The reason this is largely being treated as a joke by the British people is that most of the unpopular laws are coming from Brussels, not London. There isn't much the British government can do about EU directives, besides withdraw from the EU. And that's not on the table.
Well, that's what the insular British press says. Funny thing is, the rest of the EU tends not to have the really nasty laws. You'd think that they would if Brussels were imposing them on the whole EU, wouldn't you?
Because political parties are not even doing the things they promised *before* the elections. Should't they at least *try* to implement their political portfolios before they start pondering what their next move should be?
This was in the LibDem "portfolio" -- their manifesto promised "we will introduce a Freedom Bill to restore the civil liberties that are so precious to the British character", and this is a step towards that. I think we need to take your "political parties are not even doing the things they promised *before* the elections" with a pinch of salt, given that you've just shown that you don't actually know what they promised.
The question is did that degree help you get your second job more than the four years of on the job experience helped the other guy get his? Who will be getting the "6/8+ years of experience required... Senior/Lead blahblah" jobs first?
It certainly made me a lot more capable of doing the second job than a few years experience would have done. Whether the recruiters
knew that I don't know. In particular the hour after hour after hour of working through pages of maths gave me a degree of comfort when faced with complex maths which I could never have got under the pressure of having to be productive. Maybe two or three years down the line I hadn't caught up on the missed experience, but with the skills I learned at university I did catch up, and I'm now thirty years down the line and the ceiling I would have hit fifteen to twenty years ago without what I learned on the degree wasn't there.
Yes, of course it's hard. So is the science itself. But as said in the article, "In order to be successful, we have to do more than think we know it all, and our job is simply to tell people—and if they don’t understand, then our job is to tell them
a little bit louder. That tends not to work." And what's worse, as well as being hard it's actively discouraged by the scientific community: "Scientists who value or excel at public outreach often face the explicit or implicit scorn of their peers, for whom success in technical research is the epitome of scientific achievement and all else is secondary or even a waste of time." In other words, it's no surprise that not everybody is a scientist but when we find widespread ignorance of science that's at least in part the scientists' fault.
No, they don't want them to dumb things down. One problem that the RA mentions is the scientists treating the public as idiots which, on the whole, they're not. Maybe they're not well-informed, but just shouting "You're all idiots! We know the truth! Don't question us!" is not informing them well, and it's the way all too much scientific communication with the general public comes across. Remember that Einstein didn't say "If you don't dumb it down enough, the public won't understand it well enough", he said "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."
Your degree gets you your first job. Your first job gets you your second job and all subsequent. Maybe it's different in non-tech fields, but for me and my hiring decisions in my field (networking infrastructure software and hardware), that's the way it is. Show me your projects, show me your code, show me your references.
Yes it's the first job that gets you the second. But my experience at least is that without what I learned on the degree I wouldn't have done well enough in the first job for it to get me the second. A degree isn't just a piece of paper.
What if they walk around telling everyone they will die if they don't believe what they do? What if they do that to young children, as young as 2 or 3?
It might be unpleasant, it might be misguided, it might be wrong, it might even be odious, but I can't see how for any sense of the word it can meaningfully be described as "intolerant".
Your brain leeches out of your ears and tries to hit the "stop" button. I mean, there are actually a few good Christian tracks where the dogma doesn't overrule the art, but 666 of them? Sheesh.
Wow, you really don't care about the reason they are acting a certain way, as long as it has an outcome you desire?
What kind of morons modded you insightful.
What do you mean by "tolerance"? I can't see any issue at all with their belief system being called "tolerant" whilst believing that some will "suffer for being "non-believers" and perish forever". If they made the non-believers suffer, or even wanted them to then that would be intolerant, but simply believing it to be the case doesn't. I believe that if you hold your head in a strong flame then you will suffer and perish forever. Does that make me intolerant?
Because religious groups propagate ideas that are known to be false. You can without a doubt easily prove that the world is older than 4,000 years, yet there are many Christians that will tell you otherwise.
