Still, just deleting inappropriate characters is a pretty trivial case of what they are proposing
Yeah, and?
If they patent "Using untwisting Rubberbands as a means of propulsion" and use some hilariously complicated rubber-band engine to power a space-shuttle as an example, I don't care. I twisted a rubber band to make a paper airplane fly or make a toy car go. Many kids have. They shouldn't get the patent.
Read Margaret Singer, Richard Ofshe, or many others if you want a good comparison of religion and cults. The key thing is that cults deceive people into joining so there is no real informed consent. People join under false pretenses and are conned out of their money (basically by false advertising / fradulent misrepresentation). No cults are ever upfront about all their beliefs because nobody would ever join if they knew about the wacky shit higher up the ladder. You have to be good and brainwashed before you even find out about the space alien stuff.
That's a very narrow-minded view of what a cult is, as it was tailored to a target -- but it illustrates a point. Basically, a cult is to beliefs as weeds are to plants. A plant is not a weed unless it's unwanted. A belief is not considered a "cult" unless it's unwanted (or it becomes self-ascribed as a 'cult'). Those that are large enough to be considered "mainstream" or philanthropic enough to be tolerated by those who are mainstream are only labelled "cults" by, perhaps, a miffed passerby. They are not considered "cults" in the by and large, because we seem to think they belong where they are.
In most of Europe, however, any sect is considered a "cult" unless it has an enormous representation (like Lutheran). In Germany and France, there are only a few large organizations considered as "religions" that are state-recognized. This list, for example, excludes Jehovah's Witnesses. Now, I don't agree with much of what the JW's preach (including, but not exclusive to practical things like refusing blood transfusions and birthdays). I was bothered by their visits, I could see the manipulation in their Watchtower magazines (ironically, it was the same manipulation patterns used in Richard Dawkins books), and I know more about their doctrines than probably 80% of their membership -- they were some of the nicest people I knew in Germany. They treated their spouses with respect. They would bother themselves with frivolities like asking "How are you today?" to strangers (very uncommon in Europe) and they were generally much happier than the average German. When offered a choice between a devout JW, their practices, and what the person was like compared to a devout Catholic or Lutheran, their practices, and what the person was like -- The "cult" of Jehovah's Witnesses is far less alien (vs. consumption of their god's flesh, colored robes, incense, darkened lodges for worship, etc.) and far more beneficial to the person than the large Catholic or Lutheran churches.
tl;dr: The French definition of "cult" is not the same (legally or spiritually) as the English definition.
Was this based on a regex? It seems non-trivial to me to be able to validate an incomplete string against a complete regex intelligently. It sounds like that's what IBM wants, which would not be easy and would be pretty cool.
It didn't start out like that, but eventually, after people had brilliantly avoided the standard search/replace function of javascript by doing things like "Copy/Paste" or holding down the comma key (for some reason, JS would only replace one instance of comma for each time the function was called, so if they got several commas, it would only delete one for each OnKeyUp they fired) we resorted to using a regex. It was for a small calculator on the site, but the client had very specific ideas of how it should act when people inputed information into it, and regular expressions slowly became the most elegant solutions to the problem available to us.
So you created a shitty form that just ignored what the used typed, because after all, the developer knows best? Kind of completely the opposite of what they are doing, isn't it? They are allowing the user to type in the format they are comfortable with, while presenting to the programmer what they are expecting. Good UI design says if the user types 123-45-6789, they should see 123-45-6789, and not 123456789. If the user types 123x45-6789. let them know the 'x' is wrong, don't just assume you know what they meant and drop it. This patent seems to be aimed directly at trying to fix the horrible practices you and a thousand other developers foist on the public.
Perhaps if you removed your nose from your small intestine far enough for your eyes to see the screen past your sphincter, you would see that this is exactly NOT what IBM is proposing. It is not some "Auto-complete my SSN" function. If some user types "I would like to donate $10k,000.0r4 to this charity", someone like you would automatically assume that he is brilliant in coming up with his own system of alphanumeric currency that may somehow translate into real-world dollars. In this case, whatever AJAX or javascript functions that may calculate door prizes or shipping or whatever he may also need to see, based on his input, would be broken, but it's because the stupidity of the developer not recognizing the brilliant man's new currency system (and possible numeric system that could possibly be dodecadecimal or greater, for all you know) and not because some guy with fat fingers couldn't realize the fact he was typing letters where the numbers should go.
