Just an idea: After some time of getting "thrown" things at it, its gravital pull sould increase isn't it ?
Yes, though for a supermassive black hole that is already composed of the masses of many stars, adding another one now and then probably won't increase the gravitational pull suddenly or significantly.
All the objects previously in stables orbit should start to feel the pull and their previously stable orbit should start to get messed up (exentric orbits, and then maybe plunging orbits ?).
Yes, when a central mass increases, everything in orbit will "fall toward it" a bit faster. But they will still have their "sideways" orbital velocity, and for a small mass increase (or even a relatively large one), the orbit will just end up going faster and being somewhat smaller.
In general, the changes in orbits and velocity won't be enough to sustain a "chain reaction" where new stuff is continuously falling in... at least not in a mature star system.
The music company did not have authority to grant CBS the rights. The lyrics clearly stated who owned the copyright. CBS could have easily figured this out.
Not only that, but it seems the bigger problem may be that they implied the whole thing wasn't licensed from anyone in some merchandise and instead was made up by one of the writers on the show.
From TFA:
"Defendants not only willfully infringed Plaintiffs' copyright, but they failed to credit Edith Newlin as the author of the Soft Kitty Lyrics. Instead, they placed a credit line on some merchandise items that made it appear as if one of the Defendants themselves created the soft Kitty lyrics," the suit claims. "The credit states that the Soft Kitty Lyrics were 'Written by Bill Prady.' Bill Prady is a principal of Defendant Chuck Lorre Productions, one of the producers of The Big Bang Theory."
Even if they licensed the music and/or the lyrics, implying that they wrote it is clearly problematic. Even if the work was in public domain (which, arguably, it should be in any sensible copyright system), it still would be appropriate to credit the original creator, even if not legally mandated.
One of the biggest surprises [a professor] found: Only half the students ever used the home page he had so carefully built for the course. Instead, many students just jumped to the homework, and only clicked to a reading assignment or lecture if they didn't know the answer to a question.
The professors find reading student assignments to be TL;DR, so they plan to read summaries of stats and cool-looking graphs instead:
Mr. Chuang was blunt with his colleagues at the conference about the typical faculty reaction to an older experiment with learning analytics, which flagged struggling students at the fifth week of classes, an approach many colleges have experimented with. "The number one thing our faculty would like is an ease in the burden of teaching so they can go back to research," he said.
But the profs then find the new analytics to be TL;DR, so they need to hire other people to look at them for them:
How did those professors react? "A big Huh, and Why?, and What can I use this for?" explained Mr. Chuang at a session at recent education-technology conference. "I think part of the challenge is addressing that gap of understanding the potential of analytics," he added. To do that, MIT started a Digital Learning Lab and hired postdoctoral fellows who serve as "ambassadors to a revolution" to help professors interpret the numbers.
This all seems rather ridiculous, particularly if you look at the ONE practical example in TFA of something useful they seem to have discovered through all of this complex data analysis (other than that students just don't do anything you don't force them to). That practical example was where a "difficult" problem on a problem set turned out to have an unexpectedly high number of correct answers from students. Why? The problem was poorly written and gave a clue away.
Seriously? That's the best example they can come up with?
I have a modest proposal instead of all of this "analytics" and TL;DR -- try READING.
If students do the reading, and professors actually look at the work they do... or at least have graduate teaching assistants look at that work, then the teaching assistants will discover where the questions are poorly worded and "too many" students are getting a tough problem right. We don't need to hire a new team of postdoc "ambassadors to a revolution" to collect hoards of data just to find errors in a problem set.
And professors should stop expecting college students to do readings or use materials if they aren't directly relevant to assignments or tests, particularly in online courses. Is it really surprising to ANYONE that students in online courses will skip over materials unless they actually need them to complete the assignments? Do people really need "analytics" to discover this? If you want students to use materials or do readings, then hold them responsible for them. Seriously. I remember when I was an undergrad -- I had some lecturers who were quite bad, so just stopped going to class. If I could get everything I needed to do well from problem sets and assignments, why waste my time? On the other hand, I had some lecturers who would spend a lot of time discussing materials necessary for the tests and stuff that was harder to get from readings, etc. -- so I'd go to those classes.
This is really basic pedagogical common sense. But instead, TFA seems to be recommending some sort of data-mining approach for the TL;DR generation, rather than just having everyone (students, faculty, teaching assistants) just spend a little more time paying attention to what's going on. Studies have shown that college students on average spend about half as much time actually studying/reading/etc. outside of class compared to 50 years ago. This kind of stuff doesn't seem to be improving that sit
How do we know the black hole itself didn't strip the stars away? That's kinda what they do, isn't it?
Not really, or at least not anymore than stripping the planets in the solar system away is "kinda what" the sun does. Contrary to the popular image, black holes aren't like giant vacuum cleaners that suck stuff in. Most of them tend to have lots of things in stable orbits around them, as stars have planets, and planets have moons. The only stuff that tends to fall in is stuff that gets directed towards them. A giant black hole at the center of a galaxy would only tend to consume stars which were "thrown" toward it, usually by unstable orbital dynamics created by encounters with other stars.
CP is center of pressure, and CM is center of mass, so CP/M is clearly the center of pressure divided by mass.
Precisely. And the units are obviously number of bulls-eyes*** you win in darts at the bar** per the number of slugs* you get in during the drunken brawl afterward.
* Unit of mass
** Unit of pressure
*** Unit of center:)
I am certain this is more energy efficient by a LONG shot, that does not make it more reliable or cost effective.
Remember to factor in any energy required for manufacturing the camera and screen too, if you're actually interested in energy conservation and not just lowering your power bill by a few dollars per year (since that's what you'll save on average). Air is not dense at all and doesn't require a lot of energy to cool -- chances are you spend $5-10 per year or so for refrigerator openings if you're average... the rest of fridge costs are for cooling down actual food (usually requires thousands of times as much as an equivalent volume of air) and keeping it cold.
My guess is you'll probably have to use this for several years to save the equivalent in manufacturing energy spent, but it's hard to know without a detailed breakdown.
The article does not explicitly mention how the 'tests' requested by the husband were performed. They could have been breathalyzer tests (unlikely in a hospital setting, but not impossible).
Yes, and the article does not explicitly mention who took those 'tests' in the hospital either, or under what circumstances. They could have been breathalyzer tests administered by chimpanzees who were simultaneously juggling hamsters while jumping through flaming rings (unlikely in a hospital setting, but not impossible).
TFA didn't rule out the chimps, so I suppose that's justification for modding up the idea that no one at any point did an ACTUAL BAC test.
Seriously? The woman had a BAC that in many people could be near fatal. The husband doesn't believe it because it seems insane. Since breath tests are KNOWN to be quite inaccurate in a variety of circumstances, I can understand his skepticism.
And yet you assume the hospital staff just came in and did another breath test, which satisfied him? And on that basis the hospital staff diagnosed her with an exceptionally rare condition?
Or maybe, just maybe, the hospital did what would be standard procedure in such circumstances and actually checked the real BAC rather than relying on a test that is known to have problems.
Note that this does not say they did a blood test with a blood alcohol content result of nearly 0.4. They did breath test that produced results that would correspond with a BAC of nearly 0.4 in a normal person.
Actually, TFA says explicitly that they did a blood test at the hospital and it showed a level of 0.3.
The entire point that this condition affects the relation between breath alcohol measurements and actual blood alcohol content.
Citation needed. The blood test was administered hours after the breathalyzer, and TFA implies she had had at least some drink earlier... and even if not, blood alcohol levels presumably vary over time, even in people with this condition, since alcohol production is triggered by dietary intake.
What's funny is that the article never mentions any actual blood tests, only breathalyzer tests.
Except that it does, which makes your +5 Informative rating funny.
Instead of allowing his wife to be released as the hospital recommended based on her lack of drunken symptoms, the husband asked for tests to be run. Sure enough, Marusak says, the results showed a blood alcohol level of 0.30, hours and hours after her last drink.
