Doubtful. I work in education, and federal-level funding has gone up rather sharply since Bush took office, mainly due to NCLB. I think the feds provide something like $38B in direct funding to states now. Of course, a lot of this is entailed for things like after school programs, so your mileage and personal school experience may vary.
One of the best propositions to come out of California was Prop 13 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prop_13) which capped property tax increases. As a result of that, even with spiraling house prices (well, not recently) here in California, people have been able to afford keeping their homes. When I was in Connecticut a couple months ago, I saw what happens without a measure like that, which huge property taxes being probably the biggest issue the residents of the state face right now.
There's a reason why there's userblocks for "This user has made xx,000 edits to Wikipedia". Often you'll read of a new admin who'll have "joined November 2006, made 11,000 edits, then became admin April 2007". 11,000 edits in 4 months? Right. And Wikipedia encourages this kind of behavior by tracking this, and then making laudatory stats pages which show the "top 10 editors", which is amazingly stupid.
When I completely rewrote a major section of the Taekwondo article, I made... one edit. If I'd been one of these attention-seeking people, I'd have made each word a different edit, to artificially boost my nonsensical "edit count".
I have seen similar statements about a person's edit count, and agree that there's really no valid reason for it, unless maybe that it's the person's first post ever (in an AfD discussion??) which might be evidence he's a sockpuppet. There's this sort of sneering sense of superiority among people with these artificially inflated edit counts towards normal users, as if normal users couldn't go around reformatting dates or adding citation-needed tags to every other sentence in random articles.
Assuming a) he's not behind the scenes pulling strings, unlikely not to be the case, as he's still very vocal on mailing lists, and b) he doesn't have a sockpuppet (hell, I'd be surprised if he didn't have another admin sockpuppet).
Uh, I'm not a tax guy (IANATG?), but I'm pretty sure your property taxes went up because, ya know, your house is worth more now than it was in the 1970s.
>>If you look at every one of these cases, who keeps popping up? It's the same group of editors - David Gerard, JayJG, JzG, SlimVirgin, etc... all with the blessing of Der Fuehrer Jimbo.
I don't know the other guys, but I really detest JayJG. He would do "drive-by reversions" on completely uncontroversial edits, like adding ISBN numbers to book entries, or modifying a summary to better reflect the article below, usually saying they were "unsupported edits".
Looking at his history list at the time, he was doing between one to three reversions a minute, so there's no fucking way he actually read the article in question to see that the summary changes were, in fact, reflective of the article below (which also had the references in question). Changing it to have the reference in the summary, he'd revert it saying that there was now too much link cruft in the summary.
Either he was pushing his own personal agenda (which, looking at his history of 'edits', I'm strongly inclined to believe), or he was just trying to boost his "edit count" in some sort of retarded metric that a lot of wikipedians share, that rank people by the numbers of edits they make, which is perfectly retarded. I saw a admin ignore one guy's post in a edit war thread because he "only had 80 edits".
I actually prefer to make edits anonymously, since I'd rather have the edits judged solely on their merits, and not traced to me as well, in case a potential employer googles me, but the wikipedian admins (ignoring the don't bite the newbs policy) tend to treat all anonymous edits as vitriolic spam, regardless of quality. You know what? Just turn off anonymous editing on all of wikipedia if you're going to reject the addition of something as noncontroversial as adding ISBN numbers to a page, ok? Right now, they're just pretending to allow anonymous edits.
Try the following experiment: make 10 anonymous edits to a {{controverisal}} page, then make 10 while logged in, and see if their isn't a bias there.
The only really positive thing is that it seems JayJG has retired (an extended so-called "wikibreak", which is a perfectly retarded term as well, IMO).
>>If it's unprovabal, it's not science, and therefor, has no place in the schoolroom.
Huh, well, English is unprovable as well, should we therefore say it has no place in the classroom?
Philosophy of Language, if you've ever studied it, is one of the most self-contradictory and complex topics out there.
