As far as I can tell the incrementalist argument goes like this:
- The two-party system is destroying the country.
- But one of the two parties will destroy democracy imminently, so we have to vote for the lesser evil this time, and then,
- …
As far as I can tell the incrementalist argument goes like this:
Indeed, in the boating world, the words are “stand-on” or “burdened” vessel, which makes it clear that the vessel that should continue its course has the obligation to do so under the collision regulations. The “give way” vessel should alter its course or intentions to “keep clear.” Nobody — nobody! — has the “right of way.”
Nah, like 50% of it is just telling people to restart their computers.
Seriously. Saying “we’re fucking morons” for being surprised by the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center might be hyperbole, except the same group tried the same thing in 1993! They were just bad at it. Instead of being a KIND OF A REALLY BIG HINT, that incident just kind of disappeared down the memory hole.
Salt is a preservative, so salted butter will last quite a lot longer when unrefrigerated.
Scenario: I want to call a friend in Bulgaria. It’s 11:23AM GMT. What’s he likely to be doing right now? With timezones, I can quickly calculate that it’s 2:23PM local time, and intuitively know. Without, I’d have to look up a timetable of daily activities in Sofia.
I guess if I called regularly, I could memorize the timetable, or maybe roughly calculate an offset in hours to add or subtract from GMT to intuitively relate his schedule to mine. For example, my dinner time is about 11PM GMT, so his dinner time is about 7AM GMT.
But, I wonder, if I went there to visit, would it be easier to memorize the local timetable, or just do the math when I check the time?
I would make the written English language 100% phonetic.
Nobody speaks written English, so how do we know it’s not already phonetic?
Well, the chief of police in my city did this (accidental discharge of gun in the oven) once, so make of that what you will. He did have the integrity to discipline himself, per department policy.
Almost literally true, which is why it makes a great response to OP’s question.
Oh, hell, classes just resumed at the university here, so the new batch of freshmen is here, and some days I feel like it. But I don’t count the Cold War as a war, just like the Holy Roman Empire wasn’t holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.
Yes, that’s what I see, that’s clearly what he’s doing. The difference is that in 2016, he was able to retain in long-term memory what didn’t work, and had the mental flexibility to try out new bits to find things that did. Now, he keeps going back to the same dry well over and over again, in every speech, which is evidence that he’s losing it. (As further evidence, I’d point out that this is consistent with the amount of time it took him to grasp that he wasn’t running against Biden anymore.)
When I was born, the United States wasn’t involved in a war.
Reminds me of an old Yakov Smirnoff routine. Espresso powder makes espresso, and milk powder makes milk. So what does baby powder make?
Hamas is Israel.
Case-sensitive is easier to implement; it’s just a string of bytes. Case-insensitive requires a lot of code to get right, since it has to interpret symbols that make sense to humans. So, something over wondered about:
That’s not hard for ASCII, but what about Unicode? Is the precomposed ç treated the same lexically and by the API as Latin capital letter c + combining cedilla? Does the OS normalize all of one form to the other? Is ß the same as SS? What about alternate glyphs, like half width or full width forms? Is it i18n-sensitive, so that, say, E and É are treated the same in French localization? Are Katakana and Hiragana characters equivalent?
I dunno, as a long-time Unix and Linux user, I haven’t tried these things, but it seems odd to me to build a set of character equivalences into the filesystem code, unless you’re going to do do all of them. (But then, they’re idiosyncratic and may conflict between languages, like how ö is its letter in the Swedish alphabet.)
That’s true, but our theory of physics is far more complex than those simple patterns. It actually consists of many, many interrelated theories that mutually reinforce each other. And that so many of them describe phenomena described with c as a term strongly indicates the speed of causality of pretty fundamental.
In any case, I’d be very interested to learn how it shakes out, but I probably won’t be around in 300 years to do so!
Ah, but “major technological breakthroughs” != “major technological breakthroughs concerning faster-than-light travel”. Certainly, there will be more of the former in the next 300 years, but our understanding of physics precludes the latter.
The quality of our understanding of physics is proved by the technological advances that we’ve already made with it. Yes, we’re missing some major pieces, like how to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics (how to quantize gravity), but the problem that physicists face on this front is actually how stunningly well the Standard Model holds up, and has so far resisted attempts to break it. It’s highly unlikely that we’ll discover anything which completely upends the laws of physics as we know them.
Honestly, I feel like too many people have a cognitive bias from living in a time of unparalleled technological advancement. We’ve gone from, e.g. mechanical chronometers to calculate longitude on wooden vessels propelled by the wind to GPS-guided international flights in a historical blink of an eye. The pace of technological change even in living memory has been immense.
Not knowing how any of it works, it’s easy to think of it akin to magic, and to extrapolate from “18th century humans -> 21st century humans” to “21st century humans -> alien technology”. The catch is that this technological surge has come about because we’ve figured out how the physical universe works, not in spite of missing out on big chunks of potential knowledge.
All of our technology has plumbed the depths of our physical, scientific knowledge. The same physical knowledge that allows us to do wonders also shows us the limits, and provides the definitive answers as to why there’s not “alien technology” out there that would seem like magic to us.
Put another way, it would be really bonkers if the scientific knowledge that has enabled us to do so many practical things, like create tiny devices like the one I’m using to tap out a message, was somehow totally wrong.
There was a Republican chode here in Wisconsin who voted twice to prove that people could vote twice. (The clerks caught his double vote, and he got prosecuted.)
Proposed reform measure: Just like teachers have to buy classroom supplies out-of-pocket, have police officers buy their own ammo.