We've been over this. Torvalds can't change the kernel to GPLv3, because the copyright is owned by a thousand different contributors.
Yes, we have been over this and Linus himself has said that he could if he wanted to fairly easily because most of the contributions are made by a small number of people. So he can get the current developers to agree on changing the copyright of all the code they contributed, leave the rest as GPL2, and replace the license in those as those segments get replaced, which he estimated would probably only take about a year or so.
That said, a lot of the contributors to the kernel are companies that would like to continue without GPL3 restrictions. So I'm pretty sure, "would either have to comply with it or stop upgrading" turns into, "actually, we'll start contributing code to the android fork of the kernel and stop contributing code the Linus controlled one." He'd lose that battle if he tried to change the license (not that he wants to).
There are consistent references that Wally was a great engineer in his youth. Years of bad management has disillusioned him to the point where he realizes nothing he does really matters, so he might as well do nothing.
Basically, Wally is what Dilbert would end up being with 30 years of experience.
The point wasn't that math is not necessary. It's that the only things mathematical extrapolations will teach you is more math.
I understand that was your point, but I still disagree with it. I think that can be true, and I think that it often is true, but that goes back to teaching people how to reason instead of teaching trivia and specific algorithms.
The reason I used relativity with my example is that you can't understand it without math. You absolutely can't. People who understand the math can give you some simplified consequence of the theory, but you are guaranteed to misunderstand that simplification and apply it incorrectly when reasoning out consequences that arise from the simplification.
Now, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with telling people layman's explanations for things. I'm just saying that shouldn't be confused with education. If you're in school learning a science, that's not what should be happening. They should give you the fundamentals first, like all that math. Then they should give you detailed theory. Then they should force you to think about the consequences of the theory and determine whether you're coming to the correct conclusions as a method to determine whether you've grasped the theory and are able to apply it in the future. Because that's the point of learning about that stuff in the first place, ability to apply it.
Science is the part about figuring out how things actually work. Math is the part about figuring out what else you can do with the tools you used to do that.
I don't think that distinction exists. I think science is the part about figuring out how things actually work, and math is how you describe what you've figured out. Your amusing bernoulli equation comment is probably a reference to this xkcd strip. Well, the thing about what causes lift in airfoils is another really good example of what I'm talking about. The "longer distance" explanation is a layman's explanation that works on some levels, but is fundamentally incorrect. Air molecules hitting the wing in a Newtonian fashion is another explanation often given that works on some levels, but is fundamentally incorrect. You simply can't explain the science of airfoils satisfactorily without going into math, part of which is the bernoulli equation. So a teacher should be giving the students all those equations, and then ask that question in the exam: "explain how airplanes can fly upside down." They're not just regurgitating theory, they're forced to prove they understand it.
That's why "the scientific method" includes testing hypotheses. So that people don't do the math, come up with the next formula in the family (which can be 100% mathematically correct), and simply state that this is how the universe works.
I agree with you 100%, which is why I mentioned that tests shouldn't be about reciting the details back to you. Exams are a good time to talk about the "big facts" as you called them. The students have all the information they need to figure out what those facts are, so let's see if they can do that. Ask them about the consequences of what they've learned and see if they can apply it to actually figure out how the universe works.
If you do it your way then yes, they'd be able to tell you that plants get most of their mass from the atmosphere, but they still wouldn't understand it.
No, if you do it my way then they learn that plants get their mass from the air and how it happens, instead of just how it happens. They'll also learn how you go from an observed fact (plants aren't taking mass from the ground, where's it coming from? it must be the water or the air) and figure out how it works. That's science.
Nature doesn't give you intricate theories that you can turn into facts, it just gives you facts. If you want mathematics, that's down the hall.
Nature might gives you facts, but it gives no way to communicate those facts without mathematics. That trip down the hall is a requirement for anyone doing science. It's the difference between the dude in the internet posting his butchered layman's explanation of relativity which he read in a pop-science book and the engineers who used it when designing GPS.
It points out the real problem with science education: we're not teaching the big facts and then delving into the intricacies, we're teaching the intricacies and hoping the big facts are obvious.
It's nothing about "informal" or "principle-based" reasoning, it's just inadequate communication.
Ugh. We should be teaching the intricacies and allow the students to derive the big facts. Doing otherwise reinforces memorization. If you do it your way then yes, they'd be able to tell you that plants get most of their mass from the atmosphere, but they still wouldn't understand it. They'd be reciting trivia.
The problem is that we don't teach people how to reason. Look at how MozeeToby explained the big fact. He used a number of intricacies, "farmers ship millions of tons of foodstuffs every year", "plants grow in soil only inches deep", "plants can grow in water more efficiently than in soil." From these tools, he's able to derive the "big fact." He's not reciting trivia, he's giving you small facts and demonstrating that he understands their significance.
Ideally, that's how science classes would be taught. You give the student the equations, you explain the theory. Then you don't ask them to recite them back to you on tests. You give them problems which force them to show understanding. Ask for the big fact in the test, "explain, and back up with reaction equations, where plants get most of their mass from. Explain how they acquire each chemical at every step of the process."
