If I'm perfectly pleasant and do proselytize--that is, discuss questions of religion with people who disagree seeking to persuade them--can I still avoid the nutjob label? I think that would depend on whether you're bothering them about it. If you're friends who are talking about it because it interests both of you, or they came up and tried to sell you on their views, I don't think many people have a problem with that (if it's private -- I've gotten into trouble with that myself on message boards). If you approach strangers and ask if they've heard the good news about Ceiling Cat, that another matter.
If not, do I get to call atheists who argue for atheism "nutjobs"?... do I get to call an unpleasant atheist a nutjob? If they're approaching people in church parking lots on Sunday morning telling them the good news about being able to sleep in, sure. And I assume you mean they're unpleasant about being an atheist (the guy in the next cubicle is unpleasant and a conservative Christian, but those have nothing to do with each other, so I wouldn't call him a religious nutjob) -- if so, I'd call that fair. We do tend to grow out of it after a couple years of not convincing anyone, though.
Quakers != Baptists. Different breed of nut job. I think that was more about the Puritans than the Quakers. And while the Quakers I know tend to be on the flakey side (much like the Wiccans), they're perfectly pleasant and don't proselytize; I think that would disqualify them from the "nutjob" label.
Now, it could seriously slow down a production server, but... you're not pushing untested SQL on a production server now, are you? Right? Riiiiiiiiiiight? Not as part of a system, no, but if I just need answers, I run untested queries on production servers all the time.
The problem with centralized curriculum is that the curriculum in a farming/small industrial town of 2000 (300 people in the high school, and that is 3 towns combined for the district) will be vastly different than that of a school that has 4000 students. I'm missing something here. Why would they be different, apart from the larger school being able to offer a wider variety of classes?
Elementary school education remains largely the same. Elementary is where I would make the biggest changes. I have no problems with public high schools in decent school districts.
Mandatory daily music classes: It's been pretty well demonstrated that music (at least instrumental -- I don't remember about vocal) education and practice is very good for brain development.
Reading: No extra instruction should be needed, just lengthen the school day and make the kids sit there and read for an hour or two per day while the teachers do grading or read something for themselves. The kids can read whatever they want, as long as it's professionally edited and uses standard grammar (i.e., no comic books). Aside from practicing the mechanics of reading, it will give them better vocabulary and good enough instincts on grammar and spelling that formal instruction is largely superfluous.
Foreign language immersion: From kindergarten through second or third grade, the language used in the classroom should be different than the language used at home. This one may not be possible, as finding enough teachers who are fluent with no accent in major foreign languages could be too difficult. Still, immigrant kids learn English in school with no trouble, and American kids going to an international school in a foreign country pick up the local language (this is how my wife learned German).
Math: Long multiplication and especially long division are the enemy! We like to think of them as "teaching the fundementals", but they aren't fundamental. They are shortcuts to perform multiplication and division by hand faster and with less paper, but they're rigid, frustrating, and build skills that are of no use in anything else. Doing multiplication and division by hand with an algebraic style means that wrong underestimates (with division) are still a step in the right direction, and builds practice with the mechanics of algebra without getting into the abstraction that elementary-age kids have trouble with. The kids won't be as good at doing the multiplication and division problems by hand as they are now, but that frankly isn't an important life skill. Also, a lot of geometry can be taught in late elementary school to break up the monotony of arithmetic.
After this not that long list I'm left with: Sandisk, Cowon, and perhaps cheap chinese manufacturers. Went with a Cowon D2 16GB one, which seems a lot nicer than the Sandisk alternative. I've never heard of Cowon, but I've been really happy with my Sansa (Sandisk) Clip MP3 player.
In Denmark, 60% of housing is connected to district heating. [inist.fr] 95% of that heat is "waste" from power plants. If you have cities of more than a few thousand people in temperate/cold areas it's a viable strategy. Hell, it ought to be a viable strategy in your basement. You're burning fuel to heat air and water, anyway; it shouldn't really take away from that to harness the mechanical energy from expansion. The only downside apart from initial expense is you'd mainly be generating electricity when the demand is lowest.
If you think he's there for completely altruistic reasons Not at all. He has plenty of money to spend the rest of his life in luxury doing what makes him happy. For now, what makes him happy is feeding his ego.
That doesn't sound very positive, but I bet a lot of us would be the same way. Wouldn't you like to have a staff at your disposal to work on making things the way you think they ought to be, at least in the areas you're interested in? Hell, that's why people run for president.
Chevy Chase: Uh, Roseanne, that's a teaser site, not a taser site. Wrong Gilda Radner reference. You're thinking of Emily Litella.
