baconner

>Also, in the realm of morality, everything atheism purports to be true is completely optional.

Well, no. Atheism does not purport anything to be true at all.

It's a lack of belief in one thing. I don't understand why that's so difficult for religious people to understand. Atheism is not a replacement for religion. There is no atheist rulebook, no set of beliefs, nothing.

Atheists can of course have morals but they don't derive from atheism and are not hindered by it either. They're unrelated.

*Edit, expanding...

Your argument presupposes that the only place morals can be derived from is religion where that the rules exist is the entire argument for why you should follow them. God says so, end of discussion.

There are better ways to derive morals based on day to day reality. There are better reasons not to murder than god says so.

I don't see a lot of audio issues, but tons of problems with screen sharing and video.

My company has about 4000 users in 100+ countries so maybe it's bandwidth/scale in part. i see a lot of stuff like skypefb crashes or doesn't render correctly when you try to screen share, etc especially internationally.

Not 100% certain part of it isn't due to us cheaping out on infrastructure to run it.

Ha you got me there

I must say I've been really disappointed with how often it crashes outright or has major rendering issues during screen sharing. When it works it's really convenient but 20% of meetings with screen share involved seem to have an issue. I really think quality is life or death for these products. If my company weren't a tight Microsoft partner I really doubt we'd be using it.

WebEx wasn't as convenient but at least it worked correctly the vast majority of the time.

Seemed like it was just a mobile join notification in the video similar to Skype for business or WebEx if you are using VoIP. No?

My company used WebEx and I could make it dial me and start up my conference line without having to go through all the regular pin entry stuff. Now we're using Lync (Skype for business) which is similar although tragically buggy. That can also dial me and sends notifications if you hook it up.

The key for these kind of apps is cost and reliability. Seems like they're advertising substantial cost reductions and better quality. If either one is true they'll likely make out really well.

Wrt the bedtime thing cats are territorial and some will get a lot of anxiety about not being able to access their whole territory for patrol, etc. So if you're putting them in a room at night closed off you may be stressing your cat out and that's why she's fleeing. If I put my cat in a room too long the escape attempts and complaining are epic.

It's not for everybody but I kind of find that "pal, you don't _own_ me" look when my cat knows what I'm asking but doesn't feel like it endearing.

Ha my spouse decided to try this once.

Emphisis on _Once_.

So true. My cat really wanted to head outside to check out a bobcat and the Coyotes that were hunting it recently.

Seriously. This kills the cat.

Good point and actually it cuts against my judicial review argument given FISA's reputation (and stats) for approving virtually everything.

Agreed - enforcing the constitution is a tag team effort between the judiciary and the people. I would prefer it if there were required judicial approval for new laws and EOs, but alas that's not our system.

oh, and now this:

https://www.thenation.com/article/leaked-draft-of-trumps-rel...

Pretty sure I have a good grip on what the ACLU stands for and that is mainly equal protection under the law.

If stepping on lgbtq rights becomes convenient for Trump he will do it in a heartbeat, but right now he finds it more useful to demonize Muslims, immigrants, and people of color.

Speaking as a bisexual man myself deciding it's not worth the effort to attack me right now is not the same as being pro LGBTQ rights. Obama is the only president we have to thank for those protections Trump didn't do anything.

This is a pattern with him over and over. Credit taking for things others have _clearly_ done and it's repulsive.

And besides I don't know many LGBTQ people who don't consider an attack on any vulnerable minority an attack on us all. Hell gay immigrants have had loads of experience with cruel treatment by the us government. We're well aware of what it's like to have our families ripped apart with a deportation.

OK fine it's more accurate to say Trump is anti Constitutional limits on his power whatever those limits are. the ACLU is just defending it's interpretation of those limits.

We can parse the syntax more but my main point is simply that the ACLU has consistently stood for equal protection under the law. Trump is the new variable in this situation and brings a wildly anti equal protection view so he crashed into them (and the Constitution imo) not the other way around.

Frankly, I'm not convinced he has even read more than snippets of the bill of rights.

TWISI the org chart of the US Government is basically the constitution a the top & each branch of government below reporting to the constitution.

Unfortunately the Constitution can't call up the president or file lawsuits on it's own so the ACLU takes it upon themselves to make an argument on behalf of the big boss.

So many business people who want to be politicians mistake the presidency for being CEO. The president isn't CEO, more like co-COO and sometimes a swift and loud reminder of that fact is necessary.

I think it would be more accurate to say right now that Trump is anti ACLU and everything it stands for. They're the static object in this equation imo.

They're not anti-Trump the person. They're against anyone who intends to ignore/damage civil liberties and Trump the candidate was pretty explicit about his thoughts there and is following through.

