It's when a random pile of metal scraps and electronic parts spontaneously forms itself into a working robot, decides it has some purpose and learns to do it. Up until then, it's all creationism.
If my name were Bob McDonald, and I wanted to open McDonald's Steros, and I had a store logo that had nothing to do with yellow arches (say it was a blue neon sign with cursive lettering), I'd be willing to take on McDonald's over my right to use that name. On the other hand, if my name were Jim Smith, and I started McDonald's Hot Dogs with a stand in the park, and I spelled it with curvy, yellow lettering, and I had an obnoxious clown trying to attract children to my hot dog stand, then yeah, they'd probably sue me, and rightly so.
I would presume so. I have not seen any legal action pass between IBC root beer and the International Bank of Commerce (IBC again). As long as you don't have a blue logo on your store that looks like IBM, and as long as you don't go anywhere near the computer industry, you'd probably be okay.
I have, until today, never mentioned Godzilla, nor do I have any imagery of him on this site. Nor do I refer to my logo as Godzilla. It's always been, "That little dragon guy."
He has a cartoon that a reader sent in to him with "Davezilla vs. Godzilla" after he got the letter from the lawyers. Prior to that, he did not use the name "Godzilla" on his site.
Let's not even talk about their new military contracts since they've become THE aircraft company of the USA, or their NASA contracts.
Actually, Boeing's military aircraft market has become somewhat stagnate. With the award of the JSF, Lockheed-Martin is the ONLY contractor currently producing and delivering new aircraft for the USAF (F-22 and F-16 mods belong to them too). Boeing has been completely shoved out of that market space, which caused some political stir among advocates of Boeing who claimed that their JSF prototype was clearly superior and that it was dangerous for the military to basically put all of its eggs in one basket. In any case, Boeing's only military market right now is in support contracts for aging aircraft. They are hardly "THE" contractor for military aircraft in the USA.
That's true. On the other hand, I hear so many people blame Windows problems on drivers, like the only way to crash Windows is to install some rogue hardware with some unstable driver that you pulled off of www.warez-drivers.com, and here I had a factory-configured machine, with factory-configured drivers (nothing "rogue" until the modem got fried), and the configuration was (presumably) tested to some degree before it was sold, and it still crashed all the time. It is a rare day that we don't have to reboot the thing. The fact is, Windows 95 sucked hard, Windows 98 was little better, and Windows ME is just W98 Third Edition. I haven't tortured myself with XP yet. Windows 2000 is the only MS OS that I can use with minimal pain.
Wow. You must have gotten lucky and received the 31337 bug-free version of Windows 98. The old Compaq my wife uses has the OEM 98 installed on it (so we can't blame it on drivers -- they're all on that wretched "restore" CD that just dumps an image on your drive), and it crashes all the time. I finally got so sick of fighting it, I installed Win2k on the thing (which is the one decent OS to come out of Redmond), but it was really slow on that 333 MHz processor and 64M RAM, and then the modem got fried in an electrical storm, and Win2k couldn't handle the spare ISA modem I had lying around, so I had to "restore" that crap, and now it crashes all the time again. It is so time for me to put together a replacement machine.
I honestly believe that it'd be possible for them to pass laws making DVD hacking technically punishable by the death penatly (even if such that it would never be actually used) inside of a year, with the right campaign contributions.
This is a major stretch. You forget that the reason politicians like campaign contributions is because it buys them exposure: Air time, posters, ads, etc. Ultimately, politicians are still accountable to the voters. The reason money is so important is that it gets your smiling face in front of enough voters that you have a shot at winning. Introducing a law that would introduce the death penalty for hacking DVDs would be political suicide (even in Texas, where we like the death penalty) for the congress person who introduces it, and voting for that law would be political suicide for every congress person who voted for it. While it's true that those with money can have a lot of influence over the political process, the laws have to be introduced in benign sounding ways. You can't rock the boat too much all at once, or the voters don't like it and you get voted out.
I'd love to see the shots in Contact where Jody Foster is "time/space traveling"
But would you be willing to sit through the rest of that movie just for those few moments of eye candy? I think that has got to be the most tedious and pointless movie I have ever seen (of course, I never watched Titanic, so maybe that would have been worse). Too many movies try to be "epic" by making themselves long when the material could be covered in 1.5 - 2 hours (Pearl Harbor, for example, could have been just the middle 90 minutes and it would be one of my favorite all-time movies). There are some long movies that are good (Dances With Wolves, for example, and you'd never guess that Kenneth Branaugh's Hamlet is something like 5 hours). Contact, however, IMHO, falls squarely into the "too long and self important" category.
