Either they're dangerous or they're not. If they're dangerous then the planes need to be fixed to prevent terrorists from using this to cause problems.
You really don't understand statistics, do you? Risk is probabilistic. The target level of safety for aircraft is of the order of less than one accident in 10^7 flight hours, which we're achieving. Turning on a mobile phone does not make the aircraft crash: it increases the risk. If you got lots of terrorists on every flight (which would cost a fortune) you'd probably pull the figure down below 10^7 flight hours to -- oh, who knows, let's say one accident in every 10^6 flight hours. That's an unacceptable level of safety, and you'd see more news of air crashes, but it's still better than it was in the 1970s, so it would hardly induce terror. So the terrorists would have bought all those tickets and failed to achieve their objectives.
The line about terrorists using mobile phones to crash planes is a staple of stand-up comics, but here's a hint: stand up comics are after an immediate laugh, not detailed analysis. They're not a good source of safety policy.
Clearly terrorists are stupid when they try to sneak bombs on board; a dozen of them should bring iPads and iPhones onto a flight and turn them all on at the same time during takeoff.
Yes, because increasing the risk from one in ten million to one in a million is really going to cause terror.
It isn't particularly obvious to the project team either, and the European standardisation laws were still an issue last thing I heard (a couple of weeks ago).
That's sort of debatable. The tunnels are too small for it to work as a heavy rail link as defined in European rail standards (as was pointed out at a presentation I was at recently, they could get a European standard-sized heavy rail locomotive through the tunnel but not operate it through the tunnel because there's no room for safe electrical separations). But there's a policy decision for it not to be a metro system, which would allow smaller units. So it's actually neither one nor the other; a heavy rail system that is too light to be a heavy rail system. Say one thing for the British: we can compromise.
First person doesn't bother me, but present tense does. Novice writers often use it because they think (wrongly, IMHO) that it makes the narrative more "immediate". All it really does as far as I can see is make control of the pace very difficult, and the writers who use present tense tend to be precisely the writers who can't handle that.
Seeing what statistically significant humans think is highlight-worthy is incredibly depressing.
But it's at least least warned me not to bother reading The Hunger Games -- the quotes all seem trite and badly written to me, so it seems that the books are not for me.
and this is pretty unlikely given that the U.S. doesn't have the sort of cozy, formal overlap of public and private sectors that France, China, or even Great Britain have
That would be why there's never been any suggestion at all of US commercial interests influencing foreign policy, then.
You don't bother questioning anybody. You arrest and charge the guy from Albany (came up first on the alphabetic list; don't even look to see if there are any other matches because that could compromise what follows), use DNA evidence to argue that the chance that it's not him is less than one in a trillion, secure a conviction on that basis, and chalk up one to your key performance indicators. If the guy from Queens commits another crime, you get him for that one and you have two crimes solved, whereas if you'd got him the first time you would only have solved one. Everybody wins (except the guy from Albany, but hey, he's a felon anyway -- he must be, he's been convicted).
Certainly in the case of Ada the only change was the addition of some new reserved words -- no warping of the syntax at all (although some of the constructs might have been better for some syntactic sugar).
The OP also failed to mention Ahmadinejad's "wipe Israel off the map" speech
The mistranslation of the speech that the person in (IIRC) 14th place in the chain of command made? I can't think why the OP didn't think that was worth mentioning.
Well, one can program.net in lots of languages -- I've done it in Ada and Python, for example -- so MS didn't exactly ram C# down anybody's throat. But it does integrate particularly well with.net, and.net did make life a lot easier for MS Windows programmers. So yes, being backed by a big corporation helped, but so was J#. I reckon it also succeeded by making it easy (relatively familiar syntax for C++ and Java programmers) to do a job that enough people wanted to do (program MS Windows).
I seem to remember that COMAL didn't -- at least the BBC B implementation. If it thought that what you'd written wasn't what you meant it would silently change it to what it thought you meant. With the state of AI at that time, that was a pretty serious source of uncertainty.
In the UK the argument was over photorealistic images, giving prosecutors the hassle of determining whether a real child was subjected to whatever is depicted. By outlawing all such images, whether photographed or drawn, the prosecutors are saved that hassle. And it's not limited to photorealistic images because photographs can be cartoonised. That means that I could buy a book over the counter in a high-street book store -- Alan Moore's Lost Girls for instance -- and then end up on the sex offenders register for possessing it. It would all come down to the whim of the prosecutors.
Well, one possibility is that the police are paying way over the odds for their meth. Does anybody here know -- er, admit to knowing -- the actual street price of meth?
