I said once that the best answer to the trap question "Do you believe in evolution?" is "I believe in evolution the same way I believe there is a city called Philadelphia." I've never been to Philadelphia; no, Mr. Ham, I wasn't there. But I've heard about Philadelphia, I've read about Philadelphia, I've seen pictures of Philadelphia, when driving in Baltimore I've seen road signs directing me to Philadelphia, and I've even known people who (claimed to have) lived in Philadelphia--all of which adds up to sufficient evidence for "I believe there is a city called Philadelphia" to be a reasonable statement.
Those who are devoted to proving in their own minds that Science Is Just Another Religion tend not to understand this distinction, of course.
Can you imagine a surgeon... "Well we'll just start cutting and figure it from there" no no, talk about outcome, not process. Agile talk is for the operating room, not the waiting room.
Inadvertently, you've just come up with an excellent analogy. Surgeons don't actually work that way, and a good thing too. In fact, no one who has to do any complicated and tricky task with a specified outcome works that way... except a certain group of fad-following programmers.
"You're doing it wrong" is the first excuse ever given when someone criticizes Agile. At the same time "you're doing it wrong" applies to just about every group using Agile that I've seen. There's a whole industry grown up around Agile consultants who go around to companies to tell them "you're doing it wrong".
Yep. Agile can never fail, only be failed. If it appears to have failed, it's because you're not really devoted to its principles. You must be on fire with the spirit of the scrum, brother! You must accept the stand-up into your heart and soul!
(Listening to a bunch of Agile true believers talking about programming is like listening to preachers at a revival meeting, only without the nice singing in between sermons.)
Or at least we should make a Department of Space Transportation. Unrelated to Homeland Security. It could still be under the executive branch, and Civil.
We already have a Department of Transportation, which is where any regulatory agency for space flight belongs. The key is to start thinking of space travel as, you know, transportation rather than something new and different and scary. Unfortunately, it seems like we're still stuck with IN SPAAACE slapped onto things, kind of like ON THE INTERNET. Only with even less excuse, since the internet was still purely theoretical when Sputnik was launched, and barely a glimmer when Apollo 11 landed.
But you can guarantee DHS/TSA will get their noses in there somehow.
You never hear about the government laying people off unless they misbehave, and government salaries and benefits are way higher than the private sector.
Can I move to your planet? It sounds like a good place to get a job.
lol leftist faggot, why not hand over the world to china
And thus we see the right wing eating its own. Jane Q. Public is one of Slashdot's most reliably conservative posters--but one post that deviates from orthodoxy, and out come the McCarthyite claws. Kind of like how Grover Norquist was accused of being a secret Muslim the other day.
Yes, I do, because I don't share the irrational hatred of it that seems to be so common around here. It's a tool, no more and no less, good for some things and not so good for others.
Near-revolution brewing in an American ally, and nearly zero mention on the home pages of CNN, Fox or MSNBC.
I think you answered your own implied question. Turkey is a designated Good Guy, and therefore this can't possibly be that important. Until and unless they become a designated Bad Guy (which can happen very quickly) in which case this will immediately become a Vital Struggle For Freedom against the Worst Dictatorship In Human History.
But praise and fawning over Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot.
Wow. You genuinely believe that, don't you? Which probably explains this priceless line:
Obama uses the full force of government to stifle opposition.
Hint: under Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot, you wouldn't be saying that, with or without the thin gloss of anonymity that comes from posting under a screen name. If web forums had existed in their day, very bad things would have happened to anyone posting such a comment. You clearly have no idea what "the full force of government to stifle opposition" actually looks like, and for all our sakes, I sincerely hope you never find out.
If you want real stats you have to go procedure by procedure and compare similar cases
Which, amazingly, is exactly what the authors of the paper did. It's open-access; click the link and read it for yourself.
Oh, wait, I forgot. On Slashdot, scientists are morons and people who read an article on a pop-sci site a month ago know everything, and any use of statistics can and must instantly be banished with the Words Of Power, Which I Will Not Utter Here.
