At the university I attended, making a mistake in the format of your references was considered plagiarism.
Yeah... that's because otherwise people would claim that they just 'made a mistake' and forgot to mention a couple cites. At my college, when there were cheating scandals, we always heard the perp say that, which is crazy because it doesn't make any sense. If you, say, mistakenly put a comma where the citation format requires a semicolon, I hardly think any school would bat an eye; but if you mistakenly cite 7 papers when you have whole paragraphs listed from 6 others, that's gonna get you parkhursted. Of course, there is a scale all along between those extremes.
Gimme a break, dude. If all you've done is read the Constitution, and ignored the 250 years of jurisprudence since (which is in fact exactly what you have done), then you have a pitiful understanding of the law around you.
If Congress didn't have the power to regulate things like health care, then it wouldn't be allowed to regulate things like health care; but in fact it does, so your underlying assumption is incorrect. Shown.
If mandating health care was plainly unconstitutional, as you claim, then the members of congress who so strongly opposite the policy would bring up that point; but in fact they don't, so again, your underlying assumption is incorrect. Shown.
Look, hey, it's fine to have an opinion about the constitution, or to oppose a certain policy, or whatever, but nobody will take you seriously if you start challenging the legal notions that were worked out in our country tens or hundreds of years ago. I sure won't.
Yeah. In a mid-level CS class once I just had no idea how to do the problem set. It was a bit above my ability, and I hadn't left nearly enough time to complete it. A friend gave me his solution from the previous year, for reference. I felt it was okay if I could read his, understand it, and apply the understanding to my own code; but after trying, I didn't understand it, and didn't have time to apply anything to anything.
I turned in my own work, which was incomplete and didn't fully 'work'. I received a fair grade (above zero, below failing) and learned to try a bit harder next time. My school, like Stanford, had an Honor Principle, and I respected that very much. I appreciated that our exams were usually not proctored, and professors weren't usually going out of their way to look for cheating (but of course would deal with it when it came up, which it did sometimes), so I kept my nose clean.
I remember the last time I distinctly cheated on a test: it was a grade school spelling quiz. I got semi-caught. I don't think that was the lesson which changed me forever, but somewhere along the line I decided that, for me, I was comfortable enough with my ability level that I didn't want to make a habit of cheating.
Yeah, that's a good point, but everyone here on Slashdot needs to be careful not to dismiss academic standards just because they are different than corporate standards. There are different rules for different situations.
Yes, in industry we are paid to solve the problem as cheaply (quickly) as possible, whereas in college we are expected to solve the problem ourself, or withing whatever constraints the professor applies.
College isn't about teaching you how to work in industry, it's about making you educated, and hopefully a good education will result in a person who can work in industry, and who can also function in other roles (public life, family life, back in academia, in humanitarian situations, whatever).
Holy crap. That's amazing. Sure, it's amazing that somebody could go that long being functionally illiterate in the computer language, but even moreso it's amazing that he understood FOR loops but not WHILE loops! If anything, a WHILE loop is perfectly plain, it does precisely what it says it does; whereas a FOR loop is something that needs five seconds of explanation for a newb. Also, ferkrisake, he couldn't google "while loop"?
I'm surprised to have to address this on Slashdot, but I will.
You are incorrect in saying we must define it before we can recognize it. Alan Turing taught that we can recognize it despite difficulty in defining it. He devised a test, a very famous test, named after himself, for how we can recognize artificial intelligence.
So we can put a date on when we create artificial intelligence based on when the artificial intelligence passes the test.
I wonder if I can contrive a situation which would defy those rules. Hmmm, how about a broadcast signal? Like, I'm on one side of a political border producing content legal in my jurisdiction, but the signal can be picked up passively by a person who is merely tuning their radio, not specifically asking for my "illegal" broadcast. In that case, a person is exposed to the content without asking for it, and yet I also didn't exactly push it into their life. What would you think about that?
First of all, the Congress definitely has the constitutional power to regular health care and apply fines. It is still, nevertheless, probably a bad policy.
More importantly, the "fine" is in the form of your tax refund: don't have health insurance, then the government takes up to $xx of your tax returns. Thus, by your absurd logic, nobody is "forcing" you to get health insurance because working is "voluntary", because you do not have to work. The homeless people living under the bridge wouldn't have to pay, and wouldn't get fined for it.
I'm sure we could biatch at each other for a long time before realizing that we both agree on the lameness of the proposed health care reform; but your logic in arriving there is, in my opinion, very bad.
Yes, I agree, the US does have some very bad and strange legal decisions.
