You guys know that A - the Federal website notwithstanding, the actual results of the law are pretty much as predicted by the laws designers and the CBO predicted, not the disaster the right wing kept claiming would happen, and B - Websites . . . can be redesigned . . .
Because you're focusing on a short term issue here.
Okay - as a veteran, I read, enjoy, sympathize with, and utterly disagree with the theory of government Heinlein was expounding on in Starship troopers.
But it *is* a valid theory of government, that citizenship is distinguished via volunteering for government service. Notably - the *only* benefits given for this in the book are that you can A) Vote B) Run for Public Office C) Teach Social Studies (And evidently hold certain other specific jobs not mentioned) The theory being that, having been willing to put your life on the line for society, you are qualified to make decisions about people putting their lives on the line for society.
I disagree with it (I think it undervalues other contributions to Society), but the point is that agree or not Heinlein makes a valid argument and puts enough into it that you can disagree with it and still admit it's a valid argument. If you're going to satire it your satire needs to be as smart as the original book.
Bluntly, it's not. It answers the arguments of the original book by ignoring them and treating them as unworthy of argument - the term for that is not satire, it's contempt. It would be merely insulting if that contempt were in the venue of an original work that took the premise from a new angle - but they didn't do that. They actually bought the book, then pissed on it.
Now, let's be honest - it this were, say Anthem, I wouldn't care. You can logically prove that Anthem actually sucks as an argument, and you can treat it with contempt without actually being dumber than it is. But Starship Troopers doesn't actually meet that criteria. It has an argument you need to actually answer.
The, a 'Independent' Journal Review is not terribly independent - Pretty Right wing actually, and the article cited has a *lot* of context missing. It's not as bad as some I've read - the basic thesis is true, but statistically neither the Conservatives, the Liberals, or the Tea Party itself are *meaningfully* correlated with better or worse understanding of Science - very slight negatives in the main body of Conservatives, very slight positives in Liberals and Tea Party members, but the correlations are miniscule. The researcher has some choice words to say regarding the attempt to make the Tea part look like hyper-encephalic geniuses here, including a bit of snark along the lines of "Hey Suddenly Eastern Ivy League Studies are completely trustworthy among Tea Party Conservatives - Who Knew!"
Actually my problem with this is that it is impossible for a company that creates bot software to break *Blizzards* terms of service. Only the customer can break Blizzards TOS, because only the customer actually has a relationship with Blizzard.
Moreover - it doesn't even pass muster on that level because the TOS as they stand - are not actually legal. The Uniform Commercial Code is the only legal framework for interpreting a TOS agreement, and the UCC is quite clear - this kind of Boilerplate agreement is only acceptable as a contract between Merchants - http://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/2/2-104#2-104(1) (1) "Merchant" means a person who deals in goods of the kind or otherwise by his occupation holds himself out as having knowledge or skill peculiar to the practices or goods involved in the transaction or to whom such knowledge or skill may be attributed by his employment of an agent or broker or other intermediary who by his occupation holds himself out as having such knowledge or skill. (...) (3) "Between Merchants" means in any transaction with respect to which both parties are chargeable with the knowledge or skill of merchants.
The default under UCC code is not that people are considered to be merchants, but consumers - and thus, under the law, this type of boilerplate agreement is not applicable. Unless there is a 'professionsal' WoW player, the TOS is unenforceable.
This is simply interference in a third parties right to contract.
I think the more important question to me - *is* there a good programming language for the iPad or (more importantly for me) the Android platform, preferably without jailbreaking it?
I believe you can run bash after jailbreaking, and that's not un-useful, but yeah, I hadn't realized how much it annoys me that there's no quick easy way to do programming (or frankly, scripting) on my tablet barring that.
I confess my calculator of choice was a TI-35 Galaxy Solar, and I tended to work fine with that - anything more complex I could simplify in my head til the TI-35 was fine.
