As a kid who grew up in America saying the pledge to the flag every morning, I can report that its not brainwashing, its more like insensitivity training. After a few repetitions it looses all its meaning (if any of us understood what it really meant in the first place) and you start wondering what the point of an enforced display is.
In about 3rd or 4th grade I tried not participating, just staying quietly in my seat, and was scolded for it. I figured if I pushed the issue they'd drop it, but at that age I didn't have the strength of conviction to do it on principle alone. From then on I stood quietly with my hands behind my back, which, evidently, was acceptable.
Even with insurance, a doctor's appointment is months away
You need to find a new doctor. The half-dozen or so times I've needed to see my regular doctor outside of a regularly=scheduled checkup I've always had the option of coming in the same day, within a few hours.
However, given the cost of decent medical insurance, if one is a healthy, single person in an industry not associated with high injury risk, its probably not a bad idea to go without insurance and just contribute a couple hundred bucks a month to an investment account instead.
Once you start getting up to 35 or 40, or have to pay for a non-working spouse or children, then insurace starts to become a viable option.
Its all a risks game though. If you don't have insurance and you rack up a quarter million dollar hospital bill from some serious trauma, you'll be pretty screwed for a long time. If you make a good living the government won't pay for much of it, and you'll owe the hospital for a long, long time. On the plus side, I don't think medical debits show up on your credit score (privacy concerns).
To be perfectly honest however, there is a law that states that everybody should have equal rights to a license, so it really depends on what the license entails as to whether any other person would have rights to use the code under the same non-GPL license restrictions. i.e. If the developer paid the copyright holders 1$ each, anybody should be allowed to get the same license for the same price
What? That sounds silly. As owner of a copyrighted work, it should be my perogative to license it to whomever I choose, for whatever I can convince them to give me for it.
Its a regular practice in many vertical markets to charge every customer differently (normally as much as you can wring out of them), and its not uncommon to make the sign a non-disclosure regarding the licensing terms.
100 pretty saavy guys all with their own agendas and loyalties and flunkies trying to legislate for 350,000,000 people, 175,000,000 of whom are of below average intelligence, many of the rest of whom are intelligent, but clueless of what it really takes to deal with potentially 175,000,000 idiots picking the countries leaders based on nothing more than television ads and 'Crossfire', and you want them to take time to vote on every piddling bit of crap that some idiot somewhere managed to lobby into existance?
What we could use is some automation to handle relatively minor issues at a lower level so those 100 guys can spend their time on the important stuff without screwing people who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
For example, the high school I attended needed $4 million to build a new wing. The funds were obtained as part of a rider on an important bill that had absolutely no connection to schools or construction. Its a dumb way to have to get stuff. Had the bill been unpopular the school would not have gotten the money. So the success of the project depended on playing political games to put the appropriation in the right place (instead of someone else getting their appropriation there), and in no way depended on the merit of the project, which maybe 2 people in the entire federal government give more than a rats ass about.
We need a system that can keep local stuff local, and unlink minor stuff from things of national consequence. It'll never happen though, its too big a project and too many people like it just the way it is.
I'd also like to know the nature of the deaths. If the people killed under Saddam were non-combatants (women, children, elderly, etc), and those killed during the invasion and occupation were willing combatants, then I don't have a problem with the latter figure being greater.
Do they call up the utility company and verify the account information?
If not its pretty trivial to print out a fake.
If they do call the utility company, do they make the mistake of using the telephone number printed on the bill that you provide? (if they are going to all that trouble, I'd guess not, but its a possability).
The parties aren't the problem. The root of the problem is that each voter can only vote for one candidate. Since we have two very strong parties, third parties are almost guarenteed to loose. The herd behavior is to not 'waste' the vote on an almost sure looser.
You could say 'people just need to get a spine and vote how they want', but that is simply not how change happens in a large society.
The solution is instant runoff voting, where each voter ranks the candidates in order of preference. This allows people like myself who would prefer a libertarian candidate over a dem or repub to vote for them, without loosing my chance to also express my vote about which of the the favorites is prefered (in reality I vote libertarian anyway, because as noted in another post, the other two are essentially equally evil, so it doesn't matter anyway. I consider my vote not a vote toward who is to be President, but a vote against our existing voting system).
All voting systems have quirks, so there is a trade-off when choosing one over another, but so far I think instant runoff is the most optimal. Visit the FairVote website for more information.
Hawking recently reversed his position on that, he no longer believes that information is destroyed. He conceded his bet to a fellow on that subject. It was all over the (geek) news not long ago.
