There's no evidence that certain demographics are actually better at computer science. The general barrier is desire; people who aren't white/asian males generally don't sign up for it. Those who do often complain that they're left out or ostracized.
When I was taking CS at college, there was one female CS major out of about fifteen. I don't actually know if she lacked opportunities - I was a returning student and didn't live on the campus, and when I talked to her I was usually talking about calculus rather than CS - but one of the complaints women have had was that they weren't welcome in the "boy's club."
By requiring all students to study CS, that problem is mostly eliminated (except in cases where there's only one black kid in the class, for instance - not much you can do about that).
"Equal achievement" doesn't mean every kid gets the same grade. It means the curriculum is designed to make the grade any particular child will receive independent of their race, social status, etc. In other words, they want to avoid a situation where all the black kids are flunking, for instance. I doubt it's actually achievable - culture does have some effect on the willingness of a student to learn - but they want to eliminate race/class/etc. from the equation as much as possible.
Homo sapiens survived them, sure. Human civilization has yet to pass that test.
I think we'll do all right, personally - we've got the technology to deal with most of it. It's the change in the weather patterns and the economic effects from that (think farmland becoming unusable due to drought, industries having to relocate, sea levels rising above the level of coastal cities, etc.) that we'll have the hardest time with. I highly doubt we'll have a dark age, but a prolonged economic depression in parts of the developed world will change things quite a bit.
Equal compulsion is the only real method to actually accomplish "equal achievement." Otherwise, it'll only be the white and asian boys signing up for it.
Listing the various identity groups is standard fare for government programs. There's still a lot of people around who remember segregation.
Obviously, learning to read, write and do basic math will be set aside for learning how to program.
Funny, I didn't read anything about that, and I can't imagine anyone seriously suggesting it.
Here is the problem, these people don't have a clue what is learned at what levels. And while I am all for teaching Computer science and such where it is profitable to do so, starting before kids can even write and do math is not "computer science" at all, it is just dick waving "hey look what I did for the kids!" political crap.
Depends on the curriculum. There are "computer science" concepts that can be taught at an early age, if your definition of the term is broad enough. My kid can't read yet, but can get around on the computer all right.
Here's an idea. Why not focus on reading, writing, math and building upon those at the appropriate times? And what about all those kids who don't want to be computer geeks, but rather artists, business people, biologists, doctors, lawyers etc? Are we going to build all those careers into our children's curriculum as well?
No one is suggesting throwing reading, writing, or math out the window. And as far as kids who don't want to be computer geeks - so what? I didn't want to be an athlete, but I still took gym. I didn't want to be a classical musician, but I still had to learn the recorder in third grade. I didn't want to be an artist, but I still had to take art class all through elementary school. If you actually paid some attention, you'd notice that art (art class), business (keyboarding, english, junior-high math), biology (biology, life science), medicine (see biology, health class), and law (social studies, government, history) are pretty much already covered. If anything, it's the trades that are underrepresented; most schools no longer have shop class.
The fact is, factory learning is dead, we just don't know it yet. We have spent the last 250 years in factory schools, built using factory ideas to populate our factories with workers.
Your knowledge of history is quite lacking. "Factory" education was only important outside of the northeast starting about a hundred and fifty years ago.
Today, we need a change in how we educate people, so that they are ready for information jobs.
What do you think this is?
This requires scrapping the "one size fits all" education model that is clearly dying (NCLB, Common Core etc), and replacing it with student paced education system where each student has a customized curriculum, based on ABILITY and WILLINGNESS to learn.
Your knowledge of human growth, psychology, and public funding is also lacking.
Interests change. Just because a third grader isn't interested in science class doesn't mean they won't be interested in or required to know that information as adults. Kids change as they grow up. Younger kids are interested in playing. Older kids are interested in getting laid or hanging out with their friends. They attend school and learn the things they do because they're forced to.
The federal standards exist because there are some states or cities that consistently produce undereducated graduates. Some of it is cultural; kids in the 'hood don't see the need for education as much as kids in a white, upper-class neighborhood. Some is based on demographics or economics; Mississippi doesn't have access to the public funds that Alaska does. The standards suck, and pretty much no one likes them, but no one seems to be able to come up with a plan that's both better and - this is important - affordable, while providing equal access to education.
Equal access to education is important. This is America, where the circumstances of your birth and upbringing are (theoretically, anyway) not a limiting factor on what you can accomplish. Someone growing up in inner Detroit should ha
"Special Needs" generally refers to physically handicapped kids or kids with a learning disability. In other words, they need to accommodate children who are deaf, blind, or dyslexic.
Kids with IQs below 72 tend to have their own curriculum and (around here, anyway) are not expected to keep up with the same standards as kids with normal intelligence.
That doesn't mean that all the kids need to get the same grade. And I'm sure "special needs" doesn't mean the developmentally challenged kids (who generally get their own curriculum), but kids with handicaps or IEPs. In other words, screenreaders or braille pads have to be available, and the IEP program has to adapt to the requirements for students with particular learning disabilities.
