An enormous difference between your professor and Governor Palin is that your professor won't have his finger on The Button should some sort of conflict arise between his work and his religion.
I'm willing to tolerate far more eccentricity in my professors than in my presidents, because the worst a professor can do is waste my time.
(And yes, I know Palin is a candidate for vice president, not president. But essentially the only function of that job is to act as president should the real president be killed, incapacitated, or otherwise removed from office. So the VP's qualifications as president should certainly be examined carefully. Particularly since if the VP suddenly has to take over, it's almost certain to be right in the middle of a national crisis.)
Why does every criticism of a major presidential candidate have to elicit the response "but look, the other major candidate is just as bad"? They both suck! Justifying one side by saying that the other side is just as bad is ridiculous.
You might assume that, but it's wrong. Generally agreements are worked out to decide the governance and legal basis of military bases, but they remain sovereign territory of the hosting country.
The case of Guantanamo Bay is particularly weird because the lease was worked out long before the current Cuban government took power, is extremely unequal, and in practice the US does not allow Cuba any kind of control over the area. If it weren't for the fact that the US military so heavily outmatches that of Cuba, it would have surely been eliminated long ago. But despite all of this, legally speaking, it's still part of Cuba.
So the fact that the current administration has no problem with blatantly violating the Constitution is somehow a counter to the argument that Constitutional protections apply to non-citizens? That makes no sense!
Seriously? You don't see the difference between anonymously leaving behind poor-quality prints and having your prints entered into a database along with your name, date of birth, current address, and photograph?
Sorry non-US citizens, the Constitution and it's amendments only apply to US Citizens, no matter how much some people may want them to apply to the world.
Got a cite for this? Like, say, the passage in that document where it says that it only applies to citizens?
I think the real issue is that space travel is still intimately tied to nationalism. You would never come up with different words for "pilot", because pilot is just a job. But "astronaut" is a job which is deeply tied into the massive penis-comparison space game between nations.
So what? They can call it whatever they want in their language. (You think that the Chinese word for "Taikonaut" is actually "Taikonaut"? Think again!) English words for foreign people are still English words.
I think you severely underestimate the determination of customs people.
This law won't make a bit of difference during the actual process of getting your laptop seized.
If you refuse to cooperate you're still going to find your laptop gone and probably your ass in jail, with or without this law.
And if you decide to challenge it in court, the law may make it harder to fight but in the end the question will still come down to whether it's a constitutional violation or not.
That doesn't make sense to me. If these laptop searches are unconstitutional now, they'll still be unconstitutional after this law is passed. Nothing in the 4th amendment says "unless Congress passes a law that says it's ok."
Did I miss the part where it explained how the terrorists in question used open wifi as part of their attacks, or are you just saying that it's another case of government using terrorism as an excuse to crack down on something?
Think what you like. But run through the discussion to this story. Except for the big thread that started with the one guy who said "correlation is not causation", it looks to me like approximately every reply to this story assumes that the study has concluded that these plastics cause heart disease. Seems to me that we need more people saying that correlation is not causation, not fewer.
However, I should say that I agree with you completely that the statement itself is, generally, said in a completely knee-jerk manner with no thought behind it.
Seeing as how the article comes right out and says, essentially, that correlation is not causation and there is no evidence for causation in the study, how can you possibly start out with those two questions in your post? His post completely agrees with the researchers who performed the study, and yet you somehow feel a need to sit there and lecture him for stating a fundamental fact of statistics. Well done!
It's a defensive reaction, because most people think that correlation is causation.
Publish a study that shows how ice cream sales are correlated to shark attacks, to a very high degree. Watch how all the morons swarm out of the woodwork to talk about the evils of ice cream and how Nature is getting her revenge and all other kinds of stupid crap.
It's true that "correlation is not causation" does not add anything to the discussion. But it does keep things from being subtracted by idiots who can't grasp that concept.
Surprisingly enough, people choose Windows for reasons other than legacy. Maybe they have a lot of knowledgeable Windows developers, or the company has some stupid policy about which OSes you can use, or maybe they actually prefer to work with Windows.
Looks like this particular Cray is just using regular old InfiniBand. While that's certainly a cut above your typical high-speed Ethernet you might find in a cheap cluster, there's nothing particularly non-off-the-shelf about it. You could easily grab some standard PCs, equip them with InfiniBand, and achieve similar performance.
There really isn't such a thing as a "real" supercomputer anymore. In decades past, a Cray was a truly stupefying beast. Custom hardware all over the place, attention to detail in engineering that you'd never find anywhere else, and massively fast. This "Cray" is basically just high-end PC hardware in a pretty box.
Now there's nothing wrong with that approach, and I'm sure it saves people a lot of time and effort compared to throwing together their own system. But it's not some special, magical construct you can't find elsewhere.
It's great that people are taking such an interest in this election. Now if only we could get some candidates who are actually worth voting for, we'd be in business!
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What's sad is when certain fans attribute a completely natural difference in taste to some kind of defect.
Huh? What? Did you post this to the wrong thread?
I wouldn't want a member of the regular church-going population to be president either.
An enormous difference between your professor and Governor Palin is that your professor won't have his finger on The Button should some sort of conflict arise between his work and his religion.
