Constitution, what Constitution?
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Don't forget you aren't legally required to graduate from High School, and attending a government-run school isn't even the only way to get high school diploma. The government CAN require you do to things to graduate from government-run schools, like, say, attend classes. I really am having a hard time getting worked up about mandatory community service. Maybe that's because I'm getting old.
You may not realize this, but Social Security doesn't secure Society any more than Civil Security will secure Civility. I'm not for or against mandatory community service, but government names have always been largely propaganda.
Take a piece of elastic material, test its strength at a certain length, then stretch it as much as you can, let it snap back and test it at the same length again. I'd expect it to provide less pulling power at that length after the stretch, even if it's an organic stretchy material that's attached to bones and can change it's actual stretchiness at will.
In my polling place, like all of the others, they divided us up into three lines by last name (A-G, H-P,Q-Z). That's all pretty standard. The problem was that the H-P line was taking 2 to 3 hours to move through and vote, while the other two were taking about half an hour.
So I've got two questions about that. First, given a database of registered voters, it should be trivial to run a query and get a way to distribute names into three even groups.
The second issue I have is this -- Last names are not distributed evenly across ethnic groups. A much higher percentage of people of Irish or Scottish descent will be in the H-P group (Think of all of the O'somethings and the McLastnames). So by messing with the distributions of the names, you could actually make it more likely for people of particular ethnic groups to walk off without voting.
I'm not saying that happened, and people of Irish and Scottish descent are not exactly an underprivileged minority. I guess what I'm really saying, is that an 'M' of Scottish descent, that sucked.
And you missed my point. This was the quote from your previous post:
Darwin's argument on that point was simply wrong. Have you ever had a class on Evolution? Did the teacher draw this distinction? If they did not, that's teaching Evolution as a secular religion
The role of a science class it not to point out everything that was once believed but has now been discredited, even if we're talking about the great minds. It's to teach the process, and include some highlights of what currently has NOT been discredited. Your argument that it's a religion if we don't teach the specific beliefs of one guy who died 125 years ago is nonsense, even if they are only taught to point out that they were wrong. There is certainly a place for that sort of discussion (a history of science class, for instance, or in some kind of biographical discussion). Science class (especially at the pre-university level) just wouldn't be possible if we had to teach everything that every luminary ever believed to be true that has since been discredited.
I'd love to know what evidence could falsify Evolution.
You know how every once in a while someone refers to evolution as a cat being born to a dog, or some variation? If that could be proved to happen, it would be pretty damning evidence to evolution as we know it. If one species could give birth to an animal which was so different from its parents it couldn't reproduce with the species of its parents but COULD reproduce with an existing other species, we'd pretty much have to re-evaluate the whole theory.
Darwin's argument on that point was simply wrong.
Have you ever had a class on Evolution? Did the teacher draw this distinction? If they did not, that's teaching Evolution as a secular religion,
Darwin died in 1882. This may surprise you, but some scientific work has been done in this area since he first published. He was wrong about a handful of things.
Incidentally, one of the ways that science is unlike a religion is that a respected scientist can be proven to have made a mistake and we can all acknowledge that it was wrong. Now, if the founder of a religion (say, Jesus) was proven to have stated things that are demonstrably incorrect, we'd all have to pretend that he didn't mean what he said, or that we just misinterpreted it. But no, Darwin was a guy who said a few incorrect things. Newton did too, incidentally, but that doesn't mean gravity doesn't work at all -- just that it doesn't work exactly the way he described it.
You didn't refer to evolution as "Darwinism," but I've always assumed that the people who do that share the same misunderstanding that evolution is some kind of cult of personality based on Darwin's charismatic personality.
One kind of animal changing into another is the basic proposition of evolution.
No, it absolutely isn't. The two basic propositions of evolution are:
1. Organisms will have random, often tiny differences from their parents.
2. Organisms will be more or less likely to survive to reproduce based on these differences.
That's all that's needed. When you throw in almost unimaginable amounts of time, eventually you'll find an organism (after a huge number of generations, each slightly different than their parents) which can be defined as a different species than the "original" one (I put original in quotes because you could take the analysis back further and use THAT organism as the end result too. But you'd never have a child that wasn't "the same animal" as its parent, except in the sense that YOU aren't the same animal as your parents (for instance, you might be taller, or have a different hair color, or have an extra finger, or have extra nipples, or have a slightly smaller appendix, or have exceptionally good eyesight or dexterous hands, or any of a million other tiny differences).
