If C means “average” then yes, you should get something like a bell curve. However if C means “passing” there is absolutely no reason that the outcome should be a bell curve.
What it boils down to is the simple question... do you want to pass lazy morons just because the class on the average was lazier and dumber still? If the answer is “yes... it looks bad if the entire class fails”, you then have to try to get a distribution that works for everyone... and since every lazy moron’s parent is convinced that HIS lazy moron of a child deserves an A, the entire curve tends to swing that direction.
The alternative is to apply a “standardized” test – and even those are normed (difficulty adjusted so that “too many” don’t pass or fail)! – which the lazy morons will then claim is discrimination against lazy morons.
Well, duh... the Fahrenheit scale was specifically designed to cover the entire range of temperatures found on planet earth. Anywhere outside of the 0-100 degree range is an unearthly place which should instead be classified as either “hell” or “hell... and did the _____ win the superbowl/world series/etc.?”
E was never part of the standard 5-letter A-B-C-D-F grading system because it would have been confusing. The existing E-S-N-U grading scale used the letter E to indicate Excellent, or the highest possible grade.
Besides, geologic processes do result in upside down strata. There's no indication that a flood could.
Depending on the order – and speed – in which the sediments were deposited there’s no reason to expect that they couldn’t be laid out-of-order from what you observe elsewhere.
That's why we don't find complete trees in a upright position. We usually only find the root system and a few feet of trunk. Of course they were buried rapidly as in less than a few decades.
Citation? This certainly doesn’t look like “roots and a few feet of trunk”. Besides which, the strata through which they often extend is thought to have required millions of years for deposition, not mere decades, and other fossils within those rock layers are dated accordingly.
In the case of the trees buried by volcanoes, they tend not to be upright.
They are if they’re floating in that position, as the case in both Spirit Lake (Mt. St. Helens) and Yellowstone Park IIRC.
You’re missing the point. As long as you have some sort of “hover” action, this applies – in fact, since useful information is often hidden until you mouse-over something, hardware designers are constantly trying to find better ways of implementing hover on touch interfaces.
Go check out Google’s new-and-improved image search results page for a perfect example of this sort of thing. They’ve completely done away with the text surrounding each image – hovering over one of the results for a moment enlarges it and reveals the associated text (URL and text blurb from the page containing it).
In other words, for example, if you perform a search and hover the mouse over all the pr0n on the first page to get a better look, page 2 is going to be dynamically re-sorted to give you more pr0n, and the advertisements will change to ads for adult websites.
It’s already trivially easy to use a screen recorder to capture video from those sort of sites. Plus, cam-to-cam has typically come with the caveat that your IP address can be known to your chat partner... I think it was MSN or AIM that used to warn of this when enabling your webcam? Unless they’re streaming everyone’s feed through their servers – which they don’t want to do – your computers will connect directly, and you can see the IP address of the other person listed in your active connections using netstat in the Windows command prompt.
The lowest age of consent anywhere in the US is 16, with some states providing close-age exemptions... for example, if both individuals are at least 14 and within 2 years of age to each other – e.g. 14 and 16 – it may not be a crime, or the crime may be reduced, e.g. from a felony to a misdemeanor.
However this does not mean that the age of consent is 14 in that case because a 14-year-old still cannot legally have sex with anyone outside that strict close-age exemption, e.g. with a 17-year-old. The age of consent is the age at which a person can legally have sex with an adult (i.e. any other person who is of the age of consent).
Mistake as to incapacity or age--consent not a defense, when.
566.020. 1. Whenever in this chapter the criminality of conduct depends upon a victim's being incapacitated, no crime is committed if the actor reasonably believed that the victim was not incapacitated and reasonably believed that the victim consented to the act. The defendant shall have the burden of injecting the issue of belief as to capacity and consent.
2. Whenever in this chapter the criminality of conduct depends upon a child being thirteen years of age or younger, it is no defense that the defendant believed the child to be older.
3. Whenever in this chapter the criminality of conduct depends upon a child being under seventeen years of age, it is an affirmative defense that the defendant reasonably believed that the child was seventeen years of age or older.
4. Consent is not an affirmative defense to any offense under chapter 566 if the alleged victim is less than twelve years of age.
