Political Correctness has replaced both freedom of religion AND freedom of speech in this country.
No. You are still free to practice any religion that you want. Please explain when and how the government has prevented you from practicing your religion. Likewise, please explain when and how the government stopped you from exercising your right to free speech.
We've become a nation of cowards.
Please post a YouTube video of you burning a stack of Korans, Bibles, Torahs, etc. to prove you aren't a coward.
So, if someone decides to burn a Bible would they do the same
There is a difference between some random individuals burning a holy book, and an organised congregation of religious followers burning a holy book. There are already videos on YouTube of Bible burning, but it is just individuals, and they are not doing it on an emotional day like 9/11. I'm pretty sure that RackSpace would indeed remove the web site of a radical Islamic group that was planning to burn bibles on 9/11.
Frankly, while I find the idea of burning any book abhorrent I think that spitting in the face of these radicals of Islam is more important than not. Either bring your religion to 21st century and join the rest of us or shut the hell up.
There are over 1 billion Muslims in the world, and several million living in the Western world. What percentage of them will resort to violence as a form of protest when these books are burned? Even a few thousand people is several orders of magnitude less than 1%. So it's hardly representative of the Muslim world. In a similar vein, Christians burnt down the Saint Michel theater in Paris, putting 13 people in hospital, just to protest against the film "The Last Temptation of Christ", so it's hardly like Islam has a monopoly on its followers wanting to restrict freedom of speech. (The Bible actually insists that blasphemers" should be killed by Christian congregations: "And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying... he that blasphemeth the name of the LORD, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him.")
Assange is too pussy to ever take on someone like an Iranian mullah, because these guys would simply send someone to slit his throat and not worry about it.
Krycek: "If Mulder's such a threat, why not eliminate him?" Smoking Man: "That's not policy." Krycek: "It's not? After what you had me do?" Smoking Man: Kill Mulder and you risk turning one man's religion into a crusade.
Since when has ocean drilling even a part of space exploration? Or any drilling for that matter?
One of the anticipated problems of future space missions is that humans will need to find resources outside of the Earth environment. The amount of energy required to lift materials out of the gravity well of our planet is huge, so it makes sense to explore other options. NASA has researched laser drilling, deep drilling Mars for water, Moon drilling, low energy mobile drilling etc. NASA's remit is not just shooting satellites into orbit, it is also to conduct early stage R&D for exactly this kind of stuff.
And why the FUCK is NASA the only expert around to be able to help the stranded miners?
NASA employs many experts with the skills to do detailed drilling, modelling and geologic and seismic analysis.
Why does NASA have not only the desire, expertise, or the capability to test a BOP?
Who would you rather have test it? Deep sea drilling is a tight-knit industry. I would be surprised if there were any independent testing labs for this technology.
There is no reason why an American (for example) should acknowledge German soldiers fighting for Germany, especially when the latter was an enemy country.
If the aim were to accurately and truthfully recognise the actions of history, then an observer would acknowledge the actions of other humans without drawing the artificial distinction that one group happened to be born in a different nation to those of another group. If all else were considered equal, and the people of both groups were acting in the same way, and with the same motivations regardless of nationality, then nationality should not be considered a significant factor by an honest observer. Of course, this is not an ideal world, and often such an observer will be biased by their own concerns, particularly if this involves feelings of nationalism.
"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilisation should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder." - Albert Einstein
I very much doubt that Americans fighting on the ground and breaking open concentration camps really thought "we'd really leave these guys rot if Germans didn't attack us first, and we didn't have to hold back the Soviets".
I'm not so sure. Of course, liberating the concentration camps would invoke feelings of anger and pity. But the majority of soldiers did not actively take part in that. For most, the war meant being shot at, half starved, fear of being gassed, risking life and limb day after day in appalling trench warfare conditions. 10 million of those Americans were conscripts who would rather not have been there. The predominant feeling before Pearl Harbor was that Americans did not want to get involved in another European war. This is not a dig at Americans - millions of Russians, Japanese and British were also conscripted. For many conscripts, a refusal to fight would have meant public ridicule, jail time or even death.
By the way, the same goes for Soviets - Stalin's politics is one thing, soldiers on the ground is another.