That said, the no calculator bias is a bit off in my opinion - it's all grand to know it well enough to scratchpad it, but in the real world you will be working problems that you *need* a calculator for. Statistics is particularly egregious about this but hardly the only contender for mathematics where habitually doing it by hand is actually a bad habit.
Now if someone could explain the attraction of reverse polish notation... (No, don't, really.)
In my experience Hulu Plus is the same price as Netflix with the additional 'features' of . . . A worse interface (As of the latest iteration, there's a 'view timeline' at the bottom of the interface that doesn't actually show you where you are in the episode, and if you click *anywhere* on it to, say, watch Kevin Spacey steal Colberts Emmy again, you go back to the beginning of the program again. Seriously.) Less Content (and some of the actual *good* content is just web series you can view for free - I'm looking at you Kevin Pollack - {G}), Shows expiring at random times, Arbitrary licensing on how you can stream (I'm *paying* for the Simpsons, but can't actually watch it over Roku? You have my money, why do you even *care*?) Commercials, a tendency to crash/hang more often than Netflix on any given platform.
Netflix is far from perfect, but frankly if Netflix doubled their price, I'd pay it and drop Hulu - 90% of what I watch on Hulu is The Daily Show/Colbert Report anyway - heck if Netflix picked those two shows up I'd drop Hulu. Heck, if Comedy Centrals internet streaming was half decent, I'd drop Hulu. And they were asking for *how* much to sell Hulu last month? Gee, I can't imagine why no one jumped on that.
Hulu - there to make you really appreciate Netflix! Pug
Who . . . the hell . . . watches ~40 hours a week of TV?
Well - checking the 2011 BLS American Time Use Survey that's wrong; Actually, his number almost exactly match my math for "Leisure and Sports" Daily *30, but the numbers for "watching Television" (a subcategory) come to 2.75 hours/day, or ~82 hours per month on average; even among people that watch some *every* day that only goes up to 105 hours a month on average. Then there's the assumption that that is all 'original programming', as opposed to movies, reruns,catching up on series you missed the first time around.
So the premise is based on flawed data from the getgo, exacerbated by bad logic. (Chart won't go through here "Filter error: Please use less whitespace", but search for "Watching television" in the report; )
Error 451: This site is unavailable . . . despite the server running perfectly fine, the domain being properly paid for, and all content being legal under standard interpretations of fair use and fair dealing, yet is mysteriously not coming up for reasons we cannot tell people about . . .
Yes - the teenager acted irresponsibly. He *probably* thought he was being manly and heroic. One wonders where in our gun-toting, Stand your ground, Castle Doctrine culture a teenager could get get the message that it was somehow heroic and manly to intercept a creepy man following them before they got to their house where anything might happen, but who knows where kids come up with these ideas.
But you're right - It's almost as if I was holding the heavily armed adult neighborhood watch volunteer to some higher standard than the teenager, expecting him to have actively done something to avoid a confrontation that could rapidly escalate out of control. Terribly biased of me.
I had the good fortune to run across Bayes Theorem (Not by name) in an article about misdiagnosing problems in Discover magazine back in the 80's, and for some reason filed the factoid away as 'Oh, this is *important* and is going to apply to a lot of things' and have never forgotten it.
The fundamental takeaway for me is "It doesn't *matter* how accurate your test is - what matters is how accurate it is compared to how rare the condition you're looking for is.". Random drug tests, random highway stops, the instant you are doing anything that force a 99% accurate test on a population that might only be 1% guilty, you should be fined for a violation of Bayesian logic.
It is one of those universally applicable truths, and we need to hammer it into the brain of every teenager before the get out of High school.
At some point if you decide to ignore the advice of a 911 operator and follow someone, you are taking responsibility for the consequences of those actions. Maybe Trayvon Martin did something anyone would have done at the time, and maybe he was stupid, and maybe both . . . but he didn't create these circumstances, Zimmerman did.
