Okay, one more time: it's not about the personal views of Chick-fil-A management; it's about the uses to which they put their money (which, of course, ultimately comes out of their customers' pockets) and specifically, their donations to anti-gay-rights causes. It's their right to spend that money how they wish, of course. It is also our right to say, individually or en masse, "We are not going to give you our money to do this."
And hey, if there were OPEC-free oil available, I'd be happy to buy it. Unfortunately the world oil market doesn't work that way. I don't have much choice about where the gas I use to fill up my car comes from; I have a whole bunch of choices about where to get a chicken sandwich. You do what you can, when you can, and grown-ups understand that just because you can't fix all the world's problems doesn't mean you shouldn't try to fix some of them.
Last week I thought it might be a close race, but I'm now seeing an Obama landslide.
If everyone who is legally eligible and wishes to vote is allowed to do so, and if the votes are accurately counted, then yes. Unfortunately, those are two pretty big "if"s right there.
Depends on your POV: you could think of potentially cancerous cells as being species of one-celled organisms, with the successful ones being those which go on to form actual tumors, which do of course reproduce within the body. Eventually, they do kill the host and thus themselves, but this is really no different from a species going extinct when it uses up the resources available in its local ecosystem.
And I treat everyone the same regardless of sex! And women just say this stuff because they're weak delicate feminine flowers who can't take the way men talk to each other! They're just illogical! And society is biased in favor of women these days anyway!
There, that should cover most of the comments on this story.
One theory is that it was developed to defeat text filters created by BBS or Internet Relay Chat system operators for message boards to discourage the discussion of forbidden topics, like cracking and hacking.... Variants of leet have been used for censorship purposes for many years; for instance "@$$" and "$#!+" are frequently seen to make a word appear censored to the untrained eye but obvious to a person familiar with leet.
We've been able to write all kinds of Forbidden Words online for a long time now. The only reason for "leet" euphemisms nowadays is to call attention to how Daring and Naughty you are--which, frankly, is a pretty shitty reason.
I was wondering about that. If the motto is actually "Do epic shit," that's a sign that someone at Microsoft gets it. If it's "Do epic $#!+" or "Do epic s--t," they don't.
And if you don't know calculus, you'll have a hell of a time understanding numerical analysis.
That's why calculus is, like it or not, the foundation course for studying math beyond the introductory level. Not so much for its own sake, but because it crops up in so many other branches of mathematics--including a whole bunch of computer science, as it iturns out.
If the quantity (sales of product X) / (sales of product Y), plotted over time, forms an exponential growth curve, it seems entirely reasonable to say that "sales of X are growing exponentially faster than sales of Y." Note that I have no idea if that's the case for this particular example, just noting that the phrase itself isn't inherently unreasonable.
We haven't seen consciousness with only a brain, for example.
Nor have we seen circulation with only a heart, breathing with only a pair of lungs, or insulin production with only a pancreas. So what? All organs operate within the body, and are mutually dependent on each other's correct function. This doesn't imply anything mystical.
It should also be pointed out that Ike got elected primarily on the promise to fight the Commies in Korea.... His opponent Adlai Stevenson, on the other hand, really did advocate peaceful foreign relations.
We were already fighting the Commies in Korea, and by 1952 the war was deeply unpopular with the American people. The perception was that Eisenhower, with his WW2 experience, would bring the war to a quick and honorable end ("peace with honor," to use a phrase common to a later land war in Asia...) while Stevenson would either pull back in defeat or continue with the pointless bloodshed. Cold War politics were a lot more complicated, and the partisan lines much less clearly drawn, than the cartoonish version of McCarthyite Republican hawks and appeasement-minded Democratic doves that a lot of people seem to think they remember.
Depends on the conditions after death, among other things. If it's lying out in the open, a few weeks to a few months, less in warm weather or if it's ripped up by scavengers. If the conditions are just right... well, right now we may or may not be able to get enough DNA from mammoths frozen for ~10,000 years, and which froze almost immediately after they died. A few tens of millions of years? Probably not, although we could always get fantastically lucky.
Dromeosaurs (a.k.a. raptors) which were, as far as we can tell, all feathered. Some of the smaller ones took to the air (probably after an intermediate stage of gliding for short distances) and, well, that was that. I don't know whether this is something that's thought to have happened only once and given rise to all modern birds, or several times throughout the Mesozoic and given rise to several different lines (which is a perfectly good word in this context, BTW) of descent that survived to the modern day.
Because the atom bomb was a good thing, so is computers used to destroy privacy, drone strikes killing civilians who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time
The atom bomb was (and is) a good thing. Notice how no one's actually tried to take over the world lately? It's not because people have grown any less ambitious or bloodthirsty since the days of Alexander or Temujin or Napoleon or Hitler.