Ok, but that does not change the fact that the bakery in this situation was in fact discriminating. You don't have to refuse all service to be discriminating illegally.

A more sinister version of the same logic is the argument that states weren't discriminating against gay people by not letting them marry someone of the same sex because technically they could go find someone of the opposite sex and be granted a wedding license for a life of misery married to someone who they could literally never be attracted to instead of the person they were attracted to and loved. It's discrimination in either case.

It's sad that less people we're inspired to donate earlier, but IMO the whole "you're just realizing this now?" thing is unproductive.

Every person has a moment when they wake up and decided to step up, usually several. Litigating their decision process after he fact does nothing to help. Just say "thanks and welcome, now let's go wake up some others."

Momentum is important and true or not this kind of stuff serves only as a speedbump.

Wrong is wrong. Silly hypotheticals don't change basic ethics.

It's actually not that expensive to get dual 27 @4k vs. a single very large format (32+) 4k if you hunt around for deals.

I bought a two LG 27UD680-P for 350 USD each last month over a single BenQ BL3201PH 32 which was about 800 USD at the time.

The more people they bring I to the .net community the more opportunities they have to sell tons of azure services. Doesn't hurt them to be more open because existing .net shops are still going to pay for msdn, etc.

There's a bit of a difference between saying in advance that you won't accept the results "Unless I win" and asking for a recount with some evidence of potential irregularities in hand after the election is concluded.

It wasn't wrong of Gore to push for a recount in 2000 within the bounds of the law so long as when that process was complete he conceded, asked his supporters to let it go, and let the country get back to business.

Well let me first re-assert my point that it is not a _contradiction_ to be more concerned about one type of voter fraud than another and one doesn't necessarily need to have definitive proof in the form of a stack of scientific studies to form the opinion that suppression is a bigger issue than individual voter fraud. Still, more data is better and it's a heavily studied topic. So here's my basic logic by which I came to that conclusion plus a few articles & studies.

Individual voter fraud (where an individual votes more than once, or as another person, etc) is pretty rare or at least very rarely convicted. I am confident saying that because there is a lot of political and media incentive to go find those cases yet the number of actual convictions for individuals committing voter fraud every election is very small compared to the voting population. This year I've only see two in the news despite it being a hot topic:

* https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/10/2... * http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/illinois/alton-election-j...

State governments have again and again set up task forces to try and root out this kind of fraud and come up with only a handful of cases. For example in 2008 Wisconsin had a voter id task force investigation looking specifically for voter fraud and came up with a total of 20 individuals. ( https://badgerherald.com/news/2011/02/01/doj-task-force-char... ). The voting population of WI that year was over 2,900,000. So even if WI only caught say 1 of 100 fraudsters that's only 2000 fraudulent votes. It's not _nothing_ and those people should absolutely be prosecuted but quite unlikely to swing the vote. A big effort to get lots of voters to do this would increase the number of co-conspirators and likely increase their chances of being caught. So overall at least what they've found is a very small effect, yet they still came back later and enacted strict Voter ID. Why?

Voter ID, one of the most popular recent forms of law to combat this type of fraud, has a demonstrable effect at depressing voter turnout overall by as much as 2% ( http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/measurin... ) in some cases. There are some conflicting studies as is normal in science but that seems to be the growing consensus and I think it follows basic logic that it does suppress votes the question is just how much and for whom. Added barriers to vote are bound to stop some eligible voters from coming to the polls. Even rain depresses turnout and ID requirements are a bigger barrier IMO.

When I first started to dig in a little more on this topic recently I was startled by the numbers of US Citizens who do not have any kind of government Photo ID and reading more started to sympathize with how difficult it could be to get the ID in the first place if you are impoverished, elderly, or just don't have your birth certificate for whatever reason. For example in Texas during the trial which struck down their recent very strict voter id law the court found that about "608,470 registered Texas voters lack the ID necessary to vote" ( https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/separating-fact-fiction-v... ). And something that should surprise no-one it's correlated highly with poverty which is also correlated highly with being in certain ethnic minorities so the effect is likely to be more pronounced there.

So IMO you take all of that and the back of napkin math says that even if that 2% depressed turnout is highballing it and it's more like .5% we're looking at a theoretical 14,500 less eligible votes in WI in 2008 with an added Voter ID law vs. my inflated estimate for 2000 in person voter fraud (when they found only 20). If our goal is to maximize eligible voter turnout which one is more damaging to the right to vote? Voter ID good intentions or not has a much worse effect. So essentially my assertion is that Voter ID is the medicine which hurts the patient more than helping presuming our goal is to maximize the number of legitimate votes in each election.