Actually, Sept. 10 is the day it all went to hell. I woke up in the morning and forgot to wish my wife "Happy Birthday" until about 20 or 30 minutes later. She didn't buy my story when I tried to blame it on the UNIX clock rollover.
I don't have terribly strong feelings about GMO crops either way, but this is one argument that bothers me. The source of "world hunger" and starvation problems has very little to do with the ability of the Earth to produce sufficient crops to feed its residents. There is plenty of food available. It has a great deal more to do with money and polotics. It is a matter of distribution of food. Those countries or people with money and/or political influence eat. The others do not.
You don't think nearly large enough. If we're sedning up high-profile, star-studded doomsday missions, we need to get, at a bare minimum, Alec Baldwin, Bette Middler, Brittney Spears, Janet Jackson and Dell Guy From Hell on board. And wasn't Lance Bass saying he wanted to take a space shot?
Let me first say that I'm all for NEO search. If nothing else, I think it's handy to know what's hanging around in your neighborhood. But, the "odds" were not stating that the asteroid is just poking around wherever it gets a notion to go, and it just might decide to come knocking on our door. The "odds" were the result of a preliminary analysis that yielded a VERY broad arc, which happened to include Earth as one of its points. Within a matter of a few days, after the asteroid had been studied more and its path had been refined, Earth was completely eliminated from the arc, meaning that aside from the quantum physics interpretation that there is a non-zero probability that the thing will just randomly and at the last minute make a sharp and essentially impossible change in its course and head straight for Earth, there is basically NO CHANCE that the thing will hit the Earth in 2019. The arc for 2060 still includes the Earth as a remote possibility, but chances are that we will soon be eliminated from that path too. So, we're not taking a gamble -- any more than we're taking a gamble that the sun will suddenly and randomly plummet in some crazy direction and consume the Earth and the rest of the solar system.
My Halliday, Resnick and Walker Text (4th Edition) states, next to the picture of the woman, that one person was killed and seven were injured. The woman in the picture and her brother actually left about five minutes before the strike.
Re:Not so new techniques for science
on
What, Me Worry?
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· Score: 3, Funny
That's not scientists. That's environmentalists, who are like the bastard step-children science left on the side of a snowy mountain, hoping they would just freeze to death. Unfortunately, some bleeding heart woodsmen rescued them and now we're stuck with them.
Now I see that we need to form a special interest group: The Consortium of Programmers who want Properties in C Plus Plus, or CPP-CPP for short. Now we just need somebody with some extra money lying around to host the domain http://cpp-cpp.org and we can start gathering support, and before you know it, we'll have bought our very own U.S. Senator! Huzzah!!!
If you are honestly interested in the subject, we can continue the discussion off list. My e-mail is listed with my information. As for the BYU link to "The Book of Abraham Project" (it works now; it must have been down last night), I have not read the whole thing, but the author quotes lots of scriptures and some addresses from the semi-annual General Conference. Those are things you can find on lds.org, so feel free to look up those references, but remember that the author's interpretation is not authoritative. You will have to form your own opinions on the interpretation unless you can find an official source (i.e., somehting living in the mormon.org or lds.org domains) in which a General Authority has interpreted the passage. Again, anything you find at lds.org or mormon.org, you can consider official. Anything you find somewhere else on the internet is like most stuff you find on the internet -- may be true, may not be true. The problem with BYU, and that area in general, is there are just way too many Mormons there (I mean that quite seriously -- I live right in the middle of the Bible Belt and couldn't be happier).
Clearly, there will be no consensus here because we are working from different definitions of the word "Chrstian." I agree that there are doctrinal differences between Mormons and other Christians, and I do not apologize for those beliefs, but I would like to clarify a couple of things from your post.
The quote you provide from Elder Ballard is both accurate and in context, and you are quite correct that the proper place to find out about what Mormons believe is to visit either lds.org or mormon.org, both of which are operated and overseen by the Church and can be trusted to contain correct information.
