Climate change denial is a mainstream conservative belief.
And no, we don't need diversity in all its forms. We can do without the moronic, hateful and extremist.
120 karma · joined December 11, 2014
And no, we don't need diversity in all its forms. We can do without the moronic, hateful and extremist.
The entire project is a combination of TU Delft publicity stunt and EU subsidies sinkhole. In 10 years of screwing around with bittorrent it hasn't produced anything that could compete with the side projects of individual hackers.
It's a disgraceful waste of community money.
The code may be fixable (though I doubt they even care), the project however isn't.
This part alone shows how much superficial BS this is.
You cannot produce anything without using the earth's resources. They do not naturally belong to any man.
So it's either "take what you want, by force, and fuck everyone else", or we find some peaceful way to share those resources amongst each other. Preferably without terminally destroying them for future generations.
Yes, the latter is done through a huge variety of intricate social constructs, and all of them are corrupt to some degree, because such is mankind.
But the only society in which you do not need permission from your fellow men is one in which the majority of the population has the status of serfs.
The reasoning behind the law is perfectly logical, and the problem they're trying to solve very real. The actual implementation utterly impractical, and a major burden on pretty much everyone.
But the only people who could have told the political dinosaurs and clueless civil servants just how impractical chose to pretend the change would somehow magically just go away.
This is one piece of legislation that could probably have been stopped or redirected quite early on, if those affected had just bothered to try.
This goes well beyond the metric system. In many ways the US is extremely old-fashioned in the eyes of other Westerners, clinging to customs most of us have abandoned many decades ago. Unless there is a clear economic advantage in it, the US is strongly resistant to change for fear of diluting its still relatively young and shallow identity.
On typical form of American deflection is coming up with elaborate explanations why what works for other countries won't work for America. Sometimes these exceptionalist arguments are not entirely untrue (the US is an exceptional nation in many ways), but they become really transparent when they try to argue why other countries are different. (Most of those arguments just show a willful cultural ignorance, especially remarkable when coming from well-educated and well-traveled Americans.)
No, for the US there is no compelling economic reason to go metric. But that's not the reason why it doesn't, that's just the rationalization du jour. Any other country would not be afraid to adopt the simple convenience of joining the rest of world in a single standard.
Yes, yes it does. At least it does for me. I haven't read as much and bought as many books in decades. A considerable part of my media consumption time has shifted away from series, movies and internet back to books. Mostly because it's so damn easy to get the next book. And the next. Etc.
> If you don't have a license, you're leaving the door open for people to fool with your code.
IANAL, but the author has apparently never even heard of the existence of copyright law. Nothing this guy writes about licenses should be taken seriously.
I would be surprised if UberPop is still in operation anywhere in Europe by the summer of 2015. It's patently illegal on multiple fronts.
Some governments are open to providing a regulatory framework (one that covers safety and consumer protection), especially in places where the taxi market is dysfunctional, but Uber's "fuck your laws, we'll do it anyway" attitude is extremely counterproductive in that respect.
UberX is a professional limousine service, and in most places they operate they abide by the rules. (Which also means they're not particularly cheaper than regular taxis.)
The only people who want to live "higher" are the people who want high end apartments in the inner city. And those are the places where height restrictions are there to protect the historical nature of the inner city.
And with the high level of gentrification in many successful cities, unlike 25 years ago those urban centers are now also attractive for older people and people with families, people who used to move to the suburbs.
People want to be there, and contrary to what a very vocal minority suggests, most people don't want to work remotely, at least not full-time, and those that do don't necessarily want to do it from the middle of f-ing nowhere.
"Keeping the costs sane" for tech workers would mean putting the housing out of reach of many ordinary people.
There is a finite amount of space, and the reason why housing scarce in many cities in Europe is because a large portion is reserved for rent controlled social housing (which unlike the US isn't just the extreme low end).
Not doing that clearly doesn't work either (see SF), and has so many negative social side-effects that are unacceptable in Europe, so you don't even have to bother trying to suggest it.
It simply comes down to too many people wanting to live where there's not enough space. To solve that, you have to look at social factors, not bureaucracy and real estate.
Personally I would suggest looking at the people who actually wouldn't mind getting out of those cities but currently can't for various social and economic reasons. Ironically, those are not the tech workers who could at least theoretically work remotely.
I certainly think we could use more interest in the human stories, because a lack of interest is the primary reason for the growing anti-tech backlash.
Seriously, if you take anything that inhibits your natural sense of danger and alertness, you should not be out on the streets. This kind of idiotic behavior by tourists is the excuse a conservative government in the Netherlands has abused to crack down on psychedelics, where previously there was absolutely no problem at all.
If irresponsible behavior is a reason to ban stuff, why don't we just ban alcohol, cars, electricity and sharp objects, all of which "cause" more harm than XTC.
Please stop doing that, comparing the USA to some fictional country called Europe to prove a point. I agree with many of your arguments, but where the author of this piece is generalizing based on anecdotes, you're generalizing based on stats. And opportunistically picking and mixing stats from different countries on top of that.
For someone who likes to throw around stats and pretend to make a scientifically based argument, what does a conclusion like "most European countries are behind the USA" even mean? Europe has countries the size of a few football fields. It has large, thinly populated countries, small, densely populated countries and everything in between.
I would really appreciate it of people would stop using this fictional Europe for their ideological political arguments about the USA.
Full disclosure: I happen to be from a country in Europe that has higher participation rates for women than the US, is not Scandinavian, doesn't have particularly strong supportive policies (better than the US, but that isn't saying much) and on top of that: despite these stats women in this country are leaving the labor force in large numbers when they get kids, which particularly shows up in a lack of women in senior leadership positions. These things vary wildly per country and culture.
I'm in my country. You're serving me bits just now in order to tell me this. WTF?
It's like sitting down in restaurant, see a wonderful meal being served at the table right next to you, seeing the meal on the fucking menu, but when you order being told "no sir, not at your table".
In what industry do people come back after being treated like that?
One application, supporting two operating systems and three formats. Whooptidoo.
For something that is technically as easy as copying any format file to any device. Congrats. Great f-ing progress.
Not to mention the fact that most of what I would like to consume in media isn't legally available in my country in those or any other format. And anything but music is still DRM-crippled.
It's not just easier to get pirated content, it's still largely the only way.
Seriously though, I may be a minority, but it's not all that unusual to not strongly fall into either category, left-handedness is very much a spectrum. These kind or studies and articles making left and right handedness a black and white thing feel kind of outdated.
Yeah, no, I have a bit of a problem with this. There is a lot of stuff coming out of this hack that should never, ever have been on corporate IT systems in the first place. Stuff that doesn't come out of regular HR data where people should have a reasonably expectation of privacy and security, but stuff people have put there themselves.
And I don't think this should ever be considered normal behavior, to use corporate IT systems to store such private data.
Yes, these people are victims, but I think it sends the wrong message to say that their own role in this was completely normal behavior. It should be possible to be critical of this without drifting into blaming the victim territory, and I'm kind of missing that from the whole Sony hack discussion.