Gun owners are innocent. Its the guns themselves that are the problem. Simply by existing, those weapons pose a threat. Its kind of what the word "weapon" implies. That's why I will continue to insist that we should be taking measures to ensure and yes, if necessary enforce, responsible use and storage of those weapons. A hell of a lot of crimes committed with illegal firearms would be eliminated (or at least committed with a less deadly weapon) if "illegal" meant "had to go find a shady black market dealer" rather than "nicked it from my friend's dad who keeps it in his unlocked kitchen drawer" or "bought it from some kid at school who did that."

As for your comparisons.. lets pick an easy one: If "terrorism" was a physical object that we could just say "OK ban that" then I'd be all for it as well. And we still do what we can to prevent potential terrorists from getting their hands on things like large quantities of chemicals that are common used in bombs. Even something like simple garden fertilizer.. if someone notices you buying it in what they consider to be excessive bulk, the FBI may be flagged and if you're not an active farmer you may well get a visit or be put under surveillance for a while.

You didn't have a gun 50 years ago either. You're well aware that I was using the collective "you" in that statement.

Say what? Its one hell of an extrapolation to claim that say, Sweden (pretty liberal) and North Korea (vast police power) are somehow even remotely similar.

For the same reason you have to submit to the "car control police" or the "food safety police" (if you work in a restaurant.) Any time you have the power to injure or kill people, there should be some sort of check on that power to balance it out.

You tell me. I'm not the conservative here. I fully support people expressing their sexual desires in any form they like providing its consensual. And its definitely not "historical." There are plenty of states with anti-sodomy laws on file. Trump himself has made specific attacks against transgender individuals. There's continual attacks on gay and lesbian folk. Never mind when you get into things like abortion rights. That's all happening right now, every day in the US. Its hardly "historical."

Say what? I'm not sure how you construe "we need to stop letting our kids get killed" as "bullying."

Yeah. Conservatives are all perfectly nice to the Muslim community, the Mexican community, the LBGTQ community, etc.

Yes. So?

We denounce bigoted asshats. The fact that most of the bigoted asshats in the US happen to be white Christians is coincidence. We'd just as quickly denounce say, a Myanma Buddhist if they were being a bigoted jerk. Of course conservatives like to read the liberal disgust over the Rohingyan genocide as "loving Muslims" rather than what it actually is -- denouncing hatred in _all_ its forms.

Now you've run into a bit of a problem. On one hand, you have the bigots who are intentionally trying to divide us. On the other, you're that denouncing the bigots divides the bigots from the rest of us. There's one big difference though: Bigots can learn to be less hateful but black people can't learn to change their skin color and gay people can't change what shape of genitalia turn them on.

When did I do that? Unless of course your definition of "bad guys" is gay people, Muslims, etc who have done nothing wrong beyond not being like you. If that's your definition then I definitely will not stop defending them until such time as they no longer attacked for merely existing.

Conservatives always want to see things through an "if you're not with us, you're against us" lens and they try to force what they see of liberalism into their viewpoint. But we don't fit that mold at all -- we _just don't care_ who you are. We only care what you do.

Your skin tone, your religion, your sexual preferences. In the liberal view none of those make up a person. Only how you act and how you treat others makes up a person and if that person is an asshole, then we feel fully justified in calling you out in the (admittedly rather small) hope that you'll recognize something in yourself that you need to change to become a better person.

Of course, that entire wall of text has a big caveat on it: We use the conservative/liberal dichotomy in more than one way, and we're not very good at distinguishing our usage. A person can be socially conservative and fiscally liberal. Or the other way around. You can support gay marriage and be against abortion. Or the other way around. You can allow for polygamy but think interracial marriage is a horrible sin. Or the other way around. Personally I tend to be very liberal socially -- I think people should be allowed to be whoever the fuck they want to be and that's fine.