The same goes for most Germans, Japanese and everyone else. Most people don't want to leave their families and loved ones at home in order to go abroad and fight some horrible war. Some minority, sure, but the majority would much prefer peace. Remember the football match in no man's land on Christmas day 1915? Such a thing would not be possible if either side were the bloodthirsty monsters that they were portrayed as. I once saw a WWII decorated American war hero saying that he didn't hate the Japanese, because they were just doing their job as soldiers like everyone else. If someone who actually took part in the war can acknowledge such a thing, then maybe there is hope for the rest of us.
My experience in academia taught me that there was no such thing as the "authoritative" source. If one scholar thought one thing about a particular subject, there was always at least one other scholar who disagreed with him/her.
There will always be someone who disagrees, whether in academia or politics or industry. This is a good thing - disagreements lead to experiments, which lead to answers and convergence on more accurate hypotheses. But one of the unfortunate side effects of debate is that some members of the public will inevitably latch onto crackpot ideas that agree with their pre-existing notions of the world, and assign as much value to the opinion of a single scholar as to the settled findings of the field. For example, there are undoubtedly a few scholars out there who will insist that evolution did not happen. However, this is not a "scholarly dispute", and there are very few people who would call these individuals authoritative just because they disagree with mainstream opinion.
Get a crowd of these yahoos together and odds are you won't even get them to agree on what time it is.
There are several perspectives here. One is that these people are human, and any large group of humans is unlikely to completely agree on every detail of a certain topic. Another perspective is the one already made - that disagreement is a good thing, because it leads to experiment proposals to resolve the issue.
Any attempt to get agreement out of scholars usually just results in really bland "committee" history (the kind some prevalent in so many unreadable textbooks).
It's easy to bash "elitist" academics. Let's try that quote again...
Any attempt to get agreement out of politicians usually just results in really bland "committee" history
Any attempt to get agreement out of corporations usually just results in really bland "committee" history
Any attempt to get agreement out of historians usually just results in really bland "committee" history
See, it works with everyone... Any attempt to get agreement out of people who disagree on a point will result in a compromise that appears "bland" to an external observer.
Such controversy-free scholarly writing is bizarre at best, absolutely misleading at worst.
Are you suggesting that academics should "teach the controversy"? Where have we heard that before?
scholars don't like it because they don't get paid to write articles for it
Actually, most scholars think that the concept of a world class free encyclopedia is awesome. Many of the Wikipedia articles that you praise were probably contributed to by academics at some point. The issue is something else: how a field is to be interpreted by Wikipedia authors. When looking at the field of astro-physics, should the written interpretation of that field be guided by "elistist authorative sources" like, say, Stephen Hawking or Albert Einstein, or should we ascribe the same value to their interpretation as we would to any other human on the planet? There are some benefits of taking a Wikipedia "any collaborator" approach, but there are also drawbacks. Whether one way is better than the other remains to be seen, but I don't really see the conflict - there is plenty of space on the net for Wikipedia, Scholarpedia, Stanford Encyclopedia etc. Arguing that there should be only one encyclopedia is like arguing that there should only be one newspaper.
Nangar Khel incident. Polish troops mortar a civilian village. They are currently being tried for war crimes.
Nobody's tried to cover it up.
Kunduz airstrike: German commander ordered the bombing of a crowd surrounding two hijacked fuel tankers. NATO insists that "no civilians were in the vicinity" and 56 "purely enemy insurgents" killed. What actually happened? An estimated 142 civilians killed. Wikipedia says "The major German newsweekly Der Spiegel, in an exhaustive research article published in February 2010, called the incident a war crime - due to the fact that the attack on the tankers had broken a number of rules of conduct, and also led to a later cover-up"
"As details from the deadly Sept. 4 bombing in Kunduz, Afghanistan continue to emerge, it has become more apparent that German commanders both disregarded NATO rules of engagement and misled the US pilots who carried out the attack. One pilot says he would have refused to attack had he been told the truth." Der Spiegel: German Army Withheld Information from US Pilots
Khataba raid: "US special forces soldiers dug bullets out of their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath of a botched night raid, then washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened, Afghan investigators have told The Times. Two pregnant women, a teenage girl, a police officer and his brother were shot on February 12 when US and Afghan special forces stormed their home in Khataba village, outside Gardez in eastern Afghanistan. The precise composition of the force has never been made public. The claims were made as Nato admitted responsibility for all the deaths for the first time last night. It had initially claimed that the women had been dead for several hours when the assault force discovered their bodies." The Times: US special forces 'tried to cover-up' botched Khataba raid in Afghanistan
Assange drummed up excitement, played the media really well, and then released these so-called Afghan War Diaries, to much fanfare...and it's turned out to be a fat lot of nothing.
