At the same time, we’re eating a really horrible nutrient-poor diet made up of industrial foods designed to make us want to eat more industrial foods. Plus we’ve got massive amounts of pollution from burning petrolium, hormones in the ground water, antibiotics in our foods, PBA from our food containers, and all manner of other junk ruining our health. Some people are still stuck on this bogus idea that autism is caused by vaccines, while they continue to eat a horrible diet and pollute their bodies in other ways that are much more likely to account for this measurable increase in the rate of autism (not quite explained by just an increased rate of diagnosis).
This brings up an idea that my wife pointed out. In recent history, there has been an increase in the rate of transgendered individuals. This has resulted in political polarization, where some people are demonizing them and others are saying that body dismorphic disorder is somehow a good thing. Both are wrong. People with body dismorphic disorder have every right to their dignity and to manage and adjust their bodies as they see fit. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t an external cause, and we think a major factor is all of these hormines being pumped into the water supply. Lots of women take birth control pills, which is putting estrogen and progesterone into the water, and hormones are given to food animals. These are having an impact on development in fetuses and young children. So the next time some fundamnetalist asshole tries to tell you that there’s something BAD about people who have gender identiy issues, you can point out to them that we, as a society, did this to them. It’s our fault for poisoning the water and food. And the consequences are that more people with gender identity issues, and this is something we have to accept, and we have to treat these people like human beings and stop trying to put forth the idea that these people are crazy or making immoral choices.
You too are caught in the same binary thinking. The whole point of not putting yourself into a box is that you should feel free to be attracted to whomever. If you’re only attracted to males or only females, that’s fine. If you’re attracted to both, that’s fine too. What if you’re attracted to lots of females but only the occasional man? That’s fine too. This is about FREEDOM by eliminating the boxes. It’s about freedom to not be judged, freedom to make your own choices.
Let’s say, hypothetically, that there’s a genetic bias for humans to be mostly straight. What I’m trying to say is that in the future I hope it’s not considered weird for a person to have any mix of genders in sexual partners. 50/50? 90/10? 100/0? All fine. All not weird. We need to eliminate these boxes that force us into artificial categories.
Today’s binary sexuality is a cultural artifact. People are really on a spectrum. “Most people” are straight because they’re somewhere closer to the middle and therefore trainable to be straight. The people who are so gay or so straight innately that they can’t be trained are relatively rare (in the 10% range on either end).
Jack Harkness is more along the lines of what I’d expect in the distant future, where sexual roles and orientations are more fluid. In the future, people will think it’s really quaint how we used to have these boxes we were supposed to put ourselves in. Such limited thinking.
(BTW, one thing that bothered me (and apparetly also John Barrowman) about the last season of Torchwood is that Jack was only ever in sex scenes with men. If he’s supposed to be omnisexual, why not mix it up? That bartender he hooked up with was pretty good looking, but I wasn’t enthralled by that Italian guy. Having him also hook up with a woman would have been really hot.)
In 2013, I got called by Google out of the blue to go on-site to their NYC location, just after I’d turned 40. Note that I had gotten my PhD in 2012 and was working as a CS professor when they called me. They insisted that I was so awesome that they skipped me right past the phone technical interview directly to an on-site interview, because they really wanted me right away. Oddly, although I’d made it clear that my strongest skills were in computer architecture and circuit design, they insisted on interviewing me for a software engineering positon (which I had done for many years prior to grad school, so I was not totally unreasonable). I’d also told them that my “superpower” was debugging, but they never tested me on that. The interview went reasonably well anyway, although the whole process was totally dehumanizing, with it being obvious that I was going to be judged by what 5 engineers wrote down about me on a single sheet of paper.
About a month later, I got the rejection call. The two reasons I recall being given were (1) something about not fitting with the culture, and (2) they felt that I had jumped around too much in jobs. The first one other people told me was code for “too old.” The second one made no sense since it was clear from my CV that I’d only ever had two real jobs, one before grad school and one after, plus a couple of short internships during grad school.