I'm copying this post because it was posted by an AC, and it obviously shouldn't be lost to mods.
Come on mods -- seriously... I expect many posters here won't read TFA, but if you read a post that claims something isn't in TFA, take a few seconds and skim TFA to see that it's -- ya know -- actually TRUE before modding up as "Informative."
Well, the only thing you really missed from TFA is this great quote, which was intended to talk about NPR online articles, but applies equally well to Slashdot... and particularly the comments right here in this thread:
every one of its articles now bleeds with its comment section, much of it written by posters who haven't even read the article in question--essentially erasing the dividing lines between expert, echo chamber, and dilettante, journalist, hack, and self-promoter, reportage, character assassination, and mob frenzy.
He's using "Protean" (which should be capitalized) to mean "changing."
This is what I suspected. The problem is that "history" should not be "Protean".
Instead of
... our protean cultural history on Wikipedia
I would suggest "our Protean culture". Or even "... our changing culture".
I agree that the author's prose is unnecessarily wordy and trying to be too " clever."
But you missed the point here -- history shouldn't change (well, at least not in the common imagination; historiography shows us otherwise), but it DOES change on Wikipedia. Not only is Wikipedia continuously being edited and updated, but people here are always talking about the excessive coverage of random pop culture topics... and that of course is continuously evolving. You can actually see it happen as a pop culture topic becomes of interest, and people start writing articles on every episode of a TV series and every minor character, but then those projects often get abandoned when the series becomes less popular. Eventually the short stub articles are deleted or merged and effectively turns into "archive mode," rather than an active in-progress historical writing about ongoing culture.
Anyhow, I'm pretty sure the author DOES mean that history is changing, since history is nothing but records and narratives told about past events. So "protean" makes sense here, at least potentially. (Whether this overcomplicated prose is necessary to express such ideas is of course a different question.)
(Also, for the record, Protean is often capitalized, but doesn't necessarily need to be. When adjectives derived from proper names come to have their own specific English meaning that doesn't necessarily depend on detailed knowledge of the thing the word is named after, they often can be used without capitals. See titanic, herculean, mercurial, quixotic, etc. Protean is unusual enough that I'd probably capitalize it, but I wouldn't think it "wrong" if I saw it without a capital.)
It's statements like this that make me wish there were a much stronger word in the English language than "bullshit."
BS is actually fairly mild, despite containing a mild scatological obscenity.
Usage tip: If you want to express yourself, choose a less common word -- poppycock, hooey, balderdash, twaddle, claptrap, rubbish, bilge, Scalia's favorite "pure applesauce," or even the redundant "blathering blatherskite." Calling something BS is just a standard criticism -- if you want to insult something, pull out the multisyllabic and rare words, or just go for hyperbole: absurd, asinine, vacuous, patent nonsense.
(P.S. All of that said, I actually think GP's statement is true, but only because "asshole" is a more masculine insult which tends to be better suited to males. There are other words which tend to be used to describe the exact same behavior in females... despite the Slashdot claims to the contrary, sometimes vocabulary and usage does slant more to one sex or the other.)
Can any of the people who have anecdotes about asshole editor grievances please actually post some links? Seriously, I don't think you a lying, give us a chance to overthrow the assholes with actual evidence.
It's really easy to find. Imagine a controversial topic -- any topic you imagine people would tend to get in fights about. Now go read the "Talk Page" on Wikipedia on an article about it. In a significant number of such articles, you're likely to find all sorts of dysfunction with minority views either summarily suppressed or sometimes arbitrarily held up over the clear consensus of the majority (and sometimes even the clear scholarly consensus).
Better yet, imagine some topic that there's some common popular misunderstanding but where some pedantic jerks would love to debate it. Then go read the "Talk Page." Here, the vast majority of articles will have bizarre edit wars, wikilawyering, and various bureaucratic BS.
This stuff is quite common. It's not hard to find if you spend ANY time perusing the Talk pages on articles.
Essentially, all of the easy and common knowledge topics have already been covered. We're at the point now where only two types of edits can really happen. First is highly specialized knowledge, so yes, only a fraction of the community can do that properly.
Actually, for at least the past decade of so, Wikipedia has been actively driving expert editors away. If you were lucky enough to get started back before 2005 or so (and thus had an established rep) or have managed to fight your way through wikilawyering and bureaucracy while doing massive amounts of grunt work to prove yourself, then you have enough credibility to make significant changes without being immediately rejected.
But I know lots of academics who have tried to edit Wikipedia at some point over the past decade and gave up. They could have added significant "specialized knowledge" as part of the community, but they were driven away. Yes, some of them tried to do inappropriate things like pushing their own research -- but most of them just wanted to correct obvious errors that experts in a field would know (and which there is clear expert consensus about -- often decades old), but which popular sources that general Wikipedia editors tend to use may not reflect as well.
The problem with "verifiability" as a criterion is that there are lots of possible "verifiable" sources (according to the Wiki definition) in the world. At some point, you often need a subject expert to be able to arbitrate between the relative weight that should be given to them. Old paper encyclopedias had such people on staff or hired to edit a specific selection of articles.
If anything, this isn't a problem. It means they've achieved a very significant goal. They have a huge percentage of human factual knowledge all in one place.
Sorry for the irony, but [citation needed]. Do you have any idea of the amount of academic scholarship coming out in specialist journals and publications all the time? Most of that is obviously cutting edge research and may not be ready for an encyclopedia yet, but the majority of "factual" (i.e., scholarly consensus) stuff that any specialist on a given topic would know about an article is likely NOT in Wikipedia yet.
And since Wikipedia has a bizarre draconian (and inconsistently applied) deletionist bias toward "notability," most of that information simply can't make it on Wikipedia under present policy -- and if it does, it could be summarily deleted with all evidence of its existence removed.
Meanwhile, for reasons I mentioned above, there's a lot of crap in Wikipedia that is known by experts to be false, so saying Wikipedia is a collection of "human factual knowledge" is more than a bit misleading (it gets worse if you factor in the effects of random vandalism).
Wikipedia wants to reflect the mainstream press and most reliable sources.
That's simply not true. Wikipedia wants to reflect the consensus of the most ACCESSIBLE and POPULAR sources, which include the mainstream press.
In another reply in this thread, you also claim that Wikipedia doesn't want to get involved in scholarly debates or whatever -- but that's also not true. It wants to declare whatever appears in the most ACCESSIBLE AND POPULAR sources as correct, regardless of what the consensus of scholars is.
The more obscure the field, the more likely you are to find this sort of tension, particularly when that obscure field also tends to show up in popular accounts (often in very naive ways). You'll see this, for example, in a lot of humanities articles, where there's a scholarly consensus that some popular account has been wrong for half a century, but Wikipedia still states that incorrect popular view, because it appears in ACCESSIBLE AND POPULAR sources.
Meanwhile, if you go to any academic journal in that field, it would be immediately clear that the popular view is crap. But try correcting something like that on Wikipedia.
In a mainstream print encyclopedia back in the day, you would inevitably have some of that too. But the bigger encyclopedias would at least hire some subject editors who could differentiate between some nonsense spouted in a popular "History of Art for Dummies" coffee-table book and dozens of articles by experts in professional journals of the field.
I'm specifically talking about things here that are non-controversial. The consensus of experts is settled, but those results haven't trickled down to the mainstream media and popular literature. It's next to impossible to correct such errors on Wikipedia -- and yes, they are ERRORS, not simply a "different view" or some sort of "popular consensus."
I've tried to fix some of these years ago, but gave up. In one case, I made a change and posted a talk page thing explaining the edit with a source, which was reverted. I then posted links to over a DOZEN standard professional articles on the subject that make it clear what the scholarly consensus is, and how mainstream perception is based on an old myth that was discounted by experts decades ago. It was reverted summarily, and my sources were deleted. That was actually the final straw that caused me to stop editing Wikipedia after being somewhat active for a couple years and gradually discovering how screwed up it was.
