I would propose that it is only intuitive to a small subset of the population.
I would agree here. The common concept of a 'list', be it shopping or todo, is actually closer to the concept of something like a 'bag' - the strange a rarely-implemented datatype from the equally strange and rarely used formal-logic-vs-programming language 'Z'. A list is generally in no particular order, although one might order one's shopping list in the order in which one expects the items therein to be encountered in the supermarket. And a list may contain duplicate items, but usually only in the sense that I wish to purchase five loaves of bread.
Similarly there isn't really anything in common usage that would convey the particular semantics of an 'array'. That is, an array is ordered, may contain duplicate elements, is no more expensive to search through than a list (cache-misses notwithstanding), but is more expensive to remove items from. These are advanced concepts, but any understanding of 'lists' and 'arrays' is incomplete without them.
I doubt there is a single person alive who cannot donate anything. And even if there are, they can still be on the list, and they probably would have been since before they got sick too.
You made an assumption, which was that you can only be on the list if you can donate an organ upon your death (which like I say, is probably everyone. You'd have to be pretty damn sick to not even be able to donate a cornea). No-one, apart from you, has suggested that you can only be on the list if you are likely to be healthy enough upon your death to donate an organ. If that were the rule, I agree, it would make no sense. But I don't think it's what's being suggested here.
True, it's not real mathematics. But it is unquestionably useful, and promotes a general level of numeracy (as distinct from an understanding of mathematics) amongst the population. I wish I'd learnt my times tables, whereas now I reach for the calculator to get the joke in the Hitch-hikers Guide.
If you are willing to donate organs after your death, you sign up to the list. The list is binding. This means that if you're on the list and you die, your organs are harvested and then the hollow corpse is handed over to the family for an undertaker to stuff with sawdust. Your family is not consulted, the process is automatic and driven solely by a) Your death, and b) Your prior decision.
Once you're on the list, you are eligible for transplants, should they ever become necessary. If you're not on the list, then you're not eligible - unless you're under some age of consent limit. Maybe there's a grace period of a year say, during which you need to make the choice but are still eligible for transplant.
Where's the problem? Or is your comment written under the misapprehension that the GP's proposal applies to live donors, whereas it in fact applies only to dead ones?
Well, since this suggestion is about the current organ donor scheme, which only kicks in when you're dead, I'm not sure that there would be a big problem.
If your medications mean that your organs are no longer in a fit state to be useful to another, then I guess they don't get donated.
The extremely simple suggestion proposed by the GP seems to have generated a great deal of very silly discussion, chiefly from ACs - is there a clever troll around somewhere having a bit of fun?
I'm not so sure that you're right about that. If, say, at eighteen one chose whether or not to be a donor, and that the consequences of that choice were as described above, then many people would choose the donor option. In the UK at least, one makes that choice when applies for a driver's licence (AFAICR). The problem is that the choice isn't binding, as already mentioned by several posters in this thread and others. If that particular ethical dilemma could be navigated and the donorship became a choice of and only of each individual donor, then I think the parent's solution would work.
Currently, I can declare myself a donor - as I and many others already have done - and have that extremely personal decision reversed by traumatised family members. This should not be possible.
Not exactly, the article is proposing a solution to a shortage of transplant donors. The solution it proposes is a market in organs, which is clearly insane to anyone with a functioning brain.
jythie's proposal is a much saner solution to the same problem, in which (and here I'm putting words into the poster's mouth, but I feel I'm pretty safe) the decision to be on a donor list would be binding, and only those on a donor list or below the age of consent would be eligible for transplants.
Some vehicles are perfectly capable of doing 100mph while others need to be throttled back for safety reasons.
Really? What safety reasons? There are no cars that can travel on a public road at almost 45 meters per second even remotely safely. Car accidents at speed are not generally caused by cars falling to bits on the road, but by their drivers being human beings and thus making a hash of the extremely demanding task of piloting a vehicle that will have travelled four meters in a tenth of a second.
Well that sounds terrible for you. I do mean it actually, though it might sound snarky, a nasty flu really is perfectly awful. The last one I had hit the whole family, kids and all, at the same time. Now that sucked.
Many people all around the world are working very hard to try and cure Influenza, and lots of other even more horrible viruses. Like, oh I don't know, HIV for example. They are extremely tough. They aren't really alive, so you can't kill them as such. And things like the flu mutate at the drop of a hat, making vaccines effective only for short periods. Every flu you get is actually a different disease, and if you happen to get more than one at a time, you'll probably be infectious with a whole new variety.