I used to have a professor while in college for an EE class that insisted in individual oral exams. The class was small enough, but it still took him about two weeks to go through everyone, each time. When you were taking the exam, he'd start by pointing you to the blackboard with a calculator and asking you a tremendously complicated question, which you could solve if you really understood the material. Most people couldn't, but that's ok: He would ask you a somewhat simpler question, which, if you could solve would lead you part of the way to the answer to the original question. If you couldn't solve that, he'd break it up into simpler questions. Eventually, he'd break it down far enough that everyone would have an a-ha moment, and he'd grade you based on just how much he had to help you before you got the answer. I swear I learned more in that one class than in any EE course I had taken before, and most of it was right there during the exam. I had equations memorized, but I didn't understand them until I was forced to think.
Didn't the "Don't call me Shirley" line get used in the 1978 Superman film as well? I may be misremembering, but I thought that that fellow who was the editor of the Daily Planet (can't remember his name) said "Don't call me Shirley" to either Lois, Clark, or Jimmy.
Perry White added "don't call me sugar" to his request for coffee from Jimmy Olsen. He was trying to say, "don't call me chief."
Just look up the results for any drug clinical trial, and you'll see objective clinical results in the placebo arm of the trial. Give somebody a statin and it will lower their LDL by 30%, but give them a placebo and it will probably drop it around 5-10%. No need to ask the patient how they're feeling, just take a blood sample and send it to a lab, all in a blinded trial where nobody doing the testing knows how it will turn out.
Not surprising, considering anyone in drug trials for a cholesterol drug will also be entering a specific diet designed to lower their cholesterol. This is why you need a control group, to remove other variables from the mix.
Placebos don't do anything because they don't have any active ingredients. Thinking that you're taking something that is going to help you has all sorts of psychological effects which may improve your quality of life and make you feel better, but it's not going to lower your cholesterol or get your cancer into remission.
I still haven't figured out why homeopathic pills have been so very effective in pets (mine, and those of friends), however. Does my dog sense my confidence? How does that affect measures such as thyroid levels, joint inflammation, or ability to climb stairs? As with many alternative therapies, the commonly-spouted theory makes no sense, but nevertheless there's something going on which deserves investigation.
There's a reason why people do double-blind studies, where the experimenter also doesn't know which is the control group. If you're the one measuring these things you may be inadvertently inserting bias. "Hey, look...I think he climbed the stairs a little bit better this time." Especially since the things you mention may naturally vary from day to day, and even different times of the same day.
A proper double-blind study with a control group and probably a larger sample size than the number of pets you've personally treated with homeopathy wouldn't show any difference between the placebo group and the homeopathy group. Now you might want to claim that the control group's placebo is also somehow "optimized placebo." I'm not sure what you mean by that in the first place.
I disagree. Teaching students the tools of the trade (IDEs, debugging, control structures, if....then...else) are the foundations of the Science. You are taught math the entire time in high school, and an advanced math program starts with the assumption that you know how to add, subtract, multiply, etc. Teaching kids, either in high school or CS101 gives them the tools to move onto and understand Binary Trees and Linked Lists..
I agree, but I don't think anyone is complaining that those courses are being taught. They're complaining about the label. Learning basic arithmetic is important, and you can't do Calculus without it, but if you label a basic arithmetic course 'Calculus 101', you're doing something wrong, and you should be called on it.
I had a class named "Keyboarding" in high school, in which they taught us how to type. I also took "Computer Science" in which we learned about sorting algorithms and linked lists. They keyboarding course helped in the Computer Science course, as it allowed me to write my code without hunting and pecking for letters. I'm glad I took keyboarding, but I would have been pissed off if they were teaching me how to type in my "computer science" course.
Well, if I built a highway with money out of my own pocket, sure I'd charge a toll to everybody who travels on it.
You're hitting on the difference between real property and "intellectual" property. If you paid a civil engineer to design your highway, do you think he should have any right to keep demanding a percentage of the money you make from those tolls because he's the one that came up with the design?
Nobody is saying that you should be able to just walk in a store and take a music cd. The cd is an actual property that belongs to the store. The music in it is something completely separate and it is interesting to ask why it is that the composer doesn't get paid once on delivery of the new song, the artists once for the recording session, and so on. You know, the same way that you paid that civil engineer once to design your highway.
I'm saying that the criticism has nothing to do with damaging "someone else's predetermined view of things". In fact the most vocal critics are the people who have the most to gain from this research being correct.
Ah, sorry about that. I misunderstood what you were saying. I agree completely.
Also, arguments in the scientific community are nothing new, and a lot controversy occurs because somebodies research infringes on someone else's predetermined view of things.
It's telling in this case that many of the sceptical responses are coming from the researchers who pioneered arsenic-based biochemistry.
I'm not sure what you implying. The people who have done work in the field are the people most likely to read and understand the paper. They're the most qualified to give any response at all.