"Access" means all schools in the area get the same equipment and programs (and theoretically, all teachers receive appropriate training), even if it's in the middle of the ghetto and surrounded by barbed wire and metal detectors. "Achievement" means it's a required course for everyone, since CS traditionally attracts white or asian males.
That varies, though. I've got an AS in computer science from a community college. There was little to no theoretical training involved - just three classes - Java, C, and Visual Basic programming (all taught by a guy that never stepped away from COBOL).
Of course, an associate's degree in computer science is worth slightly more than toilet paper, if only because of the fancy ink.
Plus running the wires, patching and painting any holes in the drywall (or plaster, for older homes), figuring out what the idiot that wired the place was thinking when he ran the wires the way he did, crawling around in the attic or crawlspace (been in a poorly ventilated attic in the dead of summer?) and trying to fish a cable through (possibly through insulation), understanding the applicable codes (federal, state, and local) and making sure your work meets them, liaising with the local power authority if you need to move the outside wire (a herculean effort in some places), oh, and making absolutely sure that your work isn't going to burn the house down and kill people. I can't imagine the insurance is very cheap.
And that's just for residential. Commercial is a completely different world. Go into a factory and start following the conduit sometime.
There's a world of difference between what an electrician has to do and just putting an extra plug over the workbench in the garage.
Of course, there's no way to be sure why people in the bible belt tend to be religious, but living here most of my life has given me some clues.
We've got 3.5 million people in Oklahoma. Half of those live in Oklahoma City and Tulsa. The other half lives in smaller towns or rural areas.
The type of people who were able to survive and thrive here in the early days are the type of people that tend towards religion; hard-working, self-reliant, conservative types. Church was often the only social contact they had in a typical week. Education beyond the very basics wasn't readily available and generally deemed unnecessary. Hospitals were few and far between. Law enforcement was negligible - you protected your property and family yourself. Flooding, tornadoes, drought, violence, crime, and sickness would take loved ones and destroy the efforts of labor, sometimes taking entire towns. Then add the dust bowl and the depopulation of the western part of the state. If the only place to turn for help is God, then that's where people will turn.
Our current leaders are only a generation or two behind those events. We have access to good education and hospitals, and the towns are larger now, but attitudes change over generations. Give us time.
Kansas is a bit older, but its history just means that people were in the position that early Oklahomans were in for longer. Kansas didn't really begin to modernize until around the same time as Oklahoma. I suspect the same applies to much of Texas and Nebraska, although Texas has some older, larger cities where religion isn't necessarily the norm.
As far as Pat's comments (or Falwell's concerning Katrina), that's just the same old bullshit warmed over and re-served that religious leaders have been spouting forever. The oldest example of that I can think of is the obvious one - Sodom (there is archaeological evidence that it was a real city). It's unlikely to attract any followers, but it works on the believers. I doubt any of the mouthpieces will use the "mysterious ways" line - they'll just get people to pray for our poor, damp and bedraggled selves and play it off like it's a bigger deal than it is (while there is some major damage and loss of life, the vast majority of us are fine and we have systems in place to deal with it. Like I said before, this isn't exactly a rare occurrence.).
And those guys that paint messages on their fenceline? Yeah, I dunno about them. You see that more in Kansas than Oklahoma. My personal theory is that it's because the evangelical churches have flourished here, with their doctrine on "spreading the word." You know the old saying - the loudest aren't necessarily the majority.
I personally don't think using it to "organize" your talk is very effective, but it's great for props. How much CPU time is used in a particular part of your code? Put up a graph showing it. It gets everyone on the same page and lets them discuss it. Throw up a diagram and use a pointer to direct attention to how the different areas interact. Discussing a method of rendering surface normals in a 3D model? Put up images that compare the results side by side. I've seen it used very effectively.
If you just put up slides that show your main points, you're wasting everyone's time and attention. Take a class on giving speeches, learn how to do it right, and stop distracting your audience. The only person that needs to see your outline is you.
When I was in the Air Force, I regularly received Powerpoint attachments in my email to tell me things like "Softball game against Services Squadron on Tuesday at 5pm!" with tons of clipart and whatnot. They were always from officers. They must have a Powerpoint course at the Air Force Academy. I decided that while Powerpoint was a useful tool, officers should be banned from using it.
Oklahoma gets flooded every decade or so. Some parts even more often (the next town over floods almost every time it rains... it's a poor town so people can't afford to move).
It's because of a mixture of terrain and weather patterns. Large parts of the state are fairly flat with wide, shallow river basins. The Arkansas river near here is very wide and usually only a couple feet deep - you can walk across it and not get your shirt wet. People take their 4x4s out on it and drive between the sand bars. Canoeing on it involves getting out and dragging your canoe every half a mile or so. So when we get a lot of rain, which happens every few years, the water has nowhere to go.
