You know another great thing about statistics? People who know what they're doing can also use them to make meaningful calculations about the way things work in the real world. 90% vs 10% is an unbalanced sample, sure, but there are more than enough people in that 10% to make it a large enough sample size to calculate a meaningful odds ratio.
I've continued to find dead-tree references for various languages, DBMSs, etc. useful through several version changes. Of course any IT book is out of date before it's published, but the value of a good printed reference makes up for it relative to the up-to-the-minute nature of (good) online documentation. Both are important; neither is inherently superior to the other.
I stand in awe of your incisive rebuttal of a lengthy, carefully thought out, and well-sourced argument... based on the author's sig line. Wow. You really showed him. Surely all must bow before your superior wisdom.
We OBSERVE and experience that any moderately organized pile of atoms becomes less organized over time. This a a manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics.
Every process that takes place in a living cell leads to an overall increase in entropy. The cell exploits this to create local decreases in entropy. There is no contradiction with thermodynamics here. I really wish people who want to make this argument would crack open an elementary biochemistry book; it's generally explained within the first couple of chapters.
Isn't life just the an efficient way to increase entropy (otherwise the chemicals would not have formed in the first amoeba)?
On the molecular scale, this is true, which is why the creationist argument based on the second law of thermodynamics is simply wrong; living systems are very, very good at creating entropy, much better than non-living systems of similar size. And measured over long periods of time, we're quite good at it on a larger scale, too. But at a particular scale and for a particular amount of time, we can decrease entropy in some pretty dramatic ways -- which of course is part of what SETI is looking for.
People who quote Sherman's "war is hell" to justify wartime atrocities really ought to think about the full quote:
I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.
Uncle Billy had the 101st Fighting Keyboarders crowd much nailed, I'd say.
In addition, soldiers are trained not to think, they're trained to follow orders.
In the US Army, at least, this is simply not true.
American soldiers are very much trained to think -- mostly about tactical considerations, true ("I've been ordered to do X; what is the best way to accomplish that?") but the Law Of Armed Conflict (LOAC) is part of every soldier's training. To the degree that the LOAC is violated on the battlefield, this represents a failure of the training, not of the doctrine.
There are many nations which attempt to train their soldiers to be mindless killing machines. When those soldiers come up against soldiers who have been trained to think, the thinking ones tend to win.
When I was a kid, I read a story about a murder on a space station. The gimmick was that the space station cops were pretty sure they knew who'd done it, but he'd committed the crime and disposed of the body on a spacewalk, so they had no actual evidence. They decided to take a spacesuit identical to the dead man's and have it float up to the suspect on his next spacewalk, the idea being that it would startle him into a confession. Well, they set everything up, sending an undercover cop out with the guy to watch his reaction... and at just the right time, two suits floated up. The murderer freaked out and they ended up hauling him off to the loony bin instead of prison. He thought he'd been clever, killing the guy and shoving his body out into space -- but he'd forgotten that nothing ever really goes away in orbit, and sooner or later it will come back.
It was a silly story, written specifically for kids, but that image of the two suits floating out there, one empty and one with a corpse inside, haunted me for a looong time.
Good point. "Fake it 'til you make it," on a national (indeed, global) scale, I guess is what they're hoping for. Except they're faking it with other people's lives...
Yes indeed. Unfortunately it seems like the right-wingers still have a lot of people hoodwinked -- the default assumption is that conservatives support the troops more than liberals do, no matter what the reality is. It will take at least a generation to change that perception, I think, maybe more. What's most likely to do the trick is for the troops themselves to speak out...
You're moving the goalposts. I have no trouble with the statement that Americans regard their flag as a living thing; my point is that based on your original argument ("people have died for it") other countries have just as much reason to regard their flags as living thing as Americans do, and yet they don't generally do so. Neither your post nor my response said anything about legal flag codes.
While we're on that subject, though, can you point me to the part in the US flag code where it defines the flag as a living thing? Seriously?
I started out in the infantry. 11B, you know what that is? Then I went medical and served in Daddy Bush's war. In other words, I've done as much real soldiering as anyone -- and probably a hell of a lot more than you or GPP, whose "knowledge" of combat probably comes from sitting on your fat asses playing FPSs and munching Doritos.
