Well, as they say, 90% of everything is crap. On slashdot, something like 30-40% of comments get modded up, usually to 5, 33% or more of what you see still falls into the 90% category even if moderation is perfect. On Reddit, and with unlimited positive scores in general, you're going to see a much smaller number of comments moderated up to the point of visibility, so you're more likely to be limited to the 10% of comments that are actually good. The problem is, that assumes perfect moderation, which isn't the case. Slashdot is much more likely to catch a good comment that not everyone agrees with because it only takes 4 moderators to agree with it to move it to the top of the pile (baring of course, the "I disagree" downmods). A busy thread on Reddit might require several hundred people to upvote it before it's really visible to the average user which isn't likely to happen for an unpopular post, no matter how informative or insightful it is.
They asked us to leave and they basically said we are going to attempt to capture and jail US Soldiers if they violate any of our laws, which naturally most of them probably have to do in order to accomplish anything useful over there.
This was in direct response to contractors and soldiers committing outright murder of unarmed civilians on the streets of their major cities. Did we forget the helicopter gunship mowing down people minding their own business, and then attacking the people who came to help? How about the Haliburton contractors who opened fire in a public square for no reason? How about the group of soldiers in Afghanistan who've been convicted of randomly picking civilians to kill, essentially for fun, and planting weapons on them after the fact?
Besides all that, the right to enforce you laws inside your own borders is essentially the definition of sovereignty. You make it sound as if the Iraqis were trying to arrest soldiers for speeding when you should know by now that there have been serious criminal acts performed by US soldiers who have as often as not, gotten away with it with a slap on the wrist. It was a reasonable request by any measure, but it was obviously one that Obama couldn't have gone along with, it would have been political suicide. But I have to imagine that they could have leaned on the Iraqi government a whole lot harder and a whole lot longer if they really wanted to keep troops on the ground. Troops or no troops, the Iraqi government receives a lot of support from the US, threatening to yank that away would almost certainly have made the Iraqis change their mind.
There's a bit more too it than that though, dark matter is no longer just a guess, there is more direct evidence to back it up. To extend your analogy, lets say instead of a single ball hanging you have hundreds of them. A follower of the string theory (pun definitely intended) might make a prediction: some of the balls should have a detectable periodic motion from past disturbances. A thorough survey of the floating balls shows that yes, some of them are swinging like pendulums. It doesn't prove that the balls are hanging from strings, but it means that there's yet another effect that a modified theory of gravity has to take into account, which can be explained very easily by positing the strings. Similarly, there have been a host of indirect observations which show that either there is large amounts of matter that we can't detect or there are dozens and dozens of gravitation effects that are not only not included in current theory but in some cases appear to be mutually exclusive.
The part you're ignoring is that unlike the aether, there is actual evidence for dark matter, quite a lot of it actually. It's true that at the time it was conceived it was little more than a fudge factor, but that time has long since passed. The Bullet Cluster, for example, is probably the stongest single piece of evidence, though by no means the only one. It has a core of regular matter surrounded by a large halo of dark matter which can be observed by measuring the gravitational lensing of light passing through the region.
Fair enough, the same effect could be produced by bending spacetime in some other way, but the only way we know about today is with gravitational mass. Scientists find the assumption that there is a kind of matter we can't see much more readily than they will take the assumption that there is some force other than gravity (or some source of gravity other than mass) that warps spacetime to such a degree over such large volumes of space.
It would be trivial to encrypt the image and even more trivial to keep the image on removable media. Without knowing the details, which haven't been released yet, it's impossible to say how secure or insecure this system is. But I'd go far enough to say that it's certainly better than the current situaion, since it's unlike a virus would have access to the image unless it had already compromised the system anyway. Best case, you painlessly restore, worst case is exactly the situation we have today.
First thing I do when I get a new windows PC is make an image of the hard drive and put it somewhere safe. Windows 7 makes this pretty easy with the built in tools, and all you need is a recovery disk to boot into the mode to apply the update so the machine doesn't have to be bootable.
Pragmatism does not have to be divorced from ethics. In fact, all you have to do is append: "while maintaining human rights and abiding the constitution" to your platform. Personally, I think "do whatever empirically (or theoretically if experimental evidence is absent) works best, as best we can, regularly review the results and add them to our decision making body of evidence, all while not trampling human rights" is a great party platform; much better than blinding shouting "smaller government" or "universal healthcare" or "reduce the debt". And do note that I'm not saying a pragmatic party would or would not do those things, just that they would have to show sound, logical reasons for their decisions.
