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anon2775

Re:Why Do Hospitals Hate Sleep So Much? on Wednesday December 05, 2018 @12:34AM (#18605899)
When I was at the Stanford cardiac unit last, they let me sleep. That wasn't the problem but they had a problem giving me privacy: door wide open, curtain wide open.
Re:Exorcisms Are Gaining Popularity in the U.S. on Wednesday December 05, 2018 @12:25AM (#18605870)
Cults and other extreme forms of magical thinking take root whenever survival seems difficult. Chris Hedges' latest book delves into paths to anomie, self-destruction and insanity that are more likely as a civilization crumbles and slowly cannibalizes itself into oblivion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

Also note that Telegram and WhatsApp are insecure and horrible. I would use Signal, OTR and maybe iMessage if you trust the Apple bean-counter-turned-CEO.

Get your Clipper chips! Steaming hot Clipper chips! Chocked full of vitamins, backdoors and laughably lazy intelligence agency bungling!
Re:Refusal after Refusal on Monday December 03, 2018 @11:02PM (#18596111)
The word "literally" is misused, unnecessary and annoying.
Re:Refusal after Refusal on Monday December 03, 2018 @11:00PM (#18596103)
It sounds like a recipe for anticholinergic, Parkinsonian-like tremors, nausea, vertigo, sweating and other dysfunctions.
The 1% don't care how money is made (who it kills or destroys the planet) so long that it flows. An existential threat from externalities is just another new inelastic market to exploit.
Re:The World's Most Efficient Languages (2016) on Saturday December 01, 2018 @08:56PM (#18580292)
0. Take all concepts, modifiers and verbs

1. Make a histogram of their usage

2. Huffman encode them based on what sounds/inflections/etc. are easiest to make and most distinct

3. Add an ECC syllable to each word or phrase

4. Set straightforward, simple semantic rules so that it's mechanical, obvious and unambiguous

Relish in the glory of the next Esperanto.

Re:The Making Of Dust (2003) on Saturday December 01, 2018 @08:46PM (#18580256)
We played the beta and first release of CS in college (UCD). Ah the memories of AWP and skywalking (jumping up on crates with aid of a buddy and walking on top of the map's bounding box "sky").
Yes. What's missing from modern life is somewhat intended by corporations and the political elite: the atomizing of people from each other via glowing screens and burning down of community that churches functioned to anchor people together. The multitude of consequences are loneliness, isolation, friendlessness, depression, anxiety and more suicidal than ever. I'm not arguing magical thinking in any form has any inherent value, but the caring about each other and the social commonwealth collectivism, empathy and support it provided are indispensable to sane, decent, good and successful people. The charity, forgiveness and nonviolent disobedience by deed part of many traditional religous traditions embody virtues that to most are inherently inspirational, noble and provide the foundation of civilization as functional, decent and possessing integrity. If we let society devolve into Orwellian, Kafkaesque, social Darwinism, then feudalism, inverted or outright totalitarianism, bullshit and brutality will comprise the primary palette of the social contract.
Many organizations are in dire need of departmental NAT firewalls and VPN solutions. I had to beg, bitch and moan before a Pac10 uni would offer such a service to protect our users.
Re:Google rescinds candidate verbal offer due to low GPA on Friday November 30, 2018 @11:06PM (#18575073)
Yup. I have a horrible GPA due to a bunch of personal and disability stuff but they never look at it due to experience. If they did, I wouldn't want to work somewhere that favors GPA and/or nonsense certifications. In fact when I hire, I measure candidates inversely proportionate to their list of certs.
Re:How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes on Thursday November 29, 2018 @11:12PM (#18566605)
It's important to both suspend disbelief to enjoy fiction from reality and take fiction with a big grain of salt that it's often missing considerations of reality. It's when people confuse and conflate fiction with reality minus critical thinking that hobgoblins of the mind get let loose to draw unrealistic conclusions.

Reality and fiction slightly intersect as a fuzzy Venn diagram, to a degree, but their more often echoes of imagination than of experience.

Re:Starting a Business in Silicon Valley on Thursday November 29, 2018 @11:08PM (#18566588)
Where to eat, University Ave PA:

- Cafe 220 $

- Oren's Hummus $$

- Crepevine $$

- Il Fornaio $$$

- Coupa Cafe $$

- Local 271 $$

- Sprout $$

- Madera $$$$ (Sand Hill Rd)

Man-bod approved.

Re:Deputy AG calling for encryption backdoor on Thursday November 29, 2018 @10:59PM (#18566556)
Hello? It's 1993 calling. Will you buy these discontinued NSA Clipper chips?

No. phreak'n. way. Sunshine.

