It's exactly the same in Australia. I no longer bother to apply for public service jobs, as you have to provide an enormous set of documents which "address the essential criteria", and the interviews are mostly theatre. I just got sick of being fucked around by bureaucrats to fail to get a job that didn't pay very well anyway.
> How can 59,054,087 people be so STUPID? God help us all.
There is no god. So we're shit out of luck.
Re:Er, doesn't this claim require external evidenc
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Atlantis Found. Again.
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· Score: 1
Boom, boom!
Re:Er, doesn't this claim require external evidenc
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Atlantis Found. Again.
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· Score: 1
This sounds a whole hell of a lot like those Golden Tablets that J. Smith found, then which mysteriously disappeared after he'd translated them with the help of some magical golden spectacles (which also disappeared).
Okay - I may be misjudging you somewhat, as you haven't made your position completely clear, but I'm assuming you believe in creation "science", or at least that you reject any theories of evolution.
The thing is, I'm not sure how you can claim that evolution hasn't been experimentally tested (and I'm not just talking about fruitflies). There is a fossil record (admittedly incomplete) which indicates the mutability of species over millions of years. In just the case of primates, there's strong indications of a direct line from lemur-like creatures to us, through the great apes. I'm not a biologist, so I don't have reams of facts at my fingertips, or a very deep knowledge of evolution, but I still find it far more believable than the folk-tales of people who (to paraphrase Harry Harrison) didn't even understand the mechanism of a rainbow, because there is _absolutely_ _no_ independant, verifiable evidence of the absolute truth of those fairytales. I'm also pretty sure that there is experimental evidence of evolution (as in: The theory predicts this, but we've not found evidence of it yet. Oh, look, here's that evidence. Notch up another win for Occam's Razor.) but I must admit I'm unable to recall a specific instance. Go and talk to a bioligist. Maybe they'll be able to remember the stuff I can't right now.
'Religious radicals' is a fair call, except I'd be tempted to add a few more carefully chosen phrases, like 'not very bright', 'deluded', 'ill-informed', and 'poorly educated'. I'm sure you get my drift. I don't believe you've opened your eyes and looked at the real evidence at all, otherwise you'd be convinced that the theories of evolution offer a considerably more likely explanation than do the fairy-tales of a bunch of wandering sheep-herders. It's very sad that more than half the population of the US is in the same boat.
I'm just thankful we don't have too many of these people in Australia, although the number is growing, largely because, I suspect, science education is poorly funded here too.
The thing is, the Democrats those crackers used to vote for were people like George Wallace (a notorious segregationist, iirc), so it's hardly surprising they vote for Dubyah these days. They're obviously uncomfortable with anyone too far to the left of Adolf Hitler.
In federal elections in Australia we vote for a bunch of people - a local candidate for the electorate we live in, and the six senators who get elected for each state at that election. Our Senate ballots are the size of a bedsheet, and can have over 100 names on them. Of course, you don't have to mark against each name (you can just mark one box above the line and the votes get distributed according to whatever shady little deals the political parties have cooked up), but the votes still get counted as though each candidate had been numbered.
Hmm... that doesn't sound like it was the post that irritated me. Perhaps I miscounted, and it was the troll I was aiming at, in which case I apologise.
No, it really was designed for computing artillery charts. The thing is, when an artillery battery or, even trickier, a battleship (because it won't have a forward observer to help them walk in the fall of shot), is going to fire on a position which may be 10 or more miles away, they need to know, _very_ quickly, what size charge bags (and how many), and what barrel elevation, are going to lob a big, heavy bullet full of explosives right onto the target. Until very recently, the only way to do this was by consulting tables which gave a set of ranges, etc, related to charge size, barrel elevation, wind speed, etc, and the battery commander (or more probably a subaltern) would interpolate the actual values required. Until the work done on things like ENIAC, these charts, like tables of logarithms, sines, cosines, etc, were calculated by hand by a room full of computors (people with, if they were lucky, hand-cranked adding machines), which is an error-prone process. This, by the way, was also Babbage's motivation for the creation of the Difference Engine, because log and trig tables were used by navigators who didn't want to park their boats on rocks.
As an aside, some of the blokes I was in the army with have tales of doing survey computations with these old adding machines (because the few electronic calculators available in the '60s and '70s weren't numerically stable). You can imagine their excitement when the Corps bought a bunch of HP-25s.
At the first job I had when I got out of the army (1988), the machine room looked like a laundromat full of Maytags (we were still using an NCR mainframe), and we didn't get rid of the card punch until about '92.
The thought of a scantily-clad _male programmer_ makes me recoil in horror - actually, I don't have to imagine it, it's the sight that greets me every morning in the mirror... overweight, balding,...
We could just release it into the atmosphere... of course, then we'd all sound like Donald Duck, and probably get sued by Disney for breach of copyright.
I always do this, but my youngest son keeps bringing his little friends home, or the fuckers just turn up at meal times uninvited, and they eat it all given half a chance:(
I wish they'd all just get jobs, then they'd be too busy and too tired to infest my house.
Slashdot Mirror
It's exactly the same in Australia. I no longer bother to apply for public service jobs, as you have to provide an enormous set of documents which "address the essential criteria", and the interviews are mostly theatre. I just got sick of being fucked around by bureaucrats to fail to get a job that didn't pay very well anyway.
> How can 59,054,087 people be so STUPID? God help us all.
There is no god. So we're shit out of luck.
Boom, boom!