I'm an EE, and I constantly encounter papers I don't fully understand in electrical engineering. There are tons of papers in electrical engineering coming out that I never even bother to read. However, when the papers are in my area of research, I can grasp the details quickly and sometimes recognize mistakes (because I've made them myself in the past). It's not jealousy that they "got there first", it's not that I have a bias to my own methods, it's simply experience.
Have you ever heard a woman say "no don't stop" because when its said and whats happening can be two totally different things. Granted they should use a little less ambiguous wording, but I've had people say that to me and not mean they wanted me to quit, but wanted me to not quit.
That is an absolutely hilarious scenario.
"Why did you stop?"
"Well, you told me to."
"I told you not to stop"
"You said, 'no don't stop.' You used a double-negative."
"I meant, 'no comma don't stop.'"
"Well, ok then. Next time, use a little less ambiguous wording."
Now suppose I move your brain's data into another organic brain, electronic brain, or anything else of the source. Would you continue to "live"? Would YOU continue to live?
Yes. Yes.
To make the point more clear, what if I made an identical copy and booted both at the same time. Do you suddenly develop a psychic link with your other self, experiencing both existences at once, living in two different places?... ridiculous.
That is ridiculous. Why would there need to be a link between them for them both to be me? They would both be me at the moment they boot up. Then they would be two different people from then on in the exact same way that I'm not the same person I was ten years ago. My experiences have changed who I am, and the divergent experiences of my two copies will make them increasingly different. However, you don't argue that the changes I've been through over the past year mean that I have "died", so you can't argue that I will have died for as long as my copies live either. After all, all the experiences I've had will continue to shape them.
Remember, games have a long development time. Yes, a lot of very good adventure games came out after Myst, but most were a) started well before, and/or b) done by Sierra or LucasArts, who didn't buy into the nonsense.
That's a good point, and I will gladly concede it. Overly bitter about King's Quest VIII because of the entire concept of adding motor coordination skills to my adventure gaming (which hurt more because it was a Sierra game, and their flagship franchise at that, which to me signaled the end of the genre). I want a good story, and I want to solve puzzles, I don't want to fight random monsters. I'd be playing an FPS if that's what I wanted to do.
But the torch got picked up by Amerzone, The Longest Journey, Runaway, Fahrenheit, Anhk, etc, all notable for being non-American studios. Because adventure games couldn't get funding in American until 2004 or so.
Eh...haven't played all of those, but at least Fahrenheit suffers from the problem that I keep seeing with the modern adventure games. They're trying to add twitchy skills to them. Everyone seems to love Fahrenheit, because it does have an interesting storyline. However, I don't remember ever having to think while playing it. I just had to press the right button when a certain color lighted up on the screen.
For a decade, from 1996 when the existing pre-Myst development ran dry, to 2005 or so, you can count the number of large-scale adventure games by American publishers on one hand. Access kept Tex Murphy alive...
And now I need to dig out my copy of Under a Killing Moon. Hadn't given a thought to Tex Murphy in years...
I never considered Myst part of the adventure games genre. I really liked it, but I just labeled it in my mind as a puzzle game...with a bit of a story sprinkled in as a reward when you solve the puzzles.
I don't think Myst is what killed adventure games. In fact, I would much rather blame 3D, as in the abomination that was King's Quest VIII.
I don't know why he went so far down the weird road, or why he strayed from HIV which was the perfect example
Are you really saying that if somebody asks if you have AIDs and you say no, and sleep with them, that it should not be illegal? It's not something one would necessarily find out, even during a long relationship, if the other party does not admit to it -- nor am I prudish enough about sex to suggest it should only be had in those circumstances.
I don't know that I would call it rape--I'm not particularly opposed to the idea, just haven't given it a ton of thought--but it should definitely be illegal. Particularly if you actually infect them. AIDS is not the sure-fire death sentence it used to be, but it is extremely serious and life-threatening and a seriously disproportionate number of people will die for it. We can call it some type of rape, since the consent was predicated on a lie; we can call it some kind of fraud, since it was obtained on a lie; we can call it some sort of reckless homicide, since you weren't trying to infect them but very well may have.
In fact, after thinking about it in the course of this post I support the rape charge for it. I think you committed a crime regardless of whether or not they are infected and regardless of whether or not they die from it, and the idea that the crime should change a decade or more down the road based on what happens doesn't sit well. It should be rape, period, and the fact that you could have infected or did infect them with HIV should be considered an aggravating circumstance at sentencing.
What would you charge someone who deliberately infects (or deliberately attempts to infect you) with a dangerous disease? I agree that should be illegal, regardless of the means (sexual or not). It's still not rape, though. It's the equivalent of purposefully handling out blankets infected with smallpox.
However, I do need to stress personal responsibility still applies. What happens when you ask someone if they have AIDS, and they reply know because they do not yet know they are infected with HIV? Both people are engaged in risky behavior, but nobody is doing anything that should be considered illegal.
