I wonder what would happen if such disasters had hit a dam or a thermal gas/coal plant...
The massive environmental devastation that resulted would once again be hushed up and glossed over by the majority of the media, just like theseoneswere. Of course, they didn't even have a 9.0 earthquake or a tsunami, just some incompetence, bad safety protocols, and much looser restrictions on how they store and treat their toxic waste products.
You should learn the definitions of terms before you run around calling people "dumbass". I know I said it was OK and all, but I really didn't mean for someone to do so when they can't even get the terms right.
Well, first of all, I did specify the reason for why I was calling you a dumbass, and it's still valid. Actual research into Einstein's theology does in fact show that he was very much not a creationist as defined by the "intelligent design" group, which is the central point of the article, and thus the discussion. Changing the rules of the discussion every time the old rules make you look like an idiot is also a typical example of weak minds. We're having a debate here, not playing Calvinball.
Strange you would accuse me of quote mining and then counter one of my several arguments based on a quote.
I see that you don't actually know what "quote mining" means - it means taking small snippits of what someone said out of context to make it look like they support a position that they do not actually support. Providing the entire quotation, which research will show is actually representative of their opinion, is not quote mining, it's called "showing evidence" - something you seem to have difficulty with.
Now I don't want to argue about Einstein's theological beliefs. That's not really important.
But you're the one who brought it up! It was kinda central to your poorly thought out and unresearched point - claiming it's not relevant after you've been shown to be wrong is just silly.
My point was that if you were looking to hire Einstein, and during your research you saw the quote above, would that prevent you from hiring him? It doesn't matter what he said beyond that as the quote stands. If Behe said that he didn't believe in a "personal god", would that qualify him to teach biology?
Again, this is where the dumbass factor is coming out - hiring policies are not based on singular out of context quotes, they're based on reviews of actual work. A single comment by someone attempting to explain determinism versus non-determinism to people who don't understand (or want to understand) the math behind n-dimensional physics is not equivalent to the years and volumes of creationist schmutz Behe has spewed, again regardless of any tiny out of context snippet.
Oh, and by saying that you won't read the rest of my quotes is another way of saying, "I can't argue those, so I'll concentrate on the one I think I know something about."
No, that's just your dumbass factor emerging again. People generally put forth their best argument first, so when you start out with quote mining and false statements, generally it means that the rest of what you wrote is just as worthless, and not worth reading. Actually looking at the rest of what you wrote, once again, you are once again taking out of context statements without actually examining the people in question, to make it look like they believe things that they don't. I don't need to debunk every word of the tripe you posted, other people (like TheGratefulNet down below this post) have already done that.
Can you be an Art Professor and believe (random babbling deleted)
Art is a subjective thing. Science is not.
Can a Physicist believe in Creationism
Actually no, they can't. Creationism isn't just about biology, as most creationists spend their bogus attempts at debates sending either random physics questions at biologists, or random biology questions at physicists. They fail at both subjects.
If someone is already a scientist and then it is revealed that they are also a creationist, does that mean they fooled all of their previous professors and the folks who awarded the PhD?
First, if they're a creationist, then they are not a scientist. This is much like saying "If someone is dead, and then it is revealed that they are alive" - yes, technically at some point they may have been one and then changed over to being the other, but you can not be both at once. It means that either they suffered some sort of brain defect which rendered them unable to properly think about the world around themselves, or they were in fact lying and engaging in deceit when they obtained their PhD. It's also possible they received their degree from a non-accredited diploma mill in the first place.
Do you really want to start evaluating someone’s job qualifications based on their personal beliefs?
When those beliefs make it impossible for that person to do the job, yes, they are very much relevant.
The History Channel also played a program about how the Masonic order was secretly a cult run by the alien Reptoids and the Illuminati to take control of the US government. This was followed by a program about ghosts. I don't think "was on the History Channel" lends much in the way of credibility in the last five to ten years.
So would you not hire Einstein because he said, "God does not play dice with the universe"
That's called quote mining, and is a quick sign that the rest of your post is pointless stupidity. Einstein had a tendency to use poetic statements to attempt to illustrate principles he was trying to communicate.
He also said:
About God, I cannot accept any concept based on the authority of the Church. As long as I can remember, I have resented mass indocrination. I do not believe in the fear of life, in the fear of death, in blind faith. I cannot prove to you that there is no personal God, but if I were to speak of him, I would be a liar. I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil. My God created laws that take care of that. His universe is not ruled by wishful thinking, but by immutable laws.
That sounds pretty much like he falls into the category of "not a creationist", no matter how much you quote-mine and misrepresent things. The same applies to the rest, so yes, you are a dumbass, but it's mostly because you use either poorly researched or deliberately misleading statements to attempt to prop up a failed point.
Neah, there's no law against discriminating based on foul stenches - just incompetence. If they're completely incapable of doing the job (ie: creationists applying for biology, astronomy, geology, ancient history, anthropology, chemistry, or physics related positions) you have to find some other reason for not hiring them. If they reek like a stack of roadkill skunks that have been out in the sun all day, you can list them as "unsuitable for classroom presentation", if you remembered to include teaching as part of their required duties and qualifications.