The of course, we have the civilian casualties, currently standing at a few hundred.
The very Wikipedia article you link to, and your second statement above, contradict your first claim that the leak was "a fat load of nothing". Wikipedia says "revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents," and "Hundreds of civilians have been killed by coalition forces in several instances that were not previously revealed."
The fact that hundreds of civilians have been killed by NATO troops and that this has been hidden from the public is significant.
Except next week they will "discover" the opposite, and the following week alcohol will cause cancer
That alcohol is a contributing risk factor for cancer is already known - TFA even mentions it: "Even though heavy drinking is associated with higher risk for cirrhosis and several types of cancer (particularly cancers in the mouth and esophagus), heavy drinkers are less likely to die than people who have never drunk." (Estimates are that around 6% of cancer deaths can be attributed to alcohol consumption).
Just last year, even as Microsoft was firing US tech workers by the thousands, Microsoft was simultaneously hiring their H1B replacements.
Were these people in directly comparable jobs? I am no defender of Microsoft, but it is hardly unique during a recession to lay off some unprofitable divisions whilst maintaining other more profitable ones (a company has to keep hiring to replace people who leave).
Due to the situation that Gates himself has helped create, smart Americans would be stupid to train for STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics) jobs.
There are many people working in financial services who have degrees in mathematics or the sciences.
If you can measure three significant digits, and your effect is in the fifth, then you do not see it. However a more precise measuring apparatus may measure up to six significant digits, and there the effect may become visible.
Only when the effect becomes visible you can start saying anything about statistical significance
This is not true. By collecting many replicates a distribution can be modelled with an estimated mean possessing an accuracy greater than the possible measurement precision of an individual replicate.
Let's say you have two distributions - one centered at 4.1 and one at 4.4. Standard deviation of both distributions is 1. Your measuring equipment only has an integer resolution. About 95% of samples will have a value that is +/-2 of the true mean. So you will end up with many samples of values, predominantly...2,3,4,5,6,7... By analysing the distribution of these samples you can derive confidence intervals for the sample mean, and as the number of samples is increased, the mean estimates will converge to 4.1 and 4.4, and the confidence of these estimates will increase. Even though you do not have sub-integer resolution, by analysing the distribution of integer samples, you can deduce that your samples have in fact been taken from two independent underlying populations.
What is "artificial"? We already have sentience created from biological cells. Clearly, we could create a new sentience by engineering biological cells. Would it be "artificial"? What if it was designed from the ground up, rather than being a copy of a human brain? Why should the implementation medium (silicion versus cells) determine whether the result is "artificial"?
So if you want an AI that you can chat with and that understands you, the order is quite tall. You need to understand and code not only reasoning, but also understand and emulate body-feedback and emotions
You don't need to understand something in order to reproduce it. There have been many scientific discoveries and inventions that predated the theoretical explanations that followed. Likewise, it is possible that researchers may be able to emulate neural learning without actually understanding how it works. This has already happened with the creation of an artificial hippocampus - "Scientists do not know exactly how the hippocampus works. So the Californian team simply copied its behaviour."
The PLO imploded through their own ineptitude and inability to strike a deal with Israel.
The governing PLO was viewed as a terrorist organisation by Israel and the U.S. and was constantly undermined and accused of corruption. The people were subject to sanctions. Israel and the U.S. refused to negotiate with the PLO and said there would be no "additional Palestinian state..." (Jordan already being a Palestinian state), and "no change in the status of Judea, Samaria and Gaza other than in accordance with the basic guidelines of the [Israeli] Government". Maybe it is hard to strike a deal when the other side refuses to negotiate?
What about his comments that "South Koreans must be slapped till they become human" and "Australians are a bunch of cow herders" and "England has nothing. Its inhabitants are not human"
Ahmadinejad didn't say those things, they are quotes attributed to Mohammad-Reza Rahimi.