My suspicion, however, is that the ageism at Google is indirect and a side-effect of other practices. Despite the fact that outsiders all think that Google practices ageism, it’ll come as a shock to many people AT Google when they are judged to having practiced systematic ageism. They’ll do an internal review trying to figure out who is turing down people for their age, and they’ll come up empty, because none of the interviewers or hiring committees actually try to figure out anyone’s age. There are several factors that contribute to virtual ageism. These include the current state of CS education relative to what was taught 10 years earlier and a somewhat more systematic and less distractable mentality that sets in as people mature. I’m actually MORE effective as an engineer than I was 10 years ago due to accumulated skills, but I'm less easily diverted from the tasks at hand, which some people may interpret as being less creative (until they get me on topics outside of focused engineering problem solving). In other words, as engineer age, they continue to improve in their effectiveness, but aspects of their personalities (such as focus and less externally visible intuitive processes) naturally mature such that they behave less “Googly,” where “Googly" effectively means “having mad skills at CS theory and coding but also having not compensated quite as much for some of the ADHD traits that a lot of engineers possess."
I often ask myself whether or not I would have taken the offer. I like my current job a LOT, but the pay sucks. I gets better after tenure, but at my age with small children and medical expenses outside of what they insurance will pay for, I have to consult on the side to make ends meet. This is the main reason I took the Google interview seriously. Even if there’s a 75% chance I wouldn’t have taken the offer, there was all that build up of them talking me into going on the interview, followed by the whole dehumanizing interview, and the bizarre rejection. That makes me angry.
Today, when my day job as a professor doesn’t make enough money, I make $200+/hour as an expert witness and $150/hour as a software/hardware engineering consultant. I could work part time telecommuting and still make more money than I could ever get at Google, especially when you account for the cost of living in NYC. Google’s loss.
I don’t care how stupid you think the general public is. Food sensitivities are a serious health concerned for a sizable portion of the population. They need to be able to reliably determine what is in their food without fear of cross-contamination and hidden gochas. I believe that this right to know extends to GMO foods on principle.
There’s also a selfish aspect to this. My wife is allergic to corn (either that or one of the molds that commonly grows on corn). Most corn products are NOT LISTED as being corn products in most processed foods. So far, the most reliable way she has to avoid corn is to avoid GMO foods because the number 1 genetically modified food is corn.
My wife and I got married at the Wagnalls Memorial Library in Lithopolis, OH. Not the geekiest option but we liked it a heck of a lot better than a church or some random park.
I have the opposite problem. The people at the local Kinkos/Fedex have terrible customer service. You walk in when the place is completely empty and still wait 10 minutes for help. When you’re going to ship a package, they always try to sell you in the most expensive option. When the place has a few people waiting, they take customers out of order. If you didn’t box something yourself, they charge an enormous amount of money for packaging, and anything not FedEx-related is also enormously expensive. I dread going in there.
On the other hand, the local UPS office is run by nice people who are very efficient. All they do is shipping, but that’s usually all I need. They respond instantly to customers coming in, customers get handled quickly, and they make you feel like you actually matter as a customer.
As an assistant professor, my job is on the line. If I don’t publish enough and bring in enough external funding, I’m gone at year 6. In theory, 5 years (the period over which I’m evaluated) should be enough to get out three top-tier venue papers, but other responsibilities make that a challenge. On top of that, aside from teaching, I set my own schedule, which means that sleeping in (which the kids won’t let me do) and working late are technically my own choices.
Don’t take this as a complaint. If I didn’t want the challenge, I wouldn’t have gotten into it. All I’m saying is that much like an entrepreneur or a freelancer, I don’t really have a 9 to 5 job where this kind of “work can wait” concept even applies.
Nobody said anything about pushing anyone into any relationships they don't want. And of course, gay men have to be especially careful about STIs. All I'm saying is that there is a range of strategies for having sex while avoiding pregnancy.
The inflammatory title is meant to get attention. However, I also believe it’s true (for most cases).
We find it distasteful to force arbitary morals onto people or bombard them with propaganda and ads. Privacy violations are wrong too, and that’s what this article is really about. But the abortion issue itself is something that can be looked at objectively. And I want to understand how some people can claim to value human life on the one hand and then blithely throw it awas on the other hand.
There are situations where abortions are medically necessary (like when the mother’s life is threatened by the pregnancy), and there are some gray areas when it comes to serious developmental defects that are often terminal anyway. But a lot of the time, abortion is used as retroactive contraception. People with no self-control or forward planning ability have sex, and pregnancy happens. There are lots of ways to prevent pregnancy in the first place, not the least of which is to find a partner of the same sex, which is something we honestly need to push our society into taking advantage of more.
