Actually, being gay is a conditioned behavior in which someone chooses to repress or act upon much like finding the color yellow pleasing or displeasing. It's quite possible that they have not had any choice in the matter so it still can not be a choice but they weren't "born that way". It's not a "born that way" or anything else that would suggest someone who is gay would be defective or genetically inferior then any normal person. Gay people, just like any other persons, are genetically equal, superior, and or inferior given the population in the same way as everyone else in this world is in relation to each other. In other words, there is no "gay impairment". But that's besides the point and not even relevant to this discussion.
Ugh. I haven't seen any evidence of this at all. The gay people that I know haven't been 'conditioned' to be gay, I'm pretty sure. In fact, I'd say based on their lives, they were conditioned to not be gay, but ended up that way anyway.
I have a friend who hates cilantro, and another that hates broccoli. It's not because they've been conditioned to it, they just don't like it; there are, in fact, genetic differences between people that cause them to find the taste of broccoli or cilantro distasteful. I like both of them, and most people don't mind them, but that doesn't make them defective or genetically inferior, just different. I've always figured that gay people are like that too. They just like people of the same sex; I like people of the opposite sex. It's just part of who we are, and doesn't have anything to do with conditioning.
Groovy in particular is nice because it works so well with plain old Java. It seems like Pike is complaining about complexity in the language syntax, rather than fundamental concepts. If that is the case, then going to a completely new language (and thereby throwing away all the infrastructure, libraries, IDEs, etc.) is a really bad idea. Instead, what intelligent people are doing is writing new languages with different syntax that compile to the JVM. Then, you get to keep all the libraries, you get to keep the work thats gone into optimizing the JVM, you get to have an great IDE by slightly modifying an existing IDE (like Groovy on Eclipse). They've thrown the baby out with the bath water by starting from scratch.
In addition, the base level of knowledge required for a different-syntax but same VM language is lower. As a specific example, I hate most of the the XML parsing techniques in Java, and I've tried lots of them. With Groovy, you can add XML parsing very easily. And if all you want to do with Groovy is use it to parse XML, that's the only part of Groovy you have to add to your program. The rest of it can be completely the same as before. So, best of both worlds. What will happen though is that as you learn more concepts, you'll start adding them to the codebase, and voila, you make a gradual transition from Java to Groovy.
No, that would be stupid. Under that logic (incoming car analogy!), my car goes 2 miles per hour (because it sits in my garage most of the time). But people don't talk like that. The car has a maximum speed (about 100), a maximum it usually goes (about 68), an average speed on my commute (probably 25 mph), and average speed (over its lifetime about 2 mph). Which 'speed' is my car?
A power plant has a 'rating' which is its max output. If you want the time average power output, you can get that, but its going to be either a prediction or historical. It's not a design parameter the same way that maximum is.
You're glad to be ignorant of one of the top movies ever made (#111 in IMDB's top 250)? You're glad to be ignorant of a movie exploring what it means to be human, and hence an important question in technology (and also starring Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer, and a then-hot Daryl Hannah?)
You're glad that you can't be bothered to spend 30 seconds to figure out an odd quote, but can be bothered to respond multiple times to others regarding the quote? Part of the strength of/. is the diversity of people, interests, and opinions even though most of us are nerds, and that you dismiss an important part of nerdom offhand like that is really sad. You clearly live in a small, closed world, and it makes me wonder what on earth you are doing here.
Sycodon, get thee to google, and search for what the AC wrote. It's well known in geek circles. And his response to your response as well. And, it's pretty damn funny.
Dude, you need a serious humor injection. To lots of us, Jesus, while he may have existed, was just another deluded person. When I hear people talking about "Jesus" it is always in the religious sense, and not in the human sense; if someone wants to discuss the manuscript evidence, then they refer to the "historical Jesus".