Wikipedia's biggest problem in accuracy (aside from random vandalism) is that it simply doesn't have any equivalent of the old paper encyclopedia subject editor who could recognize the difference between "most reliable sources" (as you put it) and random popular fluff that could very well be wrong (but is "verifiable"). It usually takes someone familiar with a field and the literature of that field to be able to know which sources to trust.
And even if some subject expert manages to fight the bureaucracy and get some edits through to make an article more accurate, it could easily be reverted next week or next month or next year... by some idiot who read three popular books and thinks he knows better. So a subject expert has to not only commit to learning the Wikipedia bureaucracy and fighting it to make headway, but then has to commit to perpetual policing of such edits.
Sorry, but most academics have better things to do with their time. Thus, Wikipedia is guaranteed to gradually get further and further away from the "truth" or "consensus" of specialist literature, which repeating the same old crap said in popular sources.
Maybe there's something I'm missing as to why it is such a bad idea, but to me it seems like something worth doing.
Yes, there would be many benefits, but they are generally argued against by both liberals and conservatives because "identification papers" were historically the marker of totalitarian regimes.
And, indeed, there is a strong argument that they still could be problematic in exactly that way. Note what has happened in the past 15 years or so in the response to 9/11, and the various rights that have been undermined particularly in air travel. Note the massive government spying efforts which completely skirt the traditional interpretation of the 4th amendment. Etc., etc.
Now -- imagine that everyone was required to have a federally-issued ID card for identification purposes. Then imagine there's a terrorist incident on highways. Suddenly, the TSA can set up roadblocks in the middle of the U.S. and start doing what it does at airports -- except now at regional "checkpoints"... just to make sure you're not on the "do not drive list."
That's just one possible scenario. Without a national ID, it makes it that much harder for the feds to arbitrarily take the next steps toward totalitarian actions, further invasions of privacy and blanket searching, etc. And that's one reason why many states have deliberately passed laws to delay or frustrate the national "Real ID" initiative -- they realize where this consolidation of data on individuals can easily go.
A few decades ago, I probably wouldn't have objected too much to the idea. I agree with you about the potential benefits. But after we've seen what the federal government is willing to do in the past couple decades, no way. We'll probably get there eventually anyway within a few decades -- privacy is effectively dead. But I hope we don't help it along by shooting it, buying the casket, and serving as the pallbearer to its grave.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Note that phrase "well regulated" in the actual literal text of the Bill of Rights.
Yes, it is. But it's also part of a prefatory phrase separated by a comma, which makes clear **A** reason for the latter part of the sentence, not **THE ONLY** reason for the latter part of the sentence. Notice the separate references to "Militia" and later "the right of THE PEOPLE." There's a reason they changed the wording there.
Anyhow, I don't want to go over all of this again. You can choose your interpretation if you want, and some SCOTUS justices agree with you. After reviewing the actual writings of the Founders from that time and similar passages in state constitutions, as well as the legislative history and debates among the Founders for the 2nd amendment, it seems pretty clear that they were authorizing a broad power for "the people" to "keep and bear arms." The "well-regulated militia" stuff is just ONE reason why it's important to maintain that right... one reason important enough that they felt the need to mention it (even if they didn't mention others).
Or, to use my standard example, suppose you had a text that said:
A well-educated Electorate, being necessary to the democratic function of a free State, the right of the people to keep and read books, shall not be infringed.
Does that mean the federal government only has to allow registered voters to have books? Or might it just be saying, "the people have a broad right to own books, and here's one good reason -- though perhaps not the only reason -- why."
I can't say for certain what the 2nd amendment meant, but I think in historical context it makes more sense to read it as a broad-based right, with the Militia stuff as a prefatory clause, and it's perfectly rational to do so (even if you disagree).
The free-for-all we currently have, particularly in the form of gun show loopholes, is the opposite of "well regulated" and should be fixed.
I ABSOLUTELY agree! I think firearms should be much more regulated than they are, and I wholeheartedly endorse introducing mandatory safety, training, and licensing measures, as we already require for similarly dangerous things like cars and heavy equipment. Whether the federal government could mandate that without a Constitutional amendment is an open question, but I would support an amendment to make it possible.
People tend to forget the first half of the 2nd Amendment about the regulated militia, but it is important.
I don't forget it at all -- it's essential to the text and had an important impact, particularly in the early Republic (before a standing army existed for the federal government). I just think you're potentially reading it completely wrong.
More importantly, I'd rather live in a somewhat antiquated world that actually respects its Founding laws and works to change or clarify them as necessary, rather than one in which those laws can be arbitrarily rejected on a whim (as they basically have been for the past 75 years or so). The danger in allowing the Constitution to just mean whatever you want because it would allow the sort of changes or regulation you want is -- what happens when the feds want to break other laws you care about? I'm glad women have a "right" to an abortion, but I also think the Constitutional basis of the "right to privacy" is rather flimsy, and I think it's rather dangerous that such things depend on the whims of 9 people in black robes, rather than something more explicitly articulated. Any "right" that is found or modified through textual "interpretation" that disagrees with previous interpretation could always be reversed by judicial fiat.
It's "voluntary" in the same way that the drinking age being 21 is voluntary. The federal government actually does not have the right to regulate drinking age: that actually falls to the states.
Bah -- federalism is effectively dead. We still have many places where the federal government lets states do their thing, but if anything comes up that seems sufficiently dire, a magical solution will be found in some passage of the Constitution that will authorize federal power to trump states' rights.
I mean, if you want to go down the road to that sort of argument, you have to start with the question of whether the federal government has the right to regulate air travel at all. It certainly isn't mentioned in the enumerated powers of the Constitution. In the 1910s and 1920s, there was much debate over whether a Constitutional amendment was necessary for Congress to regulate anything other than basic interstate commerce issues. With the Air Commerce Act of 1926, the federal government formalized its role in regulating some safety measures, only for commercial flights, and rather limited. (It's important to remember this was still in the middle of the Lochner era, when the Supreme Court routinely struck down any statute that seemed like government interfering with economic liberty.)
Of course, everything changed after the FDR court-packing threat and the Switch in Time that Saved Nine in 1937, followed by sweeping federal government expansion in 1937-42, effectively culminating in the end of federalism. (Standard example: Alcohol prohibition required a Constitutional amendment before this time; marijuana prohibition did not, since it occurred at/after this time.) Federalism still nominally exists, but not really. Wherever the feds want states to do something, they tie up huge funding issues with it, as you say, so the feds bully the states into it.... and if they deem it even more important (e.g., TERRORISM!! AHHH!! RUN FOR THE HILLS!!), then they'll just magically make it a federal power by fiat.
While the feds likely could not say "no one without a Real ID compliant license flies" I'm sure they could stir up trouble in other ways with states that don't comply.
This statement is skimming over HUGE leaps in Constitutional law that have been changed by fiat just in the past few decades. After the terrorist threats in the 1970s, security screening was instituted with metal detectors and such at airports, but it was run by airports/airlines, NOT the feds, mostly because of Fourth Amendment concerns which would clearly prohibit such blanket searching (at least for the first 200 years of the Constitution or so). Prior to 2001, you submitted to voluntary security screening as a condition of the commercial contract you entered into with the airline.
Of course, after 2001 this whole 4th amendment concern was swept under the rug, and the crucial distinction between private voluntary search in a commercial transaction and government agents performing mandatory searches (which you could not just exit from -- now you could be detained by police even if you decided to leave after entering the security area).
But to get back to the real issue here -- you have to deal with the right to free travel within the U.S., which the TSA has arguably been disrupting since 2001. But the feds hesitated at first to stretch the Constitution that far. So -- while it was not widely known -- you could still travel domestically without ID for about a decade after 2001, as long as you made it clear to the TSA that you knew your rights and insisted.
But then the TSA closed that "loophole" (which used to be a g
Do you really think, you will feel good knowing it's a bot that you are talking to? If you are a kid or someone who's never been told that the other end is not a human, might enjoy the talks; but knowing very well that the other end is just arranging the words using some algorithm, what joy you think it will give you? I understand each one is different but it kind of puzzles me.
