Seriously, you've apparently read a book entitled Answering the Objections of Atheists, Agnostics and Skeptics and are now incapable of doing what the book suggested (I hope that you at least read the book). I was shocked at your laziness at first, but now it is inline with what I expect from a modern-day (American?) Christian: you ignore most of your bible too, except for the coupla lines that contradict science, or condemn fags to death and hell. Mithras and Mammon have long since dethroned the King of kings in this country, and are now commemorating another golgotha.
Back on the topic, scientists are able to give me at least a brief explanation of why I'm wrong, when I'm wrong. Sure, the details might be in a $200 textbook, but they can sketch it out.
And you creationists (at this point I have to assume you are one, and a lily-livered apologist to boot) have the gall to call scientists elitist. Pathetic.
In trials using 140 volunteers those told to act suspicious were detected...
You have got to be kidding me... Did they tell them to wear a giant black hat and carry around one of those cartoon bombs too?
As a statistician, I stopped reading there - whatever numbers they get have nothing to do with anything, except these daft fools pantomiming Osama.
Still, even if it does work there will be "immune" people (that is, those with "flattened affect"; e.g. total sociopaths like Barris from A Scanner Darkly). And since everyone who shows any response at all, will inevitably be interrogated-on-the-spot, it'd be easy for enemies to find the immune people. Just send recruits into sporting events with some alcohol, or a lighter, or some other light contraband to make a normal (read: susceptible) person nervous, but not carrying a significant penalty for possession.
Balls. People had no trouble buying DVD players before deCSS, and many (I dare say a majority) people still don't know about it/care. It's true consumers don't like DRM, but that's because they generally don't even know about it.
The increase in quality and features is not as great as DVD, and the economy is a huge issue.
I had the same experience going to headphones. Incredible, especially the brushing back and forth that begins (I believe) the track Sin.
I was hesitant to mention it as "modern music" though, because the local record store had nin in the "Establishment music" section. Gosh that made feel old...:-/
To put it as plain as day: If the corp is making a decision to maximize value, by denying or restricting your access to something, you are going to want to find a way around it. None of this is good or bad in any general sense, just rational behavior.
A better question may be, why don't we give credit to corporations when they do good? Well, we do give credit, in the form of $$$. Complaining, boycotting, &c. is the socially acceptable form of "negative money" (the unacceptable form is vandalism, robbery, kidnapping, &c.).
I think the problem is that Americans (I am one) tend to pay far too much respect to the rich and corporations. I can and do complain legitimately about Microsoft, but I still oppose most uses of anti-trust against them. Nonetheless, people look at me like I'm a communist, when I suggest that Bill Gates isn't wonderful. Even an atheist can appreciate the sense of the phrase "Render unto God what is God's and unto Caesar what is Caesar's."
Well, at least he has peace of mind. However, with a.45 the only way he's going to do much but make the bear angrier, is with a brain-shot.
He should keep the gun but as for bears, as silly as it sounds, he's probably safer carrying extra-strength pepper spray (google for "bear spray"). More likely to disable, and also nothing (or at least much less) to report to the Ranger.
It's not uncommon to be fired for personal email on work time; often this is due to confidentiality and disclosure concerns.
Similarly, I think ideally that high-level public servants (R or D or L or whatever) should be required to use government email; two accounts, one work and the other personal, both with 100% retention and logging. The work account is automatically a matter of public record with some appropriate delay (a few days or weeks). Personal is private, but accessible with court order. If the court order comes in, and they find work on the personal email, it's serious trouble.
Secret projects, if necessary, can apply for protected emails on separate servers, which aren't released to the public until the scope of the project is over. (I'm not saying whether there should be secret projects one way or the other, just that it's easy to accomodate them anyway.)
Whether for reasons of government accountability (D), or national security (R), this just makes sense. If people don't like it, they don't have to become public servants.
I noticed the same thing, but came to a different conclusion: it's real, and it's shit. Even past the registration inaccuracies, the transitions between pitches are just plain awful. They could have at least tried for some sort of smooth (possibly adaptive) interpolation. As it is, "musical instrument" is too generous a label, let alone "theremin".