This sounds a whole hell of a lot like those Golden Tablets that J. Smith found, then which mysteriously disappeared after he'd translated them with the help of some magical golden spectacles (which also disappeared).
Okay - I may be misjudging you somewhat, as you haven't made your position completely clear, but I'm assuming you believe in creation "science", or at least that you reject any theories of evolution.
The thing is, I'm not sure how you can claim that evolution hasn't been experimentally tested (and I'm not just talking about fruitflies). There is a fossil record (admittedly incomplete) which indicates the mutability of species over millions of years. In just the case of primates, there's strong indications of a direct line from lemur-like creatures to us, through the great apes. I'm not a biologist, so I don't have reams of facts at my fingertips, or a very deep knowledge of evolution, but I still find it far more believable than the folk-tales of people who (to paraphrase Harry Harrison) didn't even understand the mechanism of a rainbow, because there is _absolutely_ _no_ independant, verifiable evidence of the absolute truth of those fairytales. I'm also pretty sure that there is experimental evidence of evolution (as in: The theory predicts this, but we've not found evidence of it yet. Oh, look, here's that evidence. Notch up another win for Occam's Razor.) but I must admit I'm unable to recall a specific instance. Go and talk to a bioligist. Maybe they'll be able to remember the stuff I can't right now.
I'm extremely tolerant - I just don't suffer fools gladly.
'Religious radicals' is a fair call, except I'd be tempted to add a few more carefully chosen phrases, like 'not very bright', 'deluded', 'ill-informed', and 'poorly educated'. I'm sure you get my drift. I don't believe you've opened your eyes and looked at the real evidence at all, otherwise you'd be convinced that the theories of evolution offer a considerably more likely explanation than do the fairy-tales of a bunch of wandering sheep-herders. It's very sad that more than half the population of the US is in the same boat.
I'm just thankful we don't have too many of these people in Australia, although the number is growing, largely because, I suspect, science education is poorly funded here too.
To quote the parent post, "Real World. Fiction. Learn the difference."
...
But I guess you already knew that
The thing is, the Democrats those crackers used to vote for were people like George Wallace (a notorious segregationist, iirc), so it's hardly surprising they vote for Dubyah these days. They're obviously uncomfortable with anyone too far to the left of Adolf Hitler.
In federal elections in Australia we vote for a bunch of people - a local candidate for the electorate we live in, and the six senators who get elected for each state at that election. Our Senate ballots are the size of a bedsheet, and can have over 100 names on them. Of course, you don't have to mark against each name (you can just mark one box above the line and the votes get distributed according to whatever shady little deals the political parties have cooked up), but the votes still get counted as though each candidate had been numbered.
> Scared people do stupid things.
Yeah - like vote for Dubyah or (in my country's case) "Honest" John Howard.
Well ... possibly. Although it was pretty readable in translation, I can see that it might be hard in the original.
Solaris is too hard to understand? You're joking aren't you?
I've never had any problems with it.
Ah, but belting it with a baseball bat would be deeply satisfying in a way that couldn't be matched with a flick of the wrist.
Hmm ... that doesn't sound like it was the post that irritated me. Perhaps I miscounted, and it was the troll I was aiming at, in which case I apologise.
No, it really was designed for computing artillery charts. The thing is, when an artillery battery or, even trickier, a battleship (because it won't have a forward observer to help them walk in the fall of shot), is going to fire on a position which may be 10 or more miles away, they need to know, _very_ quickly, what size charge bags (and how many), and what barrel elevation, are going to lob a big, heavy bullet full of explosives right onto the target. Until very recently, the only way to do this was by consulting tables which gave a set of ranges, etc, related to charge size, barrel elevation, wind speed, etc, and the battery commander (or more probably a subaltern) would interpolate the actual values required. Until the work done on things like ENIAC, these charts, like tables of logarithms, sines, cosines, etc, were calculated by hand by a room full of computors (people with, if they were lucky, hand-cranked adding machines), which is an error-prone process. This, by the way, was also Babbage's motivation for the creation of the Difference Engine, because log and trig tables were used by navigators who didn't want to park their boats on rocks.
As an aside, some of the blokes I was in the army with have tales of doing survey computations with these old adding machines (because the few electronic calculators available in the '60s and '70s weren't numerically stable). You can imagine their excitement when the Corps bought a bunch of HP-25s.
At the first job I had when I got out of the army (1988), the machine room looked like a laundromat full of Maytags (we were still using an NCR mainframe), and we didn't get rid of the card punch until about '92.
The thought of a scantily-clad _male programmer_ makes me recoil in horror - actually, I don't have to imagine it, it's the sight that greets me every morning in the mirror ... overweight, balding, ...
No, the contents of the core memory was dumped to tape.
I'm happy to call you a dufus, too, and not, you will notice, anonymously. I'm not sure what exactly "dufus" means, but it sounds insulting.
This got modded insightful. I don't know why, I was just being snotty.
We could just release it into the atmosphere ... of course, then we'd all sound like Donald Duck, and probably get sued by Disney for breach of copyright.
> Cook things that freeze well.
:(
I always do this, but my youngest son keeps bringing his little friends home, or the fuckers just turn up at meal times uninvited, and they eat it all given half a chance
I wish they'd all just get jobs, then they'd be too busy and too tired to infest my house.
You are quite wrong. Study some set theory some time, or read a few of Cantor's papers, and you'll see why.
You probably need a bigger margin - no, wait, that's a different conjecture. Damn!