I'll put it this way: Trying to do modern biology without learning evolution is like trying to do modern chemistry without learning how the periodic table works.
Honestly, I don't see that it's necessary for a high school biology course. You need to understand evolution to understand why things came to work the way they do -- but most introductory biology courses focus on what they do. Certainly anyone who goes beyond the "dissect a frog" and "identify the parts of a cell" stuff of a typical high school biology course should learn about evolution, but most students don't get any further than that.
In any case, I'm not saying that evolution should not be taught. I'm saying that the fact that people fixate on evolution, when there are more relevant topics that are being ignored, is indicative of the fact that the driving force behind the debate is not a desire to improve children's education.
The periodic table is a good example of another topic that is at least as important to understand, and yet gets much less attention in education. Your average high school graduate could at least give a one-sentence explanation of evolution (even if they might not "believe" in it.) I would be surprised if the average graduate could even come up with halfway reasonable definition of an "element," much less tell you anything about the periodic table.
You may teach your children as you like, but to never teach them about evolution is abuse.
I could easily come up with dozens of scientific theories and concepts that are certainly more important to be taught than evolution.
Do you consider it abuse to not teach kids about Newton's laws of motion? Sadly, I would be willing to bet that most products of the public education system have a better concept of evolution than of inertia.
This is the problem that I have with the whole evolution/creationism in education debate: the theory of evolution is just not that important. The loudmouths on both sides of this debate aren't interested in education; they're just using it as a proxy to attack their political enemies.
Try fixing the general state of science education, and then you can go attack the evolution in education question all you want.
I kind of felt the same way on Linux/BSD platforms -- why couldn't everything be compiled statically? How much more disk space would it REALLY take to have an entire system statically linked?
Disk space isn't the only concern -- it probably isn't even the most important one, at least not anymore.
If all of your programs are statically linked, then they may (in practice, almost certainly "will") all be using different versions of the same libraries. Some of them are going to be exposed to security problems fixed in later versions and some of them will be incompatible with configuration options that you are using. If you want to upgrade a library, or apply a patch, or even switch from using one library to a compatible one, you will have to recompile every single program on your system from scratch.
I wrote about this above... in terms of AC/DC using it it's just an excuse.
If it's just an excuse, then what was the real reason?
I'm serious about that question -- I can't think of any particular ulterior motive that they could have to withholding a digital release. Perhaps they were trying to negotiate for a better deal, but that seems like a fairly roundabout way to do it when they could have just said "we want more money."
Sure it works. It's just that it only works if voters aren't stupid. Continuing to vote for the liars (because somebody told them that they have no other choice) is stupidity.
Because Obama told congress it wasn't a tax, but then told the supreme court it WAS a tax.
Obama flat out lied.
How do you expect the average Joe Sixpack voter to stay informed if the politicians are always lying?
Generally speaking I am SICK of people blaming uneducated voters for being sheeple. They are victims, and the elite are actively deceiving them precisely because they do not WANT educated voters waking up to the crap they're pulling.
If people are too stupid to figure out that when "the government" pays for something, that money comes from taxes, then I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for them.
We have a chance to throw out the liars every couple years. The results of not doing so are our own fault.
I do my own taxes and have never taken that deduction.
Well, I commend you for standing by what you believe.
But could you explain why you think that it's a "tax dodge" to not pay taxes on money that you give away? The amount of money that you save on your taxes is only a fraction of the amount that you actually gave to charity, so it would make no sense for an individual to make a monetary donation to charity in order to reduce their taxes. (Non-monetary donations and corporate donations are perhaps a little less clear-cut.)
No, it only applies to MOTOR VEHICLES which meet certain definitions. One of those definitions is that it must BURN or Combust, by the definitions of fuel in that chapter (60? 61?) and pursuant to definitions further found in chapter 90.
Well, I'm not a lawyer, but the definition here straight from chapter 90 doesn't seem to say anything to that effect:
âoeMotor vehiclesâ, all vehicles constructed and designed for propulsion by power other than muscular power including such vehicles when pulled or towed by another motor vehicle, except railroad and railway cars, vehicles operated by the system known as trolley motor or trackless trolley under chapter one hundred and sixty-three or section ten of chapter five hundred and forty-four of the acts of nineteen hundred and forty-seven, vehicles running only upon rails or tracks, vehicles used for other purposes than the transportation of property and incapable of being driven at a speed exceeding twelve miles per hour and which are used exclusively for the building, repair and maintenance of highways or designed especially for use elsewhere than on the travelled part of ways, wheelchairs owned and operated by invalids and vehicles which are operated or guided by a person on foot; provided, however, that the exception for trackless trolleys provided herein shall not apply to sections seventeen, twenty-one, twenty-four, twenty-four I, twenty-five and twenty-six. The definition of âoeMotor vehiclesâ shall not include motorized bicycles. In doubtful cases, the registrar may determine whether or not any particular vehicle is a motor vehicle as herein defined. If he determines that it should be so classified, he may require that it be registered under this chapter, but such determination shall not be admissible as evidence in any action at law arising out of the use or operation of such vehicle previous to such determination.