It puzzles me personally, too. But it's a well-known phenomenon, going back to the days of ELIZA decades ago. Even when told that there's no "person" on the other side of an electronic chat, people still often engage emotionally.
If someone is reaching out to the bot to handle loneliness; how will this eliminate it? Most us humans interact not really because of the content of the words -- it's because there is something common we share -- a shared destiny [the reason we are here..a journey.. call it soul/higher power/purpose etc].
People "talk" to deities too -- they rarely even "talk back" to most people, but people often find solace in doing so. Early ELIZA users often reported "sensing an intelligence" even after explicitly being told that there was none.
People project all sorts of things onto emotional interactions. If they need to vent or have some sort of interaction, what they say when they vent is often more important emotionally than what the response is. Hence therapy sessions (which can frequently happen) where a patient just goes in and rants for an hour, then pays a couple hundred dollars for the therapist to say, "Okay, time's up, see you next week."
Some people need to FEEL like someone is listening and caring, even if no one is. God, psychiatrists, etc. can fill that role. Why not chatbots?
BTW there are too many negatives in your statement; I don't know how you can be so sure of your future.. no one knows what's around the corner.. life changes in an instant..that's the mystery of Life
That I'll agree with. GP is way too negative. Thinking negative is more likely to produce negative results. I don't know the future either, but having a view like "I'm never gonna make friends and I'm never gonna have a meaningful emotional relationship again" is rarely helpful in making friends and having meaningful relationships.
Without some really strong evidence, why would anyone believe these 4 million new members aren't 99% AI-controlled bots? Or at least 99% of the new female users.
Well, a number of things.
(1) The argument that 99+% of female users were bots never quite made a lot of sense. It's true that men cheat more than women, but by a factor of something like 2:1, not several orders of magnitude higher. Even internet porn use is nowhere near the claimed level of asymmetry by gender on AM.
(2) The actual person who made the claim about the massive percentage of female bots actually admitted her data analysis was completely bogus and that she had no idea what she was doing in interpreting the database fields.
(3) A number of reputable news sources after the story came out actually went out and interviewed real women who had used the site. I'm not going to bother looking for it now, but I remember a BBC story who even interviewed two lesbians from neighboring towns or something that met on AM. If the 99+% bots claim was anywhere near true, it would be nearly statistically impossible for two REAL women to even find each other on AM.
(4) Even if the database analysis in the original (widely reported) story was based on a correct interpretation (which -- see point (2) above -- it wasn't), the data was also obtained from hackers who were intent on destroying the business model of AM. It would be to hackers' benefit to make things look bad for AM, and making it look all male AM users were doing was talking to a bunch of bots would be a really ingenious strategy.
(5) Even if the database analysis was correct (which seems unlikely), there are plenty of reports of users who joined after the hack to find out if their spouses were on AM. That number alone could explain a significant portion of the 4 million increase -- and those women are likely to be real women... even if they have no intention of being active on AM, they would still be new accounts.
Ultimately, I don't really care. I'm sure there may be some bots involved (at least tens of thousands existed before the hack), but I find it exceedingly unlikely that 99+% of new accounts are fake, since the original claim was bogus anyway.
BTW -- I find the whole idea of the site revolting, but I found the bot story weird enough to follow for a couple days -- until it utterly blew up and turned out to be based on a faulty analysis (as I thought was likely anyway). Of course, that never got reported widely, because "there probably are quite a few women on AM anyway" isn't nearly as interesting or sensationalistic as news as "99% of AM female 'users' are fembots and all these guys who are being embarrassed by the account leak were even greater morons than we thought!"
What Zuckerberg apparently fails to realize is that libraries don't see their users as a product, and generally don't have a vested interest in keeping their users away from the local bookstore and other non-library sanctioned locations.
"...fails to realize..."? No, he's just failing to acknowledge such differences, because they would be detrimental to Facebook's business model if too many people thought too much about what he's really doing.
Next thing you'll be claiming that a used-car salesman doesn't actually " realize" that he's making a major profit off some clunker if you buy it at his price, or that the diet pill guy doesn't "realize" that the pills don't really work, or that the TV evangelist doesn't "realize" that by sending him money for "prayers" that you're really just paying for the TV preacher's private jet.
A merchant, such as the government, can structure transactions to avoid the creation of debt in the first place.
What about taxes? Pretty sure you incur that debt to the government just by existing and doing various things in society. I'm pretty sure the government would have to repeal legal tender laws if it wanted to refuse cash for taxes... and if it did that, it would seriously risk destabilizing the currency, since the requirement that taxable value is tied to legal tender is important for the establishment of the currency as standard means of exchange in a given country... legal tender would have to be replaced with an electronic equivalent still denominated in the currency.
You're supposed to pre-wash the dishes to prevent food scraps blocking the machine.
No -- you're supposed to remove/scrape off any large pieces of food before putting dishes into the dishwasher. Doing that should prevent any clogging. No "pre-washing" is generally necessary, though many dishwashers will have trouble with certain gunky stuff (solidified eggs, peanut butter, etc.), and rinsing them may be helpful.
One reason I think dishwashers are useless.
Well, yeah, if you're doing an entire wash before even putting them in the dishwasher.
My routine? I actually cook for myself, so almost every meal has a few large pots or pans or bowls that I don't want to put into the dishwasher, because they'll take up half of a shelf or something, and that seems ridiculously inefficient. Also, I have stuff I handwash only (good knives, pans, glassware, etc.).
Anyhow, with that handwash stuff, I'll use the rinsewater collected in a small basin or sink from those dishes, and do a quick pass with any dishes that have major gunk before throwing them in the dishwasher. I don't waste any water pre-washing, since I had already collected that water from stuff that needed handwashing anyway. And since modern dishwashers use less water and energy than handwashing, there's an energy benefit as well as the less time wasted doing a full wash of the dishes.
Obviously YMMV, but if you come up with a reasonable routine, dishwashers usually save significant time and energy.
Snap circuits are neat - but I'm not a huge fan. They are generally fairly very "high level, complex" building blocks.
I somewhat agree. I think the target age is off -- I believe they say 8 or older, but they're really ideal for the 4-8 year old range, when kids are enjoying building things and are starting to follow diagrams in instruction books, but aren't really ready to understand the complexities of electronic components. They're great for introducing concepts like what a resistor, capacitor, etc. are, though they rely on a grown-up to explain a lot, since the manuals are both repetitive and often don't explain WHY things are working the way they do in a particular circuit.
Even most of the definitions of what the pins (of the modules) do aren't described, nor referenced in any instructional way.
Uh, you mean these, which are pretty detailed diagrams of what the ICs are? Again, they require an adult to work through and explain to a kid.
Basically, by themselves, they mostly are good for teaching kids to follow diagrams and learn terms like resistor, transistor, etc. They are exploratory in the sense that they can get kids excited about circuits by seeing instant results, which are a lot more exciting than blocks. (My son first started working with them when he was 3, and they were much more awesome to him than any other similar building toy to him, since they made flashing lights and fans go at different speeds and within a couple months he was looking at the kits in the back of the manual and begging me to get the kits with C3 -- a different capacitor -- etc. By his fourth birthday he was sitting in his room "building his own radio," and dancing to the music it played.)
i agree that the manuals could be a LOT better. But with adult guidance and suggestions, kids can understand more details about what's going on and learn how to build some of their own variations. Then, by the time the kid is 8 or 9, he/she will be ready to explore with a better kit of real components... and presumably ready to be arrested for "building a bomb" by clueless people who can't imagine why a kid should learn how to build things like circuits.
Widdershins is a bit different. It usually refers to the direction you go around something, rather than the direction you turn (e.g. while stationary). I realize that these are obviously related, but there's an implied difference in perspective -- counterclockwise can refer both to a path direction around an axis or the axis rotation direction itself. Widdershins, at least traditionally, tends to refer to the former, or more accurately, keeping an object to your left as you circumambulate.