But hey, let’s just terminate human life willy-nilly because it’s fucking convenient for us! As someone who is liberal about most things, I see abortion (most of the time) as a massive shirking of personal responsibility. CHOICES have consequences, and you should have to deal with them and not force others to pay for your mistakes or, say, murder someone over it.
This is what I really don’t get about the “pro choice” people. A human fetus does indeed have an underdeveloped nervous system, so killing it is not the same as torture. At the same time, you can also kill adults painlessly, yet we don’t have clinics where you can take your office enemies to have them euthanized. A human fetus is definitely alive, and it’s definitely human. So why do people make some arbitrary distinction that because it hasn’t been BORN yet, it’s okay to murder it? (I’m using the word “murder” because I don’t want to hide behind euphamisms. Deal with it. Abortion is killing someone who is not threatening your life, which makes it at least manslaughter.)
Hey, maybe you want to live in a society ruled by social darwinism, where there’s are no rules against killing people. Most slashdotters would have been killed by now by bullies in highschool in that case, so you should appreciate the systems of laws and morals that protect you. I don’t care if you’re devoutly religious or an atheist, we have solid grounds for human societies to have ethics. And we as humans have decided that killing your fellow humans is wrong. Interestingly, I find atheists to often have a stronger sense of morality, because they don’t have religious fervor to tell them when it’s okay to break their own rules to force someone else to live by their bizarre and arbitrary religious tennets. So just to be clear, this is not a religious issue.
Indeed, putting stupid religions aside, most people find murder to be objectively wrong. We value human life, instinctively, unless we’re psychopaths. It doesn’t matter if Christians tell you murder is wrong because Christians have been known to murder in the name of their God. The same is true of Muslims. When wars are fought and terrorists bomb airports, the rest of the world stands aghast at the needless loss of human life over stupid idiological issues.
So don’t distort the abortion issue into a right vs. left thing or a stupid religious issue. 99% of religion is bullshit, and we don't get the idea of murder being wrong from religion.
Often single mothers are vilified, especially if they’re in high school. (Although most abortions, I think, are not had by high school girls.) And the fathers frequently skip town or deny responsibility. A girl who has a baby before she can finish her college degree is typically screwed in more ways th
In Mars’s current atmosphere, water boils away quickly. If there pools of liquid water, logically, that would imply a denser and heavier atmosphere in the past. Can we do any math to predict bounds on what the atmosphere on Mars (given its gravity, etc.) would have had to contain in terms of content and total mass?
Fine. So there’s some overlap between Fortran 200x and Javascript. Name two things in the universe that are completely disjoint (besides Creationists and honesty).
No, Javascript belongs in an entirely different bin. Javascript is an interpreted object-oriented language that makes functions a first-class datatype. The other languages were compiled, completely procedural, and at least Fortran didn’t even support recursion until the 90’s.
Ok, so teenagers will be pushed out of McDonalds, and I recognize that as a problem. However, there are lots of jobs that are not going to be replace by AI any time soon because they rely on the human ability to deal well with irregular things. For instance, fixing plumbing problems requires an ability to diagnose where problems are and then deal with cramped spaces and irreguarly shaped arrangements of pipes. Similarly, fixing electrical problems and running ethernet through conduit are things that are conceptually simple but are challenging robotics problems. Now, perhaps we could redesign plumbing and electrical systems in future buildings to me more robot friendly, but we’re not going to go tearing down all the old ones any time soon.
If Android had failed, perhaps Sun could have managed to stay alive in part from licensing fees to phone makers running embedded JVM. Instead, everyone ditched Sun Java and went with Android because the licensing fees were less (or zero?).
Yes, Solaris and SPARC were a problem, but Java could have been a major paradigm shift for the company, allowing them to shift their focus to something new and still profitable in the new market.
As much as Java looks like C++, it’s not a direct copy. The APIs and libraries and even the culture in the development communities are completely different. Sure, it’s another C descendent, and as a C++ programmer, I picked up Java without too much effort, but it’s defintely not the same language. The Java language used by Android IS the same language, a complete carbon copy.