Still, if I had to choose (which gladly I don't) between "community standards" laws on the one hand versus "anti-social behavior" laws on the other, I'd take the community standards because at least they come from the community.
Also, I don't know what country you live in, so let me pick a fight with the UK: if I had to choose between silly things like "corporate personhood" versus very real things like the right to use deadly force to protect my own life, I have to say I prefer the latter -- which is a right that Britons do not have.
It's a big mix of good and bad, this whole business of having to live in a legal jurisdiction. Some things (most things, probably) about the USA are totally fucking awesome; some things are bad; and some are really, really fucking bad.
That is reasonable, but let me explain what you apparently never considered.
The size of our geeky outrage is proportional not only to the outrageousness of the act, but also to the magnitude of the act's impact.
So, if we were to somehow quantify it, let's say Apple's outrageous acts are, uh, twice as outrageous than Microsoft's, but Microsoft's outrageous acts impact fifty times the number of people, then Microsoft deserves 25 times the outrage. (All numbers from my toukus.)
The law's outrage works in a similar fashion: the law doesn't even bother to recognize sufficiently small-magnitude outrageous acts.
Actually, that's so obvious that I'm surprised you never thought of it -- but there it is, plain as day.
Slashdot stores aren't what makes me mad at Apple; Apple is what makes me mad at Apple. (This from a previous lifelong Mac user, who finally grew apart from Apple.) iPhone app rejections are merely one more example of Apple's shenanigans.
I was astonished the first time I realized that typical 'environmentalist' groups oppose nuclear power. That blows my mind. To this day I can't figure out how a focus on the environment would lead you *away* from nuclear power, when it is so clearly the safest way to produce abundant electricity with minimal environmental impact.
Oh yeah? I read that book when it came out and don't remember this particular example. Anyway, it's great. Also, my apologies for posting my interpretations after you had already posted the 'answers'. I replied to your comment before your reply was made, so I think my -1 Redundant reply was the result of timing. (One last thing, you are aware that your sig is truncated? You might squeeze in all the needed characters if you take out some dashes and spaces or something.)
Perhaps. Or perhaps I also meant it in jest, and you are simply humorless. Or perhaps South Park's writers didn't mean it in jest, perhaps they meant it as a simplification of an insightful observation.
Alas, unless you are a South Park writer, and unless you are me, I guess you'll never know.
True that. Fundamentalist Christians are the biggest example here of the general problem of people having wacky non-fact-based world views.
I might have expected Americans to emerge from the fog of non-fact-based world views, but as that was about to happen, in the 50s and 60s, the non-fact-based-world-view people did that Southern Strategy thing. (Also, at that same moment, people were convinced to equate godlessness with Communism, which was very unfortunate for the godless.) It's the other side of the same coin.
No, we can and should try. And while trying, we should not labor under the illusion that the metrics of the problem are clear to us, or that the solution is straightforward.
I'm not sure how you jumped from my assertion that the problem is complicated to the unrelated assertion that we shouldn't try to fix the problem. However you did that, it was in error.
That's awesome! I love it, it's a great example. I want to give it a try. I show two very different results, but I think many more are possible. Where did you get that?
Dear John I want a man who knows what love is all about. You are generous, kind, thoughtful; people, who are not like you, admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me for other men; I yearn for you. I have no feelings whatsoever when we’re apart. I can be forever happy. Will you let me be yours? Gloria
Dear John I want a man! Who knows what love is all about? You? Are generous, kind, thoughtful people, who are not like you admit to being, useless and inferior? You have ruined me! For other men I yearn; for you I have no feelings whatsoever. When we’re apart, I can be forever happy. Will you let me be? Yours, Gloria
I don't think that stands to reason, but I'm willing to be persuaded if you can explain your assumptions.
I would assume that an increasing total number of students with a fixed total number of universities would result in an equal distribution of students in each of the increasing-sized classes.
Of course, that is based on a fixed number of universities. There, my assumption is that any increase in universities is outrun by the increase in population.
I have no facts to back up my assumptions, which is why I'm willing to be persuaded.
Slashdot Mirror
At the university I attended, making a mistake in the format of your references was considered plagiarism.
Yeah... that's because otherwise people would claim that they just 'made a mistake' and forgot to mention a couple cites. At my college, when there were cheating scandals, we always heard the perp say that, which is crazy because it doesn't make any sense. If you, say, mistakenly put a comma where the citation format requires a semicolon, I hardly think any school would bat an eye; but if you mistakenly cite 7 papers when you have whole paragraphs listed from 6 others, that's gonna get you parkhursted. Of course, there is a scale all along between those extremes.