And you are incorrect about the comparison to Genghis Khan. The amount evidence is actually about the same, with very little to no manuscripts until significantly after the death of the person in question; as opposed to, for example, Julius Caesar or Mohammad, about whom much more evidence exists from their lifetimes. (And, no, Josephus doesn't count, as it's clearly an insertion by a later person). At least with Khan, we don't have zealots making up conflicting stories to match earlier prophets, and stealing from earlier figures from other religions.
Just wondering, but how would we know if something other than civilian action and terrorist incompetence was responsible for stopping terrorists?
Suppose, for a second, that there are other people that either planned or attempted terrorist activities. And the huge military industrial complex found out about it and stopped them. How would anybody know? I think that's a large part of the point of the Washington Post articles, and the problem with the article as well since they don't offer any insight to how well they have been doing. We have no idea if they have been successful at all, but maybe they have been and maybe they have not (in general). We know about several cases that the intel agencies failed (Fort Hood, Christmas bomber, Times Square), but how many successes have there been?
I do wonder if the Congressional Committees and Subcommittees that fund this stuff have any idea? Probably not, because they would be scared to death to vote against anything and get called out on it by their political opponents.
If you look at the amount of energy that a set of batteries can store, it is very small compared to the amount of energy produced by a windmill. (Or, alternately, a battery that could store the required energy would simply be huge, and hence, expensive). Look at the tables at the battery, and determine how big of a battery you would need to store, say, a days worth of a large windmill (assume 1 MW rated capacity). That's a lot of batteries, isn't it?
In terms of other battery technologies, there are vanadium redox or new liquid batteries that might eventually work (see this work from MIT). But not yet. It is currently cheaper / better to just let the extra energy go to waste then try to store it.
And it's now a wonderful example of an accidental nature preserve / wildlife sanctuary.
It's demilitarized in the sense that all the militarization of the area has occurred just outside of the zone. But, it has not just been demilitarized, it's been de-humanized, in that people don't go there unless they have a deathwish.
How do I verify that someone did not sign my name to the petition? I can check to see if someone voted in my name, since I go to my voting station, show my ID and the person signs me off the list. How do I check the petition?
There is no way back. There is enough content out there for people to get their 15 minutes of 'new' content for a whole lifetime. Hardly any new porn is being produced.
I don't believe this. The industry has changed dramatically, that is true, but porn is being produced at massive rates. Vivid is doing well, kink.com is doing great, amateur sites are going strong. The 'production values', which were never high to begin with, have dropped simply because anybody with a webcam can produce porn. There is no storyline (always a thin veil), no plot or dialog, etc. just sex. The idea that 'hardly any new porn is being produced' in this multibillion dollar industry is insane; just visit the Adult Entertainment Expo. Maybe it's not making _you_ money, and there is huge churn in the industry, but it's a giant, and booming, industry.
Pirating has certainly hurt the larger, more professional producers, just as it has hurt the music and movie industries. But at least the music and movie industries continue to put out new and fresh products. New and interesting music is constantly being created; technology in movie creation and new story lines are always in progress. The underlying problem with the porn industry is that there are only so many different ways to fuck, and they have filmed them all. There is absolutely nothing new or different about the porn industry; there is simply a continual swapping of one young female for another in the films. The barrier for entry (so to speak!) into the industry now consists of buying a camera and filming someone having sex. So, the industry as a money making enterprise is in deep trouble because they offer nothing that two random strangers can't produce just by taking off their clothes and doing what comes naturally. The only advantage that they had in the past were controlled production and distribution mechanisms, and those are long gone. And good riddance.
Only if they did not have a valid reason for the domain name. Take ford.xxx for example. Perhaps the Ford Motor Company has the strongest name, but there was president Ford, Harrison Ford, Tom Ford (clothing designer), etc. Which of them has the rights to the name? If I am a film director (of adult movies), don't I have a right to ford.xxx?
