No... you provide the facts, we provide the opinion. That's how this works.
I wish people would stop trying to put their own spin on/. stories in the summary. Let us make up our own damn minds.
Haven't you noticed? Many stories are only accepted for publication at Slashdot if they contain a provocative comment like that. Submitters have to "sell" the controversy in the story to the editors by giving an example of what sort of arguments will be had in their summary.
Take every single goddamn dime away from them. Everything they own, period. Including assets in other countries, jail them until they turn them over.
You'd have to include trusts for which they are the primary beneficiary as well. People expecting to go down would have a lot of money to spend finding ways to secure their money.
Mob based power has existed throughout history, and it usually has not been pretty.
Since this is the fourth of July, maybe we should consider that sometimes, even though the process is not pretty, the history books record the end results of a mob as an empowerment of the people. After all, the American Revolution was essentially started by small groups of people having little meetups because they were pissed about taxes, and then they eventually started organizing mobs to protest.
I don't thing this acertion means what you think it means, it dosen't mean that this common ancestor is the only one, it only means that there is a person that lived from 2000 to 5000 years ago that is in everyones that live today's family tree.
Yeah, I got what they're trying to say. I just don't think it makes much sense to describe it that way. We can easily accept that gene mixing within an interacting geographic region is fairly rapid. So the overwhelmingly dominant factor for how rapidly this would mix is the diffusion rate of early people across challenging terrain, which seems extremely difficult to model and prone to error. This seems particularly challenging when considering the Americas, where genetic evidence indicates substantially more distance in time than 2000 to 5000 years.
Second, even if it could be computed accurately, it's not clear that it's meaningful. While tracing the mitochondrial line through female ancestry, or the Y line through male ancestry, indicates a meaningful point of common origin which expanded outward, when you are talking about tracing through either parental line you are discussing a mixing in which genes are not simply spread, but are also diluted. If one guy from where Germany is now spontaneously teleported to where Argentina is now around 5,000 years ago and had a child, it is quite possible that his genes would have been diluted to the point where not a single one of his genes survived to modern times. (A calculation which considers that 1/2 of a parent's genes disappear with each child, and that depends only on the growth of the number of surviving descendents at each step in comparison to the local population.) So even if a statistical argument can show a common ancestor for a group, that does not mean that members of that group have any significant or even non-zero number of genes from this common ancestor when considering the mixed case.
The point, as far as I understood is that if you go back far enougth you will find someone who is in everyone's family tree, from everywhere in the world.
It was my understanding that anthropologists have placed this estimate as around 150,000 years ago. I'm not quite convinced that a statistical argument or mathematical simulation can trump anthropological considerations of who moved where when, and which also includes consideration of geographic isolation.
Another thought is that the sciences have become so shunned by Americans (my dad is a professor, and he says for the last twenty years it is unusual to get an American doctoral student), that those with the intelligence to make meaningful progress are attracted to other disciplines?
If by "shunned" you mean "underfunded such that you have to have so much passion (or insanity) that you're willing to throw away a ton of money to play with science", then yes.
So, for example, I would say that a die is probably going to land on a 6 because the number 6 has a higher likelihood of coming up than any of the other numbers
When a good scientist says "X is probably happening" they mean "based upon a particular metric which I think might be valid, there is a greater than 50% chance that X will occur."
Probability greater than 50% is a pretty weak threshold for two option events. Without looking at a drop of data or conducting a single study, I can assert that there is about a 50% probability that the surface of Mars is getting hotter. It takes data of almost no confidence level to shift this to either side of 50%. A 95% probability is a better cutoff point for starting to express scientific confidence. Expressing certainty should only come at a much higher threshold, and after evidence of high confidence has been accumulated in many different ways (to eliminate effects of errors intrinsic to the experimental or observational design), with no significant outstanding questions or unexplained data.
If six people are carrying a crate and five people decided to drop the crate and they let the sixth know that they are about to drop the crate and that person still holds on to the crate and gets crushed, then that person is DUMB.
So what you're saying is that if society is paying for primary and secondary education, then announces it will stop paying for it, and poor people try to send their kids to school anyway, then those poor people are dumb? Great reasoning there, nice to see we've regressed backward a few hundred years.
Removing government or public funding of education doesn't increase a "burden." It does however increase individual responsibility
That's like saying that if 6 people are carrying a heavy crate, and 5 of them let go, it doesn't increase the burden, it just increases individual responsibility. The result is you crush the one person remaining because it's too heavy to carry alone.
The economic power of a society as a whole is affected significantly by the education of its members. Creating a financially difficult situation for some members of society to get an education devalues the economy as a result, because you lose the productivity that would be generated by that child.
