joeclark77

When I do simulations in my research, I put the code on GitHub. As the article points out, the solutions are there, some people just aren't interested in using them. Practically speaking, replication doesn't happen very often, because there's no profit in it. What we need is an incentive to replicate existing studies. Maybe replicating an existing study should be a requirement for a masters degree, or for certain PhD-level research methods courses.

Acid rain is not caused by CO2 but by pollutants (such as SO2 and NO) which may also come from coal burning.

Even if CO2 were implicated, this issue has absolutely zero to do with the theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.

If the case for global warming is so strong, why are you referring to it as "climate change"?

The idea is that you won't need database-wide transactions if your data is structured into "natural aggregates" such as orders, articles, profiles, etc. In a relational database, something as simple as an "order" has components in lots of different tables -- customer, product, order, line_item, shipping_method, etc -- so you have to lock all of those tables when doing an INSERT or UPDATE.

In the ideal MongoDB implementation, an "order" would be a document of its own, and all the other parts would be attributes or nested structures. So you only really need a transaction for the document itself. Other documents could be inserted/updated at the same time without creating a conflict. That's the theory, at least. Martin Fowler has a good Youtube on "Introduction to NoSQL" that I sometimes show to my students: https://youtu.be/qI_g07C_Q5I

The other thing about NoSQL is that it's often used for write-once, then read-only applications. Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram would be good examples. When 1% of your queries are INSERTs and 99% are SELECTS (with UPDATE and DELETE almost never occurring), you really don't run as much risk of anomalies. I would not recommend NoSQL for something like a banking application where you're doing lots of updates and need to guarantee consistency.

Is it legal to shoot them there? (The coyotes, not the small kids...)

Never heard of these being called "coywolf", but it's been known for a while that eastern coyotes are partly mixed with wolves. Good for them, too. Western coyotes are kind of wimpy. Now if we could breed the coyote with various bears, North America might start to rival Africa for impressive and fearsome predators.

Mass sterilization of financially desperate young men. What could possibly go wrong?

>spouses?

wives

Wow... tough crowd.

Won't they all just go shopping?

All right, I revise my statement to "government has only one means to enforce law: force"

I suppose there are some "policies" (not laws or taxes) which can be encouraged or enacted by spending money. Doesn't detract from my point though. This is still a humorous case of some over-credentialed nitwit at WaPo "discovering" what most educated children should be able to tell you about the rule of law.

On the contrary: the issue is that we are being encouraged to see this case as a moral injustice not based on any principle or law, but because the protagonist is portrayed sympathetically. If this were reported in a neutral tone of voice the story would be simple: guy breaks law, fails to pay fine, goes to jail.

I wasn't trying to make any argument, but if you want one, I guess it's this: that in a nation ruled by law, adults who vote for laws and punishments in the abstract ought to be mature enough to face the fact that there are hard consequences.

The writer wants to denounce the lawful punishment, but imply that it's caused by racism or something, so that he doesn't have to stake his credibility on arguing for a change to the law. This kind of sob-story approach is used by those who do not respect the danger of law, are willing to vote for anything that sounds "nice", and want someone else to be blamed for the downsides.

It's always amazing to watch modern-day "educated" New York liberals discover things that every 12-year-old with a basic education in civics understood 100 years ago.

The lesson of this article: Government has only one means to carry out its policies: force (more precisely, threat of force). When you vote for a new tax or fine (cough Obamacare cough) you are voting for rough men with guns to take stubborn objectors away to prison. Period.

This is at the heart of the libertarian argument: government should be used cautiously, and the default position should always be not to impose a law unless you're sure that force is justifiable and necessary.

[Romans 7:14] For we know that the law is spiritual; but I am carnal, sold under sin. [15] For that which I work, I understand not. For I do not that good which I will; but the evil which I hate, that I do. [16] If then I do that which I will not, I consent to the law, that it is good. [17] Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. [18] For I know that there dwelleth not in me, that is to say, in my flesh, that which is good. For to will, is present with me; but to accomplish that which is good, I find not. [19] For the good which I will, I do not; but the evil which I will not, that I do. [20] Now if I do that which I will not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.