I guess for $2 you don't expect much, but please don't even compare this trash to a theremin.
I met someone like you once. I tutored him in calculus for a few weeks, then I learned he was a civil engineer for my county. In shock, I asked him then, if he worked on the new bridge. Thankfully, he said "no."
The sad thing is that what you're calling "math" is probably mostly algebraic derivation of elementary DE ("elementary" doesn't necessarily mean easy). You're not blowing off math, you're blowing off your own field. Real math about DE is when the derivations are a few lines, but each line takes you an hour just to read.
I used to think this, but then I ran into a frightening number (read: "a number greater than zero") of good advanced math students who cringe at even writing two nested for loops. It's not just distaste; it's actual anxiety and fear. (Although it must be said, this is a minority, and the truly powerful always have a knack at computing.)
In the face of this, I don't understand how they can do math; it completely destroys my cognitive "folk theory" about math. But I must say, however they do it, I'm no longer as envious of their skills. If I had to choose, I'd take the for loops... I'll keep on understanding math my way.
I agree. There is an entrenched view among mathematicians that real results means using Real numbers (all of them!); and this is true for many of them at their level of work. However that doesn't validate the attitude that discrete versions of anything are only for remedial students too retarded or flighty to grok integration.
The next step is to use this pre-emptively as part of "training". A soldier exposed in advance to killing and extreme sensory input, will not only not need therapy later, but be more effective as his job.
"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."
All right, I looked at a few commentaries and concordances. The phrase "I do set" is Strongs' [05414] and from what I can see, in the other uses in Genesis, it is read as "I give you" or "I put" something physical; e.g. Eve was given to Adam; God gave the herb bearing seed; &c.
Or, He really put the bow there; and then in another clause it gets the meaning of a memento.
The commentaries all claim that the rainbow was there before, but I think it's because they foresaw this difficulty...
Amusingly, this is a similar problem of interpretation, as there is with the second amendment of the US constitution.:)
People tell me to "go to the original language", as if I care to. Why don't you (or they) do the work for once and tell me what is wrong with the English translation? If it's such a glaring problem, it must be easy to explain at least the gist of what I'm missing. (Although note: that most of these deluded literalists are, oddly enough, literalists following the King James version, so it is not totally inappropriate for me to be following a translation.)
The same applies for taking it out of context. In my context I have no problem with Genesis; it's a good story and the only book, along with Exodus, of the pentateuch worth a damn. Note well: the literalists are the ones taking it out of context, and forcing their bad context onto others.
Are you serious? I've found that MGS is better for this kind of thing than most games. You could snipe birds and rats, and you needed to lead them sort of realistically (except for your always-perfect aim which ignores wind). And yes, the birds do spray a few feathers and gore upon a hit (unless you tranq'ed them). That and the fact that you can get stung by hornets in MGS3 actually makes you think you posted facetiously, but whatever.
One good example of this kind of detail is in MGS2, almost on the level of an easter egg. If you lobbed a grenade or set off C4 on a patch of sea lice and immediately switched to first-person view, a random number of bugs would "spatter" against your screen and drip down. Note that you have practically no reason to use FPV in such a situation, so it's there purely for "completeness".
Yeah, maybe it is mentally empty. The pop-philosophy never appealed to me that much, but the storyline is reasonable if a bit over the top sometimes (again, MGS2). It's an action video game, just a fairly intricate one.
This is not flamebait; maybe it's troll, if you want to misjudge my intent.
I think that for a lot of people, biblical literalism seems to only govern "occult" (meaning hidden) things, or at least grand-sounding things which perhaps Man ought not claim even partial knowledge of. Big things: origins of matter; life at the beginning of the earth (an amazing 5000 years ago!); evolution; &c, and that this makes it easier to accept.
Now, even though it shouldn't be, it is still to me an entirely different thing to take water, the stuff of life, tangible and indisputably understood as two H, one O, bond angle ~104 degrees, and imagine how it could possibly have been different. It appeals to a primal "need to know" in a way that the more myth-entrenched concepts of "origin" don't. It's harder to say things like "god put the fossil record there to deceive us"; it's water, you're touching it right now and you need it to live. Yet, 4500 years ago, if you had put a stick into the water and looked at it from the side, it would have not appeared broken.
