How do you think the concept of Separation of Church and State would fare under President Romney?
Far better than under a 'mainstream' Christian. Who understands better about religious persecution than Mormons? The last thing they'll do is legislate so that one religion is able to dominate more than others, because that dominant religion won't be theirs.
How about your rights to be left alone even after death?
You know what? I'm dead. If it makes my family happy to baptize me in whatever they want so that it eases their mind that they'll eventually meet me in the afterlife, that's fine with me. I'm, you know, dead, so it doesn't matter anymore. If they want to stuff me and put me in the living room, hey, that's great. Whatever makes them happy. Funerals are for the living, not for the dead.
Of course, many Catholics claim that Protestants are "not really Christianity", either (and vice-versa).
I will say one thing about Mormons... of all the people I've met of different religions, Mormons were by far the nicest and most genuine people. They actually try and live the tenants of their religion. I'm an atheist, but if I had to pick a religion to follow because I wanted the culture, I'd pick being a Mormon. I hate alcohol anyway.:)
They're not perfect of course (their support of California's Prop 8 is particularly troubling), but overall having Romney be a Mormon is a positive in my book, compared to, say, Santorum who is a full-blown religious wack job.
Are you a non-native English speaker? Then I could believe you might have trouble with it. But for what it's worth, I find it remarkably accurate, and even more remarkable, I find it useful. I don't have to memorize any voice commands, I just speak in normal English and it figures out what I mean much of the time. It is true that it needs a constant Internet connection, but I think that's why it actually works -- Apple can bring to bear a large amount of processing power. So I'm okay with a useful AI system that needs the Internet to make it work, versus previous attempts that totally suck, but can suck even without an Internet connection.
I don't use plugins. I don't know why you don't get the problem. But there are a hell of a lot of people who do, and I got the problem on every computer I ever used Firefox on.
I haven't ever had memory leak issues with Firefox, at least not in the last 5 years...
Sheesh. If you say you don't experience the problem, why are you commenting on the issue at all? I don't use extensions. And I don't give a crap what the devs think, all they have to do is look through their own bug tracking for literally hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of bug reports on this issue. And ultimately, there is only one bug report that matters to me: my own. IT SUCKS FOR ME. No extension, and the memory grows and grows. And obviously others experience the problem as well.
Why doesn't it happen to you and some other people? Who the hell knows? But that doesn't mean it's not a huge problem for a lot of other people.
Seems like just about every article that comes out about Firefox there's a dozen or so folks that keep complaining about how slow Firefox is and how much memory it leaks.
... And this is the problem with Firefox. The horrible memory leak problems have been traditionally dismissed by the Firefox team as only seen by "trolls". I gave on Firefox because it constantly sucked more and more and more memory, and I had to constantly restart the damn thing when it got over 2 gigabytes with a handful of tabs open.
Now, maybe the Firefox team (FINALLY) fixed it, and maybe they didn't. But we can't tell from this test, because they didn't do a memory leak test. What they need to do is open 41 sites, close 40 sites, open 40 sites, close 40 sites, on and on and see what happens. I know what will happen with Chrome -- since it uses a process per tab, all that memory will intrinsically get given back to the O/S. Firefox -- who knows?
But what I do know is that it's too little, too late for me. I love Chrome, and Firefox has no compelling features to make me come back.
And your attitude is why Firefox is losing. I had the same memory issues reported over and over by people, and the response from the Firefox people always was, "Oh, well, it works for me! It must either be a bad plugin or your imagination. In short, YOU suck, it's not Firefox's fault."
Well, I don't use plugins and it WAS Firefox's fault. When I can open a web site, close it, open it, close it, open it, close it, and observe the memory going up and up and up and up, it's a memory leak. Submit the bug you say? It's already been submitted 1,000 times.
So maybe Version 7 they finally got serious about the memory problems, but I doubt it. And why should I go back when Chrome is better in every way, especially speed?
Eh, I don't think vagrancy laws are clearly unconstitutional. There is clear precedent to having local laws that prevent people from being a nuisance to other people (e.g., freedom of speech doesn't mean you can get out your bullhorn at 3am). Loitering and vagrancy are a nuisance to people and businesses, and causes people to be intimidated and fearful of traveling in their own town.
I don't know how it works now, but my understanding is that in the past, you only got mod points if you were generally in the middle of visitation frequency. If you visited too little, or you visited too much, then you didn't get mod points. I believe the theory was that CmdrTaco didn't want people at either extreme. So either you haven't been visiting as much, or they changed the algorithm.
