linked article is great. Too bad you dont understand it.
It explicitly debunks the thesis that "A large population size must require a larger sample size." Great. Not an argument I made.
If there was an actual *sample* involved then there are specific tests that can be applied. There does need to be a minimum size but IF the sample is truly random and IF other factors are properly constrained it can be shockingly small. All of which is beside the point here. Because it is not a sample, anymore than lining up a group from shortest to tallest (or sorting them in a database by last name, or street address, or what have you) and picking the 5 at one end is a sample.
As a fan of the franchise all the way back the original, I gotta say, I did not buy 5, and I doubt I will buy this either. The days when I thought it was fun to spend as much time in a debugger fixing deliberate breakage as I actually spent playing it are in the past.
Slashdot Mirror
Eh, Benghazi may not belong in your list actually. Check out Seymour Hersh's recent work re: the 'rat line'
Snowden actually revealed nothing publicly. All those documents were entrusted to journalists. It's the WaPo, the Guardian, the NYT and so forth that decide which ones to publish and when, not him.
"A failing road car stops on the road. Not always ideal, but generally a controllable event"
Far from ideal, quite often fatal. A failing car on a crowded interstate can result in an accident involving many vehicles with lots of casualties, and this happens shockingly often.
"A failing flying car drops out of the sky."
Unlikely. You have redundant systems, if your main control system fails the backup kicks in, you have 8 engines and still have limited flight abilities even if over half of them fail simultaneously, and even if absolutely everything else fails there is a parachute big enough to bring the entire car down relatively gently.
"Therefore it has to be orders of magnitude more reliable than your typical car."
Yes, that part is correct.
Yeah, because Sealand is such a huge market.
Things like light-sport and ultralight aviation met a lot of resistance and took years to be accepted, but they work just fine. Yes, they are dangerous but lots of things are dangerous and we cope nonetheless. Driving a car is incredibly dangerous, the roads are overcrowded, and people are dying every day from that already.
But it's a politically safe choice to do nothing about it, because people are used to it. Whereas it's politically risky to allow people to choose another route, even if it's clearly safer, because undoubtedly there will be some accidents either way, and if you made a change that allowed a new type of accident you would be in the news and people would blame you, while you are unlikely to be blamed for all the accidents you could have prevented but did not if you simply preserve the status quo.
1. Flying cars exist, and have for decades. Look up Moller. They have a really good product already engineered, they just need to pay off the FAA before they can start selling. So I would back their project rather than this one.
2. Adding a third dimension actually expands the driving space dramatically, alleviating congestion and making collisions less likely since there is so much more space to use. Certainly there would be safety issues but there is no reason to think they would be more severe than the issues with groundbound automobiles. Are you in favor of banning them too?
I agree, it's a lunar eclipse, why cant they just call it what it is?
And it's not like they just made up a cutesy name that wasnt in use - a blood moon is an actual thing, but it's still many months in the future.
Marketing and advertising will never be satisfied until they destroy the language so completely that it can no longer be used to communicate at all.
"Road side illumination should be generally restricted to built up areas"
Very true.
But the article is set in Holland. There is absolutely nowhere in Holland that is not a built up area, and it's been that way for centuries, possibly millenia. So it makes sense they have a lot of street lights. They have relatively little crime and if glowing markings on the road can be made to work reliably in that climate (which I suspect may take some time) it might actually make things safer. Street lights can blind but a soft red glow off the road would not.
I wasnt there and and I dont believe you were either. Standard sources seem to disagree with you a bit. The Tatars were more widespread before the Communist terror, but Crimea was still significantly ethnically Russian long before that.
And I have no need to apologize for Putin. He's a brutal criminal. But he's a brutal criminal that at least seems to have a good idea of his own nations interests and pursues that and for the most part avoids working directly counter to it. It would be nice if our own 'leaders' could do that as well.
We do not 'hate minorities and want them to starve.' FFS many of us are 'minorities' ourselves.
We simply want to be able to give nice people who are not currently skilled enough to justify $15/hr a chance.
Why do you want them on welfare instead?
I far prefer an online shop. The difference between 'it's on the shelf there' and 'we can order it quickly enough to deliver it to you on time' is not something I care about. Wide selection is. Supposedly I am their target demographic.
Unfortunately Amazon as a company is pure evil, and every penny given to them is potentially a penny in the fund for lawyers to subvert our system. I never gave them a penny and, barring rather unlikely and shocking events, I never will be.
I believe if you can find a copy of 'the Illuminati Papers' that would be the most prominent point. IIRC he actually made the assertion repeatedly, in several books, but always referring back to that.
That's what you get when you let the government get involved.
We should have never created NASA to start with, we'd be at least 50 years ahead with a real (commercial) moonbase by now if we'd just let idiot millionaires shoot for the moon in peace.
""Having established its presence in the Crimean Peninsula"
Like this was recent.
Crimea has been Russian since 1783.
For my fellow Murricans, that was 7 years after our Declaration of Independence, 4 years before our Constitutional Convention, and 17 years before we moved the Federal Capital from Philadelphia to Washington.
Just so you know.
While I have seen a bit of press on the systemd issue, I do not feel like I understand it well enough to comment without an 'I may not have a clue here' caveat.