Anyway, no serious scientists have believed that the universe is determinisitic since Heisenberg came up with some sort of principle about that. I'm not partical physicists, but I think it had something to do with holodecks, coupled uncertanty compensators and transporters.
The answer in Gen 1 is that Evil is, well, evil. There is nothing good in it. Even knowledge of it is wrong.
Hmm, that sounds like something a Jehovahs Witness might say. Such a person would protect themselves by reading only those things published by an 'approved' source, such as the Watchtower Society.
I don't think I've heard a Christian say that knowledge of evil/wrong is in itself wrong/sinful.
Eh, you're just trying to pull a causality violation into it. The truth is that people give their god all the maximal 'good' qualities, and say that that is simply the only way we, with our limited intellects, can even get close to understanding what god truely is. God's true nature is so far beyond us that we cannot understand his reasons or make conjectures about why he would do something.
Now, I'm an athiest, so I think thats all a crock of shite, but I understand what they're saying. They are saying that they haven't a clue either, and they want to believe in a cosmic Daddy Warbucks so they they feel safe and loved, even though they are really just nekkid animals scratching out a precarious life in a cold, uncaring world.
Me, I'm happy in a cold uncaring world, long as I know I'm not lying to myself.
Clearly, a highly intelligent designer of a very complex system would design the system such that it used evolution to minimize design errors.
Therefore, God exists and is a pretty smart cat.
Course, we're making observations from within the system. For all we know, our complexity relative to our designer could be similar to that of a very small shell script to ourselves.
You're walking through the desert and you notice neat, uniform ripples in the sand, and you just know someone created it.
Right, says the believer in ID, God was responsible for the design of the rules of the universe that give rise to the particle dynamics that cause the blowing sand to form into those ripples.
You see, one of the problems with ID is that there are no possible counter-examples. It simply defines everything to have been created by an intelligent agent. The 'theory' of Intelligent Design cannot be falsified nor does it make testable predictions.
It seems that its primary purpose lately is to let religous orginizations get some representation in public schools.
Personally I don't have a problem with people believing that God or whomever designed the universe, it makes not the slightest difference as far as science and learning goes. My problem ID proponents is that they often create appearance of conflict where none exists. The process of science is just intended to find answers that best explain what we see around us, nothing more. It should take away none of the wonder or awe that the faithful feel. If anything it should add to it.
an Intelligent Design theorist [...] would say that a designer is necessary precisely because it is simpler to postulate a designer than to postulate the world we know coming about without one.
Given the evident complexity and our fairly apparent lack of ability to see deeply enough to easily explain things, I'm not convinced that any one is now, or ever will be smart enough to say whether it is more plausable that the universe was designed by an intelligent agent or just 'is'.
I don't have a problem with either solution, but I look around and see many religions, and members of many of them are convinced that others are wrong. It seems apparent to me that there are a great number of people smarter than myself (and even more that are dumber), many of whom are wrong. Given this I don't see any choice that I can make that has a good probability of being correct. Instead it is more rational to invest my energies elsewhere until such time that there is sufficent information to make an informed choice.
Why bother making a world that doesn't look like you made it.
Its more fun that way.
But seriously, you can't ask 'why' of any motivation of a god. Either there is no real 'why' because the god is a fictional character, or because a gods motives are beyond the capacity of humans to even begin to grasp.
Just pick a belief system that makes you feel warm and fuzzy and keep your eyes open for actions that arise from that belief system make you or your fellow humans unhappy. Adjust as necessary to balance the unhappyness with whatever lifestyle you find necessary. Reality check occasionally by opening your mind and visiting with people with many other belief systems. If you find you have to make laws to keep people in your belief system, you're probably doing something wrong.
Regarding the creation myth in Genesis, it's completely unimportant to Judeo-Christian beliefs. It was thrown in there as an example of the omnipetence of Yaweh, not as an explanation of how the world was formed and life was created. To claim that the purpose of Genesis is to inform you of the how's and why's of creation is to completely miss the point.
This is the best part about religion. You can make up any explanation of why something is the way it is, and nobody can show you to be wrong.
You can even start an entire new religon, or just fork an existing one Just make up what you want, claim divine inspiration, and you're golden (reference Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon, and L. Ron Hubbard and the Church of Scientology).
I've heard before that part of the concern with stuff like this is that it makes it harder to compare todays players with those from decades past. They make a point of trying to keep baseball construction as consistant as they can so that todays players will be hitting a ball that reacts as much as possible like the ball that Babe Ruth was hitting.
Now, I'm all for performance enhancements of all types as long as its disclosed, but I don't see any problem with also banning enhancements from certain sports to stay with the spirit of that event. Perhaps we need events for enhanced and 'all natural' players. I mean, theres more than 6 billion people on the planet, surely there's room for more than one way to play any give game?
