I know that marriage is a failing institution in the U.S. and abroad.
Most people who get married, stay married. The number of people who get married and stay married has been increasing in the US for 25 years. What makes you think the institution is failing? Sounds like it hit a bump and is recovering to me.
Of course "Marriage recovering well in US!" will sell far fewer magazines than "Beware! Your chances of divorce are over 50%!" even though the second headline is very misleading.
He's right, these $100 computers are not going to do anything to feed these people. Without food, how are they going to find the energy to turn the crank on that thing?
I think people really misunderstand the problem of hunger in Africa. The food donated from the US, especially from religious charities, coupled with Africa's own food production is adequate to feed its current population. The problem is the multitudes of internal conflict within African nations. Various warlords punish ethnic groups or extract control out of the local population through hunger. They block or destroy food from reaching these people to extend their powerbase.
And in a politically more controversial issue: Africa's food output could be doubled or quadrupled if we could develop genetically modified disease resistant crops for over there. But we've all seen how loudly people shout about GM good. Oh the horror.... yeah go tell a starving African family whose yam crop is blighted, and the local warlord has blocked delivery of foreign aid, about the horror of genetically modified crops.
Yeah, they can't eat a $100 laptop... but if they're already starving, chances are an extra $100 in food wouldn't reach them anyway.
Name me one unlazy, smart, or educated person that pays for an anti-virus subscription?
I don't use any computers that need such a thing
I run OS X, Linux, and Solaris, and I have never known anybody that has needed an anti-virus subscription for them.
Are you a teenager? One of the psychological milestones accomplished in late adolescence is understanding that the whole world is not just what you see of it. You don't seem to have completely made that separation yet. The fact that you are not a windows user does not correlate with those paying for an anti-virus subscription being somehow incompetent.
From TFA: Mr. Tanner, whose business partner has declared bankruptcy, said he lay in bed at night, wondering where he went wrong.
Well, let's see...
You bought a piece of real property, sight unseen
In a neighborhood you knew nothing about
From an agent you never met in person
You placed no contingency on a home inspection
You had repairs done by someone you didn't know
Who the agent reccomended
Folks, if you're going to invest in real property, as with many things in life, get a professional or two on your side. Hire your own real estate broker, home inspector and contractor. Your profit margin may be smaller. So small that deals like this don't make sense economically. But if just one of these deals goes south, as this one did, it will cost you 3 or 4 more deals that work out just to break even. Having your own set of licenses, bonded professionals will ensure that at most 1 in 20 deals turns out to be a lemon.
A few hundred dollars spent on an independent home inspector would have saved this guy tens of thousands. Then again, the seller probably would have argued against or just plain refused to allow an inspection. Then again, if a seller tries to stop an inspection DON'T BUY. How obvious is that?
You will sue them in federal, not a state court. Finding a lawyer to take it on contingency shouldn't be too hard.
A claim of finding a better candidate will require a mountain of evidence up against asking an illegal interview question regarding a protected class (religion).
Since this is a civil case, the bar is only "preponderance of the evidence" - not "clear and compelling" nor "beyond a reasonable doubt."
Unfortunately, atheists have no reason for believing that the laws of physics won't change radically tomorrow.
Wow. For someone who claims to use critical thinking regarding faith, that has got to be the most poorly thought out argument you could have made on the topic. If the laws of physics radically changed tomorrow that would be a strong argument IN FAVOR of a deity. Where are you getting these whack arguments?
You can expect to be asked about how often you attend church during a job interview
Wow, that would be a lazy person's dream state:
1) Apply for a job in Oklahoma, claiming to be a devout atheist 2) Sue them in federal court for violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 3) Profit!
you have to concede that is was hurtful and wrong to print the cartoons
Not all that is hurtful is wrong. Many things that show up in the newspaper are hurtful to someone.