The trick is going to be making the job postings sufficiently worded that any applicant can be legally rejected based on any non-religion problem you can find that the other (ie: actually qualified) applicants did not display. I imagine the university departments in Texas who have to hire new people will be doing a seriously careful re-wording of any job postings they make.
Companies like Sony have no choice but to do whatever they can in order to make money for their shareholders, that is their only duty in the capitalist system we live in. If they think they can make more money by being nice they will, but if they can make more money by being bastards as is usually the case then they have to do that instead.
That's not how it works.
One of the effects of unethical behavior is that people start to not like you, and protest your actions. This costs you money, and is part of the capitalist system you are saying we should be forgiving them because of - instead, we should be embracing that capitalist system, and making sure that they lose money every time they do something stupid, unethical, or just plain evil. Occupy their time, give them bad press so that people stop buying their products, and every time you do so, make absolutely sure that the reason they are losing money is clear - if the dog craps on the carpet, you don't just sigh and whine to politicians - you rub their nose in it and tell them BAD DOG! And when a corporation misbehaves and pisses on all of their customers, they need to have their noses rubbed in it and be told BAD COMPANY!.
That "duty to the shareholders" you talk about? If unethical behavior actually resulted in losses, then duty to the shareholders would prevent it. People like you who whine "Don't hate the evil company for being evil! Hate the politicians who let them!" are just encouraging them, the same way that petting the dog and ignoring what it has done wrong every time it craps on your carpet encourages it to keep crapping on your carpet.
No, I made me disable access. I left because I got a (much) higher paying job in a different industry. The boss at the old place was a friend of mine, and I explained to him what I was doing and why, as well as making sure that everything was well documented for whoever they eventually had to hire to replace me when the Vice President finally admitted he couldn't also be the entire IT department for a 40 person company.
My last action in my previous sysadmin job was to disable my own old accounts. If I find that they're accessible to me again, it means that:
They somehow guessed my line-noise password, and put it back on the account, or
They broke the servers badly, and had to restore everything from the backup I made before I left, and then were too stupid to re-do the list of admin tasks afterwards, which included disabling the accounts of three other former employees, one of which was fired for dirty dealings.
Well that's a suck-tastic downgrade from their current and past video card lines.
I'm sitting at a workstation with a pair of 2560x1600 resolution monitors right now, on an old Quatro FX 4600 NVidia card that runs them just fine. (Seriously - it's nowhere near their former top of the line, which is in the workstation at the other end of the table from me...). Since their old cards could do better, and they're now bragging about being able to do less, why should we be impressed?
Or is this a sign that the HDTV induced stagnation in the monitor market is finally going to get broken? The monitors I've got in my lab here at work cost about $3000 when they were new two years ago, but to replace them right now would cost $5000 each because "nobody wants anything but 1920x1080". I hate HDTV with a passion, because it screwed up my monitor purchasing plans. The last monitor I bought for myself, right before HDTV came out and screwed us all, was 1920x1200 - you can't even find a monitor with that high of a resolution anymore.
The problem there is that the ISPs are not being allowed the option of offering their customers options. The ISPs who provide DSL to customers are being charged these fees by Bell (the telco) and are themselves being charged $1 per gigabyte the customer uses past the first 25GB. Unfortunately, because Bell is both in the ISP and Satellite TV business, there is a massive conflict of interests here - they tend to charge the same per DSL user to the ISP that they charge their own end customers, meaning that if an ISP wants to be able to even enter the market for providing DSL access, they can afford to place about a $1 per month markup on the account in total - and then they have to pay for the outgoing internet bandwidth, tech support, server maintenance, and all of the other aspects of running an ISP based on that $1 per month. The CRTC ruling basically said "Yes Bell, you are now free to charge the ISPs more than you charge your end user customers, thus driving them out of business, and ridding yourself of competition in the ISP business, while simultaneously blocking people from using internet TV and phones to replace the satellite TV and regular phones you sell."
I'm speaking from experience here - when DSL first became available in Canada, I was running an ISP, and as owner of the phone lines, Bell wanted to charge ISPs $2 more per month per DSL customer than Bell themselves charged for home DSL service - and the CRTC thought that was perfectly OK, despite their whole mandate being to prevent monopoly abuses like that. It took massive protest and threats of lawsuits before they decided that perhaps some fairness was required.
These CRTC decisions clearly had nothing to do with the CRTC members' possession of season tickets to sporting events, use of luxury condos at resorts, and other expensive vacations paid for by Telcos and cable companies.
I use a movement sequence, and change my starting key when I need to change my password on a "schedule". All I need to remember is what key to start on. I have six different movement sequences that I use depending on what account it is, and have never had trouble keeping them separate. Then again, I also remember all phone numbers as movement sequences, and need to look at a keypad to tell people what my own phone number is.
