Either the Marines weren't supposed to worry about fractures and head wounds, or they just decided that we might have trouble remembering as much as those in the Army. Then again, I was only in for a very short time...:-)
I've already moderated comments in this story, but I have to respond to this; moderator points be damned!
You are drawing an irrelevant conclusion. Your statement,
This is of course a faulty assumption, since there is no reason for a teenager to be having sex
incorrectly assumes that there are no reasons for teenagers to be having sex. There are many reasons (it feels good, the drive to have sex is wired into the species, the desire to be closer to someone, gaining life experiences, etc.), you just may not think that they justify teenage sex. Also, your list of reasons is inadequate to prove that teenagers should not have sex. Risk can be mitigated through contraceptives (both chemical and barrier) and one could argue that having life experiences (including sex) is what develops emotional maturity.
As far as your 'proof' that teenagers are simply not emotionally ready for sex,
Teenagers are simply not emotionally ready for sex, demonstrated by the plain fact that despite state mandated, rigorous sex ed with lots of information and explicit directions, teenagers continue to get themselves pregnant.
I can only say that maybe teenagers would be more apt to not get pregnant if they felt they could go to their parents and say "I am going to start having sex, could you take me to get birth control?" instead of feeling like they had to sneak around behind everyone's back to do it. Making sex a mystical thing that you are bad if you do is certainly no way, in my opinion, to keep the majority of kids from getting pregnant.
I'm from the Midwest United States (the 'buckle of the Bible belt' it is frequently called), and in my experience growing up those who were taught abstinence were as likely to get pregnant as those that weren't (3 girls from my church youth group--all of which I had been to a 'True Love Waits' event with--got pregnant pre-maritally which was proportional to the pregnancy rate at my high scool).
Although not having sex is a sure way to not get pregnant, telling people to not have sex is not necessarily the best way to keep them from getting pregnant. The argument basically boils down to whether telling someone to not have sex or showing them ways to have sex while lowering the risk of pregnancy (and hopefully not making them feel guilty about gaining access to birth control) is more effective. The argument is open-ended enough that there can be debate, but telling the grand-parent post "This is of course a faulty assumption" because it happens to be what you believe is a bit flippant when you have no proof of your claim.
Actually, you are wrong. Jesus himself commanded in Mathew 5:48
"Be ye perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect."
And, if the Bible is to be believed, Jesus required more than "some level of niceness" to those you happen to come into contact with: Mathew 22:36-40
36 Master, which is the great commandment in the law?
37 Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
38 This is the first and great commandment.
39 And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
This brings up something else that can be irritating about some Christians (and people of other Religious faiths)--many of them don't know anything about the religion that they claim to believe. I can respect almost anyone who is at least consistant and knowledgeable of their own beliefs. Otherwise, I am afraid I must consider them and indoctrinated fool.
Accept that it isn't because there is absolutely no government protection. If someone is smart enough to develop it on their own, they can still compete with you immediately.
Also you have a slight problem that if we took your view of privacy we would basically create in a lot of instances a new legal equivalent of a patent that lasts til... infinity.
Except you can't get a patent without submitting into public view what it is your are patenting... If you want to keep your invention a secret indefinitely, you don't patent it. You produce it in such a way that reverse-engineering it is very difficult.
Except that most luxury items are quite expensive to produce (and you can't exactly copy them). Cars, boats, planes, paintings.
Oddly enough most high-end software can be classified as a tool of some sort. Most high-end tools in other areas of life last decades, but may need replacement parts (belts, bits, control boards, etc.), but when it comes to software/computers it seems that marketing gets the better of us and we have to have the brightest/newest/shiniest tool in the bunch--even though the tool we have still does all of the things we need it to.
Nor was I saying that it was probable that QM was incorrect. I was merely trying to state "We don't know everything yet." "Spooky action at a distance" has been observed. It happens. But it seems to me that although we know what happens, we are still a little fuzzy on how it happens.
As you can probably guess, I am absolutely not an expert in physics--more of an interested layman. But it seems to me that until we fully understand the how, it is a matter of security-based-upon-the-fact-that-we-don't-current ly-know how-it-works-so-we-can't-break-it. Again, I am completely a layman and QM is very non-intuitive. But, since you brought up QED, a quote from Feynman:
I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong.
Again, I am merely stating that just because we haven't found an exception--or that it seems very unlikely that one exists--still doesn't forgive the idea that we know that it doesn't. Proving a negative of this scope, of course, being quite difficult. I was not attempting to be difficult, and welcome any response that shows how I have erred.
