"Pray tell how a single mom or parents who work two jobs, or parents of families under the poverty line can do that? In an ideal world, yes, every parent should be held responsible to help his children, including doing the homework with them and learn for themselves in the process."
At one time in American History this is where the community or church would assist. The church my familiy and I attend currently assists in these situations. They assist with just about any need someone has, and doesn't limit it to church membership. Local police will actually direct people and families down on their luck to our church.
Great of you to tell us how it was in the past (a-la Ron Paul). Now, tell me how it is now. If the answer is to go back to the ways things are, great. Tell me how we get there while taking care of the shit that needs to be taken care off now.
There is plenty of welfare and food stamps to go around. Why work a shit job when you can sit at home and make more money, especially when you have a dependent child and can get Section 8 housing? Why would anyone deprive her child like that?
Talking out of experience yourself? Or are you being ineffectually sarcastic?
If you can't afford to have children, how about you don't have children.
How about you have children when you can afford them and then all of the sudden, voila, you are unemployed. That's a common theme nowadays... if you pay attention.
I mean, seriously, is that your counter-argument? There are some many variables involved in situations when a family ends up living below a certain income bracket, it is sad that supposedly critical thinking people can actually come up with such one-liners.
Of course, that is never on the table. Why are you bringing someone in this world that you cannot properly nurture and support ?
Plenty - too many - smart, educated people postpone getting married and having children to their late 30s and 40s because they feel they can't provide for them, while the poor churn out batches of babies into the social safety net without regard of how they will do in society.
Eugenics might be right down your philosophical alley buddy.
But if you are suggesting brain power as a driving evolutionary force, then this fails to explain that large brains are a fairly "recent" development in evolutionary time.
Large brains are not a recent development (think cephalopods and sharks.)
So human populations that are wiped out by disease or natural disaster are not smart enough to survive and if we look hard enough humans who have survived have bigger brains?
In the spans of centuries or even millenia? No. In the millions-long time spans from the early Homo species to the precent? Very likely.
There are plenty of variables that go into determining whether a species becomes extinct or not.
True. Glaciation, desertification, plagues. Barring sudden, catastrophic events, like the Toba supervolcanic eruption event, most of these variables are gradual, taking millenia to occur. That is the general case, and in the general case the ability to cope with such events, be it by physical or behavioral/intelligence adaptations is what matters. In the case of Human evolution, the ongoing development intelligence and cognitive skills have been the primary factors.
Quite a few of them are exogenous to the species.
All of them are exogenous to the species. It's how species adapt, physically or cognitively, that determine survival. In more intelligent species, intelligence takes a greater role than physical adaptation alone.
It doesn't matter how smart a fish you are when your lake dries up. Behaviour does not solve all problems or guarantee survival.
But that's not what TFA suggests. It simply says that when you take a very large sample of species (recent and prehistoric) over very long period of times, and map brain/mass ratio vs extintion events, there seems to be a correlation between brain/mass ratio and survival. It says nothing about any specific species on a very specific and narrow time frame on a very specific and narrow change of living conditions.
That's a corner case.
I'm sorry but if you can't help your kid in elementary school then you should be doing the homework with them. There is nothing hard or advanced in elementary school, that by the time your an adult you shouldn't know.
Pray tell how a single mom or parents who work two jobs, or parents of families under the poverty line can do that? In an ideal world, yes, every parent should be held responsible to help his children, including doing the homework with them and learn for themselves in the process.
In the real world, there are many cases (and under a certain income bracket, it is the general case) where this is not possible. And no, I'm not advocating free-wheeling welfare. But I don't advocate a dog-eat-dog system either. Someone else's failure will eventually become a social burden to me or my children. So a stable, developed sociaty needs to provide the means to lift up individuals in need to a point where they can pick themselves up.
Have you ever lived in a poor country? I have, I was born in one (hard to study and make it through with a half-filled stomach let me tell you). The cycles of poverty and uneducation are pervasive and self-perpetuating. Parents are uneducated and thus can't help their children. Such parents rarely have the means to educate themselves (ergo their children's education suffer). Options are limited, and opportunities are missed (again, due to lack of vision powered by education). Such children become adults and have children under the same conditions, perpetuating the cycle.
The wonderful thing about developed countries like the US (of which I became a citizen after climbing myself up through college while flipping burgers and driving forklifts), or Japan (which I visit frequently) or many others, is that such developed societies have infrastructures and means to lift people up and give a fighting chance (not an assurance of winning, but a chance to go for it) to anyone willing to take it.
Sadly in the last 20 years or so, that has been gradually changing in the US.