Also, it makes using the ipod screen-keyboard to log into anything really annoying. Changing keyboard types is a bigger problem for this password method than schedule-forced password changes.
Most of the time I just quietly fail the ones who do that too - especially since I very vocally warn everyone in the room that there are multiple test versions and their neighbor does not have the same questions. The answers don't line up between the tests, but visually they look the same, so people who think they're being clever copy the multiple choice questions, and then do their own work on the long questions. The only one I ever went after was because it was just so very outrageous - the long answer question said "show your rough work as part of the marks", and instead he just wrote out the final answer that the person beside him had, which contained things that had no relationship to the question on his test - he got 1/60 on the test total, (his neighbor on the other hand had 59/60,) and as it turned out was a chronic cheater. He got a zero on that test, and then I got him kicked out of the country when I caught and reported him a second time in the same semester.
Pretty sure that that violates FERPA. Parents cannot get any information about their kids' college performance unless said kids share it.
Well that would be a good reason for him to not want to send it. It's amazing how intimidating selectively chosen true phrases can be to someone with a guilty conscience. At my own university, the majority of our students are from overseas, and about half of those were sent out of the country by parents who knew they were going to be an embarrassment to the family, and wanted it to happen where the neighbors wouldn't see. They live in absolute terror of their families finding out what they've been doing - I had one student in for an academic misconduct hearing who started out the whole thing with a tear-filled confession and pleading and begging that we not tell his parents. He even confessed to having cheated in two other courses that were long since over with. Nobody had said anything to him yet. The dean said, "Will you sign the memorandum of understanding that you're on permanent probation, and will be expelled if there's any further incidents? You're still getting a zero on this test, but if you do, we'll ignore those other two courses you've just confessed to cheating in." and after it was hastily signed, informed him that the only person who would be telling his parents anything would be him, and she didn't envy his position if he did anything else. Of course, the very next day he got caught cheating again (on the next marked segment of my own class no less), and was kicked out, which caused his student visa to be canceled, and with no degree he wasn't eligible to apply for any other kind of visa. Plagiarism in projects dropped significantly the next year, when I got to truthfully tell my whole class that I had had one student thrown out of the Country for plagiarism.
There is a second stage to his detection method that you've missed here - he's most likely going to also consider the marks on the makeup test as evidence regarding cheating or not cheating.
Got a 99% on the original, but a 60% on the makeup? Gee, I wonder why? No wait... I don't wonder why. I already know. And in the US, failing the makeup that badly under those circumstances is considered enough when combined with all of the other evidence.
I had a problem with a student in my class thinking that memorizing previous tests' answers was the appropriate way of studying. Most students who do that just fail quietly, but this one was a problem because he actually stood up in class and yelled at me for changing the questions from one semester to another. In class. In front of everyone else in the class, most of whom had actually studied. I responded that only an idiot would actually expect the answers to be exactly identical on every test every semester, when the prof had told them ahead of time that there were four different versions of the test in the room to discourage "over-the-shoulder snooping". Apparently he'd memorized the answers to version "3" of the previous semester's test, and wound up with version "2" of the test that semester. Not that it would have helped him anyways, as the question order was different, and he only bothered to memorize "A, C, D, B, B, A, D, C,...".
Amusingly, I was called into my boss's office for a disciplinary hearing, as the student then complained that I had called him personally an idiot in front of the whole class. I explained what I had said, and what the student in question had done, and was told: "Ok, you're not in trouble, but for future reference, I'm still supposed to tell you that you're not allowed to call your students idiots in class, even when they are."
The problem with that is that you're adding in an extra unnecessary step.
Adding complexity to a model with no actual need for it is counter to logic.
It's like the police investigating someone's death via falling into an open sewer saying "Well, yes, it is entirely possible that Larry walked down the street, but isn't it also equally likely that he stopped and jumped up and down first? Since nobody else was there, and he's dead, we'll never know for sure, so you should believe me when I say that he stopped and jumped up and down first." There's no evidence for it, there's no reason for it to be there, and it's just plain silly to add it in where it's not needed.
Yes, but what did they _do_ with those Beams of light, bulls, birds, showers of gold, swans, and other things? They obsessed over the human forms of mortals. In much the same manner that 4chan does...
When a critical mass of IP Trolls file suits, they will eventually start winning
That's the problem - they file their suits in Texas, so they're already winning. Texas judges see "Patent Lawsuit" and immediately find for the plaintiff, regardless of evidence, propriety, or anything even remotely connected with reality. That's why these things always get filed there. The corporations don't want the patents to go away because they've already spent billions on them, and making them go away would mean they wasted that money (which they did) - and the last thing they want to happen is to feel like they wasted money. It doesn't matter that the trolls will keep suing them for stupid things that should never have been patented, and would never have been allowed through the patent office if the inspector had been sane, sober, or not stupid. All that matters is that they not feel like they wasted money on their own massive pile of invalid crap that shouldn't have been allowed to be patented.