I would be cautious about making claims as to what "physics" does and does not guarantee. "Physics" has guaranteed lots of things throughout history that it turns out to be "not quite right". Keep in mind that it took years before the majority of physicists agreed with Eistein's conclusions on relativity. Current experimentation my lead one to draw certain conclusions about the natural world, but the conclusions may not always be 100% correct.
Um... if people live forever, it doesn't mean that new people wouldn't be born who would need to obtain the 'immortality serum'. Birth rates would probably slow, but not stop. (And don't give me the overpopulation angle, necessity is the mother of invention.
But frankly, the people interested in helping people live forever probably aren't that concerened with doing it for profit in the first place. (And if you have ever seen a picture of Aubrey de Grey you will understand what I'm talking about.)
Don't discount non-commercialized medicine/research for eventually finding the 'cure for aging'. Who would have thought that someone would release a 'free' enterprise-grade operating system when they could actually charge for it indefinitely with upgrades and service packs.
I usually hate flash because on most sites it is used quite poorly. I've even argued against using it in some of our own sites (hey, I tend to think most sites should be viewable on lynx). But, I think they did an excellent job on the flash version of the site. It loads quick, looks slick, and the navigation seems pretty straight forward to me. The video descriptions of the images and zoomable 'hot spots' work especially well. I guess it just goes to show that taste is subjective. Thanks NASA.
You know, it is possible (living in a captitalist society, and all) to spend a portion of your life gathering as much wealth as you can (as easily as you can) so that you can do something useful with it later in life. We are to the point in our society that most advanced research takes a lot of money. Until we can solve the 'scarcity of goods' thing, capitalism is what we have. If you can collect millions of dollars from the drones who spend their lives solely entertaining themselves, perhaps you can use their money for something more valuable some day.
Welcome to a capitalist society. The market determines value. People get to vote on what things are worth with their pocketbooks. I don't particularly like it (and think that it completely fails in situations where doing the right thing isn't cost effective--like in medicine), but it is what we have until we find a way to make 'stuff' so plentiful that it lacks significant value. But ranting and calling people stupid who you have never met just makes you look bitter.
Actually, if you read the white-paper, it has built in ways to mark subscribers as unavailable for unsolicited or unsolicited commercial calls. If a peer violates this, they are legally liable to *all* peers. (if I read it right).
I wasn't endorsing the public school system. As I said, none of my public education (whether k-12 or university) did a particularly good job of *teaching* me things. I was merely stating that it did have the positive benefit of exposing me to things that I wouldn't normally have explored on my own.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. --Robert Heinlein
Actually becoming a well rounded individual will help you in any field that you decide to make your career. Is merely learning the information necessary for a particular trade all that a child should learn? Should we decide a child is going to be a network admin if the seem to be interested in computers and teach them simple binary math (2^n-2 and 2^(n-2) for subnetting) or hell, since no one really figures that stuff out on their own anymore, just teach them how to use a subnet calculator? Why waste all that time teaching them things that they don't need to know?
I've been a computer nerd my entire life. During school I found out that I have a knack for writing poetry. Who knew? My life was enriched by this experience, and I never would have known had I not been exposed to it. I also sing, play the piano, play golf, write code, cook, study math and physics in my free time, and game. I've also spent the last year building a rather extensive VoIP Network.
Actually learning new things helps us grow as individuals and helps us to find meaningful things to do while we're still around. What happens if you get bored with being a Network Admin after 5,10,15 years? If that is all you ever studied, it might be a little difficult to start completely from scratch with only your networking knowledge to build on. Being grounded in a wide array of subjects, even if only superficially, gives you a foundation to build upon. The brain tends to store information by connecting it with other information. The more connections, the easier it is to retain and process information quickly. Don't knock a good general education.
All of this said, I am not arguing that public schools do a good job of teaching this (I didn't find that my university did a particularly good job of teaching it either). Most K-12 programs teach to the lowest common denominator, so it is dreadfully dull to those who augment their schooling with self-education. But still it is good for exposing the young to things they wouldn't normally think of exploring on their own and giving them a base that they can continue to build on later in life.
Actually, there once was a time when if you used the Internet you probably had some level of technical skill.
You didn't just pick up an AOL CD at Wal-Mart and plop it into your e-Machine and get an account, you configured your PPP (or SLIP!) account on your machine by editing some config files and running dip on your linux box (kernel version 0.96b patch level 4!).