I could understand some rich disconnected latifundist in Brazil or Mexico saying "undeducated parents should go back to school" while playing with their silverware. But here in the US, the richest and most prosperous country in the world, the country that should be a paragon of progressive thinking in the industrialized world? I would never in my wildest dreams imagine such thinking to gradually become so common place.
If a parent can't assist there child in the courses there being taught then they should be going back to school.
And how is a parent going to afford going to school while working and supporting his family? Middle class people are finding it hard to put their children to college, and you expect a parent with little education (and ergo at or below the poverty line) to be able to do that? You are seriously disconnected with the realities of this country, and the consequences that will ultimately affect anyone regardless of income.
In essence, the argument exhibits non sequitur dumbfoolery. Despite the pedestrian simplicity of it, however, it hides a masterful combination of the following (or variants, in whole or in part):
Please. As a conservative, methinks you're talking out your ass. We have no problem with public school teachers. What we have a problem with is unions that continue to protect teachers that are poor performers or don't adapt to new teaching techniques, which is exactly the reason why we're in the sad state we are, these days. The point is that as teachers reach tenure, some, not all, can become complacent, and just use their job for a paycheck, while others go out of their way to create interesting, stimulating lesson plans. Who gets rewarded more? In most cases, the complacent one, as they've achieved tenure, they get greater raises and it's nigh on impossible to fire them.
^^^ This. I'm also a conservative (though I will most likely be voting for Obama), and indeed the problem is not public school teachers, but how many unions (not all, but many) protect under-performing teachers. There are vested interests to keep the status-quo.
However, the other side of the coin to be fair is that many in the current conservative echelons attack the teaching profession, think privatization and education budget cutting (think Gov. Rick Scott) is the solution of everything, and worse, they pander to creationists (which is one of the reasons I will not be voting GOP in these coming elections.)
There is a lot to blame on both sides of the political fence. The important thing is to move past the blaming game, pick and plan and work from there.
As a direct reply to the AC, whenever someone says "conservatives X" or "liberals X", it is almost certain that one can ignore his/her words without significant loss of information. Generalizations are the bread and butter of the feeble minded fodder for the identity politics cannons.
As a realist, I think this program is a step in the right direction, incentivizing good, young teachers to excel and actually TEACH their students, rather than just read out of a book. ON the other hand, nothing the federal government ever does ONLY costs a billion dollars.
I agree. I think there will be significant problems, and unfortunately the current GOP leadership that panders to the far right will cry havock just because the plan was proposed by dark-skinned-socialist-with-muslim-sounding-name-who-of-course-is-a-manchurian-candidates-for-the-chinese-and-satan. There will also be elements in teacher unions
No plan is ever perfect, which is why there should always be opposition, negotiation, compromise and reconciliation. But one cannot wait forever for the perfect plan. We pick one and we move from there. We fix, keep or drop pieces accordingly.
However imperfect this might be, and regardless of the problems that will occur (and they will), at least in spirit, this is a move in the right direction.
Yes, MLK's campaign was non-violent, but the opposition (led by government)
Led by government? I didn't know that the Kennedy's, Johnson, Eisenhower, and so many other members of goverment orchestrated such a violent opposition to the civil rights movement.
Since when is dislike of Romney an automatic endorsement of Obama? What if I don't like either of these assclowns?
Since always. This is a nation drowning in a sea illiterate imbeciles (some less closeted than others), to the right or to the left, bestial Luddites who cannot contemplate anything outside their identity politics POVS without recoiling in fear or disgust (or experience a mental alt+ctrl+del.) Their entire core belief system is a cesspool of black-n-white zero-sum moronisms.
Fortunately they are not a majority (they really aren't as most people are too busy dealing with the peculiarities of life, jobs and family.). Unfortunately, they are everywhere, painting anything anywhere with their black-n-white brushes.
I have to agree. It was a pretty good analysis except for that line which really doesn't fit or make sense. After all, we're talking about a spacegoing civilization that has faster-than-light engines, not to mention some absurdly large capital ships. I don't see how having engines capable of moving the Death Star is even remotely as absurd as the whole idea of a death star by itself, with a giant laser, and also ships that can travel FTL and have artificial gravity (even the tiny Millenium Falcon had artificial gravity inside).
Exactly. One should also assume within this sci-fi context, that such an advanced and old cluster of civilizations that made up the Start Wars universe would also have the know-how for synthesizing lighter, stronger material, stronger and lighter than the stuff today's carriers are made of. Currently we know of extremely strong and light materials, kevlar, obscenely strong ceramics and polymers, boron nitrate, diamons (heterodiamonds in particular), carbon nanotubes, spider silk, titanium diborites, boron nitrates, or tungsten carbides.