Reaching out to stupidity is what good developers do. You seem to think that giving stupidity the reach around is a better way to go. I disagree, and my experience with millions of users and their fractured attempts at data input disagrees with you as well. Garbage-in probably means GARBAGE-in -- not "well-thought-out but ill-formatted"-in (though that exists as well)... it's better to be safe than sorry when it comes to peoples' information. In any case, please ATTEMPT to concern yourself with what the patent says before trying a vain attempt at verbally assaulting someone with it. At least you remembered to post anonymously when you post this sort of dreck.
Whether you think this is novel or not, it's not ordinary.
One of the first forms I programmed for a commercial company would delete non-numeric characters and commas onKeyUp. It's extremely ordinary, and the practice is probably a day younger than javascript.
Yes, I agree to an extent. The RIAA was not the only place that was applying pressure. What about all the software companies? Do they fall into the same morally abject group as the RIAA?
Only if they're buying judges and legislators, demanding extradition from countries that don't offer extradition, committing perjury, monopolistic business practices, and making me listen to "Love Hurts" by Linkin Park every [bloody] time I turn on the radio in my car. Let them seek reimbursement if they can find the legal grounds to do so -- especially when they've made the trade between producer and consumer as accomodating as possible toward the consumer... but it would be more fair if they were able to find the jerkoffs who placed the pirated content on The Pirate Bay to begin with and prosecute them instead.
I must disagree with the person who modded you as "Flamebait" as you state a good case. The issue is, though, that The Pirate Bay are not the guys distributing your files. The guys who post it on The Pirate Bay are the ones that are responsible for that.
I, personally, find The Pirate Bay's neglectful attitude to be morally deviant, but I find the RIAA to be morally abject. I figured my comparison to Robin Hood to be quite accurate -- since he, too, was but a thief (even a robber) with good PR. Perhaps you'd be more apt to agree on comparing the Pirate Bay to Godzilla? He's lumbering along, breathing thermonuclear breath and smashing buildings on innocent people... but the guy he's up against is looking to completely eradicate mankind. I find myself cheering for Godzilla when the two fight. I don't condone Godzilla's destruction, but like I said: in the battle between neutral and evil, I'll choose neutral.
In the meantime, I do wish you the best of luck in your business endeavors.
Obviously, in/. universe, a judge who respects the law of copyright is biased. In other, alternative, universes judges who respect the law are respected.
He didn't respect the law of copyright. He respected the copyright holders more than the law. That was the claim of bias. The Pirate Bay is operating under the letter of Swedish law and this judge allowed the twisting of the law enough so these fellows could be convicted. That's not respect, that's abhorrence.
I have a question. Why does Slashdot constantly side with PirateBay? You are aware that they were running a major piracy ring, right? That they were providing the torrent trackers that facilitated the distribution of copyrighted materials?
Because they're like our modern day Robin Hood. They rob from the rich and corrupt, and give to the poor, in a sense.
In reality, they've abided by Swedish law. They do not give people illegal files. They do not host illegal files. They do not even link to illegal files. What they do is link to links that will link a computer to what could be illegal files (or legitimate files). They're just total bastards about it because someone who doesn't like their stuff being distributed by people who their links linking linking to is in a big huff and can't legally do anything about it, so they're breaking greater laws to bring these Robin Hoods to justice (through federal corruption).
So in a sense, you're watching two guys fighting it out. One is neutral (not good or bad, technically, as they facilitate both with their hands off the watch) and the other is evil. It's allowable for us to boo and hiss the villain when he's brought a gun to a knife fight. It's also allowed for us to cheer the morally-neutral anti-hero as he brazenly swashbuckles and insults the villain's poor taste of dress (all the while winking at the crowd with a smile that says "It's ok guys, I got this!").
Most stations won't even open the package. College stations might, but mainstream ones aren't interested.
Incorrect. You send them the CD, and then have a few different people call in and request the song over the course of a few days. The typical DJ will get curious and pop it open (or adventurous and play it). Of course, this goes hand-in-hand with all of the other steps my GP was mentioning. None of those points alone would get you in the limelight, typically, anyway. They're a concerted effort where the consolidation is exponentially more powerful than the sum of its parts.