In any case, the important thing is not that it has an infinite series of decimal digits; so does 1/3.
Indeed. So does 1/2. It just happens that the repeating portion is all zeros. We call the special case of repeating zeros 'terminating', although it doesn't really.
[RTGs] produce thermal energy through radioactive decay of Plutonium (not fission!), and directly convert it to electrical energy using thermoelectric devices (the Peltier effect). I don't recall what the efficiency of thermoelectric conversion is off the top of my head, but I don't think it's that good
Efficiency of production RTG's is about 3% to 7%. Nobody has produced one that hits 10%.
I think its more important that someone recognized when spreadsheets or other ad-hoc solutions start to become a drain on the business. At this point a team can evaluate what business processes they are being used for, how it fits in with other solutions, and perform the cost/benefit analysis of changing them.
Largish businesses without an internal team dedicated to dealing with that kind of stuff will likely waste quite a lot of time dealing with inefficent processes.
Disregard parent. GP is correct, high mass, low reps makes muscles stronger (and harder) without developing the tendancy to pump up as much.
I'm not what I'd consider a body builder (I don't do it to make myself look good oiled up in a speedo), but I train with weights using high mass low reps. Since I started a year ago the weight I'm lifting has gone way up (anywhere from 50% to 150% depending on muscle group), but other than losing some fat and filling out a bit I'm not much bigger.
Anyway, if you are a pasty, skinny geek, it doesn't matter how you lift the weights (presuming you don't hurt yourself), you'll gain muscle mass as well as strength for the first year or two. eventually you'll probably hit a point where you need to start using some more advanced techniques to continue making good gains.
AC misses the point. The morality problem is not with the reverse engineering, but with its social/political ramifications. While legal, it (predictably) caused the guys who make BitKeeper to pull their support, which causes problems for lots of people.
Curiously though, the shortcut installed in the start menu is still very slow to load. Takes it about 6 seconds to bring up the app, then the app loads very quickly. Running directly from the AcroRd32.exe is very fast. The icon seems to point to some of the installer dlls, not sure whats going on there, but its quite slow.
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As a kid who grew up in America saying the pledge to the flag every morning, I can report that its not brainwashing, its more like insensitivity training. After a few repetitions it looses all its meaning (if any of us understood what it really meant in the first place) and you start wondering what the point of an enforced display is.
In about 3rd or 4th grade I tried not participating, just staying quietly in my seat, and was scolded for it. I figured if I pushed the issue they'd drop it, but at that age I didn't have the strength of conviction to do it on principle alone. From then on I stood quietly with my hands behind my back, which, evidently, was acceptable.
Even with insurance, a doctor's appointment is months away
You need to find a new doctor. The half-dozen or so times I've needed to see my regular doctor outside of a regularly=scheduled checkup I've always had the option of coming in the same day, within a few hours.
However, given the cost of decent medical insurance, if one is a healthy, single person in an industry not associated with high injury risk, its probably not a bad idea to go without insurance and just contribute a couple hundred bucks a month to an investment account instead.
Once you start getting up to 35 or 40, or have to pay for a non-working spouse or children, then insurace starts to become a viable option.
Its all a risks game though. If you don't have insurance and you rack up a quarter million dollar hospital bill from some serious trauma, you'll be pretty screwed for a long time. If you make a good living the government won't pay for much of it, and you'll owe the hospital for a long, long time. On the plus side, I don't think medical debits show up on your credit score (privacy concerns).
To be perfectly honest however, there is a law that states that everybody should have equal rights to a license, so it really depends on what the license entails as to whether any other person would have rights to use the code under the same non-GPL license restrictions. i.e. If the developer paid the copyright holders 1$ each, anybody should be allowed to get the same license for the same price
What? That sounds silly. As owner of a copyrighted work, it should be my perogative to license it to whomever I choose, for whatever I can convince them to give me for it.
Its a regular practice in many vertical markets to charge every customer differently (normally as much as you can wring out of them), and its not uncommon to make the sign a non-disclosure regarding the licensing terms.
100 pretty saavy guys all with their own agendas and loyalties and flunkies trying to legislate for 350,000,000 people, 175,000,000 of whom are of below average intelligence, many of the rest of whom are intelligent, but clueless of what it really takes to deal with potentially 175,000,000 idiots picking the countries leaders based on nothing more than television ads and 'Crossfire', and you want them to take time to vote on every piddling bit of crap that some idiot somewhere managed to lobby into existance?