If the ontological argument shows anything (which I agree it might not, but not because of this issue) then it shows that the "creator" had to be fundamentally simple in terms of the "creation". In other words, it's not an assumption but a conclusion. The definition arises specifically from the argument. Aquinas devoted an entire section of Summa Theologica to the question of whether God was necessarily simple, so these bite-size summaries are not really doing justice to the complexity and detail of his argument.
In what way does a computer specialist's job rely on the scientific method?
I'd say that any diagnostic and troubleshooting is going to use the scientific method.
Based on the data, you formulate a hypothesis as to the underlying cause, and then attempt to remediate it. Then you determine if your hypothesis was correct, and you're either done, or you need to keep looking for another plausible hypothesis.
I'm sorry, but anybody who has to work with reality and arrive at logical conclusions based on reality is going to use the scientific method in some way or another. Otherwise you'd be doing things at random.
That's a trivial level of scientific method (phrased in a positivist way, but it would work much the same in any of the other scientific methods) which ID proponents actually have no trouble with at all. Some of the best programmers I have known have been religionists, and it doesn't seem to have impaired their programming. One of my final year engineering set texts at university had an Islamic dedication, but it doesn't seem to have led to any engineering errors. Your suggestion that a religionist is incapable of doing that sort of work is falsifiable. Are you going to be scientific about it?
If your sysadmin is pulling out the ouija board or calling the psychic hotline to find out what's wrong with the server, get a new sysadmin.
Yes, if he was doing that then it would be a reason to get rid of him. Was he doing that, or is that a strawman?
And, slightly more on topic, if a co-worker started handing me DVDs on intelligent design, I'd be forced to tell him to keep his crap to himself -- same as if you handed me pamphlets for your church; I'm not interested, please go away or I shall have to talk to HR.
Yes, but his spokesperson suggests (doesn't specifically say) that he was doing that in response to co-religionists asking about those things, in which case I wouldn't have a problem with it. Although if his co-religionists kept their jobs then it does rather support the idea that the reason for him losing his job was nothing to do with his religious beliefs but something to do with his behaviour or performance.
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Either they're dangerous or they're not. If they're dangerous then the planes need to be fixed to prevent terrorists from using this to cause problems.
You really don't understand statistics, do you? Risk is probabilistic. The target level of safety for aircraft is of the order of less than one accident in 10^7 flight hours, which we're achieving. Turning on a mobile phone does not make the aircraft crash: it increases the risk. If you got lots of terrorists on every flight (which would cost a fortune) you'd probably pull the figure down below 10^7 flight hours to -- oh, who knows, let's say one accident in every 10^6 flight hours. That's an unacceptable level of safety, and you'd see more news of air crashes, but it's still better than it was in the 1970s, so it would hardly induce terror. So the terrorists would have bought all those tickets and failed to achieve their objectives.
The line about terrorists using mobile phones to crash planes is a staple of stand-up comics, but here's a hint: stand up comics are after an immediate laugh, not detailed analysis. They're not a good source of safety policy.
And if those amplifiers are unshielded, the designers should be shot.
Because the weight of the shielding isn't an issue at all in an aircraft, is it?
But if there's a suspected problem, I bet they can turn theirs off faster than they could get yours turned off.
Clearly terrorists are stupid when they try to sneak bombs on board; a dozen of them should bring iPads and iPhones onto a flight and turn them all on at the same time during takeoff.
Yes, because increasing the risk from one in ten million to one in a million is really going to cause terror.
After all, there is only one Chinese person, with only one opinion, isn't there? Just as everybody on /. agrees about everything.
ji1feng3, since you asked. Sorry, /. doesn't seem to let the Chinese script through.
It isn't particularly obvious to the project team either, and the European standardisation laws were still an issue last thing I heard (a couple of weeks ago).
It has an excellent art galley.
That's sort of debatable. The tunnels are too small for it to work as a heavy rail link as defined in European rail standards (as was pointed out at a presentation I was at recently, they could get a European standard-sized heavy rail locomotive through the tunnel but not operate it through the tunnel because there's no room for safe electrical separations). But there's a policy decision for it not to be a metro system, which would allow smaller units. So it's actually neither one nor the other; a heavy rail system that is too light to be a heavy rail system. Say one thing for the British: we can compromise.
First person doesn't bother me, but present tense does. Novice writers often use it because they think (wrongly, IMHO) that it makes the narrative more "immediate". All it really does as far as I can see is make control of the pace very difficult, and the writers who use present tense tend to be precisely the writers who can't handle that.
You have to manipulate protons, not electrons, to convert an atom from one element into another element.
Bit they're bigger, so it must be easier, right? :-)
Seeing what statistically significant humans think is highlight-worthy is incredibly depressing.
