If they do things to far out of line, they can certainly expect to loose their jobs.
Uhhh... are you living in the same country as the rest of us? When corporate heads screw up, they leave the company with tremendous "golden parachute" severance deals, then go on to be hired by some other company at even higher compensation. They most certainly do not end up suffering the way free-market zealots say they should.
The government is still moving money around, which is inefficient. Its like moving energy-there is some loss for administration at the least.
Right. That's why the best thing for the economy is for all the money to be stuffed into mattresses, so it doesn't circulate at all. Oh, wait, no, that's not right. It's the other thing, you know, dead wrong economically. Velocity of money is important and when you're in a credit crunch (which we still are), one key thing is to keep the money moving. It's a lot like oil in an engine. If you "save" all the oil in the pan, the engine locks up and destroys itself.
Minor nit, but the 14th Amendment is "the Constitution itself". Amendments are part and parcel of the document -- that's why they're amendments, not appendices. They change the document (which, incidentally, is why it's a "living document").
It'd be fine to say "In the original Constitution,..."
Some people assume that traffic can be modelled like water in pipes. "Road is congested? Make it wider and the congestion will ease." What they don't realise is that motorists are more intelligent than water particles.
Also, when you treat traffic as a compressible fluid, you get 20-car pile-ups, because cars aren't compressible... or at least, they're not uncompressible afterwards...
personally, the only thing i am sure about when it comes to this debate is that there are not enough human beings on earth to significantly change a structure as large and complex as the earth's atmosphere.
Then you are sure of nothing, because it's already well-established that the activities of humanity have impacted the atmosphere. Ever hear of acid rain? or the ozone hole? or even just heat-islands around cities?
However, it doesn't contradict, and in fact confirms, that there was a general consensus that we would eventually enter another ice age.
And there still is such a consensus. The tricky bit is, what is "eventually"? People were always thinking in terms of 20,000 years or longer. Even if we fail to act on C02, eventually the Earth will return to glaciation... if you wait long enough.
Thank goodness. I thought I was all alone in feeling this way about Ellison's "City" script. It's a steaming turd of poor writing that respects none of the conventions of the show in which he brutally tried to shoe-horn it. It makes characters act in uncharacteristic ways, gets preachy at the wrong moments, and all in all just plain sucks. I'll go further: I haven't read anything by Ellison that even remotely justifies his reputation as a mover-and-shaker in science fiction. It's all pretentious, tedious, smug crap. He's just someone who caught the New Wave and rode it for all it was worth, and was catapulted far beyond his meager talents.
Harlan Ellison is a nightmare from which science fiction is waiting to awaken.
There is zero evidence for most of what is written in scripture, especially the parts that creationists/ID believers subscribe to.
I guess that depends on what you mean by "evidence". The divergence between those espousing science and those railing against it is, more often than not, a disagreement on what is the ultimate arbiter of truth. To a scientist, the ultimate arbiter of truth is the physical world. The Universe cannot be wrong. To a fundamentalist, the ultimate arbiter of truth is the Bible (or Koran or other source). The Bible cannot be wrong. In any conflict between your ultimate arbiter of truth and some interpretation of the world, the interpretation has to lose.
But if you and someone else disagree on the ultimate arbiter of truth, it's unlikely you can ever "resolve" any differences at all. You're not speaking the same language.
In summary, "Copy Protection" prevented you from making unauthorized "copies" of the software. "DRM" is designed to prevent you from making unauthorized "uses" of that same software.
Excellent summary. People try hard to obfuscate the difference.
To continue to label modern evolutionary theory as 'Darwinism' walks into a creationist trap
Actually, to pretend that scientists refer to evolutionary theory as "Darwinism" is walking into the creationist trap, since (in my experience, at least) only creationists refer to it that way. Scientists refer to evolution as, well, evolution.
And since this is going to happen at some point, better to piss off the remainder right after he takes office than right before the next election cycle starts.
I don't know if you pay attention to politics regularly or not, but the "next" election cycle started on Nov 5. There's no time to govern any more...
What's wrong with charging your friends for helping them?
Because then they're not your friends, they're your customers.
My friend Mike, who was the only one of us with a car, expected people to chip in for gas when we went anywhere.
I'd expect it, too. But if someone didn't have the cash, I'd probably let them slide, if I considered them a friend. Of course, if they were a friend, they'd want to chip in. In either case, Mike wasn't "making money" on the transaction (we hope); he was dividing the marginal cost among the recipients. I assume he didn't charge you for some portion of his insurance or car payments...
But for FOSS, the marginal cost is close enough to zero to defy accounting.
That sounds nice. However, we don't have to speculate as to whether a demonstration bomb would have sufficed. It wouldn't have. You know how I know? Because destroying an actual city didn't suffice!. If the Japanese high command didn't surrender after we did in fact destroy Hiroshima, it seems inconceivable that they would have if we had blown up an empty island... Now, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't have tried a demonstration. That would likely have been a more moral course (although I hesitate to pass judgment on anybody who's gone through an actual existential conflict). But whether or not we should have tried the demonstration, it's pretty clear it wouldn't have worked.
