> Highly anecdotal, though - where would I meet the fatties who never leave the house?:)
It'll be hard to meet those who are too fat to fit the doorway of their own house.
There have been a few who were so fat, that people had to bust a hole in their house to get them out...
I find it amazing how those can get so fat and not die - perhaps those that survive to that point have special genes (the rest die off at the usual "way too obese stage" and don't get to this "world record challenger stage").
I was mainly pointing out that it's clearly not as simple as: calories in - calories used, which the OP was claiming as _obvious_. This "obvious" but stupidly wrong claim is popularly waved about every time the topic of obesity comes up.
More accurate is: calories in - (calories used + calories excreted).
If you are right in your claim, your example already proves the "calorie in - calorie used" claim wrong. Since you eating the 3000 calories of protein or fibre would be different from you eating 3000 calories of sugar and starch. One has you gaining very little weight and certainly less fat. The other has you gaining more weight.
Most humans could eat lots of calories in the form of grass, but not gain much weight since their digestive systems won't be able to digest much of it, and most of it would just be excreted. In contrast cows are more efficient at converting grass to body mass (not that efficient but better than us).
Similarly the giant panda normally has a diet that consists mainly of bamboo, but it is not efficient at digesting it, so they have to eat quite a lot of bamboo.
I find it annoying that so many people (even many dietitians) don't take excretion into account and think it's simply calories in vs calories used. Worse is when they claim they are obviously right when they are so obviously wrong.
p.s. the bacteria is part of the reason why, not the sole reason. I was just giving examples of what people are working on, when it's past the "calories in - calories used" inanity.
p.p.s. Sometimes I wonder whether those dietitians etc are really helping given the sort of crappy advice they give that's backed by zero scientific research. Heck the "getting animals to put on weight fast" industry is probably knows more about what they doing. Whether the results are actually good for the humans eating the animals is a different matter. It's clear that a free range chicken is a very different from one cooped up in a cage, so I wouldn't be surprised if eating one instead of the other has a different impact on your health.
> The basic fact that consuming more energy than you use makes you fat > seems too obvious to even bother arguing about anymore.
Obvious but wrong. Clearly it's not so simple. You like many other people miss out the amount excreted. Unless you consider excretion of calories to be using those calories, which would be stupid.
I don't see many diet researchers measuring the amount of calories in the feces or other excretion. And there certainly are differences.
Also people are now noticing the differences in digestive systems: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100526141845.htm
Many obese people have bacteria and digestive systems that are more efficient and/or converts food into stuff that makes them fat.
Some probably have cultivated those bacteria through poor diets (poor at least from a modern day "plenty of food" sedentary lifestyle perspective), others might just be unfortunate.
So I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that in some unfortunate people the food becomes changed by their bacteria so that they need to eat more or feel like eating more.
For example: a) Say you need a minimum of 10 x A, 10 x B, and the food is 10 x A and 10 x B, but the bacteria keep converting half of the A to B, so you need to consume 20 x A and 20 x B, and end up with 10 x A and 30 x B. You meat the "A" requirement but you get fat and unhealthy.
b) Alternatively your bacteria might just do better on a fattening diet and so they have evolved to make sure (by various means) that you feel like eating a fattening diet suitable for them. After all who's the boss? You (10 trillion cells) or the 100 trillion bacteria in your gut? If it's a democracy you lose;).
It's certainly not all due to bacteria either, but just pointing out it's not so simple when you get to the details:).
FWIW, I'm not fat (puny and skinny actually), but I'm not one of those who place the blame for obesity completely on the obese. Or think they are lesser beings than I am (they most certainly are greater in some ways;) ).
Yeah same here, but can you get free water instead of the free coke?
If you still get the free coke, because of "parent programming" as I mentioned, you'd be tempted to finish it, on behalf of the starving kids in Africa. Even though your drinking it or not has zero effect on whether those kids starve or not (mass starvation is mostly due to bad politicians/leaders).
Of course if people consume and spend more and only die soon after their most productive ages, then overall it is actually better for the country in economic terms.
The young ones cost the country and produce little, so it's a loss if they die. Most only start being a net gain after their 30s. But past 50+ most stop being such a great contributor and start costing again.
So it's good economically if people conveniently died (due to obesity related diseases or smoking or whatever) sometime after the net gain period and before the "cost" age.
Most people will eventually die. Thus if you're obese (but not so obese that you can't be productive) or a smoker, thanks for your sacrifice.:)
Is there really a strong correlation between the playstation and obesity?