That you can follow someone on the street, kill them, and not even be found guilty of manslaughter beggars the imagination.
In testing the Mi-Go Phone did have some sound problems, occasional whispering effects, and a small percentage of violent madness. Also a somewhat larger percentage of non-violent madness, whimpering, screaming in the dark, fetal position, and hallucinations.
On the good side, unlimited data plan, and discounted rates for Miskatonic University students and faculty.
I was aware of a couple of those but - they really aren't consistent.
Now, it's feasible we have a 'Blind Man describing an Elephant' Scenario here - these are all different perspectives on the same underlying issue. But my judgement call is really that it doesn't feel like that. This feel far more like replication of work (and yes, lack of respect of constitutional limits) than an overarching plan.
There should be elephant sized footprints here - and I'm just not seeing them.
We can't 'know' this is false, but . . . we can look at what the implications would be if this were true.
This would require vast storage, incredible database crossreferencing, would imply certain kinds of information be available not only without warrants, but without ever needing to pull the original data. Not only would warrants be redundant, so would National Security Letters.
All without a single patriot in the government going public and blowing the lid off this, yet simultaneously putting this information in the hands of someone willing to shoot their mouth off on CNN.
Can, in theory, all this be true? Sure. It could happen. *Practically* can all this be true? No - too many conspirators have to work invisibly, never tipping their hands, never making a mistake. Just don't buy it.
Actually, I worked with a company with a bunch of legacy software, and after testing it turned out . . . everything worked fine on Wine (or under a dos emulator).
Literally everything. I won't say there wasn't a learning curve going to Kubuntu but it worked on their old PC's, eliminated a lot of security overhead, and their legacy software worked pretty much better than before.
Ubuntu is in my opinion the best learning system, if you need further stability I'd recommend the stable version of Debian.
The 'stable' version is Glacial in it's upgrade approach for anything except security. That can *also* be frustrating, but it does give an utterly consistent environment to learn in.
Yes - and the law says that information created in the government isn't covered by copyright. Note that none of the charges against Aaron Swartz include infringement of copyright, but "Computer Fraud and Abuse" and "Wire Fraud". They didn't have a case for copyright infringement, and they knew it. This was about defending a monopoly of information that was *not* constitutionally protected, but under the auspices of contractual relationships that Aaron Swartz had not signed to protect access to information that as a citizen he was legally entitled too.
Aaron Swartz was right. And this was about destroying him for that.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/subscription subscription (sb-skrpshn) n. 1. a. A purchase made by signed order, as for a periodical for a specified period of time or for a series of performances.
Sorry, but for anything beyond the trivial *all* that requires licenses in the current legal paradigm. Sure, I may just file off the serial numbers and resell it, and if it's trivial or common knowledge I may well be able to do so legally and even ethically, but anything beyond that means I have put anyone buying the software off of me at risk.
You may not care if I use your work, but *I* can't ethically put others at risk by using your work.
As I understand it, 'Veins' of material don't occur naturally in an asteroid.
On Earth at least (with the exception of Iron), veins are created because hot water/steam under great pressure dissolves minerals, then as it goes up through the crust, the various metals precipitate out as the water becomes less superheated - the veins result because the exact temperature at which Silver starts being deposited along the fissure is different from Gold, Nickel, or Lead etcetera.
Iron on the other hand precipitated out of the oceans during the oxygen catastrophe when oxygen bound with iron and fell to the seafloor.
Neither of these processes is going to happen on an asteroid?
Slashdot Mirror
You guys know that
A - the Federal website notwithstanding, the actual results of the law are pretty much as predicted by the laws designers and the CBO predicted, not the disaster the right wing kept claiming would happen, and
B - Websites . . . can be redesigned . . .
Because you're focusing on a short term issue here.
Pug
Okay - as a veteran, I read, enjoy, sympathize with, and utterly disagree with the theory of government Heinlein was expounding on in Starship troopers.