Don't believe in freedom? Like as in, don't believe in leprechauns? Don't believe in Santa Claus?
Gimme a break, dude. If all you've done is read the Constitution, and ignored the 250 years of jurisprudence since (which is in fact exactly what you have done), then you have a pitiful understanding of the law around you.
If Congress didn't have the power to regulate things like health care, then it wouldn't be allowed to regulate things like health care; but in fact it does, so your underlying assumption is incorrect. Shown.
If mandating health care was plainly unconstitutional, as you claim, then the members of congress who so strongly opposite the policy would bring up that point; but in fact they don't, so again, your underlying assumption is incorrect. Shown.
Look, hey, it's fine to have an opinion about the constitution, or to oppose a certain policy, or whatever, but nobody will take you seriously if you start challenging the legal notions that were worked out in our country tens or hundreds of years ago. I sure won't.
Yeah. In a mid-level CS class once I just had no idea how to do the problem set. It was a bit above my ability, and I hadn't left nearly enough time to complete it. A friend gave me his solution from the previous year, for reference. I felt it was okay if I could read his, understand it, and apply the understanding to my own code; but after trying, I didn't understand it, and didn't have time to apply anything to anything.
I turned in my own work, which was incomplete and didn't fully 'work'. I received a fair grade (above zero, below failing) and learned to try a bit harder next time. My school, like Stanford, had an Honor Principle, and I respected that very much. I appreciated that our exams were usually not proctored, and professors weren't usually going out of their way to look for cheating (but of course would deal with it when it came up, which it did sometimes), so I kept my nose clean.
I remember the last time I distinctly cheated on a test: it was a grade school spelling quiz. I got semi-caught. I don't think that was the lesson which changed me forever, but somewhere along the line I decided that, for me, I was comfortable enough with my ability level that I didn't want to make a habit of cheating.
Yeah, that's a good point, but everyone here on Slashdot needs to be careful not to dismiss academic standards just because they are different than corporate standards. There are different rules for different situations.
Yes, in industry we are paid to solve the problem as cheaply (quickly) as possible, whereas in college we are expected to solve the problem ourself, or withing whatever constraints the professor applies.
College isn't about teaching you how to work in industry, it's about making you educated, and hopefully a good education will result in a person who can work in industry, and who can also function in other roles (public life, family life, back in academia, in humanitarian situations, whatever).
Holy crap. That's amazing. Sure, it's amazing that somebody could go that long being functionally illiterate in the computer language, but even moreso it's amazing that he understood FOR loops but not WHILE loops! If anything, a WHILE loop is perfectly plain, it does precisely what it says it does; whereas a FOR loop is something that needs five seconds of explanation for a newb. Also, ferkrisake, he couldn't google "while loop"?
It's almost unbelievable!
That was a long-winded way of saying you don't know what a Turing Test is.
I'm surprised to have to address this on Slashdot, but I will.
You are incorrect in saying we must define it before we can recognize it. Alan Turing taught that we can recognize it despite difficulty in defining it. He devised a test, a very famous test, named after himself, for how we can recognize artificial intelligence.
So we can put a date on when we create artificial intelligence based on when the artificial intelligence passes the test.
For more, research "Turing Test".
Yeah. That sounds reasonable to me.
I wonder if I can contrive a situation which would defy those rules. Hmmm, how about a broadcast signal? Like, I'm on one side of a political border producing content legal in my jurisdiction, but the signal can be picked up passively by a person who is merely tuning their radio, not specifically asking for my "illegal" broadcast. In that case, a person is exposed to the content without asking for it, and yet I also didn't exactly push it into their life. What would you think about that?
That's what I fear! That the Supreme Court will change this from a regional clusterfuck into a national clusterfuck!
Serious question:
Would it be different if I printed out the webpages and sent them to you in the mail, when you requested them? Then where does the act occur?
I'm pretty sure all this part of the law comes from a ruling about newspapers, and whether they had to conform to laws where they were distributed.
As you read this, imagine me rolling my eyes.
First of all, the Congress definitely has the constitutional power to regular health care and apply fines. It is still, nevertheless, probably a bad policy.
More importantly, the "fine" is in the form of your tax refund: don't have health insurance, then the government takes up to $xx of your tax returns. Thus, by your absurd logic, nobody is "forcing" you to get health insurance because working is "voluntary", because you do not have to work. The homeless people living under the bridge wouldn't have to pay, and wouldn't get fined for it.
I'm sure we could biatch at each other for a long time before realizing that we both agree on the lameness of the proposed health care reform; but your logic in arriving there is, in my opinion, very bad.