If you limit things to be taught in the classroom to just things that can be empirically proven through science, I think you'll eliminate pretty much every class in school. Think about it: Journalism? Football? Math? Even evolution can't be put in a test tube and replicated.
Most "paradoxes" like this come from using poorly defined terms. In this case, it's equating "infinite" with "has all properties" or something along those lines, which doesn't make a lot of sense. We can have a concept of an infinite number, after all, that doesn't include good or evil.
God has the capability of doing evil, but chooses not to.
Yeah, my thanksgiving was similar. My family all whacking virtual tennis balls at each other and bowling all day. We all worked up quite a sweat, since we were swinging our arms for real, and not just wiggling it a little bit.
We did smack a door, and two of the dogs (who unfortunately kept trying to sniff the controllers while serving), but it was one of the most fun times I've had with my family in a long time.
Was why I got one, actually.
In Fresno, a local Target on the edge of town had 146 Wiis in stock (not a typo, they checked their stock room for me), when I got mine, and they hadn't sold out in months.
I think that kind of explains why some people are having time trying to find them... their delivery people are getting lazy, and just dropping them all off at the first store they get to.
If I ask for help in writing, say, a red-black tree implementation, and you answer saying, "here's how you can do it!" I think there's an implicit agreement saying the OP could use the code.
Even though I had my car broken into twice during the two years I lived in the Bay Area, I'd gladly take a higher crime rate if it meant I could get to the airport (40 minutes by car) in 1 hour by mass transit, as opposed to the 3 hours it currently takes.
I think BART is rated at $25M/mile, at least the last time I read a report on it.
And they considered that too expensive to do anything with it, so there's gaping holes in the BART network that will permanently be plugged with buses.
Hmm, a Maglev between San Francisco and San Diego would only be $500 billion dollars, or roughly equivalent to the Department of Defense's entire budget for the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars.
I'm reasonably confident I wouldn't buy any product marketed as containing unicorn blood and pomegranates.
(Unless maybe it was a smoothie or something. Unicorn blood and pomegranates both grant eternal life, so the only thing better than living forever, is living twice as forever.)
Yes, thank you for pointing this out. Most people on Slashdot seem to think there's a linear relationship between radiation exposure and death. They think "If X leads to 100% mortality, then 1% of X should lead to 1% of mortality, or 'hidden diseases' or stuff like that." It turns out that it's actually a very non-linear relationship.
The human body actually has the ability to produce anti-oxidants, which increase when exposed to radiation, since you get more free radicals floating around your body when exposed to radiation. At low radiation levels (i.e. where your body isn't suffering a lot of trauma from the radiation itself), it's doubtful that radiation leads to increased mortality at all. In fact, as you pointed out, due to the higher levels of antioxidants (and possible other mechanisms we don't know about), higher (but still low) levels of radiation have been associated with lowered mortality.
I read about this when I was in college over 10 years ago, so this isn't exactly new news at all, though most people aren't aware of it.
Anyone else find this quote troubling: "Like you don't open a double-A battery, you just plug [the reactor] in and it does its chemical thing inside of it. You don't ever open it or mess with it."'
A chemical reaction is not a nuclear reaction. I think that any company that doesn't understand this difference shouldn't really be in the business of making portable nuclear reactors.
I'm sure people here will have any number of criticisms to the idea of a portable nuclear reactor, but it's actually a very old concept. The arctic early-warning radar systems back in the cold war days had truck-sized nuclear reactors developed for them.
Wow, thanks for giving me a reference on Godwin's Law.:p
Actually, it's a perfectly reasonable example. The Nazi's were able to do experiments unconstrained by ethics or religion. There are many useful and unethical experiments which we can't replicate since our only data points came from Nazi Germany.
The ethics debate over stem cells, which anyone would agree has a strong religious element to it, is a good example of how the two spheres of influence (what Gould would call Non-overlapping magisteria) should overlap with each other. Science cannot make normative claims -- religion and ethics can. Science can only make positive claims.
As long as the skin cells are not taken through a form that could be considered a viable human, I think this should end the ethical problems with stem cells nicely.