However, byu.edu cannot be trusted as a source of doctrine, and particularly, the page you visited seems to just be the reflections of a random student or professor. The link does not work, so I can't see who wrote it, and I can't claim any more authority to define church doctrine than the author, so I will defer you to the pages at lds.org and mormon.org above. Some of those assertions you will find on the pages above, and those you can call LDS doctrine (you are quite correct that many of them will be different from what you believe). Others you will not find (I do have to address the worst fallacy: Yes, God did create us. I don't know what the context of that quote was or what the author was trying to point out, but it simply is not true. Gen 1:27 -- God created man in his own image. The only thing I can think of, besides the author just being whacko, is that we believe that God the Father directed the creation through Jesus Christ, who is also God, but since you believe they are one and the same, I can't see a whole lot of divergence there).
If you are seriously interested in what we believe on those subjects, there is a link to the scritpures on the lds.org site, and you can look up the following references, which pertain to the assertions in the page you found: Gen. 1:26-27 (Bible); Alma 34:8-10(Book of Mormon); Doctrine and Covenants 131:22-23; Moses 1: 10-17, 31-42 (Pearl of Great Price); Rev. 12:1-11 (remember, we identify Lucifer with Satan) (Bible).
The scriptures are the basis of our beliefs, and anything else you happen across on that site, you can trust, especially if it is a quote from one of our General Authorities (like Elder Ballard), who are the ones authorized to interpret scripture.
In summary, yes, we believe in Christ and all of his teachings, yes, we believe in the Holy Bible (we particularly prefer the KJV), yes, we probably have very similar beliefs about what is right and what is wrong, yes, we celebrate holidays, birthdays, Easter, Christmas, and any other excuse we can find to serve red punch and cookies, yes, there are sometimes substantial differences between Mormons and other Christians, but no, that is not a reason that we cannot all work together for good common causes. If you know many Mormons, you will probably find that they are overall pretty normal folks. So, I think that other than a difference in definition of the word "Christian," we pretty much agree with each other. And that is indeed the most religious and off-topic discussion I have ever had on Slashdot.
From Merriam-Webster OnLine: Christian: 1 a : one who professes belief in the teachings of Jesus Christ
Islam and Jehovah's Witnesses are not, and as far as I know do not claim to be, Christian because they do not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God nor that he is a Divine Being of any kind. Christianity is not a specific religion, nor is it limited to Protestant religions. It is based on a belief in the Divinity of Jesus Christ, which is a category that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints falls squarely into. The examples you cite of "radically non-Christian" beliefs are among arguments commonly taken out of context to foster distaste for our belief system, and it is probable you did not hear them from a member of our church. For example, we believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. We also read in the Bible that Lucifer is a fallen from Heaven (cf. Isa. 14:12 -- "How art thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer!"), so we may infer that he, too, was a child of God, albeit "child" is used in a completely different context. So to say that Lucifer is a brother to Jesus Christ is nothing more than to say we are all children of God, but not in the sense that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, so Jesus Christ is a brother to all of us, but in an astronomically superior sense. The other example you cite is not something you will find anywhere within the canon of scripture used by the Church, and is extrapolated from a belief that cannot be intelligently discussed without a foundation of much more basic beliefs. In any case, the beliefs upon which those things are founded, even in context, are more like the quantum physics of our belief system. The basic algebra is mostly the same. I think it is much more important, especially in our interfaith relations, that, like other Christians, we believe in the teachings of Jesus Christ that instruct us to love our neighbors, do good to others and live good, clean lives. It is for this reason that Mormons can often be found working alongside Baptists, Protestant Christians and Catholics for common causes despite certain doctrinal differences (of which there are many -- that I do not dispute).
I know/. is not the best place to have a religious discussion, but these kinds of misconceptions are the things that get us classed and confused with JW's so frequently (I have seen so many people shocked at the fact that we celebrate Easter, Christmas and birthdays, I just had to say something).
Not to be hyper-sensitive, but Mormons are Christians. They use the same Bible, OT and NT, that the rest of the Christian world uses, believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, believe that He died on the cross and was resurrected, believe that He will return to the Earth, and, incidentally, the proper name of the church is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I'm sure there was no ill will in your separating us (yes, of course I'm a Mormon) from Christianity, but it's a common mis-conception to either categorize us with JW's, with whom we have almost nothing in common, or outright confuse us with them.