I see a stronger correlation between the portion/serving sizes.
When parents keep programming their children from young to finish everything on their plate and don't waste, think of the starving in Africa etc, they sure are going to find it difficult to not try to finish a super sized meal/drink.
And the businesses are sure happy to sell larger sizes. You can more easily sell larger portions for higher revenue and profits. Only a few snobs like going to expensive restaurants to get very expensive food in tiny portions.
As for "food preparation time", I eat out very often and thus spend nearly zero food preparation time and I'm not obese. It's just a matter of what you choose to eat and drink.
Here's a tip, cut out the sugar water and fries. Only have them as a treat once in a long while. Do fast food establishments in the USA make it easy and convenient to just order water with their burgers? Or is it more expensive to do so than to order it with sugar water?
Defaults are important if you are going to roll something out to thousands of desktops.
It has to be decent or half decent at least, so you don't get so many calls. It has to be consistent too, so that you don't so many calls and so that when you get the calls you don't waste extra time trying to figure out where the fuck is the close button is.
That's why many large corporations aren't rolling out Windows 7 over night, and they even upgrade Windows 7 machines to XP when they buy them. Windows 7 changed many things for little gain (Vista doesn't even exist as far as many corps are concerned;) ). The rest are doing it by attrition (only as new machines come in).
So the fact that "Desktop Linux" can't even get simple stuff like this right isn't going to help acceptance at all. Think long and hard about where you want to put your menus, close buttons, cancel and OK, and then STICK TO IT. Stop fucking around with it.
Unless of course you have a powerful reality distortion field like Steve Jobs.
p.s. Those stupid wobbly windows and zillions of themes aren't worth anything when it comes to productivity. Making it easy for users to change themes just makes it hard for Support to help them over the phone if they pick something really different.
> Sounds like a job. What's wrong with that? > We allow people to do all sorts of awful, dangerous things for money, why not sex?
Yeah just like the "President of the USA" job.
1) It's a very dangerous job - nearly 10% of the workers got killed because of their job. Converting to deaths per 100000 that's 9090 killed per 100000, more dangerous than the other dangerous legal jobs I'm aware of (if you know of a more dangerous legal job let me know - space shuttle astronaut? 14 deaths per 300+? ). 2) Some say what they do is immoral. 3) Millions nowadays seem to say what they do is awful.
I wouldn't recommend anyone to be a prostitute. Only if there's no other job that you are better suited for.
Same for President of the USA, I don't think it's such a great job either - there's so much shit up there. If you try to clean too much of it up you'd probably be killed, if you try to clean it a bit of it slowly, you'd still get lots of shit on you, you'll stink and millions of people will still hate you.
Uh that's why it pays a lot more than serving fast food. A lot more. Higher risk, higher pay. It might even be safer than doing night-shift in 7-11 or similar places, and it sure as hell pays a lot better.
And if you don't want to sleep with a disgusting old lard, don't. Who's forcing you? It's the illegal prostitution rings that really force women to do what they don't want to do - they lock the women up in rooms etc. So if prostitution was legal and well regulated it'll be a lot better for the prostitute (and their customers).
I don't recommend prostitution as a job (I've actually discouraged someone from doing so, hopefully she's got a safer job now - I doubt it pays as well though). It's a bit like one of those "star jobs" (sports athletes, actresses etc) but not as bad in some ways- the top bunch get a lot of money, the mid bunch get a fair bit, the rest just get by. And when you get less attractive the money dries up, and you better have other skills or have enough money stashed away.
But did they clutter up "casual encounters" that much when the adult section was around? If they didn't then it sure shows that the section worked.
I don't see the problem with having an adult section.
If it bothers people, those people just should stop going there.
As for kids, just install some nanny software or a proxy and let them learn to use their brains to think of clever ways of getting at porn or find other things to do:).
Many of Vikings moved to Great Britain. Their descendants are the English football fans who regularly go to Europe, get really drunk, fight the locals and each other.
The rest of the Vikings who stayed at home learned how to work together and survive peacefully with what they have.;).
> Both Northrop Grumman and EMC declined to comment, > The manufacturer reports that the system and its underlying technology have an exemplary history of reliability
> Trying hard at something you're neither gifted nor particularly interested in is an essential requirement for getting a job. > Most employers would be more impressed with someone who at least finished their course and got a low grade, rather than just gave up.
Really?