They were set to make plenty of money from licensing embedded JVM to phone makers, until Android came along and wrecked that market for them. It’s the one niche where they COULD have made money directly from licensing the JVM. All other deployments were there just to get people hooked on the language, although perhaps Sun could have charged for support for some high-end Java-based web server or something. In short, Google took away Sun’s only avenue for profiting from Java that would not have annoyed the shit out of the developer community.
I’m not saying Sun didn’t make any mistakes. They were, in part, trying to appeal to the open source community, which represents a lot of kinds of the people who would be developing on the Java platform during their day jobs. So there are perhaps things that they could have been more restrictive on, but they’re all double-edged swords. My whole point is that while what Google did was LEGAL, there are many ways in which it might be considered WRONG from an ethical standpoint.
When the little guy (like ReactOS, for instance) clones the APIs of the big guy with an entrenched platform (Microsoft), all we’re doing is protecting our freedoms. But Google was not a “little guy” at the time and certainly isn’t now, while Sun HAD been big but was already suffering financially at the time Google developed Android. So basically, way to kick a brother while he’s down, eh?
Although it’s meant for a machine, I think declaring code is documentation. It’s also somewhat redundant because in theory, a compiler COULD just find the function definitions directly and infer the prototypes. This is true about Verilog, for instance. Declaring code is in the form of code, but it doesn’t represent any functionality, only the interface you use to get access to the functionality provided by the defining code.
That all being said, I hold an unpopular opinion. What Google did should be techinically legal, and it should obviously be possible to develop compatible implementations of operating systems and other software infrastructures. However, Google’s choice to usurp the Java empire totally fucked over Sun. Android started at a time when Sun was still Sun. They were making revenue from Java, and if that revenue stream had continued, the may have been able to avoid going under. Instead, Android totally ripped the rug out from under that part of Sun, and Sun had to liquidate and get sold to to the assholes at Oracle.
So while technically, within the law, Google doesn’t owe a penny to Oracle (in my opinion), what Google did was morally wrong, and there were consequences (surely anticipated by Google to some degree or other) that lead to Sun’s demise.
Yes, if Java was the one thing that broke Sun, then there were bigger problems there, but that doesn’t change the fact that Android fucked over Sun. Basically, people at Sun put an enormous amount of effort into developing a platform independent language and software infrastructure that we have all benefitted greatly, but they never got the chance to reap the rewards because Google took it all away.
What this basically tells me is that unless I’m just a pure altruist and humanitarian and ready to give away all of my hard work for no reward, then I should just not do anything, because all my hard work is just going to be (legally) ripped off by some other company. I’m a huge fan of both using and contributing to free software, but a dude’s gotta eat, and we should have a moral right to get something back from our efforts. Copyrights are FAR too lengthy, and patents are given away for the stupidest shit, but the spirit of these protections is sound in that for a limited time, you should be able to profit from your hard work. Sun’s ability to profit from Java was far too limited, because they were never able recoup the investment. If Google had played nice, then Sun would still exist, and the world would be a better place.
Oh, and don’t give me bullshit about how Google could have chosen a different language. Sure, they could have. Apple sure did, and Objective-C sucks. That doesn’t change the fact that Google’s boostrapping would have taken FAR LONGER if they’d had to start from scratch. And I’m of the opinion that although I hate GC’d languages in general, and they suck battery like there’s no tomorrow, Android apps would be a hell of a lot crashier in general if they’d chosen a language with manual memory management. If Google had made other choices, Java would have remained longer under the control of Sun, and Android would have taken far longer to get off the ground. It’s possible that if Google had taken that route, their software stack would be more mature now and not tied down by the drawbacks that Java has with regard to energy usage.
I have creatinists on my family, so I’m always looking for more simple and direct arguments about the age of the universe. SN1987A is one example.
So, if there were tsunamis on Mars, that means there was lots of water at one point, so
- How conclusive is it that the observed features had to be caused by water? - What is the minimum amount of water necessary to have caused these features? - Where did all the water go? - At what rate was the water lost? - What, therefore, is the minimum age of the planet planet on the basis of this analysis?