The true fallacy is not necessarily that statistics are made up or are wrong. The problem is that statistics themselves are just numbers that do not tell a complete story. The compelling question in any of these interests is not necessarily "how many" but "why are there that many?" For example, some hispanic interest group recently named St. Mary's University Law School in San Antonio as one of the "Top 5 Law Schools for Hispanics." I remember being shocked, because I'm from the area and I know that St. Mary's basically sucks. I went on to read the article and found that the ranking was basically based on the ratio of hispanic students to white students in the schools studied and nothing else. Specifically excluded from the ranking was the percentage of students that actually pass the State Bar Exam (St. Mary's is one of the lowest in the nation on this statistic right now). The interest group had an axe to grind: higher admission rates for hispanic students. It doesn't matter if they are getting a quality education, it just matters that by claiming higher admission rates, they can claim a victory for their specific agenda. The reason St. Mary's has a high percentage of hispanic students is that San Antonio has a high percentage of hispanics (pretty close to 50%). It had nothing to do with St. Mary's being more "enlightened" or "tolerant" of racial diversity. The statistic simply told that St. Mary's was located in a predominantly hispanic area. What was interesting was that on the same list, an Ivy League school (I forget which) located much farther north and east (i.e. further away from Mexico), which had a lower overall hispanic population, also ranked very high on the list. In that case, the statistic really did represent something about the school other than its location, but again, the statistic by itself did not reveal what that something was. Only an in-depth analysis of the school, its culture, admission procedures and criteria and academic environment could have given a hint of what that something was. There we have two schools examined in the same study, gaining somewhat similar scores on the applied scale, and the statistics tell two completely different stories. Reducing people, institutions and other complex phenomena to simple data points is good only for those who then take the statistics and manipulate them to tell the story they want told.
As people were jumping onto that new-fangled internet thing, I'm sure the bandwidth usage did double every 100 days
Not that anybody ever reads the articles (especially the editors), but:
"To be fair, says Mr Odlyzko, Internet traffic did grow this quickly in 1995 and 1996, when the Internet first went mainstream. But since then, he estimates, annual growth has settled down at around 70-150%, a far cry from the 700-1,500% trumpeted by WorldCom."
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, Emacs would be a great operating system... if only it came with a decent editor.
Elvis isn't dead. He just went home.
It's when a random pile of metal scraps and electronic parts spontaneously forms itself into a working robot, decides it has some purpose and learns to do it. Up until then, it's all creationism.
If my name were Bob McDonald, and I wanted to open McDonald's Steros, and I had a store logo that had nothing to do with yellow arches (say it was a blue neon sign with cursive lettering), I'd be willing to take on McDonald's over my right to use that name. On the other hand, if my name were Jim Smith, and I started McDonald's Hot Dogs with a stand in the park, and I spelled it with curvy, yellow lettering, and I had an obnoxious clown trying to attract children to my hot dog stand, then yeah, they'd probably sue me, and rightly so.
I would presume so. I have not seen any legal action pass between IBC root beer and the International Bank of Commerce (IBC again). As long as you don't have a blue logo on your store that looks like IBM, and as long as you don't go anywhere near the computer industry, you'd probably be okay.
That's true. On the other hand, I hear so many people blame Windows problems on drivers, like the only way to crash Windows is to install some rogue hardware with some unstable driver that you pulled off of www.warez-drivers.com, and here I had a factory-configured machine, with factory-configured drivers (nothing "rogue" until the modem got fried), and the configuration was (presumably) tested to some degree before it was sold, and it still crashed all the time. It is a rare day that we don't have to reboot the thing. The fact is, Windows 95 sucked hard, Windows 98 was little better, and Windows ME is just W98 Third Edition. I haven't tortured myself with XP yet. Windows 2000 is the only MS OS that I can use with minimal pain.
Wow. You must have gotten lucky and received the 31337 bug-free version of Windows 98. The old Compaq my wife uses has the OEM 98 installed on it (so we can't blame it on drivers -- they're all on that wretched "restore" CD that just dumps an image on your drive), and it crashes all the time. I finally got so sick of fighting it, I installed Win2k on the thing (which is the one decent OS to come out of Redmond), but it was really slow on that 333 MHz processor and 64M RAM, and then the modem got fried in an electrical storm, and Win2k couldn't handle the spare ISA modem I had lying around, so I had to "restore" that crap, and now it crashes all the time again. It is so time for me to put together a replacement machine.
Actually, Sept. 10 is the day it all went to hell. I woke up in the morning and forgot to wish my wife "Happy Birthday" until about 20 or 30 minutes later. She didn't buy my story when I tried to blame it on the UNIX clock rollover.
You don't think nearly large enough. If we're sedning up high-profile, star-studded doomsday missions, we need to get, at a bare minimum, Alec Baldwin, Bette Middler, Brittney Spears, Janet Jackson and Dell Guy From Hell on board. And wasn't Lance Bass saying he wanted to take a space shot?