Furthermore, just being a monopoly isn't, generally, enough to get in trouble. Using your monopoly status illegally, generally to force customers to use your other products, is illegal. You'd have to make an argument that Google is unfairly forcing their search users to also use their other services, which is an argument that can probably be made but is going to be hard to sell when nearly all their services are provided for free.
If you are able to safely stop, you stop. It isn't that hard. Yeah, you might have to sit through the light that you could have made it through every so often, but yellow doesn't mean "make it through if you can" it means "stop if you can".
If you are in the intersection when the light turns red, you have the right of way to clear the intersection before anyone else goes. It's really pretty simple and no cop or red light camera anywhere in the US should give you a ticket for it.
Since China is a democratic country, shouldn't they be able to decide it themselves, without US trying to manipulate?
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
inalienable/inlnbl/ Adjective: Unable to be taken away from or given away by the possessor: "inalienable human rights".
Unlike many of the things people throw around as being something the US was founded on the protection of human rights was basically the first one out of the box. If you believe people have inalienable rights it is morally bankrupt to not speak up when you see others being denied them. And I don't pretend the US has been perfect, we've ignored these ideals repeatedly, and not just recently but going back to practically the day the declaration of independence was signed, that still doesn't make it right.
DARPA's total budget is miniscule, less than 0.4% of the US defense spending. Their lack of overhead is unheard of in government organizations, 140 highly educated and knowledgeable industry experts whose sole purpose is to identify technology that is several generations ahead of what anyone else is looking at and make sure it gets funded. Besides that, much of what they fund has serious civilian applications in addition to their military uses.
"He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife."
I have my doubts... no aviation system should rely solely on one data point for navigation. GPS is good, but easily jammed, counting on it in a military situation is questionable. The story would also imply that the Iranians cracked the encryption that military grade GPS uses, which would be far more concerning than merely losing a stealth drone. Until I hear otherwise, I'll have to doubt that the drone has no inertial navigation, VOR navigation, or compass & dead reckoning system.
One thing that makes a difference between FF and IE pushing upgrades, if I have IE6 installed on my machine, it's because there's some horribly written intranet site that will only work in IE6. I'm not saying that every IE6 user can use that excuse, but there exist some number of us for whom it is true. Do they have a way to force a downgrade or install versions side by side?
I don't think he's saying ebooks are cheaper in a general sense, he's saying that cheap ebooks are outselling the more expensive ebooks, which is what is skewing the results. I know I would never go to the bookstore (or even the library) to get a short story and very rarely a novelette, but I've gotten several on my Kindle because the price was right ( $1 ) and their customer ratings were high. So yeah, the Kindle does change my reading material, but that's because A) I refuse to pay $10+ for the ebook edition of a book B) I also refuse to buy a physical copy of a book (yeah, I know blasphemy, whatever. I significantly prefer the convenience of ebooks over paper). And that leaves me with a very different group of books that are in my acceptable price range.
He's paid to be delusional. What's he supposed to say? "iPhone outsells every other phone by an order of magnitude and Android devices in general are rapidly cornering the lion's share of the market and now we've made this commitment to Windows Phone 7 that we can't just drop for a number of reasons" Yeah, I'm sure the shareholders will love that.
What is there to memorize in math above a grade school level? I'm not trying to be difficult, I'm really asking. You need to know the operators of which there are 5 that are really important for 90% of the people out there (+-*/^) and you need to understand what = actually means (it means "equals" as the, the same. It does not mean "the answer goes to the left"). 'Consumer' math follows from the operators. Algebra follows from understanding 'equals'. Geometry I'll admit requires a bit more memorization, but not much that isn't covered by SOHCAHTOA or easily reasoned out by drawing shapes on a piece of grid paper. And calculus flows from Algebra and Geometry easily enough if it's taught the correct way. I'm seeing maybe 10 pieces of information that are required to be memorized to have a basic understanding of calculus (granted, there are lots of shortcuts that could be memorized but they aren't really necessary).
