It is not as if supreme court judges can do whatever they want. The law that legally makes corporation into a person caused that decision and should be stricken down, then even a conservative judge woudn't be able to argue for such nonsense.
AFAIK, corporate personhood in US law comes from Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, and has never been codified into law. What the Supreme Court did, it can undo.
There are times in real life experience where you just get hit by problems that look like the walls of Troy. On those occasions, having a degree is like pulling out a map which shows you where the unlocked back door is.
This.
Possibly the single most valuable thing you get out of a formal education in any field is the knowledge of what you don't know. Smart people with lots of OJT will know many things -- probably more than most recent graduates with lots of education but little working experience -- but they will also have huge gaps in their knowledge and they won't know where those gaps are. Those who have good formal educations will have at least an idea of the gaps, and they'll also have the skills to fill those gaps on an as-needed basis. They'll be able to say to themselves, "This problem looks like something one of my professors talked about..." and go and find the needed information. The experienced but untrained, in the same situation, will simply have no idea how to proceed.
Education vs. experience is often presented as a binary choice, and it drives me nuts. Both are valuable -- for any complex job, both are necessary for all but the rare geniuses who can figure out almost any problem just by looking at it -- and the combination of the two is far more powerful than either is alone.
Or it's just a matter of convergent evolution. There's no reason that the "underlying mechanisms" (which, of course, we're a long way from figuring out) couldn't have evolved twice, or more. Empathy seems to me like a survival trait in social animals. Although I hold out hope for AI over the long term, I think it's a dangerous assumption that the mechanisms are so simple we'll be able to simulate them with modern hardware.
Given that our last common ancestor was probably asocial and kind of dumb (like most modern amphibians and reptiles) it seems a lot more likely to be a case of convergent evolution than common inheritance.
Um no, nobody is claiming that humans evolved from ravens, or vice versa. What they're saying is that empathy is a trait which apparently involved in both species, and this is an interesting finding. That's all.
I have to admit to mixed feelings about this. There's an obvious danger of censorship, and I don't want to see anything on the internet, porn or anything else, pushed into a walled garden. But I'm old enough to remember when.org and.net actually meant something, and I'd actually like to see much stricter standards applied to who can register for those. The precedent is already set; it just hasn't been followed for years. It's a dilemma.
Incidently, no. "xxx" comes from old wordfilters on school nets, where blacklisted words were replaced by x's instead. Guess what sex got replaced with? Yup, "xxx".
No, GPP is right. "XXX" far predates the widespread use of networking in schools, and comes from the movie industry. The story goes something like this: when the MPAA created its film rating system in the 1960s, they copyrighted all the ratings but X. So if you said you were making a G-rated or R-rated movie, say, you had to get the MPAA to sign off on it, but you could rate your movie X without any approval. If you submitted a porn movie (or occasionally a very violent movie) to the MPAA, they'd obligingly slap an X on it, but it wasn't a requirement. The porn industry being what it is, porn movie producers decided that just "rated X" wasn't strong enough to get their target audience's attention, and started slapping the label "rated XXX" on the hardcore stuff. It didn't really mean anything, of course, but it was apparently an effective marketing ploy. Eventually the MPAA decided that they didn't want to be associated with X and XXX at all any more, and stopped rating movies X altogether, replacing it in their ratings scheme with NC-17.
Except for that last bit, all of this happened in the 1960s and early 1970s, at a time when the number of schoolkids using any kind of networking technology was vanishingly small. Trust me, when you register "barelylegalteenlesbians.xxx" it's not images of PLATO you'll be evoking.
Okay, fair enough. I'll spell it out. When you say "statistically speaking" to a statistician, this will be taken to mean a conclusion based on some kind of sound statistical practice. It's like saying "medically speaking" to a physician or "technically speaking" to an engineer or "aeronautically speaking" to a pilot. And because statistics are so often questionable in their origin ("87.3% of statistics are made up on the spot, Kent, everyone knows that!") and/or abused to draw false conclusions ("three-quarters of all school shooters since Columbine played video games within 24 hours before the shootings!") statisticians tend to react strongly to such abuse of language. Like I said, it's very much like a techie hearing "I can't connect to the internet because my RAM is filling up my hard drive, or maybe I got a virus in my CPU" and thinking, Oh, God, where do I even start?