Against many bacterial infections, and against viruses that for whatever reason don't mutate as fast as the flu, medical science has been extremely successful. I think you should cut it a break.
If your immune system can kill off cells that have mutated -- a sort of integrity check -- then you can't get cancer.
Which would be great, except that I think there might be a more general principal at work here - something related to Entropy or Thermodynamics or something - which might place an upper limit on how reliable any machine can possibly be. Which isn't to say we couldn't make cancer much less common, but something about how many pathways lead to the development of tumours makes me think that it might be a fundamental eventual side-effect of being alive at all.
Yeah, but on the other hand capital letters are easier to recognise instantly on their own than lowercase letters, you know shift is pressed because you just pressed it, and the fact that a big 'flag' appears above the letter when you've pressed them is very helpful visual feedback. On android the stock keyboard's letters light up under your fingers, which is a bit pointless.
Why do you think physical keyboards have capital letters on them, when people write lowercase letters far more often?
Not that I'm arguing that you shouldn't be able to install different keyboards on an iOS device, just that I think the apple on-screen keyboard is actually really very good indeed.
The treatment for a broken leg is the same regardless of how you broke it.
Hardly. Some people wind up in a hospital bed strapped to pulleys and weights, others with metal frames plunging into their flesh, and yet others hobble home in a plaster cast. You do seem to be oversimplifying to me.
So long as their freedom doesn't harm someone else, I believe in freedom.
Same here. I'm not sure that everyone would agree on a definition of harm though, wherein the devil of the details lies.
That was a pretty interesting article you linked to, not so much because of the 90% figure, but that there are religious academics (to whom no-one appears to be listening, thankfully) who don't even believe that the rhythm method is moral. Good lord. No pun intended.
I have a serious question: Are there really people, in this day and age, living in the modern world, who actually believe that contraception is immoral? I mean, people other than the pope that is, and his opinion is a bit moot anyway since he's supposed to be celibate. Because I do find that perfectly extraordinary, and would love to hear some rationale behind it.
Gosh, we did all manage to make sex into quite a big deal, didn't we?
A sliding cover to a camera does not adhere to KISS from a user's perspective. It's actually an annoying additional step to using the camera - not to mention another moving part on a laptop that may break and/or jam. Plus it's actually less useful - if the sliding cover is open one probably still wants an LED to indicate whether or not the camera is actually active.
The idea of tying the LED to the power supply to the camera also won't work, at least for modern macbooks, because that camera sensor is in fact always active. It's also used as the ambient light sensor to automatically dim the display in low-light conditions. Of course, they could have used an additional sensor for that, but that would have increased the cost and complexity of the camera hardware.
The real issue here is much more general, which is that it should manifestly not be possible without root privileges to modify the firmware in any of the microcontrollers in a laptop (of which I'm sure there are several).
"Language evolves" is a slightly leading statement, since it suggests that evolves is being used in it's generally-accepted-but-not-quite-correct sense of improves. It doesn't though, it just changes. And in doing so we still continue to understand it. There is no such thing as grammatically incorrect speech, since the definition of grammar can only be an examination of how language is spoken. See "The Language Instinct" by Stephen Pinker for an excellent and in-depth study of this point.
Perhaps you should read a little more widely on the Philosophy of Science before you suggest that 'Science' doesn't 'like' philosophy. Additionally, science is not a 'thing', that can like or dislike anything.
Accepting science on faith doesn't lessen the science.
Yes, it does.
You seem to stick to the idea that the corpus of knowledge gathered through the scientific method is the same thing as the scientific method itself. The difference has already been explained by another poster rather more eloquently than I could. Religious people accept religious truths on faith, whereas those of a more scientific frame of mind accept scientific hypotheses on the basis that they rest upon evidence. They may accept that the evidence exists by trusting those in the scientific community to not pull the wool over their eyes, but this is not the same thing as accepting the hypotheses itself on faith.
Or at least, I don't believe that it ought to be true - or that it is necessarily true.
Science, or rather recent scientific findings, are generally transmitted to the wider population via the media. Science itself, as is often noted on this site, is not a collection of articles of faith - but a process. Religion is not a process, it is a collection of articles of faith. This is the difference. Science, the process, generates as its output a set of testable hypotheses. Some of these, some of the more esoteric ones related to subatomic particles and so-on, are rather hard to test. But the evidence that things like Quantum Mechanics and Relativity work are all around us. Computers are GPS would neither be where they are today if it were not for the hypotheses tested by the scientific method.