Slashdot Mirror
Just an idea: After some time of getting "thrown" things at it, its gravital pull sould increase isn't it ?
Yes, though for a supermassive black hole that is already composed of the masses of many stars, adding another one now and then probably won't increase the gravitational pull suddenly or significantly.
All the objects previously in stables orbit should start to feel the pull and their previously stable orbit should start to get messed up (exentric orbits, and then maybe plunging orbits ?).
Yes, when a central mass increases, everything in orbit will "fall toward it" a bit faster. But they will still have their "sideways" orbital velocity, and for a small mass increase (or even a relatively large one), the orbit will just end up going faster and being somewhat smaller.
In general, the changes in orbits and velocity won't be enough to sustain a "chain reaction" where new stuff is continuously falling in... at least not in a mature star system.
The music company did not have authority to grant CBS the rights. The lyrics clearly stated who owned the copyright. CBS could have easily figured this out.
Not only that, but it seems the bigger problem may be that they implied the whole thing wasn't licensed from anyone in some merchandise and instead was made up by one of the writers on the show.
From TFA:
"Defendants not only willfully infringed Plaintiffs' copyright, but they failed to credit Edith Newlin as the author of the Soft Kitty Lyrics. Instead, they placed a credit line on some merchandise items that made it appear as if one of the Defendants themselves created the soft Kitty lyrics," the suit claims. "The credit states that the Soft Kitty Lyrics were 'Written by Bill Prady.' Bill Prady is a principal of Defendant Chuck Lorre Productions, one of the producers of The Big Bang Theory."
Even if they licensed the music and/or the lyrics, implying that they wrote it is clearly problematic. Even if the work was in public domain (which, arguably, it should be in any sensible copyright system), it still would be appropriate to credit the original creator, even if not legally mandated.
The whole theme of TFA seems to be TL;DR.
The students find course materials to be TL;DR:
One of the biggest surprises [a professor] found: Only half the students ever used the home page he had so carefully built for the course. Instead, many students just jumped to the homework, and only clicked to a reading assignment or lecture if they didn't know the answer to a question.
The professors find reading student assignments to be TL;DR, so they plan to read summaries of stats and cool-looking graphs instead:
Mr. Chuang was blunt with his colleagues at the conference about the typical faculty reaction to an older experiment with learning analytics, which flagged struggling students at the fifth week of classes, an approach many colleges have experimented with. "The number one thing our faculty would like is an ease in the burden of teaching so they can go back to research," he said.
But the profs then find the new analytics to be TL;DR, so they need to hire other people to look at them for them:
How did those professors react? "A big Huh, and Why?, and What can I use this for?" explained Mr. Chuang at a session at recent education-technology conference. "I think part of the challenge is addressing that gap of understanding the potential of analytics," he added. To do that, MIT started a Digital Learning Lab and hired postdoctoral fellows who serve as "ambassadors to a revolution" to help professors interpret the numbers.
This all seems rather ridiculous, particularly if you look at the ONE practical example in TFA of something useful they seem to have discovered through all of this complex data analysis (other than that students just don't do anything you don't force them to). That practical example was where a "difficult" problem on a problem set turned out to have an unexpectedly high number of correct answers from students. Why? The problem was poorly written and gave a clue away.
Seriously? That's the best example they can come up with?
I have a modest proposal instead of all of this "analytics" and TL;DR -- try READING.
If students do the reading, and professors actually look at the work they do... or at least have graduate teaching assistants look at that work, then the teaching assistants will discover where the questions are poorly worded and "too many" students are getting a tough problem right. We don't need to hire a new team of postdoc "ambassadors to a revolution" to collect hoards of data just to find errors in a problem set.
And professors should stop expecting college students to do readings or use materials if they aren't directly relevant to assignments or tests, particularly in online courses. Is it really surprising to ANYONE that students in online courses will skip over materials unless they actually need them to complete the assignments? Do people really need "analytics" to discover this? If you want students to use materials or do readings, then hold them responsible for them. Seriously. I remember when I was an undergrad -- I had some lecturers who were quite bad, so just stopped going to class. If I could get everything I needed to do well from problem sets and assignments, why waste my time? On the other hand, I had some lecturers who would spend a lot of time discussing materials necessary for the tests and stuff that was harder to get from readings, etc. -- so I'd go to those classes.
This is really basic pedagogical common sense. But instead, TFA seems to be recommending some sort of data-mining approach for the TL;DR generation, rather than just having everyone (students, faculty, teaching assistants) just spend a little more time paying attention to what's going on. Studies have shown that college students on average spend about half as much time actually studying/reading/etc. outside of class compared to 50 years ago. This kind of stuff doesn't seem to be improving that sit
How do we know the black hole itself didn't strip the stars away? That's kinda what they do, isn't it?
Not really, or at least not anymore than stripping the planets in the solar system away is "kinda what" the sun does. Contrary to the popular image, black holes aren't like giant vacuum cleaners that suck stuff in. Most of them tend to have lots of things in stable orbits around them, as stars have planets, and planets have moons. The only stuff that tends to fall in is stuff that gets directed towards them. A giant black hole at the center of a galaxy would only tend to consume stars which were "thrown" toward it, usually by unstable orbital dynamics created by encounters with other stars.
CP is center of pressure, and CM is center of mass, so CP/M is clearly the center of pressure divided by mass.
Precisely. And the units are obviously number of bulls-eyes*** you win in darts at the bar** per the number of slugs* you get in during the drunken brawl afterward.
* Unit of mass :)
** Unit of pressure
*** Unit of center
I am certain this is more energy efficient by a LONG shot, that does not make it more reliable or cost effective.
Remember to factor in any energy required for manufacturing the camera and screen too, if you're actually interested in energy conservation and not just lowering your power bill by a few dollars per year (since that's what you'll save on average). Air is not dense at all and doesn't require a lot of energy to cool -- chances are you spend $5-10 per year or so for refrigerator openings if you're average... the rest of fridge costs are for cooling down actual food (usually requires thousands of times as much as an equivalent volume of air) and keeping it cold.
My guess is you'll probably have to use this for several years to save the equivalent in manufacturing energy spent, but it's hard to know without a detailed breakdown.
The article does not explicitly mention how the 'tests' requested by the husband were performed. They could have been breathalyzer tests (unlikely in a hospital setting, but not impossible).
Yes, and the article does not explicitly mention who took those 'tests' in the hospital either, or under what circumstances. They could have been breathalyzer tests administered by chimpanzees who were simultaneously juggling hamsters while jumping through flaming rings (unlikely in a hospital setting, but not impossible).
TFA didn't rule out the chimps, so I suppose that's justification for modding up the idea that no one at any point did an ACTUAL BAC test.
Seriously? The woman had a BAC that in many people could be near fatal. The husband doesn't believe it because it seems insane. Since breath tests are KNOWN to be quite inaccurate in a variety of circumstances, I can understand his skepticism.
And yet you assume the hospital staff just came in and did another breath test, which satisfied him? And on that basis the hospital staff diagnosed her with an exceptionally rare condition?
Or maybe, just maybe, the hospital did what would be standard procedure in such circumstances and actually checked the real BAC rather than relying on a test that is known to have problems.
Note that this does not say they did a blood test with a blood alcohol content result of nearly 0.4. They did breath test that produced results that would correspond with a BAC of nearly 0.4 in a normal person.
Actually, TFA says explicitly that they did a blood test at the hospital and it showed a level of 0.3.
The entire point that this condition affects the relation between breath alcohol measurements and actual blood alcohol content.
Citation needed. The blood test was administered hours after the breathalyzer, and TFA implies she had had at least some drink earlier... and even if not, blood alcohol levels presumably vary over time, even in people with this condition, since alcohol production is triggered by dietary intake.
What's funny is that the article never mentions any actual blood tests, only breathalyzer tests.
Except that it does, which makes your +5 Informative rating funny.