As for the other examples, yes, of course these technologies can be misused. But I think you'd be hard pressed to argue that computer and aviation technology in general haven't made the world a better place. Cautionary tales such as Frankenstein, and the moden Luddite favorites Gattaca and Jurassic Park, tend to argue against science and technological advancement in general: not "You shouldn't use this knowledge to do that specific thing," but "This knowledge should be left alone forever." Which is fundamentally a pretty dumb idea, and even dumber when people use computers to express it.
I think it's pretty well accepted at this point. Early birds and feathered ground-dwelling dromeosaurs are anatomically almost identical. Obviously there's no way to be sure without DNA, but we're probably about as sure that aves is a subset of dinosauria as we are of anything in paleontology. (IANAP, terms and conditions may apply, see your local paleontologist for details.)
Jurassitanic. The touching story of a doomed love between a beautiful woman and a scrappy, determined raptor, set against the background of one of the greatest theme park disasters of all time. It'll be the date movie of the year.
Crichton was trying to make a point with his Jurassic Park novels. It was a cautionary tale about "the law of unintended consequences".
And so? Why should we take Jurassic Park, or any work of fiction, as a guide to the way this would work in the real world?
Cautionary tales of Science Run Amok are at least as old as modern science itself (Frankenstein was published in 1818, arguably about the point where science as we understand it today was emerging from the morass of religious teleology, superstition, and philosophical maundering) and for just as long, they've been held up as examples of why we shouldn't do this or that: "That which we know now is Good and Right and The Way Things Are, but this new knowledge you're seeking is in the realm of Things Man Was Not Meant To Know!" And for the entire time, science has gone ahead anyway, and within a generation or two everyone pretty much agrees that it was a good thing... just in time to complain about whatever new field of knowledge is opening up and is therefore Scary and Dangerous.
I'd say spending any amount of money to clone dinosaurs is a bad idea, but that's not because the end result will be people getting eaten by raptors. It's because we don't have any dinosaur DNA* and aren't likely to have enough to get anything like a complete sequence, nor do we have nearly enough basic biological knowledge to create a viable embryo even if we did have the genetic information. Now, speaking as a bioinformaticist, if Clive Palmer wants to devote a portion of his considerable wealth to creating the knowledge that would allow us to clone dinosaurs if we were lucky enough to retrieve some reasonably intact tissue, I'll applaud -- but I hope he's not expecting to have a pet stegosaurus any time in the next few years, or even decades.
*Not counting bird DNA, which of course is plentiful, but reconstructing the ancestral sequences back to the point necessary to create "dinosaurs" as most people think of them would be just about as huge a challenge as building the whole thing from scratch.
Especially with your over the top reply to the previous fellow.
Over the top, really? You may see it that way; personally, I'd say that anyone who replies to an entirely reasonable statement like "We need diplomacy, not bombs. We need to stop trying to be the world's 'policeman', stop propping up dictators, stop propping up the rebels to take down the dictators we earlier propped up, and slash military spending" with macho rumblings such as "In an ideal world, diplomacy should lead the way... Unfortunately we do not live in an ideal world... In this world we live in, talking softly while carrying a big stick is still the most practical way of doing things" deserves no end of derision.
Do you really think there's anyone here who doesn't understand that "we do not live in an ideal world"? We can acknowledge this fact and still try to make the world a little less, well, non-ideal. Some ways to do this are to maintain a military adequate to defend our territory and meet our treaty obligations without sinking our economy into the military machine, rely on diplomacy as our first option for resolving conflicts with other nations, and resort to force only when there's no other option.
Of course, if you'd rather, feel free to keep making ominous pronouncements about big sticks. And when it comes time to swing that stick, you're welcome to be first over the top. I did my time, in Daddy Bush's war. When and where did you step up to the plate to back your rhetoric?
Maybe you missed the part where he clearly stated he was talking about unprotected sex? I suppose there are people who see sticking needles in themselves as a sexual act, but I'm willing to go out on a limb and say they're such a tiny minority that their effect on the numbers is close enough to zero as makes no difference.
If your audience is highly technical, and knowledgeable in the field then speak the language. If they are not, then bring it down to their level.
The problem is that in the process of trying to "bring it down to their level," writers often change the meaning of what they're saying enough that it's actually wrong. No one should use jargon needlessly (a rule which applies as much to writing for a technically knowledgeable audience as for the general public, BTW) but at some point we need to be willing to say to the readers, essentially, "If you're afraid of learning the correct vocabulary to describe the subject of the story, then it probably isn't for you. Nothing to see here, move along."
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, one more time: it's not about the personal views of Chick-fil-A management; it's about the uses to which they put their money (which, of course, ultimately comes out of their customers' pockets) and specifically, their donations to anti-gay-rights causes. It's their right to spend that money how they wish, of course. It is also our right to say, individually or en masse, "We are not going to give you our money to do this."
