Is there an expectation that cops should shoot someone?
No, but the legal standard used in most places is not whether or not you EXPECT harm to happen, rather whether the harm is a reasonably foreseeable consequence of your action. Most juries would agree that sending armed officers to a house in the night represents a pretty predictable and finite set of outcomes, some of which involve violence (whether to the resident or the police).
So, for example, if you rob a bank with a toy gun, you're obviously not intending to shoot someone, but if the security guard shoots at you and hits an innocent bystander, you'll be charged with that death because it was a reasonably foreseeable consequence of waving what appeared to be a weapon in front of an armed guard.
Is Brazil trying to frighten away foreign investment?
Is Brazil trying to frighten tax evaders? Yes, yes they are. You can bet your ass that this will be a lot more effective at getting executives to comply with the law than some bill+interest would be.
Unless there's like, stars and stuff in the sky. This isn't Wonder Woman's invisible jet -- painting it black just makes it harder to see in low light. The engines still make noise and attract attention, and it's perfectly visible when it's flying low. That's why it doesn't fly low on missions, but near bases when it's taking off and landing there are plenty of civilians who can see it, and had seen it for years before it was ever officially acknowledged to exist.
But we find it's FIFTY PERCENT. Gee... I wonder how anybody explains that...
Because pedophiles attack targets of opportunity, it has nothing to do with sexual orientation. Since there's a (near) 50/50 split of male and female children, a pedophile is going to have the opportunity to assault both sexes more or less equally.
So is Christian Fundamentalism in the United States. It's the nature of all forms of fundamentalism to try and enforce their views through political and legal means as well as evangelism.
I wonder how many of those comments are duplicates.
I think duplicate comments would be even worse than unique ones. If a huge number of the reviewers see the same failings in the spec, then obviously the spec is clearly broken and should have been worked on more before even being submitted, much less before being considered for a fast-track approval.
If your goal is to be detected, then the effectiveness of security procedures is moot. You could just walk people into airports with bombs strapped to their chests and bring along a camera crew.
Sure you can't predict random screening, but still the residual number of operatives will get through. If you're screening half the people (randomly) then: If you send one operative you have a 50% chance of one getting through. Send two and you have a 75% chance of at least one getting through. Send ten and you have a 99.9% chance of at least one getting through. The handy thing about many organisations is that they are willing to play the numbers.
But that's only if you assume that security doesn't react in any way to the discovery of an operative, which is of course false. Once any operative is found, security will then force ALL passengers to be rescreened at that location, and increase security at other locations temporarily as well.
So sending in one operative gives you a 50/50 chance of being successful. Send two and you have only a 25% chance of successfully penetrating security. Send ten and you're virtually guaranteed to initiate a complete lockdown of all air traffic in the country.
But because total download equals total upload, it is mathematically impossible for an entire community to keep a ratio above 1:1
1:1 isn't required at any private site I know of. Usually.8:1 or even.7:1 is good enough -- as you say, it's impossible for EVERYONE to have 1:1, but when you're dealing with huge volumes of data like demonoid is (and of course some people who just leech and then let their accounts get canceled) keeping a decent ratio is perfectly doable. I obviously can't check my demonoid ratio right now, but I think it's.85:1 or so and it says I'm "one of the good guys".
I haven't heard of a single class where that is the actual goal of the class
You're right, it has nothing to do with something that is taught. That's the whole point. The "geometry" problems on an IQ test aren't tests of geometry any more than the language problems are tests of vocabulary. Neither is testing something teachable, though they both depend on having a certain functional literacy in math and english.
IQ tests are about the abstract reasoning and patterns behind both language and spacial relationships. Sure, you can do marginally better by simply studying word lists so that you're circumventing some of the ambiguity that is deliberately created, but there's a definite upper end to what you can gain without having the actual abstract reasoning and pattern-detecting that IQ tests are designed to measure. Certainly someone with a 1000 on the SAT or a 100 IQ could gain a few percentiles by studying vocab, but they are not the ones stressing the test.
Half of the WASI IQ test is simply a vocabulary test.
I think you'll find that it isn't a vocabulary test, it's a test of whether you can on-the-fly generalize and intuit how to reapply pieces of language (after all, IQ tests are basically designed to test your ability to see patterns and apply them).
Sure, if you don't know anything about the English language, you'll be screwed, but if you don't know anything about geometry you'll be screwed just the same. You could TRY to memorize the whole dictionary, or you could be abstract enough to recognize (whether consciously or not) the functions of prefixes, suffixes, letter combinations that indicate the mother language of the root word, etc. You don't have to have studied language or vocabulary to recognize that words where "j" makes a "y" or "h" sound behave differently than words where "j" makes a "j" or "g" sound, and then draw rough conclusions about the meaning and behavior of similar words. Certainly well enough to do simple antonym, synonym and verbal relationship tests.