So I would argue that since using the 'net is so much easier than it once was, that you probably do run into lot more 'stupid' (read technically inept) people than you once did. Whether this is completely a bad thing, I am not qualified to answer (even though I find myself longing for 'the good old days' occasionally, as well). 'Stupid' people far outnumber the rest of us and the 'net wouldn't be nearly as much a part of society without them.
We'd probably not have any kind of 'cheap' home broadband without them. Hell, perhaps we should raise a glass to the 'stupid' people and say, "Thanks for funding the technology that we love and will use to its fullest potential."
Slashdot Mirror
Either the Marines weren't supposed to worry about fractures and head wounds, or they just decided that we might have trouble remembering as much as those in the Army. Then again, I was only in for a very short time... :-)
Start the breathing, stop the bleeding, protect the wound, treat for shock, SIR!
You are drawing an irrelevant conclusion. Your statement,
incorrectly assumes that there are no reasons for teenagers to be having sex. There are many reasons (it feels good, the drive to have sex is wired into the species, the desire to be closer to someone, gaining life experiences, etc.), you just may not think that they justify teenage sex. Also, your list of reasons is inadequate to prove that teenagers should not have sex. Risk can be mitigated through contraceptives (both chemical and barrier) and one could argue that having life experiences (including sex) is what develops emotional maturity.As far as your 'proof' that teenagers are simply not emotionally ready for sex,
I can only say that maybe teenagers would be more apt to not get pregnant if they felt they could go to their parents and say "I am going to start having sex, could you take me to get birth control?" instead of feeling like they had to sneak around behind everyone's back to do it. Making sex a mystical thing that you are bad if you do is certainly no way, in my opinion, to keep the majority of kids from getting pregnant.I'm from the Midwest United States (the 'buckle of the Bible belt' it is frequently called), and in my experience growing up those who were taught abstinence were as likely to get pregnant as those that weren't (3 girls from my church youth group--all of which I had been to a 'True Love Waits' event with--got pregnant pre-maritally which was proportional to the pregnancy rate at my high scool).
Although not having sex is a sure way to not get pregnant, telling people to not have sex is not necessarily the best way to keep them from getting pregnant. The argument basically boils down to whether telling someone to not have sex or showing them ways to have sex while lowering the risk of pregnancy (and hopefully not making them feel guilty about gaining access to birth control) is more effective. The argument is open-ended enough that there can be debate, but telling the grand-parent post "This is of course a faulty assumption" because it happens to be what you believe is a bit flippant when you have no proof of your claim.
This brings up something else that can be irritating about some Christians (and people of other Religious faiths)--many of them don't know anything about the religion that they claim to believe. I can respect almost anyone who is at least consistant and knowledgeable of their own beliefs. Otherwise, I am afraid I must consider them and indoctrinated fool.
I can't believe I misspelled 'Except'. sheesh. Preview!
Accept that it isn't because there is absolutely no government protection. If someone is smart enough to develop it on their own, they can still compete with you immediately.
Except you can't get a patent without submitting into public view what it is your are patenting... If you want to keep your invention a secret indefinitely, you don't patent it. You produce it in such a way that reverse-engineering it is very difficult.
Oddly enough most high-end software can be classified as a tool of some sort. Most high-end tools in other areas of life last decades, but may need replacement parts (belts, bits, control boards, etc.), but when it comes to software/computers it seems that marketing gets the better of us and we have to have the brightest/newest/shiniest tool in the bunch--even though the tool we have still does all of the things we need it to.
It occurs to me that I graduated high school in 1995. /me sighs and goes to bed early
Nor was I saying that it was probable that QM was incorrect. I was merely trying to state "We don't know everything yet." "Spooky action at a distance" has been observed. It happens. But it seems to me that although we know what happens, we are still a little fuzzy on how it happens.
As you can probably guess, I am absolutely not an expert in physics--more of an interested layman. But it seems to me that until we fully understand the how, it is a matter of security-based-upon-the-fact-that-we-don't-current ly-know how-it-works-so-we-can't-break-it. Again, I am completely a layman and QM is very non-intuitive. But, since you brought up QED, a quote from Feynman:
Again, I am merely stating that just because we haven't found an exception--or that it seems very unlikely that one exists--still doesn't forgive the idea that we know that it doesn't. Proving a negative of this scope, of course, being quite difficult. I was not attempting to be difficult, and welcome any response that shows how I have erred.I would be cautious about making claims as to what "physics" does and does not guarantee. "Physics" has guaranteed lots of things throughout history that it turns out to be "not quite right". Keep in mind that it took years before the majority of physicists agreed with Eistein's conclusions on relativity. Current experimentation my lead one to draw certain conclusions about the natural world, but the conclusions may not always be 100% correct.