Smart employers will realize it is better if that someone finished and did OK or even did very well. Or that person also tried something else and got good grades.
If you have a habit of persisting but only producing crap results, you'd be more likely to be wasting your time and everyone else's time.
Either get better at it, or do something that you are better at. Stop wasting time and resources. Otherwise, it just makes people think you're stupid, incompetent and stubborn. Someone who doesn't easily learn from mistakes.
Being stubbon, competent, and smart has its merits. Stubborn, incompetent and stupid is just bad.
p.s. no, I'm not a person who thinks that highly of Thomas Edison and his "perspiration" methods.
This way those who want to learn can more easily learn, even if they are in some cybercafe in some poor country.
Those who want to get a degree would probably still have to pay and jump through more hoops. But as we all know, getting a degree is not the same as learning.
Yep. The most likely reason the movie didn't do that well was because most people didn't want to watch it. Or they were told not to bother from those who watched it.
I wonder if those 5000 John Does are actually the total number of those who pirated the movie - which would be a rather embarrassingly small figure:). From what I hear, I wouldn't bother wasting my bandwidth downloading Hurt Locker, and I doubt I'd bother popping down the local pirate shop to get a copy.
If filmmakers wanted to make more money they should make movies that millions of people will want to watch, and make it easy for them to pay and watch it.
FWIW, I paid to watch Avatar in the cinema. And it was worth my money, nice graphics and all that. Even my mom paid to watch it with one of her friends and they both liked it too. Surprise surprise, my mom doesn't always like the same movies I like. My dad didn't want to watch it - he said it was too long. IIRC he watched LoTR, and I think that did well by most sane estimates.
This way users are more likely to realize they've been pwned.
If they lose access to their accounts because some spammer is stupid[1] and changes the passwords, that's not always a minus to the rest of us.
[1] If you kick out the real user from his/her account you significantly raise the odds that someone is going to do something about/to you. Whereas previously the real user might not even notice his/her account is being used for spam, or not even care.
Quote: "On the basis of those calculations, Gottman has proven something remarkable. If he analyzes an hour of a husband and wife talking, he can predict with 95% accuracy whether that couple will still be married fifteen years later. If he watches a couple for fifteen minutes, his success rate is around 90%. Recently, a professor who works with Gottman named Sybil Carrère, who was playing around with some of the videotapes, trying to design a new study, discovered that if they looked at only three minutes of a couple talking, they could still predict with fairly impressive accuracy who was going to get divorced and who was going to make it. The truth of a marriage can be understood in a much shorter time than anyone ever imagined."
But I disagree with the conclusion over the "doctors being sued" part. The conclusion was to avoid certain doctors, but to me that study could just indicate people are more likely to sue doctors they don't like rather than that those type of doctors are more likely to commit sue-worthy mistakes. Unless of course the study also analyzed the success/failure rates of those doctors. It would actually be interesting if that was done and it turned out that the doctors who had a less friendly tone were actually significantly worse, but I don't get that from the article.
Seriously, that's why trying to prove certain things may not be possible. Saying they are likely to be XYZ based on certain evidence is wiser, but insisting that you are even close to 100% sure is being silly. If it turns out we really are in something similar to a universe simulator/virtual machine there's no guarantee we can prove anything about stuff outside.
For example, say I create a universe simulator, set up a universe, make copies and mess about with some copies. Pause one, edit and restart it.
How old would that universe be? From the "inside" it might be billions of years or more. From outside it might have just started a moment ago.
From inside that universe, based on the rules, there could be no evidence or need for a creator. From the outside there could be one or many creators involved in designing it, etc. Or the concept of "one" vs "many" doesn't really translate that well.
Yes it could turn out that isn't a creator at all, and it just so happens it's like that. But it could even turn out to be stranger - because the rules outside aren't necessarily the same as the rules inside, heck thinking they must be takes an immense leap of faith in my opinion.
Looking at the evidence, I think the universe isn't quite so simple as many think (even the very smart ones). As such, I personally believe there is a God and he has a strange sense of humour. I may be wrong, but how can a intelligent, rational and knowledgeable mere human being can be so sure he/she is right about the universe?
It's certainly not a simple 3 body newtonian universe we're in. And thank God the graphics are better than Civ2:).
Hey there's a reason why they have a long track record. The weaker and less fit ones died out. Survival of the fittest and all that. You might even argue that Atheism is a default (most animals do not appear to have much of a religion), and that religion has evolved and outcompeted Atheism in humans.