Since literalists stake their fervor on a complete acceptance of the Bible (not just vis-a-vis evolution but against all science and even all other truth), I want one of these religious apologists to construct an explanation of how god did this. How did God cause water to start refracting while leaving every other fact about the world unchanged?
Really, it's the least they could do, right? I'll accept that "God did it," along with everything else in your storybook, if you can just tell me an acceptable story of what the physical world was like before rainbows existed, and just how such a fundamental change in matter could have happened while leaving the rest of the world more-or-less the same. Did he change the valence of oxygen? Try drinking some hydronium and tell me how you like it. Were there not electrons before the Flood? If that's the case, how did stuff stay together back then? I would love to read your explanation - it would be the greatest work of hard sci-fi ever to grace the earth and well worth my conversion just to read it! But I am not holding my breath...
The good guys don't always win, but the status quo sucks and we're sacrificing (part of) a generation right now. The Dawkins-crusaders aren't doing much, and the "Brights" movement smacks of a populist MENSA: all of the arrogance, with no entrance requirement. Any ideas?
Xian fundamentalism isn't going away without something happening (whether or to what extent it was engineered by a Republican alliance is irrelevant now); and finally, the equation of fundamentalist USian Xianity (2x offensive abbreviation combo!) with Islamic fundamentalism is tired & ridiculous.
I suspect that the real story behind this ID thing is that the Republican interest (the real players are as agnostic as the rest of us) in this is really in disgracing the Department of Education. If we get the government teaching religion, it legitimizes opposition to yet another government program.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh wow, I totally missed your joke. How fripping embarrassing.
Well, duh it was even called Centipede...
What?
Holy shit! What was the placement exam for skipping sex ed?!
It'd be worth failing, just for the chance to try!
Wow, this is rich.
Seriously, you've apparently read a book entitled Answering the Objections of Atheists, Agnostics and Skeptics and are now incapable of doing what the book suggested (I hope that you at least read the book). I was shocked at your laziness at first, but now it is inline with what I expect from a modern-day (American?) Christian: you ignore most of your bible too, except for the coupla lines that contradict science, or condemn fags to death and hell. Mithras and Mammon have long since dethroned the King of kings in this country, and are now commemorating another golgotha.
Back on the topic, scientists are able to give me at least a brief explanation of why I'm wrong, when I'm wrong. Sure, the details might be in a $200 textbook, but they can sketch it out.
And you creationists (at this point I have to assume you are one, and a lily-livered apologist to boot) have the gall to call scientists elitist. Pathetic.
In trials using 140 volunteers those told to act suspicious were detected...
You have got to be kidding me... Did they tell them to wear a giant black hat and carry around one of those cartoon bombs too?
As a statistician, I stopped reading there - whatever numbers they get have nothing to do with anything, except these daft fools pantomiming Osama.
Still, even if it does work there will be "immune" people (that is, those with "flattened affect"; e.g. total sociopaths like Barris from A Scanner Darkly). And since everyone who shows any response at all, will inevitably be interrogated-on-the-spot, it'd be easy for enemies to find the immune people. Just send recruits into sporting events with some alcohol, or a lighter, or some other light contraband to make a normal (read: susceptible) person nervous, but not carrying a significant penalty for possession.
Balls. People had no trouble buying DVD players before deCSS, and many (I dare say a majority) people still don't know about it/care. It's true consumers don't like DRM, but that's because they generally don't even know about it.
The increase in quality and features is not as great as DVD, and the economy is a huge issue.
I had the same experience going to headphones. Incredible, especially the brushing back and forth that begins (I believe) the track Sin.
I was hesitant to mention it as "modern music" though, because the local record store had nin in the "Establishment music" section. Gosh that made feel old... :-/
nin's pretty hate machine had some nice left-to-right fades on a few samples, sometimes layered. Not as large-scale as Pink, but a well-done effect.
Are you really that fucking stupid?
To put it as plain as day: If the corp is making a decision to maximize value, by denying or restricting your access to something, you are going to want to find a way around it. None of this is good or bad in any general sense, just rational behavior.
