My taste buds disagree that this is “unfortunate”.

Censorship sucks and I can’t believe we let an entire country get away with it and still did business with them the whole time.

It is not clear to me that the country would be less censored now and the people there better off if we had refused to do business with them.

(Just to be clear, I am not saying that we handled China as well as we could have over the last few decades, but hindsight is 20-20.)

I think that sometimes what happens to people is that they build the life that they implicitly believe they are “supposed” to be living because that is what they see everyone else around them doing, rather than based on an honest self-assessment of whether this really is the what will make them happy. When they realize that this life is not actually making them very unhappy, they look for outside factors to blame because they did everything that they were “supposed” to be doing so it could not have been their own misinformed choices that led them to this point.

And in fairness, no one chooses where they are born and the cultural conditioning that we receive, so this is not entirely their fault. It is really a societal problem that we do not encourage enough people to engage in true self-introspection to figure out for themselves what is important to them and what they want to get out of life so that they make these kinds of decisions with great deliberation and personal self-insight rather than taking the default option.

A Linuxponential curve!

Genuine question: does anyone actually use Vala for anything? I think that the idea of a language whose OOP system is native GObjects is a nifty one, but I have seen no evidence that it has caught on in any significant way.

Have you really not heard of it? It is a new architecture that is a bit better than x64_64.

I find the author’s writing style immature, sensationalist, and tiresome, but they raise a number of what appear to be solid points, some of which are highlighted above.

I tried reading the article and gave up because life is too short for me to read a tiresome article making points that aren’t even particularly that new.

So does that make the new name the undead name, and therefore like a zombie name?

The difference is that aether unraveled pretty quickly when we started seriously looking for it because experiments kept being outright inconsistent with what it was predicted we would see if it were there, whereas there are lots of independent lines of evidence that all point to the dark matter existing in the same page, so it really is not the same situation at all. The only problem with dark matter is that it doesn’t show up in our particle detectors (so far, at least), but there is no law of the universe that says that everything that exists has to.

It helps to realize that mass is just a bookkeeping label that we assign to the “internal” energy of a system, where the choice of what counts as being “internal” is somewhat arbitrary and depends on the level we are studying.

For example, if you measure the mass of the nucleus of some atom, and then compare your measurement to the sums of the masses of the protons and neutrons inside of it, then you will see that the numbers do not agree. The reason for this is that much of the mass of a nucleus is actually the energy of the strong force bonds holding the nucleons together.

But you can actually drop down another level. It turns out that the vast (~ 99%) majority of the mass in the proton in turn does not come from the quarks but from the energy of the gluon field holding them together.

And if you drop down yet another level, the quarks get their mass through their interactions with the Highs field.

So in short, it is energy all the way down.

I disagree; I think that we do care about it being popular enough that it incentivizes software and hardware vendors to support it rather than ignoring it.

I see a lot of enthusiasm here, and there is nothing wrong with that, but… am I the only one who actually found the movie to be kind of disappointing?

I’ve only met one other person that knew who/what Dvorak was/is, and also reportedly used that keyboard layout.

I experimented with it in University–I actually got a screwdriver and pried up and rearranged all of the keys on my keyboard within a week or so of starting–but after graduating I noticed that I was still slower at typing on Dvorak than I was on QWERTY so I gave up and changed back.

I can understand this view for early backers (I’m one of them) but what about people who decided to drop money on the game in the last 2 or even 5 years? Were they also scammed despite hundreds of articles about delays, issues and thousands of people yelling about a scam every time SC is mentioned?

Maybe, maybe not, but is entirely possible to be scammed while also being in a position where you should have known better; the two are not mutually incompatible.

The root of the problem is that you think of momentum as being defined to be the product of something’s mass and its velocity, but this is actually only an approximation that just so happens to work extremely well at our everyday scales; the actual definition of momentum is the spatial frequency of the wave function (which is like a special kind of distribution). Thus, because photons can have a spatial frequency, it follows simply that they therefore can have momentum.

Something else that likely contributes to your confusion is that you probably think that where something is and how fast it is going are two completely independent things, but again this is actually only an approximation; in actuality there is only one thing, the wave function, which is essentially overloaded to contain information both about position and momentum. Because you cannot pack two independent pieces of information into a single degree of freedom, it is not possible for position and momentum to be perfectly well defined at the same time, which is where the Heisenberg uncertainty principle comes from.

I’m not sure why anyone would think I meant ‘restrain’, but oh well.

The Bhagavad Gita spends a lot of time extolling the importance to spiritual life of controlling the senses with the goal of restraining them, and in particular this is a precept of the Krishna Consciousness cult.

Try reading before you down vote.

Speaking only for myself, what really threw me off was the following:

Apologies if you’ve already tried this or something similar, it doesn’t work for everyone, but I got mine back by using essential oils to restrain [emphasis mine] my olfactory system.

I think that if I’d realized that you meant to say “retrain” here instead of “restrain”, I would not have been so quick to initially dismiss it as obviously nonsense.

Horribly incompetent? No. Flawless, or even particularly prescient? No. They got a lot of big stuff right; they got a whole lot wrong.

So just to be clear: you think that this particular language was badly written because it is so easily bypassed?

If, as you say,

I’m unconcerned with how it was intended since that’s totally irrelevant to what it actually is.

Then why did you waste time describing what you believed was the intention behind it earlier when you said,

I think of it as a rhetorical flourish to emphasize the importance they placed on representing states rather than people.

Regardless, the other point that I made that you haven’t addressed still stands: they put that prohibition against banning the slave trade in there for a reason, and that reason was presumably not “as a rhetorical flourish”, so either the people who insisted that it be present were horribly incompetent at writing legal language that would preserve their own interests, or your personal opinion as to how Constitutional law works in this case is missing something important.

If the purpose of that clause were to restrict the kinds of laws that Congress can pass instead of the kinds of amendments that are allowed, then why does it appear in Article V, which relates to amendments, rather than Article I, which relates to Congress?