On Question Time Anna Soubry (Under-Secretary of State for Health) said that some doctors schedule more at-risk surgeries on a Friday because then they will be able to deal with the patient during the weekend when they don't have surgeries planned.
They control for the type of procedure, so you can rule out the obvious confounding factor of scheduling procedures that are inherently more dangerous for later in the week. It doesn't tell you about the differences between the individual patients, of course ("this hip replacement's going to much trickier than that one, so I'll do it on Friday") but the numbers do not provide any evidence for the hypothesis that this kind of schedule-shuffling is going on. Comparing between types of procedures, the numbers for risk (Table 1, toward the bottom) look pretty flat, with the obvious (and unsurprising) exception that procedures performed on the weekend tend to be lower risk. Between Mondays and Fridays, there's essentially no difference at all.
You do need to be careful when you want to find explanations for statistics like these.
Stupid researchers! They never thought of that! [rolls eyes]
No, it's not. You may have been confused because his name is Farnsworth, which isn't a particularly common name; as another poster said, it would be interesting to know if there's a family connection with the Farnsworth the fusor is named for. Fusor.net, AFAICT, is a site run by and for fusor hobbyists, people who like to tinker with the kind of machines this kid built.
And for those who are saying "Oh, he just downloaded some tutorials off the net"--well, if you could or would have done something like that as a teenager, good for you, but most people couldn't or wouldn't. It's not groundbreaking research, but putting together a working fusor is a pretty neat accomplishment for a high-school kid.
That's pretty much the kind of thing I was thinking of when I said, "I'm sure it will find its uses." It's very different from replacing Windows as the primary corporate and home user desktop OS, which is what I had the impression OP had in mind.
It's the only realistic chance of dethroning MS from the desktop in favor of an open alternative.
It has no chance of dethroning Windows. Zero. Zip. Nada.
Look, no one will ever be as good at being Microsoft as Microsoft is. ReactOS may be eventually be 99 44/100 % Windows compatible. It may look like Windows, feel like Windows, and act like Windows almost all the time--but it won't be Windows. And sooner or later, anyone running it will run into some instance where Windows does this but ReactOS does that. Now, when this happens (when, not if) developers will say, "That's interesting, we should fix that." But regular users will think, "Serves me right for trying to use this cheap knockoff. Guess I'll just get the real thing." And if anyone asks them about their experience with ReactOS, that's pretty what they'll say.
ReactOS is an interesting project, and I wish them the best of luck. I'm sure it will find its uses. Taking significant market share away from Microsoft isn't one of them.
The same, BTW, applies to open-source clones of other Microsoft products, which is why it's kind of dismaying that the OpenOffice family (LibreOffice, etc.) tries so hard to imitate Microsoft Office interface standards. Those aren't the only way to design office software, and there's no reason to assume they're the best, either. The more you chase the market leader, the less chance of eventually becoming the market leader you have. Try to do something different and better instead. That's about the only way any piece of software has ever broken another's market dominance, and probably the only way it ever will.
That might be true, I don't know, I wasn't one of the pre-adoption G+ users. But I can tell you that since G+ has been public, it has always been slower than facebook. The initial page load takes longer, posting a comment takes longer, posting a page takes longer, everything takes longer and as far as I can tell, it always has.
Now that I think about it, yeah, I guess I was one of the beta users. What the hell, I tried that with Gmail, years ago, and that worked out pretty well...
The pre-public-release G+ was kind of odd-looking, but my God it was fast. I'm really sad about how quickly it went downhill.
If you didn't get that from TFA, you may have read it, but you certainly didn't understand it.
I'll just re-quote from the article the passage I quoted in a previous post:
The senior VP had serious technical chops, but he wasn't about to demonstrate them in front of his peers. He feared, justifiably, that if he did so he'd get classified as a techie and taken out of consideration as a possible future CEO.
Understanding this is pretty easy; if you choose not to do so, that's your business, so to speak.
Believe it or not, that's the opposite of what the summary says.
No it's not. The summary (and the article, which is essentially the same fluff as the summary repeated several times--I RTFA'd so you don't have to) says to avoid technical jargon, which has actual meaning and is therefore terrifying to people who want to be executives. The bullshit list is business jargon, which is inherently meaningless and is therefore very useful to C*Os and those who like to imagine themselves in such positions.