So I doubt that this recent resurfacing of Atheism will beat the major religions.
Most humans will always want to be part of a greater something. So they will always find something.
I see football/soccer fans attending their "worship services", making pilgrimages and even waging holy wars against infidels who worship the False Teams. Heck there might even be far more "Holy Vegetarians/Vegans" (who make Veganism a near religious practice) than there are Strict Atheists (those who when in deep shit won't start crying for help to God or Gaia or the Flying Spaghetti Monster etc).
Some religions might actually provide more benefit than cost to believers as a group. Atheists might insist on not seeing them, but research done by scientists certainly have indicated that the religious live longer. There are plenty of other benefits. Many of the top hospitals and schools were established by the religious. So while this increased the cost to those individuals, society has benefited greatly.
It is also easy to reason that since the placebo effect is real and effective in many diseases, someone who believes in a God that helps, can more easily self-administer the placebo effect (via praying) than some Atheist who doesn't.
Thus if a particular religion does not cost its adherents (as a group) very much, than with these benefits (and other benefits), it would be evolutionarily fitter than Atheism which does not provide much benefit.
And what benefits does Atheism actually provide to its adherents? Plenty of historical evidence shows that the religious are also capable of rational and scientific thinking - many great scientists and innovators have been religious.
If Atheism provides fewer benefits than religion then the religions that cost less will be better for humans in that respect. Of course there are some religions that cost more, but encourage adherents to eliminate everyone else. But that does not mean all religions are worse for humans than Atheism.
If benefits of Atheism are few, rational atheists who aim to help humanity should actually encourage the following of certain religions over other religions or even Atheism;).
Does the law also apply to resellers? If it does I can see how this would be good for certain company strategies.
There are many companies that have no intention of still selling the same product for 3 years and certainly do not intend to be still selling the same product for 20 years. So put a suitable patent number on say an iPhone and voila customers can't even legally resell their old iPhone by the time the new one is out, if you want an iPhone someone has to give it to you for free or you'll have to buy the new one:).
> In fact it only indicts them further that nobody in those cultures was smart enough to figure out 'well, what if we made these bigger?'
The article I linked to has some theories on why they didn't do it, and I doubt it's because they weren't smart enough to think "what if we made these bigger".
People can come up with all sorts of rationalization to justify killing something or someone. And they do.
Special casing human life puts one additional barrier to this, yes it's not even close to 100% effective but it is better than current alternatives I'm aware of, including not treating human life as a special case.
Not special casing human life wouldn't have stopped Hitler at all. He was pretty good at surrounding himself with people who wouldn't kill him, people who probably made an internal calculation that having Hitler alive would be more beneficial to themselves than having Hitler dead.
We do execute people who conduct war crimes, but since we "special case human life" we have a special process to do so. It's not just some random person doing a quick mental calculation and then going yeah the world would be better off if this guy was dead, and then pulling the trigger.
After all, if what you say is OK, then what is to stop some random guy on the street thinking "bmacs27 is doomed to die anyway, the world would be better off without bmacs27 consuming resources at a rate way above the world average, so I'll do the world a favour by killing bmacs27 and a few similar others". Or some person thinking - this old/paraplegic/sick person is no longer contributing to society and can no longer contribute much, the world is better off without him/her, and then killing that person.
Some random guy could think that now, but because we special case human life we have one additional reason to say he has done something wrong when he kills. And he also might be more likely to be aware that he is doing something wrong (though he decides to still do it anyway).
We don't give the authority to individual humans to personally decide whether to discard other humans. In some countries humans can't even do that to some lucky non-human animals that have been special cased by people in those countries.
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> Highly anecdotal, though - where would I meet the fatties who never leave the house? :)
It'll be hard to meet those who are too fat to fit the doorway of their own house.
There have been a few who were so fat, that people had to bust a hole in their house to get them out...
I find it amazing how those can get so fat and not die - perhaps those that survive to that point have special genes (the rest die off at the usual "way too obese stage" and don't get to this "world record challenger stage").
I was mainly pointing out that it's clearly not as simple as: calories in - calories used, which the OP was claiming as _obvious_. This "obvious" but stupidly wrong claim is popularly waved about every time the topic of obesity comes up.
More accurate is: calories in - (calories used + calories excreted).
If you are right in your claim, your example already proves the "calorie in - calorie used" claim wrong. Since you eating the 3000 calories of protein or fibre would be different from you eating 3000 calories of sugar and starch. One has you gaining very little weight and certainly less fat. The other has you gaining more weight.