Instead of allowing his wife to be released as the hospital recommended based on her lack of drunken symptoms, the husband asked for tests to be run. Sure enough, Marusak says, the results showed a blood alcohol level of 0.30, hours and hours after her last drink.
I'm copying this post because it was posted by an AC, and it obviously shouldn't be lost to mods.
Come on mods -- seriously... I expect many posters here won't read TFA, but if you read a post that claims something isn't in TFA, take a few seconds and skim TFA to see that it's -- ya know -- actually TRUE before modding up as "Informative."
every one of its articles now bleeds with its comment section, much of it written by posters who haven't even read the article in question--essentially erasing the dividing lines between expert, echo chamber, and dilettante, journalist, hack, and self-promoter, reportage, character assassination, and mob frenzy.
He's using "Protean" (which should be capitalized) to mean "changing."
This is what I suspected. The problem is that "history" should not be "Protean".
Instead of
I would suggest "our Protean culture". Or even "... our changing culture".
I agree that the author's prose is unnecessarily wordy and trying to be too " clever."
But you missed the point here -- history shouldn't change (well, at least not in the common imagination; historiography shows us otherwise), but it DOES change on Wikipedia. Not only is Wikipedia continuously being edited and updated, but people here are always talking about the excessive coverage of random pop culture topics... and that of course is continuously evolving. You can actually see it happen as a pop culture topic becomes of interest, and people start writing articles on every episode of a TV series and every minor character, but then those projects often get abandoned when the series becomes less popular. Eventually the short stub articles are deleted or merged and effectively turns into "archive mode," rather than an active in-progress historical writing about ongoing culture.
Anyhow, I'm pretty sure the author DOES mean that history is changing, since history is nothing but records and narratives told about past events. So "protean" makes sense here, at least potentially. (Whether this overcomplicated prose is necessary to express such ideas is of course a different question.)
(Also, for the record, Protean is often capitalized, but doesn't necessarily need to be. When adjectives derived from proper names come to have their own specific English meaning that doesn't necessarily depend on detailed knowledge of the thing the word is named after, they often can be used without capitals. See titanic, herculean, mercurial, quixotic, etc. Protean is unusual enough that I'd probably capitalize it, but I wouldn't think it "wrong" if I saw it without a capital.)
It's statements like this that make me wish there were a much stronger word in the English language than "bullshit."
BS is actually fairly mild, despite containing a mild scatological obscenity.
Usage tip: If you want to express yourself, choose a less common word -- poppycock, hooey, balderdash, twaddle, claptrap, rubbish, bilge, Scalia's favorite "pure applesauce," or even the redundant "blathering blatherskite." Calling something BS is just a standard criticism -- if you want to insult something, pull out the multisyllabic and rare words, or just go for hyperbole: absurd, asinine, vacuous, patent nonsense.
(P.S. All of that said, I actually think GP's statement is true, but only because "asshole" is a more masculine insult which tends to be better suited to males. There are other words which tend to be used to describe the exact same behavior in females... despite the Slashdot claims to the contrary, sometimes vocabulary and usage does slant more to one sex or the other.)
Can any of the people who have anecdotes about asshole editor grievances please actually post some links? Seriously, I don't think you a lying, give us a chance to overthrow the assholes with actual evidence.
It's really easy to find. Imagine a controversial topic -- any topic you imagine people would tend to get in fights about. Now go read the "Talk Page" on Wikipedia on an article about it. In a significant number of such articles, you're likely to find all sorts of dysfunction with minority views either summarily suppressed or sometimes arbitrarily held up over the clear consensus of the majority (and sometimes even the clear scholarly consensus).
Better yet, imagine some topic that there's some common popular misunderstanding but where some pedantic jerks would love to debate it. Then go read the "Talk Page." Here, the vast majority of articles will have bizarre edit wars, wikilawyering, and various bureaucratic BS.
This stuff is quite common. It's not hard to find if you spend ANY time perusing the Talk pages on articles.
Essentially, all of the easy and common knowledge topics have already been covered. We're at the point now where only two types of edits can really happen. First is highly specialized knowledge, so yes, only a fraction of the community can do that properly.
Actually, for at least the past decade of so, Wikipedia has been actively driving expert editors away. If you were lucky enough to get started back before 2005 or so (and thus had an established rep) or have managed to fight your way through wikilawyering and bureaucracy while doing massive amounts of grunt work to prove yourself, then you have enough credibility to make significant changes without being immediately rejected.
But I know lots of academics who have tried to edit Wikipedia at some point over the past decade and gave up. They could have added significant "specialized knowledge" as part of the community, but they were driven away. Yes, some of them tried to do inappropriate things like pushing their own research -- but most of them just wanted to correct obvious errors that experts in a field would know (and which there is clear expert consensus about -- often decades old), but which popular sources that general Wikipedia editors tend to use may not reflect as well.
The problem with "verifiability" as a criterion is that there are lots of possible "verifiable" sources (according to the Wiki definition) in the world. At some point, you often need a subject expert to be able to arbitrate between the relative weight that should be given to them. Old paper encyclopedias had such people on staff or hired to edit a specific selection of articles.
If anything, this isn't a problem. It means they've achieved a very significant goal. They have a huge percentage of human factual knowledge all in one place.
Sorry for the irony, but [citation needed]. Do you have any idea of the amount of academic scholarship coming out in specialist journals and publications all the time? Most of that is obviously cutting edge research and may not be ready for an encyclopedia yet, but the majority of "factual" (i.e., scholarly consensus) stuff that any specialist on a given topic would know about an article is likely NOT in Wikipedia yet.
And since Wikipedia has a bizarre draconian (and inconsistently applied) deletionist bias toward "notability," most of that information simply can't make it on Wikipedia under present policy -- and if it does, it could be summarily deleted with all evidence of its existence removed.
Meanwhile, for reasons I mentioned above, there's a lot of crap in Wikipedia that is known by experts to be false, so saying Wikipedia is a collection of "human factual knowledge" is more than a bit misleading (it gets worse if you factor in the effects of random vandalism).
Wikipedia wants to reflect the mainstream press and most reliable sources.
That's simply not true. Wikipedia wants to reflect the consensus of the most ACCESSIBLE and POPULAR sources, which include the mainstream press.
In another reply in this thread, you also claim that Wikipedia doesn't want to get involved in scholarly debates or whatever -- but that's also not true. It wants to declare whatever appears in the most ACCESSIBLE AND POPULAR sources as correct, regardless of what the consensus of scholars is.
The more obscure the field, the more likely you are to find this sort of tension, particularly when that obscure field also tends to show up in popular accounts (often in very naive ways). You'll see this, for example, in a lot of humanities articles, where there's a scholarly consensus that some popular account has been wrong for half a century, but Wikipedia still states that incorrect popular view, because it appears in ACCESSIBLE AND POPULAR sources.
Meanwhile, if you go to any academic journal in that field, it would be immediately clear that the popular view is crap. But try correcting something like that on Wikipedia.
In a mainstream print encyclopedia back in the day, you would inevitably have some of that too. But the bigger encyclopedias would at least hire some subject editors who could differentiate between some nonsense spouted in a popular "History of Art for Dummies" coffee-table book and dozens of articles by experts in professional journals of the field.
I'm specifically talking about things here that are non-controversial. The consensus of experts is settled, but those results haven't trickled down to the mainstream media and popular literature. It's next to impossible to correct such errors on Wikipedia -- and yes, they are ERRORS, not simply a "different view" or some sort of "popular consensus."
I've tried to fix some of these years ago, but gave up. In one case, I made a change and posted a talk page thing explaining the edit with a source, which was reverted. I then posted links to over a DOZEN standard professional articles on the subject that make it clear what the scholarly consensus is, and how mainstream perception is based on an old myth that was discounted by experts decades ago. It was reverted summarily, and my sources were deleted. That was actually the final straw that caused me to stop editing Wikipedia after being somewhat active for a couple years and gradually discovering how screwed up it was.