In short, if the person was under the age of thirteen / twelve (depending on the particular law being violated), you have no defense of “I thought he/she was old enough” (yeah... right). However, if the criminality of the act hinges on believing the person to be 17 (the age of consent is 17), and you reasonably believed that they were 17 and consented to the act, that is a valid defense against criminal charges.
What did Chatroulette think was going to happen when they thought diving into the realms of social networking and adding the element of live video feed of everyone who is on there to anyone wanting to look? It's, of course, easier for an exposer or behaviorally creepy basement dweller to crawl out of their cave online than it is in public.
Throw in the whole concept of being anonymous and you have a service that is inevitably doomed for exactly what they’ve become.
...but enough of the social network rant. I'm glad to see Chatroulette policing up their mess and trying to enforce some sort of civil 'net etiquette
Utterly futile. As DNS-and-BIND sarcastically pointed out, internet anonymity combined with video cameras is a recipe for... this. Chatroulette is not simply flawed; it is fatally flawed. It cannot be anything but what it is.
The only way that they could even attempt to stop the crapflood is by having a large moderator group issuing IP and cookie bans immediately to offensive users... and that would be largely ineffective because most of those users probably know how to delete their cookies and reset their IP address or use a proxy while surfing.
No, unless it is. For instance, if you’re displaying yourself to a child... and you’d probably have to be doing so knowingly, or at least without having taken any basic sort of steps to ensure that the person you’re talking to is over 18 (if they claim to be, that’s probably good enough unless it’s pretty obvious that they aren’t).
Oh, you mean the oddities that the creationists have deemed to be "odd." I'm sitting on a mountain of folded strata right now. They are nearly vertical under this building. There's a sharp rift to the east where sharply folded strata have fallen. Near the bottom you get the strata in reverse order. Near the top you get them in the normal order. No identifiable fossils in these, though. They've been through a bit too much. But there's nothing "odd" about inverted strata.
Then upside-down strata with no evidence of geological disruption is still “odd” even by your explanation.
The lower portions of the tree were buried in sediment. Silicates in the water would leach into the tree replacing the wood.... But it's some much easier to say that God put them there that way.
Meanwhile, the top of the tree rots. No, it’s much easier to say that they were buried cataclysmically rather than over millions of years – such as has in fact been observed in action at Mt. St. Helens.
You misunderstand him. Nowhere did he suggest that.
Yes he did. He said specifically that:
“No, he means falisfy, as in you can't disprove the opposite.”
I.e. that to falsify something means you can’t disprove the opposing theories. This is incorrect. Falsifying something means disproving it. Falsifying something does not mean attempting to disprove all alternate theories and failing.
So, what you’re telling me is... all car warranties are specifically written in such a way that violates laws that were specifically written to allow people to do stuff like I described without totally voiding their warranties.
Actually, the manufacturer is obligated to honour the warranty on the car even if you replace the engine, as long as the damage wasn’t caused by you or the modification that you did. Likewise, the warranty on the engine you took out will still be good if you put it in a different car, again as long as the damage isn’t caused by it operating in a different car than it was designed to be used in.
No guarantee will be made that the stuff will play nicely together as expected, but the parts should all continue to function as designed.
What he was saying is that, inevitably, dumb people will go through that process of denying the antecedent and conclude that they must not have had the right until the court gave it to them... and if they believe that, they’ll more readily give it up. They didn’t miss it before...
I agreed with the bit that I quoted, but the part I disagreed with was more in the immediately preceding statement:
No, he means falisfy, as in you can't disprove the opposite.
Failing to disprove an opposing theory does not necessarily falsify your theory. It does probably show that your theory is at least incomplete, but the two theories may in fact be mutually correct; there may be other considerations that cause one theory to apply in one instance and the other in another; etc.
For instance, gravity. Scientists had their theory of gravity in which things fell down, toward the earth. However some observable things do not fall down: stars, planets, the sun and moon. Every time a scientist dropped an apple, it fell to the ground... and millions of stars are still hanging up there with no explanation. At the time, they speculated that there were two sorts of matter: stuff that falls and stuff that doesn’t. Of course this was incorrect, as we know now; only after a more universal theory of gravitation was developed could both of these observed phenomena be explained without contradiction. Was the original theory of gravity, “stuff goes down”, false? No, only when it was applied inaccurately. Stuff does go down, under the circumstances to which that theory applies, and under other circumstances you need a broader or alternate theory.
