MadWombat

Why? The original comment I was replying to claimed that Google is not a monopoly because you can easily replace Google with DDG. Which is bullshit. Google provides dozens of services (search, gdocs, photos, youtube, maps etc) where DDG only provides one. And even with the one it does provide, the search results are a lot less useful in about 50% of the searches I do. Which is why I don't use DDG even for search. So yeah, if you are going to argue that I can replace Google with DDG, I am going to argue that you can replace gigabit fiber connection with dial-up.

> just look at the ground next time you're walking outside to see all the cigarette butts

Amusingly, this is more of a result of anti-tobacco campaigns. I have recently visited Prague and one of the things I noticed were the ashtrays everywhere and very few cigarette butts on the street. But in NYC, where I live, there are no ashtrays and so you get cigarette butts all over the place. Because smokers are not going to quit smoking simply because you removed all the ashtrays.

> but few are actually practicing those things

It really depends on the kind of books you read. If you are reading a self-help book of some sort and you think its ideas are sound, sure, you should at least try to practice what it says. On the other hand, I don't think I am expected to jump under a train after reading Anna Karenina.

Does DDG do spreadsheets? Document editing? Maps and direction finding? Video streaming? Photo management? DDG is nowhere near providing the services that Google provides.

For what it is worth, I have read at least a few works of science fiction where "access to information as basic human right" question was either discussed o at least brought up.

> ISPs are different because of the lack of competition. If you don't like Google you can use Duck Duck Go.

This is very much not the case both ways. Yes, you could use DuckDuckGo instead of Google. But by the same logic you can always use some local DSL provider for your ISP. That is still a thing in most places. Of course, you will get 1.5Mbps instead of 50Mbps via Comcast, but it is not like DDG provides the same range of service as Google either.

I don't know. But if all we have is a correlation, than calling it "settled science" is misleading.

> Understanding that we are changing the balance of greenhouse gases

Are we? How settled is the science on anthropogenic part of AGW? Between the natural ocean cycle of carbon dioxide emission and absorption and constantly changing cloud cover and the generally chaotic climate system, how can we reliably tell that it is the human contribution in particular that is causing the changes?

I am rather curious about your sugar industry and coral reef claim. Do you have any good sources I could check?

As for climate science and its predictions, I tend to keep an open mind myself, too much advocacy seems to be floating both ways and I don't want to wade through all the Marc Moranos and Greta Tunbergs to get to tangible information. That said, I have recently found this article comparing climate model accuracy over the years.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-m...

> Why is it wrong to say explicitly offensive things

Because they are offensive

> and why should someone be legally punished for it

Because that is what legal systems are for. Punishing people who do things we, as a society, find objectionable

> Who gets to decide what is and isn't offensive and to what degree?

That is a rather general question, but generally speaking, the law makers and the legal system decide things like that.

Now, mind you, personally, I support a rather radical version of freedom of expression. I think almost every kind of censorship is ultimately detrimental to society, but I am not naive enough to ask "but who gets to decide" or "but why cannot I"

> On the extreme end, a video can be totally fake

Sure. And either you can prove it or not. But that is not what I am arguing against. The way things seem to be working today, is that you say "person X cures cancer" and I say "person X eats babies", neither one of us has any proof whatsoever, but that is OK because nobody ever asks for proof because "hey, there is no such thing as facts anymore"

This is a bizarre line of reasoning

> his perception that there are a set of correct facts and incorrect facts is just so meaingless

Yes, there are facts. In your example, if I say "person X said Y" and have a video of them saying it, I am stating a fact. I am not dealing in beliefs and I don't give a fuck whether or not the person still supports the statements they made or not. I am saying that at some point in time T, person X said Y and this fact is on record.

> The mainstream media - both the news media and entertainment media more broadly - was extremely accommodative and deferential to the Obama administration

You don't watch FOX News much, I assume

> and didn't have to write CSS hacks for electronics stores

could you explain that?

Also, "mp3 is license free" rhymes :)

I am a somewhat active SO user and one thing I see other contributors repeating over and over is "stackoverflow is not a code writing service". Usually this comes up in the context of some kid posting their college assignment and asking people to solve it, but I think it should extend further.

Do not copy/paste code from stackoverflow. SO is not a code writing service. It is a problem solving/question answering service. Any code you see in the answers should be takes as reference only. If you don't understand what the code does, re-read the answer, check the documentation, understand and then write your own code. What happened here is such a stupidly trivial bug. If someone only took a second glance at this code it would be blindingly obvious what is going on here. I saw it as soon as I looked at the SO code sample and I don't even write C#. Do people at Docker even do code reviews?

Also, when I write answers in SO, I try (not 100% of the time, but I do try) to make my code generic, so it solves the problem the user is having, but does not include any specifics from the question. I suggest you all do the same.

P.S. I know that this rant of mine is rather idealistic. Nobody is going to stop copy/pasting code and these things will keep happening. But writing this was therapeutic.

I have been using Docker on OS X for a while, haven't had any major issues, but maybe my experience is atypical.

I looked at other options a few times. I do not see how I can convince my whole social circle to use anything else. Especially in the absence of any feature complete alternative.