It was not long ago that scientists created a genetically altered goat that produced spider silk on its milk (insert gratuitous goat pr0n joke here.) It would not be long (in terms of centuries) when our societies will be able to execute, in very autonomous/robotic ways (if not in bio-engineering ways), complex structures using lighter and stronger materials, with less amounts of materials, in scales we cannot imagine yet (let alone an incredibly old and advanced galactic society.)
Any text encoding has many good uses. And XML many good uses stem from the fact that... it is used, not because of its intrinsic qualities.
There is a reason why configuration files are moving away from XML. There is a reason why over-http data exchange protocols and RPC/messaging mechanism are moving away from XML (or at least from WS-*). It was just a stupid pipe dream to represent everything as a document. ZOMG, HTML is just SGML, so the next evolutionary step... for everything... must be.... (cue drums)... XML!
I was once one of those completely clueless people who thought so. You need something? XML! You need to configure something? XML? You need to store data? XML! You need a serialization protocol? XML! You need to specify name/value pair configuration parameters? XML! You need to externalize workflow logic? XML! You need to represent math equations? XML... oh noes, even worse, MathML!!!
Nah, XML-RPC is too primitive, let's throw everything and the kitchen sink in it for corner case problems that most people never face, let's call it WS-*. What do we use? XML! Say with me! XML!
Think otherwise? Name me 2-3 cases where XML fits a role where something else, say, JSON or ASN.1 fails to a degree that makes XML the better alternative.
I'd suggest base it on XML with a header section and header-element to get the transfer started then accept any kind of structured data including additional header elements.
Haven't we learned enough already from industrial pain to stay away from XML? JSON, BSON, YAML, compact RELAX NG, ASN.1, extended Backus-Naur Form. Any one of them, or something inspired by any (or all) of them, that is compact, unambiguos (there should be only one canonical form to encode a type), not necesarily readable, possibly binary, but efficiently easy to dump into an equally compact readable form. Compact and easy to parse/encode, with the lowest overhead possible. That's what one should look for.
But XML, no, no, no, for Christ's sake, no. XML was cool when we didn't know any better and we wanted to express everything as a document... oh, and the more verbose and readable, the better!!(10+1). We really didn't think it through that much back then. Let's not commit the same folly again, please.
Most people don't understand that they are giving their data to Facebook if they have marked something as "private." You can thank the dismal state of computer education in this country, which is generally on the level of, "Here is how you use MS Word, and here is how you search Google for sources in your essay!"
1. It goes beyond the dismal state of computer education in this country, but the dismal state of education in general, and civic education in particular. However,
2. people make their own choices, well educated and otherwise. At the end of the day, the onus is on you and me to know WTF we get into. In the general case, ignorance does not excuse ultimate responsibility for the outcome of one's actions. And that's how it should be.
Look through Facebook ToS and I bet you find all usual disclaimers. They may give some information to police, but it does not create any responsibility towards users.
^^^ THIS. That/. self-proclaimed critical thinking geeks fail to realize this is beyond me. Any argument (pro or against FB) directly based on any premise inconsistent with that fact is, by necessity, a flawed one.
I think the ability to read posts and chats are required simply from a support perspective. How can any of their guys troubleshoot problems without seeing customer data?
Perhaps the issue is if they are held to some kind of confidentiality agreement lick Doctors and Lawyers.
Interesting.
But they are not. Barring federally-regulated information (HIPAA or SOX for example), I don't know whether FB (or Internet information/communication service providers in general) that provide their services for free should be held to the same type of legal standards. Maybe yes, maybe not. It is not something that people can go and say "ZOMG YES" simply because of their personal privacy as they exercise their own information sharing actions.
One thing for sure is that only fools get up angrily in arms because FB doesn't act like a phone carrier or a hospital with the information people put on their own free will after signing FB TOS.
Another example is storing educational media, graduate-level online class lectures (can't go out w/o them), google tech talks That stuff will gobble up 8GB extremely fast. Corner case? Maybe. Irrelevant? Only to you for the purpose of fishing for red herrings.
Wow, just wow. I have a better solution to your problem:
Pop the good Lady Media Consumption's tit out of your mouth now and then and disconnect. Staring blankly at a screen with a slack jaw while you do EVERYTHING is unhealthy. Learn to enjoy the places and moments you're living in, rather than needing to be staring at a high-def video constantly, or pacifying your children using the same technique.
8 GB storage is more than enough for any conceivable amount of reading you're going to do on a trip that's shorter than a few months. You can fit days worth of music into 8 GB.
Lecture me as if you know me. How quaint. To consume or not consume, that's a person prerogative, one whose healthiness depends on the situation. To take a description of situations to elaborate a rant about an unhealthy lifestyle that you so freely imagine to masturbate your strawman, that works well for camouflaging poorly constructed arguments (or when you have a base need to look for something to be emotional about, to point a finger and yell "YOU", getting a hard-on in the process.)