Disclaimer: I'm a high school teacher so I have a dog in this fight. Having said that: The idea of widespread public examination sounds like a good one... except, who writes the exam? Who decides what is good to cover and what is not? For example, the article talked about how kids do worse on old-style exams and explicitly mentioned them as "math-heavy" (meaning, I am pretty sure, calculation-heavy). Learning to do the calculations does not make one a better engineer or scientist. Doing lots of calculations might give you an intuition about the flow of numbers. On the other hand, both as a research scientist and now as a teacher, I've encountered many for whom it did no such thing. I suspect, in fact, that for the overwhelming majority it does not do that. For some it probably impedes knowledge.
The old tests tested methods and material now out of date. It didn't prepare those students for the world they lived in any better than we do now... and it sure as hell didn't prepare them for our world.
Fixing education is going to require much, much, much bigger thinking than "Let's go back to the old ways". Because here's the dirty little secret about the Golden Age of Education: There never was one.
Or do we say "Life is hard, wear a cup. Our liberties are more important"?
I just don't get this. Everyone -- but everyone -- will patriotically mouth that you need to be willing to put it all on the line for your freedoms. You have to risk despair and death. You have to have something worth dying for.
But somehow eveyone's come to the crazy conclusion that this necessarily means enrolling in the military. Here's how the average citizen takes the risk that makes democracy precious: He puts up with the possibility that the open system under which he lives might -- might -- not get the bad guys before they pull off another stunt.
The price of liberty is the risk of death. Men and women in uniform pay that price explicitly and daily. I'm willing to pay it in my daily living, too. Especially when the thing we're talking about -- "security theater" -- does almost nothing to preserve my life anyway.
Except that you can't prove he didn't spike the Red Bull...
Are you really saying the bar is that low? Really? We now have to prove that a wild conjecture is not true?
I agree that holding a Red Bull is incredibly weak evidence that he's given up drinking, but it's simply absurd to spin it as "evidence" that he hasn't.
Honest question: How do you know the pictures are from a "public" event? I read the article (but quickly) and it seemed they were at a party. Is every party "public"? I don't know the law but I don't think you surrender your expectation of privacy by inviting a few friends over. When does it cross the line?
Anyone with any sort of brain knows that Obama has no idea about anything
which clearly explains why McCain's campaign feels a need to raid his site for ideas...... and why Senator McCain felt compelled to reverse his long-standing, long-stated "policy" in Afghanistan, in order to adopt Sen. Obama's.
Guh. I know I'll engender flamage but I found these two books to be little more than dreck. It's been a long while since I read them but at my recollection, there was essentially zero useful science in them. It was a lot of "oh, isn't that coincidence MEANINGFUL...?"
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Uhhh... are you living in the same country as the rest of us? When corporate heads screw up, they leave the company with tremendous "golden parachute" severance deals, then go on to be hired by some other company at even higher compensation. They most certainly do not end up suffering the way free-market zealots say they should.
Right. That's why the best thing for the economy is for all the money to be stuffed into mattresses, so it doesn't circulate at all.
Oh, wait, no, that's not right. It's the other thing, you know, dead wrong economically. Velocity of money is important and when you're in a credit crunch (which we still are), one key thing is to keep the money moving. It's a lot like oil in an engine. If you "save" all the oil in the pan, the engine locks up and destroys itself.
Minor nit, but the 14th Amendment is "the Constitution itself". Amendments are part and parcel of the document -- that's why they're amendments, not appendices. They change the document (which, incidentally, is why it's a "living document").
It'd be fine to say "In the original Constitution, ..."
Also, when you treat traffic as a compressible fluid, you get 20-car pile-ups, because cars aren't compressible... or at least, they're not uncompressible afterwards...
personally, the only thing i am sure about when it comes to this debate is that there are not enough human beings on earth to significantly change a structure as large and complex as the earth's atmosphere.
Then you are sure of nothing, because it's already well-established that the activities of humanity have impacted the atmosphere. Ever hear of acid rain? or the ozone hole? or even just heat-islands around cities?
And there still is such a consensus. The tricky bit is, what is "eventually"? People were always thinking in terms of 20,000 years or longer. Even if we fail to act on C02, eventually the Earth will return to glaciation... if you wait long enough.
Thank goodness. I thought I was all alone in feeling this way about Ellison's "City" script. It's a steaming turd of poor writing that respects none of the conventions of the show in which he brutally tried to shoe-horn it. It makes characters act in uncharacteristic ways, gets preachy at the wrong moments, and all in all just plain sucks. I'll go further: I haven't read anything by Ellison that even remotely justifies his reputation as a mover-and-shaker in science fiction. It's all pretentious, tedious, smug crap. He's just someone who caught the New Wave and rode it for all it was worth, and was catapulted far beyond his meager talents.
