Lagged2Death

Some of my family members are outspoken racists who were planning to vote for Trump. Some recent family gatherings have been explosive and memorable.

What point were you attempting to communicate here?

At other times, in other situations, I have been sympathetic to this line of reasoning, but I don't think it applies here.

Let me quote something I wish I had written myself:

When you're offered a chance to get something you want by throwing minorities to the wolves, and you take it because hey, no skin off my nose, that's racism. That's evil. It's low-key evil distinct from actively advocating slavery or painting swastikas on walls, but it's more than mere "apathy" to racial issues.

To actively vote for a racist candidate with a racist platform is simply a racist act, regardless of the voter's reasons or intentions. That is, as far as I can see, merely factual.

"Labeling" is ironically and conveniently a label itself. Sometimes "labeling" is a real concern. This isn't one of those times.

He straight bragged about participating in such schemes from the other side.

You're right. I was thinking of resonances. Even in that case, I might be wrong.

The press I saw served mainly as a gigantic megaphone used to amplify a river of Trump bullshit 24/7. They did not call him out as a liar, not remotely to the degree that would have been appropriate.

Trump controls something like ~500 businesses; what conflicts of interest might arise from him assuming the title of President? Why haven't I seen any news about that?

But I know all about Clinton's personal email server. Which apparently resulted in no real breaches of security. Why do I know so much about that?

We diagnose them as racists in the way Dark Age clerics confused medical problems with demonic possession ... That’s the fantasy, the idea that if we mock them enough, call them racist enough, they’ll eventually shut up and get in line.

It's mockery to point out racism and sexism, now? What?

The data after the fact does indeed support the "they're just fucking racists" interpretation. Now more than ever.

The fact that they don't believe they are racists or that they don't understand that they are racists doesn't mean the "racist" diagnosis is wrong. The fact that calling someone a racist isn't nice doesn't mean racism should be tolerated or covered up.

If you want journalists to approach Trump supporters with empathy, fine: go ahead and approach the racists with empathy. If "empathy" means "covering up racism with nicer words" then that's bullshit, that's not journalism anymore.

Click on the gem and the web page will play a "chirp," which is loud and beepy and not ultrasonic or secret at all. It's an analog modem type system, except probably way slower than 300 or even 110 baud. Everything old is new again, I guess.

In any case, the point is: the Chirp system is distinct from the supposedly-possible secret systems the Ars story is fretting over.

I've seen several articles worrying about the use and abuse of data transmission via secret ultrasound, but I've never seen any claims that named names or that offered a way for readers to verify or check anything.

I don't think you can count on the average laptop/phone speakers, mics, and digital audio systems to deal with ultrasound.

If a computer's audio drivers and audio hardware are set up to play back at standard CD/DVD sample rates (44KHz or 48KHz), then ultrasonics are not happening there, period. The same principle applies to inputs.

Even if all the hardware and software on two devices is capable of and configured for producing/receiving ultrasonic frequencies, it seems pretty likely that loud ultrasonic screeches played on a 50-cent cell-phone speaker would produce audible harmonics, and the jig would be up.

I expect secret ultrasonic data transmission over commodity systems is the sort of thing a well funded state organization might turn to for a targeted operation. Because it might work under exactly the right circumstances, but it would be fiddly and terrible for general use.

I think it's kind of troubling that "the vast variety of information services that comprise the internet" apparently means "Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook" to laymen now.

It may seem "lightweight" in a modern desktop machine, but I believe the way it works is: it keeps the index of your entire filesystem in RAM at all times. And it continuously monitors that filesystem to keep the index updated. It's kind of brute-force, really. I can think of some ways that could get out of hand and not seem so lightweight.

Regardless, the gap between what Everything can do and what the built-in File Explorer search can do is an embarrassing canyon, and I can't believe MS hasn't even fixed the built-in search enough to make it function correctly let alone quickly at this late stage.

Okay, but a big part of the opposition to raising necessary taxes to maintain infrastructure is the notion: "I already pay for that." So pointing out that no, you don't already pay for that, you're being subsidized in this case, becomes really important.

In any case, I'd argue that pushing more of the costs of roads onto the immediate road-users would internalize now-externalized costs, produce better incentives, and ultimately more efficient use of resources of many kinds.

This is exactly how the makers of advanced stationary steam engines operated after the start of the industrial revolution. The engine is "free," the customer pays a fraction of the fuel savings.

What I don't understand is: how come it's not the established players like GE or ConEd who are pursuing these strategies? If someone's going to eat your lunch, why not make sure it's you?