Wikipedia's biggest problem in accuracy (aside from random vandalism) is that it simply doesn't have any equivalent of the old paper encyclopedia subject editor who could recognize the difference between "most reliable sources" (as you put it) and random popular fluff that could very well be wrong (but is "verifiable"). It usually takes someone familiar with a field and the literature of that field to be able to know which sources to trust.
And even if some subject expert manages to fight the bureaucracy and get some edits through to make an article more accurate, it could easily be reverted next week or next month or next year... by some idiot who read three popular books and thinks he knows better. So a subject expert has to not only commit to learning the Wikipedia bureaucracy and fighting it to make headway, but then has to commit to perpetual policing of such edits.
Sorry, but most academics have better things to do with their time. Thus, Wikipedia is guaranteed to gradually get further and further away from the "truth" or "consensus" of specialist literature, which repeating the same old crap said in popular sources.
Maybe there's something I'm missing as to why it is such a bad idea, but to me it seems like something worth doing.
Yes, there would be many benefits, but they are generally argued against by both liberals and conservatives because "identification papers" were historically the marker of totalitarian regimes.
And, indeed, there is a strong argument that they still could be problematic in exactly that way. Note what has happened in the past 15 years or so in the response to 9/11, and the various rights that have been undermined particularly in air travel. Note the massive government spying efforts which completely skirt the traditional interpretation of the 4th amendment. Etc., etc.
Now -- imagine that everyone was required to have a federally-issued ID card for identification purposes. Then imagine there's a terrorist incident on highways. Suddenly, the TSA can set up roadblocks in the middle of the U.S. and start doing what it does at airports -- except now at regional "checkpoints"... just to make sure you're not on the "do not drive list."
That's just one possible scenario. Without a national ID, it makes it that much harder for the feds to arbitrarily take the next steps toward totalitarian actions, further invasions of privacy and blanket searching, etc. And that's one reason why many states have deliberately passed laws to delay or frustrate the national "Real ID" initiative -- they realize where this consolidation of data on individuals can easily go.
A few decades ago, I probably wouldn't have objected too much to the idea. I agree with you about the potential benefits. But after we've seen what the federal government is willing to do in the past couple decades, no way. We'll probably get there eventually anyway within a few decades -- privacy is effectively dead. But I hope we don't help it along by shooting it, buying the casket, and serving as the pallbearer to its grave.
Let me quote the 2nd Amendment for you:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Note that phrase "well regulated" in the actual literal text of the Bill of Rights.
Yes, it is. But it's also part of a prefatory phrase separated by a comma, which makes clear **A** reason for the latter part of the sentence, not **THE ONLY** reason for the latter part of the sentence. Notice the separate references to "Militia" and later "the right of THE PEOPLE." There's a reason they changed the wording there.
Anyhow, I don't want to go over all of this again. You can choose your interpretation if you want, and some SCOTUS justices agree with you. After reviewing the actual writings of the Founders from that time and similar passages in state constitutions, as well as the legislative history and debates among the Founders for the 2nd amendment, it seems pretty clear that they were authorizing a broad power for "the people" to "keep and bear arms." The "well-regulated militia" stuff is just ONE reason why it's important to maintain that right... one reason important enough that they felt the need to mention it (even if they didn't mention others).
Or, to use my standard example, suppose you had a text that said:
A well-educated Electorate, being necessary to the democratic function of a free State, the right of the people to keep and read books, shall not be infringed.
Does that mean the federal government only has to allow registered voters to have books? Or might it just be saying, "the people have a broad right to own books, and here's one good reason -- though perhaps not the only reason -- why."
I can't say for certain what the 2nd amendment meant, but I think in historical context it makes more sense to read it as a broad-based right, with the Militia stuff as a prefatory clause, and it's perfectly rational to do so (even if you disagree).
The free-for-all we currently have, particularly in the form of gun show loopholes, is the opposite of "well regulated" and should be fixed.
I ABSOLUTELY agree! I think firearms should be much more regulated than they are, and I wholeheartedly endorse introducing mandatory safety, training, and licensing measures, as we already require for similarly dangerous things like cars and heavy equipment. Whether the federal government could mandate that without a Constitutional amendment is an open question, but I would support an amendment to make it possible.
People tend to forget the first half of the 2nd Amendment about the regulated militia, but it is important.
I don't forget it at all -- it's essential to the text and had an important impact, particularly in the early Republic (before a standing army existed for the federal government). I just think you're potentially reading it completely wrong.
More importantly, I'd rather live in a somewhat antiquated world that actually respects its Founding laws and works to change or clarify them as necessary, rather than one in which those laws can be arbitrarily rejected on a whim (as they basically have been for the past 75 years or so). The danger in allowing the Constitution to just mean whatever you want because it would allow the sort of changes or regulation you want is -- what happens when the feds want to break other laws you care about? I'm glad women have a "right" to an abortion, but I also think the Constitutional basis of the "right to privacy" is rather flimsy, and I think it's rather dangerous that such things depend on the whims of 9 people in black robes, rather than something more explicitly articulated. Any "right" that is found or modified through textual "interpretation" that disagrees with previous interpretation could always be reversed by judicial fiat.
It's "voluntary" in the same way that the drinking age being 21 is voluntary. The federal government actually does not have the right to regulate drinking age: that actually falls to the states.
Bah -- federalism is effectively dead. We still have many places where the federal government lets states do their thing, but if anything comes up that seems sufficiently dire, a magical solution will be found in some passage of the Constitution that will authorize federal power to trump states' rights.
I mean, if you want to go down the road to that sort of argument, you have to start with the question of whether the federal government has the right to regulate air travel at all. It certainly isn't mentioned in the enumerated powers of the Constitution. In the 1910s and 1920s, there was much debate over whether a Constitutional amendment was necessary for Congress to regulate anything other than basic interstate commerce issues. With the Air Commerce Act of 1926, the federal government formalized its role in regulating some safety measures, only for commercial flights, and rather limited. (It's important to remember this was still in the middle of the Lochner era, when the Supreme Court routinely struck down any statute that seemed like government interfering with economic liberty.)
Of course, everything changed after the FDR court-packing threat and the Switch in Time that Saved Nine in 1937, followed by sweeping federal government expansion in 1937-42, effectively culminating in the end of federalism. (Standard example: Alcohol prohibition required a Constitutional amendment before this time; marijuana prohibition did not, since it occurred at/after this time.) Federalism still nominally exists, but not really. Wherever the feds want states to do something, they tie up huge funding issues with it, as you say, so the feds bully the states into it.... and if they deem it even more important (e.g., TERRORISM!! AHHH!! RUN FOR THE HILLS!!), then they'll just magically make it a federal power by fiat.
While the feds likely could not say "no one without a Real ID compliant license flies" I'm sure they could stir up trouble in other ways with states that don't comply.
This statement is skimming over HUGE leaps in Constitutional law that have been changed by fiat just in the past few decades. After the terrorist threats in the 1970s, security screening was instituted with metal detectors and such at airports, but it was run by airports/airlines, NOT the feds, mostly because of Fourth Amendment concerns which would clearly prohibit such blanket searching (at least for the first 200 years of the Constitution or so). Prior to 2001, you submitted to voluntary security screening as a condition of the commercial contract you entered into with the airline.
Of course, after 2001 this whole 4th amendment concern was swept under the rug, and the crucial distinction between private voluntary search in a commercial transaction and government agents performing mandatory searches (which you could not just exit from -- now you could be detained by police even if you decided to leave after entering the security area).
But to get back to the real issue here -- you have to deal with the right to free travel within the U.S., which the TSA has arguably been disrupting since 2001. But the feds hesitated at first to stretch the Constitution that far. So -- while it was not widely known -- you could still travel domestically without ID for about a decade after 2001, as long as you made it clear to the TSA that you knew your rights and insisted.
But then the TSA closed that "loophole" (which used to be a g
Do you really think, you will feel good knowing it's a bot that you are talking to? If you are a kid or someone who's never been told that the other end is not a human, might enjoy the talks; but knowing very well that the other end is just arranging the words using some algorithm, what joy you think it will give you? I understand each one is different but it kind of puzzles me.