You should move "The Students" to the "who loses" category. What do you do when the vouchers no longer match the tuition costs? Do you think the government will just continue raising the voucher amount? If you think that, then perhaps you can explain why the grants given for college never match the tuition levels of college. Clearly we have a voucher-based system going on for higher education, but it's not meeting the tuition levels.
With public education, the government is forced to meet the numbers on the school budget. With a voucher based system, the government can cut corners by putting more of the burden on the people, and then the children of poor people get screwed.
So prove to me that we have a government with the mindset to fully fund private education at the college level, and THEN we can think about converting the primary and secondary education over to a similar system. Until then, it's all just hot air.
Are you aware that the average US citizen pays nearly 50% of his yearly earnings to government through the existing web of federal, state, and local taxes and fees? Do you realize that in the absence of coercive taxing, the rightful owner of those earnings would be able to decide for himself where to direct his wealth?
And if you give back 100% of the taxes normally paid by someone working TWO full time minimum wage jobs, how many school tuitions do you think that would cover?
The phrase you slipped in there was "rightful owner", but the consequence of this is creating a society where opportunity for each person is based on the wealth of each person's parents, and not based on the merits of that person. This is quite counter to the goals of a strong society and strong economy, because it prematurely truncates the potential of a good portion of the population.
Now they are promoting it again and the president has near dictator level powers-- its the SAME people too!
What's ironic is that they could just as easily prohibit amendments to bills which add content unrelated to the topic of the bill, or set an upper limit on the size of a bill. After all, congress would only promote the line item veto as a means of restricting the stupidity of congress, so why not congress just change its procedures to produce less stupidity in the first place?
If they make many more much smaller bills with less bundled crap, then this would be the equivalent of line item congressional voting. It would be like the government actually passing each law based on its own merits, rather than by what other laws are filed in the same drawer...
Keeping people dumb keeps them under your thumb. America's elementary and secondary educational system is run in much the same way. Privatization of education is the only real solution.
Yeah, private education will really help the oppressed in America to be able to climb out of their poverty and despair, with only a minimal expense of paying out several times their annual salary in tuition each year.
By the time you've spent that (minimum of) 20 seconds typing that comment, you would have been in already.
But every time someone says "Screw it" and doesn't register, their web stats will record someone who reached the registration page, but gave up before making it through to see their news and their banner ads (and any business worth its salt should be examining viewing patterns). Enough of that, and they will conform to a less annoying policy. Nearly every news article is in a few dozen sources anyway, so it's usually not worth doing it their way when I can just as easily avoid supporting an approach which annoys me.
Government could block off any area they desire... no pictures allowed (we could never uncover conspiracies then). It sounds like it's a technology for the power hungary.
Cameras already seem to be prohibited by policy at most federal buildings, most embassies, and I seem to recall reading that the U.S.-run prison systems in Iraq no longer permit cameras. I think they've already taken care of that "problem".
Now if videotaping police on the street becomes illegal for the same reasons of "security", then we will have a significantly more serious problem.
Guess what? I do not want my advertizing to be entertaining. I want it to be informative.
So do I, but if this were the only way products were presented, then people would only buy what they really wanted or needed, and consumption/sales would be down drastically. Capitalism will never settle on this as an exclusive solution, since it contradicts the principle of maximizing profit.
I agree that if you make the personal choice to ignore any emotional advertising and only look for information, then you find yourself buying a lot less useless crap.
A beautiful and entertaining suggestion, although unfortunately it's easily worked around by generating spinoff companies and leasing the technology from them.
That depends. Did you buy it with cash or with a credit card? Would you suddenly not buy it if it had an RFID tag inside the box? After you installed it, did you use MSN chat? Or did you use hotmail? Did you at any time while using that computer give your name or address to any company which you could envision MS forming a marketing partnership with? It's very easy to cross-link databases with large numbers of entries, as the biggest overhead is thinking to do it, and then purchasing access to the database for the appropriate price (perhaps a deal as simple as "let us access your userbase, and we'll let you link every visitor to your site with the real identity of that visitor").
This has nothing to do with paranoia, this is just how the state of information availability is developing.
Slashdot Mirror
No... you provide the facts, we provide the opinion. That's how this works.
/. stories in the summary. Let us make up our own damn minds.
I wish people would stop trying to put their own spin on
Haven't you noticed? Many stories are only accepted for publication at Slashdot if they contain a provocative comment like that. Submitters have to "sell" the controversy in the story to the editors by giving an example of what sort of arguments will be had in their summary.
Take every single goddamn dime away from them. Everything they own, period. Including assets in other countries, jail them until they turn them over.