The only people who are calling it "habitable" are journalists who don't read what the scientists actually wrote.
It was supposed to be in the region where liquid water is capable of existing - that does NOT under any circumstances, immediately mean that it's "habitable". It means that there's a possibility of water being liquid - nothing more, nothing less. You can have a lot of situations where there's the possibility of there being liquid water, that are still completely not habitable.
First, just because water "can be liquid" there doesn't mean there actually _is_ any water. It could be a dry, airless rock.
Second, if there is water, there's no requirement that there not be hundreds of other chemicals present that result in it being horribly toxic and corrosive.
Third, there's no knowledge of the planet's size - only it's mass. If it's a big chunk of heavy radioactive elements like Uranium, it might be a ball smaller than the moon with gravity that squashes anything on it's surface flat, and again, completely not habitable - similarly, it could be mostly very light elements and gasses, in which case you'd be facing a "surface" gravity of next to nothing, and no really discernible differentiation between the mostly hydrogen atmosphere, mostly hydrogen and other chemicals ocean, and possibly not even existing ground (much like you'd find in a gas giant like Jupiter or Saturn - Saturn's average density is less than that of water.)
In short: There was no "habitable" planet announced - there was a candidate planet located in the region where water can exist, and it has not been confirmed by other researchers examining their own data, when they went to double-check the results of the original team. That's how science works.
Atheist Communists started plenty of fights over religion.
Derp? That wasn't the question. the question was "When was the last time a war was started because of atheist beliefs? Here's a hint: Never. Wars are fought over "you have resource X and we want it", or "our god doesn't like your god, and he told us to kill you". You're not going to find atheists starting wars over their lack of god anywhere outside of Southpark reruns.
The fact that atheism is relatively new doesn't change the fact that it's just another religion.
Sorry, wrong again. Atheism pre-dates your religion - people didn't believe in god(s) long before they made up yours. And it's not a religion any more than not collecting stamps is a hobby.
I don't know about that man, some batteries are pretty heavy.
Drop one of those things on your foot while you're trying to invert the color palette, and you might be off for some serious worker's compensation claims.
As a person who has taught programming classes before, I can not emphasize how much the idea of a language where my students would be required to write neat, human-readable code in order to have it actually run fills me with joy. After marking 60 assignments in a single sitting, being able to look at the code my students make, and actually read it without having to scroll to the side, or edit it myself (hitting enter and tab a lot) would be really neat.
Sadly, that's not the language that I have to teach, since you can't embed it in a web page and expect it to run on more than a few fringe users' browsers, so I'm stuck teaching JavaScript, which somehow always ends up being either "never hit enter" and all on one line, or else "hit enter and add whitespace completely at random"...
People should not be encouraging "learning" OO programming in PHP - doing so creates some VERY bad habits.
One such bad habit is best exemplified by a job I was hired for a few years ago, to fix a company's internal data tracking application/internal website, which was built entirely in PHP (with an MS Access97 database that was being migrated over to MySQL one table at a time with an SQL bridge "merging" the two... I didn't design it, I was hired to fix it.)
The first thing I noticed was that the site was super slow. A simple database query was taking 10 minutes to load a table with 100 items in it - they said the old programmer blamed the MS Access database, but I wasn't so sure. When I looked at the code, I realized to my horror that the person who wrote it was obsessed with OO programming, to the point that _everything_ was encapsulated in an object, right down to every table cell and row of the output, which were all containing data transfered from objects that contained the individual row/column items from the query. I re-wrote the code in a completely non-OO version, and the page took exactly 5 seconds to come up. Moving the table over to the MySQL database later on only shortened that to 4 seconds - not a major improvement. Then I spent six months, one page/report/whatever at a time, re-coding their entire system and removing all traces of OO, so that it would actually run in an acceptable manner. After I was done, the only remaining OO code was the database access routines, which handled accessing the merged set of databases, and the site ran much better.
PHP and pure OO coding are not a good combination, for one big reason: PHP is for web applications, which start up, produce a single page, finish, and release their memory completely, destroying any data structures you've created. That means that data structures which are efficient for long-term (read: more than a few seconds) storage of data and ease of access to it may not be good in a web application, because the initialization cost of those structures is higher than the savings they'll give you for the 0.1 seconds of (optimal) anticipated runtime. A bit of OO is okay for it to make coding things easier, but when you're _learning_ OO, you want to get as fully into it as possible, and PHP is a bad language to do that in. Java, Python, C++, and even (shudder) C# are all far better for that purpose.
Nope, npviewer.bin crashes all the time on me too, and the flash 10 for 64 bit only really supports "some" of the features of flash. Lots of flash _including_ sites work ok, but when they're _really_ heavy flash, or use a lot of recent flash features, it pretty much kills the site, with sections missing, needing to reload the page two or three times to get it to display, and having sections of the page randomly dissapear as one flash bit that isn't supported yet crashes _all_ flash in _all_ tabs. And I've been keeping up with the updates on their release page - they keep churning out new versions every month or two, but the bugs I see never seem to be the ones that got fixed.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder what would happen if such disasters had hit a dam or a thermal gas/coal plant...