But it *is* a valid theory of government, that citizenship is distinguished via volunteering for government service. Notably - the *only* benefits given for this in the book are that you can
A) Vote
B) Run for Public Office
C) Teach Social Studies (And evidently hold certain other specific jobs not mentioned)
The theory being that, having been willing to put your life on the line for society, you are qualified to make decisions about people putting their lives on the line for society.
I disagree with it (I think it undervalues other contributions to Society), but the point is that agree or not Heinlein makes a valid argument and puts enough into it that you can disagree with it and still admit it's a valid argument. If you're going to satire it your satire needs to be as smart as the original book.
Bluntly, it's not. It answers the arguments of the original book by ignoring them and treating them as unworthy of argument - the term for that is not satire, it's contempt. It would be merely insulting if that contempt were in the venue of an original work that took the premise from a new angle - but they didn't do that. They actually bought the book, then pissed on it.
Now, let's be honest - it this were, say Anthem, I wouldn't care. You can logically prove that Anthem actually sucks as an argument, and you can treat it with contempt without actually being dumber than it is. But Starship Troopers doesn't actually meet that criteria. It has an argument you need to actually answer.
As Satire, it completely fails.
Pug
I'm pretty sure when we get there we get to meet Space Lincoln.
The, a 'Independent' Journal Review is not terribly independent - Pretty Right wing actually, and the article cited has a *lot* of context missing. It's not as bad as some I've read - the basic thesis is true, but statistically neither the Conservatives, the Liberals, or the Tea Party itself are *meaningfully* correlated with better or worse understanding of Science - very slight negatives in the main body of Conservatives, very slight positives in Liberals and Tea Party members, but the correlations are miniscule. The researcher has some choice words to say regarding the attempt to make the Tea part look like hyper-encephalic geniuses here, including a bit of snark along the lines of "Hey Suddenly Eastern Ivy League Studies are completely trustworthy among Tea Party Conservatives - Who Knew!"
Original Post: Some data on education, religiosity, ideology, and science comprehension
His Update with a review of responses: Congratulations, tea party members: You are just as vulnerable to politically biased misinterpretation of science as everyone else! Is fixing this threat to our Republic part of your program?
Pug
Actually my problem with this is that it is impossible for a company that creates bot software to break *Blizzards* terms of service. Only the customer can break Blizzards TOS, because only the customer actually has a relationship with Blizzard.
Moreover - it doesn't even pass muster on that level because the TOS as they stand - are not actually legal. The Uniform Commercial Code is the only legal framework for interpreting a TOS agreement, and the UCC is quite clear - this kind of Boilerplate agreement is only acceptable as a contract between Merchants -
http://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/2/2-104#2-104(1)
(1) "Merchant" means a person who deals in goods of the kind or otherwise by his occupation holds himself out as having knowledge or skill peculiar to the practices or goods involved in the transaction or to whom such knowledge or skill may be attributed by his employment of an agent or broker or other intermediary who by his occupation holds himself out as having such knowledge or skill.
(...)
(3) "Between Merchants" means in any transaction with respect to which both parties are chargeable with the knowledge or skill of merchants.
The default under UCC code is not that people are considered to be merchants, but consumers - and thus, under the law, this type of boilerplate agreement is not applicable. Unless there is a 'professionsal' WoW player, the TOS is unenforceable.
This is simply interference in a third parties right to contract.
Citation Needed
I think the more important question to me - *is* there a good programming language for the iPad or (more importantly for me) the Android platform, preferably without jailbreaking it?
I believe you can run bash after jailbreaking, and that's not un-useful, but yeah, I hadn't realized how much it annoys me that there's no quick easy way to do programming (or frankly, scripting) on my tablet barring that.
Any contenders?
I confess my calculator of choice was a TI-35 Galaxy Solar, and I tended to work fine with that - anything more complex I could simplify in my head til the TI-35 was fine.