Yeah, all those stupid PhD physicists, wasting money on experimental rigorous verification of stuff that any random geek on/. already knows is true. Tell you what, why don't you send them an e-mail explaining how they're wasting time and money, and let us know how that turns out?
The thing is, many other flags have also been fought and died over; pretty much the entire reason flags came into existence was so that soldiers could identify their units on the battlefield, and there's a good reason that color-bearer was both one of the most honored and one of the most dangerous positions in any army. The idea of "rallying 'round the flag" in a literal sense died sometime in late 1914, along with a hell of a lot of brave, doomed young men trying to do exactly that, but the symbolism remains. There's nothing unique in the history of the Stars and Stripes that explains why it's obsessed over in a way that the Union Jack, les couleurs, etc. aren't.
Think about this logically. She is from the military. They are primarily liberals. Therefore they ~HATE the military.
Fuck you.
No, seriously, fuck you.
I am a liberal. I am a veteran. Most of my family and friends are also liberals, and many of them are also veterans. Those of us who are veterans are proud of our service, and those who aren't are proud of us for having served. None of us hate the military.
I am a Democrat, and I among my fellow Democrats I do not encounter hatred of the military. What I encounter is respect for my service and -- frequently -- the bond of meeting a fellow vet, who is also proud of having served, as well as a committment to cleaning up the mess that conservative chickenhawks have made of the country over the last eight years. You know, the people who "support the troops," but God forbid they or their kids should ever actually serve a day in uniform or hear a shot fired in anger.
Liberals hate the military? In many cases, we are the military. See, one of the great things about the military is that it's pretty much a cross-section of the country. Liberal and conservative and libertarian, black and white and Asian and Hispanic, Christian and Jew and Muslim and atheist and Hindu and every other religion you can think of -- you will find all of these, in every possible combination, serving America. Which is, when you come right down to it, a pretty liberal phenomenon in itself.
You, I expect, have lived your entire life surrounded by people pretty much just like you, and you're perfectly happy in your little comfort bubble where "the troops" are heroic abstractions doing heroic things far, far away. I.e., a conservative chickenhawk, just like your heroes Bush and Cheney. Don't worry, you can keep doing that. People like me, and people unlike me, who can put their differences aside to agree on a common goal, will keep on defending your right to be a self-righteous asshole, however little you deserve it.
This is the part where you say something you know lots of people will agree with, but preface your statement by telling us how bold and daring and anti-PC you are. GMAFB, AC.
What's particularly puzzling is that the explanations for under-representation of women that were assembled back in 1991 applied to all technical fields. Yet women have achieved broad parity with men in almost every other technical pursuit. When all science and engineering fields are considered, the percentage of bachelor's degree recipients who are women has improved to 51 percent in 2004-5 from 39 percent in 1984-85, according to National Science Foundation surveys.
"Women aren't interested in X" has historically been applied to X = medicine, business, politics... and it's always been wrong. There's something specific about CS here, and I don't think it's the field.
Of course their motivation is profit, but it's a question of costs and benefits. Lots of companies hold many patents they don't vigorously enforce, because they've decided that in the long run suing everybody won't pay off. (At one time, IBM alone could pretty much have put the entire rest of the computer and electronics industry out of business by enforcing every patent they held... and they would have destroyed themselves in the process. A kind of MAD.) My guess -- and this is of course purely a guess -- is that Halliburton wants this patent as protection against getting trolled themselves; they don't much care what the trolls do to anyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
Having been both a medic and a programmer, I can tell you that "basic proven work flow improvements" are not one-size-fits-all.
Now I'm not positive about marajuana, but as for Coke, Heroine and Meth; a single use is usually all it takes to become an addict.
This is a widespread belief, but there is absolutely no evidence that it's true. None. Zero.
If you ask any cop, he will tell you that there is no such thing as a casual coke/heroine/meth user, only addicts. Once you do it, you don't stop.
Asking a cop for unbiased information about drugs is like asking Bill Gates for unbiased information about Linux.
Now there are RARE cases of people who only do it a few times, but they are RARE.