What if it's conditional consent? Some mysterious guy tells you he's a secret agent, helping to spy on some of the most powerful corrupt organizations and governments in the world, always hiding and on the run lest the bad guys catch up to him. You're so taken in that you agree to sleep with him. Then you find out later that he's just some computer nerd who runs a website...
Not saying that that's what happened, but I do think there needs to be some exception or alternative recourse in your definition of consent if the consent was obtained via deception or misrepresentation.
That's the poor judgement of the woman, not rape. It's not illegal to lie. It's not illegal to lie in order to convince a woman to have sex with you (well, it might be in Sweden, but that'd be insane).
Either you take the risk that the person is lying to you, and take them at their word accepting all the consequences of your decision, or you take the time to get to know them before you engage in sexual activities. If you don't take the responsible route, it's your fault, you're the one being irresponsible.
Uhm... I went wrong by not explaining my point in excruciting detail?
You went wrong by thinking this is code optimization. It's not, it's a scheduler. What this does patch does is to assign CPU time to different processes that are running simultaneously in such a way that it's more optimal for a user workstation, as compared to the previous scheduler. So if you're watching 1080p video and compiling the kernel, that's not happening more efficiently, but the 1080p playback is getting CPU time slices such that you're not going to be stuttering just because the compiler is also using the CPU.
If humans screw up the earth to the point where it becomes unlivable, our species deserves to just become extinct.
Eh...in the long term, no matter how well you try to take care of the planet, you will exhaust its non-renewable resources. I don't know that this is deserving of extinction any more than any migratory animal that eats the grass of one location and then moves on to the next location is deserving of extinction.
Nice rant. No, actually, completely irrelevant rant. This research shows how your body breaks down viruses and provides a potential means of stimulating this response. If anything, it makes it harder for viruses to adapt, because they're faced with exactly the same defence mechanism as without this boost, it's just more powerful so they are destroyed faster and have less time to adapt.
You tried to label a comment as "completely irrelevant" but still you demonstrate you fail to understand the basic aspects pertaining to evolution. The thing is, "making it harder to adapt" does not, nor it can ever mean "making it impossible to adapt". They will adapt. It will only take a single virus to survive a stimulated response for it to replicate and propagate. With all the other unadapted virus out of the picture, the replicas of the adapted virus will in essence have an entire ecosystem at their disposal, where they will freely propagate, infect and replicate. Your poor understanding of this subject is what lead incompetent health officials and irresponsible patients to contribute to the development of the so called superbugs, which are no laughing matter.
But hey, keep spewing uneducated drivel and accuse those who demonstrate a better understanding of the subject as making "completely irrelevant rants". Meanwhile nature does work in spite of your lack of understanding.
Actually, in this case, the person you're replying to is right. If the stimulated response is causing your body to use the exact same method of attack against the viruses, but just cause it to act faster, than it is lowering the chance for the virus to adapt. After all, the ones who are susceptible to the immune system response are already being killed by this response, and are getting a greater number of generations in which to develop a mutation that might make them more resistant to it. If you can make the immune system kill them faster using the same method, then yes, they could still adapt, but now you're giving them less time to do it. Assuming it's even possible for them to develop a mutation that can stop it, which is not necessarily a given.
You already got fingerprinted when you got your passport, and because you're a U.S. citizen, the government already knows far more about you than it needs to already (far more than it does about some random foreign dude.) You've already been hassled, you just don't know it yet.
The government does know far more about me than it needs to already, I won't argue with that. However you're either not a US citizen or have never traveled overseas. You don't get fingerprinted when getting a passport. Photo ID and proof of citizenship are sufficient information (and no, I didn't get fingerprinted for my driver's license or birth certificate). I'm guessing not US citizen, because otherwise you'd know that there are very few things that get Americans riled up, but among the big ones are gun control and government IDs. A large number of Americans would make a big fuss if the government started fingerprinting us.
"Raising awareness" my ass. We have to go through the exact same bullshit when we return from abroad. So you're saying that we should go overseas, get fucked by everybody else's security, and then come back home and get fucked by ours too.
No, we don't. I've been overseas many times since 9/11. There's a separate line for citizens and non-citizens. Citizens don't get fingerprinted. In fact, the vast majority of the time, it was rather hassle free for me. Customs guy looks at the passport, asks me what the purpose of my visit abroad was. Waves me through.
This consisted of using the old school stain your hand for a week ink for ALL fingers. They would then hold up the card, look at it intently and say something about the US requiring THEIR citizen to do this, then tear up the paper and throw it away.
That would be so awesome if true. It just sounds too good to be.
I see. So America should not be able to penalize the citizens of other countries for the things their governments do, but other countries should be allowed to penalize our citizens for the things our government does.
Yep. Hypocrisy is still very much alive on Slashdot.
This isn't really penalizing someone. Unlike the US, apparently they aren't even keeping the fingerprints in a database. They're tearing it up and throwing it away right in front of you. Sounds more like a way to bring awareness to the behavior of their government to the citizens. After all, we are a democracy, and we get some say in what our government does, do we not?