That said, the no calculator bias is a bit off in my opinion - it's all grand to know it well enough to scratchpad it, but in the real world you will be working problems that you *need* a calculator for. Statistics is particularly egregious about this but hardly the only contender for mathematics where habitually doing it by hand is actually a bad habit.
Now if someone could explain the attraction of reverse polish notation ... (No, don't, really.)
Pug
I confess I'm been really pleased with my PRS950. Works great.
In my experience Hulu Plus is the same price as Netflix with the additional 'features' of . . .
A worse interface (As of the latest iteration, there's a 'view timeline' at the bottom of the interface that doesn't actually show you where you are in the episode, and if you click *anywhere* on it to, say, watch Kevin Spacey steal Colberts Emmy again, you go back to the beginning of the program again. Seriously.)
Less Content (and some of the actual *good* content is just web series you can view for free - I'm looking at you Kevin Pollack - {G}),
Shows expiring at random times,
Arbitrary licensing on how you can stream (I'm *paying* for the Simpsons, but can't actually watch it over Roku? You have my money, why do you even *care*?)
Commercials,
a tendency to crash/hang more often than Netflix on any given platform.
Netflix is far from perfect, but frankly if Netflix doubled their price, I'd pay it and drop Hulu - 90% of what I watch on Hulu is The Daily Show/Colbert Report anyway - heck if Netflix picked those two shows up I'd drop Hulu.
Heck, if Comedy Centrals internet streaming was half decent, I'd drop Hulu.
And they were asking for *how* much to sell Hulu last month? Gee, I can't imagine why no one jumped on that.
Hulu - there to make you really appreciate Netflix!
Pug
Who . . . the hell . . . watches ~40 hours a week of TV?
Well - checking the 2011 BLS American Time Use Survey that's wrong; Actually, his number almost exactly match my math for "Leisure and Sports" Daily *30, but the numbers for "watching Television" (a subcategory) come to 2.75 hours/day, or ~82 hours per month on average; even among people that watch some *every* day that only goes up to 105 hours a month on average. Then there's the assumption that that is all 'original programming', as opposed to movies, reruns,catching up on series you missed the first time around.
So the premise is based on flawed data from the getgo, exacerbated by bad logic.
(Chart won't go through here "Filter error: Please use less whitespace", but search for "Watching television" in the report; )
Pug
Error 451: This site is unavailable . . . despite the server running perfectly fine, the domain being properly paid for, and all content being legal under standard interpretations of fair use and fair dealing, yet is mysteriously not coming up for reasons we cannot tell people about . . .
You do the math.
Yes - the teenager acted irresponsibly. He *probably* thought he was being manly and heroic. One wonders where in our gun-toting, Stand your ground, Castle Doctrine culture a teenager could get get the message that it was somehow heroic and manly to intercept a creepy man following them before they got to their house where anything might happen, but who knows where kids come up with these ideas.
But you're right - It's almost as if I was holding the heavily armed adult neighborhood watch volunteer to some higher standard than the teenager, expecting him to have actively done something to avoid a confrontation that could rapidly escalate out of control. Terribly biased of me.
Pug
I had the good fortune to run across Bayes Theorem (Not by name) in an article about misdiagnosing problems in Discover magazine back in the 80's, and for some reason filed the factoid away as 'Oh, this is *important* and is going to apply to a lot of things' and have never forgotten it.
The fundamental takeaway for me is "It doesn't *matter* how accurate your test is - what matters is how accurate it is compared to how rare the condition you're looking for is.". Random drug tests, random highway stops, the instant you are doing anything that force a 99% accurate test on a population that might only be 1% guilty, you should be fined for a violation of Bayesian logic.
It is one of those universally applicable truths, and we need to hammer it into the brain of every teenager before the get out of High school.
Pug
What an amazing set of rationalizing "What If's".
At some point if you decide to ignore the advice of a 911 operator and follow someone, you are taking responsibility for the consequences of those actions. Maybe Trayvon Martin did something anyone would have done at the time, and maybe he was stupid, and maybe both . . . but he didn't create these circumstances, Zimmerman did.