I didn't say it was unparseable, I said it was madness. Computer languages are not primarily designed for the computer, they're designed for human beings, and having a single common symbol represent two commonly used ideas is dumb. I don't particularly like it in English writing, either.
? And why semicolons instead of periods? If only I had a time machine...
First think about decimal points, and then think about the lexical madness of also using periods as an end-of-statement indicator. They made the right choice.
e.g.:
int a = 5..
int a = 5.2.
int a = 5.b = 5.6.
etc...
You know, my 11-year-old son said something kind of interesting last night, on this subject. This month's article in Scientific American is about multiverse theories, and he asked me (paraphrase), "If the universe is contained among a bunch of other universes, and the universe is expanding, isn't it possible that the other universes are exerting pressure on our universe as it's expanding?"
I'd never really thought about that before, and it may be an unanswerable question (along the lines of, "what are the multiverses contain in"), but I thought that was an intriguing thought.
This shows there was huge curiosity. I created a Google+ account to see what was there, but have no intention of moving from Facebook where everyone already is. Google+ has a slick interface, but no real deep improvement to where my entire circle of "normal" friends would ever go there. A social network is a natural monopoly. That's going to be a tough nut for Google to crack. (And Facebook's privacy features are fine, if people bother to use them).
Are you going to explain to your child's future bosses that he can not be expected to act in an appropriate (as deemed by the authority figures of that space) manner because he is just too gifted?
And something else I want to say about this. In my experience, the people who are most successful in the world are NOT the ones who learn to go with the flow and "do whatever the teachers tells you to do." The latter kids are the ones who grow up to be cogs in the machine, because that's what cogs do -- do whatever they're told to do.
While I do what's necessary to get my kid to get his work done, I'm also proud that he's not just a cog in the machine, and that he DOES have his own thoughts and desires, and doesn't give a crap what anyone else thinks about what he should or should not be doing. While it's very difficult to raise a kid like that, his attitude will serve him well when he's out in the world, and he wants to make happen what HE wants to make happen. Most people seem to sit around waiting for permission to pursue their dreams, and that's definitely not a problem my kid will ever have.
As a teacher, I can say that your last paragraph is a (not "the") problem.
*sigh* No, that was NOT a problem, and your "blame parents first" attitude IS a problem. I never used myself as an example with my kid. My only point was that I understood how he felt. If teachers are not the problem and my kid being broken is the problem, then why would he do well for some teachers and fail with others? It's because the other teachers are not good teachers. A good teacher finds a way to work with all types of kids.
You're making assumptions that are not warranted. I am not making excuses for my kid, I am simply stating the fact that he is different. I'm guessing you were one of those stepford kids that love school -- most teachers are (which is why they're teachers). But not everyone is like that. For some people, school is a boring, torturous hellhole that must be endured, and will NEVER be a fun, pleasant place for any extended length of time. So the training here is getting him to endure hell (though, of course, I don't phrase it that way). Enjoying school is seemingly not an option.
Out in the real world, we can choose the environment we want to work in. I don't work for authoritarian assholes because I don't do well in that environment, while other people do well in that structured "do what I tell you to do" kind of environment. I've been very successful, despite not fitting in with the authoritarians. My kid will need to find his way in the world just like me and everyone else.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw
My son is the unreasonable man, and it's my job to get him to survive in the world that he finds himself. But public schools don't make that very easy.
Parental education is a better place to start with reform.
I don't mean this to sound snotty (really), but I'm guessing you don't have kids in public school (correct me if I'm wrong).
Public school works pretty well if you have "Stepford Children" that love school, but if you have any sort of square-peg kind of geeky kid who dislikes the overly structured nature of school, good luck. No matter how involved you are, the school hates you and doesn't give a crap about your kid except to get him to shut up. Some individual teachers aren't like that; we had good experiences and they found ways to engage my "different" kid. But some of the teachers and all of the administration became enemies when we couldn't do a personality transplant on our gifted, bored kid.
Now, some reading this will roll their eyes and say, "See!? It proves that you had a troublemaker and you didn't do crap to discipline the little bastard!" Which is not true at all. My kid was never a troublemaker, but he was a dreamer and wanted to spend his waking thoughts on his designs for building things. Some teachers saw his gifts, worked with him, and he did well. Some just refused to engage him unless he toed their Authoritarian line, and there was clearly something wrong with him.