And hey, if there were OPEC-free oil available, I'd be happy to buy it. Unfortunately the world oil market doesn't work that way. I don't have much choice about where the gas I use to fill up my car comes from; I have a whole bunch of choices about where to get a chicken sandwich. You do what you can, when you can, and grown-ups understand that just because you can't fix all the world's problems doesn't mean you shouldn't try to fix some of them.
He probably would have appreciated your thank you a hell of a lot more last week.
[golf clap]
Last week I thought it might be a close race, but I'm now seeing an Obama landslide.
If everyone who is legally eligible and wishes to vote is allowed to do so, and if the votes are accurately counted, then yes. Unfortunately, those are two pretty big "if"s right there.
Depends on your POV: you could think of potentially cancerous cells as being species of one-celled organisms, with the successful ones being those which go on to form actual tumors, which do of course reproduce within the body. Eventually, they do kill the host and thus themselves, but this is really no different from a species going extinct when it uses up the resources available in its local ecosystem.
And I treat everyone the same regardless of sex! And women just say this stuff because they're weak delicate feminine flowers who can't take the way men talk to each other! They're just illogical! And society is biased in favor of women these days anyway!
There, that should cover most of the comments on this story.
Indeed. From the link:
One theory is that it was developed to defeat text filters created by BBS or Internet Relay Chat system operators for message boards to discourage the discussion of forbidden topics, like cracking and hacking. ... Variants of leet have been used for censorship purposes for many years; for instance "@$$" and "$#!+" are frequently seen to make a word appear censored to the untrained eye but obvious to a person familiar with leet.
We've been able to write all kinds of Forbidden Words online for a long time now. The only reason for "leet" euphemisms nowadays is to call attention to how Daring and Naughty you are--which, frankly, is a pretty shitty reason.
I was wondering about that. If the motto is actually "Do epic shit," that's a sign that someone at Microsoft gets it. If it's "Do epic $#!+" or "Do epic s--t," they don't.
Yes, exabytes of data were lost in that disaster.
And if you don't know calculus, you'll have a hell of a time understanding numerical analysis.
That's why calculus is, like it or not, the foundation course for studying math beyond the introductory level. Not so much for its own sake, but because it crops up in so many other branches of mathematics--including a whole bunch of computer science, as it iturns out.
If the quantity (sales of product X) / (sales of product Y), plotted over time, forms an exponential growth curve, it seems entirely reasonable to say that "sales of X are growing exponentially faster than sales of Y." Note that I have no idea if that's the case for this particular example, just noting that the phrase itself isn't inherently unreasonable.
Stop trying to apply physical laws to information.
I will be happy to do so, as soon as giant media companies agree to do the same.
You are describing how things are supposed to work. GPP and TFA are describing how things actually work.
We haven't seen consciousness with only a brain, for example.
Nor have we seen circulation with only a heart, breathing with only a pair of lungs, or insulin production with only a pancreas. So what? All organs operate within the body, and are mutually dependent on each other's correct function. This doesn't imply anything mystical.
It should also be pointed out that Ike got elected primarily on the promise to fight the Commies in Korea. ... His opponent Adlai Stevenson, on the other hand, really did advocate peaceful foreign relations.
We were already fighting the Commies in Korea, and by 1952 the war was deeply unpopular with the American people. The perception was that Eisenhower, with his WW2 experience, would bring the war to a quick and honorable end ("peace with honor," to use a phrase common to a later land war in Asia ...) while Stevenson would either pull back in defeat or continue with the pointless bloodshed. Cold War politics were a lot more complicated, and the partisan lines much less clearly drawn, than the cartoonish version of McCarthyite Republican hawks and appeasement-minded Democratic doves that a lot of people seem to think they remember.
Depends on the conditions after death, among other things. If it's lying out in the open, a few weeks to a few months, less in warm weather or if it's ripped up by scavengers. If the conditions are just right ... well, right now we may or may not be able to get enough DNA from mammoths frozen for ~10,000 years, and which froze almost immediately after they died. A few tens of millions of years? Probably not, although we could always get fantastically lucky.
Neat stuff! Thanks for the info.
Dromeosaurs (a.k.a. raptors) which were, as far as we can tell, all feathered. Some of the smaller ones took to the air (probably after an intermediate stage of gliding for short distances) and, well, that was that. I don't know whether this is something that's thought to have happened only once and given rise to all modern birds, or several times throughout the Mesozoic and given rise to several different lines (which is a perfectly good word in this context, BTW) of descent that survived to the modern day.