[[citation needed]] And I'm talking peer-reviewed medical studies, not DEA or DARE propaganda.
Please don't confuse recreational drugs with brain-rewriting poison.
I think you're the only one doing that here.
You know another great thing about statistics? People who know what they're doing can also use them to make meaningful calculations about the way things work in the real world. 90% vs 10% is an unbalanced sample, sure, but there are more than enough people in that 10% to make it a large enough sample size to calculate a meaningful odds ratio.
I've continued to find dead-tree references for various languages, DBMSs, etc. useful through several version changes. Of course any IT book is out of date before it's published, but the value of a good printed reference makes up for it relative to the up-to-the-minute nature of (good) online documentation. Both are important; neither is inherently superior to the other.
Dude, you so need to get laid.
I stand in awe of your incisive rebuttal of a lengthy, carefully thought out, and well-sourced argument ... based on the author's sig line. Wow. You really showed him. Surely all must bow before your superior wisdom.
p=np is a classic theoretical computer problem that has never been solved
"Let n = 1."
There you go. Why do people get so worked up about this?
I'll be seeing that first run in theatres and buying the DVDs.
They predicted that, you know.
We OBSERVE and experience that any moderately organized pile of atoms becomes less organized over time. This a a manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics.
Every process that takes place in a living cell leads to an overall increase in entropy. The cell exploits this to create local decreases in entropy. There is no contradiction with thermodynamics here. I really wish people who want to make this argument would crack open an elementary biochemistry book; it's generally explained within the first couple of chapters.
Isn't life just the an efficient way to increase entropy (otherwise the chemicals would not have formed in the first amoeba)?
On the molecular scale, this is true, which is why the creationist argument based on the second law of thermodynamics is simply wrong; living systems are very, very good at creating entropy, much better than non-living systems of similar size. And measured over long periods of time, we're quite good at it on a larger scale, too. But at a particular scale and for a particular amount of time, we can decrease entropy in some pretty dramatic ways -- which of course is part of what SETI is looking for.
People who quote Sherman's "war is hell" to justify wartime atrocities really ought to think about the full quote:
I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.
Uncle Billy had the 101st Fighting Keyboarders crowd much nailed, I'd say.
In addition, soldiers are trained not to think, they're trained to follow orders.
In the US Army, at least, this is simply not true.
American soldiers are very much trained to think -- mostly about tactical considerations, true ("I've been ordered to do X; what is the best way to accomplish that?") but the Law Of Armed Conflict (LOAC) is part of every soldier's training. To the degree that the LOAC is violated on the battlefield, this represents a failure of the training, not of the doctrine.
There are many nations which attempt to train their soldiers to be mindless killing machines. When those soldiers come up against soldiers who have been trained to think, the thinking ones tend to win.
When I was a kid, I read a story about a murder on a space station. The gimmick was that the space station cops were pretty sure they knew who'd done it, but he'd committed the crime and disposed of the body on a spacewalk, so they had no actual evidence. They decided to take a spacesuit identical to the dead man's and have it float up to the suspect on his next spacewalk, the idea being that it would startle him into a confession. Well, they set everything up, sending an undercover cop out with the guy to watch his reaction ... and at just the right time, two suits floated up. The murderer freaked out and they ended up hauling him off to the loony bin instead of prison. He thought he'd been clever, killing the guy and shoving his body out into space -- but he'd forgotten that nothing ever really goes away in orbit, and sooner or later it will come back.
It was a silly story, written specifically for kids, but that image of the two suits floating out there, one empty and one with a corpse inside, haunted me for a looong time.
Good point. "Fake it 'til you make it," on a national (indeed, global) scale, I guess is what they're hoping for. Except they're faking it with other people's lives ...
Yes indeed. Unfortunately it seems like the right-wingers still have a lot of people hoodwinked -- the default assumption is that conservatives support the troops more than liberals do, no matter what the reality is. It will take at least a generation to change that perception, I think, maybe more. What's most likely to do the trick is for the troops themselves to speak out ...
You're moving the goalposts. I have no trouble with the statement that Americans regard their flag as a living thing; my point is that based on your original argument ("people have died for it") other countries have just as much reason to regard their flags as living thing as Americans do, and yet they don't generally do so. Neither your post nor my response said anything about legal flag codes.