But other "liberal" aspects I'm more centrist on -- For example I'm fine with you having your gun and I don't support a full ban (though I'd certainly take it if that's what gets offered by some strange twist..) But I want to be damned sure you're going to be responsible with it. And I'm not just going to take your word on that. So unless you can come up with some other way to guarantee me that you (and your neighbor and Jim from 3 states over and 100 million other people) are all going to be perfectly responsible, government oversight is about the best we're going to get.

There's pretty much no subject I fall heavily to the right on though. The far right's plan in almost every instance is "me me me and fuck everyone else." I'm certainly no saint but I just can't imagine myself being that selfish.

So liberals want to regulate dangerous weapons. Conservatives want to regulate your penis/vagina. Which do you think is worse for society, or even for you personally?

Obama's. And Bush2's. It went at least as far back as post-9/11 paranoia. Not to mention the government has been trying to spy on people for decades now, consistently and under both parties. Anyone remember Joe McArthy?

So is freedom of religion, yet the right wingers have no problems denouncing Islam every time there's a terrorist attack (even when the attack was perpetrated by white Christian dudes against other white Christian dudes -- they still try to find a way to either blame Islam or shift the conversation to "Muslim terrorists."

You can still make the argument today, as I just did. Conservatives may want to regulate and remove a different set of your rights, but at the end of the day you still have less rights.

The main difference is the purpose of doing so: The left wants to do so for (yes, sometimes misguided) public health and safety reasons, while the right seems to want to remove your rights mostly for religious reasons. That latter part is a big problem since the US is supposed to be secular. (And of course both parties are happy to remove your rights if it nets their donors a payday..)

Outages aren't really the biggest concern. Yes they're annoying, but everyone experiences them once in a while and there's a significantly higher chance that your own personal server (ie: probably a slapped together PC that you also game on, browse the web on, etc) will break than AWS will. Not that AWS never breaks as noted, its just a far, far lower chance.

The big problem is the question of what happens when Amazon goes out of business. Or decides they no longer care about AWS. Or jacks up the price by 200%. Or changes the terms of service in a way that's untenable for your needs.

Outages aren't the issue.. control is the issue. If you build your business on AWS (or Azure or whatever Google's cloud offering is called or any other) then you're essentially betting your future on those companies being rock solid both financially and contractually for as long as you intend to remain in business yourself.

Yeah it would have to absolutely be something Apple designed and built for. I have no doubt that just tacking a third party lens on top of (rather than in place of) the existing lens would be less than ideal. I'm thinking something more in concept to those cheap 3D glasses where you drop your phone in to do most of the heavy lifting.. so the "camera" is just a foundation for holding the lenses, the tripod mount, etc.. and your phone acts as the camera's processing unit, replacing the often-terrible display, buttons, UI, etc with something designed by a company known for good (or at least reasonably decent) design.

Of course it would be optimal if the camera's CCD could be used as well, but its not 100% necessary for my idea. It would just save having to attach a plug or otherwise pairing the phone with the "camera" unit.. though that may be desirable anyway so that the phone could control things like zoom and focus and other features that require physically manipulating the lenses and other non-processing operations.

People already have those "tools to kill themselves." The safe injection site gives them a way to use the drugs that's safer for them, safer for the public and if they do OD, they've got trained staff on hand who can deal with the situation instead of in a dirty apartment or an alley or something where they're almost certain to die, with a body left for just anybody to find.

And of course you're also ignoring that safe injection sites also highly promote and often even offer services to help addicts get off the drugs, so its helping in that aspect as well.

So it:
a) Is cheaper in the long term by ensuring immediate care is available should an OD occur rather than having to deal with the much more expensive consequences after the fact.

b) Helps the public by reducing used needle litter, reducing the spread of infections diseases and so on.

c) Helps the drugs users themselves, as much as they can be helped.