I'm willing to tolerate far more eccentricity in my professors than in my presidents, because the worst a professor can do is waste my time.
(And yes, I know Palin is a candidate for vice president, not president. But essentially the only function of that job is to act as president should the real president be killed, incapacitated, or otherwise removed from office. So the VP's qualifications as president should certainly be examined carefully. Particularly since if the VP suddenly has to take over, it's almost certain to be right in the middle of a national crisis.)
Why does every criticism of a major presidential candidate have to elicit the response "but look, the other major candidate is just as bad"? They both suck! Justifying one side by saying that the other side is just as bad is ridiculous.
Rude? Watch me not care.
I'll pardon your ignorance if you pardon my advice to just fucking google it.
You might assume that, but it's wrong. Generally agreements are worked out to decide the governance and legal basis of military bases, but they remain sovereign territory of the hosting country.
The case of Guantanamo Bay is particularly weird because the lease was worked out long before the current Cuban government took power, is extremely unequal, and in practice the US does not allow Cuba any kind of control over the area. If it weren't for the fact that the US military so heavily outmatches that of Cuba, it would have surely been eliminated long ago. But despite all of this, legally speaking, it's still part of Cuba.
So the fact that the current administration has no problem with blatantly violating the Constitution is somehow a counter to the argument that Constitutional protections apply to non-citizens? That makes no sense!
Seriously? You don't see the difference between anonymously leaving behind poor-quality prints and having your prints entered into a database along with your name, date of birth, current address, and photograph?
Sorry non-US citizens, the Constitution and it's amendments only apply to US Citizens, no matter how much some people may want them to apply to the world.
Got a cite for this? Like, say, the passage in that document where it says that it only applies to citizens?
I think the real issue is that space travel is still intimately tied to nationalism. You would never come up with different words for "pilot", because pilot is just a job. But "astronaut" is a job which is deeply tied into the massive penis-comparison space game between nations.
Because people, as a whole, are jackasses and morons who don't think, they rationalize.
So what? They can call it whatever they want in their language. (You think that the Chinese word for "Taikonaut" is actually "Taikonaut"? Think again!) English words for foreign people are still English words.
I think you severely underestimate the determination of customs people.
This law won't make a bit of difference during the actual process of getting your laptop seized.
If you refuse to cooperate you're still going to find your laptop gone and probably your ass in jail, with or without this law.
And if you decide to challenge it in court, the law may make it harder to fight but in the end the question will still come down to whether it's a constitutional violation or not.
That doesn't make sense to me. If these laptop searches are unconstitutional now, they'll still be unconstitutional after this law is passed. Nothing in the 4th amendment says "unless Congress passes a law that says it's ok."
Did I miss the part where it explained how the terrorists in question used open wifi as part of their attacks, or are you just saying that it's another case of government using terrorism as an excuse to crack down on something?
Think what you like. But run through the discussion to this story. Except for the big thread that started with the one guy who said "correlation is not causation", it looks to me like approximately every reply to this story assumes that the study has concluded that these plastics cause heart disease. Seems to me that we need more people saying that correlation is not causation, not fewer.
However, I should say that I agree with you completely that the statement itself is, generally, said in a completely knee-jerk manner with no thought behind it.
Seeing as how the article comes right out and says, essentially, that correlation is not causation and there is no evidence for causation in the study, how can you possibly start out with those two questions in your post? His post completely agrees with the researchers who performed the study, and yet you somehow feel a need to sit there and lecture him for stating a fundamental fact of statistics. Well done!
Actually he completely agrees with the conclusion, which was that there is correlation but as yet no evidence for causation. You fail it!
It's a defensive reaction, because most people think that correlation is causation.
Publish a study that shows how ice cream sales are correlated to shark attacks, to a very high degree. Watch how all the morons swarm out of the woodwork to talk about the evils of ice cream and how Nature is getting her revenge and all other kinds of stupid crap.
It's true that "correlation is not causation" does not add anything to the discussion. But it does keep things from being subtracted by idiots who can't grasp that concept.
Surprisingly enough, people choose Windows for reasons other than legacy. Maybe they have a lot of knowledgeable Windows developers, or the company has some stupid policy about which OSes you can use, or maybe they actually prefer to work with Windows.
Looks like this particular Cray is just using regular old InfiniBand. While that's certainly a cut above your typical high-speed Ethernet you might find in a cheap cluster, there's nothing particularly non-off-the-shelf about it. You could easily grab some standard PCs, equip them with InfiniBand, and achieve similar performance.
There really isn't such a thing as a "real" supercomputer anymore. In decades past, a Cray was a truly stupefying beast. Custom hardware all over the place, attention to detail in engineering that you'd never find anywhere else, and massively fast. This "Cray" is basically just high-end PC hardware in a pretty box.
Now there's nothing wrong with that approach, and I'm sure it saves people a lot of time and effort compared to throwing together their own system. But it's not some special, magical construct you can't find elsewhere.
Of course it's inconclusive. You can hardly have a conclusive survey about which candidate is better when they aren't really all that different.
It's great that people are taking such an interest in this election. Now if only we could get some candidates who are actually worth voting for, we'd be in business!