If availability is all thats required why can't a League of Legends team be coed? Just because team siren was awful doesn't mean that female players can't or won't play League of Legends professionally and/or on competitive teams at a high level. Considering how much effort has been put into making female players into placekickers in college football, in league of legends the admittance of female players should be a trivial non-issue.
As a CS major who mostly focused on systems-level architecture and did in fact "write an OS" (sort of) and "write a compiler" (not a very good one), this is very useful training to learn the skills needed to do anything else. But it is worth pointing out, there are a lot of employers who could care less about how good you actually are at important skils, and demand that you have 5 or 10 or 200 years of experience working with PHP or rails or actionscript or whatever it is that employers want you to know these days.
Now if you insist that you don't want to work for such employers that don't have very realistic assessments of what they actually want -- you would be quite justified in my opinion, but you should be very aware of just what you are doing and whether or not you can afford to search in a way that does not compromise your standards. Because in my experience the employers who care very much about how many years of experience I have working with databases and couldn't care less whether I have the skill to pick up what they want in a few weeks, is a considerable majority.
The comparison with the NYC subway is an imperfect analogy, to say the least. The cost of building, maintaining, and operating a subway system is broadly incomparable to the cost of building, maintaining, and operating fiber cables. Not to mention the large numbers of NIMBY trolls that hold up the process for weeks to sue the city for creating a big, ugly subway entrance in front of their door, only to get the case thrown out and then illegitimately file an extremely similar suit with a few word changes.
Probably for the sake of efficiency. Let's say that magically we all agreed that traffic cops are basically tax collectors who in maybe 20% of cases levy fines and/or arrests towards jerks who are endangering others by driving unsafely (or arguably, people who are unreasonably obstructing traffic and/or otherwise being jerks despite driving safely) and in 80% of cases are collecting taxes from a random sample of essentially law-abiding drivers (these percentages are highly inexact). If we relegated the latter duty to the city in the form of increased taxation, in theory we might realize these two benefits:
Progressive taxation rather than taxation by random sampling
Better use of police time for persons trained as police, and city officials' time for people trained as tax collectors
Now, naturally this is unrealistic, because it would require raising taxes, which it seems like no politician ever is willing to do in spite of the country being bankrupt. But in theory we might realize these efficiencies.
It feels to me as though your claims are overstated here. That is to say, linguistic categories and words shift over time, but they do so in a way that continues to convey meaning most of the time to most parties involved. To say that any word can be used as a substitute for any other word in some other context is true as long as the word can be understood by its audience.
The phrase "I used a so to pump gas" is really a perfect example, because although you claimed that it is clear as day what "so" means, the complete opposite is true. It is not clear what a so is. It is clear enough that the so, whatever it is, is being used to pump gas. Maybe the nature of the so is not important, and the speaker only wishes to convey that they pumped gas, in which case the speaker succeeded at conveying the important information. But because the speaker drew attention to the so pragmatically, that isn't likely. But from reading on the internet, and not having the so pointed out to me, I still don't know what the so is. I only know what it was used for and that ostensibly, because of its use case, it is probably some kind of siphon or pump. But if the word refers to anything more specific, like some specific type of siphon I would have no way of knowing.
Calculators were certainly allowed when I took the test in 2006 or 2007. I don't remember if it was a graphing calculator or a stupid calculator (TI-34 or something). Either way the TI-89 series was definitely banned.
modded one of your other comments up, and one of your other comments down, and now I am undoing both of these to make a point that needs to be made (it is a shame, because the post I modded up was a good post, and the post I modded down was a bad post).