A lot of TV shows have vanished from our screens because of this: Terminator, My Name is Earl, Scrubs, Frasier, Samantha Who... the list is endless.
You, sir, have inspired me to build my own race of super robots to send back in time to stop such things. I've already dispatched 3 terminators. One, each, to kill the man who cancelled Scrubs, the man who cancelled Frasier and the man who cancelled My Name is Earl after their first seasons. Perhaps this will allow them a good chance at 3 seasons apiece....
It was like a random-word generator spat out the questions in the most convoluted way possible, asking the oddest, nonsensical questions they can. For example:
Given that 100 milliliters is equal to approximately 0.4 cup,
205 milliliters is equal to approximately how many cups?
Which of the following expressions models the solution to the
problem above?
A. (100 - 0.4)(205)
B. 105% of 0.4
C. (205 - 100)(0.4)
D. 205% of 0.4
The person who wrote this exam probably did so from a mental hospital.
There ought to be some Internet service that searches for your real name in search engines and is able to tell if the pages are fake or not. Some sort of identity theft service. I think such a service exists, but I don't know how to find them.
Wanna bet CO2 still warms the atmosphere after they incorporate the new ocean current data? We won't know for sure until they incorporate the new data, but I'll take that bet.
They haven't bothered to scientifically test to see if CO2 warms the atmosphere -- they've only shown that correlation exists between increased atmospheric temperature and carbon dioxide content. They've also seen that when temperatures increase, carbon dioxide and methane is released in greater quantities from natural sources. They've shown that carbon dioxide blocks heat rays as well. If taking these 3 observations and using them to say "It's a scientific fact that CO2 warms the atmosphere" then you are operating under a different definition of "science" than I do.
What makes you think they'll "scientifically" incorporate this model? Despite popular belief, making a documentary and pretending it's a NOVA special doesn't make something science. Neither does appearing on public broadcasting.
Scientists stitching together molecules like a chemical zipper to recreate a simple RNA sounds a lot more like "Design" and a lot less like "abiogenesis" to me, actually...
Quoting Sutherland's team from TFA:
It's not as simple as putting compounds in a beaker and mixing it up. It's a series of steps. You still have to stop and purify and then do the next step, and that probably didn't happen in the ancient world.
Seriously, watching Abiogenesis fiends bickering with "Intelligent Design" supporters over who is more wrong makes me think I'm back on Digg when it was used as Richard Dawkin's RSS feed.
1. Tell Whiskey Snob you need to verify his $20,000 bottle's value.
2. Tell Whiskey Snob the bottle was brewed in the 80's, and you have since disposed of the "worthless spirits" after the intensive testing, but offer to buy him a bottle of Johnny Walker if it will be any condolence.
3. Sell $20,000 bottle of whiskey to 3rd party.
4. ?????
5. Profit!
The impact hit large animals with high energy requirements hardest, and everything else hard. Hence you get big things with moderate to high metabolisms going extinct completely, and many, many smaller things going extinct as well. If you were small, you had a chance. If you were big, but had low energy requirements, you had a chance. If you were big, and had high energy requirements, you had little to no chance. This is the pattern of the extinction, and it matches the impact theory.
You argue that large animals with high energy requirements take aggro from the impact -- odd inference -- you took two observations, obtusely linked them, and said it proves your claim. "Mass Extinction" possibly happened over a very long period of time. The only arguments I've heard against this were probability calculators -- which, frankly, have Zero place in paleontology. We know a number of things that did go extinct and a number of things that survived. Our grip on what life was like 65 million years ago is threadbare and capricious. Watch old 80's documentaries on dinosaurs, then 90's documentaries, then the latest you can find. The fact you rule things out with inference and saying "EVERYBODY IN THE WHOLE WORLD KNOWS THIS HYPOTHESIS IS TRUE. THEY'RE SCIENTISTS" screams groupthink so loud I can't hear anything else you're trying to say.
Please, treat all, "the meteorite didn't kill the dinosaurs!" articles and papers (even if they're in peer-reviewed journals) with extreme scepticism. They are almost always embarrassingly myopic or out of date. There is an imperial fuckload of evidence that the bolide impact did it.