Most humans could eat lots of calories in the form of grass, but not gain much weight since their digestive systems won't be able to digest much of it, and most of it would just be excreted. In contrast cows are more efficient at converting grass to body mass (not that efficient but better than us).
Similarly the giant panda normally has a diet that consists mainly of bamboo, but it is not efficient at digesting it, so they have to eat quite a lot of bamboo.
I find it annoying that so many people (even many dietitians) don't take excretion into account and think it's simply calories in vs calories used. Worse is when they claim they are obviously right when they are so obviously wrong.
p.s. the bacteria is part of the reason why, not the sole reason. I was just giving examples of what people are working on, when it's past the "calories in - calories used" inanity.
p.p.s. Sometimes I wonder whether those dietitians etc are really helping given the sort of crappy advice they give that's backed by zero scientific research. Heck the "getting animals to put on weight fast" industry is probably knows more about what they doing. Whether the results are actually good for the humans eating the animals is a different matter. It's clear that a free range chicken is a very different from one cooped up in a cage, so I wouldn't be surprised if eating one instead of the other has a different impact on your health.
> The basic fact that consuming more energy than you use makes you fat
;).
:).
;) ).
> seems too obvious to even bother arguing about anymore.
Obvious but wrong. Clearly it's not so simple. You like many other people miss out the amount excreted. Unless you consider excretion of calories to be using those calories, which would be stupid.
I don't see many diet researchers measuring the amount of calories in the feces or other excretion. And there certainly are differences.
Also people are now noticing the differences in digestive systems: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100526141845.htm
Many obese people have bacteria and digestive systems that are more efficient and/or converts food into stuff that makes them fat.
Some probably have cultivated those bacteria through poor diets (poor at least from a modern day "plenty of food" sedentary lifestyle perspective), others might just be unfortunate.
So I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that in some unfortunate people the food becomes changed by their bacteria so that they need to eat more or feel like eating more.
For example:
a) Say you need a minimum of 10 x A, 10 x B, and the food is 10 x A and 10 x B, but the bacteria keep converting half of the A to B, so you need to consume 20 x A and 20 x B, and end up with 10 x A and 30 x B. You meat the "A" requirement but you get fat and unhealthy.
b) Alternatively your bacteria might just do better on a fattening diet and so they have evolved to make sure (by various means) that you feel like eating a fattening diet suitable for them. After all who's the boss? You (10 trillion cells) or the 100 trillion bacteria in your gut? If it's a democracy you lose
It's certainly not all due to bacteria either, but just pointing out it's not so simple when you get to the details
FWIW, I'm not fat (puny and skinny actually), but I'm not one of those who place the blame for obesity completely on the obese. Or think they are lesser beings than I am (they most certainly are greater in some ways
Yeah same here, but can you get free water instead of the free coke?
:)
If you still get the free coke, because of "parent programming" as I mentioned, you'd be tempted to finish it, on behalf of the starving kids in Africa. Even though your drinking it or not has zero effect on whether those kids starve or not (mass starvation is mostly due to bad politicians/leaders).
Of course if people consume and spend more and only die soon after their most productive ages, then overall it is actually better for the country in economic terms.
The young ones cost the country and produce little, so it's a loss if they die. Most only start being a net gain after their 30s. But past 50+ most stop being such a great contributor and start costing again.
So it's good economically if people conveniently died (due to obesity related diseases or smoking or whatever) sometime after the net gain period and before the "cost" age.
Most people will eventually die. Thus if you're obese (but not so obese that you can't be productive) or a smoker, thanks for your sacrifice.
Is there really a strong correlation between the playstation and obesity?
I see a stronger correlation between the portion/serving sizes.
When parents keep programming their children from young to finish everything on their plate and don't waste, think of the starving in Africa etc, they sure are going to find it difficult to not try to finish a super sized meal/drink.
And the businesses are sure happy to sell larger sizes. You can more easily sell larger portions for higher revenue and profits. Only a few snobs like going to expensive restaurants to get very expensive food in tiny portions.
As for "food preparation time", I eat out very often and thus spend nearly zero food preparation time and I'm not obese. It's just a matter of what you choose to eat and drink.
Here's a tip, cut out the sugar water and fries. Only have them as a treat once in a long while. Do fast food establishments in the USA make it easy and convenient to just order water with their burgers? Or is it more expensive to do so than to order it with sugar water?