Now the media, that's another story. If the wider population's exposure to this set of hypotheses - any of which could in principal be overturned at any time - is only through the more or less illiterate scribblings of the popular media, then yes. Everything is taken on faith, and in this sense we do have what is effectively a religion. This is because the scientific community is woeful at explanations digestible by the general public, and usually hedge their bets in rather unconvincing ways. They may say 'there is no evidence for', meaning 'it's probably not true, but this is a process and more research is always needed'. That's not terribly convincing, and the popular media pick up the slack.
Why, I wouldn't be surprised if the "trolls" weren't actually aliens risking violation of the prime directive just to try and help you humans out by demonstrating exactly how insane your current patent and copyright system is.
I'm very pleased to hear that your neighbourhood is crime-free to the extent that you are able to teach your child that... wait, you're teaching her to pretty much be afraid wherever she is. Look inside the car before you get in, in case there's a mugger in there? Are you serious?
Anyway, my neighbourhood is fine thanks. My point is a more general one, and isn't related to where I live or to where you live. It's related to the statement that you feel it necessary to teach someone that they should never put themselves in a position where they can be attacked. I do not see how it is possible to achieve that, and further I believe that it generates an unnecessary climate of fear around everything that person does.
But I really don't want to argue with you about this - I just wanted to make the point that it is never the fault of the victim under any circumstances. It is always the responsibility of the attacker. Always. And none of us, male or female, should ever feel that we have to live in fear just because we could be raped or attacked. And in the original article, the lady in question should have an expectation of privacy when in private, and people that secretly film others and then publish the footage should be punished as harshly as the law allows. And arguing that it was her fault because she put herself in that position is nothing more than victim blaming.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do you care so much what other people teach their kids?
Because ignorance hurts us all.
And not only *that*, but all forms are transitional forms.
I would propose that it is only intuitive to a small subset of the population.
I would agree here. The common concept of a 'list', be it shopping or todo, is actually closer to the concept of something like a 'bag' - the strange a rarely-implemented datatype from the equally strange and rarely used formal-logic-vs-programming language 'Z'. A list is generally in no particular order, although one might order one's shopping list in the order in which one expects the items therein to be encountered in the supermarket. And a list may contain duplicate items, but usually only in the sense that I wish to purchase five loaves of bread.
Similarly there isn't really anything in common usage that would convey the particular semantics of an 'array'. That is, an array is ordered, may contain duplicate elements, is no more expensive to search through than a list (cache-misses notwithstanding), but is more expensive to remove items from. These are advanced concepts, but any understanding of 'lists' and 'arrays' is incomplete without them.
I doubt there is a single person alive who cannot donate anything. And even if there are, they can still be on the list, and they probably would have been since before they got sick too.
You made an assumption, which was that you can only be on the list if you can donate an organ upon your death (which like I say, is probably everyone. You'd have to be pretty damn sick to not even be able to donate a cornea). No-one, apart from you, has suggested that you can only be on the list if you are likely to be healthy enough upon your death to donate an organ. If that were the rule, I agree, it would make no sense. But I don't think it's what's being suggested here.
it does however not seem like real mathematics.
True, it's not real mathematics. But it is unquestionably useful, and promotes a general level of numeracy (as distinct from an understanding of mathematics) amongst the population. I wish I'd learnt my times tables, whereas now I reach for the calculator to get the joke in the Hitch-hikers Guide.
How? That does't make any sense.
If you are willing to donate organs after your death, you sign up to the list. The list is binding. This means that if you're on the list and you die, your organs are harvested and then the hollow corpse is handed over to the family for an undertaker to stuff with sawdust. Your family is not consulted, the process is automatic and driven solely by a) Your death, and b) Your prior decision.
Once you're on the list, you are eligible for transplants, should they ever become necessary. If you're not on the list, then you're not eligible - unless you're under some age of consent limit. Maybe there's a grace period of a year say, during which you need to make the choice but are still eligible for transplant.
Where's the problem? Or is your comment written under the misapprehension that the GP's proposal applies to live donors, whereas it in fact applies only to dead ones?
Well, since this suggestion is about the current organ donor scheme, which only kicks in when you're dead, I'm not sure that there would be a big problem.
If your medications mean that your organs are no longer in a fit state to be useful to another, then I guess they don't get donated.