While we're on that subject, though, can you point me to the part in the US flag code where it defines the flag as a living thing? Seriously?
Fuck you too, AC.
I started out in the infantry. 11B, you know what that is? Then I went medical and served in Daddy Bush's war. In other words, I've done as much real soldiering as anyone -- and probably a hell of a lot more than you or GPP, whose "knowledge" of combat probably comes from sitting on your fat asses playing FPSs and munching Doritos.
Yeah, all those stupid PhD physicists, wasting money on experimental rigorous verification of stuff that any random geek on /. already knows is true. Tell you what, why don't you send them an e-mail explaining how they're wasting time and money, and let us know how that turns out?
The thing is, many other flags have also been fought and died over; pretty much the entire reason flags came into existence was so that soldiers could identify their units on the battlefield, and there's a good reason that color-bearer was both one of the most honored and one of the most dangerous positions in any army. The idea of "rallying 'round the flag" in a literal sense died sometime in late 1914, along with a hell of a lot of brave, doomed young men trying to do exactly that, but the symbolism remains. There's nothing unique in the history of the Stars and Stripes that explains why it's obsessed over in a way that the Union Jack, les couleurs, etc. aren't.
Think about this logically. She is from the military. They are primarily liberals. Therefore they ~HATE the military.
Fuck you.
No, seriously, fuck you.
I am a liberal. I am a veteran. Most of my family and friends are also liberals, and many of them are also veterans. Those of us who are veterans are proud of our service, and those who aren't are proud of us for having served. None of us hate the military.
I am a Democrat, and I among my fellow Democrats I do not encounter hatred of the military. What I encounter is respect for my service and -- frequently -- the bond of meeting a fellow vet, who is also proud of having served, as well as a committment to cleaning up the mess that conservative chickenhawks have made of the country over the last eight years. You know, the people who "support the troops," but God forbid they or their kids should ever actually serve a day in uniform or hear a shot fired in anger.
Liberals hate the military? In many cases, we are the military. See, one of the great things about the military is that it's pretty much a cross-section of the country. Liberal and conservative and libertarian, black and white and Asian and Hispanic, Christian and Jew and Muslim and atheist and Hindu and every other religion you can think of -- you will find all of these, in every possible combination, serving America. Which is, when you come right down to it, a pretty liberal phenomenon in itself.
You, I expect, have lived your entire life surrounded by people pretty much just like you, and you're perfectly happy in your little comfort bubble where "the troops" are heroic abstractions doing heroic things far, far away. I.e., a conservative chickenhawk, just like your heroes Bush and Cheney. Don't worry, you can keep doing that. People like me, and people unlike me, who can put their differences aside to agree on a common goal, will keep on defending your right to be a self-righteous asshole, however little you deserve it.
... and thus we come back to stewardesses, of course.
This is the part where you say something you know lots of people will agree with, but preface your statement by telling us how bold and daring and anti-PC you are. GMAFB, AC.
Key paragraph from TFA:
What's particularly puzzling is that the explanations for under-representation of women that were assembled back in 1991 applied to all technical fields. Yet women have achieved broad parity with men in almost every other technical pursuit. When all science and engineering fields are considered, the percentage of bachelor's degree recipients who are women has improved to 51 percent in 2004-5 from 39 percent in 1984-85, according to National Science Foundation surveys.
"Women aren't interested in X" has historically been applied to X = medicine, business, politics ... and it's always been wrong. There's something specific about CS here, and I don't think it's the field.
Of course their motivation is profit, but it's a question of costs and benefits. Lots of companies hold many patents they don't vigorously enforce, because they've decided that in the long run suing everybody won't pay off. (At one time, IBM alone could pretty much have put the entire rest of the computer and electronics industry out of business by enforcing every patent they held ... and they would have destroyed themselves in the process. A kind of MAD.) My guess -- and this is of course purely a guess -- is that Halliburton wants this patent as protection against getting trolled themselves; they don't much care what the trolls do to anyone else.
Ah hah, on a computer, right. Maybe even on the internet, too! That changes everything! How silly of me to forget. ;)