This is one of several comment about high school students and their abilities. My wife and brother are both teachers, and I help out with the science fair. Some of the things that the students are doing in high school are pretty amazing today. The gaussian curve of intelligence and dedication is amazingly wide, and the ones on the right side of the curve in terms of science are simply amazingly intelligent, hard working, and fascinated by learning. The underlying ideas and using the computer to do CFD is not too much to ask for many of these students. (The ones in the middle of the curve, and the ones on the left side of the curve, are not going to get it, but not everyone is going to be an engineer).
Being happy that they just know how to do integrals is not enough. Some of these smart kids would be bored to tears if they didn't have this sort of class and challenge. For them, doing something like this can be a positive life changing experience. In our state in the US, we are so concentrated on standardized testing that all the kids need to pass, that the ones that could pass in their sleep are being ruined.
No, you start with the Bernoulli principle, in a simplified form. That is, the kinetic energy plus pressure is a constant. You show them the really cool demonstrations of blowing over a piece of paper to make it go up, or the ball in the vacuum cleaner exhaust that stays in the exhaust despite perturbation. Then, you discuss why a curve ball curves. Then, you show them a simple pitot tube and put it in different velocities of air.
Then, you apply this to airfoils.
Then, you go to the NASA page and get their simulator FoilSim II.
Then, you point out that the simplifications that you made above can be improved on, but that the math gets really messy, and so we use the underlying physics equations and solve the numerically, using CFD.
But nobody has discussed how to actually achieve the 'don't write for a specific browser'. The answer is to use a library (Yahoo, ExtJS, Google, Prototype, etc) that takes care of that for you. Then, you write to the library and your problems are solved.
Also, I wonder what the people who post insulting things about someone else's religion think they're achieving. Is there any beneficial outcome from that?
I've always hoped that they would realize that their taboo was broken, and nothing bad happened. No thunderbolts, no giant cracks in the earth, that sort of thing. Then, maybe they will start to think about their religious beliefs.
General question: How do we promote the social advancement? What can we do so that the pendulum swings back to the sanity area? It's just not clear to me what the driving factors are to make that happen, but then again I have never understood why the Enlightenment happened, i.e. why it was not stopped by the forces then in power.
What I really expect is for people to be able to tell the difference between an entire religion, and one asshat who claims to follow that religion.
Not when the asshat is able to get the police to open an investigation. Not when the asshat can issue a fatwa that someone else should die, and others try to carry that out. Not when the asshat's religious point of view is part and parcel of the entire structure of government. Not when there is a pattern of asshattery associated with the entire country.
When Rev Phelps says that God hates fags, I don't blame Christianity. I look around and see that the legal system and religious institutions are set up that nutcases like him are allowed to be asshats, because it means freedom of religion and expression for everyone. In this case, I do blame Islam. It is intimately tied to the government, their legal system, and allows, even condones, this sort of thing. It's a (further) indication that Islam is broken in a fundamental way and is incompatible with western civilization. One asshat, that's an outlier; an entire frigging country of government backed asshats, that's a problem.
In theory, I'd agree with you: from a moral point of view, the person who does these things deserves to lose their life.
From a practical point of view, it's a terrible idea. The justice system is not able to correctly mete out these punishments. People who commit these crimes go free. People who are innocent are convicted of them. Also, the threat of a death penalty causes mismatch in threatened penalties compared with the evidence against them, so they plead guilty to a lesser charge rather than lose their life for a crime they did not commit. The police lie under oath and fake evidence, with the truth coming out years or decades later. Witnesses are horribly unreliable, and they can be pressured to perjure themselves.
Add up the expenses and hoops involved in death penalty cases and it's a cheaper proposition to put someone in prison for the rest of their lives.
So, yes, I agree with you that they _ought_ to die, but don't think that we should be doing it.
It's obviously a PR stunt, but really that might be what they need.