The problem is the fact that grade school and even high school math teachers are not required to take any higher level math to get their degree. They don't understand the subject anywhere near the level they should and (as you basically say in your comment) their discomfort advertises to the students "Hey, even the teacher doesn't really get this stuff, why should I be expected to?". And then the kicker: most elementary school teachers are female. There's been all kinds of research that says when a young girl sees a woman she respects suffer in a subject it can have profound effects on their attitude, which in turn has profound effects on their performance. The same is true for young boys and male teachers, but there are so few male grade school teachers that in the bulk statistics it ends up giving the appearance that girls are bad at math.
IT worker means, I assume, never going over the wall (or berm, fence, what have you). For people stationed strictly on base a warzone can be safer than many parts of the US. Hell, it can be safer than a 45 minute commute every day. It's a calculated risk to earn 3-4x the money, often with significant tax breaks; if student loans and a home mortgage are the prison some slashdotters make them out to be, a year or two of this will earn you a get out of jail free card. Now maybe I'm wrong and the Poster is looking for a job in the field dodging bullets and roping out of helicopters, but the fact is they don't give those jobs to desk jockeys because, guess what, they're not physically and emotionally prepared for it the way a trained soldier is.
I can't think of any greater sin in most pagan religions than murdering a perfectly healthy tree to make your home look pretty. It only sounds pagan because you have no actual concept of what paganism is.
Better yet, if most of the essays are unoriginal why not just pick the ones that are original as the winners and post the archive of all past winners so people know what you're looking for. Most high school students think the scholarship funds and colleges want the boiler plate, "this is why I deserve your attention" type essay. It's up to you to lay out the recommendations and ground rules if you really want something beyond that.
I gave you money, you gave me a product. If I buy a book, the publisher can't sue for me for crossing out the paragraphs I don't like and writing in the margins and nothing the publisher puts in the front cover of the book will convince me otherwise. What I do with the information contained in the product I purshase is my business, so long as I'm not distributing those changes to other people the makers of the software should have absolutely no standing to say what I do with it.
Slashdot Mirror
If a goto would improve the flow of your program odd are high (think: 99.9%) that your program wasn't designed correctly.
Life is defined as something that feeds and reproduces.
So... fire is alive by your definition and a bumble bee drone isn't.
Well, as they say, 90% of everything is crap. On slashdot, something like 30-40% of comments get modded up, usually to 5, 33% or more of what you see still falls into the 90% category even if moderation is perfect. On Reddit, and with unlimited positive scores in general, you're going to see a much smaller number of comments moderated up to the point of visibility, so you're more likely to be limited to the 10% of comments that are actually good. The problem is, that assumes perfect moderation, which isn't the case. Slashdot is much more likely to catch a good comment that not everyone agrees with because it only takes 4 moderators to agree with it to move it to the top of the pile (baring of course, the "I disagree" downmods). A busy thread on Reddit might require several hundred people to upvote it before it's really visible to the average user which isn't likely to happen for an unpopular post, no matter how informative or insightful it is.
They asked us to leave and they basically said we are going to attempt to capture and jail US Soldiers if they violate any of our laws, which naturally most of them probably have to do in order to accomplish anything useful over there.
This was in direct response to contractors and soldiers committing outright murder of unarmed civilians on the streets of their major cities. Did we forget the helicopter gunship mowing down people minding their own business, and then attacking the people who came to help? How about the Haliburton contractors who opened fire in a public square for no reason? How about the group of soldiers in Afghanistan who've been convicted of randomly picking civilians to kill, essentially for fun, and planting weapons on them after the fact?
Besides all that, the right to enforce you laws inside your own borders is essentially the definition of sovereignty. You make it sound as if the Iraqis were trying to arrest soldiers for speeding when you should know by now that there have been serious criminal acts performed by US soldiers who have as often as not, gotten away with it with a slap on the wrist. It was a reasonable request by any measure, but it was obviously one that Obama couldn't have gone along with, it would have been political suicide. But I have to imagine that they could have leaned on the Iraqi government a whole lot harder and a whole lot longer if they really wanted to keep troops on the ground. Troops or no troops, the Iraqi government receives a lot of support from the US, threatening to yank that away would almost certainly have made the Iraqis change their mind.