Slashdot Mirror
At the same time, we’re eating a really horrible nutrient-poor diet made up of industrial foods designed to make us want to eat more industrial foods. Plus we’ve got massive amounts of pollution from burning petrolium, hormones in the ground water, antibiotics in our foods, PBA from our food containers, and all manner of other junk ruining our health. Some people are still stuck on this bogus idea that autism is caused by vaccines, while they continue to eat a horrible diet and pollute their bodies in other ways that are much more likely to account for this measurable increase in the rate of autism (not quite explained by just an increased rate of diagnosis).
This brings up an idea that my wife pointed out. In recent history, there has been an increase in the rate of transgendered individuals. This has resulted in political polarization, where some people are demonizing them and others are saying that body dismorphic disorder is somehow a good thing. Both are wrong. People with body dismorphic disorder have every right to their dignity and to manage and adjust their bodies as they see fit. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t an external cause, and we think a major factor is all of these hormines being pumped into the water supply. Lots of women take birth control pills, which is putting estrogen and progesterone into the water, and hormones are given to food animals. These are having an impact on development in fetuses and young children. So the next time some fundamnetalist asshole tries to tell you that there’s something BAD about people who have gender identiy issues, you can point out to them that we, as a society, did this to them. It’s our fault for poisoning the water and food. And the consequences are that more people with gender identity issues, and this is something we have to accept, and we have to treat these people like human beings and stop trying to put forth the idea that these people are crazy or making immoral choices.
You too are caught in the same binary thinking. The whole point of not putting yourself into a box is that you should feel free to be attracted to whomever. If you’re only attracted to males or only females, that’s fine. If you’re attracted to both, that’s fine too. What if you’re attracted to lots of females but only the occasional man? That’s fine too. This is about FREEDOM by eliminating the boxes. It’s about freedom to not be judged, freedom to make your own choices.
Let’s say, hypothetically, that there’s a genetic bias for humans to be mostly straight. What I’m trying to say is that in the future I hope it’s not considered weird for a person to have any mix of genders in sexual partners. 50/50? 90/10? 100/0? All fine. All not weird. We need to eliminate these boxes that force us into artificial categories.
Today’s binary sexuality is a cultural artifact. People are really on a spectrum. “Most people” are straight because they’re somewhere closer to the middle and therefore trainable to be straight. The people who are so gay or so straight innately that they can’t be trained are relatively rare (in the 10% range on either end).
Jack Harkness is more along the lines of what I’d expect in the distant future, where sexual roles and orientations are more fluid. In the future, people will think it’s really quaint how we used to have these boxes we were supposed to put ourselves in. Such limited thinking.
(BTW, one thing that bothered me (and apparetly also John Barrowman) about the last season of Torchwood is that Jack was only ever in sex scenes with men. If he’s supposed to be omnisexual, why not mix it up? That bartender he hooked up with was pretty good looking, but I wasn’t enthralled by that Italian guy. Having him also hook up with a woman would have been really hot.)
In 2013, I got called by Google out of the blue to go on-site to their NYC location, just after I’d turned 40. Note that I had gotten my PhD in 2012 and was working as a CS professor when they called me. They insisted that I was so awesome that they skipped me right past the phone technical interview directly to an on-site interview, because they really wanted me right away. Oddly, although I’d made it clear that my strongest skills were in computer architecture and circuit design, they insisted on interviewing me for a software engineering positon (which I had done for many years prior to grad school, so I was not totally unreasonable). I’d also told them that my “superpower” was debugging, but they never tested me on that. The interview went reasonably well anyway, although the whole process was totally dehumanizing, with it being obvious that I was going to be judged by what 5 engineers wrote down about me on a single sheet of paper.
About a month later, I got the rejection call. The two reasons I recall being given were (1) something about not fitting with the culture, and (2) they felt that I had jumped around too much in jobs. The first one other people told me was code for “too old.” The second one made no sense since it was clear from my CV that I’d only ever had two real jobs, one before grad school and one after, plus a couple of short internships during grad school.