The extremely simple suggestion proposed by the GP seems to have generated a great deal of very silly discussion, chiefly from ACs - is there a clever troll around somewhere having a bit of fun?
I'm not so sure that you're right about that. If, say, at eighteen one chose whether or not to be a donor, and that the consequences of that choice were as described above, then many people would choose the donor option. In the UK at least, one makes that choice when applies for a driver's licence (AFAICR). The problem is that the choice isn't binding, as already mentioned by several posters in this thread and others. If that particular ethical dilemma could be navigated and the donorship became a choice of and only of each individual donor, then I think the parent's solution would work.
Currently, I can declare myself a donor - as I and many others already have done - and have that extremely personal decision reversed by traumatised family members. This should not be possible.
Dr House (md)
Dr House is fictional character who, if ever made real, would kill probably 90% of the cases he managed.
Ooops. Fed the troll.
Not exactly, the article is proposing a solution to a shortage of transplant donors. The solution it proposes is a market in organs, which is clearly insane to anyone with a functioning brain.
jythie's proposal is a much saner solution to the same problem, in which (and here I'm putting words into the poster's mouth, but I feel I'm pretty safe) the decision to be on a donor list would be binding, and only those on a donor list or below the age of consent would be eligible for transplants.
That sounds pretty sensible to me.
Some vehicles are perfectly capable of doing 100mph while others need to be throttled back for safety reasons.
Really? What safety reasons? There are no cars that can travel on a public road at almost 45 meters per second even remotely safely. Car accidents at speed are not generally caused by cars falling to bits on the road, but by their drivers being human beings and thus making a hash of the extremely demanding task of piloting a vehicle that will have travelled four meters in a tenth of a second.
Well that sounds terrible for you. I do mean it actually, though it might sound snarky, a nasty flu really is perfectly awful. The last one I had hit the whole family, kids and all, at the same time. Now that sucked.
Many people all around the world are working very hard to try and cure Influenza, and lots of other even more horrible viruses. Like, oh I don't know, HIV for example. They are extremely tough. They aren't really alive, so you can't kill them as such. And things like the flu mutate at the drop of a hat, making vaccines effective only for short periods. Every flu you get is actually a different disease, and if you happen to get more than one at a time, you'll probably be infectious with a whole new variety.
Against many bacterial infections, and against viruses that for whatever reason don't mutate as fast as the flu, medical science has been extremely successful. I think you should cut it a break.
If your immune system can kill off cells that have mutated -- a sort of integrity check -- then you can't get cancer.
Which would be great, except that I think there might be a more general principal at work here - something related to Entropy or Thermodynamics or something - which might place an upper limit on how reliable any machine can possibly be. Which isn't to say we couldn't make cancer much less common, but something about how many pathways lead to the development of tumours makes me think that it might be a fundamental eventual side-effect of being alive at all.
Well.... ok....
But sometimes you do chop it off, if it's really bad. And if you're a horse you generally get shot.
Yeah, but on the other hand capital letters are easier to recognise instantly on their own than lowercase letters, you know shift is pressed because you just pressed it, and the fact that a big 'flag' appears above the letter when you've pressed them is very helpful visual feedback. On android the stock keyboard's letters light up under your fingers, which is a bit pointless.
Why do you think physical keyboards have capital letters on them, when people write lowercase letters far more often?
Not that I'm arguing that you shouldn't be able to install different keyboards on an iOS device, just that I think the apple on-screen keyboard is actually really very good indeed.
The treatment for a broken leg is the same regardless of how you broke it.
Hardly. Some people wind up in a hospital bed strapped to pulleys and weights, others with metal frames plunging into their flesh, and yet others hobble home in a plaster cast. You do seem to be oversimplifying to me.
Other than that you make excellent points :)
So long as their freedom doesn't harm someone else, I believe in freedom.
Same here. I'm not sure that everyone would agree on a definition of harm though, wherein the devil of the details lies.
That was a pretty interesting article you linked to, not so much because of the 90% figure, but that there are religious academics (to whom no-one appears to be listening, thankfully) who don't even believe that the rhythm method is moral. Good lord. No pun intended.
I have a serious question: Are there really people, in this day and age, living in the modern world, who actually believe that contraception is immoral? I mean, people other than the pope that is, and his opinion is a bit moot anyway since he's supposed to be celibate. Because I do find that perfectly extraordinary, and would love to hear some rationale behind it.