A better question may be, why don't we give credit to corporations when they do good? Well, we do give credit, in the form of $$$. Complaining, boycotting, &c. is the socially acceptable form of "negative money" (the unacceptable form is vandalism, robbery, kidnapping, &c.).
I think the problem is that Americans (I am one) tend to pay far too much respect to the rich and corporations. I can and do complain legitimately about Microsoft, but I still oppose most uses of anti-trust against them. Nonetheless, people look at me like I'm a communist, when I suggest that Bill Gates isn't wonderful. Even an atheist can appreciate the sense of the phrase "Render unto God what is God's and unto Caesar what is Caesar's."
Well, at least he has peace of mind. However, with a .45 the only way he's going to do much but make the bear angrier, is with a brain-shot.
He should keep the gun but as for bears, as silly as it sounds, he's probably safer carrying extra-strength pepper spray (google for "bear spray"). More likely to disable, and also nothing (or at least much less) to report to the Ranger.
It's not uncommon to be fired for personal email on work time; often this is due to confidentiality and disclosure concerns.
Similarly, I think ideally that high-level public servants (R or D or L or whatever) should be required to use government email; two accounts, one work and the other personal, both with 100% retention and logging. The work account is automatically a matter of public record with some appropriate delay (a few days or weeks). Personal is private, but accessible with court order. If the court order comes in, and they find work on the personal email, it's serious trouble.
Secret projects, if necessary, can apply for protected emails on separate servers, which aren't released to the public until the scope of the project is over. (I'm not saying whether there should be secret projects one way or the other, just that it's easy to accomodate them anyway.)
Whether for reasons of government accountability (D), or national security (R), this just makes sense. If people don't like it, they don't have to become public servants.
I noticed the same thing, but came to a different conclusion: it's real, and it's shit. Even past the registration inaccuracies, the transitions between pitches are just plain awful. They could have at least tried for some sort of smooth (possibly adaptive) interpolation. As it is, "musical instrument" is too generous a label, let alone "theremin".
I guess for $2 you don't expect much, but please don't even compare this trash to a theremin.
Then again many people's pirated WinXP won't talk to WPA2 either...
I met someone like you once. I tutored him in calculus for a few weeks, then I learned he was a civil engineer for my county. In shock, I asked him then, if he worked on the new bridge. Thankfully, he said "no."
The sad thing is that what you're calling "math" is probably mostly algebraic derivation of elementary DE ("elementary" doesn't necessarily mean easy). You're not blowing off math, you're blowing off your own field. Real math about DE is when the derivations are a few lines, but each line takes you an hour just to read.
I used to think this, but then I ran into a frightening number (read: "a number greater than zero") of good advanced math students who cringe at even writing two nested for loops. It's not just distaste; it's actual anxiety and fear. (Although it must be said, this is a minority, and the truly powerful always have a knack at computing.)
In the face of this, I don't understand how they can do math; it completely destroys my cognitive "folk theory" about math. But I must say, however they do it, I'm no longer as envious of their skills. If I had to choose, I'd take the for loops... I'll keep on understanding math my way.
I agree. There is an entrenched view among mathematicians that real results means using Real numbers (all of them!); and this is true for many of them at their level of work. However that doesn't validate the attitude that discrete versions of anything are only for remedial students too retarded or flighty to grok integration.
The next step is to use this pre-emptively as part of "training". A soldier exposed in advance to killing and extreme sensory input, will not only not need therapy later, but be more effective as his job.
"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."
I very much respect Bruce Sterling; I loved Holy Fire and "Red Star, Winter Orbit", and his writing about cyberpunk itself is even good.
However, in this case he's mostly hamming it up LARPing a character from Rainbows End.
All right, I looked at a few commentaries and concordances. The phrase "I do set" is Strongs' [05414] and from what I can see, in the other uses in Genesis, it is read as "I give you" or "I put" something physical; e.g. Eve was given to Adam; God gave the herb bearing seed; &c.
Or, He really put the bow there; and then in another clause it gets the meaning of a memento.
The commentaries all claim that the rainbow was there before, but I think it's because they foresaw this difficulty...