Of course, my sympathies are with my son, since I was the gifted, bored student who despised school as well. But I was constantly involved in trying to get him engaged, and the school was very, very, VERY difficult to work with. And this was one of the better school districts in the country. You don't realize how broken everything is until you run up against the problems.
The reactionary media have done such a good job at smearing 'teachers unions' that right wingers will use that very name as reference to a belief structure claiming that America is better off with teachers who live in poverty. Without unions, there would not be a blue collar middle class.
That's like saying that without buggy whips, there would be no modern car industry. While technically true (we had to have buggy whips to get horse-drawn carriages, which led to horseless carriages), it's not really relevant to the present day. Unions have long outlived their usefulness, and are often very harmful now, particularly the teacher's union that flat-out shields abusive teachers. I'm not one to throw around the word "evil" a lot, but if anything is evil in this world, it's the teacher's union. It is a terrible, horrible organization.
Now companies don't want to hire except when the person is perfect.
That's a symptom of oversupply of labor, not a structural change. With unemployment so high, if I'm looking to hire someone, why would I hire someone who needs training if I there are 10 people in a line with high experience who are competing for the same job? When demand outstrips supply, you'll see this trend reverse, as it did during the dot-com boom of the 90s, where any fool was being hired as a "web developer".
Well, to be perfectly precise, itsdapead's statement should have been, "The tablet-that-doesn't-totally-suck market was created out of nowhere by Apple less than 18 months ago."
I don't feel like rehashing this YET AGAIN, but I will only say that I've used both, and in my experience the snobbery against MySQL is misplaced and is based on knowledge a decade out of date. We moved our database platform from PostgreSQL to MySQL a few years ago for various technical reasons and it has worked out well. Like I said, I don't feel like rehashing this yet again, my only point is that PostgreSQL and MySQL are roughly comparable, and each has advantages over the other (in MySQL's case, some significant advantages).
(and I refuse to be dragged into this yet again!:) But I felt like I had to throw in something.)
Slashdot Mirror
Oops, you are correct, sir. Finger fart!
How do you think the concept of Separation of Church and State would fare under President Romney?
Far better than under a 'mainstream' Christian. Who understands better about religious persecution than Mormons? The last thing they'll do is legislate so that one religion is able to dominate more than others, because that dominant religion won't be theirs.
How about your rights to be left alone even after death?
You know what? I'm dead. If it makes my family happy to baptize me in whatever they want so that it eases their mind that they'll eventually meet me in the afterlife, that's fine with me. I'm, you know, dead, so it doesn't matter anymore. If they want to stuff me and put me in the living room, hey, that's great. Whatever makes them happy. Funerals are for the living, not for the dead.
Of course, many Catholics claim that Protestants are "not really Christianity", either (and vice-versa).
I will say one thing about Mormons... of all the people I've met of different religions, Mormons were by far the nicest and most genuine people. They actually try and live the tenants of their religion. I'm an atheist, but if I had to pick a religion to follow because I wanted the culture, I'd pick being a Mormon. I hate alcohol anyway. :)
They're not perfect of course (their support of California's Prop 8 is particularly troubling), but overall having Romney be a Mormon is a positive in my book, compared to, say, Santorum who is a full-blown religious wack job.
Speech recognition is not what we're talking about. Natural language processing is what we're talking about.
Are you a non-native English speaker? Then I could believe you might have trouble with it. But for what it's worth, I find it remarkably accurate, and even more remarkable, I find it useful. I don't have to memorize any voice commands, I just speak in normal English and it figures out what I mean much of the time. It is true that it needs a constant Internet connection, but I think that's why it actually works -- Apple can bring to bear a large amount of processing power. So I'm okay with a useful AI system that needs the Internet to make it work, versus previous attempts that totally suck, but can suck even without an Internet connection.
I don't use plugins. I don't know why you don't get the problem. But there are a hell of a lot of people who do, and I got the problem on every computer I ever used Firefox on.
I haven't ever had memory leak issues with Firefox, at least not in the last 5 years...
Sheesh. If you say you don't experience the problem, why are you commenting on the issue at all? I don't use extensions. And I don't give a crap what the devs think, all they have to do is look through their own bug tracking for literally hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of bug reports on this issue. And ultimately, there is only one bug report that matters to me: my own. IT SUCKS FOR ME. No extension, and the memory grows and grows. And obviously others experience the problem as well.