You have namedropped about personality type twice in this thread. Moreover, you have namedropped about personality types at somewhat random times and in ways that convey little wisdom. It suggests that you have internalized the aspects of the personality type you identify with into interpreting your experiences (which is pretty common among the internet communities devoted to discussing personality typologies). This is very bad practice which in my mind calls the integrity of your character somewhat into question. Typology is far from a thorough description of a person (and has no basis in science nor really any evidence), which is something that "serious" participants in the typology communities all seem to eventually observe and subsequently fall into disillusion over. This is not a damning factors for typology models, per se (I think they are overlooked in academia), but they ought to be a hint that internalizing the model like you are doing is unwise. (To be fair, you do not appear to be doing it very severely.)
As a western Buddhist (with no interest in reincarnation), I strongly disagree that knowledge is anti-buddha. I am not familiar or interested enough with other traditions to evaluate the claims that knowledge is integral to these traditions, but I strongly believe that knowledge is integral to being a Buddhist. There is no need for faith a priori to be a Buddhist, instead practitioners are encouraged to discover the truth of the Buddha's teaching for themselves by way of directly experiencing how deleterious their egos and thoughts can become by meditating.
Faith is defined as the ability to know that something is true without having to think about it, which is one of the qualities that is cultivated by meditative practice over the life of the individual. (specifically it is one of the fetters that is said to be released by stream entry -- I am not sure it is so simple as that, but then again I have not achieved stream entry).
Cinnamon is fine. There is nothing wrong with cinnamon. It's a good desktop. If you want to use cinnamon you'll find that its a good desktop.
My preference is MATE because it's the desktop I have been using for the last 10 years. For this reason, within fifteen seconds of seeing MATE I realized I'd never use a different desktop in my life. But if you want to use cinnamon, nothing is stopping you, and its pretty easy to decide to switch later.
But the 3 sets of double consonants are not consecutive. The only word in the english language (that I know of) for which there exist 3 consecutive sets of double consonants is "bookkeeper."
What you are suggesting is true of the letter of the treaty.
But it is also worth noting that Ukrainian leaders, such as Yulia Tymoshenko, view this agreement as a sign that the US and Europe should take "decisive action" to help Ukraine secure its borders. And they, and perhaps other members of the international community, may view the US and European states negatively for failing to do so, regardless of the legal implications.
I, like you, am not arguing for or against intervention in Ukraine. By contrast, I think the fate of Ukraine cannot be reasonably decided by western powers and must be decided by the citizens of Ukraine, in spite of any help we might offer.
But, while I am also willing to talk about the legal ramifications of accords such as the Budapest memorandum, I think the importance of what is legally required of international law is very low. Your analogy of breaking into people's homes is flawed, because suppose that a criminal broke into your home. You would lose some stuff, and then the police would investigate, attempt to apprehend the criminal and so on. You may even have insurance, such that you may be reimbursed for the things that the burglar stole. These are all relatively small-scale policies to minimize the damage to the individual, and the police does the best job that they can.
But in the case of international law, there is no centralized police force that can tell Russia what they can and cannot do (in contrast to say, Namibia where the IMF acts as an insurance policy and the UN has some amount of effective power despite its bureacracy). Even if organizations such as the UN were functional at solving practical international problems, Russia can simply veto any resolution the UN makes.
This question is intended in good faith: why is it the responsibility of the US to determine who has and does not have nukes? Nuclear proliferation is an international problem. While it is debatable -- let us say for the sake of argument that it is true (I certainly agree) -- whether or not nuclear proliferation really makes the world less safe, why is it the responsibility of the US to enforce such rules?
It has historically -- say in WWII -- been international coalitions that stopped problems of this sort that dealt with these sorts of problems. But it seems very much like Ukraine is our friends. I see no great reason to prohibit them from pursuing a nuclear program to defend themselves against their international enemies. Or does the US really feel that it its responsibility to fight every war that might ensue in the world?
The orange revolution was in 2004, not 2008, and the Maidan protests were not effected as a result of Yanukovych's attempts to amend the constitution. Indeed, this may have been one instance of corruption that fueled the protests, but the constitutional changes were passed and ratified by the Ukrainian parliament in 2010 (or 2011? I forget) and were reverted by the new Ukrainian parliament near the end of February.