The massive environmental devastation that resulted would once again be hushed up and glossed over by the majority of the media, just like these ones were. Of course, they didn't even have a 9.0 earthquake or a tsunami, just some incompetence, bad safety protocols, and much looser restrictions on how they store and treat their toxic waste products.
You should learn the definitions of terms before you run around calling people "dumbass". I know I said it was OK and all, but I really didn't mean for someone to do so when they can't even get the terms right.
Well, first of all, I did specify the reason for why I was calling you a dumbass, and it's still valid. Actual research into Einstein's theology does in fact show that he was very much not a creationist as defined by the "intelligent design" group, which is the central point of the article, and thus the discussion. Changing the rules of the discussion every time the old rules make you look like an idiot is also a typical example of weak minds. We're having a debate here, not playing Calvinball.
Strange you would accuse me of quote mining and then counter one of my several arguments based on a quote.
I see that you don't actually know what "quote mining" means - it means taking small snippits of what someone said out of context to make it look like they support a position that they do not actually support. Providing the entire quotation, which research will show is actually representative of their opinion, is not quote mining, it's called "showing evidence" - something you seem to have difficulty with.
Now I don't want to argue about Einstein's theological beliefs. That's not really important.
But you're the one who brought it up! It was kinda central to your poorly thought out and unresearched point - claiming it's not relevant after you've been shown to be wrong is just silly.
My point was that if you were looking to hire Einstein, and during your research you saw the quote above, would that prevent you from hiring him? It doesn't matter what he said beyond that as the quote stands. If Behe said that he didn't believe in a "personal god", would that qualify him to teach biology?
Again, this is where the dumbass factor is coming out - hiring policies are not based on singular out of context quotes, they're based on reviews of actual work. A single comment by someone attempting to explain determinism versus non-determinism to people who don't understand (or want to understand) the math behind n-dimensional physics is not equivalent to the years and volumes of creationist schmutz Behe has spewed, again regardless of any tiny out of context snippet.
Oh, and by saying that you won't read the rest of my quotes is another way of saying, "I can't argue those, so I'll concentrate on the one I think I know something about."
No, that's just your dumbass factor emerging again. People generally put forth their best argument first, so when you start out with quote mining and false statements, generally it means that the rest of what you wrote is just as worthless, and not worth reading. Actually looking at the rest of what you wrote, once again, you are once again taking out of context statements without actually examining the people in question, to make it look like they believe things that they don't. I don't need to debunk every word of the tripe you posted, other people (like TheGratefulNet down below this post) have already done that.
Can you be an Art Professor and believe (random babbling deleted)
Art is a subjective thing. Science is not.
Can a Physicist believe in Creationism
Actually no, they can't. Creationism isn't just about biology, as most creationists spend their bogus attempts at debates sending either random physics questions at biologists, or random biology questions at physicists. They fail at both subjects.
If someone is already a scientist and then it is revealed that they are also a creationist, does that mean they fooled all of their previous professors and the folks who awarded the PhD?
First, if they're a creationist, then they are not a scientist. This is much like saying "If someone is dead, and then it is revealed that they are alive" - yes, technically at some point they may have been one and then changed over to being the other, but you can not be both at once. It means that either they suffered some sort of brain defect which rendered them unable to properly think about the world around themselves, or they were in fact lying and engaging in deceit when they obtained their PhD. It's also possible they received their degree from a non-accredited diploma mill in the first place.
Do you really want to start evaluating someone’s job qualifications based on their personal beliefs?
When those beliefs make it impossible for that person to do the job, yes, they are very much relevant.
This was on the History Channel.
The History Channel also played a program about how the Masonic order was secretly a cult run by the alien Reptoids and the Illuminati to take control of the US government. This was followed by a program about ghosts. I don't think "was on the History Channel" lends much in the way of credibility in the last five to ten years.
So would you not hire Einstein because he said, "God does not play dice with the universe"
That's called quote mining, and is a quick sign that the rest of your post is pointless stupidity. Einstein had a tendency to use poetic statements to attempt to illustrate principles he was trying to communicate.
He also said:
About God, I cannot accept any concept based on the authority of the Church. As long as I can remember, I have resented mass indocrination. I do not believe in the fear of life, in the fear of death, in blind faith. I cannot prove to you that there is no personal God, but if I were to speak of him, I would be a liar. I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil. My God created laws that take care of that. His universe is not ruled by wishful thinking, but by immutable laws.
That sounds pretty much like he falls into the category of "not a creationist", no matter how much you quote-mine and misrepresent things. The same applies to the rest, so yes, you are a dumbass, but it's mostly because you use either poorly researched or deliberately misleading statements to attempt to prop up a failed point.
