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Comment teenager (Score 1) 19

as a kid, i built one of dave mao's presses. it's deceptively simple for what it does.

it's basically a stack of belleville washers leveraging a pair of tongs.

you can create different pressures depending on the way you stack the washers, which are essentially springs.

i didn't have the cash for the diamonds, but it worked. if i kept it, i could probably buy diamonds for it.

Submission + - WebKit introduces new tracking prevention policy (webkit.org)

AmiMoJo writes: WebKit, the open source HTML engine used by Apple's Safari browser and a number of others, has created a new policy on tracking prevention. The short version is that many forms of tracking will now be treated the same way as security flaws, being blocked or mitigated with no exceptions.

While on-site tracking will still be allowed (and is practically impossible to prevent anyway), all forms of cross-site tracking and covert tracking will be actively and aggressively blocked.

Education

Is Believing In Meritocracy Bad For You? (fastcompany.com) 480

An anonymous reader quotes Fast Company: Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. This is not least because merit itself is, in large part, the result of luck. Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called "grit," depend a great deal on one's genetic endowments and upbringing.

This is to say nothing of the fortuitous circumstances that figure into every success story. In his book Success and Luck, the U.S. economist Robert Frank recounts the long-shots and coincidences that led to Bill Gates's stellar rise as Microsoft's founder, as well as to Frank's own success as an academic. Luck intervenes by granting people merit, and again by furnishing circumstances in which merit can translate into success. This is not to deny the industry and talent of successful people. However, it does demonstrate that the link between merit and outcome is tenuous and indirect at best. According to Frank, this is especially true where the success in question is great, and where the context in which it is achieved is competitive. There are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless failed to become the richest person on Earth. In competitive contexts, many have merit, but few succeed. What separates the two is luck.

In addition to being false, a growing body of research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that believing in meritocracy makes people more selfish, less self-critical, and even more prone to acting in discriminatory ways.

The article cites a pair of researchers who "found that, ironically, attempts to implement meritocracy leads to just the kinds of inequalities that it aims to eliminate.

"They suggest that this 'paradox of meritocracy' occurs because explicitly adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral bona fides."

Comment hypocrisy (Score 1) 67

I read the summary of this article and read the previous summary and...

The US and the rest of the "free world" (such as it is) is bitching and moaning about APT10, a so-called hacking collective. Whilst the "free world" goes on hacking sprees against their own citizens (five-eyes, etc).

It's not about catching criminals (the ACLU is falling into the semantics trap). It's about "instant dossiers" on people who might upset "the system" - i.e., the incumbent powers that be. Everyone has skeletons, and without "second chances" (the US since its founding had been the land of second chances - ability to re-invent oneself, until recently, with this data collecting bullshit tied to Real ID), there is not a politician in the US that can effect change.

The future is a mishmash of Big Brother, Little Brothers (private companies collecting data to sell you things, for example) Brave New World, and GATTACA, in the worst possible way. Because every time I think something has gotten as worse as it can get, it gets worser by orders of magnitude, so my ruminations here and in my head can't possibly imagine the tyrannical dystopia coming down the road.

NUMBER: 1593
AUTHOR: Benjamin Franklin (1706â"90)
QUOTATION: âoeWell, Doctor, what have we gotâ"a Republic or a Monarchy?â

    âoeA Republic, if you can keep it.â
ATTRIBUTION: The response is attributed to BENJAMIN FRANKLINâ"at the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, when queried as he left Independence Hall on the final day of deliberationâ"in the notes of Dr. James McHenry, one of Marylandâ(TM)s delegates to the Convention.

https://www.bartleby.com/73/15...

"This tribble is dead, Jim" -- Dr. McCoy

--
BMO

Comment Re:no. (Score 1) 256

>silly talk

Actually, no. The Democratic Party has been running away from the failed campaign of McGovern learning all the wrong lessons and tying themselves to concepts like "electablity" and doing everything they can to not appear "too leftist" whatever that is at the time. They abandoned the unions, losing all those votes and set the stage or the deundustrialisation of America through lopsided trade agreements. Shit like this has let the Republicans drive every argument all the way down to the vocabulary used. So as the Republicans have drifted into insanity, Dems have become "Republican Lite"

Trump didn't spring fully formed from the head of Zeus.

They have been pulling this shit for 50 years. Why stop now?

>trump's crimes

The American public doesn't give a shit. The American public, by and large, assumes all politicians are on the take..

The American public wants someone to at least pretend to care about their bread and butter issues. As stated above, the par\\Democratic Party has been running away from that sort of stuff since McGovern. Trump won the clown car because out of all the other candidates on the R side he at least mouthed the concepts even though he was lying.and when the DNC riggged it so that someone who had awful negatives, it was only inevitable that trump won the presidency.

Now w are stuck with him and fucking morons like you think that impeachment is going to fix things. It will ifx nothing and if successful, we will wind up with pence.While Trump is a little kid pretending to be dictator, pence will be the real deal and will use things embedded in the ndaa and such, that Obama and his predecessors signed off on, to silence critics.

We are so fucked.

Comment Re:no. (Score 1) 256

I do see it as a viable political football, like schools, health-care and other civilization building issues.

BUT...

The dems have failed at every turn over the past 50 years, running away from McGovern.

Even the ACA is a failure and capitulation to "republican values"

I am almost all out of fucks to give.

I had high idealistic hopes for the Internet last century.

And I look at a president that uses the most important vehicle for the spread of knowledge for his own personal alt.flame.

Burn. It. All. Down.
--
BMO

Submission + - AmigaOS 3.1.4 released for classic Amiga (hyperion-entertainment.com)

Mike Bouma writes:

The new, cleaned-up, polished Amiga operating system for your 68K machine fixes all the small annoyances that have piled up over the years. Originally intended as a bug-fix release, it also modernizes many system components previously upgraded in OS 3.9.

Contrary to its modest revision number, AmigaOS 3.1.4 is arguably as large an upgrade as OS 3.9 was, and surpasses it in stability and robustness. Over 320K of release notes cover almost every aspect of your favourite classic AmigaOS — from bootmenu to datatypes.


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