"Known" is a tricky word, and so is "prove". I am pretty damn sure that the world is older than 4000 years, and it has been proven to my satisfaction But "pretty damn sure" is only the same as "know" if I'm being fairly loose with my words, and what satisfies me in terms of proof clearly doesn't satisfy everybody..
Example: I try to convince you that I had a flying cow in my backyard. I sincerely believed it try to teach your children that cows can fly if you sacrifice food an money to them. Is it alright for me to go around saying this, taking money and food from the innocent and weak? No, this is immoral whether I believe it is true or not.
In what ethical system would that be immoral if you believed it? Stupid, misguided maybe, but I don't know of any ethical system in which it would be immoral to do what you believe to be the right thing.
As somebody who is a "liberal arts" major and an engineering major, I figure that a service like this would be more use to the engineering students. I know that the college that awarded me my liberal arts degree (Humanities with English Language) and one of my engineering degrees uses software to check for consistent writing style, and any attempt to use that service on my Humanities degree would have rung alarm bells all over the place. On my engineering degrees, though, essay questions were rare enough that they probably wouldn't have enough sample of somebody's writing style to build a robust case against them if they used this service, and the remaining assignments were pages of calculations which don't seem to carry as clear a stylistic "fingerprint" as essays.
By the way, as well as sales and marketing, I think you'll find quite a few of those liberal arts majors end up in government. Wouldn't it be nice if one could be sure that all of one's MPs, Senators, Congressmen, whatever, were at least competent in their specialist fields? Looking around, I can't help wondering whether the idea of people paying others to do their coursework might have been around for a little longer than Jordan Kavoosi's company.
But "Affect" has got nounal senses so it is gramattical in that context, although I don't think it can be parsed in a way that makes any sense. I therefore suggest that the error is neither a spelling nor a grammar error but is a rather a semantic error.
Well if it is a war on curiosity, pick your side, mate. Resist ! Once they'll discover that 99% of the people caught by anti-terrorist laws were genuinely curious persons, they may think about stopping the madness.
Assuming, of course, that it matters to them who they catch, and they're not simply interested in keeping the fear levels high.
I honestly don't know how they reconcile their belief and their failure to follow the strict rule of their god. I don't have any firm religious beliefs (I'm not atheist, I don't disbelieve and I'd like to believe I'm open to the idea of a god, I just lack the blind faith requirement) but it seems to me that if I knew in my heart that there was an all powerful being who could send me to burn for eternity, I'd do whatever that bastard told me to.
That wouldn't be worship of God, that would be appeasement of a demon,
A few years of self privation in this life to negate an eternity of pain seems like a pretty good payout, and yet I see many Christians who blatantly ignore or give very wide interpretation to what the Bible tells them, almost always in favour of how they want to live their lives. Either these people don't really believe, or they believe but they think their god is lying about the whole eternity bit
I suspect that they do really believe, but they don't believe what you think they should believe. Specifically, they don't believe that what you think is "the strict rule of their god" actually is "the strict rule of their god". That is in no way incompatible with Christianity as defined, for example, by the major Christian creeds such as the Apostle's Creed or Nicene Creed, neither of which identifies the Bible as "the strict rule of their god".
or their own ego is so great that they just think god'll forgive them all their transgressions
Well, that they are likely to believe if they believe the traditional creeds.
Well, Jesus referenced the inhabitants of Sodom as bad people to whom bad things happened, but did not mention what they did wrong. The author of Jude wrote "In a similar way, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion. They serve as an example of those who suffer the punishment of eternal fire.", which (if you accept the story) is pretty uncontroversial. There are surely few who would try to argue that heterosexual rape and attempted homosexual rape are not "sexual immorality and perversion". And don't forget that in Ezekiel we have "Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy." The locals in the movie "Deliverance" "gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion", but if somebody think that movie was solely about homosexuality or that it's relevant to caring consensual homosexual relationships then they have some serious hangups.