In Genesis 1:29, God gives them every plant to eat, no exceptions.
Nope, actually it reads: “And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.” Definitely a few exceptions – and did the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil have a seed? And it didn’t exactly say “no other exceptions”, either.
And if they do, he says they will surely die on that very day. Which they do, and they don't.
The death was an immediate spiritual death accompanied by the immediate beginning of the gradual process of aging and the inevitable physical death. It did not mean immediate physical death, no.
Then who did Cain marry?
Oh, an easy one. I like easy ones. He clearly married one of his sisters. Incest wasn’t forbidden until later, and needed not be forbidden anyway... since their DNA was only one generation away from Adam & Eve’s there would have been no risk of birth defects caused by recessive mutations.
Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not suffer a sorceress to live. Anyone who violates any number of things shall be put to death.
Those exceptions... such pesky things. How will anyone ever manage to straighten out all this mess...
We are indeed both wasting our time. I have nothing against the Bible or those who believe in it. I'm no scholar in this area, but there certainly are contradictions within it, with what people say about it, and with observed reality. Are they all that important? Not so much. I will say that the Bible is the best thing that ever happened to a large number of people.
Well, I’ve read it a few times and I think the contradictions are more between what people believe about it and what it says. Anyway, that’s a fair enough place to leave the discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
E was never included in the scale because it was already used in the existing scale, which went:
E = Excellent
S = Satisfactory
N / NI = Needs Improvement
U = Unsatisfactory
If C means “average” then yes, you should get something like a bell curve. However if C means “passing” there is absolutely no reason that the outcome should be a bell curve.
What it boils down to is the simple question... do you want to pass lazy morons just because the class on the average was lazier and dumber still? If the answer is “yes... it looks bad if the entire class fails”, you then have to try to get a distribution that works for everyone... and since every lazy moron’s parent is convinced that HIS lazy moron of a child deserves an A, the entire curve tends to swing that direction.
The alternative is to apply a “standardized” test – and even those are normed (difficulty adjusted so that “too many” don’t pass or fail)! – which the lazy morons will then claim is discrimination against lazy morons.
Well, duh... the Fahrenheit scale was specifically designed to cover the entire range of temperatures found on planet earth. Anywhere outside of the 0-100 degree range is an unearthly place which should instead be classified as either “hell” or “hell... and did the _____ win the superbowl/world series/etc.?”
Why is Q always followed by a U in words?
It is? (And if you played competitive Scrabble you would never have said such a thing in the first place...)
Yeah, you meant "Wow that really works! Give this man a meal!" (they eliminated D)
E was never part of the standard 5-letter A-B-C-D-F grading system because it would have been confusing. The existing E-S-N-U grading scale used the letter E to indicate Excellent, or the highest possible grade.
ESET NOD32 > Norton or McAfee.
Lying to a grand jury isn’t exactly a smart move, either.
Besides, geologic processes do result in upside down strata. There's no indication that a flood could.
Depending on the order – and speed – in which the sediments were deposited there’s no reason to expect that they couldn’t be laid out-of-order from what you observe elsewhere.
That's why we don't find complete trees in a upright position. We usually only find the root system and a few feet of trunk. Of course they were buried rapidly as in less than a few decades.
Citation? This certainly doesn’t look like “roots and a few feet of trunk”. Besides which, the strata through which they often extend is thought to have required millions of years for deposition, not mere decades, and other fossils within those rock layers are dated accordingly.
In the case of the trees buried by volcanoes, they tend not to be upright.
They are if they’re floating in that position, as the case in both Spirit Lake (Mt. St. Helens) and Yellowstone Park IIRC.
You’re missing the point. As long as you have some sort of “hover” action, this applies – in fact, since useful information is often hidden until you mouse-over something, hardware designers are constantly trying to find better ways of implementing hover on touch interfaces.