I was under the impression that SAT scores were normalized, so the distribution was the same between years. Am I wrong? Anyone have any sources?
Yes and no, one problem is that now they normalize the test TOO often, due to the fact that students weren't scoring well (average SAT score fell to about 930-950 or so by the early 1990s). They added essays and some other stuff which arguably added more subjectivity to the grading, and they did a BIG recalibration in 1994 that basically gave everyone an extra hundred points (don't they allow calculators now, too?). So any test scores from 1994 or later are considered meaningless as anything other than an indication of how you did on the SAT compared to the other students that exact same year.
Before 1994, the SAT correlated closely with IQ and could generally be compared (roughly) across years because it hadn't changed much in decades (precisely the complaint that led it to being redesigned). For example, MENSA doesn't accept SAT scores after 1994 as indication of intelligence.
It doesn't take many people using 99% of their bandwidth to totally fuck up the bandwidth oversell formula used by an ISP, thus ruining performance for everyone in that bandwidth pool.
That's true, but still has nothing whatsoever to do with the issue. Publishing a limit isn't going to make people spend time and energy finding things to download that they wouldn't otherwise download, just because they want to make sure they use all they can.
People seem to handle strict, defined limits on cell phones every month without displaying this kind of pathological behavior. I have 800 minutes a month on my cell phone plan, and usually use about 200. It never occurred to me that I should be making a call and leaving it sit there for several hours just just make sure I used up 799 minutes every month. If everyone used ALL their minutes every month, all our bills would go up very quickly because the system is oversubscribed, just like cable.
My point that you seem to be taking a dim view of is that I constantly hear people whine that GIMP is not as good as Photoshop.
You spent most of your reply saying variations of "stop whining" and "if you can't be bothered to fix it yourself, then be quiet" (which are, by the way, the two classic responses to any criticism of an open-source project in general and the GIMP in particular, so you can imagine why it's difficult to convince people to give useful, detailed criticism, since history has shown -- particularly with the GIMP! -- that all the time providing detailed feedback will be wasted when the developers and user both dismiss it out of hand).
You can add a disclaimer that you're not flaming, but that doesn't change the fact that you most certainly are. You were basically chastising him for criticizing the application and not being sufficiently grateful to the developers. If you didn't mean it that way, that's fine, but that's what the words you wrote meant to the rest of us out here who read them.
The points in your post themselves are...well, basically like I said, the old refrain of "either check a patch into CVS or shut up", or pay someone to do it. There's not much to address, that argument's been had a million times already. If the devs don't want anything but code or money, I'm sure most will be happy to oblige once that is made known. But don't ask for input and then tell anyone who takes the time to respond that they're just an ungrateful jerk for not giving you code or money.
You also acted like if he just called it the "gnu image manipulation program", that would somehow solve the naming problems. It doesn't. The program is called the GIMP in the splash screen, in the docs, the mailing list, the books, everywhere -- it's an offensive name and it hurts the program, period. No amount of handwaving or rationalizing will change that fact. It's one of the most easily testable and easily provable failings of the application, and has been noted at least a hundred thousand times since the program came out, yet the question keeps coming up "why isn't the GIMP more popular"?
LOL, yeah I read that on the blog and realized that after all these years the GIMP folks still haven't listened to a word anyone has ever said. They simply can't seem to comprehend that user interface design is not about selecting pretty colors or glossy icons, or adding skins or docking windows.
Granted, lots of programmers don't seem to understand that interface design is not about cosmetics, it's just that few groups are as arrogant in their ignorance as the GIMP developers.
IT should be ONE document with THREE pages! How stupid can it get?
Yes it should. Freehand supported multiple pages for many years before Adobe killed it. The problem is that Adobe always sold page layout applications as well as Illustrator, so they never had any interest in making AI a viable layout app for small documents. Which is a shame, since it's a natural place for that stuff to be -- text controls in both AI and Freehand were always so dramatically superior and more detailed than anything they could provide in a more general layout application.
LOL, I assure you, even us "nontechnical" design weenies make fun of the select/direct select tools. Freehand only ever had one select tool, and seemed to get the job done just fine:). I believe it's just a case of toolbar inertia -- for all the changes that have been made to palettes, menus, etc, I don't recall a tool EVER being removed (or even moved to a different spot?) from the AI toolbar (though they've "demoted" some on the Photoshop toolbar, so it shouldn't be that big a deal).
