Notice there's no STEM items here (science, technology, engineering, mathematics). Highlighting that all these "soft" type courses accept, potentially, a lot of BS. (I think philosophy classes are enormously important, the root of our culture, but still... I know it's BS'able in many cases.) No wonder some students find the actual hard sciences -- that have actual right and wrong answers and require justification -- overwhelmingly difficult in comparison.
The airlines are already being hit in the pocket, they already don't like it, and they have zero say in the matter. This is a political problem. Man up and be a citizen, not an anonymous consumer.
I mean, don't fly if you don't want to. But don't deceive yourself into thinking that makes a difference.
Wow, that whole post reads like a drug-induced hallucination. Every bit of it is false. However, I'll just comment on this part:
"Terrorists don't go after low-hanging fruit... they go after the spectacular. Otherwise they'd be bombing suburban bus and train routes, malls, and other places which are almost impossible to police."
Um, yeah, that happens, like, every day in Israel, the greater Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan? Three days ago a car bomb blew up a building in the center of Karachi (Pakistan's largest city). Link. Two weeks ago a bomber killed 20 people in Istanbul's tourist and shopping center. Link. The last attempted terrorist bombing in the U.S., in May, was in the shopping/entertainment area of Times Square. Link.
"Trying to annoy the TSA for a day will do absolutely nothing. If you want to end these policies, refuse to fly until they're gone."
Totally disagree. Organized public action is necessary to get results.
The point isn't to annoy the TSA so much. The point is to get the other passengers thinking about and discussing the issue. (Website's 1st line: "OptOutDay.com is an educational outreach campaign, designed to get people to better understand what they are now consenting to when they purchase a plane ticket.") Private, invisible, personal non-purchases will not serve to publicize the issue among the electorate.
"In the end, lawyers are held responsible for their--and even their clients'--actions all the time. We get fined, suspended, disbarred, held liable, and otherwise disciplined on a regular basis. Does it happen often enough? Sometimes I doubt that."
For criminal prosecutors, as I understand it, not remotely often enough. Need some more of that:
"Significantly, of the 4,741 public disciplinary actions reported in the California State Bar Journal from January 1997 to September 2009, only ten involved prosecutors, and only six of these were for conduct in the handling of a criminal case. That means that the State Bar publicly disciplined only one percent of the prosecutors in the 600 cases in which the courts found prosecutorial misconduct and NCIP researchers identified the prosecutor."
Re:Both are caused by an active social life
on
Sex Drugs and Texting
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"I'll be the first to say it: Correlation does not imply causation."
Cool, I came here looking for the first dummy who was going to say that. It's Slashdot's most popular content-free thing to mindlessly parrot.
Both the article and even the summary here correctly use the term "correlate" (As in, "Alcohol and drug use also correlate with frequent texting and heavy Facebook use."), so what could you possibly think that you're adding or correcting? As Daniel Dvorkin says, "The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using 'correlation is not causation' as an argument is close to 1."
"There's a fundamental reason why tax cuts are good: starve the beast."
Idiot. Budget cuts might possibly starve the beast. Or even a balanced budget amendment. Tax cuts alone just mean charging current expenses to a high-rate credit card. That you & I are on the hook for. This is exactly the same kind of reasoning that has personal debt in the USA at obscene levels. Buy now & pay later, yeah, right.
Well, admittedly the article itself describes it as, "A family unit that cheerfully ignores the traditional view of a family... drew the ire of many conservative groups for its proposed use in the New York school system to portray a lesbian family as normal, wholesome, and happy."
Now, I don't think this a threat to anyone's family in any way. But apparently there's a strongly-felt other side to that argument, which is actually referenced by the article itself. So you can at least see how this got picked up by this (undesirable) screening process.
You know, if you read the "fasterthanthewind" website, the story is that the math actually came first, and the first one of these vehicles was built later on, because -- guess what -- there were skeptics who refused to believe the math. In the modern era I'd argue it's rare for something to get invented without the physics having been done before that.
We learned today that Andrew Bauer passed on Sept 6. As our blog followers will recall, Andrew Bauer was not the original inventor of the concept, but did build the first successful DDWFTTW cart that anyone seems to know of. He did this to settle a friendly wager with colleague and notable aero engineer A.M.O. Smith in 1969. As we understand, the wager was based on a claim in a student's paper, written 20 years before, that DDWFTTW should in fact be possible. In some small way JB and I have tried to model ourselves after Andrew by doing the engineering and demonstrating the principle - rather than simply proving it on paper.