The newspapers that printed those comics didn't seem to be doing so in support for free speech
I disagree with that sentiment 100%. Newspapers and journalists often get defensive over issues which limit the freedom of the press. I believe that the newspapers that did not publish the cartoons over here did so because they were cowing to fear of reprisals. They certainly weren't so respecting of "hurtful" themes when publishing images of the Virgin Mary made from cow dung several years back. Somehow I doubt they suddenly grew a moral compass.
1) Suggest a possible discovery of liquid water out there 2) Make allusion to possibility of life emerging there 3) ??? 4) Grant Funding!
I'm as much a fan of discovery as the next scientifically minded person, but this has become a little tired in recent years. Every time a possible discovery of liquid water creeps up, the potential for life always follows in the very next paragraph if not the next sentence. One would wonder what would happen if we found a vast reservoir of liquid water but no life in it. I imagine some segment of astrobiology would be so incredulous as to insist on probing it until an earth born microbe manages to survive the trip and contaminate the discovery.
When I was first reading this I thought "Wow, wouldn't it be interesting to figure out how liquid water could have existed there." Then came the inevitable "hey, maybe there's life there!" I just gave up. The conditions for liquid water are remarkable enough, do we need to include the outrageously small probability of life developing before we've looked at the more answerable questions like "where's the heat coming from?"
I'm in the UK where Tivo has unfortunately long since left. My Tivo has been suitably modded
I'm a TiVo user in the US, but I am curious about TiVo as a company. When they pulled out, did you have to modify your subscription at all? Are you still paying, using a fake call hack, or did tivo remove the subscription requirement?
WTF?! If we assume a zip disk has at most 250MB of space, the upper bound for your graphical assets is 250MB, leaving, conservatively 350MB of space left on your CDR.
You wrote 300MB of source & classes for a class?
I've worked for places with a hundred man-years on a Java project and the whole thing fit on a mini-CDR. Were you guys some kind of programming gods that you could write a million lines of code in a year??
"Correlation is not causation," is useful when teaching introductory students the risks in too-readily drawing causal conclusions from a simple empirical correlation between two measured variables.
The people I work with, involved in very real research, do NOT take "Correlation does not imply causation" as simplistic. While it may be useful for suggesting avenues to research, it is just not much more useful than that.
Whole scientific fields are based on correlational data (e.g., astronomy).
I doubt an Astronomer would entirely agree with this statement.
Well conducted correlational studies provide opportunities for theory falsification.
YES! But in this case, he is NOT falsifying a theory. A true statement should not lead to a false result. However a false statement doesn't tell us anything.
They allow for statistical controls of plausible alternative explanations.
They allow us to reject plausible alternative explanations. Other than that, I do not follow his argument.
In young children the number of cavities present and the size of their vocabularly have a strong positive correlation. It would be unethical to do an experiment where we allowed half of a sample population go without proper dental hygiene in order to properly test this. So we are left with the correlational study data. Hence, cavities must improve a child's vocabularly, right??
As children age they get more cavities. They also learn more words. Thus both cavities and vocabularly are effects of age; of course they are correlated. But the "cause" in this case is incorrect.
If it is true that people with a propensity for violence like to play violent games *and* they like to commit violent acts, then playing violent video games and committing violent crimes WILL BE CORRELATED but neither will be a cause of the other. Until these people come up with a control for the variable "propensity for violence" their studies will be specious.
I realize that's what the guide says, but do you know of such a warranty the guide says exists? Take for instance this nugget from the Microsoft Office EULA:
Microsoft and its suppliers provide the Software and support services (if any) AS IS AND WITH ALL FAULTS, and hereby disclaim all other warranties and conditions, whether express, implied or statutory, including, but not limited to, any (if any) implied warranties, duties or conditions of merchantability, of fitness for a particular purpose, of reliability or availability, of accuracy or completeness of responses, of results, of workmanlike effort, of lack of viruses, and of lack of negligence,
If Microsoft isn't even providing such warranties, where are the "usually available" ones?
I'm always amazed at how defensive people get when evolution is questioned.