The first quote is actually wrong (it was "The Koreans also need to be slapped" - with the context of a "slap" being economic tariffs in response to sanctions). The other quotes are accurate though.
I stand my my statement that this guy is a nutjob (note: I speak of Ahmedinejad
Maybe he is. But making up bad translations and falsely attributing quotes to him does not make the case.
Ahmadinejad is not a great person, or a great leader, but making stuff up about him is just stupid. Surely there are plenty of real reasons to dislike his policies?
So, how exactly do you go about changing the "occupying regime" in Israel
The statement didn't refer to "Israel" - it referred to Jerusalem. Jerusalem is "disputed or occupied" depending on who you ask: "the U.S. government, the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, the European Union, the UK, and the International Committee of the Red Cross, among other entities, all reject the Israeli usage and consistently use the term "occupied" in reference to East Jerusalem".
without removing (alive or dead) the Jews that currently live there.
In the same speech Ahmadinejad explained that "regime change" would come from "a democratic government elected by the people". He later clarified that "elections should be held among Jews, Christians and Muslims so the population of Palestine can select their government and destiny for themselves in a democratic manner". He has repeatedly rejected the interpretation of the translation that calls for genocide against the Jews.
Slashdot Mirror
Political Correctness has replaced both freedom of religion AND freedom of speech in this country.
No. You are still free to practice any religion that you want. Please explain when and how the government has prevented you from practicing your religion. Likewise, please explain when and how the government stopped you from exercising your right to free speech.
We've become a nation of cowards.
Please post a YouTube video of you burning a stack of Korans, Bibles, Torahs, etc. to prove you aren't a coward.
So, if someone decides to burn a Bible would they do the same
There is a difference between some random individuals burning a holy book, and an organised congregation of religious followers burning a holy book. There are already videos on YouTube of Bible burning, but it is just individuals, and they are not doing it on an emotional day like 9/11. I'm pretty sure that RackSpace would indeed remove the web site of a radical Islamic group that was planning to burn bibles on 9/11.
Frankly, while I find the idea of burning any book abhorrent I think that spitting in the face of these radicals of Islam is more important than not. Either bring your religion to 21st century and join the rest of us or shut the hell up.
There are over 1 billion Muslims in the world, and several million living in the Western world. What percentage of them will resort to violence as a form of protest when these books are burned? Even a few thousand people is several orders of magnitude less than 1%. So it's hardly representative of the Muslim world. In a similar vein, Christians burnt down the Saint Michel theater in Paris, putting 13 people in hospital, just to protest against the film "The Last Temptation of Christ", so it's hardly like Islam has a monopoly on its followers wanting to restrict freedom of speech. (The Bible actually insists that blasphemers" should be killed by Christian congregations: "And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying ... he that blasphemeth the name of the LORD, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him.")
From today I'm a simple person and mechanical engineer who enjoys noodles, cricket and basketball.
And swingers. Don't forget the swingers.
Assange is too pussy to ever take on someone like an Iranian mullah, because these guys would simply send someone to slit his throat and not worry about it.
And yet, Wikileaks has already leaked (supposed) secret recordings of Iranian security force discussions and documents from the Iranian Ammunition Industries group. Having said that, there may well be fewer leaks from Iran for several reasons: lower levels of PC ownership, no personal laptops or PCs in the military, increased monitoring of personal internet connections etc.
Good quote.
Krycek: "If Mulder's such a threat, why not eliminate him?"
Smoking Man: "That's not policy."
Krycek: "It's not? After what you had me do?"
Smoking Man: Kill Mulder and you risk turning one man's religion into a crusade.
Since when has ocean drilling even a part of space exploration? Or any drilling for that matter?
One of the anticipated problems of future space missions is that humans will need to find resources outside of the Earth environment. The amount of energy required to lift materials out of the gravity well of our planet is huge, so it makes sense to explore other options. NASA has researched laser drilling, deep drilling Mars for water, Moon drilling, low energy mobile drilling etc. NASA's remit is not just shooting satellites into orbit, it is also to conduct early stage R&D for exactly this kind of stuff.
And why the FUCK is NASA the only expert around to be able to help the stranded miners?
NASA employs many experts with the skills to do detailed drilling, modelling and geologic and seismic analysis.
Why does NASA have not only the desire, expertise, or the capability to test a BOP?