Gosh, we did all manage to make sex into quite a big deal, didn't we?
A sliding cover to a camera does not adhere to KISS from a user's perspective. It's actually an annoying additional step to using the camera - not to mention another moving part on a laptop that may break and/or jam. Plus it's actually less useful - if the sliding cover is open one probably still wants an LED to indicate whether or not the camera is actually active.
The idea of tying the LED to the power supply to the camera also won't work, at least for modern macbooks, because that camera sensor is in fact always active. It's also used as the ambient light sensor to automatically dim the display in low-light conditions. Of course, they could have used an additional sensor for that, but that would have increased the cost and complexity of the camera hardware.
The real issue here is much more general, which is that it should manifestly not be possible without root privileges to modify the firmware in any of the microcontrollers in a laptop (of which I'm sure there are several).
Although the AC is woefully ignorant, his advice is nutritionally pretty sound, if perfectly disgusting.
Language also devolves.
No, it doesn't.
"Language evolves" is a slightly leading statement, since it suggests that evolves is being used in it's generally-accepted-but-not-quite-correct sense of improves. It doesn't though, it just changes. And in doing so we still continue to understand it. There is no such thing as grammatically incorrect speech, since the definition of grammar can only be an examination of how language is spoken. See "The Language Instinct" by Stephen Pinker for an excellent and in-depth study of this point.
Odd arguments, and an odd position.
Perhaps you should read a little more widely on the Philosophy of Science before you suggest that 'Science' doesn't 'like' philosophy. Additionally, science is not a 'thing', that can like or dislike anything.
Accepting science on faith doesn't lessen the science.
Yes, it does.
You seem to stick to the idea that the corpus of knowledge gathered through the scientific method is the same thing as the scientific method itself. The difference has already been explained by another poster rather more eloquently than I could. Religious people accept religious truths on faith, whereas those of a more scientific frame of mind accept scientific hypotheses on the basis that they rest upon evidence. They may accept that the evidence exists by trusting those in the scientific community to not pull the wool over their eyes, but this is not the same thing as accepting the hypotheses itself on faith.
I do not believe that this is true at all.
Or at least, I don't believe that it ought to be true - or that it is necessarily true.
Science, or rather recent scientific findings, are generally transmitted to the wider population via the media. Science itself, as is often noted on this site, is not a collection of articles of faith - but a process. Religion is not a process, it is a collection of articles of faith. This is the difference. Science, the process, generates as its output a set of testable hypotheses. Some of these, some of the more esoteric ones related to subatomic particles and so-on, are rather hard to test. But the evidence that things like Quantum Mechanics and Relativity work are all around us. Computers are GPS would neither be where they are today if it were not for the hypotheses tested by the scientific method.
Now the media, that's another story. If the wider population's exposure to this set of hypotheses - any of which could in principal be overturned at any time - is only through the more or less illiterate scribblings of the popular media, then yes. Everything is taken on faith, and in this sense we do have what is effectively a religion. This is because the scientific community is woeful at explanations digestible by the general public, and usually hedge their bets in rather unconvincing ways. They may say 'there is no evidence for', meaning 'it's probably not true, but this is a process and more research is always needed'. That's not terribly convincing, and the popular media pick up the slack.
Why, I wouldn't be surprised if the "trolls" weren't actually aliens risking violation of the prime directive just to try and help you humans out by demonstrating exactly how insane your current patent and copyright system is.
Really? Because I'd be fucking astonished.
This is an awfully peculiar discussion.
I'm very pleased to hear that your neighbourhood is crime-free to the extent that you are able to teach your child that... wait, you're teaching her to pretty much be afraid wherever she is. Look inside the car before you get in, in case there's a mugger in there? Are you serious?
Anyway, my neighbourhood is fine thanks. My point is a more general one, and isn't related to where I live or to where you live. It's related to the statement that you feel it necessary to teach someone that they should never put themselves in a position where they can be attacked. I do not see how it is possible to achieve that, and further I believe that it generates an unnecessary climate of fear around everything that person does.
But I really don't want to argue with you about this - I just wanted to make the point that it is never the fault of the victim under any circumstances. It is always the responsibility of the attacker. Always. And none of us, male or female, should ever feel that we have to live in fear just because we could be raped or attacked. And in the original article, the lady in question should have an expectation of privacy when in private, and people that secretly film others and then publish the footage should be punished as harshly as the law allows. And arguing that it was her fault because she put herself in that position is nothing more than victim blaming.