There's a difference between teaching children to be skeptical and think critically of all claims and teaching children to be skeptical of evolution. When nothing is questioned except evolution, kids tend to think that evolution is the only thing that appears to be questioned. If you want to teach kids that scientists have a full consensus on virtually nothing, fine. If you just want to teach that scientists lack consensus on issues disputed in the bible (evolution & big bang) that is not OK.
It's intellectually dishonest to hold evolution up to a higher standard than physics or chemistry.
My aren't we the language Nazi here... First notice how you said "What they are doing is stealing." Well, you're using "steal" intransitively, thus it should have been clear to you that definitions 1a-1d do not apply. This should have been doubly apparent since the sample usages are way off from your intended meaning (steal a kiss, steal the show)
So we're left with definition 1 of steal, which of course requires us to agree on what property is. The two definitions you point out are:
2b: the exclusive right to possess, enjoy, and dispose of a thing 2c: something to which a person or business has a legal title
Well 2b doesn't work. It should be obvious that when a studio sells a movie, they cannot dispose of it later. Their right is not exclusive. The "thing" they possess is the copyright. 2c almost works, except the thing which the studio has legal title to is a copyright.
When you download a movie, you do not take their copyright away. I don't condone copyright infringement, but it is in a class separate from stealing.
I'm not clear on why I'm not clear, so I'll try and distill why I don't consider Python's OO implementation clean under the whole method(self) context:
1) The syntactic declaration of a class method doesn't match the syntatic call of the method. The declaration must contain a self reference parameter.
class A:
foo(self,x,y): # 3 args ..
a.foo(x,y) # 2 args
2) Python gives no special treatment to the self parameter, thus it is mutable. Further it is renamable, there is nothing special about the variable "self". You could have just as easily called the variable "this" or "badParameterName".
class A:
def foo(y):
print "foo %d" % y
def foo(self,y):
print "foo2 %d" % y
a.foo(4)
3) Worse still, you can create methods that are completely accidental that fail in odd ways because Python gives the first parameter of a method special treatment when calling, but at no other time.
class A:
def foo(flag=0,y=50):
if flag != 0: ...
a.foo(y=4) # hmmm, I could have sworn I didn't set that flag...
4) Python does not have an object context so all references to class variables or methods must be prefixed by the first parameter.
class A:
bar(self):
print "bar"
foo(self):
print "foo",
bar() # this doesn't call my bar() method?!
The 'foobar' method knows exactly which object it belongs to.
Really? I noticed that foobar didn't print any information about the object it belonged to. Without changing the method signature, why don't you add a variable to the class and have it print that out. If foobar *really* knows which object it belongs to, you'll have no trouble with this.
Your assumption that I don't understand the inner workings of either Python or Java is entirely incorrect. The code was written specifically to show how Python objects have a very sketchy grasp of object identity.
Object methods have complete lack of contextual identity within their instance. The same closure rule that causes problems with variable scoping extends in a non-sensical way to Python objects, such that Python never checks to see if a variable is outside a method's scope but inside the object's scope. It goes local->global->builtin whether it's a function or object method. This can't be fixed easily because Python object methods are simply handled as name-mangled functions. That's why "self" is an explicit parameter that is mutable and all references to class variables and methods must be prefixed with "self." That is not clean OO.
The result, of course, is that Python prints "Bad". Python has a problem with its use of a self referential object variable as an implicit parameter. There is no concept of something like Java's "this". That is not clean OO.
First, enzymes are proteins. Second, the only "algorithm" that needs to be followed for evolution to occur is an occasional copying error. Your application of a computer science term to biochemistry is quite inapplicable. A genetic algorithm is a mathematical model inspired by observing nature, nature really couldn't give a crap what inspiration or models are created.
Many structures present within plants and animals are either completly wrong or completly right; there is no approximating.
While I disagree that there is a completely right structure within any plant or animal, I think it's more important to point out what you didn't say: "some structures within plants and animals are only approximately correct." Exactly what evolution would predict.
comparison between the acts of wearing one and using an operating system doesn't measure up.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and bet that you cannot create an analogy which cannot be reinterpretted to expose some fundamental difference.
