I'm in New Zealand. A couple of years ago, the government banned smoking in bars here, and despite the huge outcry from smokers at the time (and general ambivalence from non-smokers), it really has made a huge change to the attitude to smoking over here. Smokers are much more aware of those around them and quite happily throw on their coats and light up outside. The very idea that people could, only a few years ago, light up inside seems bizarre and unpleasant to non-smokers.. it feels like it's always been this way.
You can call it social engineering, but personally, I'm not complaining, and neither is anyone else.
If women want men to read the signals properly, we need to know the rules and they need to be consistent.
What, so all the world's women should get together and sign an agreement on whether having doors held open for them is acceptable or not? You need to realize that all women are individuals and have different social expectations. I shouldn't have to say that in this day and age, but a lot of men don't seem to understand this.
I studied philosophy for a couple of years at University and got very fed up with Idealism. It plays a very silly semantic game which relies on the notion that we do not experience reality, but merely experience 'sense-datum'.
I call bs on this. We don't experience our 'sense-datum', rather, 'sense-datum' is the means, the process by which we experience reality.
Sure, you could look at it either way, and empirical evidence isn't going to help (if it did, it would be science, not philosophy). But the latter seems the more sensible view to me, since it doesn't require turning our view of the world on its head, nor does it render the concept of 'reality' meaningless.
People often say things along the lines of "We should be focusing on creating and improving quality software for Linux rather than hacking our way into running EVIL Windows proprietary software", and I think there's a lot of merit to that argument.
The common example that's batted about is the GIMP. At the moment, it pretty much sucks monkey balls (zealots will dispute this, but there are other examples). But it's the best native imaging software we've got, and we should be putting as many resources as possible into making it more functional and more usable.
At the same time, we can't expect people to just 'put up with it' until it gets to an acceptable point, so I can't see anything wrong with putting a bit of steam into getting shit like Photoshop running nicely on Linux as an interim solution.
If you think I'm talking smack, picture Chicago buried under a mile of ice. It happened before, it WILL happen again. Oh, well now that I imagine it, I see that it must be true.
Funny that you mention that, as there's a New Zealand movie called Black Sheep about exactly that.
Except everything goes horribly wrong, and they end up with 1000s of zombie sheep running about the place, eating everyone (and turning bitten survivors into weresheep).
Your post, while rather nicely written, misses the point entirely.
A kibibyte is NOT defined as 1000 bytes, it is defined as 1024 bytes. You argue that SI units are nonsense because they attempt to standardize at base 10; this would indeed be ridiculous, but on the contrary, they are an attempt to standardize at base 2. Essentially, a kibibyte is exactly the same as what is currently known as a kilobyte in conventional usage.
The trouble with using prefixes like 'kilo', 'mega', 'giga' is that they are ambiguous in the computing context. By definition, these terms represent powers of 10, yet the way these terms are used in computing contradict their intended usage.
Replacing these terms with clearer ones like kibibyte, mebibyte etc makes alot of sense to my way of thinking, especially when their abbreviations are identical (KB, MB, etc).
There's no such thing as a religious war.
Nations fight territorial wars, using religion to inspire fervour in their soldiers and citizens. It's alot easier to inspire a man to kill another man by convincing him that it'll get him to heaven than by telling him they'll have more room to grow corn.
Except that kind of argument only really works if you're willing to completely disregard the way that we use language.
'Evil' (note the apostrophes) is a word, which has different significance within different cultures. Evil is an act which harms others unnecessarily. In the former case, I'm MENTIONING the word. In the latter case, I'm USING it. And when I USE the word, that's what it means.
When I talk about Evil, I'm talking about a completely different thing (act which harms others unnecessarily) than, say, when a fundamentalist Christian talks about evil (act which is prohibited by scripture). This doesn't make them wrong in the use of the word, it merely makes their use inconsistent with mine.
So I don't feel there's any intellectual problem with me calling slavery evil, or calling stoning people to death evil, or me calling female circumcision evil, regardless of whether other cultures consider these things acceptable.
To say that I'm wrong to describe these things as evil because they have different ideas about what is evil makes no more sense than to say that I'm wrong to say "George Bush is an ass" because a British person would think I was calling him a donkey.
I was reading about the Tunguska event just yesterday. As I understand it, there's no evidence that the director of the foundation ever claimed he'd found an alien spacecraft; it's a spurious claim that showed up in some book or another by some "UFO Researcher" or some such thing and has circulated widely since.
I'm under the impression that the Russians say "It was a comet!" whereas the Americans say "Nuh-uh, it was a meteor!", and there's much contention over this. But as far as I'm aware, these two are the only theories that hold much water for mainstream scientists.
I think a three and a half minute song has a lot less potential for creative expression than a full length LP. As a musician myself, I see individual songs on an album as being pretty much analogous to the movements of a symphony.
A good album/symphony should be greater than the sum of its parts, and the interplay between the various musical (or lyrical) ideas across the entire work is an important aspect of this. Taken by itself, a song or movement can still be a brilliant and enjoyable piece of music, but the subjective experience of the listener is entirely different.
You grossly misunderstand big bang theory. It doesn't state that the universe erupted out of nothing; I believe the term that physicists use is a 'singularity'. And it's not 'erupting', it's 'expanding'. It's like blowing up a balloon, you're not creating more rubber, you're expanding it.
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I'm in New Zealand. A couple of years ago, the government banned smoking in bars here, and despite the huge outcry from smokers at the time (and general ambivalence from non-smokers), it really has made a huge change to the attitude to smoking over here. Smokers are much more aware of those around them and quite happily throw on their coats and light up outside. The very idea that people could, only a few years ago, light up inside seems bizarre and unpleasant to non-smokers.. it feels like it's always been this way. You can call it social engineering, but personally, I'm not complaining, and neither is anyone else.