"As for Disney extending copyright on Mickey Mouse, why shouldn't they be allowed to do that if they're still making money off of Mickey Mouse?"
Because they are stealing from the public. They fact they are still making money on it makes it worse, not better. When the copyright to the first Mickey Mouse movie was granted in 1928, the deal was that they would get sole ability to profit from it for about 50 years, and then it would belong to citizens of the US en masse. They reneged on that deal and stole from us. Every day that goes by there is both money and the product itself (for that like it or have kids that do) that is being withheld from the US public and handed over to a private company, in violation of the words of the Constitution, and also the letter of the law when the copyright was granted.
"Trim calculus and formal proofs down to the basics; there is no need to have students memorize several pages of integration tables and several pages of proofs..."
Your calculus professors had you memorize several pages of proofs? I am highly, highly skeptical.
I'm not sure Prof. Ramanathan's essay is coherent. I'm extremely wary of a thesis posed as a question: "How much math do you really need in everyday life?" Also, there's a shit-ton of elderly, loopy/cranky professor emeritus (retired) types out there writing on how their whole discipline has totally lost its way from the old days.
So, I can't tell exactly what his recommendation is. Is it to cut off math education after a certain point? Would he make algebra non-required in the high school educational system? Or is it to just give up on perceived attempts to make people "love" math with contrived examples? The "question posed as thesis" leaves these issues all tangled up. Apparently, a coherent argument wasn't necessary for the Washington Post to get some publicity for a retired crank whacking his own discipline.
That is one super-shitty Fox article that's been chosen to base the headline here on.
FTA: "...now NIST plans submit what amounts to a formal complaint at next October's General Conference on Weights and Measures -- along with a proposal to define a new kilogram according to something called a Planck value... Physicists may scoff at the thought people allowed to walk among the living who don't know what a Planck value is. But all you need to know is, they're using it to determine the mass of one mole of silicon atoms."
"Polite to them?! Umm...i'm close enough (not in the geographic sense) to my friends and family that when we want to talk, hang out, or get together, we use that crazy new invention called the telephone. You might not have heard of it, as it's a fairly new thing...."
Facebook's killer app is in planning parties (esp. with single people looking for romantic partners) and handling new contacts afterward. Calling people individually for this purpose is not time-effective. Once upon a time, written invitations and thank-you's would be sent (weddings still show this artifact), but today the Internet makes this the better choice.
FTA: "Publishers also do promotion and marketing, though I haven't seen much of this for ebooks. Drawing on our fan bases, we sent out 260 advance reading copies of 'Draculas'..."
The undercurrent to all these "internet for the win" stories is the same. This guy's primary advantage is that he's succeeded with major book publishers in the past. This gave him marketing, promotion, name recognition, fan base, contacts with Amazon and Huffington post to get the promotions for this project. Once you have the major-industry name recognition, then it's relatively easy to spin off and use the price advantages of the Internet to do your own thing.
However, the vast majority of EBook self-publishers will not have this advantage, and will not have any chance of leveraging the same success or payoff for the last two month of this guy's labor (which is the entirety it took him to co-write and market this book). In addition, it's quite likely that there's a limited window of opportunity for this -- as book publishers become aware of the "spin-off" effect, it's quite likely that they'll start demanding more restrictive career-long contracts from new up-and-coming authors (same as how the music industry now wants "360 deal" chunks of a performer's outside concert, merchandise sales, etc.)
Slashdot Mirror
Notice there's no STEM items here (science, technology, engineering, mathematics). Highlighting that all these "soft" type courses accept, potentially, a lot of BS. (I think philosophy classes are enormously important, the root of our culture, but still... I know it's BS'able in many cases.) No wonder some students find the actual hard sciences -- that have actual right and wrong answers and require justification -- overwhelmingly difficult in comparison.
Hint: You personally are not 90% of airline passengers. Political organization and outreach is necessary.
The airlines are already being hit in the pocket, they already don't like it, and they have zero say in the matter. This is a political problem. Man up and be a citizen, not an anonymous consumer.
I mean, don't fly if you don't want to. But don't deceive yourself into thinking that makes a difference.