What we could use is some automation to handle relatively minor issues at a lower level so those 100 guys can spend their time on the important stuff without screwing people who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
For example, the high school I attended needed $4 million to build a new wing. The funds were obtained as part of a rider on an important bill that had absolutely no connection to schools or construction. Its a dumb way to have to get stuff. Had the bill been unpopular the school would not have gotten the money. So the success of the project depended on playing political games to put the appropriation in the right place (instead of someone else getting their appropriation there), and in no way depended on the merit of the project, which maybe 2 people in the entire federal government give more than a rats ass about.
We need a system that can keep local stuff local, and unlink minor stuff from things of national consequence. It'll never happen though, its too big a project and too many people like it just the way it is.
I'll second that.
I'd also like to know the nature of the deaths. If the people killed under Saddam were non-combatants (women, children, elderly, etc), and those killed during the invasion and occupation were willing combatants, then I don't have a problem with the latter figure being greater.
Do they call up the utility company and verify the account information?
If not its pretty trivial to print out a fake.
If they do call the utility company, do they make the mistake of using the telephone number printed on the bill that you provide? (if they are going to all that trouble, I'd guess not, but its a possability).
The parties aren't the problem. The root of the problem is that each voter can only vote for one candidate. Since we have two very strong parties, third parties are almost guarenteed to loose. The herd behavior is to not 'waste' the vote on an almost sure looser.
You could say 'people just need to get a spine and vote how they want', but that is simply not how change happens in a large society.
The solution is instant runoff voting, where each voter ranks the candidates in order of preference. This allows people like myself who would prefer a libertarian candidate over a dem or repub to vote for them, without loosing my chance to also express my vote about which of the the favorites is prefered (in reality I vote libertarian anyway, because as noted in another post, the other two are essentially equally evil, so it doesn't matter anyway. I consider my vote not a vote toward who is to be President, but a vote against our existing voting system).
All voting systems have quirks, so there is a trade-off when choosing one over another, but so far I think instant runoff is the most optimal. Visit the FairVote website for more information.
Here's an article link. The story was covered by a number of different sites and publications.
Hawking recently reversed his position on that, he no longer believes that information is destroyed. He conceded his bet to a fellow on that subject. It was all over the (geek) news not long ago.
Anyway, no serious scientists have believed that the universe is determinisitic since Heisenberg came up with some sort of principle about that. I'm not partical physicists, but I think it had something to do with holodecks, coupled uncertanty compensators and transporters.
The answer in Gen 1 is that Evil is, well, evil. There is nothing good in it. Even knowledge of it is wrong.
Hmm, that sounds like something a Jehovahs Witness might say. Such a person would protect themselves by reading only those things published by an 'approved' source, such as the Watchtower Society.
I don't think I've heard a Christian say that knowledge of evil/wrong is in itself wrong/sinful.
The cool part is that people can make untestable conjectures about an unknowable being and other people take them seriously.
Eh, you're just trying to pull a causality violation into it. The truth is that people give their god all the maximal 'good' qualities, and say that that is simply the only way we, with our limited intellects, can even get close to understanding what god truely is. God's true nature is so far beyond us that we cannot understand his reasons or make conjectures about why he would do something.
Now, I'm an athiest, so I think thats all a crock of shite, but I understand what they're saying. They are saying that they haven't a clue either, and they want to believe in a cosmic Daddy Warbucks so they they feel safe and loved, even though they are really just nekkid animals scratching out a precarious life in a cold, uncaring world.
Me, I'm happy in a cold uncaring world, long as I know I'm not lying to myself.
Clearly, a highly intelligent designer of a very complex system would design the system such that it used evolution to minimize design errors.
Therefore, God exists and is a pretty smart cat.
Course, we're making observations from within the system. For all we know, our complexity relative to our designer could be similar to that of a very small shell script to ourselves.
You're walking through the desert and you notice neat, uniform ripples in the sand, and you just know someone created it.
Right, says the believer in ID, God was responsible for the design of the rules of the universe that give rise to the particle dynamics that cause the blowing sand to form into those ripples.
You see, one of the problems with ID is that there are no possible counter-examples. It simply defines everything to have been created by an intelligent agent. The 'theory' of Intelligent Design cannot be falsified nor does it make testable predictions.
It seems that its primary purpose lately is to let religous orginizations get some representation in public schools.
Personally I don't have a problem with people believing that God or whomever designed the universe, it makes not the slightest difference as far as science and learning goes. My problem ID proponents is that they often create appearance of conflict where none exists. The process of science is just intended to find answers that best explain what we see around us, nothing more. It should take away none of the wonder or awe that the faithful feel. If anything it should add to it.
an Intelligent Design theorist [...] would say that a designer is necessary precisely because it is simpler to postulate a designer than to postulate the world we know coming about without one.