That you can follow someone on the street, kill them, and not even be found guilty of manslaughter beggars the imagination.
Pug
As a 6'2" 300 pound Man, I have the luxury of going "I will never draw a weapon unless I intend to kill someone".
Assuming that is true of everyone in every situation is the most amazing egotism.
In testing the Mi-Go Phone did have some sound problems, occasional whispering effects, and a small percentage of violent madness. Also a somewhat larger percentage of non-violent madness, whimpering, screaming in the dark, fetal position, and hallucinations.
On the good side, unlimited data plan, and discounted rates for Miskatonic University students and faculty.
Pug
I was aware of a couple of those but - they really aren't consistent.
Now, it's feasible we have a 'Blind Man describing an Elephant' Scenario here - these are all different perspectives on the same underlying issue. But my judgement call is really that it doesn't feel like that. This feel far more like replication of work (and yes, lack of respect of constitutional limits) than an overarching plan.
There should be elephant sized footprints here - and I'm just not seeing them.
Pug
We can't 'know' this is false, but . . . we can look at what the implications would be if this were true.
This would require vast storage, incredible database crossreferencing, would imply certain kinds of information be available not only without warrants, but without ever needing to pull the original data. Not only would warrants be redundant, so would National Security Letters.
All without a single patriot in the government going public and blowing the lid off this, yet simultaneously putting this information in the hands of someone willing to shoot their mouth off on CNN.
Can, in theory, all this be true? Sure. It could happen. *Practically* can all this be true? No - too many conspirators have to work invisibly, never tipping their hands, never making a mistake. Just don't buy it.
Pug
Actually, I worked with a company with a bunch of legacy software, and after testing it turned out . . . everything worked fine on Wine (or under a dos emulator).
Literally everything. I won't say there wasn't a learning curve going to Kubuntu but it worked on their old PC's, eliminated a lot of security overhead, and their legacy software worked pretty much better than before.
They were shocked at how much better things ran.
Pug
Ubuntu is in my opinion the best learning system, if you need further stability I'd recommend the stable version of Debian.
The 'stable' version is Glacial in it's upgrade approach for anything except security. That can *also* be frustrating, but it does give an utterly consistent environment to learn in.
Pug
Yes - and the law says that information created in the government isn't covered by copyright.
Note that none of the charges against Aaron Swartz include infringement of copyright, but "Computer Fraud and Abuse" and "Wire Fraud".
They didn't have a case for copyright infringement, and they knew it. This was about defending a monopoly of information that was *not* constitutionally protected, but under the auspices of contractual relationships that Aaron Swartz had not signed to protect access to information that as a citizen he was legally entitled too.
Aaron Swartz was right. And this was about destroying him for that.
Pug
Prior Art
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/subscription
subscription (sb-skrpshn)
n.
1. a. A purchase made by signed order, as for a periodical for a specified period of time or for a series of performances.
Sorry, but for anything beyond the trivial *all* that requires licenses in the current legal paradigm. Sure, I may just file off the serial numbers and resell it, and if it's trivial or common knowledge I may well be able to do so legally and even ethically, but anything beyond that means I have put anyone buying the software off of me at risk.
You may not care if I use your work, but *I* can't ethically put others at risk by using your work.
Pug
As I understand it, 'Veins' of material don't occur naturally in an asteroid.
On Earth at least (with the exception of Iron), veins are created because hot water/steam under great pressure dissolves minerals, then as it goes up through the crust, the various metals precipitate out as the water becomes less superheated - the veins result because the exact temperature at which Silver starts being deposited along the fissure is different from Gold, Nickel, or Lead etcetera.
Iron on the other hand precipitated out of the oceans during the oxygen catastrophe when oxygen bound with iron and fell to the seafloor.
Neither of these processes is going to happen on an asteroid?
Pug