There's a bit more too it than that though, dark matter is no longer just a guess, there is more direct evidence to back it up. To extend your analogy, lets say instead of a single ball hanging you have hundreds of them. A follower of the string theory (pun definitely intended) might make a prediction: some of the balls should have a detectable periodic motion from past disturbances. A thorough survey of the floating balls shows that yes, some of them are swinging like pendulums. It doesn't prove that the balls are hanging from strings, but it means that there's yet another effect that a modified theory of gravity has to take into account, which can be explained very easily by positing the strings. Similarly, there have been a host of indirect observations which show that either there is large amounts of matter that we can't detect or there are dozens and dozens of gravitation effects that are not only not included in current theory but in some cases appear to be mutually exclusive.
The part you're ignoring is that unlike the aether, there is actual evidence for dark matter, quite a lot of it actually. It's true that at the time it was conceived it was little more than a fudge factor, but that time has long since passed. The Bullet Cluster, for example, is probably the stongest single piece of evidence, though by no means the only one. It has a core of regular matter surrounded by a large halo of dark matter which can be observed by measuring the gravitational lensing of light passing through the region.
Fair enough, the same effect could be produced by bending spacetime in some other way, but the only way we know about today is with gravitational mass. Scientists find the assumption that there is a kind of matter we can't see much more readily than they will take the assumption that there is some force other than gravity (or some source of gravity other than mass) that warps spacetime to such a degree over such large volumes of space.
It would be trivial to encrypt the image and even more trivial to keep the image on removable media. Without knowing the details, which haven't been released yet, it's impossible to say how secure or insecure this system is. But I'd go far enough to say that it's certainly better than the current situaion, since it's unlike a virus would have access to the image unless it had already compromised the system anyway. Best case, you painlessly restore, worst case is exactly the situation we have today.
First thing I do when I get a new windows PC is make an image of the hard drive and put it somewhere safe. Windows 7 makes this pretty easy with the built in tools, and all you need is a recovery disk to boot into the mode to apply the update so the machine doesn't have to be bootable.
Pragmatism does not have to be divorced from ethics. In fact, all you have to do is append: "while maintaining human rights and abiding the constitution" to your platform. Personally, I think "do whatever empirically (or theoretically if experimental evidence is absent) works best, as best we can, regularly review the results and add them to our decision making body of evidence, all while not trampling human rights" is a great party platform; much better than blinding shouting "smaller government" or "universal healthcare" or "reduce the debt". And do note that I'm not saying a pragmatic party would or would not do those things, just that they would have to show sound, logical reasons for their decisions.
Furthermore, just being a monopoly isn't, generally, enough to get in trouble. Using your monopoly status illegally, generally to force customers to use your other products, is illegal. You'd have to make an argument that Google is unfairly forcing their search users to also use their other services, which is an argument that can probably be made but is going to be hard to sell when nearly all their services are provided for free.
If you are able to safely stop, you stop. It isn't that hard. Yeah, you might have to sit through the light that you could have made it through every so often, but yellow doesn't mean "make it through if you can" it means "stop if you can".
If you are in the intersection when the light turns red, you have the right of way to clear the intersection before anyone else goes. It's really pretty simple and no cop or red light camera anywhere in the US should give you a ticket for it.
Since China is a democratic country, shouldn't they be able to decide it themselves, without US trying to manipulate?
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
inalienable/inlnbl/
Adjective: Unable to be taken away from or given away by the possessor: "inalienable human rights".
Unlike many of the things people throw around as being something the US was founded on the protection of human rights was basically the first one out of the box. If you believe people have inalienable rights it is morally bankrupt to not speak up when you see others being denied them. And I don't pretend the US has been perfect, we've ignored these ideals repeatedly, and not just recently but going back to practically the day the declaration of independence was signed, that still doesn't make it right.
DARPA's total budget is miniscule, less than 0.4% of the US defense spending. Their lack of overhead is unheard of in government organizations, 140 highly educated and knowledgeable industry experts whose sole purpose is to identify technology that is several generations ahead of what anyone else is looking at and make sure it gets funded. Besides that, much of what they fund has serious civilian applications in addition to their military uses.
Some things that are being funded today with obvious civilian uses:
Reusable Launch Vehicle
Artificial Intelligence
Powered Exoskeleton
Thought Controlled Prosthetic
Brain Computer Interface
Distributed Satellites
"He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife."