My suspicion, however, is that the ageism at Google is indirect and a side-effect of other practices. Despite the fact that outsiders all think that Google practices ageism, it’ll come as a shock to many people AT Google when they are judged to having practiced systematic ageism. They’ll do an internal review trying to figure out who is turing down people for their age, and they’ll come up empty, because none of the interviewers or hiring committees actually try to figure out anyone’s age. There are several factors that contribute to virtual ageism. These include the current state of CS education relative to what was taught 10 years earlier and a somewhat more systematic and less distractable mentality that sets in as people mature. I’m actually MORE effective as an engineer than I was 10 years ago due to accumulated skills, but I'm less easily diverted from the tasks at hand, which some people may interpret as being less creative (until they get me on topics outside of focused engineering problem solving). In other words, as engineer age, they continue to improve in their effectiveness, but aspects of their personalities (such as focus and less externally visible intuitive processes) naturally mature such that they behave less “Googly,” where “Googly" effectively means “having mad skills at CS theory and coding but also having not compensated quite as much for some of the ADHD traits that a lot of engineers possess."
I often ask myself whether or not I would have taken the offer. I like my current job a LOT, but the pay sucks. I gets better after tenure, but at my age with small children and medical expenses outside of what they insurance will pay for, I have to consult on the side to make ends meet. This is the main reason I took the Google interview seriously. Even if there’s a 75% chance I wouldn’t have taken the offer, there was all that build up of them talking me into going on the interview, followed by the whole dehumanizing interview, and the bizarre rejection. That makes me angry.
Today, when my day job as a professor doesn’t make enough money, I make $200+/hour as an expert witness and $150/hour as a software/hardware engineering consultant. I could work part time telecommuting and still make more money than I could ever get at Google, especially when you account for the cost of living in NYC. Google’s loss.
I don’t care how stupid you think the general public is. Food sensitivities are a serious health concerned for a sizable portion of the population. They need to be able to reliably determine what is in their food without fear of cross-contamination and hidden gochas. I believe that this right to know extends to GMO foods on principle.
There’s also a selfish aspect to this. My wife is allergic to corn (either that or one of the molds that commonly grows on corn). Most corn products are NOT LISTED as being corn products in most processed foods. So far, the most reliable way she has to avoid corn is to avoid GMO foods because the number 1 genetically modified food is corn.
My wife and I got married at the Wagnalls Memorial Library in Lithopolis, OH. Not the geekiest option but we liked it a heck of a lot better than a church or some random park.
I have the opposite problem. The people at the local Kinkos/Fedex have terrible customer service. You walk in when the place is completely empty and still wait 10 minutes for help. When you’re going to ship a package, they always try to sell you in the most expensive option. When the place has a few people waiting, they take customers out of order. If you didn’t box something yourself, they charge an enormous amount of money for packaging, and anything not FedEx-related is also enormously expensive. I dread going in there.
On the other hand, the local UPS office is run by nice people who are very efficient. All they do is shipping, but that’s usually all I need. They respond instantly to customers coming in, customers get handled quickly, and they make you feel like you actually matter as a customer.
Computer: Tea, Earlgrey, hot.
Some people are saying that this new behavior is killing screen. Can’t systemd be configured to automatically recognize screen and not kill it?
As an assistant professor, my job is on the line. If I don’t publish enough and bring in enough external funding, I’m gone at year 6. In theory, 5 years (the period over which I’m evaluated) should be enough to get out three top-tier venue papers, but other responsibilities make that a challenge. On top of that, aside from teaching, I set my own schedule, which means that sleeping in (which the kids won’t let me do) and working late are technically my own choices.
Don’t take this as a complaint. If I didn’t want the challenge, I wouldn’t have gotten into it. All I’m saying is that much like an entrepreneur or a freelancer, I don’t really have a 9 to 5 job where this kind of “work can wait” concept even applies.
Nobody said anything about pushing anyone into any relationships they don't want. And of course, gay men have to be especially careful about STIs. All I'm saying is that there is a range of strategies for having sex while avoiding pregnancy.
The inflammatory title is meant to get attention. However, I also believe it’s true (for most cases).
We find it distasteful to force arbitary morals onto people or bombard them with propaganda and ads. Privacy violations are wrong too, and that’s what this article is really about. But the abortion issue itself is something that can be looked at objectively. And I want to understand how some people can claim to value human life on the one hand and then blithely throw it awas on the other hand.
There are situations where abortions are medically necessary (like when the mother’s life is threatened by the pregnancy), and there are some gray areas when it comes to serious developmental defects that are often terminal anyway. But a lot of the time, abortion is used as retroactive contraception. People with no self-control or forward planning ability have sex, and pregnancy happens. There are lots of ways to prevent pregnancy in the first place, not the least of which is to find a partner of the same sex, which is something we honestly need to push our society into taking advantage of more.
