Parents in crap areas don't care if their children fail at school (after all, they failed school and they're 'OK'), so they don't encourage their children to succeed at school.
I see this attitude a lot and I think it is incorrect and quite probably classist. Parents in "crap areas" do want their children to be better off than they are, but they don't know how to help their children succeed. Parents in "crap areas" are also often busy working to provide shelter, food, and clothing so that their children can survive. Success may sometimes take a lower priority.
Dismissing the problems in "crap areas" as due to uncaring parents and teachers completely ignores the social issues that perpetuate those attitudes. -- JimFive
I'm saying that, due to how government operates, when it's tasked with doing something, it's extremely inefficient.
Let's take this as a given and even assume that inefficiency in governance is bad per se.
The solution to this is not to say "The government shouldn't do stuff". The solution is to change "how the government operates".
Using this topic as as example: The government should guarantee long term project support and funding, not dictate solutions or components.
Re: The previously mentioned USPS. If the post office is a valuable government service then it should be funded approprately from the general fund. The government should not be attempting to make the USPS "profitable", which is an ideologically driven ploy to attempt to gain support for shutting it down (cf: Amtrak).
Changing how the government operates in these situations is certainly not going to be easy and there are going to be many ideas both good and bad presented. One idea that has potential, but is also open to abuse, is the line item veto. Alternatively, an amendment that puts limits and requirements on the types of laws that can be passed (e.g. Laws must be about only one thing. Laws may not single out one entity for preference).
Throwing up your hands and saying "the government shouldn't do stuff" ends up being more limiting to our future than allowing the government to, for example, research solar panels, batteries and alternative fuels. Eventually, those technologies that NASA has been using successfully for decades will become economically viable. Until then, there is no incentive for the private sector to be working on then. -- JimFive
Even using the odd's of a series, if you put in boy(tuesday)+girl, and girl+boy(tuesday), then why don't you use boy(tuesday)+boy and boy+boy(tuesday) also?
Because boy(tuesday)+boy and boy+boy(tuesday) both include the possibility of boy(tuesday)+boy(tuesday). So you have:
Bt + G = 7 possibilities
Bt + B = 7 possibilities
B + Bt = 7 possibilities
G + Bt = 7 possibilities
Minus 1 Bt + Bt to prevent double counting gives 27 possibilities of which (Bt+B) + (B+Bt) - 1 have two boys.
-- JimFive
That answer is WRONG [...] The number of days in a week is arbitrary.
The arbitrariness of the demographic factor doesn't matter. The question would be more formally phrased as:
Given all of the families that have two children, [at least] one of which is a boy born on a Tuesday. What fraction of those families do we expect to have two boys?
Notice how much easier the problem becomes when you take it out of the "personal anecdote" category and phrase it as a statistical question. You just enumerate all of the possible child pairs that have one boy born on a Tuesday (which works out to be 27) then you count how many have two boys(13), and you have your answer. -- JimFive
Birth order matters.
You could also have:
Boy on Tuesday, Girl on Monday
Boy on Tuesday, Girl on Tuesday ...
Boy on Tuesday, Boy on Monday
SKIP Boy on Tuesday, Boy on Tuesday
Boy on Tuesday, Boy on Wednesday ...
Giving 13/27.
-- JimFive
Of course I am also against state "license" of straight marriages as well.
So am I, to an extent. I see no constitutional problem with the state licensing a civil union to allow the state to keep track of kinship for inheritance purposes. That civil union should have nothing to do with religious marriage and should apply to both homosexual and heterosexual couples.
It's none of the government's business *at all* who you marry, and a violation of civil rights IMO-1st amendment, 5th, 6th, 8th, 9th- to require some permission/permit/license from big brother to get married.
You do realize that there is no requirement to get a marriage license in order to have a religious marriage ceremony? The marriage license declares to the state that these two people are now next of kin and confers other legal benefits.
USA marriage licenses are an archaic holdover from extremely racist jim crow miscegenation
No, marriage licenses are a way for the state to determine inheritance priority and kinship. State involvement in marriage contracts has been occuring for hundreds, if not thousands of years. While the rules have certainly been used to perpetuate prejudice the main concerns of the state are money and property.