Roseanne Roseannadanna would go on and on about some celebrity she met on the street and how they were doing something gross. Her coanchor would ask what that had to do with the original point, and then Roseanne would say "Well, it just goes to show you, it's always something! If it's not one thing, it's another."
Roseanne Roseannadanna was cute, but Emily Litella is probably my all time favorite recurring SNL skit, except possibly Toonces, The Cat Who Could Drive a Car.
An out-of-the-box installation of Vista gets me to a workable desktop in 34 seconds on my system. From power-on? Mine takes about that long once the BIOS startup stuff is done, but that takes about 20 seconds. Athlon X2 5000+, 4GB RAM, Samsung Spinpoint drive.
How many times do you really need to get an email six months old? About twice a week. It would be more often if Outlook's search didn't suck so bad. GroupWise is still nowhere near as good at searching email as GMail, but it's a lot better than Outlook and I used to routinely search about five years worth of email in GroupWise.
This wasn't for CYA purposes, just to look up what I did on earlier projects that needed attention again.
It's obvious that wider availability means more people will use it. Yeah, probably. It also means fewer people will use inhalants, which are far more dangerous.
It's like the old question of whether God could create something to heavy for him to lift. The answer to one of faith is a simple "yes". I think a more sensible answer would be that "something too heavy for Him to lift" doesn't actually mean anything. It would be like asking whether your database can be more orange.
Substantive criticism of a 3-O (omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent) god usually involves The Problem of Evil. The usual response to that is free will, but I don't think free will can exist in any universe where an omniscient (including prescient, which a god outside of time would be) being exists, even if that being is powerless. Some Christians don't seem to get that point when I make it, but I've run into others who respond that omniscience is not a simple concept. Episcopalians apparently restrict it to mean only knowledge of those things that would not interfere with free will.
Personally, I don't see why the even otherwise moderate Christians insist on clinging to the absolutist 3-O and biblical infallibility view. It's not like the religion would fall apart without them.
I wouldn't say that they only use the Bible, a lot of them introduce many things that are not outlined or even mentioned in the bible. So what? This is why I have a higher opinion of Catholicism now as an agnostic than I did as a Protestant. The Protestant fixation on a book is just weird; why should that be a higher authority than the church that created it?
The Christians I really like, though, are the Quakers. If I hadn't become convinced that Judaism has never been true, I'd probably be Quaker, now.
Having socalised healthcare costs a lot of money. It costs a lot of taxes, but it's not like we aren't paying that money, anyway, along with massive billing overhead and waste when people only get treated in emergency rooms.
Universal healthcare would be nice, but I support a single-payer system on efficiency grounds.
I do find it odd that in many places in the United States it's legal for an adult to have sex with a 16 year old but illegal to tape it. If nothing else, a 16 year old can't sign a modeling release.
What I find is strange that in many places, a 16 year old can have sex, can be behind the camera recording other people having sex, but can't legally view the tape they just took.
some promiscuous gorilla species have specially adapted dicks to help them remove the previous male's sperm, thereby increasing their own chances. That may be all of the great apes (gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos and people).
Take a look at your own (or find a volunteer if you're female). Squishy pointed front to push previous semen out of the way (granted, it helps with penetration, too), flaring out to the rim where it suddenly goes back in so that semen can be caught behind the head and pulled out. Why else would the back of the penis head have that shape?
Crysis has the reputation of needing at least a couple hundred dollar video card to play passably. For something I'm actually interested in, Supreme Commander is a little easier to meet (at least in the graphics), but probably won't be handled well by my wife's three-year-old video card or my new onboard (AMD 780G) graphics.
Whenever the earlier of Spore and Starcraft 2 come out, I figure I'll try it out on what I've got, but expect to go back to the store for a real video card. Then I'll pick up Supreme Commander, too.
I do have one nice thing to say about W3.11; if you can get it to run on anything about as or more modern then a PII it runs (and installs) really fast! I imagine it installs about as fast as your floppy drive (that you presumably bought just for this) can read the ~20 discs.
This made me smile, imagining telling my past self circa 1995 about that system you're running. I thought that when I got my MP3 player (Sansa clip, 4GB, looks like a smaller Zippo), and telling my 1993 self about it, since I lived connected to a Walkman at the time. I mentioned that to my wife, and my son (10) piped up "What's a Walkman?"
Don't like the Constitution? Great, then get it amended. That's the process, not haveing a bunch of lawyers in black robes twist it around. No, not really. Judicial review has been an important part of our government since 1803, or our entire history as a successful country.
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Yes, voodoo economics and the like. You should probably still avoid that sense of the term when you're talking about religion.
or spouts a bunch of "Mega-Churchian" Voodoo
Voodoo (or Vodou or a couple of other spellings) is an entirely different religion.