Neah, there's no law against discriminating based on foul stenches - just incompetence. If they're completely incapable of doing the job (ie: creationists applying for biology, astronomy, geology, ancient history, anthropology, chemistry, or physics related positions) you have to find some other reason for not hiring them. If they reek like a stack of roadkill skunks that have been out in the sun all day, you can list them as "unsuitable for classroom presentation", if you remembered to include teaching as part of their required duties and qualifications.
The trick is going to be making the job postings sufficiently worded that any applicant can be legally rejected based on any non-religion problem you can find that the other (ie: actually qualified) applicants did not display. I imagine the university departments in Texas who have to hire new people will be doing a seriously careful re-wording of any job postings they make.
Companies like Sony have no choice but to do whatever they can in order to make money for their shareholders, that is their only duty in the capitalist system we live in. If they think they can make more money by being nice they will, but if they can make more money by being bastards as is usually the case then they have to do that instead.
That's not how it works.
One of the effects of unethical behavior is that people start to not like you, and protest your actions. This costs you money, and is part of the capitalist system you are saying we should be forgiving them because of - instead, we should be embracing that capitalist system, and making sure that they lose money every time they do something stupid, unethical, or just plain evil. Occupy their time, give them bad press so that people stop buying their products, and every time you do so, make absolutely sure that the reason they are losing money is clear - if the dog craps on the carpet, you don't just sigh and whine to politicians - you rub their nose in it and tell them BAD DOG! And when a corporation misbehaves and pisses on all of their customers, they need to have their noses rubbed in it and be told BAD COMPANY!.
That "duty to the shareholders" you talk about? If unethical behavior actually resulted in losses, then duty to the shareholders would prevent it. People like you who whine "Don't hate the evil company for being evil! Hate the politicians who let them!" are just encouraging them, the same way that petting the dog and ignoring what it has done wrong every time it craps on your carpet encourages it to keep crapping on your carpet.
No, I made me disable access. I left because I got a (much) higher paying job in a different industry. The boss at the old place was a friend of mine, and I explained to him what I was doing and why, as well as making sure that everything was well documented for whoever they eventually had to hire to replace me when the Vice President finally admitted he couldn't also be the entire IT department for a 40 person company.
My last action in my previous sysadmin job was to disable my own old accounts. If I find that they're accessible to me again, it means that:
No, they mean 2560x1440 with progressive scan.
Well that's a suck-tastic downgrade from their current and past video card lines.
I'm sitting at a workstation with a pair of 2560x1600 resolution monitors right now, on an old Quatro FX 4600 NVidia card that runs them just fine. (Seriously - it's nowhere near their former top of the line, which is in the workstation at the other end of the table from me...). Since their old cards could do better, and they're now bragging about being able to do less, why should we be impressed?
Or is this a sign that the HDTV induced stagnation in the monitor market is finally going to get broken? The monitors I've got in my lab here at work cost about $3000 when they were new two years ago, but to replace them right now would cost $5000 each because "nobody wants anything but 1920x1080". I hate HDTV with a passion, because it screwed up my monitor purchasing plans. The last monitor I bought for myself, right before HDTV came out and screwed us all, was 1920x1200 - you can't even find a monitor with that high of a resolution anymore.
The problem there is that the ISPs are not being allowed the option of offering their customers options. The ISPs who provide DSL to customers are being charged these fees by Bell (the telco) and are themselves being charged $1 per gigabyte the customer uses past the first 25GB. Unfortunately, because Bell is both in the ISP and Satellite TV business, there is a massive conflict of interests here - they tend to charge the same per DSL user to the ISP that they charge their own end customers, meaning that if an ISP wants to be able to even enter the market for providing DSL access, they can afford to place about a $1 per month markup on the account in total - and then they have to pay for the outgoing internet bandwidth, tech support, server maintenance, and all of the other aspects of running an ISP based on that $1 per month. The CRTC ruling basically said "Yes Bell, you are now free to charge the ISPs more than you charge your end user customers, thus driving them out of business, and ridding yourself of competition in the ISP business, while simultaneously blocking people from using internet TV and phones to replace the satellite TV and regular phones you sell."
I'm speaking from experience here - when DSL first became available in Canada, I was running an ISP, and as owner of the phone lines, Bell wanted to charge ISPs $2 more per month per DSL customer than Bell themselves charged for home DSL service - and the CRTC thought that was perfectly OK, despite their whole mandate being to prevent monopoly abuses like that. It took massive protest and threats of lawsuits before they decided that perhaps some fairness was required.
These CRTC decisions clearly had nothing to do with the CRTC members' possession of season tickets to sporting events, use of luxury condos at resorts, and other expensive vacations paid for by Telcos and cable companies.
I use a movement sequence, and change my starting key when I need to change my password on a "schedule". All I need to remember is what key to start on. I have six different movement sequences that I use depending on what account it is, and have never had trouble keeping them separate. Then again, I also remember all phone numbers as movement sequences, and need to look at a keypad to tell people what my own phone number is.
Also, it makes using the ipod screen-keyboard to log into anything really annoying. Changing keyboard types is a bigger problem for this password method than schedule-forced password changes.