You'd have to include trusts for which they are the primary beneficiary as well. People expecting to go down would have a lot of money to spend finding ways to secure their money.
Mob based power has existed throughout history, and it usually has not been pretty.
Since this is the fourth of July, maybe we should consider that sometimes, even though the process is not pretty, the history books record the end results of a mob as an empowerment of the people. After all, the American Revolution was essentially started by small groups of people having little meetups because they were pissed about taxes, and then they eventually started organizing mobs to protest.
I don't thing this acertion means what you think it means, it dosen't mean that this common ancestor is the only one, it only means that there is a person that lived from 2000 to 5000 years ago that is in everyones that live today's family tree.
Yeah, I got what they're trying to say. I just don't think it makes much sense to describe it that way. We can easily accept that gene mixing within an interacting geographic region is fairly rapid. So the overwhelmingly dominant factor for how rapidly this would mix is the diffusion rate of early people across challenging terrain, which seems extremely difficult to model and prone to error. This seems particularly challenging when considering the Americas, where genetic evidence indicates substantially more distance in time than 2000 to 5000 years.
Second, even if it could be computed accurately, it's not clear that it's meaningful. While tracing the mitochondrial line through female ancestry, or the Y line through male ancestry, indicates a meaningful point of common origin which expanded outward, when you are talking about tracing through either parental line you are discussing a mixing in which genes are not simply spread, but are also diluted. If one guy from where Germany is now spontaneously teleported to where Argentina is now around 5,000 years ago and had a child, it is quite possible that his genes would have been diluted to the point where not a single one of his genes survived to modern times. (A calculation which considers that 1/2 of a parent's genes disappear with each child, and that depends only on the growth of the number of surviving descendents at each step in comparison to the local population.) So even if a statistical argument can show a common ancestor for a group, that does not mean that members of that group have any significant or even non-zero number of genes from this common ancestor when considering the mixed case.
If I'm wrong here please someone correct me - but I don't think anybody's ever been forced into going into space against their will.
:)
Well, not unless you count this guy.
and there are even records of castaway American natives ending up in Europe around the birth of Christ.
By any chance can you give a reference for this? It would be intriguing to read about.
The point, as far as I understood is that if you go back far enougth you will find someone who is in everyone's family tree, from everywhere in the world.
It was my understanding that anthropologists have placed this estimate as around 150,000 years ago. I'm not quite convinced that a statistical argument or mathematical simulation can trump anthropological considerations of who moved where when, and which also includes consideration of geographic isolation.
More people are killed/maimed/whatever working on construction sites here. Way more.
Well, Law & Order is on TV every time you turn it on. Ever hear of a TV show called Brick & Mortar?
Another thought is that the sciences have become so shunned by Americans (my dad is a professor, and he says for the last twenty years it is unusual to get an American doctoral student), that those with the intelligence to make meaningful progress are attracted to other disciplines?
If by "shunned" you mean "underfunded such that you have to have so much passion (or insanity) that you're willing to throw away a ton of money to play with science", then yes.
So, for example, I would say that a die is probably going to land on a 6 because the number 6 has a higher likelihood of coming up than any of the other numbers
Okay. I bet you $5 it won't.
You wouldn't say "a die will probably come up as 6", you would say "a die is most likely to come up as 6".
But a die will probably not come up as 6, and is most likely to not come up as 6. So I would say both are wrong.
However, you can say "6 is the most likely number to come up" or "6 is more likely than all the other numbers."
When a good scientist says "X is probably happening" they mean "based upon a particular metric which I think might be valid, there is a greater than 50% chance that X will occur."
Probability greater than 50% is a pretty weak threshold for two option events. Without looking at a drop of data or conducting a single study, I can assert that there is about a 50% probability that the surface of Mars is getting hotter. It takes data of almost no confidence level to shift this to either side of 50%. A 95% probability is a better cutoff point for starting to express scientific confidence. Expressing certainty should only come at a much higher threshold, and after evidence of high confidence has been accumulated in many different ways (to eliminate effects of errors intrinsic to the experimental or observational design), with no significant outstanding questions or unexplained data.
If six people are carrying a crate and five people decided to drop the crate and they let the sixth know that they are about to drop the crate and that person still holds on to the crate and gets crushed, then that person is DUMB.
So what you're saying is that if society is paying for primary and secondary education, then announces it will stop paying for it, and poor people try to send their kids to school anyway, then those poor people are dumb? Great reasoning there, nice to see we've regressed backward a few hundred years.
Removing government or public funding of education doesn't increase a "burden." It does however increase individual responsibility
That's like saying that if 6 people are carrying a heavy crate, and 5 of them let go, it doesn't increase the burden, it just increases individual responsibility. The result is you crush the one person remaining because it's too heavy to carry alone.