How many users of the typical operating system don't realize it's the equivalent of a short skirt (and that they're not wearing any panties)?
You see your not wearing any panties comparison doesn't hold up. While wearing a short skirt is likely done to look appealing, go without panties is done to stand out. None of the operating systems are going out of their way to attract attention unless they're a honeypot.
Being vulnerable to a crime does not make you responsible for the crime, even if there were steps you could take to make yourself less vulnerable. That's all the analogy was trying to say.
Slashdot Mirror
I know that marriage is a failing institution in the U.S. and abroad.
Most people who get married, stay married. The number of people who get married and stay married has been increasing in the US for 25 years. What makes you think the institution is failing? Sounds like it hit a bump and is recovering to me.
Of course "Marriage recovering well in US!" will sell far fewer magazines than "Beware! Your chances of divorce are over 50%!" even though the second headline is very misleading.
Try this or maybe this.
The first relies on an almost 15 year old report. The second is much more recent (and it's a journal article).
He's right, these $100 computers are not going to do anything to feed these people. Without food, how are they going to find the energy to turn the crank on that thing?
I think people really misunderstand the problem of hunger in Africa. The food donated from the US, especially from religious charities, coupled with Africa's own food production is adequate to feed its current population. The problem is the multitudes of internal conflict within African nations. Various warlords punish ethnic groups or extract control out of the local population through hunger. They block or destroy food from reaching these people to extend their powerbase.
And in a politically more controversial issue: Africa's food output could be doubled or quadrupled if we could develop genetically modified disease resistant crops for over there. But we've all seen how loudly people shout about GM good. Oh the horror.... yeah go tell a starving African family whose yam crop is blighted, and the local warlord has blocked delivery of foreign aid, about the horror of genetically modified crops.
Yeah, they can't eat a $100 laptop... but if they're already starving, chances are an extra $100 in food wouldn't reach them anyway.
Name me one unlazy, smart, or educated person that pays for an anti-virus subscription?
I don't use any computers that need such a thing
I run OS X, Linux, and Solaris, and I have never known anybody that has needed an anti-virus subscription for them.
Are you a teenager? One of the psychological milestones accomplished in late adolescence is understanding that the whole world is not just what you see of it. You don't seem to have completely made that separation yet. The fact that you are not a windows user does not correlate with those paying for an anti-virus subscription being somehow incompetent.
Well, let's see...
Folks, if you're going to invest in real property, as with many things in life, get a professional or two on your side. Hire your own real estate broker, home inspector and contractor. Your profit margin may be smaller. So small that deals like this don't make sense economically. But if just one of these deals goes south, as this one did, it will cost you 3 or 4 more deals that work out just to break even. Having your own set of licenses, bonded professionals will ensure that at most 1 in 20 deals turns out to be a lemon.
A few hundred dollars spent on an independent home inspector would have saved this guy tens of thousands. Then again, the seller probably would have argued against or just plain refused to allow an inspection. Then again, if a seller tries to stop an inspection DON'T BUY. How obvious is that?
Looks like a windfall waiting to happen to me.
Unfortunately, atheists have no reason for believing that the laws of physics won't change radically tomorrow.
Wow. For someone who claims to use critical thinking regarding faith, that has got to be the most poorly thought out argument you could have made on the topic. If the laws of physics radically changed tomorrow that would be a strong argument IN FAVOR of a deity. Where are you getting these whack arguments?
You can expect to be asked about how often you attend church during a job interview
Wow, that would be a lazy person's dream state:
1) Apply for a job in Oklahoma, claiming to be a devout atheist
2) Sue them in federal court for violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
3) Profit!
you have to concede that is was hurtful and wrong to print the cartoons
Not all that is hurtful is wrong. Many things that show up in the newspaper are hurtful to someone.