What about the abundance of evidence that a meteorite didn't hit the earth with enough impact/fallout/nuclear winter to wipe out every reptile? (Exhibit A: Reptiles) I think that warrants consideration for alternative theories. I could write a comic book about how the meteorite caused dinosaurs to mutate and grow feathers (the energy to grow these feathers shrunk the dinosaurs) that agrees with the data more than the "meteorite killed everything. Except alligators, tortoises, monitors, snakes, iguanas, and archaeoptrix's offspring who had grown enough feathers by this point, and all the fish in the ocean that global warming is, like, totally extincting right now. (But it did extinct the plesiosaur)" Try common sense before groupthink.
Not hosting those books is not "Censorship", it's simply not hosting books they deem inappropriate (which is their right to do). If you have a website or a business with a website, then you have the right to NOT link to sites or articles which you completely disagree with or find inappropriate. If Google went around banning those books from every library, bookstore, and online bookstore -- then it would be censorship. They're not a government institution, and they're not a monopoly. Let them do whatever the hell they want.
If Iraq bombed and invaded America, then Canadians who went into American churches and blew up Americans for being Protestant instead of Catholic, also proceeding to American police stations and blowing those up -- and every now and then actually killing an Iraqi soldier -- because when Iraq leaves, they want the US to be Catholic-Only (and death to any who are not), then they would be terrorists and insurgents.
Perhaps you should read "Lord of the Flies" or "On War"
By and large, the mainstream organized "religions" (using your AD-HOC definition which includes nationalism/imperialism) create peace, not war. Consider that there are over a billion Chinese people living within close proximity to each other without absolutely slaughtering one another for their resources. Consider how few wars there actually are in a world of 6 billion, starving people, when it's hard to find any 2 people who can get along without fighting.
When there's not a large-scale joining force, the conflicts simply move to smaller scales. Gangs, school bully packs, ghettos, cliques, tribes -- we are a social and warlike race. Conflict breeds resolution and diversity breeds conflict. When there's no diversity, then it's resources or even competitive lust that create the conflict. I can move state to state within the US without worrying about which state I actually come from. Meanwhile, in Africa, where languages, nationalities, and religions differ greatly from tribe to tribe, there is slaughter and bloodshed over women, food, and plain paranoia that the other guys might come over and kill you if you don't kill them first.
The big "religions" have absolved us from that to a point where we don't even wear weapons on our way to work anymore. We imagine ourselves dying in car accidents sooner than being gunned down by a neighboring city in a skirmish to steal some women. War is not our every day absolute. We're a generation and nation of pussies now, and we've turned to bite the hand that feeds that lifestyle. Yes, the nation of Islam threatens your peace, but the very fact you HAVE peace is probably thanks to that same nation of Islam has united the warlike with the peaceful to an ingenious restraining point. The bloodiest "religions" have managed to extinguish themselves by this point, for now... but if you take away what we have now, it will be replaced -- because humans join together and conflict. That's what our kids are born to do, and it's what we live and die for.
In some defense, if he is a member of the organization not in a capacity of financial beneficiary of copyright, then it isn't quite so clear cut. If he firmly believes in copyright as a matter of law and principle, I don't think it's much different than a judge being a member of an organization lobbying for tougher murder penalties, etc.
Convicting all gun-owners of "assault with a deadly weapon" for owning a gun, because the judge belongs to an anti-gun lobby, would be a more accurate descriptor here. What the PirateBay owners were doing was not illegal under Swedish law until the judge warped it enough to appear to be illegal, as it met his own political (and financial) interests and agenda to see these men in shackles when they were law-abiders.
Do you think that when you become a lesbian, your reproductive tract falls out or something?
Are you inferring that lesbians can reproduce asexually? Or that a human egg can fetilize another human egg? I mean no offense to you, as I find many of your posts to be enlightening. This one, though, politically correct as it is, is mind-numbingly short-sighted.
Slashdot Mirror
Still, just deleting inappropriate characters is a pretty trivial case of what they are proposing
Yeah, and?
