This is one of the more fun corollaries to Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced engineering is indistinguishable from wizardry".
2,000 karma · joined August 9, 2012
...yes?
Let's accept, for the sake of argument, that arming victims does in fact reduce or eliminate the ability of a mass shooter to inflict casualties. The only way to ensure that someone is carrying a concealed weapon in whichever screening is hypothetically attacked is to ensure that someone is carrying a concealed weapon in most if not all screenings. That's a lot of handguns.
The vast majority of these weapons will be used responsibly, but some small fraction of them will be used in crimes of passion or suicides that would not have happened but for the easy availability of a deadly weapon. Some other tiny fraction of them will injure or kill someone accidentally.
Mass shootings and terrorist attacks, while incredibly tragic, are incredibly rare. They also rarely have casualty counts above the low double digits. Meanwhile firearm accidents kill hundreds of people every year, and suicide and homicide claim tens of thousands. Arming ourselves to a level that can prevent black swan events is optimizing for the wrong case and will almost certainly lead to more loss of life than it prevents.
Absolutely, but that's exactly why the government needs to be large and do lots of things. Take minimum wage for example. Assume that tomorrow the government revoked the power to control wages. What happens next?
Fast food chains and big box stores would push their wages as low as the market will bear. Some employees will quit, but a lot will stay because working 80 hours a week and living in abject poverty is still better than literally starving. There's still a minimum wage, it's just now being set by corporate entities that don't (and shouldn't) have any motivations beyond their own company's self interest.
Or maybe the employees unionize. They get organized and set terms for as high a wage as they can extract from the employers. The employee's quality of life goes up, but the business owners now have no recourse but to pay the demanded wages or close. And the new employment contracts start including clauses about mandatory union membership (including dues). Again, a minimum wage is being set by someone, just not someone who has (or should have) any interest in the larger economic repercussions.
The power exists, and it's going to be wielded by somebody somewhere. The government, at least, is ostensibly motivated by the best interests of the populace at large. That interest is, of course, frustrated as often as its honored in the real world. Still, I don't see how taking power from an institution that only intermittently pursues my best interests and handing it to an institution that never does is in any way an improvement.
> Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
> Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call.
US trademarks are only good for the line of business I'm in. If I were to publish a software product called Mustang, for example, Ford wouldn't be able to sue me for copyright infringement. My product shares a trademark with one of theirs, but it's in a different enough market that the two trademarks don't conflict with each other.
It sounds like Groupon's proposed product is point of sale hardware. That's different enough from a desktop window manager that Groupon can quite possibly get a lawyer to convince a jury that they're different businesses. Therefore GNOME Foundation has to pay a lawyer to stand up and argue the other side of the case.
I have, actually. The person I care about did not have any substantial pre-depression experience with mood altering substances, prescription or otherwise, but post-depression treatment with antidepressents has been a huge help to them and, indirectly, to me and the rest of my family. Nevertheless, I do have a pretty good guess as to what your experience has been like.
My post was intemperate, to say the least. Your post struck a nerve with me and provoked a reaction that was undeserved. I've had to deal with one too many "depression isn't real" and "people just want happy pills" attitudes in the past and it's apparently caused my reading comprehension to suffer. I painted with far too broad a brush and you have my sincerest apologies.
Not to derail the conversation too much, but fuck you. That's not even close to what depression is or how it works. Depression isn't when your life sucks so you feel bad, it's when you feel bad for no reason, even when your life is objectively pretty good. It's a well documented medical phenomenon that can fortunately be managed rather well with, among other things, medication. Comments like this, though, serve only to stigmatize treatment and actively discourage people from seeking help.
I have a close family member with depression. They've been on Zoloft for a little over a year now and it has been a huge blessing. The single biggest obstacle to getting them help was helping them overcome the social anxiety and sense of failure caused by stigmatizing and belittling attitudes like yours.
Yes, many more people are on antidepressants than in generations past. Many more people also take antihistamines daily and get an annual flu shot and nobody thinks that signals some downfall of civilization. Modern medicine has provided effective treatments for countless conditions, ranging from minor annoyances to debilitating illnesses, that previous generations had no alternative but to endure quietly. In almost every area, save this one, this is rightly regarded as a triumph of science and a huge net good for humanity. Why is it about mental illness that causes otherwise smart, empathetic, and scientifically literate people to start clutching their pearls?
Regardless, kudos on the project. It looks like a marked improvement over the normal state of affairs. The built-in templating is far from the worst thing about WP, but it is easy low-hanging fruit to modernize, and I for one am glad to see that effort pay off.