Defaults are important if you are going to roll something out to thousands of desktops.
;) ). The rest are doing it by attrition (only as new machines come in).
It has to be decent or half decent at least, so you don't get so many calls.
It has to be consistent too, so that you don't so many calls and so that when you get the calls you don't waste extra time trying to figure out where the fuck is the close button is.
That's why many large corporations aren't rolling out Windows 7 over night, and they even upgrade Windows 7 machines to XP when they buy them. Windows 7 changed many things for little gain (Vista doesn't even exist as far as many corps are concerned
So the fact that "Desktop Linux" can't even get simple stuff like this right isn't going to help acceptance at all. Think long and hard about where you want to put your menus, close buttons, cancel and OK, and then STICK TO IT. Stop fucking around with it.
Unless of course you have a powerful reality distortion field like Steve Jobs.
p.s. Those stupid wobbly windows and zillions of themes aren't worth anything when it comes to productivity. Making it easy for users to change themes just makes it hard for Support to help them over the phone if they pick something really different.
> Sounds like a job. What's wrong with that?
> We allow people to do all sorts of awful, dangerous things for money, why not sex?
Yeah just like the "President of the USA" job.
1) It's a very dangerous job - nearly 10% of the workers got killed because of their job. Converting to deaths per 100000 that's 9090 killed per 100000, more dangerous than the other dangerous legal jobs I'm aware of (if you know of a more dangerous legal job let me know - space shuttle astronaut? 14 deaths per 300+? ).
2) Some say what they do is immoral.
3) Millions nowadays seem to say what they do is awful.
I wouldn't recommend anyone to be a prostitute. Only if there's no other job that you are better suited for.
Same for President of the USA, I don't think it's such a great job either - there's so much shit up there. If you try to clean too much of it up you'd probably be killed, if you try to clean it a bit of it slowly, you'd still get lots of shit on you, you'll stink and millions of people will still hate you.
Uh that's why it pays a lot more than serving fast food. A lot more. Higher risk, higher pay. It might even be safer than doing night-shift in 7-11 or similar places, and it sure as hell pays a lot better.
And if you don't want to sleep with a disgusting old lard, don't. Who's forcing you? It's the illegal prostitution rings that really force women to do what they don't want to do - they lock the women up in rooms etc. So if prostitution was legal and well regulated it'll be a lot better for the prostitute (and their customers).
I don't recommend prostitution as a job (I've actually discouraged someone from doing so, hopefully she's got a safer job now - I doubt it pays as well though). It's a bit like one of those "star jobs" (sports athletes, actresses etc) but not as bad in some ways- the top bunch get a lot of money, the mid bunch get a fair bit, the rest just get by. And when you get less attractive the money dries up, and you better have other skills or have enough money stashed away.
But did they clutter up "casual encounters" that much when the adult section was around? If they didn't then it sure shows that the section worked.
:).
I don't see the problem with having an adult section.
If it bothers people, those people just should stop going there.
As for kids, just install some nanny software or a proxy and let them learn to use their brains to think of clever ways of getting at porn or find other things to do
Many of Vikings moved to Great Britain. Their descendants are the English football fans who regularly go to Europe, get really drunk, fight the locals and each other.
;).
The rest of the Vikings who stayed at home learned how to work together and survive peacefully with what they have.
> Both Northrop Grumman and EMC declined to comment,
;).
> The manufacturer reports that the system and its underlying technology have an exemplary history of reliability
So who's lying
> Trying hard at something you're neither gifted nor particularly interested in is an essential requirement for getting a job.
> Most employers would be more impressed with someone who at least finished their course and got a low grade, rather than just gave up.
Really?
Smart employers will realize it is better if that someone finished and did OK or even did very well. Or that person also tried something else and got good grades.
If you have a habit of persisting but only producing crap results, you'd be more likely to be wasting your time and everyone else's time.
Either get better at it, or do something that you are better at. Stop wasting time and resources. Otherwise, it just makes people think you're stupid, incompetent and stubborn. Someone who doesn't easily learn from mistakes.
Being stubbon, competent, and smart has its merits. Stubborn, incompetent and stupid is just bad.
p.s. no, I'm not a person who thinks that highly of Thomas Edison and his "perspiration" methods.
Wow, given the content I almost expected it to come from theonion instead of thecrimson.
