lake99

You covered both points, gerrymandering and (sectarian) identity politics. I don't think there is a better or worse here. They both suck in their own unique ways. But I agree that India is more democratic than the US. We have many parties to choose from.

Direct democracy is not a solution either. That will lead us straight to the tyranny of the majority. The religious and intellectual minorities will suffer straight-away. I won't elaborate on that. Next, it will be the wealthy. What would stop the illiterate majority from voting to take away all the wealth of the 1%?

The only way out I see is with the Supreme Court taking drastic measures to clean up the constitution. I don't see that happening in our lifetimes.

It's a common occurrence on /r/India. The amount of habitual downvoting I have seen there, I have not seen on other general-interest forums.

I agree there, and lacking any concrete data, it's better to not pass off opinion or speculation as fact.

For quite a lot of the sectarian violence, I blame the government and the political parties for having policies that favour some castes over others, and for being soft on sectarian violence. Moreover we, in the middle class, who lead lives far away from politics, are largely isolated from these shenanigans.

> which is obviously testing for a different kind of unconscious bias altogether.

No, the control group for that would be men who have, as you put it, "stereotypical 'camp' gay man accent", i.e. similarly qualified men who happen to naturally sound like this.

> One of the arguments against mass surveillance is that it is blatant intrusion of privacy

That argument does not hold under the current constitution of India. Under the guise of one threat or another (terrorists, corruption, protection of classes of people) the government has nullified all our rights. On the one hand the government is quite open about its maliciousness. On the other hand, unlike the First World governments, the government is honest about the rights it grants us. We don't have a situation where the constitution guarantees something, and the law enforcement agencies violate it.

The bottom line: if you care about your privacy, don't depend on the government, wherever you are.

Quite a few apps on Linux depend on Python as their go-to extensions/plugins language. Here is a small sample

    nearly all the system config GUIs relased by Redhat
    inkscape
    quodlibet
    csound
    ntop
    samba
    ranger
    libreoffice (but this supports a few other languages)

Try to run any modern Linux distro and tell me how far you get without installing Python.

> It is unusual for a police officer to incriminate himself.

I don't know how the system works, but from what I have learnt from TV & movies, I guess took the deal to confess, in exchange for a lighter sentence.

> If Hicks hadn't incriminated himself, it sounds like there was no evidence to support Blacks claims.

We already know Black was locked up, bruised, and who his arresting officers were. I seriously doubt if Hicks testified out of the goodness of his heart.

That didn't work either. Apparently, it has something to do with Tor Browser, where it didn't work although I enabled JS. Pasting worked fine on another browser.

If the author is reading this, I wish he'd do this for copy-pasted text too. I tried pasting some text from Apple's website, and it did nothing.

Both, you and cuddlybacon are right. A long time ago, they worked under the assumption that the FS is case-sensitive, and all the games I installed back then had title-cased folder names. Gradually, Valve stopped caring about this, and my games stopped working. I had to go in and manually change some game folder names to lower-case. It then kept some small files under SteamApps and the downloaded games under steamapps. They have fixed that now. Now, I have both CONFIG and config in my Steam folder.

How would it work? By a combination of magic and "we can't be bothered; the users should figure out something".

Are you sure you want to publicize your home address?

I am close to your age, and I have always called it "O-S-ecks" because I hate roman numbers (there's a book that I call D-S-M-eye-vee) and because "O-S-ex ten point nine" sounds better than the alternative.

> called "liberal" dominantly for some decades, some adopted the moniker "progressive" when it was perceived that the right had created bad associations with "liberal" a few decades ago

This is not supported by history in any way. This wikipedia article [1] is a good place to start. There are other explanations on Quora [2] [3]. These are not primary sources, but they have the relevant references.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism_in_the_United_State...

[2] https://www.quora.com/When-did-the-term-liberalism-come-to-d...

[3] https://www.quora.com/How-did-it-come-to-be-that-in-the-USA-...

Your post confuses me, no offense intended. Friedman and Hayek called themselves liberals, not conservatives. The American progressive movement co-opted the word "liberalism". Before that, they called themselves "progressives". Is that what you're looking for?

Todd8's comment below confuses me for the same reason. Rawls could be considered to be on the US-left. The other people he mentioned, except Gross and Levitt, all opposed Rawls, and called themselves "liberals".

No, on this very page, we seem to have a couple of Australians and a few Europeans, expressing how these terms mean something else in their countries. I don't know how South Americans use these terms, but I expect them to be closer to the European sense.

> in the rest of the world is rather to the right of centre

I find "rest of the world" hard to justify. The Indian right-wing are Hindu hardliners, but economically not all that different from the "center-left" INC, both of which, are IMO, way more left-wing than the US Democratic party when it comes to economics. Socially, all parties here pander to their regional (as opposed to national) voterbases. The Pakistani right-wing also seems to oppose economic liberalism (i.e. capitalism). Looking beyond this region, each country seems to have its own "left-right" divide, while not sharing much in the ideology of another country's "left-right" divide.