Also, call me when you've done an experiment that shows how the first cell came to life or how a fish grows lungs
First, the first cell isn't a question of evolution. Incidentally, the theory of relativity also doesn't explain the first cell, but that doesn't disprove relativity either. As far as the first fish with lungs, it was probably similar to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiktaalik
Actually, you're wrong. I remember as a kid visiting my cousins in England and reading their "Irish Jokes" books. For the Americans, they were the same stupid, unacceptable jokes presented here as Polish jokes. Anyway, they've stopped that now, so you can't get away with it. But have you ever heard anyone stand up for the English? How many movies have you seen where the evil genius villain has an English accent? The world must think England is a country of Evil Geniuses and Super Spies. Oh, and drunk effeminate pirates.
being backed by a 156 billion $ company behind it and still about the same marketshare as Linux?
yeah, but how much money did Linus make off of his marketshare? (I know, I'm just kidding about that) Still, you seem to be implying that being a $156 billion dollar company makes them a failure if they don't also have a monopoly in their space. I would argue that shareholders care a lot more about their marketcap than their marketshare.
We are making an assumption the can even understand our technology by then . . . At least with a stone tablet, all you have to do is look at it . . . ( ad figure out the language, another barrier future readers will have )
I know, there's no point in telling you to RTFA. But we aren't assuming they'll understand our technology, we're assuming they'll have a microscope of some kind. This is essentially a metal tablet with really tiny writing. As far as figuring out the language that's the point -- they only need to know one language. If they have some access to English (say, a couple of Shakespeare plays are still read by scholars) or French or Chinese (perhaps most likely, by sheer numbers) they'll be able to read all of the major languages, and pretty much any document from our era that they find.
I haven't had any dropped calls. The articles I've read say it's a problem in densely packed areas, and I'm in a close suburb of Washington DC. Haven't dropped one call yet, and I got it about a week after they were released.
They've sold millions of these phones, but you don't seem to have considered that the few hundred (or a thousand?) people claiming to love the phone and the few hundred (or a thousand) of people angrily posting about dropped calls may be different groups of people.
Like any device, there are things to like about it and things to not like about it.
I can't think of a job that can be more easily offshored than computer programming.
I don't really disagree with your main point, but this line is just hyperbole. Light manufacturing is more easily off-shored, that's why garments are almost not produced in first-world countries at all. Likewise with any repetitive activity. Coding certainly can be off-shored, but developers need to be closer to managers (because there are lots of decisions to be made, and a lot of these require feedback loops to constantly adjust decisions). It can be off-shored, but it's not any where near as easy as it sounds.
But for digital, noise is photon noise and that pretty much only depends on the number of photons per pixel, not pixel size.
And what affects the number of protons that hit each pixel? Yes, f-stop is a big piece of it, but the other piece is the size of the pixels. And the size of the pixel is essentially determined by how many you pack into a given sized-sensor. Your argument is like saying what matters when generating solar power isn't the size of the solar panel, it's the number of photons that hit it. That's true, except the easiest way to increase the number of photons that hit it is to make the panel bigger.
those cameras have sensors a fraction of the size of SLRs, meaning lower sensitivity, less information per pixel, and more noise and distortion.
That matters to landscape and portrait photographers, it doesn't matter much to news photographers.
That is true except for the the situation described in the parent -- at a concert, badly lit, from a huge distance, with people moving around on stage.
You start with a tiny sensor, add a big zoom which further reduces the light hitting the sensor, and ALSO magnifies any hand movement. You will need to increase the time of your exposure to compensate for the noise from the tiny sensor and the big zoom. That means you'll get more blur from the subject moving in the picture, and also further increases the blur from your hand movement (which the zoom with then magnify again). Your chances of getting anything identifiable with a tiny sensor in a handheld camera, at night (or in an enclosed bar or whatever), zoomed as far as it can go, with your subjects dancing around -- or even swinging back and forth with the music -- is pretty much zero. Your only chance is a really wide shot of the whole stage and crowd in front of you.