Who would you rather have test it? Deep sea drilling is a tight-knit industry. I would be surprised if there were any independent testing labs for this technology.
There is no reason why an American (for example) should acknowledge German soldiers fighting for Germany, especially when the latter was an enemy country.
If the aim were to accurately and truthfully recognise the actions of history, then an observer would acknowledge the actions of other humans without drawing the artificial distinction that one group happened to be born in a different nation to those of another group. If all else were considered equal, and the people of both groups were acting in the same way, and with the same motivations regardless of nationality, then nationality should not be considered a significant factor by an honest observer. Of course, this is not an ideal world, and often such an observer will be biased by their own concerns, particularly if this involves feelings of nationalism.
"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilisation should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder." - Albert Einstein
I very much doubt that Americans fighting on the ground and breaking open concentration camps really thought "we'd really leave these guys rot if Germans didn't attack us first, and we didn't have to hold back the Soviets".
I'm not so sure. Of course, liberating the concentration camps would invoke feelings of anger and pity. But the majority of soldiers did not actively take part in that. For most, the war meant being shot at, half starved, fear of being gassed, risking life and limb day after day in appalling trench warfare conditions. 10 million of those Americans were conscripts who would rather not have been there. The predominant feeling before Pearl Harbor was that Americans did not want to get involved in another European war. This is not a dig at Americans - millions of Russians, Japanese and British were also conscripted. For many conscripts, a refusal to fight would have meant public ridicule, jail time or even death.
By the way, the same goes for Soviets - Stalin's politics is one thing, soldiers on the ground is another.
The same goes for most Germans, Japanese and everyone else. Most people don't want to leave their families and loved ones at home in order to go abroad and fight some horrible war. Some minority, sure, but the majority would much prefer peace. Remember the football match in no man's land on Christmas day 1915? Such a thing would not be possible if either side were the bloodthirsty monsters that they were portrayed as. I once saw a WWII decorated American war hero saying that he didn't hate the Japanese, because they were just doing their job as soldiers like everyone else. If someone who actually took part in the war can acknowledge such a thing, then maybe there is hope for the rest of us.
My experience in academia taught me that there was no such thing as the "authoritative" source. If one scholar thought one thing about a particular subject, there was always at least one other scholar who disagreed with him/her.
There will always be someone who disagrees, whether in academia or politics or industry. This is a good thing - disagreements lead to experiments, which lead to answers and convergence on more accurate hypotheses. But one of the unfortunate side effects of debate is that some members of the public will inevitably latch onto crackpot ideas that agree with their pre-existing notions of the world, and assign as much value to the opinion of a single scholar as to the settled findings of the field. For example, there are undoubtedly a few scholars out there who will insist that evolution did not happen. However, this is not a "scholarly dispute", and there are very few people who would call these individuals authoritative just because they disagree with mainstream opinion.
Get a crowd of these yahoos together and odds are you won't even get them to agree on what time it is.
There are several perspectives here. One is that these people are human, and any large group of humans is unlikely to completely agree on every detail of a certain topic. Another perspective is the one already made - that disagreement is a good thing, because it leads to experiment proposals to resolve the issue.
Any attempt to get agreement out of scholars usually just results in really bland "committee" history (the kind some prevalent in so many unreadable textbooks).
It's easy to bash "elitist" academics. Let's try that quote again...
See, it works with everyone... Any attempt to get agreement out of people who disagree on a point will result in a compromise that appears "bland" to an external observer.
Such controversy-free scholarly writing is bizarre at best, absolutely misleading at worst.
Are you suggesting that academics should "teach the controversy"? Where have we heard that before?
scholars don't like it because they don't get paid to write articles for it
Actually, most scholars think that the concept of a world class free encyclopedia is awesome. Many of the Wikipedia articles that you praise were probably contributed to by academics at some point. The issue is something else: how a field is to be interpreted by Wikipedia authors. When looking at the field of astro-physics, should the written interpretation of that field be guided by "elistist authorative sources" like, say, Stephen Hawking or Albert Einstein, or should we ascribe the same value to their interpretation as we would to any other human on the planet? There are some benefits of taking a Wikipedia "any collaborator" approach, but there are also drawbacks. Whether one way is better than the other remains to be seen, but I don't really see the conflict - there is plenty of space on the net for Wikipedia, Scholarpedia, Stanford Encyclopedia etc. Arguing that there should be only one encyclopedia is like arguing that there should only be one newspaper.