-- JimFive
I don't dispute that it would be possible to come up with a system of "wholesaling" ebooks. I dispute that it makes any sense to do so.
Requiring the retailer to buy in batches means that at some point the retailer is going to be in a position where they have a customer for one book, but don't want to commit to the batch size. So the retailer needs to be able to order one ebook and sell it to the customer instantly (because the idea of being out of stock on an ebook is absurd). If they can do that, why would they ever tie up money to preorder a batch (except possibly for highly popular new releases (such as a new Twilight book).
If the retailer can't just order one book then they get into a situation where they are better off not selling the ebook, which is bad for everybody. -- JimFive
What I'd like to see is $10 for a combo paperback, ebook edition. I'd also like to see some sort of deal where if I currently own a book I can get the e-book at a very reduced price (~$1). -- JimFive
I don't see why e-books cannot just be sold like normal books. Publishers wholesale them to retailers [...]
How do you wholesale an e-book? Is the publisher going to tell the retailer, "you can only sell 10 of this book?" The wholesale/retail model works for physical goods because of the problem of getting the objects to the consumer in a distributed marketplace. E-books don't have this problem. -- JimFive
but the most plausible explanation is simple voting machine tallying error with no nefarious purpose behind it.
I disagree. It is very difficult to get a computer to make a mistake when adding 1 to another number. Therefore, a collection of such mistakes of enough magnitude to affect an election's result is almost certainly nefarious. -- JimFive
This paper appears to argue that Benford's law doesn't work for determining election fraud. Presumably because election results are not distributed appropriately for analysis by Benford's law. I would guess, not having read the paper yet, that the precinct sizes are not sufficiently distributed across multiple orders of magnitude for the law to work. -- JimFive
what kind of "art" is the art that people won't pay you to keep doing? From prehistoric times people only become artists if people payed to see their stuff
What?!? Most art is created by amateurs for their own pleasure (c.f. Emily Dickinson). The idea that something is worthwhile only if others are willing to give you money to do it is absurd.
It is also bizarre to me that you think the cave paintings at Lascaux were done by some sort of professional prehistoric artist. Humans have been creating art for pleasure, communication and learning for a very long time. -- JimFive
I find it horrifying that you think it is legitimate for a company to control its product after it's sold.
Many years ago the auto companies tried this. They claimed that it voided the warrantee on the car to have third party parts installed in the car. (My recollection is that they also tried to limit work to only dealer mechanics but I couldn't find a quick reference to that.) The 1975 Magnuson-Moss Act forbids this practice.
To fully answer your question, this is different from Walmart not stocking something because I can buy THAT IDENTICAL THING somewhere other than Walmart. I cannot buy THAT IDENTICAL iPhone App anywhere other than the iPhone AppStore. Buying a different phone and a different application is not equivalent. -- JimFive
do you really need proof that socializing with your peers develops social skills?
Even more, you need to show: a. Peer group socialization is more important than non-peer group socialization for social skills development.
b. The institutional environment of a group school provides adequate opportunities for socialization. (N.B. If the school is providing those opportunites are they doing so at the expense of academic education?)
c. Children who are home schooled lack adequate opportunites for socialization.
You keep asserting that home schooled children are isolated. I imagine this is because you think home schooling parents don't allow their children to leave the house. Club sports and other community based groups (Chess club, swim lessons, community orchestra, the artists guild etc.) are ideal for organized socialization that is not limited to an environment of 25 like-aged children being dictated to by a single authoritarian adult.
You also seem to be under the misconception that home schooling parents are doing so out of ideological concerns. That is becoming less true. Many home schooling parents are doing so as a way out of the public school system without the expense of a private school. -- JimFive
Yeah, I'm way late. But the test is a test of your reaction time, not your "right vs. wrong" answers. The test apparently shows that it takes most people (Americans) longer to classify a black person into a positive category than for a white person. The presumption is that the length of this delay can be used a measure of racism. It was also shown that if the test-taker had been exposed to positive images of blacks (e.g. Martin Luther King speeches, etc) that es score was more neutral.