Or, you can get a dSLR with a big sensor and a big lens that allows in more light.
Seriously, concerts and bird-watching are the two times you can really justify using an expensive camera. Landscapes are generally pretty good at staying still, and they're often still there the next morning when the light is better:)
Sitcoms? Sometimes incredibly stupid, but mostly fine.
Reality TV is a trap of the most dangerous and intellectually lethal kind.
So you can still be an intellectual if you watch "According to Jim," but "The Amazing Race" is right out.
Other examples -- my mother-in-law is a home economics teacher (it's called Family and Consumer Sciences now, by the way). She sews as a hobby, and enjoys watching Project Runway (a reality show about people designing clothes and competing for a clothing contract). Is it really anti-intellectual to watch people competing at your hobby? Even if you take notes while you watch?
What about something like Monster Garage, or Mythbusters? How do you define Reality TV anyway? Does Jeopardy count?
Is this a woosh moment for me? Because I'm thinking the intersection of flat-earthers would contain the same number of flat-earthers as it does creationists. Maybe you're saying the intersection of those two groups would be a large group by itself?
For things like reports, your developers have to write complex SQL. You can argue that it shouldn't be a developer, instead it should be done by a "development DBA" or whatever, but essentially whoever writes the SQL IS the developer for reports. Even experienced DBAs can leave out a join in a complex (10 or more table) query, and it often isn't found if it's only run against a development and/or QA database with limited data and no real load. Cartesian products should be found if anyone actually reads the output in QA, but that doesn't always seem to be the case.
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Constitution, what Constitution? Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Don't forget you aren't legally required to graduate from High School, and attending a government-run school isn't even the only way to get high school diploma. The government CAN require you do to things to graduate from government-run schools, like, say, attend classes. I really am having a hard time getting worked up about mandatory community service. Maybe that's because I'm getting old.
You may not realize this, but Social Security doesn't secure Society any more than Civil Security will secure Civility. I'm not for or against mandatory community service, but government names have always been largely propaganda.
Take a piece of elastic material, test its strength at a certain length, then stretch it as much as you can, let it snap back and test it at the same length again. I'd expect it to provide less pulling power at that length after the stretch, even if it's an organic stretchy material that's attached to bones and can change it's actual stretchiness at will.
And what ever happened to your bikini team?
I was a C-Section baby, you insensitive clod!
In my polling place, like all of the others, they divided us up into three lines by last name (A-G, H-P,Q-Z). That's all pretty standard. The problem was that the H-P line was taking 2 to 3 hours to move through and vote, while the other two were taking about half an hour.
So I've got two questions about that. First, given a database of registered voters, it should be trivial to run a query and get a way to distribute names into three even groups.
The second issue I have is this -- Last names are not distributed evenly across ethnic groups. A much higher percentage of people of Irish or Scottish descent will be in the H-P group (Think of all of the O'somethings and the McLastnames). So by messing with the distributions of the names, you could actually make it more likely for people of particular ethnic groups to walk off without voting.
I'm not saying that happened, and people of Irish and Scottish descent are not exactly an underprivileged minority. I guess what I'm really saying, is that an 'M' of Scottish descent, that sucked.
Darwin's argument on that point was simply wrong. Have you ever had a class on Evolution? Did the teacher draw this distinction? If they did not, that's teaching Evolution as a secular religion
The role of a science class it not to point out everything that was once believed but has now been discredited, even if we're talking about the great minds. It's to teach the process, and include some highlights of what currently has NOT been discredited.
Your argument that it's a religion if we don't teach the specific beliefs of one guy who died 125 years ago is nonsense, even if they are only taught to point out that they were wrong. There is certainly a place for that sort of discussion (a history of science class, for instance, or in some kind of biographical discussion). Science class (especially at the pre-university level) just wouldn't be possible if we had to teach everything that every luminary ever believed to be true that has since been discredited.
psychics are real despite what the blowhard freak James Randi would have you believe.
