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powertower

4,798 karma · joined November 29, 2010

Working on server software that uses Apache, MySQL, and PHP.
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powertower··on The Tunguska Event
That's actually one of the theories of crop circles...

That they are signs being used to gauge how the time-line has been effected.

http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/anasazi/fringe2015c.html

powertower··on Bayesian Analysis of Racial Bias in Police Shootings in the United States
Does that take into account the type of police officer making the arrest (patrol, traffic, detective, narcotics, transit, desk/administrative, etc) and also the deployment and arrest location?

If the same cops patrol the same demographic and the same high crime areas it would reason that the same cops (and same type of specific category) will be making the majority of the arrests. Which will skew the mentioned statistic to them.

powertower··on Bayesian Analysis of Racial Bias in Police Shootings in the United States
These are not hidden facts. You can find them quite easily with simple queries...

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/African-Americans-cite...

"African Americans in San Francisco are cited for resisting arrest at a rate eight times greater than whites even when serious crimes are not involved, according to statistics drawn from court records."

Here is also a good overall source (but the author has a label on him).

http://www.colorofcrime.com/2016/03/the-color-of-crime-2016-...

powertower··on Bayesian Analysis of Racial Bias in Police Shootings in the United States
Another point is how do you factor out the possibility that blacks are significantly more likely to resist arrest and fight with the police officer in a manner that would justify a shooting such as grabbing at the officers' weapons, beating the cop with his own equipment, etc?

From the last time I checked into it, blacks where on the order of 10 times more likely to resist arrest than whites, and 4 times more likely to kill a cop.

powertower··on Bulgaria Passes a Law Requiring Open Source
> 300k euros for a static website? Let's hope it's over.

That is actually not that bad considering the fact that to sell to the government usually requires going through a lengthy bureaucratic process that involves metric tons of meetings, paperwork, constant back-and-forth, changes and revisions, guarantees, insurance, etc, that costs the seller easily north of 100k+ just to get started.

Meaning the cost is not in the product nor service, it is rather in the process.

powertower··on Claim that jet stream crossing equator is ‘climate emergency’ is utter nonsense
> ...and is in fact an ardent denier who compared those who do believe that climate change is a serious threat 'nazis'.

http://www.drroyspencer.com/2014/02/time-to-push-back-agains...

You're putting a spin on what he believes, and how the nazis thing got started.

powertower··on ‘Scary’ reasons why LinkedIn sold to Microsoft
In what ways are those reasons "scary", and to whom are they scary?

Seems link LinkedIn got a good offer, and did not sell out of fear.

powertower··on Internet Archive is suffering from a DDoS attack
When things don't make sense, often it is because information is missing and/or misdirection is in play.

For example -

This could be a cover for an operation that Internet Archive is not aware of, that is possibly tied to the Internet Archive truck theft (and recovery) that happened a few months back.

The truck's contents (drives, network gear, h/w's firmware, etc) was the way to get a payload into the internal network. And the DDoS attack is now covering whatever is really happening with lots of noise.

This is pure speculation on my part, but is much more reasonable than the pretense that someone would be stupid enough to DDoS the Way Back Machine because a few sites it auto-archived had some links to terrorists. In combination with someone also being stupid enough to steal a flaming truck (https://blog.archive.org/2016/04/20/truck-and-back-again-the...).

powertower··on Tesla offered $325M for Salton Sea startup
> Crimea is not Russia either.

Crimea was part of Russia longer than the US has existed. While its previous host, Ukraine, has only existed as a country for 20-some odd years.

Once the government of Ukraine was overthrown, the people of Crimea had every right to decide to stay or leave. And you will not find a single poll before-or-after not showing an overwhelming support for the latter.

> it was Ukraine snuggling up to the EU that provoked Russia into intervening...

A foreign-lead coup of a twice elected democratic government that put in a puppet regime for the sole purpose of creating problems for Russia is what lead things to the way they went.

Right now, what is happening in the eastern parts of Ukraine is a civil war - resulting from ethnic cleansing, neocon agenda, etc. And what is happening in the west of Ukraine is a total economic collapse from the so called free-trade deals with the EU.

powertower··on Tesla offered $325M for Salton Sea startup
For the curious, this is the patent for the tech - http://www.google.com/patents/US8637428
powertower··on Educate Your Immune System
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jb__daXOQJ0
powertower··on Facebook and Twitter pledge to remove hate speech within 24 hours
You can have any opinion you want as long as it agrees with our's. Everything else is hate speech.
powertower··on How the Supermarket Tabloids Stay Out of Court (1991)
> Trump ... has frequently polluted our highest political discourse with tabloid-level internet conspiracy theories.

If I'm reading your statement correctly...

I've listened to some of Trump's speeches, and also the mainstream media's constant misrepresentation of them.

Would you mind sharing how Trump is polluting our "highest political discourse"?

powertower··on How do food manufacturers calculate the calorie count of packaged foods? (2003)
Also this is interesting... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutter_oil
powertower··on FBI raids dental software researcher who discovered patient data on FTP server
> Remember clock Ahmed the clock kid?

It turned out that his invention was a fully pre-built alarm clock removed from its plastic housing.

Also other details emerged that pretty much sealed the case against him - what he did was create an intentional hoax.

powertower··on Diversity and Inclusion at GitHub
To me every example of diversity basically has been the concept that "there are too many white people in the room." And to a smaller degree that "there are too many straight men...".