If they patent "Using untwisting Rubberbands as a means of propulsion" and use some hilariously complicated rubber-band engine to power a space-shuttle as an example, I don't care. I twisted a rubber band to make a paper airplane fly or make a toy car go. Many kids have. They shouldn't get the patent.
Read Margaret Singer, Richard Ofshe, or many others if you want a good comparison of religion and cults. The key thing is that cults deceive people into joining so there is no real informed consent. People join under false pretenses and are conned out of their money (basically by false advertising / fradulent misrepresentation). No cults are ever upfront about all their beliefs because nobody would ever join if they knew about the wacky shit higher up the ladder. You have to be good and brainwashed before you even find out about the space alien stuff.
That's a very narrow-minded view of what a cult is, as it was tailored to a target -- but it illustrates a point. Basically, a cult is to beliefs as weeds are to plants. A plant is not a weed unless it's unwanted. A belief is not considered a "cult" unless it's unwanted (or it becomes self-ascribed as a 'cult'). Those that are large enough to be considered "mainstream" or philanthropic enough to be tolerated by those who are mainstream are only labelled "cults" by, perhaps, a miffed passerby. They are not considered "cults" in the by and large, because we seem to think they belong where they are.
In most of Europe, however, any sect is considered a "cult" unless it has an enormous representation (like Lutheran). In Germany and France, there are only a few large organizations considered as "religions" that are state-recognized. This list, for example, excludes Jehovah's Witnesses. Now, I don't agree with much of what the JW's preach (including, but not exclusive to practical things like refusing blood transfusions and birthdays). I was bothered by their visits, I could see the manipulation in their Watchtower magazines (ironically, it was the same manipulation patterns used in Richard Dawkins books), and I know more about their doctrines than probably 80% of their membership -- they were some of the nicest people I knew in Germany. They treated their spouses with respect. They would bother themselves with frivolities like asking "How are you today?" to strangers (very uncommon in Europe) and they were generally much happier than the average German. When offered a choice between a devout JW, their practices, and what the person was like compared to a devout Catholic or Lutheran, their practices, and what the person was like -- The "cult" of Jehovah's Witnesses is far less alien (vs. consumption of their god's flesh, colored robes, incense, darkened lodges for worship, etc.) and far more beneficial to the person than the large Catholic or Lutheran churches.
tl;dr: The French definition of "cult" is not the same (legally or spiritually) as the English definition.
Was this based on a regex? It seems non-trivial to me to be able to validate an incomplete string against a complete regex intelligently. It sounds like that's what IBM wants, which would not be easy and would be pretty cool.
It didn't start out like that, but eventually, after people had brilliantly avoided the standard search/replace function of javascript by doing things like "Copy/Paste" or holding down the comma key (for some reason, JS would only replace one instance of comma for each time the function was called, so if they got several commas, it would only delete one for each OnKeyUp they fired) we resorted to using a regex. It was for a small calculator on the site, but the client had very specific ideas of how it should act when people inputed information into it, and regular expressions slowly became the most elegant solutions to the problem available to us.
So you created a shitty form that just ignored what the used typed, because after all, the developer knows best? Kind of completely the opposite of what they are doing, isn't it? They are allowing the user to type in the format they are comfortable with, while presenting to the programmer what they are expecting. Good UI design says if the user types 123-45-6789, they should see 123-45-6789, and not 123456789. If the user types 123x45-6789. let them know the 'x' is wrong, don't just assume you know what they meant and drop it. This patent seems to be aimed directly at trying to fix the horrible practices you and a thousand other developers foist on the public.
Perhaps if you removed your nose from your small intestine far enough for your eyes to see the screen past your sphincter, you would see that this is exactly NOT what IBM is proposing. It is not some "Auto-complete my SSN" function. If some user types "I would like to donate $10k,000.0r4 to this charity", someone like you would automatically assume that he is brilliant in coming up with his own system of alphanumeric currency that may somehow translate into real-world dollars. In this case, whatever AJAX or javascript functions that may calculate door prizes or shipping or whatever he may also need to see, based on his input, would be broken, but it's because the stupidity of the developer not recognizing the brilliant man's new currency system (and possible numeric system that could possibly be dodecadecimal or greater, for all you know) and not because some guy with fat fingers couldn't realize the fact he was typing letters where the numbers should go.