The economic power of a society as a whole is affected significantly by the education of its members. Creating a financially difficult situation for some members of society to get an education devalues the economy as a result, because you lose the productivity that would be generated by that child.
You should move "The Students" to the "who loses" category. What do you do when the vouchers no longer match the tuition costs? Do you think the government will just continue raising the voucher amount? If you think that, then perhaps you can explain why the grants given for college never match the tuition levels of college. Clearly we have a voucher-based system going on for higher education, but it's not meeting the tuition levels.
With public education, the government is forced to meet the numbers on the school budget. With a voucher based system, the government can cut corners by putting more of the burden on the people, and then the children of poor people get screwed.
So prove to me that we have a government with the mindset to fully fund private education at the college level, and THEN we can think about converting the primary and secondary education over to a similar system. Until then, it's all just hot air.
Are you aware that the average US citizen pays nearly 50% of his yearly earnings to government through the existing web of federal, state, and local taxes and fees? Do you realize that in the absence of coercive taxing, the rightful owner of those earnings would be able to decide for himself where to direct his wealth?
And if you give back 100% of the taxes normally paid by someone working TWO full time minimum wage jobs, how many school tuitions do you think that would cover?
The phrase you slipped in there was "rightful owner", but the consequence of this is creating a society where opportunity for each person is based on the wealth of each person's parents, and not based on the merits of that person. This is quite counter to the goals of a strong society and strong economy, because it prematurely truncates the potential of a good portion of the population.
Now they are promoting it again and the president has near dictator level powers-- its the SAME people too!
What's ironic is that they could just as easily prohibit amendments to bills which add content unrelated to the topic of the bill, or set an upper limit on the size of a bill. After all, congress would only promote the line item veto as a means of restricting the stupidity of congress, so why not congress just change its procedures to produce less stupidity in the first place?
If they make many more much smaller bills with less bundled crap, then this would be the equivalent of line item congressional voting. It would be like the government actually passing each law based on its own merits, rather than by what other laws are filed in the same drawer...
(i.e. an incumbent doesn't get a payraise that he voted for).
;)
Voted "on". (Or better yet, was in office during the passage of.) Be careful not to leave a loophole.
but of course there are no explainations to be found for the difference.
:)
Maybe the driver inhaled while going downhill?
They do list "conservative driving habits" as a key improvement...
Keeping people dumb keeps them under your thumb. America's elementary and secondary educational system is run in much the same way. Privatization of education is the only real solution.
Yeah, private education will really help the oppressed in America to be able to climb out of their poverty and despair, with only a minimal expense of paying out several times their annual salary in tuition each year.
By the time you've spent that (minimum of) 20 seconds typing that comment, you would have been in already.
But every time someone says "Screw it" and doesn't register, their web stats will record someone who reached the registration page, but gave up before making it through to see their news and their banner ads (and any business worth its salt should be examining viewing patterns). Enough of that, and they will conform to a less annoying policy. Nearly every news article is in a few dozen sources anyway, so it's usually not worth doing it their way when I can just as easily avoid supporting an approach which annoys me.
Government could block off any area they desire ... no pictures allowed (we could never uncover conspiracies then). It sounds like it's a technology for the power hungary.
Cameras already seem to be prohibited by policy at most federal buildings, most embassies, and I seem to recall reading that the U.S.-run prison systems in Iraq no longer permit cameras. I think they've already taken care of that "problem".
Now if videotaping police on the street becomes illegal for the same reasons of "security", then we will have a significantly more serious problem.
Guess what? I do not want my advertizing to be entertaining. I want it to be informative.
So do I, but if this were the only way products were presented, then people would only buy what they really wanted or needed, and consumption/sales would be down drastically. Capitalism will never settle on this as an exclusive solution, since it contradicts the principle of maximizing profit.
I agree that if you make the personal choice to ignore any emotional advertising and only look for information, then you find yourself buying a lot less useless crap.
A beautiful and entertaining suggestion, although unfortunately it's easily worked around by generating spinoff companies and leasing the technology from them.
That depends. Did you buy it with cash or with a credit card? Would you suddenly not buy it if it had an RFID tag inside the box? After you installed it, did you use MSN chat? Or did you use hotmail? Did you at any time while using that computer give your name or address to any company which you could envision MS forming a marketing partnership with? It's very easy to cross-link databases with large numbers of entries, as the biggest overhead is thinking to do it, and then purchasing access to the database for the appropriate price (perhaps a deal as simple as "let us access your userbase, and we'll let you link every visitor to your site with the real identity of that visitor").
This has nothing to do with paranoia, this is just how the state of information availability is developing.