Seriously, assuming for a second that indeed one (I in particular) is a media zombie, your counter-argument means shit to the fact that there are other useful cases for using a media device while on the road. To work, to read to name a few. To kill time or stay awake during a long trip across timezones (so that you can knock yourself out to sleep when you reach your destination, and awake more or less well the meeting that awaits you)... and so on and so on...
Your supposed use cases are so unlikely, or so esoteric, that they can be safely ignored as a primary driver in the purchasing decision for these products.
Doesn't matter if they are unlikely or esoteric because at the end of the day, your opinion of them are simply subjective. Given that I'm not alone in wishing usb/micro-sd storage capabilities, that distinctly shows that there is a consumer base that will prefer not to purchase a device without it.
Whether that is the common case is irrelevant. The question was "why do you want physical media, you have the net." And the answer is, no, we don't have the fucking net.
It wasn't about whether that desire was to fulfill healthy or unhealthy habits, or whether the number of consumers who want it are small or large. If that's what you wanted to argue (a purely subjective position), then ask the fucking question those terms.
You are simply grasping at straws, diverting the original proposition ("you can haz teh interweebz everywer") to "ZOMG, ur unhealthy, stop and smell teh flowrs" as a remediation response to the former being a shitty argument.
Why the obsession with physical media?
Both the Kindle and Nexus 7 assumes that you are consuming media from the net.
Jesus's clone riding a genetically resurrected dinosaur in the name of logistics, man. Are you aware that net access is not omnipresent, and despite the media/geek-wannabe hype, it will not be for years to come? It might be omnipresent in our cubicles and wired dwellings, but once we step into the sunlight (${DEITY:-FSM} knows some of us do), we don't even get a guarantee of cell phone signal everywhere.
Do you think wifi fares better?
Let's forget the hyperbole for a second. You want to have access to your media anywhere. When you are a car passenger. On a train. On an airplane. When you are camping, or at the beach. To read your books or play videos to entertain/control/mind-numb-into-submission your toddlers. That's why you need permanent storage.
It is one of the reasons I've been hesitant to buy the Kindle Fire or similar devices without a micro-sd port. I do frequent trips (mostly to Japan), and I want to have access to my media (for the same reasons outlined above) when having a 16+ hour flight coupled with 2+ hours in the train upon arrival (or when I'm in a train between cities.) I can't do that unless I purchase a WIFI receiver (typically with a monthly subscription). That's a situation that repeats itself when traveling overseas (or even when traveling within the country).
So physical media matters for practical reasons. It is unpractical for Amazon and Google to presuppose users will have access to the net anytime anywhere. There is a reason why tablets and netbooks either have a usb/micro sd port, or manufactures like Apple and Samsung provide usb/micro sd adapters for their devices.
Lay the infrastructure that makes this possible first, and then we talk about replacing physical media with oooooooooo the cloud. This should be an obvious thing for the./ geekterati. Don't know why it is not.
Wake me up when someone actually manages to build a tunnel anywhere near that size that's vacuum tight and has a realistic notion of what size and number of vacuum pumps would be required to keep a high enough vacuum in it. Oh, and handling the exterior pressure loading without risk of accidental implosion would be nice.;)
The other problem which is less trivial than it might seem is how to get people and cargo (and possibly vehicles) onto and off of these trains without breaking the vacuum.. really big airlocks at the stations maybe?.. and how to evacuate one of these safely in case of an emergency on the main line..
Wake me up when someone actually builds a flying machine or an iron-clad boat... oh wait:)
You know of all the places to build a bullet train California seems one of the worst places to do it. Forgetting for a moment that the state already has crippling debt, lets think about Earthquakes, which happens to be one of the natural disasters that strike with little to no warning. I can't imagine any sort of high speed mag lev line will have any sort of real earth quake tolerance, but maybe I'm wrong and some physics or engineering major can come on here and tell me why traveling at a huge speed, on a systems that requires a contiguous track in an earthquake prone region is a good idea.
Somebody tell the Japanese about this. They have been building the impossible in terms of mass transit for the last few decades.
Slashdot Mirror
"Pray tell how a single mom or parents who work two jobs, or parents of families under the poverty line can do that? In an ideal world, yes, every parent should be held responsible to help his children, including doing the homework with them and learn for themselves in the process."
At one time in American History this is where the community or church would assist. The church my familiy and I attend currently assists in these situations. They assist with just about any need someone has, and doesn't limit it to church membership. Local police will actually direct people and families down on their luck to our church.