The senior VP had serious technical chops, but he wasn't about to demonstrate them in front of his peers. He feared, justifiably, that if he did so he'd get classified as a techie and taken out of consideration as a possible future CEO.
For any/.er working in an environment like that, I'd like to think this would be a sign that it was time to get the hell out.
When G+ started out, it was clean, fast-loading, reliable, and did exactly what it was supposed to do and no more. You know... like Google used to be. I had real hopes that G+:FB::Google:Yahoo.
Every change since then has made it uglier, slower, and buggier; with the latest interface changes they've not only caught up to but actually surpassed Facebook in the amount of irritating crap they shove at the user. Google may be able to coast on people's affection for them as a search engine (especially when the competition is Bing) but they're going to find it increasingly difficult to break into new markets if all they do is ape the worst behavior of the existing market leader--which in this case emphatically includes "adding a bunch of new 'features' when the ones we already have are kind of crap."
I still use Google as my primary search engine, Gmail as my e-mail provider, and Google Maps when I want to figure out how to go somewhere I haven't been before. Nothing they've done since then has provided any reason to switch from whatever solution I'm currently using. And I really don't think I'm alone in this.
I'm pretty sure GPP is making fun of Ken Ham's thought-stopping advice to his followers, which is supposed to immediately make "evolutionists" stop dead in their tracks, fall down on their knees, pray for forgiveness, and embrace the obvious Truth. Or something like that.
You left off the rest: "with his most mundane statements breathlessly repeated as though they were great wisdom." It's not Tyson's being an effective science popularizer that bugs me--I'm all for that--but the cult-of-personality aspect which seems to follow. Again, this is very much as it was with Sagan.
Slashdot Mirror
I said once that the best answer to the trap question "Do you believe in evolution?" is "I believe in evolution the same way I believe there is a city called Philadelphia." I've never been to Philadelphia; no, Mr. Ham, I wasn't there. But I've heard about Philadelphia, I've read about Philadelphia, I've seen pictures of Philadelphia, when driving in Baltimore I've seen road signs directing me to Philadelphia, and I've even known people who (claimed to have) lived in Philadelphia--all of which adds up to sufficient evidence for "I believe there is a city called Philadelphia" to be a reasonable statement.
Those who are devoted to proving in their own minds that Science Is Just Another Religion tend not to understand this distinction, of course.
Wake me up when the liberals are protesting in front of the white house or anywhere else while Obama is in charge.
Who the hell do you think Occupy are? A bunch of right-wingers?
Can you imagine a surgeon... "Well we'll just start cutting and figure it from there" no no, talk about outcome, not process. Agile talk is for the operating room, not the waiting room.
Inadvertently, you've just come up with an excellent analogy. Surgeons don't actually work that way, and a good thing too. In fact, no one who has to do any complicated and tricky task with a specified outcome works that way ... except a certain group of fad-following programmers.
"You're doing it wrong" is the first excuse ever given when someone criticizes Agile. At the same time "you're doing it wrong" applies to just about every group using Agile that I've seen. There's a whole industry grown up around Agile consultants who go around to companies to tell them "you're doing it wrong".
Yep. Agile can never fail, only be failed. If it appears to have failed, it's because you're not really devoted to its principles. You must be on fire with the spirit of the scrum, brother! You must accept the stand-up into your heart and soul!
(Listening to a bunch of Agile true believers talking about programming is like listening to preachers at a revival meeting, only without the nice singing in between sermons.)
Or at least we should make a Department of Space Transportation. Unrelated to Homeland Security. It could still be under the executive branch, and Civil.
We already have a Department of Transportation, which is where any regulatory agency for space flight belongs. The key is to start thinking of space travel as, you know, transportation rather than something new and different and scary. Unfortunately, it seems like we're still stuck with IN SPAAACE slapped onto things, kind of like ON THE INTERNET. Only with even less excuse, since the internet was still purely theoretical when Sputnik was launched, and barely a glimmer when Apollo 11 landed.