The issue people have with stem cell research is not stem cells per se, but that the harvesting of embryonic stem cells results in the destruction of a viable human.
Remember, religious people haven't had issues with adult stem cell research -- which this is. It's only embryonic stem cell research and SCNT processes which result in a viable human that people take ethical issues with.
If this can directly transform a skin cell into heart cells or whatever without moving through an "embryonic" state, then it's really the best of both worlds.
Heh, I used to use a 6800 with a 3800+. Replaced it with a 7950 and it was a huge, huge step up in performance. I also replaced my CPU with a dual core 4800+, which helped a fair amount, too, especially with background activity going on.
Get an NVIDIA 7950 ($160 on Newegg) or a 8600GTS ($149 for a 256MB / $179 for a 512MB). Even though the 7950 is actually faster on a lot of games, I'd go with the 8600GTS -- it's a very fast card for the price, and runs DX10. It also has a higher nominal 3DMARK score than the 7950, even though game benchmarks are a bit lower.
I'm using a 8800GTS, which is nice and fast, but is incredibly hot. It generates huge amounts of waste heat, meaning I actually have to run the AC in my room or it gets uncomfortable sitting next to my computer.
Hmm, back when I had an easily OCable CPU, I noted that a 50% increase in CPU speed was worth about a 20% increase in 3DMARK performance. Not terrible, but not worth the effort for me on future machines with CPUs that were less OCable.
System ran at a 50% overclock for 4 years with no stability issues.
Slashdot Mirror
What's sad is that 20 years later, FF1 is still the best. With the possible exception of FF Tactics.
Sorry, that was in New Jersey, not Connecticut.
Doubtful. I work in education, and federal-level funding has gone up rather sharply since Bush took office, mainly due to NCLB. I think the feds provide something like $38B in direct funding to states now. Of course, a lot of this is entailed for things like after school programs, so your mileage and personal school experience may vary.
One of the best propositions to come out of California was Prop 13 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prop_13) which capped property tax increases. As a result of that, even with spiraling house prices (well, not recently) here in California, people have been able to afford keeping their homes. When I was in Connecticut a couple months ago, I saw what happens without a measure like that, which huge property taxes being probably the biggest issue the residents of the state face right now.
There's a reason why there's userblocks for "This user has made xx,000 edits to Wikipedia". Often you'll read of a new admin who'll have "joined November 2006, made 11,000 edits, then became admin April 2007". 11,000 edits in 4 months?
:p
Right. And Wikipedia encourages this kind of behavior by tracking this, and then making laudatory stats pages which show the "top 10 editors", which is amazingly stupid.
When I completely rewrote a major section of the Taekwondo article, I made... one edit. If I'd been one of these attention-seeking people, I'd have made each word a different edit, to artificially boost my nonsensical "edit count".
I have seen similar statements about a person's edit count, and agree that there's really no valid reason for it, unless maybe that it's the person's first post ever (in an AfD discussion??) which might be evidence he's a sockpuppet. There's this sort of sneering sense of superiority among people with these artificially inflated edit counts towards normal users, as if normal users couldn't go around reformatting dates or adding citation-needed tags to every other sentence in random articles.
Assuming a) he's not behind the scenes pulling strings, unlikely not to be the case, as he's still very vocal on mailing lists, and b) he doesn't have a sockpuppet (hell, I'd be surprised if he didn't have another admin sockpuppet).
Is he? Oh, wonderful.
Uh, I'm not a tax guy (IANATG?), but I'm pretty sure your property taxes went up because, ya know, your house is worth more now than it was in the 1970s.
>>If you look at every one of these cases, who keeps popping up? It's the same group of editors - David Gerard, JayJG, JzG, SlimVirgin, etc... all with the blessing of Der Fuehrer Jimbo.
I don't know the other guys, but I really detest JayJG. He would do "drive-by reversions" on completely uncontroversial edits, like adding ISBN numbers to book entries, or modifying a summary to better reflect the article below, usually saying they were "unsupported edits".