As for the "appeal to hypocrisy," sorry, I don't accept that it's fallacious. You made what was clearly an intuitive statement, and that statement denigrated other people for using their intuition. That's hypocritical, period. Hypocrisy may not make an argument invalid, but it sure as hell weakens it, and in any case it's repulsive. Despite what you may have learned in Philosophy 101 (or even 201, 301, or 401) in the real world people will listen to you a lot more if you're not so obviously failing to live by your own words.
Finally, I will note that any definition of "intuition" which has it coming out of nowhere is meaningless. Everyone except infants makes judgements based on previous experience. And I suspect that you may have misunderstood the definition as it's used even in philosophy: "a priori" is emphatically not the same thing as "ex nihilo."
Well, see, when you say "statistically" in the presence of a statistician, and you're not using any kind of statistical methodology, expect to get called on it. You know how it drives techies nuts when people who are wilfully ignorant of computers use terms like "RAM" and "hard drive" and "CPU" interchangeably, and think they're making sense? It's kind of like that.
There is nothing in my post about using my "gut instinct"; my statements were made in accordance with the facts I've observed.
Which is pretty much what intuition is. It doesn't come out of nowhere. It's a matter of putting together what we've observed (or think we've observed) in the course of experience, and then using that information to make quick judgements.
Sophist, meet real philosopher.
Keep telling yourself that, kiddo. Whatever makes it easier for you to live in your little self-created world.
Maybe it's just my experience, but I have gathered that a higher percentage of women seem to ignore objective data if their "intuition" suggests otherwise.... Statistically, this problem-solving method appears to be a field where women are lacking.
Except you haven't done any studies, just "gathered." You say "statistically" to give your assertion an air of scientific credibility, but you have no statistical methodology here. You're going with your gut feeling. Your hunch. Your... wait for it... intuition.
I do use Sage for some work, but I didn't know about the RPy interface or the ability to run worksheets in R. That sounds well worth checking out. Can you point me to the documentation?
But I don't have much experience with R. How does it perform when you aren't using (and combining) the builtin methods, but are writing some number crunching routines of your own?
It's not bad. If you try to write naive C-style code, you'll run into all the overhead of an interpreted language and it will run very slowly. But if you (a) try to do everything you possibly can as matrix operations and (b) make intelligent use of the functional programming features, it compares well to NumPy/SciPy. And as with Python, it's easy enough to write your own packages using C or Fortran and then call them from the main language (which is how NumPy/SciPy works, of course.)
Speaking as someone who uses both R and Python all the time, I'd say that while R is very very good at a lot of what it does, it's just not as good as a general-purpose language as Python. I find myself doing as much preprocessing in Python as possible, then saving the results in DB tables and having R finish the analysis. And yes, I know about RPy, but the programming overhead of representing data structures in both languages, and making sure that they're talking to each other correctly, can be considerable; so is the runtime overhead of passing really big data sets back and forth. (Note that it's been a while since I used RPy for anything big, and a lot has been improved in that time, so it may be time for me to give it another shot.) Python code is just cleaner and easier to write for most tasks. I like both languages for their strengths, but overall, if you can do a particular analysis in Python then that's usually the easier choice.
Nothing is worth anything, in a real sense. Gold is just some random metal. Currency is just some paper. Worth is a fiction dictated by markets.
Food and land. Actually, just land, since if you have that (good land, anyway) you can grow food. Agreed that the "worth" of just about everything else, including gold, is an agreed-upon fiction, but there really is an absolute standard of value: the stuff you need to survive. In the modern industrialized world, of course, we tend not to worry too much about that, but it's good to remember that there is something at the base of the pyramid.
Maybe the neutrons that get generated by the reactor and get absorbed by the reactor housing, eventually making it radioactive enough that proper disposal is necessary
I could be wrong about this, but I think the fast neutrons generated by Farnsworth-type devices will go right through anything this guy is likely to have in his apartment. They won't hang around long enough to create significant amounts of heavy (i.e. radioactive) isotopes, and the flux won't be intense enough to do any damage while the machine is turned on. Again, this is just something I think I remember from reading up on the matter years ago, so take that FWIW.