The New Testament position on homosexuality is nowhere near as clear as either side of the argument would have you believe. In almost all the places where there is a reference to it in English-language Bibles there are serious questions about the correct way to translate the passage, and both sides have good arguments for how they translate them. It really isn't certain which side is right. The only exception is Romans 1, which pretty certainly refers to homosexual sex, but there the interpretations differ. It refers to men and women abandoning heterosexual relationships for homosexual relationships, but many lesbian and gay people argue that they never had any such heterosexual inclinations in the first place so they haven't abandoned them. In any case, the passage describes this as a consequence of sin, not as sin itself.
That's only relevant to those Christians who consider the Bible to be authoritative in such matters, anyway. It's not relevant to the many Christians who don't see the Bible that way or, of course, to those who are not Christian at all.
Isn't the point of TeX that you worry about the content, NOT the layout ?
No, TeX doesn't separate layout from content. And even using tools built on TeX that do make that separation, such as laTeX, you still have to worry about both (or get the worrying about one of them done for you). A [la]TeX document still needs to be laid out at some point, and getting the layout right is (at present) the hard part; help with that would be useful.
What I don't get is that nearly everything produced these days follows the LaTeX mentality of separating content from presentation
LaTeX wasn't Knuth, though. It was built on top of TeX, which was Knuth's, but TeX didn't separate content from presentation.
Everyone gets the content sorted out and then someone (and often someone who knows about layout) actually places the text on the page. Using Word seems completely backward and out of touch, it's the FrontPage of word processing. How many serious websites get designed using that?
Word separates content from presentation just as well as LaTeX does. Pretty much every modern word processor does. It's not using Word (or OO.o Writer, or any other word processor) that's backward and out of touch, it's you who doesn't realise how much word processors have changed since the 1980s.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason this is largely being treated as a joke by the British people is that most of the unpopular laws are coming from Brussels, not London. There isn't much the British government can do about EU directives, besides withdraw from the EU. And that's not on the table.
Well, that's what the insular British press says. Funny thing is, the rest of the EU tends not to have the really nasty laws. You'd think that they would if Brussels were imposing them on the whole EU, wouldn't you?
Because political parties are not even doing the things they promised *before* the elections. Should't they at least *try* to implement their political portfolios before they start pondering what their next move should be?
This was in the LibDem "portfolio" -- their manifesto promised "we will introduce a Freedom Bill to restore the civil liberties that are so precious to the British character", and this is a step towards that. I think we need to take your "political parties are not even doing the things they promised *before* the elections" with a pinch of salt, given that you've just shown that you don't actually know what they promised.
The question is did that degree help you get your second job more than the four years of on the job experience helped the other guy get his? Who will be getting the "6/8+ years of experience required ... Senior/Lead blahblah" jobs first?
It certainly made me a lot more capable of doing the second job than a few years experience would have done. Whether the recruiters knew that I don't know. In particular the hour after hour after hour of working through pages of maths gave me a degree of comfort when faced with complex maths which I could never have got under the pressure of having to be productive. Maybe two or three years down the line I hadn't caught up on the missed experience, but with the skills I learned at university I did catch up, and I'm now thirty years down the line and the ceiling I would have hit fifteen to twenty years ago without what I learned on the degree wasn't there.
This is hard.
Yes, of course it's hard. So is the science itself. But as said in the article, "In order to be successful, we have to do more than think we know it all, and our job is simply to tell people—and if they don’t understand, then our job is to tell them a little bit louder. That tends not to work." And what's worse, as well as being hard it's actively discouraged by the scientific community: "Scientists who value or excel at public outreach often face the explicit or implicit scorn of their peers, for whom success in technical research is the epitome of scientific achievement and all else is secondary or even a waste of time." In other words, it's no surprise that not everybody is a scientist but when we find widespread ignorance of science that's at least in part the scientists' fault.
No, they don't want them to dumb things down. One problem that the RA mentions is the scientists treating the public as idiots which, on the whole, they're not. Maybe they're not well-informed, but just shouting "You're all idiots! We know the truth! Don't question us!" is not informing them well, and it's the way all too much scientific communication with the general public comes across. Remember that Einstein didn't say "If you don't dumb it down enough, the public won't understand it well enough", he said "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."