It's not clear what the US goal is in Afghanistan, and how to get there. But the possibility of mineral wealth can be a useful fact in affecting the calculus of other countries in how they deal with the conflict. The possibility of lots of lithium can be very important to the Chinese, and having their backing in making Afghanistan stable would be very welcome. It's going to be a corrupt hellhole no matter what the US does, but if enough other countries want it to be a stable, mineral-producing, corrupt hellhole then maybe it will be.
Oy, you completely missed the point. The questions (whether computers can think or submarines can swim) are asking the wrong questions. They presuppose that the object (computer or submarine) can or will accomplish the task (thinking or swimming) in the same way that people or animals perform the task. They don't and they won't, so it's a bad question. The questions should be asked relative to the task (some goal) that the object can accomplish. Much of the discussion above is not 'can computers think' but 'can computers be intelligent', and others in the threads have rightly pointed out that it starts with the definition of 'intelligent' and then you have to have criteria for determining yes or no.
Submarines cannot swim. They can propel themselves through water, and how they do so is an interesting subject. But it's different from swimming. Computers cannot think. They can come up with useful and correct answers to questions (or question to answers in this case). And how they do so and how to make them better (by some measure) is an interesting subject. But, it's not 'thinking'.
I believe that David Foster Wallace discussed this at length (actually, he seems to discuss everything at length) in Infinite Jest. It leads to all sorts of bad things.
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Actually, being gay is a conditioned behavior in which someone chooses to repress or act upon much like finding the color yellow pleasing or displeasing. It's quite possible that they have not had any choice in the matter so it still can not be a choice but they weren't "born that way". It's not a "born that way" or anything else that would suggest someone who is gay would be defective or genetically inferior then any normal person. Gay people, just like any other persons, are genetically equal, superior, and or inferior given the population in the same way as everyone else in this world is in relation to each other. In other words, there is no "gay impairment". But that's besides the point and not even relevant to this discussion.
Ugh. I haven't seen any evidence of this at all. The gay people that I know haven't been 'conditioned' to be gay, I'm pretty sure. In fact, I'd say based on their lives, they were conditioned to not be gay, but ended up that way anyway.
I have a friend who hates cilantro, and another that hates broccoli. It's not because they've been conditioned to it, they just don't like it; there are, in fact, genetic differences between people that cause them to find the taste of broccoli or cilantro distasteful. I like both of them, and most people don't mind them, but that doesn't make them defective or genetically inferior, just different. I've always figured that gay people are like that too. They just like people of the same sex; I like people of the opposite sex. It's just part of who we are, and doesn't have anything to do with conditioning.
Groovy in particular is nice because it works so well with plain old Java. It seems like Pike is complaining about complexity in the language syntax, rather than fundamental concepts. If that is the case, then going to a completely new language (and thereby throwing away all the infrastructure, libraries, IDEs, etc.) is a really bad idea. Instead, what intelligent people are doing is writing new languages with different syntax that compile to the JVM. Then, you get to keep all the libraries, you get to keep the work thats gone into optimizing the JVM, you get to have an great IDE by slightly modifying an existing IDE (like Groovy on Eclipse). They've thrown the baby out with the bath water by starting from scratch.
In addition, the base level of knowledge required for a different-syntax but same VM language is lower. As a specific example, I hate most of the the XML parsing techniques in Java, and I've tried lots of them. With Groovy, you can add XML parsing very easily. And if all you want to do with Groovy is use it to parse XML, that's the only part of Groovy you have to add to your program. The rest of it can be completely the same as before. So, best of both worlds. What will happen though is that as you learn more concepts, you'll start adding them to the codebase, and voila, you make a gradual transition from Java to Groovy.
equals 3 football fields (for non-US).
No, that would be stupid. Under that logic (incoming car analogy!), my car goes 2 miles per hour (because it sits in my garage most of the time). But people don't talk like that. The car has a maximum speed (about 100), a maximum it usually goes (about 68), an average speed on my commute (probably 25 mph), and average speed (over its lifetime about 2 mph). Which 'speed' is my car?