Yeah, seriously. Somebody mod the parent up here. An astrophysicist fails to extract DNA?
The didn't fail to extract DNA. They noted that the cells contain no DNA.
I must admit, I'm developing a healthy skepticism of any such announcement coming out of India.
Three of the five authors of this paper are based at British universities.
there's no evidence here of "war crimes"
Nangar Khel incident. Polish troops mortar a civilian village. They are currently being tried for war crimes.
Nobody's tried to cover it up.
Kunduz airstrike: German commander ordered the bombing of a crowd surrounding two hijacked fuel tankers. NATO insists that "no civilians were in the vicinity" and 56 "purely enemy insurgents" killed. What actually happened? An estimated 142 civilians killed. Wikipedia says "The major German newsweekly Der Spiegel, in an exhaustive research article published in February 2010, called the incident a war crime - due to the fact that the attack on the tankers had broken a number of rules of conduct, and also led to a later cover-up"
"As details from the deadly Sept. 4 bombing in Kunduz, Afghanistan continue to emerge, it has become more apparent that German commanders both disregarded NATO rules of engagement and misled the US pilots who carried out the attack. One pilot says he would have refused to attack had he been told the truth." Der Spiegel: German Army Withheld Information from US Pilots
Khataba raid: "US special forces soldiers dug bullets out of their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath of a botched night raid, then washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened, Afghan investigators have told The Times. Two pregnant women, a teenage girl, a police officer and his brother were shot on February 12 when US and Afghan special forces stormed their home in Khataba village, outside Gardez in eastern Afghanistan. The precise composition of the force has never been made public. The claims were made as Nato admitted responsibility for all the deaths for the first time last night. It had initially claimed that the women had been dead for several hours when the assault force discovered their bodies." The Times: US special forces 'tried to cover-up' botched Khataba raid in Afghanistan
Assange drummed up excitement, played the media really well, and then released these so-called Afghan War Diaries, to much fanfare...and it's turned out to be a fat lot of nothing.
The of course, we have the civilian casualties, currently standing at a few hundred.
The very Wikipedia article you link to, and your second statement above, contradict your first claim that the leak was "a fat load of nothing". Wikipedia says "revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents," and "Hundreds of civilians have been killed by coalition forces in several instances that were not previously revealed."
The fact that hundreds of civilians have been killed by NATO troops and that this has been hidden from the public is significant.
The article is not clear as to what the age range of the people in the survey was. It says "The sample of those who were studied included individuals between ages 55 and 65 who had had any kind of outpatient care in the previous three years. The 1,824 participants were followed for 20 years." Does this mean all of those surveyed were in the 55-65 age range? It is known that moderate alcohol consumption in the elderly results in increased longevity due to lower incidences of heart disease. But, for every else alcohol makes death more likely due to accidents, suicide etc.
Except next week they will "discover" the opposite, and the following week alcohol will cause cancer
That alcohol is a contributing risk factor for cancer is already known - TFA even mentions it: "Even though heavy drinking is associated with higher risk for cirrhosis and several types of cancer (particularly cancers in the mouth and esophagus), heavy drinkers are less likely to die than people who have never drunk." (Estimates are that around 6% of cancer deaths can be attributed to alcohol consumption).
Just last year, even as Microsoft was firing US tech workers by the thousands, Microsoft was simultaneously hiring their H1B replacements.
Were these people in directly comparable jobs? I am no defender of Microsoft, but it is hardly unique during a recession to lay off some unprofitable divisions whilst maintaining other more profitable ones (a company has to keep hiring to replace people who leave).
Due to the situation that Gates himself has helped create, smart Americans would be stupid to train for STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics) jobs.
There are many people working in financial services who have degrees in mathematics or the sciences.
Intentional targeting of innocent civilians is inherently at odds with freedom.
Like the U.S. and British bombers that deliberately targetted cities full of German civilians in WWII?
For those who haven't seen it yet...
Wikileaks - CIA Red Cell Memorandum on United States "exporting terrorism"
Telegraph article - CIA memo on United States as 'exporter of terrorism' published by Wikileaks
If you can measure three significant digits, and your effect is in the fifth, then you do not see it. However a more precise measuring apparatus may measure up to six significant digits, and there the effect may become visible.
