I just watched it on my Roku3, and I have to say I really enjoyed it. Hopefully it will get enough votes for Amazon to make the rest of the series.

When we build a society in which government is the solution to every single problem, what else did we expect?

If smoking bothers us, instead of simply going somewhere else, we campaign for a massive national ban on smoking enforced by the government.
If eating too much makes us fat, we elect politicians who cheerfully try to ban large sodas and contemplate legislation against restaurants that serve food that doesn't meet "our" healthy standards.
If we're upset that people have made such crappy life choices that they cannot afford fundamental expenses to support their life & kids, we insist that the government take wealth from everyone to pay them.

I'd say the idea that police swoop in to intervene when we decide to parent in a way not narrowly defined as "ok" by the bureaucrats is *precisely* in line with this trend.

" However, in my state, it is illegal for you to have more than one child. Well, effectively anyway. It is illegal for you to be on a different level of your house than your child, and we had twins and another girl a year older. In order to obey the law, you would have to carry all three of them with you when you put one of them to bed."
If you're talking about states in the US, I call utter and complete bullshit.

I challenge you to cite any code or collection of codes that would even IMPLY that you're limited in the number of children you could have, or that you cannot be on a different level of the same domicile as your child.

That's absolutely nonsensical, sorry.

You're approaching this as if it's fact-based. Typical nerd error.
This is a social crusade to make sure there are more vaginas present in tech companies regardless of context, qualifications, or even women's preferences.
This is a quest not about fairness, but about righteousness.

It's curious, though, that I don't see a similar indignation that women are underrepresented as janitors, ditch-diggers, or even in the trades - electricians, plumbers, etc. Certainly, women are just as capable to fill those roles, so why no ardent crusade to bring those numbers up as well?
It's almost like they're cherry-picking where women should be treated fairly and where they should still be treated preferentially. Of course, it would be harder to summon up great gobs of indignation if your fuel is hypocrisy.

"It's stupid on every level not to acknowledge the obstacles women face when they try to join a tech company."

Seriously, just fuck off already.
(And I'm not saying that because you have a vagina, I'm saying it because you're stupid.)

Quick quiz: you're a HR manager. You have 14 positions to fill this quarter, and likely will interview at least 300 people. You have about a million other things on your desk to deal with.
Two equally qualified candidates are interviewed for a job, one male, one female.
The male candidate, particularly if he's white, will likely as not take the job and do the work (unless he's a millenial, then all bets are off about the 'do the work' bit, but that's not a gender thing). If he doesn't do the work, or doesn't fit in with the rest of the team, or for whatever reason, you can get rid of him. Done.
The female candidate you need to evaluate how 'sensitive' this applicant is to diversity, and whether turning her down is going to (at the best) dump a crapton of nonsense on your head from higher-ups about filling gender quotas and making sure you're 'sensitive' enough to see her abilities, making sure the interview and setting are 'people oriented' enough, or (at worst) get you a call in 3 days from legal saying that somehow you said/did the wrong thing and now you're getting sued....and then understanding that if you DO hire her, you may have to walk on such eggshells every flipping day, waiting for some unsocialized geek in your engineering department to have the unmitigated gall to, I dunno, ask her out, at which point legal WILL be on your phone about the 'hostile' work environment.

So please, tell me again how CONSTANT bitching about gender diversity in tech and how unfair it is that "nobody offered her a potty break" is going to possibly encourage that HR person to go ahead and give that job to a woman?

Freedom of speech is, in the first place as a constitutional issue, is only as regards government limiting the speech of citizens; ergo the government should not be able to make any speech illegal (which it has in many contexts).

Secondly, simple common sense recognizes some words are offensive. And yes, I agree with him that some people (in the internet we call them trolls) deliberately provoke with words. The legitimate response, then, are WORDS, not violence.

And you're telling me that every one of them has to stream a separate movie in HD simultaneously?