Ok, I will grant that psychics are real. It's just their supernatural abilities that are fake.
I'd love to know what evidence could falsify Evolution.
You know how every once in a while someone refers to evolution as a cat being born to a dog, or some variation? If that could be proved to happen, it would be pretty damning evidence to evolution as we know it. If one species could give birth to an animal which was so different from its parents it couldn't reproduce with the species of its parents but COULD reproduce with an existing other species, we'd pretty much have to re-evaluate the whole theory.
Darwin's argument on that point was simply wrong. Have you ever had a class on Evolution? Did the teacher draw this distinction? If they did not, that's teaching Evolution as a secular religion,
Darwin died in 1882. This may surprise you, but some scientific work has been done in this area since he first published. He was wrong about a handful of things.
Incidentally, one of the ways that science is unlike a religion is that a respected scientist can be proven to have made a mistake and we can all acknowledge that it was wrong. Now, if the founder of a religion (say, Jesus) was proven to have stated things that are demonstrably incorrect, we'd all have to pretend that he didn't mean what he said, or that we just misinterpreted it. But no, Darwin was a guy who said a few incorrect things. Newton did too, incidentally, but that doesn't mean gravity doesn't work at all -- just that it doesn't work exactly the way he described it.
You didn't refer to evolution as "Darwinism," but I've always assumed that the people who do that share the same misunderstanding that evolution is some kind of cult of personality based on Darwin's charismatic personality.
One kind of animal changing into another is the basic proposition of evolution.
No, it absolutely isn't. The two basic propositions of evolution are:
1. Organisms will have random, often tiny differences from their parents.
2. Organisms will be more or less likely to survive to reproduce based on these differences.
That's all that's needed. When you throw in almost unimaginable amounts of time, eventually you'll find an organism (after a huge number of generations, each slightly different than their parents) which can be defined as a different species than the "original" one (I put original in quotes because you could take the analysis back further and use THAT organism as the end result too. But you'd never have a child that wasn't "the same animal" as its parent, except in the sense that YOU aren't the same animal as your parents (for instance, you might be taller, or have a different hair color, or have an extra finger, or have extra nipples, or have a slightly smaller appendix, or have exceptionally good eyesight or dexterous hands, or any of a million other tiny differences).
Also, call me when you've done an experiment that shows how the first cell came to life or how a fish grows lungs
First, the first cell isn't a question of evolution. Incidentally, the theory of relativity also doesn't explain the first cell, but that doesn't disprove relativity either. As far as the first fish with lungs, it was probably similar to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiktaalik
Actually, you're wrong. I remember as a kid visiting my cousins in England and reading their "Irish Jokes" books. For the Americans, they were the same stupid, unacceptable jokes presented here as Polish jokes. Anyway, they've stopped that now, so you can't get away with it.
But have you ever heard anyone stand up for the English? How many movies have you seen where the evil genius villain has an English accent? The world must think England is a country of Evil Geniuses and Super Spies. Oh, and drunk effeminate pirates.
being backed by a 156 billion $ company behind it and still about the same marketshare as Linux?
yeah, but how much money did Linus make off of his marketshare? (I know, I'm just kidding about that) Still, you seem to be implying that being a $156 billion dollar company makes them a failure if they don't also have a monopoly in their space. I would argue that shareholders care a lot more about their marketcap than their marketshare.
We are making an assumption the can even understand our technology by then . . . At least with a stone tablet, all you have to do is look at it . . . ( ad figure out the language, another barrier future readers will have )
I know, there's no point in telling you to RTFA. But we aren't assuming they'll understand our technology, we're assuming they'll have a microscope of some kind. This is essentially a metal tablet with really tiny writing. As far as figuring out the language that's the point -- they only need to know one language. If they have some access to English (say, a couple of Shakespeare plays are still read by scholars) or French or Chinese (perhaps most likely, by sheer numbers) they'll be able to read all of the major languages, and pretty much any document from our era that they find.