If Harvard really wants to help those with financial problems they could start by putting more of their lectures on line: http://www.youtube.com/user/harvard?blend=2&ob=4#g/u
MIT has certainly lots more available: http://www.youtube.com/user/MIT#g/u
Stanford has some too. And India sure has lots http://www.youtube.com/user/nptelhrd?blend=1&ob=4
This way those who want to learn can more easily learn, even if they are in some cybercafe in some poor country.
Those who want to get a degree would probably still have to pay and jump through more hoops. But as we all know, getting a degree is not the same as learning.
Yep. The most likely reason the movie didn't do that well was because most people didn't want to watch it. Or they were told not to bother from those who watched it.
I wonder if those 5000 John Does are actually the total number of those who pirated the movie - which would be a rather embarrassingly small figure :). From what I hear, I wouldn't bother wasting my bandwidth downloading Hurt Locker, and I doubt I'd bother popping down the local pirate shop to get a copy.
If filmmakers wanted to make more money they should make movies that millions of people will want to watch, and make it easy for them to pay and watch it.
FWIW, I paid to watch Avatar in the cinema. And it was worth my money, nice graphics and all that. Even my mom paid to watch it with one of her friends and they both liked it too. Surprise surprise, my mom doesn't always like the same movies I like. My dad didn't want to watch it - he said it was too long. IIRC he watched LoTR, and I think that did well by most sane estimates.
But despite that, somehow LOTR allegedly didn't make enough money for some crooks to pay Peter Jackson his fair share, and apparently Return of the Jedi never made money ( http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article6024677.ece). "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" lost money too: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100708/02510310122.shtml
So guess who I think are the real thieves and crooks in the movie and music industry? It's not those file sharers.
Makes you wonder how they stay in business. Perhaps the Government should shut them down and put them out of their misery.
> If we're in a VM then what's going on outside doesn't matter. It's not like we're ever going to make the jump to the "outside" world,
How can you be so sure of this conclusion?
Many people wipe/modify VMs based on what happens inside.
No it's a reasonably useful feature.
This way users are more likely to realize they've been pwned.
If they lose access to their accounts because some spammer is stupid[1] and changes the passwords, that's not always a minus to the rest of us.
[1] If you kick out the real user from his/her account you significantly raise the odds that someone is going to do something about/to you. Whereas previously the real user might not even notice his/her account is being used for spam, or not even care.
Sure looks more like elrousO to me...
For scenarios and for many people those initial perceptions are often right[1] (and good enough).
But going by guesses does not make for a fair trial.
[1] See: http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/excerpts/2005-01-07-blink_x.htm
Quote: "On the basis of those calculations, Gottman has proven something remarkable. If he analyzes an hour of a husband and wife talking, he can predict with 95% accuracy whether that couple will still be married fifteen years later. If he watches a couple for fifteen minutes, his success rate is around 90%. Recently, a professor who works with Gottman named Sybil Carrère, who was playing around with some of the videotapes, trying to design a new study, discovered that if they looked at only three minutes of a couple talking, they could still predict with fairly impressive accuracy who was going to get divorced and who was going to make it. The truth of a marriage can be understood in a much shorter time than anyone ever imagined."
But I disagree with the conclusion over the "doctors being sued" part. The conclusion was to avoid certain doctors, but to me that study could just indicate people are more likely to sue doctors they don't like rather than that those type of doctors are more likely to commit sue-worthy mistakes. Unless of course the study also analyzed the success/failure rates of those doctors. It would actually be interesting if that was done and it turned out that the doctors who had a less friendly tone were actually significantly worse, but I don't get that from the article.
No, it's virtual machines all the way...
:).
Seriously, that's why trying to prove certain things may not be possible. Saying they are likely to be XYZ based on certain evidence is wiser, but insisting that you are even close to 100% sure is being silly. If it turns out we really are in something similar to a universe simulator/virtual machine there's no guarantee we can prove anything about stuff outside.
For example, say I create a universe simulator, set up a universe, make copies and mess about with some copies. Pause one, edit and restart it.
How old would that universe be? From the "inside" it might be billions of years or more. From outside it might have just started a moment ago.
From inside that universe, based on the rules, there could be no evidence or need for a creator. From the outside there could be one or many creators involved in designing it, etc. Or the concept of "one" vs "many" doesn't really translate that well.
Yes it could turn out that isn't a creator at all, and it just so happens it's like that. But it could even turn out to be stranger - because the rules outside aren't necessarily the same as the rules inside, heck thinking they must be takes an immense leap of faith in my opinion.