What, so all the world's women should get together and sign an agreement on whether having doors held open for them is acceptable or not? You need to realize that all women are individuals and have different social expectations. I shouldn't have to say that in this day and age, but a lot of men don't seem to understand this.
I studied philosophy for a couple of years at University and got very fed up with Idealism. It plays a very silly semantic game which relies on the notion that we do not experience reality, but merely experience 'sense-datum'.
I call bs on this. We don't experience our 'sense-datum', rather, 'sense-datum' is the means, the process by which we experience reality.
Sure, you could look at it either way, and empirical evidence isn't going to help (if it did, it would be science, not philosophy). But the latter seems the more sensible view to me, since it doesn't require turning our view of the world on its head, nor does it render the concept of 'reality' meaningless.
People often say things along the lines of "We should be focusing on creating and improving quality software for Linux rather than hacking our way into running EVIL Windows proprietary software", and I think there's a lot of merit to that argument. The common example that's batted about is the GIMP. At the moment, it pretty much sucks monkey balls (zealots will dispute this, but there are other examples). But it's the best native imaging software we've got, and we should be putting as many resources as possible into making it more functional and more usable. At the same time, we can't expect people to just 'put up with it' until it gets to an acceptable point, so I can't see anything wrong with putting a bit of steam into getting shit like Photoshop running nicely on Linux as an interim solution.
Wait.. you're.. admitting you were wrong? Get the hell out of here, and don't come back!
We used poisonous gases, and we poisoned their asses!
Funny that you mention that, as there's a New Zealand movie called Black Sheep about exactly that.
Except everything goes horribly wrong, and they end up with 1000s of zombie sheep running about the place, eating everyone (and turning bitten survivors into weresheep).
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0779982/
I read that as "In the developing world, they're actually more practical than landmines".
I mean to say, I hadn't thought the exploding battery problem was THAT serious.
Your post, while rather nicely written, misses the point entirely.
A kibibyte is NOT defined as 1000 bytes, it is defined as 1024 bytes. You argue that SI units are nonsense because they attempt to standardize at base 10; this would indeed be ridiculous, but on the contrary, they are an attempt to standardize at base 2. Essentially, a kibibyte is exactly the same as what is currently known as a kilobyte in conventional usage.
The trouble with using prefixes like 'kilo', 'mega', 'giga' is that they are ambiguous in the computing context. By definition, these terms represent powers of 10, yet the way these terms are used in computing contradict their intended usage.
Replacing these terms with clearer ones like kibibyte, mebibyte etc makes alot of sense to my way of thinking, especially when their abbreviations are identical (KB, MB, etc).
What does Will Smith have to do with this?!
There's no such thing as a religious war. Nations fight territorial wars, using religion to inspire fervour in their soldiers and citizens. It's alot easier to inspire a man to kill another man by convincing him that it'll get him to heaven than by telling him they'll have more room to grow corn.
Except that kind of argument only really works if you're willing to completely disregard the way that we use language. 'Evil' (note the apostrophes) is a word, which has different significance within different cultures. Evil is an act which harms others unnecessarily. In the former case, I'm MENTIONING the word. In the latter case, I'm USING it. And when I USE the word, that's what it means. When I talk about Evil, I'm talking about a completely different thing (act which harms others unnecessarily) than, say, when a fundamentalist Christian talks about evil (act which is prohibited by scripture). This doesn't make them wrong in the use of the word, it merely makes their use inconsistent with mine. So I don't feel there's any intellectual problem with me calling slavery evil, or calling stoning people to death evil, or me calling female circumcision evil, regardless of whether other cultures consider these things acceptable. To say that I'm wrong to describe these things as evil because they have different ideas about what is evil makes no more sense than to say that I'm wrong to say "George Bush is an ass" because a British person would think I was calling him a donkey.
Given the context, it doesn't sound like he was too au fait with the technical details, so I wouldn't read too much into it.
I was reading about the Tunguska event just yesterday. As I understand it, there's no evidence that the director of the foundation ever claimed he'd found an alien spacecraft; it's a spurious claim that showed up in some book or another by some "UFO Researcher" or some such thing and has circulated widely since. I'm under the impression that the Russians say "It was a comet!" whereas the Americans say "Nuh-uh, it was a meteor!", and there's much contention over this. But as far as I'm aware, these two are the only theories that hold much water for mainstream scientists.
Correlation != Causation.
It's also not hard to fix them once they're found. When an error is found on a Wikipedia page, contributors will swarm over it like ants.
I think a three and a half minute song has a lot less potential for creative expression than a full length LP. As a musician myself, I see individual songs on an album as being pretty much analogous to the movements of a symphony.
A good album/symphony should be greater than the sum of its parts, and the interplay between the various musical (or lyrical) ideas across the entire work is an important aspect of this. Taken by itself, a song or movement can still be a brilliant and enjoyable piece of music, but the subjective experience of the listener is entirely different.
The more and more I see shit like this, the more appealing Libertarianism looks as a political philosophy. This worries me greatly.
I know, it was a joke. Apparently a bad one.
Which of course, would be followed by the sequel.. "Hortibot vs. the Triffids".
"DIE, human WEEDS!!!"
Oooh, that's just nasty. And surely illegal. Any lawyers about?
You grossly misunderstand big bang theory. It doesn't state that the universe erupted out of nothing; I believe the term that physicists use is a 'singularity'. And it's not 'erupting', it's 'expanding'. It's like blowing up a balloon, you're not creating more rubber, you're expanding it.
Pheromone signals from dominant males spark new brain cells in their female partners "But your honour, I only beat my wife to make her smarter."