But hey, let’s just terminate human life willy-nilly because it’s fucking convenient for us! As someone who is liberal about most things, I see abortion (most of the time) as a massive shirking of personal responsibility. CHOICES have consequences, and you should have to deal with them and not force others to pay for your mistakes or, say, murder someone over it.
This is what I really don’t get about the “pro choice” people. A human fetus does indeed have an underdeveloped nervous system, so killing it is not the same as torture. At the same time, you can also kill adults painlessly, yet we don’t have clinics where you can take your office enemies to have them euthanized. A human fetus is definitely alive, and it’s definitely human. So why do people make some arbitrary distinction that because it hasn’t been BORN yet, it’s okay to murder it? (I’m using the word “murder” because I don’t want to hide behind euphamisms. Deal with it. Abortion is killing someone who is not threatening your life, which makes it at least manslaughter.)
Hey, maybe you want to live in a society ruled by social darwinism, where there’s are no rules against killing people. Most slashdotters would have been killed by now by bullies in highschool in that case, so you should appreciate the systems of laws and morals that protect you. I don’t care if you’re devoutly religious or an atheist, we have solid grounds for human societies to have ethics. And we as humans have decided that killing your fellow humans is wrong. Interestingly, I find atheists to often have a stronger sense of morality, because they don’t have religious fervor to tell them when it’s okay to break their own rules to force someone else to live by their bizarre and arbitrary religious tennets. So just to be clear, this is not a religious issue.
Indeed, putting stupid religions aside, most people find murder to be objectively wrong. We value human life, instinctively, unless we’re psychopaths. It doesn’t matter if Christians tell you murder is wrong because Christians have been known to murder in the name of their God. The same is true of Muslims. When wars are fought and terrorists bomb airports, the rest of the world stands aghast at the needless loss of human life over stupid idiological issues.
So don’t distort the abortion issue into a right vs. left thing or a stupid religious issue. 99% of religion is bullshit, and we don't get the idea of murder being wrong from religion.
Often single mothers are vilified, especially if they’re in high school. (Although most abortions, I think, are not had by high school girls.) And the fathers frequently skip town or deny responsibility. A girl who has a baby before she can finish her college degree is typically screwed in more ways th
In Mars’s current atmosphere, water boils away quickly. If there pools of liquid water, logically, that would imply a denser and heavier atmosphere in the past. Can we do any math to predict bounds on what the atmosphere on Mars (given its gravity, etc.) would have had to contain in terms of content and total mass?
Fine. So there’s some overlap between Fortran 200x and Javascript. Name two things in the universe that are completely disjoint (besides Creationists and honesty).
On the other hand, dehydrated mushrooms are great to add to many dishes for flavor.
The worst thing about being stuck in an elevator is when you’ve had too much coffee and really have to pee.
No, Javascript belongs in an entirely different bin. Javascript is an interpreted object-oriented language that makes functions a first-class datatype. The other languages were compiled, completely procedural, and at least Fortran didn’t even support recursion until the 90’s.
It’s interesting how some plants like to suck up certain minerals. Rice and arsenic. Tobacco and polonium. What others do you know about?
Ok, so teenagers will be pushed out of McDonalds, and I recognize that as a problem. However, there are lots of jobs that are not going to be replace by AI any time soon because they rely on the human ability to deal well with irregular things. For instance, fixing plumbing problems requires an ability to diagnose where problems are and then deal with cramped spaces and irreguarly shaped arrangements of pipes. Similarly, fixing electrical problems and running ethernet through conduit are things that are conceptually simple but are challenging robotics problems. Now, perhaps we could redesign plumbing and electrical systems in future buildings to me more robot friendly, but we’re not going to go tearing down all the old ones any time soon.
If Android had failed, perhaps Sun could have managed to stay alive in part from licensing fees to phone makers running embedded JVM. Instead, everyone ditched Sun Java and went with Android because the licensing fees were less (or zero?).
Yes, Solaris and SPARC were a problem, but Java could have been a major paradigm shift for the company, allowing them to shift their focus to something new and still profitable in the new market.