A power plant has a 'rating' which is its max output. If you want the time average power output, you can get that, but its going to be either a prediction or historical. It's not a design parameter the same way that maximum is.
You're glad that you can't be bothered to spend 30 seconds to figure out an odd quote, but can be bothered to respond multiple times to others regarding the quote? Part of the strength of /. is the diversity of people, interests, and opinions even though most of us are nerds, and that you dismiss an important part of nerdom offhand like that is really sad. You clearly live in a small, closed world, and it makes me wonder what on earth you are doing here.
Sycodon, get thee to google, and search for what the AC wrote. It's well known in geek circles. And his response to your response as well. And, it's pretty damn funny.
And you are incorrect about the comparison to Genghis Khan. The amount evidence is actually about the same, with very little to no manuscripts until significantly after the death of the person in question; as opposed to, for example, Julius Caesar or Mohammad, about whom much more evidence exists from their lifetimes. (And, no, Josephus doesn't count, as it's clearly an insertion by a later person). At least with Khan, we don't have zealots making up conflicting stories to match earlier prophets, and stealing from earlier figures from other religions.
Suppose, for a second, that there are other people that either planned or attempted terrorist activities. And the huge military industrial complex found out about it and stopped them. How would anybody know? I think that's a large part of the point of the Washington Post articles, and the problem with the article as well since they don't offer any insight to how well they have been doing. We have no idea if they have been successful at all, but maybe they have been and maybe they have not (in general). We know about several cases that the intel agencies failed (Fort Hood, Christmas bomber, Times Square), but how many successes have there been?
I do wonder if the Congressional Committees and Subcommittees that fund this stuff have any idea? Probably not, because they would be scared to death to vote against anything and get called out on it by their political opponents.
In terms of other battery technologies, there are vanadium redox or new liquid batteries that might eventually work (see this work from MIT). But not yet. It is currently cheaper / better to just let the extra energy go to waste then try to store it.
It's demilitarized in the sense that all the militarization of the area has occurred just outside of the zone. But, it has not just been demilitarized, it's been de-humanized, in that people don't go there unless they have a deathwish.
How do I verify that someone did not sign my name to the petition? I can check to see if someone voted in my name, since I go to my voting station, show my ID and the person signs me off the list. How do I check the petition?
There is no way back. There is enough content out there for people to get their 15 minutes of 'new' content for a whole lifetime. Hardly any new porn is being produced.
I don't believe this. The industry has changed dramatically, that is true, but porn is being produced at massive rates. Vivid is doing well, kink.com is doing great, amateur sites are going strong. The 'production values', which were never high to begin with, have dropped simply because anybody with a webcam can produce porn. There is no storyline (always a thin veil), no plot or dialog, etc. just sex. The idea that 'hardly any new porn is being produced' in this multibillion dollar industry is insane; just visit the Adult Entertainment Expo. Maybe it's not making _you_ money, and there is huge churn in the industry, but it's a giant, and booming, industry.
Pirating has certainly hurt the larger, more professional producers, just as it has hurt the music and movie industries. But at least the music and movie industries continue to put out new and fresh products. New and interesting music is constantly being created; technology in movie creation and new story lines are always in progress. The underlying problem with the porn industry is that there are only so many different ways to fuck, and they have filmed them all. There is absolutely nothing new or different about the porn industry; there is simply a continual swapping of one young female for another in the films. The barrier for entry (so to speak!) into the industry now consists of buying a camera and filming someone having sex. So, the industry as a money making enterprise is in deep trouble because they offer nothing that two random strangers can't produce just by taking off their clothes and doing what comes naturally. The only advantage that they had in the past were controlled production and distribution mechanisms, and those are long gone. And good riddance.
Only if they did not have a valid reason for the domain name. Take ford.xxx for example. Perhaps the Ford Motor Company has the strongest name, but there was president Ford, Harrison Ford, Tom Ford (clothing designer), etc. Which of them has the rights to the name? If I am a film director (of adult movies), don't I have a right to ford.xxx?