I want to point out that all of the factual errors I just corrected in your post, I knew off the top of my head.
In spite of your factual errors, I agree with your point; the Ukrainian people have an unusually strong spirit and the Maidan revolution would not have happened in many other countries. However, it remains to be seen to what degree the results of the Maidan revolution can actually run a government, and to what extent that popularly supported government can protect the eastern part of Ukraine from Russia (so far, it has done very little). Now maybe it's true that Yatsenyuk and Tymoshenko and Klitscho and the other leaders of the current Ukrainian government have decided not to do anything because they have completely thrown their lot in with the US and Germany and are not willing to risk making moves without having convinced their allies that all the pressure that can be put on Russia has been done. But while the west continues to deliberate about the exact extent of economic sanctions, it remains true that Ukraine is not going to get a "get out of russia free card" from the US military stepping in and making quick work of the situation. Ultimately the west is unwilling to overextend themselves and it will have to be Ukrainians that take an active role in making Ukraine into the country that they would like it to be.
Where the real uncertainty lies is not in the spirit of the Ukrainian people to resist "Soviet Ukraine" as you say -- it is the effectiveness of the popular government to take action to prevent a Soviet Ukraine. And on that point, the Tymoshenko government does not exactly have an excellent administrative record.
The difference is, there *are* BitTorrent users who aren't pirating stuff (I didn't say there are many). Most of the BitTorrent users who use BitTorrent to download legal content also probably use it for piracy, but I bet there are some that dont want to be traced running trackers and make sure to only use it for downloading freely available software such as linux disk images.
Shakespeare was written in Ancient greek right? It certainly isn't English. Perhaps there is common ground with Shakespeare and other important aims of the modern educational system after all.
(As an aside, Greek is actually a language still spoken, in Greece, Macedonia, and Cyprus. This language is not exactly the same as the ancient greek typically taught in schools elsewhere, but it bears enough resemblance that by far this is not the worst language that one could learn, although it is quite far from the most economically promising choice either).
High school students need Shakespeare because it is morally relevant?
Please, do elucidate how fiction about some Italian families do not get along and how some histrionic people in those families whined about their lives for 300 pages and then killed themselves, written in broken, obsolete English, is "morally relevant" to young people today.
Certainly when I was in high school Shakespeare was very much a question of moral relevance. The ever-present moral quandary was something like: "how relevant is morality in suppressing the urge I have to repeatedly swat my English teachers with various blunt objects for repeatedly making me read this garbage and then writing essays to analyze it."
ANY curriculum that does not require my children to read 17th century British plays and 19th century British poetry as my high school teachers decided to do (presumably because they are sadists and enjoyed wasting my time) -- cannot be all bad.
Nobody actually thinks that every game should be free to play. This discussion is about which models of game payment are fair to the players, developers, and both justify the cost of creating the game and paying for it.
There are some models of payment which are clearly not fair to the developers. Most developers are unwilling to use a payment model, for instance, in which the game is distributed for free (as in beer) and no payment is given, and most gamers who enjoy free content understand this.
Among models that do generate revenue, as a gamer, I feel that there are a number of payment models that are fair and under which I purchase games. These include a one-time payment, free to play premium content that has little effect on gameplay (as in games such as League of Legends). In many circumstances, I would also accept advertising in exchange for freely played games.
In addition to these models which I consider fair, there are other models I consider unfair and will not purchase games with, including any sort of subscription (as in games such as WoW) and highly restrictive paywalls (as in games such as SWTOR).
Other people may have different views on what is fair and what is not, and may choose to speak with their wallets as consumers in a different way that I do (I refuse to buy products from unfair payment models). And that is fine. But broadly, there is considerable consensus that you have ignored entirely in this discussion as to which payment models in general are the hallmarks of good companies that produce good content and are good for the health of the industry, and which ones are practiced by companies like EA and lead to shit like Dungeon Keeper.