Slashdot Mirror
We've been over this. Torvalds can't change the kernel to GPLv3, because the copyright is owned by a thousand different contributors.
Yes, we have been over this and Linus himself has said that he could if he wanted to fairly easily because most of the contributions are made by a small number of people. So he can get the current developers to agree on changing the copyright of all the code they contributed, leave the rest as GPL2, and replace the license in those as those segments get replaced, which he estimated would probably only take about a year or so.
That said, a lot of the contributors to the kernel are companies that would like to continue without GPL3 restrictions. So I'm pretty sure, "would either have to comply with it or stop upgrading" turns into, "actually, we'll start contributing code to the android fork of the kernel and stop contributing code the Linus controlled one." He'd lose that battle if he tried to change the license (not that he wants to).
I would pass on Wally...
There are consistent references that Wally was a great engineer in his youth. Years of bad management has disillusioned him to the point where he realizes nothing he does really matters, so he might as well do nothing.
Basically, Wally is what Dilbert would end up being with 30 years of experience.
The point wasn't that math is not necessary. It's that the only things mathematical extrapolations will teach you is more math.
I understand that was your point, but I still disagree with it. I think that can be true, and I think that it often is true, but that goes back to teaching people how to reason instead of teaching trivia and specific algorithms.
The reason I used relativity with my example is that you can't understand it without math. You absolutely can't. People who understand the math can give you some simplified consequence of the theory, but you are guaranteed to misunderstand that simplification and apply it incorrectly when reasoning out consequences that arise from the simplification.
Now, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with telling people layman's explanations for things. I'm just saying that shouldn't be confused with education. If you're in school learning a science, that's not what should be happening. They should give you the fundamentals first, like all that math. Then they should give you detailed theory. Then they should force you to think about the consequences of the theory and determine whether you're coming to the correct conclusions as a method to determine whether you've grasped the theory and are able to apply it in the future. Because that's the point of learning about that stuff in the first place, ability to apply it.
Science is the part about figuring out how things actually work. Math is the part about figuring out what else you can do with the tools you used to do that.
I don't think that distinction exists. I think science is the part about figuring out how things actually work, and math is how you describe what you've figured out. Your amusing bernoulli equation comment is probably a reference to this xkcd strip. Well, the thing about what causes lift in airfoils is another really good example of what I'm talking about. The "longer distance" explanation is a layman's explanation that works on some levels, but is fundamentally incorrect. Air molecules hitting the wing in a Newtonian fashion is another explanation often given that works on some levels, but is fundamentally incorrect. You simply can't explain the science of airfoils satisfactorily without going into math, part of which is the bernoulli equation. So a teacher should be giving the students all those equations, and then ask that question in the exam: "explain how airplanes can fly upside down." They're not just regurgitating theory, they're forced to prove they understand it.
That's why "the scientific method" includes testing hypotheses. So that people don't do the math, come up with the next formula in the family (which can be 100% mathematically correct), and simply state that this is how the universe works.
I agree with you 100%, which is why I mentioned that tests shouldn't be about reciting the details back to you. Exams are a good time to talk about the "big facts" as you called them. The students have all the information they need to figure out what those facts are, so let's see if they can do that. Ask them about the consequences of what they've learned and see if they can apply it to actually figure out how the universe works.
If you do it your way then yes, they'd be able to tell you that plants get most of their mass from the atmosphere, but they still wouldn't understand it.
No, if you do it my way then they learn that plants get their mass from the air and how it happens, instead of just how it happens. They'll also learn how you go from an observed fact (plants aren't taking mass from the ground, where's it coming from? it must be the water or the air) and figure out how it works. That's science.
Nature doesn't give you intricate theories that you can turn into facts, it just gives you facts. If you want mathematics, that's down the hall.
Nature might gives you facts, but it gives no way to communicate those facts without mathematics. That trip down the hall is a requirement for anyone doing science. It's the difference between the dude in the internet posting his butchered layman's explanation of relativity which he read in a pop-science book and the engineers who used it when designing GPS.
It points out the real problem with science education: we're not teaching the big facts and then delving into the intricacies, we're teaching the intricacies and hoping the big facts are obvious.
It's nothing about "informal" or "principle-based" reasoning, it's just inadequate communication.
Ugh. We should be teaching the intricacies and allow the students to derive the big facts. Doing otherwise reinforces memorization. If you do it your way then yes, they'd be able to tell you that plants get most of their mass from the atmosphere, but they still wouldn't understand it. They'd be reciting trivia.
The problem is that we don't teach people how to reason. Look at how MozeeToby explained the big fact. He used a number of intricacies, "farmers ship millions of tons of foodstuffs every year", "plants grow in soil only inches deep", "plants can grow in water more efficiently than in soil." From these tools, he's able to derive the "big fact." He's not reciting trivia, he's giving you small facts and demonstrating that he understands their significance.