Most of the time I just quietly fail the ones who do that too - especially since I very vocally warn everyone in the room that there are multiple test versions and their neighbor does not have the same questions. The answers don't line up between the tests, but visually they look the same, so people who think they're being clever copy the multiple choice questions, and then do their own work on the long questions. The only one I ever went after was because it was just so very outrageous - the long answer question said "show your rough work as part of the marks", and instead he just wrote out the final answer that the person beside him had, which contained things that had no relationship to the question on his test - he got 1/60 on the test total, (his neighbor on the other hand had 59/60,) and as it turned out was a chronic cheater. He got a zero on that test, and then I got him kicked out of the country when I caught and reported him a second time in the same semester.
Pretty sure that that violates FERPA. Parents cannot get any information about their kids' college performance unless said kids share it.
Well that would be a good reason for him to not want to send it. It's amazing how intimidating selectively chosen true phrases can be to someone with a guilty conscience. At my own university, the majority of our students are from overseas, and about half of those were sent out of the country by parents who knew they were going to be an embarrassment to the family, and wanted it to happen where the neighbors wouldn't see. They live in absolute terror of their families finding out what they've been doing - I had one student in for an academic misconduct hearing who started out the whole thing with a tear-filled confession and pleading and begging that we not tell his parents. He even confessed to having cheated in two other courses that were long since over with. Nobody had said anything to him yet. The dean said, "Will you sign the memorandum of understanding that you're on permanent probation, and will be expelled if there's any further incidents? You're still getting a zero on this test, but if you do, we'll ignore those other two courses you've just confessed to cheating in." and after it was hastily signed, informed him that the only person who would be telling his parents anything would be him, and she didn't envy his position if he did anything else. Of course, the very next day he got caught cheating again (on the next marked segment of my own class no less), and was kicked out, which caused his student visa to be canceled, and with no degree he wasn't eligible to apply for any other kind of visa. Plagiarism in projects dropped significantly the next year, when I got to truthfully tell my whole class that I had had one student thrown out of the Country for plagiarism.
There is a second stage to his detection method that you've missed here - he's most likely going to also consider the marks on the makeup test as evidence regarding cheating or not cheating.
Got a 99% on the original, but a 60% on the makeup? Gee, I wonder why? No wait... I don't wonder why. I already know. And in the US, failing the makeup that badly under those circumstances is considered enough when combined with all of the other evidence.
I had a problem with a student in my class thinking that memorizing previous tests' answers was the appropriate way of studying. Most students who do that just fail quietly, but this one was a problem because he actually stood up in class and yelled at me for changing the questions from one semester to another. In class. In front of everyone else in the class, most of whom had actually studied. I responded that only an idiot would actually expect the answers to be exactly identical on every test every semester, when the prof had told them ahead of time that there were four different versions of the test in the room to discourage "over-the-shoulder snooping". Apparently he'd memorized the answers to version "3" of the previous semester's test, and wound up with version "2" of the test that semester. Not that it would have helped him anyways, as the question order was different, and he only bothered to memorize "A, C, D, B, B, A, D, C, ...".
Amusingly, I was called into my boss's office for a disciplinary hearing, as the student then complained that I had called him personally an idiot in front of the whole class. I explained what I had said, and what the student in question had done, and was told: "Ok, you're not in trouble, but for future reference, I'm still supposed to tell you that you're not allowed to call your students idiots in class, even when they are."
The problem with that is that you're adding in an extra unnecessary step.
Adding complexity to a model with no actual need for it is counter to logic.
It's like the police investigating someone's death via falling into an open sewer saying "Well, yes, it is entirely possible that Larry walked down the street, but isn't it also equally likely that he stopped and jumped up and down first? Since nobody else was there, and he's dead, we'll never know for sure, so you should believe me when I say that he stopped and jumped up and down first." There's no evidence for it, there's no reason for it to be there, and it's just plain silly to add it in where it's not needed.
Yes, but what did they _do_ with those Beams of light, bulls, birds, showers of gold, swans, and other things? They obsessed over the human forms of mortals. In much the same manner that 4chan does...
When a critical mass of IP Trolls file suits, they will eventually start winning
That's the problem - they file their suits in Texas, so they're already winning. Texas judges see "Patent Lawsuit" and immediately find for the plaintiff, regardless of evidence, propriety, or anything even remotely connected with reality. That's why these things always get filed there. The corporations don't want the patents to go away because they've already spent billions on them, and making them go away would mean they wasted that money (which they did) - and the last thing they want to happen is to feel like they wasted money. It doesn't matter that the trolls will keep suing them for stupid things that should never have been patented, and would never have been allowed through the patent office if the inspector had been sane, sober, or not stupid. All that matters is that they not feel like they wasted money on their own massive pile of invalid crap that shouldn't have been allowed to be patented.
The only people who are calling it "habitable" are journalists who don't read what the scientists actually wrote.
