No. That would mean less then a day heads-up from the researcher.

It would be a really impressive turn around on the fix from Debian, though ;-).

there's no bias, the photos represent the general state of the whole country

No they don't. Source: growing up in said country during that era. There weren't that many horses then, even in the countryside.

And they did have tractors. Plowing with a horse was a curiosity even in the eighties.

Nope, when I was young and visited my family in Rzeszowskie district many farmers did plough using horses. Countryside that I remember looked like this. Ofcourse there were tractors, but A LOT of people were using horses - even in the beginning of 90's it depended on how poor a region was.

Harvesters and tractors were often rented for specific tasks.

This plays nicely to the Western stereotype, though. (Not the pictures in and of themselves, but pretending the outliers to be the typical).

I remember the outrage over Microsoft Encarta which used photos similar to the Barbey's ones to illustrate the "Poland" entry in 2003 :)

See http://of19.internetdsl.pl/bzdury/encarta/

Two can play that game, http://www.landoverbaptist.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/... - life of an American citizen, 2016.

And two did play it indeed :) Communist propaganda would actually pull a similar trick on the West, focusing the coverage on the stuff that was, well; weird or creepy at best.

For example the "This is America" documentaries (by Romano Vanderbes) were broadcasted on the communist TV in 70s/80s in prime time. An average viewer would assume it to be an accurate representation of the prevalent lifestyle.

i grew up in Poland too, east, and south-east looked like like this, or worse. where did you grow up? not everybody had a tractor, still had plenty of horses around, doesn't mean everybody used them, that'd be ridiculous

Warsaw, with parts of family near Ciechanów and near Piła.

No, not everybody had a tractor - that would be ineffective, given how many small family-owned farms there were. But they did use tractors and combine harvesters. TBH I don't know whether they were shared between neighbors or just unofficially borrowed(#) for a bottle of vodka from the state farms (PGR).

(#)There's this Polish verb "załatwić" which I cannot properly translate to English. It means obtaining products or services using ones connections, cunning and possibly transfer of a usual token of appreciation as in "załatwić za flachę" (obtain something in exchange for a bottle of vodka).

I think the most direct English translation for this word is "finesse". I had only ever known this word as a noun before recently hearing it used as a verb in US prison slang from a documentary.

EDIT: Then again, maybe not. When I hear people in Poland use that word, I'd maybe translate it as "organise" or "arrange", but only in the sense of arranging the acquirement of something.

Kind of "to sort out", but the more specific meaning is lost. The history has filled our vocabulary with quite a lot of such terms that don't lend themselves well to translation. Eg. "chałtura".

you grew up in the country's capital, and had family in the north-west, no wonder you have no idea how life really was

Both - as they're commonly referred to - "Poland A" and "Poland B" comprise of significant portions of the population. I can't see why life in one should be considered "real", while in the other, not. There are two sides to this picture.

Because capitals are show off places in oppressive countries. The reality is outside. I grew up in a small city in USSR and sometimes speak to people that grew up in Moscow or Leningrad. The difference is huge... They often owned cars, had frequent access to bananas and oranges, and the stores were generally adequately stocked. Not for us and the rest of the country..

That's true, but my parent commenter referred to the entire North West (which is, generally speaking, more well off in Poland) not being "real". Not just Warsaw. Ciechanów or Piła, both rather small towns, could hardly be considered show off places.

Overall the gap was more along the lines of big cities vs. province as you say; rather than geographical. In a centrally planned economy large urban centers were overprivileged in the pecking order.

...which means that the pictures have a bias, and they don't represent the state of the whole country at the time.

(not that there is anything wrong with it)

I was plowing with horse when I was 5 years old in 1995 in south-east Poland. This is when we switched to self-made tractor and anyway farm was gone in 2000s when my grandpa stopped to care. Things changed a lot but south-east outside cities is still relatively poor.

What are you talking about and why are you lying?