In fact, I have a family of 6 HEAVY users, ranging in age from 17-47. They all live at home weekends and summers, and with a 10meg down/1 meg up connection, we're perfectly adequate.
Two might be watching an HD movie, another watching another movie on her phone elsewhere, and 3 playing MMOs online, and aside from a rare hitch in the film - usually having more to do with the neighborhood than our home, as it's exclusively at primetime - we all get along just fine.

So yeah, "25m is the baseline" is utter bullshit.

"But by pressurizing every crack to 30,000 psi with a mixture of sand and bullshit water"
I've never seen a better metaphor for American politics in 2014.

...can we just cut the bullshit, for once? "...25 Mbps downstreamâ"the speed increasingly recognized as a baseline to get the full benefits of Internet access..." according to whom?

Absolute nonsense. I can stream an HD movie easily at 10mpbs if the neighborhood lets me actually HAVE 10. WTF do you *need* 25mpbs for, much less to assert it's some sort of "bottom adequate floor"?

Right now, Democrats are perfectly cool with a quasi-liberal president ruling by fiat while Republicans are enraged by his unconstitutional actions.

With the next Republican president, when he or she issues law circumventing Congress, Republicans will cheer while Democrats are apoplectic.

Actual principles like checks and balances, limited federal power, etc don't hold much sway in US politics today, so much as where the actors stand relative to the political poles.

Frankly, pox on both their houses. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and Caesarism is fundamentally in opposition to what this country was founded on. But the oligarchs have decided otherwise.

...I'd drop 'dictionary'. Who uses them instead of a website anyway?

The OP isn't jeering because the idea is obvious; they're jeering because having an experiment to PROVE the obvious is stupid. That isn't how science works, that's how time-serving bureaucracy in research works, when you get a grant to prove something utterly obvious is a waste of money, time, and intellectual resources.

And no, I doubt there are any gifted people that can pick up musical instruments just by watching; listening is pretty intrinsic to what you're discussing there, too.

In any case, to have an experiment where you have people transmitting knowledge, some allowed to use language and some not IS really rather pointless. OBVIOUSLY adding language will increase the rate of knowledge transmission in everything.* It's a gigantic (and I'd say unjustified) step to purport, then, that such a broadly useful thing as language was evolved 'primarily' to transmit that single function whose applicability was likely limited to only a 100k year span. Language is so generally useful to transmit all information that teasing out a specific reason is (again, to me) almost pointless. PERSONALLY, I'd say that the advantage of language is that it allows people to communicate experiences to people not witnessing the original (they being separated by either geography or time). That alone would be of massive utility making learning incremental for the entire group, rather than limited to the individual's own personal experiences.

*except, perhaps, married couples. I'm just sayin'....

Enthusiastically? Maybe not.

I submit that as much as people like to complain about Pax Americana, Pax Sinica will be a helluva lot more overbearing, ethnocentrist, and painful to anyone not Chinese (and within that group, very narrowly benefiting their "1%ers" to an even more lopsided degree than US society today).

It will be interesting to see how 'open' their space program will be to other countries; they've already shown themselves to be rather terrible 'space citizens' in terms of debris-consequences.

I don't care how rich you are, death will still claim you.

The ultimate equalizer is a bitch, ain't it?

...I've been part of some goofy marketing things, and some business programs that EVERYONE INVOLVED knew were pointless wastes of time, so I get that.

But this even goes further. How could anyone even sign this with a straight face? Do they take themselves so seriously that they actually believe that
a) "dangerous" AIs are possible, and
b) that by the time a) is possible, they'll still be alive, and
c) that they'll be relevant to the discussion/development, and
d) anyone will give a flying hoot about some letter signed back in 2015?*

*let's face it, if you're developing murderous AIs, I'm going to say that you're likely morally 'flexible' enough that a pledge you signed decades before really isn't going to carry much weight, even assuming you couldn't get your AI minions to expunge it from memory anyway.