I don't know about everyone else, but to me these are confusing as fuck. In continue/break/early return diagrams, there is no second condition, so it is not clear when/why the dotted line logic path happens. The "no fall-through" has so many arrows it takes some zen meditation to figure out what it means. And the exception diagram is just amazing, does the catch block get executed no matter whether there was an exception or not? Because there is an arrow leading to it from the regular, no exception, path. I could go on, but it becomes progressively more and more bizarre.

They don't pass the actual label, the pass two images and a 0/1 valued boolean "Are these images in the same class?"

> Why wasn't I required to return this box for reuse?

Because I wouldn't order anything from a service that required me to return the box. Going to a postal office is highly inconvenient for someone working full time. Of course, I could be convinced to just drop off the box at some kind of drop off/pick up station (provided it was not too far out of my normal commute), but that would require a whole new layer of infrastructure.

In the problem, the people are tied down to the tracks. Or possibly glued. Or to make it even more horrifying, riveted :)

Consider a variation on the trolley problem. Just like always, there are two track branches and a switch. On the main track, there are five people, on the side track there is one person. But this time things are a tiny bit different. The trolley driver is braking. And the five people on the main track are a few hundred yards down the track, so maybe the trolley will be able to stop before it runs them over. But not. But there is a chance. The one person on the side track, on the other hand, is right here, there is no chance in hell they live if you pull the switch. So what do you do? How do you even reason about something like this?

> In fact I can't think of a single good design reason to ever animate an icon

I can think of a few cases where animated icons make sense.

1. Control feedback. If your icon deforms slightly under your mouse when you click, it provides extra feedback indicating that your action was registered.

2. Notifications. As you, yourself said, motion catches attention. So animated icons would serve well for any kind of event notification. New message or event, action completion etc.

3. Progress indication. An icon for something that takes a long time, like a file download, could be animated to indicate that the process is still ongoing.

I am sure there are other examples.

The general problem with "ends justify the means" arguments, as I see it, is not as much completeness of the consequences, but rather the risk analysis. A lot of "ends justify the means" points of view involve doing certain harm now for uncertain good in the future. Like "lets execute a few thousand class traitors today, so we can build a socialist paradise tomorrow" or "lets lower the taxes for the rich and in a few years the wealth will trickle down". At this point it is kinda hard to be a consistent consequentialist. How certain do you have to be about the paradise of tomorrow to justify an execution today?

> keeps producing markets where the available choices are only skin deep

Because it turns out that catering to minority demands only works for some markets, but not others (i.e. all cell phones look and function the same, but there are dozens of different flavors and textures of peanut butter). And also, because it turns out that convincing the customer base that what you offer is what they want is easier than making the things they actually want (mostly because people rarely know what they want in the first place).

Also, all three examples you mentioned have fairly straight forward reasons. There are no physical keyboards on phones because most people prefer more screen space and a keyboard takes space. There are no "dumb" TVs because people prefer their appliances to work out of the box and that is exactly what the "smart" TVs provide, you don't have to plug them into any other device to get them to show you content. And cars have been pretty standard for a while now, there might be some demand for a car with a dildo shaped joystick instead of a steering wheel, but maybe not enough to warrant actually making one.

> I just don't understand why people run windows.

My use of my home computer mostly consists of making/learning music and playing games. Both of these activities pretty much require Windows. There are some ways around it, like I could be running games under Wine and use a Linux DAW and use something like LinVST to get my plugins working, but it requires a lot of effort and the results are not guaranteed (people seem to have mixed experience running Kontakt 6 under Wine and not all games run equally well). Or I could go the money route and buy a console for games and a Mac for music, but it seems like an overkill and I would be exchanging a nasty proprietary system that is Windows for two separate nasty proprietary systems of Mac and PS4/Xbox.

> so your “sense of self” does not get affected by what anyone says

But it should be affected. As the substance abuse programs say "the first step to solve any problem is to acknowledge that there is a problem". For example, if you think of yourself as a good husband and a good father and then your wife and kids come to you and tell you that you are not, you should probably reassess your self-evaluation. Maybe you are not what you think you are.

Thank you so much, you are one of the very few people I have met online who acknowledges that "meditation" is not a single practice.

That said, I am not sure I understand what you mean when you say "cravings and aversion come from how you react to things you may find desirable or undesirable". It seems kinda meaningless, like yeah, I feel aversion when I don't want things to happen and yes, things I don't want to happen are undesirable to me. And yes, desirableness and undesirableness are, of course, connected to me, it is me who decides which things are desirable or undesirable to me.

Like, lets say I fall into sewage treatment tank. Drowning in shit is an undesirable thing and I feel a great aversion to it. And yes, it is me, personally, who finds drowning in shit undesirable, the undesirableness of this outcome is connected to me very directly. But I do not see how meditation might help me.

The problem I have with statements like the one commented on is that there is no such thing as "meditation". There is a whole bunch of very different techniques from a whole bunch of different cultures that are all called meditation and the only thing they have in common is that it is a mental exercise of some sort. But considering how different these techniques are, it would be strange to expect them to provide any kind of common effect, like making you take things less personally. It also makes phrases like "I meditate every day" and "You should try meditation" meaningless. Consider spiritual exercises of Ignatius Loyola and compare them, say, to a Sufi Zikr and to a Hatha Yoga practice. All three are most definitely meditation practices, so when you say "you should meditate" do you mean I should drop on my knees and pray to Jesus, gather a bunch of guys and run in cicles singing in arabic or do a downward dog? And do you think any one of these would help me take things less personally?