This isn't to say that their aren't problems with the conclusions being drawn from this test, there are. But I think you misunderstood how it is supposed to work. -- JimFive
As I see it, the only problem here is if, and how, Amazon shares that data with others.
Actually, I think the problem here is that Amazon CAN share that data with others. There is no reason that the backup/restore on new device process should allow Amazon to read your stuff. All of your stuff in Amazon's cloud should be encrypted in such a way that Amazon can't read it, use it, or disclose it. While Amazon may have a claim on the data they collect when you purchase something from them, they have no claim on the data that you generate and put on your device. Whether that data is an ebook that you got elsewhere or notes on a book you bought from Amazon, it is private data and I do hold an expectation of privacy with regards to it.
Keep in mind that, regardless of Amazon's intent, if they have access to the data, then they are only a court order away from being required to leave it identified and turn it over to law enforcement. -- JimFive
I agree with your friends. The problem isn't the little number, it's the text at the bottom of the page. And the problem occurs when the editor/author/translator uses the footnotes as a place for commentary instead of clarification (or worse, when they do both and you can't tell the difference until you start reading the note). A short translation note, or note to tell the modern reader something that the contemporary reader would have known is fine. But notes explaining how this passage fits in with one of the themes of the story are completely unacceptable. Primarily because I don't want to be told what the themes are, I want to read it and decide what I think the themes are.
And no, you can't ignore the notes because they are right there. When I get down to the bottom of the page, I've read the note before I realize it.
In short, footnotes should only be used to clarify the text. If you want commentary, have endnotes or an appendix. -- JimFive
just can't see too much difference between the OS X "walled garden" and the iPhone OS "walled garden" legally
I think there is a big difference between:
You can't install this copyrighted and patented software on unapproved hardware.
and
You can't run unapproved software on this device that you own.
The first is a license condition. The second is using their power in the device market to grab a piece of the software market.
Note: I would prefer that Apple just sell an unsubsidized, unsupported OSX for non-branded hardware, but they aren't required to obey my preferences. -- JimFive
It is NOT their device. It is the purchaser's device. Once it has been sold Apple's ability to determine what happens to it approaches (should approach) zero. The fact that the AppStore enables Apple to control what software goes on to the end-user's device strongly indicates that the AppStore is anticompetitive, and is probably a monopoly.
Once they are the ONLY game in town, we can have this discussion again.
The AppStore is the only game in town for putting software on Apple Branded mobile devices. The fact that you can't separate the AppStore from the Apple Branded device clearly demonstrates that Apple is involved in antitcompetitive practices with regard to the AppStore (Using market power in one area [devices] to control another area [software distribution] is anticompetitive) -- JimFive
It's wrong to compare iPhones, iPads, iWhatevers to gaming consoles at this time.
I disagree. The fact that console makers have gotten away with controlling the software supply chain, albeit in a less blatant way than Apple, seems to indicate an anti-trust issue.
There is no legitimate reason for allowing a company to control what can be run on hardware that the company built and sold. This would be like Ford saying that you must use only Ford-branded Tires. It is clearly an anticompetitive practice, using power in one market to gain power in a different market. The fact that it is enforced technologically doesn't make it legal or ethical.
The problem I have with this inquiry is that it is looking at the wrong thing. The AppStore as the only way to get software on to the iPhone is the problem. If a competitor to the AppStore was possible there would be no tool-chain restriction. -- JimFive
If you're working someplace where "everyone" is getting the refundable earned income credit, then your employer is part of the problem, as are you for supporting em. Pay a living wage to people and they don't qualify for that credit. Even if they don't qualify for the refundable credit, if you are working at a place where "everyone" is getting all of their withholding refunded, that's still a problem with the wages that your employer is paying. -- JimFive
Slashdot Mirror
But I don't want to have it sitting on my shelf if I'm just going to read it once and probably not go back.
Library. InterLibrary Loan Service.
If you're going to just read it once and don't want it on your shelf why are you buying it at all?