It's no different than tornadoes or drought. You live here, you get used to it. Unless you live in Moore, which is rapidly becoming a running gag around here.
You can blame God for it if you like (or Obama, he gets blamed for everything around here), but that's like blaming God for earthquakes in Tokyo and California, or hurricanes in the Caribbean. The "ways" aren't exactly mysterious. You live in the great plains, you're going to get floods and tornadoes.
Space weapons aren't illegal. You just can't have orbital weapon platforms for weapons of mass destruction (think nukes).
It's perfectly legal for any country to send up a satellite that could attack other satellites or space stations. It's even fine to put one up there that uses conventional warheads or kinetic weapons against targets on earth.
It's also perfectly legal to put up weapon platforms that are capable of launching nukes from space - it's just not legal to arm them with actual warheads.
The reason we don't do much of any of that is because a) we have no reason to attack anyone in space (yet), b) we can shoot down satellites from earth just fine, and c) we can attack other places on earth more efficiently and with less cost without orbital platforms.
I don't have any sympathy for the Confederacy. My state wasn't around then, and Indian Territory (which fought for the south) wasn't actually the precursor to Oklahoma (it just took up the same land). That said, there is a very sound basis for the requirement for slavery.
Slavery being a state-by-state option doesn't work. A person has rights, even non-citizens, that slaves do not. The US Constitution (and both federal and state laws) had to bend over backwards to make a viable legal framework for this.
That's because the status of a person isn't a state issue. It's a federal one. The federal government determines if you're a citizen, a resident legal or illegal alien, or a nonresident foreign national. Crossing state lines does not change your status.
By requiring slavery, the status of "slave" became equal in all states.
There's also the notion that since slaves were property, a slaveowner would be able to take his property with him anywhere in the country.
The general framework of the constitution would have worked well for the Confederacy, although I'd be surprised if (had they won) they wouldn't have made amendments shortly after the war. They were a bit pressed for time when they adopted it. State rights would probably have been a key issue.
Also, from a practical standpoint, given how much trouble slavery had caused for the US government, the CS probably wanted to avoid unnecessary infighting. And there's the point that no state was actually required to sign on with the Confederacy - if Georgia, for instance, wanted to be its own country, it was certainly free to do so.
1) Your idea of a republic doesn't resemble any actual government in the world. Idealism is nice, I suppose, but that's just not the way things work. Also, I've met quite a few libertarians who believe (as did pre-civil war Democrats) that the government shouldn't be responsible for public infrastructure, such as roads. The free market - that magic bullet that fixes everything - will take care of it.
2) I was not arguing that the government would force addicts to seek treatment, only that libertarians would offer no assistance in doing so. And from what I've seen, many libertarians fully believe that no, they should not help addicts.
3) You saying this doesn't happen? Also,
4) The idea that those with money shouldn't be responsible for those without money (at least insofar as taxation is concerned) is one of the core principles of libertarianism. Anything else would be wealth redistribution. To quote one libertarian I know personally, "that's what churches are for."
Just as an aside, I do generally agree with the libertarian ideas on social issues. Too bad the rest of the Republican party doesn't.
It's a complicated issue, but a lot of it boils down to what level of government is doing it.
In the case of municipal ISPs, it's a local government. Local governments provide all kinds of services to the public as a matter of course. Around here, they provide electricity, water, a library, police, fire, trash collection, sewer, landfill, permitting, zoning, street maintenance, free WIFI (which sucks), and all kinds of other things.
The federal government can't provide most of those things, by law. States can, depending on their constitutions, and local governments can depending on state laws and their own charters. This is basically what the "states' rights" debate is all about. It's been going on since this country was founded, and will likely continue until the Canadians finish their war machines, stop acting so polite to everyone, and take over the world (at which point we'll get decent health care and maple syrup).
Health care is contentious because most proposals for an actual decent healthcare system involve taking our current federal health care system (medicare) and extending it to everyone (it currently only covers people of retirement age). Medicare is considered "socialist" by a lot of groups on the right, but since it benefits the elderly, and the elderly vote, it won't be going away. Extending it out would mean more power in the hands of the federal government (a big no-no for the libertarians) and higher taxes (a big no-no for Republicans in general). Plus it would shake up the medical industry, which pulls in money hands-over-fist with the current system and doesn't want to see it change (and can afford lobbyists).
You have to understand that most people here don't actually understand what "socialist" means. The older generation grew up with cold-war era anti-communist propaganda, so "socialism" has bad connotations among a lot of the population. The right and their media mouthpieces use the word all the time in manners that Europeans (who actually do understand what socialism is) would find baffling. It's the nature of politics.
We could spend one quarter of the money on treatment programs and end up with fewer drug abusers than we've managed with the "War on Drugs".
That's not how libertarians work.