~Douglas Adams
I have my doubts... no aviation system should rely solely on one data point for navigation. GPS is good, but easily jammed, counting on it in a military situation is questionable. The story would also imply that the Iranians cracked the encryption that military grade GPS uses, which would be far more concerning than merely losing a stealth drone. Until I hear otherwise, I'll have to doubt that the drone has no inertial navigation, VOR navigation, or compass & dead reckoning system.
One thing that makes a difference between FF and IE pushing upgrades, if I have IE6 installed on my machine, it's because there's some horribly written intranet site that will only work in IE6. I'm not saying that every IE6 user can use that excuse, but there exist some number of us for whom it is true. Do they have a way to force a downgrade or install versions side by side?
I don't think he's saying ebooks are cheaper in a general sense, he's saying that cheap ebooks are outselling the more expensive ebooks, which is what is skewing the results. I know I would never go to the bookstore (or even the library) to get a short story and very rarely a novelette, but I've gotten several on my Kindle because the price was right ( $1 ) and their customer ratings were high. So yeah, the Kindle does change my reading material, but that's because A) I refuse to pay $10+ for the ebook edition of a book B) I also refuse to buy a physical copy of a book (yeah, I know blasphemy, whatever. I significantly prefer the convenience of ebooks over paper). And that leaves me with a very different group of books that are in my acceptable price range.
He's paid to be delusional. What's he supposed to say? "iPhone outsells every other phone by an order of magnitude and Android devices in general are rapidly cornering the lion's share of the market and now we've made this commitment to Windows Phone 7 that we can't just drop for a number of reasons" Yeah, I'm sure the shareholders will love that.
What is there to memorize in math above a grade school level? I'm not trying to be difficult, I'm really asking. You need to know the operators of which there are 5 that are really important for 90% of the people out there (+-*/^) and you need to understand what = actually means (it means "equals" as the, the same. It does not mean "the answer goes to the left"). 'Consumer' math follows from the operators. Algebra follows from understanding 'equals'. Geometry I'll admit requires a bit more memorization, but not much that isn't covered by SOHCAHTOA or easily reasoned out by drawing shapes on a piece of grid paper. And calculus flows from Algebra and Geometry easily enough if it's taught the correct way. I'm seeing maybe 10 pieces of information that are required to be memorized to have a basic understanding of calculus (granted, there are lots of shortcuts that could be memorized but they aren't really necessary).
The problem is the fact that grade school and even high school math teachers are not required to take any higher level math to get their degree. They don't understand the subject anywhere near the level they should and (as you basically say in your comment) their discomfort advertises to the students "Hey, even the teacher doesn't really get this stuff, why should I be expected to?". And then the kicker: most elementary school teachers are female. There's been all kinds of research that says when a young girl sees a woman she respects suffer in a subject it can have profound effects on their attitude, which in turn has profound effects on their performance. The same is true for young boys and male teachers, but there are so few male grade school teachers that in the bulk statistics it ends up giving the appearance that girls are bad at math.
IT worker means, I assume, never going over the wall (or berm, fence, what have you). For people stationed strictly on base a warzone can be safer than many parts of the US. Hell, it can be safer than a 45 minute commute every day. It's a calculated risk to earn 3-4x the money, often with significant tax breaks; if student loans and a home mortgage are the prison some slashdotters make them out to be, a year or two of this will earn you a get out of jail free card. Now maybe I'm wrong and the Poster is looking for a job in the field dodging bullets and roping out of helicopters, but the fact is they don't give those jobs to desk jockeys because, guess what, they're not physically and emotionally prepared for it the way a trained soldier is.
I can't think of any greater sin in most pagan religions than murdering a perfectly healthy tree to make your home look pretty. It only sounds pagan because you have no actual concept of what paganism is.
Better yet, if most of the essays are unoriginal why not just pick the ones that are original as the winners and post the archive of all past winners so people know what you're looking for. Most high school students think the scholarship funds and colleges want the boiler plate, "this is why I deserve your attention" type essay. It's up to you to lay out the recommendations and ground rules if you really want something beyond that.
(c) Blackhats are leaving infected USB sticks on public transit on purpose to act as honey pots and spread infections.
I gave you money, you gave me a product. If I buy a book, the publisher can't sue for me for crossing out the paragraphs I don't like and writing in the margins and nothing the publisher puts in the front cover of the book will convince me otherwise. What I do with the information contained in the product I purshase is my business, so long as I'm not distributing those changes to other people the makers of the software should have absolutely no standing to say what I do with it.