“Which is all to say that another piece of flagrant nonsense has ascended to the highest levels of U.S. politics and media. To call it a conspiracy theory would be far too kind, because no comprehensive theory has been floated to explain the pattern of events. But then, even the phrase pattern of events is imprecise, because there is no pattern here at all. Given all the people who could have been roped into this narrative but weren’t, any hope of finding meaning falls away. Barring any dramatic new disclosures, the mystery of the missing scientists has the dubious honor of being a sham in every way at once.”

Excerpt From
“The ‘Missing-Scientist’ Story Is Unbelievably Dumb”
Daniel Engber
The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/sc...

I guess the project is 20 years old, but I drove one of the first Street View cars in the summer of 2007 — 18 years ago. I was in the second batch to go out. Drove every other day from sun up to sun down for months. It put calluses on my steering wheel hand. I quickly listened to my entire iTunes library on my 80GB iPod. Started churning through books on tape. You cannot imagine how many flat tires we got. The first cars were cheap Chevy Cobalts. As one of my supervisors said, "It's a $10,000 car with $20,000 of computer equipment in it." We recorded everything on to hard drives (there was a giant box of them in the trunk) and when we had filled up the case we'd just ship it back to California. At the time, conventional internet could not get that much data there faster. We had a display in the cab that would show us where we had been and what roads had been recorded, but we literally just drove around in circles (concentric, expanding circles) because the map on the screen was unbelievably bad. The first maps were based on public records, and public records were wildly bad depending on the location. I found a "road" on the map that was through a 100-year-old cemetary. There were entire subdivisions on the map that didn't actually exist and entire subdivisions that did exist that weren't on the map. We were under strict orders not to talk about it to anybody except cops that pulled us over and wanted to know why we were so weird. On my very last day as a driver, I was sitting on the side of the road at a far-off location waiting for the sun to rise high enough (we had to drive where we were going to start for the day, and then start driving a half-hour after sunrise). A cop pulled up behind me, flashed his lights, came up to my window and said, "Is that the Google Street View car?" I gave him a tour.

I don't know why Allstate needs to track it. I'm from Kansas and my wife is from Oklahoma, and all of I-35 is just normal people driving reasonable speeds and Texans in large vehicles going 125mph past them. Being from Texas *should* cost you more because even if you're not driving like that, you're on the road with lunatics constantly. Allstate's program is opt-in. You get a discount if you do, so maybe "bribe-in" is more accurate. But if people are opting in, great. That's their choice. If the data is showing oh-my-god-does-anyone-enforce-speed-limits-there then that's another thing.

I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR NEW AI OVERLORDS. How dare Apple snub the coming apocalypse of all its glory?! (h3lp)

Iâ(TM)m also a lifetime Apple user, and I used MacOS X Server on a box back in 2013 and used it for a couple of years ⦠that said, Iâ(TM)m not sure it offers anything so special that I canâ(TM)t just homebrew the rest.

The new model is so small that you will not be able to put your monitor on top of it. It's only 5" by 5" — almost 3" x 3" smaller than the older ones. I don't know what your home servers are connected to, but you'd have to rearrange your whole setup for the radically smaller form factor anyway.

Cleary the breakthrough we need is to just figure out how to use humans as organic batteries.

1. a) You're assuming that Davies is trying to upset people when it seems that what he is doing is celebrating people who are not often celebrated. If one feels personally attacked by someone else getting the attention, then one is seriously immature. 1b) The show is for children, who paradoxically aren't as immature about seeing people who aren't like themselves. Children themselves are not as set in stone about what "normal" is — particularly not sexual identity — and therefore do not think anything is particularly weirder than anything else. It's gross when everyone's parents' kiss, for example. 1c) This back-door "go woke, go broke" argument is widely and easily discredited as conservative wishful thinking (with a rhyming scheme).

2. If Doctor Who's original mission was science education, that was lost in the mix in the first season. As a fan since the 1970s, I can say that it's basically always been anti-fascist science fiction, and there's a reason the Dalek creators (the Kaled) dressed like Nazis. There was a line in the latest special where the Doctor corrected Ruby that what he was doing was a science and she countered with a paraphrasing of Arthur C Clarke: sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

3. This is not where it gets fun. What about this show turned you into a progressive 40 years ago? Watching white people run around with other white people doing white things in white London? Was it the overtly sexist way that Leela paraded around in a leather skirt or was it episodes of the overtly racist Talons of Weng-Chiang? Did you feel included by the space virus trying to eat the Doctor's mind in "The Invisible Enemy"?