Slashdot Mirror
If availability is all thats required why can't a League of Legends team be coed? Just because team siren was awful doesn't mean that female players can't or won't play League of Legends professionally and/or on competitive teams at a high level. Considering how much effort has been put into making female players into placekickers in college football, in league of legends the admittance of female players should be a trivial non-issue.
As a CS major who mostly focused on systems-level architecture and did in fact "write an OS" (sort of) and "write a compiler" (not a very good one), this is very useful training to learn the skills needed to do anything else. But it is worth pointing out, there are a lot of employers who could care less about how good you actually are at important skils, and demand that you have 5 or 10 or 200 years of experience working with PHP or rails or actionscript or whatever it is that employers want you to know these days.
Now if you insist that you don't want to work for such employers that don't have very realistic assessments of what they actually want -- you would be quite justified in my opinion, but you should be very aware of just what you are doing and whether or not you can afford to search in a way that does not compromise your standards. Because in my experience the employers who care very much about how many years of experience I have working with databases and couldn't care less whether I have the skill to pick up what they want in a few weeks, is a considerable majority.
Spoken like someone who has never lived in a city with more than 10,000 people.
Legally true, but not necessarily widely followed.
The comparison with the NYC subway is an imperfect analogy, to say the least. The cost of building, maintaining, and operating a subway system is broadly incomparable to the cost of building, maintaining, and operating fiber cables. Not to mention the large numbers of NIMBY trolls that hold up the process for weeks to sue the city for creating a big, ugly subway entrance in front of their door, only to get the case thrown out and then illegitimately file an extremely similar suit with a few word changes.
Probably for the sake of efficiency. Let's say that magically we all agreed that traffic cops are basically tax collectors who in maybe 20% of cases levy fines and/or arrests towards jerks who are endangering others by driving unsafely (or arguably, people who are unreasonably obstructing traffic and/or otherwise being jerks despite driving safely) and in 80% of cases are collecting taxes from a random sample of essentially law-abiding drivers (these percentages are highly inexact). If we relegated the latter duty to the city in the form of increased taxation, in theory we might realize these two benefits:
Now, naturally this is unrealistic, because it would require raising taxes, which it seems like no politician ever is willing to do in spite of the country being bankrupt. But in theory we might realize these efficiencies.
It feels to me as though your claims are overstated here. That is to say, linguistic categories and words shift over time, but they do so in a way that continues to convey meaning most of the time to most parties involved. To say that any word can be used as a substitute for any other word in some other context is true as long as the word can be understood by its audience.
The phrase "I used a so to pump gas" is really a perfect example, because although you claimed that it is clear as day what "so" means, the complete opposite is true. It is not clear what a so is. It is clear enough that the so, whatever it is, is being used to pump gas. Maybe the nature of the so is not important, and the speaker only wishes to convey that they pumped gas, in which case the speaker succeeded at conveying the important information. But because the speaker drew attention to the so pragmatically, that isn't likely. But from reading on the internet, and not having the so pointed out to me, I still don't know what the so is. I only know what it was used for and that ostensibly, because of its use case, it is probably some kind of siphon or pump. But if the word refers to anything more specific, like some specific type of siphon I would have no way of knowing.
Calculators were certainly allowed when I took the test in 2006 or 2007. I don't remember if it was a graphing calculator or a stupid calculator (TI-34 or something). Either way the TI-89 series was definitely banned.
modded one of your other comments up, and one of your other comments down, and now I am undoing both of these to make a point that needs to be made (it is a shame, because the post I modded up was a good post, and the post I modded down was a bad post).