Looking at his history list at the time, he was doing between one to three reversions a minute, so there's no fucking way he actually read the article in question to see that the summary changes were, in fact, reflective of the article below (which also had the references in question). Changing it to have the reference in the summary, he'd revert it saying that there was now too much link cruft in the summary.
Either he was pushing his own personal agenda (which, looking at his history of 'edits', I'm strongly inclined to believe), or he was just trying to boost his "edit count" in some sort of retarded metric that a lot of wikipedians share, that rank people by the numbers of edits they make, which is perfectly retarded. I saw a admin ignore one guy's post in a edit war thread because he "only had 80 edits".
I actually prefer to make edits anonymously, since I'd rather have the edits judged solely on their merits, and not traced to me as well, in case a potential employer googles me, but the wikipedian admins (ignoring the don't bite the newbs policy) tend to treat all anonymous edits as vitriolic spam, regardless of quality. You know what? Just turn off anonymous editing on all of wikipedia if you're going to reject the addition of something as noncontroversial as adding ISBN numbers to a page, ok? Right now, they're just pretending to allow anonymous edits.
Try the following experiment: make 10 anonymous edits to a {{controverisal}} page, then make 10 while logged in, and see if their isn't a bias there.
The only really positive thing is that it seems JayJG has retired (an extended so-called "wikibreak", which is a perfectly retarded term as well, IMO).
>>But Ron Paul isn't a viable substitute. It's like replacing your dog, who won't stop shitting on the floor, with an untamed raccoon.
What does that make Hillary then?
Oh, wait, Newt Ginrich's mom already made that joke.
>>If it's unprovabal, it's not science, and therefor, has no place in the schoolroom.
Huh, well, English is unprovable as well, should we therefore say it has no place in the classroom?
Philosophy of Language, if you've ever studied it, is one of the most self-contradictory and complex topics out there.
If you limit things to be taught in the classroom to just things that can be empirically proven through science, I think you'll eliminate pretty much every class in school. Think about it: Journalism? Football? Math? Even evolution can't be put in a test tube and replicated.
Most "paradoxes" like this come from using poorly defined terms. In this case, it's equating "infinite" with "has all properties" or something along those lines, which doesn't make a lot of sense. We can have a concept of an infinite number, after all, that doesn't include good or evil.
God has the capability of doing evil, but chooses not to.
Oops, meant to paste this after the first paragraph above:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2006/20061113.jpg
Yeah, my thanksgiving was similar. My family all whacking virtual tennis balls at each other and bowling all day. We all worked up quite a sweat, since we were swinging our arms for real, and not just wiggling it a little bit.
We did smack a door, and two of the dogs (who unfortunately kept trying to sniff the controllers while serving), but it was one of the most fun times I've had with my family in a long time.
Was why I got one, actually.
In Fresno, a local Target on the edge of town had 146 Wiis in stock (not a typo, they checked their stock room for me), when I got mine, and they hadn't sold out in months.
I think that kind of explains why some people are having time trying to find them... their delivery people are getting lazy, and just dropping them all off at the first store they get to.
Depends. IANAL, but intent matters.
If I ask for help in writing, say, a red-black tree implementation, and you answer saying, "here's how you can do it!" I think there's an implicit agreement saying the OP could use the code.
Even though I had my car broken into twice during the two years I lived in the Bay Area, I'd gladly take a higher crime rate if it meant I could get to the airport (40 minutes by car) in 1 hour by mass transit, as opposed to the 3 hours it currently takes.
I think BART is rated at $25M/mile, at least the last time I read a report on it.
And they considered that too expensive to do anything with it, so there's gaping holes in the BART network that will permanently be plugged with buses.
Hmm, a Maglev between San Francisco and San Diego would only be $500 billion dollars, or roughly equivalent to the Department of Defense's entire budget for the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars.
Somehow, I don't see that happening. Ever.
I'm reasonably confident I wouldn't buy any product marketed as containing unicorn blood and pomegranates.
(Unless maybe it was a smoothie or something. Unicorn blood and pomegranates both grant eternal life, so the only thing better than living forever, is living twice as forever.)