4. Every one of your examples of the Doctor giving up power that he did not actually want in the first place. That's not sacrifice. That's power brokering. He doesn't want to be president of the Time Lords — and living on Gallifrey — because he wants to run off and do his own thing. Running off was what he wanted to do, and if he was sacrificing he'd do what he didn't want to do for the sake of others. Donna, as you noted, did, in fact, give up something she wanted. Not wanting it means it's not a sacrifice. It's OK to regret sacrifice even though you know you'd do it again. And recognizing that is not a sign of brain damage.

5. (You wrote a second 4 after calling people stupid, but I'll call it 5 for you.) The idea of justice has always evolved, and it evolves faster now. There was a time when it was OK to own other people. It is now considered a bad thing. Freeing enslaved people used to be a criminal act; now it is considered at the very least justice to capture someone who enslaves people and put them in prison. That's just an easy example that you can't argue with. In America when Doctor Who first aired 60 years ago, some people considered it perfectly acceptable in many states to have racially segregated public spaces — places where Blacks weren't allowed to use the same water fountains and public pools. Places where they had to enter through the back door so they wouldn't be seen by white customers. The thing that pisses off right-wingers about changing the notion of justice is that it often moves the goalposts to put them on the losing side of things. If your great grandpa thought Black people should sit at the back of the bus if they were going to be on it at all, then he gets made to be on the wrong side of modern thinking. And he gets mad about it. And he thinks how much better it used to be in the old days. In the old days he was happy and didn't have to consider other people's feelings. He didn't have to worry about Justice because it was whatever he thought it was at exactly that time and how dare *they* change it around him. Of course, what has happened is that the cruelty of the status quo has been reveled to enough people that they have said "actually, let's not behave that way anymore because of observable outcomes of that behavior." And, collectively, eventually, the notion of justice changes over time. Now imagine a Time Lord being slightly ahead of you on that curve.

"I personally selected these images of violence and power to represent myself. How dare you judge me by the things I chose to project to people!" Dude. If you don't want people to think your a violent showboater, don't pin images like that on your sleeve. You've said that you think it's

To paraphrase Maya Angelou: when someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time.

What you are talking about is not superficial image stuff. It is a choice you've made about representing yourself to strangers on the street. It's easily removed by you if you don't want people leaping to conclusions. I don't have any bumper stickers (except for my kids' elementary school sticker) on my Honda CRV. What stereotypes to people draw from that? That I have children. End of conclusions.

You've more or less said here that you believe that you are confident that you can stand up for your views. But really you just keep coming back to "bullies are only bullies based on their interactions" but you aren't understanding that the way you present yourself in society is in fact an interaction itself. Telegraphing association with a group known for higher rates of aggravated assault and domestic violence is one way to intimidate people and basically just bully them at a distance.

Well, if youâ(TM)re self-identifying as a bully and have all the signs of being a bully and a little flock of nerds hiding under your wing for protection from other bullies, youâ(TM)re still a bully. And no, I would not want to room with you, because youâ(TM)d be insufferable. Could I debate you about anything? Sure. Do I want to? No.

No, that's not what that translates to at all. It means that when one person or a group of people is aggressive and threatening, other people really would rather not interact with them. So when you slap a Punisher decal and a bunch of pro-gun stickers on the back of your Ford F-250 modified to roll coal, no body wants to talk to you about what kind of an idiot you are because it's just not pleasant. Anonymously, they'd be more likely to confront your ideas because of the lack of threatening posture. But it has nothing to do with a confidence in standing up for ideas. It has a lot to do with just generally not wanting to have to engage in that level of conflict. I had a guy threaten to kill me and my family because I had the audacity to suggest that trans people were just people. I can stand there all day and debate the merits of his ideas, but when lives are threatened then it's not really a debate anymore. It is, at that point, an interaction that is designed to make me hesitant to engage with people like him in the future. He doesn't want an exchange of ideas. So all his general war paint goes into a mental bucket of "don't engage if you don't have to."

I wouldn't dorm with him in college. Not because I am unconfident in my ability to stand up for different ideas, but because that guy is a jackass. I simply wouldn't want to live with that. And I wouldn't wan to live with someone who puts on the same social war paint as him, either.

71% of Bullies said they would dorm with a Nerd, but only 38% of Nerds said that they would dorm with a Bully. Nerds are more likely to say that "most or all of their friends have similar views."

Yeah, almost. There's certainly a bias in Republican circles towards group think and appeals to authority, but Democrats tend to herd like cats. It would follow that Republicans —particularly those told that they are talking to another Republican —would change their individual position more easily. And, also, American politics is skewed waaaaaaay to the right to the point that it is pretty hard to reasonably move someone further right.

If it can afford to fire someone and give them $80 million, it can spend "tens of millions" to prove that it's doing its job.
https://qz.com/1783658/boeings...