It's more like:
1) Abolish laws that make drugs illegal, thus saving money on prisons and law enforcement, and lower taxes accordingly 2) Let addicted people pay for their own treatment, "entitlement" and whatnot 3) Wealthy Americans install better security or live in gated communities, paid for by the savings in taxes 4) Who cares about everyone else? If they were important, they'd have money.
If you've been around for a while, you've seen how ads have gotten consistently worse since the beginning. Adblocking is a normal response.
Remember, spam is a type of advertisement. You don't see very many people advocating it. Telemarketing is another. Hardly anyone cries about the do not call list.
Google's approach (tracking aside) is the right one. Their ads generally don't bother people. Contrast that with the last few years of video ads (with sound!) or the "darken the page and load some stupid thing in the middle" thing that's getting so popular.
Advertisers have to deal with the fact that being annoying is going to lose them customers. This is a good thing. Without people adblocking to keep them in check, the internet would be unusable.
In old versions of UNIX (not open source, but only because there was no such distinction at the time - the source was very much available) the compiler would add code to any program you tried to compile named 'login'. You could look at the source for the login program all you want and never see the backdoor. You also would have a hard time finding the code in the C compiler.
And this was just something Ken Thompson did to prove that he could. Imagine what the NSA would be capable of.
Umm... Perhaps metric never evolved a common unit there (e.g. decimeters) because it's really unnecessary? Just like you don't need specific units between inches and thousandths of an inch (3 orders of magnitude), metric folks somehow manage to deal with 2 orders of magnitude quite easily without an intermediate unit.
I don't need to convert thousandths of an inch to anything because I'm effectively not measuring the same things with them.
For instance, I would measure a table leg in inches, but never need to convert that to thousandths. I might measure the amount I need to trim off a tenon to fit into a mortise in thousandths (I generally don't - I hit it with a plane or chisel a few times and test the fit again - but that's down to style) - but again, I don't need to convert that anywhere.
That's kind of the point - metric units are a "one size fits all" solution. For a woodworker, it makes sense to have units around the size of feet and inches. For a farmer, yards, acres, etc. make a lot more sense. You use the units that most closely match the areas you need. I could certainly do all my woodworking using fractions of a yard, or a farmer could measure his field in square feet, but it'd be silly when there are much more appropriate units available.
I'm certainly not suggesting that it's impossible to do common tasks in the metric system. What I am suggesting is that they're not using units tailored for the purpose they are being applied to.
What possible reason do you have to laugh at the metric system, other than the rather arbitrary feeling that you specifically want a measurement unit equal to about 1/3 of a meter?
What's funny (only marginally, but still) is what I've stated above; they're using units that are inappropriate for their purpose. Measuring lake volume in acre-feet makes a lot of sense for the people that use that unit; using cubic meters seems downright silly. It's like seeing someone climb mountains in ballet slippers.
What Google products (other than datacenters, which it builds where power is already available) would benefit from gen IV reactors? Hint: you're never going to get a phone with a thorium reactor built into it.
I'm certainly not against development of smaller reactors - lead-cooled fast reactors have a lot of promise for powering remote areas, for instance - but why would it make sense for Google to invest in them rather than technology that directly impacts its business?
It makes a lot of sense when you consider what it's meant to measure.
Lakes (and more importantly, reservoirs) are measured in acre-feet. We measure the land in acres. When a reservoir fills up, we can see how much land is covered for every foot the water rises. You create a table for that and you can tell the volume of water based on the depth.
Acre-inches is also commonly used, especially when figuring things like water release from a dam. It's generally not used for things like water in a river, unless an upstream dam is discussing water release with a downstream dam. For water in a river, we do cubic feet per minute.
Yeah, I know, it's not base 10, but we've been using these measurements for a long time and it's not like conversion is terribly hard when necessary - and it's generally not necessary. Ease of conversion is overrated. For example, I do woodworking as a hobby - I have very handy units of feet, inches, and thousandths of an inch (which I rarely use myself, but some woodworkers do). I can convert between inches and feet easily, but I have no need to convert any of my measurements to yards or miles. With metric, I could do these conversions easily, but I'm stuck with a measurement system that gives me no widely-used unit between something a bit less than half an inch and something a bit longer than a yard.
It's the same with most things. How often do you actually need to convert units in daily life? Unless you're an engineer or something similar, you probably don't*.
So you continue to laugh at our measurement system, and we'll continue to laugh at yours.
* obvious exception of cooking inserted here. The metric recipes tend to use measurements of mass rather than volume for many ingredients, mostly because you don't have a very good selection of volume units. Still, anyone that's been cooking for a while knows how many teaspoons are in a tablespoon, and how many tablespoons are in an ounce - and cup->pint->quart->gallon isn't very difficult, either.
Slashdot Mirror
There's no evidence that certain demographics are actually better at computer science. The general barrier is desire; people who aren't white/asian males generally don't sign up for it. Those who do often complain that they're left out or ostracized.