--
JimFive
Parents in crap areas don't care if their children fail at school (after all, they failed school and they're 'OK'), so they don't encourage their children to succeed at school.
I see this attitude a lot and I think it is incorrect and quite probably classist. Parents in "crap areas" do want their children to be better off than they are, but they don't know how to help their children succeed. Parents in "crap areas" are also often busy working to provide shelter, food, and clothing so that their children can survive. Success may sometimes take a lower priority.
Dismissing the problems in "crap areas" as due to uncaring parents and teachers completely ignores the social issues that perpetuate those attitudes.
--
JimFive
I'm saying that, due to how government operates, when it's tasked with doing something, it's extremely inefficient.
Let's take this as a given and even assume that inefficiency in governance is bad per se.
The solution to this is not to say "The government shouldn't do stuff". The solution is to change "how the government operates".
Using this topic as as example: The government should guarantee long term project support and funding, not dictate solutions or components.
Re: The previously mentioned USPS. If the post office is a valuable government service then it should be funded approprately from the general fund. The government should not be attempting to make the USPS "profitable", which is an ideologically driven ploy to attempt to gain support for shutting it down (cf: Amtrak).
Changing how the government operates in these situations is certainly not going to be easy and there are going to be many ideas both good and bad presented. One idea that has potential, but is also open to abuse, is the line item veto. Alternatively, an amendment that puts limits and requirements on the types of laws that can be passed (e.g. Laws must be about only one thing. Laws may not single out one entity for preference).
Throwing up your hands and saying "the government shouldn't do stuff" ends up being more limiting to our future than allowing the government to, for example, research solar panels, batteries and alternative fuels. Eventually, those technologies that NASA has been using successfully for decades will become economically viable. Until then, there is no incentive for the private sector to be working on then.
--
JimFive
Even using the odd's of a series, if you put in boy(tuesday)+girl, and girl+boy(tuesday), then why don't you use boy(tuesday)+boy and boy+boy(tuesday) also?
Because boy(tuesday)+boy and boy+boy(tuesday) both include the possibility of boy(tuesday)+boy(tuesday). So you have:
Bt + G = 7 possibilities
Bt + B = 7 possibilities
B + Bt = 7 possibilities
G + Bt = 7 possibilities
Minus 1 Bt + Bt to prevent double counting gives 27 possibilities of which (Bt+B) + (B+Bt) - 1 have two boys.
--
JimFive
That answer is WRONG [...] The number of days in a week is arbitrary.
The arbitrariness of the demographic factor doesn't matter. The question would be more formally phrased as:
Given all of the families that have two children, [at least] one of which is a boy born on a Tuesday. What fraction of those families do we expect to have two boys?
Notice how much easier the problem becomes when you take it out of the "personal anecdote" category and phrase it as a statistical question. You just enumerate all of the possible child pairs that have one boy born on a Tuesday (which works out to be 27) then you count how many have two boys(13), and you have your answer.
--
JimFive
Birth order matters.
...
...
You could also have:
Boy on Tuesday, Girl on Monday
Boy on Tuesday, Girl on Tuesday
Boy on Tuesday, Boy on Monday
SKIP Boy on Tuesday, Boy on Tuesday
Boy on Tuesday, Boy on Wednesday
Giving 13/27.
--
JimFive
Of course I am also against state "license" of straight marriages as well.
So am I, to an extent. I see no constitutional problem with the state licensing a civil union to allow the state to keep track of kinship for inheritance purposes. That civil union should have nothing to do with religious marriage and should apply to both homosexual and heterosexual couples.
It's none of the government's business *at all* who you marry, and a violation of civil rights IMO-1st amendment, 5th, 6th, 8th, 9th- to require some permission/permit/license from big brother to get married.
You do realize that there is no requirement to get a marriage license in order to have a religious marriage ceremony? The marriage license declares to the state that these two people are now next of kin and confers other legal benefits.
USA marriage licenses are an archaic holdover from extremely racist jim crow miscegenation
No, marriage licenses are a way for the state to determine inheritance priority and kinship. State involvement in marriage contracts has been occuring for hundreds, if not thousands of years. While the rules have certainly been used to perpetuate prejudice the main concerns of the state are money and property.