Remember, this is a pilot project. The ultimate plan is, indeed, to get deep sequencing on 1000 people. Personally I suspect (and hope!) that by the time the project is finished, the "thousand-dollar genome" will be a reality and it will be possible to do, e.g., clinical trials which include deep sequencing of the genomes of arbitrary sets of several hundred or several thousand people. If that happens, we'll probably have 1000G to thank for a lot of it, just as we have the HGP to thank for a lot of the sequencing technology we have today.
One of the major advantages of projects like this, funded by NCBI and EBI and other government agencies, is that the data will be a lot harder for anyone to put under IP restrictions than it would be if it came out of private labs.
I'd cheerfully join a firing squad or spring the trap on a gallows.
Hey, look, it's Internet Tough Guy!
Lots of people like to brag about how easy they'd find it to kill people under various circumstances (execution, war, and self-defense are the most popular ones) but in the real world, most people who have to kill their fellow human beings under any circumstances are deeply affected by it. And those who aren't? They're psychopaths, and there's a good chance they'll be on death row themselves one of these days.
So which one are you: naive or nutcase? I'm betting on the former.
Unfortunately, you can't use the number of people who "spoke up" as evidence of public outcry
People speaking up is the definition of public outcry. You may very well be right that there are more people who think it's fine than people who don't (although such "silent majority" arguments are always kind of suspect) but those people are, in fact, not making an outcry in support of their position.
The right to anonymity does not imply that every possible forum of speech must have a provision for anonymity.
No "provision for anonymity" is necessary; all that is necessary to preserve the right is not to actively take it away. Nor is it necessary to "make it legally mandatory to facilitate anonymity everywhere" -- what an absurd strawman. Just don't interfere with it, and it will facilitate itself just fine, as it's currently doing.
And if it's a right, then it's a right everywhere. That is one of the main differences between rights and priveleges.
Slashdot Mirror
It is not as if supreme court judges can do whatever they want. The law that legally makes corporation into a person caused that decision and should be stricken down, then even a conservative judge woudn't be able to argue for such nonsense.
AFAIK, corporate personhood in US law comes from Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, and has never been codified into law. What the Supreme Court did, it can undo.
There are times in real life experience where you just get hit by problems that look like the walls of Troy. On those occasions, having a degree is like pulling out a map which shows you where the unlocked back door is.
This.
Possibly the single most valuable thing you get out of a formal education in any field is the knowledge of what you don't know. Smart people with lots of OJT will know many things -- probably more than most recent graduates with lots of education but little working experience -- but they will also have huge gaps in their knowledge and they won't know where those gaps are. Those who have good formal educations will have at least an idea of the gaps, and they'll also have the skills to fill those gaps on an as-needed basis. They'll be able to say to themselves, "This problem looks like something one of my professors talked about ..." and go and find the needed information. The experienced but untrained, in the same situation, will simply have no idea how to proceed.
Education vs. experience is often presented as a binary choice, and it drives me nuts. Both are valuable -- for any complex job, both are necessary for all but the rare geniuses who can figure out almost any problem just by looking at it -- and the combination of the two is far more powerful than either is alone.
Or it's just a matter of convergent evolution. There's no reason that the "underlying mechanisms" (which, of course, we're a long way from figuring out) couldn't have evolved twice, or more. Empathy seems to me like a survival trait in social animals. Although I hold out hope for AI over the long term, I think it's a dangerous assumption that the mechanisms are so simple we'll be able to simulate them with modern hardware.
Given that our last common ancestor was probably asocial and kind of dumb (like most modern amphibians and reptiles) it seems a lot more likely to be a case of convergent evolution than common inheritance.
To be fair, dolphins are a lot more closely related to us than ravens are, so this is still a pretty interesting and significant finding.
"... which apparently evolved in both species ..." was what I meant to type, of course.
Um no, nobody is claiming that humans evolved from ravens, or vice versa. What they're saying is that empathy is a trait which apparently involved in both species, and this is an interesting finding. That's all.
I have to admit to mixed feelings about this. There's an obvious danger of censorship, and I don't want to see anything on the internet, porn or anything else, pushed into a walled garden. But I'm old enough to remember when .org and .net actually meant something, and I'd actually like to see much stricter standards applied to who can register for those. The precedent is already set; it just hasn't been followed for years. It's a dilemma.
