Yes. Americans keep complaining about their government, yet every election they keep on voting for the same party they voted for last time, the same one that already did what the didn't like - or they don't bother. Where I live, people complain that they can't influence politics, they can't even complain about the government online without getting arrested. They don't have voting rights to do anything about it. Americans do! No amount of lobbying can force you to vote for someone you don't want.
Please don't lump pedophiles in with murderers. Many of them are in prison simply for downloading a file from the internet. In some cases, the content is perfectly legal and harmless but was edited to be sexually suggestive and the people caught with it end up in prison. That's not to say some don't actually abuse children, but many do not.
Now isn't the time to help. Enough governments already have relief supplies available for natural disasters so they're already helping. If you really want to help then work on protection against future disasters. People only feel like they care now because it's in the news. The ongoing vulnerability of the Phillipines to natural disasters isn't in the news and people won't care enough to help them prepare before it happens again. A sea wall last week would have been worth a lot more than food today but it's not newsworthy so people didn't contribute.
In a way it's glaringly true. Most Americans will die from eating too much domesticated meat which is known to cause heart disease. If you're already overweight or have high cholesterol/etc then any undetected possible effect from additives/GM is irrelevant.
This is the hypocracy we all accept as OK. If citizens are barred from travelling internally we call it a human rights violation (USSR, China). If foreigners are barred from travelling between countries we call it "important reasons - immigration control". Same with spying, assasination, torture, killing civilians in war, etc. Human rights don't apply to non-citizens of just about any country.
"part of the support network either through willful ignorance or" this includes all Americans who pay taxes, vote for the government, etc. Ultimately everyone shares some blame but when we see someone who's more directly responsible than ourselves, we tend to blame them and forgive ourselves. As a non-America, I see Obama voters as responsible because he told them he would attack Pakistan with drones as part of his first election campaign.
Predictably many people are skeptical. But just stop and think about how many times you've caused an accident or near miss, ignored a road sign, got stuck while merging, etc and ask yourself if the computer would have done a better job. The new buzzword is "zero fatalities" and it's a far too important goal to just dismiss with typical I'm-a-better-driver-than-any-dumb-machine attitude.
I don't like this kind of nonsense arrogance: "In a period when eugenic theories still circulated, Molaison’s doctors reportedly told him that he shouldn’t have sex, since he would likely reproduce children who were similarly damaged." We're still in that period and it's probably a good thing. In America you can still go to prison for having sex when there's a high risk of passing on genetic problems to your possible children, specifically by both partners being close relatives.
To me this is a good sign. Not every small town needs to exist. Historically there were reasons for them - agriculture I guess. But now they often serve no purpose except to house the old people who have trouble leaving. The fact is the world doesn't need as many farmers as it used to so these places are better off left to disappear. It might feel sad if your hometown is lost but it's only physical things whose usefulness has passed.
It has a bit of preachiness that makes me suspicious how accurate it is. I wonder what less appealing regrets she filtered out. Also, it's on the same site that says "Many of these mantras still exist, but it is very difficult to find those who can chant them accurately. This is actually a safety measure because if the wish-fulfilling mantras were easily chanted, there would no doubt be many people who would misuse them.".
Is this really a problem? Isn't corporate tax rate one of the ways countries compete for businesses to be registered with them and pay them tax? I'm sure any government efforts to reduce this will just make it harder for everyone to run companies from other countries.
I can't see any negative here. Nobody's complaining that private security firms exist. They're already used by rich people and businesses anyway. How is a group of residents in a suburb different from a group of residents in an apartment block or workers in a company? Next, the internet commenters will be telling us we aren't allowed to buy a computer because it disenfranchises the poor who go without.
I used to live in a low-middle class neighborhood with a group of volunteer security guards. They'd drive around at night looking out for burglaries. Is that wrong?
We blame the victim all the time. Many alcoholic, drunk driver, bad-at-their-job people would rather not be like that but they're suffering some kind of severe emotional trouble and don't have the willpower to overcome it, much like this girl. They still get fired and charged with DUI regardless.
Sorry, you're not allowed to assign average IQs to racial groups anymore. Not since black Americans were found to be lower than whites. You have to attribute the anomalous test scores to the biases in the tests to be politically correct.
I agree. People need to assess whatever information they find before acting on it. The more well-known these become, the less influential they should be on any one individual.
If it really is public information then it's perfectly OK to publish it. Complain to the politicians if you don't like arrest records being public. If you're supposed to have a "clean" record then you should just lie to your employer and say "I wasn't convicted". That's what a cleaned record does anyway. Mr. Birnbaum would have been telling as much of a lie by not mentioning his conviction like he'd hoped to.
My education by Youtube says they're supposed to follow a person. So it might still be quite useful even blind as long as it goes roughly the route its leader went.
This part is the most exciting to me. - "obsoletes the idea of opening a document. Essentially, all documents can be open all the time. All you have to do to interact with one is to zoom in close enough."
Maybe oneday the save icon will go because applications will maintain their state automatically and the whole concept of working on an "open" copy of a file which is different from the "saved" one will disappear. Actually, why hasn't that taken over a long time ago? Some applications and many web apps do it so they don't need any save icon.
Anyone remember the days when you had a website with your photos on it, and you could link to and from them however you wanted? The cost of a free service is ever-increasing anti-features. Imagine if there was an easy way to buy your own premade website with your own domain name, with HTTP links to your friends' websites. Of course it wouldn't be popular because it would cost the price of a takeaway lunch and not have the magical hype feeling that a branded service does. Or maybe I'm just too old to appreciate likes and retweets :P
I just discovered this is a popular political debate so shouldn't be in HN. I do understand how licenses work, just take issue with using the word "free" for something that has artificial restrictions. This comes from frustration of running up against brick walls of "no, you're not allowed to use our software for that" when I tried to use the so-called free software.