When I was taking CS at college, there was one female CS major out of about fifteen. I don't actually know if she lacked opportunities - I was a returning student and didn't live on the campus, and when I talked to her I was usually talking about calculus rather than CS - but one of the complaints women have had was that they weren't welcome in the "boy's club."
By requiring all students to study CS, that problem is mostly eliminated (except in cases where there's only one black kid in the class, for instance - not much you can do about that).
"Equal achievement" doesn't mean every kid gets the same grade. It means the curriculum is designed to make the grade any particular child will receive independent of their race, social status, etc. In other words, they want to avoid a situation where all the black kids are flunking, for instance. I doubt it's actually achievable - culture does have some effect on the willingness of a student to learn - but they want to eliminate race/class/etc. from the equation as much as possible.
Homo sapiens survived them, sure. Human civilization has yet to pass that test.
I think we'll do all right, personally - we've got the technology to deal with most of it. It's the change in the weather patterns and the economic effects from that (think farmland becoming unusable due to drought, industries having to relocate, sea levels rising above the level of coastal cities, etc.) that we'll have the hardest time with. I highly doubt we'll have a dark age, but a prolonged economic depression in parts of the developed world will change things quite a bit.
Equal compulsion is the only real method to actually accomplish "equal achievement." Otherwise, it'll only be the white and asian boys signing up for it.
Listing the various identity groups is standard fare for government programs. There's still a lot of people around who remember segregation.
Obviously, learning to read, write and do basic math will be set aside for learning how to program.
Funny, I didn't read anything about that, and I can't imagine anyone seriously suggesting it.
Here is the problem, these people don't have a clue what is learned at what levels. And while I am all for teaching Computer science and such where it is profitable to do so, starting before kids can even write and do math is not "computer science" at all, it is just dick waving "hey look what I did for the kids!" political crap.
Depends on the curriculum. There are "computer science" concepts that can be taught at an early age, if your definition of the term is broad enough. My kid can't read yet, but can get around on the computer all right.
Here's an idea. Why not focus on reading, writing, math and building upon those at the appropriate times? And what about all those kids who don't want to be computer geeks, but rather artists, business people, biologists, doctors, lawyers etc? Are we going to build all those careers into our children's curriculum as well?
No one is suggesting throwing reading, writing, or math out the window. And as far as kids who don't want to be computer geeks - so what? I didn't want to be an athlete, but I still took gym. I didn't want to be a classical musician, but I still had to learn the recorder in third grade. I didn't want to be an artist, but I still had to take art class all through elementary school. If you actually paid some attention, you'd notice that art (art class), business (keyboarding, english, junior-high math), biology (biology, life science), medicine (see biology, health class), and law (social studies, government, history) are pretty much already covered. If anything, it's the trades that are underrepresented; most schools no longer have shop class.
The fact is, factory learning is dead, we just don't know it yet. We have spent the last 250 years in factory schools, built using factory ideas to populate our factories with workers.
Your knowledge of history is quite lacking. "Factory" education was only important outside of the northeast starting about a hundred and fifty years ago.
Today, we need a change in how we educate people, so that they are ready for information jobs.
What do you think this is?
This requires scrapping the "one size fits all" education model that is clearly dying (NCLB, Common Core etc), and replacing it with student paced education system where each student has a customized curriculum, based on ABILITY and WILLINGNESS to learn.
Your knowledge of human growth, psychology, and public funding is also lacking.
Interests change. Just because a third grader isn't interested in science class doesn't mean they won't be interested in or required to know that information as adults. Kids change as they grow up. Younger kids are interested in playing. Older kids are interested in getting laid or hanging out with their friends. They attend school and learn the things they do because they're forced to.
The federal standards exist because there are some states or cities that consistently produce undereducated graduates. Some of it is cultural; kids in the 'hood don't see the need for education as much as kids in a white, upper-class neighborhood. Some is based on demographics or economics; Mississippi doesn't have access to the public funds that Alaska does. The standards suck, and pretty much no one likes them, but no one seems to be able to come up with a plan that's both better and - this is important - affordable, while providing equal access to education.
Equal access to education is important. This is America, where the circumstances of your birth and upbringing are (theoretically, anyway) not a limiting factor on what you can accomplish. Someone growing up in inner Detroit should ha
"Special Needs" generally refers to physically handicapped kids or kids with a learning disability. In other words, they need to accommodate children who are deaf, blind, or dyslexic.
Kids with IQs below 72 tend to have their own curriculum and (around here, anyway) are not expected to keep up with the same standards as kids with normal intelligence.
That doesn't mean that all the kids need to get the same grade. And I'm sure "special needs" doesn't mean the developmentally challenged kids (who generally get their own curriculum), but kids with handicaps or IEPs. In other words, screenreaders or braille pads have to be available, and the IEP program has to adapt to the requirements for students with particular learning disabilities.
"Access" means all schools in the area get the same equipment and programs (and theoretically, all teachers receive appropriate training), even if it's in the middle of the ghetto and surrounded by barbed wire and metal detectors. "Achievement" means it's a required course for everyone, since CS traditionally attracts white or asian males.