Incidently, no. "xxx" comes from old wordfilters on school nets, where blacklisted words were replaced by x's instead. Guess what sex got replaced with? Yup, "xxx".
No, GPP is right. "XXX" far predates the widespread use of networking in schools, and comes from the movie industry. The story goes something like this: when the MPAA created its film rating system in the 1960s, they copyrighted all the ratings but X. So if you said you were making a G-rated or R-rated movie, say, you had to get the MPAA to sign off on it, but you could rate your movie X without any approval. If you submitted a porn movie (or occasionally a very violent movie) to the MPAA, they'd obligingly slap an X on it, but it wasn't a requirement. The porn industry being what it is, porn movie producers decided that just "rated X" wasn't strong enough to get their target audience's attention, and started slapping the label "rated XXX" on the hardcore stuff. It didn't really mean anything, of course, but it was apparently an effective marketing ploy. Eventually the MPAA decided that they didn't want to be associated with X and XXX at all any more, and stopped rating movies X altogether, replacing it in their ratings scheme with NC-17.
Except for that last bit, all of this happened in the 1960s and early 1970s, at a time when the number of schoolkids using any kind of networking technology was vanishingly small. Trust me, when you register "barelylegalteenlesbians.xxx" it's not images of PLATO you'll be evoking.
Okay, fair enough. I'll spell it out. When you say "statistically speaking" to a statistician, this will be taken to mean a conclusion based on some kind of sound statistical practice. It's like saying "medically speaking" to a physician or "technically speaking" to an engineer or "aeronautically speaking" to a pilot. And because statistics are so often questionable in their origin ("87.3% of statistics are made up on the spot, Kent, everyone knows that!") and/or abused to draw false conclusions ("three-quarters of all school shooters since Columbine played video games within 24 hours before the shootings!") statisticians tend to react strongly to such abuse of language. Like I said, it's very much like a techie hearing "I can't connect to the internet because my RAM is filling up my hard drive, or maybe I got a virus in my CPU" and thinking, Oh, God, where do I even start?
As for the "appeal to hypocrisy," sorry, I don't accept that it's fallacious. You made what was clearly an intuitive statement, and that statement denigrated other people for using their intuition. That's hypocritical, period. Hypocrisy may not make an argument invalid, but it sure as hell weakens it, and in any case it's repulsive. Despite what you may have learned in Philosophy 101 (or even 201, 301, or 401) in the real world people will listen to you a lot more if you're not so obviously failing to live by your own words.
Finally, I will note that any definition of "intuition" which has it coming out of nowhere is meaningless. Everyone except infants makes judgements based on previous experience. And I suspect that you may have misunderstood the definition as it's used even in philosophy: "a priori" is emphatically not the same thing as "ex nihilo."
Well, see, when you say "statistically" in the presence of a statistician, and you're not using any kind of statistical methodology, expect to get called on it. You know how it drives techies nuts when people who are wilfully ignorant of computers use terms like "RAM" and "hard drive" and "CPU" interchangeably, and think they're making sense? It's kind of like that.
There is nothing in my post about using my "gut instinct"; my statements were made in accordance with the facts I've observed.
Which is pretty much what intuition is. It doesn't come out of nowhere. It's a matter of putting together what we've observed (or think we've observed) in the course of experience, and then using that information to make quick judgements.
Sophist, meet real philosopher.
Keep telling yourself that, kiddo. Whatever makes it easier for you to live in your little self-created world.
Thanks!
Maybe it's just my experience, but I have gathered that a higher percentage of women seem to ignore objective data if their "intuition" suggests otherwise. ... Statistically, this problem-solving method appears to be a field where women are lacking.
Except you haven't done any studies, just "gathered." You say "statistically" to give your assertion an air of scientific credibility, but you have no statistical methodology here. You're going with your gut feeling. Your hunch. Your ... wait for it ... intuition.
Pot, meet kettle.
I do use Sage for some work, but I didn't know about the RPy interface or the ability to run worksheets in R. That sounds well worth checking out. Can you point me to the documentation?
But I don't have much experience with R. How does it perform when you aren't using (and combining) the builtin methods, but are writing some number crunching routines of your own?