--
JimFive
I don't dispute that it would be possible to come up with a system of "wholesaling" ebooks. I dispute that it makes any sense to do so.
Requiring the retailer to buy in batches means that at some point the retailer is going to be in a position where they have a customer for one book, but don't want to commit to the batch size. So the retailer needs to be able to order one ebook and sell it to the customer instantly (because the idea of being out of stock on an ebook is absurd). If they can do that, why would they ever tie up money to preorder a batch (except possibly for highly popular new releases (such as a new Twilight book).
If the retailer can't just order one book then they get into a situation where they are better off not selling the ebook, which is bad for everybody.
--
JimFive
until prices are reasonable (at $5, I'd go nuts,
What I'd like to see is $10 for a combo paperback, ebook edition. I'd also like to see some sort of deal where if I currently own a book I can get the e-book at a very reduced price (~$1).
--
JimFive
I don't see why e-books cannot just be sold like normal books. Publishers wholesale them to retailers [...]
How do you wholesale an e-book? Is the publisher going to tell the retailer, "you can only sell 10 of this book?" The wholesale/retail model works for physical goods because of the problem of getting the objects to the consumer in a distributed marketplace. E-books don't have this problem.
--
JimFive
I'm guessing the GP was referring to: This article but it may have been this one
--
JimFive
but the most plausible explanation is simple voting machine tallying error with no nefarious purpose behind it.
I disagree. It is very difficult to get a computer to make a mistake when adding 1 to another number. Therefore, a collection of such mistakes of enough magnitude to affect an election's result is almost certainly nefarious.
--
JimFive
This paper appears to argue that Benford's law doesn't work for determining election fraud. Presumably because election results are not distributed appropriately for analysis by Benford's law. I would guess, not having read the paper yet, that the precinct sizes are not sufficiently distributed across multiple orders of magnitude for the law to work.
--
JimFive
what kind of "art" is the art that people won't pay you to keep doing? From prehistoric times people only become artists if people payed to see their stuff
What?!? Most art is created by amateurs for their own pleasure (c.f. Emily Dickinson). The idea that something is worthwhile only if others are willing to give you money to do it is absurd.
It is also bizarre to me that you think the cave paintings at Lascaux were done by some sort of professional prehistoric artist. Humans have been creating art for pleasure, communication and learning for a very long time.
--
JimFive
I find it horrifying that you think it is legitimate for a company to control its product after it's sold.
Many years ago the auto companies tried this. They claimed that it voided the warrantee on the car to have third party parts installed in the car. (My recollection is that they also tried to limit work to only dealer mechanics but I couldn't find a quick reference to that.) The 1975 Magnuson-Moss Act forbids this practice.
To fully answer your question, this is different from Walmart not stocking something because I can buy THAT IDENTICAL THING somewhere other than Walmart. I cannot buy THAT IDENTICAL iPhone App anywhere other than the iPhone AppStore. Buying a different phone and a different application is not equivalent.
--
JimFive
That's just not true. He also regurgitated facts about Whaling, a completely different thing. (100 pages is pretty generous)
--
JimFive
do you really need proof that socializing with your peers develops social skills?
Even more, you need to show:
a. Peer group socialization is more important than non-peer group socialization for social skills development.
b. The institutional environment of a group school provides adequate opportunities for socialization. (N.B. If the school is providing those opportunites are they doing so at the expense of academic education?)
c. Children who are home schooled lack adequate opportunites for socialization.
You keep asserting that home schooled children are isolated. I imagine this is because you think home schooling parents don't allow their children to leave the house. Club sports and other community based groups (Chess club, swim lessons, community orchestra, the artists guild etc.) are ideal for organized socialization that is not limited to an environment of 25 like-aged children being dictated to by a single authoritarian adult.
You also seem to be under the misconception that home schooling parents are doing so out of ideological concerns. That is becoming less true. Many home schooling parents are doing so as a way out of the public school system without the expense of a private school.