Reaching out to stupidity is what good developers do. You seem to think that giving stupidity the reach around is a better way to go. I disagree, and my experience with millions of users and their fractured attempts at data input disagrees with you as well. Garbage-in probably means GARBAGE-in -- not "well-thought-out but ill-formatted"-in (though that exists as well)... it's better to be safe than sorry when it comes to peoples' information. In any case, please ATTEMPT to concern yourself with what the patent says before trying a vain attempt at verbally assaulting someone with it. At least you remembered to post anonymously when you post this sort of dreck.
Whether you think this is novel or not, it's not ordinary.
One of the first forms I programmed for a commercial company would delete non-numeric characters and commas onKeyUp. It's extremely ordinary, and the practice is probably a day younger than javascript.
Yes, I agree to an extent. The RIAA was not the only place that was applying pressure. What about all the software companies? Do they fall into the same morally abject group as the RIAA?
Only if they're buying judges and legislators, demanding extradition from countries that don't offer extradition, committing perjury, monopolistic business practices, and making me listen to "Love Hurts" by Linkin Park every [bloody] time I turn on the radio in my car. Let them seek reimbursement if they can find the legal grounds to do so -- especially when they've made the trade between producer and consumer as accomodating as possible toward the consumer... but it would be more fair if they were able to find the jerkoffs who placed the pirated content on The Pirate Bay to begin with and prosecute them instead.
I must disagree with the person who modded you as "Flamebait" as you state a good case. The issue is, though, that The Pirate Bay are not the guys distributing your files. The guys who post it on The Pirate Bay are the ones that are responsible for that.
I, personally, find The Pirate Bay's neglectful attitude to be morally deviant, but I find the RIAA to be morally abject. I figured my comparison to Robin Hood to be quite accurate -- since he, too, was but a thief (even a robber) with good PR. Perhaps you'd be more apt to agree on comparing the Pirate Bay to Godzilla? He's lumbering along, breathing thermonuclear breath and smashing buildings on innocent people... but the guy he's up against is looking to completely eradicate mankind. I find myself cheering for Godzilla when the two fight. I don't condone Godzilla's destruction, but like I said: in the battle between neutral and evil, I'll choose neutral.
In the meantime, I do wish you the best of luck in your business endeavors.
Obviously, in /. universe, a judge who respects the law of copyright is biased. In other, alternative, universes judges who respect the law are respected.
He didn't respect the law of copyright. He respected the copyright holders more than the law. That was the claim of bias. The Pirate Bay is operating under the letter of Swedish law and this judge allowed the twisting of the law enough so these fellows could be convicted. That's not respect, that's abhorrence.
I have a question. Why does Slashdot constantly side with PirateBay? You are aware that they were running a major piracy ring, right? That they were providing the torrent trackers that facilitated the distribution of copyrighted materials?
Because they're like our modern day Robin Hood. They rob from the rich and corrupt, and give to the poor, in a sense.
In reality, they've abided by Swedish law. They do not give people illegal files. They do not host illegal files. They do not even link to illegal files. What they do is link to links that will link a computer to what could be illegal files (or legitimate files). They're just total bastards about it because someone who doesn't like their stuff being distributed by people who their links linking linking to is in a big huff and can't legally do anything about it, so they're breaking greater laws to bring these Robin Hoods to justice (through federal corruption).
So in a sense, you're watching two guys fighting it out. One is neutral (not good or bad, technically, as they facilitate both with their hands off the watch) and the other is evil. It's allowable for us to boo and hiss the villain when he's brought a gun to a knife fight. It's also allowed for us to cheer the morally-neutral anti-hero as he brazenly swashbuckles and insults the villain's poor taste of dress (all the while winking at the crowd with a smile that says "It's ok guys, I got this!").
Most stations won't even open the package. College stations might, but mainstream ones aren't interested.
Incorrect. You send them the CD, and then have a few different people call in and request the song over the course of a few days. The typical DJ will get curious and pop it open (or adventurous and play it). Of course, this goes hand-in-hand with all of the other steps my GP was mentioning. None of those points alone would get you in the limelight, typically, anyway. They're a concerted effort where the consolidation is exponentially more powerful than the sum of its parts.