Ideally, that's how science classes would be taught. You give the student the equations, you explain the theory. Then you don't ask them to recite them back to you on tests. You give them problems which force them to show understanding. Ask for the big fact in the test, "explain, and back up with reaction equations, where plants get most of their mass from. Explain how they acquire each chemical at every step of the process."
I used to have a professor while in college for an EE class that insisted in individual oral exams. The class was small enough, but it still took him about two weeks to go through everyone, each time. When you were taking the exam, he'd start by pointing you to the blackboard with a calculator and asking you a tremendously complicated question, which you could solve if you really understood the material. Most people couldn't, but that's ok: He would ask you a somewhat simpler question, which, if you could solve would lead you part of the way to the answer to the original question. If you couldn't solve that, he'd break it up into simpler questions. Eventually, he'd break it down far enough that everyone would have an a-ha moment, and he'd grade you based on just how much he had to help you before you got the answer. I swear I learned more in that one class than in any EE course I had taken before, and most of it was right there during the exam. I had equations memorized, but I didn't understand them until I was forced to think.
Didn't the "Don't call me Shirley" line get used in the 1978 Superman film as well? I may be misremembering, but I thought that that fellow who was the editor of the Daily Planet (can't remember his name) said "Don't call me Shirley" to either Lois, Clark, or Jimmy.
Perry White added "don't call me sugar" to his request for coffee from Jimmy Olsen. He was trying to say, "don't call me chief."
Just look up the results for any drug clinical trial, and you'll see objective clinical results in the placebo arm of the trial. Give somebody a statin and it will lower their LDL by 30%, but give them a placebo and it will probably drop it around 5-10%. No need to ask the patient how they're feeling, just take a blood sample and send it to a lab, all in a blinded trial where nobody doing the testing knows how it will turn out.
Not surprising, considering anyone in drug trials for a cholesterol drug will also be entering a specific diet designed to lower their cholesterol. This is why you need a control group, to remove other variables from the mix.
Placebos don't do anything because they don't have any active ingredients. Thinking that you're taking something that is going to help you has all sorts of psychological effects which may improve your quality of life and make you feel better, but it's not going to lower your cholesterol or get your cancer into remission.
I still haven't figured out why homeopathic pills have been so very effective in pets (mine, and those of friends), however. Does my dog sense my confidence? How does that affect measures such as thyroid levels, joint inflammation, or ability to climb stairs? As with many alternative therapies, the commonly-spouted theory makes no sense, but nevertheless there's something going on which deserves investigation.
There's a reason why people do double-blind studies, where the experimenter also doesn't know which is the control group. If you're the one measuring these things you may be inadvertently inserting bias. "Hey, look...I think he climbed the stairs a little bit better this time." Especially since the things you mention may naturally vary from day to day, and even different times of the same day.
A proper double-blind study with a control group and probably a larger sample size than the number of pets you've personally treated with homeopathy wouldn't show any difference between the placebo group and the homeopathy group. Now you might want to claim that the control group's placebo is also somehow "optimized placebo." I'm not sure what you mean by that in the first place.
I disagree. Teaching students the tools of the trade (IDEs, debugging, control structures, if....then...else) are the foundations of the Science. You are taught math the entire time in high school, and an advanced math program starts with the assumption that you know how to add, subtract, multiply, etc. Teaching kids, either in high school or CS101 gives them the tools to move onto and understand Binary Trees and Linked Lists..
I agree, but I don't think anyone is complaining that those courses are being taught. They're complaining about the label. Learning basic arithmetic is important, and you can't do Calculus without it, but if you label a basic arithmetic course 'Calculus 101', you're doing something wrong, and you should be called on it.
I had a class named "Keyboarding" in high school, in which they taught us how to type. I also took "Computer Science" in which we learned about sorting algorithms and linked lists. They keyboarding course helped in the Computer Science course, as it allowed me to write my code without hunting and pecking for letters. I'm glad I took keyboarding, but I would have been pissed off if they were teaching me how to type in my "computer science" course.
Well, if I built a highway with money out of my own pocket, sure I'd charge a toll to everybody who travels on it.
You're hitting on the difference between real property and "intellectual" property. If you paid a civil engineer to design your highway, do you think he should have any right to keep demanding a percentage of the money you make from those tolls because he's the one that came up with the design?
Nobody is saying that you should be able to just walk in a store and take a music cd. The cd is an actual property that belongs to the store. The music in it is something completely separate and it is interesting to ask why it is that the composer doesn't get paid once on delivery of the new song, the artists once for the recording session, and so on. You know, the same way that you paid that civil engineer once to design your highway.
I'm saying that the criticism has nothing to do with damaging "someone else's predetermined view of things". In fact the most vocal critics are the people who have the most to gain from this research being correct.
Ah, sorry about that. I misunderstood what you were saying. I agree completely.
Also, arguments in the scientific community are nothing new, and a lot controversy occurs because somebodies research infringes on someone else's predetermined view of things.
It's telling in this case that many of the sceptical responses are coming from the researchers who pioneered arsenic-based biochemistry.