That varies, though. I've got an AS in computer science from a community college. There was little to no theoretical training involved - just three classes - Java, C, and Visual Basic programming (all taught by a guy that never stepped away from COBOL).
Of course, an associate's degree in computer science is worth slightly more than toilet paper, if only because of the fancy ink.
Plus running the wires, patching and painting any holes in the drywall (or plaster, for older homes), figuring out what the idiot that wired the place was thinking when he ran the wires the way he did, crawling around in the attic or crawlspace (been in a poorly ventilated attic in the dead of summer?) and trying to fish a cable through (possibly through insulation), understanding the applicable codes (federal, state, and local) and making sure your work meets them, liaising with the local power authority if you need to move the outside wire (a herculean effort in some places), oh, and making absolutely sure that your work isn't going to burn the house down and kill people. I can't imagine the insurance is very cheap.
And that's just for residential. Commercial is a completely different world. Go into a factory and start following the conduit sometime.
There's a world of difference between what an electrician has to do and just putting an extra plug over the workbench in the garage.
I think you're overthinking matters.
Of course, there's no way to be sure why people in the bible belt tend to be religious, but living here most of my life has given me some clues.
We've got 3.5 million people in Oklahoma. Half of those live in Oklahoma City and Tulsa. The other half lives in smaller towns or rural areas.
The type of people who were able to survive and thrive here in the early days are the type of people that tend towards religion; hard-working, self-reliant, conservative types. Church was often the only social contact they had in a typical week. Education beyond the very basics wasn't readily available and generally deemed unnecessary. Hospitals were few and far between. Law enforcement was negligible - you protected your property and family yourself. Flooding, tornadoes, drought, violence, crime, and sickness would take loved ones and destroy the efforts of labor, sometimes taking entire towns. Then add the dust bowl and the depopulation of the western part of the state. If the only place to turn for help is God, then that's where people will turn.
Our current leaders are only a generation or two behind those events. We have access to good education and hospitals, and the towns are larger now, but attitudes change over generations. Give us time.
Kansas is a bit older, but its history just means that people were in the position that early Oklahomans were in for longer. Kansas didn't really begin to modernize until around the same time as Oklahoma. I suspect the same applies to much of Texas and Nebraska, although Texas has some older, larger cities where religion isn't necessarily the norm.
As far as Pat's comments (or Falwell's concerning Katrina), that's just the same old bullshit warmed over and re-served that religious leaders have been spouting forever. The oldest example of that I can think of is the obvious one - Sodom (there is archaeological evidence that it was a real city). It's unlikely to attract any followers, but it works on the believers. I doubt any of the mouthpieces will use the "mysterious ways" line - they'll just get people to pray for our poor, damp and bedraggled selves and play it off like it's a bigger deal than it is (while there is some major damage and loss of life, the vast majority of us are fine and we have systems in place to deal with it. Like I said before, this isn't exactly a rare occurrence.).
And those guys that paint messages on their fenceline? Yeah, I dunno about them. You see that more in Kansas than Oklahoma. My personal theory is that it's because the evangelical churches have flourished here, with their doctrine on "spreading the word." You know the old saying - the loudest aren't necessarily the majority.
Exactly.
I personally don't think using it to "organize" your talk is very effective, but it's great for props. How much CPU time is used in a particular part of your code? Put up a graph showing it. It gets everyone on the same page and lets them discuss it. Throw up a diagram and use a pointer to direct attention to how the different areas interact. Discussing a method of rendering surface normals in a 3D model? Put up images that compare the results side by side. I've seen it used very effectively.
If you just put up slides that show your main points, you're wasting everyone's time and attention. Take a class on giving speeches, learn how to do it right, and stop distracting your audience. The only person that needs to see your outline is you.
When I was in the Air Force, I regularly received Powerpoint attachments in my email to tell me things like "Softball game against Services Squadron on Tuesday at 5pm!" with tons of clipart and whatnot. They were always from officers. They must have a Powerpoint course at the Air Force Academy. I decided that while Powerpoint was a useful tool, officers should be banned from using it.
Oklahoma gets flooded every decade or so. Some parts even more often (the next town over floods almost every time it rains... it's a poor town so people can't afford to move).
It's because of a mixture of terrain and weather patterns. Large parts of the state are fairly flat with wide, shallow river basins. The Arkansas river near here is very wide and usually only a couple feet deep - you can walk across it and not get your shirt wet. People take their 4x4s out on it and drive between the sand bars. Canoeing on it involves getting out and dragging your canoe every half a mile or so. So when we get a lot of rain, which happens every few years, the water has nowhere to go.
It's no different than tornadoes or drought. You live here, you get used to it. Unless you live in Moore, which is rapidly becoming a running gag around here.