A lot of TV shows have vanished from our screens because of this: Terminator, My Name is Earl, Scrubs, Frasier, Samantha Who... the list is endless.
You, sir, have inspired me to build my own race of super robots to send back in time to stop such things. I've already dispatched 3 terminators. One, each, to kill the man who cancelled Scrubs, the man who cancelled Frasier and the man who cancelled My Name is Earl after their first seasons. Perhaps this will allow them a good chance at 3 seasons apiece....
Practice Test in PDF form
It was like a random-word generator spat out the questions in the most convoluted way possible, asking the oddest, nonsensical questions they can. For example:
Given that 100 milliliters is equal to approximately 0.4 cup, 205 milliliters is equal to approximately how many cups?
Which of the following expressions models the solution to the problem above?
A. (100 - 0.4)(205)
B. 105% of 0.4
C. (205 - 100)(0.4)
D. 205% of 0.4
The person who wrote this exam probably did so from a mental hospital.
There ought to be some Internet service that searches for your real name in search engines and is able to tell if the pages are fake or not. Some sort of identity theft service. I think such a service exists, but I don't know how to find them.
If there is one, I haven't found it. :(
-Ryan Goatse
Wanna bet CO2 still warms the atmosphere after they incorporate the new ocean current data? We won't know for sure until they incorporate the new data, but I'll take that bet.
They haven't bothered to scientifically test to see if CO2 warms the atmosphere -- they've only shown that correlation exists between increased atmospheric temperature and carbon dioxide content. They've also seen that when temperatures increase, carbon dioxide and methane is released in greater quantities from natural sources. They've shown that carbon dioxide blocks heat rays as well. If taking these 3 observations and using them to say "It's a scientific fact that CO2 warms the atmosphere" then you are operating under a different definition of "science" than I do.
What makes you think they'll "scientifically" incorporate this model? Despite popular belief, making a documentary and pretending it's a NOVA special doesn't make something science. Neither does appearing on public broadcasting.
Abiogenesis.... Take that ID-iots!
Scientists stitching together molecules like a chemical zipper to recreate a simple RNA sounds a lot more like "Design" and a lot less like "abiogenesis" to me, actually...
Quoting Sutherland's team from TFA:
It's not as simple as putting compounds in a beaker and mixing it up. It's a series of steps. You still have to stop and purify and then do the next step, and that probably didn't happen in the ancient world.
Seriously, watching Abiogenesis fiends bickering with "Intelligent Design" supporters over who is more wrong makes me think I'm back on Digg when it was used as Richard Dawkin's RSS feed.
1. Tell Whiskey Snob you need to verify his $20,000 bottle's value.
2. Tell Whiskey Snob the bottle was brewed in the 80's, and you have since disposed of the "worthless spirits" after the intensive testing, but offer to buy him a bottle of Johnny Walker if it will be any condolence.
3. Sell $20,000 bottle of whiskey to 3rd party.
4. ?????
5. Profit!
Or they could do something really novel like let *me* handle *my* own money bypassing SS entirely.
Careful, you try not paying your taxes and Obama will tap you as a cabinet member so fast your head will spin.
The impact hit large animals with high energy requirements hardest, and everything else hard. Hence you get big things with moderate to high metabolisms going extinct completely, and many, many smaller things going extinct as well. If you were small, you had a chance. If you were big, but had low energy requirements, you had a chance. If you were big, and had high energy requirements, you had little to no chance. This is the pattern of the extinction, and it matches the impact theory.
You argue that large animals with high energy requirements take aggro from the impact -- odd inference -- you took two observations, obtusely linked them, and said it proves your claim. "Mass Extinction" possibly happened over a very long period of time. The only arguments I've heard against this were probability calculators -- which, frankly, have Zero place in paleontology. We know a number of things that did go extinct and a number of things that survived. Our grip on what life was like 65 million years ago is threadbare and capricious. Watch old 80's documentaries on dinosaurs, then 90's documentaries, then the latest you can find. The fact you rule things out with inference and saying "EVERYBODY IN THE WHOLE WORLD KNOWS THIS HYPOTHESIS IS TRUE. THEY'RE SCIENTISTS" screams groupthink so loud I can't hear anything else you're trying to say.
