As the article says, Ancestry wasn’t selling this data and was linking back to where it had come from. Ancestry also says they will honor robots.txt with instructions not to scrape data.
You are right. I was just reacting to the idea that anything you find on webpage is yours to use without restriction. Think about pictures of my kids on social media!
I doubt it's still used much in web programming, but for backend data processing there are plenty of systems that output XML. XSLT is a great resource when you need to simplify a gnarly document.
Congress was destined to this fate when they eliminated earmarks. Earmarks, or pork barrel spending, were derided as gov't waste, but in reality they were the grease that kept legislation moving. A representative could go back to their voters and say, "I voted for this thing you might not like, but I did it to ensure this crucial local project got done."
Without earmarks there is no incentive to compromise. Compromise is actually a liability now, because there is always someone who will challenge you in a primary and promise to be more "ideologically pure." Without the ability to point to money and public works to defend yourself both during a primary and an election the best you can do is point to a record without compromise.
Not wanting to compromise comes largely from the two-party system. If a politician had to worry about losing votes to a more moderate party, they'd end up with less extreme voting records.
Multi-party governments function largely because some subset of the parties agrees to compromises to gain a combined majority on a specific topic; none of them can do anything in isolation.
You're absolutely right IMO. When there is no reason to compromise and compromise can only hurt you, no one compromises and nothing gets done. Earmarks shift those incentives in the right direction, and their cost is a small price to pay to have a government that governs.
I think the results are mixed and the lessons aren’t clear to me.
Perhaps earmarks were the result of an electorate that wanted more purity in decision-making (at the cost of stability). In other words, earmarks didn’t break cooperation. Corrupted cooperation led to the end of earmarks.
Earmarks probably do grease the wheels, but it’s important to remember a step existed before the compromise: a member of the congress could hold out until they received something, often unrelated to the matter at hand. That is wasteful and, to some, dishonest.
Now, did a removal earmarking result in more financial efficiency? Surely not. The budget deficit continued to grow, mostly because of Obamacare, Covid, wars, tax cuts.
So what of compromise? One might think compromise is dead, and yet we live in a world where Ukraine aid is tied to social media ownership.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion. Basically the right wing’s latest boogeymen to scare up their base. Think how “woke” has been co-opted and used by pundits to make people angry.
You’ve got the causality reversed. What “makes people angry” is what certain progressives believe and say and do. Co-opting the label “woke” just gives people a way to communicate about those ideas; it doesn’t create the anger.
People propose lots of changes, most get shot down and rejected by society because they’re bad ideas. Go look at all the dead-end ideas from the 1960s. Most of what falls within the umbrella of “woke” today will meet the same fate.
For example, I’m pretty sure that 10 years from now the racial affinity groups in my 5th grader’s school are going to be an embarrassing idea liberals will pretend never happened, rather than being the future of race relations in America.
My litmus test for what’s real versus manufactured outrage is running things by my CNN-watching, Biden-voting immigrant parents. Most woke ideas get a derisive snort from my dad, though he’s quite worked up over racial preferences, affinity groups, and the idea that you can’t be racist towards whites. My mom, meanwhile, got very worked up over the 2020 riots and mass immigration from Latin America. She approvingly texted me Trump’s ban on DEI trainings in the federal government.
These are people who consume zero right wing content, so it’s not like they’re being socialized to be mad about stuff that they wouldn’t otherwise be mad about. In fact it’s the opposite—they would be madder if CNN wasn’t careful to hide the full scope of what woke people think and believe.
For example the collection of beliefs that led Google to engineer an AI that draws pictures of black Nazis. That did percolate up to CNN, because it was so silly. But all the stuff that these engineers learned about race in college that led them to make the AI this way doesn’t make it to CNN.
This is like asking a Roman to "be specific" in describing early Christianity (and doing so in a couple of sentences). What, like you're not seeing what I'm seeing?
But let's pick one example: woke people believe that skin-color diversity is both meaningful and a good thing in and of itself. They would say that, all else being equal, a group of people with a mix of races is better than a group of white people, even if there was no evidence that the white group was that way due to discrimination.
Do they? I thought the woke thing was more about discrimination, but I don’t know much about this. The statement makes sense though, why do you think it’s wrong?
The statement is wrong because skin color is superficial and meaningless. Here’s a thought experiment: say you have a group of white people, and then I (a “brown” person) join them. Woke thought posits that, through added “diversity,” the group has become “stronger.” But to be “stronger” it must be “different.” What non-superficial characteristic about me are you inferring about me that leads you to conclude I changed the group by joining it? Any answer to that is going to be racist.