Great of you to tell us how it was in the past (a-la Ron Paul). Now, tell me how it is now. If the answer is to go back to the ways things are, great. Tell me how we get there while taking care of the shit that needs to be taken care off now.
There is plenty of welfare and food stamps to go around. Why work a shit job when you can sit at home and make more money, especially when you have a dependent child and can get Section 8 housing? Why would anyone deprive her child like that?
Talking out of experience yourself? Or are you being ineffectually sarcastic?
If you can't afford to have children, how about you don't have children.
How about you have children when you can afford them and then all of the sudden, voila, you are unemployed. That's a common theme nowadays... if you pay attention.
I mean, seriously, is that your counter-argument? There are some many variables involved in situations when a family ends up living below a certain income bracket, it is sad that supposedly critical thinking people can actually come up with such one-liners.
Of course, that is never on the table. Why are you bringing someone in this world that you cannot properly nurture and support ?
Plenty - too many - smart, educated people postpone getting married and having children to their late 30s and 40s because they feel they can't provide for them, while the poor churn out batches of babies into the social safety net without regard of how they will do in society.
Eugenics might be right down your philosophical alley buddy.
But if you are suggesting brain power as a driving evolutionary force, then this fails to explain that large brains are a fairly "recent" development in evolutionary time.
Large brains are not a recent development (think cephalopods and sharks.)
So human populations that are wiped out by disease or natural disaster are not smart enough to survive and if we look hard enough humans who have survived have bigger brains?
In the spans of centuries or even millenia? No. In the millions-long time spans from the early Homo species to the precent? Very likely.
There are plenty of variables that go into determining whether a species becomes extinct or not.
True. Glaciation, desertification, plagues. Barring sudden, catastrophic events, like the Toba supervolcanic eruption event, most of these variables are gradual, taking millenia to occur. That is the general case, and in the general case the ability to cope with such events, be it by physical or behavioral/intelligence adaptations is what matters. In the case of Human evolution, the ongoing development intelligence and cognitive skills have been the primary factors.
Quite a few of them are exogenous to the species.
All of them are exogenous to the species. It's how species adapt, physically or cognitively, that determine survival. In more intelligent species, intelligence takes a greater role than physical adaptation alone.
It doesn't matter how smart a fish you are when your lake dries up. Behaviour does not solve all problems or guarantee survival.
But that's not what TFA suggests. It simply says that when you take a very large sample of species (recent and prehistoric) over very long period of times, and map brain/mass ratio vs extintion events, there seems to be a correlation between brain/mass ratio and survival. It says nothing about any specific species on a very specific and narrow time frame on a very specific and narrow change of living conditions. That's a corner case.
I'm sorry but if you can't help your kid in elementary school then you should be doing the homework with them. There is nothing hard or advanced in elementary school, that by the time your an adult you shouldn't know.
Pray tell how a single mom or parents who work two jobs, or parents of families under the poverty line can do that? In an ideal world, yes, every parent should be held responsible to help his children, including doing the homework with them and learn for themselves in the process.
In the real world, there are many cases (and under a certain income bracket, it is the general case) where this is not possible. And no, I'm not advocating free-wheeling welfare. But I don't advocate a dog-eat-dog system either. Someone else's failure will eventually become a social burden to me or my children. So a stable, developed sociaty needs to provide the means to lift up individuals in need to a point where they can pick themselves up.
Have you ever lived in a poor country? I have, I was born in one (hard to study and make it through with a half-filled stomach let me tell you). The cycles of poverty and uneducation are pervasive and self-perpetuating. Parents are uneducated and thus can't help their children. Such parents rarely have the means to educate themselves (ergo their children's education suffer). Options are limited, and opportunities are missed (again, due to lack of vision powered by education). Such children become adults and have children under the same conditions, perpetuating the cycle.
The wonderful thing about developed countries like the US (of which I became a citizen after climbing myself up through college while flipping burgers and driving forklifts), or Japan (which I visit frequently) or many others, is that such developed societies have infrastructures and means to lift people up and give a fighting chance (not an assurance of winning, but a chance to go for it) to anyone willing to take it.
Sadly in the last 20 years or so, that has been gradually changing in the US.
I could understand some rich disconnected latifundist in Brazil or Mexico saying "undeducated parents should go back to school" while playing with their silverware. But here in the US, the richest and most prosperous country in the world, the country that should be a paragon of progressive thinking in the industrialized world? I would never in my wildest dreams imagine such thinking to gradually become so common place.
If a parent can't assist there child in the courses there being taught then they should be going back to school.
