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Comment Re:Scientists my foot (Score 3, Informative) 319

predominantly scientists who played prominent roles in the Manhattan Project during WW2.

WW2 ended in 1945 and everybody of prominence back then is long dead.

Not sure how that pertains to my answer to your question; but yes, the Manhattan Project (or its precursor) scientists involved in the creation of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists -- Rabinowitch, Szilard, Oppenheimer, Bethe, Urey, etc. -- are gone now, although a few survived until relatively recently (Hans Bethe, for instance, did not pass until 2005).

But even if they were alive, try explaining, why their role in the development of the weapon makes them better experts on matters of foreign policy, military, and psychology, than that of any engineer or a dentist?

Why, in other words, should we value their opinion on how imminent the use of their weapon is over that of an engineer or a dentist?

Do you think, bladesmiths could better predict the imminence of duels, than other contemporaries?

I don't know why you're asking me these questions, since I merely answered the one you posed (about what the basis for the name was), and made no assertions of the sort that your questions seem to imply or defenses of anything the Bulletin has ever published.

The so-called "Doomsday Clock" is undoubtedly the most notorious thing about the Bulletin; but it's a tiny fraction of what they publish and what they argue. In general, and from my experience, the papers/articles published therein which argue for any particular viewpoint on an issue tend to be supported with attempts at logical reasoning built upon a set of claimed evidence. That absolutely does not make any of them right, any more than the many papers that fill scientific journals every week are all correct; and it's completely reasonable to argue that one sees flaws in their reasoning or in the set of facts/axioms/whatever on which their reasoning is based; and I'd be very surprised if any of the principals involved in the publication now, or those who write for it, would argue to the contrary.

Comment Re:I think it sucks (Score 1) 660

In terms of Photoshop, for example, there's plenty of free software/alternatives that you can use for viewing your data.

Perhaps not anymore. The OP seems to be suggesting that they're moving to a cloud storage paradigm where you no longer have local access to the files, in which case you can't easily (or perhaps, eventually, at all) pass them to GIMP or whatever else.

Comment Re:Linus Haiku (Score 3, Informative) 507

Haiku yours is not The point missed by you it was It was a joke. Whoosh.

For what it's worth, your post isn't a haiku either. Nor was the original "Linus Haiku". A haiku need not have a 5-7-5 syllable structure; and a 5-7-5 syllable structure does not make something a haiku. Haiku require a cutting word (kireji), and carry imagery of the natural world.

These are closer to senryu than haiku.

Comment Re:Can we not just make this one rule... (Score 1) 681

For what we pay them, we're not going to get that kind of bravery.

As a country, we could pay cops a lot more money and get recruits who you'd actually *want* to be a cop. But as a country we value entertainment more than having competent police (or teachers), so we pay cops (and teachers) small money, and so those professions don't attract the best possible recruits.

Comment Re:Why rescue those who acted stupidly? (Score 1) 172

See, I think it's wrong not to help people who have been wiped out by a disaster. But the corollary to that (in my mind) is that I think it's stupid to settle people where they are likely to be wiped out if there is a disaster. That only makes it more disastrous.

But the implicit assumption you're making in this case is that all these flooded houses in Houston were likely to experience a flood like this. Likely over what sort of time scale? As others have noted multiple times, there is no historical precedent at all for what happened. It makes perfect sense to criticize re-building in a place that has repeatedly flooded. But we're talking about places that have never, ever flooded in recorded history. Any estimate of the likelihood of something like this happening would have been absurdly small -- non-zero, yes, but absurdly small. So if you're using the criterion that one shouldn't live in a place where the likelihood of a flood is non-zero, then the earlier complaint remains: the same argument can be made of every other type of disaster, and there's no place on the entire planet one can live.

Comment Re:Anyone notice a pattern of behavior ? (Score 1) 381

Absolutely. The one I was quite frustrated about was when the VERY useful (for me, anyway) Usenet archive DejaNews got folded into Google Groups and then made useless. Searching for old Usenet posts now is harder than it was, and most old content appears to have gone unavailable.

Comment Thanks for this article. (Score 1) 381

I don't expect that Google will care one bit about the complaints of posters here; but it's a little bit of comfort to hear other people expressing the same feelings I have. I'm sure there are people out there who like these changes, but I cannot imagine why. What they describe as a "cleaner" interface is, for me, too homogenous. What they got rid of to make it "cleaner" was, for me, useful content. Scrolling around it now is actively unpleasant. Google News has been my homepage on all platforms for years. Now, I'm looking for a new site to use as my homepage.

Comment WikiLeaks is a different beast (Score 2) 895

In response to these events, WikiLeaks has tweeted "Trump's National Security Advisor Michael Flynn resigns after destabilization campaign by US spies, Democrats, press."

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/...

Wow. WikiLeaks has become a completely, utterly, totally different animal from what they were when they started out.

Comment RTFA (Score 1) 341

"Third. What kind of idiot doesn't back up their stuff?"

What kind of idiot doesn't RTFA they're complaining about? He *did* back up his stuff; that's how he was able to recover his stuff. The blog post was informational, for folks who don't know about this issue.

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