That said, there's a lot more than JUST network effects and habitual learning going on in the Adobe UIs. They're one of the few places outside MS and Apple that does any *real* usability testing. Adobe has always been trying new ways of displaying and interacting with fairly complex information -- they haven't always hit it out of the park, but they're still way ahead of 99% of other developers. It's certainly not shit or atrocious, though it can be dense (as any professional application can be).
I don't think it's particularly open to the new user (I do training sometimes and see where people stumble) but there's a lot to be respected in how accessible they make everything once you overcome the initial learning curve.
Slashdot Mirror
No, but the legal standard used in most places is not whether or not you EXPECT harm to happen, rather whether the harm is a reasonably foreseeable consequence of your action. Most juries would agree that sending armed officers to a house in the night represents a pretty predictable and finite set of outcomes, some of which involve violence (whether to the resident or the police).
So, for example, if you rob a bank with a toy gun, you're obviously not intending to shoot someone, but if the security guard shoots at you and hits an innocent bystander, you'll be charged with that death because it was a reasonably foreseeable consequence of waving what appeared to be a weapon in front of an armed guard.
Is Brazil trying to frighten tax evaders? Yes, yes they are. You can bet your ass that this will be a lot more effective at getting executives to comply with the law than some bill+interest would be.
Wow, the single most useful comment in the entire thread. Thanks for providing actual context to the situation!
You are aware that it was Bush's campaign that filed the first court challenges to the Florida ballots, right?
I'm sure you'll happily apply the entire rest of your comment to Bush now that you know he's the one who caused the inevitable Caesar.
Unless there's like, stars and stuff in the sky. This isn't Wonder Woman's invisible jet -- painting it black just makes it harder to see in low light. The engines still make noise and attract attention, and it's perfectly visible when it's flying low. That's why it doesn't fly low on missions, but near bases when it's taking off and landing there are plenty of civilians who can see it, and had seen it for years before it was ever officially acknowledged to exist.
Maybe you go blind when the sun sets, but most people don't.
Because pedophiles attack targets of opportunity, it has nothing to do with sexual orientation. Since there's a (near) 50/50 split of male and female children, a pedophile is going to have the opportunity to assault both sexes more or less equally.
All it proves is you mailed yourself an envelope on that date.
So is Christian Fundamentalism in the United States. It's the nature of all forms of fundamentalism to try and enforce their views through political and legal means as well as evangelism.
I think duplicate comments would be even worse than unique ones. If a huge number of the reviewers see the same failings in the spec, then obviously the spec is clearly broken and should have been worked on more before even being submitted, much less before being considered for a fast-track approval.
If your goal is to be detected, then the effectiveness of security procedures is moot. You could just walk people into airports with bombs strapped to their chests and bring along a camera crew.
But that's only if you assume that security doesn't react in any way to the discovery of an operative, which is of course false. Once any operative is found, security will then force ALL passengers to be rescreened at that location, and increase security at other locations temporarily as well.
So sending in one operative gives you a 50/50 chance of being successful.
Send two and you have only a 25% chance of successfully penetrating security.
Send ten and you're virtually guaranteed to initiate a complete lockdown of all air traffic in the country.
1:1 isn't required at any private site I know of. Usually
You're right, it has nothing to do with something that is taught. That's the whole point. The "geometry" problems on an IQ test aren't tests of geometry any more than the language problems are tests of vocabulary. Neither is testing something teachable, though they both depend on having a certain functional literacy in math and english.
IQ tests are about the abstract reasoning and patterns behind both language and spacial relationships. Sure, you can do marginally better by simply studying word lists so that you're circumventing some of the ambiguity that is deliberately created, but there's a definite upper end to what you can gain without having the actual abstract reasoning and pattern-detecting that IQ tests are designed to measure. Certainly someone with a 1000 on the SAT or a 100 IQ could gain a few percentiles by studying vocab, but they are not the ones stressing the test.
I think you'll find that it isn't a vocabulary test, it's a test of whether you can on-the-fly generalize and intuit how to reapply pieces of language (after all, IQ tests are basically designed to test your ability to see patterns and apply them).
Sure, if you don't know anything about the English language, you'll be screwed, but if you don't know anything about geometry you'll be screwed just the same. You could TRY to memorize the whole dictionary, or you could be abstract enough to recognize (whether consciously or not) the functions of prefixes, suffixes, letter combinations that indicate the mother language of the root word, etc. You don't have to have studied language or vocabulary to recognize that words where "j" makes a "y" or "h" sound behave differently than words where "j" makes a "j" or "g" sound, and then draw rough conclusions about the meaning and behavior of similar words. Certainly well enough to do simple antonym, synonym and verbal relationship tests.