If I'm perfectly pleasant and do proselytize--that is, discuss questions of religion with people who disagree seeking to persuade them--can I still avoid the nutjob label?
I think that would depend on whether you're bothering them about it. If you're friends who are talking about it because it interests both of you, or they came up and tried to sell you on their views, I don't think many people have a problem with that (if it's private -- I've gotten into trouble with that myself on message boards). If you approach strangers and ask if they've heard the good news about Ceiling Cat, that another matter.
If not, do I get to call atheists who argue for atheism "nutjobs"?... do I get to call an unpleasant atheist a nutjob?
If they're approaching people in church parking lots on Sunday morning telling them the good news about being able to sleep in, sure. And I assume you mean they're unpleasant about being an atheist (the guy in the next cubicle is unpleasant and a conservative Christian, but those have nothing to do with each other, so I wouldn't call him a religious nutjob) -- if so, I'd call that fair. We do tend to grow out of it after a couple years of not convincing anyone, though.
Quakers != Baptists. Different breed of nut job.
I think that was more about the Puritans than the Quakers. And while the Quakers I know tend to be on the flakey side (much like the Wiccans), they're perfectly pleasant and don't proselytize; I think that would disqualify them from the "nutjob" label.
Now, it could seriously slow down a production server, but... you're not pushing untested SQL on a production server now, are you? Right? Riiiiiiiiiiight?
Not as part of a system, no, but if I just need answers, I run untested queries on production servers all the time.
The problem with centralized curriculum is that the curriculum in a farming/small industrial town of 2000 (300 people in the high school, and that is 3 towns combined for the district) will be vastly different than that of a school that has 4000 students.
I'm missing something here. Why would they be different, apart from the larger school being able to offer a wider variety of classes?
Elementary school education remains largely the same.
Elementary is where I would make the biggest changes. I have no problems with public high schools in decent school districts.
Mandatory daily music classes: It's been pretty well demonstrated that music (at least instrumental -- I don't remember about vocal) education and practice is very good for brain development.
Reading: No extra instruction should be needed, just lengthen the school day and make the kids sit there and read for an hour or two per day while the teachers do grading or read something for themselves. The kids can read whatever they want, as long as it's professionally edited and uses standard grammar (i.e., no comic books). Aside from practicing the mechanics of reading, it will give them better vocabulary and good enough instincts on grammar and spelling that formal instruction is largely superfluous.
Foreign language immersion: From kindergarten through second or third grade, the language used in the classroom should be different than the language used at home. This one may not be possible, as finding enough teachers who are fluent with no accent in major foreign languages could be too difficult. Still, immigrant kids learn English in school with no trouble, and American kids going to an international school in a foreign country pick up the local language (this is how my wife learned German).
Math: Long multiplication and especially long division are the enemy! We like to think of them as "teaching the fundementals", but they aren't fundamental. They are shortcuts to perform multiplication and division by hand faster and with less paper, but they're rigid, frustrating, and build skills that are of no use in anything else. Doing multiplication and division by hand with an algebraic style means that wrong underestimates (with division) are still a step in the right direction, and builds practice with the mechanics of algebra without getting into the abstraction that elementary-age kids have trouble with. The kids won't be as good at doing the multiplication and division problems by hand as they are now, but that frankly isn't an important life skill. Also, a lot of geometry can be taught in late elementary school to break up the monotony of arithmetic.
After this not that long list I'm left with: Sandisk, Cowon, and perhaps cheap chinese manufacturers. Went with a Cowon D2 16GB one, which seems a lot nicer than the Sandisk alternative.
I've never heard of Cowon, but I've been really happy with my Sansa (Sandisk) Clip MP3 player.
In Denmark, 60% of housing is connected to district heating. [inist.fr] 95% of that heat is "waste" from power plants. If you have cities of more than a few thousand people in temperate/cold areas it's a viable strategy.
Hell, it ought to be a viable strategy in your basement. You're burning fuel to heat air and water, anyway; it shouldn't really take away from that to harness the mechanical energy from expansion. The only downside apart from initial expense is you'd mainly be generating electricity when the demand is lowest.
If you think he's there for completely altruistic reasons
Not at all. He has plenty of money to spend the rest of his life in luxury doing what makes him happy. For now, what makes him happy is feeding his ego.
That doesn't sound very positive, but I bet a lot of us would be the same way. Wouldn't you like to have a staff at your disposal to work on making things the way you think they ought to be, at least in the areas you're interested in? Hell, that's why people run for president.
Chevy Chase: Uh, Roseanne, that's a teaser site, not a taser site.
Wrong Gilda Radner reference. You're thinking of Emily Litella.