It does look like Twitter is for rejects if you only read the top entries.

it has everything to do with the current political climate, and the fact that extremist views on one side are tolerated, while ones on the other are actively being fought against

if you don't want to listen to "nut jobs", you don't have to, nobody's shoving Alex Jones in your face, but banning people you find objectionable sets up a dangerous precedent

I'm sorry you feel that way but maybe the invisible hand of the free market has decided that it just isn't profitable for large companies to provide platforms for people like Alex Jones. You should be happy to live in a world where a business is allowed to make decisions that act in their rational best interest instead of being forced by government to do something that doesn't make sense to their bottom line.

Maybe Mr. Jones can build his own content distribution channels? If he can't, maybe his ideas just aren't that popular and his business should fail?

And for what it's worth, Alex Jones supporters spread like a cancer through sites that allow it. The community surrounding him and those like him are often more toxic then the founders.

i don't understand why anybody, especially a person with technical knowledge, would purchase and install a device that constantly listens to its surroundings and uploads conversations to the internet

it's scary what a third party can do through your smartphone, let alone all the IoT garbage connected to an Echo

So, a government organisation is openly telling Facebook how to moderate speech now, and they're complying? I know Facebook's a private company, so they don't have to uphold the 1st amendment, I'm just wondering how far do we have to go down this rabbit hole before people wake up.

Exactly. This is government censorship, they're just using the facade of Facebook to do it. COINTELPRO is a good read, the FBI is untrustworthy and works against American interests when it comes to foreign and domestic politics and political organizing (please notice the specifics of this, I am not saying FBI is untrustworthy in all aspects).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

Which gov't org TOLD them how to moderate? All I really saw was the FBI alerted them to some suspicious activity linked to foreign entities, which FB investigated and agreed that the acct's violated FB's policies and so they removed them. Did I miss something?

The most interesting thing about that article to me was discovering FB uses WordPress to publish them.

If the government is telling Facebook how to moderate their platform, wouldn't that be a violation of the 1rst amendment? Since it would be the government actively trying to restrict what someone else can say?

In a clearly biased environment like Facebook everything is "Fake News".

Nice to have this on paper, but I'm fairly sure everybody knew this already.

It's scary that people like Luckey or Thiel aren't immune to political persecution in Silicon Valley. Can't imagine how oppressive the environment has to be for the regular folk.

"Move along, there's nothing to see here" mentality. Just because the sky's not falling, doesn't mean there's no problem.

Freedom of speech is a right that's frightingly easy for people to give up, and articles like these do nothing but hurt the situation.

so, in your opinion, it's alright to ban people from speaking because it gets tiring when they're obviously wrong, and still they refuse to stop talking

I was responding to the OP who said that it's better to hear people and try to counteract their argument. I think that's a bad idea. Instead I recommend ignoring them.

I would ban people on a private system if they are causing a problem with the service. If I were running the service then the criteria I would use is whether or not it's impacting how I run the service. Probably to your horror, I would think very hard about banning people who I don't personally want to attract and who are chasing away the people who I do want to attract. As much as possible I would avoid it, but a big part of running a good establishment is choosing your clientele. It is analogous to refusing to serve someone who is loud and beligerent in a find dining establishment, while encouraging that person in a raucous bar.

I feel that people should be able to say whatever they want in their own homes. They should be able to say whatever they want in their own establishments. They should be able to publish what they want and sell/give it away to people who want it.

However, I think there are limits to what should be accepted in public spaces. I think that people should not be forced to publish things they disagree with, unless they have a monopoly or near-monopoly for publishing in a medium. Controversially, I think that people should be allowed to refuse service for any reason, unless they have a monopoly or near-monopoly on the service (and I happen to live in a country where this is the case).

So, that's my opinion. Believe it or not, I'm not actually interested in debating it, but because you asked me what my opinion was, I gave it to you. I suspect it differs substantially in some ways from your opinion and I have absolutely no problem with that.

Yes, banning trolls is morally fine. If you want to design a system to automatically detect them, that's where things get hard

the way you said it, it looks like we can just model the system based on your understanding of what's right or wrong, or maybe you have some other infallible person in mind?