It was supposed to be in the region where liquid water is capable of existing - that does NOT under any circumstances, immediately mean that it's "habitable". It means that there's a possibility of water being liquid - nothing more, nothing less. You can have a lot of situations where there's the possibility of there being liquid water, that are still completely not habitable.
First, just because water "can be liquid" there doesn't mean there actually _is_ any water. It could be a dry, airless rock.
Second, if there is water, there's no requirement that there not be hundreds of other chemicals present that result in it being horribly toxic and corrosive.
Third, there's no knowledge of the planet's size - only it's mass. If it's a big chunk of heavy radioactive elements like Uranium, it might be a ball smaller than the moon with gravity that squashes anything on it's surface flat, and again, completely not habitable - similarly, it could be mostly very light elements and gasses, in which case you'd be facing a "surface" gravity of next to nothing, and no really discernible differentiation between the mostly hydrogen atmosphere, mostly hydrogen and other chemicals ocean, and possibly not even existing ground (much like you'd find in a gas giant like Jupiter or Saturn - Saturn's average density is less than that of water.)
In short: There was no "habitable" planet announced - there was a candidate planet located in the region where water can exist, and it has not been confirmed by other researchers examining their own data, when they went to double-check the results of the original team. That's how science works.
Atheist Communists started plenty of fights over religion.
Derp? That wasn't the question. the question was "When was the last time a war was started because of atheist beliefs? Here's a hint: Never. Wars are fought over "you have resource X and we want it", or "our god doesn't like your god, and he told us to kill you". You're not going to find atheists starting wars over their lack of god anywhere outside of Southpark reruns.
The fact that atheism is relatively new doesn't change the fact that it's just another religion.
Sorry, wrong again. Atheism pre-dates your religion - people didn't believe in god(s) long before they made up yours. And it's not a religion any more than not collecting stamps is a hobby.
I don't know about that man, some batteries are pretty heavy.
Drop one of those things on your foot while you're trying to invert the color palette, and you might be off for some serious worker's compensation claims.
And another one, this one with sound even: http://29a.ch/jswars/
As a person who has taught programming classes before, I can not emphasize how much the idea of a language where my students would be required to write neat, human-readable code in order to have it actually run fills me with joy. After marking 60 assignments in a single sitting, being able to look at the code my students make, and actually read it without having to scroll to the side, or edit it myself (hitting enter and tab a lot) would be really neat.
Sadly, that's not the language that I have to teach, since you can't embed it in a web page and expect it to run on more than a few fringe users' browsers, so I'm stuck teaching JavaScript, which somehow always ends up being either "never hit enter" and all on one line, or else "hit enter and add whitespace completely at random"...
People should not be encouraging "learning" OO programming in PHP - doing so creates some VERY bad habits.
One such bad habit is best exemplified by a job I was hired for a few years ago, to fix a company's internal data tracking application/internal website, which was built entirely in PHP (with an MS Access97 database that was being migrated over to MySQL one table at a time with an SQL bridge "merging" the two ... I didn't design it, I was hired to fix it.)
The first thing I noticed was that the site was super slow. A simple database query was taking 10 minutes to load a table with 100 items in it - they said the old programmer blamed the MS Access database, but I wasn't so sure. When I looked at the code, I realized to my horror that the person who wrote it was obsessed with OO programming, to the point that _everything_ was encapsulated in an object, right down to every table cell and row of the output, which were all containing data transfered from objects that contained the individual row/column items from the query. I re-wrote the code in a completely non-OO version, and the page took exactly 5 seconds to come up. Moving the table over to the MySQL database later on only shortened that to 4 seconds - not a major improvement. Then I spent six months, one page/report/whatever at a time, re-coding their entire system and removing all traces of OO, so that it would actually run in an acceptable manner. After I was done, the only remaining OO code was the database access routines, which handled accessing the merged set of databases, and the site ran much better.
PHP and pure OO coding are not a good combination, for one big reason: PHP is for web applications, which start up, produce a single page, finish, and release their memory completely, destroying any data structures you've created. That means that data structures which are efficient for long-term (read: more than a few seconds) storage of data and ease of access to it may not be good in a web application, because the initialization cost of those structures is higher than the savings they'll give you for the 0.1 seconds of (optimal) anticipated runtime. A bit of OO is okay for it to make coding things easier, but when you're _learning_ OO, you want to get as fully into it as possible, and PHP is a bad language to do that in. Java, Python, C++, and even (shudder) C# are all far better for that purpose.
Nope, npviewer.bin crashes all the time on me too, and the flash 10 for 64 bit only really supports "some" of the features of flash. Lots of flash _including_ sites work ok, but when they're _really_ heavy flash, or use a lot of recent flash features, it pretty much kills the site, with sections missing, needing to reload the page two or three times to get it to display, and having sections of the page randomly dissapear as one flash bit that isn't supported yet crashes _all_ flash in _all_ tabs. And I've been keeping up with the updates on their release page - they keep churning out new versions every month or two, but the bugs I see never seem to be the ones that got fixed.