Why doesn't it happen to you and some other people? Who the hell knows? But that doesn't mean it's not a huge problem for a lot of other people.
Seems like just about every article that comes out about Firefox there's a dozen or so folks that keep complaining about how slow Firefox is and how much memory it leaks.
... And this is the problem with Firefox. The horrible memory leak problems have been traditionally dismissed by the Firefox team as only seen by "trolls". I gave on Firefox because it constantly sucked more and more and more memory, and I had to constantly restart the damn thing when it got over 2 gigabytes with a handful of tabs open.
Now, maybe the Firefox team (FINALLY) fixed it, and maybe they didn't. But we can't tell from this test, because they didn't do a memory leak test. What they need to do is open 41 sites, close 40 sites, open 40 sites, close 40 sites, on and on and see what happens. I know what will happen with Chrome -- since it uses a process per tab, all that memory will intrinsically get given back to the O/S. Firefox -- who knows?
But what I do know is that it's too little, too late for me. I love Chrome, and Firefox has no compelling features to make me come back.
And your attitude is why Firefox is losing. I had the same memory issues reported over and over by people, and the response from the Firefox people always was, "Oh, well, it works for me! It must either be a bad plugin or your imagination. In short, YOU suck, it's not Firefox's fault."
Well, I don't use plugins and it WAS Firefox's fault. When I can open a web site, close it, open it, close it, open it, close it, and observe the memory going up and up and up and up, it's a memory leak. Submit the bug you say? It's already been submitted 1,000 times.
So maybe Version 7 they finally got serious about the memory problems, but I doubt it. And why should I go back when Chrome is better in every way, especially speed?
Eh, I don't think vagrancy laws are clearly unconstitutional. There is clear precedent to having local laws that prevent people from being a nuisance to other people (e.g., freedom of speech doesn't mean you can get out your bullhorn at 3am). Loitering and vagrancy are a nuisance to people and businesses, and causes people to be intimidated and fearful of traveling in their own town.
Wait, what? The law prohibits homelessness? In the US? Where?
Vagrancy Laws cover that, as well as loitering laws.
I don't know how it works now, but my understanding is that in the past, you only got mod points if you were generally in the middle of visitation frequency. If you visited too little, or you visited too much, then you didn't get mod points. I believe the theory was that CmdrTaco didn't want people at either extreme. So either you haven't been visiting as much, or they changed the algorithm.
I didn't say it was unparseable, I said it was madness. Computer languages are not primarily designed for the computer, they're designed for human beings, and having a single common symbol represent two commonly used ideas is dumb. I don't particularly like it in English writing, either.
? And why semicolons instead of periods? If only I had a time machine...
First think about decimal points, and then think about the lexical madness of also using periods as an end-of-statement indicator. They made the right choice.
e.g.:
int a = 5..
int a = 5.2.
int a = 5.b = 5.6.
etc...
Whoa, Rob is gone? That's far more interesting news than this story.
That's like saying if I don't own the blueprints for my toaster, then I don't own the bread.
You know, my 11-year-old son said something kind of interesting last night, on this subject. This month's article in Scientific American is about multiverse theories, and he asked me (paraphrase), "If the universe is contained among a bunch of other universes, and the universe is expanding, isn't it possible that the other universes are exerting pressure on our universe as it's expanding?"
I'd never really thought about that before, and it may be an unanswerable question (along the lines of, "what are the multiverses contain in"), but I thought that was an intriguing thought.
This shows there was huge curiosity. I created a Google+ account to see what was there, but have no intention of moving from Facebook where everyone already is. Google+ has a slick interface, but no real deep improvement to where my entire circle of "normal" friends would ever go there. A social network is a natural monopoly. That's going to be a tough nut for Google to crack. (And Facebook's privacy features are fine, if people bother to use them).
Are you going to explain to your child's future bosses that he can not be expected to act in an appropriate (as deemed by the authority figures of that space) manner because he is just too gifted?
And something else I want to say about this. In my experience, the people who are most successful in the world are NOT the ones who learn to go with the flow and "do whatever the teachers tells you to do." The latter kids are the ones who grow up to be cogs in the machine, because that's what cogs do -- do whatever they're told to do.
While I do what's necessary to get my kid to get his work done, I'm also proud that he's not just a cog in the machine, and that he DOES have his own thoughts and desires, and doesn't give a crap what anyone else thinks about what he should or should not be doing. While it's very difficult to raise a kid like that, his attitude will serve him well when he's out in the world, and he wants to make happen what HE wants to make happen. Most people seem to sit around waiting for permission to pursue their dreams, and that's definitely not a problem my kid will ever have.