The newspapers that printed those comics didn't seem to be doing so in support for free speech
I disagree with that sentiment 100%. Newspapers and journalists often get defensive over issues which limit the freedom of the press. I believe that the newspapers that did not publish the cartoons over here did so because they were cowing to fear of reprisals. They certainly weren't so respecting of "hurtful" themes when publishing images of the Virgin Mary made from cow dung several years back. Somehow I doubt they suddenly grew a moral compass.
1) Suggest a possible discovery of liquid water out there
2) Make allusion to possibility of life emerging there
3) ???
4) Grant Funding!
I'm as much a fan of discovery as the next scientifically minded person, but this has become a little tired in recent years. Every time a possible discovery of liquid water creeps up, the potential for life always follows in the very next paragraph if not the next sentence. One would wonder what would happen if we found a vast reservoir of liquid water but no life in it. I imagine some segment of astrobiology would be so incredulous as to insist on probing it until an earth born microbe manages to survive the trip and contaminate the discovery.
When I was first reading this I thought "Wow, wouldn't it be interesting to figure out how liquid water could have existed there." Then came the inevitable "hey, maybe there's life there!" I just gave up. The conditions for liquid water are remarkable enough, do we need to include the outrageously small probability of life developing before we've looked at the more answerable questions like "where's the heat coming from?"
I'm in the UK where Tivo has unfortunately long since left. My Tivo has been suitably modded
I'm a TiVo user in the US, but I am curious about TiVo as a company. When they pulled out, did you have to modify your subscription at all? Are you still paying, using a fake call hack, or did tivo remove the subscription requirement?
WTF?! If we assume a zip disk has at most 250MB of space, the upper bound for your graphical assets is 250MB, leaving, conservatively 350MB of space left on your CDR.
You wrote 300MB of source & classes for a class?
I've worked for places with a hundred man-years on a Java project and the whole thing fit on a mini-CDR. Were you guys some kind of programming gods that you could write a million lines of code in a year??
And you only got a B?!
God, that statement is so dishonest.
"Correlation is not causation," is useful when teaching introductory students the risks in too-readily drawing causal conclusions from a simple empirical correlation between two measured variables.
The people I work with, involved in very real research, do NOT take "Correlation does not imply causation" as simplistic. While it may be useful for suggesting avenues to research, it is just not much more useful than that.
Whole scientific fields are based on correlational data (e.g., astronomy).
I doubt an Astronomer would entirely agree with this statement.
Well conducted correlational studies provide opportunities for theory falsification.
YES! But in this case, he is NOT falsifying a theory. A true statement should not lead to a false result. However a false statement doesn't tell us anything.
They allow for statistical controls of plausible alternative explanations.
They allow us to reject plausible alternative explanations. Other than that, I do not follow his argument.
In young children the number of cavities present and the size of their vocabularly have a strong positive correlation. It would be unethical to do an experiment where we allowed half of a sample population go without proper dental hygiene in order to properly test this. So we are left with the correlational study data. Hence, cavities must improve a child's vocabularly, right??
As children age they get more cavities. They also learn more words. Thus both cavities and vocabularly are effects of age; of course they are correlated. But the "cause" in this case is incorrect.
If it is true that people with a propensity for violence like to play violent games *and* they like to commit violent acts, then playing violent video games and committing violent crimes WILL BE CORRELATED but neither will be a cause of the other. Until these people come up with a control for the variable "propensity for violence" their studies will be specious.
I'm always amazed at how defensive people get when evolution is questioned.
There's a difference between teaching children to be skeptical and think critically of all claims and teaching children to be skeptical of evolution. When nothing is questioned except evolution, kids tend to think that evolution is the only thing that appears to be questioned. If you want to teach kids that scientists have a full consensus on virtually nothing, fine. If you just want to teach that scientists lack consensus on issues disputed in the bible (evolution & big bang) that is not OK.
It's intellectually dishonest to hold evolution up to a higher standard than physics or chemistry.