Have you seen Russian cartoons? Trust me, they make weird crap like that.
I've gotten so used to pronouncing the 'G' that it took me a while to get the joke... I feel a little sad about that.
But frankly, the people interested in helping people live forever probably aren't that concerened with doing it for profit in the first place. (And if you have ever seen a picture of Aubrey de Grey you will understand what I'm talking about.)
Don't discount non-commercialized medicine/research for eventually finding the 'cure for aging'. Who would have thought that someone would release a 'free' enterprise-grade operating system when they could actually charge for it indefinitely with upgrades and service packs.
Here are some better screenshots of apps in this release with descriptions. Much better than the 640x480 screenshots linked to in the article.
I usually hate flash because on most sites it is used quite poorly. I've even argued against using it in some of our own sites (hey, I tend to think most sites should be viewable on lynx). But, I think they did an excellent job on the flash version of the site. It loads quick, looks slick, and the navigation seems pretty straight forward to me. The video descriptions of the images and zoomable 'hot spots' work especially well. I guess it just goes to show that taste is subjective. Thanks NASA.
Welcome to a capitalist society. The market determines value. People get to vote on what things are worth with their pocketbooks. I don't particularly like it (and think that it completely fails in situations where doing the right thing isn't cost effective--like in medicine), but it is what we have until we find a way to make 'stuff' so plentiful that it lacks significant value. But ranting and calling people stupid who you have never met just makes you look bitter.
Actually, if you read the white-paper, it has built in ways to mark subscribers as unavailable for unsolicited or unsolicited commercial calls. If a peer violates this, they are legally liable to *all* peers. (if I read it right).
I agree that limiting them to non-reproductive is dirty from a business prespective, but it doesn't support the grandparent argument in the least.
10 Terawatts?! Jesus, I thought we only needed 5 Megawatts by mid-May!
(Mark offered to give a free IAXy to the person who got this slashdot story posted) :-)
I wasn't endorsing the public school system. As I said, none of my public education (whether k-12 or university) did a particularly good job of *teaching* me things. I was merely stating that it did have the positive benefit of exposing me to things that I wouldn't normally have explored on my own.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
--Robert Heinlein
Actually becoming a well rounded individual will help you in any field that you decide to make your career. Is merely learning the information necessary for a particular trade all that a child should learn? Should we decide a child is going to be a network admin if the seem to be interested in computers and teach them simple binary math (2^n-2 and 2^(n-2) for subnetting) or hell, since no one really figures that stuff out on their own anymore, just teach them how to use a subnet calculator? Why waste all that time teaching them things that they don't need to know?
I've been a computer nerd my entire life. During school I found out that I have a knack for writing poetry. Who knew? My life was enriched by this experience, and I never would have known had I not been exposed to it. I also sing, play the piano, play golf, write code, cook, study math and physics in my free time, and game. I've also spent the last year building a rather extensive VoIP Network.
Actually learning new things helps us grow as individuals and helps us to find meaningful things to do while we're still around. What happens if you get bored with being a Network Admin after 5,10,15 years? If that is all you ever studied, it might be a little difficult to start completely from scratch with only your networking knowledge to build on. Being grounded in a wide array of subjects, even if only superficially, gives you a foundation to build upon. The brain tends to store information by connecting it with other information. The more connections, the easier it is to retain and process information quickly. Don't knock a good general education.
All of this said, I am not arguing that public schools do a good job of teaching this (I didn't find that my university did a particularly good job of teaching it either). Most K-12 programs teach to the lowest common denominator, so it is dreadfully dull to those who augment their schooling with self-education. But still it is good for exposing the young to things they wouldn't normally think of exploring on their own and giving them a base that they can continue to build on later in life.
You didn't just pick up an AOL CD at Wal-Mart and plop it into your e-Machine and get an account, you configured your PPP (or SLIP!) account on your machine by editing some config files and running dip on your linux box (kernel version 0.96b patch level 4!).
So I would argue that since using the 'net is so much easier than it once was, that you probably do run into lot more 'stupid' (read technically inept) people than you once did. Whether this is completely a bad thing, I am not qualified to answer (even though I find myself longing for 'the good old days' occasionally, as well). 'Stupid' people far outnumber the rest of us and the 'net wouldn't be nearly as much a part of society without them.
We'd probably not have any kind of 'cheap' home broadband without them. Hell, perhaps we should raise a glass to the 'stupid' people and say, "Thanks for funding the technology that we love and will use to its fullest potential."
Bah! The game was rigged, I tell you! Rigged!