jcromartie

But our gov't is right on top of banning even more harmless plants... (Kratom this time).

If bananas reflected yellow light, but we saw them as blue instead by some purely neuropsychological phenomenon, would this cause any significant problems?

Am I the only one that actually did learn this in school?

The most terrifying thing about prions is that they are infectious but not alive: they can't be "killed" in the normal sense by sterilization. The proteins must literally be dissolved to neutralize them.

I don't think anybody ever meant to imply that pure functions can be composed in any order. That's the confusion here. "Pure functions can be run in any order" only means that they don't have side effects so one call doesn't impact another, but nobody ever meant or (hopefully) understood that to mean that the inputs and outputs of pure functions could be composed in any order. I don't even know what kind of confusion could lead to such an idea.

Are you sure we are talking about the same "functional programming"? Consider a function that parses a number from a string, and a function that doubles a number. How could anybody expect the order of these applications to not matter?

When reading anything on The Guardian it's important to ask what they aren't telling you, because it's almost certain that they are omitting many very salient details out in order to fit the story into their own narrative. If you knew that Nieto had other problems, you likely wouldn't come away from the Guardian article believing that he was executed for being Hispanic.

People in third world nations don't have any empathy super powers for people who are ethnically, religiously, or socio-economically from themselves either.

I remember that thread. I actually think they took my advice to heart.

They moved a 2-ton car... on wheels, on sealed concrete, with winches...

So, how does it turn out for people who shoot at the police? I'm sorry but you are living in libertarian cowboy fantasy.

And part of the reason why cops are armed to the teeth is because the citizens are. It would require real total mutual disarmament of citizens and police to change anything in the USA.

So I don't see it changing any time soon.

And until the people employed by the systems that police, prosecute, and incarcerate other people have a sufficient safety net, they will be motivated to prop up those systems.

Universal basic income just makes too much sense.

> those of us who are non-white, older than 40, disabled, trans, not neurotypical, queer, from low-income backgrounds, and/or a host of other identities will continue to be locked out of tech.

What if those people are just less likely (note: this is about probability, for all I know the best programmer in the world could be a disabled queer 50 year old black person from a poor family) to be competitive among candidates? This basically amounts to hiring as charity.

There is no end to the list of possible "identities". You can ALWAYS slice humanity up into smaller and smaller groups to find some identity that is underrepresented. Everybody is clamoring to grab a niche identity to claim oppression points. This is why identity politics is garbage.

Unless for-profit corporations are actually jobs programs in disguise, there's only one sensible thing to do: value people for what they can do for the company. Period. Though maybe favoring a candidate because they have the right skin color IS actually good for companies? Who knows?

Trans people have contributed some crucial developments in tech. The ARM processor was invented by a trans woman. If trans people were barred from the industry we might not have all these amazing mobile devices right now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson

How about a "blind" hiring process? For software engineers, it's easy to imagine tools that could help evaluate skills without revealing that person's race or gender.

If I want to see someone's work, and they provide a URL, I'm interested in the content, not the identity of the service it's hosted on. Gee, this sounds familiar...

You say "adapt" but you mean "capitulate."

How many more years before all of these orgs finally come to the realization that making hiring decisions based on skin color or genitals isn't a winning strategy?

Unless my 2013 Nexus 7 has a hardware problem I don't see any reason to replace it. It's really hard to imagine a compelling reason to upgrade from today's crop of tablets.

This is a fantastic illustration of geological processes. Sometimes I look at hillsides and geological layers and wonder how they could ever be built up so much. How could hundreds of feet of rock be deposited little by little, to make such thick layers? Well, here it is. A boat that sank in a river is 49 feet below a cornfield only a few human generations later. Amazing.

Police officers abuse their romantic partners at about twice the average rate. Domestic violence occurs in about 40% of households with police officers.

It seems that microcephaly is associated with onset of Zika during the first trimester of pregnancy. Considering the mild nature of the illness, couldn't the virus be its own vaccine? Could a woman proactively contract the virus while postponing pregnancy, in order to thwart it?

Let's see how babies do on a planet without rainforests.

If a technology exists, and can feasibly be leveraged by a party to its advantage, then you should assume that it is happening.

Why shouldn't we use statistical inference to deliver information that enables responders to be better prepared to deal with a situation? I would hate to be a false positive, but I'd rather have the chance of being flagged as "green" when police are headed my way, rather than always being presumed to be a "red" as seems to be the case now. This seems like it would be the opposite of being presumed guilty until proven innocent, for most people.

And this isn't surveillance: they aren't collecting new information, just putting available data sources together. Unless deducing things from existing data is somehow surveillance?

I don't think Radiohead's earlier albums were as influential as they were released to an audience who was influenceable. They had influence because young people listened to them, and now the people who listened to them a lot aren't up-and-coming musicians anymore.

Are there grounds for a lawsuit when a manufacturer pushes out an update to a product that intentionally degrades its feature set like this? This is no longer the same product that these users bought, it's effectively damaged by the update.

Twitter deciding that they don't want ISIS supporters using their application violates nobody's 1st Amendment rights.