It's not bad. If you try to write naive C-style code, you'll run into all the overhead of an interpreted language and it will run very slowly. But if you (a) try to do everything you possibly can as matrix operations and (b) make intelligent use of the functional programming features, it compares well to NumPy/SciPy. And as with Python, it's easy enough to write your own packages using C or Fortran and then call them from the main language (which is how NumPy/SciPy works, of course.)
Speaking as someone who uses both R and Python all the time, I'd say that while R is very very good at a lot of what it does, it's just not as good as a general-purpose language as Python. I find myself doing as much preprocessing in Python as possible, then saving the results in DB tables and having R finish the analysis. And yes, I know about RPy, but the programming overhead of representing data structures in both languages, and making sure that they're talking to each other correctly, can be considerable; so is the runtime overhead of passing really big data sets back and forth. (Note that it's been a while since I used RPy for anything big, and a lot has been improved in that time, so it may be time for me to give it another shot.) Python code is just cleaner and easier to write for most tasks. I like both languages for their strengths, but overall, if you can do a particular analysis in Python then that's usually the easier choice.
Nothing is worth anything, in a real sense. Gold is just some random metal. Currency is just some paper. Worth is a fiction dictated by markets.
Food and land. Actually, just land, since if you have that (good land, anyway) you can grow food. Agreed that the "worth" of just about everything else, including gold, is an agreed-upon fiction, but there really is an absolute standard of value: the stuff you need to survive. In the modern industrialized world, of course, we tend not to worry too much about that, but it's good to remember that there is something at the base of the pyramid.
Maybe the neutrons that get generated by the reactor and get absorbed by the reactor housing, eventually making it radioactive enough that proper disposal is necessary
I could be wrong about this, but I think the fast neutrons generated by Farnsworth-type devices will go right through anything this guy is likely to have in his apartment. They won't hang around long enough to create significant amounts of heavy (i.e. radioactive) isotopes, and the flux won't be intense enough to do any damage while the machine is turned on. Again, this is just something I think I remember from reading up on the matter years ago, so take that FWIW.
I'm having a vasectomy tomorrow ... One of my friends owns a metal shop so I can get some nice looking parts made
Okay, that is a really disturbing juxtaposition of images.
If you haven't saved enough for most of your retirement by the time you hit your 40s, you kind of deserve to have to worry about it.
WTF are you talking about? Do you have any idea how things work in the real world?
I'm still in my 20s
Ah. Carry on, then.
Remember, this is a pilot project. The ultimate plan is, indeed, to get deep sequencing on 1000 people. Personally I suspect (and hope!) that by the time the project is finished, the "thousand-dollar genome" will be a reality and it will be possible to do, e.g., clinical trials which include deep sequencing of the genomes of arbitrary sets of several hundred or several thousand people. If that happens, we'll probably have 1000G to thank for a lot of it, just as we have the HGP to thank for a lot of the sequencing technology we have today.
One of the major advantages of projects like this, funded by NCBI and EBI and other government agencies, is that the data will be a lot harder for anyone to put under IP restrictions than it would be if it came out of private labs.
I'd cheerfully join a firing squad or spring the trap on a gallows.
Hey, look, it's Internet Tough Guy!
Lots of people like to brag about how easy they'd find it to kill people under various circumstances (execution, war, and self-defense are the most popular ones) but in the real world, most people who have to kill their fellow human beings under any circumstances are deeply affected by it. And those who aren't? They're psychopaths, and there's a good chance they'll be on death row themselves one of these days.
So which one are you: naive or nutcase? I'm betting on the former.
Unfortunately, you can't use the number of people who "spoke up" as evidence of public outcry
People speaking up is the definition of public outcry. You may very well be right that there are more people who think it's fine than people who don't (although such "silent majority" arguments are always kind of suspect) but those people are, in fact, not making an outcry in support of their position.
The right to anonymity does not imply that every possible forum of speech must have a provision for anonymity.
No "provision for anonymity" is necessary; all that is necessary to preserve the right is not to actively take it away. Nor is it necessary to "make it legally mandatory to facilitate anonymity everywhere" -- what an absurd strawman. Just don't interfere with it, and it will facilitate itself just fine, as it's currently doing.
And if it's a right, then it's a right everywhere. That is one of the main differences between rights and priveleges.