Anarcho-capitalists advocate private courts and private enforcement, but that is impossible (at least for cases like this one) to put into practice when an existing government has already established a monopoly on this. Unless the government is abolished, using its facilities is a perfectly reasonable way to settle conflicts. Not only that, in some cases, using government facilities becomes mandatory, whatever your political beliefs. For example, if someone gets murdered in his house, and he is the sole witness, he is bound by law to report it. (At least, this is how I understand the law.)

I think they complement each other. Gimp is probably powerful, but I by the time I figure out how to do something, I forget what I was trying to do in the first place. Krita is easy to use, but can't do SVG. And Inkscape is still the best for SVG.

I remember running FVWM quite comfortably back then on 16MB. I dual-booted with Windows 95, which also ran quite smoothly.

No, they are not interested enough to care about version upgrades, but they do want to keep running the latest apps and games. This was a real problem until Kitkat came along. These days, app developers seem to be aiming for a minimum of Kitkat, so users who don't upgrade don't suffer as much.

I blame customers too, but for a different reason. I only reward manufacturers for devices that are well-represented on Cyanogenmod. Granted, someone like my mom has no hope of installing Cyanogenmod on her own, given that she knows nothing of Google or Android. But as long as people have friends or family to help them out with technical matters, they only have themselves to blame for devices whose software quickly go stale.

I doubt it. Judging by history, it's more likely they'll demand access to all that data.

It's too late for me to fix my comment. I'll tone it down next time.

> and learn what's up there during the seasons.

That's a good point.

I haven't used binoculars myself, so I wouldn't know whether to recommend it or not. But generally, when people ask me, I drive them in the direction of learning as much as they can before buying specialized equipment.

> The OP is of the former type: before you go there and photograph, first take time and enjoy the simple, dark sky.

Contrast that with what I wrote:

> 1. Install an astronomy app on your mobile phone. Start with free ones, and see where it leads you. I recommend Skeye. This is good for going out by yourself and looking up things you see in the sky.

Please don't make assumptions about me. For the record, my photographs are not for the social media. They are for me. I did not post any of my own here.

With the author's method, one might get to see M31 as a gray fuzz after they acquire a 10" telescope. With my method, they get to see M31 with a fair bit of color, when it is viewable at their location. While it's fine to go the author's route if that's what satisfies them, the reason I have such little regard for the author is his arrogance about a field that he is completely ignorant of. A beginner learning from just his article would walk away with a distorted sense of the field. I'd advice learning from someone who is more well-rounded.

> The advice not to do astrophotography is meant for the beginner.

My advice is meant for the beginner as well. All the other things you pointed out, well, you need to learn those things for astrophotography, even if you don't have a telescope. Given how many of us have DSLRs, this is something we can start today.

> He essentially advises you not to take part in a tech arms race as a beginner.

I did not advice getting into the arms race either. My advice was on getting started for free. But here's the thing. I did not ignore recent advances in hardware and software (i.e. cameras, smartphones, apps).

Compare the simulated picture of M31 in the article and the one shot with a 50mm kit lens: http://petapixel.com/2014/07/30/sony-a7s-astrophotography-re.... One can do much better with lenses that go to 200mm, which the stock zoom lens on some cameras already do.

If you make huge investments on viewing equipment and try to get into astrophotography later on, it might turn out that your equipment is completely unsuitable. Ignore it at your own peril.

I did start with a ~50mm lens, but without a tracker. My camera can do up to 30s auto exposures, but those exhibit star trails at 50mm. I limit myself to 10s-15s exposures, and shoot a few hundred of them. The stars move, but the stacker (I use deepskystacker.free.fr) aligns them before stacking them. Though I'll add that DSS has a pretty steep learning curve of its own.

I agree that a beginner can't jump into astrophotography with a telescope. I'm of the opinion that learning with a camera and a tripod will teach a beginner to have reasonable expectations.

It's not. If you have a decent camera and clear skies, you can begin learning now, and have something half decent by the end of the night. Additional investment: 0$. Most important, remember that this article is an opinion piece. There are other (IMO, better) opinions.

The advice here seems dated, even for 2015. Here's my advice:

1. Install an astronomy app on your mobile phone. Start with free ones, and see where it leads you. I recommend Skeye. This is good for going out by yourself and looking up things you see in the sky. For a PC, Stellarium is the best I have seen.

2. Get a camera capable of taking long exposure RAW photos, and get a tripod. There is so much hidden within the range of our FOV, that a telescope or binoculars are overkill. You'll use the camera for other things, so that won't be a special-nights-only investment. A basic DSLR should be fine, though I am curious about how well generic travel-zoom cameras do. If you have such a camera already, and played around with it, let me know.

Telescopes come after this stage.

> What about Astrophotography?

> Don't.

Sorry, this is shitty advice. His friend blew thousands of dollars on the hobby. I didn't.

> and untold thousands of rejected images

In the days of DSLRs? That's like saying I'm no good at computer games because of all the "bullets" that didn't hit my intended target. Lame. To put it bluntly.

> 8) Avoid any thoughts of astrophotography.

Fuck off.

> Nonetheless it's pretty typical for loan words to keep rules like this from the source language

I wouldn't even know of the japanese rules to "keep" when pluralizing "emoji". Apart from that, as an city-dwelling Indian, quite a lot of our language borrows words from English and Hindi when we are not speaking either of these languages. The rules are always that of the target language, rather than the source language.