Because if it's a Moslem country, it's going to be a lot different from a Western country, and different again for an Asian one.
Being happy that they just know how to do integrals is not enough. Some of these smart kids would be bored to tears if they didn't have this sort of class and challenge. For them, doing something like this can be a positive life changing experience. In our state in the US, we are so concentrated on standardized testing that all the kids need to pass, that the ones that could pass in their sleep are being ruined.
Then, you apply this to airfoils.
Then, you go to the NASA page and get their simulator FoilSim II.
Then, you point out that the simplifications that you made above can be improved on, but that the math gets really messy, and so we use the underlying physics equations and solve the numerically, using CFD.
But nobody has discussed how to actually achieve the 'don't write for a specific browser'. The answer is to use a library (Yahoo, ExtJS, Google, Prototype, etc) that takes care of that for you. Then, you write to the library and your problems are solved.
Also, look up what happened to Max Hardcore.
Also, I wonder what the people who post insulting things about someone else's religion think they're achieving. Is there any beneficial outcome from that?
I've always hoped that they would realize that their taboo was broken, and nothing bad happened. No thunderbolts, no giant cracks in the earth, that sort of thing. Then, maybe they will start to think about their religious beliefs.
In that vein, Mohammad molests dogs.
General question: How do we promote the social advancement? What can we do so that the pendulum swings back to the sanity area? It's just not clear to me what the driving factors are to make that happen, but then again I have never understood why the Enlightenment happened, i.e. why it was not stopped by the forces then in power.
What I really expect is for people to be able to tell the difference between an entire religion, and one asshat who claims to follow that religion.
Not when the asshat is able to get the police to open an investigation. Not when the asshat can issue a fatwa that someone else should die, and others try to carry that out. Not when the asshat's religious point of view is part and parcel of the entire structure of government. Not when there is a pattern of asshattery associated with the entire country.
When Rev Phelps says that God hates fags, I don't blame Christianity. I look around and see that the legal system and religious institutions are set up that nutcases like him are allowed to be asshats, because it means freedom of religion and expression for everyone. In this case, I do blame Islam. It is intimately tied to the government, their legal system, and allows, even condones, this sort of thing. It's a (further) indication that Islam is broken in a fundamental way and is incompatible with western civilization. One asshat, that's an outlier; an entire frigging country of government backed asshats, that's a problem.
From a practical point of view, it's a terrible idea. The justice system is not able to correctly mete out these punishments. People who commit these crimes go free. People who are innocent are convicted of them. Also, the threat of a death penalty causes mismatch in threatened penalties compared with the evidence against them, so they plead guilty to a lesser charge rather than lose their life for a crime they did not commit. The police lie under oath and fake evidence, with the truth coming out years or decades later. Witnesses are horribly unreliable, and they can be pressured to perjure themselves.
Add up the expenses and hoops involved in death penalty cases and it's a cheaper proposition to put someone in prison for the rest of their lives.
So, yes, I agree with you that they _ought_ to die, but don't think that we should be doing it.
It's not clear what the US goal is in Afghanistan, and how to get there. But the possibility of mineral wealth can be a useful fact in affecting the calculus of other countries in how they deal with the conflict. The possibility of lots of lithium can be very important to the Chinese, and having their backing in making Afghanistan stable would be very welcome. It's going to be a corrupt hellhole no matter what the US does, but if enough other countries want it to be a stable, mineral-producing, corrupt hellhole then maybe it will be.
Submarines cannot swim. They can propel themselves through water, and how they do so is an interesting subject. But it's different from swimming. Computers cannot think. They can come up with useful and correct answers to questions (or question to answers in this case). And how they do so and how to make them better (by some measure) is an interesting subject. But, it's not 'thinking'.
I believe that David Foster Wallace discussed this at length (actually, he seems to discuss everything at length) in Infinite Jest. It leads to all sorts of bad things.