But yeah, if you are replacing a simple robust and proven system with a complex new system, you damn well better have a MUCH better case than 'it boots faster' or your reception is going to be my boot up your arse.
Boots faster? How often do you boot? FFS.
You could reduce my boot time to nothing and if you introduce a minor regression in the process it's not worth it.
Robert Anton Wilson summed it up nicely many years ago: "National security is the number one cause of national insecurity."
"There are people not on SysV init? "
I believe ALL the BSDs still use BSD init, though I dont keep up with them and could be mistaken. Slackware stuck to BSD init when other distros went to SysV, although Patrick wound up as I mentioned modifying it a little for compatibility with upstreams that ASSume SysV.
"That is why I use a window manager as GUI (fvwm2 in my case), not something that thinks it is an essential part of the OS and has any business doing a lot of things that have no place in a GUI."
I quit using GNOME when it quit being willing to work with my choice of window manager (and they broke a few other things at the same time.)
"Same, incidentally, with systemd: Its job (should it ever be able to do it properly) is to start services that configure themselves in whatever way they see fit. Instead it takes over everything it can get its hands on and tries to be some kind of "meta-kernel"."
I dont pretend to be conversant with all the relevant issues but that is my impression of systemd too. An overly large and complicated replacement for a simple system that has always worked perfectly in my experience.
Well, actually, a replacement for a replacement for the system I am perfectly happy with. I never adopted SysV init either (except via the futzing that Patrick did to accommodate packages that think they require it.)
Well that and GNOME relies on GTK, which was the GIMP ToolKit at one point in time.
Yeah that's just not accurate.
It's not change=good versus change=bad. Everyone is ok with change. The question is what type of changes and why?
Gnome has a history of changing for the worst, and for the worst reasons.
Not just Gnome, they are a leading case but the affliction they suffer from appears to be very widespread in the computing industry. We have a glut of 'designer' prima donnas that all want to 'change' and 'innovate' for no reason other than so they can feel trendy, and this is a predictable result.
Change comes in so many different forms. "I changed this line to fix this bug" is one kind of change. "I changed the master control loop slightly to add a hook for new functions I wrote" is another. "I broke everything completely so we can all have a lot of fun rewriting everything from scratch, and let's make it totally different just to be fresh!" Is a third.
It's not that there is something inherently evil about the third type of change, even. No, it's perfectly acceptable, fine, good, laudable - in the right situation.
But gnome has earned a reputation for excessive and inappropriate changes.
The basic mental malfunction that leads from Gnome3 from Gnome2 is the same as the one that lead from Gnome1 to 2. I guess not as many people used unix key-bindings and window manager choice as some of the things they have broken more recently, but I did and the project has been dead to me ever since they made it clear they broke those things on purpose and would stick by that decision.
"should her life be ruined over the fact that she made some mistakes while in government?"
A question that could be asked of any war-criminal.
Most of her colleagues have received promotions and honors for their failures, so I can see how this might seem unfair from her point of view.
But let's quit thinking about fair for her for just a moment and think about fair to her victims. US soldiers and foreign civilians, dead, maimed brutalized, thousands and thousands of them. Think about it from their point of view for a moment instead of hers. Think about it from the point of view of the relatives of her victims.
And then think about DB customers. Paying customers, mind you, not eyeballs at facebook or google but real live paying customers. They deserve a little respect too. Not a huge amount, perhaps, but at bare minimum keeping the likes of Condy Rice outside the walls is called for. Hiring her, and saying they were proud of it?
No one with two working brain cells could possibly trust them after that. DB is dead.
Eich is a rather different situation. Eich's 'crime' was political speech protected by the first amendment - not a crime at all, however wrong-headed, and with no connection to his work. Condy's situation is different on every count.
"Don't even pretend: his crime wasn't that he "invaded his neighboring country", but that he did so on his own accord, disobeying the US."
Actually he did not make a move until he got the green light from the US. Not that this saved him, obviously.
"They are showing that according to the type of random fluctations that happen on a short timescale, the warming apparently observed recently is not consistent with being simply random short term fluctuations."
Excellent. A much more sophisticated attempt than the summary would lead one to believe, you must have read TFA.
But tell me this, how do you know the last 500 years is an accurate proxy for the last 500m years? Oh, you dont. In fact if you would go ask a paleoclimatologist dont be surprised if he actually laughs at the suggestion immediately. Every reconstruction I have seen indicated that the last 10k years have been an unusually placid and temperate time and Earths climate has often been much more chaotic in the past.
"Oops."
Indeed, your oops.
The linked article is great. Too bad you dont understand it.
It explicitly debunks the thesis that "A large population size must require a larger sample size." Great. Not an argument I made.
If there was an actual *sample* involved then there are specific tests that can be applied. There does need to be a minimum size but IF the sample is truly random and IF other factors are properly constrained it can be shockingly small. All of which is beside the point here. Because it is not a sample, anymore than lining up a group from shortest to tallest (or sorting them in a database by last name, or street address, or what have you) and picking the 5 at one end is a sample.
As a fan of the franchise all the way back the original, I gotta say, I did not buy 5, and I doubt I will buy this either. The days when I thought it was fun to spend as much time in a debugger fixing deliberate breakage as I actually spent playing it are in the past.