Democracy is when the people can replace the government if they don't like the way it governs. What we're seeing in Europe and the US these days is that government is trying to replace the people because it doesn't like the way they vote. The unfettered-immigration and amnesty-for-illegals movements on both continents are direct attacks on democracy by governments that think they can get more money or power with a different set of voters. I don't know if anything quite like this has happened before... did the Greeks even have a word for it?

I always pray for a blizzard on election day. When there's bad weather, a lot of the low-information types who are only voting because they want the "I voted!" sticker, will stay home. At least that's my theory.

Years and years ago there was some talk of having a "postage stamp-like" fee to send and receive e-mails. Enforced by the recipient's server, I guess. That way spam and low-quality memo-writing would be discouraged. Instead of monetary points it could be karma points or something. This didn't go anywhere 10 years ago, but maybe the time is ripe for it now. People are a lot more comfortable with micropayments and there's a lot better infrastructure for the necessary communication/negotiation between sender's and recipients' email.

The article said the father is outspoken against (presumably imaginary) anti-Islamic policies.

You may not know this, but Sudan is ruled by its Muslim, Arab north and is often quite happy to enslave or murder the black Christians in its south. Hardly a model of an anti-Islamist republic.

So... kid with an Arabic name, whose father is a belligerent Islamist known to the townspeople to rail against imagined anti-Muslim racists in the town square, shows up at school with a homemade electronic device with a timer on the front of it. He takes someone's bad advice to conceal it under his clothing, and walks into a classroom where it starts beeping.

I think reasonable people can understand why the police might have been called.

It was of course unreasonable for the police to have actually arrested the boy, once they found out what they were dealing with. Reading between the lines though, maybe the article's use of "arrested" just means they took the kid home to his parents.

Maybe try to "sell" it to a donor, that is, apply for a grant to do it as a public good.

I think I've seen something like this before...

I would predict that I'll never drive one of those deathtraps either!

If the car is driven by a computer at Google, then it can be "hijacked" by the computer. A few years after mandating that everybody have self-driving cars, the argument will be that certain roads don't need to be in the system because there's far too little traffic. After that, it'll be argued that Google should be able to divert you away from certain areas of town where there's been high traffic or other hazards, without asking you. Then it'll be argued that the government can mandate certain routes in order to preserve the environment or some such excuse. Then it'll be seen as entirely reasonable that all auto "routes" be managed by city planners who want to control noise, pollution, etc, for your own good. It'll be incremental.

Fortunately, as you say, there are still a majority of sane people who vote in the USA. Will that still be true a generation later?

Not a reasonable comparison. You might as well have said "you have to BUY a car, so it's not FREE". Yes, you have to buy, register the car, and learn how to use it, and obey the laws of the road. But they allow a kind of mobility that is impossible for Europeans and other jelly-kneed metrosexual weenies to enjoy. Owners of cars don't have to organize our lives around where train stations are located or anyone else's schedule.

Driverless cars, on the other hand, aim to "tame" the automobile and make it a kind of mini-train, with someone else deciding where you may go and how you may get there. Google is already creepy enough without handing over your freedom (and privacy) of movement to their computer.

Cars give you the freedom to go anywhere, any time, without having to file a plan or ask permission from the government or from Google. You want to give up that freedom in exchange for a little safety? Go ahead, but a lot of people will never be converted.

Cars give us freedom. The reason that technocrats love "self-driving" cars is the same reason they love trains of all kinds: it means that "the system" controls who may go where, and when. A lot of us are skeptical of self-driving cars because a lot of their advocates want the next step to be banning private citizens from driving, which you've just confirmed, thanks.

And here come the technocrats ready to say "let's ban driving and make driverless cars mandatory"...

I saw one in the Air and Space Museum just this summer. Your tax dollars at work, America.

The change in elevators was from having a professional operator to allowing passengers to push the buttons themselves. Elevators are still "driven" by humans, not robots. The self-driving cars are a whole different ball of wax.

In real life, the "regular government" is Germany itself, so, there's no conflict. The victim has no recourse except to try to get his family out of the country and seek asylum. (This is really happening to Christians in Germany, by the way, I didn't make it up.) I'm just asking for what sort of thing you envision a digital citizenship/NGO/union would do. Hold a protest? Threaten a strike? And how do you enforce solidarity among the ranks if a lot of your German members share the government's attitude about Christians, for example?