Your degree gets you your first job. Your first job gets you your second job and all subsequent. Maybe it's different in non-tech fields, but for me and my hiring decisions in my field (networking infrastructure software and hardware), that's the way it is. Show me your projects, show me your code, show me your references.
Yes it's the first job that gets you the second. But my experience at least is that without what I learned on the degree I wouldn't have done well enough in the first job for it to get me the second. A degree isn't just a piece of paper.
What if they walk around telling everyone they will die if they don't believe what they do? What if they do that to young children, as young as 2 or 3?
It might be unpleasant, it might be misguided, it might be wrong, it might even be odious, but I can't see how for any sense of the word it can meaningfully be described as "intolerant".
Your brain leeches out of your ears and tries to hit the "stop" button. I mean, there are actually a few good Christian tracks where the dogma doesn't overrule the art, but 666 of them? Sheesh.
Wow, you really don't care about the reason they are acting a certain way, as long as it has an outcome you desire? What kind of morons modded you insightful.
Utilitarians, at a guess.
What do you mean by "tolerance"? I can't see any issue at all with their belief system being called "tolerant" whilst believing that some will "suffer for being "non-believers" and perish forever". If they made the non-believers suffer, or even wanted them to then that would be intolerant, but simply believing it to be the case doesn't. I believe that if you hold your head in a strong flame then you will suffer and perish forever. Does that make me intolerant?
So lets see. The state is likely to persecute them. They want to be persecuted. Where's the problem? It looks like a win for everybody!
Because religious groups propagate ideas that are known to be false. You can without a doubt easily prove that the world is older than 4,000 years, yet there are many Christians that will tell you otherwise.
"Known" is a tricky word, and so is "prove". I am pretty damn sure that the world is older than 4000 years, and it has been proven to my satisfaction But "pretty damn sure" is only the same as "know" if I'm being fairly loose with my words, and what satisfies me in terms of proof clearly doesn't satisfy everybody..
Example: I try to convince you that I had a flying cow in my backyard. I sincerely believed it try to teach your children that cows can fly if you sacrifice food an money to them. Is it alright for me to go around saying this, taking money and food from the innocent and weak? No, this is immoral whether I believe it is true or not.
In what ethical system would that be immoral if you believed it? Stupid, misguided maybe, but I don't know of any ethical system in which it would be immoral to do what you believe to be the right thing.
Maybe it's because gays just want to enjoy the same rights that you enjoy
Some of them do, some of them don't. They're not a homogeneous group, they're individuals.
whereas Muslims, Jews and Christians want to remove the rights they feel disagree with their beliefs.
Some of them do, some of them don't. They're not a homogeneous group, they're individuals.
Their right to "pursue happiness" stops when they try to impinges on the rights to pursue happiness by others.
True for both groups, I hope?
"Knooth when referenced by Americans, Knut when referenced by Europeans. Doesn't work as well as for Niklaus Wirth, does it?
As somebody who is a "liberal arts" major and an engineering major, I figure that a service like this would be more use to the engineering students. I know that the college that awarded me my liberal arts degree (Humanities with English Language) and one of my engineering degrees uses software to check for consistent writing style, and any attempt to use that service on my Humanities degree would have rung alarm bells all over the place. On my engineering degrees, though, essay questions were rare enough that they probably wouldn't have enough sample of somebody's writing style to build a robust case against them if they used this service, and the remaining assignments were pages of calculations which don't seem to carry as clear a stylistic "fingerprint" as essays.
By the way, as well as sales and marketing, I think you'll find quite a few of those liberal arts majors end up in government. Wouldn't it be nice if one could be sure that all of one's MPs, Senators, Congressmen, whatever, were at least competent in their specialist fields? Looking around, I can't help wondering whether the idea of people paying others to do their coursework might have been around for a little longer than Jordan Kavoosi's company.
But "Affect" has got nounal senses so it is gramattical in that context, although I don't think it can be parsed in a way that makes any sense. I therefore suggest that the error is neither a spelling nor a grammar error but is a rather a semantic error.
Well if it is a war on curiosity, pick your side, mate. Resist ! Once they'll discover that 99% of the people caught by anti-terrorist laws were genuinely curious persons, they may think about stopping the madness.