As a teacher, I can say that your last paragraph is a (not "the") problem.
*sigh* No, that was NOT a problem, and your "blame parents first" attitude IS a problem. I never used myself as an example with my kid. My only point was that I understood how he felt. If teachers are not the problem and my kid being broken is the problem, then why would he do well for some teachers and fail with others? It's because the other teachers are not good teachers. A good teacher finds a way to work with all types of kids.
You're making assumptions that are not warranted. I am not making excuses for my kid, I am simply stating the fact that he is different. I'm guessing you were one of those stepford kids that love school -- most teachers are (which is why they're teachers). But not everyone is like that. For some people, school is a boring, torturous hellhole that must be endured, and will NEVER be a fun, pleasant place for any extended length of time. So the training here is getting him to endure hell (though, of course, I don't phrase it that way). Enjoying school is seemingly not an option.
Out in the real world, we can choose the environment we want to work in. I don't work for authoritarian assholes because I don't do well in that environment, while other people do well in that structured "do what I tell you to do" kind of environment. I've been very successful, despite not fitting in with the authoritarians. My kid will need to find his way in the world just like me and everyone else.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw
My son is the unreasonable man, and it's my job to get him to survive in the world that he finds himself. But public schools don't make that very easy.
Parental education is a better place to start with reform.
I don't mean this to sound snotty (really), but I'm guessing you don't have kids in public school (correct me if I'm wrong).
Public school works pretty well if you have "Stepford Children" that love school, but if you have any sort of square-peg kind of geeky kid who dislikes the overly structured nature of school, good luck. No matter how involved you are, the school hates you and doesn't give a crap about your kid except to get him to shut up. Some individual teachers aren't like that; we had good experiences and they found ways to engage my "different" kid. But some of the teachers and all of the administration became enemies when we couldn't do a personality transplant on our gifted, bored kid.
Now, some reading this will roll their eyes and say, "See!? It proves that you had a troublemaker and you didn't do crap to discipline the little bastard!" Which is not true at all. My kid was never a troublemaker, but he was a dreamer and wanted to spend his waking thoughts on his designs for building things. Some teachers saw his gifts, worked with him, and he did well. Some just refused to engage him unless he toed their Authoritarian line, and there was clearly something wrong with him.
Of course, my sympathies are with my son, since I was the gifted, bored student who despised school as well. But I was constantly involved in trying to get him engaged, and the school was very, very, VERY difficult to work with. And this was one of the better school districts in the country. You don't realize how broken everything is until you run up against the problems.
The reactionary media have done such a good job at smearing 'teachers unions' that right wingers will use that very name as reference to a belief structure claiming that America is better off with teachers who live in poverty. Without unions, there would not be a blue collar middle class.
That's like saying that without buggy whips, there would be no modern car industry. While technically true (we had to have buggy whips to get horse-drawn carriages, which led to horseless carriages), it's not really relevant to the present day. Unions have long outlived their usefulness, and are often very harmful now, particularly the teacher's union that flat-out shields abusive teachers. I'm not one to throw around the word "evil" a lot, but if anything is evil in this world, it's the teacher's union. It is a terrible, horrible organization.
Now companies don't want to hire except when the person is perfect.
That's a symptom of oversupply of labor, not a structural change. With unemployment so high, if I'm looking to hire someone, why would I hire someone who needs training if I there are 10 people in a line with high experience who are competing for the same job? When demand outstrips supply, you'll see this trend reverse, as it did during the dot-com boom of the 90s, where any fool was being hired as a "web developer".
Well, to be perfectly precise, itsdapead's statement should have been, "The tablet-that-doesn't-totally-suck market was created out of nowhere by Apple less than 18 months ago."
But most reasonable people knew what he meant.
I don't feel like rehashing this YET AGAIN, but I will only say that I've used both, and in my experience the snobbery against MySQL is misplaced and is based on knowledge a decade out of date. We moved our database platform from PostgreSQL to MySQL a few years ago for various technical reasons and it has worked out well. Like I said, I don't feel like rehashing this yet again, my only point is that PostgreSQL and MySQL are roughly comparable, and each has advantages over the other (in MySQL's case, some significant advantages).
(and I refuse to be dragged into this yet again! :) But I felt like I had to throw in something.)