You have namedropped about personality type twice in this thread. Moreover, you have namedropped about personality types at somewhat random times and in ways that convey little wisdom. It suggests that you have internalized the aspects of the personality type you identify with into interpreting your experiences (which is pretty common among the internet communities devoted to discussing personality typologies). This is very bad practice which in my mind calls the integrity of your character somewhat into question. Typology is far from a thorough description of a person (and has no basis in science nor really any evidence), which is something that "serious" participants in the typology communities all seem to eventually observe and subsequently fall into disillusion over. This is not a damning factors for typology models, per se (I think they are overlooked in academia), but they ought to be a hint that internalizing the model like you are doing is unwise. (To be fair, you do not appear to be doing it very severely.)
but as everyone knows, moreSSL is just an old, crappy library that is clunky and strange and all of whose features are present in lessSSL
This is probably the best use for the bible ever described on slashdot.
As a western Buddhist (with no interest in reincarnation), I strongly disagree that knowledge is anti-buddha. I am not familiar or interested enough with other traditions to evaluate the claims that knowledge is integral to these traditions, but I strongly believe that knowledge is integral to being a Buddhist. There is no need for faith a priori to be a Buddhist, instead practitioners are encouraged to discover the truth of the Buddha's teaching for themselves by way of directly experiencing how deleterious their egos and thoughts can become by meditating.
Faith is defined as the ability to know that something is true without having to think about it, which is one of the qualities that is cultivated by meditative practice over the life of the individual. (specifically it is one of the fetters that is said to be released by stream entry -- I am not sure it is so simple as that, but then again I have not achieved stream entry).
Cinnamon is fine. There is nothing wrong with cinnamon. It's a good desktop. If you want to use cinnamon you'll find that its a good desktop.
My preference is MATE because it's the desktop I have been using for the last 10 years. For this reason, within fifteen seconds of seeing MATE I realized I'd never use a different desktop in my life. But if you want to use cinnamon, nothing is stopping you, and its pretty easy to decide to switch later.
But the 3 sets of double consonants are not consecutive. The only word in the english language (that I know of) for which there exist 3 consecutive sets of double consonants is "bookkeeper."
Can you provide me with an implementation of your hammer-to-screwdriver translator?
What you are suggesting is true of the letter of the treaty.
But it is also worth noting that Ukrainian leaders, such as Yulia Tymoshenko, view this agreement as a sign that the US and Europe should take "decisive action" to help Ukraine secure its borders. And they, and perhaps other members of the international community, may view the US and European states negatively for failing to do so, regardless of the legal implications.
I, like you, am not arguing for or against intervention in Ukraine. By contrast, I think the fate of Ukraine cannot be reasonably decided by western powers and must be decided by the citizens of Ukraine, in spite of any help we might offer.
But, while I am also willing to talk about the legal ramifications of accords such as the Budapest memorandum, I think the importance of what is legally required of international law is very low. Your analogy of breaking into people's homes is flawed, because suppose that a criminal broke into your home. You would lose some stuff, and then the police would investigate, attempt to apprehend the criminal and so on. You may even have insurance, such that you may be reimbursed for the things that the burglar stole. These are all relatively small-scale policies to minimize the damage to the individual, and the police does the best job that they can.
But in the case of international law, there is no centralized police force that can tell Russia what they can and cannot do (in contrast to say, Namibia where the IMF acts as an insurance policy and the UN has some amount of effective power despite its bureacracy). Even if organizations such as the UN were functional at solving practical international problems, Russia can simply veto any resolution the UN makes.
This question is intended in good faith: why is it the responsibility of the US to determine who has and does not have nukes? Nuclear proliferation is an international problem. While it is debatable -- let us say for the sake of argument that it is true (I certainly agree) -- whether or not nuclear proliferation really makes the world less safe, why is it the responsibility of the US to enforce such rules? It has historically -- say in WWII -- been international coalitions that stopped problems of this sort that dealt with these sorts of problems. But it seems very much like Ukraine is our friends. I see no great reason to prohibit them from pursuing a nuclear program to defend themselves against their international enemies. Or does the US really feel that it its responsibility to fight every war that might ensue in the world?
