But North Korea has now denied the involvement

Oh, that's OK then.

Do you really think North Korea could follow up on those death threats by actually attacking those people

Yes. They have shown themselves willing to do stuff like kidnapping film directors because the dictator liked them, kidnapping random japanese people for amazingly little in the way of reasons.

Bluffs are for when you are already desperately losing

Well, North Korea is, in most meaningful senses. But it's not so much bluffing, as it is giving the impression that you're crazy and could do anything. Same strategy some people advocated in the cold war, same strategy many leaders in the violent criminal underworld use. Crazy people are feared, that fear earns respect of a sort.

Well, the thing about a Black Hole, its main distinguishing feature, is it's black. And the thing about space, your basic space colour is black. So how are you supposed to see them?

Yup. "with NO INTERNET TO TELL ME WHAT I COULDN’T DO".

Well guess what, for most of human history there was no internet telling people what they couldn't do. Auerbach should be more worried that his daughter will find a novel designer identity(*) on Tumblr, than that she likes some aspects of her traditional one.

(*) They're like designer drugs, only that... um. Actually, they're just like designer drugs.

If everyone gets the option to rate one post per day, they can afford to spend some time thinking about it, avoiding that trap.

If everyone gets the option to rate every post, ratings will be dominated by those who use the right every time - vote on everything. Surprise surprise, people who spend one second per post won't be especially thoughtful. Thus, they will abuse it as an "I don't agree" button vastly more.

Responsible people's judgements take too long time. They just can't compete with impulse voters. But if you limit voting to random comments, (or limit voting privileges in some other way like slashdot does), you avoid a lot of that problem.

The moderation itself is vastly superior on slashdot compared to reddit. It's just that it matters very little for comment visibility since they inexplicably fail to use the information in sorting. There are many ways to fail.

Ah yeah, a scheme you just cooked up yourself, without justifying it. Never mind that it has terrific abuse potential, and even in the long term relies on a fixed, privileged few (the reviewers) being fair.

People blamed Japanese cars eclipsing American ones on cultural differences too. But fact it, it was an American business theorists, W. Edwards Deming, who was the father of Japanese car manufacturing's business practices. And if you look at his preaching, you'll see - well, that it is preaching, in a sense. There is a distinct moral tinge to it, directed almost exclusively at leaders.

Deming was an avid Episcopalian and psalm writer. Turns out is was a light codification of "protestant work ethic" in business language which worked for Japanese car industry, not any innate collectivism.

And why did he go to Japan? Because no one would listen in the USA. Something something prophet without honor...

Nuclear power has benefited from the near bottomless source of government funds that is called "dual use technology". You know what Sweden, India, Switzerland, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea have in common? They all pursued civilian nuclear power as a pretext for starting a nuclear weapons program. Yeah, that's right, even dumpy old Sweden wanted the bomb, and lied to the world and their own public about it. (They did change their minds, though). That's why everyone assumes Iran is lying. They know they lied.

Same with space exploration. Same with the internet. The way to get research funding in the US (and in lots of other countries) is to suggest that the technology has military relevance - with bullshit if necessary. "This kind of computer network will be very useful after a nuclear war! *snort*"

This is, IMHO, the real argument against nuclear power. Development of solar panels and windmills weren't funded for fifty years over clandestine military budgets. God knows where they'd been today if they were. With nuclear, on the other hand, there's every reason to think that the low-hanging fruit has been picked, and picked clean.

No, wild vegetation doesn't behave very much like a cornfield, that's the point. An oak tree binds up carbon for much, much longer. Thus you don't get the same wild swings.

Honest question LynnwoodRooster: Are you, in any way, paid for promoting particular views?

There's another effect. That is that the one side is already doing something pretty evil, and they know it. That makes it easier for them to be evil in their PR activity too. If you've decided to root for the bad guys for some reason, you're probably not going to worry about fighting clean.

It's no coincidence that astroturfing really took off with the tobacco industry.

You could still have some fun by flipping a few magnets, and watching the ripples spread as a wave throughout the universe

There's got to be at least a novelty toy hidden in this idea.

The reviews of the hotel are almost certainly being outrage spammed already. What's interesting is the reviews before this.

Add to that the increasing hard dependencies, like with window managers that expect systemd to offload session management and login onto and I'm not sure how feasable holding out on systemd is anymore.

Well, this is developers voting with their feet, isn't it?

More likely multiple graphs, since "skills" are abstract categories, and abstract categories are made things that ever knowing subject creates for themselves, with only approximate overlap between them. So what I mean by "interpreted language" and what you mean by "interpreted language" are going to overlap substantially, but we will draw the edges of our attention differently. Some borderline cases you will call "interpreted" and I won't, and vice versa.

That's a problem ten times more subtle than the problems they already have. I wanted to see if they had the skill "four-part choral harmonisation". It's art, right? But right away there's a problem. Performing music is a performing art, but writing music is not a performing art. They put composition under art-performing art-music-composition, and what's under composition?

Only one thing. Score reading. Which is obviously not a more specific skill of composition.