Odd view, since there is evidence of early Chinese cover ups of COVID and suppression of medical opinion that a more aggressive quarantine was needed in the roughly December period. I agree that by the time the virus was spreading much more aggressively around the country in January, the Chinese government had adopted a much more pragmatic response. But saying that their handling of the pandemic was overall good, is questionable at best.

Have never purchased any subscription software of any kind, and will never purchase any subscription software of any kind under any circumstances ever no matter what.

I don't extend to holding the company accountable for offering such a product by refusing to buy any product from them again ever. For instance I bought the Elder Scrolls Online from Bethesda, after it was no longer subscription based. But I feel like those tactics are warranted.

Rooftop solar does have to deal with things like, wind, and snow, and occasionally, hail.

Who cares if there are a bunch of me-too distros? It's not like the existence of Dervogis Linux which by default ships with a strange desktop environment that very few people use and a package manager nobody has ever heard of, affects the ubuntu user in any way.

That's a pretty fair point, but Apple provides a clever engineering solution to a practical problem that the user would rather not enter in a strong 38 character password every time they turn on the phone.

It does make me wonder though how acceptable is the solution that Apple be willing to overwrite the OS to allow for brute force decryption, specifically in case of a court order. In order to do this, the federal government pays apple a prohibitive expense, such as, $1 million, so that the privilege isn't abused. The procedure requires the phone be sent to one particular apple facility in california, and apple gives them the decrypted phone 6 to 8 weeks later. One phone per injunction.

If you trust apple, that solution might not seem so bad. But it requires you to trust apple. And while I think apple's actions here suggest their trustworthiness, I understand the good reasons people have not to do that, after all they are still Apple.

Having no law restricting abortion is firmly libertarian. Having a law restricting abortion, is government enforcement.

Whether as some people argue (ludicrously in my view) that the unborn child has rights in the eyes of the law and therefore it is OK to have laws punishing any aggressors, it is completely undeniable that this is a legislative proposal for laws that do not currently exist. I think it would be a stretch philosophically to say that the choice not to have children, and instead to have them aborted, is a threat to a functioning, orderly society with no excess laws, the one which libertarians dream of.

The fact that many libertarians in the US -- especially libertarians who are also evangelical christians and catholics -- fail to recognize that nonlegislation of abortion is as ideologically libertarian a cause as could be championed (and which was championed famously by Ayn Rand) does not make it not so.

Disclaimer: I am not a libertarian and I am not defending libertarian ideas.

If by "your scripture" you refer to any version of the old testament, it describes in some detail not necessarily all of the "how" but various events that played a role in the creation of life, including various animals in the garden of eden, and the events describing a flood where noah constructed an ark and so on. I admit freely to being broadly ignorant of the details of the old testament. But anyway that scripture does have something to say about the matter. So your comments are inconsistent with the old testament.

If you disbelieve the old testament, and are referring to some other documents as scripture, then ok. If you believe some of the old testament occurred, but do not believe all of it could have occurred, ok. If you find the stories of the old testament to be fables which did not occur but from which we should take moral guidance -- ok. There are numerous perfectly consistent ways to reconcile the metaphysical beliefs you described without contradicting the available evidence.

But the one way you cannot interpret them, reasonably, is to say that the events regarding the origin of life as described in the old testament, are correct.

"Between you and I" is gramatically correct. The "political correctness" that you speak of, I agree of course was innovated away in the language hundreds of years ago (but you can still see this in other indo european languages where "Between you and I" is the only sensible way to say it. But there's nothing ungrammatical about the statement you are pointing out.

Debian does not do this by default, but recent versions of debian installer do allow not setting a root password as an option.

Wow! I thought I was the only one who liked cheese. Bennett, you like cheese too? That's amazing! Would you consider sharing some of your thoughts on cheese over the course of eight to ten long paragraphs? That would be fascinating.

You have failed to see the astonishing insights Bennett Haselton offers here, but I will just give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are confused.

I just have one question myself about Bennett's suggestion: what is twitter?

I don't know if "unlikely to enjoy" is possible, let alone scientifically reasonable. The control group should be random. It certainly is in clinical trials that evaluate placebo.

You're assuming the kid is a pedestrian, which seems extremely unlikely. Far more likely is some other guy is driving recklessly with a kid in the passenger seat, and it's not the robot driver's fault at all but will still be blamed for not getting out of the way.

I totally agree, discrimination is discrimination is discrimination.

However, why the hell are we talking about discrimination? We are talking about a coding initiative using characters from a Disney Movie. I am aware of both men and women who dislike Frozen. My nephew, who I think is about 7 or 8, rather likes it, for instance.

You are a man who doesn't like Frozen? Perhaps your son or other male children in your family do not like frozen? That's not a problem, I am a 25 year old dude and I don't like it either. You, and others, are not being *discriminated against*, simply because somebody makes or promotes content that *you don't like.*

In languages such as Spanish where gender is an important feature of the language and considerable syntax is devoted to dealing with it, yes, what you say is correct. In English, it isn't. At least certainly not in the colloquial english spoken natively in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. Maybe some English professor somewhere has a revolutionary theory that all of these native speakers who don't use masculine pronouns in a gender-neutral way are wrong, but I see no reason why I should care about such a person.