The orange revolution was in 2004, not 2008, and the Maidan protests were not effected as a result of Yanukovych's attempts to amend the constitution. Indeed, this may have been one instance of corruption that fueled the protests, but the constitutional changes were passed and ratified by the Ukrainian parliament in 2010 (or 2011? I forget) and were reverted by the new Ukrainian parliament near the end of February.
I want to point out that all of the factual errors I just corrected in your post, I knew off the top of my head.
In spite of your factual errors, I agree with your point; the Ukrainian people have an unusually strong spirit and the Maidan revolution would not have happened in many other countries. However, it remains to be seen to what degree the results of the Maidan revolution can actually run a government, and to what extent that popularly supported government can protect the eastern part of Ukraine from Russia (so far, it has done very little). Now maybe it's true that Yatsenyuk and Tymoshenko and Klitscho and the other leaders of the current Ukrainian government have decided not to do anything because they have completely thrown their lot in with the US and Germany and are not willing to risk making moves without having convinced their allies that all the pressure that can be put on Russia has been done. But while the west continues to deliberate about the exact extent of economic sanctions, it remains true that Ukraine is not going to get a "get out of russia free card" from the US military stepping in and making quick work of the situation. Ultimately the west is unwilling to overextend themselves and it will have to be Ukrainians that take an active role in making Ukraine into the country that they would like it to be.
Where the real uncertainty lies is not in the spirit of the Ukrainian people to resist "Soviet Ukraine" as you say -- it is the effectiveness of the popular government to take action to prevent a Soviet Ukraine. And on that point, the Tymoshenko government does not exactly have an excellent administrative record.
The difference is, there *are* BitTorrent users who aren't pirating stuff (I didn't say there are many). Most of the BitTorrent users who use BitTorrent to download legal content also probably use it for piracy, but I bet there are some that dont want to be traced running trackers and make sure to only use it for downloading freely available software such as linux disk images.
Microsoft has launched tons of product lines without extensive field testing. For instance, windows 8.
I will have you know there is no such tense as the future perfect, what nonsense!
Shakespeare was written in Ancient greek right? It certainly isn't English. Perhaps there is common ground with Shakespeare and other important aims of the modern educational system after all.
(As an aside, Greek is actually a language still spoken, in Greece, Macedonia, and Cyprus. This language is not exactly the same as the ancient greek typically taught in schools elsewhere, but it bears enough resemblance that by far this is not the worst language that one could learn, although it is quite far from the most economically promising choice either).
High school students need Shakespeare because it is morally relevant?
Please, do elucidate how fiction about some Italian families do not get along and how some histrionic people in those families whined about their lives for 300 pages and then killed themselves, written in broken, obsolete English, is "morally relevant" to young people today.
Certainly when I was in high school Shakespeare was very much a question of moral relevance. The ever-present moral quandary was something like: "how relevant is morality in suppressing the urge I have to repeatedly swat my English teachers with various blunt objects for repeatedly making me read this garbage and then writing essays to analyze it."
ANY curriculum that does not require my children to read 17th century British plays and 19th century British poetry as my high school teachers decided to do (presumably because they are sadists and enjoyed wasting my time) -- cannot be all bad.
Among models that do generate revenue, as a gamer, I feel that there are a number of payment models that are fair and under which I purchase games. These include a one-time payment, free to play premium content that has little effect on gameplay (as in games such as League of Legends). In many circumstances, I would also accept advertising in exchange for freely played games.
In addition to these models which I consider fair, there are other models I consider unfair and will not purchase games with, including any sort of subscription (as in games such as WoW) and highly restrictive paywalls (as in games such as SWTOR).
Other people may have different views on what is fair and what is not, and may choose to speak with their wallets as consumers in a different way that I do (I refuse to buy products from unfair payment models). And that is fine. But broadly, there is considerable consensus that you have ignored entirely in this discussion as to which payment models in general are the hallmarks of good companies that produce good content and are good for the health of the industry, and which ones are practiced by companies like EA and lead to shit like Dungeon Keeper.