Please, treat all, "the meteorite didn't kill the dinosaurs!" articles and papers (even if they're in peer-reviewed journals) with extreme scepticism. They are almost always embarrassingly myopic or out of date. There is an imperial fuckload of evidence that the bolide impact did it.
What about the abundance of evidence that a meteorite didn't hit the earth with enough impact/fallout/nuclear winter to wipe out every reptile? (Exhibit A: Reptiles) I think that warrants consideration for alternative theories. I could write a comic book about how the meteorite caused dinosaurs to mutate and grow feathers (the energy to grow these feathers shrunk the dinosaurs) that agrees with the data more than the "meteorite killed everything. Except alligators, tortoises, monitors, snakes, iguanas, and archaeoptrix's offspring who had grown enough feathers by this point, and all the fish in the ocean that global warming is, like, totally extincting right now. (But it did extinct the plesiosaur)" Try common sense before groupthink.
Not hosting those books is not "Censorship", it's simply not hosting books they deem inappropriate (which is their right to do). If you have a website or a business with a website, then you have the right to NOT link to sites or articles which you completely disagree with or find inappropriate. If Google went around banning those books from every library, bookstore, and online bookstore -- then it would be censorship. They're not a government institution, and they're not a monopoly. Let them do whatever the hell they want.
If Iraq bombed and invaded America, then Canadians who went into American churches and blew up Americans for being Protestant instead of Catholic, also proceeding to American police stations and blowing those up -- and every now and then actually killing an Iraqi soldier -- because when Iraq leaves, they want the US to be Catholic-Only (and death to any who are not), then they would be terrorists and insurgents.
Fixed that for you.
Perhaps you should read "Lord of the Flies" or "On War"
By and large, the mainstream organized "religions" (using your AD-HOC definition which includes nationalism/imperialism) create peace, not war. Consider that there are over a billion Chinese people living within close proximity to each other without absolutely slaughtering one another for their resources. Consider how few wars there actually are in a world of 6 billion, starving people, when it's hard to find any 2 people who can get along without fighting.
When there's not a large-scale joining force, the conflicts simply move to smaller scales. Gangs, school bully packs, ghettos, cliques, tribes -- we are a social and warlike race. Conflict breeds resolution and diversity breeds conflict. When there's no diversity, then it's resources or even competitive lust that create the conflict. I can move state to state within the US without worrying about which state I actually come from. Meanwhile, in Africa, where languages, nationalities, and religions differ greatly from tribe to tribe, there is slaughter and bloodshed over women, food, and plain paranoia that the other guys might come over and kill you if you don't kill them first.
The big "religions" have absolved us from that to a point where we don't even wear weapons on our way to work anymore. We imagine ourselves dying in car accidents sooner than being gunned down by a neighboring city in a skirmish to steal some women. War is not our every day absolute. We're a generation and nation of pussies now, and we've turned to bite the hand that feeds that lifestyle. Yes, the nation of Islam threatens your peace, but the very fact you HAVE peace is probably thanks to that same nation of Islam has united the warlike with the peaceful to an ingenious restraining point. The bloodiest "religions" have managed to extinguish themselves by this point, for now... but if you take away what we have now, it will be replaced -- because humans join together and conflict. That's what our kids are born to do, and it's what we live and die for.
In some defense, if he is a member of the organization not in a capacity of financial beneficiary of copyright, then it isn't quite so clear cut. If he firmly believes in copyright as a matter of law and principle, I don't think it's much different than a judge being a member of an organization lobbying for tougher murder penalties, etc. Convicting all gun-owners of "assault with a deadly weapon" for owning a gun, because the judge belongs to an anti-gun lobby, would be a more accurate descriptor here. What the PirateBay owners were doing was not illegal under Swedish law until the judge warped it enough to appear to be illegal, as it met his own political (and financial) interests and agenda to see these men in shackles when they were law-abiders.
Would you prefer iCommand?
That's soooo 2000. Nowadays, it would be YouCommand.
Do you think that when you become a lesbian, your reproductive tract falls out or something?
Are you inferring that lesbians can reproduce asexually? Or that a human egg can fetilize another human egg? I mean no offense to you, as I find many of your posts to be enlightening. This one, though, politically correct as it is, is mind-numbingly short-sighted.