Let me first say that I'm all for NEO search. If nothing else, I think it's handy to know what's hanging around in your neighborhood. But, the "odds" were not stating that the asteroid is just poking around wherever it gets a notion to go, and it just might decide to come knocking on our door. The "odds" were the result of a preliminary analysis that yielded a VERY broad arc, which happened to include Earth as one of its points. Within a matter of a few days, after the asteroid had been studied more and its path had been refined, Earth was completely eliminated from the arc, meaning that aside from the quantum physics interpretation that there is a non-zero probability that the thing will just randomly and at the last minute make a sharp and essentially impossible change in its course and head straight for Earth, there is basically NO CHANCE that the thing will hit the Earth in 2019. The arc for 2060 still includes the Earth as a remote possibility, but chances are that we will soon be eliminated from that path too. So, we're not taking a gamble -- any more than we're taking a gamble that the sun will suddenly and randomly plummet in some crazy direction and consume the Earth and the rest of the solar system.
My Halliday, Resnick and Walker Text (4th Edition) states, next to the picture of the woman, that one person was killed and seven were injured. The woman in the picture and her brother actually left about five minutes before the strike.
That's not scientists. That's environmentalists, who are like the bastard step-children science left on the side of a snowy mountain, hoping they would just freeze to death. Unfortunately, some bleeding heart woodsmen rescued them and now we're stuck with them.
Now I see that we need to form a special interest group: The Consortium of Programmers who want Properties in C Plus Plus, or CPP-CPP for short. Now we just need somebody with some extra money lying around to host the domain http://cpp-cpp.org and we can start gathering support, and before you know it, we'll have bought our very own U.S. Senator! Huzzah!!!
If you are honestly interested in the subject, we can continue the discussion off list. My e-mail is listed with my information. As for the BYU link to "The Book of Abraham Project" (it works now; it must have been down last night), I have not read the whole thing, but the author quotes lots of scriptures and some addresses from the semi-annual General Conference. Those are things you can find on lds.org, so feel free to look up those references, but remember that the author's interpretation is not authoritative. You will have to form your own opinions on the interpretation unless you can find an official source (i.e., somehting living in the mormon.org or lds.org domains) in which a General Authority has interpreted the passage. Again, anything you find at lds.org or mormon.org, you can consider official. Anything you find somewhere else on the internet is like most stuff you find on the internet -- may be true, may not be true. The problem with BYU, and that area in general, is there are just way too many Mormons there (I mean that quite seriously -- I live right in the middle of the Bible Belt and couldn't be happier).
The quote you provide from Elder Ballard is both accurate and in context, and you are quite correct that the proper place to find out about what Mormons believe is to visit either lds.org or mormon.org, both of which are operated and overseen by the Church and can be trusted to contain correct information.
However, byu.edu cannot be trusted as a source of doctrine, and particularly, the page you visited seems to just be the reflections of a random student or professor. The link does not work, so I can't see who wrote it, and I can't claim any more authority to define church doctrine than the author, so I will defer you to the pages at lds.org and mormon.org above. Some of those assertions you will find on the pages above, and those you can call LDS doctrine (you are quite correct that many of them will be different from what you believe). Others you will not find (I do have to address the worst fallacy: Yes, God did create us. I don't know what the context of that quote was or what the author was trying to point out, but it simply is not true. Gen 1:27 -- God created man in his own image. The only thing I can think of, besides the author just being whacko, is that we believe that God the Father directed the creation through Jesus Christ, who is also God, but since you believe they are one and the same, I can't see a whole lot of divergence there).
If you are seriously interested in what we believe on those subjects, there is a link to the scritpures on the lds.org site, and you can look up the following references, which pertain to the assertions in the page you found:
Gen. 1:26-27 (Bible); Alma 34:8-10(Book of Mormon); Doctrine and Covenants 131:22-23; Moses 1: 10-17, 31-42 (Pearl of Great Price); Rev. 12:1-11 (remember, we identify Lucifer with Satan) (Bible).
The scriptures are the basis of our beliefs, and anything else you happen across on that site, you can trust, especially if it is a quote from one of our General Authorities (like Elder Ballard), who are the ones authorized to interpret scripture.