I haven't had any dropped calls. The articles I've read say it's a problem in densely packed areas, and I'm in a close suburb of Washington DC. Haven't dropped one call yet, and I got it about a week after they were released.
They've sold millions of these phones, but you don't seem to have considered that the few hundred (or a thousand?) people claiming to love the phone and the few hundred (or a thousand) of people angrily posting about dropped calls may be different groups of people.
Like any device, there are things to like about it and things to not like about it.
I can't think of a job that can be more easily offshored than computer programming.
I don't really disagree with your main point, but this line is just hyperbole. Light manufacturing is more easily off-shored, that's why garments are almost not produced in first-world countries at all. Likewise with any repetitive activity. Coding certainly can be off-shored, but developers need to be closer to managers (because there are lots of decisions to be made, and a lot of these require feedback loops to constantly adjust decisions). It can be off-shored, but it's not any where near as easy as it sounds.
sorry, I said protons in the first sentence when I mean photons. Yes, my face is red.
But for digital, noise is photon noise and that pretty much only depends on the number of photons per pixel, not pixel size.
And what affects the number of protons that hit each pixel? Yes, f-stop is a big piece of it, but the other piece is the size of the pixels. And the size of the pixel is essentially determined by how many you pack into a given sized-sensor. Your argument is like saying what matters when generating solar power isn't the size of the solar panel, it's the number of photons that hit it. That's true, except the easiest way to increase the number of photons that hit it is to make the panel bigger.
In Soviet Russia, the buildings take pictures of you! Wait, I'm sorry. I guess that's London.
those cameras have sensors a fraction of the size of SLRs, meaning lower sensitivity, less information per pixel, and more noise and distortion.
That matters to landscape and portrait photographers, it doesn't matter much to news photographers.
That is true except for the the situation described in the parent -- at a concert, badly lit, from a huge distance, with people moving around on stage.
:)
You start with a tiny sensor, add a big zoom which further reduces the light hitting the sensor, and ALSO magnifies any hand movement. You will need to increase the time of your exposure to compensate for the noise from the tiny sensor and the big zoom. That means you'll get more blur from the subject moving in the picture, and also further increases the blur from your hand movement (which the zoom with then magnify again). Your chances of getting anything identifiable with a tiny sensor in a handheld camera, at night (or in an enclosed bar or whatever), zoomed as far as it can go, with your subjects dancing around -- or even swinging back and forth with the music -- is pretty much zero. Your only chance is a really wide shot of the whole stage and crowd in front of you.
Or, you can get a dSLR with a big sensor and a big lens that allows in more light.
Seriously, concerts and bird-watching are the two times you can really justify using an expensive camera. Landscapes are generally pretty good at staying still, and they're often still there the next morning when the light is better
Sitcoms? Sometimes incredibly stupid, but mostly fine.
Reality TV is a trap of the most dangerous and intellectually lethal kind.
So you can still be an intellectual if you watch "According to Jim," but "The Amazing Race" is right out.
Other examples -- my mother-in-law is a home economics teacher (it's called Family and Consumer Sciences now, by the way). She sews as a hobby, and enjoys watching Project Runway (a reality show about people designing clothes and competing for a clothing contract). Is it really anti-intellectual to watch people competing at your hobby? Even if you take notes while you watch?
What about something like Monster Garage, or Mythbusters? How do you define Reality TV anyway? Does Jeopardy count?
Is this a woosh moment for me? Because I'm thinking the intersection of flat-earthers would contain the same number of flat-earthers as it does creationists. Maybe you're saying the intersection of those two groups would be a large group by itself?
How did the first post get modded redundant? Are we just that sick of hearing about the iPhone?
That plasma is then energised further using radio signals
I'll bet they're broadcasting the plasma's college fight song to it.
For things like reports, your developers have to write complex SQL. You can argue that it shouldn't be a developer, instead it should be done by a "development DBA" or whatever, but essentially whoever writes the SQL IS the developer for reports. Even experienced DBAs can leave out a join in a complex (10 or more table) query, and it often isn't found if it's only run against a development and/or QA database with limited data and no real load. Cartesian products should be found if anyone actually reads the output in QA, but that doesn't always seem to be the case.