All that and we've not even touched on other much more direct voter suppression efforts like this year how with some VRA restrictions out of the way many states dramatically cut back on polling places and early voting both of which have had adverse effects on minority populations https://www.thenation.com/article/there-are-868-fewer-places... . Voters in NC were lined up for four hours to vote in some democratic leaning areas like Charlotte that lost polling places and no doubt some people will give up and walk in that situation. To top it all off there are many examples of Republicans alluding to or directly stating that Voter ID, enhanced Voter Registration checks, reduced polling places, reduced early voting, etc will help their odds of winning ( http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-acknow... ). What a shame, to have powerful players in a major political party that seem to not believe in democracy at all.

ps. The Brennan Center for Justice keeps a running roundup of notable studies on the topic and several delve way more into the suppression of minority votes issue vs suppression of democratic votes. It's a good resource and while they do certainly have a viewpoint on the matter present them in a balanced manner in my opinion.

https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/research-and-publicat...

Well yeah. It's not a contradiction or a change of mind really to be concerned about one form of voter fraud and not another based on its likelihood. Individual voter fraud just doesn't make much sense as a method to swing an election. Way too many chances to get caught. way too many co-conspirators Voter suppression though or electronic machine hacking have a lot more potential. And not coincidentally those individual voter fraud protections can have a bigger effect as voter suppression than the fraud they might prevent.

That is true, but don't forget that those boundaries also come into play wrt polling place count and convenience. And that's been a clear attack vector this year in states like NC.

Sure, but if they were following that logic there'd still be a headphone jack, no?

I think the impact here has been less with individual users getting better about security and more that companies and developers have been spurred to try and do something about it. For example let's encrypt might not exist and that's led to a huge amount of traffic moving to https. Or the rise of more easy to use encrypted messaging apps like ete encryption in WhatsApp.

They may be gunning for AWS, azure, etc publicly but I'd bet the main consumers of this service will be existing Oracle ERP (and other business apps) customers. They're already just fine with paying a fortune and having an iaas backing gives Oracle another way to squeeze a bit more out. We already run your erp in Oracle's iaas, you should bring your other applications up as well, and so on.

Evil empire comments aside more cloud infrastructure competition is good for us all.

I think tufte understands that people make junk charts on purpose. I think he just doesn't agree that it's a good chart if the purpose isn't to actually inform truthfully . If your data is crap and you know it then basically you are misleading people on purpose. At that point it doesn't really matter if you have a lot of chartjunk as well.

As much as I like Few's books and have relied on them heavily in my time building SSBI tools he has a tendency to take something I basically agree with and blow it way out of proportion into an all-or-nothing type declaration. Seems he's true to form today again with a basically correct point that many SSBI tool vendors over-promise and mislead with their marketing and turned it into "self service bi is a lie" which it absolutely is not.

Self Service BI tools are not intended to take the place of analytic skill any more than they take the place of domain expertise and that has never been the meaning of the term. The promise of SSBI is to reduce the incredible friction domain experts traditionally had to deal with to get their key business questions answered. Yes, your users need to develop other analytic skills to go along with their domain expertise! Turns out most of us have stronger and weaker points and have to learn and evolve our skills to get our jobs done well. Taking on SSBI means exactly that for your users who most likely have at least one of the key skills (domain expertise) already and maybe more.

Using an exploratory type ssbi tool is a conversation with your data via an interactive tool. One question leads to another leads to another and if the alternative is having to stop and ask another department to put each follow up question on their backlog the conversation is basically broken and often business users just stop asking and revert to pure gut feel decision making. I think most of the progress made over the past 20 years in BI has been about making this kind of process more agile in the same sense as iterative development. SSBI is part of that. The inversion of analytic process in big data systems is part of that as well. ML can also play a role in that with the right circumstances.

What we can do, as BI vendors, is build tools and documentation that guide users who start with only part of the skills they need into learning the rest while using the tools we provide. We can present defaults that guide the user towards visualizations and views that are easier to interpret. We can embed analytic skill building into our applications in tutorials and hints. We can build metadata up as users inform us about the data as they use it rather than requiring them to do it up front in a big-bang DW modeling session. We can inspect the data with simple heuristics to try and hint the user how to use it with the tool or apply better defaults. We can build better cleansing munging and data consolidation tools. We can build tools to let data analyst teams also turn things around more quickly. And yes, perhaps we can try using machine learning to suggest possible avenues for the user to explore which _of course_ must be interpreted by a user with the right skills because ML is going to be wrong a lot of the time and users need to understand false positives. It's all part of the process.

Bailing out on SSBI because of marketers being marketers just isn't pragmatic. Better that we just keep evolving our products from both the data science team end and the business user ssbi end.