And how is a parent going to afford going to school while working and supporting his family? Middle class people are finding it hard to put their children to college, and you expect a parent with little education (and ergo at or below the poverty line) to be able to do that? You are seriously disconnected with the realities of this country, and the consequences that will ultimately affect anyone regardless of income.
so children, which type of fallacy does this response fall under?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
<me, me, me, me, me/>
In essence, the argument exhibits non sequitur dumbfoolery. Despite the pedestrian simplicity of it, however, it hides a masterful combination of the following (or variants, in whole or in part):
Please. As a conservative, methinks you're talking out your ass. We have no problem with public school teachers. What we have a problem with is unions that continue to protect teachers that are poor performers or don't adapt to new teaching techniques, which is exactly the reason why we're in the sad state we are, these days. The point is that as teachers reach tenure, some, not all, can become complacent, and just use their job for a paycheck, while others go out of their way to create interesting, stimulating lesson plans. Who gets rewarded more? In most cases, the complacent one, as they've achieved tenure, they get greater raises and it's nigh on impossible to fire them.
^^^ This. I'm also a conservative (though I will most likely be voting for Obama), and indeed the problem is not public school teachers, but how many unions (not all, but many) protect under-performing teachers. There are vested interests to keep the status-quo.
However, the other side of the coin to be fair is that many in the current conservative echelons attack the teaching profession, think privatization and education budget cutting (think Gov. Rick Scott) is the solution of everything, and worse, they pander to creationists (which is one of the reasons I will not be voting GOP in these coming elections.)
There is a lot to blame on both sides of the political fence. The important thing is to move past the blaming game, pick and plan and work from there.
As a direct reply to the AC, whenever someone says "conservatives X" or "liberals X", it is almost certain that one can ignore his/her words without significant loss of information. Generalizations are the bread and butter of the feeble minded fodder for the identity politics cannons.
As a realist, I think this program is a step in the right direction, incentivizing good, young teachers to excel and actually TEACH their students, rather than just read out of a book. ON the other hand, nothing the federal government ever does ONLY costs a billion dollars.
I agree. I think there will be significant problems, and unfortunately the current GOP leadership that panders to the far right will cry havock just because the plan was proposed by dark-skinned-socialist-with-muslim-sounding-name-who-of-course-is-a-manchurian-candidates-for-the-chinese-and-satan. There will also be elements in teacher unions
No plan is ever perfect, which is why there should always be opposition, negotiation, compromise and reconciliation. But one cannot wait forever for the perfect plan. We pick one and we move from there. We fix, keep or drop pieces accordingly.
However imperfect this might be, and regardless of the problems that will occur (and they will), at least in spirit, this is a move in the right direction.
As long as they don't teach critical thinking. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/texas-gop-rejects-critical-thinking-skills-really/2012/07/08/gJQAHNpFXW_blog.html
I'm guessing you're safe for a teaching position.
I guess you haven't read the actual Texas 2012 GOP platform, have you?
Well, don't complain when they come and get you because you choose to do nothing. And they will come to get you. No one is safe.
If you have to rely on false dichotomies to defend your point, then your point is likely to be invalid, if not stupid.
non-violent campaigns
Yes, MLK's campaign was non-violent, but the opposition (led by government)
Led by government? I didn't know that the Kennedy's, Johnson, Eisenhower, and so many other members of goverment orchestrated such a violent opposition to the civil rights movement.
was certainly not.
And who won? What's your point?
Since when is dislike of Romney an automatic endorsement of Obama? What if I don't like either of these assclowns?
Since always. This is a nation drowning in a sea illiterate imbeciles (some less closeted than others), to the right or to the left, bestial Luddites who cannot contemplate anything outside their identity politics POVS without recoiling in fear or disgust (or experience a mental alt+ctrl+del.) Their entire core belief system is a cesspool of black-n-white zero-sum moronisms.
Fortunately they are not a majority (they really aren't as most people are too busy dealing with the peculiarities of life, jobs and family.). Unfortunately, they are everywhere, painting anything anywhere with their black-n-white brushes.
I have to agree. It was a pretty good analysis except for that line which really doesn't fit or make sense. After all, we're talking about a spacegoing civilization that has faster-than-light engines, not to mention some absurdly large capital ships. I don't see how having engines capable of moving the Death Star is even remotely as absurd as the whole idea of a death star by itself, with a giant laser, and also ships that can travel FTL and have artificial gravity (even the tiny Millenium Falcon had artificial gravity inside).
Exactly. One should also assume within this sci-fi context, that such an advanced and old cluster of civilizations that made up the Start Wars universe would also have the know-how for synthesizing lighter, stronger material, stronger and lighter than the stuff today's carriers are made of. Currently we know of extremely strong and light materials, kevlar, obscenely strong ceramics and polymers, boron nitrate, diamons (heterodiamonds in particular), carbon nanotubes, spider silk, titanium diborites, boron nitrates, or tungsten carbides.