Only when the effect becomes visible you can start saying anything about statistical significance
This is not true. By collecting many replicates a distribution can be modelled with an estimated mean possessing an accuracy greater than the possible measurement precision of an individual replicate.
Let's say you have two distributions - one centered at 4.1 and one at 4.4. Standard deviation of both distributions is 1. Your measuring equipment only has an integer resolution. About 95% of samples will have a value that is +/-2 of the true mean. So you will end up with many samples of values, predominantly ...2,3,4,5,6,7... By analysing the distribution of these samples you can derive confidence intervals for the sample mean, and as the number of samples is increased, the mean estimates will converge to 4.1 and 4.4, and the confidence of these estimates will increase. Even though you do not have sub-integer resolution, by analysing the distribution of integer samples, you can deduce that your samples have in fact been taken from two independent underlying populations.
In Catholic tradition, it's not as common to think of the bible as the literal word of God, so it's less of an issue.
Thank God for Papal infallibility.
There is no artificial sentience on earth
What is "artificial"? We already have sentience created from biological cells. Clearly, we could create a new sentience by engineering biological cells. Would it be "artificial"? What if it was designed from the ground up, rather than being a copy of a human brain? Why should the implementation medium (silicion versus cells) determine whether the result is "artificial"?
So if you want an AI that you can chat with and that understands you, the order is quite tall. You need to understand and code not only reasoning, but also understand and emulate body-feedback and emotions
You don't need to understand something in order to reproduce it. There have been many scientific discoveries and inventions that predated the theoretical explanations that followed. Likewise, it is possible that researchers may be able to emulate neural learning without actually understanding how it works. This has already happened with the creation of an artificial hippocampus - "Scientists do not know exactly how the hippocampus works. So the Californian team simply copied its behaviour."
"Hezbollah did not appear out of Iran's magic crystal ball. It appeared directly as a result of Israeli and American forces invading Lebanon in 1982."
Bullshit. Hezbollah was born from the Shi'ite minority in Lebanon from the civil war they helped start.
Hezbollah first emerged in 1982 as a militia in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, also known as Operation Peace for Galilee, set on resisting the Israeli occupation of Lebanon during the Lebanese civil war.
The PLO imploded through their own ineptitude and inability to strike a deal with Israel.
The governing PLO was viewed as a terrorist organisation by Israel and the U.S. and was constantly undermined and accused of corruption. The people were subject to sanctions. Israel and the U.S. refused to negotiate with the PLO and said there would be no "additional Palestinian state..." (Jordan already being a Palestinian state), and "no change in the status of Judea, Samaria and Gaza other than in accordance with the basic guidelines of the [Israeli] Government". Maybe it is hard to strike a deal when the other side refuses to negotiate?
What about his comments that "South Koreans must be slapped till they become human" and "Australians are a bunch of cow herders" and "England has nothing. Its inhabitants are not human"
Ahmadinejad didn't say those things, they are quotes attributed to Mohammad-Reza Rahimi.
The first quote is actually wrong (it was "The Koreans also need to be slapped" - with the context of a "slap" being economic tariffs in response to sanctions). The other quotes are accurate though.
I stand my my statement that this guy is a nutjob (note: I speak of Ahmedinejad
Maybe he is. But making up bad translations and falsely attributing quotes to him does not make the case.
Ahmadinejad is not a great person, or a great leader, but making stuff up about him is just stupid. Surely there are plenty of real reasons to dislike his policies?
So, how exactly do you go about changing the "occupying regime" in Israel
The statement didn't refer to "Israel" - it referred to Jerusalem. Jerusalem is "disputed or occupied" depending on who you ask: "the U.S. government, the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, the European Union, the UK, and the International Committee of the Red Cross, among other entities, all reject the Israeli usage and consistently use the term "occupied" in reference to East Jerusalem".
without removing (alive or dead) the Jews that currently live there.
In the same speech Ahmadinejad explained that "regime change" would come from "a democratic government elected by the people". He later clarified that "elections should be held among Jews, Christians and Muslims so the population of Palestine can select their government and destiny for themselves in a democratic manner". He has repeatedly rejected the interpretation of the translation that calls for genocide against the Jews.