I've never seen this applied to non-whites, at least not to this degree. In fact, 100% black-demographic teams (or businesses or organisations) are oftentimes praised for being "authentically black".

IMO, the way I see it is once a productive homogeneous group (which by definition is composed of members that are able to agree with each other and engage in actual progress rather than in-fighting) puts in the effort and spends the time building the infrastructure/business/etc and makes it successful - then other groups see this as an opportunity to get something out of it... "Diversity for the sake of diversity" only comes in at the end, never at the beginning.

It is also odd that when someone says diversity is our strength, they never really share the actual details of that strength.

To me this is a turning point for a company that goes from being work oriented to becoming a race/gender oriented cesspool where everything is about your color, genitalia, and gender.

powertower··on US military uses 8-inch floppy disks to coordinate nuclear force operations
In the mean time, this thing will do Mach 20 (~ 7 km/s), and its already concidered as old-tech with a newer version being worked on -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTVgJ8Sb34E

powertower··on Hyper-Reality [video]
If there is such a thing as the Illuminati, that is bent on destroying the human spirit - this is what I imagine their plans for the future world would entail.
powertower··on I worked on Facebook's Trending team
Only anecdotal. And you can see some of it if you google 'facebook censorship'.

But here is one about Germany - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/26/mark-zuck...

Though to understand what it is really talking about, you have to understand the redefinition of "hate speech" that has happened through-out the EU.

powertower··on I worked on Facebook's Trending team
> There is no political bias that I know of and we were never told to suppress conservative news. There is an extraordinary amount of talent on the team...

I don't use Facebook, but over the last several years I kept hearing from a number of non-PC type news outlets (that I subscribe to) that even as their media platform grew and doubled and tripled, at the same time their Facebook engagement became a small fraction of what it used to be.

I've also heard that one of the quickest ways to get your Facebook account terminated in Germany is to say anything negative about the current migration situation that becomes popular or starts to get views.

This article IMO is a way to hide the real story with another story.

powertower··on For Female Astronomers, Sexual Harassment Is a Constant Nightmare
I am curious of why is it everyone here is so eager for this to be true?

Several people so far have posted that they have never seen such a thing in the field, and a number of people (outside those fields) responded that they must be blind.

The last 9 out of 10 of these types of stories ended up being exaggerated to such an extent that it became clear that they were all fabricated to get views and to drive agenda.

powertower··on Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year
This is what 1 tonne (2204 LBS) of gold looks like - http://demonocracy.info/infographics/world/gold/images/demon...
powertower··on 62 People Own Same Wealth as Half the World
Comparing wealth that was generated from/inside wealthy countries with the net worth of the poor in non-wealthy countries is not a good comparison - unless you can link that wealth as stolen from those other countries.

Otherwise, there is no link between the two.

Even when comparing the 1st and 2nd world countries you are going to have a difficult time linking this alleged wealth transfer/theft...

For example, when Apple sells a high-margin product in the USA - and the stock holders, employees, CEOs, etc, see their wealth increase - how many Rubles are stolen from the people of Russia? It is a ridiculous question.

powertower··on Obama Forgives Student Debt Of 400,000 Americans
Those quotes have details behind them. Such as that sales where mostly all shifted in from the future, less cars where sold overall (hurting the industry), the fuel economy savings resulted in mere single-digit days of gasoline saved over the lifetime of the vehicles sold, and a bunch of other not so great things.

Either way, the Brookings report ends with this quote - "In the event of a future economic recession, we would not recommend repeating the CARS program."

There is a reason for that.

powertower··on Obama Forgives Student Debt Of 400,000 Americans
The first link provided above is a Google search URL for the terms "cash for clunkers cost".

Those are article quotes from the front page results.

powertower··on Obama Forgives Student Debt Of 400,000 Americans
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2013/10/cash-for-cl...

"Almost anything would have been better stimulus than 'Cash for Clunkers'."

"Cash for Clunkers a near-total failure."

"Obama's Cash for Clunkers harmed the industry it was meant to help."

You have to take the overall effect into it.

But that might not be the best of examples. I would have rather mentioned a more touchy subject (the ACA), but that has not gone well for me in the past here.

powertower··on Obama Forgives Student Debt Of 400,000 Americans
Slightly tangential, but a good eye opener for me was the Cash for Clunkers program...

To perform an average rebate of $4000 per car, cost the taxpayers and industry $24,000 per car.

Anything the government gets into, with some notable exceptions (e.g., highway construction in the 60s), ends up with little net gains and usually a 5x overrun in costs.

powertower··on The Untouchables – Why it’s getting harder to stop multinational corporations
> Article seems somewhat biased, as if US and European agribusiness hasn't done similar in countless other countries with similar brutality!

Not promoting narratives of western/white guilt is not the same thing as being "biased".

The majority of the problems in the 3rd world are caused primarily by native interests and inside forces - that are corrupt, divisive, don't care, will brutalize their own people, etc.

Yet the majority of stories completely absolve those parties, and focus entirely on the west.

And because of this, for this reason, the problem never gets solved.

powertower··on Icelandic Prime Minister Resigns After Panama Data Leak
That was my point... He had ownership in a company that lost money and net worth (if I'm reading that correctly).

I can't find the illegal or the immoral part.

powertower··on Icelandic Prime Minister Resigns After Panama Data Leak
I've tried to locate the details of his crimes, but can't seem to. There is just some minor things listed from years ago being mentioned.

Do you know what exactly he has he done (to have to resign in shame)?

It's just odd that there are no details within the articles, nor from the people that are trying to get him to resign.

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