Go check out Google’s new-and-improved image search results page for a perfect example of this sort of thing. They’ve completely done away with the text surrounding each image – hovering over one of the results for a moment enlarges it and reveals the associated text (URL and text blurb from the page containing it).
In other words, for example, if you perform a search and hover the mouse over all the pr0n on the first page to get a better look, page 2 is going to be dynamically re-sorted to give you more pr0n, and the advertisements will change to ads for adult websites.
AdBlock Plus can already block HTML elements.
Why would you need to move your mouse over to a certain part of the screen when you can just look there?
Because something useful pops up when you do, obviously. Try the new Google Image Search to see what I mean.
It’s already trivially easy to use a screen recorder to capture video from those sort of sites. Plus, cam-to-cam has typically come with the caveat that your IP address can be known to your chat partner... I think it was MSN or AIM that used to warn of this when enabling your webcam? Unless they’re streaming everyone’s feed through their servers – which they don’t want to do – your computers will connect directly, and you can see the IP address of the other person listed in your active connections using netstat in the Windows command prompt.
The lowest age of consent anywhere in the US is 16, with some states providing close-age exemptions... for example, if both individuals are at least 14 and within 2 years of age to each other – e.g. 14 and 16 – it may not be a crime, or the crime may be reduced, e.g. from a felony to a misdemeanor.
However this does not mean that the age of consent is 14 in that case because a 14-year-old still cannot legally have sex with anyone outside that strict close-age exemption, e.g. with a 17-year-old. The age of consent is the age at which a person can legally have sex with an adult (i.e. any other person who is of the age of consent).
That’s not necessarily true. It can be a valid defense, depending on the laws in your state. For instance...
MO Revised Statutes, section 566.020:
Mistake as to incapacity or age--consent not a defense, when.
566.020. 1. Whenever in this chapter the criminality of conduct depends upon a victim's being incapacitated, no crime is committed if the actor reasonably believed that the victim was not incapacitated and reasonably believed that the victim consented to the act. The defendant shall have the burden of injecting the issue of belief as to capacity and consent.
2. Whenever in this chapter the criminality of conduct depends upon a child being thirteen years of age or younger, it is no defense that the defendant believed the child to be older.
3. Whenever in this chapter the criminality of conduct depends upon a child being under seventeen years of age, it is an affirmative defense that the defendant reasonably believed that the child was seventeen years of age or older.
4. Consent is not an affirmative defense to any offense under chapter 566 if the alleged victim is less than twelve years of age.
In short, if the person was under the age of thirteen / twelve (depending on the particular law being violated), you have no defense of “I thought he/she was old enough” (yeah... right). However, if the criminality of the act hinges on believing the person to be 17 (the age of consent is 17), and you reasonably believed that they were 17 and consented to the act, that is a valid defense against criminal charges.
What did Chatroulette think was going to happen when they thought diving into the realms of social networking and adding the element of live video feed of everyone who is on there to anyone wanting to look? It's, of course, easier for an exposer or behaviorally creepy basement dweller to crawl out of their cave online than it is in public.
Throw in the whole concept of being anonymous and you have a service that is inevitably doomed for exactly what they’ve become.
...but enough of the social network rant. I'm glad to see Chatroulette policing up their mess and trying to enforce some sort of civil 'net etiquette
Utterly futile. As DNS-and-BIND sarcastically pointed out, internet anonymity combined with video cameras is a recipe for ... this. Chatroulette is not simply flawed; it is fatally flawed. It cannot be anything but what it is.
The only way that they could even attempt to stop the crapflood is by having a large moderator group issuing IP and cookie bans immediately to offensive users... and that would be largely ineffective because most of those users probably know how to delete their cookies and reset their IP address or use a proxy while surfing.
As long as they send it straight to the feds they’re just gathering evidence.
No, unless it is. For instance, if you’re displaying yourself to a child... and you’d probably have to be doing so knowingly, or at least without having taken any basic sort of steps to ensure that the person you’re talking to is over 18 (if they claim to be, that’s probably good enough unless it’s pretty obvious that they aren’t).