Where does the law say that it applies only to vehicles that burn fuel?
IMO, there should be no deductions for charity; a tax dodge isn't charity.
Maybe there should and maybe there shouldn't, but no matter how you slice it, calling giving to charity a "tax dodge" is inaccurate, to say the least. That's typically a line from people that have never done their own taxes, and so don't understand how those deductions work.
That is the only thing that should be taken into consideration. As long as it was between consenting adults, an affair is between him, the 'afairee' and his family. As long as it doesn't effect one's job performance its really nobody's business.
Personally, It seems to me that someone with a demonstrable lack of integrity is not suited for the job of the director of the CIA.
I think you might have trouble selling it as a toy.
Outside of a war zone, flamethrowers designed as weapons are essentially never used for anything but the entertainment of the user. In other words -- a toy.
When you have a product that actually kills kids, it's not mindless regulation to ban it.
Here's a list of some products that I have within reach of my desk right now that have actually killed kids:
button batteries
plastic bags
bottled water
chairs
phone cord
The fact of the matter is that these magnets really aren't any more dangerous than any number of common household items. If you're that frightened of them, keep them out of your own house. Banning them is utterly ridiculous.
Even though they removed the Javascript, It is still effectively hidden on most monitors.
Just like Slashdot has hidden your comment, because I have to scroll down to see it?
I don't think he was ordered to post his comment by a judge.
I don't really see how that is relevant to the question of whether having to scroll a webpage -- a perfectly standard activity for anyone who uses a web browser -- constitutes "hiding" information below the first page. It's either hiding the information or it's not, regardless of the reason why the information the information is there.
No, because Slashdot did not configure the graphics on the page to make it LOOK as if you are at the bottom of the page when you really are not. Furthermore, forcing the page to automatically resize the graphics to constantly reinforce the illusion that you are at the bottom of the page is also something that Slashdot and other websites with nothing to hide are NOT doing.
The scrollbar -- complete with visual feedback of how much of the page you are viewing -- works exactly the same way on Apple's page that it does on Slashdot.
I would start with teaching people what positions the candidates actually hold on political issues. My experience has been that most voters know nothing about the candidates they vote for besides whether they have a "D" or an "R" next to their name.
Ideally, I would like a requirement that you have to demonstrate some knowledge of a candidate before you are allowed to cast a vote.
1. Declare a national holiday so all can vote on a day off to eliminate the lines. 2. Get rid of the electoral college. 3. Get Congress to override Citizen United. 4. Take the money out of the electoral system.
Funny, I'd put "educate the voting public" ahead of any of those.
Of course, it will never happen, since it suits both major parties perfectly well to keep the voters ignorant.
Don't try talking to the operators of these calls. They're abusive or they just hang up fast. I once tried to play along, but they told me I wasn't eligible, so they called me again two days later.
If you're not busy, you can get some entertainment out of stringing them along for as long as you can. Not only does it totally piss them off when they find out that you're screwing with them, but every minute that they spend talking to you is a minute less that they have to potentially make money from scamming someone else.
If everyone who got these calls would just answer and talk to them for a single minute without giving them any usable information, it would become so unprofitable that they would have to shut down.
Gerrymandering can be used for good too such as creating voting districts consisting of mostly Blacks or other minorities so they can elect a (favored minority) representative
Whether or not this is ever "good" is debatable, to say the least.
I live in a so-called "majority-minority" district which was considered a lock for a minority candidate since its creation. The incumbent has done such a poor job that he came fairly close to losing the election in 2010. The response? They adjusted the lines to pull extra minorities into his district to ensure that would never happen again.
The message there was clear: your vote counts for nothing. The representative has already been chosen by those who set up the districts.
How invasive would this really be considered, and beyond privacy concerns, how are they going to deal with the humiliation that their employees feel as a result of this?
Maybe the first thing to do is figure out why some people would be "humiliated" if other people found out that they use the restroom.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll put it this way: Trying to do modern biology without learning evolution is like trying to do modern chemistry without learning how the periodic table works.
Honestly, I don't see that it's necessary for a high school biology course. You need to understand evolution to understand why things came to work the way they do -- but most introductory biology courses focus on what they do. Certainly anyone who goes beyond the "dissect a frog" and "identify the parts of a cell" stuff of a typical high school biology course should learn about evolution, but most students don't get any further than that.