In summary, yes, we believe in Christ and all of his teachings, yes, we believe in the Holy Bible (we particularly prefer the KJV), yes, we probably have very similar beliefs about what is right and what is wrong, yes, we celebrate holidays, birthdays, Easter, Christmas, and any other excuse we can find to serve red punch and cookies, yes, there are sometimes substantial differences between Mormons and other Christians, but no, that is not a reason that we cannot all work together for good common causes. If you know many Mormons, you will probably find that they are overall pretty normal folks. So, I think that other than a difference in definition of the word "Christian," we pretty much agree with each other. And that is indeed the most religious and off-topic discussion I have ever had on Slashdot.
Islam and Jehovah's Witnesses are not, and as far as I know do not claim to be, Christian because they do not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God nor that he is a Divine Being of any kind. Christianity is not a specific religion, nor is it limited to Protestant religions. It is based on a belief in the Divinity of Jesus Christ, which is a category that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints falls squarely into. The examples you cite of "radically non-Christian" beliefs are among arguments commonly taken out of context to foster distaste for our belief system, and it is probable you did not hear them from a member of our church. For example, we believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. We also read in the Bible that Lucifer is a fallen from Heaven (cf. Isa. 14:12 -- "How art thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer!"), so we may infer that he, too, was a child of God, albeit "child" is used in a completely different context. So to say that Lucifer is a brother to Jesus Christ is nothing more than to say we are all children of God, but not in the sense that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, so Jesus Christ is a brother to all of us, but in an astronomically superior sense. The other example you cite is not something you will find anywhere within the canon of scripture used by the Church, and is extrapolated from a belief that cannot be intelligently discussed without a foundation of much more basic beliefs. In any case, the beliefs upon which those things are founded, even in context, are more like the quantum physics of our belief system. The basic algebra is mostly the same. I think it is much more important, especially in our interfaith relations, that, like other Christians, we believe in the teachings of Jesus Christ that instruct us to love our neighbors, do good to others and live good, clean lives. It is for this reason that Mormons can often be found working alongside Baptists, Protestant Christians and Catholics for common causes despite certain doctrinal differences (of which there are many -- that I do not dispute).
I know /. is not the best place to have a religious discussion, but these kinds of misconceptions are the things that get us classed and confused with JW's so frequently (I have seen so many people shocked at the fact that we celebrate Easter, Christmas and birthdays, I just had to say something).
Not to be hyper-sensitive, but Mormons are Christians. They use the same Bible, OT and NT, that the rest of the Christian world uses, believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, believe that He died on the cross and was resurrected, believe that He will return to the Earth, and, incidentally, the proper name of the church is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I'm sure there was no ill will in your separating us (yes, of course I'm a Mormon) from Christianity, but it's a common mis-conception to either categorize us with JW's, with whom we have almost nothing in common, or outright confuse us with them.
Don't worry too much. I hear that the next version (the DRM one that REALLY sucks) is going to be called "Aggie."
The true fallacy is not necessarily that statistics are made up or are wrong. The problem is that statistics themselves are just numbers that do not tell a complete story. The compelling question in any of these interests is not necessarily "how many" but "why are there that many?" For example, some hispanic interest group recently named St. Mary's University Law School in San Antonio as one of the "Top 5 Law Schools for Hispanics." I remember being shocked, because I'm from the area and I know that St. Mary's basically sucks. I went on to read the article and found that the ranking was basically based on the ratio of hispanic students to white students in the schools studied and nothing else. Specifically excluded from the ranking was the percentage of students that actually pass the State Bar Exam (St. Mary's is one of the lowest in the nation on this statistic right now). The interest group had an axe to grind: higher admission rates for hispanic students. It doesn't matter if they are getting a quality education, it just matters that by claiming higher admission rates, they can claim a victory for their specific agenda. The reason St. Mary's has a high percentage of hispanic students is that San Antonio has a high percentage of hispanics (pretty close to 50%). It had nothing to do with St. Mary's being more "enlightened" or "tolerant" of racial diversity. The statistic simply told that St. Mary's was located in a predominantly hispanic area. What was interesting was that on the same list, an Ivy League school (I forget which) located much farther north and east (i.e. further away from Mexico), which had a lower overall hispanic population, also ranked very high on the list. In that case, the statistic really did represent something about the school other than its location, but again, the statistic by itself did not reveal what that something was. Only an in-depth analysis of the school, its culture, admission procedures and criteria and academic environment could have given a hint of what that something was. There we have two schools examined in the same study, gaining somewhat similar scores on the applied scale, and the statistics tell two completely different stories. Reducing people, institutions and other complex phenomena to simple data points is good only for those who then take the statistics and manipulate them to tell the story they want told.