You can blame God for it if you like (or Obama, he gets blamed for everything around here), but that's like blaming God for earthquakes in Tokyo and California, or hurricanes in the Caribbean. The "ways" aren't exactly mysterious. You live in the great plains, you're going to get floods and tornadoes.
Space weapons aren't illegal. You just can't have orbital weapon platforms for weapons of mass destruction (think nukes).
It's perfectly legal for any country to send up a satellite that could attack other satellites or space stations. It's even fine to put one up there that uses conventional warheads or kinetic weapons against targets on earth.
It's also perfectly legal to put up weapon platforms that are capable of launching nukes from space - it's just not legal to arm them with actual warheads.
The reason we don't do much of any of that is because a) we have no reason to attack anyone in space (yet), b) we can shoot down satellites from earth just fine, and c) we can attack other places on earth more efficiently and with less cost without orbital platforms.
Unless you're testing the aerodynamics and other flight capabilities of a reusable robotic lander.
But yeah, that's probably not it. That wouldn't be classified.
My guess? They're testing some kind of new spy tech.
I don't have any sympathy for the Confederacy. My state wasn't around then, and Indian Territory (which fought for the south) wasn't actually the precursor to Oklahoma (it just took up the same land). That said, there is a very sound basis for the requirement for slavery.
Slavery being a state-by-state option doesn't work. A person has rights, even non-citizens, that slaves do not. The US Constitution (and both federal and state laws) had to bend over backwards to make a viable legal framework for this.
That's because the status of a person isn't a state issue. It's a federal one. The federal government determines if you're a citizen, a resident legal or illegal alien, or a nonresident foreign national. Crossing state lines does not change your status.
By requiring slavery, the status of "slave" became equal in all states.
There's also the notion that since slaves were property, a slaveowner would be able to take his property with him anywhere in the country.
The general framework of the constitution would have worked well for the Confederacy, although I'd be surprised if (had they won) they wouldn't have made amendments shortly after the war. They were a bit pressed for time when they adopted it. State rights would probably have been a key issue.
Also, from a practical standpoint, given how much trouble slavery had caused for the US government, the CS probably wanted to avoid unnecessary infighting. And there's the point that no state was actually required to sign on with the Confederacy - if Georgia, for instance, wanted to be its own country, it was certainly free to do so.
1) Your idea of a republic doesn't resemble any actual government in the world. Idealism is nice, I suppose, but that's just not the way things work. Also, I've met quite a few libertarians who believe (as did pre-civil war Democrats) that the government shouldn't be responsible for public infrastructure, such as roads. The free market - that magic bullet that fixes everything - will take care of it.
2) I was not arguing that the government would force addicts to seek treatment, only that libertarians would offer no assistance in doing so. And from what I've seen, many libertarians fully believe that no, they should not help addicts.
3) You saying this doesn't happen? Also,
4) The idea that those with money shouldn't be responsible for those without money (at least insofar as taxation is concerned) is one of the core principles of libertarianism. Anything else would be wealth redistribution. To quote one libertarian I know personally, "that's what churches are for."
Just as an aside, I do generally agree with the libertarian ideas on social issues. Too bad the rest of the Republican party doesn't.
It's a complicated issue, but a lot of it boils down to what level of government is doing it.
In the case of municipal ISPs, it's a local government. Local governments provide all kinds of services to the public as a matter of course. Around here, they provide electricity, water, a library, police, fire, trash collection, sewer, landfill, permitting, zoning, street maintenance, free WIFI (which sucks), and all kinds of other things.
The federal government can't provide most of those things, by law. States can, depending on their constitutions, and local governments can depending on state laws and their own charters. This is basically what the "states' rights" debate is all about. It's been going on since this country was founded, and will likely continue until the Canadians finish their war machines, stop acting so polite to everyone, and take over the world (at which point we'll get decent health care and maple syrup).
Health care is contentious because most proposals for an actual decent healthcare system involve taking our current federal health care system (medicare) and extending it to everyone (it currently only covers people of retirement age). Medicare is considered "socialist" by a lot of groups on the right, but since it benefits the elderly, and the elderly vote, it won't be going away. Extending it out would mean more power in the hands of the federal government (a big no-no for the libertarians) and higher taxes (a big no-no for Republicans in general). Plus it would shake up the medical industry, which pulls in money hands-over-fist with the current system and doesn't want to see it change (and can afford lobbyists).
You have to understand that most people here don't actually understand what "socialist" means. The older generation grew up with cold-war era anti-communist propaganda, so "socialism" has bad connotations among a lot of the population. The right and their media mouthpieces use the word all the time in manners that Europeans (who actually do understand what socialism is) would find baffling. It's the nature of politics.
Religion is the traditional opiate of the masses, and has better lobbyists.
We could spend one quarter of the money on treatment programs and end up with fewer drug abusers than we've managed with the "War on Drugs".
That's not how libertarians work.