But you can guarantee DHS/TSA will get their noses in there somehow.
You never hear about the government laying people off unless they misbehave, and government salaries and benefits are way higher than the private sector.
Can I move to your planet? It sounds like a good place to get a job.
lol leftist faggot, why not hand over the world to china
And thus we see the right wing eating its own. Jane Q. Public is one of Slashdot's most reliably conservative posters--but one post that deviates from orthodoxy, and out come the McCarthyite claws. Kind of like how Grover Norquist was accused of being a secret Muslim the other day.
I'll be over here cheering from the sidelines.
Yes, I do, because I don't share the irrational hatred of it that seems to be so common around here. It's a tool, no more and no less, good for some things and not so good for others.
Maybe even slashdotters would vote for facebook in this case.
Quite seriously, given the virulent hatred many /.ers seem to have for FB, I wouldn't count on it.
Near-revolution brewing in an American ally, and nearly zero mention on the home pages of CNN, Fox or MSNBC.
I think you answered your own implied question. Turkey is a designated Good Guy, and therefore this can't possibly be that important. Until and unless they become a designated Bad Guy (which can happen very quickly) in which case this will immediately become a Vital Struggle For Freedom against the Worst Dictatorship In Human History.
... he'd have had support from a substantial portion of the Slashdot readership.
But praise and fawning over Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot.
Wow. You genuinely believe that, don't you? Which probably explains this priceless line:
Obama uses the full force of government to stifle opposition.
Hint: under Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot, you wouldn't be saying that, with or without the thin gloss of anonymity that comes from posting under a screen name. If web forums had existed in their day, very bad things would have happened to anyone posting such a comment. You clearly have no idea what "the full force of government to stifle opposition" actually looks like, and for all our sakes, I sincerely hope you never find out.
If you want real stats you have to go procedure by procedure and compare similar cases
Which, amazingly, is exactly what the authors of the paper did. It's open-access; click the link and read it for yourself.
Oh, wait, I forgot. On Slashdot, scientists are morons and people who read an article on a pop-sci site a month ago know everything, and any use of statistics can and must instantly be banished with the Words Of Power, Which I Will Not Utter Here.
On Question Time Anna Soubry (Under-Secretary of State for Health) said that some doctors schedule more at-risk surgeries on a Friday because then they will be able to deal with the patient during the weekend when they don't have surgeries planned.
They control for the type of procedure, so you can rule out the obvious confounding factor of scheduling procedures that are inherently more dangerous for later in the week. It doesn't tell you about the differences between the individual patients, of course ("this hip replacement's going to much trickier than that one, so I'll do it on Friday") but the numbers do not provide any evidence for the hypothesis that this kind of schedule-shuffling is going on. Comparing between types of procedures, the numbers for risk (Table 1, toward the bottom) look pretty flat, with the obvious (and unsurprising) exception that procedures performed on the weekend tend to be lower risk. Between Mondays and Fridays, there's essentially no difference at all.
You do need to be careful when you want to find explanations for statistics like these.
Stupid researchers! They never thought of that! [rolls eyes]
That's the kid's own website, right?
No, it's not. You may have been confused because his name is Farnsworth, which isn't a particularly common name; as another poster said, it would be interesting to know if there's a family connection with the Farnsworth the fusor is named for. Fusor.net, AFAICT, is a site run by and for fusor hobbyists, people who like to tinker with the kind of machines this kid built.
And for those who are saying "Oh, he just downloaded some tutorials off the net"--well, if you could or would have done something like that as a teenager, good for you, but most people couldn't or wouldn't. It's not groundbreaking research, but putting together a working fusor is a pretty neat accomplishment for a high-school kid.
That's pretty much the kind of thing I was thinking of when I said, "I'm sure it will find its uses." It's very different from replacing Windows as the primary corporate and home user desktop OS, which is what I had the impression OP had in mind.
It's the only realistic chance of dethroning MS from the desktop in favor of an open alternative.
It has no chance of dethroning Windows. Zero. Zip. Nada.