But it's at least least warned me not to bother reading The Hunger Games -- the quotes all seem trite and badly written to me, so it seems that the books are not for me.
and this is pretty unlikely given that the U.S. doesn't have the sort of cozy, formal overlap of public and private sectors that France, China, or even Great Britain have
That would be why there's never been any suggestion at all of US commercial interests influencing foreign policy, then.
Or French, or American.
Yes, which was a blunder -- but it was still a mistranslation.
You don't bother questioning anybody. You arrest and charge the guy from Albany (came up first on the alphabetic list; don't even look to see if there are any other matches because that could compromise what follows), use DNA evidence to argue that the chance that it's not him is less than one in a trillion, secure a conviction on that basis, and chalk up one to your key performance indicators. If the guy from Queens commits another crime, you get him for that one and you have two crimes solved, whereas if you'd got him the first time you would only have solved one. Everybody wins (except the guy from Albany, but hey, he's a felon anyway -- he must be, he's been convicted).
Certainly in the case of Ada the only change was the addition of some new reserved words -- no warping of the syntax at all (although some of the constructs might have been better for some syntactic sugar).
The OP also failed to mention Ahmadinejad's "wipe Israel off the map" speech
The mistranslation of the speech that the person in (IIRC) 14th place in the chain of command made? I can't think why the OP didn't think that was worth mentioning.
Well, one can program .net in lots of languages -- I've done it in Ada and Python, for example -- so MS didn't exactly ram C# down anybody's throat. But it does integrate particularly well with .net, and .net did make life a lot easier for MS Windows programmers. So yes, being backed by a big corporation helped, but so was J#. I reckon it also succeeded by making it easy (relatively familiar syntax for C++ and Java programmers) to do a job that enough people wanted to do (program MS Windows).
I seem to remember that COMAL didn't -- at least the BBC B implementation. If it thought that what you'd written wasn't what you meant it would silently change it to what it thought you meant. With the state of AI at that time, that was a pretty serious source of uncertainty.
In the UK the argument was over photorealistic images, giving prosecutors the hassle of determining whether a real child was subjected to whatever is depicted. By outlawing all such images, whether photographed or drawn, the prosecutors are saved that hassle. And it's not limited to photorealistic images because photographs can be cartoonised. That means that I could buy a book over the counter in a high-street book store -- Alan Moore's Lost Girls for instance -- and then end up on the sex offenders register for possessing it. It would all come down to the whim of the prosecutors.
Well, one possibility is that the police are paying way over the odds for their meth. Does anybody here know -- er, admit to knowing -- the actual street price of meth?
Or they could pick a random name from the Völuspá, which is public domain. "Gandalf's", perhaps.
If "da Vinci" were his family name, your comment would be pertinent.
If the ontological argument shows anything (which I agree it might not, but not because of this issue) then it shows that the "creator" had to be fundamentally simple in terms of the "creation". In other words, it's not an assumption but a conclusion. The definition arises specifically from the argument. Aquinas devoted an entire section of Summa Theologica to the question of whether God was necessarily simple, so these bite-size summaries are not really doing justice to the complexity and detail of his argument.
I'd say that any diagnostic and troubleshooting is going to use the scientific method.
Based on the data, you formulate a hypothesis as to the underlying cause, and then attempt to remediate it. Then you determine if your hypothesis was correct, and you're either done, or you need to keep looking for another plausible hypothesis.
I'm sorry, but anybody who has to work with reality and arrive at logical conclusions based on reality is going to use the scientific method in some way or another. Otherwise you'd be doing things at random.
That's a trivial level of scientific method (phrased in a positivist way, but it would work much the same in any of the other scientific methods) which ID proponents actually have no trouble with at all. Some of the best programmers I have known have been religionists, and it doesn't seem to have impaired their programming. One of my final year engineering set texts at university had an Islamic dedication, but it doesn't seem to have led to any engineering errors. Your suggestion that a religionist is incapable of doing that sort of work is falsifiable. Are you going to be scientific about it?
If your sysadmin is pulling out the ouija board or calling the psychic hotline to find out what's wrong with the server, get a new sysadmin.
Yes, if he was doing that then it would be a reason to get rid of him. Was he doing that, or is that a strawman?
And, slightly more on topic, if a co-worker started handing me DVDs on intelligent design, I'd be forced to tell him to keep his crap to himself -- same as if you handed me pamphlets for your church; I'm not interested, please go away or I shall have to talk to HR.
Yes, but his spokesperson suggests (doesn't specifically say) that he was doing that in response to co-religionists asking about those things, in which case I wouldn't have a problem with it. Although if his co-religionists kept their jobs then it does rather support the idea that the reason for him losing his job was nothing to do with his religious beliefs but something to do with his behaviour or performance.