As much as Java looks like C++, it’s not a direct copy. The APIs and libraries and even the culture in the development communities are completely different. Sure, it’s another C descendent, and as a C++ programmer, I picked up Java without too much effort, but it’s defintely not the same language. The Java language used by Android IS the same language, a complete carbon copy.
They were set to make plenty of money from licensing embedded JVM to phone makers, until Android came along and wrecked that market for them. It’s the one niche where they COULD have made money directly from licensing the JVM. All other deployments were there just to get people hooked on the language, although perhaps Sun could have charged for support for some high-end Java-based web server or something. In short, Google took away Sun’s only avenue for profiting from Java that would not have annoyed the shit out of the developer community.
I’m not saying Sun didn’t make any mistakes. They were, in part, trying to appeal to the open source community, which represents a lot of kinds of the people who would be developing on the Java platform during their day jobs. So there are perhaps things that they could have been more restrictive on, but they’re all double-edged swords. My whole point is that while what Google did was LEGAL, there are many ways in which it might be considered WRONG from an ethical standpoint.
When the little guy (like ReactOS, for instance) clones the APIs of the big guy with an entrenched platform (Microsoft), all we’re doing is protecting our freedoms. But Google was not a “little guy” at the time and certainly isn’t now, while Sun HAD been big but was already suffering financially at the time Google developed Android. So basically, way to kick a brother while he’s down, eh?
Although it’s meant for a machine, I think declaring code is documentation. It’s also somewhat redundant because in theory, a compiler COULD just find the function definitions directly and infer the prototypes. This is true about Verilog, for instance. Declaring code is in the form of code, but it doesn’t represent any functionality, only the interface you use to get access to the functionality provided by the defining code.
That all being said, I hold an unpopular opinion. What Google did should be techinically legal, and it should obviously be possible to develop compatible implementations of operating systems and other software infrastructures. However, Google’s choice to usurp the Java empire totally fucked over Sun. Android started at a time when Sun was still Sun. They were making revenue from Java, and if that revenue stream had continued, the may have been able to avoid going under. Instead, Android totally ripped the rug out from under that part of Sun, and Sun had to liquidate and get sold to to the assholes at Oracle.
So while technically, within the law, Google doesn’t owe a penny to Oracle (in my opinion), what Google did was morally wrong, and there were consequences (surely anticipated by Google to some degree or other) that lead to Sun’s demise.
Yes, if Java was the one thing that broke Sun, then there were bigger problems there, but that doesn’t change the fact that Android fucked over Sun. Basically, people at Sun put an enormous amount of effort into developing a platform independent language and software infrastructure that we have all benefitted greatly, but they never got the chance to reap the rewards because Google took it all away.
What this basically tells me is that unless I’m just a pure altruist and humanitarian and ready to give away all of my hard work for no reward, then I should just not do anything, because all my hard work is just going to be (legally) ripped off by some other company. I’m a huge fan of both using and contributing to free software, but a dude’s gotta eat, and we should have a moral right to get something back from our efforts. Copyrights are FAR too lengthy, and patents are given away for the stupidest shit, but the spirit of these protections is sound in that for a limited time, you should be able to profit from your hard work. Sun’s ability to profit from Java was far too limited, because they were never able recoup the investment. If Google had played nice, then Sun would still exist, and the world would be a better place.
Oh, and don’t give me bullshit about how Google could have chosen a different language. Sure, they could have. Apple sure did, and Objective-C sucks. That doesn’t change the fact that Google’s boostrapping would have taken FAR LONGER if they’d had to start from scratch. And I’m of the opinion that although I hate GC’d languages in general, and they suck battery like there’s no tomorrow, Android apps would be a hell of a lot crashier in general if they’d chosen a language with manual memory management. If Google had made other choices, Java would have remained longer under the control of Sun, and Android would have taken far longer to get off the ground. It’s possible that if Google had taken that route, their software stack would be more mature now and not tied down by the drawbacks that Java has with regard to energy usage.
I have creatinists on my family, so I’m always looking for more simple and direct arguments about the age of the universe. SN1987A is one example.
So, if there were tsunamis on Mars, that means there was lots of water at one point, so
- How conclusive is it that the observed features had to be caused by water?
- What is the minimum amount of water necessary to have caused these features?
- Where did all the water go?
- At what rate was the water lost?
- What, therefore, is the minimum age of the planet planet on the basis of this analysis?