In any case, I'm not saying that evolution should not be taught. I'm saying that the fact that people fixate on evolution, when there are more relevant topics that are being ignored, is indicative of the fact that the driving force behind the debate is not a desire to improve children's education.
The periodic table is a good example of another topic that is at least as important to understand, and yet gets much less attention in education. Your average high school graduate could at least give a one-sentence explanation of evolution (even if they might not "believe" in it.) I would be surprised if the average graduate could even come up with halfway reasonable definition of an "element," much less tell you anything about the periodic table.
You may teach your children as you like, but to never teach them about evolution is abuse.
I could easily come up with dozens of scientific theories and concepts that are certainly more important to be taught than evolution.
Do you consider it abuse to not teach kids about Newton's laws of motion? Sadly, I would be willing to bet that most products of the public education system have a better concept of evolution than of inertia.
This is the problem that I have with the whole evolution/creationism in education debate: the theory of evolution is just not that important. The loudmouths on both sides of this debate aren't interested in education; they're just using it as a proxy to attack their political enemies.
Try fixing the general state of science education, and then you can go attack the evolution in education question all you want.
I kind of felt the same way on Linux/BSD platforms -- why couldn't everything be compiled statically? How much more disk space would it REALLY take to have an entire system statically linked?
Disk space isn't the only concern -- it probably isn't even the most important one, at least not anymore.
If all of your programs are statically linked, then they may (in practice, almost certainly "will") all be using different versions of the same libraries. Some of them are going to be exposed to security problems fixed in later versions and some of them will be incompatible with configuration options that you are using. If you want to upgrade a library, or apply a patch, or even switch from using one library to a compatible one, you will have to recompile every single program on your system from scratch.
I wrote about this above... in terms of AC/DC using it it's just an excuse.
If it's just an excuse, then what was the real reason?
I'm serious about that question -- I can't think of any particular ulterior motive that they could have to withholding a digital release. Perhaps they were trying to negotiate for a better deal, but that seems like a fairly roundabout way to do it when they could have just said "we want more money."
Sure it works. It's just that it only works if voters aren't stupid. Continuing to vote for the liars (because somebody told them that they have no other choice) is stupidity.
Because Obama told congress it wasn't a tax, but then told the supreme court it WAS a tax.
Obama flat out lied.
How do you expect the average Joe Sixpack voter to stay informed if the politicians are always lying?
Generally speaking I am SICK of people blaming uneducated voters for being sheeple. They are victims, and the elite are actively deceiving them precisely because they do not WANT educated voters waking up to the crap they're pulling.
If people are too stupid to figure out that when "the government" pays for something, that money comes from taxes, then I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for them.
We have a chance to throw out the liars every couple years. The results of not doing so are our own fault.
No developer in their right mind would claim that including APIs induces a derived work (LOL Oracle).
This is exactly the position that the FSF takes (and led to their creation of the LGPL).
If Chief Burbank gets his way, these tiny, weightless cameras...
I assume that you get weightless cameras from the same store that physics professors get their "frictionless inclines" and "massless pulleys" from?
I do my own taxes and have never taken that deduction.
Well, I commend you for standing by what you believe.
But could you explain why you think that it's a "tax dodge" to not pay taxes on money that you give away? The amount of money that you save on your taxes is only a fraction of the amount that you actually gave to charity, so it would make no sense for an individual to make a monetary donation to charity in order to reduce their taxes. (Non-monetary donations and corporate donations are perhaps a little less clear-cut.)
No, it only applies to MOTOR VEHICLES which meet certain definitions. One of those definitions is that it must BURN or Combust, by the definitions of fuel in that chapter (60? 61?) and pursuant to definitions further found in chapter 90.
Well, I'm not a lawyer, but the definition here straight from chapter 90 doesn't seem to say anything to that effect:
âoeMotor vehiclesâ, all vehicles constructed and designed for propulsion by power other than muscular power including such vehicles when pulled or towed by another motor vehicle, except railroad and railway cars, vehicles operated by the system known as trolley motor or trackless trolley under chapter one hundred and sixty-three or section ten of chapter five hundred and forty-four of the acts of nineteen hundred and forty-seven, vehicles running only upon rails or tracks, vehicles used for other purposes than the transportation of property and incapable of being driven at a speed exceeding twelve miles per hour and which are used exclusively for the building, repair and maintenance of highways or designed especially for use elsewhere than on the travelled part of ways, wheelchairs owned and operated by invalids and vehicles which are operated or guided by a person on foot; provided, however, that the exception for trackless trolleys provided herein shall not apply to sections seventeen, twenty-one, twenty-four, twenty-four I, twenty-five and twenty-six. The definition of âoeMotor vehiclesâ shall not include motorized bicycles. In doubtful cases, the registrar may determine whether or not any particular vehicle is a motor vehicle as herein defined. If he determines that it should be so classified, he may require that it be registered under this chapter, but such determination shall not be admissible as evidence in any action at law arising out of the use or operation of such vehicle previous to such determination.