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

Glorified Tweet.
Re:Tracking China's Muslim Gulag on Thursday November 29, 2018 @05:56PM (#18564962)
Satellite imagery from a BBC investigation

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/China_hidden_cam...

Estimated mass: 1.51e10 kg - heavier than the Great Pyramid of Giza but lighter than the Three Gorges Dam

(4/3) * pi * (213/2 [m])^3 * 3 [g/cm^3]

Mean diameter: 213m

Kinetic energy is 0.5 * m * v^2, so figure 10 [km/s] which works out to 7.59e17 [J] or 181 MT of KE total. The airburst is around the square root of that, so 13.5 MT.

If it hit just right, it would be big enough to wipe out a large city metropolitan area. The odds of it hitting at all aren't that great.

Postscript: There ought to be a scifi weapon that flings pyramids.

Re:Strange earthquake waves rippled around Earth on Thursday November 29, 2018 @02:17AM (#18558636)
Long period waves and their decay signature makes me suspect "water hammering" of a large volume of magma came to an abrupt stop inside a magma chamber or tube.
Re:Capitalism, Socialism or a hybrid? on Thursday November 29, 2018 @02:07AM (#18558613)
Balance the competing tyrannies

- individual / majority

- class

- age

- ability

- and many more

The messy reality of balancing interests tends not to fit to any impossibly idealistic -ism, but somewhere in the middle between the unworkable utopian extreme goal-posts of libertarian-anarchism and communism. Call it democratic socialism or socialism, what works seems to be a hybrid of many ideals.

Find out more: Economic Updates by Richard Wolff on YT

On average, Dutch farmers tend to use the least water per mass of product sold.
No, it's not.

1. Latent VZV causes shingles in later life; a horrible, painful, debilitating condition.

2. It's a signal of intentionally creating other unnecessary, preventable epidemics of treatable, disfiguring and deadly diseases.

This is clickbait based on old news. The MTA hired an unconventional transportation turn-around guru. It's going to take time to make things better.
Re:Sigrid Johnson Was Black. A DNA Test Said She Wasn’t on Tuesday November 20, 2018 @11:55PM (#18500239)
Everyone who's family has lived in North America for more than a few generations has at least some of both European and African ancestry. This means, that of these people, "black" Americans have European ancestors, and "white" nationalist Americans have African ancestors. We're all mutts, there's no "pure" anyone... just pure human.

Ancedotally: I'm an SAR member with non-tanning skin but have European, African and Asian/native American genes.

The conclusions: races are illusions and racism is completely idiotic. There are bigger things to worry about or look down on than which flavor of human a person ticks checkboxes for identity politics games.

Questions: Let's be honest, what is "diversity?" And then, why do organizations claim to be diverse when they either hire people that all look like them or hire only people that think or believe as do they? Isn't that the opposite of "diversity," but exclusive monoculture or groupthink?

Disclaimer: I barely survived the Camp Fire, with all the credit to our neighbors for letting us know.

That's a chick-little, strawman and blame-the-victim argument. The issues are:

1. PGE likely started the fire. They should be held responsible for this specific incident, not passing the buck to ratepayers or anyone else.

2. PGE is corrupting and coopting liability when it needs to pay the penalties for its actions, not pass the buck. This is separate from 1. because it indicates a greater decay of liability and they're insulating themselves to gradually become an untouchable mafia.

3. In order to get 2., removing SIG, PAC and large private monies, and all those who benefit from them, from politics is imperative.

4. Paradise is a tiny town that doesn't do a very good job with code enforcement. My mom had to mobilize the neighbors to get an abandoned propery's owner to mow their 7 ft tall, dried weeds and remove fire other hazards like an abandoned house with a tree crashed through it, but then the institutionalized owner later allowed a random tree-trimmer to dump dozens of piles of pine sawdust and logs on that property. SMH.

5. "Regulations" aren't an uniform obelisk to scapegoat that you implied. One regulation maybe advantageous or harmful uniquely to each and every affected group, depending. So don't even start spreading the tired, libertarian, utopian refrains like "If only there were no regulations, markets solve everything," which is utter horseshit. Regulations can and do work but only if the governed demand it and refuse to allow the rich and their corporations to have their way.

It's the POLR for most former/current homeowners to move to where professional town managers exist rather than deal with small-town incompetence like the bumblers in Paradise or Butte's Sheriff Kory's flimsy excuse for not activating the EAS, which likely caused the needless deaths of hundreds of disabled and elderly people.

I heard about a mayor from there at one time, nobody's ever heard of him because they were too busy showing empty podiums. ;)
24 hour donut shops: I've seen them baking all night and morning. It's a rough business.
Czech Post

https://goo.gl/maps/txNY4VB7Pfz

Is that the right one?

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