I'm not sure what you implying. The people who have done work in the field are the people most likely to read and understand the paper. They're the most qualified to give any response at all.
I'm an EE, and I constantly encounter papers I don't fully understand in electrical engineering. There are tons of papers in electrical engineering coming out that I never even bother to read. However, when the papers are in my area of research, I can grasp the details quickly and sometimes recognize mistakes (because I've made them myself in the past). It's not jealousy that they "got there first", it's not that I have a bias to my own methods, it's simply experience.
Have you ever heard a woman say "no don't stop" because when its said and whats happening can be two totally different things. Granted they should use a little less ambiguous wording, but I've had people say that to me and not mean they wanted me to quit, but wanted me to not quit.
That is an absolutely hilarious scenario.
"Why did you stop?"
"Well, you told me to."
"I told you not to stop"
"You said, 'no don't stop.' You used a double-negative."
"I meant, 'no comma don't stop.'"
"Well, ok then. Next time, use a little less ambiguous wording."
Now suppose I move your brain's data into another organic brain, electronic brain, or anything else of the source. Would you continue to "live"? Would YOU continue to live?
Yes. Yes.
To make the point more clear, what if I made an identical copy and booted both at the same time. Do you suddenly develop a psychic link with your other self, experiencing both existences at once, living in two different places? ... ridiculous.
That is ridiculous. Why would there need to be a link between them for them both to be me? They would both be me at the moment they boot up. Then they would be two different people from then on in the exact same way that I'm not the same person I was ten years ago. My experiences have changed who I am, and the divergent experiences of my two copies will make them increasingly different. However, you don't argue that the changes I've been through over the past year mean that I have "died", so you can't argue that I will have died for as long as my copies live either. After all, all the experiences I've had will continue to shape them.
It's Enrico Pallazzo !
No, it's Phil Donahue throwing up in a tuba!
Remember, games have a long development time. Yes, a lot of very good adventure games came out after Myst, but most were a) started well before, and/or b) done by Sierra or LucasArts, who didn't buy into the nonsense.
That's a good point, and I will gladly concede it. Overly bitter about King's Quest VIII because of the entire concept of adding motor coordination skills to my adventure gaming (which hurt more because it was a Sierra game, and their flagship franchise at that, which to me signaled the end of the genre). I want a good story, and I want to solve puzzles, I don't want to fight random monsters. I'd be playing an FPS if that's what I wanted to do.
But the torch got picked up by Amerzone, The Longest Journey, Runaway, Fahrenheit, Anhk, etc, all notable for being non-American studios. Because adventure games couldn't get funding in American until 2004 or so.
Eh...haven't played all of those, but at least Fahrenheit suffers from the problem that I keep seeing with the modern adventure games. They're trying to add twitchy skills to them. Everyone seems to love Fahrenheit, because it does have an interesting storyline. However, I don't remember ever having to think while playing it. I just had to press the right button when a certain color lighted up on the screen.
For a decade, from 1996 when the existing pre-Myst development ran dry, to 2005 or so, you can count the number of large-scale adventure games by American publishers on one hand. Access kept Tex Murphy alive...
And now I need to dig out my copy of Under a Killing Moon. Hadn't given a thought to Tex Murphy in years...
I never considered Myst part of the adventure games genre. I really liked it, but I just labeled it in my mind as a puzzle game...with a bit of a story sprinkled in as a reward when you solve the puzzles.
I don't think Myst is what killed adventure games. In fact, I would much rather blame 3D, as in the abomination that was King's Quest VIII.
I don't know why he went so far down the weird road, or why he strayed from HIV which was the perfect example
Are you really saying that if somebody asks if you have AIDs and you say no, and sleep with them, that it should not be illegal? It's not something one would necessarily find out, even during a long relationship, if the other party does not admit to it -- nor am I prudish enough about sex to suggest it should only be had in those circumstances.
I don't know that I would call it rape--I'm not particularly opposed to the idea, just haven't given it a ton of thought--but it should definitely be illegal. Particularly if you actually infect them. AIDS is not the sure-fire death sentence it used to be, but it is extremely serious and life-threatening and a seriously disproportionate number of people will die for it. We can call it some type of rape, since the consent was predicated on a lie; we can call it some kind of fraud, since it was obtained on a lie; we can call it some sort of reckless homicide, since you weren't trying to infect them but very well may have.
In fact, after thinking about it in the course of this post I support the rape charge for it. I think you committed a crime regardless of whether or not they are infected and regardless of whether or not they die from it, and the idea that the crime should change a decade or more down the road based on what happens doesn't sit well. It should be rape, period, and the fact that you could have infected or did infect them with HIV should be considered an aggravating circumstance at sentencing.
What would you charge someone who deliberately infects (or deliberately attempts to infect you) with a dangerous disease? I agree that should be illegal, regardless of the means (sexual or not). It's still not rape, though. It's the equivalent of purposefully handling out blankets infected with smallpox.