Look, no one will ever be as good at being Microsoft as Microsoft is. ReactOS may be eventually be 99 44/100 % Windows compatible. It may look like Windows, feel like Windows, and act like Windows almost all the time--but it won't be Windows. And sooner or later, anyone running it will run into some instance where Windows does this but ReactOS does that. Now, when this happens (when, not if) developers will say, "That's interesting, we should fix that." But regular users will think, "Serves me right for trying to use this cheap knockoff. Guess I'll just get the real thing." And if anyone asks them about their experience with ReactOS, that's pretty what they'll say.
ReactOS is an interesting project, and I wish them the best of luck. I'm sure it will find its uses. Taking significant market share away from Microsoft isn't one of them.
The same, BTW, applies to open-source clones of other Microsoft products, which is why it's kind of dismaying that the OpenOffice family (LibreOffice, etc.) tries so hard to imitate Microsoft Office interface standards. Those aren't the only way to design office software, and there's no reason to assume they're the best, either. The more you chase the market leader, the less chance of eventually becoming the market leader you have. Try to do something different and better instead. That's about the only way any piece of software has ever broken another's market dominance, and probably the only way it ever will.
That might be true, I don't know, I wasn't one of the pre-adoption G+ users. But I can tell you that since G+ has been public, it has always been slower than facebook. The initial page load takes longer, posting a comment takes longer, posting a page takes longer, everything takes longer and as far as I can tell, it always has.
Now that I think about it, yeah, I guess I was one of the beta users. What the hell, I tried that with Gmail, years ago, and that worked out pretty well ...
The pre-public-release G+ was kind of odd-looking, but my God it was fast. I'm really sad about how quickly it went downhill.
If you didn't get that from TFA, you may have read it, but you certainly didn't understand it.
I'll just re-quote from the article the passage I quoted in a previous post:
The senior VP had serious technical chops, but he wasn't about to demonstrate them in front of his peers. He feared, justifiably, that if he did so he'd get classified as a techie and taken out of consideration as a possible future CEO.
Understanding this is pretty easy; if you choose not to do so, that's your business, so to speak.
Believe it or not, that's the opposite of what the summary says.
No it's not. The summary (and the article, which is essentially the same fluff as the summary repeated several times--I RTFA'd so you don't have to) says to avoid technical jargon, which has actual meaning and is therefore terrifying to people who want to be executives. The bullshit list is business jargon, which is inherently meaningless and is therefore very useful to C*Os and those who like to imagine themselves in such positions.
The senior VP had serious technical chops, but he wasn't about to demonstrate them in front of his peers. He feared, justifiably, that if he did so he'd get classified as a techie and taken out of consideration as a possible future CEO.
For any /.er working in an environment like that, I'd like to think this would be a sign that it was time to get the hell out.
When G+ started out, it was clean, fast-loading, reliable, and did exactly what it was supposed to do and no more. You know ... like Google used to be. I had real hopes that G+:FB::Google:Yahoo.
Every change since then has made it uglier, slower, and buggier; with the latest interface changes they've not only caught up to but actually surpassed Facebook in the amount of irritating crap they shove at the user. Google may be able to coast on people's affection for them as a search engine (especially when the competition is Bing) but they're going to find it increasingly difficult to break into new markets if all they do is ape the worst behavior of the existing market leader--which in this case emphatically includes "adding a bunch of new 'features' when the ones we already have are kind of crap."
I still use Google as my primary search engine, Gmail as my e-mail provider, and Google Maps when I want to figure out how to go somewhere I haven't been before. Nothing they've done since then has provided any reason to switch from whatever solution I'm currently using. And I really don't think I'm alone in this.
:)
I'm pretty sure GPP is making fun of Ken Ham's thought-stopping advice to his followers, which is supposed to immediately make "evolutionists" stop dead in their tracks, fall down on their knees, pray for forgiveness, and embrace the obvious Truth. Or something like that.
You left off the rest: "with his most mundane statements breathlessly repeated as though they were great wisdom." It's not Tyson's being an effective science popularizer that bugs me--I'm all for that--but the cult-of-personality aspect which seems to follow. Again, this is very much as it was with Sagan.