Yes, I agree, the US does have some very bad and strange legal decisions.
Still, if I had to choose (which gladly I don't) between "community standards" laws on the one hand versus "anti-social behavior" laws on the other, I'd take the community standards because at least they come from the community.
Also, I don't know what country you live in, so let me pick a fight with the UK: if I had to choose between silly things like "corporate personhood" versus very real things like the right to use deadly force to protect my own life, I have to say I prefer the latter -- which is a right that Britons do not have.
It's a big mix of good and bad, this whole business of having to live in a legal jurisdiction. Some things (most things, probably) about the USA are totally fucking awesome; some things are bad; and some are really, really fucking bad.
Also, at least we're a democracy ferchrissake.
That is reasonable, but let me explain what you apparently never considered.
The size of our geeky outrage is proportional not only to the outrageousness of the act, but also to the magnitude of the act's impact.
So, if we were to somehow quantify it, let's say Apple's outrageous acts are, uh, twice as outrageous than Microsoft's, but Microsoft's outrageous acts impact fifty times the number of people, then Microsoft deserves 25 times the outrage. (All numbers from my toukus.)
The law's outrage works in a similar fashion: the law doesn't even bother to recognize sufficiently small-magnitude outrageous acts.
Actually, that's so obvious that I'm surprised you never thought of it -- but there it is, plain as day.
Slashdot stores aren't what makes me mad at Apple; Apple is what makes me mad at Apple. (This from a previous lifelong Mac user, who finally grew apart from Apple.) iPhone app rejections are merely one more example of Apple's shenanigans.
I was astonished the first time I realized that typical 'environmentalist' groups oppose nuclear power. That blows my mind. To this day I can't figure out how a focus on the environment would lead you *away* from nuclear power, when it is so clearly the safest way to produce abundant electricity with minimal environmental impact.
To be clear, I don't equate those two things.
Also to be clear, I am definitely an arrogant ass. In this instance, however, I was more being a wag.
Oh yeah? I read that book when it came out and don't remember this particular example. Anyway, it's great. Also, my apologies for posting my interpretations after you had already posted the 'answers'. I replied to your comment before your reply was made, so I think my -1 Redundant reply was the result of timing. (One last thing, you are aware that your sig is truncated? You might squeeze in all the needed characters if you take out some dashes and spaces or something.)
Perhaps. Or perhaps I also meant it in jest, and you are simply humorless. Or perhaps South Park's writers didn't mean it in jest, perhaps they meant it as a simplification of an insightful observation.
Alas, unless you are a South Park writer, and unless you are me, I guess you'll never know.
Hmmm. I'm skeptical of that assertion. I think fundamentalism goes way, way back.
True that. Fundamentalist Christians are the biggest example here of the general problem of people having wacky non-fact-based world views.
I might have expected Americans to emerge from the fog of non-fact-based world views, but as that was about to happen, in the 50s and 60s, the non-fact-based-world-view people did that Southern Strategy thing. (Also, at that same moment, people were convinced to equate godlessness with Communism, which was very unfortunate for the godless.) It's the other side of the same coin.
Great point! I totally agree with you.
No, we can and should try. And while trying, we should not labor under the illusion that the metrics of the problem are clear to us, or that the solution is straightforward.
I'm not sure how you jumped from my assertion that the problem is complicated to the unrelated assertion that we shouldn't try to fix the problem. However you did that, it was in error.
That's awesome! I love it, it's a great example. I want to give it a try. I show two very different results, but I think many more are possible. Where did you get that?
Dear John
I want a man who knows what love is all about. You are generous, kind, thoughtful; people, who are not like you, admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me for other men; I yearn for you. I have no feelings whatsoever when we’re apart. I can be forever happy. Will you let me be yours?
Gloria
Dear John
I want a man! Who knows what love is all about? You? Are generous, kind, thoughtful people, who are not like you admit to being, useless and inferior? You have ruined me! For other men I yearn; for you I have no feelings whatsoever. When we’re apart, I can be forever happy. Will you let me be?
Yours,
Gloria
Yeah. South Park famously said that one in four people is fucking retarded. Sounds about right to me.
I don't think that stands to reason, but I'm willing to be persuaded if you can explain your assumptions.
I would assume that an increasing total number of students with a fixed total number of universities would result in an equal distribution of students in each of the increasing-sized classes.
Of course, that is based on a fixed number of universities. There, my assumption is that any increase in universities is outrun by the increase in population.
I have no facts to back up my assumptions, which is why I'm willing to be persuaded.