Where does the law say that it applies only to vehicles that burn fuel?
IMO, there should be no deductions for charity; a tax dodge isn't charity.
Maybe there should and maybe there shouldn't, but no matter how you slice it, calling giving to charity a "tax dodge" is inaccurate, to say the least. That's typically a line from people that have never done their own taxes, and so don't understand how those deductions work.
That is the only thing that should be taken into consideration. As long as it was between consenting adults, an affair is between him, the 'afairee' and his family. As long as it doesn't effect one's job performance its really nobody's business.
Personally, It seems to me that someone with a demonstrable lack of integrity is not suited for the job of the director of the CIA.
I think you might have trouble selling it as a toy.
Outside of a war zone, flamethrowers designed as weapons are essentially never used for anything but the entertainment of the user. In other words -- a toy.
Hey, wanna buy a flamethrower?
As it happens, flamethrowers may be legally owned in most parts of the US.
Obviously somebody missed the "if it would be possible for a child to injure themselves with something, then it must be banned!" memo.
When you have a product that actually kills kids, it's not mindless regulation to ban it.
Here's a list of some products that I have within reach of my desk right now that have actually killed kids:
The fact of the matter is that these magnets really aren't any more dangerous than any number of common household items. If you're that frightened of them, keep them out of your own house. Banning them is utterly ridiculous.
Even though they removed the Javascript, It is still effectively hidden on most monitors.
Just like Slashdot has hidden your comment, because I have to scroll down to see it?
I don't think he was ordered to post his comment by a judge.
I don't really see how that is relevant to the question of whether having to scroll a webpage -- a perfectly standard activity for anyone who uses a web browser -- constitutes "hiding" information below the first page. It's either hiding the information or it's not, regardless of the reason why the information the information is there.
No, because Slashdot did not configure the graphics on the page to make it LOOK as if you are at the bottom of the page when you really are not. Furthermore, forcing the page to automatically resize the graphics to constantly reinforce the illusion that you are at the bottom of the page is also something that Slashdot and other websites with nothing to hide are NOT doing.
The scrollbar -- complete with visual feedback of how much of the page you are viewing -- works exactly the same way on Apple's page that it does on Slashdot.
Even though they removed the Javascript, It is still effectively hidden on most monitors.
Just like Slashdot has hidden your comment, because I have to scroll down to see it?
These magnets should be regulated to be sold only to those over 18. Like many other potentially dangerous products.
Like candy bars, or batteries?
What would you put on your curriculum?
I would start with teaching people what positions the candidates actually hold on political issues. My experience has been that most voters know nothing about the candidates they vote for besides whether they have a "D" or an "R" next to their name.
Ideally, I would like a requirement that you have to demonstrate some knowledge of a candidate before you are allowed to cast a vote.
1. Declare a national holiday so all can vote on a day off to eliminate the lines.
2. Get rid of the electoral college.
3. Get Congress to override Citizen United.
4. Take the money out of the electoral system.
Funny, I'd put "educate the voting public" ahead of any of those.
Of course, it will never happen, since it suits both major parties perfectly well to keep the voters ignorant.
Was very sad I wasn't asked to prove who I was other than I knew a name and and address off the top of my head.
Security is for important things, like Facebook accounts; not unimportant things, like selecting the President of the US.
Don't try talking to the operators of these calls. They're abusive or they just hang up fast. I once tried to play along, but they told me I wasn't eligible, so they called me again two days later.
If you're not busy, you can get some entertainment out of stringing them along for as long as you can. Not only does it totally piss them off when they find out that you're screwing with them, but every minute that they spend talking to you is a minute less that they have to potentially make money from scamming someone else.
If everyone who got these calls would just answer and talk to them for a single minute without giving them any usable information, it would become so unprofitable that they would have to shut down.
Gerrymandering can be used for good too such as creating voting districts consisting of mostly Blacks or other minorities so they can elect a (favored minority) representative
Whether or not this is ever "good" is debatable, to say the least.
I live in a so-called "majority-minority" district which was considered a lock for a minority candidate since its creation. The incumbent has done such a poor job that he came fairly close to losing the election in 2010. The response? They adjusted the lines to pull extra minorities into his district to ensure that would never happen again.
The message there was clear: your vote counts for nothing. The representative has already been chosen by those who set up the districts.
How invasive would this really be considered, and beyond privacy concerns, how are they going to deal with the humiliation that their employees feel as a result of this?
Maybe the first thing to do is figure out why some people would be "humiliated" if other people found out that they use the restroom.