--
JimFive
Yeah, I'm way late. But the test is a test of your reaction time, not your "right vs. wrong" answers. The test apparently shows that it takes most people (Americans) longer to classify a black person into a positive category than for a white person. The presumption is that the length of this delay can be used a measure of racism. It was also shown that if the test-taker had been exposed to positive images of blacks (e.g. Martin Luther King speeches, etc) that es score was more neutral.
This isn't to say that their aren't problems with the conclusions being drawn from this test, there are. But I think you misunderstood how it is supposed to work.
--
JimFive
As I see it, the only problem here is if, and how, Amazon shares that data with others.
Actually, I think the problem here is that Amazon CAN share that data with others. There is no reason that the backup/restore on new device process should allow Amazon to read your stuff. All of your stuff in Amazon's cloud should be encrypted in such a way that Amazon can't read it, use it, or disclose it. While Amazon may have a claim on the data they collect when you purchase something from them, they have no claim on the data that you generate and put on your device. Whether that data is an ebook that you got elsewhere or notes on a book you bought from Amazon, it is private data and I do hold an expectation of privacy with regards to it.
Keep in mind that, regardless of Amazon's intent, if they have access to the data, then they are only a court order away from being required to leave it identified and turn it over to law enforcement.
--
JimFive
I agree with your friends. The problem isn't the little number, it's the text at the bottom of the page. And the problem occurs when the editor/author/translator uses the footnotes as a place for commentary instead of clarification (or worse, when they do both and you can't tell the difference until you start reading the note). A short translation note, or note to tell the modern reader something that the contemporary reader would have known is fine. But notes explaining how this passage fits in with one of the themes of the story are completely unacceptable. Primarily because I don't want to be told what the themes are, I want to read it and decide what I think the themes are.
And no, you can't ignore the notes because they are right there. When I get down to the bottom of the page, I've read the note before I realize it.
In short, footnotes should only be used to clarify the text. If you want commentary, have endnotes or an appendix.
--
JimFive
"Exactly. Most of the comments here are the classic example of the echo chamber.", he said unreflectingly.
FTFY
just can't see too much difference between the OS X "walled garden" and the iPhone OS "walled garden" legally
I think there is a big difference between:
and
The first is a license condition. The second is using their power in the device market to grab a piece of the software market.
Note: I would prefer that Apple just sell an unsubsidized, unsupported OSX for non-branded hardware, but they aren't required to obey my preferences.
--
JimFive
Besides, its their device,
It is NOT their device. It is the purchaser's device. Once it has been sold Apple's ability to determine what happens to it approaches (should approach) zero. The fact that the AppStore enables Apple to control what software goes on to the end-user's device strongly indicates that the AppStore is anticompetitive, and is probably a monopoly.
Once they are the ONLY game in town, we can have this discussion again.
The AppStore is the only game in town for putting software on Apple Branded mobile devices. The fact that you can't separate the AppStore from the Apple Branded device clearly demonstrates that Apple is involved in antitcompetitive practices with regard to the AppStore (Using market power in one area [devices] to control another area [software distribution] is anticompetitive)
--
JimFive
It's wrong to compare iPhones, iPads, iWhatevers to gaming consoles at this time.
I disagree. The fact that console makers have gotten away with controlling the software supply chain, albeit in a less blatant way than Apple, seems to indicate an anti-trust issue.
There is no legitimate reason for allowing a company to control what can be run on hardware that the company built and sold. This would be like Ford saying that you must use only Ford-branded Tires. It is clearly an anticompetitive practice, using power in one market to gain power in a different market. The fact that it is enforced technologically doesn't make it legal or ethical.
The problem I have with this inquiry is that it is looking at the wrong thing. The AppStore as the only way to get software on to the iPhone is the problem. If a competitor to the AppStore was possible there would be no tool-chain restriction.
--
JimFive
If you're working someplace where "everyone" is getting the refundable earned income credit, then your employer is part of the problem, as are you for supporting em. Pay a living wage to people and they don't qualify for that credit. Even if they don't qualify for the refundable credit, if you are working at a place where "everyone" is getting all of their withholding refunded, that's still a problem with the wages that your employer is paying.
--
JimFive