It was not long ago that scientists created a genetically altered goat that produced spider silk on its milk (insert gratuitous goat pr0n joke here.) It would not be long (in terms of centuries) when our societies will be able to execute, in very autonomous/robotic ways (if not in bio-engineering ways), complex structures using lighter and stronger materials, with less amounts of materials, in scales we cannot imagine yet (let alone an incredibly old and advanced galactic society.)
XML has many good uses. This is not one of them.
Any text encoding has many good uses. And XML many good uses stem from the fact that... it is used, not because of its intrinsic qualities.
There is a reason why configuration files are moving away from XML. There is a reason why over-http data exchange protocols and RPC/messaging mechanism are moving away from XML (or at least from WS-*). It was just a stupid pipe dream to represent everything as a document. ZOMG, HTML is just SGML, so the next evolutionary step... for everything... must be.... (cue drums)... XML!
I was once one of those completely clueless people who thought so. You need something? XML! You need to configure something? XML? You need to store data? XML! You need a serialization protocol? XML! You need to specify name/value pair configuration parameters? XML! You need to externalize workflow logic? XML! You need to represent math equations? XML... oh noes, even worse, MathML!!!
Nah, XML-RPC is too primitive, let's throw everything and the kitchen sink in it for corner case problems that most people never face, let's call it WS-*. What do we use? XML! Say with me! XML!
Think otherwise? Name me 2-3 cases where XML fits a role where something else, say, JSON or ASN.1 fails to a degree that makes XML the better alternative.
I'd suggest base it on XML with a header section and header-element to get the transfer started then accept any kind of structured data including additional header elements.
Haven't we learned enough already from industrial pain to stay away from XML? JSON, BSON, YAML, compact RELAX NG, ASN.1, extended Backus-Naur Form. Any one of them, or something inspired by any (or all) of them, that is compact, unambiguos (there should be only one canonical form to encode a type), not necesarily readable, possibly binary, but efficiently easy to dump into an equally compact readable form. Compact and easy to parse/encode, with the lowest overhead possible. That's what one should look for.
But XML, no, no, no, for Christ's sake, no. XML was cool when we didn't know any better and we wanted to express everything as a document... oh, and the more verbose and readable, the better!!(10+1). We really didn't think it through that much back then. Let's not commit the same folly again, please.
Most people don't understand that they are giving their data to Facebook if they have marked something as "private." You can thank the dismal state of computer education in this country, which is generally on the level of, "Here is how you use MS Word, and here is how you search Google for sources in your essay!"
1. It goes beyond the dismal state of computer education in this country, but the dismal state of education in general, and civic education in particular. However,
2. people make their own choices, well educated and otherwise. At the end of the day, the onus is on you and me to know WTF we get into. In the general case, ignorance does not excuse ultimate responsibility for the outcome of one's actions. And that's how it should be.
Look through Facebook ToS and I bet you find all usual disclaimers. They may give some information to police, but it does not create any responsibility towards users.
^^^ THIS. That /. self-proclaimed critical thinking geeks fail to realize this is beyond me. Any argument (pro or against FB) directly based on any premise inconsistent with that fact is, by necessity, a flawed one.
I think the ability to read posts and chats are required simply from a support perspective. How can any of their guys troubleshoot problems without seeing customer data?
Perhaps the issue is if they are held to some kind of confidentiality agreement lick Doctors and Lawyers.
Interesting.
But they are not. Barring federally-regulated information (HIPAA or SOX for example), I don't know whether FB (or Internet information/communication service providers in general) that provide their services for free should be held to the same type of legal standards. Maybe yes, maybe not. It is not something that people can go and say "ZOMG YES" simply because of their personal privacy as they exercise their own information sharing actions.
One thing for sure is that only fools get up angrily in arms because FB doesn't act like a phone carrier or a hospital with the information people put on their own free will after signing FB TOS.
Another example is storing educational media, graduate-level online class lectures (can't go out w/o them), google tech talks That stuff will gobble up 8GB extremely fast. Corner case? Maybe. Irrelevant? Only to you for the purpose of fishing for red herrings.
Wow, just wow. I have a better solution to your problem:
Pop the good Lady Media Consumption's tit out of your mouth now and then and disconnect. Staring blankly at a screen with a slack jaw while you do EVERYTHING is unhealthy. Learn to enjoy the places and moments you're living in, rather than needing to be staring at a high-def video constantly, or pacifying your children using the same technique.
8 GB storage is more than enough for any conceivable amount of reading you're going to do on a trip that's shorter than a few months. You can fit days worth of music into 8 GB.