Given the evident complexity and our fairly apparent lack of ability to see deeply enough to easily explain things, I'm not convinced that any one is now, or ever will be smart enough to say whether it is more plausable that the universe was designed by an intelligent agent or just 'is'.
I don't have a problem with either solution, but I look around and see many religions, and members of many of them are convinced that others are wrong. It seems apparent to me that there are a great number of people smarter than myself (and even more that are dumber), many of whom are wrong. Given this I don't see any choice that I can make that has a good probability of being correct. Instead it is more rational to invest my energies elsewhere until such time that there is sufficent information to make an informed choice.
Why bother making a world that doesn't look like you made it.
Its more fun that way.
But seriously, you can't ask 'why' of any motivation of a god. Either there is no real 'why' because the god is a fictional character, or because a gods motives are beyond the capacity of humans to even begin to grasp.
Just pick a belief system that makes you feel warm and fuzzy and keep your eyes open for actions that arise from that belief system make you or your fellow humans unhappy. Adjust as necessary to balance the unhappyness with whatever lifestyle you find necessary. Reality check occasionally by opening your mind and visiting with people with many other belief systems. If you find you have to make laws to keep people in your belief system, you're probably doing something wrong.
Regarding the creation myth in Genesis, it's completely unimportant to Judeo-Christian beliefs. It was thrown in there as an example of the omnipetence of Yaweh, not as an explanation of how the world was formed and life was created. To claim that the purpose of Genesis is to inform you of the how's and why's of creation is to completely miss the point.
This is the best part about religion. You can make up any explanation of why something is the way it is, and nobody can show you to be wrong.
You can even start an entire new religon, or just fork an existing one Just make up what you want, claim divine inspiration, and you're golden (reference Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon, and L. Ron Hubbard and the Church of Scientology).
I've heard before that part of the concern with stuff like this is that it makes it harder to compare todays players with those from decades past. They make a point of trying to keep baseball construction as consistant as they can so that todays players will be hitting a ball that reacts as much as possible like the ball that Babe Ruth was hitting.
Now, I'm all for performance enhancements of all types as long as its disclosed, but I don't see any problem with also banning enhancements from certain sports to stay with the spirit of that event. Perhaps we need events for enhanced and 'all natural' players. I mean, theres more than 6 billion people on the planet, surely there's room for more than one way to play any give game?
In any case, the important thing is not that it has an infinite series of decimal digits; so does 1/3.
Indeed. So does 1/2. It just happens that the repeating portion is all zeros. We call the special case of repeating zeros 'terminating', although it doesn't really.
[RTGs] produce thermal energy through radioactive decay of Plutonium (not fission!), and directly convert it to electrical energy using thermoelectric devices (the Peltier effect). I don't recall what the efficiency of thermoelectric conversion is off the top of my head, but I don't think it's that good
Efficiency of production RTG's is about 3% to 7%. Nobody has produced one that hits 10%.
I think its more important that someone recognized when spreadsheets or other ad-hoc solutions start to become a drain on the business. At this point a team can evaluate what business processes they are being used for, how it fits in with other solutions, and perform the cost/benefit analysis of changing them.
Largish businesses without an internal team dedicated to dealing with that kind of stuff will likely waste quite a lot of time dealing with inefficent processes.
Disregard parent. GP is correct, high mass, low reps makes muscles stronger (and harder) without developing the tendancy to pump up as much.
I'm not what I'd consider a body builder (I don't do it to make myself look good oiled up in a speedo), but I train with weights using high mass low reps. Since I started a year ago the weight I'm lifting has gone way up (anywhere from 50% to 150% depending on muscle group), but other than losing some fat and filling out a bit I'm not much bigger.
Anyway, if you are a pasty, skinny geek, it doesn't matter how you lift the weights (presuming you don't hurt yourself), you'll gain muscle mass as well as strength for the first year or two. eventually you'll probably hit a point where you need to start using some more advanced techniques to continue making good gains.
AC misses the point. The morality problem is not with the reverse engineering, but with its social/political ramifications. While legal, it (predictably) caused the guys who make BitKeeper to pull their support, which causes problems for lots of people.
Very nice.
Curiously though, the shortcut installed in the start menu is still very slow to load. Takes it about 6 seconds to bring up the app, then the app loads very quickly. Running directly from the AcroRd32.exe is very fast. The icon seems to point to some of the installer dlls, not sure whats going on there, but its quite slow.
For anyone interested in the Malleus Maleficarum or "Witch Hammer", you can read it and about it online.