Looking at the evidence, I think the universe isn't quite so simple as many think (even the very smart ones). As such, I personally believe there is a God and he has a strange sense of humour. I may be wrong, but how can a intelligent, rational and knowledgeable mere human being can be so sure he/she is right about the universe?
It's certainly not a simple 3 body newtonian universe we're in. And thank God the graphics are better than Civ2
Heh, nowadays a perl/python/ruby program can increment a number faster than a 1MHz 6502 can (fastest instruction takes 2 cycles).
;).
Good times good times
> have a anciently long track record of atrocity
;).
Hey there's a reason why they have a long track record. The weaker and less fit ones died out. Survival of the fittest and all that. You might even argue that Atheism is a default (most animals do not appear to have much of a religion), and that religion has evolved and outcompeted Atheism in humans.
So I doubt that this recent resurfacing of Atheism will beat the major religions.
Most humans will always want to be part of a greater something. So they will always find something.
I see football/soccer fans attending their "worship services", making pilgrimages and even waging holy wars against infidels who worship the False Teams. Heck there might even be far more "Holy Vegetarians/Vegans" (who make Veganism a near religious practice) than there are Strict Atheists (those who when in deep shit won't start crying for help to God or Gaia or the Flying Spaghetti Monster etc).
Some religions might actually provide more benefit than cost to believers as a group. Atheists might insist on not seeing them, but research done by scientists certainly have indicated that the religious live longer. There are plenty of other benefits. Many of the top hospitals and schools were established by the religious. So while this increased the cost to those individuals, society has benefited greatly.
It is also easy to reason that since the placebo effect is real and effective in many diseases, someone who believes in a God that helps, can more easily self-administer the placebo effect (via praying) than some Atheist who doesn't.
Thus if a particular religion does not cost its adherents (as a group) very much, than with these benefits (and other benefits), it would be evolutionarily fitter than Atheism which does not provide much benefit.
And what benefits does Atheism actually provide to its adherents? Plenty of historical evidence shows that the religious are also capable of rational and scientific thinking - many great scientists and innovators have been religious.
If Atheism provides fewer benefits than religion then the religions that cost less will be better for humans in that respect. Of course there are some religions that cost more, but encourage adherents to eliminate everyone else. But that does not mean all religions are worse for humans than Atheism.
If benefits of Atheism are few, rational atheists who aim to help humanity should actually encourage the following of certain religions over other religions or even Atheism
Does the law also apply to resellers? If it does I can see how this would be good for certain company strategies.
:).
There are many companies that have no intention of still selling the same product for 3 years and certainly do not intend to be still selling the same product for 20 years. So put a suitable patent number on say an iPhone and voila customers can't even legally resell their old iPhone by the time the new one is out, if you want an iPhone someone has to give it to you for free or you'll have to buy the new one
> In fact it only indicts them further that nobody in those cultures was smart enough to figure out 'well, what if we made these bigger?'
The article I linked to has some theories on why they didn't do it, and I doubt it's because they weren't smart enough to think "what if we made these bigger".
People can come up with all sorts of rationalization to justify killing something or someone. And they do.
Special casing human life puts one additional barrier to this, yes it's not even close to 100% effective but it is better than current alternatives I'm aware of, including not treating human life as a special case.
Not special casing human life wouldn't have stopped Hitler at all. He was pretty good at surrounding himself with people who wouldn't kill him, people who probably made an internal calculation that having Hitler alive would be more beneficial to themselves than having Hitler dead.
We do execute people who conduct war crimes, but since we "special case human life" we have a special process to do so. It's not just some random person doing a quick mental calculation and then going yeah the world would be better off if this guy was dead, and then pulling the trigger.
After all, if what you say is OK, then what is to stop some random guy on the street thinking "bmacs27 is doomed to die anyway, the world would be better off without bmacs27 consuming resources at a rate way above the world average, so I'll do the world a favour by killing bmacs27 and a few similar others". Or some person thinking - this old/paraplegic/sick person is no longer contributing to society and can no longer contribute much, the world is better off without him/her, and then killing that person.
Some random guy could think that now, but because we special case human life we have one additional reason to say he has done something wrong when he kills. And he also might be more likely to be aware that he is doing something wrong (though he decides to still do it anyway).
We don't give the authority to individual humans to personally decide whether to discard other humans. In some countries humans can't even do that to some lucky non-human animals that have been special cased by people in those countries.