My aren't we the language Nazi here... First notice how you said "What they are doing is stealing." Well, you're using "steal" intransitively, thus it should have been clear to you that definitions 1a-1d do not apply. This should have been doubly apparent since the sample usages are way off from your intended meaning (steal a kiss, steal the show)
So we're left with definition 1 of steal, which of course requires us to agree on what property is. The two definitions you point out are:
2b: the exclusive right to possess, enjoy, and dispose of a thing
2c: something to which a person or business has a legal title
Well 2b doesn't work. It should be obvious that when a studio sells a movie, they cannot dispose of it later. Their right is not exclusive. The "thing" they possess is the copyright.
2c almost works, except the thing which the studio has legal title to is a copyright.
When you download a movie, you do not take their copyright away. I don't condone copyright infringement, but it is in a class separate from stealing.
31*10^9 barrels/year * 5800000btus/Barrel * 1055 Joules/btu =
1.89*10^20 Joules/Year is the worlds energy consumption
Now Assume 2 gigawatt reactors (2*10^9 watts)
Wow, you have devised a way to make use of the entire energy potential in a barrel of oil?
Do tell!
(REXX), an interpreted programming language known for its ease of use
Sounds like a great replacement for Perl to me.
No...
Ogg is a bitstream container for multimedia
Vorbis is an audio codec
Theora is a video codec
1) The syntactic declaration of a class method doesn't match the syntatic call of the method. The declaration must contain a self reference parameter.2) Python gives no special treatment to the self parameter, thus it is mutable. Further it is renamable, there is nothing special about the variable "self". You could have just as easily called the variable "this" or "badParameterName".3) Worse still, you can create methods that are completely accidental that fail in odd ways because Python gives the first parameter of a method special treatment when calling, but at no other time.4) Python does not have an object context so all references to class variables or methods must be prefixed by the first parameter.
The 'foobar' method knows exactly which object it belongs to.
Really? I noticed that foobar didn't print any information about the object it belonged to. Without changing the method signature, why don't you add a variable to the class and have it print that out. If foobar *really* knows which object it belongs to, you'll have no trouble with this.
Your assumption that I don't understand the inner workings of either Python or Java is entirely incorrect. The code was written specifically to show how Python objects have a very sketchy grasp of object identity.
Object methods have complete lack of contextual identity within their instance. The same closure rule that causes problems with variable scoping extends in a non-sensical way to Python objects, such that Python never checks to see if a variable is outside a method's scope but inside the object's scope. It goes local->global->builtin whether it's a function or object method. This can't be fixed easily because Python object methods are simply handled as name-mangled functions. That's why "self" is an explicit parameter that is mutable and all references to class variables and methods must be prefixed with "self." That is not clean OO.
Python is my scripting language of choice but I would never claim that Python's OO approach is even remotely clean. Example:The result, of course, is that Python prints "Bad". Python has a problem with its use of a self referential object variable as an implicit parameter. There is no concept of something like Java's "this". That is not clean OO.
First, enzymes are proteins. Second, the only "algorithm" that needs to be followed for evolution to occur is an occasional copying error. Your application of a computer science term to biochemistry is quite inapplicable. A genetic algorithm is a mathematical model inspired by observing nature, nature really couldn't give a crap what inspiration or models are created.
Many structures present within plants and animals are either completly wrong or completly right; there is no approximating.
While I disagree that there is a completely right structure within any plant or animal, I think it's more important to point out what you didn't say: "some structures within plants and animals are only approximately correct." Exactly what evolution would predict.
comparison between the acts of wearing one and using an operating system doesn't measure up.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and bet that you cannot create an analogy which cannot be reinterpretted to expose some fundamental difference.
How many users of the typical operating system don't realize it's the equivalent of a short skirt (and that they're not wearing any panties)?
You see your not wearing any panties comparison doesn't hold up. While wearing a short skirt is likely done to look appealing, go without panties is done to stand out. None of the operating systems are going out of their way to attract attention unless they're a honeypot.
Being vulnerable to a crime does not make you responsible for the crime, even if there were steps you could take to make yourself less vulnerable. That's all the analogy was trying to say.