The _only_ downside to safe injection sites is the NIMBY argument. Most people (rightfully, imo) don't want a bunch of drug users passing through their neighborhood, regardless of whether they're on their way to a safe injection site or for some other purpose. But that's a matter for city planners and its not _that_ hard to deal with in most cases. For starters, putting the site in an area that's already got a large drug usage problem both reduces the NIMBY complaints as well as managing the users to some degree, again helping out the non-using neighbors.

Also a bit off topic but, by the way you talk about drugs as "tools to kill themselves," I'm curious as to your views on the second amendment? I have a suspicion from your phrasing that you're a supporter..

G+ failed to take off because it was a much weaker competitor to the well-established Facebook, providing fewer features and absolutely nothing in the way of benefits.

And then Google tried to force the issue by forcing you to merge all your various Google accounts (Youtube accounts in particular since well.. Youtubers like to bitch about things.. a lot!), forcing you to use your real name, constantly bugging you to +1 things, etc. That in-your-face campaign got massive blowback (especially the account merge / loss of aliases) which in turn gave G+ a massive negative reputation. To the point where they slowly backtracked on pretty much all of that.

If Google had spent their effort trying to make their product worth switching from FB (or at least using in conjunction with FB) rather than trying to ram it down everyone's throat, they may have managed to build up a bit of a user base. Even with all that, they got a few people. But without some "killer app" that FB couldn't or wouldn't immediately emulate, they just had no chance.

Twitter is a good counter-example: They did things FB just didn't do -- limiting to short messages, and more importantly the introduction of hashtagging and @ referencing. I think FB does some version of the latter by now but they left Twitter to run that train to fame before they caught on.

Then of course there's Snapchat. Again, they got big because they do things that FB doesn't. In particular, they automatically remove things you send after a few seconds. Which is great for horny teenagers who don't want their parents (or worse, teachers) to find out that they've been sexting or who they've been sexting with, and removes fear about things like having an ex-boyfriend show everyone your dirty pictures after a breakup since you can be (relatively) sure they weren't saved by the nature of the app.

G+ just never had anything like that. Their major advertised feature was "circles" which was basically just the ability to have multiple distinct friends lists. And it turns out not enough people cared about that to make it a "killer" feature (just the maintenance alone would have been more hassle than most people care to deal with, trying to juggle who to put in which circles and the such.)

Its not about the tech. Its about the licenses. Pandora was moderately popular but Spotify managed to get all the major licensing deals and by that, beat out much of the competition. Average users don't care if you got a 0.38% better compression ratio or if you provide better deals for indie artists. They care about listening to the latest pop song right now. If you don't happen to have that one, your market share will suffer.

Which would still block those sites, as well as half the rest of the internet. The nuclear option isn't always the only option. Whether or not CF cares enough to fight this order (and I mean why would they? Sci-hub really is breaking copyright laws. You can argue whether those copyright laws are good or bad for society and if you're really motivated maybe even try to get them changed.. but you can't argue that they exist.)

Basically, CF has absolutely no grounds to ignore this order. Its not like Sci-hub is constitutionally protected as would be the case if they were say ordered by the president to block the New York Times or something.

Why would it? Major companies like FB run into issues like this all the time. Not even they have the resources it takes to ensure they're in compliance with every bylaw in every jurisdiction they service around the entire world. This is a big nothingburger that wouldn't even make the 17th page news if it was anyone other than Facebook involved. I mean its not like Russia gives a shit who the mayor of Seattle is in the same way they're interested in who POTUS is. Never mind the fact that there isn't (as far as I know) any allegations of anybody meddling in the Seattle city elections. Basically someone just found an old law that happens to have an extremely vague relation (little more than buzzword matching) to major national events and decided to make a name for themselves.

The idea with safe injection sites -- aside from just being a decent human and recognizing that other people need help -- is that needles are easier and cheaper to deal with than bodies (or worse, long-term health problems like AIDS and other needle-transmitted diseases. Even if you decide the person in question isn't worth treating, they've got the possibility to spread those diseases around and multiply the costs.)