Wait, there's a small bit you snipped out of the quote: "Home of the brave, indeed."
Agree with all of that. But the point of civil disobedience is not to make life immediately more comfortable for yourself. Home of the brave, indeed.
"And why are you assuming that people can't / won't tell everyone they know that 'I'm not flying due to these new searches'?"
Talk is cheap. It's also easily ignorable. Taking a stand in public gets more emotional impact.
"People try all the time to do these 'annoy a company for a day' events..."
I'll say it again: The point here is not to annoy the company.
Wow, that whole post reads like a drug-induced hallucination. Every bit of it is false. However, I'll just comment on this part:
"Terrorists don't go after low-hanging fruit... they go after the spectacular. Otherwise they'd be bombing suburban bus and train routes, malls, and other places which are almost impossible to police."
Um, yeah, that happens, like, every day in Israel, the greater Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan? Three days ago a car bomb blew up a building in the center of Karachi (Pakistan's largest city). Link. Two weeks ago a bomber killed 20 people in Istanbul's tourist and shopping center. Link. The last attempted terrorist bombing in the U.S., in May, was in the shopping/entertainment area of Times Square. Link.
I think the point is -- If you haven't do so already, start on this day.
"Trying to annoy the TSA for a day will do absolutely nothing. If you want to end these policies, refuse to fly until they're gone."
Totally disagree. Organized public action is necessary to get results.
The point isn't to annoy the TSA so much. The point is to get the other passengers thinking about and discussing the issue. (Website's 1st line: "OptOutDay.com is an educational outreach campaign, designed to get people to better understand what they are now consenting to when they purchase a plane ticket.") Private, invisible, personal non-purchases will not serve to publicize the issue among the electorate.
Of course... the locals aren't allowed to say otherwise, now are they?
"In the end, lawyers are held responsible for their--and even their clients'--actions all the time. We get fined, suspended, disbarred, held liable, and otherwise disciplined on a regular basis. Does it happen often enough? Sometimes I doubt that."
For criminal prosecutors, as I understand it, not remotely often enough. Need some more of that:
"Significantly, of the 4,741 public disciplinary actions reported in the California State Bar Journal from January 1997 to September 2009, only ten involved prosecutors, and only six of these were for conduct in the handling of a criminal case. That means that the State Bar publicly disciplined only one percent of the prosecutors in the 600 cases in which the courts found prosecutorial misconduct and NCIP researchers identified the prosecutor."
http://thecrimereport.org/2010/10/04/justice-on-trial/
"I'll be the first to say it: Correlation does not imply causation."
Cool, I came here looking for the first dummy who was going to say that. It's Slashdot's most popular content-free thing to mindlessly parrot.
Both the article and even the summary here correctly use the term "correlate" (As in, "Alcohol and drug use also correlate with frequent texting and heavy Facebook use."), so what could you possibly think that you're adding or correcting? As Daniel Dvorkin says, "The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using 'correlation is not causation' as an argument is close to 1."
"There's a fundamental reason why tax cuts are good: starve the beast."
Idiot. Budget cuts might possibly starve the beast. Or even a balanced budget amendment. Tax cuts alone just mean charging current expenses to a high-rate credit card. That you & I are on the hook for. This is exactly the same kind of reasoning that has personal debt in the USA at obscene levels. Buy now & pay later, yeah, right.
Well, admittedly the article itself describes it as, "A family unit that cheerfully ignores the traditional view of a family... drew the ire of many conservative groups for its proposed use in the New York school system to portray a lesbian family as normal, wholesome, and happy."
Now, I don't think this a threat to anyone's family in any way. But apparently there's a strongly-felt other side to that argument, which is actually referenced by the article itself. So you can at least see how this got picked up by this (undesirable) screening process.
You know, if you read the "fasterthanthewind" website, the story is that the math actually came first, and the first one of these vehicles was built later on, because -- guess what -- there were skeptics who refused to believe the math. In the modern era I'd argue it's rare for something to get invented without the physics having been done before that.
We learned today that Andrew Bauer passed on Sept 6. As our blog followers will recall, Andrew Bauer was not the original inventor of the concept, but did build the first successful DDWFTTW cart that anyone seems to know of. He did this to settle a friendly wager with colleague and notable aero engineer A.M.O. Smith in 1969. As we understand, the wager was based on a claim in a student's paper, written 20 years before, that DDWFTTW should in fact be possible. In some small way JB and I have tried to model ourselves after Andrew by doing the engineering and demonstrating the principle - rather than simply proving it on paper.
http://www.fasterthanthewind.org/
"They get what's essentially a contour map of your body."