Roseanne Roseannadanna would go on and on about some celebrity she met on the street and how they were doing something gross. Her coanchor would ask what that had to do with the original point, and then Roseanne would say "Well, it just goes to show you, it's always something! If it's not one thing, it's another."
Roseanne Roseannadanna was cute, but Emily Litella is probably my all time favorite recurring SNL skit, except possibly Toonces, The Cat Who Could Drive a Car.
An out-of-the-box installation of Vista gets me to a workable desktop in 34 seconds on my system.
From power-on? Mine takes about that long once the BIOS startup stuff is done, but that takes about 20 seconds. Athlon X2 5000+, 4GB RAM, Samsung Spinpoint drive.
How many times do you really need to get an email six months old?
About twice a week. It would be more often if Outlook's search didn't suck so bad. GroupWise is still nowhere near as good at searching email as GMail, but it's a lot better than Outlook and I used to routinely search about five years worth of email in GroupWise.
This wasn't for CYA purposes, just to look up what I did on earlier projects that needed attention again.
It's obvious that wider availability means more people will use it.
Yeah, probably. It also means fewer people will use inhalants, which are far more dangerous.
It's like the old question of whether God could create something to heavy for him to lift. The answer to one of faith is a simple "yes".
I think a more sensible answer would be that "something too heavy for Him to lift" doesn't actually mean anything. It would be like asking whether your database can be more orange.
Substantive criticism of a 3-O (omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent) god usually involves The Problem of Evil. The usual response to that is free will, but I don't think free will can exist in any universe where an omniscient (including prescient, which a god outside of time would be) being exists, even if that being is powerless. Some Christians don't seem to get that point when I make it, but I've run into others who respond that omniscience is not a simple concept. Episcopalians apparently restrict it to mean only knowledge of those things that would not interfere with free will.
Personally, I don't see why the even otherwise moderate Christians insist on clinging to the absolutist 3-O and biblical infallibility view. It's not like the religion would fall apart without them.
I wouldn't say that they only use the Bible, a lot of them introduce many things that are not outlined or even mentioned in the bible.
So what? This is why I have a higher opinion of Catholicism now as an agnostic than I did as a Protestant. The Protestant fixation on a book is just weird; why should that be a higher authority than the church that created it?
The Christians I really like, though, are the Quakers. If I hadn't become convinced that Judaism has never been true, I'd probably be Quaker, now.
Best bumper sticker I ever saw:
"Tired of screwing? Try riveting!"
Having socalised healthcare costs a lot of money.
It costs a lot of taxes, but it's not like we aren't paying that money, anyway, along with massive billing overhead and waste when people only get treated in emergency rooms.
Universal healthcare would be nice, but I support a single-payer system on efficiency grounds.
I do find it odd that in many places in the United States it's legal for an adult to have sex with a 16 year old but illegal to tape it.
If nothing else, a 16 year old can't sign a modeling release.
What I find is strange that in many places, a 16 year old can have sex, can be behind the camera recording other people having sex, but can't legally view the tape they just took.
some promiscuous gorilla species have specially adapted dicks to help them remove the previous male's sperm, thereby increasing their own chances.
That may be all of the great apes (gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos and people).
Take a look at your own (or find a volunteer if you're female). Squishy pointed front to push previous semen out of the way (granted, it helps with penetration, too), flaring out to the rim where it suddenly goes back in so that semen can be caught behind the head and pulled out. Why else would the back of the penis head have that shape?
Crysis has the reputation of needing at least a couple hundred dollar video card to play passably. For something I'm actually interested in, Supreme Commander is a little easier to meet (at least in the graphics), but probably won't be handled well by my wife's three-year-old video card or my new onboard (AMD 780G) graphics.
Whenever the earlier of Spore and Starcraft 2 come out, I figure I'll try it out on what I've got, but expect to go back to the store for a real video card. Then I'll pick up Supreme Commander, too.
I hope you are thinking of RAID6.
If we're talking home use, I would assume that meant RAID 1.
I do have one nice thing to say about W3.11; if you can get it to run on anything about as or more modern then a PII it runs (and installs) really fast!
I imagine it installs about as fast as your floppy drive (that you presumably bought just for this) can read the ~20 discs.
This made me smile, imagining telling my past self circa 1995 about that system you're running.
I thought that when I got my MP3 player (Sansa clip, 4GB, looks like a smaller Zippo), and telling my 1993 self about it, since I lived connected to a Walkman at the time. I mentioned that to my wife, and my son (10) piped up "What's a Walkman?"
Don't like the Constitution? Great, then get it amended. That's the process, not haveing a bunch of lawyers in black robes twist it around.
No, not really. Judicial review has been an important part of our government since 1803, or our entire history as a successful country.