Assuming, of course, that it matters to them who they catch, and they're not simply interested in keeping the fear levels high.
I honestly don't know how they reconcile their belief and their failure to follow the strict rule of their god. I don't have any firm religious beliefs (I'm not atheist, I don't disbelieve and I'd like to believe I'm open to the idea of a god, I just lack the blind faith requirement) but it seems to me that if I knew in my heart that there was an all powerful being who could send me to burn for eternity, I'd do whatever that bastard told me to.
That wouldn't be worship of God, that would be appeasement of a demon,
A few years of self privation in this life to negate an eternity of pain seems like a pretty good payout, and yet I see many Christians who blatantly ignore or give very wide interpretation to what the Bible tells them, almost always in favour of how they want to live their lives. Either these people don't really believe, or they believe but they think their god is lying about the whole eternity bit
I suspect that they do really believe, but they don't believe what you think they should believe. Specifically, they don't believe that what you think is "the strict rule of their god" actually is "the strict rule of their god". That is in no way incompatible with Christianity as defined, for example, by the major Christian creeds such as the Apostle's Creed or Nicene Creed, neither of which identifies the Bible as "the strict rule of their god".
or their own ego is so great that they just think god'll forgive them all their transgressions
Well, that they are likely to believe if they believe the traditional creeds.
Er -- why would he need Greek, Latin or Aramaic to read Leviticus "in its original writing"?
Well, Jesus referenced the inhabitants of Sodom as bad people to whom bad things happened, but did not mention what they did wrong. The author of Jude wrote "In a similar way, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion. They serve as an example of those who suffer the punishment of eternal fire.", which (if you accept the story) is pretty uncontroversial. There are surely few who would try to argue that heterosexual rape and attempted homosexual rape are not "sexual immorality and perversion". And don't forget that in Ezekiel we have "Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy." The locals in the movie "Deliverance" "gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion", but if somebody think that movie was solely about homosexuality or that it's relevant to caring consensual homosexual relationships then they have some serious hangups.
The New Testament position on homosexuality is nowhere near as clear as either side of the argument would have you believe. In almost all the places where there is a reference to it in English-language Bibles there are serious questions about the correct way to translate the passage, and both sides have good arguments for how they translate them. It really isn't certain which side is right. The only exception is Romans 1, which pretty certainly refers to homosexual sex, but there the interpretations differ. It refers to men and women abandoning heterosexual relationships for homosexual relationships, but many lesbian and gay people argue that they never had any such heterosexual inclinations in the first place so they haven't abandoned them. In any case, the passage describes this as a consequence of sin, not as sin itself.
That's only relevant to those Christians who consider the Bible to be authoritative in such matters, anyway. It's not relevant to the many Christians who don't see the Bible that way or, of course, to those who are not Christian at all.
What bit of my post are you disagreeing with? Nothing that you say seems to contradict any part of it.
Isn't the point of TeX that you worry about the content, NOT the layout ?
No, TeX doesn't separate layout from content. And even using tools built on TeX that do make that separation, such as laTeX, you still have to worry about both (or get the worrying about one of them done for you). A [la]TeX document still needs to be laid out at some point, and getting the layout right is (at present) the hard part; help with that would be useful.
TeX is simply a tool.
Wasn't that always his view? I thought he only wrote it because it was the only way to get TAoCP typeset.
What I don't get is that nearly everything produced these days follows the LaTeX mentality of separating content from presentation
LaTeX wasn't Knuth, though. It was built on top of TeX, which was Knuth's, but TeX didn't separate content from presentation.
Everyone gets the content sorted out and then someone (and often someone who knows about layout) actually places the text on the page. Using Word seems completely backward and out of touch, it's the FrontPage of word processing. How many serious websites get designed using that?
Word separates content from presentation just as well as LaTeX does. Pretty much every modern word processor does. It's not using Word (or OO.o Writer, or any other word processor) that's backward and out of touch, it's you who doesn't realise how much word processors have changed since the 1980s.