Yes, thank you for pointing this out. Most people on Slashdot seem to think there's a linear relationship between radiation exposure and death. They think "If X leads to 100% mortality, then 1% of X should lead to 1% of mortality, or 'hidden diseases' or stuff like that." It turns out that it's actually a very non-linear relationship.
The human body actually has the ability to produce anti-oxidants, which increase when exposed to radiation, since you get more free radicals floating around your body when exposed to radiation. At low radiation levels (i.e. where your body isn't suffering a lot of trauma from the radiation itself), it's doubtful that radiation leads to increased mortality at all. In fact, as you pointed out, due to the higher levels of antioxidants (and possible other mechanisms we don't know about), higher (but still low) levels of radiation have been associated with lowered mortality.
I read about this when I was in college over 10 years ago, so this isn't exactly new news at all, though most people aren't aware of it.
Anyone else find this quote troubling: "Like you don't open a double-A battery, you just plug [the reactor] in and it does its chemical thing inside of it. You don't ever open it or mess with it."'
A chemical reaction is not a nuclear reaction. I think that any company that doesn't understand this difference shouldn't really be in the business of making portable nuclear reactors.
I'm sure people here will have any number of criticisms to the idea of a portable nuclear reactor, but it's actually a very old concept. The arctic early-warning radar systems back in the cold war days had truck-sized nuclear reactors developed for them.
The question is about science done without consideration of ethics, and Mengele is an outstanding example of that.
Wow, thanks for giving me a reference on Godwin's Law. :p
Actually, it's a perfectly reasonable example. The Nazi's were able to do experiments unconstrained by ethics or religion. There are many useful and unethical experiments which we can't replicate since our only data points came from Nazi Germany.
The ethics debate over stem cells, which anyone would agree has a strong religious element to it, is a good example of how the two spheres of influence (what Gould would call Non-overlapping magisteria) should overlap with each other. Science cannot make normative claims -- religion and ethics can. Science can only make positive claims.
Yes, when science beat religion in Nazi German, it was great! ...
Oh wait, no it wasn't. You got Mengele, poster child for science without restraint.
Ethics-ly inclined people, then. =)
As long as the skin cells are not taken through a form that could be considered a viable human, I think this should end the ethical problems with stem cells nicely.
The issue people have with stem cell research is not stem cells per se, but that the harvesting of embryonic stem cells results in the destruction of a viable human.
Remember, religious people haven't had issues with adult stem cell research -- which this is. It's only embryonic stem cell research and SCNT processes which result in a viable human that people take ethical issues with.
If this can directly transform a skin cell into heart cells or whatever without moving through an "embryonic" state, then it's really the best of both worlds.
Heh, I used to use a 6800 with a 3800+. Replaced it with a 7950 and it was a huge, huge step up in performance. I also replaced my CPU with a dual core 4800+, which helped a fair amount, too, especially with background activity going on.
Get an NVIDIA 7950 ($160 on Newegg) or a 8600GTS ($149 for a 256MB / $179 for a 512MB). Even though the 7950 is actually faster on a lot of games, I'd go with the 8600GTS -- it's a very fast card for the price, and runs DX10. It also has a higher nominal 3DMARK score than the 7950, even though game benchmarks are a bit lower.
I'm using a 8800GTS, which is nice and fast, but is incredibly hot. It generates huge amounts of waste heat, meaning I actually have to run the AC in my room or it gets uncomfortable sitting next to my computer.
>>Out of curiosity, why didn't HL2 do anything for you? Did you not play the first game/not play to the end?
HL2 was just a giant Havok physics puzzle.
I'm actually curious what they worked on in the game for the four years before they licensed the Havok engine.
Hmm, back when I had an easily OCable CPU, I noted that a 50% increase in CPU speed was worth about a 20% increase in 3DMARK performance. Not terrible, but not worth the effort for me on future machines with CPUs that were less OCable.
System ran at a 50% overclock for 4 years with no stability issues.