"Mathematical security" can be politically banned, is banned in many parts of the world. You only have the option to use mathematical security because other people have been doing the politics for you.

The version of this story I saw was based on Geekbench scores. Browsing Geekbench results, I noticed that identical CPUs had scores that varied by huge amounts, as much as 2x. That may be a reflection of a real phenomenon, but it's not what I expect from a "CPU benchmark."

Geekbench also claims to model real-world applications, and I wonder what that means for comparing a phone and a laptop. Obviously there aren't so many apps that run the same way on both platforms. I wouldn't have any trouble believing, for example, that the CPU and video display system on a phone were superbly and efficiently integrated, far more so than in a desktop or laptop, and that would show up in an application benchmark. But I'd be surprised if a phone CPU can really get through many threads of branchy code faster than a big high-consumption part with giant caches can.

Anyway, I'm dubious about the Geekbench thing and I wonder if there are other measurements you have in mind.

I want alternative energy to work, but it's sobering to see the scale of the problems involved. It doesn't seem to me that laptop batteries scale up so well. If I were forced to place a bet on the future of grid-scale storage, I'd look for something else.

http://boingboing.net/2016/06/15/intel-x86-processors-ship-w...

I suspect that the paradigm of bootable flash drives simply leaves more variables uncontrolled than write-once disks do.

TP5 loads 100 popular webpages, served from a local webserver.

I don't know if that means the test pages are up-to-date copies of real-world pages or not. On one hand, real-world pages have certainly been getting heavier, and it would bear mentioning if that fact was not reflected in this test. On the other hand the graph becomes really hard to interpret if the test suite isn't a constant.

I am also using Ghostery, however, with virtually everything blocked. It wasn't my intent to block ads, but that's mostly how it works out.

Are you arguing that without the revenue from product placements, Skyfall's budget just couldn't be made to work, and it wouldn't have been a profitable production? That seems really unlikely.

This reads like a parody until it inexplicably turns out not to be.

Columbus and Ann Arbor both have big, important universities smack in the middle of town, and the demographics and culture that go with that. If you were choosing the least-surprising towns outside of the Bay Area and NYC to find software startups in, those would pretty much have to be on your list.

Young, inexperienced but passionate fish sometimes have been known to deny the existence of water. Later they're embarrassed.

The article doesn't make this explicit connection you're making, and it does justify expert recommendations by pointing out that other stores that follow such recommendations (including Wal-Mart itself in times past) reap real benefits.

...ultimately you'd just shift the problem to a different location...

So there's a constant level of crime that can never be changed? That's elitist, maybe racist suburban thinking. It's also very much in opposition to modern crime-prevention philosophy. It's a pretty huge generalization to throw out when you're complaining that other people aren't justifying their claims.

That's not actually true, though. There's evidence that domestication of fire predates humanity as we know it.

Maybe use "vaccines" instead of "fire," but it still seems sort of missing the point to co-mingle life and death matters with Photoshop and Facebook.

In the case of about 95% of the Flash that's been written, we have had a better alternative all along: Not writing Flash. Not animating the self-help menus at your ISP, not auto-playing music at every restaurant website, not cramming a megabyte of crap into the ads coming down your 56kbps modem connection, etc.

I bet Microsoft Office and LibreOffice look virtually identical to most lay-people. They probably will look more alike to you than you remember, if you take the time to look honestly. Neither Office's ribbon or the LibreOffice toolbar is really so different from the toolbars of the 1980s. This is much ado about not much.

If these matters of fashion are really so important in terms of distinguishing one piece of software from another, where does that leave the software development crowd? Did we really want to be fashion designers? Is this the way to change the world with software? Through fashionable icons and good font choices?

There's a tremendous amount of talk in this thread about how LibreOffice looks and how Microsoft Office looks, but precious little about how well they work. What does that say about us?

[Edit: consider the history of the Office GUI:

http://www.thewindowsclub.com/history-evolution-microsoft-of...

There's been an absolute rat's nest of buttons and other controls at the top of the document for 26 years. The graphic design of the 2013 version is currently more fashionable than the graphic design of the 1990 version, but the 1990 version indisputably has less stuff on it. When someone calls the older fashion "cluttered" I think they've merely learned to habitually overlook the greater clutter of the newer interface.]

That's not surprising to me. I'm not a Twitter user and I don't read the biz-interest publications.

Meyer's name (always the obviously-feminine "Melissa," never just "Meyer", just like "Hillary" rather than simply "Clinton") in contrast, was plastered all over the NYT and other mainstream outlets from the start.

It's a subtle way of making the headline function as "lady CEO" without coming out and saying it.