It's more like:
1) Abolish laws that make drugs illegal, thus saving money on prisons and law enforcement, and lower taxes accordingly
2) Let addicted people pay for their own treatment, "entitlement" and whatnot
3) Wealthy Americans install better security or live in gated communities, paid for by the savings in taxes
4) Who cares about everyone else? If they were important, they'd have money.
What we're seeing here is akin to evolution.
If you've been around for a while, you've seen how ads have gotten consistently worse since the beginning. Adblocking is a normal response.
Remember, spam is a type of advertisement. You don't see very many people advocating it. Telemarketing is another. Hardly anyone cries about the do not call list.
Google's approach (tracking aside) is the right one. Their ads generally don't bother people. Contrast that with the last few years of video ads (with sound!) or the "darken the page and load some stupid thing in the middle" thing that's getting so popular.
Advertisers have to deal with the fact that being annoying is going to lose them customers. This is a good thing. Without people adblocking to keep them in check, the internet would be unusable.
You may find this interesting reading.
In old versions of UNIX (not open source, but only because there was no such distinction at the time - the source was very much available) the compiler would add code to any program you tried to compile named 'login'. You could look at the source for the login program all you want and never see the backdoor. You also would have a hard time finding the code in the C compiler.
And this was just something Ken Thompson did to prove that he could. Imagine what the NSA would be capable of.
Umm... Perhaps metric never evolved a common unit there (e.g. decimeters) because it's really unnecessary? Just like you don't need specific units between inches and thousandths of an inch (3 orders of magnitude), metric folks somehow manage to deal with 2 orders of magnitude quite easily without an intermediate unit.
I don't need to convert thousandths of an inch to anything because I'm effectively not measuring the same things with them.
For instance, I would measure a table leg in inches, but never need to convert that to thousandths. I might measure the amount I need to trim off a tenon to fit into a mortise in thousandths (I generally don't - I hit it with a plane or chisel a few times and test the fit again - but that's down to style) - but again, I don't need to convert that anywhere.
That's kind of the point - metric units are a "one size fits all" solution. For a woodworker, it makes sense to have units around the size of feet and inches. For a farmer, yards, acres, etc. make a lot more sense. You use the units that most closely match the areas you need. I could certainly do all my woodworking using fractions of a yard, or a farmer could measure his field in square feet, but it'd be silly when there are much more appropriate units available.
I'm certainly not suggesting that it's impossible to do common tasks in the metric system. What I am suggesting is that they're not using units tailored for the purpose they are being applied to.
What possible reason do you have to laugh at the metric system, other than the rather arbitrary feeling that you specifically want a measurement unit equal to about 1/3 of a meter?
What's funny (only marginally, but still) is what I've stated above; they're using units that are inappropriate for their purpose. Measuring lake volume in acre-feet makes a lot of sense for the people that use that unit; using cubic meters seems downright silly. It's like seeing someone climb mountains in ballet slippers.
Why?
Since when is Google primarily a power utility?
What Google products (other than datacenters, which it builds where power is already available) would benefit from gen IV reactors? Hint: you're never going to get a phone with a thorium reactor built into it.
I'm certainly not against development of smaller reactors - lead-cooled fast reactors have a lot of promise for powering remote areas, for instance - but why would it make sense for Google to invest in them rather than technology that directly impacts its business?
Bonaparte built batteries for better battles!
I'm going to go lie down now, that was bad.
Given how polluted some of those lakes are, they'd be better off drinking seawater.
It makes a lot of sense when you consider what it's meant to measure.
Lakes (and more importantly, reservoirs) are measured in acre-feet. We measure the land in acres. When a reservoir fills up, we can see how much land is covered for every foot the water rises. You create a table for that and you can tell the volume of water based on the depth.
Acre-inches is also commonly used, especially when figuring things like water release from a dam. It's generally not used for things like water in a river, unless an upstream dam is discussing water release with a downstream dam. For water in a river, we do cubic feet per minute.
Yeah, I know, it's not base 10, but we've been using these measurements for a long time and it's not like conversion is terribly hard when necessary - and it's generally not necessary. Ease of conversion is overrated. For example, I do woodworking as a hobby - I have very handy units of feet, inches, and thousandths of an inch (which I rarely use myself, but some woodworkers do). I can convert between inches and feet easily, but I have no need to convert any of my measurements to yards or miles. With metric, I could do these conversions easily, but I'm stuck with a measurement system that gives me no widely-used unit between something a bit less than half an inch and something a bit longer than a yard.
It's the same with most things. How often do you actually need to convert units in daily life? Unless you're an engineer or something similar, you probably don't*.
So you continue to laugh at our measurement system, and we'll continue to laugh at yours.
* obvious exception of cooking inserted here. The metric recipes tend to use measurements of mass rather than volume for many ingredients, mostly because you don't have a very good selection of volume units. Still, anyone that's been cooking for a while knows how many teaspoons are in a tablespoon, and how many tablespoons are in an ounce - and cup->pint->quart->gallon isn't very difficult, either.