Lecture me as if you know me. How quaint. To consume or not consume, that's a person prerogative, one whose healthiness depends on the situation. To take a description of situations to elaborate a rant about an unhealthy lifestyle that you so freely imagine to masturbate your strawman, that works well for camouflaging poorly constructed arguments (or when you have a base need to look for something to be emotional about, to point a finger and yell "YOU", getting a hard-on in the process.)
Seriously, assuming for a second that indeed one (I in particular) is a media zombie, your counter-argument means shit to the fact that there are other useful cases for using a media device while on the road. To work, to read to name a few. To kill time or stay awake during a long trip across timezones (so that you can knock yourself out to sleep when you reach your destination, and awake more or less well the meeting that awaits you)... and so on and so on...
Your supposed use cases are so unlikely, or so esoteric, that they can be safely ignored as a primary driver in the purchasing decision for these products.
Doesn't matter if they are unlikely or esoteric because at the end of the day, your opinion of them are simply subjective. Given that I'm not alone in wishing usb/micro-sd storage capabilities, that distinctly shows that there is a consumer base that will prefer not to purchase a device without it.
Whether that is the common case is irrelevant. The question was "why do you want physical media, you have the net." And the answer is, no, we don't have the fucking net.
It wasn't about whether that desire was to fulfill healthy or unhealthy habits, or whether the number of consumers who want it are small or large. If that's what you wanted to argue (a purely subjective position), then ask the fucking question those terms.
You are simply grasping at straws, diverting the original proposition ("you can haz teh interweebz everywer") to "ZOMG, ur unhealthy, stop and smell teh flowrs" as a remediation response to the former being a shitty argument.
Why the obsession with physical media? Both the Kindle and Nexus 7 assumes that you are consuming media from the net.
Jesus's clone riding a genetically resurrected dinosaur in the name of logistics, man. Are you aware that net access is not omnipresent, and despite the media/geek-wannabe hype, it will not be for years to come? It might be omnipresent in our cubicles and wired dwellings, but once we step into the sunlight (${DEITY:-FSM} knows some of us do), we don't even get a guarantee of cell phone signal everywhere.
Do you think wifi fares better?
Let's forget the hyperbole for a second. You want to have access to your media anywhere. When you are a car passenger. On a train. On an airplane. When you are camping, or at the beach. To read your books or play videos to entertain/control/mind-numb-into-submission your toddlers. That's why you need permanent storage.
It is one of the reasons I've been hesitant to buy the Kindle Fire or similar devices without a micro-sd port. I do frequent trips (mostly to Japan), and I want to have access to my media (for the same reasons outlined above) when having a 16+ hour flight coupled with 2+ hours in the train upon arrival (or when I'm in a train between cities.) I can't do that unless I purchase a WIFI receiver (typically with a monthly subscription). That's a situation that repeats itself when traveling overseas (or even when traveling within the country).
So physical media matters for practical reasons. It is unpractical for Amazon and Google to presuppose users will have access to the net anytime anywhere. There is a reason why tablets and netbooks either have a usb/micro sd port, or manufactures like Apple and Samsung provide usb/micro sd adapters for their devices.
Lay the infrastructure that makes this possible first, and then we talk about replacing physical media with oooooooooo the cloud. This should be an obvious thing for the ./ geekterati. Don't know why it is not.
Yes, like aeroplanes and submarines...
If you don't reach for the stars you will never get there, if you try, you might .
Best line ever that I've read in a long, long, long time. Re-tweeting that good shit out in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1...
Wake me up when someone actually manages to build a tunnel anywhere near that size that's vacuum tight and has a realistic notion of what size and number of vacuum pumps would be required to keep a high enough vacuum in it. Oh, and handling the exterior pressure loading without risk of accidental implosion would be nice. ;)
The other problem which is less trivial than it might seem is how to get people and cargo (and possibly vehicles) onto and off of these trains without breaking the vacuum .. really big airlocks at the stations maybe? .. and how to evacuate one of these safely in case of an emergency on the main line ..
Wake me up when someone actually builds a flying machine or an iron-clad boat... oh wait :)
You know of all the places to build a bullet train California seems one of the worst places to do it. Forgetting for a moment that the state already has crippling debt, lets think about Earthquakes, which happens to be one of the natural disasters that strike with little to no warning. I can't imagine any sort of high speed mag lev line will have any sort of real earth quake tolerance, but maybe I'm wrong and some physics or engineering major can come on here and tell me why traveling at a huge speed, on a systems that requires a contiguous track in an earthquake prone region is a good idea.
Somebody tell the Japanese about this. They have been building the impossible in terms of mass transit for the last few decades.
2 isn't enough?
Of course not. Celestial Ménage à trois dude. That's how Pluto rolls.