It puzzles me personally, too. But it's a well-known phenomenon, going back to the days of ELIZA decades ago. Even when told that there's no "person" on the other side of an electronic chat, people still often engage emotionally.
If someone is reaching out to the bot to handle loneliness; how will this eliminate it? Most us humans interact not really because of the content of the words -- it's because there is something common we share -- a shared destiny [the reason we are here..a journey.. call it soul/higher power/purpose etc].
People "talk" to deities too -- they rarely even "talk back" to most people, but people often find solace in doing so. Early ELIZA users often reported "sensing an intelligence" even after explicitly being told that there was none.
People project all sorts of things onto emotional interactions. If they need to vent or have some sort of interaction, what they say when they vent is often more important emotionally than what the response is. Hence therapy sessions (which can frequently happen) where a patient just goes in and rants for an hour, then pays a couple hundred dollars for the therapist to say, "Okay, time's up, see you next week."
Some people need to FEEL like someone is listening and caring, even if no one is. God, psychiatrists, etc. can fill that role. Why not chatbots?
BTW there are too many negatives in your statement; I don't know how you can be so sure of your future.. no one knows what's around the corner.. life changes in an instant..that's the mystery of Life
That I'll agree with. GP is way too negative. Thinking negative is more likely to produce negative results. I don't know the future either, but having a view like "I'm never gonna make friends and I'm never gonna have a meaningful emotional relationship again" is rarely helpful in making friends and having meaningful relationships.
Without some really strong evidence, why would anyone believe these 4 million new members aren't 99% AI-controlled bots? Or at least 99% of the new female users.
Well, a number of things.
(1) The argument that 99+% of female users were bots never quite made a lot of sense. It's true that men cheat more than women, but by a factor of something like 2:1, not several orders of magnitude higher. Even internet porn use is nowhere near the claimed level of asymmetry by gender on AM.
(2) The actual person who made the claim about the massive percentage of female bots actually admitted her data analysis was completely bogus and that she had no idea what she was doing in interpreting the database fields.
(3) A number of reputable news sources after the story came out actually went out and interviewed real women who had used the site. I'm not going to bother looking for it now, but I remember a BBC story who even interviewed two lesbians from neighboring towns or something that met on AM. If the 99+% bots claim was anywhere near true, it would be nearly statistically impossible for two REAL women to even find each other on AM.
(4) Even if the database analysis in the original (widely reported) story was based on a correct interpretation (which -- see point (2) above -- it wasn't), the data was also obtained from hackers who were intent on destroying the business model of AM. It would be to hackers' benefit to make things look bad for AM, and making it look all male AM users were doing was talking to a bunch of bots would be a really ingenious strategy.
(5) Even if the database analysis was correct (which seems unlikely), there are plenty of reports of users who joined after the hack to find out if their spouses were on AM. That number alone could explain a significant portion of the 4 million increase -- and those women are likely to be real women... even if they have no intention of being active on AM, they would still be new accounts.
Ultimately, I don't really care. I'm sure there may be some bots involved (at least tens of thousands existed before the hack), but I find it exceedingly unlikely that 99+% of new accounts are fake, since the original claim was bogus anyway.
BTW -- I find the whole idea of the site revolting, but I found the bot story weird enough to follow for a couple days -- until it utterly blew up and turned out to be based on a faulty analysis (as I thought was likely anyway). Of course, that never got reported widely, because "there probably are quite a few women on AM anyway" isn't nearly as interesting or sensationalistic as news as "99% of AM female 'users' are fembots and all these guys who are being embarrassed by the account leak were even greater morons than we thought!"
What Zuckerberg apparently fails to realize is that libraries don't see their users as a product, and generally don't have a vested interest in keeping their users away from the local bookstore and other non-library sanctioned locations.
"...fails to realize..."? No, he's just failing to acknowledge such differences, because they would be detrimental to Facebook's business model if too many people thought too much about what he's really doing.
Next thing you'll be claiming that a used-car salesman doesn't actually " realize" that he's making a major profit off some clunker if you buy it at his price, or that the diet pill guy doesn't "realize" that the pills don't really work, or that the TV evangelist doesn't "realize" that by sending him money for "prayers" that you're really just paying for the TV preacher's private jet.
A merchant, such as the government, can structure transactions to avoid the creation of debt in the first place.
What about taxes? Pretty sure you incur that debt to the government just by existing and doing various things in society. I'm pretty sure the government would have to repeal legal tender laws if it wanted to refuse cash for taxes... and if it did that, it would seriously risk destabilizing the currency, since the requirement that taxable value is tied to legal tender is important for the establishment of the currency as standard means of exchange in a given country... legal tender would have to be replaced with an electronic equivalent still denominated in the currency.
You're supposed to pre-wash the dishes to prevent food scraps blocking the machine.
No -- you're supposed to remove/scrape off any large pieces of food before putting dishes into the dishwasher. Doing that should prevent any clogging. No "pre-washing" is generally necessary, though many dishwashers will have trouble with certain gunky stuff (solidified eggs, peanut butter, etc.), and rinsing them may be helpful.
One reason I think dishwashers are useless.
Well, yeah, if you're doing an entire wash before even putting them in the dishwasher.
My routine? I actually cook for myself, so almost every meal has a few large pots or pans or bowls that I don't want to put into the dishwasher, because they'll take up half of a shelf or something, and that seems ridiculously inefficient. Also, I have stuff I handwash only (good knives, pans, glassware, etc.).
Anyhow, with that handwash stuff, I'll use the rinsewater collected in a small basin or sink from those dishes, and do a quick pass with any dishes that have major gunk before throwing them in the dishwasher. I don't waste any water pre-washing, since I had already collected that water from stuff that needed handwashing anyway. And since modern dishwashers use less water and energy than handwashing, there's an energy benefit as well as the less time wasted doing a full wash of the dishes.
Obviously YMMV, but if you come up with a reasonable routine, dishwashers usually save significant time and energy.
Snap circuits are neat - but I'm not a huge fan. They are generally fairly very "high level, complex" building blocks.
I somewhat agree. I think the target age is off -- I believe they say 8 or older, but they're really ideal for the 4-8 year old range, when kids are enjoying building things and are starting to follow diagrams in instruction books, but aren't really ready to understand the complexities of electronic components. They're great for introducing concepts like what a resistor, capacitor, etc. are, though they rely on a grown-up to explain a lot, since the manuals are both repetitive and often don't explain WHY things are working the way they do in a particular circuit.
Even most of the definitions of what the pins (of the modules) do aren't described, nor referenced in any instructional way.
Uh, you mean these, which are pretty detailed diagrams of what the ICs are? Again, they require an adult to work through and explain to a kid.
Basically, by themselves, they mostly are good for teaching kids to follow diagrams and learn terms like resistor, transistor, etc. They are exploratory in the sense that they can get kids excited about circuits by seeing instant results, which are a lot more exciting than blocks. (My son first started working with them when he was 3, and they were much more awesome to him than any other similar building toy to him, since they made flashing lights and fans go at different speeds and within a couple months he was looking at the kits in the back of the manual and begging me to get the kits with C3 -- a different capacitor -- etc. By his fourth birthday he was sitting in his room "building his own radio," and dancing to the music it played.)
i agree that the manuals could be a LOT better. But with adult guidance and suggestions, kids can understand more details about what's going on and learn how to build some of their own variations. Then, by the time the kid is 8 or 9, he/she will be ready to explore with a better kit of real components... and presumably ready to be arrested for "building a bomb" by clueless people who can't imagine why a kid should learn how to build things like circuits.
What about widdershins?
Widdershins is a bit different. It usually refers to the direction you go around something, rather than the direction you turn (e.g. while stationary). I realize that these are obviously related, but there's an implied difference in perspective -- counterclockwise can refer both to a path direction around an axis or the axis rotation direction itself. Widdershins, at least traditionally, tends to refer to the former, or more accurately, keeping an object to your left as you circumambulate.