Amusingly, this is a similar problem of interpretation, as there is with the second amendment of the US constitution. :)
People tell me to "go to the original language", as if I care to. Why don't you (or they) do the work for once and tell me what is wrong with the English translation? If it's such a glaring problem, it must be easy to explain at least the gist of what I'm missing. (Although note: that most of these deluded literalists are, oddly enough, literalists following the King James version, so it is not totally inappropriate for me to be following a translation.)
The same applies for taking it out of context. In my context I have no problem with Genesis; it's a good story and the only book, along with Exodus, of the pentateuch worth a damn. Note well: the literalists are the ones taking it out of context, and forcing their bad context onto others.
Are you serious? I've found that MGS is better for this kind of thing than most games. You could snipe birds and rats, and you needed to lead them sort of realistically (except for your always-perfect aim which ignores wind). And yes, the birds do spray a few feathers and gore upon a hit (unless you tranq'ed them). That and the fact that you can get stung by hornets in MGS3 actually makes you think you posted facetiously, but whatever.
One good example of this kind of detail is in MGS2, almost on the level of an easter egg. If you lobbed a grenade or set off C4 on a patch of sea lice and immediately switched to first-person view, a random number of bugs would "spatter" against your screen and drip down. Note that you have practically no reason to use FPV in such a situation, so it's there purely for "completeness".
Yeah, maybe it is mentally empty. The pop-philosophy never appealed to me that much, but the storyline is reasonable if a bit over the top sometimes (again, MGS2). It's an action video game, just a fairly intricate one.
What?! Three Dune books? I know of no such thing, there is only Dune.
Thinking outside the box! Good start.
Now kindly explain the absence of water droplets in the atmosphere. The bible verse mentions clouds, so this seems like not a very promising argument.
This is not flamebait; maybe it's troll, if you want to misjudge my intent.
I think that for a lot of people, biblical literalism seems to only govern "occult" (meaning hidden) things, or at least grand-sounding things which perhaps Man ought not claim even partial knowledge of. Big things: origins of matter; life at the beginning of the earth (an amazing 5000 years ago!); evolution; &c, and that this makes it easier to accept.
Now, even though it shouldn't be, it is still to me an entirely different thing to take water, the stuff of life, tangible and indisputably understood as two H, one O, bond angle ~104 degrees, and imagine how it could possibly have been different. It appeals to a primal "need to know" in a way that the more myth-entrenched concepts of "origin" don't. It's harder to say things like "god put the fossil record there to deceive us"; it's water, you're touching it right now and you need it to live. Yet, 4500 years ago, if you had put a stick into the water and looked at it from the side, it would have not appeared broken.
Since literalists stake their fervor on a complete acceptance of the Bible (not just vis-a-vis evolution but against all science and even all other truth), I want one of these religious apologists to construct an explanation of how god did this. How did God cause water to start refracting while leaving every other fact about the world unchanged?
Really, it's the least they could do, right? I'll accept that "God did it," along with everything else in your storybook, if you can just tell me an acceptable story of what the physical world was like before rainbows existed, and just how such a fundamental change in matter could have happened while leaving the rest of the world more-or-less the same. Did he change the valence of oxygen? Try drinking some hydronium and tell me how you like it. Were there not electrons before the Flood? If that's the case, how did stuff stay together back then? I would love to read your explanation - it would be the greatest work of hard sci-fi ever to grace the earth and well worth my conversion just to read it! But I am not holding my breath...
The good guys don't always win, but the status quo sucks and we're sacrificing (part of) a generation right now. The Dawkins-crusaders aren't doing much, and the "Brights" movement smacks of a populist MENSA: all of the arrogance, with no entrance requirement. Any ideas?
Xian fundamentalism isn't going away without something happening (whether or to what extent it was engineered by a Republican alliance is irrelevant now); and finally, the equation of fundamentalist USian Xianity (2x offensive abbreviation combo!) with Islamic fundamentalism is tired & ridiculous.
I suspect that the real story behind this ID thing is that the Republican interest (the real players are as agnostic as the rest of us) in this is really in disgracing the Department of Education. If we get the government teaching religion, it legitimizes opposition to yet another government program.