Sorry, the 1994 & 1995 SATs were the new, easy kind. You could get a "perfect" score and still get several questions wrong.
Yes and no, one problem is that now they normalize the test TOO often, due to the fact that students weren't scoring well (average SAT score fell to about 930-950 or so by the early 1990s). They added essays and some other stuff which arguably added more subjectivity to the grading, and they did a BIG recalibration in 1994 that basically gave everyone an extra hundred points (don't they allow calculators now, too?). So any test scores from 1994 or later are considered meaningless as anything other than an indication of how you did on the SAT compared to the other students that exact same year.
Before 1994, the SAT correlated closely with IQ and could generally be compared (roughly) across years because it hadn't changed much in decades (precisely the complaint that led it to being redesigned). For example, MENSA doesn't accept SAT scores after 1994 as indication of intelligence.
Not at all, I understand what programmers do, the importance of it to the finished product, and respect the difficulty of doing it well.
XBox 360 is PPC-based! (I know, it's easy to forget, you just think of PPC being Apple hardware
That's true, but still has nothing whatsoever to do with the issue. Publishing a limit isn't going to make people spend time and energy finding things to download that they wouldn't otherwise download, just because they want to make sure they use all they can.
People seem to handle strict, defined limits on cell phones every month without displaying this kind of pathological behavior. I have 800 minutes a month on my cell phone plan, and usually use about 200. It never occurred to me that I should be making a call and leaving it sit there for several hours just just make sure I used up 799 minutes every month. If everyone used ALL their minutes every month, all our bills would go up very quickly because the system is oversubscribed, just like cable.
No more than one monitor!
*rimshot*
You spent most of your reply saying variations of "stop whining" and "if you can't be bothered to fix it yourself, then be quiet" (which are, by the way, the two classic responses to any criticism of an open-source project in general and the GIMP in particular, so you can imagine why it's difficult to convince people to give useful, detailed criticism, since history has shown -- particularly with the GIMP! -- that all the time providing detailed feedback will be wasted when the developers and user both dismiss it out of hand).
You can add a disclaimer that you're not flaming, but that doesn't change the fact that you most certainly are. You were basically chastising him for criticizing the application and not being sufficiently grateful to the developers. If you didn't mean it that way, that's fine, but that's what the words you wrote meant to the rest of us out here who read them.
The points in your post themselves are...well, basically like I said, the old refrain of "either check a patch into CVS or shut up", or pay someone to do it. There's not much to address, that argument's been had a million times already. If the devs don't want anything but code or money, I'm sure most will be happy to oblige once that is made known. But don't ask for input and then tell anyone who takes the time to respond that they're just an ungrateful jerk for not giving you code or money.
You also acted like if he just called it the "gnu image manipulation program", that would somehow solve the naming problems. It doesn't. The program is called the GIMP in the splash screen, in the docs, the mailing list, the books, everywhere -- it's an offensive name and it hurts the program, period. No amount of handwaving or rationalizing will change that fact. It's one of the most easily testable and easily provable failings of the application, and has been noted at least a hundred thousand times since the program came out, yet the question keeps coming up "why isn't the GIMP more popular"?
LOL, yeah I read that on the blog and realized that after all these years the GIMP folks still haven't listened to a word anyone has ever said. They simply can't seem to comprehend that user interface design is not about selecting pretty colors or glossy icons, or adding skins or docking windows.
Granted, lots of programmers don't seem to understand that interface design is not about cosmetics, it's just that few groups are as arrogant in their ignorance as the GIMP developers.
Yes it should. Freehand supported multiple pages for many years before Adobe killed it. The problem is that Adobe always sold page layout applications as well as Illustrator, so they never had any interest in making AI a viable layout app for small documents. Which is a shame, since it's a natural place for that stuff to be -- text controls in both AI and Freehand were always so dramatically superior and more detailed than anything they could provide in a more general layout application.
LOL, I assure you, even us "nontechnical" design weenies make fun of the select/direct select tools. Freehand only ever had one select tool, and seemed to get the job done just fine
That said, there's a lot more than JUST network effects and habitual learning going on in the Adobe UIs. They're one of the few places outside MS and Apple that does any *real* usability testing. Adobe has always been trying new ways of displaying and interacting with fairly complex information -- they haven't always hit it out of the park, but they're still way ahead of 99% of other developers. It's certainly not shit or atrocious, though it can be dense (as any professional application can be).
I don't think it's particularly open to the new user (I do training sometimes and see where people stumble) but there's a lot to be respected in how accessible they make everything once you overcome the initial learning curve.