Oh, you mean the oddities that the creationists have deemed to be "odd." I'm sitting on a mountain of folded strata right now. They are nearly vertical under this building. There's a sharp rift to the east where sharply folded strata have fallen. Near the bottom you get the strata in reverse order. Near the top you get them in the normal order. No identifiable fossils in these, though. They've been through a bit too much. But there's nothing "odd" about inverted strata.
Then upside-down strata with no evidence of geological disruption is still “odd” even by your explanation.
The lower portions of the tree were buried in sediment. Silicates in the water would leach into the tree replacing the wood. ... But it's some much easier to say that God put them there that way.
Meanwhile, the top of the tree rots. No, it’s much easier to say that they were buried cataclysmically rather than over millions of years – such as has in fact been observed in action at Mt. St. Helens.
Then why didn't you quote that part?
I probably should have. Moving on.
You misunderstand him. Nowhere did he suggest that.
Yes he did. He said specifically that:
“No, he means falisfy, as in you can't disprove the opposite.”
I.e. that to falsify something means you can’t disprove the opposing theories. This is incorrect. Falsifying something means disproving it. Falsifying something does not mean attempting to disprove all alternate theories and failing.
So, what you’re telling me is... all car warranties are specifically written in such a way that violates laws that were specifically written to allow people to do stuff like I described without totally voiding their warranties.
Well, as long as you’re quite certain...
Actually, the manufacturer is obligated to honour the warranty on the car even if you replace the engine, as long as the damage wasn’t caused by you or the modification that you did. Likewise, the warranty on the engine you took out will still be good if you put it in a different car, again as long as the damage isn’t caused by it operating in a different car than it was designed to be used in.
No guarantee will be made that the stuff will play nicely together as expected, but the parts should all continue to function as designed.
What he was saying is that, inevitably, dumb people will go through that process of denying the antecedent and conclude that they must not have had the right until the court gave it to them... and if they believe that, they’ll more readily give it up. They didn’t miss it before...
I agreed with the bit that I quoted, but the part I disagreed with was more in the immediately preceding statement:
No, he means falisfy, as in you can't disprove the opposite.
Failing to disprove an opposing theory does not necessarily falsify your theory. It does probably show that your theory is at least incomplete, but the two theories may in fact be mutually correct; there may be other considerations that cause one theory to apply in one instance and the other in another; etc.
For instance, gravity. Scientists had their theory of gravity in which things fell down, toward the earth. However some observable things do not fall down: stars, planets, the sun and moon. Every time a scientist dropped an apple, it fell to the ground... and millions of stars are still hanging up there with no explanation. At the time, they speculated that there were two sorts of matter: stuff that falls and stuff that doesn’t. Of course this was incorrect, as we know now; only after a more universal theory of gravitation was developed could both of these observed phenomena be explained without contradiction. Was the original theory of gravity, “stuff goes down”, false? No, only when it was applied inaccurately. Stuff does go down, under the circumstances to which that theory applies, and under other circumstances you need a broader or alternate theory.
In Genesis 1:29, God gives them every plant to eat, no exceptions.
Nope, actually it reads: “And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.” Definitely a few exceptions – and did the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil have a seed? And it didn’t exactly say “no other exceptions”, either.
And if they do, he says they will surely die on that very day. Which they do, and they don't.
The death was an immediate spiritual death accompanied by the immediate beginning of the gradual process of aging and the inevitable physical death. It did not mean immediate physical death, no.
Then who did Cain marry?
Oh, an easy one. I like easy ones. He clearly married one of his sisters. Incest wasn’t forbidden until later, and needed not be forbidden anyway... since their DNA was only one generation away from Adam & Eve’s there would have been no risk of birth defects caused by recessive mutations.
Thou shalt not kill.
Thou shalt not suffer a sorceress to live.
Anyone who violates any number of things shall be put to death.
Those exceptions... such pesky things. How will anyone ever manage to straighten out all this mess...
We are indeed both wasting our time. I have nothing against the Bible or those who believe in it. I'm no scholar in this area, but there certainly are contradictions within it, with what people say about it, and with observed reality. Are they all that important? Not so much. I will say that the Bible is the best thing that ever happened to a large number of people.
Well, I’ve read it a few times and I think the contradictions are more between what people believe about it and what it says. Anyway, that’s a fair enough place to leave the discussion.