Because the atom bomb was a good thing, so is computers used to destroy privacy, drone strikes killing civilians who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time
The atom bomb was (and is) a good thing. Notice how no one's actually tried to take over the world lately? It's not because people have grown any less ambitious or bloodthirsty since the days of Alexander or Temujin or Napoleon or Hitler.
As for the other examples, yes, of course these technologies can be misused. But I think you'd be hard pressed to argue that computer and aviation technology in general haven't made the world a better place. Cautionary tales such as Frankenstein, and the moden Luddite favorites Gattaca and Jurassic Park, tend to argue against science and technological advancement in general: not "You shouldn't use this knowledge to do that specific thing," but "This knowledge should be left alone forever." Which is fundamentally a pretty dumb idea, and even dumber when people use computers to express it.
I think it's pretty well accepted at this point. Early birds and feathered ground-dwelling dromeosaurs are anatomically almost identical. Obviously there's no way to be sure without DNA, but we're probably about as sure that aves is a subset of dinosauria as we are of anything in paleontology. (IANAP, terms and conditions may apply, see your local paleontologist for details.)
Jurassitanic. The touching story of a doomed love between a beautiful woman and a scrappy, determined raptor, set against the background of one of the greatest theme park disasters of all time. It'll be the date movie of the year.
Crichton was trying to make a point with his Jurassic Park novels. It was a cautionary tale about "the law of unintended consequences".
And so? Why should we take Jurassic Park, or any work of fiction, as a guide to the way this would work in the real world?
Cautionary tales of Science Run Amok are at least as old as modern science itself (Frankenstein was published in 1818, arguably about the point where science as we understand it today was emerging from the morass of religious teleology, superstition, and philosophical maundering) and for just as long, they've been held up as examples of why we shouldn't do this or that: "That which we know now is Good and Right and The Way Things Are, but this new knowledge you're seeking is in the realm of Things Man Was Not Meant To Know!" And for the entire time, science has gone ahead anyway, and within a generation or two everyone pretty much agrees that it was a good thing ... just in time to complain about whatever new field of knowledge is opening up and is therefore Scary and Dangerous.
I'd say spending any amount of money to clone dinosaurs is a bad idea, but that's not because the end result will be people getting eaten by raptors. It's because we don't have any dinosaur DNA* and aren't likely to have enough to get anything like a complete sequence, nor do we have nearly enough basic biological knowledge to create a viable embryo even if we did have the genetic information. Now, speaking as a bioinformaticist, if Clive Palmer wants to devote a portion of his considerable wealth to creating the knowledge that would allow us to clone dinosaurs if we were lucky enough to retrieve some reasonably intact tissue, I'll applaud -- but I hope he's not expecting to have a pet stegosaurus any time in the next few years, or even decades.
*Not counting bird DNA, which of course is plentiful, but reconstructing the ancestral sequences back to the point necessary to create "dinosaurs" as most people think of them would be just about as huge a challenge as building the whole thing from scratch.
Especially with your over the top reply to the previous fellow.
Over the top, really? You may see it that way; personally, I'd say that anyone who replies to an entirely reasonable statement like "We need diplomacy, not bombs. We need to stop trying to be the world's 'policeman', stop propping up dictators, stop propping up the rebels to take down the dictators we earlier propped up, and slash military spending" with macho rumblings such as "In an ideal world, diplomacy should lead the way ... Unfortunately we do not live in an ideal world ... In this world we live in, talking softly while carrying a big stick is still the most practical way of doing things" deserves no end of derision.
Hey, look, it's Internet Tough Guy!
Do you really think there's anyone here who doesn't understand that "we do not live in an ideal world"? We can acknowledge this fact and still try to make the world a little less, well, non-ideal. Some ways to do this are to maintain a military adequate to defend our territory and meet our treaty obligations without sinking our economy into the military machine, rely on diplomacy as our first option for resolving conflicts with other nations, and resort to force only when there's no other option.
Of course, if you'd rather, feel free to keep making ominous pronouncements about big sticks. And when it comes time to swing that stick, you're welcome to be first over the top. I did my time, in Daddy Bush's war. When and where did you step up to the plate to back your rhetoric?
Maybe you missed the part where he clearly stated he was talking about unprotected sex? I suppose there are people who see sticking needles in themselves as a sexual act, but I'm willing to go out on a limb and say they're such a tiny minority that their effect on the numbers is close enough to zero as makes no difference.
If your audience is highly technical, and knowledgeable in the field then speak the language. If they are not, then bring it down to their level.
The problem is that in the process of trying to "bring it down to their level," writers often change the meaning of what they're saying enough that it's actually wrong. No one should use jargon needlessly (a rule which applies as much to writing for a technically knowledgeable audience as for the general public, BTW) but at some point we need to be willing to say to the readers, essentially, "If you're afraid of learning the correct vocabulary to describe the subject of the story, then it probably isn't for you. Nothing to see here, move along."