But of course, helping people in need is UnAmerican.. at least in the opinion of many on the right (and even some on the left.) They'll happily eat whatever long-term costs if they get to punish people _right now_ who fell on hard times, made one bad choice they can't escape from, or were just plain unlucky in life.

Fingerprint scanner? Or change the screen to a touch device and put up a number pad? Hell they could get rid of the arrow keys and shit if they designed a decent on-screen interface. There's plenty of ways they could do it.

They're just being lazy and cheap and relying on the fact that there's only two major brands (Nikon and Canon.) Sure there's plenty of smaller names in the industry as well but there's also an insane amount of brand loyalty holy wars so the smaller brands have a hard time gaining market share even if their devices are objectively better in some way.

Imagine in Apple decided to enter the market. Perhaps an add-on that allowed you to attach professional lenses to your iPhone (which already has a pretty good CCD.) They could potentially demolish the market. Of course I don't know if the professional photography market is big enough for Apple to bother, but if they did it would at least force Canon and Nikon to start innovating again in areas other than megapixels or whatever the buzzword number of the year is these days.

The same way your iPhones does it? Sure there's some debate with regard to biometric vs passcode entry (especially in the US with respect to the 4th amendment) but aside from that, its pretty much a solved problem.

Camera makers are either being lazy, or being coerced. I suspect the former. Keep in mind it wasn't that long ago that people were bitching about camera makers not bothering to introduce digital processing features that iPhones had years earlier (to the point that some photographers were talking about just switching to using their phone flat out. Probably not seriously but I wouldn't be surprised if at least some of them chose to use their phone for certain pictures for a while, just so that they could see the filters and other processing applied on-the-fly rather than having to hope they get a good shot that they can photoshop later.)

The problem is scale. You post an ad to something like Monster.com and you can expect probably a few thousand resumes to come flooding in. That gives you two choices: Hire a handful of people (who probably don't have domain knowledge anyway) to sort through the crud over a few days, or automate the process and pass it all through a computer to do in a couple of minutes. Guess which one is more cost-effective?

Its the automatic processing that causes most (but definitely not all) of these problems. Keyword matching is easy. Distilling the essence of a document is not so much. So we're now in a bit of an arms race where job postings are a list of arbitrary and often irrelevant keywords, and resumes are just a copy of the list as best as the applicant can stretch their "skills" in order to cover the posted list. There's not a whole lot of meaning to either anymore (perhaps there never was..)

There's no real easy answer here. Its too time-consuming to go through all of the resumes manually. All I can think of is waiting until AI advances enough that it can start parsing through cover letters and non-bullet-point parts of the resume in order to get a fuller view of the applicant. But I wouldn't expect that terribly soon. In addition to being a hard problem in terms of the AI tech, there's also little incentive to do it: The longer it takes you to find the "perfect" employee, the longer you're going to be using the recruiter's service. As long as they're doing good enough to not lose your business, they don't have much reason to improve their matching system.

Yes and no. What we're really doing is playing off the ability for the human economist to creatively apply their knowledge to come up with new models to fit a handful of data points, against the computer's ability to fit millions if not billions of data points against a more rigid model.

But even assuming the economist is still "better" in some fashion even with the vast difference in the amount of data points used to generate their models, the NN still has one massive advantage: It can be copied. If you need to have an "expert" at each of three different data centers.. then hiring people means 3 different individuals would need to be found and hired (probably at a super high wage if they're good.) Whereas you only need to hire one NN guy to create his system and then copy it three times.

This becomes even more prominent if you're talking about consumer products. Something like Siri needs to have thousands if not millions of instances spun up and shutdown in order to process all of the requests from the millions upon millions upon millions of iPhone users in the world. Can you imagine if you asked Siri where the nearest Italian restaurant was and off at Apple HQ, there was some dude in the basement searching through the phone book manually in order to give you a response? That's just beyond absurd.