However, I do need to stress personal responsibility still applies. What happens when you ask someone if they have AIDS, and they reply know because they do not yet know they are infected with HIV? Both people are engaged in risky behavior, but nobody is doing anything that should be considered illegal.
What if it's conditional consent? Some mysterious guy tells you he's a secret agent, helping to spy on some of the most powerful corrupt organizations and governments in the world, always hiding and on the run lest the bad guys catch up to him. You're so taken in that you agree to sleep with him. Then you find out later that he's just some computer nerd who runs a website...
Not saying that that's what happened, but I do think there needs to be some exception or alternative recourse in your definition of consent if the consent was obtained via deception or misrepresentation.
That's the poor judgement of the woman, not rape. It's not illegal to lie. It's not illegal to lie in order to convince a woman to have sex with you (well, it might be in Sweden, but that'd be insane).
Either you take the risk that the person is lying to you, and take them at their word accepting all the consequences of your decision, or you take the time to get to know them before you engage in sexual activities. If you don't take the responsible route, it's your fault, you're the one being irresponsible.
Uhm... I went wrong by not explaining my point in excruciting detail?
You went wrong by thinking this is code optimization. It's not, it's a scheduler. What this does patch does is to assign CPU time to different processes that are running simultaneously in such a way that it's more optimal for a user workstation, as compared to the previous scheduler. So if you're watching 1080p video and compiling the kernel, that's not happening more efficiently, but the 1080p playback is getting CPU time slices such that you're not going to be stuttering just because the compiler is also using the CPU.
If humans screw up the earth to the point where it becomes unlivable, our species deserves to just become extinct.
Eh...in the long term, no matter how well you try to take care of the planet, you will exhaust its non-renewable resources. I don't know that this is deserving of extinction any more than any migratory animal that eats the grass of one location and then moves on to the next location is deserving of extinction.
Nice rant. No, actually, completely irrelevant rant. This research shows how your body breaks down viruses and provides a potential means of stimulating this response. If anything, it makes it harder for viruses to adapt, because they're faced with exactly the same defence mechanism as without this boost, it's just more powerful so they are destroyed faster and have less time to adapt.
You tried to label a comment as "completely irrelevant" but still you demonstrate you fail to understand the basic aspects pertaining to evolution. The thing is, "making it harder to adapt" does not, nor it can ever mean "making it impossible to adapt". They will adapt. It will only take a single virus to survive a stimulated response for it to replicate and propagate. With all the other unadapted virus out of the picture, the replicas of the adapted virus will in essence have an entire ecosystem at their disposal, where they will freely propagate, infect and replicate. Your poor understanding of this subject is what lead incompetent health officials and irresponsible patients to contribute to the development of the so called superbugs, which are no laughing matter.
But hey, keep spewing uneducated drivel and accuse those who demonstrate a better understanding of the subject as making "completely irrelevant rants". Meanwhile nature does work in spite of your lack of understanding.
Actually, in this case, the person you're replying to is right. If the stimulated response is causing your body to use the exact same method of attack against the viruses, but just cause it to act faster, than it is lowering the chance for the virus to adapt. After all, the ones who are susceptible to the immune system response are already being killed by this response, and are getting a greater number of generations in which to develop a mutation that might make them more resistant to it. If you can make the immune system kill them faster using the same method, then yes, they could still adapt, but now you're giving them less time to do it. Assuming it's even possible for them to develop a mutation that can stop it, which is not necessarily a given.
You already got fingerprinted when you got your passport, and because you're a U.S. citizen, the government already knows far more about you than it needs to already (far more than it does about some random foreign dude.) You've already been hassled, you just don't know it yet.
The government does know far more about me than it needs to already, I won't argue with that. However you're either not a US citizen or have never traveled overseas. You don't get fingerprinted when getting a passport. Photo ID and proof of citizenship are sufficient information (and no, I didn't get fingerprinted for my driver's license or birth certificate). I'm guessing not US citizen, because otherwise you'd know that there are very few things that get Americans riled up, but among the big ones are gun control and government IDs. A large number of Americans would make a big fuss if the government started fingerprinting us.
"Raising awareness" my ass. We have to go through the exact same bullshit when we return from abroad. So you're saying that we should go overseas, get fucked by everybody else's security, and then come back home and get fucked by ours too.
No, we don't. I've been overseas many times since 9/11. There's a separate line for citizens and non-citizens. Citizens don't get fingerprinted. In fact, the vast majority of the time, it was rather hassle free for me. Customs guy looks at the passport, asks me what the purpose of my visit abroad was. Waves me through.
That would be so awesome if true. It just sounds too good to be.
I see. So America should not be able to penalize the citizens of other countries for the things their governments do, but other countries should be allowed to penalize our citizens for the things our government does.
Yep. Hypocrisy is still very much alive on Slashdot.
This isn't really penalizing someone. Unlike the US, apparently they aren't even keeping the fingerprints in a database. They're tearing it up and throwing it away right in front of you. Sounds more like a way to bring awareness to the behavior of their government to the citizens. After all, we are a democracy, and we get some say in what our government does, do we not?