To her content and presentation are not separate entities. Font choice, heading size, margins and spacing, and colors are secondary to the text and the document structure, but they're still semantic elements and carry meaning above and beyond the structure they present. Presenting a sentence in red, for example, conveys a different meaning than making the same sentence bold, even if in theory they're simply alternate ways of conveying importance. She judges the extra expressiveness to be worth the extra complexity, even for informal documents and notes to herself.
As far as I understand, MIT-style license requirements can be satisfied by comments in the HTML or CSS whereas Creative Commons Attribution style licenses require the attribution to be visible to the end user.
That's a bit disappointing. Adding a spot attributions to the page can sometimes be a nonstarter for a lot of the designers I work with. I really wish more design assets would opt for something more like an MIT license.
> Oh, the same Anita that previously got caught with making fake death threat against herself
Being accused of something does not equate to "getting caught" doing something.
> the standard feminist tactic these days.
[citation needed]
> Anita is a talentless hack
She's consistently putting out a large volume of well-sourced content with a relatively high production value. You can argue that she cherry picks her sources (she doesn't) or that her conclusions are wrong (they aren't), or even that she's an ideologue (she is, but that's fine). It's a pretty hard lift, though, to argue that she's not competent and unerringly professional.
> who is trying to ride on the backs of the gullible male developers
Who is successfully riding on the back of an enormously successful Kickstarter campaign. Kickstarter doesn't publish demographic information on the gender or profession of its donors, but a lot of people showed a clear interest in exactly the
> by whining about non-issues and nonsensical "violence-games-games-causes-real-violence" type of arguments.
As far as I can remember, none of her videos argue that "violence-games-games-causes-real-violence". Instead, they seem to be arguing that certain types of violence are problematic in and of themselves. You don't have to agree with this assertion, but at least have the decency to engage with the argument she's actually making.
Except that I don't think she's even doing that. She seems to take pains to avoid implicating any single game, and including so many references actually serves to blunt the criticism of each individual example. Instead, the message seems to be that the conventions of storytelling in interactive media have some deep, fundamental flaws. The entire medium, therefore, must change dramatically for these flaws to be addressed.
I can understand a reaction of "I like my games just like they are, thankyouverymuch" (though such a response obviously does not justify the behavior Ms. Sarkeesian has been subjected to). Speaking for myself, though, I enjoy games in spite of, not because of, these tropes, and I can't imagine that removing them would do anything other than make future games more enjoyable.
Doing these tasks is almost certainly a suboptimal use of any single product engineer's job, but if they don't get done by someone the business won't be a business for long.
But when I went through the Ruby track (a language I'm already quite proficient at), I got almost no feedback, helpful or otherwise. Some of my entries would get one or two "thumbs up"s, but no comments, and most got no responses at all. Now that I've got a pretty good grasp on Go, my last couple of exercises there have started to follow the same trend.
On my commute home from the office, there's a short stretch (about half a city block) between where I exit from a low-traffic residential street onto a main thoroughfare and where the road widens from 2 lane to 4 lane + bikelane. On that stretch I get buzzed uncomfortably fast and close about once a week.
Plus Wordpress has a hard requirement for MySQL, and like it or not a huge number of projects still use it as a framework.
So, for example, if I was kicked out of a restaurant for not wearing shoes I couldn't generally claim free speech protections for my lack of footwear. However if I did so as part of some theoretical organized protest involving shoes then I could, as in the second case my unshod state was clearly intended to convey some message.
A lot of code written by beginners (myself included, once) will put business logic as close to where it will eventually be rendered as possible, so you end up with code that looks like this
<ul>
<?php
// Thirty lines of database calls and string manipulation
foreach ($results as $result): ?>
<li><?= $result ?></li>
<?php endforeach ?>
</ul>
The .php vs .phtml distinction has no relevance to the compiler. They're only really useful to a human in making that template/code distinction explicit.
I personally try to follow a couple basic rules. .php files should be a single <?php ?> block with nothing outside it, and .phtml files shouldn't use anything but if, foreach, and already defined variables. You'll end up with code that's both cleaner and better structured.
Second, if at all possible avoid Wordpress until you've already got a firm grasp of the language. Wordpress itself has a few decisions that made sense in PHP 4 but are terrible practice now (like using global functions instead of classes) and a few others that, while not technically wrong, were questionable even then (the loop). On top of that, the quality of code in third party themes and plugins varies wildly. If you copy the techniques you see there, you'll learn some awesome tricks, but you'll also learn every bad practice in the book. Until you've got enough experience to recognize the difference, you'll do yourself more harm than good.
I'm not sure why having an empty account is something you care to filter on. If someone really wants to pretend to be a dev, forcing them to click "Create new repo" before they sign up isn't going to provide much of a barrier. You're already basically taking them at their word so I'd recommend just dropping the requirement.