Word game bullshit. Your Orwellian "essentially a contour map of your body" is just weasel-language for "a naked picture of you". Call it like it is.
"As for Disney extending copyright on Mickey Mouse, why shouldn't they be allowed to do that if they're still making money off of Mickey Mouse?"
Because they are stealing from the public. They fact they are still making money on it makes it worse, not better. When the copyright to the first Mickey Mouse movie was granted in 1928, the deal was that they would get sole ability to profit from it for about 50 years, and then it would belong to citizens of the US en masse. They reneged on that deal and stole from us. Every day that goes by there is both money and the product itself (for that like it or have kids that do) that is being withheld from the US public and handed over to a private company, in violation of the words of the Constitution, and also the letter of the law when the copyright was granted.
"Trim calculus and formal proofs down to the basics; there is no need to have students memorize several pages of integration tables and several pages of proofs..."
Your calculus professors had you memorize several pages of proofs? I am highly, highly skeptical.
I'm not sure Prof. Ramanathan's essay is coherent. I'm extremely wary of a thesis posed as a question: "How much math do you really need in everyday life?" Also, there's a shit-ton of elderly, loopy/cranky professor emeritus (retired) types out there writing on how their whole discipline has totally lost its way from the old days.
So, I can't tell exactly what his recommendation is. Is it to cut off math education after a certain point? Would he make algebra non-required in the high school educational system? Or is it to just give up on perceived attempts to make people "love" math with contrived examples? The "question posed as thesis" leaves these issues all tangled up. Apparently, a coherent argument wasn't necessary for the Washington Post to get some publicity for a retired crank whacking his own discipline.
That is one super-shitty Fox article that's been chosen to base the headline here on.
FTA: "...now NIST plans submit what amounts to a formal complaint at next October's General Conference on Weights and Measures -- along with a proposal to define a new kilogram according to something called a Planck value... Physicists may scoff at the thought people allowed to walk among the living who don't know what a Planck value is. But all you need to know is, they're using it to determine the mass of one mole of silicon atoms."
Yeah: Bullshit and more bullshit.
Either (a) no one's made a comment in 3 hours since this story was posted, or (b) something's glitched up on Slashdot and this won't go through.
"Polite to them?! Umm...i'm close enough (not in the geographic sense) to my friends and family that when we want to talk, hang out, or get together, we use that crazy new invention called the telephone. You might not have heard of it, as it's a fairly new thing...."
Facebook's killer app is in planning parties (esp. with single people looking for romantic partners) and handling new contacts afterward. Calling people individually for this purpose is not time-effective. Once upon a time, written invitations and thank-you's would be sent (weddings still show this artifact), but today the Internet makes this the better choice.
FTA: "Publishers also do promotion and marketing, though I haven't seen much of this for ebooks. Drawing on our fan bases, we sent out 260 advance reading copies of 'Draculas'..."
The undercurrent to all these "internet for the win" stories is the same. This guy's primary advantage is that he's succeeded with major book publishers in the past. This gave him marketing, promotion, name recognition, fan base, contacts with Amazon and Huffington post to get the promotions for this project. Once you have the major-industry name recognition, then it's relatively easy to spin off and use the price advantages of the Internet to do your own thing.
However, the vast majority of EBook self-publishers will not have this advantage, and will not have any chance of leveraging the same success or payoff for the last two month of this guy's labor (which is the entirety it took him to co-write and market this book). In addition, it's quite likely that there's a limited window of opportunity for this -- as book publishers become aware of the "spin-off" effect, it's quite likely that they'll start demanding more restrictive career-long contracts from new up-and-coming authors (same as how the music industry now wants "360 deal" chunks of a performer's outside concert, merchandise sales, etc.)
No, your first sentence makes no mention of decimals.
"0.99999... is equal to 1, then 0.999999...8 is..."
Here is an article on decimal representation.
"0.99999..." satisfies the definition and is well-formed.
"0.999999...8" does not satisfy the definition and is undefined (not a number).
You might also want to look at your understanding of the ellipses symbol.