Harlan Ellison is a nightmare from which science fiction is waiting to awaken.
I guess that depends on what you mean by "evidence". The divergence between those espousing science and those railing against it is, more often than not, a disagreement on what is the ultimate arbiter of truth. To a scientist, the ultimate arbiter of truth is the physical world. The Universe cannot be wrong. To a fundamentalist, the ultimate arbiter of truth is the Bible (or Koran or other source). The Bible cannot be wrong. In any conflict between your ultimate arbiter of truth and some interpretation of the world, the interpretation has to lose.
But if you and someone else disagree on the ultimate arbiter of truth, it's unlikely you can ever "resolve" any differences at all. You're not speaking the same language.
Treating a patient as a number is dumb. Treating a patient according to an interpretation of many numbers is not.
Excellent summary. People try hard to obfuscate the difference.
Actually, to pretend that scientists refer to evolutionary theory as "Darwinism" is walking into the creationist trap, since (in my experience, at least) only creationists refer to it that way. Scientists refer to evolution as, well, evolution.
I don't know if you pay attention to politics regularly or not, but the "next" election cycle started on Nov 5. There's no time to govern any more...
Because then they're not your friends, they're your customers.
I'd expect it, too. But if someone didn't have the cash, I'd probably let them slide, if I considered them a friend. Of course, if they were a friend, they'd want to chip in. In either case, Mike wasn't "making money" on the transaction (we hope); he was dividing the marginal cost among the recipients. I assume he didn't charge you for some portion of his insurance or car payments...
But for FOSS, the marginal cost is close enough to zero to defy accounting.
That sounds nice. However, we don't have to speculate as to whether a demonstration bomb would have sufficed. It wouldn't have. You know how I know? Because destroying an actual city didn't suffice!. If the Japanese high command didn't surrender after we did in fact destroy Hiroshima, it seems inconceivable that they would have if we had blown up an empty island... Now, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't have tried a demonstration. That would likely have been a more moral course (although I hesitate to pass judgment on anybody who's gone through an actual existential conflict). But whether or not we should have tried the demonstration, it's pretty clear it wouldn't have worked.
Disclaimer: I'm a high school teacher so I have a dog in this fight. Having said that: The idea of widespread public examination sounds like a good one... except, who writes the exam? Who decides what is good to cover and what is not? For example, the article talked about how kids do worse on old-style exams and explicitly mentioned them as "math-heavy" (meaning, I am pretty sure, calculation-heavy). Learning to do the calculations does not make one a better engineer or scientist. Doing lots of calculations might give you an intuition about the flow of numbers. On the other hand, both as a research scientist and now as a teacher, I've encountered many for whom it did no such thing. I suspect, in fact, that for the overwhelming majority it does not do that. For some it probably impedes knowledge.
The old tests tested methods and material now out of date. It didn't prepare those students for the world they lived in any better than we do now... and it sure as hell didn't prepare them for our world.
Fixing education is going to require much, much, much bigger thinking than "Let's go back to the old ways". Because here's the dirty little secret about the Golden Age of Education: There never was one .
I just don't get this. Everyone -- but everyone -- will patriotically mouth that you need to be willing to put it all on the line for your freedoms. You have to risk despair and death. You have to have something worth dying for.
But somehow eveyone's come to the crazy conclusion that this necessarily means enrolling in the military. Here's how the average citizen takes the risk that makes democracy precious: He puts up with the possibility that the open system under which he lives might -- might -- not get the bad guys before they pull off another stunt.
The price of liberty is the risk of death. Men and women in uniform pay that price explicitly and daily. I'm willing to pay it in my daily living, too. Especially when the thing we're talking about -- "security theater" -- does almost nothing to preserve my life anyway.
And how's that working out for you?
The Constitution ... an elegant document for a more civilized age.
Are you really saying the bar is that low? Really? We now have to prove that a wild conjecture is not true?
I agree that holding a Red Bull is incredibly weak evidence that he's given up drinking, but it's simply absurd to spin it as "evidence" that he hasn't.
Honest question: How do you know the pictures are from a "public" event? I read the article (but quickly) and it seemed they were at a party. Is every party "public"? I don't know the law but I don't think you surrender your expectation of privacy by inviting a few friends over. When does it cross the line?
which clearly explains why McCain's campaign feels a need to raid his site for ideas... ... and why Senator McCain felt compelled to reverse his long-standing, long-stated "policy" in Afghanistan, in order to adopt Sen. Obama's.
Sadly, everyone's gonna end up voting for the Brain Slug Party... again.
I totally agree. I just didn't find anything in Tao or Dancing Wu Li to actually be enlightening. Buy hey, YMMV.
Pretty sure we're about to get a 2nd amendment row going now...
Guh. I know I'll engender flamage but I found these two books to be little more than dreck. It's been a long while since I read them but at my recollection, there was essentially zero useful science in them. It was a lot of "oh, isn't that coincidence MEANINGFUL...?"