Regardless of skin color, a group with N members vs a group with N+1 members has the added advantage of that one extra person; assuming that person isn't a negative influence on the group's productivity. That's one extra set of eyes, one extra point of view, one more set of hands. Regardless of skin color, that extra person is going to have different life experiences leading them to have a different perspective from the rest of the group.
Fine, say instead of joining the white group, I sub in for one of the white people. Woke people would still say that it’s an improvement because of increased “diversity.”
Sure. But that’s just the old “don’t discriminate” attitude, which is why I worded the hypothetical to exclude that. What distinguishes “woke” ideology is that it posits ”diversity” is better even if the lack of diversity isn’t due to discrimination. Universities aren’t saying that they need diversity to counteract the discrimination that’s happening in admissions.
This idea manifests in media, for example adding a characters of different races to historical contexts where the lack of diversity isn’t due to discrimination. (E.g. adding a random African character to medieval Scandinavia in Frozen 2.)
You're upset that a fantasy world that is based on a real place, but isn't that place mind you, added a black character? In a world with ice magic, animated snowmen, and singing reindeer you are upset about diversity because it's not realistic.
And this is a significant political issue for what you claim is the “left”? Well hidden from mainstream media-stream media (why?) i find it a bit hard to follow
That would be argued in cross-examination. A witness can be shown to be not a good witness. Perjury is very specific to knowingly lying while testifying under oath. We really don't want to expand it to areas of ignorance or disagreement; that way would stop people from testifying entirely.
This is not even near the truth. An expert (under Daubert) is someone who convinces the court they can say something relevant and reliable based on a technique that passes a test concerning:
Whether the technique or theory in question can be, and has been tested;
Whether it has been subjected to publication and peer review;
Its known or potential error rate;
The existence and maintenance of standards controlling its operation; and
Whether it has attracted widespread acceptance within a relevant scientific community.
The expert does not “know.” The expert is the only witness who can give an opinion, more or less. Because the opinion is backed up by something, the court considers it useful.
The technique they use is what’s important, not whether their opinion contradicts a fact. I think you will find in many expert trials, two experts get the same facts and come to two completely contradictory opinions, neither of which is perjury.
I loved Pebble. My wife and I had multiple watches and I was very active in the dev community. If Pebble were still around I’d still be a customer.
Pebble’s problem wasn’t the Apple Watch, although it certainly didn’t help. What killed Pebble was its growth. They hired a lot of people and rented a very expensive office, but they just didn’t have the sales to support it. The Time Round was an absolute marvel of engineering, but it should’ve been put on the back burner until the OG and the Time actually sold.
Out of all the money Pebble spent very little was for actually advertising their product. Outside of tech circles it just wasn’t a known thing, which was a shame.
It also didn’t help that their app store had no payment solution. One was eventually released by a third party but that didn’t help draw developers. Their SDK was a joy to use and Pebble Cloud was awesome. But if you can’t really get a return on investment because you can’t sell your app then nobody is going invest.
I miss Pebble a lot. I still pull out my Time Steel every so often just to admire it.
If we could beam our thoughts directly into each other's head, we would. It would be the easiest way to convey information. Alas, we don't have that ability, so we resort to the written word. If your goal is to spread something interesting don't make it more difficult for your readers by hiding your point behind a style choice that directly contradicts the readers' expectations.
Capitalization goes hand-in-hand with punctuation. A period is only part of the formula that tells a reader that a complete thought is done. Capitalizing the next letter is a signal that the next complete thought is starting. The reader doesn't have to continually guess whether the punctuation was incorrectly or accidentally placed.
I pushed through your style choice and read the article because what you had to say was interesting and important. But not all readers are going to grant you the same courtesy. If you really want the widest distribution possible do your readers a favor and capitalize things according to the rules.
You used paragraphs and correct spelling, as well as avoiding things like run-on sentences and sentence fragments. It's obvious you want people to your read your work. Whatever reasons you have for choosing to not use capitalization, those reasons are not as important as the message you are trying to spread.
OP might be a non-English language speaker. Many languages don't use capitalization at all. Some languages don't even bother to put spaces between words, it's all driven by context.
But if you're writing in English, or really any language, you should attempt to follow the rules of that language, especially if you want wide readership. Grammar rules might be arbitrary, but readers learn those rules and expect what they read to follow those rules.
